SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  “What do you say?” Hogan asked. “Is her husband slick enough to plan something like this two years in advance? Could he be pulling a stunt like ‘the Chin’?”

  I’d almost forgotten about Vincent Gigante. When I first moved to SoHo, the aging mob boss used to shuffle through the downtown streets in a bathrobe and slippers, mumbling nonsense to a “caretaker.” The big idiot charade, intended to throw off the feds, cast Gigante as mentally incompetent, too crazy to command the highly profitable Genovese syndicate he was actually running from a social club in the Village.

  “Philip is extremely vital,” I told Hogan.

  “Meaning?”

  “He built his company from nothing, from an old warehouse in Queens, in twenty-five years. Now he’s got his own little fiefdom, O-Tech, a new-media spinoff of his father’s rust-belt enterprise, Oliver Industries.”

  “So he had a head start.”

  “It wasn’t that easy. The old man was self-made, a nobody, and as tight as a virgin. Philip took his MBA from Wharton, where he learned a bit—very painfully—about social privilege. Afterwards, he played possum at Sunrise Components for five years, until the morning he breezed in, holding a majority of stock proxies, and took over the business.”

  “Sounds like a man who makes plans,” Hogan said.

  “Guile is part of his charm. When he wanted to beat out Palo Alto Consolidated, he spent three years buying their top execs away one by one, then fired the lot of them on the same June day, once he’d picked their brains clean.”

  “Right. I got a lot of tales like that in my chat with Bernstein yesterday. So, tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Philip is a terrific art customer, a truly generous man—and capable of just about any degree of cunning you care to imagine.”

  “Or maybe he’s genuinely loony,” Hogan said. “He’s got a medical file a yard deep that says so.”

  “But medical opinions can be bought?”

  “With his dough, he could buy the whole New York hospital system.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “Just tell me how he seems to you now. Lots of people put on a good act, until the bodies start to bleed. Then sometimes they get antsy, maybe fall out of character. It takes someone who knows them well to spot the crack.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. I want you to go over to the Prince Street apartment with me. Don’t worry; Mrs. Oliver’s body is long gone. I need you to tell me if anything seems to be missing, if the physical setup looks off. You know the place pretty well, don’t you?”

  “I leased it to Philip and Mandy eight years ago. I’ve been there countless times since.”

  “Good. See you in half an hour.”

  Occasionally, I wonder why I let myself get pulled into helping Hogan. But if it weren’t this complication in my life it would be something else, probably less respectable. That’s the tradeoff. Keep yourself occupied, or you might end up examining your own acts and desires—a decidedly unappealing prospect.

  Then there’s the equity thing. To tell the truth, Hogan didn’t have such a brilliant career as a cop. His old Homicide Department partner, Tommy McGuinn, was a drunk who spent most of his workday hours “gathering background” in bars. Hogan, whose tolerance for orders and rules had gone haywire after two years of Marine combat, was stuck with the street duty, the paperwork, and the covering up for McGuinn. It all soured him, understandably. Hogan still tries, in his way, to follow orders and rules—those of the Catholic Church at least—but no longer the regulations of the NYPD. One night in an alley, he had to shoot a drug-addled Honduran teenager to save McGuinn’s life. He quit the force the next morning. These days, as an independent investigator, Hogan is far from prosperous but at least he answers to no one but his clients and himself. It’s a professional condition we share.

  “How come they don’t have Philip in custody?” I asked.

  “One word. Bernstein.”

  That must have shaken up the day room. I myself had come up against Joel Bernstein, Philip’s personal lawyer, back when we were thrashing out the terms of the Oliver lease—or rather when Bernstein was thrashing me like a wheat stalk in a twenty-foot combine. His firm was famous among my real-estate pals and art clients for beating taxes, fleecing ex-spouses, merging companies that didn’t particularly want to be merged, and even providing counsel before government subcommittees. Bernstein didn’t ordinarily handle criminal cases, but Philip Oliver was no ordinary client. Over the years, with his vast entrepreneurial dealings, he had become Bernstein’s golden retirement fund.

  “This Oliver guy may or may not be nuts,” Hogan said, “but he sure had one lucid moment when he called Bernstein from the precinct. The big gun himself was down there in about five minutes and practically bitch-slapped McGuinn. Holding a distraught husband without a shred of physical evidence, just because the poor, shocked spouse—a man with a certified brain disorder—had babbled some nonsense after coming home to find his wife with her face blown away. Brutal, outrageous—and maybe grounds for a full-bore harassment suit.”

  “I can just hear him.”

  “Anyway,” Hogan said, “thanks for turning the lawyer-king on to me.”

  “You can thank Philip, really. He had Bernstein call me, asking if I knew an investigator who could make his way around SoHo. I lied and said you were an old hand.”

  “Well, I do know you. It’s like having a second brain.”

  “Yes, such as it is.”

  Linking him up with Bernstein was one of the many small favors I had traded with Hogan. Given my means of livelihood, I feel the need for a little virtuous activity now and then. Tommy McGuinn, out of guilt and gratitude, does the same. But there was more to it this time. This time I was personally involved. Amanda was my friend; Philip was my friend; even Philip’s long-deserted ex-wife, Angela, was my friend. I resented that crime had contaminated one of my buildings, that death had intruded on my private domain.

  I had already heard a lot about the murder in a general way, of course. The art world buzzed with it all weekend after the Olivers’ cleaning lady came in that Thursday afternoon and found Mandy’s body askew in an armchair. One glance at the corpse up close and the old Polish lady ran out, all a-jabber, to wave down strangers in the rain-smeared street. By then Philip, still wet from a muttering walk, was making his incoherent confession at the police station a few blocks away.

  Within hours, rumors were going around the galleries and museums. Not since Ana Mendieta went smash out a Mercer Street window and Carl Andre became suspect number one had there been such division. Back then, the debate was whether the up-and-coming Latina’s death was a drunken accident or an act of jealous rage by her big-name Minimalist husband. With the new case, there was no doubt about the nature of the event, only about who squeezed the trigger and who most wanted Amanda Oliver dead. The story hit the evening news broadcasts, of course, and got major play in the Friday papers. Heiress art collector murdered. Wayward husband has microchip empire, progressive brain disorder, 28-year-old Italian girlfriend.

  Ironically, Philip also had a solid alibi, which everyone was paying attention to except him. At openings and dinner parties the talk was all about how he couldn’t have killed Mandy in New York while he was away on a business trip in L.A.—a scenario that several associates were willing to swear to and that, presumably, airline and hotel records could confirm. Even returning on the early-bird flight, as his travel voucher specified, he wouldn’t have gotten home until about twenty-four hours after the killing.

  Hogan, as usual, had his own take on things. He didn’t especially care if Philip was guilty or innocent. As a private eye, he simply owed Bernstein solid information; the lawyer could do with it what he pleased, even ignore it if it didn’t help his case. The most useful findings, though, were clearly those that could counter the police theory of the crime. If the cops were going to go after Philip—questioning his actual whereabouts, delving into his private
life and his potential motives—Hogan wanted to be there first, doubting the client now in order to save his ass later.

  3

  I asked Hogan about the L.A. business trip story when he picked me up at the gallery and we started to walk north on Greene Street.

  “Might mean something,” he said. “Might mean nothing.”

  “Like the medical records?”

  “You got to figure that an operator like Philip Oliver could get just about anything he wants, just by asking. Or even easier. This guy, he’s paying big salaries to a bunch of corporate suck-ups who like nothing better than to please the boss. Now for a long time, maybe, old Phil has been in the dumps. He’s got a new girl, sure, but he can’t really be with her the way he wants, because the old lady would take him to court for half of everything he’s worth. So maybe Philip slips one day and says to some flunky, ‘God, I wish that damned bitch would just disappear.’ Maybe he doesn’t even have to be that specific. Maybe he just complains a little too often, a little too loud, about how Amanda is a giant goddamn drag on his life. About how, sometimes when she really pisses him off, he dreams of walking into the apartment one day to find her gone for good.”

  “But he did love her, in his way,” I said. “I’ve known the two of them since they met at Bernar Venet’s loft here in SoHo years ago. Sure, I was with Philip a few times when he played around—at the last FIAC in Paris, or whatever. But that doesn’t mean he’d have Mandy killed.”

  “You’d be surprised, Jack. People do some pretty awful things to get rid of partners who hold them too close, too long. You ought to know.”

  The May afternoon rain had turned to a fine, whispering mist. “I suppose so,” I said, “if I let myself think about it.”

  We walked in awkward silence for a moment.

  “SoHo,” Hogan said. “You’d think with all the art deals being done down here they could get some decent asphalt on the streets.”

  My friend is not particularly sentimental about 19th-century cobblestone roadways and cast-iron facades.

  “Relax, Hogan, you’d never be happy in this neighborhood.”

  “Is anyone?”

  I turned up the collar of my raincoat. “A lot of people seem to like it. Historic shells, long open floors, thin interior columns. Great for lofts, galleries, fashion boutiques.”

  “Spare me your real estate pitch.”

  “Anyhow, it’s moody in its way, don’t you think?”

  Hogan grunted his response. “Sure. Most of these buildings were sweatshops, weren’t they?”

  “You could put it that way. Some of the galleries still are.”

  “Your buddy Philip has his own sweatshops in Asia. Kids with thin, nimble fingers cutting silicon circuits for pennies an hour. And he deals with a lot of tough freight haulers to get his products shipped cheap. For some of his dad’s old-school cronies, a fat contract with Oliver Industries could be worth a courtesy hit, a little lethal favor among friends. Maybe that’s what the O-Tech ads mean when they brag about ‘global reach.’ ”

  I did my best not to hear him. You can’t deal successfully in art if you dwell on where the money comes from and how it gets made. I concern myself with my clients’ tastes and credit ratings, not their ethics.

  We turned onto Prince Street and made our way past the sidewalk vendors selling jewelry, stolen art books, incense, and fake designer handbags. Their tables, piled with goods, were wrapped in sheets of plastic as they waited in vans or doorways for the soft rain to pass. At the corner of West Broadway, I waved Hogan into the stainless-steel elevator and keyed the top floor.

  “Look,” he said as we rode quietly up the eight floors, “it wouldn’t even have to be that complicated. Who actually saw Philip in L.A.? Some hotel flunkies who wouldn’t know him from Adam—just the name on the credit card. And the business meeting? One plant manager with stock options, who depends on Philip for every knee-sock his kid wears to soccer practice and every hope he’s got of paying someday for UC Berkeley. The plane ticket could have been used by any dutiful yes-man with a passing resemblance to the boss. And frankly, to my eye, these corporate types all look alike. That leaves your pal Philip completely covered, if he decided to stay here and take care of some messy business at home.”

  The elevator opened directly onto the Oliver apartment, where spare, angular furniture caught the light from two walls of windows. Ahead, we could see the long slash of West Broadway and the trees below Canal and then, rising beyond a smattering of Tribeca buildings, the white, immensely tall Trade Towers partially lost in the clouds of a low sloppy sky. On our right, the apartment’s west bank of glass, dulled by its anti-UV glaze, looked out over rooftops thick with wooden water tanks, clustered halfway to the Hudson.

  I didn’t care for the feel of the Oliver place in this rain-gray light. Still, everything inside was the way I remembered it: a Corbusier pony-skin chaise longue, a Bendtsen sofa, a Mies coffee table, four Breuer “Wassily” sling chairs in chrome and black leather, a tall Noguchi floor lamp made of white paper.

  I went over to the switch panel. “OK?”

  “Sure,” Hogan said.

  I twisted two knobs and the track lights came up, throwing the paintings—a Kline, a Pollock, two Rauschenbergs, a Johns, a Warhol “celebrity” portrait of Mandy—into vivid, irreverent color. Hogan stared briefly at a Giacometti sculpture by the zinc-and-lacquer bar.

  “And I thought you were thin,” he said.

  “It’s a piece personally selected by Mrs. Oliver,” I told him. “Poor Mandy never saw a modernist cliché she didn’t love.”

  It must have given her some comfort, when everything else in her life was disrupted and marred, to surround herself with the safest forms of radical art. Once the split came and Philip turned up in public for the first time—flagrantly—with Claudia on his arm, Amanda went immediately to her lawyer and laid claim to the SoHo loft and its blue-chip contents, saying Philip could take his collection of works by “emerging” talents and his little Wop artist-cunt (if I recall her words correctly) and haul them all to some unheated walk-up in Brooklyn for all she cared.

  Of course, none of that kept Amanda from taking her man back every time he stumbled home or from putting on a good act for the family court judge, so that they could continue to have visits from Philip’s preteen daughter, Melissa, beloved by them both.

  “Cruise around,” Hogan said. “Tell me if anything seems strange.”

  I went first into the kitchen area, a 20-foot-deep alcove of pearwood cabinets and sweeping granite counters anchored by a Viking stove and a chrome refrigerator that could have serviced a five-star restaurant. The appliances were spotless from lack of regular use, since Mandy and Philip did not keep a full-time cook in the SoHo pied-à-terre. This was their “bohemian” getaway, after all, where Mandy could play at art patroness while Philip was at his midtown office, knitting the world together with fiber-optic cable and piling up his millions. On the far side of the wall was the exercise room, stocked like an upscale spa with resistance machines, a treadmill, and a StairMaster on which Mandy was forever striving, Sisyphus-fashion, to climb her way back to a lost youthful figure.

  “Try this,” Hogan called. He was standing by the Eames lounger and ottoman, rotating the chair slightly from side to side. “This is where she took it, you know.” I glanced down at the assemblage of bent cherrywood and black leather that itself resembled a semi-reclining body. There was a blood smear on the headrest and, below, a much larger stain on the kilim.

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Sit in it. Go on. Everything’s dry now, and the police techs have been all over the place for two days.”

  I eased myself into the shallow leather pocket, Mandy’s favorite resting place. Here she would read art books by herself in the afternoon, or lean back, hooting, waving a vodka gimlet, when someone amused her at one of the couple’s parties. From that perspective, I saw the whole stretch of living space gradually merge, through the west windo
ws, with the troubled sky over the rooftops. Behind me, I knew, was the corridor to the home office and the two matching bedrooms.

  It was all strange, from my point of view. The deep stillness, the emptiness of the place, Mandy bleeding and dead. Meanwhile, Hogan moved through the white-cube spaces, among the sleek furnishings, like a bird dog in corn shocks, his bald pate glinting under the track lights. His shoulders were hunched with the old compelling intensity. I could feel his mind working from across the room.

  “She was sitting like you are now,” he said, “with her back to the hallway. Whoever shot her came from behind and leveled a nine-millimeter at the center of her skull. You see what that means, don’t you?”

  Yes, it was clear. Either she didn’t realize the person was there at all—a sneak intruder—or else it was someone she knew well and trusted, maybe someone she expected to come and lay a hand on the nape of her neck and massage all the day’s tension away.

  “Which reminds me,” Hogan said. “How come, with all this premium merchandise on the premises, there’s no doorman, no security camera?”

  “That’s the way the tenants want it. Casualness is part of what we’re selling here. The hip downtown lifestyle, you know. SoHo cool.”

  I didn’t bother telling Hogan that Philip, acting through Bernstein, was a relentless negotiator, even with me. By my calculation, there was no sense wasting money on a door staff and closed-circuit video for an eight-flat where rent from the best apartment was locked in for a decade, with small biannual increments, at ten percent below market rate.

  “Besides, when evidence crews don’t leave the floor open, it takes three separate keys to get in here—one for the outer door, one for the elevator, one for the loft. Nobody enters by chance. As for street-level security, I’m sure stores on the block have cameras. Maybe some of the bars too.”

  “A lot of good that did Mrs. Oliver.” Hogan glared around at the empty apartment. “All right, Jack. Take a stroll through the rest of the place. See if it speaks to you.”