JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (41 page)

“Which all is that?” I asked. “Are we talking about my family again?” I tossed the sphere from my right hand to my left. It was Hauck’s turn to keep silent, and he did. His gaze was icy. I moved toward the door and Pflug shifted, blocking my way. He smiled at me and unbuttoned his jacket and shook his head. I looked at Hauck.

“I’ve answered your questions, Mr. March, and it’s only fair that you answer some of mine.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I pursed my lips and nodded. And then I pivoted and lobbed the crystal sphere at Pflug, who was game but never had a chance.

I tossed it up above his head, and against his will his eyes flicked upward and his hands moved to follow and I kicked him in the balls. The breath came out of him in a sickening bellow and he folded up around his pain, but even as he did, Pflug lunged at me. He groped in his jacket for his gun and pointed his shoulder into my gut and I turned and took the hit on my left arm. There wasn’t much behind it and Pflug clawed at me with his left hand and snapped his head up, trying to connect. But his grip was loose and his timing was way off and I stepped away and hammered twice, hard, on the side of his neck with the side of my fist. Pflug went heavily to his knees. His eyes were rolling in his head, but still he flailed at me and dug for his gun. I threw my elbow into the center of his face, and his nose exploded and he went over backwards. He lay still, with his long legs bent beneath him.

I knelt over him and pulled a semiautomatic from under his arm. It was a shiny cannon, a Desert Eagle, and it weighed about fifty pounds. I turned to Hauck. He was standing behind his desk. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes darted from me to his black telephone and back.

I went to the desk and unplugged the phone and put it on the floor. I slid the clip out of the Eagle and put it in my pocket. My hands were shaking and I took some deep breaths and concentrated on keeping them steady. I checked the chamber. The shithead had a round up there, and I jacked it out and put it in my pocket with the clip. I sat again in the Windsor chair and put the gun on the desk.

“Sit down,” I said. Hauck sat. Pflug groaned and rolled on his side. Hauck and I looked at him. Hauck shook his head and swallowed hard.

“Wasteful,” he said. “You’ve damaged a valuable asset, and for nothing.” His voice was soft again, but not yet steady.

“Not for nothing, Marcus, but to make a point.”

Hauck’s eyes narrowed. “And that is … ?”

“That you should keep your dog on a leash, Marcus. Because if he gets loose again, I’m holding you responsible.”

“Is that a—”

“Your little story about how he got out of hand is a pile of crap, and we both know it. He does what you tell him to do. For all I know, you even tell him how to do it.”

Hauck took another breath and started to speak but I cut him off again.

“But be clear on one thing: If I see him again— or anybody who works for him— around me or anyone I know, I’m talking to you, Marcus. Whether you sent him or not, I’m talking to you. You understand that?” Hauck was still and silent for a moment and then he nodded once. “And you’ll make sure that he understands?” Another nod. I stood.

“What about my offer?” Hauck said. I looked at him and didn’t know whether to laugh or spit. I settled on a bitter chuckle and headed for the door.

As I went past him, Pflug pushed himself to kneeling and launched himself at me. His movements were surprisingly fluid for someone whose nose was spread all over his face, but they were also slow and I had about a week to react. I twisted his wrist and kneed him in the jaw and sent him back down to Hauck’s geometric rug. He landed with a grunt and rolled slowly on his back.

I looked down at him and remembered George L. Gerber and his murdered dog out in LA, and thought about booting Pflug in the nuts once more. But his face was bloody, his wrist was bent and likely broken, and he was altogether too wretched. I picked up the crystal sphere, which had come to rest, unscathed, against the console, and I looked at Hauck.

He was still seated at his desk, with his fat hands clasped before him. His brow was furrowed and his mouth was a blister of concentration. His eyes were fixed across the room on the weathered stone face of Kubera. I set the glass ball on the table and closed the door behind me and left him there, waiting for a sign.

29

The Surrogate’s Court is at the end of Chambers Street, near Centre Street and in the wide shadow of the Municipal Building. It’s a frilly Beaux-Arts palace with a huge mansard roof, arched entranceways, Corinthian columns, and plenty of statues of dead city elders. The lobby is multicolored marble and lavish in its adornment, and the sweeping double staircase looks like something out of the Paris Opéra. I went through security, up one side of the staircase, and down a long hallway. I followed signs and asked directions, and the farther I went the less things looked like Paris and the more they resembled Motor Vehicles.

I found my way to a green high-ceilinged room and a table stacked with requisition forms. I filled out a form and went to the end of a very slow line. At the other end of the line was a file clerk named Larry. He was tall, thin, and dusty, and he might have been forty or seventy. He stood behind a high counter, at the head of a phalanx of filing cabinets arranged in long shadowed rows. He took my form without comment and pointed to a bench. I took a seat with the paralegals and junior associates who’d preceded me in line, and while I waited I took out my subway map.

That’s what it reminded me of, anyway. Intersecting colored lines, tick marks, lots of names and numbers— it could have been a diagram of the Fulton Street station. In fact, it was the time line I had drawn that morning— my graphic rendering of the little I knew about Gregory Danes’s disappearance and of the many questions I couldn’t answer. The theory was that in putting it down on paper, I’d see something I hadn’t seen before. It had worked for me in the past, but not this time. This time, it was the subway to nowhere. I unfolded the paper and took another look.

It started eight weeks ago— in mid-March— with marks for Danes’s lunch with Linda Sovitch, his argument with Dennis Turpin, and his abrupt exit from the offices of Pace-Loyette, and it ended on the present day in a big question mark. In between were Danes’s call to Nina Sachs, canceling Billy’s weekend visit; his call to Irene Pratt, telling her he was going on vacation; his departure from New York the next morning; his periodic calls to retrieve messages from his answering machine; his calls to Billy; and his final call for his phone messages. I’d recorded Danes’s activities in blue ink. I’d used green for Pflug’s men— their trip to see Gilpin, out in Fort Lee; their presumed visit to Nina Sachs’s place; the breakin at Pace-Loyette; the tails on what seemed like half the city; the photographs. The questions were in red.

My meeting with Hauck yesterday had given me a few more tick marks for my picture, but it had added at least as many question marks. I knew now that Hauck, too, was searching for Danes, and that he had no better idea of where to look than I did. And I was all but certain that Hauck and Danes were into something together. But I had no idea of what that something was, or why Hauck wanted Danes, or what he might do if he found him.

I scanned the time line again, but repeated viewings didn’t help. It remained history without narrative, a massing of dates and events that told no story. It captured nothing of Danes’s barren personal life, and it caught none of the pressures that had been driving him in the months before his departure— the golden career turned to lead, the thwarted attempts at professional redemption, the failed relationship with Sovitch, the custody battle with his ex-wife, and the death of the man who might have been his only friend. Danes had ridden a long stretch of bad road before he’d ever gotten in his car that morning, and I couldn’t believe that where he’d gone had nothing to do with where he’d been.

I’d drawn a red circle around the mark for Danes’s last call home. Whatever else went on before— whatever his reasons for leaving, whatever he had going on with Hauck— that was when he’d stopped calling; that was when something had happened. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something bad.

Neary had called this morning to say that Hauck had made good on his promise to pull the surveillance from my place, and I’d tried some of my questions out on him. He’d been no help with them, but he had a couple of his own for me.

“Where do you go from here?” he’d asked.

“The doorman, Gargosian, gave me something about Danes’s neighbor, a guy named Cortese. He was a music buff, and maybe the single honest-to-God friend Danes had— until the old guy died. It’s the only lead left, and I guess I’ll see what I can make of it.”

“Why?”

“I told you, it’s the only lead.”

Neary sighed. “I know it’s the only thing left to do. I meant, why are you doing it? Pflug and Hauck have backed off, and I doubt they’re coming around again anytime soon, on top of which you have no client. And while I’d be pleased as punch to know where the hell Danes has gone, I just don’t see that you have a dog in this fight anymore.”

I’d been quiet for a while, looking around at my empty apartment, thinking about Jane and about Billy, and finally I’d said nothing. It was another answer I didn’t have.

I’d spent the rest of the morning looking for Joseph Cortese, and though he’d been dead over six months, he wasn’t a hard man to find.

Cortese was seventy-eight when he passed away, widowed, childless, and very rich. The money had come from the sale of his plastics company, over twenty years before. Since then, Cortese had been a generous patron of the arts and had served on the boards of half a dozen museums, music conservatories, and dance companies around the city. According to the Times obituary, he had maintained homes in Manhattan, on Sanibel Island, Florida, and in Lenox, Massachusetts. He was survived by his nephew, Paul Cortese.

Besides the obit, I’d found traces of Cortese on the Web sites of cultural institutions all over town— in meeting minutes, on lists of major donors, and in dozens of testimonials and expressions of sorrow. They all said essentially the same thing— that Joseph Cortese was a great guy, whose company and generosity would be greatly missed. If I wanted more, I’d have to go downtown. And so I had.

Larry beckoned with a dusty finger, and I folded my map, hoisted myself from the unforgiving bench, and hobbled to the counter. He had a single sheet of paper in his hand.

“You got no standing in the case, and no court order,” he said. His voice was wheezy and soft. “So you can’t see the whole package. This is what I can give you.” He handed me the sheet. “Come back when you got some standing.” He disappeared down one of the aisles and left me to my reading.

It was the top sheet of Joseph Cortese’s estate package, the cover page of his probated last will and testament. What it revealed wasn’t much, but it was what I had come for: the name and address of his estate’s executor.

30

“We didn’t do the will,” Mickey Rich said. “Jerry Litvak— over at Litvak, Gant— did that. We do real estate here, exclusively real estate.” He was a stout man with a deep weathered voice, a warm smile, and a cool gaze. There was a little brown left in his wavy white hair, and a little more in his thick beard, and he looked to be somewhere in his middle sixties. He was the senior partner at the law firm of Rich & Fiore and the executor of Joseph Cortese’s will.

His office was furnished in oak and green leather, and it was comfortably frayed at the edges, broken in but not broken down. Family photographs covered every available surface, and an old lithograph of the Brooklyn Bridge hung behind his desk. He had a nice view of the Flatiron Building and a corner of Madison Square, and he had time on his hands. He’d agreed to see me when I told him that I wanted to discuss Joseph Cortese, and hadn’t pressed much about why.

“I know Joe forty years— from when I got out of law school and he first gave me work. We were friends ever since, so when he asked me to be his executor, what was I going to say? Besides, there wasn’t much for me to do. Joe kept his affairs neat as a pin and Jerry made a real clean will. The whole thing went through probate in under four months, which for an estate that size is some kind of record in this town.”

“I gather he didn’t have much family.”

Rich shook his head. “No. His brother and sister-in-law passed away a long time ago. And when Margie, his wife, passed, that was it.”

“The obituary said he had a nephew.”

A pained look flitted across Rich’s face. He nodded. “Paul.”

“I guess the bulk of the estate went to him?”

He nodded carefully. “The Philharmonic, City Ballet, Juilliard, the Boston Symphony, some bequests to friends, and Paulie. Paulie was well taken care of.”

“You know how I can reach him?”

Rich’s cool gaze turned downright chilly, and he sat back in his chair. “Paulie’s a little hard to locate sometimes. Why?”

I ignored the question. “He’s a big guy, balding, with dark hair and glasses?”

“You know him?”

I shook my head. “Somebody pointed him out to me, over at Mr. Cortese’s apartment building.”

“When was that?”

“Not too long ago. He seemed a little … agitated to me.”

“Paulie’s like that sometimes,” Rich said.

“How come?”

He shook his head. “You told me you wanted to talk about Joe, and now you’re asking about Paulie. What do you want, March?”

“Do you know Mr. Cortese’s friends?”

Rich smiled, and some warmth came back into his eyes. “That’s a big group. People liked Joe and he liked people. I know some of them, but not all.”

“Do you know Gregory Danes?”

The warmth vanished again and his face stiffened. He ran a hand over the front of his white shirt and fingered his red tie. “Not well,” he said. “Is that who you want to talk about?”

I nodded. “Did you ever socialize with Mr. Cortese and Danes?”

Rich shook his head. “Danes was one of Joe’s music pals. Me, I go in more for the ponies, so I never saw Danes with Joe.”