Red White and Black and Blue ds-12

by Richard Stevenson

  I made a note to track down Stiver's sister. As well as his thesis advisor.

  I told Jackman that I was puzzled as to how anybody knew I was meeting him and Insinger on Wolf Road Tuesday afternoon. I asked him if he had mentioned to anyone that we planned on meeting.

  "Not that I can think of," he said. "In fact, no. I was so busy at work…oh fuck! Shit! My break is over. I'm two minutes late. Shit. Gotta run, dude!"

  He hung up.

  I said to Timmy, "I still don't know how the Serbians knew they could find me in the Outback parking lot. Nobody involved recalls telling anybody I'd be there."

  "The two Serbians and one Roma."

  "Right."

  "You never saw the driver of the Navigator?"

  "No, just the three who jumped me."

  "And you tend to believe Insinger and Jackman?"

  "I tend to, yeah."

  "And you trust Tom Dunphy?"

  "Sure. Why not?"

  "He's well thought of. Of course, the line of work he's in…well."

  "You would know."

  "You bet."

  "No, it's not Dunphy or Jackman or Insinger who set me up, I don't think. There's something I'm missing here."

  Timmy said, "Rebec."

  "What?"

  "The ancient stringed instrument is a rebec."

  "Never heard of it."

  "Now you have."

  "I would think rebec meant to bec again."

  He ignored this and moved on. I could see that he had about three quarters of the puzzle filled in, all of it in ink.

  I said, "Would you hand me the phone book, please?"

  I looked up Stiver listings in Schenectady and found two: Anson on Ridgemont Drive and J Stiver on Pond Street. J for Jennifer?

  I dialed the J number.

  "Yes, hello?" Female, firm, clear.

  "Is this Jennifer Stiver?"

  The expected pause. Was I a telemarketer? "Yes, I'm Jenny. And you?"

  "I'm Donald Strachey, a private investigator, and I'm calling about a matter concerning your late brother Greg. I understand from friends of Greg's that you and Greg were close."

  I made out what sounded like a muttered oh shit before the line went dead.

  Chapter Seven

  Thursday morning my joints and muscles were still telling me Don't move, just don't move at all, and I had an enormous bruise on the side of my neck that Timmy said looked like a kind of evil hickey. The pain from my ripped ear felt as if I'd been gone after with a cheese grater, and something bad seemed to be going on with the five stitches under the bandage. My hearing was in fact impaired to a degree, but not so much that I couldn't hear Timmy's electric toothbrush buzzing in the bathroom as well as his nose-hair trimmer, his early-morning carbon footprint surprisingly sizeable for such a diehard environmentalist.

  Still flat on my back, I phoned a friend at APD and asked him to e-mail me the Greg Stiver suicide police report. He said those files were on paper and he would fax the report when he got a chance later in the day.

  I tried to recall who all I knew out at SUNY, preferably anybody with access to Stiver's academic and other records.

  No one came to mind who would have had that kind of access. Instead, I phoned a brilliantly clever IT guy I knew named Bud Giannopolous who I feared would one day end up in either the federal penitentiary or the CIA, depending on who came to appreciate his computer hacking abilities first.

  "Can you get into the SUNY system?"

  "Which one?"

  "Student records."

  "Piece of cake. But is this a grade change thing? I don't do that."

  "Even for five hundred thousand dollars?"

  "You jest, do you not?"

  "I do. It's not that. I just want a look at the records of a guy named Gregory Stiver, a master's candidate, who killed himself in April five years ago."

  "Jumped off a SUNY building, right?"

  "You remember?"

  "Sure. I'm acrophobic, so I always notice news stories about death by falling."

  "It's not how anybody wants to go. Some of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center towers leaped in twos, holding hands. I guess that would somehow make it easier. But this Stiver jumped alone, and I can't think of anything lonelier."

  "So you want his academic records?"

  "Yes, including his master's thesis and who his advisor was. Plus the university's report on the suicide, as well as anything else that's in SUNY's records on Stiver. How long will this take?"

  "I want to be thorough, so say an hour."

  "You can e-mail me?"

  "Well, yeah. Did you think I might bring it over by oxcart?"

  When Timmy emerged from the bathroom, I told him I was driving over to Schenectady later in the morning to talk to any of Greg Stiver's relatives I could locate and who were willing to talk to me.

  "Why don't you take a health and beauty day-both your health and your beauty have suffered-and go back to work tomorrow? The primary's not until September, and twenty-four hours won't make any serious difference."

  "I'm okay. Just achy. It might be better if I keep moving."

  He was getting into his perfectly laundered and pressed go-to-work duds, which had been meticulously laid out the night before. "Donald, somebody is obviously watching you, and they're going to know that you weren't scared off by the pounding they gave you on Tuesday. If the campaign is providing bodyguards for Insinger and Jackman, maybe they could also offer you a little help in that regard. Not somebody who would get in your way, but who could just tag along and serve as a deterrent. Or more than a deterrent if ever the need arose."

  He waited for my response and looked as if he knew what was coming.

  "Timothy, who are you talking to?"

  "Yeah, I know."

  "You're wasting your breath."

  "Right. Macho-macho-maa-haan."

  "No. It's not machismo. Alpha male strutting and posturing hold no interest for me. You know that by now, or should. I just work better alone. It's as simple as that. I need space and I need flexibility. Anyway, I'll be armed this time. I'll carry the Smith and Wesson."

  He shook his head and went back to elegantly armoring himself for a day inside one of the most dysfunctional legislative bodies in the western hemisphere. "I guess I don't 66

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson have to remind you of the statistics on people who carry guns around. It's nearly always the innocent that the weapons end up getting used on. With those innocent dead or maimed persons being the gun owners themselves, more often than not."

  "I've avoided shooting my own pancreas out for some years now. Trust me."

  "Of course I trust your judgment and your skills. But when guns start going off, luck is always an element. And you've been lucky in that regard for quite some time now."

  "Timothy, remarks about my number coming up are not helpful. Jesus."

  "Well, anyway it's all moot, since you stopped listening to me five minutes ago."

  "No, I didn't. I'm going to be careful."

  "Yes, I know you'll be careful, in your own particular way of being careful. Okay. Okay, okay."

  He had his necktie on straight now, and he came over and leaned down and-holding his tie against his chest with one hand-gave me a sweet lingering Colgate kiss. Inasmuch as I had not yet brushed my teeth, it was an especially large and loving gesture.

  "Careful, don't touch my ear."

  "I should give it a good smack."

  "Oh, you will, you will, at least figuratively speaking. But make it later in the month."

  He pressed his lips against my uninjured, unbandaged ear and said into it, "Have a safe, productive day, Detective Strachey."

  "That's what I aim to do, if at all possible."

  Bud's e-mail arrived just after nine. I had dragged out of bed, showered, pulled on some jeans painfully, and made it down to the kitchen table and my laptop. Timmy had made coffee for me-his own preference was for South Asian milky
sweet tea-and he left one of his favorite mugs at my place, a battered relic of his Peace Corps days in India. The mug bore the image of Ganesh, the elephant god, helper of scribes and remover of obstacles. While I ate some yogurt and a banana, I looked to see what Bud the remover of privacy walls had sent along.

  Greg Stiver's undergraduate academic record was solid but otherwise unrevealing. He had been a steady B-plus, A-minus student from the beginning of his SUNY career. He did consistently well in history and the social sciences and faltered only in a freshman geology course, where he got a C.

  In grad school, Stiver also did well, earning good grades and commendations from professors in economics courses ranging from statistics to "Birth Pangs of Capitalism" to "Marx Interred: Collectivism Dribbles Out." His master's thesis, called A Trabant of an Economic System, seemed from its introductory section to be about the collapse of the work ethic in East Germany during forty-five years of Marxist economics and political domination by the Soviet Union. I noted that Stiver's thesis adviser was a Dr. Paul Podolski. I checked the current roster of SUNY faculty; Professor Podolski was listed, 68

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson and I noted his phone number, office location, and e-mail address.

  The university's report on Stiver's suicide-digitalized images of typed or handwritten pages-had been compiled by campus police and was stiff with copspeak-"the subject" this,

  "the subject" that, and multiple references to "the deceased."

  No one actually witnessed Stiver's April 17 mid-morning plunge; he had jumped while classes were in session and there were no pedestrians in the immediate vicinity beside the Quad Four tower. His body was discovered adjacent to a walkway by janitorial staff on a break, apparently some minutes after Stiver had jumped. The janitors notified campus cops, who immediately called APD. The city cops responded within ten minutes and got there just before an ambulance arrived. The ambulance was pro forma; the head of the SUNY security detail had noted it was plain that Stiver's neck was broken, and his skull had cracked and brain matter had spattered across the sidewalk.

  A follow-up report, dated the next day, noted that preliminarily police believed the death to be a suicide. Stiver had gained access to the roof of the building by way of an unlocked door at the top of a stairwell. His backpack with books and "personal items" was found near the spot from which he had jumped. There was no evidence anyone else had been with Stiver on the roof.

  A third report, a day later, said APD reported to SUNY that detectives had been given a suicide note by the landlady of the deceased. Also, unnamed "friends"-Insinger and Jackman? — had told APD detectives that Stiver had been 69

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson despondent in recent weeks. So the conclusion was that Stiver had taken his own life.

  No reference was made in any of this to Stiver's sexuality or to his personal life at all, and Assemblyman Louderbush's name never came up. There was, however, a note appended to page three of the report. It read "call from Leg. Blessing responding."

  Leg. was Legislature? And who or what was Blessing?

  Chapter Eight

  Jennifer Stiver's Facebook page contained not a lot of useful information, but I could see that she was no wounded hermit. She was pretty, open-faced, and smiling in her photo, maybe a little flirtatious, with subtly applied makeup and an unsubtle head of wild honey-colored hair. She had designated herself single. Her interests, she noted, were music, dancing, and spelunking. Spelunking? In her photo, Stiver had no mud on her face and she wasn't wearing a headlamp. Her birth date made her thirty-four years old. She didn't list an astrological sign, as some Facebook users did, or any other colorations of personality. Her occupation was teacher.

  Otherwise she was unforthcoming.

  I rang Bud again.

  "Strachey, you got the stuff I sent?"

  "You bet. One more item before you bill me. Is there a Jennifer Stiver teaching in any of the schools, public or private, in or around Schenectady?"

  "Half an hour."

  "I'm here."

  While I waited, I called a woman I knew at APD, and she gave me the names of the three insurance guys who saw me get beat up by the Serbians. I phoned each one in turn on their cells, and they had little to add to what Hanratty had told me. They all apologized for not getting the tag number of the Lincoln, and they all said they were surprised I was out of the hospital so soon. They said I looked terrible lying there in 71

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson my own blood, and at first they weren't sure I wasn't dead.

  One of the three, a man named Servan Singh, said he noticed that the Navigator had a green sticker on a rear side window that looked like some kind of landfill permit. I wondered, for dumping trash or bodies?

  Bud called me back. "Jennifer Stiver teaches sixth grade at Burton Hendricks Elementary School in Rotterdam. She's been there for eight years. Her personnel file contains excellent evaluations overall. Should I send them along?"

  "No, no need."

  "There was one negative thing five years ago, not coincidentally I suppose, around the time of her brother's death. Her principal notes that she missed two weeks of school, which was a week longer than the bereavement policy allowed. She was docked a week's pay and warned not to miss any more days that were unauthorized."

  "I wonder why she didn't just say she was sick that second week. She must have had sick leave accumulated."

  "Maybe she recognized that that would have been dishonest."

  "I'm glad to have you of all people point that out to me, Bud."

  "Thinking you might need to know, I also learned that Ms.

  Stiver is now winding up her teaching duties for the school year. The last day of classes at Burton Hendricks is a week from tomorrow."

  "What time does school let out today? Surely you looked into that also."

  "Three-fifteen."

  Bud gave me the address for the school, and I asked him to stand by and not leave town. I said I was working on something both fascinating and disturbing, and he would learn about it soon enough and it would leave him disgusted.

  "Cool."

  I finished getting clothes on and took another Tylenol. I still ached all over and my ripped ear was throbbing. I retrieved and loaded the Smith amp; Wesson. The Weather Channel called for a high of eighty-three, so there was no way I was going to wear anything that would conceal the weapon.

  I stuck it in the black shoulder bag I carried when traveling in Europe and Asia. The gun nestled in there nicely with my map of Istanbul and my Imodium.

  I phoned the SUNY economics department. A secretary said Dr. Paul Podolski might be able to see me after his two-hour nine o'clock summer-school class. SUNY was on the way to Rotterdam, more or less, so I went out and was about to climb into the Toyota when I thought, oh shit, car bomb.

  With effort, I got down and checked the wheel wells nothing amiss-and then popped the hood and examined the engine. Nothing wrong there either, other than some corroded battery terminals. I thought, this is nuts. What the hell am I thinking? The Serbians warned me to get off the Louderbush investigation, and they don't even know that I'm still on it, so why would they try to blow me up? Several people-two of them other Crow Street denizens I knew vaguely-strolled by while I was inspecting the car. None seemed to be watching me or showing any interest at all in what I was doing.

  I got in and turned the key and was not blown to bits. I pulled out onto Crow, then turned up Hudson. I checked the rearview mirror periodically and headed out Lark and then left on Washington Avenue toward the SUNY main campus. Some fair-weather clouds drifted across a pale early summer sky, and I opened the car windows and sucked in air that felt unusually clean and fresh. I thought, I hurt but I am inhaling and exhaling like a pro. Nice.

  The State University of New York Albany main campus which cost hundreds of millions of dollars when it was strewn across a field by Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s but by now looked only a
little more alluring than a hot-sheet motel in Fort Lee-was sparsely populated during its summer semihiatus, and those few students and others out and about were in no big hurry. I parked and soon located Quad Four, the classroom tower from which Greg Stiver had plunged to his death. I thought I figured out the spot where he had landed. There were no aftereffects, no memorial plaque. I paused for a minute, then moved on.

  Paul Podolski had a third-floor office in a nearby building, another cement and glass upended shoe box, the public architecture of a society wary of overspending in an area it was ambivalent about, such as learning.

  I was told by the department secretary to knock on the door of room 318, but when I found 318 the door was open and a man looked up from a computer terminal.

  "Yep? What's up?"

  He looked like one of the Smith Brothers on the cough drop box, skinny, shiny on top and black beard from upper lip 74

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson to midsection I introduced myself and said I understood he had been Gregory Stiver's thesis adviser, and I asked if I might talk to him about Greg for a few minutes.

  "Maybe. Who are you working for, may I ask?"

  "I can't really say who my client is at this point. But I can tell you it's somebody entirely sympathetic to Greg, someone who is very sorry about Greg's death and the circumstances leading up to it."

  He sat there sizing me up. Who was I, and what was I up to? "What circumstances are you referring to? What circumstances leading up to Greg's suicide? That is, if it was suicide."

  I helped myself to a seat in the chair across Podolski's desk from him. "I'm talking about Greg's unhappiness in the weeks before he died. The police and press reports both refer to Greg's supposed despondency. What do you mean, if it was suicide? You have doubts?"

  "All I'm saying is, I didn't expect Greg to do such a thing.

  It was shocking to me."

  "He hadn't been depressed that you were aware of? Two friends say he was. Janie Insinger and Virgil Jackman were neighbors of Greg's and rode with him from his place on Allen Street out here to the campus a couple of times a week."