Whoever had been here before me had searched a lot, but not well. I came out with papers: a bank statement. It was six months old and crumpled, but it was better than bent staples. I pulled the bottom drawer out and reached into the empty space and found another wrinkled sheaf: credit card bills and a brokerage statement. I smoothed the documents out and folded them and put them in my pocket. I went to the orange bookshelves.
Most of the books were on business and mathematics, though there was one shelf devoted to music: history of, theory of, and composer biographies. I pulled some volumes at random from the shelves, leafed through them, and found nothing there but pages.
There were silver-framed photos lying flat on the topmost shelf, and I took them down one by one to look at. There was a picture of Billy standing on the deck of the Intrepid and looking sullen, and another of him on the climbing wall at Chelsea Piers, looking embarrassed and angry. There was a photo of Danes in black tie flanked by several gray-haired executive types. He was holding a framed certificate that declared him to be 1999’s analyst of the year, at least in the judgment of one prominent trade rag. Next to that photo was the framed certificate itself. It seemed to have aged well. There was a picture of Danes and an older man, standing on either side of a young Asian woman who was holding a violin. I recognized the woman from television and from the time I’d heard her play at Carnegie Hall. I didn’t recognize the old man. He had sparse white hair on a tanned and freckled head, and his face was narrow and hollow-cheeked. His smile was tired but warm. The last photo was an old one- over ten years old. It was of Danes and Nina Sachs, and it had the same tropical backdrop as the one Sachs had shown me in her apartment. In this one, she and Danes stood side by side on a stone terrace above an empty bay. He wore a blazer and white trousers, and his hair looked blond in the sunlight. Nina wore the same gauzy caftan. Their fingers were laced and they smirked identically into the camera, as if at a private joke. They looked happy.
I checked my watch. Christopher was no doubt having seizures downstairs; it was time to go. I looked quickly through the front hall closet and the powder room and found nothing in either place. I listened at the front door. It was quiet in the corridor, and I slipped out and locked the door behind me. I took my gloves off, put them in my pocket, and took a deep breath.
The elevator came right away and I was about to step on when a tall broad-shouldered man came churning out. His head was down and he sideswiped me as he went past. I rocked backward but he seemed not to notice. He had a long coat on, too warm for spring, and jeans and work boots. There was an unkempt fringe of dark hair around his ears and collar, and a thin tangle across the top of his large head. His face was full, and shaded by a few days’ dark growth. His mouth was small and puffy and it was moving as he stepped off the car, but only he could hear the words. His wire glasses were askew on his broad nose, and I caught only a glimpse of his eyes, which were dark and agitated and far away.
I stepped into the elevator and watched him go to the door next to Danes’s- apartment 20-C- bend over the handle, and work a key in the lock. The doors slid closed and I descended. The elevator car had a rank smell.
Peter Spiegelman
JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home
14
It was four o’clock when the taxi dropped me at 23rd Street, and I took my time walking home from there. When I got to 16th I was reasonably sure I was alone. My block was quiet: a couple of dog walkers, two moms pushing strollers, a FedEx guy unloading, a light blue van pulling away from the curb, a dirty red hatchback pulling in. I went upstairs.
It was too warm in my apartment and the air was stale, and I opened all the windows while my voice mail played over the phone speaker. There was a message from Mrs. K, telling me, in somewhat cautious tones, that two more interviews had been scheduled at Klein for later that week and to consult my e-mail for details. And Nina Sachs had phoned, to ask- brusquely- that I call her with a progress report. I shook my head and wondered what she’d make of the lingerie.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it myself. The clothing and the receipt suggested that Danes and Sovitch had been having a thingand an ongoing thing, at that. If that was so, it would cast a different light on what Sovitch had said to me- and maybe explain her distinct lack of journalistic curiosity. I wouldn’t know until I had another chat with her, and maybe not even then. Maybe I’d find that the underwear belonged to someone else altogether. Maybe it belonged to Danes. I called Nina Sachs’s number and let it ring twelve times before I gave up.
Jane had called too. “I’ve got time off for good behavior tonight. Want to do something? I’ll ring when I’m ready to leave.”
I flicked on my stereo. WFUV was playing Freedy Johnston, but I wasn’t in the mood. I put a Ry Cooder disc in, something Cuban with guitars, poured a big glass of water, and carried it to the table. I took off my coat and emptied its pockets of souvenirs: my handwritten list of phone calls and messages, the business card, and the wrinkled collection of months-old documents- the bank statement, the brokerage statement, and the credit card bills.
I’d tried pressing Christopher for more current mail when I’d come downstairs, but he was no help, telling me only that Danes’s box was empty and his mail was being held at the post office. He hadn’t been completely useless, however, even if he was unwilling at first.
It had taken the threat of withholding the rest of his cash, and the suggestion that I might stick around and talk to the building super, to get Christopher to admit that this wasn’t the first time he’d sold access to Danes’s apartment. That had happened almost ten days earlier, he told me- the week before our first conversation- and the buyers were the same two nondescript guys he’d told me about before. But despite my arm-twisting, Christopher had continued to insist that he knew neither their names nor how to contact them. At least he was consistent. I drank some water, pushed up my sleeves, and picked up the bank statement.
It was six months old but illuminating nonetheless. For one thing, it explained why the lights were still working in Danes’s apartment. Most of his regular bills- for phone, cable, electricity, condo common charges, parking, even his maid service- were paid automatically, by direct debit from his checking account. His paychecks came in the same way, two times a month, fat and automatic. If his current balance was anything like the one he’d had six months ago, his cable service was assured for years to come.
For another, the statement rendered Nina Sachs’s concern for her ex-husband in concrete terms: six thousand a month in alimony and another six in child support. Nina would have to sell a lot of paintings to generate that kind of cash flow, and she would definitely notice when the check was late.
Danes’s brokerage statement covered roughly the same period as the bank statement. His portfolio was a conservative mix of stocks, corporate bonds, and government bonds, with a market value at the time in the high seven figures. The companies he owned were big household names, and there were none on the list that I recognized as technology firms. Buy-and-sell activity in the account was quite low.
None of that was particularly surprising; as head of research at Pace-Loyette, Danes’s personal investing would be constrained by layers of rules and regulations laid down by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Association of Securities Dealers, the New York Stock Exchange, and his own firm. His holdings would be subject to scrutiny by each of those parties, and every buy or sell order that he placed would require the prior approval of Pace’s compliance department. Active trading- short-term speculating as opposed to longer-term investing- would be difficult, if not altogether prohibited, and for all intents and purposes, he’d be barred from owning shares in the technology companies that his department issued reports on and maybe even in companies in the same industries.
I looked at the month-to-date and year-to-date returns calculated on the statement. Its lack of flash had not inoculated Danes’s portfolio against the vagaries of the market,
and its performance, at least as of six months ago, was decidedly anemic.
A gust of wind sent pages flipping across my tabletop and I rose to shut some windows. Day was fading and the sky was pink and vaguely tropical looking. Sixteenth Street was in shadow. The sidewalks had filled and traffic was backed up behind a van parallel parking in a space across the street. It was a tight spot, but the van’s driver was deft and traffic was soon moving again. I worked the kinks from my neck and looked at the van. Its taillights went out but no doors opened. I rolled my shoulders and wondered what color it was. Gray? Silver? Light blue? It was impossible to tell in this light.
I sat down at the table again and slid Danes’s credit card bills over. They weren’t quite as old as the two statements but they weren’t current either, so there were no convenient, week-old charges from the Hideout Hilton or the like to be found in them. Scanning the pages, I saw that for the most part Danes took his meals on the Upper East Side, bought his clothes on Madison Avenue and his music on the Internet. But it wasn’t all eating and shopping. There was a three-month-old charge, over a weekend, from a pricey bed-and-breakfast in East Hampton. There was another charge, four months back, from an inn in Lenox, Massachusetts. And earlier that same month, there had been what looked like a weekend trip to Bermuda.
I stacked the credit card statements together and put them next to the bank and brokerage statements. Like them, these had been illuminating but not immediately useful. My eyes felt gritty and dry. I was tired of looking at numbers. I picked up the business card.
I’d never heard of Foster-Royce Research, but I assumed from the name that it was a stock research outfit or maybe a corporate headhunting firm. I found it on the Web and found that I was wrong.
Research was apparently a polite English way of saying private investigations. Foster-Royce was a London-based detective agency and, apparently, an up-market one. Besides its headquarters on Threadneedle Street, the firm had offices in Paris, Zurich, Madrid, Rome, Hong Kong, Toronto, and New York- all the better, I guessed, to support its self-proclaimed specialty in international assignments. According to its Web site, Foster-Royce investigators had broad experience with such outfits as Interpol, the Metropolitan Police, the Gendarmerie Nationale, the RCMP, the FBI, and others, and maintained deep local contacts in all the countries where Foster-Royce kept offices. They promised thoroughness, professionalism, integrity, and, of course, discretion. I hoped that last bit was just talk. The corporate directory told me Judith Pearson was assigned to the New York office and gave me the number.
Judith Pearson took my call without delay. She had a pleasant southern voice and a friendly manner, and she was discreet to the point of mute. She wouldn’t tell me if she’d ever met Gregory Danes or even heard his name before, much less admit that he was a client of Foster-Royce. But she did invite me to call her again if there was anything else she could help me with. Her good-bye was cheerful and self-satisfied. I sighed.
I got up and stretched and stood by the windows. The sky was dark now, and tinged with purple. The evening rush had merged seamlessly with the leading edge of the dinner crowd, and traffic was, if anything, worse. The streetlights were lit, and I saw the van still parked across the way.
I filled my water glass, turned on the television, and switched to BNN. Market Minds was on, and Linda Sovitch’s blond image filled the screen. She was saying something about housing starts and mortgage refinancings, and I turned the sound off and watched her full lips move and her blue eyes shift back and forth. She gestured with her left hand, and the big yellow diamond on her ring finger flashed under the studio lights. I thought of something I had read somewhere.
I opened my laptop and went online, back to LindaObsession. com. I found what I was looking for on the bio page: a mention of Sovitch’s marriage, ten years earlier, to real estate developer Aaron Lefcourt. It got just a single line- as if the Web site’s authors couldn’t bear to contemplate it any longer. It was the only reference to Lefcourt anywhere on the site, and I had to look elsewhere to learn more.
I didn’t have to look hard. Aaron Lefcourt, while not a household name, was by no means anonymous. For the last dozen years, he’d been CEO of Royal Court Development, a real estate company started by his father back in the sixties. When Aaron took over, Royal Court specialized in cheesy “vertical malls” in New York City’s poorer neighborhoods. Twelve years later, Royal Court had interests all over North America, including hotels, convention centers, golf courses, and ski resorts. According to a recent interview in BusinessWeek, Aaron had plans to expand into Asia and to take the company public “any day now.” According to a companion piece that ran alongside the interview, Lefcourt’s success in real estate was his second act. Before that, he had achieved a sort of fame in another sphere altogether- television.
Fourteen years earlier, Aaron Lefcourt had been an executive at AXE- one of the first of the upstart television networks- and a wunderkind in a business of wunderkinds. He’d developed such landmark series as Showmom, a sitcom about a kooky single mother, her smart-aleck teenage daughters, her lovable ex-con grandma, and her life as a Vegas showgirl, and Taggers, a drama about an attractive and racially diverse troupe of LA graffiti artists who were also undercover cops. Lefcourt had had the network’s top spot all but locked up when his genius overreached.
According to the article, industry insiders now judged the show to have been far ahead of its time- a forerunner of reality television. Back then they had called it “shocking” and “beyond bad taste.” The show had been Lefcourt’s pet project, his brainchild, and it was called Me! Me! Me! Its premise was simple: three adorable orphaned children would compete in games of chance and skill and vie for the affections of a wealthy childless couple. At the end of the segment, the couple would choose one child for adoption and send the others back to their orphanages. It aired only once. A firestorm of angry print and chatter ensued, and culminated in Lefcourt’s dismissal two days later.
The articles mentioned Linda Sovitch only briefly, and then only to speculate about her husband’s influence on the steep upward trajectory of her TV career- a subject her husband declined to discuss.
I looked at the photo of Lefcourt. He was forty-three now. His face was full and shiny, with rounded features and deep dimplescherubic but for the hint of anger around his small mouth, and the watchfulness in his dark eyes. His brown hair was wavy and gleaming.
I rubbed my eyes and drank my water. Market Minds had ended and two paunchy bald guys in expensive suits were yammering silently and pointing at each other. I turned the television off and walked back and forth in front of my windows and looked down at 16th Street, at the van still parked there.
So what if it is light blue? I asked myself. There are plenty of blue vans in New York, and nothing sinister about them, right? I slipped on my coat and went downstairs.
It was cool outside, and the sidewalks were full of couples and loud groups. The van was up the block, about forty yards away. At street level I could see that it was light blue and that its windows were smoked. I walked away from it, to the corner, and crossed the street and came up on the other side. I was half a block away when the van’s tailpipe smoked and its lights flared and it pulled out of its tight spot and drove off. I tried to read its rear plate but it was caked in mud.
Plenty of light-blue vans in New York. Right. The jumpy off-center feeling that had hung behind my eyes like a nascent migraine since I’d spotted the tails last Friday blossomed now into full-blown paranoia.
I looked at the cars parked on the block, and at the crowd that filtered past, and I thought about how I might do it. I wouldn’t leave it to just one car, and I wouldn’t leave it to cars alone. I looked up and down the street, but I knew it was no use; if anyone else had been watching, they’d seen me make the van and seen the van take off. They would’ve dropped far back by now. Assuming the van had been watching me in the first place. Shit. Someone took hold of my arm and I reached out and spun around.
/>
“Jesus Christ!” Jane said. She yanked her wrist from my grasp. “What’s the matter with you? You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “You surprised me.”
Her brow was furrowed, and a patina of anger lay over her tired, pretty face. She rotated her wrist and massaged it with her other hand.
“Sorry,” I said again.
“You look like you just stuck your finger in a light socket. What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing… I was going to the store. I thought you were going to call before you left work.”
“I was in a hurry to get out of there.”
I took Jane’s arm and walked her across the street and up the stairs to our building. Her eyes were narrow.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. What do you want to do for dinner?”
Jane shook her head and went inside. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me shower and change first.” I nodded. She pressed the elevator button and looked at me some more.
“Let me see the hand,” I said. She held up her hand and I took it in mine and inspected it elaborately. I turned it over and kissed her palm. “Better?” I asked.
“It’s a start.”
Peter Spiegelman
JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home
15
Tuesday morning was wet and windswept- more like March than nearly May- and I was soaked by the end of my run and chilled to my fillings. My apartment was quiet and full of rainy light, and though her perfume hung faintly in the air, I knew that Jane had gone. I tapped some wall switches and the overheads came on, and the place was brighter but just as empty. I stripped off my clothes and toweled myself dry and stretched.
Death's little helpers jm-2 Page 17