SISTER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 4) (2 page)

CHAPTER
2
– BASS AND DREAMS

Nothing clears the mind after a tawdry marital stakeout than matching wits with some bass and pickerel. I decided to head upstate to Greenwood Lake outside Poughkeepsie to do some therapeutic fishing. I would eat my breakfasts at a local diner where the waitresses called everyone honey and the eggs were runny, just like they should be. For dinner I would hit Maloy’s Tavern, a local watering hole in nearby Ellenwood known for good steaks, where I would drink bourbon and swap lies with other fishermen.

Not that I had many lies to tell. I mean, fishing shouldn’t be a fair contest. A well-educated human, armed with the latest spinning tackle and shiny lures against creatures with brains the size of a pistachio should prevail. I consider myself a good fisherman. I did a lot of fishing as a youngster and had good memories of trips with friends. That’s probably why I still like to occasionally wet a line, even alone. It brings back those memories. As we get older, making new ones gets harder.

But during my last two trips to Greenwood Lake, I had managed to land exactly one bluegill that must have been trying to mate with the Rapala lure that snagged him. The sunfish was almost as big as the lure. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of fish in the lake. During my previous trips I could see large swirls in the weeds and lily pads where the pickerel were ambushing shiners, and frequent explosions as bass smashed into insects and frogs on the surface. I probably could have done very well using live bait. But I consider myself a purist. I like to cast artificials. I have lures that mimic shiners, frogs, worms, crayfish, beetles and some things that look like they exploded out of someone’s chest in
Aliens
. A couple of them are large enough to have conning towers and attract depth charges from a passing destroyer. They wobble, wiggle and weave. They bubble, dart and dive. They chug and pop along the surface like miniature motorboats. Most have multiple sets of treble hooks, with points sharp enough to split an atom. All are terrific for catching tree branches. Not to mention the occasional horny panfish. But the largemouth bass and pickerel in the well-fished lake have seen them all. Peanut brains notwithstanding, they are more wary.

I’d been coming to Greenwood Lake since I was a teen-ager, when it seemed I always caught fish. For the past several years I’ve rented the same two-room, spider-rich cabin in the most secluded part of the lake. There is nothing like rowing across a mist-covered lake in the early morning when there is still a chill in the air and there is the prospect of catching a lunker bass. The row back, sans fish, is not as much fun.

The rental agent said she would leave the key under the mat. It was late on a Friday and I headed to Maloy’s. The kitchen closes at 10 P.M. and I made it just in time to order a burger. I washed it down with three bourbon Old-Fashioneds. I think I’m the only person to order Old-Fashioneds in Maloy’s. I’ve been working off the same bottle of bitters for a couple of years.

I spent Saturday and early Sunday beating the water into a froth with every lure in my arsenal. Even the bluegills ignored me. Perhaps it wasn’t mating season. At night in Maloy’s, I seemed to be the only one without a fish story, true or not. You can’t lie about fish if you didn’t catch one. I couldn’t even brag about the one that got away when it was an old shoe that fell off my hook before I got it into the boat. I was beginning to wonder if a well-placed hand grenade could be considered an artificial lure.

Then, late Sunday morning, I was working some structure near a large fallen tree. The tree and some of its submerged branches had already gobbled up two of my more expensive lures and I had decided to try a weed-less contraption that looked like a can opener. There weren’t any weeds, but I was hopeful that the wire guard around the single hook would prevent a snag on anything. Still, the casting was tricky. There was a small gap between the tree and the shore where the water was darker than elsewhere. I suspected there was a deep cleft or pool. My first four casts either hit the shore or the tree trunk, short of where I wanted to be. I created a lot of ripples, so I sat back and waited 15 minutes until the water calmed. If there was a fish in that pool, I didn’t want to spook it. If there wasn’t, I was going to feel pretty stupid. But feeling stupid went with the territory. After all, I was hoping for a fish that wanted to eat a can opener.

I made a perfect cast into the gap. I let the lure sink and then started retrieving. I got stuck. It wouldn’t budge. I’d obviously caught on to some submerged branches. So much for a weed-less lure. The hell with it. I didn’t want the damn lure anyway. I pulled back hard on my rod, intending to break the line and call it a weekend. I’d head to Maloy’s Tavern and go into my fall-back spiel about the wonders of fresh air. 

When the three-pound largemouth broke the water with my lure flashing in its mouth, I almost fell backwards off my seat. 

Ten minutes later, after several magnificent jumps, the beautiful olive green fish, its dark horizontal stripe glistening along its flank, was flopping wildly in my boat. I usually practice catch-and-release, but I decided to eat my trophy. The fact that it was fooled by a can opener indicated that its loss would not endanger the lake’s gene pool. I rowed back to my cabin and cooked the bass on the shore next to the dock the way my friends and I had when we came up to the lake on a Red Line Bus in high school. Cut into chunks, soaked in beer, breaded and pan fried in butter over a fire made from broken branches. Ate it with my fingers, too, washed down with the rest of the beer. I’ve had neater meals, but none better. I felt like Natty Bumpo.

I decided to call it a day. Things could only go downhill. I went back to the cabin and cleaned up, then stopped at Maloy’s on the way home for some coffee and homemade apple pie. I was hoping there would be other fisherman there. There were. By the time I left, my largemouth was the size of the Hindenburg. I got back to Staten Island late Sunday night. It had turned out to be a great weekend.

***

Except for the dream. The one I had my first night at the lake. It had been a long drive and I was beat. The late burger and bourbons did the rest. I fell into a virtual coma. If it hadn’t been for the dream, I probably would have slept until noon.

I don’t dream often, and usually don’t remember much of them. Just as well, since the few I do recall more vividly tend to involve someone trying to kill me and I wake up in a cold sweat.  A few years back, the dreams — OK, they were nightmares — featured a lot of thumping helicopters, men with turbans and, for some reason, hissing hand grenades that I couldn’t seem to get away from because my legs weren’t moving fast enough.

I suppose they were tangled in the bed sheets. At least that’s what the shrink at the Veterans Administration suggested. She had heard every kind of Post-Traumatic Stress dream in the book and didn’t think mine rose to the level of disability. That was fine with me, since my occasional heavy drinking and prescription-pill popping seemed to be working as I self-adjusted back to society. The doc was a very attractive woman and I tried to string her along by claiming I had a recurring dream about getting a Dear John letter from a camel, but she wasn’t buying.

  My rare bad dream nowadays usually concerns someone trying to carve me up or poisoning me. I don’t need a shrink to tell me where they come from. I’ve had some interesting cases recently. But my legs still never seem to work.

Of course, I occasionally have what you might call an erotic dream. Not the embarrassing teen-age kind where you avoid your mother’s eyes when she does the laundry. Just a run-of-the-mill pleasant dream invariably involving a gorgeous woman, who usually, but not always, looks something like Alice Watts. Or, I’m ashamed to say, Eleni Rahm. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t ever tell a shrink I was dreaming about the daughter of Marat Rahm, the head of the local Russian mob.

But like even the scary dreams, I quickly forget them by my second cup of coffee, and it might be three months before I have another one.  

The dream I had on Friday night at the lake wasn’t pleasant. Not exactly a nightmare, because there was an erotic undertone. But neither Alice nor Eleni made an appearance.

Ronnie Frost did.

Clear as a bell. Looking as she did 20 years ago, floating in water with her hand outstretched.

We were swimming in the Silver Lake reservoir on Staten Island. She was sinking and I was trying frantically to reach her. I’m a good swimmer and for once my damn legs were working fine, but she kept drifting just out of reach. Then she disappeared and I woke up.

It’s not unusual for a face from the past to pop up, seemingly unbidden, in a dream. It doesn’t even have to be human. Hell, Scruffy the wonder dog, the best mutt I ever had, once made a brief appearance.

But this was different. There were no grenades involved, but I still woke up in a cold sweat.

CHAPTER
3
– LOOSE LIPS

I was sitting in my office on Wednesday when my cell phone buzzed. The caller I.D. said “Narrows Medical.”

“Arman would like to see you.”

It was a voice that sounded like it came from the bottom of a Ukrainian coal mine.

“Is he sick?”

“No. Why? Oh, the phone. I’m calling from the office.”

“What office?”

Maks Kalugin gave me an address in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn.

“You have GPS. We’ll be here all day.”

“I’m a little busy, Maks.”

I wasn’t. I was all alone, reading
The New York Times
on the web. I didn’t have a client.  Abby Jones, my office assistant, had taken the day off to bone up for her private investigator’s exam. I didn’t expect her to have a problem with it. She was super-sharp former Army military policewoman who had also worked security in my building before I shanghaied her. When she passed the test, we would have a decision to make about her future.

“It’s about Mrs. Capriati,” Maks said. A pause. “Not on the phone.”

He hung up. I got up.

***

The three-story building was on the corner of Hamilton Parkway and Fourth Avenue and Bay Ridge Avenue. The blue awning said “Narrows Medical Center.” I went through the double glass doors into an empty waiting room. On one wall there was a large poster hanging askew. It showed a burly, coarse-featured woman with a finger to her lips. At first I took it for one of those World War II “Loose Lips Sink Ships” posters that warned people not to discuss maritime matters in port, lest the news found its way to the ears of a Nazi spy, who would pass it on to lurking U-Boats. On closer examination, it turned out to be a Soviet worker in overalls saying “Spletnya Neelza!” with a hammer and sickle in the background. I straightened the poster out, on general principles. The only furniture in the waiting area consisted of a wooden bench under the poster and, in the center of the room, what appeared to be a receptionist desk, with all its drawers opened. There were papers and office supplies strewn about. The whole place looked like it had been tossed.

A broad, flat head stuck out from one of the doors down the hallway.

“In here,” Maks Kalugin growled.

I entered a room that also looked trashed. Judging by the diplomas on the wall, which were askew, it was obviously a doctor’s office. Two women were at a makeshift table in a corner working on laptops. Arman Rahm was sitting behind a large desk, leafing through a stack of papers in his lap. With his slicked-back dark hair and high-cheekboned, chiseled features, he was an extraordinarily handsome man, and as usual, he looked like he’d just stepped out of a high-end catalogue. He was wearing light-brown linen trousers, a two-button check sport coat, a light-blue button-down shirt and a wine-colored cashmere vest. His chair was tilted back and his feet, in white-and-brown leather loafers, were crossed on the desk.

“Gatsby, I presume.”

He looked up at me and smiled, showing a perfect set of white teeth.

“Alton, good of you to come.”

I looked around.

“You need my help redecorating?”

“F.B.I. agents never clean up after themselves. Of course, my people are responsible for some of the mess. We swept the building for bugs. I have a cleaning crew coming in tomorrow. Then I’ll get some painters, carpet guys and furniture people in here. We should be up and running in a week.”

“Up and running what?”

“I haven’t thought of a name yet, but it will have ‘Medical’ in it.”

“Why not keep the old name?”

Kalugin made a sound that was probably a laugh.

“Because if anyone Googles it, all the indictments will come up. The idiots who ran this armpit are all facing 20 years in Federal prison.”

“Your kind of people, Arman. I take it someone who worked here ignored the poster out front.”

“What poster.”

“The one with Kalugin’s sister saying ‘Spletnya Neelza!’, which I presume doesn’t have anything to do with German U-Boats.”

“I wish my sister looked that good,” Maks said.

“It means ‘Don’t Gossip!”, Rahm said. “And you are correct. Someone didn’t keep their mouth shut. What did you mean about German U-Boats?”

I told him.

“Same idea. But it wasn’t only loose lips. The doctors who ran this Medicare mill were just too greedy. It’s hard to avoid Federal scrutiny when you are billing for more patients than there are people in Brooklyn. They charged more than $30 million for services that weren't necessary. Hell, they were no-show practitioners anyway. They were hardly ever here and only performed a small fraction of the procedures they ordered. The dolts ran patients through here faster than my girls give lap dances in South Beach.”

I walked around to look at the diplomas, which I also straightened.

“Dr. Aleksandr Golovanov?” I leaned closer to read the small print. “Gee, I didn’t know you could get a medical degree online.”

“He ran the place,” Rahm said. “He paid cash kickbacks to Medicare beneficiaries and used the beneficiaries' names to bill Medicare.”

“Forgive me for saying this, Arman, but why all the disapproval?”

“I like a good scheme as well as the next man,” he said, smiling. “But these dog turds give Russians a bad name. They don’t even read the papers. The Government is cracking down on this sort of thing. I own this building, so I started getting the kind of publicity I don’t need or want.”

“Then why keep it going?”

“Public relations. I’ll turn it into a legitimate clinic. I’ll make money. I mean, we’ll still be dealing with the Government, right. I’ll just fold it into my other medical properties.”

“What other medical properties?”

“Nursing homes, mainly. Which brings me to why I asked you to come over. Mrs. Capriati died.”

I was sorry to hear that. She was a nice lady whose son, Billy, was a wannabe gangster who got himself involved in a turf war between the Rahms and the Carlucci crime family. The Rahms needed Capriati dead before he could testify against them and I had been duped into finding him by Arman’s actress sister, Eleni. I managed to locate him, through his invalid mother, hiding in a Federal witness protection program. Maks Kalugin promptly broke his neck in a Florida condo. The entire fiasco was somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Rahms prevented Nando Carlucci from carving me up in my own basement and nursed me back to health. I laid a guilt trip on the Rahms, who promised to look after Mrs. Capriati. The additional fact that I slept with Eleni Rahm and also met Alice Watts during the case did help assuage any lingering bad feeling.

“What happened?”

“Old age. She went peacefully. We took care of the funeral arrangements.”

“All I asked was for you to take care of her when she was alive. Send money every month.” I glanced at the women working the computers and lowered my voice. “After all, you killed her son.”

“They don’t speak English,” Rahm said. “As for her son, it couldn’t be helped. You know that.”

“And it was quick,” Kalugin interjected.

Arman and I both looked at him.

“I’m just saying,” Kalugin shrugged.

“You cut off his finger and sent it to the Carluccis,” I pointed out, “with his college ring still on it.”

“Anyone can send a finger. It was important that they knew who he was. Besides, he was already dead.”

I decided to leave it at that. 

“Anyway, we became quite fond of the old woman,” Arman continued. “When we saw how badly the place was run, we bought it. Then a few more. They come in handy for the families of some of our associates, many of whom are getting old. They are not happy about what’s available locally.”

“Medicare clinics and nursing homes. What’s next? Funeral homes?”

“Actually, my friend, I’ve already made an offer on a couple of them in New Jersey.”