Marked Man (20 page)

“It’s been like this
for about a year,” said Jenna Hathaway as we stood in a sorrowful group beneath the bright sun in the parking lot outside the Sheldon Himmelfarb Convalescent Home for the Aged. She was fiddling with her keys, her head was bowed, she seemed younger somehow as she talked about her father.

“It’s been like what?” said Monica.

“My father doesn’t recognize anyone anymore. Not my mother, not his old friends. I’m just the woman who comes in every other day to say hello. It’s as if all the names in his life have slipped away from him, all but one.”

“Your sister,” I said to Monica.

Monica nodded without surprise, as if obsession with her sister Chantal were only to be expected, and, seeing the company she was in, maybe she had a point.

“Each detective has an unsolved case that haunts him,” said Jenna. “For my father it was your sister’s disappearance. He couldn’t abide the idea that a girl that young, so full of life, could simply vanish. He never put the case to sleep when he was still at the department, and when he retired, he took the file to keep working on it. That was going to be his hobby. But somewhere along the line, his mind latched onto the whole affair with something beyond obsession. Every day and every night he would stare at the file, at the pictures, the clippings, the strange lighter he found in your sister’s drawer. It was as if the rest of the world had ceased to matter and all that was left was the one thing that didn’t exist anymore—Chantal.”

I could see it right off during my brief visit behind the curtain. That was the first unpleasant surprise I mentioned before. I had come to Detective Hathaway with a series of questions, but he was the only one who did the asking.
Have you seen her? Do you know what happened to her? She was just here, and then she was gone.
His eyes were unfocused, his jaw trembling.
Chantal. Where is Chantal?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I have to get out of here. I have to find her. Will you help me?”

“I don’t think I can, Detective.”

“You have to, you must. I need to find her.”

“We all need to find her,” I had said.

“After a while my mother couldn’t take it anymore,” said Jenna Hathaway in that parking lot. “She grabbed the file, everything he had about Chantal, and burned it all. She hoped that would free his mind of the missing girl. But it didn’t work out that way, it only drove him deeper into himself. We wanted to believe he had willfully shut us out of his life. Somehow that was easier for us to handle than the truth, that his fixation with Chantal was an indication of something going awry in his brain. By then it was too late to do anything.”

“But you’re still trying, aren’t you?” I said.

Something changed in her just then. Her back straightened, her eyes flashed anger, she was no longer Jenna Hathaway, bereaved daughter. Instead she was now Jenna Hathaway, self-righteous federal prosecutor. It didn’t last but for a moment, before she deflated again.

“I thought maybe learning the truth might help,” she said. “Maybe if he found out what really happened to Chantal, he’d find another name to replace hers in his memory.”

Monica reached over and took hold of Jenna Hathaway’s hand. “I understand,” she said, and they looked at each other with the sad knowledge of their secret bond: They both had parents obsessed with the same missing girl.

“So how’d you light on Charlie?” I said.

“There was a task force formed to try to deal once and for all with the remnants of the Warrick gang. It wasn’t my usual turf, but they
brought me in to see if there were any tax charges that could be leveled at the leaders.”

“The Al Capone strategy,” I said. Despite all his thieving and murders, it was a tax charge that finally sent old Scarface to Alcatraz.

“During one of the meetings,” said Jenna, “Charlie Kalakos’s name popped up. There were rumors that he wanted to come home. He had once before given information against the Warricks, and his testimony could be the linchpin of a RICO charge that could wipe out the gang once and for all. But I also remembered my father telling me of his suspicions about a connection between Charlie Kalakos, the Randolph Trust heist, and the missing girl. So I asked to be assigned to deal with Charlie, and I pressed the FBI to find him. That’s why they were outside Charlie’s mother’s house when you went visiting.”

“And why you’ve been such a hard-ass about giving him a deal.”

“I just want to find out what he knows.”

“But you’re not willing to give him immunity.”

“If he’s responsible for what happened to that girl, he has to pay a price. And if you have a problem with that, maybe you should ask Monica.”

We both looked at Monica.

“I’m with her,” she said, edging closer to Jenna.

“Thanks for the support,” I said. “Okay, how about this? Why don’t I draft up a cooperation agreement for my client? I’ll send it to you, and you can put in the provisions you want regarding Chantal’s disappearance. I’ll give a look-see to what you have in mind.”

She stared at me for a moment and then turned her head with suspicion. “That sounds almost reasonable. What’s the catch?”

“No catch. But I’d appreciate you hand-delivering it to me so we can talk it over. I’ll be running around the next couple of days, but I’ll be in family court on Wednesday morning. The child involved in my case is not at risk, so the judge has been letting the proceeding drag, delaying the trial to deal with more pressing matters. I could be waiting there for hours. That would be a good time to talk. And there might actually be something in my case you’d be interested in.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you then. But you won’t be disappointed.”

She looked at me again, trying to figure what the hell I was doing, and then she looked at Monica. “How did you guys end up together, anyway?” said Jenna.

“I began looking into the Chantal situation myself,” I said, “and found Monica. Let me ask you, before he drifted away, what did your father tell you about the case?”

“Just that he was sure there was a connection between the robbery and the disappearance, and he was focusing on five neighborhood guys. Charlie was one of them.”

“What about at the trust? Did he think anyone there was part of it all?”

“There were two women at the trust who were apparently in some sort of death fight. One was a young Latin woman, the other was an old lady who my father said he never trusted. I forget her name.”

“LeComte?”

She looked at me, surprised. “That’s it, yes. Tell me, why are you so interested, Victor? Why did you start looking into Chantal’s disappearance in the first place?”

“You don’t know?”

“No. How would I know?”

“Because somebody knows. Somebody made sure that the missing girl’s name was tattooed onto my brain, and I thought you might be the one.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“No idea, huh?”

“None.”

I stared hard at her. Not a smile, not so much as a twitch. Damn, I thought I had figured it out.

“Nice girl,” said Monica after Jenna Hathaway had shaken her keys for the last time and left the parking lot.

“You two seemed to hit it off.”

“Remember how she said I should call her for coffee sometime? I think I will. We have a few things in common.”

“You going to tell her what you do for a living?”

“Shut up.”

“Well, I noticed that you seem more comfortable with a fake job and a fake relationship. So maybe you should lie to Jenna and start up a fake friendship.”

“Victor, if you want to psychoanalyze me, get a degree.”

“Exception noted.”

“What?”

“That’s lawyer talk for you’re right and I’m sorry.”

“Did you really think that Jenna was responsible for the tattoo?”

“It was a thought.”

“You still don’t get it, do you? So where do we go now?”

“I suppose to Mrs. LeComte at the Randolph Trust.”

“Let’s do it.”

“I think I’ll do this one alone, Monica. Mrs. LeComte, despite being on the far side of seventy, is a woman to be reckoned with. She’ll want to use all her charms and wiles on me, and I think I’ll let her.”

“Why, you’re a regular
Sammy Glick, aren’t you?” said Agnes LeComte, leaning forward, her legs crossed, her elbows on the table as she slowly stirred her iced tea with a long silver spoon.

We were sitting at an outside table at a café just east of Rittenhouse Square. The sun was bright, her sunglasses were big, pedestrians passed by, their arms swinging. Women smiled down at me, assuming I was lunching with my grandmother.

“I knew another Sammy Glick just like you,” she said, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Sammy Glick?” I said.

“You are young, aren’t you? Do you have a mentor, Victor?”

“Not really. I’ve had a few people who helped me along the way, but generally I’ve muddled through the thickets of the law on my own.”

“I don’t mean in the law—what do I know of the law?—I mean in other ways. There is so much in life one can learn from a more mature viewpoint.” She pursed her wrinkled lips, demurely lowered her chin. “Trust me, I know.”

“While I would never deny the need of a more mature viewpoint in my life, Mrs. LeComte, what I really wanted to discuss was the Randolph Trust robbery thirty years ago.”

“Why would you ask me?” she said, her silver teaspoon still stirring her tea. “Why wouldn’t you ask your client? He knows far more about it than I, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “But my client is not as available to
me as I would like, seeing as he is on the run. And I would like to know the way the trust saw it.”

“Oh, I don’t want to talk about that silly old robbery. Don’t we have other things to talk about?”

“Okay, then,” I said. “Who is this Sammy Glick person you mentioned?”

“Are you jealous of another man?” She laughed. “Sammy Glick is a character in a novel written decades ago. He is a young Jewish boy with a sharp ferret face who rides his ambition to unimaginable heights.”

I put a hand to my jaw. “You think I have a ferret face?”

“From firsthand knowledge, Victor, I have learned that certain intimate relationships of diverse ages can be a glorious opportunity for both parties. One learns from experience, the other is inspired by youth. Have you ever read Colette?”

“No, actually. Is she any good?”

“She’s yummy, and she has much to say on the benefits of ripened wisdom handed down to the young.”

Gad, could this have turned any weirder? “Can we talk about the heist?” I said.

“I would prefer not to.”

“Mr. Spurlock himself suggested I talk to you about the robbery. He’d be disappointed if he discovers that you refused to answer my questions.”

Her face soured at the name of the trust’s president. “I was at the trust before he was born, and I will be at the trust long after he is thrown out of his post.” She took the lemon from the rim of her glass, bit into it with yellow teeth. Her lips curled like an old movie queen. “What would you wish to know, Victor?”

I leaned forward, lowered my voice. “How did they do it?”

“No one is certain,” she said. “You’ve seen the trust’s building. It is a fortress, impregnable, impossible to break into even with a battering ram, and there was no evidence of a battering. The doors were all locked tight, the windows intact. But, like the Greeks at Troy, they found a way inside. How they did so is the enduring mystery. Once inside, they were able to immobilize the guards, silence the alarms, and
open the locked cabinets and safes where the most valuable objects were stored.”

“Could they have just snuck in?”

“There are only two entrances into the building and each was constantly guarded. No one was ever allowed in without authorization and without signing the book. Even I was required to sign in and out.”

“Maybe they came in as visitors and never left.”

“Impossible,” she said. “From the earliest days of the trust, Mr. Randolph feared that someone would either steal or vandalize the artwork. And just a few years before the robbery, when that madman took a hammer to Michelangelo’s
Pietà
in Rome, Mr. Randolph himself tightened all procedures. Visitors were required to put their names into a log, and a complete search of the building was conducted each night after visiting hours. In any event, the day of the robbery was not a sanctioned visiting day and there were no educational events scheduled.”

“Could someone have let them in? Maybe left a window unlocked?”

“Everything that night was checked and double-checked. The records are clear. Still, there were some irregularities. Miss Chicos had signed out some blueprints of the building and her fingerprints were found on the file jacket containing diagrams of the alarm system. None of that information was in the purview of her employment, which made her an obvious suspect. She was a young curator just out of graduate school. Nothing could be proved, but still, the suspicion was enough to force her to forfeit her position. I never thought much of her in the first place. Her tastes were slightly vulgar and her neck was too long.”

“Too long for what?”

“Is there really a chance that your client will return the Rembrandt to the trust?”

“There’s a chance.”

“What about the missing Monet? It was a small work, but so lovely. Does your client have anything to say about that?” Her chin rose, the lines outside the dark circles of her glasses deepened.

“No,” I said. “Just the Rembrandt.”

“Pity. It was one of my favorites.”

“Can I show you something, Mrs. LeComte?” I pulled out the photograph of Chantal Adair. “Have you ever seen this girl before?”

She took the photograph, examined it carefully. “No, never. Lovely girl, though. Is she somebody I should know?”

“Probably not. Do you know where that Miss Chicos is now?”

“I heard Rochester. Just the place for her, don’t you think?”

“Why’s that?”

“I’ve heard things about Rochester.”

“You mentioned you met another Sammy Glick once? Who was the other?”

“Oh, Victor, we all have our lost loves, don’t we? Some dwell on the past, others move forward. This was fun. We should do it again. Maybe someplace more intimate than an outdoor café. And maybe after you’ve read Colette. You know, those of us who have been on the younger side of one of those special relationships want nothing more than to pass on all we’ve learned. There is so much I could do for you if you would let me.”

And I knew exactly what she had in mind.