by Wally Duff
Carter jumped up. “What?! Why wasn’t it reported?”
I held up my hand. “Relax and let me explain.”
He sat down and I did.
“Who killed Zhukov?” he asked.
“Dr. Alan Peebler.”
“Wow. Can you prove it?”
“Maybe, but I’m not sure I want to.”
“A problem with your source?”
“He is the only one, and he has disappeared.”
“Where is Zhukov’s body?”
“I know where it is, but all it’ll prove is that he’s dead.”
He stood up and hugged me. “I know how much you wanted to write this article. I’m so sorry. You did your best, but without Dr. Peebler as a source, you don’t have a story.” His hug tightened. “And next time, please tell me the whole truth about your investigations.”
I wanted to say that in the future I would tell him the whole truth, but will there even be any more stories? How important is writing a front page story after being there when Alan was killed by angry Russians?
149
Friday morning, Janet and Frankie sat across from me at Starbucks. He drank a triple espresso. I had my usual green iced tea. She had a Venti black coffee. Laughing Larry sat in the corner with four other men about his retirement age. Larry is a regular who bellows out an annoying laugh in response to anything. As they talked, he bellowed so loudly it was hard for us to carry on a conversation.
“A good story,” Janet said, after I finished telling them about Alan.
“Too bad you can’t write it,” Frankie said. “If the cops ever find out about the dude with the missing fingers and Diane Warren being buried side-by-side in that basement, it might be a problem because you would be the primo suspect for offing both of them.”
“Thank God Alan took care of all that DNA, or I might be the detective who slaps the cuffs on you,” she said.
“You’ll need a new story, Tina,” he said. “Any ideas?”
“Honestly, last night when I told Carter what happened, I was ready to hang it up and stop writing. But just now after I told you what happened to Alan, I realized I’ll never stop. It’s in my DNA.”
From forgotten-BOOM! due out in the spring of 2020
1
“The last name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall is Second Lieutenant Richard Vandergeer,” Greg Garland said.
It was Saturday afternoon. My husband, Carter Thomas, was at home with our two daughters, Kerry and Macy. Garland and I sat at a back table in our neighborhood Starbucks. The strong and familiar aroma of brewing coffee competed with Garland’s Old Spice aftershave. Like many people his age, he’d liberally applied the classic scent, too much so in my opinion.
His lanky six five frame was folded into one of the wood chairs. I turned on my cell phone and put it on the table. As a former investigative journalist, I would record what he was going to tell me in case I decided to work on this new story.
“Six months ago I was in D.C. for a legal seminar,” he continued. “On the last night, after a few too many after-dinner drinks, I decided to make my first visit to the Vietnam Memorial. I stumbled around in a downpour checking out the sections from my time in-country with the Air Force in 1975. I discovered Vandergeer’s name at the bottom of Panel 01W.”
I sipped on an unsweetened Grande green iced tea. Garland had a Venti black coffee in front of him, but he wasn’t drinking it.
“At the time, his name didn’t mean anything to me but it kept bugging me. At the hotel, I went online and did a background check on him.”
“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” Laughing Larry Albert bellowed out. He sat with a group of four retired male friends in the corner opposite from where we were. The annoying noise made it difficult for me to concentrate on what Greg said as he told me the story of the Mayaguez attack, which happened in 1975 in the Gulf of Siam shortly after the fall of Saigon.
“I discovered that Vandergeer had been listed as killed in action. His remains were recovered in 2000 and buried the same year in Arlington, which is why he’s the last name on the wall.”
I tapped my fingers on the tabletop. “Why is this so important to you now after all this time?”
“I left Vietnam the day before the incident. Shortly after that, I was discharged from the Air Force. Until that night six months ago, I didn’t know Vandergeer was dead.”
I waited.
He stared at the tabletop. “It was my battle plan and orders that resulted in him being killed.”
~
Author’s Note
In my first book, boom-BOOM!, I included the article: “Lonely Stay-at-Home Mothers Are Now Wooing Each Other.” It was written by my daughter Christina Duff, now Tina Duff Taylor, and was the background story for that book and the Hamlin Park Irregulars series.
My son-in-law, Jeffrey Taylor (Carter in all the books), also penned a book, The Pru-Bache Murder, which had a strong background influence on brainy-BOOM!
Here is a portion of a review of his book from the Chicago Tribune. I think you will see why it had a major impact on my book:
Anyone who has been taken in by a financial markets hustler will feel a reflexive jolt of fear and loathing on reading Jeffrey Taylor's tale of a high-pressure stockbroker who blazed briefly and then was snuffed out by one of his victimized clients.
Some might even feel that the retribution exacted, which included hacking the stockbroker's body apart and strewing the pieces about the landscape, was all too richly deserved.
The story of the broker, Michael Prozumenshikov, goes beyond the life and grim death of a lone con artist. It also delves into the changes in the business culture of brokerages in the 1980s and the sociology of the Russian Jewish immigrant community in America.
Even more, it offers a wealth of detail on how investors can get dragged into ventures beyond their means or control, and it is especially perceptive about the psychology of one investor whose losses tipped him over the edge.
Prozumenshikov was a Russian immigrant fascinated by American capitalism. He became a broker in the early 1980s and worked for Minneapolis-area offices of Merrill Lynch, Drexel Burnham Lambert and Prudential-Bache (now Prudential Securities.)
He grew up in the harsh, deprived environment of Leningrad in the 1950s and 1960s, living in a decaying apartment where 31 residents cohabited in space meant for one family.
His father was a factory supervisor. Prozumenshikov, showed athletic prowess in throwing the hammer and was helped by his sports connections in getting into a prestigious dental school and then attaining a prized place in a Leningrad clinic despite doing poorly in his studies.
He left the Soviet Union during a wave of Jewish immigration in the 1970s and went to Minneapolis, where a colony of Russian Jews had begun to settle. Despite dogged efforts, he failed his U.S. dental exams and was floundering until a stockbroker friend in the immigrant community helped him to learn the business and get a job.
He quickly showed prodigious talent, absorbing information and pursuing clients inexhaustibly. He also showed a ruthless ambition, greed for wealth and utter disdain for rules and ethics.
Acknowledgements
Does art imitate life? With the Marcia and Alan characters in this book, it does. Sadly, they are gone now, but their unique personalities and quirky ways will never be forgotten.
I could never begin to conceive of scenes like Alan standing on his head the first time I met him. Or the roll of toilet paper on his belt to solve his dripping nose problem. They actually happened.
And Marcia? Everything I wrote about her is based on her life, and what a life it was!
We miss them both.
But David Scott and Rick Carey are still with us! They have been kind enough to allow me to include them as characters in my books. I love writing about them, and I think it shows. I love you guys and hope you are with us for a long, long time.
My core production group has pretty much remained the same for all my books. Nancy Cohen is m
y trusted editor, and I doubt I could get any of my books printed without her fabulous help.
Ana Magno continues to amaze me. I suggest the concept of the cover to her in an email and, in short order, she has it done.
Abby Anderson does my Facebook entries, and Jen Maher is my website guru. Thanks to both of you.
Joy Larsen continues to be the voice of the first three books in the Hamlin Park Irregulars series, which are now on Audible (www.Amazon.com). She is the best.
A special shout-out to my daughter, Tina, who is the model for the protagonist Tina in all the books. As always, she read the almost-finished version of this book, and I finally got her: this time, she didn’t figure out who the killer was.
And thanks to Tina’s husband, Jeff, and their kids and our grandkids, Kerry, 20, Macy, 18, and Nick, 16, and their dog, Ruby.
Thanks to my son, James E. Duff, and his wife, Julia. They are in the final stages of finishing their next feature movie, Sugaring Season. Look for it.
To Brittany Haynie (Brittany Simon in the books) and her husband (and my golfing partner), Luke, and their son, Jetter, who will be three in December, and their dog, Dexter.
And to Mo, who continues to be Denny Crane to my Alan Shore and the reason I’m late coming home from the office.
And finally, to my wife Mindy. She is always there for me, except when she is doing one of her many other projects: check out AllCore360 to see her latest one. The concept works, and look for it if there is one in your area.
I can’t forget to mention Bentley, our Bichon Frisé. He is my partner on our nightly walks as I try to help him lose the pounds we’ve added during our weekend trips to Starbucks where he “orders” a Puppaccino.
I enjoyed writing the next book, forgotten-BOOM! (book five in the Hamlin Park Irregulars series, which is scheduled to be published in spring 2020), because it deals with the forgotten Vietnam War. I was in the Air Force during that time (1973-75), stationed in San Antonio, Texas, at Wilford Hall USAF Medical Center.
The next book after that, love-BOOM!, will feature Tina’s brother, Jimmy Edwards, a pitcher for the San Diego Padres. It is Mindy’s favorite of all the books and was the first book I wrote.
I continue to have a full-time ENT practice in Omaha, along with my other non-nosepicker activities of being a husband, father, grandfather, magician for birthday parties, exercise nut, and golfer. Speaking of which, look for Rotary Swing Golf and instructor Chuck Quinton (rotaryswing.com) if you want to improve your golf game. It really helped me.
And finally, thank you for joining Tina and her friends for more Irregular adventures. As always, if you want to discuss this book, or anything about any of the books in the Hamlin Park Irregulars series, please contact me at [email protected] or on my website: wallyduff.com or hamlinparkirregulars.com. You can also check out Tina’s neighborhood on YouTube: boom-BOOM! by Dr. Wally Duff, the video book trailer.