by Chris Knopf
I’d watched dawn slowly light up the neighborhood. I was almost through the big thermos of coffee I’d brought with me, and it still wasn’t enough. An edgy, bleary call for sleep clung to my mind. I wondered why it used to be so much easier to defy the norms of sleep and wakefulness. I looked at my weathered and trampled face in the rearview mirror and basically had my answer.
Time hadn’t been on my side before and wasn’t about to start now.
A woman in a Mazda sports car drove out the driveway. I got a good look at her, good enough to easily see she wasn’t his wife, unless she’d turned her black hair blonde and shed about twenty years in age.
Reynolds came shortly after, driving one of the bigger models of Mercedes. It rolled down the driveway and turned toward the Scarsdale train station, as expected. I fell in behind, as planned.
I knew that effectively tailing someone—keeping them in sight without giving yourself away—was a hard-earned skill, but I’d scoped out the route from Reynolds’s house to the station, and it was pretty straightforward, and unlikely to raise suspicion if he noticed an old Jeep was always in his rearview mirror.
Early as it was, there were only a few spaces left at the station. Masters of the Universe had to be committed early birds. Reynolds had a sticker on his windshield that authorized him to park there. I didn’t, but I’d be gone before they noticed.
I heard the click of the Mercedes’s door locks and had my little automatic stuffed into Reynolds’s stomach as soon as he got out of the car. I had him give me the car keys.
“Let’s get back inside,” I said, unlocking the doors and walking around to the passenger side.
“You know you’re going to jail for this,” he said, as soon as we were in the leathery comfort of the Mercedes.
“Maybe. I might see you there, if what I think is true.”
“I don’t know what you think.”
“I think there’s no such thing as an easy job. I learned that from years of carpentry. Even the smallest task can go awry if you aren’t careful with measurements and tools, manual or power. It takes a lot of concentration. I also think the worst thing that can happen to some people is big success. It gives them the idea they can do whatever they want and get away with it. Creates the illusion of invulnerability.”
“You’re sore about your girlfriend. Trust me, she’s not that interesting.”
“How do you know I won’t shoot you in the belly?”
“You won’t.”
I didn’t shoot him in the belly, but I did shoot the Mercedes’s radio, which was pretty startling for Reynolds.
“Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “What the fuck!”
Then I shot the speedometer.
“Getting closer,” I said.
“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “Please stop.”
“You stop. Keep Galecki away from me and Amanda. Two of his guys went down last night and that’ll keep happening until I reach you. Understand?”
He nodded without saying anything, which I knew meant nothing, but it felt good to see him do it. Part of me wanted to stick the gun to his temple and pull the trigger, but that was a road I wasn’t prepared to travel, as much as I wanted to.
“I hate people like you, Reynolds,” I said. “Always have. Maybe someday I’ll get over it.”
“Class warfare, Acquillo. You’ll never win.”
I had to give him credit for having the balls to say that when they were within range of my little gun. I got a grip on my rancor and got the hell out of there, unsatisfied, but still in possession of the scant remains of my own principles and self-respect.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The late executive director of the Puerto Rico campus of Worldwide Loventeers was named Carolyn Harris. She had a daughter, Eulah, who lived in the northwest corner of Connecticut, according to Jackie’s research.
I was in my old Jeep and the Grand Prix was in the shop that had put it back together the last time I’d used it as a defensive weapon.
“At least it’s the front this time,” said the guy at the counter. “I think our work in the back is fully intact. Next time get T-boned and you’ll end up with a whole new car.”
I took the ferry out of Port Jefferson, which landed in Bridgeport, and then drove up Route 8 till it terminated in Winsted, and then a few miles more over wooded hills to the address Jackie had given me. It was a gravel driveway that took another five minutes to traverse until I reached a small Cape Cod house with a few horses hanging around a paddock outside a big red barn.
Imagining attack dogs and shotguns, I took my time getting out of the Jeep. After Puerto Rico, it was a pleasure to be surrounded by tall New England hardwoods and hemlock. Jackie had also given me a phone number, which I dialed on my smartphone.
A woman answered and said, “Is that you in the drive?”
“It is. I’m here to talk to you about your mother.”
“She’s dead.”
“I know. It’s what I want to talk about.”
“I’m alone here,” she said.
“I can meet you someplace nearby. Get a cup of coffee or something.”
The line went quiet for a moment, but then she gave me the name of a coffee shop in town. She told me to go there and she’d follow in about fifteen minutes. I thanked her and hung up.
Nature hadn’t been kind to Eulah Harris. Short and overweight, with hair so thin and wispy you could see her scalp. It made me think of what Charlotte said about Carolyn’s proud mane of white hair. A woman who thought naming her female child Eulah was a good idea.
When she sat down, I slid her my private investigator’s license. She studied it carefully and wrote down my name and license number in a little address book she took out of her purse.
“First off, I’m sorry about your loss,” I said.
“Thanks, I guess. It was a few months ago. I’m over it, I think. What’s your interest?”
“I’m looking into the Worldwide Loventeers.”
I didn’t want to say more than that, and luckily, she didn’t ask.
“Her pobrecitos. The wretched refuse she looked after. She loved them.”
“That’s what she was like? Loving?”
Eulah shook her head in a way that was hard to read as a yes or a no. Turned out to be both.
“Everyone will tell you my mother was the kindest, gentlest, most generous, and gracious person you’d ever meet. I didn’t like her very much.”
A waitress stopped at the table and Eulah said all she wanted was a cinnamon bun and some water. I got coffee.
“You didn’t like her?” I asked.
“She didn’t like me. Or my younger brother. As soon as he was born, she left us with our father and went to Africa. And then lived in every other rat hole around the world. We saw her exactly twice. At my brother’s wedding and our father’s funeral. What mother does that?”
A lifetime of harm and grievance seeped out of her and flooded the table between us. I wondered if all that toxicity had found its way to her depleted scalp.
“I’m sorry,” I said, which was all I could say.
“Everybody’s sorry. I appreciate it, though, since otherwise, what would human beings be worth?”
Her gaze was focused somewhere in the middle of my shirt, as if looking up toward my face was too painful an effort. When her cinnamon bun arrived, she picked it up and ate it with two hands, like a raccoon. She spoke in an urgent monotone that didn’t entirely line up with the content of her speech.
“Do you have any idea why your mother took her own life?” I asked, as gently as I knew how.
Eulah scoffed.
“Who believes that? Morons.”
“So you don’t think she killed herself.”
“Carolyn? Why would she do that? Was anybody happier with life?”
I wasn’t sure how to converse with a person who spoke in rhetorical questions, but I tried anyway.
“A person who was ill, maybe, or hiding a mental illness, a d
epression?”
“Laughable,” said Eulah.
When she’d gnawed the cinnamon bun down to a half-dollar-sized lump, she looked at it appraisingly, then popped it in her mouth.
“Can I have another one of those?” she asked. “I assume you’re paying.”
“Have all you want. Bottomless buns here at the Winsted coffee shop.”
“That’s funny,” she said, though amusement didn’t show on her face. “My father left me and my brother more than five million dollars each. Carolyn should have stuck around for that.”
“So your father was good to you.”
“He was. Outsourced a lot to nannies and caregivers, and didn’t know which end of a screwdriver would turn a screw, but he hugged us a lot, and could act silly, and that probably saved our lives. Are you Jewish? You’ve got the nose.”
“My mother’s father was a Jew,” I said, “but I’m mostly French Catholic with a little Italian mixed in for extra flavor. And the nose was modified in the boxing ring.”
“My father was Jewish, even though he had this WASPY name Harris. But he didn’t practice. I think that’s too bad. We might have liked it. Carolyn was a Swede. My brother got all the blond.”
Her second cinnamon bun arrived and she went at it with the same feral vigor. I wondered if she’d dip it in a stream if any were nearby.
“So if you don’t think your mother committed suicide, what happened?” I asked, trying to drag the conversation back to relevance.
She shrugged.
“Somebody threw her off that cliff. Might’ve had it coming, who knows. But she didn’t kill herself. That’s absurd.”
A thought jumped at me.
“Why are you so sure about your mother’s state of mind if you only saw her twice in your life?”
“I wrote her every day,” she said, with the same inflection-free voice. “She wrote back about every two weeks. Twelve thousand, seven hundred and seventy-five letters versus eight hundred and fifty-six. But who’s counting.”
“Every day,” I said.
“Every day. Still do. They all get returned, but I’m not sure how to stop.”
“And you saw no sign of suicidal thoughts.”
“If my mother killed herself, pigs can fly faster than a Boeing 777 and lesbian leprechauns run the Pentagon.”
She offered me the symmetrically fashioned circular remains of her second cinnamon bun. I said only if she was thoroughly sated. She said she was, so I ate it.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Tasty. But not the best I’ve had.”
She slapped the table top.
“That’s what I’m talking about. Honesty. Why can’t the world have more of it?”
“Honestly don’t know.”
And this time she gave up a little surreptitious grin and almost brought her gaze even with my eyes. I appreciated the effort, paid the bill, and let her get back to whatever life she’d carved out for herself.
“WE NEED serious hacker help here,” I told Jackie over the phone as I headed back south to Southampton. “Randall Dodge-grade help.”
“He’s resigned from the trade,” said Jackie. “He blames it on you, by the way.”
“I kept him out of jail, the ingrate.”
“Only because you almost put him there. I’m not here to play chicken and egg.”
Randall was a Shinnecock Indian and master of the digital world who’d done a lot of favors for me after Jackie and I had done a lot of favors for him. I wasn’t sure how the tally sheet stacked up, but I still felt it was leaning in my direction.
I hung up on Jackie and called him.
“As I’ve told Jackie, fuck no,” he said, without a lot of hesitation when he heard it was me on the line.
“I love you, Randall,” I said. “Not in the carnal sense, of course, but you’re one of my favorite people.”
Randall seemed a little touched by that.
“Well, thank you, Sam. I guess I love you too.”
“So just do this for me. I’ll protect you.”
“As if,” he said. Then paused, and said, “What is it?”
So I told him. Not that hard, I suggested, which he didn’t buy.
“Not that hard if you don’t have to do it,” he said.
Then I told him why it was important. As a Native American by designation, with a lot of black and Latino stirred into the mix, social causes resonated.
“All right, what the fuck,” he said. “If I get nailed, Jackie needs to defend me for free.”
“Have you ever paid her?”
“I guess not.”
“So, same deal.”
I gave him all the information Jackie had acquired on Carolyn Harris, enough to get him on the scent.
“All I need is her e-mail,” I said. “Say over the last year of her life. Busting into the Loventeers’ server would be dandy, but I’m guessing the good stuff will be in her private communications.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have her computer, would you?”
“Nah, that’d be too easy. You prefer a challenge.”
“You’re welcome to go screw yourself, Sam. And I mean that in the most loving way.”
I HAD another computer project on my list, but not requiring Randall’s level of expertise. I called Jackie and told her she could do it just fine.
“I need to get Ruth Bellingham’s permanent address,” I said. “I’m assuming it’s somewhere in or around New York, not Puerto Rico.”
“Do you know how many hours of research that can take?”
“You know what? You digital geniuses are all a bunch of whiners.”
“Only you can compliment and insult a person in a single sentence,” she said.
“I think it’s important that we haven’t heard from her. She couldn’t get back the stolen files through legal means, so she got New York to send in the hit team. I warned Art Reynolds to keep Galecki and his goons away from us, and we haven’t heard from him either. Innocent people would be raising holy hell by now. I know where to find Reynolds, but Bellingham is closer to the action, and maybe a softer target.”
I got off the phone with her in mid-complaint and concentrated on piloting the convoluted path to the ferry dock in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The trip across the sound almost felt like a vacation, the air all stirred up with summerly breezes and the setting sun turning the water a dark steel-blue, casting magic-hour light that improved the complexions of all the people sitting outside on top of the ship. A woman about my age with straight black hair and a Schnauzer that was catching every treat she tossed him, no matter how challenging, asked me if I liked dogs. I said, sure, I had one myself, a mutt and not as good an infielder, but possessing other qualities.
“Good chick magnet?” she asked.
“Already attracted one of those,” I said. “She’s been looking after the dog lately, so maybe we both caught her.”
“I can’t imagine life without some dopey, furry thing to sleep with every night. Though I guess you could have said that about my ex-husband.”
She also said she couldn’t be friends with anyone her dog didn’t like. She’d never trust them, believing the Schnauzer was a flawless judge of character.
I asked her to give me one of his treats, which I lobbed to him, an easy catch.
“If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t even do that,” she said. “He’d just let it drop on the floor. It’s uncanny.”
“I know some people whose character could use a little judging. Maybe you should hire him out.”
“Ha, ha. Maybe cover the cost of all these treats. What is your girlfriend feeding yours?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her Fromager d’Affinois, pâté campagna, and biscotti, so I just said I didn’t know, but I was sure it was okay. She said her ex-husband used to get drunk and feed the Schnauzer beer.
“Did he like your husband?” I asked.
She pondered that.
“Come to think of it, he did. I guess he�
��s not that perfect.”
“Might’ve been the beer.”
“Might’ve been.”
“I’ve got good news, bad news, and worse news,” said Randall, when I picked up his call.
I was in my shop at the drawing table, trying to muscle through some tricky calculations.
“Let’s take it in order.”
“Carolyn Harris’s personal e-mail account is still open.”
“That’s great.”
“But the provider is very serious about security. It’s a freaking steel vault.”
“What’s the worst part?” I asked.
“Have to have the password. Normally, you could use brute force. It’s an app that tries random shit, like millions of word and number combinations an hour, until something clicks. I happen to possess one of the best of those things, though I deny ever having used it.”
“So?”
“The provider also noticed this is a way to break into their customers’ mailboxes, so they detect brute force attempts in about ten seconds and lock up the account. Even I can’t get around that. Not unless I have the computer itself. Then there are ways. Maybe.”
I asked him to give me a second to think. As he was talking, something slipped into my mind, a thought or a memory, with no words attached. But I could feel it in there, fluttering around the region between the conscious and subconscious.
When it didn’t come, I said I’d call him back.
“For sure. I’m just here doing honest work.”
I knew that recall wasn’t easily forced. In fact, whenever I struggled to capture a fleeting thought, it would always scamper away. It was better to invoke the powers of Zen, to relax the jaw, slow the breathing, and seek the soundless void.
I slid off the stool and lay down on the concrete floor, closing my eyes. I was always lousy at clearing my brain, a hectoring, chaotic generator of furious noise if there ever was one. But I could divert the cacophony to something else, to more soothing contemplation.
