JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (7 page)

Giselle Thomas answered on the first ring. Her voice was mature and musical and Caribbean. I asked for Danes and there was a little sigh at the other end of the line.

“Who’s calling, please?” I gave her my name. “Mr. Danes isn’t in, Mr. March. Is there someone else? Irene Pratt, maybe?”

“When is the last time Mr. Danes was in, Ms. Thomas?”

She paused. “I need to refer you to Ms. Mayhew, in Corporate Communications, sir.”

“Does she know when you last heard from Mr. Danes? Does she know where you think I might find him?”

Giselle Thomas laughed. It was liquid and pleasant. “Well, Mr. March, I can’t say exactly what Ms. Mayhew knows, but I expect it’s many things. And she’ll be pleased to tell you, I’m sure. Shall I transfer you?”

“I understand the company has its rules, Ms. Thomas, and I appreciate that you’ve got to follow them, but it’s not Ms. Mayhew who can help me, it’s you. You know Mr. Danes. You’ve worked with him for— how long has it been? If you’d rather not talk at the office, I’d be happy to meet you someplace. Just name the spot.”

She laughed some more. “You sound like a nice fellow, Mr. March, you do. And it’s nice that you want to talk to me. But that just isn’t going to happen. Now, would you like me to put you through to Nancy Mayhew?” I declined politely and rang off.

I tried Irene Pratt’s number next, but it was answered immediately by a computer voice that asked me to leave a message. Giselle Thomas had made it sound like Pratt was in the office, so I hung up and waited five minutes and tried again. The result was the same. I skipped down to Anthony Frye.

Frye’s line also went straight to voice mail, but the voice on the recording was a woman’s and the message was brief. Anthony Frye was no longer employed by Pace-Loyette, and any inquiries should be made to Irene Pratt. I made a note to find a home number for him and tried Pratt’s line once more. This time I got through.

“Research, Pratt,” she said quickly. I introduced myself and asked her if she knew how I might get in touch with Gregory Danes.

“And this is in reference to what?” she said. Her voice was high and nasal, and she had a faint Long Island accent. She sounded impatient, and I heard pages turning at her end.

“This is in reference to the fact that I’d like to know where he is.”

“Greg is on leave. If you want to know anything else, you’ve got to talk to Nancy Mayhew in Communications.”

“Have you heard anything from him in the last five weeks, Ms. Pratt? Has anyone there?”

“You’re with who, March?”

“I’m an investigator, and I’m trying to locate Gregory Danes.”

“You’re with the police?” she said. I had her full attention now.

“I’m a private investigator. Have you heard from him, Ms. Pratt?” She was quiet for a while, and when she answered she spoke softly and more slowly.

“I’m sorry, but … I really can’t help you. Let me give you Nancy Mayhew’s number.” She read it to me and said good-bye.

I sighed and worked the kinks from my neck. All roads seemed to lead to Nancy Mayhew. I punched her number.

Nancy Mayhew and I got on first-name terms right away. She was crisp and smart and friendly, and she laughed like an aunt of mine from Oyster Bay. And besides the business about Danes being on leave, she told me not a single thing.

“Did he actually tell someone there that he was going on leave, Nancy?”

“I’m afraid I just can’t say, John.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

She laughed. “I’m sorry, John.”

“Can you say when you last spoke with Danes? Was it any time in the last five weeks?”

She laughed again and didn’t bother with an answer. “Perhaps you can tell me, John— who is it that you’re working for?”

It was my turn to chuckle, after which I hung up.

Through the open windows the breeze had picked up, and there was a bite to it now. Rain was coming. My coffee was cold again, but I drank it anyway and watched some clouds slide by. Three people with nothing to say. I called Dennis Turpin.

An assistant answered, took my name, and asked me to hold. I didn’t hold long.

“I know who you are, March, and I know what you’ve been up to,” Turpin said, when he came on the line. He had a faint New England accent and an irritated, scolding tone. “You’ve harassed three of my people today with your questions, and we don’t appreciate that around here.”

I was surprised that Turpin knew about my other calls so quickly; Neary was right about Danes having his management spooked. And I was surprised by Turpin’s choice of words. Harassed? I wasn’t even warmed up yet. And my people? That was a rather pompous construction for a mere in-house lawyer.

“I’m not trying to harass anyone. I’d simply like to get in touch with Gregory Danes.”

“And I believe you’ve been told— more than once— that Danes is on leave. But you don’t seem satisfied with that answer.”

“That answer is fine, as far as it goes. It just happens not to go very far. Do you expect Danes back anytime soon? Has anyone there actually spoken to him since he’s been away, or gotten messages from him, or e-mail? How about a postcard?”

Turpin made a puffing noise. “You have no standing,” he snapped. “We’re not obliged to put up with this.” He went silent then, and I got the distinct impression he was counting to ten. He sighed loudly.

“Maybe you want to answer some questions yourself, March— like who you’re working for on this. Maybe we could do a little horse-trading.” Turpin was trying for conciliatory, even friendly, but it came out sounding sneaky. Still, his offer was my best bet for getting into Pace-Loyette, at least for now.

“I need to talk to my client first,” I said.

Turpin snorted. “You do that,” he said, “and you come see me, tomorrow at one— assuming you’ve got something to trade.” He rang off.

I put the phone down and wondered what Nina Sachs would have to say about my meeting with Turpin. Giving him her name seemed like a small thing to me, considering that the folks at Pace-Loyette already knew that Nina was trying to locate her husband, but I wasn’t sure she’d see it the same way. I punched her number and Ines Icasa answered. She spoke quietly, and told me in her precise accented English that Nina was not available. She asked if I’d like to leave a message. I declined.

I stood and stretched. I was stiff from too much phone time and jumpy from too much coffee and I needed a run to work it all out. And then I needed to go uptown, to Danes’s apartment building. But before that, I had two more dots to connect.

I slid my laptop over and opened a file I’d saved two days ago. In it were the links I’d found when I’d been studying up on Nina Sachs. They consisted mainly of reviews of her shows and announcements of significant sales of her work. I scanned a few of them. In the last three years, Nina had had a half-dozen shows at a SoHo gallery called I-2 Galeria de Arte. I put the gallery name in a search engine.

According to its Web site, I-2 Galeria de Arte had been around for a dozen years and dealt in a wide variety of contemporary art: painting, sculpture, even video. It specialized in works by women and by Latin American artists, and it maintained three exhibition spaces: in SoHo, in Brooklyn, and upstate on the Hudson River in Kinderhook. I looked at the gallery’s Brooklyn address. It was the same as Nina Sachs’s. I looked at the picture of the gallery’s owner. It was Ines Icasa.

4

Gregory Danes’s brick and dressed-stone apartment building squatted prosperously on 79th Street, between Lexington and Third avenues. I stood with Christopher beneath its green awning, out of the rain. Christopher was my height— just over six feet— and skinny, and he looked twenty-something going on sixty. His narrow face was pale and pocked with acne scars, and his bony fingers were cigarette-stained. His gray doorman’s uniform hung off him like skin sloughing from a snake, and his thick hair struggled beneath his uniform cap.

Christopher was happy to take my money and happy to talk to me in return, but he was nervous just then. His small eyes flitted around and he looked through the glass doors behind me, into the building’s lobby. He stiffened, locked a polite smile onto his face, and barely moved his jaw when he spoke.

“Here’s that motherfucking super; that fucking guy hates my guts. Does nothing but give me the evil eye all day. Do me a favor, man, take a walk around the block. Give it ten and come back. He’ll be gone then and we can talk.” I looked past him and nodded and headed west on 79th Street. The rain made a gentle patting sound on my umbrella.

I walked up Lex and looked into the small handsome shops that lined the street. They were full of delicate wicked-looking shoes, and stationery made from butterfly wings, and French baby clothes that were hand-stitched by blue-eyed virgins. The window displays were intricately wrought and exhibited the merchandise with fetishistic devotion, and they all made me think of Joseph Cornell. I crossed Lex at 83rd Street and went west toward Park Avenue. I meandered slowly down Park, past big old buildings of the sort Danes’s building aspired to be, and went east again on 75th. And then I headed back.

Christopher gave me a relaxed nod as he pulled open the heavy door. The lobby was wide and deep, with a vaulted ceiling and Persian rugs on the polished stone floors, and it was empty but for us. We stood in a vestibule near the entrance and Christopher’s eyes scanned the sidewalk out front. I slipped him a twenty and he made it vanish.

“That prick should be out for twenty minutes at least,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“You work here long?” I asked.

“About a year, part-time. I fill in for the regulars when they’re on vacation or out sick. I end up pulling eight, maybe ten, shifts a month.”

“All daytime shifts?”

Christopher snorted. “I wish. Usually they shuffle the duty so I work the overnights— midnight to six.” I nodded.

“How’d you get lucky with daylight hours today?”

Christopher gave a wry smile. “Super-Prick is short-staffed the next few weeks; he had no choice.”

“You know the tenants at all?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Working the late shift I don’t see much of them, plus a lot of them are real assholes— wouldn’t piss on ’em if they were on fire.” A bronze elevator door slid open at the back of the lobby. A fiftyish woman in a Burberry trench coat got out, trailed by a dachshund in matching outerwear. She glanced at the empty concierge station and sniffed. She eyed Christopher and sniffed more loudly. She looked at me. My hair was shorter, my clothes fit better, and I had no acne scars, but she was unimpressed. Christopher said hello and held the door and she sniffed once more as she went through.

“See what I mean?” he said. I nodded sympathetically and pulled out a photo of Danes.

“You know him?”

Christopher looked at the picture and looked at me. His small eyes got smaller. “Danes, right?”

I nodded. “Seen him around?”

He shook his head slowly. “Not for a while— I don’t remember when the last time was. I told this to the other guys.”

I looked at Christopher and took a deep breath. I slipped the photo back into my pocket. “What other guys?” I asked quietly.

Christopher shuffled his feet and looked away from me. His eyes were nervous when they finally came back to mine. “I guess you’re not with them, huh?” he said.

“What other guys, Christopher?”

“The two guys who asked about Danes before.”

“When before?”

He shrugged. “Ten days ago, maybe.”

“What did they ask?”

Christopher ran his eyes around the lobby. “The same as you. They showed me a picture, asked if I’d seen him around and when I’d seen him last. Asked if I knew his friends in the building.”

“And you told them … ?”

“Same as I told you. I haven’t seen the guy, and I don’t know shit about the tenants.”

I nodded. “Who were they?” Christopher shook his head and looked confused. “Were they cops? Were they lawyers?”

“Not lawyers … not cops, either. They were private, like you.”

“These guys have names?”

Another headshake. “Not that I remember.” I stared at him, and he ran a stained hand over the back of his neck and said nothing.

“You remember what they looked like?” I asked.

“They just looked like … two guys.”

I sighed. “Were they short, tall, black, white?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. They were … medium. They were white, the both of them, and I think they had brown hair. They were about the same height— maybe six feet, maybe a little shorter.”

I shook my head. “Did they say anything about calling if you happened to see Danes?” I asked. “Did they give you a phone number?”

Christopher tugged at his ear and rubbed the back of his neck again and looked around the lobby. “No, bro, they didn’t say anything about that. They just asked their questions and split.”

I looked at him some more. I was fairly sure that Christopher was not being entirely truthful with me. I was fairly sure, in fact, that he was lying through his teeth. But I still needed him, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. “And you haven’t heard from them since?” I asked.

“Nope,” Christopher said, and looked at his watch. He craned his neck to check the sidewalk, east and west. “Not to rush you or anything, but that prick’ll be back soon.”

“Sure,” I said. “We’re just about done. Anybody working here who knows the tenants well?”

“The guy I’m subbing for today: Paul Gargosian. He’s been here since they opened the place, and he knows everybody. He’s an okay guy, too— you grease him and he’ll talk to you.”

“When’s he back?”

“Couple weeks.”

“Know his number, or where he lives?”

“In the Bronx someplace— I don’t know.” Christopher looked at his watch again, more nervous now. “I don’t want to rush you, but … ”

I nodded. “No problem, Christopher, you’ve been a big help. How much to get into Danes’s apartment?”

Christopher looked at me and winced. “Shit, bro, you don’t want much, do you?” He shook his head and tugged on an ear. “That could be my job, for chrissakes.” I nodded and let him keep talking and thinking about it. “Oh, Christ, what the fuck are you going to do in there?”