WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  Of this I have no doubt.

  “They stole my life.” Her voice is a pained and harsh whisper. She takes in a deep breath. I watch her chest rise and fall, taking in oxygen, gaining strength. “My only son, my Frederick…When I first heard he was dead, it felt like somebody had whacked me with a baseball bat. I dropped to the floor. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. My life ended. Just like that. All that love I had for that boy, the precious beautiful boy, it didn’t die. It turned to rage. Right there.” She shakes her head, her eyes dry. “Without that rage, I don’t think I would have ever stood up.”

  There is a water bottle next to her with a straw. She lifts it to her lips, and her eyes close.

  “I became consumed with justice. You, Mr. Lockwood, you worry about stopping bad people before they commit more crimes. What you do is admirable and even practical—you stop crimes. You prevent more people from having to go through the horror of what happened to Frederick and me. But that wasn’t my motivation. I didn’t think or even care if the Jane Street Six did it again. I had that rage. I had that rage—and I had to put it somewhere.”

  “Tell me what you did next,” I say.

  “Research,” she replies. “Do you research your enemies, Mr. Lockwood?”

  “I do.”

  “I learned that three of the six came from religious families—Billy Rowan, Lake Davies, and Lionel Underwood. I also figured that they were scared, trying to find a way to come in from the cold. So I made that pitiful religious appeal on television. And I prayed—no joke—that one of them would call me.”

  “And one did call you,” I say.

  “Billy Rowan. That part was true, just like I told everyone. He came in the kitchen door.”

  “What happened next?”

  “That baseball bat. A literal one rather than figurative. I hid it next to the refrigerator. Billy was sitting at my kitchen table. I asked if he wanted a Coke. He said yes, please. So polite. Hands folded in his lap. Crying. Telling me how sorry he was. But I had planned this. He had his back to me. I took the bat and whacked him in the skull. Billy’s whole body shuddered. I hit him again. He teetered on the chair and then fell to the linoleum. I hit him again and again. That rage. That burning rage. It was finally being fed—you’ve felt that?”

  I nod.

  “Billy was on the floor. Bleeding. Eyes closed. I raised the bat over my head again. Like an axe. It felt so good, Mr. Lockwood. You know. Beforehand I’d worry that the actual act would make me queasy. But my God, it was the opposite. I was enjoying myself. I was idly wondering how many more blows it would take to kill him when I suddenly had a better idea.”

  “That being?”

  Vanessa Hogan smiles again. “Find out what he knows.”

  “Makes sense,” I agree.

  “I called Nero Staunch. We had met in Lower Manhattan at a meeting for the victims’ families. I asked him to come alone. The two of us dragged Billy down into my basement. We tied him to a table, then we woke him. Nero used a power drill with a narrow bit. He started on Billy’s toes. Then he moved to his ankles. At first, Billy claimed he didn’t know where the others were—they had all split up. Nero didn’t buy it. It took some time. Billy loved Edie Parker. Did you know they were engaged?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “So Billy tried to hang on, which only made it worse. Inevitably, the truth came out. He didn’t know about the others, but he and Edie were hiding together. They planned on turning themselves in. And you’re correct, Mr. Lockwood—those two didn’t throw cocktails that night. They’d planned to, he admitted, but when the bus went over the railing, they all just ran. Billy and Edie’s hope was that if they surrendered early, they’d be spared the worst of it, especially if one of the parents was willing to forgive them.”

  Vanessa Hogan ups the sickly-sweet smile.

  “That parent,” I say, “being you, of course.”

  “Of course. To be on the safe side, Billy had come alone to feel out the situation, leaving Edie hiding alone at a lake cabin owned by an English professor at SUNY in Binghamton. Nero and I drove up with Billy in the trunk. We found Edie Parker. We made sure she didn’t know anything more—which enraged me. I wanted to find them all, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen quite yet. Then we finished with Edie and Billy.”

  “What did you do with the bodies?” I ask.

  “Why would you want to know?”

  “Idle curiosity, I guess.”

  Vanessa Hogan’s eyes are on mine now, probing. A few seconds later, she waves her hand and says, “Oh, why not?” in a too-cheerful tone. “Nero had an alliance with a mob boss named Richie B who lived in Livingston. Richie B had a furnace on the back of this huge estate. We brought the bodies there. That was the end of that.”

  Her story is pretty much what I had expected, and she relishes the telling of it.

  “So two are dead almost immediately,” I say. “A few years later, Lake Davies turns herself in. She goes to Nero Staunch and makes a deal for Lionel Underwood. Were you aware of that?”

  Vanessa frowns. “Nero told me—but after the fact. I wasn’t happy about it.”

  “You wanted to get both of them?”

  “Of course. But Nero said it wasn’t as easy as you see on TV to kill her in prison. For one thing, Lake Davies was being held in a federal facility. That makes it harder, he said. But between you and me? I think Nero was just an old-world sexist. Killing men? No problem. But his stomach couldn’t handle Edie Parker. I took the lead in that.”

  I nod slowly, trying to put it together as she speaks. “So that’s four of the six accounted for,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “And then, what, you heard nothing?”

  “For over forty years,” she says.

  “And then someone—maybe a man named Randy—comes to Nero Staunch with information on Ry Strauss’s whereabouts,” I say. “Nero is too old and sick to do anything about it anymore. He’s in a wheelchair. His power is all ceremonial. His nephew Leo is the boss now, and Leo’s against this kind of vigilantism. So Nero calls you. I can show you three calls coming from the Staunch family craft brewery to your home. Landlines, which, if you don’t mind me saying, is old-school.”

  “That’s not proof of anything.”

  “Not in the slightest,” I agree. “But I don’t need proof. This isn’t a court of law. It’s just you and I having a chat. And I still need answers.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you.”

  “Oh right.” Vanessa nods, remembering. “The Hut of Horrors. Your uncle and your cousin.”

  “Yes.”

  “So go on,” she says. “Tell me the rest of your theory.”

  I hesitate—I want her to say it—but then I dive in. “I don’t know if the information came to you directly from Nero Staunch or if Staunch sent this Randy to you. That doesn’t really matter. You ended up getting the contents of Ry Strauss’s safe deposit box. That told you what name he was using, where he lived, perhaps a phone number. Ry was understandably panicked about the robbery. You called him and pretended to be someone from the bank. What did you tell him exactly?”

  She narrows her eyes, tries to look wily. “What makes you so sure it was me?”

  I open the file I’ve brought with me and pull out the first still from the CCTV camera in the basement. “We thought the perpetrator was a small, bald man. But once I realized that the killer could be a woman, one who perhaps lost her hair because of chemotherapy, well, that’s you, isn’t it?”

  She says nothing.

  I pull out the second still and hand it to her. On it, a man with jet-black hair and a brunette are exiting via the front door.

  “This is the CCTV from the lobby of the Beresford. It was taken six hours after the one I just showed you from the basement. The man”—I point—“is a building resident named Seymour Rappaport. He lives on the sixteenth floor. The woman with him, however, is not his wife. No one knows who she is. Seymour didn’t know eit
her. He said the woman was in the elevator when he got in, so she had to have come from a higher floor. We checked pretty thoroughly. There is no sign of this woman entering the building. You were very clever. You wore an overcoat on the way in via the basement. You dumped it in the middle of Ry’s apartment. No one would notice it unless they specifically looked. When you put on that wig, the bald man vanished for good. Then you took the elevator down and exited with another resident. Genius really.”

  Vanessa Hogan just keeps smiling.

  “You did make one small mistake though.”

  That makes the smile falter. “What’s that?”

  I point to the left shoe in one photograph, then the other.

  “Same footwear.”

  Vanessa Hogan squints at one image, then the next. “Looks like a white sneaker. Common enough.”

  “True. Nothing that would hold up in a court.”

  “And come now, Mr. Lockwood. Aren’t I too old to pull this off?”

  “You’d think so,” I say, “but no. You had a gun. You kept it against his back. I could, of course, ask the FBI to pull all the nearby street camera footage from the day. I’m sure we would find the bald man holding a gun on him. We might even get a clearer shot of your face.”

  Vanessa is loving this. “You don’t think I would have disguised my face too? Nothing much, just a little stage makeup?”

  “More genius,” I say.

  “I wonder though.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “I never realized the painting over his bed was so valuable.”

  “And if you had?”

  Vanessa Hogan shrugs. “I wonder if I would have taken it.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t, no.”

  So there we are. I now know the fate of all six of the Jane Street Six. It occurs to me, as I sit there with Vanessa Hogan, that I am the only person in the world who does.

  As if she could read my thoughts, Vanessa Hogan says, “Now it’s your turn, Mr. Lockwood. Where is Arlo Sugarman?”

  I ponder how to answer this question. There is still one more thing I want to know. “You interrogated Billy Rowan and Edie Parker.”

  “We went over that.”

  “They told you that they didn’t throw Molotov cocktails.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “And what about Arlo Sugarman?”

  “What about him?”

  “What did they say about his role in all this?”

  The smile is back. “I’m impressed, Mr. Lockwood.”

  I say nothing.

  “You think that makes Arlo guiltless?”

  “What did Billy and Edie tell you?”

  “Do you promise that you’ll still tell me where Arlo Sugarman is?”

  “I do, yes.”

  Vanessa settles back. “You seem to know already, but okay, I’ll confirm it for you. Arlo wasn’t there—but he was still the one who planned it. The fact that he ended up being too gutless to show doesn’t make him any less guilty.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. “One final question.”

  “No,” Vanessa Hogan says, and I hear steel in her voice. “First, you tell me where Arlo Sugarman is.”

  It is indeed time. So I just say it: “He’s dead.”

  Her face drops.

  I produce a photograph of the tombstone. I tell her what Calvin Sinclair had told me. It takes a while for Vanessa Hogan to accept all of this. I take my time. I explain all I know about Arlo Sugarman, how he spent time in Oklahoma and overseas, how he seemed to do good in his life and try to right whatever wrong he’d committed.

  After some time, Vanessa Hogan says, “So it’s over. It’s really over.”

  It was for her. It wasn’t for me.

  “One more thing,” I say, as I rise to leave. “If Billy and Edie didn’t throw the explosives, did they say who did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Ry Strauss, for one.”

  “And for the other?”

  “You’ve seen the grainy images,” she says. “There were still six people there. Ry Strauss got someone else to take Arlo Sugarman’s place. He threw the second one.”

  “And his name?”

  “Billy and Edie didn’t know him before that night,” she says. “But everyone called him Rich.” She sits up a little straighter. “Do you have any idea who that is?”

  Rich, I say to myself.

  Short, of course, for Aldrich.

  “No,” I tell her. “No idea at all.”

  CHAPTER 34

  When I take the helicopter to my familial home of Lockwood, I customarily don’t appreciate the views. Human beings adapt, one aspect of which is that when something becomes common, we lose the sense of awe. We take the everyday for granted. I am not saying this is a negative. Too much is made of “live every moment to its fullest.” It is an unrealistic goal, one that leads to more stress than satisfaction. The secret to fulfillment is not about exciting adventures or living out loud—no one can maintain that kind of pace—but in welcoming and even relishing the quiet and familiar.

  My father is on the putting green. I stop twenty yards away and watch him. His stroke is a perfect metronome. Golfers will disagree, but to be great at the game, you have to be a little OCD. Who else can stand over the same putts for hours on end and work on their stroke? Who else can spend three hours straight in the same bunker in order to perfect spin and trajectory?

  “Hello, Win,” my father says.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  He is still eyeing up his putt. He has a routine. He does it every time, no matter what, no matter how many putts in a row he practices. His theory, which is the same one I apply to martial arts, is that you practice the same way as you play.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” he says.

  “I was thinking that to be great at golf, you have to be a little OCD.”

  “Elaborate, please.”

  I explain briefly about obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  He listens patiently, and when I finish, he says, “Sounds like an excuse not to practice.”

  “That could be.”

  “You’re a very good player,” he says, “but you never wanted it enough.”

  That is true.

  “Now Myron,” Dad continues. “He seems sweet and nice, and he is. But on the basketball court? He’s barely sane. He wants to win that badly. You can’t teach that kind of competitive spirit. And it’s not always a healthy thing either.”

  He stands up now and turns to me. “So what’s wrong?”

  “Uncle Aldrich.”

  He sighs. “He’s been dead for more than twenty years.”

  “Did you know about his problems?”

  “Problems,” he repeats, and shakes his head. “Your grandparents preferred the term ‘predilections.’”

  “When did you know?”

  “Always, I guess. There were incidents when he was still in middle school.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, what difference does it make, Win?”

  “Please.”

  He sighs. “Peeping Tom to start. He would also get too aggressive with girls. You have to remember. This was the sixties. There was no such thing as date rape.”

  “So your parents moved him around,” I say. “Or they paid people to let it go. He changed high schools twice. He started at Haverford and then the family shipped him to school in New York.”

  “If you know all this, why are you asking?”

  “Something happened in New York,” I say. “What?”

  “I don’t know. Your grandparents never told me. I assume it was another incident with another girl. They sent him to Brazil.”

  I shake my head. “It wasn’t a girl,” I say.

  “Oh?”

  “Aldrich was one of the Jane Street Six.”

  I wanted to see if he knew. I can see from his face that he didn’t.

  “Uncle Aldrich was there that night. He threw a Molotov cocktail
. A few days later, your parents sent him to Brazil. Kept him in hiding, just in case. They set up that shell company to keep Ry Strauss quiet.”

  “What is the point of this, Win?”

  “The point is,” I say, “that didn’t stop Aldrich. Men like him don’t get better.”

  My father’s eyes close as though in pain. “Which is why I broke off with him,” he says. “Cut him off and never spoke to him again.”

  There is anger in his voice—anger and deep sadness.

  “He was my baby brother. I loved him. But after that incident with Ashley Wright, I knew that he would never change. Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps if our parents hadn’t always facilitated him, perhaps if they had made Aldrich get help or face some consequences, it wouldn’t have come to that. But it was too late. Granddad was dead, so it was up to me. I did what I thought best.”

  “You cut ties.”

  He nods. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  I nod and move closer to him. He is a simple man, my father. He has chosen to live behind these hedges, safe, protected. He has chosen to be passive. Has that worked for him? I don’t know. I am my father’s son, but I am not my father. He did what he thought best, and I love him for it.

  “What?” he asks. “Is there something else?”

  I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I assure him.

  He searches my face for a few moments. Again I show nothing.

  I do not want to break his heart.

  After a few moments pass, he points to the rack on his left. “Grab a club,” he says, as he lines up the balls for our favorite backyard game.

  I want to stay with him. I want to stay and play Closest to the Cup with my father until the sun sets, like we used to when I was a child.

  “I can’t right now,” I tell him.

  “Okay.” He looks down at a golf ball, as though he’s trying to read the logo on it. “Later maybe?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  I want to tell him the truth. But I never will. It would only hurt him. There would be no upside, no positive change. I stay silent and wait until he turns his attention back to the small white ball on the green. His eyes focus on it, only it, and I know, because I’ve seen him doing it many times, he is escaping into this simple, habitual activity. I try to do the same sometimes. I even get there once in a while.