by Thomson, Lh
“Hey! Liam!” It was Ricky Ellis, my neighbor and, as far as I could tell so far, the building’s resident good guy.
“What’s shaking Ricky?”
Ricky was as gay as a pride parade, which when you’re also from a devoutly religious family can be a hell of a tough road. He’d been rejected by his family’s community and made one of his own instead among the residents in the building, where he helped the older folks, hung out with those of us who had the time or inclination and also met his new boyfriend, a retired school custodian named Al. Al, as far as I could tell, was also a hell of a nice guy.
“Liam, man, you got to hang around the building more. We had a par-ty here last weekend… all I can say is ‘Wow!’.”
I smiled. “I heard. Not really my thing, but I’m glad everyone had a good time. I hear Old Lady Corbett on the first floor was dancing in the hallways.”
“Too bad you couldn’t make it, my friend. You should have seen the younger ladies. And you would have been the only straight guy under 40.”
“My luck. Had a case.”
“We had a case too … a case of wine. At least! I felt, like, poisoned.”
“Ouch.”
“You know it. My head is still hurting five days later.”
“How’s Al?”
“Oh, you know. His sciatica’s acting up. He says he can tell the fall is coming.”
Al was at least twenty years older than Ricky but neither seemed to notice, and once people had been around them together for a few moments, they didn’t generally, either.
“My old man’s the same way. Trick knee.”
“But it’s so sexy when Al needs me,” he said. “He’s like a little baby deer.”
“Right. My old man might shoot a little baby deer and eat it. But that’s as close as he’d come.”
He laughed. “Hey, did you get that message?”
“What…?”
“The two guys.” My blank look drew elaboration. “Two guys stopped by yesterday, said they might have a job for you.”
If I was in the habit of accepting freelance gigs from strangers, it might have made sense. But naturally my alarm bells were going off.
“What’d they look like, Rick?”
He thought about it. “Sloppy dressers, like most middle-aged fat men. Suspenders, dress pants, raincoats.”
Feds or wiseguys. Or maybe just salesmen. “Were they carrying anything? You know, like Encyclopaedias or anything?”
He shook his head. “No. They just kept their hands in their pockets and said to tell you they stopped by.”
Feds wouldn’t have said anything. They’d have just come back later.
I didn’t want to worry the kid, so I just nodded and smiled, then headed for elevator. “No big deal, Ricky. I’m sure they’ll catch up to me. Look, I’m going to head upstairs.”
“Oh… yeah, okay, man. If you want to stop by for a beer later, Al’s making his flatbread pizza. It’s really good. You’ll really like it, ese.”
Ever the host. “I might do, I might do. We’ll see how the evening goes.”
“Right on, Liam. Later baby,” he said, before heading towards his little green Toyota.
Upstairs, I changed into a short-sleeved sweatshirt and shorts and got in a quick workout then hammered the speed bag for a few minutes, trying to puzzle out what the big guy had been up to with that painting. I thought about the photo of the Dufresne that Alison had shown me, its graceful sliding curves and lines, the muted sense of color blooming within its abstract shapes.
I was going to need another look at it.
Once I’d gotten a sweat going, I took a break, feeling the familiar tightness in my biceps from working the bag. I looked out of the picture window at the city below. The lights and traffic maintained a constant colored blur, even as the evening drew in and the sun hung low in a hazy sky.
Somewhere out there, that Vermeer might be my ticket towards paying off my debt and getting back on my feet, and it was waiting for me to find it. If PMI paid out against its full value, it could cover my entire court debt in one shot.
I didn’t want to worry Ricky; but now I had the added pressure of keeping my head down, because Philly’s a town with a long history of mobsters popping up in the most inconvenient places. And I had to figure out what that stunning blonde was doing sleeping with another guest from the gallery opening.
Chapter Three
One of the first things that I learned about investigative work from Ramon Garcia de Soria is that a lot of it is tedious.
Before you can start asking people questions and investigating motives, you have to make sure you’re questioning the right people and that you’re asking the right questions. And that usually means going through paperwork – or at the very least, digital archives. If you don’t know a subject well, you can’t cover all the bases.
Most people have no idea how much available information there is on them out there and publicly available: vital statistics, residential records, property ownership and titles, liens, civil and criminal court filings, acknowledgements for donations, online references … all of these things help a good investigator track someone down, or trip someone up.
And most of it sticks around forever.
So I spent a chunk of Friday morning filing title searches at a string of anonymous government buildings. I guess some of it could have been done online, but I like dealing with people, and I was already on a first-name basis with half the ladies at the vital statistics and court offices.
A title search on Paul Dibartolo’s Chestnut Hill home, for example, showed an outstanding mortgage of $2,357,540 from a new lien issued just six months earlier. But he’d bought it on a lien four years before that, which meant this was a second mortgage, and big one at that – more than he’d originally paid for the house.
He also had a sealed civil settlement with his wife. Lots of civil documents – usually those from family court – weren’t considered public information. But a handful of the other suits mentioned the value of the spousal support payments, and he was keeping her in a fine style.
A few other civil suits seemed to involve partners and suppliers, not uncommon for someone of Dibartolo’s affluence. They added up to a couple of million dollars more.
Still, I had a hard time picturing Dibartolo laying down the law to hired muscle. That mortgage bill was big enough to warrant all sorts of action, but guys like him? They didn’t usually hire a couple of hard men to knock over a gallery. It just wasn’t the right style. Rich guys used other people’s money to leverage more of other people’s money – it’s why they’re always reinventing themselves.
No, Dibartolo was probably a thief, of a sort; very few guys with that sort of money and that sort of debt were straight-laced. But I couldn’t see him pulling the heist.
This kind of logic, of course, is not something my father and brother would agree with; they’re old school policemen, flatfoots. They know that ninety-eight percent of the time, the first guy who looks like he did it, did it.
Most of the crimes they dealt with were just that simple. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and kills people like a duck, it’s probably the duck you’re looking for; so arrest the duck.
The kind of guys they ran into – neighborhood low-lifes and operators – weren’t big on subtlety, and were tripped up easily. The Philly police still routinely picked up guys wanted on warrants by sending them an invite to a free raffle draw, for example. Sometimes, the pickup rate for what had to be the dumbest sting in history was as high as eight-five percent. At another one, they offered to forgive credit card debt for anyone wanted on warrants. More than eight hundred guys showed up.
But this was different. It may have been that a couple of sides of beef pulled it off; but I doubted the two guys on the camera were fans of obscure Dutch painters.
Of course, Dibartolo wasn’t the only person there during the robbery who had major moolah. The gallery owner, John DeGoey, had a file that made
Dibartolo’s look economically optimistic.
He was facing civil suits – and a number of outstanding judgments – from dozens of companies. Some of the awards were huge, in the low millions of dollars. The gallery building, meanwhile, was strictly floating on bank paper. Why the bank hadn’t sued yet to try to minimize its exposure or seize the asset I couldn’t say, but it was surprising.
The third big-money guy there was the next door neighbor, Carl Hecht. A large, beefy man with pale skin, thinning sandy hair and glasses, Hecht’s building was owned by a numbered company, free and clear. A corporate registration search on the company showed Hecht as one of the directors. Its address was another building downtown.
Typically these addresses were to the company’s legal counsel, and the three law firms listed at the other building confirmed that was likely the case. On a hunch, I ran a title search on the law office, and it was owned by the same numbered company.
The suggestion was that Carl Hecht had a heck of a lot of money. But it was of the anonymous, corporate persuasion – and that always makes me nervous. Taking on individuals, especially those operating on the shady side of the law, was one thing. Taking on the full legal might of a modern corporation was a hell of a lot more intimidating. A biker will try to punch your lights out and, if you’re lucky, won’t stomp you so hard afterwards that he kills you. But a big corporation will destroy your life, your hopes and your dreams accidentally, without even noticing, and still won’t give a damn afterwards.
Imagine what one can do when it’s really going after you.
I’d anticipated needing to talk to DeGoey and Hecht after my initial conversation with Alison Pace, and put calls in to both to try to set something up. I still hadn’t heard from the latter, but DeGoey had a few free minutes on Friday morning.
His office was on the twelfth floor, with tall tinted windows that looked out over the city. DeGoey was a ginger-haired man with a wispy beard, seated behind an expansive, modern desk with a glass-insert top; he was leaning back in his leather office chair with his legs crossed and fingertips together, like a talk show host studying his guest.
One of the things I learned quickly from Ramon is that it helps to interview a man in his own surroundings. It affords him a false sense of ease and confidence. It also gives you a chance to inspect those surroundings for information: where he went to school, whether he has pictures of his family, what kind of stuff he reads. It may sound trivial, but by the end, you have at least a small idea of who the guy really is, and when it comes to asking questions that he’ll answer, that’s a real advantage.
His office was just a few blocks away from the gallery and I made a mental note to find out how much he owed on it. If his financial problems on the gallery building were any indication – not to mention the number of people suing him – the place had to be hocked up to the rafters.
But for now, DeGoey was playing the role of the bewildered host.
“I was quite surprised when you called to say you’d be dropping by,” he said.
“Really?”
“I can’t understand how much simpler this could be, Mr. Quinn.”
“In what respect, sir?”
“Well, our premiums were fully up-to-date, yes?”
“To my knowledge, sir, yes, there’s no issue there.”
“And we were robbed in front of a room full of people?”
“I wouldn’t say quite full....”
“But you get my meaning.”
“Sure.”
“So your company should have no problem covering our policy.”
I shrugged. “Honestly, sir, that’s not my department. I’m just the guy who investigates what happened. Your adjuster will figure out that stuff once I make my report.”
He seemed to accept that and leaned back in his chair, but then added, “Well that’s fine; but it doesn’t explain your need to come over here and interrogate me.”
Now, consider that I had not yet asked this man a question. There are certain signs of a guilty conscience that do not take a great surplus of intuition to spot.
I said, “Sir, it’s just routine procedure in every large claim to go over pertinent details and meet with everyone involved. Additionally, you were a witness to the theft…”
“Inasmuch as any of us was, Mr. Quinn.” He leaned forward slightly and lowered his voice, as if speaking to a child. “You see, I was on the floor at the time, trying to avoid having my head blown off.”
“Yes, sir…”
“So I didn’t really see anything. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone there gave you basically the same perspective.”
“Yes, sir. That’s not really what I wanted to ask you about.”
He wasn’t sure where I was going with it, so he backed down. “Oh.”
“Mr. DeGoey, you’re in a lot of financial difficulty, a lot of trouble. Did it occur to you that someone might have stolen the painting to damage you personally? Between the insurance hit, the bad press…”
He snorted. “Where did you get that idea?”
“Which, the…”
“The financial difficulty, as you put it. Does it look like I’m having financial difficulty?”
He sounded like Dibartolo. I took a pause before answering and tried to look a little exasperated. “Mr. DeGoey, I’m a professional insurance investigator. Your debts aren’t particularly hidden.”
DeGoey pulled his chair forward and leaned on his desk, pondering what tack to take next. He looked down at a writing pad calendar unhappily. “It’s all a bit like a house of cards right now, you know? Like one bad push…”
Realizing that I knew about the red ink had wilted his resolve, and now the businessman just looked tired. “You spend years building up your business, and you get so involved, sometimes you don’t see the problem until it’s too late.”
I point out at this juncture that it’s my brother Andy who’s the priest. I don’t take confessional, and guys living on other people’s money, like DeGoey, only ever sought as much support as was required to con the guy across the table or to try and get others to feel sorry for them. My sympathy cup did not exactly runneth over.
“Had anyone inquired about buying the building? There must have been pressure from the banks to sell such a prime piece of real estate.”
“By the day. And I’d just as soon get it all over with. If I could sell out and cover my creditors, don’t you think I’d do that?”
“So why not?”
DeGoey sighed. One of the reasons gangsters like to get businesses in trouble before they “bail them out” is that it’s normal for those businesses to operate within confidentiality clauses. But DeGoey’s fatigue suggested he was tired of keeping his mouth shut.
“My partner, Carl Hecht. He has a veto on the sale of any capital assets that he slipped into our partnership agreement a few years ago, when he extended me some … help.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He’s a full partner. As long as the company is still technically solvent, he has the power to draw on credit, and to find more.”
“So he’s bleeding you dry.”
“I didn’t say that.”
He didn’t have to. Hecht’s racket was as old as the hills, a favorite of wise guys going back to the days of Angelo Bruno and Phil Testa. It also usually wasn’t a hand anyone played without the implied threat of violence to back it up. First, the gangster advances the business some liquid support, a little cash to tide them over. Then his crew starts working behind the scenes to tear the business down – robberies, arson, graffiti, threatening customers; anything they can do to make the businessman think he needs help from his generous wise guy friend, the guy who advanced him a few bucks. Now, he’s paying security to the wise guy. But after a few weeks, the wise guy expresses misgivings, concern that his friend is taking all the business risk and paying the wise guy for doing nothing. So he offers to go in with him, invest the money needed to REALLY make the business take off.
>
And that’s all it takes. Once the wise guy is a full partner, all bets are off; he’ll bleed the place until neither it nor the guarantor of all that credit – the other partner – has anything left.
“So what’s his racket when he’s not putting the screws to you?”
“Putting the screws to me? His ‘racket’? Are you referring to his main business?”
Are you stalling trying to think of an answer? “As you say, Mr. DeGoey. What was his main business?”
DeGoey wasn’t accustomed to a lot of questions, and he paused for a few seconds and squirmed in his chair while struggling for a tactful response. Finally, he composed himself. “I suppose that’s a question you’ll have to ask Mr. Hecht. I would simply describe him as a businessman.”
“I suppose I will have to talk to him.”
He looked nervous. “Is that really necessary? Dennis and Carl are very busy men, after all. I’m not sure they’d enjoy having you bother them.”
I studied him for a second or two before replying. He was trying so hard to look calm and collected. “Mr. DeGoey, are you afraid of your partner? Because I get the feeling maybe you should be talking to the police.”
He didn’t reply. It was obvious he wanted me out quickly. He stood then flourished his arm towards the door. “I won’t be keeping you any longer, Mr. Quinn. I presume you have everything you need.”
I got up and smiled, heading for the exit.
“Not even close.”
Carl Hecht’s lawyer was listed as John Guglioni and his office was just a few blocks away, so I hoofed it over. The sidewalks in this part of town weren’t exactly teeming with pedestrians, and the storefronts had that sad, vacant quality you notice when someone ignored the old maxim of location above all.
The building was another anonymous tower, although Guglioni’s firm was high-powered enough to have brought in a designer, so the décor was exceptional, right down to the immaculately framed Matisse prints on the rose-marble back wall. The receptionist was the type who preferred the title “assistant,” wore a power suit and yet had no pause in bringing someone a cup of coffee while they waited.
