And Sometimes I Wonder About You (9 page)

“M
ardi?” I said over the intercom.

“Yes sir?”

“Find a number for Sergeant Peter Morton of the NYPD in Queens, then call him for me.”

“Through regular channels?”

“Fast.”

“Okay,” she said. “Mr. Domini was here. He looked at the door and the wall. I told him about your door, too. He said he’d be back with a crew this afternoon.”

After getting off the phone with my brave assistant I stood up and walked most of the length of my deserted hallway. I made it all the way up to the hole gauged through the wall and stuck my head through to peek out at Mardi. She was just putting the phone down.

“It’s so strange to see you come through the wall like that,” she said.

I didn’t respond, just pulled back in and walked almost to my door. I did an about-face and went all the way to my utility closet. I had a bottle of Cuban rum in there but I didn’t reach for it.

“Peter Morton on line seven,” a disembodied voice called out over the office PA system.

I picked up a phone at a vacant cubicle and said, “Sergeant?”

“Are you really Leonid McGill?”

“Yes I am.”

“Wow.”

“Glad to see you know who I am.”

“Know who you are? I’ve had papers calling for your arrest on my desk half a dozen times.”

“I hope that’s not the case right now.”

“Not from this morning anyway.”

I liked the banter. Had I my druthers we’d have gone on like that for a minute or two and then I’d have downed a glass of rum, gone to Gordo’s, and watched the boxers whale on each other.

“What can I do for you, Leonid?” Sergeant Morton asked.

I didn’t like the familiarity. It meant that he was treating me like a suspect or a snitch.

“Josh Farth,” I said.

“He’s an um…friend of mine from Boston…he, uh, called me a couple of days ago asking for a PI who didn’t mind looking under slimy rocks. Like I said—you’re famous.”

Morton wasn’t a very good liar. Josh Farth, I was pretty sure, had called his cop friend to cover his story, whatever that was.

“You don’t know me, Sergeant. Why throw him my name?”

“He asked a question and your name was the answer.”

“What’s his business?”

“Security and research for some big company.”

“Which one?”

“I forget.”

“You forget.”

“Yeah. One day I’ll get so old that I won’t even be able to recognize my own shoes unless I’m wearing them.”

The buzzer to the front door still worked. It sounded and I said, “I have to go, Sergeant. Thanks for the referral.”

“Anytime.”

I was wondering if the NYPD had a file on me that included the layout and the general security systems of my office. They’d be sure to have my address.

I went through the wall into the reception area and gave Mardi a questioning look.

“It’s a man in a suit,” she said, looking up from the monitor in her desk drawer. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Grabbing the front door by the handle and bracing it up high with the palm of my left hand, I dragged the portal open and leaned it against the wall.

“Mr. Farth?”

“Mr. McGill?” He wore a light-colored pearl-gray suit with a dark green dress shirt—no tie.

“That wasn’t even ten minutes.”

“Less than an hour.”

I couldn’t argue with his math so I said, “Come on in.”

He walked through looking at the loose door and the tarp that mostly covered the dark stain on the floor. His face was that odd combination of unsightly and yet well manicured. The nose was too big but he’d had a facial, the hair was too thin but his barber was a hairdresser too. His knuckles were like mismatched stones though the nails and cuticles had been trimmed and varnished.

He turned his gaze on me with eyes that were the color green you expected a frog to leap from.

“Redecorating?”
he asked.

“Something like that.”

“So what can I do for you, Mr. Farth?” I asked when we were ensconced in my almost unmolested office.

“I wanted to hire you but you look busy enough already.”

“Just a break-in. The cops have already made their report. What do you need?”

“Was that blood on the floor?”

“No. There was a gallon jug of molasses on my receptionist’s desk. The burglars must have knocked it over.”

Farth paused for maybe ten seconds or so. He was trying to look as if maybe there was too much happening in my office and he should take his business elsewhere. If he did that I’d forget him.

“I’m looking for a young woman,” he said at second eleven.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Her name is Coco Lombardi,” he said, ignoring my lame joke. He reached into his jacket pocket, taking out a three-by-five glossy. “She’s dropped out of sight and her family is quite worried.”

I took the picture and studied it. Sitting on a barstool she was lovely the way strippers are lovely, all decked out in glitter and little else. Her eyelashes were over two inches long and her makeup was thick enough it might have stopped a bullet. Maybe someone with no experience would have been fooled, but I could see that the twenty-something burlesque dancer and the teenager in the photo Hiram had showed me were either closely related or one and the same.

“Girls like this go missing every other day,” I said. “They usually turn up—one way or the other.”

“It’s the other that her family is trying to avoid.”

“Boston family?”

Feigning surprise, the well-put-together and ugly man said, “I didn’t know I had an accent.”

“Peter Morton,” I said.

“You’re thorough.”

“Rich family?”

“My client is.”

“Who’s that?”

The ugly man tried to put on a sympathetic-but-sorry expression and failed.

“That’s one thing I can’t tell you,” he said. “My client likes privacy. That is my first concern.”

“So how do I know that you aren’t using me to wipe out a state’s witness or to get revenge for a jilted john?”

“You watch too much television, Mr. McGill,” Farth admonished. “People do things like that in old books. In the new world criminals stick among themselves. Anyway, I just need you to find Ms. Lombardi and tell her that I’d like to have a conversation with her. You can set that up any way that makes you comfortable.”

He was very good. If I hadn’t met Hiram Stent, seen the photo of Celia Landis, had my office invaded by professionals, and been the cause of two innocent men’s deaths, I might have believed about 2 percent of what he was saying.

“The reason I’m here,” Josh said, now affecting honesty, “is because Coco is in trouble with some bad people. She knows some things that she shouldn’t know and maybe has taken things that don’t belong to her.”

“From your client?”

“No, no. My client is close to the family. I’m here on a mission of mercy, not vengeance.”

“And how do I fit into this mission?”

“Peter told me that you are often a person of interest to the police.”

“And yet you want to hire me anyway.”

“I believe that I will need a man like you to find Coco.”

“A man like me.” I was liking our back-and-forth. It was a way to hone my skills.

“A professional who isn’t afraid of the law,” Farth explained.

“Do you have an ID, Mr. Farth?”

“Why?”

“Just so that I can say, if asked by the constabulary, that I at least checked that you were who you said you were.”

He smiled and took a wallet from his back pocket. From this he produced a Massachusetts driver’s license. Joshua Farth, DOB December 1971.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

“What?”

“Ten thousand down payment for the search and another ten when I find the girl and facilitate your talk.”

“Twenty thousand dollars for a simple missing person case?”

“That’s the going price for a man not afraid of the law.”

“That’s outrageous,” he said in a tone that carried no outrage whatsoever.

Farth or Shonefeld, or whatever his name was, gave me a frown that ever so slowly turned into a smile. I doubted if this man ever had an honest expression in his life. Everything he said, every response he gave, was planned. Too bad for him his plans were scrawled in crayon.

He reached into the same pocket that held the stripper’s photograph. From this he brought out a stack of hundred-dollar bills bound together in thousand-dollar packets. He counted out ten of these and put them on the desk, returning the rest of the treasure to the all-purpose pocket.

Gathering up the cash I asked, “What else can you give me about Coco?”

“Since she’s come to New York she’s been an artist’s model, a topless dancer, a personal assistant to a painter named Fontu Belair, and once she was arrested for kiting checks. She got out on bail and disappeared.”

“So the police are looking for her,” I said.

“Maybe in their sleep. She’s been in New York nearly a year.”

“What about before then?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Did she live in Boston?”

“Possibly. The only information I have about her is since she moved to New York.”

“What about her family?”

“My client is protecting them from the complete truth about the girl. I haven’t even met them.”

“Is Coco her real name?”

“I doubt it,” Josh said. “Like I said, I don’t even know if she’s originally from Boston. One guy said that she told him she came from out west somewhere.”

“What guy?”

“A man called Buster who worked at the Private Gentleman’s Club on Thirty-ninth Street.”

It’s funny how a word can trigger a deeply felt response. Josh said “Buster” and I suddenly had the strong desire to jump across my big black desk and bust his head. Killing him would have given me great pleasure but that’s not what Hiram had posthumously hired me for. He hired me to get his 10 percent and use that to bring Lois and the kids back into his life, such as it was.

T
he meeting with Farth lasted a quarter hour more. He gave me a couple of addresses and informed me that the money I’d been given didn’t have to be reported. He gave me an address or two for witnesses and a phone number where he could be reached.

“There’s a sense of urgency on behalf of the girl’s parents,” he said after rising to leave. “My client would like to limit their friends’ pain and so the sooner you find Coco the better.”

I walked Josh Farth down the hall, through the hole, and out the front door. I didn’t like him and he, I believed, could have easily ended my life without remembering my name in the morning.

After he was gone I levered the heavy door back into place.

“What did you think of Mr. Farth?” I asked Mardi. I’d learned over time that her insight on human nature was at least as keen as my own.

“I don’t know,” she said, considering. “He’s kinda like a ghoul—there in his body but not in his eyes.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with Twill?”

“You know Twill,” she said, once again staring me in the eye. “He’s always doing something he shouldn’t. When I was in the tenth grade I stayed away from him because everybody said he was one of the bad kids.”

“And what is my bad child doing today?”

“You’ll have to ask him, sir. He’s my best friend and I won’t tell his stories.”

She was right of course. I looked away because her eyes had gained the power of a woman since she admitted putting her stepfather in his place.

“You should go home,” I told her.

“You’re firing me?”

“No. No, I’m trying to protect you. I won’t have you sitting behind a door that might fall in at any moment when there’s a good chance that the real bad guys might return.” I handed her the black envelope from my outbox and the ten thousand Farth had given me. “Put this in the safe and stay home until I call for you to come back.”

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

Before I could think up some wise-assed retort the buzzer sounded.

Bells and buzzers had begun to bother me. They seemed like evil portents insinuating themselves between me and my loved ones.

“It’s Mr. Domini and some other men,” she said.

I did my exercise with the front door, revealing a crew of six.

Westley Domini was a short Italian man, though not as short as I. He had white hair and skin as close to white as it could get. He was my Mr. Fixit and a former member of one of the more powerful New Jersey mobs. He’d done some bad things in his life but then met a woman named, of all things, Ginger and decided to leave the mob business to do the thing he loved most, which was, like his immigrant grandfather, working with his hands.

This decision brought him to my office. He’d heard that I’d gone straight and wanted, for lack of a better term, a blueprint for success. We talked and drank and drank and talked for fifty hours. At the end of the session Westley had promised to work for me whenever I needed it.

For my part, I rarely called on him.

“Looks like they took your fancy door off with a firecracker” was the first thing Westley said.

“Yeah. Can you fix me?”

“Quintez, Li,” he said to two of his crew. “Let’s start diggin’ this wall out.”

Domini had a multiracial crew culled from New York. I had convinced him that he had to break daily ties to his old friends in Jersey.

“How long?” I asked the reformed pimp and murderer.

“By nine tonight,” he said. “We’ll get to your back-office door too.”

“Some guys from Seko Security will be here along the way,” I said. “Let ’em do what they need to do.”

Back at my desk I called Zephyra Ximenez, my Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant (TCPA). I rarely saw this pillar of my information jungle; if we met face-to-face two times in a year that was a lot. Most of our work was over the phone or via the Internet. It’s not that I didn’t want to see the
Dominican/Moroccan
beauty from Queens. She had skin the color of polished onyx and poise that would have put Princess Grace to shame. But Zephyra plied her trade for her many clients by wire, satellite, and microwave beams. She eschewed office work. I couldn’t blame her.

“Hello, Mr. McGill,” she said, answering on the eighth ring. She had my number and therefore my name.

“Hey, Z, how’s it goin’?” I could hear the Domini crew banging from down the hall.

“All right I guess,” she said.

“Problems?”

“A little bit.”

“We’ll get back to that in a minute,” I promised. “First I need you to do some research for me.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“There’s supposed to be a law firm in Frisco called Briscoe/Thyme. I think the last name is spelled like the Simon and Garfunkel song but it could be temporal.” I liked talking to Zephyra because she knew all the words in five or six dictionaries. “I can’t find ’em so I thought you could look.”

“Sure thing.”

“Also I’m looking for a young woman named Coco Lombardi. She’s a stripper here in New York but she might be from Boston originally. Celia Landis might be her alias or vice versa. And there’s some other names I’d like you to look up,” I added. “Josh Farth, forty-four, private investigator or security specialist; Alexander Lett, around forty, from down in DC. He’s a strong-arm so probably listed as security too. Then there’s a Marella Herzog. That name is almost definitely a.k.a. but it’s probably used down in DC for a wedding registration at high-end stores. I’d like to know who she’s marrying and what her backstory is.”

“Got it, got it, and got it,” Zephyra said; her voice sounded cheerier when she was working. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, yeah. Check out the social media sites for somebody named Twitcher.”

“Male or female?”

“Man.”

“Age?”

“It’s Twill.”

Silence, then: “Okay.”

“What’s wrong, Z?”

“I don’t think I want to talk about it.”

“Then let me do the talking,” I said in my most avuncular tone. “There was once a fat man named Bug Bateman who lived in a hole clutching a stick of dynamite in one hand and his dick in the other. A Spanish princess named Ximenez dragged him out of there, made him do push-ups and shop at Armani, and then, just when he was exactly what she wanted, she told him that she needed the freedom to see other guys. He found out that there are many women who want a guy like him.”

“He rubs my nose in it.”

“Any guy you know that you wouldn’t mind spending a few weeks with?”

“There’s this man that calls himself Petipor the Younger. A Turkish technology importer. I think his father is a Thracian prince.”

“After you finish with my searches go away with him.”

“And you’ll tell Bug?”

“I won’t need to.”

“Where do you want me to start with your work?”

“Do a cursory on Coco first and get that to me as soon as possible.”

“You got it, boss.”