by Neil Gordon
I was stammering a little. “No.”
“Okay, kid. You’ll see him this afternoon, then. I guess.”
The call had come in as I sat down at my desk. Now, thinking about it, I checked my messages and found that it was the third time Cusimano had called that morning. I booted my computer, launched my phone book, and called your daddy’s house, where there was no answer, then his office, which picked up right away.
“Mike? Ben Schulberg, up at the Times.”
“Hey, Ben.” Jim’s assistant answered in what struck me as an anxious voice.
“Mr. Grant in?”
“No, he’s not.”
There was a silence. I found myself holding the receiver with both hands.
“Mike, tell me what’s up.”
“Nothing’s up.”
“Yes, something is. Tell me. Off the record. I can help.”
I listened to the silence of Mike’s struggle for a moment, holding his breath. Then he spoke.
“Well, the woman who takes care of Jim’s daughter? This morning, Jim and Isabel don’t come over. So Molly goes over to his house, and finds that they hadn’t slept there.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Well, yeah. She’s…she’s kind of Jim’s girlfriend. They’re very close. It’s very unusual. Look, we’re badly worried.”
“And why?”
“Because…look, you know the kind of work Jim does. And he’s been under a great deal of pressure. We’re extremely worried.”
“Okay. Could you keep me in the loop? I’ll see if I can find something.”
Ten-fifteen. I was standing before I even hung up the telephone, and my cigarette was lit before I got out of the building lobby. Still, it was only half smoked before I was back at my desk, on the edge of my chair, dialing the number of the Albany FBI field station and speaking in a voice that, since I’d last spoken to Cornelius, I had not yet used.
“Mr. Cornelius. Listen. I’ve got something for you. The terms are that I get exclusive coverage, and the fullest disclosure the law allows.”
This time, Cornelius was prepared. “Mr. Schulberg, if you have evidence of a crime, you are legally obliged to tell me. And don’t give me any privileged-source bullshit, my bosses are itching to take the question to court.”
“Okay. Send someone over to arrest me. Because I have solid suspicion of a serious crime, and I’m not telling you anything. And by the time you even get me handcuffed, it’ll be too the fuck late.”
I hung up. There was a pause of perhaps two minutes, during which I kept my hand on the receiver.
I wanted to smoke.
At last, the phone rang. “This better turn out good, Schulberg.”
“It will.”
“Go ahead then.”
“Okay. I’m on the way to your office. While you’re waiting, you know Jim Grant, Billy Cusimano’s lawyer? James Marshal Grant. Run a check on Jim Grant’s recent credit card activity, EZ Pass usage, and cell phone. I’ll be right there.”
“Wait. Why?”
It was like my whole body was on the way to the door while the phone tethered me to the desk.
“Because Jim Grant’s kidnapped his daughter to escape his wife’s custody suit.”
Date: June 9, 2006
From: “Daddy”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 11
Clayton, New York. Midsummer sun, rich with the potamic hues of the St. Lawrence River. The shores of Canada a virtually neon green in the distance.
At 10:00, I parked at the bottom of the highway exit ramp and listened to the hourly news on NPR, all the while carrying on the game of “I Spy” I was playing with you, buckled in the backseat, over the sound of the radio. When nothing on the news made me nervous, I drove on into town and found the post office.
On the street: vacation families in shorts and sandals and T-shirts advertising various products moved under the high, hot sun, overflowing out the door of the breakfast joint, the drugstore, the sporting goods shop. I watched the scene through the windscreen for a time. No one was hanging out casually watching the post office front door, no vans were parked, no pedestrians passed, then passed again. Finally, instructing you to stay in the car, I pulled on a baseball cap from Jam’s Café and Pancake House in Haines Falls, climbed out into the heat, and went through the front door.
Wearing the hat on my head and my heart, I swear to you, Izzy, in my mouth. Right between my teeth. Red, and beating, and dripping blood.
The post office doubled as a convenience store, and I noticed, in passing, that Sharon Solarz was on the front page of the New York Times. I didn’t buy the paper but went straight to the counter and picked up the package of clothes I had express-mailed to John Herman, care of General Delivery, in what seemed like another life. The woman behind the counter gave it to me without a second glance, but it was not until I was walking out that I allowed relief to flood through me, like a drug. I went back to the car, and I remember, I lifted you out and hugged you like I had not seen you in six weeks.
God, I was scared.
I locked the car and, carrying the package, walked with you down the main street to the little Greyhound terminal, announced by a neon sign surviving from the 1940s. With the sun already up for hours, the temperature was in the high nineties, the air laden with moisture. In the station, there were two ticket booths, and I approached the left-hand one, then hoisted you into my arms so you could see in the window while I bought two tickets on the 10:30 to Montreal, an adult and a child, the adult wearing a hat reading “Jam’s Café and Pancake House,” across the border to Montreal.
The bus was leaving in ten minutes. Plenty of time, I assured you, for you to go to the bathroom. You asked me, what if we missed it? Then there was a 10:50, I told you. You didn’t, of course, think to ask how I knew this schedule by heart. Your daddy, you still thought, knew everything.
And I didn’t, of course, think to tell you that I had memorized, long before, virtually every bus leaving that station, any morning of the week.
Date: June 9, 2006
From: “Benjamin Schulberg”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 12
Albany, New York. I arrived at the Albany FBI’s office by 11:00 to find Kevin Cornelius in the situation room with a task force of four. Three were on the telephone, one before a computer screen. Kevin took me directly to the wall, where a state map was hung.
“Grant’s credit card paid a motel room in Watertown last night. This morning his EZ Pass paid a toll on I-84.”
Watching the map, I nodded. “Canada.”
“Yep. More important, he express-mailed a package to himself in Clayton last Saturday, from Albany.” There was thinly veiled satisfaction in Cornelius’s voice. “Must have been a change of clothes for his kid. Used the same credit card then. Not smart. Not smart at all. For such a smart guy.”
Cornelius laughed—a laugh I recognized as the one a sixty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year cop laughs when a Yale-educated lawyer makes a mistake. When he was finished, I said, “That’s the day I first went to see him.”
He nodded happily. “Never fails. Use the press, make the criminal make a mistake. Clayton police already found Grant’s car on Clayton Main Street, right near the post office.”
I watched him now, mouth open, which seemed to satisfy him. “Did he pick up his package?”
“Sure did.”
“Have you checked the bus station?”
“Better yet, we have a middle-aged man with a daughter buying tickets on the 10:30 to Montreal. Bus left thirty minutes ago. Canadian police are searching for him.”
“You mean, they don’t have him yet?”
“No, buddy.” He said it in a singsong, with a western lilt. “The bus made four stops in Canada b
efore we traced him to it. There’s a dragnet out already. Won’t be long, Ben. And when we get him, we’ll get him on the other side of the border. That’s international flight.”
“Is it really?” And as I said that, Cornelius’s earlier comment, about your daddy not being smart, came back to me, and I sat down heavily on a chair, as realization after realization washed through me.
Date: June 9, 2006
From: “Daddy”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 13
Eleven o’clock. In the bus station in Clayton.
At ten-twenty, when you went to the bathroom, I left you with strict instructions to wash your hands and then wait just inside the bathroom door until I knocked.
Then I went to the men’s room.
Inside, I went into a stall and locked the door. I took off the baseball cap and put on sunglasses. I took off my white shirt and blue jeans. Then I opened the Mailboxes Etcetera box and took out the nylon Sportsac bag. From it I put on a loud blue tropical shirt and a pair of white pants. I stuffed my other clothes back and closed the bag. Then I peeled the address labels off the box, tore them up, and flushed them down the toilet. Finally, I folded the box carefully and wedged it behind the toilet.
I went right back out now, a balding man in a loud shirt and black glasses, carrying a Sportsac bag, hoping I looked like a tall Jack Nicholson traveling alone, knowing I looked like an upstate loser who had just lost all his money at a reservation casino. I crossed the little terminal to the right-hand teller and bought two adult tickets to New York City, Port Authority.
Then I collected you from the girl’s room.
The New York bus left at 10:40. We waited together, sitting in the little lunch counter in the back of the terminal. You talked to the counter-person, played with an activity book I had bought, drank an orange juice. I, next to you, watched the police following the trail I’d left from the Mailboxes Etc. in Albany to the bus to Canada.
This was a key time, the time at the beginning when, I knew, any mistakes you had made would come out and bite you, hard. And that was as it should be: if there were mistakes, I wanted to find out early, at the beginning, rather than later, when I would have involved other people too.
I watched—and I didn’t quite watch. An unreal air hung over the scene for me. Both state cops and what looked like FBI were in the ticket booths, and after a time a few carloads left, lights flashing, in the direction of the bridge to Canada.
Then it was just a bus station again. The smell of bus exhaust and hot dogs was familiar from ages spent in bus terminals when I was younger. But nothing felt familiar. The sense of loss that had been tearing at me since early in the morning, it shocked me.
Izzy. I can’t tell you how happy I had been as Jim Grant. It was like being a child. I missed everything: the kitchen of the house in Saugerties; the run to Dutcher Notch; I missed Molly. It was a feeling of mourning, a mourning nearly as intense as I’d felt when I read that my father had died in ’94, and with it came shock, for I had not known that I could feel this mourning for my own life. And I asked myself, How was I, an overgrown baby feeling homesick, meant to take care of you?
And then we were on the bus, with its stale smell of gas and old smoke, pulling out and through town. At the post office, two state police cruisers were parked, and I could see that the police were searching my car, but the bus went right on by, out onto the highway, the pitch of its tires on concrete rising with its speed.
New York City. Just like I pictured it. From far in my mind came Stevie Wonder’s voice from “Living for the City.” Believe it or not, Izzy, I hadn’t been to New York City in twenty years.
I closed my eyes now, tight, and all of New York—the whole city—appeared to me a strange, foreign, frightening world.
Date: June 9, 2006
From: “Benjamin Schulberg”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 14
At twelve-thirty, Kevin Cornelius and his task force were eating sandwiches in the situation room. The subject of discussion was marriage and its discontents—particularly when those discontents caused arrests to be made, which was more often than one might have thought.
That’s always the way with cops, when writers get to them. First they have to tell you what weasels all writers are. Then they have to tell you how tough they are. Only when the proper pecking order has been established, and they’ve proved themselves to be the purplest-assed baboon in the troop, do they start spilling their guts all over the floor. And before long, everyone is telling you about the screenplay they’re writing, or the short story, or the novel, or failing that, their secret passion for needlepoint. Never fails—or hardly ever.
These guys were still at stage two. All of them had been involved in parental kidnappings before; all had war stories to tell me.
Only I, it seemed, was watching the big clock on the wall ticking.
When I could, I excused myself and went outside. Stepping into the sun, I put a cigarette in my mouth, then ostentatiously patted down my pockets, looking for matches. Clearly having none, I walked now over to my car, sat in the front seat, and turned on the engine. I lit my cigarette from the lighter, then switched to the battery charger and placed a call.
Anyone watching could have seen I was calling a pager. I punched in some numbers, then hung up and waited, smoking. In a few moments my phone rang, and I answered.
“Hey, bub.” Billy Taylor’s deep, rich voice sounded in my ear, and as always, I felt a little safer. Billy, as law enforcers go, was the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, he’d much rather have been a writer, and he admitted it. For another, he only enforced laws he believed in.
“Billy, how are you?”
“Better’n you, the sound of your voice.”
“You haven’t had the chance to run the check, have you?”
“I have not. My assistant has, though.”
“What’d she get?”
“Well, bub, your boy’s pretty interesting. You know that?”
I realized my hand was holding the cell phone like a vise. I changed hands and lowered my voice.
“Bill, I’m outside an FBI field station, and there’s a manhunt going on. Give it to me.”
Billy’s voice changed. “There’s three datapoints. One: your man hasn’t filed taxes on his social but once, and the social was only issued in one-nine-seven-six. That’s from Autovan, so it’s not so reliable. But there it is. That make sense?”
Me, dry mouthed: “It could. But it also couldn’t—he worked for his wife’s foundation, unpaid. What’s two?”
“A death certificate in the name of James Marshal Grant was issued in Bakersfield, California, where your man says he comes from, in 1959. A two-year-old boy, killed in a car crash.”
“Oh, God. Dead baby.” My stomach was plummeting.
“Not bad, for a college boy. But three’s the kicker.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your man had a PSA test last year.”
“PSA?”
“Prostate-specific antigen. A screening for prostate cancer.”
“So?”
“The doctor’s records specify it was a screening, mind. No specific complaint. No benign hypertrophy, no problem pissing, no burning, no tingling. No impotence, pain, weight loss, anemia. No—”
Billy was mid-fifties. I interrupted. “Billy?”
“Yes, bub.”
“How’s your prostate?”
“Sucks. Big time.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“That’s okay, bub. Four marriages, five kids. I’m about done with it, anyways.”
“Hope so. Now, about my man.”
With satisfaction in his voice, Bill answered. “In the absence of a specific complaint, you only scre
en for PSA after forty-five. Your man’s supposed to be thirty-nine.”
I let a long silence hang in the phone. “I see.”
Billy, who had done three tours of duty in Vietnam, spoke with a chuckle in his voice. “You got a tiger by the tail there, bubba?”
“I believe I do.”
“Need some protection? I can have a man with you in a quarter hour.”
“No, it’s not me that needs the protection.”
“On the hunt, are we? Well, boy, remember, that’s dangerous too. If it hollers, you let it go and call me tout suite. Promise?”
“I promise, Billy.”
God, I felt exhausted as I walked back into the situation room. A glance was enough to see that nothing had changed except the subject of conversation, which was now sex crimes. Drained, I sat down next to Cornelius. A New York Times was on the table. I picked it up and turned to page 21, where I knew—I had already read the article and noted the reference to my having broken the Solarz story—there was a photo. Here, a picture ran of Sharon Solarz, sitting on the hood of a car between Billy Ayers and Skip Taube, in front of the University of Michigan campus. The caption had it at 1971, and dully I registered the mistake: it must have been before March 6, 1970, in fact, because Diana Oughton was visible in the background, and Diana Oughton died in the town house bombing. Next to her was Jason Sinai, and it was at his picture that I peered closely. Staring across twenty-five years back at me, the young man told me nothing. Then, without looking up, and interrupting the description of the apprehension of a serial rapist, I asked.
“Kevin, didn’t you say you got Grant’s prints out of Cusimano’s house?”
“I did.”
“Did you run them against anything?”
“No. Just against Grant’s known prints.”
“I see.” Now I closed the papers and sighed. “Can you run them against Jason Sinai?”
Cornelius stared. “Why would I do that?”
I checked my watch. Nearly eight hours to deadline. It seemed like no time at all for the story I had to write.
“Because I was wrong. Jim Grant didn’t run to escape his wife’s custody suit.”
