JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (8 page)

“I’m just trying to find the guy, Christopher. I’m not interested in taking his stuff.”

“Shit … it’d need to be at least a hundred— no, two hundred.” I nodded.

“Two hundred’s fine,” I said. “When?” Christopher was looking paler.

“It’s got to be next week— Monday afternoon. Super-Prick will be out then.” I wasn’t happy with a six-day wait, but I didn’t have a lot of options. I nodded. Christopher checked the sidewalk again. “You’ve got to split.”

“Just one more question,” I said. “Where do the tenants garage their cars?”

“I know two places people use,” he said, and gave me their names. “Now get out of here, man.” I went.

The parking garages Christopher told me about were each within four blocks of the building, but in opposite directions. I went north and got lucky.

It was off Third Avenue, tucked between two worn apartment buildings, and its entrance was a narrow oil-stained ramp leading down. I found a small quiet man named Rafe in a glass booth at the bottom of the ramp. His hair was black and wavy and his dark eyes were set deeply in a weathered intelligent face. He recognized Danes’s picture and identified him as “black ’04 BMW Seven-fifty.” He told me the car wasn’t in and hadn’t been for a while, and for twenty bucks he looked through a stack of wrinkled papers and gave me its plate number and the date and time it had last gone out. It was five weeks ago, the day after Nina Sachs had last spoken with Danes, at nine-twenty in the morning. I asked Rafe where the nearest gas stations were. He told me, and I thanked him. I turned to leave and then turned back.

“Has anyone else come asking about this?” I said.

A look of calculation passed quickly across Rafe’s face and he nodded at me. “One guy, a week and a half back.”

“What did he ask about?”

“About the car and the customer— like you— and I told him the same things. I got twenty-five out of him, though.”

I fished a ten from my pocket. “You remember what he looked like?”

Rafe tucked the bill away. “White guy, in his thirties maybe, skinny, about five-ten, with dark hair and a mustache.”

“He give you a name or show some ID?” He shook his head. “He give you a number to call, in case Danes showed up?”

“He tried to. I told him no thanks. It’s one thing taking cash and answering questions, but being a spy is something else.”

I nodded. “Has he been back since?”

“Nope,” Rafe said, and then the phone rang in the glass booth and he picked it up and started talking. I made my way back up the ramp.

The closest of the gas stations was north, near an on-ramp to the FDR Drive. I was still feeling loose from my run and the rain was still soft, and I walked uptown and wondered all the way about who else was searching for Gregory Danes.

The station was on the corner, and a steady stream of cars pulled in and out, veering dangerously across many lanes of traffic as they did. It was not quiet. Besides the pumps there were two greasy repair bays with car lifts and a cramped store that sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, and soda. Jammed between the bays and the store was a filthy glassed-in office. It smelled of gasoline and cigars and dirty socks. I waited at a chest-high plywood counter for Frank to get off the phone.

Frank was black, about sixty and mostly bald, and he looked like he’d spent much of his life moving heavy things around. He was just under six feet, with a massive chest and shoulders and no neck to speak of. He wore a gray uniform shirt with an open collar, his name on the pocket, and the sleeves rolled up over beefy forearms. He hung up the phone and ran a hand over his broad, tired face.

“Let me see that again,” he said. I gave him the picture of Danes, and he fished a pair of half-glasses out of his pocket and peered at it. After a while he shrugged.

“He drives a black BMW Seven-fifty, if that helps,” I said. “An ’04.”

“I don’t know … maybe. He’s not one of my regulars— not one of my weekly guys— but I’ve seen him before.”

“You remember when the last time was?” He shook his head. “Were you here five weeks ago, around nine-thirty in the morning?”

Frank snorted. “Buddy, I own this place. If I’m not asleep, I’m here. But I don’t remember if he was in or not.”

“Would any of your guys remember?”

Frank laughed. “I’d be surprised but go ahead, knock yourself out.” Frank was right.

It was after five when I got home. My apartment was full of gray light and my head was full of questions. There was a phone message from Jane, telling me she had a dinner with the buyers that night, and another, from my brother Ned, reminding me of my nephew’s birthday party that weekend and telling me to expect some e-mail: three résumés and a schedule of interviews.

Klein & Sons was in the market for a security director. Ned had tried to sell me on the job and wasn’t happy when I’d run in the opposite direction. In a momentary spasm of familial conciliation, I’d offered to interview the candidates on his short list. It was one of those good deeds that had certain punishment written all over it.

I checked my e-mail and found the résumés there. I also found reports from the search services. I poured myself a cranberry juice and sat down to read them, wondering if they’d shed any light on where Gregory Danes had driven to when he’d driven off the map.

5

Richard Gilpin was calling himself Gilford Richards these days, at

least at the esteemed investment firm of Morgan & Lynch of Fort Lee, New Jersey. His voice was deep and ripe with sincerity, but he went quiet when I used the name Gilpin and hung up when I said I was calling about his half brother, Gregory Danes.

Finding Gilpin hadn’t been hard; he was in the book, at an address somewhere in Englewood. I’d called that number and an answering machine there told me I’d reached the residence of Gilford Richards. I’d plugged Gilford Richards into a search engine and come up with Morgan & Lynch’s cheesy Web site. According to the site, Morgan & Lynch was a Cayman Islands company that operated half a dozen hedge funds— microcap stock and foreign equity funds mainly. They claimed steady growth in assets under management, and remarkable returns, and they made elaborate and incoherent statements about the mathematical models used to manage their investments. The whole thing reeked of Ponzi.

No one named Morgan or Lynch seemed to be associated with the firm, but Gilford Richards was listed as one of its principals. Richards’s CV was impressive but curiously failed to mention his earlier incarnation as Gilpin or his run-ins with the SEC. An oversight, no doubt. After five attempts, I gave up trying to reach him again, and resigned myself to a trip to Fort Lee. But not today.

Today, Dennis Turpin was on my calendar. I’d called Nina Sachs last night, to get approval to disclose her name to Turpin. It was a surprisingly painless experience. And from what I’d heard on the phone, the whole gestalt at Sachs’s place had taken a definite uptick.

Nina had answered. Her voice was light and her mood was expansive. There was music in the background, and Billy was laughing and calling to Ines.

“Come on, Nes, I put on that Miami shit you like.” He sang “Turn the Beat Around,” badly.

I told Nina about my talk with Turpin and about his offer to trade information, and she didn’t think long before agreeing.

“Hey, what the hell— they already know I’m looking for Greg.” She thought longer about my conversations with Christopher, the doorman, and Rafe, the garage attendant.

“It wasn’t the cops?” she asked after a while. She was quieter and worried.

“It doesn’t sound like them.”

“So, who then?”

“I was hoping you might have an idea.”

“Fuck, no. People from work, maybe?”

“Could be,” I had said. “Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow.”

I had some time until my afternoon meeting with Turpin— time enough for lunch and more phone calls. I punched Simone Gautier’s number.

She had no word for me yet on the hospitals and morgues, but that’s not why I was calling. I gave her Danes’s plate numbers and a description of his BMW and agreed on a fee to have her check out the longterm parking lots at Newark and LaGuardia and JFK. I’d already searched for Danes’s car in the NYPD’s online database of impounded vehicles and come up empty, and I didn’t hold out great hope for the longterm lots— Danes struck me as the type to use a car service for his airport trips— but I’d feel stupid if I missed something so obvious.

My next call was to Paul Gargosian, the vacationing doorman from Danes’s building. I’d found him in the book, too— the only Gargosian with an address on City Island, in the Bronx. Mrs. Paul Gargosian answered. She had a heavy Brooklyn accent, and she was friendly and forthcoming.

“Paulie’s away, hon, down in Sarasota the next couple weeks, with his brother, Jerry. They’re out on Jerry’s boat most of the time, and I don’t know when he’s going to call. You want to leave a number, maybe he’ll get back to you.” I gave her my number and thanked her.

Then I went to the kitchen, made two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread, and poured a tall glass of milk. I sat at my long table and opened up my laptop, picking up where I’d left off last night, reading the reports from the search services.

They held no easy answers. The apartment on 79th Street was Danes’s only real property; there was no weekend place in the Hamptons and no winter home in Florida; there was no summer cottage in Maine. He’d bought the apartment almost four years ago, and at the same time sold a place on 90th Street, in Carnegie Hill. He’d been in that place since the divorce, when he and Nina had agreed to sell the co-op they’d owned on Monroe Place, in Brooklyn Heights. And there was only the Beemer to look for; no other vehicles were registered to Danes, not in the fifty states anyway. There was, however, a long list of court cases and arbitration claims.

The search services had provided me with docket numbers, and now I was plowing through online court records and the SEC database for the details of each case. I hadn’t realized there were so many of them. Nor had I realized that, in addition to charging Pace-Loyette with wrongdoing, some made claims against Danes specifically. A lawyer named Toby Kahn represented Danes in the suits, and I spoke to his voice mail and asked him to call. It was slow going, and I hadn’t gotten through many cases when it was time for my meeting at Pace-Loyette. I added water to Jane’s tulips and headed out the door.

Pace-Loyette’s headquarters occupied eight floors of a tower at 52nd Street and Sixth Avenue, a block up from Radio City. The main reception area was on the twentieth floor and was done up like Mies van der Rohe’s rumpus room. The furniture was black leather, chromed steel, and sharp angles, the marble floors were bare and whiter than eggshells, and the walls were mostly glass.

The reception desk was a glass and steel sliver, nearly invisible edge on, and so was the receptionist. She was tall and thin and bloodless, with platinum hair and big gray eyes. Her dress was steel-colored silk, and she spoke softly and in a monotone. She bade me sit, and played her fingers across the keys of a slim phone and whispered into the handset. She put down the phone and looked at me and nodded, but the look and the nod were empty of meaning. In a while a young woman came to get me. She was small and nervous-looking.

I followed her onto the elevator, and off again on the twenty-fourth floor. We went to the left, past a waiting area with blocky leather chairs and glass end tables, and through a pair of glass doors. Everything beyond the doors— the carpet, the cubicle walls, the filing cabinets and furniture— was shades of gray. The cubicles were full of people talking on telephones and peering at computers. Their low voices merged into an ambient murmur, punctuated only by the soft tapping of keys. The young woman led me down a hallway to a door with Turpin’s name on it. She knocked sharply and pushed it open and I went in.

It was a corner office, square, with big windows and nice light and views west and north. I saw the CBS building across 52nd Street and a chunk of the Hilton across Sixth Avenue. The walls were white and the floors were covered in thick beige carpet. The furniture was office modern: warm woods and brushed steel, earth tones and soothing patterns. There was a tan sofa to my right, and two matching chairs arranged around a low table. An L-shaped desk dominated the other end of the room, with a leather throne and a long credenza behind it and a pair of chairs out front. There was a woman in one of the chairs, who looked up when I came in. There was a man on the throne, who did not.

The woman was a well-maintained forty. She wore a black suit and a white blouse, with a green silk scarf at her neck. Her hair was a glossy auburn, with just enough gray to make it plausible, and there were freckles sprayed across her cheeks. Laugh lines bracketed her mouth and brown eyes, but just then she wasn’t laughing.

From behind his desk, Turpin ignored me elaborately. He was fiftyish and small, but fit-looking. His pin-striped jacket lay smoothly on his shoulders and around his bright white shirt. His gray hair was short and parted neatly on the right, and his brows were dark, perfectly clipped lines above nearly black eyes. His face was clean-shaven, and his skin fit so tightly over the muscle and bone underneath that it gave him a slightly simian look— like a very tidy chimp. He perused the monitor before him and laughed to himself now and then, ostensibly at something he saw there. No one said anything.

The woman looked at me and gave nothing away. Turpin gazed more intently at his screen and laughed more loudly. I figured the performance might go on for a while, so I took a seat next to the woman and looked at Turpin’s bric-a-brac.

There was a framed photo on the credenza behind him, of himself in the cockpit of a sailboat with three people I took to be his wife and kids. The wife had lank blond hair, a sour mouth, and a seasick look. The kids looked teenaged and sullen.

Next to the photograph, in a neat row, were a dozen Lucite tombstones commemorating M and A deals that had been presided over by the law firm of Hazelton, Brown & Cluett. I hadn’t heard of any of the companies involved, but I knew Hazelton as a white-shoe securities law firm. The deals were a decade old, and Dennis Turpin had been the firm’s officiating partner on each one.