Too Close to Home

by Andrew Grant

  “Thanks for your help. And don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul. I won’t even need to disturb Pablo. I’ve got a kind of passkey that should do the job just fine.”

  * * *

  —

  I once read in a different magazine that a house is a machine for living in. If that’s true, then Klinsman’s apartment was a machine for flaunting wealth in. I opened the main door—the alarm wasn’t armed and the lock took fifteen seconds to pick, which proves it’s true that there’s nothing more dangerous than thinking you’re safe—and stepped into a foyer that must have been thirty feet wide. Its floor and walls were finished in black-and-white marble, like zebra hides that had been petrified and polished. I continued through a squared-off arch into a living room—or great room, as the sales brochure probably called it—which was thirty feet deep by sixty wide. That was the whole width of that part of the building. It was like stepping into a designer furniture store. There were pieces by all the big guns—van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Noguchi—everywhere I looked, all jumbled in with no rational organization or division between living room and dining items. The space itself was completely open except for six massive circular pillars arranged evenly around the perimeter. There weren’t any walls—just full-height windows with narrow, delicate frames on all three sides. Central Park was laid out to the north, a deep green canyon carved out through the angular cliff-edged buildings. The Hudson flowed languidly past on the western side, and the East River balanced things up on the right. The room was so high up it was like looking at a model of the city, a sanitized facsimile, not the real thing. It was fascinating to gaze out for a few minutes, but I knew I could never live in a place like that. I didn’t see the point. If you want to live in New York, then live in New York. Not perched above it. A city should be a thing you participate in, not look down at through a triple layer of self-cleaning glass.

  I left the living room, moved back across the foyer, and started down a corridor that took me past a giant kitchen with an attached breakfast room. Next I came to a bedroom, about fifteen feet square, not counting its full bath. My attention was drawn because it was completely dark. I went inside and switched on the light. The windows were covered with blackout blinds, and in place of a bed and a dresser and the normal bedroom things, this room was fitted out with a pair of floor-to-ceiling cabinets along the full length of the north and south walls. Each had glass doors, digital thermometers with displays built into the frames, and racks and racks of wine bottles were lined up inside. Each slot was numbered, and the bottles were lying with their corks facing out so I couldn’t see their labels. They wouldn’t have meant much to me anyway, but I’d scanned the file at the courthouse and seen the list of the ones that had been destroyed by the fire at Klinsman’s mansion. I wondered if I’d recognize any of the same kind here. And I wondered if any of them were worth more than an apartment, like the one I’d pretended to find.

  The next door led to another bedroom of the same size, also dark, with an identical setup for storing wine. The next room, which was in the southwest corner, was laid out as a home office. Two whole sides were made of glass, with more stunning, sterile views. There was another giant column set just in from the angle of the windows. A large antique yew desk with a riot of ornate carving took up much of the north wall. An iMac with a giant screen was sitting on top of it, so I took a black box out of my case—the same kind Robson had used at Rooney’s office—and hooked it up. While it took care of copying everything on the computer, I searched the desk drawers. They were full of the normal kinds of clutter—pads of paper, pens stolen from hotel bedrooms, a letter opener, loose AA batteries rolling around, chargers for obsolete phones, operating instructions for a first-generation Blackberry—but nothing significant.

  The wall above the desk was covered with framed pictures. There was a large one in the center with eighteen small and medium ones clustered around it, giving the impression that someone flung them toward the top corner of the room and they somehow got stuck in motion. The focus of the biggest one was a guy in fake fatigues with the name Klinsman taped to his chest, a hunting rifle in his hands, and an elephant at his side. It was lying on the ground with half its skull blown away. The guy was smiling. He was in most of the other pictures, too. Some with the dead elephant. Others, in a Jeep, or standing in the bush, or near a lake, or by some scenic vista. But regardless of these other shots, my eyes kept getting drawn back to the first image. Regardless of any Chinese government connection, and whatever lay behind the share-shorting deal, Klinsman and I were going to have a conversation before this thing was over.

  There were two armchairs by the east wall, angled toward each other. They were covered with tobacco leather, heavily distressed, I’d guess artificially. A campaign chest with polished brass corner protectors and locks sat between them for use as a table. A large shell sat on it, apparently serving as an ashtray based on the way it was stained and the trace of cigar odor that lingered around it. There were framed images on this wall, too. Seven of them. They were all the same size, set out in two rows with four above and three below, and a blank space at the bottom right denying the symmetry. They were all graphs. Their titles were company names. Their vertical axes showed values in millions of dollars. Their horizontal axes, time. In all of them the values had declined, rapidly. Each one had a sticker applied inside the glass, at the top right where there was space above the plot line. They were star-shaped. The first two, starting at the top left, were gold and were embossed with #1. The next was a yellowy #3. Then a silver #2. The lower row started with another silver #2. Then there were two more gold #1s. It was very strange. The opposite of a glory wall. More of an homage to disaster. The financial equivalent of a chauffeur hanging photographs of wrecked limousines. I could see why Klinsman wouldn’t want to display them at his office. Why he wanted to display them at all was still a mystery. Maybe they were some kind of masochistic motivation device. Maybe he thought that being confronted by his failures would drive him to do better. Or maybe they were someone else’s failures—some bitter rival—and he had them there to gloat over. Either way, it was weird.

  I moved on to the drawers in the wooden chest. The bottom two were empty, but in the top one I found a blue folder. There were two items inside it. The printout of a graph, with the same kind of drastic downhill profile as the framed ones but with dates from only a few weeks ago. And a star, embossed with a gold #1. Whoever’s performance he was immortalizing, it evidently hadn’t improved of late.

  There was a subdued ping to my left. The process of copying Klinsman’s computer files was complete, so I dropped the file back in the drawer, collected my black box, and continued my recce. The next room, heading east now, was around fifteen feet by ten. It was lined with built-in wooden bookshelves. Made of alder, by the look of them. They were beautiful. The work of a true craftsman. I could inspect every detail, because there weren’t any books on them. There was no furniture of any other kind, either. Just a pallet in the center of the floor, made to support twelve narrow wooden crates. The kind that valuable paintings are transported in. There were numbers stenciled on the sides, but no indication of the artist or the work.

  The final area—the toe of the boot-shaped floor plan—occupied about a third of the overall space. It was the master suite, with a door that could be locked to keep any family members or visitors at bay. It had two full baths on the right-hand side of its private corridor. On the left there was a walk-in closet. It had two doors, and the storage options suggested it had been laid out with his and hers sections in mind, but the room wasn’t segregated inside. One rail was in use at his end. Five suits were on it, hanging in monochrome order from black to pale gray. There were a dozen shirts, all white with monograms, and two pairs of khaki pants. One drawer contained underwear. Four pairs of shoes were jumbled on the floor. The rest of the rails, drawers, shelves, cupboards, nooks, and display cases—there seemed to be acres of pl
aces to hold things—were empty. The only other items in there were suitcases. There were two of them at the far end, leaning against the wall. They were full of women’s clothes, along with the musty smell that comes from being closed up for too long. I shut the cases again and was about to leave through the second door when it struck me—I was in a place about twenty-five feet long by twelve feet wide. That’s three hundred square feet. More than three times the net living area a soldier gets in a barracks. And it was a closet. Which wasn’t even being used.

  The bedroom was at the end of the corridor. It was twenty feet by thirty, with floor-to-ceiling windows providing views to the north, the east, and the south. There was only one piece of furniture. A bed. It was circular, and had been set in the center of the room like an island. I sat on the edge and looked out. I could see shrunken versions of some of my favorite buildings dotted around the toylike city, way below. The Citicorp was there. Rockefeller Center. The shiny top of the Chrysler. The sight reminded me of all the times as a kid I’d go with my father to the observation deck at the Empire State Building. He’d quiz me on what had changed as visit by visit we watched the city evolve. The memories are still there, fused together like a time-lapse movie in my head. The perspective this place gave was very different, though. And not just because I was looking south, not north.

  I gazed out until the shadows began to lengthen, then hauled myself up, grabbed my case, and started toward the exit. I was halfway there when, on the spur of the moment, I ducked into the first of the bedrooms that had been fitted out as a wine cellar. I opened the door to one of the cabinets. Picked out a bottle at random. It was a red. A Bourgogne, Domaine Leroy Richebourg. I checked the label and found its date: 1949. I googled it and saw that a bottle of that vintage had just sold for $6,000. A bargain, compared to the Chateaux Margaux. I put it in my case, and set the doctored Yellow Tail in its place in the cabinet. Then I retraced my steps out of the apartment, through the locked door, and down in the hotel’s service elevator. I found my way back to the auxiliary plant room. The same guys were inside, playing the same game.

  “Thanks for your help, fellas.” I stopped just inside the door. “They did need a little adjustment, but those sensors are fine now. Shouldn’t hear any more about them for a long time. But before I go, I have something for you.” I opened my case and took out the bottle of Richebourg. “Enjoy. Just do me one favor. If Pablo catches you, don’t tell him it came from me.”

  * * *

  —

  Robson was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor when I got home. His laptop was open in front of him, and he was surrounded by half a dozen uneven stacks of paper.

  “I got us a printer.” Robson scowled. “You owe me.”

  “Sure.” I reached for my wallet. “How much was it?”

  “Not for buying it. For getting it set up. The damn thing’s possessed. I had to take it upstairs and threaten to throw it out of the window before it bent to my will.”

  “That sounds tough. How about if I make it up to you with Chinese food?”

  “That might work.”

  “Do you fancy going out?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, that’s good. Because I have carryout waiting for us in the kitchen.”

  We ate our food quickly—old habits—while I outlined what I’d found in Klinsman’s apartment. Then we tossed the trash and headed back to the living room to confront Robson’s piles of papers.

  “What have we got?” I was trying to make sense of his stacking scheme.

  “Not much. Just a bunch of stuff about Rooney’s security business.” Robson pointed with his foot. “We’ve got accounts. Lists of clients. Lists of employees. Contractors. Suppliers. Sample proposals. Standard letters—follow-ups, price-rise notices, service reminders. It’s all totally boring. There’s nothing about Pardew, his file, why it was taken, returned, or what was removed from it. Nothing about Spangler. No mention of any JD. I’m just hoping this whole exercise doesn’t turn out to be a bust.”

  “What about the locked files?”

  “I haven’t got into them, yet. I hate to do it, but maybe it’s time to ask Harry.”

  “I can do that. I’ll call him, set up a meeting for tomorrow. If he’s free.” I retrieved my case and took out the black box. “In the meantime, I have some files of my own to check. I want to see what secrets Klinsman is hiding on his home computer.”

  Easy, like Sunday morning.

  It was Sunday morning. And if by easy the song meant tired because I got so little rest—sleep being no match for the thrill of finding an interesting little nugget in Klinsman’s computer files—then I guess that was true, too.

  There wasn’t much data to sort through. I guessed it was Klinsman’s secondary machine. He probably had another computer—most likely a laptop, as he traveled so much—for everyday use. A lot of his records were synced, using a cloud service to keep them up-to-date. His calendar was. So were his contacts and his personal email account. There were only three documents saved exclusively on that hard disc. They were all spreadsheets. Inventories, listing things that he owned. One was about art. One, cars. The other, wine. Each had a table that recorded the individual items, the date and place they were purchased, the price he paid, their location, and their current value. He had an extensive portfolio, as he probably thought of it. A staggeringly valuable range of possessions. Taken together they painted a stunning picture. But it was when I focused on the details that things became really interesting.

  I first noticed something fishy in the spreadsheet that cataloged Klinsman’s wine collection. In the court documents that he filed, Klinsman claimed to have lost 261 bottles in the fire. His spreadsheet showed that only 197 were stored in that cellar. I went back to the records of his art. He’d claimed that four paintings had been destroyed. Only one, the least valuable of the group, was supposed to have been hanging at the house. He’d claimed that six of his cars were written off. I remember, because the list included long-lost American brands like Studebaker and Duesenberg that I’d been desperate for my father to buy when I was a kid. It’s possible that he had room for all of them in his garage—but four were listed at a storage facility in White Plains.

  Was it conceivable that the differences in the records were simply clerical errors? Or that Klinsman had moved some of his things around and not updated his files? Sure. But when all the discrepancies were in his favor, and he stood to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result, I wasn’t buying it. I decided that unless Robson had found a lead to Pardew since the night before, Klinsman’s Westchester mansion—or the remains of it—would be the next place I’d visit.

  Robson was already in the living room when I came downstairs. I guessed he’d been there for a while. He was in his pajamas—his favorite blue silk pair—and his teacup was down to the dregs. He was sitting in the same spot on the floor as yesterday, but I was pretty sure the piles of papers had all been shifted around.

  “Morning.” He looked up when he heard me at the doorway. “Put the kettle on.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “It’s a pain in my ass.” He shook his head. “I’m still looking for the devil.”

  “Do you think it’s likely you’ll find him in the house?”

  “In the details. I’m thinking something must be hidden in all these files. Even if it’s nothing to do with Pardew directly, there might be something we can use for leverage over Rooney.”

  “Sounds like a plan. And maybe there’s something in the locked files, also, if Harry can get in. I’m seeing him in an hour. I’m going to give him Klinsman’s contacts, too. Maybe he’s mixed up with someone we can lean on. He actually had a buddy with the initials JD. I thought it might be our lucky day. Two birds, one stone. Then I googled the guy. He died a year ago.”

  “A long shot, but worth taking. Anything else inte
resting on his computer?”

  I told him about the spreadsheets. “His calendar was on there, too. Shows him being away in the UK for another few days. Lots of business meetings penciled in. I’ll ask Harry to look at everyone he’s seeing. He seems like a dull boy, though, our Jimmy. All work, and not very much play. The only social thing listed is a dinner club that gets together every two or three months. Hopefully we’ll be done with him before the next one. If not, I might have to see if they have room for an extra member.”

  * * *

  —

  No one knew what had happened to Harry Hamilton to make it so he wouldn’t work in the field anymore. More accurately, no one I knew well enough to talk to could tell me. All I did know was that he still did a good enough job for the 66th to be happy to let him stay at home in New York and handle some of the murkier analytical tasks that came along. And fortunately for me he was sometimes happy to deploy those skills, off the books, when I was in need of help.

  I was still half a mile from the place we’d agreed to meet, making slow progress up Eighth Avenue and finding out the hard way that the semi-seized clutch in Robson’s Cadillac was not well suited to stop-and-go traffic, when Harry materialized out of the crowd waiting at a set of lights. He glided across a couple of feet of asphalt and was sitting in the passenger seat with the door closed before I’d barely registered movement. And I couldn’t put my finger on how, because he wasn’t slouching or pressing himself back in his seat, but when I looked across I got the impression I could see straight out of the window, like he wasn’t really there.

  “Are we on TV?” Harry’s body was completely still. “Is there a new show, Badge Engineering Gone Wrong? I thought this was a Pontiac when I saw it coming. It was only because of the hideous color I knew it was you.”