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

by Vincent Zandri

  Blood took the bill and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Pleasure doing business, Keeper,” he said as a young, white male dressed in a business suit came around the corner of my building. When his eyes caught mine, he cautiously backed up and out of sight.

  “Looks like a buyer, Blood,” I said.

  “The dealers got to make a living in the age of mass unemployment, right? I try and make sure they don’t sell no heroin or injectable shit though,” he said. “That stuff’s for the uptown Clinton Avenue junkies. That’s what I tell them. You wanna sell on my street, you sell recreational shit to recreational-minded suburban white-breads. End of story.”

  The middle-aged, former-convict-turned-college-graduate, and self-appointed Sherman Street Watch Committee chairman tossed me a wave and made his way around the corner to keep an eagle’s eye on the drug deal that was about to go down—for which he would no doubt collect a sizeable percentage, albeit silently and anonymously. I closed my car door, turned the engine over, and opened the windows to let out some of the heat that was already building up so early in the morning.

  As I pulled away from the curb and headed down the one-way roadway toward Lark Street, I took a glance at Blood in the rearview mirror. He was standing maybe twenty feet away from a young dealer, a black man dressed in a polyester track suit, his head covered in a do-rag. The customer was handing the dealer a business-letter-sized envelope that was no doubt filled with cash. Blood looked on as though he were refereeing a boxing match, his big arms crossed over his considerable chest. The dealer and customer both smiled profoundly at each other before parting ways. It was a curious dance of black-market economics and a clash of two opposing cultures, not altogether different from that which I once knew all too well inside the concrete jungle.

  Jungle boogie . . .

  Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting inside the 4Runner with the window down and Cliff Brown going on the cassette tape deck. Cliff could really bring tears to my eyes when he belted out “Somewhere over the Rainbow” on his trumpet. I was probably the only man in Albany who still owned a cassette tape deck stereo in his ride. But hey, at least I knew the outdated music machine was never going to be stolen at night while I slept, even if I stupidly left the doors unlocked down on Sherman Street.

  Resting beside me on the passenger’s side seat like a little square bundle of joy was a box of a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts all laid out, nice and neat and colorful in a bright pink box. As luck would have it, the Albany Times Union awarded its star bloggers with their own parking spaces. I figured the best way to run into the very man I intended to see was to park in his designated space.

  I waited for the time it took Cliff Brown to play three songs and ate a blueberry cake donut, which I washed down with a large coffee and milk. No sugar. When the older-model, compact, tan Honda hatchback pulled up behind me, the driver hitting his horn, I knew I had my man. Without hesitation, I quickly reached over, opened the glove box, hit the Play/Record button on the microcassette player I stored inside it, and then covered it with a pair of black leather gloves. I wasn’t sure if Bolous would have anything earth-shattering to tell me. But if he did, I’d at least have a record of it.

  I slapped the glove box closed and held my ground while chewing on a second blueberry cake donut. It was still warm and practically melting in my mouth. Heaven in the shape of an o.

  Turned out Bolous wasn’t as fat as his official Albany Times Union headshot made him out to be. He was, instead, terrifically out of shape. I watched the tall, skinny-yet-bloated and paunchy, double-chinned man approach me from the vantage point of the side view mirror. As the writing embossed on the mirror glass warned, he was closer than he appeared, so when his knuckles wrapped on the window, it startled me a bit. I thumbed the button that allowed the window to roll down electronically.

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing some donuty goodness. “Can I help you?”

  “You’re parked in my spot, dude.”

  I pretended to appear wide-eyed and startled.

  “Is that a fact?” I said, staring through the windshield at the plastic and wood sign that said Reserved for Ted Bolous.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “You’re not theee Ted Bolous? The famous food critic and blogger? Wow, I’m a big fan, and now I’m actually parked in your spot. Wait till my friends hear about this.”

  He smiled. That was a good sign. He fancied himself a local celebrity.

  “Yes,” he said, dragging out the s in yes as if he were a snake, or maybe just more in touch with his feminine side than the average male. “As a matter of fact, I am Ted Bolous.”

  He was wearing a blue blazer over a brown T-shirt that said Lorna Del Ray superimposed over a rustic beach scene in sunny SoCal. His jeans weren’t regular Levi’s 505s, like my own, but skinny jeans. They fit so tightly that his considerable paunch spilled over his thin leather belt like uncooked pizza dough. On his feet, he wore little leather booties that weren’t exactly boots or loafers, but something in-between. He wore thick, black, square-rimmed eyeglasses, and his hair was black and very thick and parted in the middle. He sported an unusually wide mouth that was surrounded by a very trim beard. If I had to guess, my new friend Ted Bolous was not only a foodie, but a pop-culture monster. And—dare I say it—a metrosexual who might get along swimmingly with my client, Harold Sanders.

  “Would you like me to back out, Mr. Bolous?” I said.

  “That would be the idea,” he said, hiking up the black computer bag, which was strapped to his narrow shoulder.

  “Listen,” I said, “perhaps I should introduce myself.” Then I told him who I was, who I presently worked for, and why I was parked in his space.

  “Jesus,” he said, “do I look like I’d want to speak with you? Maybe you should back out now before I call in security.”

  I reached for the donuts and held them up to the open window.

  “There’s a large coffee in it for you too,” I said.

  He looked one way and then the other. I could practically hear his stomach growling from inside the 4Runner.

  “Just back out,” he said, “and let me pull in. Then I’ll give you five minutes. But no more.”

  “Swell,” I said. “You seem like a strawberry crème guy to me.”

  He smiled at that, his chubby cheeks blushing red.

  “For your sake,” he said, “I hope the coffee’s still hot.”

  11

  WE SAT IN MY 4Runner with the electricity on but the engine off. That way, Cliff Brown could provide a low-volume soundtrack to my conversation with the locally famous Mr. Bolous.

  Ted was munching on one of the strawberry crèmes with one hand while holding his still-hot coffee, to which he’d added four sugars, in the other hand.

  “I really have to watch the sweets,” he commented, eyes staring deep into his coffee. “I’m forty-three now. Diabetes could be looming around the corner like a sugary black hole.”

  I sipped my coffee and contemplated his not-quite-accurate black hole metaphor.

  “Exercise is key,” I said.

  “I’m too busy eating to exercise.”

  “I would be too if I ate for free.”

  “Comes with the job,” he smiled.

  “The blogger’s life,” I said.

  “I’d rather be fictionalizing,” he said.

  Fictionalizing . . . He pronounced it as though he’d invented it. Maybe he did.

  “Lately you’ve been writing not only about food and restaurants but about Robert David Jr. and Robert David Sr.”

  He nodded and sipped his coffee.

  “The Davids own one of the most popular, if not the most popular, gourmet restaurants in Albany. When something happens that involves them—and potentially the future of that establishment—I feel it my duty to write about it.”

  “And to open up the forum to the law-abiding public,” I said.

  “Yes, I invited my readers to post comments as moderated by me.”

  I ga
ve him a slight love tap with my elbow and a wink.

  “Move like that just might increase readership. Am I right?”

  He pursed his lips and cocked his head.

  “Perhaps,” he whispered.

  “You sure are smart, Mr. Ted,” I said. “I bet you’ll be writing for Gourmet in no time. Or maybe you’ll have your very own series on the Food Network like Rachael Ray. Don’t you just want to eat her right up? Yummo.”

  He was trying hard not to show how right I was in my assessment regarding his hopes and fictionalizing dreams, but his face beamed red under all that scraggly facial hair. It didn’t take a genius to know that Mr. Bolous craved serious fame. He finished his donut and with hardly any movement or physical exertion, somehow managed to snatch up the second strawberry crème.

  “So what kind of answers do you want from me?” he asked.

  “You know Robert Jr. pretty well,” I said.

  “He’s not my best friend.”

  “But you’re close enough to have been trusted with a copy of the lawsuit, which you then sprung on the public.”

  “Professional courtesy.” He shrugged. “Quid pro quo.”

  “You eat for free,” I said, “and you take care of him in other ways by keeping him and his restaurant in the news.”

  He ate one more donut and drank more coffee.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Do you think Robert Jr. is capable of trying to kill someone like Sarah—even accidentally?”

  He swallowed.

  “How should I know?” he said. “I’m the last person on earth you want speculating about something like that. The suit, that Mr. Sanders has brought against the Davids, is some pretty serious shit. Attempted murder, negligence, and conspiracy to cover up the truth. I just write it the way I see it, and right now, I’m just as confused as the APD as to what happened to Sarah back in February.”

  “I’m just asking you your opinion, off the record, if you think the kid could do such a thing.”

  He swallowed and looked at me.

  “You wearing a wire, Marconi?”

  I made the sign of the cross, knowing that the tape recorder in the glove compartment was doing its job. Not that Bolous had told me much of anything thus far.

  “On my late old man’s grave,” I said. “This is all on the up-and-up. Straight, no chaser.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Robbie parties a lot. He works the bar and manages to get pretty hammered most nights. It’s possible they had a fight, and it got out of hand. But I don’t think he would do anything to intentionally hurt Sarah. I was under the impression they were very much in love.”

  “Have you ever witnessed him being violent to anyone else?”

  His face went a bit pale then. He looked at his watch and downed the rest of his donut.

  “Look, Marconi,” he said, “my editor is going to be on my case if I don’t get inside.”

  He opened the door while Cliff Brown quietly wailed his trumpet from the grave.

  “So you have been witness to one of his violent episodes?”

  “Seriously,” he said, “I gotta go.”

  He got out and closed the door. Hard.

  I watched him make the short trek into the Albany Times Union building and enter through an unmarked employee entrance that required a key on his key ring. I guess that way he could avoid the legions of blogger fans, who no doubt awaited him at the building’s front door.

  I knew that I’d shaken him up a little with the violence question. I could only wonder where and when he’d witnessed the Robert David Jr. temper. I reached into the glove box, lifted up the pair of black leather gloves, and pressed the Stop button on the tape recorder. I rewound the tape to the beginning. I couldn’t be sure, but it was possible that Sanders and Miller both might like to hear Bolous’s opinion of Junior’s violent predisposition. They might also be interested in how quick the blogger was to end the conversation once the subject came up.

  I thought about Harold Sanders and his forty million reasons for me to prove Robert David Jr. did, in fact, hurt Sarah Levy and then proceeded to cover it up along with his father. I thought about Sarah Levy sitting inside a rehabilitation center, her brain still scrambled from the incident. I thought about Robert Jr., his cocaine, his sexy new girlfriend, his vampire teeth, his bleeding Sarah tattoo, his green eyes, his devilish smile. His violence. I thought about Robert David Sr. and the crucial role he played in all this.

  I looked down at the donuts. Still eight left.

  I didn’t have a third large coffee to go with them, but maybe by now, Albany’s biggest land developer already had had his caffeine fix for the day. I pulled out my smartphone, Googled Robert David Sr., found the address for David Enterprises down on Broadway and turned over the engine. Driving out of the Albany Times Union parking lot, I pulled a left onto the suburban Albany Shaker Road and headed east toward the Hudson River.

  It was time to shake up the sugar daddy.

  12

  DAVID ENTERPRISES WAS HOUSED in an unassuming building located in an unassuming part of town. The three-mile stretch of Broadway located in North Albany had, over the years, become a more-or-less deserted relic of what it once was in the 1940s and 1950s, when it was filled with young men and women who worked in the many department stores, steel mills, fabric outlets, and eateries that lined both sides of the busy street. But now that the department stores had closed in favor of the shopping malls and the steel mills had packed up and gone south of the border to Mexico or east to China, dozens of historic brick and plaster-coated high-rises and other buildings sat vacant and rotting.

  David Enterprises was obviously an outfit that saw the value in renovating some of these old buildings, since it was housed inside one of them. Pulling into a small parking lot located adjacent to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, four-story, brick building, my immediate thought was that Robert David Sr. couldn’t be all bad if he were making a solid investment in Albany’s future by giving new life to its once-rich past. But then, for all I knew, his operation was just a front for something more insidious. Keeper, the suspicious.

  I grabbed the box of donuts, or what was left of them, and exited the 4Runner. I crossed the hot, sunbaked parking lot and took special notice of a spit-and-polish, black, four-door Mercedes sedan parked in the spot closest to the front entrance, Its front grill was only inches away from a pilaster-mounted iron placard bearing the embossed name and title Robert David Sr., President and CEO. Gave me chills just to be standing on the same plot of land as someone who might be president of anything. Made me wish I had more donuts with me.

  I entered the vestibule of an old building that had recently undergone a renovation that transformed the place into something high-tech and sophisticated. Other than the thick glass walls that framed the waiting room and a safety glass security door that led into the main office, the interior was entirely open, the exposed brick walls painted black, and the floor underfoot consisting of the building’s original rough plank floor, which had obviously been refinished and re-planed. Temporary partitions and enclosures separated workers from one another while track lighting wrapped its way around the upper walls and across the open ceiling overhead.

  To my right, I found a reception counter that at present appeared entirely unoccupied. To my left was a leather couch and couple of matching chairs. In front of that was a glass-and-metal coffee table covered with all the right magazines: Architectural Digest, Food & Wine Connoisseur, Metropolis Design . . .

  The wide wall behind the couch was covered with framed photos of the many properties the Davids owned. There was a series of full-color glossies that featured some of the same abandoned buildings I’d just seen located on Broadway and also some of the newer steel-and-glass towers that lined both sides of State Street in downtown Albany. A nice interior shot of Manny’s front bar was placed beside a few shots of its brick-and-glass exterior.

  The wall also bore some shots of a business-suited Robert S
r. wearing a hard hat and donning a shovel while standing in the center of a group of other suited professionals who were also wearing hard hats and donning shovels. Each of them had one foot pressing down on a spade, which had been painted gold, and the other foot planted firmly on hallowed ground that was about to be broken for a new building that was no doubt financed by the Davids. There had to be a dozen different versions of the same groundbreaking ceremony. Standing on one side of David Sr. in at least two or three of those photos was Albany’s mayor, Gary Jennings, looking tall, barrel-chested, and tanned. Standing on the other side of David Sr. was a ravishing, tall, blonde-haired woman dressed in a black mini dress with a matching jacket. I knew her as the county prosecutor, Jennifer Waters. Good to know David Sr. had Albany politics on his side.

  One last photo showed the proud father and son standing before the bar at Manny’s, their arms wrapped around each other, their smiles beaming, each of them sporting a full head of reddish-blond hair and a similar long, thin, clean-shaven face that beamed with identical bright green eyes. They may have been father and son, but they looked more like brothers. There was something about their smiles that was both pleasantly attractive and yet pleasantly devilish.

  “Can I help you?” came the voice of a woman from behind me.

  I turned quickly, but then slowly and coolly approached the reception window.

  “My name is Keeper Marconi,” I said. “I’m a private detective. I was wondering if I might get a few minutes with Mr. David.”

  She was a tall brunette with long hair, bright brown eyes, and thick, sensuous lips. She was wearing a fire-engine red wraparound dress that revealed its share of cleavage and just a hint of an expensive, black lace underwire push-up bra.