Ready. Set. Psycho.

by John Griffin

  “What did he tell you to do?”

  “He gave me a test tube. Told me to put it into the throat of a young girl.”

  “Didn’t strike you as odd that the next day a young girl showed up dead on your watch?”

  A tear rolled down Paulie’s cheek. He looked around. “No, man.” He put his hand on his mouth. “He killed that guy? And that girl?”

  “He killed a whole lot more than that.”

  “He going to kill me?”

  “Not if you tell me everything you know, and we find him first.”

  “Who the fuck are you? You a cop?” Paulie asked.

  “Yeah,” Reg said. Paulie did not ask for identification, and Reg thought, Yeah, this guy’s an idiot.

  Chapter Fifteen:

  Solomon

  Solomon approached the orange door. He slipped a key into the pad lock, turned it, slipped the lock off, and slid up the storage door. Inside the concrete room with no windows were a second-hand desk and chair. On both sides of the room hung large corkboards, and in the middle of the room was a whiteboard. The corkboard to his left had a picture of the home in Short Hills in the center. Connected to the picture with red string were pictures of all the apparatus of the alarm system that had been recently installed, with post-it notes of codes to disarm or dismantle them. On the right were the four safes the group was targeting, all circled and highlighted in wide-angled photographs of the room where they were situated. There was a fifth picture of an empty closet in the basement that had not been retouched.

  Solomon walked to the far wall and picked up a red marker. His name, along with The Man in Black, Sham, Reginald, Vince, and Lisa were written there in his nearly illegible script. Next to each of them was written a phone number and a dollar figure. The Man in Black’s dollar figure was largest. Lisa’s was $400,000. The three thieves other than Solomon had $1,000,000 each assigned to them. Using the red marker, Solomon crossed off Vince’s name and then adjusted Sham and Reginald’s shares up to $1,375,000, putting Vince’s down to $250,000.

  Solomon reviewed his work, checked his math, and then nodded as he drew three more strikes through Vince’s name and then a happy face in yellow next to it. Solomon smiled, turned his back to the whiteboard, and left the storage unit. He shut the door, replaced the pad lock, and locked it.

  He put the key back into his right pocket and then fished around in his left pocket, removing another, similar key. Solomon walked to the storage unit next door and unlocked it and went in. It was organized identically to the last, except the corkboards and whiteboards contained information exclusively about Justin Graham. Solomon stood in the room, closing the door behind him and turning on a battery-operated lamp. He exhaled, picked up his phone, and then told the person on the other line he needed to talk this through.

  Lisa arrived with Clive. They knocked on the door to the storage unit. It was raining. Solomon opened, and Clive rushed in. “Fucking cold, Sol,” he said. “And wet. And not much better in here.” He helped himself to the lone seat and shook off some of the water.

  “Nothing on your end?” Solomon asked Lisa.

  “I don’t really hear much. That’s mostly up to Roger and Thomas. I don’t have line of sight, but I get the sense that they are as active as they can be, but they are waiting for a break.”

  “They shouldn’t be waiting,” Solomon said.

  “They’re not. You know what I mean. They’re working, but there’s nothing for them. No clues. Sol, you know what they are up against. There’s nothing to work with,” Lisa said. “And if Roger and Thomas know something, they aren’t saying.”

  “And you?” Solomon asked, looking at Clive.

  “The body with the note was otherwise just a body. And no others have popped up.”

  “Okay. Well, we have figured out how he got the note into the body,” Solomon said.

  “Paulie?” Clive asked.

  “Yes.” Solomon took Paulie’s picture and added it to a timeline on the corkboard. On the far left were the eighteen dead homeless men. Next were Francine, then Juanita, then Greg. To the right of them were still frames of Justin’s trip through Europe, aligned to the timeline as best as Kevin could figure it. After that was a picture of Vera, and then Paulie. The last picture on the far right was Hyacinth.

  “What do we know?” Lisa asked.

  “He paid Paul ten thousand to slip the note into Vera’s throat.”

  “Should I have Roger and Thomas pick him up?” Lisa asked.

  “Probably,” Solomon said. “But if you could wait a few days, I’d appreciate it.”

  Lisa shook her head.

  Solomon turned his back. “He’s only made one mistake.” He approached the corkboard hanging over the desk where the doctor was seated. He pulled out a credit card receipt. “His parents kept the credit card going after he ran off. He used it three days later and then probably realized that they hadn’t forgotten to turn it off but had left it on so we could track him. Maybe he did it on purpose. I don’t know. That’s the game. In any event, he bought camping gear in Germany, a small city outside Munich. At a hostel.”

  “And what did you find there?” Lisa asked.

  Solomon turned around. “What makes you think I went there?”

  “What did you find, Sol?” Clive asked.

  “I did not go there. But I made some calls. He didn’t use the gear,” Solomon said. Next to the receipt was a picture of two blonde gentlemen. “Fritz and Frank…”

  “No,” Clive said, laughing.

  “I kid you not.” Solomon continued. “He bought it for them.”

  “So he bought camping gear for a couple German students. What’s the connection?” Lisa asked.

  “Me,” Solomon said. He moved to the corkboard on the opposite wall. “Fritz and Frank Buchholz, great-grandchildren of Karl Buchholz, one of my grandfather’s closest business partners until Hitler came to power. He is the one who alerted the regime when my grandfather first tried to escape. They arrested him, confiscated his entire collection. As a reward, Karl was allowed to keep what he wanted and sell what he wanted. He kept what he thought were the eighteen most valuable paintings.”

  Clive put his hand over his mouth. “I hope this kid doesn’t think of me as his mortal enemy anytime soon. What did he do? Kill them?”

  “From what I could tell, he made friends with them. I spoke with them. He spent a week with them in one of their castles,” Solomon said.

  “Castles?” Lisa said.

  “This was a very small castle,” Solomon said, pointing to a picture of it on the corkboard in the proper place on the timeline. “When the week was up, he was gone, and so was a box in the basement. Fritz and Frank didn’t know what was in the box, but their father was very angry.”

  “Did they call the cops?” Lisa asked.

  “No.”

  “So then it isn’t very valuable, whatever it was,” Clive said.

  “A psycho kid with art-collecting parents steals a box from the grandson of a Nazi art dealer, and you think it wasn’t valuable because he didn’t call the cops?” Lisa asked sarcastically. “No. He didn’t call the cops because he couldn’t report it missing. Couldn’t even hang it in his house. He didn’t call the cops because it was so fucking valuable. What was it?”

  “Either the Metzinger or the Gierymski. My grandfather had tracked the other sixteen away from Buchholz,” Solomon said.

  “From your grandfather’s collection?” Clive asked. “My word. He just took it? Why didn’t you or your father just go and take it? It couldn’t have been that easy.”

  “We tried,” Solomon said.

  “What happened?” Clive asked.

  “Buchholz woke up,” Solomon said.

  “Did your father get caught?” Clive said, leaning forward.

  “No. He got out and left the country. The year he went missing — the year he died — he had gone back to Germany to try again.”

  “And the kid’s trail?” Lisa asked.

&
nbsp; “Cold after that. Nothing until Paulie and the note in the dead girl’s throat.”

  “So he’s got the girl, and he’s got one of the works of art your father and grandfather had spent a life trying to find? Does he bury the art in the woods? He can’t bring that here. He could perhaps get through customs with a fake passport, or through the porous borders with Mexico or Canada, but nobody is letting art through uninspected,” Lisa asked.

  “No,” Solomon said. “It will be with him. So how does he get back into the country?”

  “Boat,” Clive said. “I can’t tell you how many dead, suffocated migrant workers I investigate in a year. They pay obscene amounts of money to get into the country, and there isn’t a customs agent on this end when you come out of a shipping container in the middle of the night.”

  Lisa and Solomon stared at the doctor. “What?” Clive said. “You didn’t invite me here for my looks. I’ve been very useful in this investigation.”

  “Boat,” Solomon said, shrugging. “So where do they land?”

  “There are a couple cartels that run using ships from North Africa. It is usually just a few shipping crates per boat. They land on the pier, right here in New York. New York is still the place cargo ships make land on the East Coast,” Clive said.

  “So he buys himself a shipping crate and makes land here in New York. Sometime between April 28th, when he took off on Fritz and Frank, and September 27th, when he hands Paul the note for the dead girl’s throat.”

  “Does he cross as a migrant?” Lisa asked.

  “Would he take the risk?” Solomon said.

  “No,” Clive said. “Not if he knows what they go through. The kid might be tough and might think he’s tougher still than he actually is, but I wouldn’t call him stupid, and he’s not going to get into a sealed steel container with thirty poor people who don’t speak his language with a priceless painting and hope to reach the other side alive.”

  “So he buys up an entire cargo suite for himself,” Solomon says.

  “Noticeable,” Lisa said, adding, “Need a few names?”

  “Just one or two,” Solomon replied.

  “So what do we learn out of this?” Clive asked. Lisa and Solomon looked at him again. “No, I get it, you think it is a dumb question. But really, what do you get out of it, Sol? It is obviously how he got into the country. It’s obvious. So you go talk to some dangerous people? They maybe — maybe — cooperate, and you find out you’re right. But they probably don’t know where he went afterwards, so you’re no further along. You don’t fill in any blanks, here.”

  “I bring you the body of a man found in a warehouse who is shot in the head,” Solomon said. “During the examination you find water in his lungs — enough to drown him. What do you do?”

  “I follow the evidence.” Clive said. “And try to figure out how he drowned and why someone shot him in the head after he died.”

  Solomon sat in the waiting area of the office on the fortieth floor of the Time & Life Building on the Avenue of the Americas. His view faced west. The woman he was here to meet was running thirty minutes late, and the receptionist had offered coffee and water, but Solomon had declined. As Solomon tapped his right foot, the phone rang and the receptionist stood and invited Solomon into the office.

  He sat across from a tall blonde woman who was on the phone. She spoke with a strong East German accent. She was in her fifties and wore a black pantsuit. She nodded at him and motioned for him to sit as she told the person on the other end of the line she had to go.

  She stood, extended her hand, and shook Solomon’s firmly, his grip weak compared with hers. “Gertrude,” she said as she sat back down and leaned backward. “Money?”

  Solomon took a stack out of his right breast pocket and handed it over. She counted and then said to him, “A lot of money for a date.”

  “I know how important your clients’ privacy is,” Solomon said.

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “A former associate of mine availed himself of your border crossing services, coming here likely from somewhere in North Africa,” Solomon said.

  “We don’t keep manifests on those trips,” she said. “I’m not sure I can help you.”

  “You’ll remember this one. He bought out the entire container so he could travel alone,” Solomon said.

  Gertrude nodded. “That would have been expensive.”

  “That would not have been a problem.”

  “That would have been far more expensive than five thousand dollars for a date.”

  “Can I appeal to your sense of justice?” Solomon asked.

  Gertrude laughed. “I’d like to see you try.”

  “This person is Psycho — the killer who kidnaps young girls and lets them suffocate.”

  Gertrude stared back at him. “Nope. That appeal is not going to work. Some of my very best friends do much worse things to young girls than kill them.”

  “So what would a date like this cost?” Solomon asked.

  “He would have had to pay five hundred thousand to buy out both sides of a container contract. It’s not just the cost of getting here — that gets you on the boat. That is actually pretty cheap. He would also be responsible for paying to be free from work afterward. That’s where we really make our money. Getting on the boat is our loss leader. The work you do for us afterward pays a much more handsome return.”

  Solomon smiled. “I wouldn’t suppose a show of force would do anything to convince you?” They both laughed. “I didn’t think so. So, what, a million?”

  Gertrude nodded. “I’d need the money, and I’d need to know that other potential clients never find out that we leaked this information. It would be bad for business.”

  “So, a million and a promise of discretion?” Solomon asked. Gertrude nodded. “Okay. Can I have my employer call yours?” Gertrude nodded again. Solomon sent a text.

  They sat waiting. After a few minutes, Gertrude started answering emails on her computer. After twenty minutes, she fielded a phone call from her husband asking about what to pick up for dinner. When she hung up, she shook her head. “Asshole,” she said. “I work all day, and he sits at home and is too lazy to go out to get something for me to cook for dinner when I get home. You married?”

  “Almost, once,” Solomon said.

  “Kids?”

  “The closest thing I’ve ever had was one of Psycho’s victims.”

  Gertrude shook her head. “Don’t make revenge personal,” she said. “It has to end, and it always ends badly. Either you’re dead, or he is, and all that’s left is regret for the time you’ve lost. It isn’t worth it.”

  “Have you ever had revenge like this?” Solomon asked.

  “Once,” Gertrude said. “A few years back I ran into a man at a coffee shop who had raped me when I was sixteen. He was twenty-two at the time, a college tutor. My parents wanted me to learn English. He taught me. He raped me the first time in my third lesson. The last time was our last lesson, fifty sessions later. So I saw him when I was visiting home in a coffee shop. He came up and said hi to me. He asked me how I have been. And it was like he owned me. So I made a call, and I followed him out of the café and beat him to death with a cricket bat, and then got picked up and left the country before they found the body. Haven’t been home since.”

  “Worth it?”

  “The revenge? No. The lesson it taught me about forgiveness? Yes.”

  “Forgiveness?” Solomon asked, astonished.

  “I kept expecting to feel healed, to have expunged this dark secret of mine and to feel vengeance. But it never came. I still hated him. I still wanted to kill him — but there he was, dead already, and I got to do it myself, even. I got to see the fear in his eyes and know that he knew that I was doing it, and that he knew why I was doing it. So I learned about forgiveness. It is not about forgiving the other person. Fuck them. It is about not carrying around your hate. It is about giving yourself permission to move on with your life so t
hat one person and all the awful things they did to you don’t define who you are.”

  Her phone rang. She picked it up and in fluent Russian had a brief conversation, mostly agreeing and acknowledging what she was being told. “We have terms,” she said as she hung up. “Justin landed at Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in Newark Bay on August 15th. He was on a ship flagged from Cayman Islands called the Nautilus, in a container marked JFKU3976482.”

  “Any point in me going to check that out?” Solomon asked.

  “The container is still there. We may have cleaned it, maybe not. Maybe you find something? Probably you find nothing. But as soon as we open the container, our contract is finished and we don’t know what he did from there. So what are you going to do?”

  Solomon stood, shaking Gertrude’s hand as she stood. “I’m going to follow the evidence,” he said.

  Solomon stepped into the warehouse. Dim lamps hung fifty feet up. Dirt, grit, grime, and water from the day’s rain trailed in and out of the open doorway. He followed an impish man with a limp and a broad, graying neck beard. “Lucky,” the man said as he continued along midway into the warehouse. “Very lucky. This one is on the ground.”

  Solomon smiled. “Not luck,” he said quietly. “Design.”

  The man took a pair of bolt cutters and cut the lock on the door. Solomon took his flashlight and turned it on, looking inside. He turned back to the man and tried to hand him fifty dollars.

  “No charge for the help,” the man said, waving him off.

  “Not for your help,” Solomon said. “For your discretion.”

  “Discretion’s worth double,” the man said, smiling, before shouldering his bolt cutters and leaving.

  Solomon put the money back into his pocket. He turned and stepped into the container. Standing in the doorway, he trained his flashlight around the interior. On his right was a thin mattress and a blanket. On his left was a bucket. Throughout were empty bottles of water and wrappers from energy bars. He walked toward the mattress first, turning it over, inspecting the blanket. He sat on it. It was moist. He absently picked up one of the wrappers and read the label. It was written in German, but there was an English translation as well as French, Spanish, and Italian and half a dozen other languages he didn’t recognize.