by Chris Knopf
Gerry was also a graphic artist, so in addition to clamps, block planes and power tools, the shop had a powerful Mac attached to a scanner and four-color printer. On top of that, Gerry was a former professional guitar player with a world-class collection of vintage guitars, accumulated over forty years of steady, strategic acquisition.
“All of them.”
“Really,” he said.
“You once told me you’d sell the lot for a quarter million dollars. You could get more if you did it one guitar at a time, but you were daunted by the logistics.”
“You’re right about that, Art.”
“Okay, today’s your lucky day.”
“Prices have dropped a lot since we talked,” he said. “I’m not sure you could improve on the bulk price.”
“I’m willing to take that chance,” I said.
“Cool. But how come?”
I gave him a brief rundown on what had happened to me. He could have found out on his own, so there was no advantage in keeping it from him. It also gave me a reason for making the offer: I told him I needed something to keep me busy during recovery.
“Holy crap, man, that’s fucking horrible. I’m sorry, I really am.”
We worked out the mechanics of the transaction. Using her power of attorney, Evelyn would wire the money to his account in Amsterdam. When he confirmed the funds had arrived, he’d alert the high-security storage facility where he kept the guitars and give me the combination to get inside the vault. He would also mail a coded description of the collection to Evelyn’s address, so I could retrieve the instruments on a guitar-by-guitar basis.
After the deal was struck, he told me a little about his time in the Netherlands, where he was on a year-long grant teaching the art of furniture making. He said it was the first time he’d made money from his lunatic profession without blowing saw-dust out his nose every night. He and his wife were having such a great time, he had no intention of returning for at least a year; so if I wanted to mess around in his shop when I felt better, he told me to feel free.
“It’s super therapy, Arthur. I’m telling you.”
I thanked him, and got off the phone. Then I yelled for Evelyn.
“Can I use your computer?” I asked her.
“You were a lot easier to handle when you were in a coma,” she said, walking into the room.
I started to go through the awkward and painful process of getting out of bed. She watched me without raising a hand to help. She was a doctor. She knew what sort of help I really needed.
“While you’re racing to my office, I’ll boot up the computer,” she said, and left the room.
When I finally got there, with the help of a walker, I sat in front of the screen and called up our online investment and retirement accounts. I sold everything, then directed the proceeds, almost $300,000, into a joint checking account to which I added Evelyn’s name.
Two days later Evelyn wired $250,000 to Gerry Charles, and the next day he sent me all the enabling information, completing the transaction.
I now had a ready source of entirely non-traceable cash, available to be meted out whenever needed.
Done deal.
CHAPTER 3
Detective Mike Maddox was a lot younger than I thought a plainclothesman would be. I was surprised to learn he was a college graduate with two years of law school, finishing his third at night. A short, neatly groomed African-American in a conservative suit that complemented his small frame, he looked more like one of Florencia’s claims managers than a Stamford police department detective.
He introduced himself, shook my hand and sat in the visitor’s chair. He held a pad and small digital recorder. He clicked on the recorder and held it up in the air.
“You mind?” he asked. “So I don’t miss anything.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“First off, I’m very sorry for your loss. I know this is difficult and I apologize in advance for any emotional stress this conversation will cause. Though I’m sure you want a positive resolution of this case as much as I do.”
“Maybe more so,” I said.
“Of course. So tell me what happened. Anything you can remember.”
So I did, just as he asked. I’d been running through the main event in my head since regaining consciousness, straining to remember every detail. Not that I trusted the recollection. I knew from countless research interviews that memory was an unreliable thing. The mind had a variety of storage and retrieval mechanisms, all imperfect in different ways, even when you haven’t had a bullet pass through your brain.
“So you don’t know what was on that piece of paper the suspect gave your wife.”
“No. But I think it was some type of form—five questions he had her answer. He said he knew one of the answers, that she only had a one-in-five chance of guessing which one. A simple proof that she wasn’t fudging things.”
“Anything going on with your wife leading up to this? Had she been herself, acting normally?”
“Yes. I would have known if she was bothered by something important. I know everyone thinks they know their spouses that intimately, but this is what I believe.”
“So no theories, no possible motives?” said Maddox.
“No. What about you?” I asked. “What’s the official theory? Does this guy sound familiar?”
Maddox kept the same pleasant, helpful look on his face, but he paused before answering.
“The description of the individual does not ring any bells, at least with me, but this was an expert hit, I’m certain of that. The hat and sunglasses, the type of weapon, the totally clean crime scene—rounds and spent shells recovered—all the tell-tales are there. Don’t expect anything to come of the SUV. For sure stolen and long gone. I believe your wife knew something, or had something, or saw or did something, to bring this on. Doesn’t mean it was intentional, or that she’d done anything wrong in the eyes of the law, but obviously in the eyes of people outside the law.
“And you don’t know what that something was?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Since you’ve been unconscious, your wife’s company has been in the custody of your sister. Miss Cathcart and her attorney have been very cooperative. We’ve grilled every one of her employees and anyone outside the agency who might have an insight into the case and come up with zilch. We’ve had forensic accountants from the State Police go over audits of the last three years, and the same thing. Nothing out of the ordinary. Your wife ran a very clean and professional business.”
“Not surprised,” I said.
“Your business, on the other hand, we know very little about, because Miss Cathcart refused access to your files. She was holding out hope that you’d be in a position to grant us that authority yourself, and lo and behold, here you are.”
“Be my guest,” I said, without hesitation. “I have no paper records. It’s all in my computer. Just give me a chance to copy the hard drive for safety’s sake, and you can have it. And you can search my house, my office, anything you want.”
“I can make that copy for you,” he said.
“You can watch Evelyn make it, following my instructions, which you can approve.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. We already searched your house,” he said. “We found some external hard drives, but since the warrant didn’t cover the computer, we had to leave them where they were.”
“Those are archives. You can have them, but I’ll need copies.”
We negotiated the next steps. He was happy to sustain the coma ruse as well as he could, but noted it wouldn’t last forever.
“For example, you need to work with our sketch artist. A little hard to explain that the suspect was described by a person in a coma. Certain people have to know to keep the investigation going, and the more people know, the harder it is to secure. Especially with a high profile case like this. Eventually, whether you like it or not, you’ll have to rejoin the living,” he said.
“That’s what
I intend to do, detective.”
EASIER SAID than done. The next two weeks were a cavalcade of frustrations. Cursed with full, morphine-free awareness, I was alternately whipsawed by existential rage and despair and the physical stress of my sadly impaired self. As hoped, my mobility returned relatively quickly, though the left side of my face, the one controlled by the damaged right side of my brain, had a slight, but likely permanent droop, as you often see in stroke victims. My left side also dragged behind the other half. The hole in my leg healed better than anyone thought it would, though the bullet wound would likely hamper movement forever. In other words, I had a limp.
The clarity of my vision, on the other hand, came close to what I had before. Evelyn arranged for an optometrist to come to the house and fit me with glasses, which neatly compensated for the minor deficiencies—though I found the weight hanging off my face hard to get used to, even though half the world seemed to manage it with little complaint.
Beginning with walks to the bathroom three times a day, I built up strength in my gunshot leg until I could go two miles at a time on the treadmill Evelyn kept in the basement. I had it set on the slowest speed, and would never move much faster than that, but steady was achievable.
As promised, the sketch artist showed up and spent a few hours with me going through the well-known process. I expected a friendly person with a charcoal drawing pad. What I got was a crabby grey-haired guy with a laptop loaded with sketch art software.
Seeing the man in the trench coat emerge from the screen was an exceptionally unsettling moment. Worse because I really had no idea if it was what the guy actually looked like. There’s a reason eyewitness testimony is often disallowed, even when the witness isn’t brain damaged. I shared this thought with the artist, asking whether he ever checked on the accuracy of his images after the fact. He said they were usually close enough.
“Meaning the witness had a great memory, or the cops just arrested some poor schlub that looked like the sketch,” he said. “And no, I don’t care either way.”
Maddox emailed a copy of the sketch to my office computer, which Evelyn had secured and brought to my bedroom.
After that, I hosted a few of Evelyn’s buddies from the hospital who assessed my physical and mental state, clinically and otherwise. A psychiatrist, the neurologist Dr. Selmer, and a musculoskeletal specialist all weighed in. The result was inconclusive, mostly due to the relatively early stage of recovery, though everyone but the shrink thought I had a reasonable chance at regaining much of my original self. The psychiatrist told me and my sister that my cognitive acuity was remarkably intact, but my social affect, empathy and equanimity factors were nearly immeasurable. She attributed this, breezily I thought, to having been recently shot in the head and witnessing the brutal murder of my beloved wife. I told Evelyn I hoped we hadn’t overpaid for that diagnosis.
My right hand was stiff, but still steady as a rock, though my famous grin, now rarely deployed, looked like a sneer. Worse, my sensory acuity was seriously jumbled. Selmer said it had something to do with damage to the parietal lobe, causing a pathology called optic ataxia, where your arms and legs essentially lose track of things your eyes have identified and fixed in the physical world. So I fell a lot and often misjudged the location of common objects like toilets, ottomans, serving dishes and household pets.
This was disappointing, but not as startling as the dyscalculia. I’d had no reason to use any sort of math in the process of recovery, so it was surprising to be unable to add five and five. I laughed, assuming it was a fluke of the moment, and tried other combinations, all completely impenetrable. I told the doctor I’d pulled an 800 on my math SAT’s and wrestled with esoteric calculations for a living. He said the part of my brain that did all that had apparently been mashed into glop by the bullet passing through.
The musculoskeletal guy said I’d never run the New York City Marathon, but I’d achieve a reasonable gait over time, until arthritis hit, which could be severely disabling, depending on genetic factors. I liked him the best because he was harshly direct and to the point, which I noticed despite my apparently diminished social affect.
Meanwhile, my personal appearance had been totally transformed. The severe weight loss had altered my morphology, and with my new glasses, shaved head (a custom maintained after the operations), lost moustache, and the downward curve of my dreary, depressed expression, I didn’t look anything like the me that was.
This would have been disturbing, if not so strategically helpful.
Strategic is too big a word. It was much more of an outline of a direction with only the initial stages laid out in order. This wasn’t my preferred approach. I’m a person who likes to have every inch of a journey determined before I take the first step. But I was weak from injury and the struggle with my altered circumstances. And, worst of all, there was that blanket of grief enveloping my mind, like an evil drug, clouding my judgment and threatening my sanity.
I’d never practiced TM, or Zen meditation, or any other mental discipline that might have trained me to control my emotional state. Instead, I merely immersed myself in the task. I became literally single-minded. Focused and impossible to distract, consumed by an unwavering obsession.
This is what I knew how to do.
IT WASN’T perfect, but moving into Gerry’s shop apartment would get me away from Evelyn and provide an ideal staging area for the next phase. All I needed was to learn to walk farther than down the hall or two miles on the treadmill.
So I kept practicing, pushing my endurance to the limit, which grew greater every day.
I wasn’t ready, but almost, which I decided was close enough. My first trip outside was in the dark. It was early in the evening, but the sky was moonless and overcast. I wore a long overcoat and my L.L. Bean washed canvas trekking hat to cover the bald head, surgical scars and bullet holes—now little pink craters, the most conspicuous of which was on the left side of my forehead near where my hairline used to be. I used my rehab-issue cane, an aluminum number with a fat rubber tip and form-fitting grip, that had become a natural extension of my being.
I walked about a block and caught a bus into town, where I got off and walked another block to an Internet café run by a young anarchist whose only restriction was pornography.
“Can’t have people just using the place to get a stiffy,” is how he explained it to me. He also claimed to have ways around being traced through IP and MAC addresses, though I knew that to be essentially impossible. For my purposes, however, his relative untrackability was good enough.
I paid cash for two hours of computer time, which I spent scanning obituaries. I set these basic parameters: males within four years of my age; born in Connecticut; died in a distant state; minimum survivors; ethnically compatible with my new appearance; uneventful lives.
The same criteria used by identity thieves, which I hoped to successfully emulate.
One of the more interesting assignments I’d had was to test an identity theft protection product marketed by one of my insurance clients. I’d been asked to assess the product’s various features and benefits, so in the process I learned a lot about the tactics of the people it was meant to protect you from.
In my budgeted two hours at the anarchist’s café, I logged the names and useful statistics of two dozen recently departed, and their closest relatives. I wrote this information in a little softbound notebook and stuffed it in my pocket.
Then I went home and went to bed, utterly exhausted by the effort. This was one of the things people who are recovering from massive injuries know better than anyone. It isn’t just the healing, it’s the destruction of your former vitality that’s the most difficult to accept. But you have no choice. Your body is calling the shots.
The next night I went to another store in Stamford, one that sold pre-paid cell phones. Their record-keeping protocols were on a par with the anarchist’s café, amounting to taking your cash and handing you a phone. Very popular with the illegal dru
g industry.
I took the phone and a pen and paper, illuminated by a tiny flashlight, and sat in a park to make phone calls. Calling people and extracting information from them is one of my life skills, honed over thousands of phone interviews on every subject imaginable, some even more emotionally difficult than the recent death of a loved one. Yet with the right questions, asked in the right order, with the right tone and pitch, most people will tell you anything you want to know.
As always, the first few were a little bumpy, but by the fifth I had my rhythm, in both the form and content of my approach. I told them there would be no penalty if they agreed to allow me, as a representative of the Social Security Administration, to file the necessary paperwork. All I needed was confirmation of the SS number, along with the number of years they’d lived at their most recent address, to assure I had the right person. They could expect a check reflecting the deceased person’s current contribution to the fund, and a written report within three months.
Most wisely hung up, but in two days of fishing I’d collected seven good names with SS numbers and expressions of gratitude for the written report, if not the check.
I FELT strong enough a week later to pack a duffle bag with sturdy everyday clothes and a supply of toiletries. I put $20,000 in big and small bills in a leather pouch secured inside the waistband of my pants.
When Evelyn got home that evening, I gave her my final instructions.
“Please put the proceeds from the house and cars into something extremely safe and liquid, like half cash, half treasuries. Put the life insurance payments in something that’ll earn a little interest. Like six month CD’s. I’ll let you know when I’ve figured out how to make transfers.”
