LOSERS LIVE LONGER (Hard Case Crime Book 59)

by Russell Atwood

  He blinked, one two three.

  “You were recommended.”

  “By whom?”

  “One of your satisfied customers, of course.”

  If only he knew what a short list that was.

  “And who would that be?”

  Blink, blink, blink.

  “I’d rather not say. Privacy, you understand. But does it matter? Maybe I should’ve said I picked you out of the phonebook. Do you check references on all your clients? I thought it worked the other way round.”

  He was getting exasperated with me and I was getting sick of the smell of his cologne. I was going to have to light a match soon.

  I bowed my head. “You got me. Come on up.”

  Once inside, he gave my office a sweeping glance. Something about its barrenness made him smile.

  “Take a seat,” I said, indicating the club chairs as I went behind my desk and sat down. The light on my answering machine was flashing four new messages, but I didn’t play them now.

  Windmann looked at the answering machine, too, inclining his head slightly as if to say, “Go ahead, don’t mind me.” But I did mind him.

  I picked up the pouch of loose tobacco and started to roll a cigarette.

  Windmann smiled wryly, reached into a breast pocket, removed a thin silver case, and pushed a button which flipped open the P.W.-engraved lid.

  “Have one of mine?”

  Dunhill Blue. I selected one from the side near his thumb and lit up. I drew deep. After my harsh diet of roll-your-owns, the filtered cigarette was like smoking morning mist.

  “How can I help you, er…Paul?”

  He told me. And within thirty seconds, I pegged him as a wrong client. I recognized the signs because I’ve had a few over the years. Evasive, reluctant to give details, curious about what method will be used, restrictions on what they want done, and, above all, no police involved.

  The most typical wrong clients a P.I.—especially a one-man operation—has to contend with are stalkers. They want to hire you to do one specific job, either get an unlisted phone number or find the new address where someone has moved to, and they’re willing to pay for it; money is no object (as long as you tell them how you do it, so next time they can do it for themselves).

  All of which you sometimes get with a right client as well. But the decider is the story. A wrong client always has a story prepared. A right client, half the time, doesn’t know what he wants done. He has a problem, and by coming to you shows he’s run out of ideas on how to solve it. Getting his story is like removing shrapnel from a fleshy buttcheek with tweezers. Grab a bit here and drop it in the dish—kaplang—grab another bit there—kaplang—and probe deeper into the meat for a missing piece that might connect the two. Sometimes it requires more skill and finesse than the actual job itself.

  But a wrong client’ll always tell you a tale.

  I leaned back, smoking, and listened to Paul Windmann’s.

  “Two nights ago,” he said, “I was robbed. I went for a drink with a business associate at this place that just opened on Rivington Street called The Parallel Bar. We had a couple of drinks and then my associate left around ten p.m. I stayed for another and while I was drinking it, this blonde woman came over and started talking to me. A real hottie. Sounded foreign, sort of a thick accent, but she didn’t say where she was from. I bought her a drink and we seemed to connect, so we had a few more. By midnight, we were both a little drunk. I had an early appointment the next day, so I decided to call it a night. I asked for her number so we could hook up over the weekend.

  “But she made it—how shall I say—very obvious she didn’t want our evening to end. She suggested we go back to my place. Now, that’s important, because it was her idea, not mine. Not that I didn’t immediately concur, but generally I like to get to know someone first. When a woman is that eager, it usually means she does that sort of thing a lot, and I’ve no interest in catching an STD. But as I said, I was under the influence and she was very attractive and very willing, and well…I relaxed my caution. We took a cab back to my place.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “I live at the Crystalview. Do you know it? Well, it’s a relatively new condominium on the west side, just below Canal.”

  He gave me the exact address and I jotted it down.

  “Well, on the way, she practically raped me in the cab. I had to peel her off me in order to pay the fare. By the time we got up to my apartment, I was more than ready.

  “But as soon as we walked through the door, she cooled off, didn’t act nearly as drunk as she had been—or as I felt. She wanted to talk, listen to some music, have another drink. She said she had this special drink she wanted to make for me.”

  I arched an eyebrow.

  Windmann said, “You can see where this is going. She made up these drinks that looked like Cosmos. She downed hers in two gulps and I followed suit. Suddenly she had her dress off and was taking my clothes off, and we were both naked on my couch. I tried leading her to my bedroom, but I couldn’t keep my legs straight under me, and she was laughing and laughing. That’s all I remember clearly until about dawn.

  “I woke up naked on the floor. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I only realized when I was about to call out to her that she’d never told me her name. And I felt sick, sicker than any hangover I ever had. She must’ve drugged me with some sort of date-rape drug.”

  “A roofie.” Rohypnol, one of the benzodiazepines. Better living through chemistry.

  “Whatever, only she didn’t rape me, she ripped me off. All my money was gone, credit cards, two wristwatches, and my iPod. All gone. The little bitch.”

  I sat forward and planted my elbows on the desk.

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well…to be honest, I’m afraid to.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  He smiled sheepishly. He had even white teeth. “Well, in retrospect, I’m not a hundred percent sure whether she was eighteen or not.”

  “You’re saying she may have been underage?”

  “I’m not sure. They were serving her at the bar, so I figured she was old enough. But if not, well, I might end up getting arrested myself.”

  I nodded. That made sense even if nothing else did. I reached for my pouch of tobacco to roll a cigarette, but Windmann got his engraved silver cigarette case out again and offered me another of his. I took one, but not because I really needed a cigarette. I wanted to see his case again. Looked like real silver to me. But if he’d been robbed, why hadn’t it been taken too? If he’d been robbed…

  I lit up and smoked. It felt strange not to be constantly picking shreds of tobacco off my tongue.

  I asked him, “You’ve cancelled your credit cards?”

  “Naturally.”

  “So, what you want me to do,” I said, anticipating the payoff, “is find the woman.”

  But he surprised me.

  “What? No. No. I never want to see her again. I just want my…things back.”

  “Still means I’ll have to find this woman.”

  “Does it really? I hoped you might have…other ideas.”

  “I always have other ideas. Have you got a list of everything that’s missing?”

  He blinked one, two, three.

  “No…I mean, well, most of it I don’t care about. Actually, all I really would like returned is my iPod. You see, my entire music collection is on it. I’ve been assembling it for years. And like an idiot, I never backed any of it up on my computer.”

  “What about the wristwatches?”

  He waved it away. “They’re both old, and one doesn’t even work anymore.”

  I nodded. I thought it over.

  A private investigator confronted with a wrong client typically should respond by showing him the door and telling him never to come back. That’s if the P.I. wants to safeguard his bond and keep his license. Okay, so maybe this guy wasn’t a
stalker, but he was something, something wrong, possibly even dangerous.

  I told him, “I’m sorry, Mr. Windmann—”

  “Paul.”

  “Yeh, Paul, but I don’t see how I can help you, given that you don’t want me to do anything.”

  Windmann crossed his legs, straightened his pantleg, uncrossed his legs again, then leaned forward.

  “May I speak frankly to you, Mr. Sherwood?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “I…this morning, I got a phone call. It was from a man who knew about my being robbed the other night. He said he had nothing to do with it, but that he might be able to arrange for the return of my things.”

  “For a price?”

  “Naturally.”

  “How much?”

  He waved that away, too. “The point is that I don’t trust myself to remain calm in the situation. I’d like to retain you to be available to retrieve my things if and when this person does call me back.”

  I started to mumble a protest, but let it peter out as Windmann reached into his jacket pocket for his billfold. He extracted four bills, laying them down one at a time on my desk.

  The whole set-up stunk, but I put my olfactory objections on hold as soon as I saw the color of his money. It was orange. Euros in the denomination of fifty. I’d never been bought in Euros before, it was a novelty. Times had certainly changed. The U.S. dollar was no longer the currency of coercion.

  “It’s all I have at the moment,” he said. “Is it sufficient? To start with?”

  I held one of them up to the window to see its watermark. Peek-a-boo. As far as I could tell, the bills were genuine.

  I said, “Consider me retained. Paul.”

  He smiled winningly.

  “Thank you, thank you so much. I feel better already.”

  Well, that made one of us. I opened my center desk drawer, swept in the bills and took out my carboned receipt pad. I started to write.

  “I really don’t need a receipt,” he said.

  I kept writing. “Yeh, well, I do.”

  I had him sign it—his signature looked like a broken kite string—then handed him the copy and kept the original.

  He stood and we shook hands.

  He said, “I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”

  He started toward my office door.

  I called to him, “By the way, Paul, what kind of business are you in?”

  “I don’t see how that—”

  “Would it be real estate by any chance?” I was thinking back to that curtain-twitcher at Rauth Realty.

  He triple-blinked and his lips curled into a half-smile lazily like worms awakened from dark soil. He said, “I’ve got my fingers in a lot of different pies, Mr. Sherwood.”

  “Sounds messy.”

  The smile went away. He said, “I’ll be in touch.”

  After he left I changed clothes, into a pair of khakis and a dark blue Polo sport shirt. I got my last can of Coke out of the mini-fridge and sat back at my desk. I played the four new messages on my answering machine.

  The first two were from Matt Chadinsky, both long messages, richly embroidered with expletives, which ate up the allotted times. Omitting all the swear words, the messages only amounted to, “Where are you? I told you to stay put.”

  Yeh, easier said than done.

  The third and fourth messages were both from women. None from Paul Windmann, which meant he came by and rang my bell without even calling first. His wrongness was growing by steady increments, but I was past being surprised.

  But life still offered some surprises: the third message was someone who wanted to hire me.

  “Good afternoon. This is Mrs. Dough. D-O-U-G-H, like bread.” She had a clear, young voice with just a twist of New England twang to it. “My husband John and I would like to discuss the possibility of hiring you. Your Yellow Pages ad says you perform background checks on potential employees. We’re new to the neighborhood and are in the process of hiring a nanny for our two-year-old daughter. We’d like to stop by this afternoon, say about three o’clock, if that’s okay. We don’t have a landline yet, but my cell phone number is…” She read off a 917 number and I wrote it down on the same sheet I’d jotted Windmann’s address on. I paused the message and called her back, got her voicemail and told Mrs. Dough three o’clock was convenient for me.

  Then I played the final message.

  “Hello, I am trying to connect…to contact George Rowl. I don’t…he told me he was to be seeing you this morning, but I do not heard from him since…is maybe I misunderstood. I am sorry, I will call you again.” Click.

  Since it was the last message I’d received, I picked up my phone and dialed *69, but it was a number with a masked I.D. I listened to it again, a distinct accent in the woman’s voice. Sayre Rauth? No, her accent was barely noticeable. This woman’s was thick, nearly as thick as that mustached goon’s had been—or the woman Paul Windmann described to me as the one who robbed him.

  But I wasn’t any linguist, it could’ve been anything from Croatian to Ukrainian to Turkish, for all I knew.

  That was the problem, what I didn’t know outweighed what I knew ten to one.

  Time to remedy that and get the odds on my side.

  Just for a change.

  Chapter Eight: KNUCKLING DOWN

  I powered up my laptop computer, unplugged my phone, and switched the line over to my modem. I logged onto the Internet and brought up a search engine.

  I started by searching on some of the names I’d come across so far. I began with Sayre Rauth.

  Nothing.

  I next tried Rauth Realty in Manhattan.

  Again nothing.

  I tried words at random, typing in “spinach manifold,” and got six hits. So the search engines were working, if not properly, at least to form.

  Next I typed in, “Paul Windmann.” I got several results, but none that were relevant. Most of them pertained to a Water Board commissioner in Melbourne, Australia. There was even a picture of the guy, a dark-complexioned man in his late fifties.

  I was beginning to feel like I was wasting my time, so I typed in a name I knew would at least get me some direct results. Law Addison.

  This time I got thousands of hits, which presented the new problem of too much information—Forbes and Vanity Fair magazine articles before his arrest, newspaper articles after, Lincoln Center patrons lists, SEC filings, miscellanreous blogs—forcing me to skim and put my Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics to work.

  Lawrence Addison, age 39…born in Taunton, Massachusetts…attended Boston University… worked in now-defunct Boston-based brokerage firm as a financial analyst before starting Isolde Enterprises, a financial management firm based in Manhattan…a roster of A-list celebrities as clients, supporting his intoxicating international lifestyle…“Stockbrokerage is as much an art as painting a picture or writing a sonnet,” said Addison in a recent…adhering to a conservative investment strategy… $100,000 on corporate credit cards for airline tickets… trips to Rome, Switzerland, Bahamas… $80,000 sky-blue Mercedes-Benz… avid opera buff…$20,000 donation to Lincoln Center Performing Arts… web of fraud… over 100 wrongfully endorsed checks from client accounts… unapproved transfers… deposited funds in Isolde’s corporate bank accounts… mingling personal expenses and the firm’s operating costs… managed 250 portfolios… assets with a market value of over $2 billion… among those who trusted Addison with millions… star-studded clientele included Oscar winners, rock musicians… allegedly paid complaining clients with funds siphoned from other clients’ accounts… were said to be held in escrow, trust, or sub accounts, but Isolde had no escrow, trust, or sub accounts… Ponzi-type scheme… Manhattan federal grand jury indictment… separate civil action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission… forensic accounting probe revealed… MONEY GURU TO THE STARS ARRESTED… faces up to 20 years in prison on three federal counts stemming from his alleged… prosecutor argues flight risk… Addison released on a
$2 million bond… CELEBRITY BROKER SKIPS BAIL, MAY 11… fugitive thought to be in the company of the wife of one of his former clients…

  All of it seemed useless until one name sprang out at me. Michael Cassidy.

  I scrolled back. Estranged wife of one of Isolde’s former clients, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ethan Ore, Ms. Michael Cassidy was Law Addison’s live-in lover at the time of his disappearance and was thought to have fled with him.

  Ms. Michael Cassidy.

  I started a new search, typing in “Michael Cassidy.”

  Again, there were thousands of results. Some were for a male actor by that name, but more for the woman. She was famous, apparently. Hundreds of jpeg images of her, and though the hairstyle and coloring were different, I recognized her from the first shot. Those crazy green eyes were unmistakable. She was the woman from Owl’s hotel room.

  I clicked on her bio. Her father was Kimble Cassidy, lead singer of the ’70s rock band Leavenworth. She was the child of his third marriage, this one to a back-up singer he met on the band’s fourth reunion tour. He died of a brain aneurysm when she was eleven.

  In the mid-1990s, she’d risen to what passes for fame nowadays as part of a reality TV show featuring children of dead celebrities, and gained notoriety from two drug busts on heroin possession, which got her booted from the program.

  Shortly thereafter, Michael Cassidy met and married a young actor and wannabe Orson Welles by the name of Ethan Ore. Ore subsequently rose to fame of his own for writing and directing an independent film called Dazey Miller.

  I checked the IMDB listing and read the synopsis: “Daughter of has-been rock star gets turned onto drugs by members of her father’s band and becomes a call-girl in Milwaukee until a Rwandan cab driver helps her get clean.”

  The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay that year, but it didn’t win. Maybe because Ore’s screenplay, far from original, had mirrored his wife’s true story. The week before the Oscars, Michael Cassidy had been busted again buying heroin from an undercover cop in L.A. The couple separated shortly after, but there was no record of their divorce being finalized.

  I started a new search, this one on Ethan Ore. Fewer hits this time, but the very first one surprised me with another unexpected connection. Ore’s new film, Reneg, was being screened this week at the same West Side Film Festival that had premiered the unfortunate Craig Wales’ new star vehicle. In fact, Ore’s film had been rescheduled at the last minute to provide a more prominent time slot for Wales’ movie. It was after that screening that Craig Wales had overdosed.