WIN

by Coben, Harlan

She saunters away before I can offer a tip. The door opens. It is, I think, the big man who accompanied Leo Staunch to my hospital room, but it is hard to say. I can only tell you that he is north of six six with wide shoulders and a hairline so thick and low that it seems to start at his eyebrows. He, too, sports the prerequisite facial hair and a fedora that looks too small on his head, like one of those baseball-shape-headed mascots with a tiny cap.

  “Come in,” he says.

  I do. He closes the door behind me. There are four other hipsters in the room, all offering up tough hipster glares behind hipster glasses.

  “I’ll need your weapons,” says the big hipster who opened the door.

  “I left them in the car.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “How about that razor you got tucked up your sleeve?”

  Big Hipster grins at me. I grin back.

  “All of them,” I repeat.

  The big hipster asks for my phone. I make sure the passcode is locked and hand it over. He then nods toward another hipster. This second hipster produces a handheld metal detector and starts to run it over my body until a voice says, “Let it go. If he does something stupid, all of you shoot him, okay?”

  I recognize Leo Staunch from his hospital visit. He waves for me to join him, and I enter an office that if I read up more about the subjects, I would probably describe as “Zen” or “feng shui.” It’s white with orbs and a huge window with a view of a fountain in a courtyard. There are also, I note, handicap railings and a wheelchair ramp.

  When the door closes, I can no longer hear the sounds from the brewery. It is as though we’ve entered another realm. He asks me to sit. I do. He goes around a see-through Plexiglas desk and takes the chair across from me. His chair is a few inches higher than mine, and I want to roll my eyes at the weak attempt at intimidation, except for one thing:

  Leo Staunch was right about one thing when he visited me. I am not bulletproof. I am also not suicidal, and while I have taken way too many chances with my personal safety, I like to think that I do so with a modicum of discretion.

  In short, I need to be careful here.

  “So,” Leo Staunch begins, “you know where Arlo Sugarman is?”

  “Not yet.”

  Leo Staunch frowns. “But on the phone—”

  “Yes, I lied. Alas, I’m not the only one.”

  He takes his time with that. “Tread carefully, Mr. Lockwood.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Come now, you don’t hit me as the type who wants things sugarcoated, so let me state this plainly. When you visited me at the hospital, you assured me that you had nothing to do with Ry Strauss’s death.”

  I don’t know what reaction I’m expecting from Leo Staunch. Denial perhaps. Faux surprise possibly. But instead he waits me out.

  I add, “That wasn’t true, was it?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’ve come across some new information.”

  “I see,” Staunch says, spreading his hands. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Did you kill Ry Strauss?”

  “That’s a question,” he says, “not new information.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know Ry Strauss lived in the Beresford before his death?”

  “Again no.” He runs his hand through his hair to slick it back down. Leo Staunch has that kind of waxy skin that suggests something in the cosmetic/Botox family. “What is your new information, Mr. Lockwood?”

  “Not long before the murder,” I say, “you were told that Ry Strauss lived in the Beresford.”

  He crosses his legs and starts tapping his chin with his index finger. “Is that a fact?”

  I wait.

  “Tell me how you know this.”

  “The how is irrelevant.”

  “Not to me.” Leo Staunch tries to give me the hard eyes now, but the spark won’t flame. “You come into my place of work under false pretenses. You call me a liar. I think I’m owed an explanation, don’t you?”

  I do not wish to get Steve in trouble, but here we are. “There was a bank robbery,” I say.

  His expression is unreadable, cold stone. I spend the next minute or two explaining about the bank robbery and the safe deposit box belonging to Ry Strauss. I keep names out of it, but really, how difficult would it be for a man like Leo Staunch to find out who my source is?

  “So your contact,” Leo Staunch says when I finish. “He claims that he sold the information on Ry Strauss to me.”

  “Or gave.”

  “Or gave.” Staunch nods as though this suddenly makes sense to him. “So what do you want from me?”

  The question throws me. “I want to know whether you killed Ry Strauss.”

  “Why?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What difference does it make?” Staunch continues, but I can feel a shift in the air. “Let’s pretend your source is telling you the truth. Suppose he gave us this information. Suppose, hypothetically, I decided to use it to avenge my sister. So what? Are you going to arrest me?”

  I thought the question was rhetorical, so I wait. He does the same. After a few seconds pass, I finally say, “No.”

  “Are you going to tell the cops on me?”

  My turn again: “No.”

  “So you and I, we need to focus on what’s important here.”

  “And what might that be?” I ask.

  “Finding Arlo Sugarman.” His voice is odd now, faraway. Something in the room has definitely changed, but I am not sure what to make of it. Staunch suddenly spins his chair, so his back is to me. Then, in a low voice, he adds, “What difference does it make if I killed Ry Strauss?”

  I find this disconcerting. I am not sure how to proceed. I decide to heed his earlier warning and thus tread carefully. “There is more to this.”

  “More to Ry Strauss’s death?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean, like the art heist?”

  “For one.”

  “What else?”

  Do I want to get into Cousin Patricia and the Hut of Horrors with him? No, I do not.

  “It would help me,” I say with as much care as I can muster, “to know the full truth. You went to avenge your sister. I understand that.”

  I hear a chuckle. “You don’t understand at all.”

  There is a heaviness in his tone, a profound and unexpected sadness. Leo Staunch stands now, still not facing me, and moves to the floor-to-ceiling window. “You think that I want you to find Arlo Sugarman so I can kill him.”

  It was not a question, so I choose not to answer.

  “That’s not the case at all.”

  His back is still to me. I wait and stay silent.

  “I’m going to tell you something now that will never leave this room,” he says. He finally turns around and faces me. “Do I have your word?”

  So many promises made today. Two of our biggest delusions are that “loyalty” and “keeping promises” are admirable qualities. They are not. They are oft an excuse to do the wrong thing and to protect the wrong person because you are supposed to be “a man of your word” or have a bond with or allegiance to someone who deserves neither. Loyalty is too often used as a replacement for morality or ethics, and yes, I know how strange it may sound to hear me lecture you thusly, but there you go.

  “Of course,” I say, lying with ease (but not immorally). And then, because words are so very, very cheap, I thicken it with, “You have my word.”

  Leo Staunch is facing the window. “Where to begin?”

  I do not say, “At the beginning,” because that would (a) be a cliché and (b) really, I would rather he just get to it quickly.

  “I was sixteen years old when Sophia was killed.”

  Sigh. So much for getting to it quickly.

  “She was twenty-four. It was just the two of us—me and Soph. After my mother had her, the doctors told my mom that sh
e couldn’t have any more kids, but eight years later, surprise, there I was.” I see him smile via the reflection in the window. “You can’t believe how much they all spoiled me.” Leo Staunch shakes his head. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  I see no reason to interject here, so I stay quiet.

  “You know who we are, right?”

  Curious question. “You mean, your family?”

  “Exactly. The Staunch family. Let me give you some quick background. Uncle Nero and my dad were brothers. They were super close. With these kinds of, shall we say, enterprises, you need one leader. Uncle Nero was older and nastier, and my dad, who everyone tells me was a gentle soul, was happy to stay behind the scenes. Still that didn’t save him. When my dad got whacked back in 1967, well, maybe you know about the outcome.”

  I do a bit. There was a mob war. The Staunches won.

  “So Uncle Nero, he became like a father to me. Still is. You know he comes in here a few times a week? At his age, amazing. He had a stroke so it’s hard for him. He uses a wheelchair.”

  I look at the handicap railings. I remember the ramp at the door.

  “Let me skip ahead, okay?” he says.

  “Please.”

  “When those college kids killed my sister, no one had to say anything because we all understood: The family was going to avenge Sophia’s death. In Uncle Nero’s eyes, this was worse than what happened to my father. That, at least, was business. The Jane Street Six to us were a bunch of spoiled, overeducated, anti-war, draft-dodging, leftist pinkos. It made Sophia’s death, in our eyes, even more senseless.”

  I could see that. Someone like Nero Staunch would see these rich, pampered kids—students who would look down at someone like him, make him feel inferior—and feel even more enraged.

  “So Uncle Nero put out the word. He started searching for them. He made it very clear that anyone who gave us information on any of the Jane Street Six—or heck, could prove he killed one—would be richly rewarded.”

  “I bet you received some leads,” I say.

  “We did. But you want to know something surprising?”

  “Sure.”

  “None panned out. For two years, we got nothing.”

  “And then?”

  “And then Lake Davies got caught or turned herself in, I don’t even know which. Lake understood the score. Once she got into the prison system, we would be able to get to her. And if by some chance we couldn’t—if they put her in protective custody, for example—we would get her when she got out. So her lawyer came to us to deal.”

  “Davies gave you information,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  This all made sense to me. Lake Davies would make a deal with the Staunches so as to protect herself. When she was released from prison, she then changed identities and, in short, went back undercover just in case the Staunches chose to no longer honor their deal.

  I remembered what Lake Davies had said to me when we met up at her pet hotel, the Ritz Snarl-Fun. I asked her whether she’d gone into hiding in West Virginia because she feared Ry Strauss would find her. Her reply:

  “Not just Ry.”

  “So who did Davies give you?” I ask.

  A shadow crosses his face. “Lionel Underwood.”

  The room falls silent.

  I ask, “Where was he?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I always figured they were hiding on hippie communes or something. But Lionel, maybe because he was Black or something, I don’t know, he was living under the name Bennett Leifer in Cleveland, Ohio. He worked as a trucker. He was married. His wife was pregnant.”

  “Did the wife know who he really was?”

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No,” I say. “I guess not.”

  “You can probably guess the rest.”

  “You killed him?”

  Leo Staunch says nothing, which says everything. He collapses back into the chair hard, as though someone had taken out his knees. For a few moments, we just sit there in silence. When Leo speaks again, his voice is low.

  “We own the entire row of warehouses on this side of the street. There is a building two doors down. It’s a muffler shop now, but back then…” His eyes close. “It took three days.”

  “You were there?”

  His eyes are still closed. He nods his head. I am not sure what to make of it, so for now, I go with the obvious. Lionel Underwood is dead. Of the Jane Street Six, I now know the fate of three—Ry Strauss is dead, Lionel Underwood is dead, Lake Davies is alive. I still have three to go—Arlo Sugarman, Billy Rowan, Edie Parker.

  There is another issue, a bigger issue, ablaze right now: Why has Leo Staunch decided to tell me this? Some may believe that this is a very bad sign for me, that now that I know the truth, Leo Staunch will have no choice but to kill me. I don’t believe that. Even if I was foolhardy enough to run to the feds, what could they do after all these years? What could they prove?

  Moreover, if Leo Staunch’s plans include killing me, there would be no reason for the confession first.

  “I assume,” I continue, “that you or your uncle asked Mr. Underwood about the whereabouts of the other Jane Street Six.”

  He stares off behind me, unseeing. His eyes are shattered marbles. “We did more than ask.”

  “And?”

  “And he didn’t know.”

  “Did he tell you anything else?”

  “By the end,” Leo Staunch says in a hollow voice, “Lionel Underwood told us everything.”

  He is flashing back to that time in the now-muffler shop. His face is losing color.

  “Like what?”

  “He didn’t throw a Molotov cocktail.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I do. He broke. Entirely. By the second day, he begged for death.” His eyes have tears; he blinks them away. “You want to know why I’m telling you this.”

  I wait.

  “For a while, I convinced myself I was okay with it. I got revenge for my sister. Maybe Lionel Underwood didn’t throw this explosive, but as my uncle reminded me, he’s still guilty. But I couldn’t sleep. Even now, all these years later, I still hear Lionel’s screams at night. I see his contorted face.” His eyes find mine. “I’m not afraid of violence, Mr. Lockwood. But this kind of, I don’t know, vigilantism, I guess…” He wipes one eye with a forefinger. “You want to know why I’m telling you this? Because I don’t want the same thing to happen to Arlo Sugarman. Whatever his sins, I want him captured and brought to trial. I lost my taste for revenge.” He leans closer to me. “The reason why I am asking you to find Arlo Sugarman is, so I can protect him.”

  Do I believe this?

  I do.

  “One problem,” I say.

  “Oh, there are more than one,” Leo says with the sad chuckle.

  “My bank robber source was adamant. He sold you the information on Ry Strauss’s whereabouts.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I do.”

  Leo Staunch considers this. “Did your source say that he sold the information to me—or did he say he sold it to a Staunch?”

  I am about to reply when my gaze gets snagged on those handicap railings. I stare at them a second before I turn back to Leo. “You think he sold it to Uncle Nero?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your uncle had a stroke. He’s in a wheelchair.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t hire someone to do the job.”

  “I don’t think he did.”

  “Then what?” I ask.

  “Just find Arlo Sugarman.”

  “What about the others?”

  “When you find Arlo Sugarman,” Leo Staunch says, heading toward the door, “you’ll find all the answers.”

  CHAPTER 30

  The Reverend Calvin Sinclair, graduate of Oral Roberts University and, if Elena Randolph is to be believed, onetime
lover of Ralph Lewis aka Arlo Sugarman, exits the front door to St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church. He walks a British bulldog on a ropy leash. They say that pet owners oft look like their pets, and that seems to be the case here. Both Calvin Sinclair and his bulldog companion are squat, portly-yet-powerful, with a wrinkled face and a pushed-in nose.

  St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church is located on a surprisingly large plot of land in Creve Coeur, Missouri, part of Greater St. Louis. The sign out front tells me that services are Saturday at 5:00 p.m., Sunday at 7:45—9:00—10:45 a.m. In smaller print, it notes that prayer services will be led by “Father Calvin” or “Mother Sally.”

  The Reverend Sinclair spots me as I get out of the back of a black car. With his free hand, he shields his eyes. He looks to be his age—sixty-five—with thin wisps of hair on his scalp. When he’d opened the church door, he wore a practiced wide smile, the kind of thing you put on just in case someone is around and you want to appear kind and friendly, which—who am I to judge yet?—Calvin Sinclair may very well be. When he sees me, however, the smile crumbles to dust. He adjusts his wire spectacles.

  I start toward him. “My name is—”

  “I know who you are.”

  I arch one eyebrow to register my surprise. Calvin Sinclair’s voice has a nice timbre to it. I am sure that it sounds celestial coming from a pulpit. I did not call beforehand or announce my arrival. Kabir had contacted a local private investigator who assured us that Sinclair was at the church. Had Sinclair traveled somewhere else whilst I was in the air, said private detective would have followed him so I could have confronted him wherever I saw fit.

  The British bulldog waddles toward me.

  “Who’s this?” I ask.

  “Reginald.”

  Reginald stops and regards me with suspicion. I bend down and scratch behind his ears. Reginald closes his eyes and takes it in.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Lockwood?”

  “Call me Win.”

  “Why are you here, Win?”

  “I assume you know why.”

  He nods with great reluctance. “I suppose I do.”

  “How do you know my name?” I ask.

  “When Ry Strauss was found murdered,” he begins, “I knew that would mean renewed interest in…” Calvin Sinclair stops and squints up at either the sun or his version of God. “You were on the news a lot.”