WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  “What stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever junk he had in his apartment.”

  “Did he ever tell you about his junk?”

  “Huh?”

  “As in, what he had in his apartment.”

  “No.”

  “Did you read about the recovered stolen Vermeer?”

  Her eyes are emeralds with yellow specks. She looks at me over the amber liquor in her glass. “Are you saying…?”

  “In his bedroom.”

  “Holy shit.” She shakes her head. “That explains a lot.”

  “Like?”

  “Like how he got the money for the apartment. There were other paintings stolen, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “From someplace in Philadelphia?”

  “Right nearby.”

  “Ry visited Philly a lot. When he’d run away. Had friends there, I guess, a girlfriend maybe. So yeah, Ry could have done it, sure. Maybe he fenced a painting or two, and that’s how he got all that money.”

  It made sense.

  “Did you notice any changes in him recently?” I ask.

  “Not really, no.” Then thinking more about it, she says, “But, well, come to think of it, yeah, but I don’t think it has anything to do with this.”

  “Try me.”

  “His bank got robbed. Or at least that’s what Ry told me. He was freaking out about it. I told him not to worry. Banks have to make you whole if they got robbed, I said. That’s true, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “But he wouldn’t calm down.”

  I consider this. “Was he imagining it or—?”

  “No, no, it was in the Post. Bank of Manhattan on Seventy-Fourth. He even told me—last time I saw him, come to think of it—that the bank had left a message.”

  “On his phone?”

  “Don’t know, come to think of it.”

  “Did he own a phone?”

  “Just a burner I bought for him at Duane Reade. It lets you keep the same number for years. I don’t know the details.”

  No phone, I knew, had been found at the murder scene. Interesting.

  “He never kept it on,” she continues. “He was afraid someone could track him. He’d, like, check for messages once or twice a week.”

  “And the bank left him a message?”

  “I guess. Or at the front desk. Whatever. They wanted him to come down to the branch or something.”

  “Did he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I consider this. “Ry Strauss left the Beresford during the day on Friday. Less than an hour later, he came back with someone.”

  “Back to his apartment? With a guest?”

  “A small bald man. They came through the basement.”

  “It had to be with the killer.” She shakes her head. “Poor Ry. I’m going to miss him.”

  Kathleen throws back the rest of the drink and moves closer to me. Very close. I don’t back up. Her hand rests on my chest. Her blouse is too tight. She looks up at me with the emerald eyes. Then her hand slides slowly down my body, and she cups my balls.

  “I don’t think I want to be alone tonight,” she whispers, giving me just a perfect little squeeze.

  And so she stays.

  CHAPTER 14

  I sleep, though “sleep” may be the wrong word choice on this particular night, in an antique, baroque, four-poster canopy bed made of carved mahogany with an embroidered lace topper. The bed is a bit much, I confess, dominating the room in every way, the four posts nearly scraping the ceiling, but it still sets the mood.

  At sunrise, Kathleen kisses my cheek and whispers, “Find the bastard who killed him.”

  I have no desire to avenge Ry Strauss, especially since it appears likely that he did one or more of the following (in time sequence): Stole my family’s art, murdered my uncle, abducted and assaulted my cousin.

  Which begs the question: What exactly am I after here?

  I rise and shower. The copter awaits. When it touches down in Lockwood, my father is waiting for me. He is decked out in a blue blazer, khaki trousers, tasseled loafers, and a red ascot. He wears this outfit nearly every day with very few variations. His thinning hair is slicked back against the skull. He stands with his hands behind his back, shoulders pulled up. I see me in thirty years’ time, and I don’t really like that.

  We greet with a firm handshake and awkward embrace. My father has piercing blue eyes that seem somehow all-knowing, even now, even when the mind has grown cloudy and erratic.

  “It’s good to see you, son.”

  “And you,” I say.

  We share a name—Windsor Horne Lockwood. He’s the second, I’m the third. He is called Windsor. I, like my beloved grandfather, am Win. I have no son, just a biological daughter, so unless I, to quote my father, “up my game,” the Windsor Horne Lockwood name will end at three. I don’t really see this as any great tragedy.

  We start back toward the main estate.

  “I understand the Vermeer has been found,” my father says.

  “Yes.”

  “Will any of this reflect poorly on the family?”

  This may seem like an odd opening question, but I’m not surprised by it. “I can’t see how.”

  “Marvelous. Have you seen the Vermeer for yourself?”

  “I have.”

  “And it’s undamaged?” Off my nod, he continues: “This is grand news. Simply grand. No sign of the Picasso?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  The barn is up ahead on the left. My father doesn’t so much as glance at it. You may be wondering why I keep making a big deal of the barn, so I will tell you plainly: I shouldn’t. I was wrong. I blamed my mother, and that was a mistake on my own part. I see that now. To be fair, I was only eight years old.

  How to explain this and not seem crass…?

  When I was eight years old, not long after Granddad’s funeral, my father and I strolled unsuspectingly into that barn. It was a setup. I know that now. I didn’t then. But I didn’t know a lot of things then.

  Cutting to the chase: We walked in on my mother naked on all fours, with another man mounting her from behind.

  Just like the horses.

  I can see you nodding knowingly. This incident illuminates so much, you think with a tsk. It explains why I can’t get close to a woman, why I only see them in terms of sex, why I am afraid of being hurt. Oddly enough, what I see mostly when I remember that day is not my mother on her hands and knees, her lover’s hand pulling her hair, her eyes rolling back. No, what I remember most clearly is my father’s ashen face, his mouth slightly agape almost as it is now from the stroke, his eyes shattered, staring out at nothing.

  As I said, I was eight years old. I never forgave my mother.

  That angers me.

  I know that my behavior was understandable, but many years later, when I watched my mother die in her sickbed, I realized what a stupid waste it had all been. The cliché applies here—life is indeed short. I think about what she lost and what I lost, how simple forgiveness could have enhanced her short life and mine. Why couldn’t I see that then? I have lived a life of few regrets. This—how I treated my own mother—is my greatest. I never considered the fact that perhaps my mother had her reasons or perhaps she didn’t know better or perhaps she made, as we all do, a terrible, tragic mistake. My mother was so young, only nineteen when she got pregnant and married my father. Perhaps she had wants that she couldn’t express. Perhaps, like her oldest son, monogamy was not for her. Perhaps my father, who ended up getting married twice more, and the trappings of Lockwood Manor were stifling, suffocating, making it impossible for her to breathe. Perhaps my mother didn’t want to break up a family or hurt her children and perhaps she genuinely loved this other man and in the end, who knows the truth, not me, because I never asked, never gave her the chance to explain, refused to listen until it was too late. I was only a child, but I was stubborn.

  Originally,
I razed that barn to rid myself of the awful memory of what my father and I had witnessed, but now I see the new edifice as more a monument to my own foolishness and stubbornness, a monument to my wasteful, judgmental blunder.

  My father steadies himself by taking my arm. “When will we get the Vermeer back?” he asks.

  “Soon.”

  “Good, and no more loaning out artwork,” he grouses. “It’s not like we are big collectors. Our two masterpieces should never leave Lockwood again.”

  I disagree with this, but I see no reason to voice that now. I love my father dearly, though objectively there is little to admire about him. He is a standard-issue, trust fund ne’er-do-well. He inherited great wealth, giving him an array of choices, and his choice has been to spend his life doing exactly what he pleases—golf and tennis, luxury clubs and travel, reading and educational experiences. He drinks too much, though I’m not sure I would call him an alcoholic. He has no interest in work, but then again, why should he? He dabbles in charities the way the wealthy often do, giving enough to appear magnanimous but not enough to cause the smallest of sacrifices. He cares very much about appearances and reputation. There is an odd psychology amongst those who inherit great wealth, because deep down inside, they realize that they did nothing to earn it, that it really was just a matter of luck, and yet how can it be that they are not special? My father suffers from this malady. “I have all this,” the thinking goes, “ergo I must be somehow superior.” This leads to a constant internal battle to maintain the false narrative of somehow “deserving” all these riches, of being “worthy.” You push away the obvious truth—that fate and happenstance have more to do with your lot in life than your “brilliance” or “work ethic”—so as not to shatter your self-created myth.

  But my father and those like him know the truth. Deep down. We all do. It haunts us. It makes us compensate. It poisons.

  “On the news,” my father begins, “they said the Vermeer was found in a New York City apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that the thief was found dead?”

  “There is probably more than one thief,” I remind him. “But yes, he was murdered.”

  “Do you know the man’s name?”

  “Ry Strauss.”

  We don’t stop short, but my father slows for a moment. His lips thin.

  “Do you know him?” I ask.

  “The name is familiar.”

  I briefly explain about the Jane Street Six. He asks a few follow-up questions. We reach the entrance to Lockwood Manor. A woman is dusting in the parlor. When we come in, she vanishes without a word as she’s been trained to do. The indoor staff dress in a brown that matches the wood, the outdoor in a green that matches the lawn, both a camouflage of sorts created by my great-grandmother. The Lockwoods treat help well, but they are always just the help. When I was twelve years old, my father noticed one of our landscapers taking a break to look at the setting sun. My father pointed to the skyline and said to me, “Do you see how beautiful Lockwood is?”

  “Yes, of course,” young me replied.

  “So do they.” He gestured toward the landscaper. “That laborer gets to enjoy the same view we do. It isn’t different for him, is it? He sees the exact same thing you and I do—that same sunset, that same tree line. Yet does he appreciate that?”

  I don’t think I realized at the time how utterly clueless my father was.

  We are all masters of self-rationalization. We all seek ways to justify our narrative. We all twist that narrative to make ourselves more sympathetic. You do it too. If you are reading this, you were born in the top one percent of history’s population, no question about it. You’ve experienced luxuries that painfully few people in the history of mankind could have even imagined. Yet instead of appreciating that, instead of doing more to help those beneath us, we attack those who got even luckier for not doing enough.

  It is human nature, of course. We don’t see our own faults. As Ellen Bolitar, Myron’s mother, likes to say, “The humpback never sees the hump in his own back.”

  Nigel peeks in on us. “Do we need anything?”

  “Just some privacy,” my father snaps. He says “privacy” with the short i, as though he’s suddenly British. Nigel rolls his eyes and gives my father a mock salute. To me, he glares a quick warning before closing the doors.

  We sit across from one another in the red velvet chairs near the stone fireplace. My father offers me a cognac. I pass. He starts to pour his own, but his arm is slow and uncooperative. When I offer to help, he shakes me off. He can manage. It’s still early in the morning. You must think he has a drinking problem, but that’s not it; he just has nowhere else he needs to be.

  “Your cousin Patricia was here with you,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She is a member of the family,” I say.

  My father lances me with the blue eyes. “Please, Win, let’s not insult my intelligence. Your cousin hasn’t been to Lockwood in over twenty years, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And it isn’t a coincidence that the day the Vermeer is found she came back, is it?”

  “It is not.”

  “So I want to know why she was here.”

  This is my father, the somewhat bullying interrogator. I haven’t experienced much of this side of him since his stroke. I’m glad to see his ire, even though it is aimed squarely at me. “There may be a connection,” I say, “between the art heist and what happened to her family.”

  Dad’s eyes start blinking in astonishment. “What happened to her…?” His voice trails off. “You mean her abduction?”

  “And Uncle Aldrich’s murder,” I add.

  He winces at his brother’s name. We stay silent. He lifts the glass and stares at the amber liquid for far too long. “I don’t see how,” he says.

  I stay still.

  “The paintings were stolen before the murder, correct?”

  I nod.

  “A long time before, if I recall. Months? Years?”

  “Months.”

  “Yet you see a connection. Tell me why.”

  I do not want to go into details, so I switch topics. “What caused the rift between you and Uncle Aldrich?”

  His eyes flare at me from over the crystal. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You never told me.”

  “Our…” He takes a moment to think of the word. “Our dissolution took place years before his murder.”

  “I know.” I stare into his face. Most people claim that they cannot see family resemblances when it comes to themselves. I can. Almost too much. “Do you ever think about that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you and Aldrich hadn’t”—I make quote marks with my fingers—“‘dissolved,’ do you think he would still be alive today?”

  My father looks stunned, hurt. “My God, Win, what a thing to say.”

  I realize that I’d wanted to draw blood—and apparently, I succeeded. “Do you ever think about that possibility?”

  “Never,” he says too forcefully. “What has gotten into you?”

  “He was my uncle.”

  “And my brother.”

  “And you threw him out of the family. I want to know why.”

  “It was so long ago.”

  He raises the glass to his lips, but now it is shaking. My father has gotten old, an obvious observation alas, but we are often told how aging is a gradual process. Perhaps that’s true, but in my father’s case, it was more like a plummet off a cliff. For a long time, my father clung to that beautiful edge—healthy, strong, vibrant—but once he slipped, his descent was steep and sudden.

  “It was so long ago,” my father says again.

  The pain in his voice is a living thing. The thousand-yard stare, not all that different from the one I’d seen in that barn so many years ago, is back. I see where he is looking—another blank spot on the wall. Once upon a time, a stunning
black-and-white photograph of Lockwood Manor hung in that spot. The photograph had been taken by my uncle Aldrich sometime in the late 1970s. It, like my uncle, was long gone now. I had never really thought about that until now, that even Uncle Aldrich’s artistic contributions to this estate had been scrubbed away when he was hurled out of the family circle.

  “You told me that it was some sort of money issue,” I say. “You implied Uncle Aldrich embezzled.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Was that true?”

  He snaps out of it with a fury. “What difference does it make? That’s the trouble with your generation. You always want to unearth unpleasantness. You think dragging the ugly out in the sunlight will destroy it. It doesn’t. Just the opposite. You give the ugly thing life nourishment. I never spoke of it. Your uncle never spoke of it. That’s what being a Lockwood means. We both knew that many people thrive on our familial misery. They want to exploit any weakness. Do you understand that?”

  I say nothing.

  “Your responsibility, as a member of this family, is to protect our good name.”

  “Dad?”

  “Do you hear me, Win? The Lockwoods don’t air our dirty laundry.”

  “What happened?”

  “Why are you suddenly in touch with Patricia?”

  “Nothing sudden about it, Dad. We’ve always stayed in touch.”

  He rises. His face is red. His entire body is quaking. “I’m not discussing this any longer—”

  He is too agitated. I need to calm him. “It’s okay, Dad.”

  “—but I’m reminding you right now that you’re a Lockwood. That’s an obligation. You inherit the name, you inherit all that comes with it. Whatever happened with this art heist—whatever happened to my brother and Patricia—it has nothing to do with a very old rift between Aldrich and me. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” I say in my most tranquil tone, rising from my seat. I hold up my hands in a composed, I’m-unarmed gesture. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  The door opens, and Nigel is there. “All okay in here?” He sees my father’s face. “Windsor?”

  “I’m fine, dammit.”

  But Dad doesn’t look fine. His face is still flushed as though from overexertion. Nigel gives me a baleful look.