City Of Lies (13 page)

Harper frowned. He didn’t understand.

‘The day Marilyn Monroe died,’ Cathy explained. ‘He figures this has some meaning and significance in his life, and he is a little obsessed with the woman.’

‘Obsessed?’ Harper asked.

‘Books, posters, videos of every film she made . . . and that doesn’t even get close to the Di Maggio baseball.’

‘What baseball?’

‘Apparently Frank Duchaunak paid five thousand dollars for a baseball signed by Joe Di Maggio because he believed Marilyn Monroe might have held it for him when he signed it.’

‘You’re kidding?’ Harper said.

‘No word of a lie,’ Walt said. ‘It is what it is . . . and hey, I don’t have a problem with a guy having an interest, you know? Some guys like racing cars, others like to collect stamps or shot glasses or whatever, but you get a guy like Duchaunak with this Marilyn thing, and hey, this goes a little out into left field, if you know what I mean.’

Harper – about to ask another question, a question about Sol Neumann and Mr Marcus – was interrupted by Walt Freiberg’s cellphone.

‘Ah, for Christ’s sake,’ Walt said under his breath, and retrieved the phone from his jacket pocket. He looked at the screen, and then edging his chair back he stood slowly, his expression changing as he rose.

‘You have to excuse me,’ he said. ‘I have to take this call.’

Harper smiled, nodded.

Walt Freiberg started walking, and as he did so he took the call. ‘Tell me all about it,’ he started. ‘I want to know what the fuck went wrong—’

Harper strained to hear what he was saying but Walt walked out of earshot and made his way towards the exit.

‘You don’t try and listen,’ Cathy Hollander said.

‘Eh?’

She smiled, glanced towards Walt Freiberg as he vanished through the doorway.

‘To the conversations, the phone calls, whatever. You don’t try and listen.’

Harper shrugged his shoulders.

‘For real,’ Cathy said. ‘There are certain things Walt is very conscious of, and one of them is his work. His work is his own business, no-one else’s, and he makes it a very definite rule that nothing interferes with it.’

‘Hey,’ Harper said. ‘I’m neither one way nor the other on this thing. I’m the new kid on the block. I’m here and I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing here. Walt Freiberg is a distant memory from my childhood who happens to have surfaced. This cop guy, this Duchaunak, he tells me that Walt and my father are business partners, that they’ve been partners for many years, right?’

Cathy shook her head. ‘Whatever you say.’

‘It’s not what
I
say, Miss Hollander, it’s what the Marilyn Monroe-obsessed cop told me, that Walt and my father have been business partners for many years.’

‘Okay, so what?’

‘So what?’ Harper asked. ‘Well, I don’t know what kind of business and I don’t s’pose it matters what kind of business, but it seems to me that if Walt has been around my father for as long as I think then it seems awful strange that he’s so calm.’

‘So calm? What d’you mean, so calm?’

‘Your partner, your friend, whatever . . . they get shot, shot in a liquor store robbery. They’re laid up in hospital and there’s a very good possibility that they’re going to die, and you spend your time out and about having lunch in some fancy fucking restaurant—’

‘What would you have him do, Mr Harper?’

Harper looked at Cathy, his expression one of surprise. He sensed that his outburst had alienated her. He wished he could wind it back and start over.

‘Walt Freiberg has lost a lot of people,’ Cathy said.

Harper shook his head. He had no idea what she meant.

‘I can’t tell you a great deal from personal experience,’ she went on. ‘I haven’t been around for an awful long time, and to tell you the truth I don’t know a great deal more about Walt Freiberg and your father than you do, but I know that Walt has had a pretty interesting life, and when it comes to losing people
Walt has done a good deal of that. Walt has made losing people something of a secondary career.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Harper said.

Cathy smiled. ‘And you’re not going to . . . here comes the man himself.’

Harper turned and saw Walt walking across towards them. He was grinning broadly. He took his seat. Harper could tell he’d been outside from the coolness he exuded.

‘Sorry kids,’ he said. ‘Just a little matter that needed sorting. Now where were we? Oh yeah, we were talking about Frank Duchaunak and his Marilyn Monroe fixation. Freakin’ whackjob if you ask me,’ and Walt Freiberg was talking, and Harper was listening, and there was something about the manner in which he spoke, the way he seemed to make everything he was saying the most important thing to be said, and there were jokes, another reference to Duchaunak thinking with his dick instead of his head—

‘Guy’s put so much trust in his dick he’s the only person I know who washes his hands
before
he takes a leak!’

And Harper, caught somewhere within the overlapping emotions of everything that had happened – anxiety, confusion, grief, loss, a fear of the unknown perhaps – forgot to ask about Sol Neumann and Mr Marcus, and even if he had remembered perhaps would not have possessed the nerve to ask, because everything except that which Walt Freiberg was speaking of seemed insignificant. When Walt was there it was Walt’s life, Walt’s words, Walt’s moment. Walt Freiberg possessed the ability to sweep everyone around him into the whirlwind of his own reality, and there was little that could be done to avoid its magnetism. Walt seemed to make the idea of being excluded something awkward and potentially unpleasant. John Harper, a man with little bearing and few reference points, went with the flow. He ate the food, he drank the wine, and at the end of the meal he smoked two of Cathy Hollander’s cigarettes, didn’t even try to remind himself that he’d quit.

She seemed animated, more alive, and Harper considered an odd thought: that the more time he spent with someone, the more he got to know them, the more attractive they became. It was as if the real personality shone through the exterior facade. In that moment, and those that followed as he watched her,
listened to her, he believed she was the only real reason he had for staying in New York.

And when they were done; when the check was paid, coats gathered, farewells uttered and hands shaken; when fifty-dollar bills were discreetly pressed into receptive palms, John Harper went out of the Tribeca Grill onto Greenwich Street feeling as if he’d touched the edges of a world he could never hope to occupy. Walt Freiberg – a man who’d made losing people a secondary career – told Harper that it had been good to eat together, that they should do it again the following day, and then explained that he had some affairs to deal with and Cathy would drive him back to his hotel. He would call Harper later, perhaps in the morning, because there was someone he wanted Harper to meet.

And then he was gone. Like that. Just gone.

Harper stood there, Cathy Hollander to his right, ahead of them the black Merc that she’d driven over that morning, and he wondered where the rest of his life had disappeared to.

He thought of Harry Ivens, figured he should call him, and then realized that he’d been in New York less than twenty-four hours.

‘What?’ Cathy asked him.

Harper shook his head. ‘I arrived here yesterday,’ he said quietly. ‘I feel like I’ve been here days.’

Cathy smiled knowingly. ‘That’s New York,’ she said. ‘Well, half of it’s New York and half of it’s Walt.’

‘And you?’ Harper asked. ‘How much of it is you?’

Cathy laughed. ‘I’m just the eye candy sweetheart,’ she said, and then she put her hand through and beneath Harper’s arm and pulled him close. ‘There aren’t a hundred ways to say this, and maybe there isn’t even one way to say it pretty, but I sort of come with the territory.’

Harper once again recognized his own naivete. He wanted to ask more but couldn’t.

‘I’ll drive you to your hotel,’ she said. ‘Unless there’s somewhere else you want to go.’

Harper watched her carefully, tried to read some deeper meaning into her comment. He perceived nothing and was disappointed. He smiled and shook his head. ‘I’m tired Cathy,
real tired. Feel like I could sleep for a month.’ It was only after he’d spoken that he realized he’d called her by her first name.

‘Well, seems to me the greatest difficulty people have in life is not doing the thing they feel they should do. You want to go sleep for a month I’m sure Walt will settle the tab at the Regent.’

Harper started laughing. He realized he was a little drunk. He didn’t care.

‘Get in the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll drop you off.’

Harper did as he was told.

Cathy pulled away, turned the CD player on – Peggy Lee, radio broadcast recording,
a cappella
version of ‘Fever’. It felt like the woman’s voice was seducing him. He leaned back against the headrest, closed his eyes, could smell Cathy Hollander’s perfume once again. Maybe it was neither Peggy Lee nor Cathy Hollander; maybe it
was
New York. New York wasn’t America, never had been, never would be. It was as far from America as one could hope to get. The city owned itself, and no-one owned the city, except maybe Frank Sinatra and he was dead.

Harper smiled to himself. Wondered why he’d resisted coming back all this time. Because of Garrett? Because of what had happened back then?
Back then
was all the way back then. Didn’t seem like it was following him, didn’t seem like he’d find it around the corner or waiting on the junction when he took a walk.

‘Can I have a cigarette?’ he asked.

‘Help yourself,’ Cathy said, and nodded towards the glove-box. Harper flipped the catch, searched through the CD cases and traffic citations and found a pack of Winstons.

‘You can keep those,’ she said. ‘I’m actually trying to quit.’

Harper smiled. ‘That’s what I was telling myself yesterday.’

‘Hell of a thing eh? I’ve known people quit coke and heroin and pills, but never able to quit smoking.’

‘Hell of a thing,’ he echoed, and put the cigarette in his mouth. Cathy passed him a lighter from her coat pocket.

It was only minutes, but minutes stretched at their seams, and then they were pulling up outside the American Regent. Harper opened the door, and before he stepped out he paused and turned to look at her.

‘Feels like a dream,’ he said quietly.

‘Better than a nightmare,’ she replied.

He smiled. ‘I don’t know what to think about Walt Freiberg.’

‘Don’t try and think anything.’

‘He worked with my father for a long time?’

She shrugged. ‘Far as I can tell . . . haven’t been around that long myself.’

‘And where do you go now?’

‘Home . . . until he calls me, and then I’ll go meet him. Perhaps he won’t call me and I’ll stay in my apartment and watch TV or something.’

‘You want to come up?’ Harper asked.

‘Like a date or something?’

Harper laughed, felt awkward, but pleasantly so. For a moment he believed he didn’t care what she thought of him. ‘A date? No,’ he said. ‘Just for company.’

‘If it isn’t a date I’m not coming,’ she said, and smiled almost coyly.

‘I’d like you to come up,’ Harper repeated, even though he was aware of how foolish he sounded. ‘Really.’

She paused for a moment, reached out and touched his hand. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I think it’d be better if you went and got some sleep, Mr Harper—’

‘John.’

‘My turn to be difficult,
Mr Harper
,’ she repeated.

Harper eased out and stood on the sidewalk. He leaned down and smiled like the fool he was.

‘Go,’ she said, ‘before you say something you don’t mean and will regret tomorrow.’

Harper stood up straight and closed the car door. She drove away. She didn’t look back, didn’t glance over her shoulder.

In a small kind of way Harper was disappointed.

Up on Fifty-first, right there between Eight and Ninth, there’s a church building, St Paul’s something-or-other. High up on the wall overhanging the street there’s a neon cross, like a Jesus kind of cross. Words on it read
SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT
. Glows bright at night, like a warning, a halfway house for the soul; there to remind the folks of New York that God is watching, that God sees everything.

Frank Duchaunak stands on the facing sidewalk. He believes what the cross says. He believes that sin will find you out.

He knows nothing about John Harper, except that he wrote a book called
Depth of Fingerprints
. He tried to order it on the internet but didn’t succeed. He sent Faulkner out to find one at a library, to call him when he had it, and in the meantime he took a drive, just took a drive for no other reason than to be outside of the precinct house.

He will get a call in a little while and he will go back. Faulkner will have found a copy, and Duchaunak will sign out and go home. He’ll read the thing in one sitting, and he will enjoy the book despite its darker aspects and narrow shades, but it will not serve to answer the question that has plagued him since Lenny Bernstein’s shooting: Who is John Harper, and why is he here?

He feels that the answer to that question may provide the answers to so many others. Was Lenny’s shooting an inside thing, perhaps carried out by Ben Marcus, or was it the random consequence of an opportunist hold-up? Tomorrow he will retrieve the CCTV footage from the store and see if something can be gleaned from it.

He stays there for a little while, there on the sidewalk looking at the neon sign. He doesn’t want Lenny to die. Doesn’t want him to die until the scales have been balanced.

He buries his hands in his overcoat pockets.

The evening smells cool and crisp; smells like snow.

‘He said that?’ Marcus asked. ‘Those were his words exactly?’

Neumann nods. ‘Hell, Ben, you should’ve seen the guy. It was like Lenny twenty, thirty years ago. He introduced him, said that it was Lenny’s son, called him John. I followed them, followed Freiberg and the girl. They took him over to Bobby De Niro’s place in Tribeca, you know? He even had the nerve to ask me to eat with them.’