WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  “Hello, Win.”

  PT sits up front with a wide smile. I haven’t seen him in nearly two decades. He looks old, but then again, I guess he is. He doesn’t rise from his seat to greet me, and I notice the cane next to him. He is big and bald with huge gnarled hands. I bend toward him and stretch out my hand. His grip is firm, his eyes clear. He gestures for me to sit across from him. The G700 can hold nineteen passengers. I know this because someone is trying to sell me one. The seats are, as you might expect, wide and comfortable. We sit facing one another.

  “Are we going anywhere?” I ask.

  PT shakes his head. “I figured this would be a good spot to meet privately.”

  “I didn’t know the G700 had been released yet.”

  “It hasn’t been,” he says. “I didn’t fly in on this.”

  “Oh?”

  “I use a government-issue Hawker 400.”

  The Hawker 400 is a far smaller and older jet.

  “I’m borrowing this for our meeting because it’s more comfortable than the Hawker.”

  “That it is.”

  “And because the Hawker probably has listening devices on board.”

  “I see,” I say.

  He looks me over. “It’s really good to see you, Win.”

  “You too, PT.”

  “I hear Myron got married.”

  “He invited you to the wedding.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  PT doesn’t elaborate, and I won’t push it. Instead, I try to take the lead.

  “Do you know who the dead hoarder is, PT?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure, Win?”

  I don’t like the glint in his eye. “I only saw a corpse photo of his face,” I say. “If you want to show me more—”

  “No need,” he says. As I said, PT is a tall man. You can see that even as he sits. He rests his palms on his high knees, as though posing for a statue. “Tell me about the suitcase.”

  “You’re not going to tell me who the victim is,” I ask, “or do you not know?”

  “Win?”

  I wait.

  “Tell me about the suitcase.”

  His voice has an edge. It is meant, I assume, to intimidate, but directed at me it comes across as something more worrisome.

  It comes across as fear.

  “I’m waiting,” PT says.

  “I know.”

  “Why won’t you tell us about your suitcase?”

  “I am protecting someone,” I tell him.

  “Noble,” PT says. “But I need to know.”

  I hesitate, though in truth I knew that we would get to this point.

  “Whatever you tell me stays between us. You know that.”

  PT leans back and gestures for me to go ahead.

  “My aunt gave me the suitcase when I was fourteen,” I begin. “It was a Christmas present. She made one up for all the males in the Lockwood family. Only the males. She gave the females a small makeup bag instead.”

  “Sexist,” PT says.

  “We thought so too,” I say.

  “We?”

  I ignore him. “I also detested the bag, the whole idea of leather monogrammed luggage, really. What’s the point? I didn’t want it, so a female relative and I traded pieces. I took the makeup bag with her initials on it. She took my suitcase. Oddly enough, I still use the makeup bag as my travel toiletry bag. Like an inside joke.”

  “Wow,” PT says.

  “What?”

  “You’re dancing, Win.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve never heard you overexplain like this. I assume it’s because you don’t want to tell me who the female relative was?”

  He is correct, but there is no point in stalling. “My cousin Patricia.”

  He looks confused for a moment. Then he sees it. “Wait. Patricia Lockwood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dear Lord.”

  “Indeed.”

  He tries to take this in. “So how did her suitcase end up in that closet at the Beresford?”

  The FBI would have figured out about the suitcase eventually. It’s in their files. That is one of the three reasons I decided to come clean. Reason One: I trust PT as much as you can trust someone in this situation. Reason Two: If I gave PT this information, he would probably share what he knows with me. And Reason Three: The FBI will sooner or later put it together without my help and then, alas, Cousin Patricia and I will appear as though we had something to hide.

  “Win?”

  “After the two men murdered my uncle,” I begin, “they made Patricia pack a suitcase.”

  My words take a few seconds to register. When they do, PT’s eyes go wide. “You mean…good Lord, are you talking about the Hut of Horrors?”

  “Yes.”

  He rubs his face. “I remember…that’s right. After they murdered your uncle, they made her take some clothes. To distract or something, right?”

  I say nothing.

  “So what did they do with the suitcase?”

  “Patricia doesn’t know.”

  “She never saw the suitcase?”

  “Never.” I clear my throat and speak dispassionately. From my tone of voice, I might have been talking about office equipment or bathroom tile. “Patricia was blindfolded and gagged. Her hands were bound behind her back. They threw her and the suitcase in the trunk and drove off. When they stopped, they made her walk through the woods. She doesn’t know how long, but she thinks for at least a full day. They never spoke to her. Not the whole time they walked. When they got to the shed, they locked her inside. She finally took off the blindfold. It was dark. Another day passed. Perhaps two. She isn’t sure. Someone left granola bars and water. Eventually, one of the men came back. He used a box cutter to slice off her clothes. He raped her. Then he took her clothes, threw down a few more granola bars, and locked her up again.”

  PT just shakes his head.

  “He did this,” I continue, “for five months.”

  “Your cousin,” he says. “She wasn’t the first victim.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I forget how many others.”

  “We know of nine others. There may have been more.”

  His jowls hang slacker now. “The Hut of Horrors,” he says again.

  “Yes.”

  “And they never caught the perpetrator.”

  I don’t know whether he is asking or merely stating what we both know. Either way, his words hang in the air between us for too long.

  “Or perpetrators plural,” PT adds. “That was the odd part, right? Two men kidnap her. But only one keeps her captive, is that right?”

  I correct him. “Only one raped her. That is her belief, yes.”

  In the distance, I can hear the whir of a plane taking off.

  “So most likely…” PT begins, but then his voice sputters. He looks up at the cabin ceiling, and I think I see something watery in his eyes. “Most likely,” he tries again, “the hoarder was one of those two men.”

  “Most likely,” I say.

  PT closes his eyes. He rubs his face again, this time with both hands.

  “Does what I’ve told you clarify things?” I ask.

  He rubs his face some more.

  “PT?”

  “No, Win, it doesn’t clarify a goddamn thing.”

  “But you know who the hoarder is, right?”

  “Yes. It’s why I’m back. It’s the case I could never let go.”

  “You aren’t talking about the Hut of Horrors, are you?”

  “I’m not,” PT says. He leans forward. “But I’ve been searching for that hoarder for nearly fifty years.”

  CHAPTER 6

  PT rubs his jaw. “What I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential.”

  This statement bothers me because PT knows giving me a warning like this is both superfluous and insulting.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You can’t tell anyone.�
��

  “Well, yes,” I reply, and I can hear the irritation in my voice, “that’s strongly implied with the use of the phrase ‘strictly confidential.’”

  “Anyone,” he repeats. Then he adds, “Not even Myron.”

  “No,” I say.

  “No what?”

  “I tell Myron everything.”

  He stares at me a moment. Normally, PT displays all the emotional range of a file cabinet. Ask ‘Siri, show me unflappable,’ and a photograph of PT pops up on your screen. Today, though, on this Gulfstream G700, the agitation comes off him in waves.

  I sit back, cross my legs, and gesture with both hands for him to bring it on. PT reaches into the briefcase by his side. He pulls out a manila folder and hands it to me. He glances out the window as I open the envelope and pull out the photograph.

  “You recognize it, I assume.”

  I do. You would too. It is one of those iconic photographs that define the anti-war, flower-power, feminist-civil-rights counterculture sixties or perhaps (I can’t remember exactly) the very early 1970s. Along with other defining images of the era—the Chicago Seven trial, Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller at Kent State, the Merry Pranksters atop their psychedelic bus, a female demonstrator offering a flower to a National Guardsman, the packed crowd at Woodstock, the Black student sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter—this notorious shot of six New York City college students had been plastered across the front page of every newspaper and had entered the annals of the unforgettable.

  “It was taken the day before the attack,” PT says.

  I remember that. “How many died again?”

  “Seven dead, a dozen injured.”

  The photograph was taken in the basement of a town house on Jane Street in Greenwich Village. There are six people in the photograph—four straggly men, two straggly women, all with long hair and garbed in Early American Hippie. All six look elated with huge smiles and bulging eyes; if I blew up the photograph, I’m sure I would see pupils dilated from something in the psychedelic family. All six hold wine bottles high in the air in some kind of bizarre victory salute. Wicks jut out of the top. The bottles, the world would soon learn, are loaded with kerosene. The next night, those wicks would be lit, the bottles thrown, and people would die.

  “Do you remember their names?” PT asks me.

  I point at the two men in the middle. “Ry Strauss, of course. And Arlo Sugarman.”

  The two leaders are household names. In most famous photographs, people search for some kind of extra meaning in the placement of subjects, almost as you would, to stay on subject, with a great painting. You can see that all here. The two men in the middle seem larger, bathed in a more distinct light. Like Rembrandt’s Night Watch, for example, there is a ton going on in the photograph. You would first view it as a whole and then notice the individual figures. Strauss has long blond hair, like Thor or Fabio, while Sugarman has a loose Art-Garfunkel-esque Afro. Strauss holds the Molotov cocktail in his right hand, Sugarman in his left, and their free arms are draped around each other’s necks. They both stare straight into the lens, prepared to take on the world, which they will soon do—and fail miserably.

  “How about her?” PT asks, leaning forward and tapping the face of the young woman to Ry Strauss’s right. The woman is petite and looks less sure. Her eyes are on Strauss, as though trying to follow his lead. Her bottle is only half-raised, her gesture more tentative.

  “Lark Something?”

  “Lake,” PT corrects. “Lake Davies.”

  “She was the only one caught?”

  “More than two years later. She turned herself in.”

  “There was controversy around her sentence.”

  “She served only eighteen months. Her defense attorney made a compelling case that her part had been relatively minor—supposedly, the men wouldn’t let the women throw an explosive—and that she’d been young and stupid and in the thralls of her boyfriend Ry Strauss. Ry was the charismatic leader, the Charles Manson so to speak, of the group. Arlo Sugarman was more the nuts-and-bolts guy. Lake Davies also cooperated with us.”

  “Cooperated how?”

  “Okay, let’s go back.” PT leans forward and points at the various faces as he speaks. “Ry Strauss and Arlo Sugarman were the leaders. They were both twenty-one. Lake Davies was nineteen years old, a freshman at Columbia University. The other woman, the redhead, was Edie Parker from New Jersey. The final two guys are Billy Rowan, a junior from Holyoke, Massachusetts—also Edie Parker’s boyfriend—and the Black guy is Lionel Underwood. Underwood was also a junior at NYU. With me?”

  “Yes.”

  “This photograph was taken the night before they attacked the Freedom Hall on the Lower East Side. The Freedom Hall was going to hold a USO dance with soldiers and local girls, so their plan was to burn down the hall before the dance.”

  I frown. “Attacking a dance.”

  “Right? Heroes.”

  “Or they were high.”

  “These groups believed that the United States was on the precipice of real political change and that violence would speed it up.”

  I frown. “Or they were high.”

  “Do you remember what happened that night?”

  “I’ve read about it,” I say, “but it was a little before my time.”

  “The group claimed they never wanted to hurt anyone. It was just going to be property damage. That’s why they threw the Molotovs late at night when they knew the Freedom Hall would be empty. But one of their throws went astray and hit a telephone pole. The wires go down, sparks fly up—and all that distracts a Port Authority bus driver, who’s on the ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. In a panic, the driver swerves hard to the right. The bus hits a stone wall, flips over the overpass, and plunges into the East River. The deaths were all by drowning.”

  His voice trails off.

  “So two-plus years later, Lake Davies walks into the FBI office in Detroit and turns herself in. But the fate of the others—Strauss, Sugarman, Rowan, Parker, Underwood—that’s still a mystery.”

  I know all this. There have been countless documentaries, podcasts, movies, novels written about them. There was a hit folk ballad that still got radio time called “The Disappearance of the Jane Street Six.”

  “Why did she turn herself in?” I ask.

  “She’d been on the run with Ry Strauss. That’s what she told us, at least. She said a secret network of radicals had been keeping wanted militants hidden from the law. This wasn’t news to us. Members of the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the FALN, whatever—they were all on the run and getting help in one way or another. At one point, Davies said, Ry Strauss had cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance, using the same doctor who later worked on Abbie Hoffman. She and Strauss kept on the move, staying a step ahead of law enforcement. They ended up on a fishing boat in the Upper Peninsula. The boat capsized, and Strauss drowned. That’s when she decided to surrender.”

  “Strauss drowned,” I repeat.

  “Yes.”

  “Like his victims?”

  “Yes.”

  I point to the Afroed Arlo Sugarman. “Wasn’t Sugarman almost captured?”

  A shadow crosses PT’s face. I see his fingers start to flex and unflex. “Four days after the attack, the FBI got a tip that Arlo Sugarman was hiding in a derelict brownstone in the Bronx. As you can imagine, the Bureau was being stretched pretty thin. We had a lot of agents investigating, but with six suspects to find and with a lot of tips coming in…”

  He stops and takes a deep breath. He rubs his face again.

  “We only sent two agents to the brownstone.”

  “No backup?”

  “No.”

  “Should have waited,” I say. I remember this. “Sugarman shot one of them, right?”

  “A decorated agent named Patrick O’Malley. His rookie partner screwed up, let him go in through the back door on his own. O’Malley got am
bushed. He died on the way to the hospital. Left six kids without a father.”

  “And Sugarman escaped,” I say.

  PT nods. “There’s been no sign of him since.”

  “No sign of any of them.”

  “Yeah, the great mystery.”

  “Did you have a theory?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “I figured they were all dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love folklore as much as the next guy, but the truth is, it’s hard to stay hidden for fifty years. All those militants who went underground? They’d either surrendered or been caught by the early 1980s. The idea that all of the Jane Street Six could still be alive this whole time without being discovered—it just didn’t make sense.”

  I stare at the photograph.

  “PT?”

  “Yes?”

  “I assume the hoarder is one of the Jane Street Six.”

  PT nods.

  “Which one?”

  “Ry Strauss,” he says.

  I arch my eyebrow. “Lake Davies lied then.”

  “It would seem so, yes.”

  I consider this. “And Ry Strauss, the charismatic face of the Jane Street Six, ends up a reclusive hoarder living atop a high-rise on Central Park West.”

  “With a priceless Vermeer hanging over his bed,” PT con- tinues.

  “That he stole from my family.”

  “Before kidnapping and assaulting your cousin. Not to mention, murdering your uncle.”

  We let that sit a moment.

  Then I say, “You don’t expect to keep Strauss’s identity a secret, do you?”

  “No, that would be impossible. We have a day, maybe two tops, before this story truly explodes.”

  I steeple my fingers. “So what do you want from me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I want you to investigate.”

  “What about the Bureau?”

  “This revelation is going to bring up a lot of embarrassing memories for the FBI. You probably don’t remember the Church Committee in 1975, but it revealed a whole host of illegal surveillance activities by us—on civil rights groups, feminists, anti-wars, the whole of what we called back then the New Left.”