The Devil Knows You're Dead (28 page)

She had occupied five different apartments in the Holtzmann building, three of them in the same vertical line as the Holtzmann apartment, each of them in turn sold out from under her. She had trouble recalling the name MultiCircle Productions, but she remembered the apartment. I don’t know what there was to remember, since she hadn’t lived in it and since it was substantially identical to the ones above and below it, but then I’m not in that business.

She remembered now. A man had come by himself to look at apartments. He looked foreign, but he could have been European or South American, she couldn’t tell which. He was tall and slim and dark and he hardly said a word. She’d rushed the sales pitch and didn’t show him everything because he made her nervous.

And you had to follow your instincts, because the job was a dangerous one. For a woman, anyway. Because men were hitting on you all the time, and that was okay, it got to be a nuisance but you learned to live with it. But sometimes it wasn’t just hitting on you, it didn’t stay verbal, it turned physical. Sometimes it was rape.

Because it was easy for them. You were alone, you were in your own apartment, there was even a bed there to help them get the idea. And the building was generally half-empty at the very least, so there was no one around to hear you scream. Not that they could hear you anyway because that was a big selling point of the better new buildings. They were completely soundproof, and wasn’t that a great thing to tell a potential rapist?

She’d been lucky so far, but she knew women who hadn’t. This guy had spooked her some, so quiet and watchful and all, but nothing happened, he never hit on her at all. And when he left she was sure she would never see him again.

Which was true, actually, because she didn’t. From then on the only person she saw was his lawyer, who was Hispanic. He didn’t have an accent but his name was Spanish, and no, she couldn’t remember it. Garcia? Rodriguez? It was a common Spanish name, that was all she remembered. She didn’t remember the buyer’s name, either, and she had a hunch she had never heard it, or else she probably would have known whether he was South American or European, wouldn’t she? From the name?

She was pretty sure all anybody ever told her was MultiCircle Productions, whatever that was. See, anybody could buy a condo. With a co-op you had to go before the tenants’ board and satisfy them that you were a decent person and you wouldn’t be giving loud parties or being an unwelcome presence in the building. They could turn you down for any reason at all, or for no reason. They could discriminate in ways that were illegal for either a landlord or a private seller. Why, there was one East Side co-op that turned down Richard Nixon, for heaven’s sake!

Condos were different. If you had a pulse and your check was good, you could buy a condo, and the other tenants couldn’t keep you out. And once you had it you could sublet it, which a lot of co-ops didn’t allow. So the luxury condos were very popular with foreigners who wanted a safe investment in the United States. And buyers of that sort were in turn quite popular with people selling condos, because they didn’t expect you to finance their purchase, nor did they want a clause in the sales contract making the sale contingent upon their getting a mortgage. They generally wrote out a check and paid the full sum in cash.

Which was what this buyer had done. She remembered the closing, because nobody showed up for it, not even MultiCircle’s lawyer. He sent the check by messenger.

Come to think of it, had she ever met the lawyer? They’d spoken on the phone several times, and she had this mental picture of him that looked like the lieutenant on
Miami Vice
, but had she ever seen him?

She didn’t remember the selling price, but she could ballpark it. All the apartments on a line varied in price—the higher you went, the more you had to pay—and that floor on that line would be, let’s see, three-twenty? Well, give or take ten or fifteen thousand dollars, but that was close, anyway.

Probably a third of that was the view, and wasn’t it spectacular? You didn’t mind sitting around by the hour waiting for prospects when you had that to look out at. She’d enjoyed living there, although she hadn’t been crazy about the neighborhood to begin with. But she liked it better as she got to know it more.

“There’s a place right across the street,” she said, “that’s really super. Jimmy Armstrong’s? Looks like nothing much from the outside, but it’s nice and the food’s sensational. Serious chili, and the selection of beers on tap is outstanding. You ought to check it out.”

I assured her I would.

I called Elaine. “I had a hunch you’d be home,” I said.

“I was out earlier, though. I went to the gym. Of course there were no cabs to be had, but I put on that plastic
shmatte
and I carried an umbrella. And I still got soaked going and coming, but it didn’t kill me. You’re home, I take it?”

“And staying put.”

“Good, because it doesn’t look as though it’s going to quit soon. If I lived on a lower floor I’d start building an ark.”

I told her what I’d learned about MultiCircle. “Foreign money,” I said, “and no easy way to tell where it came from. One principal or a whole slew of them, and no way to tell that, either. A condo’s an attractive investment, a good hedge against inflation and a way to shift some money here to guard against political or economic instability at home.”

“Wherever home is.”

“Although that probably wouldn’t have been a big consideration, not if they were already incorporated in the Caymans and could stow the money in a dollar account there. Still, it’s a good investment and you can rent it out. There’s usually a minimum rental period, it’s not like a hotel, although some resort condos have the minimum down to three days. In New York it’s generally a month, sometimes longer.”

“And in the Holtzmanns’ building?”

“A month, but it didn’t matter to MultiCircle because they never had a tenant in there. Glenn and his wife”—interesting how I avoided saying her name—“were the first people to spend a night there.”

“And they’d been married all of a week at the time? I bet they did a good job of christening it.”

“MultiCircle paid cash,” I said. “They sent over a check in full payment.”

“So?”

“So how did they lose it? I was thinking foreclosure, but how can you foreclose on a nonexistent mortgage? Sometimes a corporation has its assets seized to satisfy creditors, but this was some kind of shell in the Caymans. What kind of creditors would they have?”

“Their lawyer could probably tell you.”

“Could but wouldn’t. Assuming I knew who he was, which I don’t. She didn’t remember his name. It’s probably on a piece of paper somewhere, and I’ll try to find it, but even if I managed to find the guy I wouldn’t get anything out of him. MultiCircle. You know what that sounds like to me?”

“Like going around in circles?”

“Like wheels within wheels,” I said.

“Does it even matter who they are, or why they lost the property? I mean, if you were investigating me, would you want to know who lived here before I did?”

“This is different,” I said. “There’s something strange about MultiCircle Productions, and there’s something strange about US Asset Reduction Corp., and God knows there’s something strange about Holtzmann. All that strangeness, you’ve got to assume a connection.”

“I guess.”

“I have a feeling it’s right in front of me,” I said. “But I just can’t see it yet.”

I called Joe Durkin. “I actually tried you an hour ago,” he said. “Two, three times. Your line was busy.”

“I’ve been on it all morning.”

“Well, just to set your mind at rest, Gunther Bauer was not the hired agent for an international conspiracy. I was lucky, guy I talked to was polite as can be. I could tell he wanted to laugh in my face, but he managed to control himself. Gunther’s beef with George was personal and deeply felt, according to him. He was nobody’s guided missile. Unless God told him to do it, which is possible, but he wasn’t taking orders from any intermediary.”

“I didn’t really have much faith in that theory anyway.”

“No, but you thought it was worth checking, and you’re an overly stubborn son of a bitch but you’re not stupid.”

“Thanks.”

“The idea was somebody put him up to it to keep George from talking, right?”

“Well, George wasn’t much of a talker. But to close out the case.”

“It was already closed out, though I’ll grant you this slams the door. But if you’re thinking about somebody pulling strings inside Rikers—”

“Which has been known to happen.”

“Oh, no question, but it’s not something your average citizen can do. You can’t take a course at the Learning Annex, ‘How to Arrange a Homicide Behind Prison Walls.’ Might be a popular course, but they haven’t offered it yet.”

“No.”

“So you’re thinking in terms of somebody with reach. You must’ve found something indicates Holtzmann’s dirty.”

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

“Bought an apartment from a foreigner that nobody was living in.”

“Well, Jesus, that’s just as suspicious as hell, isn’t it?”

“Why would a foreigner buy an apartment and not live in it or rent it out? You got any idea?”

“I don’t know, Matt. Why would a foreigner do anything? Why would a foreigner join the police force?”

“Huh?”

“You didn’t read about that? There’s a proposal to do away with the citizenship requirement on the NYPD.”

“Seriously? Why would they want to do that?”

“To make the department more representative of the population at large. Which is a worthwhile goal, don’t misunderstand me, but that’s a hell of a way to do it. You should hear the PBA delegate on the subject.”

“I can imagine.”

“ ‘Go all the way,’ he says. ‘Why should they even need green cards? Take illegal aliens, take wetbacks. Hang a fucking sign on the Rio Grande,
You too can be a police officer
.’ He was in rare form.”

“Well, it’s an unusual idea.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” he said, “and it won’t do what they want it to, because what you’ll wind up with is half the male population of Woodside and Fordham Road, donkeys fresh off the Aer Lingus flight. Remember when they did away with the height requirement? That was supposed to get more Hispanics on the force.”

“Did it work?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not. All it brought in was a lot of short Italians.”

I called Holtzmann’s previous landlord, owner of the building in Yorkville where he’d been living when he met Lisa. When I was downtown I’d found the address in an old city directory and got the landlord’s name and address from city real estate records. That’s not always easy, a lot of landlords hide behind corporate shells as hard to penetrate as MultiCircle, but not this fellow. He owned the building, lived with his wife in one of its sixteen units, and served as its superintendent himself.

And he remembered Glenn Holtzmann, who had evidently lived there ever since he moved back to the city from White Plains. The landlord, a Mr. Dozoretz, had only good things to say about Holtzmann, who had paid his rent on time, made no unreasonable demands, and caused no problems with other tenants. He’d been sorry to lose him as a tenant, but not surprised; the fourth-floor studio was a tight fit for one person, and far too small for two. A great shock, though, what had happened to Mr. Holtzmann. A tragedy.

SOMETIME after noon I called down to the deli and asked them to send up some coffee and a couple of sandwiches. Fifteen minutes later I was so lost in thought that the knock on my door came as a surprise. I ate my lunch dutifully, without really tasting it, and got back on the phone.

I called New York Law School and spoke to several different people before I managed to confirm the dates of Holtzmann’s attendance there. No one I talked with remembered him, but his records indicated an unremarkable student. They had the name of the White Plains firm where Holtzmann had gone to work after graduation, and his address there, the Grandview Apartments on Hutchison Boulevard, but that was as recent as their information got; he hadn’t bothered to keep them up to date.

The Westchester Information operator had no listing for the law firm Kane, Breslow, Jespesson & Reade, but under
Attorneys
she had a Michael Jespesson listed. I called his office but he was out to lunch. I thought, in this weather? Why couldn’t he order in from a deli and eat at his desk?

I might have tried the Grandview Apartments but I couldn’t imagine what I might ask whoever took my call. Even so, it was a struggle to keep from calling them. There is an acronym in the New York Police Department, or at least there used to be. They taught it to new recruits at the Academy, and you heard it a lot in all the detective squad rooms. GOYAKOD, they said. It stood for Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors.

You hear it said that that’s how most cases are closed, and that’s not even close to true. Most cases close themselves. The wife calls 911 and announces she shot her husband, the holdup man runs out of the convenience store and into the arms of an off-duty patrolman, the ex-boyfriend has a knife under his mattress with the girl’s blood still on it. And of the cases that require solution, a majority are closed through information received. If a workman is as good as his tools, a detective is no better than his snitches.

Now and then, though, a case won’t solve itself and no one will be obliging enough to drop a dime on the bad guy. (Or on the good guy; snitches lie, too, like everybody else.) Sometimes it takes actual police work to clear a file, and that’s when GOYAKOD comes into play.

It’s what I was doing now. I was employing a foul-weather version of GOYAKOD. I was sitting on my ass and using the phone, waging the same kind of war of attrition on the blank wall of Glenn Holtzmann’s death. The only thing wrong with it is that sometimes it becomes pointless and mechanical. You’re at a dead end, but rather than admit it and try to figure out where you took a wrong turn, you keep on knocking on doors, grateful that there is an endless supply of doors to knock on, grateful that you can keep busy and tell yourself you’re doing something useful.