by Bruce Wagner
He sat in a stall and scrolled through his BlackBerry. Frances-Leigh said his mother had called; she seemed to be reaching out to him less often, even when there was a “big” death in the news. Dodd felt a pang of guilt, and promised himself he would spend more time at Saint-Cloud. It was anyone’s guess how much longer she’d be living there.
The men at the urinals spoke some kind of Arabic. He heard his name—Doahd Trotter—stranded like an oasis amid melodiously guttural consonants. One of them laughed, shifting to English, the accent clipped and British.
“No one can remember him? But how is it possible?”
“I’m telling you,” said his friend. “I spoke to the crazy woman—Marzie. And she said no one can recall. He is the Invisible Man!”
“As long as he puts his money where his mouth is, what difference can it make? He is going to build a hell of a thing.”
“I don’t know if you want your money where that mouth is,” he said nonsensically. “You don’t know where that mouth has been!”
“He is not the Invisible Man—he is the Indivisible Man. Because he will never divide that pile of money up.”
“Oh!” laughed the other. “Ho! The Indivisible Man! The Indivisible Man! Oh! Ho!”
There was more unintelligible Semitic discourse; urinals flushed and faucets turned at sink. As they toweled their hands, Dodd heard his name mentioned once more amid the babble, and then Forbes and then “number twenty-three.”
“I am predicting I too will be on the list—in the privacy of my home, I will soon make number two!”
They laughed all the way out.
On Sunday afternoon, the detective drove to Broad Beach and limped around an empty lot. He felt it would be irresponsible to share what he suspected—what he knew—before the computers gave confirmation. That could take a week, maybe more.
What if he was wrong? What if he was just lovelorn and in the wake of the perceived “breakup” with Trinnie had superimposed all this foolishness onto the wrong man? That’s insane—it was Marcus, he was certain … but what if he was withholding information from the family because deep down he was angry that the ghostly rival of his affections had returned to the scene? His predicament was even worse than when he had gotten shot; at least then, his role was clear-cut. There were pills to take and wounds to swab—the healing was visible. It behooved him to convey the weird development to his client, Louis Trotter (after all, he was still on the payroll); that was the right and happy solution. He fantasized breaking the news to Trinnie, but that wasn’t his place, as martyred or heroic as it would make him feel.
Samson headed back down PCH. He called Saint-Cloud and asked to speak to Mr. Trotter. The old man wasn’t home, but a servant patched him through to the Silver Seraph. That part of the highway was dicey when it came to cell phones; they could barely hear each other.
“Samson?”
“Yes! I need to talk to you.”
“Where————you?”
“Around————bu.”
“Where?”
“Malibu——Malibu!”
“Do you————where the————Dining Car is?”
“The what?”
“The Pacific Dining Car!”
“Yes! On W———?”
“The Pacific Dining Car!”
“On Wilshire!”
“Yes!”
The detective said he would see him there, but the phone was already dead.
By the time he arrived, his employer was seated in a bar banquette. He looked like someone who’d just been in a hit-and-run. As Samson slid into the booth, the barkeep brought another martini and it was just in time, because Mr. Trotter had downed the one at hand.
“I have something to tell you,” said the old man. To fortify himself, he swallowed the contents of the glass. “I—I—well, Samson, what I mean to say is—is—is … that I found our Marcus!”
CHAPTER 37
Twin Towers
Here is the tale Louis Trotter disgorged.
He explained how, at their reconciliatory dinner with the Weiners, they had been graced with Bluey’s presence and how they partook of “sweetmeats arranged upon a tray given her six decades ago by the redoubtable Peggy Guggenheim herself.” The offerings were delicious, but what had truly captivated, to the extent of rendering Ruth Weiner strangely mute, were certain thumbprint cookies smeared with pomegranate jam. At first they had thought she was choking, but when Mrs. Weiner recovered she took another bite and then another, rolling crumbs and syrup on her palate until she literally slapped the table.
“It’s Marcus!” she cried. When asked what on earth she meant, Ruth averred that those cookies were aptly named, for whoever made them could be identified with the same precision a fingerprint afforded—there being now no question in her mind that her son, Marcus Weiner, had cooked this jam and the buttery indentations wherein each dollop rested; after a somber retasting, her husband, Harry, with as much resolve but less volubility, concurred.
At the moment of epiphany, it so happened that Trinnie was in the powder room and Toulouse was checking on Pullman, who was mistakenly thought to have cried out in pain (it was only Winter’s television). It is to Louis Trotter’s credit that the Redlands woman was so quickly heeded—with alacrity, he told them the secret must be kept from Trinnie and the boy (and anyone else); in the morning he would take immediate steps to find the delicacy’s maker. The impromptu pact helped soften the bedeviling shock of Ruth’s discovery, so that when Trinnie returned from the loo, she couldn’t put enough of a finger or thumb on what was amiss to dare wonder out loud, instead ascribing any residual awkwardness to the Weiners’ valiant efforts to be gracious after so many years of snubbing and callous disregard—in other words, true to Bluey’s admonition, Trinnie put it all on herself. Louis feared his wife might blurt something out, but she was an absolute dream, ingenuously engaging the in-laws in conversation that allowed them to forget, or at least cover over, the bizarre revelation. Perhaps she never fully absorbed the implications of Ruth’s outburst; and even if Bluey had said something, it would have sounded “off” enough to be easily quashed and ignored.
The old man had not been sleeping well since Bluey’s travails and, keeping to form, fared poorly that night. He was completely dressed by six o’clock Sunday morning and took his coffee on the terrace. The top button of his shirt—part of a $35,000 set of Lagerfeld-designed diamond-encrusted camellias—remained irksomely undone. He would have a word or two with the ladies at Brown’s, the dry cleaners, because he was having trouble closing his top buttons, especially on the last batch of shirts sent over.
When patience no longer held, Epitacio drove him to Le Marmiton, where they sat in the Silver Seraph for a full hour awaiting the doors of the bakery to open. When they did, Mr. Trotter examined the cases, but there were no thumbprints to be seen. He smiled gnomishly—a grin that frightened children but merely put adults off, at least until they know who they were dealing with—telling the girl behind the counter that he’d recently sampled a marvelous cookie which he was positive had been bought from this very establishment, smeared with the unforgettable jelly of an ancient fruit, et cetera, et cetera. She was only a part-time worker, she said. She disappeared, and voices were heard from a back room. The girl returned with a shrug, and just when the old man was about to imperiously reclaim his just desserts or go down trying, a youngish Mediterranean, with deep black tendrils and the annoyed look of someone awakened several hours before he had a right to be, entered—no, filled—the small main room.
“We cannot get any more,” he said, sounding very French.
“Really!” The old man’s blood was up; he was on the scent. “And tell me why is that?”
“The person now doesn’t make. We have tried—but we cannot.”
“Then do you know where I might find him?”
“I have many things to do this morning—” He smiled in such a way to indicate that the old man had already seen the best of
him by far.
With a thuggish toss of his head, our would-be customer beckoned the Frenchman to come out of earshot of the girl.
“If you tell me where I can find this man, I will give you a thousand dollars in cash. Now.”
To prove his point, he reached into his pocket and pulled out just that—nothing more, nothing less.
“I am not a whore,” said the waiter with a smile, “but today, you make me one!” To emphasize that he meant business, Mr. Trotter palmed the notes into the Frenchman’s hand. “He is a very gifted man, who lives at a shelter—a place for the homeless people. It sounds I know to be quite bizarre. But he is a very great pâtissier.”
“But where—”
“They call the habitation SeaShelter—it is one word. Olympic Boulevard, near where are the big Blue Buses.”
“Do you know his name?”
“It is William. I do not know more.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“Anytime! Au revoir!”
Things didn’t go as easily at “the habitation” as at the bakery. Mr. Trotter did cut strange enough a figure to warrant immediate attention; the weird visitor had to be reckoned with. The presence of the Rolls and its liveried driver elicited stares from staff and resident alike, and cluckings that weren’t all that far afield from the old man’s chuffs.
He stood in SeaShelter by the seashore’s shiny aluminum shell, prepared to shellac a SeaStaffer. A frowning African American informed him that the gentleman to whom he referred was no longer in residence and that his whereabouts were unknown and confidential (which struck the old man as contradictory). The interviewees were naturally cynical and suspicious, and this morning even more so, not being a happy group after having been told that the body of Jane Scull had been found in a squat with its throat slashed. They didn’t know what to make of this old freak, and their patience grew thin as the layers of one of William’s mille-feuilles; Mr. Trotter was making inquiries about cookies and jam and whatnot, the entire subject of which they were still mildly paranoid. The digger’s instincts told him that an offer of moneys would not go down well, and he retreated to the leather wings of the Seraph to plot his next move.
Slowly, the car wheeled away from the tiny receiving area. A quarter of a block later, his driver remarked that a gesticulating bum was flagging them down. They turned the corner and Mr. Trotter opened his window; Epitacio cautioned him to be wary.
“You tryin’ to find William?” He looked sixty years old but was probably closer to forty, with washed-out Dust Bowl features. His pants were cinched by rope, like a dancer in an Agnes de Mille ballet.
“William? Why—yes!”
“They arrested him. Took him away. Police took him away.” Before the last few words were out of his mouth, the indigent had accepted a one-hundred-dollar bill, pre-folded with the artistry of origami and slipped so silkily into the weathered hand that the old man knew enough to apply some pressure (unnecessary for, say, a doorman) so its recipient would at least know that a bill had been passed.
Not half an hour later, he was inside the Santa Monica police station—
At this point, he interrupted himself and apologized to Samson for not having called him straightaway. He waved at the barkeep for another drink. It was the speed at which things were happening that took him by surprise, he said, and filled him with a treasure hunter’s euphoria. The detective, who had been struggling to suppress his own shockingly pertinent “intelligences,” fleetingly wondered how Mr. Trotter would have gained access to the prisoner, who was no longer even in SMPD custody. Clarification was swift in coming. It seemed that a captain of the latter precinct knew the famed philanthropist from his profligate donations to various policemen’s balls, leagues and benefits (his grandchildren did after all attend school in that beachside city); some years back, Mr. Trotter had offered to build a gymnasium for the officers—a kingly gesture declined for legal reasons but the generosity of which was never forgotten by the thin blue line. After a family friend (then Patrolman Dowling) was shot in the line of duty, the paterfamilias let it be known that anonymous funds would be available through the Trotter Family Foundation in cases of pediatric emergency or catastrophic family illness, in perpetuity. More than a few of the fraternity had availed themselves. When the reason for his presence at the precinct was told, one can imagine the eagerness with which its soldiers volunteered their aid. The aforementioned captain made some inquiries and quickly ascertained an “aka William”—arrested at the SeaShelter hangar in the early-morning hours—had already been transferred to Twin Towers on the charge of murder. When Mr. Trotter relayed his “extreme interest” in the fate of the suspect, the captain took it upon himself to escort the dapper figure downtown, as his shift was anyways ending. There, in the desolate landscape behind Union Station, on the seventh floor of an off-pink edifice, Louis caught a glimpse—for that is all he said he wanted—of the man who had once been (and was still) his son-in-law. He knew immediately it was him; that was the digger’s gift. He had a sixth sense for bodies and the same for the ground in which those bodies would one day lie.
As the detective began his side of the serpentine tale—how he was the officer who happened to have been assigned months ago to the very case in which the arrestee now prominently figured, and how the arrestee was a suspect in the murder of a woman who happened to be the mother of the same girl who’d been harbored by his own grandchildren—well, as Samson began to unwrap and exhibit these astonishments, the old man listened with a preternatural interest that turned preternaturally painful; clutching his throat, he collapsed. He rallied in time to greet the paramedics, declining their offer to ferry him to St. John’s. (The world was filled with St. John’ses.) Epitacio, he said, would take him to Cedars. Within minutes, the chauffeur had alerted the emergency room to their imminent arrival; Mr. Trotter’s internist was on his way; VIP liaisons were dispatched and a deluxe room prepared. Samson wished to accompany him in the Rolls, but the old man insisted that he follow, which of course he did, though not before quietly advising Epitacio to take the quickest route to UCLA if so much as the shade of a need grew apparent.
Mr. Trotter, never one for hospitals, even those with wings graced by his name, refused to be admitted. He had no fever. His throat was sore, and gave him some trouble swallowing; he was routinely cultured for strep. Bedford Drive’s pre-eminent ENT man was enlisted to examine the tycoon, and palpated the mass (the thing that had been giving his topmost buttons their workout), declaring it to be something more than a swollen gland, though how much more he couldn’t say. It was not “pulsatile,” yet it didn’t feel like a tumor, and that was odd; they would have to rule one out. The medics weren’t happy with the headstrong patient taking his leave, but wangled a promise that he would return later in the week for an outpatient biopsy.
On Monday, the digger burrowed into “the case.” Powerhouse attorneys were hired to represent the captive, who naturally proclaimed innocence in all matters relating to the grotesque assault and death—and subsequent rape—of a prostitute and drug addict called Millicent “Geri” Kornfeld. Per Detective Dowling’s instructions, the Adirondack Park sheriffs of Essex County, New York, had already been contacted, and while those lawmen were able to dredge up a record of his detention, the defendant’s fingerprints proved more elusive; they had some more rummaging to do. As far as anyone knew, Marcus Weiner had never been enlisted in the military, so the detective’s fears might indeed be realized—there was the chance that an official identification would never be made. He remembered seeing a French movie about a man who returned to a village claiming to be someone he wasn’t; by the end no one, not even family and old lovers, knew truth from fiction.
Now that aka William had “lawyered up,” Samson Dowling received a call from said legal counsel, telling him to have no further contact with the defendant. Even though it was a “friendly” notice—they knew of his special connection to the case—Samson got depressed. But he gladly told them all he k
new: of his informant, whose whereabouts were unknown, and how the victim’s daughter, AWOL from MacLaren at this time, had some months ago identified the telltale ascot as having belonged to the suspect.
A meeting with his son-in-law could easily have been arranged, but the benefactor felt his place for now was behind the scenes. At his prompting, a medical team examined the prisoner; the psychopharmacologist who looked after Dodd was enlisted to provide one or two cutting-edge prescriptions cropped from the latest harvest of smartbomb antipsychotics. The old man didn’t wish the story leaked to press, so made sure that the more celebrated attorneys on the team avoided the arraignment. (He himself chose not to come.) Eulogio embarked for Redlands to pick up Harry and Ruth, who Mr. Trotter felt should be present.
Tuesday morning, the defense met with judge in chambers. They informed him the suspect had been I.D.’d by his father-in-law, who had in fact engaged their services on the defendant’s behalf; no further details relating to their unusual employer were discussed. (The judge listened with a glacial reserve broken only at the mention of the famous surname, when an eyebrow rose involuntarily with near comic effect.) Mr. Weiner, they added, had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, but a full psychiatric evaluation was not yet complete. One of the lawyers then remarked that the parents of aka William Marcus aka Marcus Weiner would be in attendance this morning and would provide definitive witness to his identity, though it had been roughly fourteen years since they’d seen their son last.
Once in court, the ascot was presented as damning evidence and a trial date was set. DNA had been collected from the victim shortly after her death; a sample from the defendant was ordered for comparison. In spite of eloquent pleas and the unusual circumstances surrounding the detainee, owing to the nature of the crime and aka William Marcus aka Marcus Weiner’s alleged flight from the facility in upstate New York, bail was firmly denied.
