1 Runaway Man

by David Handler

  “Hey there, high pockets!” Al Posner has called me that since I was a kid. It’s a subtle knock on my height. “I’m glad you’re here today. My nephew Herb’s girl, Sonya, is dropping off a coffee cake. Real nice kid. She teaches kindergarten over on West End Avenue.”

  I sighed inwardly. The minyan regulars are always trying to fix me up with their assorted homely daughters, granddaughters and nieces. “Al, I wish I could stick around but I’m on a job today.”

  “What’s so important you can’t wait five minutes?”

  “Hey, if he’s gotta go he’s gotta go.” Morris Kantor patted me on the back. “Say hi to that beautiful mother of yours, okay?”

  I promised I would and started up the stairs with my yoga mat. Too late—Sonya Posner was already descending those same stairs. I knew it was Sonya because she was clutching a coffee cake in a Tupperware container. The high-heeled boots she had on were not ideal for stairs. Or possibly she was just a natural born klutz. But she teetered and lost her balance about halfway down. As the coffee cake went flying, she let out a shriek and took a full-tilt header right at me. I swear she would have broken her neck if I hadn’t caught her. Somehow, the two of us tangoed our way down the stairs unharmed. When she loosened her Vulcan death grip on my shoulders I got my first good look at her.

  I let out a startled gasp. Sonya was, well, she was drop-dead gorgeous. It wasn’t just that she had creamy, perfect skin framed by lustrous black hair that I wanted to run my fingers through right away. Or that she possessed a pair of bruised, overripe red lips with just a hint of an overbite that made her mouth incredibly, erotically kissable. Or that she had a striking aquiline nose and chiseled, terrific cheekbones. She had the most arrestingly beautiful pair of pale green eyes I’d ever gazed into in my whole life. All I wanted to do was get lost in them for a good long weekend. Preferably while naked. True, she towered a good four inches over me and was not exactly light as a feather. But something happened to me when our eyes met. My pulse raced. My belly fluttered. I even felt a slight sensation of dizziness.

  Whatever it was I swear she felt it, too. Because the two of us stood there staring at each other for the longest time before she said, “You’re Benji, am I right? Sure, I am. You’re the only one here who’s under the age of ninety.” Okay, there was a small issue with her voice. It was a bit nasal. A lot nasal. And she yammered in gulpy fits and starts. “Uncle Al? He’s told me all about you. How you’re a lawyer. How you own all sorts of buildings in the neighborhood.”

  “He may have oversold me a bit.” My own voice sounded strangely rusty.

  “I told him for-get-it. No more fix ups. How many smug, self-important dickheads does a girl have to meet before she’s had enough?” Sonya’s gaze fell on the coffee cake container on the floor. “I spent half the fucking night baking that thing and now it’s roadkill. What am I saying? It probably sucked anyway. I suck at baking. And I have to do cupcakes at school with the kids today. You like cupcakes, Benji? Of course you do. Who doesn’t like cupcakes? Screw it, maybe I can salvage a few pieces.” She picked up the fallen cake and set it on the counter, then unbuttoned her shearling coat and took it off.

  Now all I could do was gape. I’d been right about Sonya’s bone structure. Frail she wasn’t. A tad hippy even. But it wasn’t her hips I was staring at. It was her cowl-necked sweater. Or, more specifically, what was inside of her cowl-necked sweater. Sonya Posner had herself a serious rack. I’m talking major league zoomers. She could give even Lovely Rita a run for her cup size.

  “And here they are,” Al joked, nudging me with his elbow. “My niece Sonya.”

  “No offense, Uncle Al,” she snapped. “But that has never been funny.”

  Me, I still didn’t say a word. I’d gone mute.

  “The answer is yes,” she informed me matter-of-factly. “They’re a hundred percent real. But enough about me and mine. What’s your deal? Are you Mister Hit It and Quit It? How many girls have you got on the string right now? Two, three? Plus maybe a few helpless, juicy tenants who are a teensy bit late on their rent, am I right?”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

  She nodded knowingly. “That’s what I figured. There isn’t a straight guy on the planet who has eyelashes like yours.”

  “No, that’s not it either.”

  “Well, then what is it?”

  “I just haven’t met the right girl yet.”

  Now it was her turn to stare at me. “Anybody got a pen?”

  You never saw a gang of old men whip out their ballpoints so fast.

  She accepted Morris Kantor’s Bic, grabbed hold of my left hand and started scribbling all over the back of it. “Here’s my cell and my land line. Call me. And don’t wash that hand or you’ll never see me again. Which you’ll regret for the rest of your life.” Sonya gave my hand a little squeeze, then tilted her head at me, her alluring pale green eyes shining. “You really don’t have a girlfriend?”

  “I really don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Wow, maybe this is my lucky day. Would that be a fucking scream or what?”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T REALIZE OUR FURNACE had seized up again until I tried to jump into a nice, hot, steaming shower and discovered that it was a nice, freezing-cold one. If Mom had been an early riser she’d have let me know. But Mom seldom stirs before nine. And she always waits up for me when I’m out on a case. She’d been watching Letterman when I tapped on her door after I got home from Willoughby. I ran it for her over dishes of rocky road ice cream.

  Shivering, I threw my clothes back on and grabbed my toolbox. Our furnace is down in the dimly lit, supremely creepy basement. I took a wrench to the nozzle, which promptly spewed black water into the bucket that I keep down there for such occasions. The nozzle was clogged with gunk again. So was the filter. The lines were gunky. The tank was gunky. The whole system needed to be replaced.

  I was doing what I could when the elevator door opened and out marched a scowling Mrs. Felcher, her shock of white hair uncombed, a lit cigarette dangling from her lip. Our deadbeat tenant in 3A smokes four packs a day, is somewhere between the ages of eighty-five and hundred and not exactly easy on the eyes. Picture Albert Einstein as a drag queen. Now picture him in a ratty old bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.

  “How are you today, Mrs. Felcher?” I said pleasantly.

  “Feh,” she snarled.

  “And how is Mr. Felcher?”

  “Who, that two-timing son of a bitch? He’d chase after a fart if he thought he could plow it.”

  Near as I could tell, there’d been a brief indiscretion back in the Gerald Ford years between Mr. Felcher and a Chock full o’Nuts counter girl. Mrs. Felcher still hadn’t forgiven him. She stubbed out her cigarette with her slipper, removed a fresh one from the pocket of her robe and started to light it.

  “Would you mind not smoking that right now, ma’am?”

  “You people today,” she said accusingly. “With your political correctness thing.”

  “It’s not a political correctness thing. It’s a kaboom thing. I’m working with fuel oil here.”

  “My apartment is freezing cold. The furnace isn’t on.”

  “I know this, ma’am. It’ll be up and running soon.”

  “This sort of thing never happened when your father was alive. Your father took care of things.”

  “My father collected the rent every month, too.”

  She cupped a hand behind her ear. “What’s that you said?”

  “I said, yes, ma’am.”

  She got back in the elevator and lit her cigarette, glowering at me in defiance. Mercifully, the door closed and I was left in peace.

  I cleaned everything, reassembled it and hit the restart button. The old furnace rumbled and grumbled, but it did fire up and begin to run. I toted the bucket of gunky black water upstairs and dumped it in the gutter with all of the other gunky black water. The lights were on in our second floor office windows. Lovely Rita had arrived.
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  She was putting the coffee on and, in sharp contrast to Mrs. Felcher, was primped and polished to perfection. Hair and makeup just so. Cream-colored turtleneck and tailored grey flannel slacks hugging her every curve for dear sweet life.

  “Hey there, Benji,” she exclaimed, a dazzling smile on her face. She never lets her pain show through—even though she’s staring at eight long years before no-good Clarence is even eligible for parole.

  “Rita, you sure do look like a million bucks today.”

  “You’re sweet. I wish you meant that.”

  “I do mean it. You’re a major babe,” I said, sniffing hungrily at the air.

  There was a fragrant paper bag on her desk. Fried egg sandwiches from Scotty’s. They made them on fresh onion bagels from H & H Bagels.

  “I got two of them,” she said. “One’s for you.”

  “Rita, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “I do. You’d stumble around, clueless and starved.”

  Our radiator pipes began to clank. A truly horrible noise, but welcome.

  “I ran Bruce Weiner’s credit cards for you last night,” she reported. “He hasn’t used his Visa or MasterCard in the past seventy-two hours. He withdrew two hundred bucks from a Citibank ATM near the Canterbury campus four days ago. That’s the last activity of any kind I could find.”

  “I need to know which residence hall he lives in,” I said, munching on my breakfast. “Also his roommate’s class schedule. Chris Warfield’s his name. If you could scan Chris’s ID photo for me that would be great. Also anything you can dig up on his family background.” I polished off the last of the bagel, tossing the foil wrapper in the trash. “Me, I’m going to take another crack at a hot shower.”

  Rita arched an eyebrow at me. “Just one second there, little lamb. You’re not getting off that easy.”

  “You’re absolutely right. My turn to pay, sorry.”

  “That’s not it and you know it. You’ve been holding out on me. What’s her name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “The girl you met.”

  “Who says I met a girl?”

  “I do. You have stars in your eyes.”

  “I just came from yoga. That’s my prana.”

  “Screw your prana. That’s pure testosterone. You’ve practically got steam coming out of your nostrils, you little stud bull. Come on, who is she?”

  “Honestly, Rita, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  In response she stuck her pink tongue out at me. Not so long ago, there were Wall Street titans who would have stuffed a C-note in her G-string for that particular privilege. Me, I get it for free. Just one of the many perks of working for Golden Legal Services.

  Back upstairs in my apartment, I pulled a beat-up duffel bag out of my bedroom closet and stuffed it with enough T-shirts and sweaters to approximate a couple of weeks’ worth of clothing. By now the water was good and hot. I stripped down and got clean. Didn’t comb my hair or shave when I climbed out. I was getting into character now—the scruffier the better. I sifted through my vast collection of college sweatshirts. Settled on the one with cropped sleeves, from SUNY Binghamton. Put it on over a long-sleeved thermal T-shirt, along with the oldest pair of jeans I owned. For shoes I went with Timberland hiking boots. For a coat I chose a down jacket from my high school days that was ripped in a couple of spots and repaired with silver duct tape. A wool stocking cap completed the outfit.

  Downstairs in the office, Rita was on the phone dunning one of our former clients for money we were owed. The info that I’d requested was waiting for me in a file folder on my desk. I waved good-bye and headed out, my daypack slung over one shoulder, duffel over the other.

  The stairs leading down to the 103rd Street subway platform are right there on our corner. An uptown No. 1 train was pulling in with a screech as I was swiping my MetroCard. I hopped aboard, found a seat and inserted my iPod earbuds. A lot of the riders were tucked inside of iPod cocoons—although I was probably the only one listening to the original Broadway cast recording of Pajama Game with John Raitt, Janis Paige and Eddie Foy, Jr.

  As I rode uptown, duffel between my feet, I studied the file on Chris Warfield. Judging by his student ID photo, Chris was a prototypical slacker type with a mop of curly blond hair, four-day growth of beard and an impish grin. Except you have to be seriously smart to get into Canterbury. Not to mention well-heeled, unless you’re able to secure an academic scholarship like Charles Willingham had. Chris’s father was the top pediatric neurosurgeon in the city. Owned a co-op on Park Avenue as well as a weekend place on Candlewood Lake in northwestern Connecticut. Chris had attended the ultra-exclusive Dalton School. He was a straight-A student at Canterbury. And he wasn’t exactly feasting on gimme courses. Today he had Latin from 8:00–9:00, Greek philosophy from 9:15–10:45 and Roman history from 11:00–12:30. After a lunch break, Chris would be coasting his way through pre-Revolutionary American economic history.

  By now my train had rattled its way beneath Harlem to Washington Heights. At 168th Street I changed to the A train and kept on riding up, up, up toward the remote northernmost tip of Manhattan. The population really thins out up there. On the west side, facing the Hudson, there’s Fort Tryon Park and not much else. Once you get above Dyckman Street you’re in the Inwood section, home to The Cloisters. At the narrow northernmost tip of Manhattan, where the island is separated from the Bronx by a narrow waterway known as the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, there’s windswept Inwood Hill Park with its panoramic views of the New Jersey Palisades. You’ll find Baker Field up there. That’s where the Columbia Lions try to play competitive Ivy League football. And you’ll find Canterbury College. In fact, the very last stop on the A train, 207th Street, is commonly known as the Canterbury stop.

  When I emerged from the subway tunnel there, I didn’t feel as if I was in New York City anymore. And I for sure didn’t feel as if I was in the twenty-first century. Canterbury was built of brownstone in the late 1800s in a style known as Collegiate Gothic. If you didn’t know it was a college campus you’d swear it was a monastery of some kind. Maybe it was the gargoyles that helped put that over. Or the bell tower. Or those high stone walls.

  A pair of twenty-foot wrought iron gates provided access to the walled campus yard. Outside of the gates, 207th Street was lined with campus pubs and take-out food places. Not a whole lot of them. Canterbury had fewer than two thousand students and the only graduate degree programs they offered were academic ones. This was a place where serious scholars passed what they knew on to future serious scholars. It was not a place where you expected to find the most celebrated college basketball player in the whole country.

  It was past eleven o’clock by the time I got there. Chris would be soaking up Roman history in Chichester Hall. An Asian kid with round glasses directed me across the quad to a stone building next to the bell tower. I set my duffel on an ice-encrusted bench there and sat atop it, my nose buried in Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood by the late actress Evelyn Keyes who, I swear, shtupped everyone in Tinseltown except Scarlett O’Hara. When Chris’s class was over, the door to Chichester Hall opened and students came pouring out. Chris was walking with a slender, gorgeous Middle Eastern girl. He wasn’t a particularly big guy. Not much taller than I. He wore a vintage tweed topcoat over a fisherman’s knit sweater, chalk-striped suit trousers and lumberjack boots.

  “Hey, it’s Chris, am I right?” I slung my duffel over my shoulder and started toward him, grinning. “The Beefer told me—just look for the guy with blond hair who’s walking with the best-looking girl on campus.”

  “Yeah, I’m Chris,” he acknowledged, affably enough. The girl just looked right through me. “And you are?…”

  “His cousin Benji? Benji Golden? He said to look him up when I got to town.” I’d eased into a slightly more adolescent upspeak. “I’ve texted him, like, six times in the past two days but I haven’t heard back. I stopped by your
residence hall, Hudson, but nobody seems to know where he is. I thought you might know.”

  Chris stood there nodding his head. “Sure, sure.”

  “I must be going,” the girl said to him coolly.

  They exchanged a hug before she walked away. He watched her go, beaming, before he turned back to me. “So you’re Bruce’s cousin?”

  “Benji. The Beefer hasn’t mentioned me?”

  “He may have, bro. Just doesn’t ring a bell. Where do you go?”

  “Binghamton? I’m studying film up there. Or I was. Just decided to take this semester off. Or I should say they decided on account of I still owe them my tuition money from last year. Thought I’d Kerouac around before I head back to the West Coast. My folks live out there. Sherman Oaks? Believe, I am in no hurry to go back. The Beefer said I could crash on your residence hall sofa for a couple of nights.”

  “I wish I could help you but I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Well, this sucks. Do you know where he is?”

  “Bruce … isn’t here right now. He’s left campus.”

  “No way! I’m the designated family fuckup. What’s going down?”

  “It’s kind of complicated.” Chris ran a hand through his unruly blond curls. “Have you eaten lunch yet?”

  He led me out the main gate to a bustling pizzeria called Rico’s. The legend of Charles Willingham lived large in there. Every inch of wall space was lined with framed New York Daily News and New York Post back page headlines crowing about Charles In Charge and the magical Canterbury Tale. An authentic replica of his green No. 11 jersey was hanging behind the cash register along with several autographed photos of Charles standing behind that very counter with his big arms wrapped around the owner and his wife.