The Guilty: (P.I. Jack Marconi No. 3)

by Vincent Zandri

  I raised up my beer as if to make a toast. He raised up his glass and clinked the bottle. Sometimes a simple gesture like that is as close as you can come to being a blood brother to an Albany cop. Especially a detective. I felt honored.

  “So what do you think about this lawsuit Harold Sanders has brought upon our wealthy, young Robert David Jr.?”

  “Can’t say I blame him. And our young Mr. David isn’t exactly so young. He’s forty-one, and I think he somehow beat the shit out of her, but he did so in a way that left nothing traceable.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I’ve done a little research on the APD’s dime. It’s possible to punch with an open fist, hitting with the hard part of the palm.” He demonstrated by holding up his hand, palm open, jamming it against his other open palm so that it made a loud slap across the bar. It grabbed the attention of the construction workers. “But the problem with that,” he went on, repositioning his hands around his cocktail, “is that you gotta be Mike Tyson in order to deliver an open-handed blow powerful enough to put someone into a coma. Even then, it can still leave marks traceable to the perp. Theoretically speaking.”

  “And Sarah was in pretty bad shape when she was delivered to Memorial Medical?” It’s a question for which I already knew the answer. But not the details.

  He nodded. “She was a hairsbreadth from meeting her maker. Only youth and her relative physical health pulled her out.”

  “And if she’d died?”

  “I’d try and slap David with reckless endangerment at the very least. Not that it would stick. But it would be something.”

  “Why don’t you do that now?”

  “They don’t have a crime called ‘almost reckless endangerment’ yet. But if they did, I’d be using it.”

  We chewed on that for a minute while we drank.

  “So to clarify: if he didn’t hit her with his fists or a blunt object, you think it’s possible his story about her slipping and falling on the ice checks out?”

  “I don’t. Like I said, she was in very bad shape.”

  “Maybe he hit her with a blunt object. A baseball bat maybe. And then she slipped and fell on the ice.”

  “Thus far the docs say no baseball bat. Something like that would have left a distinct mark. In today’s digital age, you’d probably be able to trace the wood grain to the exact moment and place of manufacture.”

  “Louisville,” I said, cocking my head. “Well, something had to have hit her. Or she had to have hit something.”

  “David claims he dropped her several times trying to get her into the back of his dad’s car. But I’m not convinced that would put her into a coma. He would have had to drop her from a height of ten feet to do that kind of damage. Not the distance from his shins to the ground. It just doesn’t sit right with me.”

  I drank some more beer and wiped the foam from my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Robert David Jr. and Robert David Sr.,” I said, shifting the direction of the question and answer. “Pretty tight pair.”

  “Senior owns half of Albany plus a popular high-end eatery which Junior co-owns and runs.” He made quotation marks with his fingers when he said the word runs.

  “Manny’s,” I said. “The kid apparently lives in one of the old man’s houses too.”

  “Yup,” he said, finishing his drink and tapping the empty glass on the table to get the young female bartender’s attention. “The forty-one-year-old kid does indeed live under one of the old man’s roofs.”

  “Must be nice to be rich,” I said. “Not have to pay for yourself.”

  “Yup,” he said, as the bartender refreshed his drink with a smile befitting of her youth, long brunette locks, blue eyes, and perfectly positioned nose ring. She also smiled when she brought me a new bottle of Bud without my asking for it. I wondered if she liked older men. Scratch that . . . mature men.

  “Think David and Sarah were fighting, and that’s what led to her storming out on a cold winter’s night?”

  “You’re projecting when you say storming out, but yeah, I’d have to guess that they’d gotten into something.”

  “They look like the perfect little couple. Think they do drugs?”

  “He’s richer than Christ Almighty and has a rep for boozing and coking, and she’s divorced once already with a little boy to care for. Her architect father must have a shitload of dough, but apparently he doesn’t spread the wealth with his kids, choosing instead for them to make it on their own.”

  “Coking. Now there’s a red flag. Add this up: rich plus spoiled plus booze plus coke plus ego, and what do you get?”

  “Add in a pretty horrible temper tantrum, and you’ve got a pretty boy who likes to beat the crap out of his women now and again if he’s not getting what he wants.”

  “Robert David Jr. been married before?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Know of anyone he used to date?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, but I’m sure if you nosed around Manny’s a little, you might find out. Word is that the kid bartends at night . . . when he feels like working.”

  “I’ll make a mental note of that, Detective.”

  “You do that,” he said, taking his first sip from the new drink.

  I drank more of my new beer, leaving it half full when I set it back down. Keeper, the optimist.

  “So the 40-million-dollar questions are as follows: Why did Junior call Senior at two in the morning instead of calling 911? How close does Junior live to Senior? What were Junior and Sarah arguing over—if they were arguing? And what did Junior hit her with if his story about her being dropped on the icy pavement doesn’t check out in the end?”

  “That’s it? That’s all the questions you got, Keeper? Famous PI like you?”

  I drained the beer. When the cute bartender went to retrieve another from the cooler, I told her I’d had enough.

  “Well, truth be told, Detective,” I said, sliding off the stool, “I do have one more question.”

  “Lay it on me,” he said, drinking down the rest of his scotch, gesturing to the cute bartender for one more. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “From the newspaper clippings I read, your staff at the APD interviewed more than sixty people, but you didn’t interview Robert David Jr. You really let him get away with the Fifth Amendment crap?”

  Cute Bartender brought him his drink and tossed him a wink. He set his hand on her hand and gave it a squeeze. Her smiley face filled with pink blush. Score one for the single, mature cop.

  “Not sure I can answer that one with a straight face.”

  I nodded and bit down on my bottom lip.

  “Money talks,” I said. “Have the Davids been making nice donations to the Albany Police Benevolence Society?”

  “No comment,” he said. “But yes, a little pretty green distributed in the right places can certainly get results.”

  “Results that border on obstruction of justice.”

  “Border being the keyword here.”

  “I gotta talk to Sanders’s lawyer, Terry Kindler. But the man I really want to talk with is Robert David Jr.”

  “Go for the throat,” the detective grinned, bringing his third drink to his lips.

  “Hey, I used to be a prison warden.” Then, in my best gestapo imitation, I said, “I haf vays of making people talk.”

  Miller drank and then set his glass back down onto the bar, perfectly, onto its own condensate ring.

  “Just don’t get arrested in the meantime,” he said. “David might stink like hell, but he has his rights.”

  “So did Sarah Levy before somebody, or something, nearly beat her to death and left her with scrambled brains for the rest of her days.”

  “If you do get David to talk, you’ll call me right away?”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” I said. Then, cocking my head in the direction of his drink and my empty beer bottle. “You got this round?”

  “Courtesy of the APD,”
he said. “We protect, and we serve, and we do so unselfishly.”

  I turned and headed for the door, wondering how many drinks it was going to take before Detective Miller asked Cute Bartender to go home with him. And if she would say yes.

  4

  AS SOON AS I got back behind the wheel of my twenty-year-old, fire-engine red Toyota 4Runner, I used my smartphone to place a call to Harold Sanders’s lawyer. When Kindler’s secretary came on the line, I asked for “Terry Kindler . . . Esquire.” Heavy emphasis on esquire.

  “Can I tell the Esquire what this is about?” she asked.

  I told her. She told me to hang on for a moment. I hung on. Just my smartphone and me.

  “Been a long time, Keeper,” the sixty-something-year-old attorney said when he came on the line. “Looks like my client has already been to see you.”

  “Still super sharp as always, Esquire,” I said. “You should donate your brain to science.”

  “When you can charge $300 an hour, you tend to keep your gray matter in shape. What can I do for you?”

  For a brief second, I pictured the clean-shaven, bespectacled, bow-tie-wearing lawyer seated behind his mammoth mahogany desk, a panoramic view of downtown Albany visible in the picture window behind his black leather swivel chair.

  “You really think you’re gonna get forty mil out of the Davids?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one hired to scoop up the dirt.”

  “Figured you’d say that. I’m good at digging up the dirt. It’s what I do in place of using brains and the title of esquire. You, on the other hand, dish out the dirt I scoop.”

  “You are indeed the best. You’re in touch with your verbs too. That’s why I suggested you to Sanders.”

  “I have an English degree from night school,” I said. “Nick Miller at the APD gave your creepy client the thumbs up regarding my services too.”

  “My client is not creepy. He’s artsy but practical. He’s in line to design the new nanotech facility planned for Albany’s west end. It’s a massive, high-profile undertaking.”

  “Does Sanders really have offices all over the world, Esquire? Or is he just padding the business cards?”

  “Stop calling me Esquire. I don’t even know what it means . . . Well, scratch that, I know what it means, but I don’t like it . . . And no, I won’t discuss my client’s business affairs with you, other than the little mention about the nanotech thing.”

  “He shakes hands like wet fish have sex. Means he can’t be trusted.”

  “To each his own, Keeper. His daughter was nearly killed when Robert David Jr. did whatever he did to her. If the Davids didn’t have more money than Oprah, Robert Jr. would be incarcerated by now.”

  “Always comes back to the ching, doesn’t it?” I said. “Anything you can shed light on that might aid me in my investigation, oh powerful wizard of the law? You think the Davids’ lawyer will talk to me?”

  He cleared his throat the same way Harold Sanders did in my office a little while ago. Not because it required clearing, but because he wanted my undivided attention.

  “You can try. But the Davids don’t have a lawyer per se, rather a team of lawyers who work in-house. You’ll never get through to them.”

  “Guess I’ll start digging in the dirt while you collect your fee.”

  “Don’t be a jerk, Marconi. As I said, I’m just the professional who facilitates the civil lawsuit by regurgitating the information on the proper forms and filing it with the proper county authorities. You provide the veracity to said lawsuit by digging in the fucking dirt. The rest is up to a judge and due process.”

  “You don’t have to keep using the f-word.”

  “Anything else, Sister Mary Marconi? I gotta take a shit.”

  “You gotta go, you gotta go. I’ll let you get back to your three hundred bills an hour and your esquire brains.”

  “Use ‘em or lose ‘em.”

  The lawyer hung up without a goodbye.

  For a time, I just sat behind the wheel thinking about things. I wondered what went into building a nanotech facility. Very small machines for very small products. Very small people working on them. Like the munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. Or so I imagined. In any case, I obviously wasn’t about to get much in the way of scoop on my new client from Terry Kindler, Esquire. And I wasn’t sure I needed any in order to do my job. But at least I had made an attempt to speak with Kindler. In my mind, I crossed off a to-do item on my imaginary list. Keeper, the organizer.

  It was hot out, and I wanted a cold beer in the worst way. I knew I could dance around the subject for a while, poke and prod my nose into people and things only vaguely associated with Robert David Jr. Or I could cut to the chase and talk to the real thing.

  Using my smartphone, I googled Robert David Jr.’s address. Within the time it took to recite the letters G-P-S, I had not only the address, but also a cute, little digital map to go with it. I set the smartphone into its black, plastic, windshield-mounted port and set a course due southwest for the Albany suburbs.

  5

  IT TOOK ME MAYBE ten minutes to find North Allen Street, which was located in an area of Albany’s concrete jungle where midtown ends and the more residential west side begins. I turned onto it, crossing over the busy Western Avenue, where I hooked a quick right, then made a quick left onto an immediately sleepy Marion Avenue. The avenue was actually more like a boulevard in that it was made up of one road that led in a southerly direction and a parallel road that proceeded north. The two roads were separated by a cute-but-narrow meridian meticulously landscaped with green grass, flowers, and trees. It appeared to be lovingly maintained no matter the cost to a neighborhood watch committee or perhaps the neighborhood beauty treatment committee.

  Judging by the size and variety of the mansions that surrounded me, cost didn’t seem to be a problem in this community. The neighborhood was hilly, and if I didn’t know for certain that I was driving in the city of Albany, I would have sworn I’d somehow been transported to Hollywood and Beverly Hills in SoCal. Even the evening’s brilliant setting sun and the relentless summer heat added to the illusion. The only things missing were the palm trees.

  Just as Google promised, I found Robert David Jr.’s house about ten houses in on the right. Situated up on a small plateau, it was a three-story, tan-plaster-and-red-brick house with a postmodern design and a high-angled roof covered in red, concave tiles that one might find topping a country casa in Spain or Italy. The lawn and gardens were fastidiously maintained, and I imagined that the tall, black metal fence that surrounded the backyard also protected Junior from intruders who wanted to hop into his pool totally uninvited.

  A tall, narrow window-wall made of opaque glass block was positioned parallel to the heavy wooden front door, while a steep set of sloping steps led down to a driveway that accessed a two-car garage. I stopped the 4Runner just beyond the driveway and eyed the staircase, which was made entirely of brick laid horizontally. I thought: If it turns out that Sarah did, in fact, accidentally slip on those steps and fall down the entire flight only to land in the driveway on her back, then I’m quickly going to be out of job, and Sanders’s lawsuit is going nowhere. I could proceed only under the assumption that what happened to Sarah outside Junior’s house was no accident. Keeper, the deductive.

  I wasn’t exactly ready for an opening Q & A with the accused should he be home, but just eyeing the place from behind the wheel, I got the feeling that the house was, at present, empty. My gut told me to get out and do some snooping. After all, that was my job.

  Snooping. Digging.

  Killing the engine, I grabbed my smartphone and got out.

  I made my way to the driveway first, snapping pictures with the phone’s camera app. The driveway was flat and smooth and had recently been seal-coated so that it still had that smell of brand-new black tar. So much for any physical evidence that might have assisted cops in discovering precisely where and how many times Sarah might have fallen on the drivewa
y. But then, midsummer had barely arrived and the damage had been done last winter. The time for uncovering physical evidence had long passed.

  Or had it?

  I proceeded up the steps of the David mansion, taking some smartphone photos along the way, staring down at the brick pavers for what they might reveal: a piece of clothing, a tuft of dark hair, an earring. Anything. But my quick survey didn’t reveal a thing other than a long, winding set of steps made of brick that felt very hard under the soles of my brown Tony Lamas.

  When I found myself at the top of the brick steps, I couldn’t help but look through the small, glass light embedded into the door at eye level. The small, square-shaped glass was clear and gave me an unobstructed view of the home’s tiled vestibule. The glass was wide enough to allow my eyes a view of the dark dining room to my right, a narrow swatch of sunlit kitchen directly ahead of me, and some of the wide-open, scarlet red living room to my left. The glass also gave me a view of the man who presently occupied the living room: Robert David Jr. himself.

  I had no worries about him calling the cops on me or screaming at me to get off his dad’s property while pointing a big fat gun at my face. Not in his condition. The rich young man was passed out on the couch, surrounded by empty beer bottles and overfilled ashtrays. Set out on a stainless steel coffee table was a large mirror. The mirror housed a couple of credit cards and some tightly rolled up bills, denominations not known. The party had ended too soon. There were still some fat lines of white nose candy left over. But then, I guess when Junior came to, those lines would be a much more welcome sight than your average cup of Maxwell House. Black, no sugar.

  A second matching couch set up perpendicular to David’s also contained a body. This one a long, leggy blonde. A blonde young woman, I should say. She was dressed only in a white lace thong and matching bra, and from where I stood, I could just about make out the colorful tattoo she possessed on the left side of her neck. The tattoo bore the shape of a serpent: A coiled red, yellow, and blue snake, its mouth wide open and bearing a long set of half-moon-shaped fangs. Every time she inhaled and exhaled, the snake looked as though it were about to strike her earlobe, which I guess was the whole point.