What’s my type?
I wrote one word: Hot.
That’s my type. I don’t care whether she’s blonde, brunette, redhead, or bald. I don’t care whether she’s short or tall, heavyset or emaciated, white, Black, Asian, young, old, whatever.
My type?
I use one type of criteria and rank them thusly:
Super Super Hot.
Super Hot.
Hot.
More Hot Than Not.
That’s it. The rest, as I say, does not matter. I hold no prejudices or biases when it comes to hotness, and yet I ask you: Where are my laurels for being so open-minded?
I am first to arrive in the suite. The app tells me that my rendezvous partner is still fifteen minutes away. The shower is supplied with Kevis 8 shampoo and Maison Francis Kurkdjian Aqua Vitae scented shower cream. I take advantage of that. I strip down and close my eyes under the heavy stream of the propulsive-power-jet Speakman shower head.
I think chronologically for a moment. We have the Jane Street Six attack. We have the art heist at Haverford College. We have my uncle’s murder and my cousin’s abduction. Three different nights. The first two are connected by the Vermeer found in the possession of the most famous of the Jane Street Six. Then we add in the suitcase, and it becomes apparent that all three are somehow linked.
How?
Most obvious answer: By Ry Strauss.
We know Strauss was leader of the Jane Street Six. We know he was in possession of the stolen Vermeer (where is the Picasso, by the way?). We know that the suitcase, last seen when Patricia was abducted, was in his tower apartment.
Was he the mastermind behind all three?
I get out of the shower. Ms. 9.85 Rating should be here within minutes. I am about to silence my phone when Kabir calls.
“I found the security guard from the art heist.”
“Go on.”
“At the time of the robbery, he was an intern paying off student debts by working security at night.”
I remember this. One of the criticisms leveled at both the college and our family was that we had trusted two priceless masterpieces to shoddy security. It was a criticism, of course, that proved spot-on.
“His name is Ian Cornwell. He’d only graduated from Haverford the year before.”
“Where is he now?”
“Still at Haverford. In fact, he’s never left. Ian Cornwell is a professor in the political science department.”
“Find out if he’s on campus tomorrow. Also get a copter ready. I’m flying to Lockwood first thing in the morning.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“I need some information about Malachy’s.”
I start telling him what I need when I hear the elevator ping.
The 9.85 rating has arrived.
I finish up quickly and say, “No calls for the next hour.” Then, thinking about that rating, I add, “Perhaps the next two or three.”
I disconnect the phone as she steps out of the elevator.
I had assumed the rating would be an exaggeration. It isn’t.
She has always been—and remains now—at least a 9.85. For a moment, we just stare at one another. I am in my robe. She is in a crisply tailored business suit, but everything she wears always looks crisply tailored. I try to remember the last time I saw her in the flesh. When she and Myron ended their engagement, I gather, but I can’t recall the specifics. Myron had loved her with all his heart. She had shattered that heart into a million pieces. Part of me found the whole thing incomprehensible and tedious, this brokenhearted thing; part of me understood with absolute clarity why I would never let any woman leave me that way.
“Hello, Win.”
“Hello, Jessica.”
Jessica Culver is a fairly well-known novelist. After a decade together, she and Myron broke up because in the end, Myron wanted to settle down, marry, have children and Jessica sneered at that sort of idyllic conformity. At least, that was what she’d told Myron.
Not long after the breakup, Myron and I saw a wedding announcement in the New York Times. Jessica Culver had married a Wall Street tycoon named Stone Norman. I hadn’t seen, heard, or thought about her since.
“This is a surprise,” I say.
“Yep.”
“Guess it isn’t going so great with you and Rock.”
Immature of me to intentionally get the name wrong, but there you go.
Jessica smiles. The smile is dazzling and beautiful, but it doesn’t reach more than my eyes. I remember when that same smile used to knock poor Myron to his knees.
“It’s good to see you, Win.”
I tilt my head. “Is it?”
“Sure.”
We stand there a few more moments.
“So are we going to do this or what?”
CHAPTER 11
The answer ends up being “what.”
Jessica and I spend the next hour lying on the bed and talking. Don’t ask me why, but I end up telling her about Ry Strauss and the Vermeer and the rest. She watches me closely as I speak, completely rapt. As I said, I don’t get romantic relationships. During the years that Jessica and Myron were a couple, I understood that she was very attractive and immensely doable, but so are a lot of women. I never got why Myron would want only one woman or put up with her mood swings and drama. Now, as she lies alongside me and gives me that laser focus, I perhaps get a tiny sliver of the appeal.
I stop and tell her this.
“You hated me,” Jessica says.
“No.”
“You viewed us as rivals.”
“You and I?”
“Yes.”
“For?”
“For Myron, of course.”
Jessica shifts on the bed. She is still clothed. I remain in my bathrobe. “You know I wrote a piece on the Jane Street Six for the New Yorker.”
“When?”
“It was on one of the anniversaries of the attack. Twenty, maybe twenty-fifth, I don’t remember. You can probably find it online.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “It’s pretty fascinating stuff.”
“How so?”
“It’s a perfect storm of what-if tragedy. The six had originally planned to hit another USO dance hall a month earlier, but Strauss had come down with appendicitis. What if he hadn’t? Several of the six were getting cold feet and threatened not to show. What if one or two had backed out? They were just stoned kids wanting to do some good. They didn’t set out to hurt anyone. So what if? What if that one Molotov cocktail hadn’t gone astray?”
I’m not impressed with this analysis. “Everything in life is a what-if.”
“True. Can I ask a question?”
I wait.
“Why isn’t Myron helping you? I mean, all the times you played Watson to Sherlock…”
“He’s busy.”
“With his new wife?”
I don’t feel right talking about Myron with her.
Jessica sits up. “You said you need to watch the documentary on the Jane Street Six.”
“I do.”
“Let’s watch it together and see what happens.”
* * *
Jessica lies on the right side of the bed, I take the left. Our bodies are close together. I prop up the laptop between us. She puts on reading glasses and flips off the lamp. I click the play button. We start watching the documentary in surprisingly comfortable silence. I find this whole experience odd. For me, Jessica was just an annoying and inconvenient extension of Myron, never her own being. To see or experience her with no attachment to him feels somehow uneasy, not in spite of the comfort but because of it. For the first time, I am seeing her as her own entity, not just Myron’s hot girlfriend.
I am not sure how I feel about that.
The documentary begins by pointing out that the group was never called the Jane Street Six. They were just six seemingly random college students, a ragtag splinter quasi-group from the Weather Underground or Students for a Democratic Society. The nickname Jane
Street Six was given to them by the media after that disastrous night for the very simple reason that the famed photograph of the six of them had been taken in the basement of a town house on Jane Street in Greenwich Village. “It was down in the dark dwelling,” the serious narrator informed us, “that they brewed the most deadly cocktail of all—the Molotov cocktail.”
Dum, dum, duuuum.
The narrative then went back in time to how Ry Strauss and Arlo Sugarman originally bonded as sixth graders in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. They flashed up an old black-and-white classic team photo of Ry and Arlo on a Little League team, half-standing, half-kneeling, dramatically using red marker to circle the two young faces on the far right.
“Even then,” Mr. Voiceover gravely intoned, “Strauss and Sugarman stood side by side.”
The documentary mercifully skipped those poorly acted and poorly lit reenactment scenes, the ones you always see on true crime drama. They stuck to real footage and interviews with local police, with witnesses, with survivors from the bus crash, with families and friends. A tourist had snapped a photograph of Ry Strauss and Lake Davies running away. The photo was blurry, but you could see them holding hands. The rest were behind them, but you couldn’t make out any faces.
The documentary did a bit on the seven victims—Craig Abel, Andrew Dressler, Frederick Hogan, Vivian Martina, Bastien Paul, Sophia Staunch, Alexander Woods.
Jessica says, “Remind me to tell you about Sophia Staunch when we’re done.”
The documentary focused in on five teenage boys from St. Ignatius Prep who had gone to New York that fateful night to celebrate the seventeenth birthday of Darryl Lance. Back in those days, bars and clubs were not strict about proof of age—and the drinking age had only been eighteen anyway. It came out later that the boys had gone to a strip club with the subtle moniker Sixty-Nine before hopping on the late-night bus heading back out to Garden City. Darryl Lance, who had been in his mid-forties when they filmed the documentary, spoke about the incident. He’d only suffered a broken arm, but his friend Frederick Hogan, also age seventeen, died in the crash. Lance welled up when he described the flames, the panic, the bus driver’s overreaction.
“I could see the driver turn the wheel too hard. We went up on just two wheels. I could see the bus start to careen out of control and head for that stone wall. And then we plunge off the road almost in slow motion…”
They then replayed the press conference where Vanessa Hogan absolved the Six. “I forgive them totally because it’s not my place to judge, only God’s. Perhaps this was God’s way for Frederick to pay for his own sin.”
I turn slightly toward Jessica. “Is she saying God executed her son for going to a strip club?”
“Apparently,” she says. “I interviewed her for my story.”
The doc moves on to Billy Rowan’s surprise visit to Vanessa Hogan. On the screen, an older Vanessa Hogan spoke to the documentarian about it:
“We sat right here, right at this very kitchen table. I asked Billy if he wanted a Coke. He said yes. He drank it so fast.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Billy said it was an accident. He said they didn’t mean to hurt anyone, that they only wanted to make a statement against the war.”
“What did you think of this?”
“I kept thinking how young Billy was. Frederick was seventeen. This boy was only a few years older.”
“What else did Billy Rowan say?”
“He saw me on the television. He said he wanted to hear me forgive him with his own ears.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“That couldn’t have been easy.”
“The path isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be righteous.”
Jessica looks at me. “Good line.”
“Indeed.”
“She used it on me too.”
“But?”
Jessica shrugs. “It sounded too rehearsed.”
Back on the screen, Vanessa Hogan says:
“I tried convincing Billy to surrender, but…”
“But?”
“He was so scared. His face. Even now, I think about Billy Rowan’s scared face. He just ran out my kitchen door.”
I whisper, “She’s kind of hot.”
“Ew.”
“You don’t think so?”
“You haven’t changed, Win, have you?”
I smile and shrug. “What was your take when you met her?”
“Two words,” Jessica says. “Batshit crazy.”
“Because she’s religious?”
“Because she’s a nut. And a liar.”
“You don’t think Billy Rowan visited her?”
“No, he did. A lot of evidence proves it.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. Vanessa Hogan’s reactions were just all off. I get the belief that your son has gone to a better place or that it’s God’s will, but there were no tears, no mourning. It was almost as though she expected it. Like it wasn’t a surprise.”
“We all grieve in different ways,” I say.
“Yeah, thanks for offering up the comforting cliché, Win. But that’s not it.” Jessica rolls on her side to face me. I do the same. Our lips are inches apart. She smells incredibly good. “Sophia Staunch,” she says.
Another Jane Street Six victim. “What about her?”
“Her uncle was Nero Staunch.”
Nero Staunch was a huge name in organized crime back in the day. I roll on my back and put my hands behind my head. “Interesting,” I say.
“How so?”
“Lake Davies not only changed her name, but she changed her entire identity and moved to West Virginia. I asked her if she did that because she was afraid Ry Strauss would find her.”
“What did she say?”
“Her exact words were, ‘Not just Ry.’”
“So she was afraid of someone else,” Jessica says. “And who better than Nero Staunch?”
When we finish the documentary, Jessica asks to see my list of people to question. I show it to her. We add Vanessa Hogan. Why not? She was the last person to see Billy Rowan.
“Is Nero Staunch still alive?” she asks me.
I nod. “He’s ninety-two.”
“So out of the game.”
“You’re never really out of that game. But yes.”
I add his name to the list too. We are still in the bed. Jessica meets my gaze and holds it.
“Are we going to do this, Win?”
I move to kiss her. But I stop. She smiles.
“Can’t, huh?”
“It’s not that,” I say.
I don’t quite understand what I am feeling, and that annoys me. Jessica and Myron have been over for a long time. He’s happily married to another woman. She is mind-bendingly beautiful—Super Super Hot—and willing.
Jessica then reads my next thought and says it out loud: “If sex is such a casual thing to you, why can’t you?”
I don’t reply. She rolls out of bed.
“Maybe you should think about that,” she says.
“No need.”
“Oh?”
“I still think of you as Myron’s girl.”
She smiles at that. “Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing more?”
“Like?”
“I don’t know. Like something more”—Jessica looks up, fake searching for the word—“latent.”
“Oh please. Could you be more obvious?”
“One of us couldn’t be.”
“Come back to the bed,” I say. “Let me convince you otherwise.”
But she is already heading to the elevator. “It really was good to see you, Win. I mean that.”
And then she’s gone.
CHAPTER 12
I get back to the Beresford at one a.m.
Hormuz spots me coming to the door. He hurries to open it. I flash a fake FBI identification and stick it back in my coat pock
et. I realize that impersonating an officer is breaking the law, but here is the thing about being rich: You don’t go to jail for crimes like this. The rich hire a bunch of attorneys who will twist reality in a thousand different ways until reality is made irrelevant. They’d claim Hormuz is a liar. They’d say I was obviously joking. They’d deny I ever flashed anything at all, or if we are on tape, they’d say I flashed a photograph of someone I was visiting. We would whisper quietly in the ears of friendly politicians, judges, prosecutors. We would make donations to their campaigns or their pet causes.
It would go away.
If by some miracle it didn’t go away—if by some one-in-a-thousand chance the authorities were called in on this and stood up to the pressure and took it to trial and found a jury to convict me of impersonating an officer—the punishment would never be prison time. Rich guys like me don’t go to prison. We—gasp!—pay fines. Since I have a ton of money already, a hundred times more than I could spend in a lifetime at the very least, why would that deter me?
Am I being too honest?
A similar calculation is made in my business all the time. It is why so many choose to bend the rules, break the rules, cheat. The odds of getting caught? Slim. The odds of being prosecuted? Slimmer. If you do somehow get caught, the odds of simply paying a fine that will be lower than the amount of money you stole? Great. The odds of doing any kind of real prison time? A mathematical formula constantly approaching zero.
I detest that. I don’t stand for cheaters or thieves, especially those who aren’t doing it to feed a starving family.
Yet here I am with my fake ID.
Do I appear the hypocrite?
“Yeah, Hermit was like a vampire,” Hormuz tells me. “Only came out at night, I guess.”
Hormuz has eyes so heavily lidded I don’t get how he sees anything. He has a bowling-ball paunch and one of those dark faces that appear to be five-o’clock-shadowed seconds after a shave.
“You want something to drink?” he asks me. “Coffee?”
Hormuz shows me his mug, which probably began life as something in the white family but is now stained the color of a smoker’s teeth.
“No, I’m good. I understand the mystery tenant used the basement exit.”
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