Rocky smiled, looking pleased as the line of attractive women walked past, each one thanking him for holding the door open for her on the way out.
“Such a gentleman,” Finn said dryly.
As the door finally closed, Rocky threw him a wink. “Can you blame me, Finn? That’s the closest thing I’m getting to a hot date any time soon at our age.”
“Speak for yourself, old-timer.”
Rocky grabbed one of Finn’s shoulders and gave it a good, friendly shake.
“Get this geezer a drink on me,” Finn said, calling out to Clarissa behind the bar.
Rocky gave him an appreciative wink. “Business must be good.”
Indeed, it was, Finn thought. He’d opened this bar thirty-five years ago, when he was only twenty-seven years old, with a business loan cosigned by his parents. That was back when the denizens of the West Village were artists, rebels, hippies, and others looking for a community away from the posher, more proper areas of New York City. Finn wasn’t drawn so much to the counterculture as he was to the cheap rent.
He told his folks that someday this neighborhood would take off, but never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined the hipness of downtown Manhattan in the new millennium. Now he enjoyed the best of both worlds. He still catered to regulars like Rocky, keeping the music on the jukebox about right for their era. But he also had a cocktail menu with cosmopolitans and apple martinis, trivia night Thursdays, and Sunday Bloody Mary singalongs to bring in the young people who thought it was cool to hang out at an old established joint once in a while.
As he watched Rocky settle into his usual spot at the end of the bar and take a long pull from his on-the-house beer, Finn allowed himself to enjoy a moment of pride in the business he had built.
The snow was really starting to stick by the time Clarissa appeared at his booth with a glass mug filled with dark liquid. He could tell from the way she carried it that the drink was hot.
“Is that what I think it is?” Finn asked.
“Your favorite.” Favorites, Finn thought. Just like with his kids, Finn would never admit that he had favorite employees, but Clarissa was indeed his favorite. According to her birth certificate, she was twenty-six years old, but he was convinced that her soul was born in 1937. Plus, she made a hazelnut hot toddy that tasted like heaven in a cup.
A loud roar came from the back room, and she responded with a cross look. “We’ve got some numbskulls back there tonight. Angry vibes if you know what I mean. Too much testosterone. No offense, of course.”
“Of course,” he said with a smile.
“Some guy with a big mouth is celebrating his twenty-first birthday. He’s home on winter break from Vassar, which he is quite loud and proud about. According to him, he’s already got a top job lined up on Wall Street. He’s going to own this town by the time he’s thirty.”
“So when’s the wedding?” Finn asked.
“To him? Not in this lifetime! Besides, he’s got his eyes set on someone else. He’s trying to move in on one of the women back there, buying her drinks all night.”
“Let me know if he crosses a line. If he’s looking to cause trouble, I’d rather toss him out of here before he gets started.”
As Clarissa turned toward the bar, the volume from the back room suddenly burst to an even higher decibel level, nearly causing Finn to spill his hot toddy. The heavy purple curtain separating the room from the rest of the bar billowed as if a heavy gust of wind had found its way inside, and two men came tumbling out, shoving each other, surrounded by a crowd. A tall guy in a sports jacket and loosened collar cried out, “Come on, Wall Street tough guy. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
They were moving so quickly that Finn could only make out the dark hair of the taller fighter, and the red hair of the shorter, squatter one. A woman screamed, “Jay, watch out!” as the dark-haired one threw a punch that landed against his opponent’s jaw.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Finn hollered, jumping up from his booth with both palms up. Finn’s was known for being a low-key hangout, but you don’t own a bar for three and a half decades without learning how to break up a fight. It’s just a couple college kids, Finn thought. Amateur hour. I’ve got this.
The men paid no attention to Finn and continued to shove and punch each other, carried by the momentum of the crowd around them. Finn jumped into the group, trying to reach the two fighters to break them apart. Before he knew it, he was being pushed through the doorway outside. The sidewalk in front of the bar was beginning to become slippery. A younger man next to him lost his footing and fell to the ground as the dark-haired fighter bent low and charged toward the redhead, letting out what sounded like a loud growl.
Finn inserted two pinkies into the corners of his mouth and gave the crowd his best attention-getting wolf whistle. “Enough of this, fellas. Break it up, break it up.”
He felt a push behind him and was heading even closer to the action. Once they can see and hear me, he thought, I’ll be able to calm them down I’ll get right between them if I have to.
The redhead’s eyes opened wide as he registered Finn’s presence in front of him. His lips parted. He’s just a kid, Finn thought. I can tell he’s scared and wants this to be over. We’re all fine here. Almost done.
The kid’s gaze lowered, and Finn allowed his eyes to follow, suddenly aware of a strange feeling in his abdomen. A sharp pain. The glow of the corner street lantern was refracted from the top of the metal blade, two inches of it visible between Finn’s sweatshirt and the knife handle. The fingers wrapped around the handle were clenched into a fist. He watched the blade get pulled out of his body, and then took a deep gasp for air, like a swimmer coming up from the water. The air turned into a scream as the knife plunged into him again.
Finn’s knees buckled beneath him, and he collapsed to the sidewalk. The last thing to fall was his head against the first snow of winter on the concrete.
“Fiiiiinnnn! No, Finn, no. Please, someone call an ambulance. He’s stabbed.”
It was Clarissa. The last thing Finn saw was his favorite employee, futilely pressing her bar apron against his sweatshirt.
* * *
The bystanders failed to stop the bar brawl, but the sight of their beloved bar’s owner, bloodied on the ground, drastically altered the mood of the crowd. No longer onlookers, they jumped into action, working together to detain the two fighters until official help arrived.
The EMTs pulled up within minutes, but Lou Finney was pronounced dead at the scene. Meanwhile, the bar regular named Rocky found an open buck knife about twelve feet from Finn’s body, tossed or kicked there by either his killer or someone else, intentionally or not, during the chaos after his stabbing. As a last way to help his friend, he watched over the weapon, making sure no one touched it, until police arrived.
The earliest responding police officers learned that the dark-haired fighter was Darren Gunther, a junior at Vassar College, the one celebrating his twenty-first birthday. The redhead was Jay Pratt, a twenty-seven-year-old commercial real estate broker. Lieutenant Leo Farley, a rising NYPD star, was the detective to get the call out.
Chapter 18
Laurie noticed that her father had stood up and was pacing back and forth as he recounted the history of the case against Darren Gunther for the murder of a beloved West Village bar owner named Lou Finney. That was always a sure sign that he was feeling anxious.
“It was a bar fight that spun out of control,” Leo explained. “Gunther was a good-looking, charismatic college student with the confidence of the multimillionaire he was determined to become. Jay Pratt, by comparison, was a nerdy little pipsqueak—a fancy Upper East Side kid who walked into a ready-made job at his dad’s commercial real estate business. And Lou Finney? He was the nice guy who was trying to keep two hotheads from getting rowdy in his establishment. His death was a major blow to the neighborhood. Word spread fast. The entire sidewalk in front of the bar was covered with flowers and handmade sympathy cards by the
following morning.”
Alex leaned forward from his position on the sofa next to Laurie, his elbows against his knees, fingertips steepled. “I actually remember when that happened,” Alex said. “I was in college at the time, too. A couple of my friends from Fordham went down to the village that night for drinks, but I stayed home. I had one last final exam to cram for. My friends were on their way to Finn’s later that night when they saw the police and crime tape out front. The next day, they said they might have been there when the fight broke out if they hadn’t been caught in traffic caused by the snow.”
“I remember it, too,” Laurie said. “I had just gotten home for winter break, and I remember you telling Mom about the case the next morning when you came back for a quick pit stop. By the time you returned later that evening, you had Gunther’s con-fession.”
“No,” Leo said, tapping a corrective finger in the air. “It was more complicated than that. When I came home for a break, I had the first version of his confession, but I knew Gunther was holding back—spinning the facts to give him a shot with a sympathetic jury. It was that conversation with your mom during my break that cracked it all open. I went back to the station and questioned Gunther again. Got him to show his true colors.”
The memory was coming back to Laurie more clearly. “I remember you telling Mom later that she was the one to solve the case.”
Alex’s gaze moved back and forth between them like a spectator at Wimbledon, trying to make sense of the conversation.
“Here’s how it went down,” Leo said, seeing Alex’s confusion. “Finn was trying to break up the fight as it spilled out onto the sidewalk, but Gunther and Pratt were clawing at each other’s throats. Plus, a bunch of people from the bar had spilled outside, too, drawing even more gawkers from the streets. It was total pandemonium. And then Finn dropped to the ground, stabbed—twice it turned out—in the abdomen.” Leo’s left hand touched the area just above his belt indicating the location of the wounds. “No one actually saw the stabbing, but the most likely scenario was that it was one of the two brawlers—Gunther or Pratt.”
“They each blamed the other one,” Laurie explained, trying to hurry the story along. She knew her father could easily spend an hour talking about the case, especially in light of the distortions Darren Gunther had made of the facts over the last several months. She understood her father’s obsession with the facts, but was eager to hear how they might relate to Johnny’s disap-pearance.
“When I first read them their rights—in separate interrogation rooms, obviously—both of them said the other guy must have been the one to pull the knife. And I had no witnesses. Gunther, Pratt, and Finn had been clustered too tightly together for anyone else to have a good view. By the time Finn fell, the knife had been dropped on the sidewalk, and from the looks of the handle, we suspected someone had done a quick wipe-down to try to get rid of any fingerprints. We found Finn’s blood on both men, including their hands, but that didn’t tell me much under the circumstances. So I waited a bit and told Gunther we found his prints on the knife. And, of course, I told Pratt the exact same thing.”
“And whose prints did you actually find?” Alex asked.
“No one’s,” Leo said. “Obviously, it took the crime lab a couple of weeks to confirm that for certain. But that night, I told them both that whoever did the quickie cleanup job on the knife’s handle had missed a couple spots, and that we had found two latents remaining as points of comparison. I explained how a fingerprint is made up of loops and whorls and arches. I said we had thirteen matching points on one of the latents, and twenty on the other. It was practically a forensic science seminar. I even brought in the kind of graphics an expert witness would put on a screen during a trial so they could see the similarities with their own eyes—but it was evidence from an entirely different case.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Alex noted. “Even as a defense attorney, I knew that police were allowed to use deception during an interrogation.”
“Exactly,” Leo said. “As long as the defendant’s statements remain voluntary—which they were. Well, Pratt was absolutely defiant. He told me to bring in a Bible or a lie detector so he could swear that he never touched a knife. He insisted that the lab must have switched his print card with Gunther’s. But not Gunther. I could see the wheels churning. Suddenly, he shifted his story entirely. He claimed Finn was the one who pulled the knife in the first place, saying he’d show the two of them for starting a fight in his bar. He claimed he was trying to take the weapon away to protect himself when someone pushed Finn toward him.”
“Twice?” Alex asked with disbelief. “He accidentally stabbed the man twice?”
Leo shook his head. “Of course not. That’s why I said this was the first version of his confession. I knew it was bogus. And Gunther looked so smug, almost smiling as I left the room, daring me to try to disprove his story. You’ve seen Gunther’s interviews with those fawning TV hosts? He’ll never sit down with someone with a real journalism or criminal law background. He’s tapped into the celebrity showbiz market. He was the same arrogant guy, even back then.”
“The profile in Vanity Fair called him disarmingly charming,” Laurie recalled dryly.
“And he knows it,” Leo said. “That charm and some smarts are what earned him scholarships to prep school and to Vassar.”
“Well, it probably helped that he had lied and said he was an orphan,” Laurie said.
In the lead-up to Gunther’s criminal trial, Leo and the police discovered that Gunther had a dark side lurking beneath his charismatic exterior. Deeply insecure, he manipulated people to gain access to elite circles, only to steal personal items from the homes of his hosts and lie about his background. His high school teachers and college professors were under the impression that he had been orphaned during middle school after his parents died in a private plane crash, but it turned out that his single mother was alive and well and working as a housekeeper in Forest Hills.
But Leo knew none of this the night of the murder. It was Laurie’s mother who had pointed Leo in a new direction of interrogation when he had come home briefly in the early morning hours after the killing.
“Eileen was always so intuitive,” Leo said, his voice softening at the memory of Laurie’s mother. “I saw Gunther and Pratt as two young hotheads in some booze-filled bar brawl. She was the one who wanted to know what the two men had been fighting about in the first place. Gunther never offered his side of that story, but Pratt said it started after he bought a drink for a woman he knew from boarding school. Eileen heard that and… boom!” Leo pointed a finger for emphasis. “Eileen said, ‘That’s it! I guarantee you, it’s about Gunther trying to control that young woman. He didn’t want her talking to another man.’ Sure enough, I got hold of this bartender from Finn’s, a woman named Clarissa DeSanto. She said Gunther had been focused all night on another customer—female, probably three years older than him, dressed down in jeans and a sweater for a night in the Village, but wearing two-karat diamond studs and a stack of Cartier bracelets.”
“Out of Gunther’s league?” Alex asked.
“That was Clarissa’s impression, so I worked that angle. I tracked the female customer down through one of her friends’ credit card charge. Her name was Jane Holloway. She and Pratt went to high school together. She said Gunther kept trying to talk to her all night. At first, she was flattered, but then she and her friends joked about him behind his back, saying he was the next Wolf of Wall Street, that kind of thing. She finally fibbed and told him she was engaged, so he’d leave her alone. Then when Pratt showed up, Gunther said something like, You must be the lucky fiancé. Your girl’s been talking to me all night. From there, it quickly became clear there was no actual engagement. Jane had embarrassed him big time.”
“So it was all about his fragile ego,” Alex said.
“Exactly, or at least, that was my theory. I pulled him back into the interrogation room, this time making it clear I kne
w how insecure he was. How rejected he must have felt. How he had spent his entire birthday seeking attention from a woman he could never actually date. How Jane had treated him like a joke. When he realized that I knew—that I could see who he truly was—he finally confessed, and this time it was the truth. He called the girl and her friends names that could never be repeated in polite company, and he admitted that he stabbed Finn in a blind rage.”
“All because a woman rejected him,” Laurie said.
“It happens much too often, sadly,” Leo said. “When the trial came around, Gunther denied ever making that confession. He told the jury I fabricated every single word of it, claiming once again that he never even saw the knife and had no idea who stabbed Lou Finney. He said someone else in the crowd must have done it.”
“And you really think that Gunther might have something to do with Johnny’s disappearance?” Laurie asked.
“The thing that has always made him tick was his desire to control his own narrative,” Leo said. “First, he wanted to be the up-and-coming, hot-shot financial wizard. Now he wants to be the brilliant writer who was railroaded by the police. And guess who’s the bad guy in this narrative—the one he needs to control if his story’s going to stick?” Leo held up one hand. “This guy. Gunther probably hoped I’d be six feet under by now, or living out my days playing horseshoes on a beach, not caring one way or the other about some ancient case. But that’s not me. I’ve been fighting him every step of the way. Unless I say I fabricated that confession, the DA’s not going to dump that conviction.”
Laurie closed her eyes and tried to imagine Darren Gunther plotting from a prison cell to abduct a child to gain leverage over the detective who stood between him and freedom. Using an innocent little boy as a pawn would be sociopathic. But she knew Gunther was cunning and charming. He had contacts with people outside of prison who might be willing to help him obtain what they saw as justice in the long run.
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