Brighton Beach: A Kurtz and Barent Mystery (Kurtz and Barent Mysteries Book 5)

by Robert I. Katz

Most do, Barent thought, but no, that wasn’t much of a help.

  Mitchell Price had worked for a small brokerage firm called Adler and Bowen, Associates. His co-workers had been only a bit more helpful than the daughter and the ex-wife. One of them, a thin guy named Gerald Cox, who wore suspenders and a designer suit, very respectable in a stock-brokerish sort of way, said, “She was blonde. Mitchell liked blondes. His ex-wife was a brunette. He tended to go for women who wouldn’t remind him of his past mistakes.”

  “Do you have a name?” Moran asked.

  Gerald Cox shook his head. “Afraid not.”

  “Any idea what this blonde does for a living? Or where she works?”

  “Sorry,” Gerald Cox said. “No clue.”

  And that, so far, was that. No clue. Except for the knife wound in the neck, of course. That was definitely a clue, but so far, a clue that was leading them nowhere.

  There was one other potential clue, of course. It was a long shot but since they had nothing else worth pursuing, they might as well pursue this one.

  Jeffrey McDonald owned a car dealership in the Bronx. He was middling successful and resented it. With his talents, he should have been rich by now, or so Jeffrey McDonald thought. He was no dummy, however. When contacted by Barent, he had immediately clammed up. “Talk to my lawyer,” he said, and hung up.

  Barent frowned at the phone. Win some, lose some, he thought. The fact that McDonald refused to talk was suspicious but suspicions went only so far, these days. Barent had no basis to arrest the guy and nothing that would convince a judge to issue a search warrant. They could put him under surveillance but at this point, Barent’s very hazy suspicions wouldn’t justify the time and expense.

  “Crap,” he muttered. Then he smiled. There was one other possible way to get to Jeffrey McDonald.

  The pretty young girlfriend, as McDonald’s ex-wife had predicted, was already becoming disillusioned. Her name was Audrey Schaeffer. Jeffrey McDonald, it turned out, was not exactly the man of her dreams.

  When Barent and Moran had knocked on her door, she had been more intrigued than suspicious. Audrey Schaeffer had been raised in a small town in Indiana. Her father was a veteran who owned a gas station. Her uncle was a cop. Audrey Schaeffer, unlike so many denizens of New York City, was inclined to look favorably upon the police.

  “Jeffrey…” she said, and winced. “I’m afraid that Jeffrey was a mistake.”

  No surprise, there, Barent thought.

  “In what way?” Moran said.

  She shrugged. “I was flattered, at first. He’s older, good-looking, successful…” She shrugged again.

  Jeffrey McDonald was certainly older, Barent reflected, and not bad looking in a washed out sort of way, and successful by the standards of a small town girl far from the big city. He owned his own home, he drove a new car and he certainly wasn’t starving.

  Audrey Schaeffer smiled. “He’s not a bad guy, you understand. It’s just that he has a predictable routine and I barely fit into it at all. He gets up at the same time every day and goes to work. He plays golf on the weekends. He likes Ruby Tuesday and Uno’s pizza. He watches TV after dinner.” She raised an eyebrow.

  Barent and Moran looked at each other. “So?” Barent said.

  “So that’s it,” Audrey Schaeffer said. “He has this little, compartmentalized life and there isn’t a lot of room in it for me, or for anything outside of the usual.” She grinned. “Aside from the obvious, of course, and even there, he sticks to his routine.”

  This was not exactly what they wanted to know. “Tell us about the night of the accident,” Barent said.

  “Not much to tell. We saw a movie and then went to dinner. On the way out of the restaurant, he seemed pretty drunk but we had shared a bottle of wine, so I was a little drunk, too. We were walking down the street to the parking lot and he just keeled over. Luckily, we were near the corner and the cars were all going slow. The guy who hit him tried to swerve away but Jeffrey fell right in front of his car.”

  “He keeled over before the car hit him,” Barent said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you had one bottle of wine between you…”

  “What sort of wine?” Moran said.

  She blinked. “Why does that matter?”

  “Most white wine,” Barent said, “ranges from between eleven percent and thirteen percent alcohol, depending on the type of grape and where the wine comes from. Sweet wines are even lower, since some of the sugar is retained and doesn’t ferment into alcohol. Most red wine ranges from thirteen percent and up. It makes a big difference to how drunk somebody can get from one bottle.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know that.” She frowned. “It was white. I don’t like those big, heavy Chardonnays. It was a Riesling.”

  “Dry or sweet?”

  “Off-dry. A little sweet.”

  Barent glanced at Moran. “More like eleven, then, maybe even less.”

  “He probably had more of it than I did,” Audrey Schaeffer ventured.

  “Still,” Moran said, “it’s not likely that half a bottle of relatively low alcohol wine would put a grown man down for the count.”

  “I suppose not.” Audrey Schaeffer shrugged.

  “And so far as you know,” Barent asked, “he has no history of drug abuse?”

  “No,” Audrey Schaeffer said. “Not so far as I know.”

  “How about you?” Moran said. “Any history of drug abuse?”

  She blinked at him, looking hurt. “No,” she said.

  Barent frowned at Moran. “Forgive my partner,” he said. “Sometimes he just can’t help himself.”

  She grimaced and looked away. “Is there anything else?”

  “No,” Barent said. He and Moran both rose to their feet. “Thank you for your cooperation.” He handed her a card. “If you think of anything, anything at all that might shed some light on what happened, please give me a call.”

  She fingered the card, looking uncertain, then shrugged.

  On the way out of the apartment, Barent turned to Moran and said, “Jerk.”

  Moran smiled. “You were right,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself.”

  Steve Ryan was depressed. He was very depressed. He swirled the glass of 18-year old Macallan and peered through it at the light. Dark brown, smoky, in Steve Ryan’s opinion, it was the best Scotch he had ever had. Certainly, the best for the price.

  Steve Ryan was a plastic surgeon. Plastic surgeons make a lot of money. With great power comes great responsibility, Steve Ryan thought. He forgot who said that. Churchill, maybe…or maybe it was Voltaire.

  Comparing himself to Churchill might have been just a tad egotistical but only just a tad. He was a surgeon, after all, and surgeons do have great responsibility.

  Steve Ryan loved surgery. He always had.

  What was that other saying? Oh, yes…Stupid is as stupid does. Steve Ryan had a high IQ. Steve Ryan had received A’s in every course he had ever taken. Steve Ryan had goals, aspirations and direction. Steve Ryan had always known what he wanted and where he was going. Steve Ryan had never been plagued with the doubts common to lesser mortals…not until it had all come crashing down on top of him because he had been really, really stupid.

  Know thyself and act accordingly. He forgot who said that. Socrates, maybe…or maybe Sun-Tzu. A much better saying, in the end, and one that Steve Ryan knew well and had chosen to ignore.

  A lot of high IQ morons in this business. He sighed, sipped his Scotch and let the taste swirl around his tongue. The glass, he dimly noted, was almost empty. He carefully poured it full.

  Always a thoughtful young man, Steve Ryan had long ago discovered that smart people did not always make smart decisions. Most mistakes, he had come to realize, were not caused by stupidity or even ignorance. No, most of the very worst mistakes were caused by flaws in one’s character, and the most common such flaws were arrogance and self-delusion.

  I’m smarter than all the rest. I’m s
o smart that I’m never wrong.

  Except, sometimes he was.

  Steve Ryan had wanted to be a surgeon and by God, Steve Ryan had managed to become one. He had gone to Princeton, then Medical School at Columbia, always succeeding, always being praised, then surgical training at MGH. It was there, early in his residency, that Steve Ryan dimly began to comprehend that he had made a fundamental mistake.

  He lifted a hand and stared at it. Long, delicate fingers, narrow hands, hands that could slip easily into a wound, a surgeon’s hands, or so he had always told himself.

  He had always been just a little bit clumsy. He had graduated at the top of his class but had never been much of an athlete. The baseball was almost always in the catcher’s mitt before he could manage to swing his bat. The football, somehow, would rarely stick in his hands.

  That was okay. Steve Ryan was the cerebral sort. He didn’t need to be an athlete. He was a genius, or so his parents and sometimes his teachers had told him. A genius was above such things.

  Athletic ability, or the lack of it, should have been his first clue. Oh, a surgeon didn’t need to be able to hit a baseball but he did need eye-hand coordination, and a really good surgeon needed more than most. He needed to be able to direct his instruments to the proper place, to make precise cuts, to sew a neat, tidy line, to be delicate, to be precise.

  Steve Ryan, as was sometimes said among surgeons, had lousy hands. By the time he had come to realize this, it was too late. His mentors had known, of course. He hadn’t graduated with the rest of his class. They had held him back, making him take his senior year of residency over again, which he had bitterly resented, and after that, they had gently suggested a year in the lab, which he had reluctantly agreed to. They had tried to steer him into a career in research, where his high IQ would be an asset and his lack of coordination would not be a hindrance.

  Oh, well…

  The second glass of Scotch was somehow, unaccountably, almost empty. He squared his shoulders and put down the glass. Decisions, he thought. It was time to face up to reality. It was time to get his life in order…

  “Thanks for your help the other night,” Steve Ryan said.

  Kurtz looked up. Steve Ryan was standing next to the table, carrying a tray with what appeared to be a plate of chicken tenders and some coleslaw. Kurtz himself had nearly finished a second slice of the cafeteria’s mediocre pizza.

  Steve Ryan sat down opposite Kurtz, dipped a piece of chicken into some honey mustard and stolidly chewed it.

  “How’s it going?” Kurtz asked.

  Steve Ryan shook his head, looking sorrowful. “I’ve decided that I need to specialize,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Kurtz said. “You’re a plastic surgeon. You’re already specializing.”

  Steve Ryan, unfortunately for them all, had a sense of civic responsibility. The big money in plastic surgery was in cosmetics but the tough cases, the cases that actually meant something to the patient beyond mere vanity, lay in reconstructive plastic surgery, fixing the anomalies, usually either congenital or caused by trauma that made a victim truly hideous, that precluded a normal life.

  Steve Ryan wanted to do good. It was just too bad that he couldn’t do it.

  Steve Ryan gave a tired grin. “It has been shown on numerous studies that surgeons who specialize on a limited number of procedures have a better outcome.”

  This was true. One of the prime causes of a poor outcome was what the statisticians sometimes called “excessive variation,” which meant simply doing a lot of different things and generally doing them differently every time. Doing a few things and doing them the same way tended to produce much better results.

  Steve Ryan, it occurred to Kurtz, whether consciously or not, had finally come to realize something very important about himself: he was a lousy surgeon.

  “What are you going to specialize in?”

  “Rhinoplasties.”

  Rhinoplasties…otherwise known as ‘nose jobs.’ Kurtz nodded. “A good choice,” he said. Cosmetic, lucrative, and as surgery went, easy. Everybody wanted a perky, up-tilted little nose. A lot of girls in New York started out with noses that were neither up-tilted, little nor perky. In some sections of New York, a nose job was almost a rite-of-passage marking a teenager’s entrance into womanhood.

  “Yeah.” Steve Ryan nodded. “I thought so.”

  “You can be the next Dr. Diamond.” With offices in Beverly Hills, Dr. Jason Diamond was world famous as the go-to guy for Hollywood stars looking for a little nip or tuck.

  Steve Ryan smiled wanly. “One step at a time, but yeah, a limited series of procedures in which I’ll be the acknowledged expert: nose jobs, botox, lip augmentation, maybe blepharoplasties also.”

  All good choices. Botox eliminated superficial wrinkles. Lip augmentation usually involved little more than the injection of dermal fillers and blepharoplasties, sometimes referred to as “eye lifts,” were a common procedure among middle-aged, well-to-do women about town. All of these had the advantage, like nose jobs, of being relatively low-risk and not particularly difficult.

  “I do them all, anyway,” Ryan said. “A little advertising and before long, I’ll have a boutique practice. Less trouble, more money…why not?”

  Lydia James, meanwhile, was septic, bacteria from her perforated bowel having spread from the surgical wound into the peritoneum and then into her blood stream. Her blood pressure at this point was supported by increasing doses of Levophed (derisively referred to by generations of residents as “Leave-‘Em-Dead”) but Levophed was a drug of last resort and could only do so much. Unless the antibiotics were able to clear the infection, which at this point seemed unlikely, Lydia James was going to die.

  “That seems like a smart decision,” Kurtz said. “Good luck with it.”

  Chapter 5

  Though he had no formal education beyond the fifth grade, Javier Garcia was highly intelligent and had read widely. As a young man, he had always been careful to keep his literary preferences to himself. Being from a small village in Mexico and having been recruited by La Familia at the age of nine, first as a runner, then an enforcer, then an assassin-in-training, he knew how to impress his colleagues and competitors (they were the same) as well as his superiors in the organization. They would have been more suspicious than impressed if they had known of Javier Garcia’s fondness for Thomas Aquinas, Octavio Paz, Miguel de Unamuno and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

  Sadly, Javier Garcia’s extensive reading and wide experience had given him a jaundiced view of mankind.

  Satisfaction verging on excitement filled him, however, as he waited for his guest this evening to arrive. The restaurant as usual was busy, as it should be, since the food it served was excellent. His bodyguards, eating at booths and tables scattered across the floor, did not stand out in any way.

  Javier Garcia had never met Juan Moreno, but he knew of him. He was the leader of an organization much like his own, and Javier Garcia imagined that the two of them had much in common, both now middle-aged and seasoned, having survived the testosterone fueled machismo of their youth and risen through the ranks of their respective organizations, both having demonstrated over and over again that they were smart, tough, disciplined and ruthless.

  The door to the restaurant opened. A small man with broad shoulders entered, followed by another and then two more. After them came another, a bit taller, a bit thinner, with a hint of gray at the temples. Juan Moreno. This one surveyed the restaurant, taking in the diners and the bustling waitstaff, letting his eyes linger for a moment on the booth where Javier Garcia sat in the shadows.

  The hostess said something to him and he said something back. The hostess smiled and nodded her head. She turned. Juan Moreno’s men fanned out and sat down with their backs to the wall. They were handed menus, which they barely glanced at. The taller man followed the hostess to Javier Garcia’s booth. He slid inside, looking at Javier Garcia with interest.

  “Your waiter will be with you sh
ortly,” the hostess said.

  Juan Moreno nodded, his eyes fixed on Javier Garcia.

  “So,” Garcia said, “welcome to Casa Lindo.” He pondered Juan Moreno’s blandly smiling face. “Your request for a meeting came as a surprise,” he said. “We both play similar roles in the life of this city, and yet we have never sat down together before this evening.”

  Juan Moreno’s lips quirked upward. “I stick to my neighborhoods. You stick to yours.” He shrugged. “The arrangement works. We have had peace for many years.”

  Javier Garcia frowned. Juan Moreno’s words were true. “Is something about to change that?”

  Juan Moreno drew a deep breath. “I hope not, but I tell you nothing that you do not already know when I say that things always change. The old pass away. The young take their place and wish to do things differently and then they, too, grow old and set in their ways.” He shrugged.

  Javier Garcia’s eyes flicked to the side. A waiter stood there, holding a bottle and two glasses. He placed these on the table, bowed and walked away without a word. Javier Garcia picked up the bottle and poured each glass a quarter full. “Try it,” he said.

  Juan Moreno picked up his glass, swirled the brown liquid, sipped. He tilted his head to the side. “What is this?” he asked.

  “Barbados Private Estate. I think it is the finest rum in the world. It is not the most expensive, merely the finest.”

  “You are hospitable,” Juan Moreno said. “For that, I thank you.” He sipped again. “I might have expected tequila.”

  Javier Garcia shrugged. “I prefer rum.”

  Juan Moreno sipped again and grimaced. “You wonder why I asked to meet with you.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Javier Garcia nodded.

  “I have come to you, to one of your places, as a mark of my respect and also as a demonstration of my faith in your good sense. I am under no illusions that my four men are enough to protect me, should you wish to do me harm.”

  “I have no doubt,” Javier Garcia said, “that the consequences of causing you harm would be wide-spread and severe.”