"And you think Huttington has something to do with Maria's disappearance?"
Santacristina nodded. "I last saw her two days before she disappeared. I dropped by unexpectedly and it was evident that she had been crying. But she assured me it was nothing, and that soon everything would be all right. The next day, I called to check in on her, but there was no answer. And there was no answer the next day or the next, either… It was not like her. She called me almoste very day. She knew how lonely I was without Elena."
He'd driven to his daughter's apartment and talked the landlord into letting him in. "All of her books for school were piled neatly on her desk, ready for class," he said. "Even her clothes were laid out and waiting. Everything you would expect of a young woman going to school. But the most important clue that something was wrong was that her cat was almost crazy for want of food and water. She loved that cat and would have never left it to suffer like that."
"Did you go to the police?"
"Yes," he replied. "They were polite and took my information down. But they seemed to think that she was just a silly college girl who ran away from home."
"Did you tell them your suspicions about Huttington having an affair with your daughter?" Meyers asked.
"No," he said. "I was sure he had made her pregnant. But I did not yet suspect him. I was afraid that he had spurned her and…and she had, perhaps, harmed herself. Or maybe let her guard down in her grief and was attacked by a stranger."
"Have the police done anything?" Marlene asked.
Santacristina nodded. "Yes," he said. "As much as they could. When Maria did not return, a young detective was assigned to her case. He filed a report with the FBI and registered her with a national crime computer in case someone saw her, or she tried to leave the country, or…or a body was found that matched her identity."
The Basque stopped talking for a moment to compose himself, then smiled at some memory. "Her mother was always afraid of losing her, so she had Maria fingerprinted when she was a young child when the police were promoting such a program. But there was nothing."
Santacristina said he began to wonder more about Huttington. "I called and asked to meet privately with him. I wanted to ask him when he had last seen her and what had happened. But he would not see me without his attorney present, and there is something about that man, Barnhill, that makes my skin crawl. I did not want to discuss my daughter's sexual life in front of him."
Marlene frowned. "But what makes you think Huttington was responsible for her disappearance?"
Santacristina was silent for a long moment. "I believe that she was pregnant," he said. "I found a box for a pregnancy test kit in her bathroom trash can. There was a positive result on the indicator strip. I think that the child was his. But he is a married man, an upstanding-oh, what is the term?-pillar of the community. Getting a young college girl pregnant would have been a great embarrassment, and maybe cost him his job. I think this is why my Maria is…she is gone."
He'd crashed a university dinner party and attempted to talk to Huttington, but Barnhill had him thrown out and arrested for trespassing. "The charges were dropped, but I was told to stay away from him or go to jail. This seemed to me to be the acts of guilty men, so I went back to the young detective and told him what I believed."
"Did he look into it?" Meyers asked.
"Yes, or at least that is my understanding," Santacristina said. "He told me he talked to Huttington-though Barnhill had insisted on being present-but the sasikumea…"
"What is sasikumea?" Marlene interrupted.
"Bastard," Santacristina replied. "And he is one and worse. He did not show the slightest concern about Maria's disappearance, not even the sort a university president would for his intern. All he ever said to the press was that he hoped she was all right and had simply 'moved on.' Anyway, Huttington denied having an affair-saying that I had jumped to conclusions-and that he had not seen Maria for more than a week before she disappeared. He said he assumed she had quit."
"Did you ever tell the press about your theory?" Marlene asked.
Santacristina shook his head. "There is no proof," he said. "And if I made it public, Barnhill would go after me, and as you may have guessed from my conversation with them this afternoon, my immigration status is somewhat questionable. I would not care about that if it would help find my daughter, but I fear that if I am deported, there will be no one here who will remember Maria and seek justice for her."
"But what I don't get is why Barnhill hasn't carried out his threat to report you," O'Toole said.
"They are not anxious for the publicity," Santacristina replied. "So far the newspapers and television stations have not caught wind of this, but if I was arrested, they would pay attention to what I said. So we have this stalemate."
Santacristina hung his head and his shoulders shook. When he brought himself back under control, he apologized for crying. "It is a sign of weakness."
"No, it's not. It's a sign of love and heartbreak," Marlene replied. "But we can change the subject if you like."
Santacristina nodded. "Yes, please," he said with a weak smile. "Tell me why you are here with these gentlemen."
Marlene smiled at the gallantry, but let Meyers and O'Toole talk to him about the lawsuit. "So I guess we both have problems with Huttington and Barnhill," O'Toole said when they finished. "But unlike you, I don't know why they turned on me."
Santacristina suddenly furrowed his brow and then looked intensely at Marlene. "Maybe we were intended by God to meet," he said.
"I'm always open to the possibility," she replied. "But why do you say that?"
"Bear with me, as I have not thought this out entirely," Santacristina said. "But Coach O'Toole, you said you were surprised at the lack of support from Huttington, someone you once considered to be on a friendly basis with, no? What might that indicate to you?"
"I see where you're going," O'Toole replied. "That somebody has something on Huttington and is blackmailing him to support Porter and get rid of me."
Santacristina nodded emphatically. "Yes. And what if this blackmail ties Huttington to what happened to my daughter?"
"I guess that's one possible theory," Marlene said slowly, then shook her head. "But on its face, I think most people would say these are two unrelated events, and we'd only be guessing at a connection."
"Perhaps," Santacristina agreed. "Perhaps I am just a father driven mad with grief. But I believe it is true."
"And you know what," Marlene said. "Something in my gut tells me it is, too." She looked at the other two men and thought of Butch. "The question is what can we do about it?"
Two hours later, Clyde Barnhill was about to call it a day when the telephone in his office rang. Sighing, he answered it.
"What in the hell is that Jew bastard doing getting involved in this?" said the voice on the other end.
"Hello, John," Barnhill replied. "I told you before. The 'Jew bastard' knew O'Toole's brother. They were roommates in college."
"Yeah, so the fucking district attorney for New York just happens to take a case in Bumfuck, Idaho," Porter complained. "You don't find that a little coincidental? I don't believe it for a minute. And now his wife is out here-hanging out with that Basque mother-fucker."
Barnhill did not like Big John Porter, nor his idiot son. But they served an important purpose for his friends back East, and so he resisted the urge to tell him to stick it up his ass.
"Calm down, John," Barnhill said. "We checked it out with friends in New York. Karp is on a leave of absence. He got shot but the shooter was not accurate enough. O'Toole obviously called him and asked for help. I wouldn't worry about his wife, obviously just some bored housewife who wants to play investigator."
"Yeah, and maybe you don't know, maybe she's working with Santacristina," Porter said. "She and O'Toole and that attorney fella, Meyers, were about to mix it up with my boy and his friends when Santacristina showed up. That a coincidence, too?"
"I've said it befor
e, John," Barnhill replied, letting a little anger seep into his voice. "Your boy needs to lay low and stay away from those 'friends.' It draws attention to him right now and won't look good if it gets into this trial."
"Yeah, yeah, I've told my boy that he has to watch out for what he does in public. But he likes those fellas, and they, at least, treat him with respect," Porter replied. "Tough to keep an eye on him 24/7."
"I understand," Barnhill said. "We just need to be careful around the woman. She's the wife of the district attorney. If something happened to her, there'd be a lot of eyes looking this way."
The phone went so silent that Barnhill thought he could hear the poorly greased wheels in Porter's head grinding slowly. "Yeah, you're right," the big man agreed at last. "But nobody messes with my boy and gets away with it forever."
If your boy was any dumber, Barnhill thought, he'd be a donkey, and not a very smart one. "Well, my advice right now is that we all sit tight. There are more pressing concerns than Marlene Ciampi."
"I ain't so worried about her," Porter replied. "But like you said, she's the wife of the fucking Jew bastard district attorney of New York, and that ought to worry everybody. If you know what I mean."
"I know, John," Barnhill said. "And our friends are monitoring the situation. Now go have yourself a nice Jack Daniel's on ice, and I'm going home to do the same."
"All right, Clyde," Porter said. "And oh, hey, we going to get any huntin' in this winter? We can use the Unified Church property anytime we want and no fucking game wardens to worry about."
"Sounds like a plan, John," Barnhill said. "I wouldn't mind shooting something…I wouldn't mind that at all."
15
A stiff breeze swept down the concrete canyons, stirring up old leaves and litter as the few tourists willing to brave the elements on a chilly Sunday evening to window-shop along Fifth Avenue pulled their coats tighter and tugged their hats down around their ears. Despite the cold, V. T. Newbury hesitated outside of the towering skyscraper as the sun slipped into the cloud bank somewhere beyond New Jersey. He'd been going in and out of the skyscraper most of his life, but the only reason he had was now gone, and he felt as if he no longer belonged there.
A sudden gust of frigid air slapped him in the face, like someone trying to get him to come to his senses. He considered turning around and taking a taxi back to his place in the Village, but taking a deep breath, he pushed through the revolving doors. Normally, they would have been locked on a Sunday, but not when Dean Newbury's nephew was coming to visit.
As V.T. walked up to the security desk, the guard smiled and hooked a thumb toward the private Newbury, White amp; Newbury Only elevators behind him. "Good evening, Mr. Newbury, your uncle is expecting you," the young man said pleasantly. "And by the way, I was sorry to hear about your father. A nice man. Always had time to ask how I was doing."
"Thank you, uh"-Newbury glanced down at the man's name tag-"David. Yes, he was a good man. I miss him." Not trusting himself to talk about his father's death without crying, he entered the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor of the seventy-story building.
The family firm occupied the entire floor-and that was just for the senior partners and their secretaries. The entirety of the next two floors below also housed the firm's junior partners, as well as the foot-soldier attorneys, paralegals, investigators, secretaries, researchers, and, occupying a wing of its own, the all-important billing department.
When the doors opened again, V.T. stepped off the elevator and waved to the pretty receptionist at the front desk, who smiled and pointed toward the office of his uncle, Dean Q. Newbury, the impervious, flint-eyed, most senior of senior partners.
"They got you working on a Sunday?" he asked the receptionist as he headed in the indicated direction.
"If your uncle's here, I'm here, Mr. Newbury," she called after him.
V.T. hurried down the hall, but then slowed as he approached the office opposite his uncle's, which had been his father's for nearly fifty years. The door was open and the lights on, so he stepped inside.
It was a magnificent office, as befitted the number two partner of the nearly two-hundred-year-old firm. The entire office was four times the size of his quarters at the District Attorney's Office. The furnishings were much nicer, too-soft couches and chairs done in light tan leather, with accents of wood around the library and the trim.
The main room was dominated by an ancient rosewood desk, said to have once been owned by George Washington when the ragtag Continental army was holed up on "York Island," awaiting the armed might of the British Empire. There was also a full kitchen with oak countertops and a refrigerator on which photographs of V.T. and his mother hung from magnets. The walls were tastefully decorated with art, including a large oil painting of V.T.'s parents and himself as a five-year-old boy, enjoying a picnic on the beach at the family's Cape Cod oceanfront house.
More photographs of the family were propped along the bookshelves, which were full of various texts. They weren't just law books, either, but the sort of books a bright young son might choose to read during a visit to his father's office while the old man worked. Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. A first-edition copy of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises with the inscription "to my fishing buddy, Vincent, Warmest Regards, Ernest." History books. Poetry books. Copies of the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah, plus treatises on Buddhism and Hinduism.
There was even a much-thumbed copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Its hard use indicated that his father would have preferred a transient life spent in smoky coffeehouses, listening to Beat poets, to his penthouse suite and corporate law. But that was simply not an option for Newburys, for whom duty to the family firm was cast in stone-at least not until V.T. and his cousin Quilliam broke the mold.
As always, the most impressive part of the office to V.T. was the view of Central Park. The gray crowds of trees stretched away to the north in the dimming light outside, but within a couple of months would be leafing out, an oasis of green in gray old Gotham. Even in winter, the scenery before him reminded V.T. of how the contrasting views from his father's and his uncle's offices matched their personalities.
His father spent many of his lunch hours walking in the park; he called it "getting in touch with sanity." Winter mornings sledding with his son gave way to summer mornings playing catch or taking a stroll with his wife while their boy wobbled ahead on a new bicycle.
Dean Newbury's office, on the other hand, faced south. Still a fantastic view, but one dominated by edifices of granite, concrete, glass, and steel. Fitting, V.T. thought, for a man with the emotional capacity of a rock.
Then again, he knew that his father also had reaped the benefits of a big-money law firm without complaint. He'd never had to worry about how to pay the mortgage or send his son to the finest boarding schools and Europe for "fine tuning."
His wife's family, who were quick to remind the Newbury side that they could trace their American beginnings back to the Pilgrims, were wealthy New England bluebloods. But the Newbury family was richer still, though considered by their in-laws to be "newcomers," having only reached America sometime around the Revolutionary War.
Neither side was known for its warmth. Public demonstrations of affection were frowned upon. But the New Englanders were puppy dogs compared to the Newbury branch. In fact, V.T.'s paternal grandfather, a one-eyed monster named Haldor, made Uncle Dean Newbury seem warm and cuddly as a koala bear. Not once could V.T. remember having received a pat on the head or a kind word from the time he was born until the old man's death. In fact, his most vivid memory of Grandfather Newbury was how the family patriarch would follow him with that one eye as he walked past, like a vulture sizing up a dying rabbit.
When V.T. asked his father why Grandfather Newbury didn't seem to like him much, his father laughed. So you noticed that, too, eh? he'd said. Don't let it bother you, it's just the way he is; he treated me the same, and I don't think he knows any better.
The only person
who ever really seemed to matter to Grandfather Newbury was Uncle Dean, who, V.T. gathered from his mother, spent much of his time after adolescence in his father's company. But I daresay there's little affection between them, she'd added. It's more like they're in business together. Just remember you have a mother and father who love you very much.
V.T. had considered himself lucky that he got his pair of parents.
While still patrician in many respects, they were odd ducks in their respective families, with all sorts of unsavory habits like laughing out loud and kissing in public. Their child was considered insufferably unruly-likely to speak before spoken to, and loud. But his parents ignored their families' admonishments to take him in hand before it was "too late."
When V.T.'s grandfather passed away there was a large funeral on what was a fittingly gloomy, misty day, attended by a host of severe, important-looking men and their dour, faded wives. But he couldn't remember anybody actually crying except for his dad. The others simply stood or sat beneath umbrellas with their faces unmoving, as if set in stone. And when the brief service was over, they simply turned away, got in their limousines, and returned from wherever they came.
V.T. and his father were the last ones left at the grave site.
They'd stood there holding hands and looking at the casket as raindrops struck it and rolled off. The boy had looked up at his father and been surprised to see tears also rolling from his face. Good-bye, Dad, he'd said at last. I wish I could have known you.
With the passing of the old man, V.T.'s uncle had been next in line for what his dad called the throne… And he's welcome to it.
Dean Newbury was a chip off the granite block that was his father. He made it clear at every opportunity that his brother was a disappointment to the family and argued incessantly with him about taking on pro bono cases on behalf of indigent people or causes Vincent supported, such as Greenpeace.
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