1 Runaway Man (2 page)

“What’s your client’s relationship with Bruce Weiner?” Mom wanted to know. “Are we talking about a grandparent?”

“Our client is not a grandparent,” Seymour replied, glaring at Gus.

“Then why has he left this young man something of considerable value?”

“I didn’t say our client was a ‘he.’ And, again, there is no need for you to know that.”

“Are his parents aware of this bequest?”

“No, they are not.”

“Do they stand to gain from it?”

“Only in the sense that that their son will now be financially independent.”

“Do they realize he’s missing?” I asked.

“I said he left campus three days ago. I did
not
say he was missing.”

Mom puffed out her cheeks with exasperation. “How about we cut the crap, Peter? Do you have reason to believe that something has happened to him?”

“No reason whatsoever. We’re simply anxious to clear this matter up quickly and discreetly. As far as we know the young man has not been the victim of a crime. Or had cause to visit the campus health center. Nor has he returned home to Willoughby. He has simply disappeared.” Seymour gazed down his long nose at me. “Can you find him?”

“Oh, I can find him. And when I do?”

“Have him contact us so we that can fulfill our legal obligation to our client.”

“What if he’s not interested?”

“He’s always free to donate the money to a worthy cause.”

“No, I mean what if he doesn’t want to talk to you? Because it sounds to me like he’s purposely avoiding you. Any reason why he’d want to do that?”

“None. We’re attempting to bestow a considerable fortune on him.” Seymour raised his chin at me. “Just find him, all right? Feel free to contact me directly day or night as soon as you have news. This is a priority matter for us. We are highly motivated.” He removed a slim envelope from his briefcase and handed it across the desk to Mom. “A down payment for your services. I believe you’ll find it quite generous.”

Mom opened the envelope and had a look, her eyes widening slightly. “It’s quite generous times two.”

“You’ll receive an equal amount upon successful completion of the assignment—plus a bonus of twenty-five thousand dollars. As I said, this is a priority matter.”

She squinted at the check. “What’s the Aurora Group?”

“A holding company.”

“Meaning, what, we’re off the books?”

“Not at all. Aurora’s merely an entity that we set up for occasions when we find it necessary to retain outside contractors.”

Mom sat back in her chair, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, what’s really going on here?”

“Just find Bruce Weiner.” Peter Seymour’s face revealed nothing. The man was impenetrable. He closed his briefcase, fetched his dark gray overcoat from the coat rack and put it on. It looked like cashmere, probably because it was. “I shall take the stairs down,” he announced. And with that he was gone.

I headed straight for the window, gazing down at his town car at the curb.

“What are you doing, Bunny?”

“I want to see how he gets out to the car without getting his shoes dirty.”

“Simple. He’ll change them before he leaves the building.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because that’s what women do.”

Sure enough, Peter Seymour was wearing an old pair of black brogans when he strode across the slushy sidewalk to his car and got in. Must have had them stashed in his briefcase.

“What do you think?” I asked her as the Town Car pulled away.

“I think he’s a rat and we’re the mice. You?”

“It’s a fool’s errand of some kind. I just can’t figure out
what
kind.”

“If we weren’t flat broke I’d have told him to take his snippy attitude and get the hell out. Unfortunately, we can’t exactly be choosy right now,” she confessed as she endorsed Seymour’s check. “Rita, we’re rich!”

Rita let out a whoop and rushed in, snatching the check from her. “Does this mean I can deposit my last two paychecks?”

“Go for it,” Mom said to her.

Rita hurried back out, her wondrous rear end wiggling.

“We wouldn’t be so broke if you collected the rent from our tenants,” I pointed out. “Pearl is at least three months behind. So is Scotty.”

“Times are hard, Bunny. They’re suffering.”

“How about the Felchers? They’re living here rent free.”

“It’s a sin to dun the elderly.”

“Mom, you’re a sweet person but as a landlady, you suck.”

She brooded in silence for a moment, her lower lip stuck out. “Who knows, maybe Seymour’s on the level. Maybe this is exactly what it appears to be—send a nice Jewish boy to find a nice Jewish boy. You’ve got to like the symmetry, right?”

“Actually, I’m not a big fan of symmetry.”

*   *   *

BUT MOM KNOWS BEST.

The part about us being in no position to turn down a lucrative gig, I mean. It’s a tough time to be running a small agency. When the economy turns sour people don’t hire a private investigator to catch a two-timing spouse in the act. They just cheat on each other in sullen defiance.

An agency can’t operate on the cheap. You need state-of-the-art computers, software and surveillance equipment. And you need someone like Rita. Give her ten minutes and she can hack into anybody’s most personal records. Mom befriended her way back when Rita was working the clubs as Natural Born—out of respect for not only her boobies, but her flaming red hair. Rita used to babysit me. She was also the object of my earliest, most tumid adolescent yearnings. These days, she’s married to Clarence, who used to play outside linebacker for the Jets and is currently serving ten to fifteen at Sing Sing for aggravated assault. Rita spends sixteen hours a day at her desk, consumed by loneliness and raging hormones. But she’s true blue to Clarence. Never, ever considers stepping out with another man.

After I graduated from NYU drama school, the folks decided to sell our raised ranch in Mineola and move in over the office. By then I had my own place in the East Village and was trying to scratch out a living as an actor. I caught the show business bug from Mom. Desperately wanted to act. I got two weeks on a soap. A few commercials that went national. Speaking roles on a couple of different
Law & Order
episodes. Given my slight stature and boyish features, they continued to cast me as a high school kid even after I got out of drama school. Until the day they stopped casting me altogether. There isn’t much demand for a twenty-five-year-old juvenile type. Make that zero.

So I joined the family business. I have a genuine gift for tailing people. Partly it’s my dramatic training. Partly it’s what my dad taught me. I can tail anyone through the streets and subways of New York City and they never know I’m there. But my specialty is finding runaways. Thousands of high school and college-age kids from all over the country disappear into the Big Apple maw every year. Some are fleeing an abusive home life. Some are chasing the Broadway or catwalk dream. Some are just running and have no idea why.

I know all about that. Three weeks before I graduated from high school I gathered up my life savings of $238, packed an overnight bag and caught a Greyhound bus for Hollywood. Didn’t tell my folks. Didn’t tell anyone. I told myself I wanted to be a movie star. Mostly, I was just desperate to escape. If I didn’t get away I was positive I’d explode all over the Derek Jeter posters on my bedroom wall. After ten days out there, I was shuffling along Hollywood Boulevard with twenty-three cents in my pocket, starved and homesick. A real nice young guy named Stan took pity on me and bought me a meal. Stan even offered me a chance to appear in adult films if I was willing to go down on his extremely large friend Larry. I politely said I’d rather not. He not-so-politely pointed out that it wasn’t exactly a request. My dad found me in a cheap motel room three days later, drugged, dehydrated and dazed. When I was cleared to leave the hospital, we got on a plane for home and the matter was never discussed again. Except for the occasional nightmare that awakened me, screaming, my Project Runaway episode was history.

But I’ve been there, okay? I know what they’re going through. I know what can happen to them. It’s not my job to choreograph happy endings. I’m a private investigator. It’s not the career that I dreamt of, but given my upbringing I suppose it was inevitable that I’d end up where I am. Actually, it all seems pretty normal to me. Mind you, I go to work every day with two gorgeous women who used to get naked for a living—one of whom is my mom. So one man’s idea of normal is another’s oedipal fantasy a trois.

After Peter Seymour drove off, I went up to my book-lined apartment. Reading is one of my passions. Mostly showbiz memoirs and biographies, the juicier the better. My apartment has good light, thanks to the wraparound windows. A wood-burning fireplace. Comfy, overstuffed furniture that I inherited from my grandmother’s apartment in Flatbush. On muggy August afternoons I swear it still smells like kasha knishes. I built a fire in the fireplace and put some music on the stereo. Broadway musicals are my other passion. None of that Andrew Lloyd Webber crap either. Real stuff, like the digitally remastered original cast recording of
Gypsy
starring the great Miss Ethel Merman.

I stretched out in front of the fire with Seymour’s file on the Weiner family. Bruce’s parents, Paul and Laurie, were both forty-eight years old. Paul was a bond trader with Farrell and Company, as Seymour had mentioned. Laurie, who’d taught school before she and Paul started their family, volunteered at the local elementary school as a teacher’s aide. In addition to Bruce, the Weiners had a daughter, Sara, age seventeen, a senior at Willoughby High School who had applied to Columbia, Tufts, UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Sara was a straight-A student, a flautist and an all-conference soccer player. Both of the Weiner kids were athletic. Bruce had been the starting center on the Willoughby High basketball team. He did not play for the team at Canterbury. He appeared to be a model student. Had a 3.76 GPA. No record of drug or alcohol-related activity. No citations from the campus police for excessive partying. The kid seemed clean. But it also seemed obvious that the Leetes people hadn’t put boots on the ground at Canterbury. All they had were the fruits of a computer search. No dirt.

Although they sure had a lot of it on Bruce’s parents. Paul Weiner was a Gold Card member of the Gladiator’s Club, a high-end online escort service. The man had engaged in twelve assignations in midtown Manhattan hotel rooms over the past eighteen months at a cost of fifteen hundred dollars each. His preference was for Asian women who were young, petite and took excellent care of their feet. He also belonged to an online dating service and had been romantically involved with three different women in the past year. All three were Asian. Four years ago, he’d an affair with an unmarried coworker named Michelle Chen. It had ended when Michelle transferred to the San Diego office. She was presently married and had a small child.

Laurie Weiner had met with two different divorce attorneys in the past six months but had not retained either of them. Instead, she’d embarked on an affair with the married principal of the elementary school where she volunteered. The affair was ongoing. He had rented an apartment in Scarsdale for their trysts, which occurred three times a week between the hours of four and six
P.M.

It’s like my dad used to say: It’s amazing what you find out about people when you find out about people.

There was more. Paul Weiner, who was accustomed to earning a six-figure annual Christmas bonus, hadn’t received one last month due to the sucky economy. Their home, which had slid 40 percent in market value since they bought it in 2004, was mortgaged to the rafters. Bruce’s tuition and room and board at Canterbury came to about forty thousand dollars a year. Laurie’s eighty-two-year-old mother, an Alzheimer’s sufferer, was in an assisted living facility in Armonk that cost even more than that. Between them, Paul and Laurie were presently carrying over sixty thousand dollars in credit card debt. They had a daughter who’d be starting college next year. Almost no savings. They were staring at real trouble.

I set the file aside, wondering once again why Seymour wasn’t using the Leetes Group to find Bruce. They had a gazillion operatives on their payroll. If anyone had the resources to track him down it was the Leetes Group. So why us?

It was 6:20
P.M.
Paul Weiner probably wouldn’t be home yet from the city, but Laurie ought to be rolling in right about now from getting sweaty with her married boyfriend. She answered the phone on the third ring, sounding rushed and harried.

“Good evening, Mrs. Weiner. I’m Benjamin Golden of Golden Legal Services. We’ve been retained by a law firm to carry out a confidential legal matter concerning your son Bruce.”

Her first response was wary silence. Totally normal. I would have reacted the same way. “I … don’t understand. Is Bruce is in some kind of trouble?”

“Nothing of the sort, ma’am. A certain party has bequeathed something to Bruce. We’ve been retained to contact you and expedite the inheritance.”

“You’d better talk to my husband about it. I can give you his office number.”

“Already have it, thanks. And I’d rather discuss it with both of you.”

“And
who
did you say you’re with?”

I ran through it for her again. This time she was writing it down. “We prefer to handle these matters in person, Mrs. Weiner. I’d like to swing by your home this evening if you don’t mind. It won’t take long.”

Most wives would have put me off with a simple, “I’ll have my husband call you.” But I had the advantage of knowing that the Weiners weren’t getting along.
And
that she’d just been out shtupping her boyfriend and was anxious to jump in the shower before Paul got home.

Which was why she reluctantly said, “I guess that’ll be okay. We should be done with dinner by 8:30.”

I phoned my own dinner order down to Scotty’s. Diego brought it up to me on a covered tray. Room service is one of the perks of being the landlord. Tonight’s special was Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, string beans and tapioca pudding. I watched
Jeopardy
while I ate, washing it down with a glass of milk.