“You got lucky here, you most of all, March. You fucked me on those files, and don’t think I don’t know it. But I’ve got enough agita right now; I don’t need to go chasing twenty-year-old crimes, or newer ones where the victims only testify under subpoena. And I don’t need to be dancing around with you and the counselor. You get a pass this time, but my hand to god, you’ll never get another one from me.” Then she left.
“Not a happy woman,” Neary said.
“After chasing Nassouli for three years, and having him turn up dead, she’s looking for some good news. She might’ve thought those files were going to be it—a shot in the arm to her prosecutions. That’s not going to happen, so she’s pissed. We should be very grateful that she’s got a full plate,” Mike said.
“I am,” I said. “Any bets on them finding Mills?”
“I’d think the chances are good,” Mike said, putting on his coat. “As you pointed out, he’s mostly an amateur. Trautmann handled all the heavy lifting.”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t underestimate the guy,” Neary said. “Bernie did, and look what happened to him.” He had a point. Neary slung his coat over his arm and picked up his briefcase. I called to him before he reached the door.
“Where did you tell me they found Nassouli’s body?” I asked him.
“Way out in Suffolk. A place called Cedar Point Park. It’s on the South Fork; I don’t know which town. Why?”
“Just curious,” I said. He looked at me, shook his head, and left.
“What was that about?” Mike asked.
“Nothing. You find Pierro last night?”
“Late last night. He’s in San Francisco. Ecstatic doesn’t begin to describe him. Helene should be calling you.”
“She already has. She’s coming by this afternoon to pick it up,” I said.
“You look inside?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “You want to?”
Mike looked horrified. “Look inside? I don’t even want to know it exists.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Helene wouldn’t be over for a few hours. It was time enough. I poured myself some coffee and cranked up my laptop. I got online and found a map of Long Island, then one of Suffolk County and then one of East Hampton, where I found Cedar Point Park. It was on a knob of land that jutted into Gardiner’s Bay and looked out over Shelter Island. I opened my address book and found Randy DiSilva’s number.
Randy is a small, round, mostly bald man in his middle sixties. He has a bushy gray moustache and a perpetual tan, and looks like he should be fixing dog races in Florida instead of running a small detective agency with his two sons, out in Riverhead. But he was born and bred on eastern Long Island, and he knows his way around the potato farmers and fishermen, and the old- and new-money crowds, too. I use him whenever I’ve got divorce work out there. Usually when I call, it’s a drop-everything, all-hands-on-deck kind of drill. And Randy is always happy to scramble the squadron on my behalf, and overcharge me wildly for it. But he’s thorough and fast, and in two years, neither of us has had cause to complain.
I reached him on the first try. I told him what I wanted and when I needed it. He thought about it for a couple of minutes, and then quoted me a price. It was over twice what it ought to cost—just about right from Randy; I agreed. He told me he’d call in two hours, and I knew that he would.
I went into my bedroom, and from under a pile of clothes that smelled of smoke, I pulled the manila envelope. It was creased and torn in places, but still sealed. I could feel a thick sheaf of paper in there, but its bulk came from the videocassette. I sat on the bed and opened the little metal clasp.
I can’t say I was surprised. I recognized some of the documents from Pierro’s fax. There were others I hadn’t seen before. I read through them. They all followed the same pattern. Six companies, introduced to Rick Pierro by Gerard Nassouli; six sets of faked loan applications, authored by Nassouli and Pierro; six hefty credit lines extended by French Samuelson; then a blizzard of transactions—dirty money to clean.
And, of course, there were pictures. There were eight of them, and they were grainy, like images transferred from video. But they were clear enough to see the players and follow the action. Everyone looked so young—Helene, Nassouli, Trautmann, and a blond girl who couldn’t have been fifteen.
I took the package out to the living room and turned on the TV and the VCR. I didn’t watch much, enough to know that the pictures came off the tape, enough to revise my estimate of the blond girl’s age downward, and to wonder if she’d been there willingly, or if she’d even known where she was. Enough to see that Alan Burrows hadn’t lied about the production values; even the sound quality was good. The dialogue was limited and repetitive, but the voices were distinct.
I hadn’t heard Nassouli speak before, or seen him except in photographs. His voice was medium-deep, with a trace of an English accent, but it was otherwise unremarkable. The sleek, ursine look he had in photos was there on tape too, and so was his camera awareness. Here, he was less an active participant than a director, a manipulator, a watcher. Yet he was also aware of being watched, and he seemed to pose and preen for his unseen audience. Quite a piece of work. I stopped the tape and put everything back in the envelope and sat on my sofa, sick and tired. Disappointed, but somehow not surprised.
I wanted to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head and stay that way for a week or two. But I couldn’t, not yet. I checked the time. I changed the dressings on my wrists. I made a tuna sandwich and heated some soup from a can and ate. I read the paper. I checked the time again. Finally, the phone rang. It was Randy, as good as his word.
“It’ll be three years in April that the place changed hands,” Randy told me. “April 10 was the closing date, in East Hampton. Buyers name of Dooley, from the city; local lawyers on both sides. Need the names?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “You know how long it was on the market before it sold?”
“Hang on a sec, I got that here.” There was a ruffling of papers. “Here we go. It was fast. Went on the market March 14; they got an offer on the sixteenth and accepted it the same day. The way they priced it, I’m not surprised. It was an easy two hundred grand under market for back then. Like they say in the trade, it was priced to move. You need anything else?”
“Let me have the address again,” I said, and he gave it to me. I thanked Randy and promised to put his check in the mail today. We said our good-byes.
I went to my laptop. I pulled up my case notes and read through them and looked at the date Randy had given me. I went back online. It didn’t take long for me to find a detailed map of the area around the address I’d gotten from Randy. I sat there looking at it for a while, and then I pulled up driving instructions from that address to Cedar Point Park. The instructions were short and simple, and why not? The trip was barely half a mile. I pushed back from my table and looked out the windows at the bars of bright sunlight and blue shadow that fell on the buildings across the way. I rubbed my eyes.
It was wild conjecture and circumstantial bullshit, and I knew it—or at least a part of me did. No cop or prosecutor would waste a brain cell on it. Yeah, there was motive, more than enough. It was sitting in an envelope on my kitchen counter. It was easy to imagine a scene, three years back, of Gerard Nassouli waving a sample of that stuff in front of Pierro, in an attempt to finance the fugitive life he was about to embark on. And it was easy to imagine a murderous response. But that’s all it was—imagination.
Pierro had a motive; Mrs. Pierro did too, for that matter. But so, it seemed, did virtually everyone who’d run across Gerard Nassouli. There were forty or fifty envelopes in those boxes back at Trautmann’s place, and who knows how many more that went up in his bonfire. Forty or fifty people with motives, some perhaps better than Pierro’s. But how many of them had had houses half a mile from where Nassouli’s body was found? And how many of those had put their houses up for sale a week after Nassouli disappeared?
How many of those houses had been priced to move so quickly?
“A fucking fairy story,” I heard Shelly DiPaolo’s voice say in my head. And she’d be right. I didn’t even have a schizo to back me up on this one. But another part of me was unconvinced, troubled by the coincidences, and thinking about how one might trace the Pierros’ movements on a March day nearly three years back.
“A fucking fairy story,” I said aloud. And one that nobody cared about. Nobody mourned Gerard Nassouli; he’d left behind no family. And nobody would argue that the world wasn’t a better place without him. I rubbed my eyes again and got up and drank a glass of water.
Maybe it was my own ruffled feathers fueling this. Maybe I was pissed off because they’d lied to me, both of them, from the get go— Pierro about being clean, Helene about everything else. But that wasn’t a surprise, not really. Clients do it all the time, and I’d half-known that these clients were no different. Maybe it was because I’d thought better of Helene. I’d liked her. I’d liked the way she was with her kids, and I’d liked her photographs. I’d liked her style. I’d thought she was smart, and that she had better judgment than this, or at least better taste.
The intercom buzzed. She was right on time.
Helene walked in with her big shearling coat on her arm and her cheeks red from the chill outside. She wore snug, suede pants in a fawn color, a pink cashmere sweater, and low boots. A brown leather tote bag hung from her shoulder. She looked around.
“This is nice, John. Wonderful light, and great ceilings,” she said. She was smiling and her brown eyes sparkled and her chestnut hair was loose and glossy. She looked brand-new. Her makeup was nearly invisible and a faint perfume moved around her, something with roses.
Helene focused on me, and her pretty smile faded, replaced by an equally pretty look of concern. “Oh lord, your wrists, your face—you’ve been hurt again, haven’t you? It was over all this, wasn’t it? Oh, John, I’m so sorry. Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. I just need some more sleep.”
Her brow furrowed deeply. “This is too much, really. I . . . I’m so sorry, John.”
I shook my head a little and told her to sit. I offered her a drink. She sat at the kitchen counter and asked for a seltzer. I poured two. She drank some of hers and set it down. She propped her elbows on the counter and rested her chin atop her clasped hands and looked at me. I looked back. The manila envelope was on her right, not three feet away. She never glanced at it.
“There’s some news since we spoke this morning,” I said. A frown moved quickly across her face and vanished, like a breeze rolling across a pond. She stared at me, waiting for it. I told her about Mills and Trautmann and who’d killed whom. She thought about it for a while, her face blank, then she gave a tiny shrug.
“I should think he’d be easier for the police to track down than that Trautmann,” she said, without much concern. She sipped at her drink some more. I shrugged back at her.
“Maybe.” Helene was quiet, watching the bubbles rise in her glass.
“We’re so grateful, John, Rick and I both,” she said, finally. I nodded.
“Is Rick still in San Francisco?” I asked.
“He’s taking the red-eye home tonight. But he’s so happy after talking to Mike, he could probably fly back under his own steam. Speaking of which . . . we wanted you to have this.” She reached into her bag and drew out a small envelope. She handed it to me. It was heavy, ivory-colored stock. Inside was a check. It was a big one, and it was made out to me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s just a token, really,” she said. “We’re so lucky that we had you to stand by us. I don’t know what we would’ve done otherwise.” I handed the check back to her.
“Thanks, Helene, but no thanks,” I said. She looked surprised and confused. “It’s a nice gesture, but not a good idea. Technically, I work for Mike. He pays me well and passes along those costs to you, probably with a hefty markup. It’s because I work for him, and not you, that what I do can stay confidential. Taking money from you complicates things.” But Helene was insistent.
“But we want you to have something—a bonus—for everything you’ve done. We can give it to Mike, and he can pass it along to you. That’s okay, right? Or do you want cash? We could do that too.”
“You can do whatever the hell you please,” I said, surprised by my own sudden anger. “It’s your money. If you’re determined to get rid of some, I can think of a dozen charities that could use it.” Helene drew back, her face stiff. She was very still.
“I’ve offended you somehow, John,” Helene said softly, the accent more distinct in her lowered voice. “I don’t know how, but I must’ve, and I’m very sorry. It’s the last thing I meant to do. If you’d like us to make a charitable donation, of course we will. Just tell me where to send it.” I was quiet and so was she, for what seemed a long time. My eyes flickered down the counter to the manila envelope, and Helene’s eyes followed.
“Jesus,” she said, in a slow, tired sigh. She shook her head. She pressed her palms together in her lap and looked down at them and took a deep breath. When she spoke her voice was flat and exhausted.
“You looked. And now you’re angry with us—angry with me. You, too? Why, because I lied? Because you saw the pictures and read the papers, and now you think that I’m a whore and Rick’s a crook? Is that it? You’re mad because you worked so hard, and got hurt, and it turned out to be all on account of a whore and a crook?” She ran out of breath and stopped. She shook her head a little.
“You’re mad? How do you think we feel? All you did was work for a whore. It could’ve been worse. You could’ve woken up one morning to find you’d married one.” She laughed, harsh and bitter. A tear rolled down her cheek, and then another, but she did not sob or sniffle.
“I was nineteen, for god’s sake. I was a kid—too stupid, too full of myself. Were you never like that? Am I the only one?” A shudder ran through her and her shoulders shook but she bit back whatever was welling up. “And Rick—back then, he wasn’t much more than a kid himself. He was finding his way, trying to make something out of his life. And the world he found himself in just didn’t seem to want any part of him.” The breath left her again and she paused, still shaking her head.
“You want an apology? Fine, we’ve got plenty of those—even more than we’ve got money. That’s all we do now is say we’re sorry. I say I’m sorry to Rick, for being . . . for not being what he thought I was. He says he’s sorry to me for the mistakes he’s made. He breaks down; I hold him together, and he says he’s sorry for that too. We both say it, silently, to the children, and we pray they never know any of this.” She stopped and held her glass, as if she was about to drink, but she didn’t. Her voice was exhausted, too thin and strained to carry anger or sadness or anything other than her plain words.
“Jesus, I am just so tired of it all. I just want it to be over. But what’s one more between friends, huh, John?” She straightened herself in her seat and put her hands in her lap. Tears were still rolling slowly down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, John. I’m sorry I lied. I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry you think I’m a whore. I’m sorry Rick and I weren’t worthy of your efforts. There, does that about cover it?” She stood and pulled on her coat. She reached down the counter and took the envelope and tucked it in her bag. She chuckled ironically.
“Maybe you should have some kind of test for prospective clients; find out beforehand if they measure up to your moral standards. Find out if they’re the kind of people who deserve your help. Then you could avoid these problems.” She wiped her eyes and cheeks with the back of her hand, and drank some seltzer. Then she looked at me and shook her head. She put her hand lightly on my arm.
“I’m sorry, John. That was . . . that wasn’t right. This has been so terrible. It’s taken such a toll. I wish you could’ve known us before all this. This isn’t us. We’re . . . we’re good people. I know that must sound stupid to you.” She sque
ezed my arm gently and moved away, unhurried, to the door. I spoke as she reached for the knob.
“You ever go back to East Hampton?” I asked. She turned around.
“It was expensive to keep up, and there were vandalism problems, too, and it took so long to get out there, that’s why we sold it,” she said.
Her answer was matter-of-fact and mundane, low-key and unexceptional. It was delivered smoothly, but with pauses and stops in all the right places, so it didn’t seem practiced. It was the best kind of lying. But it was the answer to a question I hadn’t quite asked, and in the instant the words passed her lips, we both knew it. We looked at each other across a dense silence.
There was the briefest flash of something in Helene’s eyes. Fear? Anger? It was gone too quickly to tell, replaced by a steely calculation, a quick, cold weighing of options and odds and possible outcomes. It reminded me, suddenly and vividly, of the look in Bernhard Trautmann’s eyes when I’d stared at them over the barrel of my gun.
“Fuck you,” she said, like she was spitting out a pit, and she left.
I stared at the door for a long time, until the hairs on the back of my neck relaxed and my spine warmed up. Helene Pierro was a scary person, less obviously so than someone like Trautmann, but all the more dangerous because of that. Her perfume still hung in the air, more like a threat than a promise now.
I rinsed Helene’s glass and my own and put them in the dishwasher. Then I wrote out a check to Randy DiSilva, slipped it in an envelope, and went out to mail it. The temperature was dropping with the sun, and a chill ran through me as I stood in the doorway of my building. I found myself checking the street, as I had when I’d thought Trautmann might be around, looking for payback, and realized I had that same creepy, watch-your-back feeling. I shook my head. Helene was scary, I told myself, but a drive-by wasn’t her style. I dropped the letter in the box on the corner and went back home. I was hurting in many different places, and my bed was calling.
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