JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (21 page)

The desktop had nothing on it but equipment: a telephone and an answering machine at one end and, at the other, a flat-screen monitor and a mouse, both hooked to a docking station for a laptop. But there was no laptop in sight. I followed cables from the docking station to a cabinet in the credenza and found a printer-copier-fax combo and a modem, but still no laptop. It was impossible to know if it had left with Danes or afterward.

A blinking light on the answering machine caught my eye. I picked up the telephone. It had caller ID, and I scrolled through the recorded numbers. There were fifty of them, all the phone could hold. I thought for a moment about taking the phone and the answering machine with me but decided against it. There was a chance— maybe a good one— that this case could become a police investigation. If it did, the cops would take a very dim view of my walking off with evidence, so dim they might walk off with my license in return. I got out my pad and pen and sat down in the swivel chair.

It took me fifteen minutes to copy down the caller ID information from Danes’s phone and another ten to listen to the dozen messages on his answering machine. I wrote down the names of the callers and when they called. All the messages were from people I knew: Nina Sachs, Irene Pratt, Dennis Turpin, Giselle Thomas, and Nancy Mayhew. The wording was different, but the content was all the same: “Where are you? Call me.” One of the last calls was from Billy. It began with a long breathing silence after the beep, disappointment perhaps, at getting the machine. When he finally spoke, his voice was a choked mix of hurt and anger and low expectations bitterly fulfilled.

“You were supposed to pick me up,” he said. And then, after a long pause: “Are you ever going to fucking call?”

Billy’s message was fairly recent, just over a week old, and none of the messages went back much more than three weeks. I put my pad away. I pressed the redial button on the phone and after two rings got a Chinese restaurant that I knew was around the corner, on Third Avenue. Someone asked for my order and I hung up.

The desk had a center drawer, and I pulled it out and put it on my lap. Inside were paper clips, rubber bands, a roll of postage stamps, and— in the back— Danes’s passport. It was dog-eared and swollen, full of stamps from countries in Europe and Asia and the Caribbean, and its presence here meant that Danes wasn’t in any of those places. At the back of the drawer was a business card. The paper was heavy stock and the print was black and sober-looking. FOSTER-ROYCE RESEARCH. JUDITH PEARSON, ACCOUNT MANAGER. I put the card in my pocket and the drawer back in the desk and turned to the credenza.

The top drawer was full of file folders and so was the bottom. There were labels on the folders— phone, condo, utilities, bank, brokerage, insurance, legal— and nothing at all inside them. I pushed them aside and found only paper clips and bent staples on the bottoms of the drawers. I closed the drawers and heard a tearing sound. I opened them again and knelt down and reached my hand into the space behind the drawers.

Whoever had been here before me had searched a lot, but not well. I came out with papers: a bank statement. It was six months old and crumpled, but it was better than bent staples. I pulled the bottom drawer out and reached into the empty space and found another wrinkled sheaf: credit card bills and a brokerage statement. I smoothed the documents out and folded them and put them in my pocket. I went to the orange bookshelves.

Most of the books were on business and mathematics, though there was one shelf devoted to music: history of, theory of, and composer biographies. I pulled some volumes at random from the shelves, leafed through them, and found nothing there but pages.

There were silver-framed photos lying flat on the topmost shelf, and I took them down one by one to look at. There was a picture of Billy standing on the deck of the Intrepid and looking sullen, and another of him on the climbing wall at Chelsea Piers, looking embarrassed and angry. There was a photo of Danes in black tie flanked by several gray-haired executive types. He was holding a framed certificate that declared him to be 1999’s analyst of the year, at least in the judgment of one prominent trade rag. Next to that photo was the framed certificate itself. It seemed to have aged well. There was a picture of Danes and an older man, standing on either side of a young Asian woman who was holding a violin. I recognized the woman from television and from the time I’d heard her play at Carnegie Hall. I didn’t recognize the old man. He had sparse white hair on a tanned and freckled head, and his face was narrow and hollow-cheeked. His smile was tired but warm. The last photo was an old one— over ten years old. It was of Danes and Nina Sachs, and it had the same tropical backdrop as the one Sachs had shown me in her apartment. In this one, she and Danes stood side by side on a stone terrace above an empty bay. He wore a blazer and white trousers, and his hair looked blond in the sunlight. Nina wore the same gauzy caftan. Their fingers were laced and they smirked identically into the camera, as if at a private joke. They looked happy.

I checked my watch. Christopher was no doubt having seizures downstairs; it was time to go. I looked quickly through the front hall closet and the powder room and found nothing in either place. I listened at the front door. It was quiet in the corridor, and I slipped out and locked the door behind me. I took my gloves off, put them in my pocket, and took a deep breath.

The elevator came right away and I was about to step on when a tall broad-shouldered man came churning out. His head was down and he sideswiped me as he went past. I rocked backward but he seemed not to notice. He had a long coat on, too warm for spring, and jeans and work boots. There was an unkempt fringe of dark hair around his ears and collar, and a thin tangle across the top of his large head. His face was full, and shaded by a few days’ dark growth. His mouth was small and puffy and it was moving as he stepped off the car, but only he could hear the words. His wire glasses were askew on his broad nose, and I caught only a glimpse of his eyes, which were dark and agitated and far away.

I stepped into the elevator and watched him go to the door next to Danes’s— apartment 20-C— bend over the handle, and work a key in the lock. The doors slid closed and I descended. The elevator car had a rank smell.

14

It was four o’clock when the taxi dropped me at 23rd Street, and I took my time walking home from there. When I got to 16th I was reasonably sure I was alone. My block was quiet: a couple of dog walkers, two moms pushing strollers, a FedEx guy unloading, a light blue van pulling away from the curb, a dirty red hatchback pulling in. I went upstairs.

It was too warm in my apartment and the air was stale, and I opened all the windows while my voice mail played over the phone speaker. There was a message from Mrs. K, telling me, in somewhat cautious tones, that two more interviews had been scheduled at Klein for later that week and to consult my e-mail for details. And Nina Sachs had phoned, to ask— brusquely— that I call her with a progress report. I shook my head and wondered what she’d make of the lingerie.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it myself. The clothing and the receipt suggested that Danes and Sovitch had been having a thing— and an ongoing thing, at that. If that was so, it would cast a different light on what Sovitch had said to me— and maybe explain her distinct lack of journalistic curiosity. I wouldn’t know until I had another chat with her, and maybe not even then. Maybe I’d find that the underwear belonged to someone else altogether. Maybe it belonged to Danes. I called Nina Sachs’s number and let it ring twelve times before I gave up.

Jane had called too. “I’ve got time off for good behavior tonight. Want to do something? I’ll ring when I’m ready to leave.”

I flicked on my stereo. WFUV was playing Freedy Johnston, but I wasn’t in the mood. I put a Ry Cooder disc in, something Cuban with guitars, poured a big glass of water, and carried it to the table. I took off my coat and emptied its pockets of souvenirs: my handwritten list of phone calls and messages, the business card, and the wrinkled collection of months-old documents— the bank statement, the brokerage statement, and the credit card bills.

I’d tried pressing Christopher for more current mail when I’d come downstairs, but he was no help, telling me only that Danes’s box was empty and his mail was being held at the post office. He hadn’t been completely useless, however, even if he was unwilling at first.

It had taken the threat of withholding the rest of his cash, and the suggestion that I might stick around and talk to the building super, to get Christopher to admit that this wasn’t the first time he’d sold access to Danes’s apartment. That had happened almost ten days earlier, he told me— the week before our first conversation— and the buyers were the same two nondescript guys he’d told me about before. But despite my arm-twisting, Christopher had continued to insist that he knew neither their names nor how to contact them. At least he was consistent. I drank some water, pushed up my sleeves, and picked up the bank statement.

It was six months old but illuminating nonetheless. For one thing, it explained why the lights were still working in Danes’s apartment. Most of his regular bills— for phone, cable, electricity, condo common charges, parking, even his maid service— were paid automatically, by direct debit from his checking account. His paychecks came in the same way, two times a month, fat and automatic. If his current balance was anything like the one he’d had six months ago, his cable service was assured for years to come.

For another, the statement rendered Nina Sachs’s concern for her ex-husband in concrete terms: six thousand a month in alimony and another six in child support. Nina would have to sell a lot of paintings to generate that kind of cash flow, and she would definitely notice when the check was late.

Danes’s brokerage statement covered roughly the same period as the bank statement. His portfolio was a conservative mix of stocks, corporate bonds, and government bonds, with a market value at the time in the high seven figures. The companies he owned were big household names, and there were none on the list that I recognized as technology firms. Buy-and-sell activity in the account was quite low.

None of that was particularly surprising; as head of research at Pace-Loyette, Danes’s personal investing would be constrained by layers of rules and regulations laid down by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Association of Securities Dealers, the New York Stock Exchange, and his own firm. His holdings would be subject to scrutiny by each of those parties, and every buy or sell order that he placed would require the prior approval of Pace’s compliance department. Active trading— short-term speculating as opposed to longer-term investing— would be difficult, if not altogether prohibited, and for all intents and purposes, he’d be barred from owning shares in the technology companies that his department issued reports on and maybe even in companies in the same industries.

I looked at the month-to-date and year-to-date returns calculated on the statement. Its lack of flash had not inoculated Danes’s portfolio against the vagaries of the market, and its performance, at least as of six months ago, was decidedly anemic.

A gust of wind sent pages flipping across my tabletop and I rose to shut some windows. Day was fading and the sky was pink and vaguely tropical looking. Sixteenth Street was in shadow. The sidewalks had filled and traffic was backed up behind a van parallel parking in a space across the street. It was a tight spot, but the van’s driver was deft and traffic was soon moving again. I worked the kinks from my neck and looked at the van. Its taillights went out but no doors opened. I rolled my shoulders and wondered what color it was. Gray? Silver? Light blue? It was impossible to tell in this light.

I sat down at the table again and slid Danes’s credit card bills over. They weren’t quite as old as the two statements but they weren’t current either, so there were no convenient, week-old charges from the Hideout Hilton or the like to be found in them. Scanning the pages, I saw that for the most part Danes took his meals on the Upper East Side, bought his clothes on Madison Avenue and his music on the Internet. But it wasn’t all eating and shopping. There was a three-month-old charge, over a weekend, from a pricey bed-and-breakfast in East Hampton. There was another charge, four months back, from an inn in Lenox, Massachusetts. And earlier that same month, there had been what looked like a weekend trip to Bermuda.

I stacked the credit card statements together and put them next to the bank and brokerage statements. Like them, these had been illuminating but not immediately useful. My eyes felt gritty and dry. I was tired of looking at numbers. I picked up the business card.

I’d never heard of Foster-Royce Research, but I assumed from the name that it was a stock research outfit or maybe a corporate headhunting firm. I found it on the Web and found that I was wrong.

Research was apparently a polite English way of saying private investigations. Foster-Royce was a London-based detective agency and, apparently, an up-market one. Besides its headquarters on Threadneedle Street, the firm had offices in Paris, Zurich, Madrid, Rome, Hong Kong, Toronto, and New York— all the better, I guessed, to support its self-proclaimed specialty in international assignments. According to its Web site, Foster-Royce investigators had broad experience with such outfits as Interpol, the Metropolitan Police, the Gendarmerie Nationale, the RCMP, the FBI, and others, and maintained deep local contacts in all the countries where Foster-Royce kept offices. They promised thoroughness, professionalism, integrity, and, of course, discretion. I hoped that last bit was just talk. The corporate directory told me Judith Pearson was assigned to the New York office and gave me the number.

Judith Pearson took my call without delay. She had a pleasant southern voice and a friendly manner, and she was discreet to the point of mute. She wouldn’t tell me if she’d ever met Gregory Danes or even heard his name before, much less admit that he was a client of Foster-Royce. But she did invite me to call her again if there was anything else she could help me with. Her good-bye was cheerful and self-satisfied. I sighed.