by Tim Green
“Sure,” Osinski said, his face flaring up again.
“Tell your mother hello from me,” Niko said. “She must be proud.”
Niko went back across the street. His newspaper waited on the step. Niko went inside. Another police car rolled up the street and pulled into the club. He stood in his living room and opened the paper to the local section. Page one had a three-column picture of the dead man on the eighteenth green. The body was facedown. No head. No hands.
Niko changed into his gray suit. With the local section folded on the front seat beside him, he backed out of the driveway and headed up the hill past the golf course. With such a blue sky and balmy temperature, the fairways were conspicuously empty.
It was less than fifteen minutes to the big house on the farm. He passed the original farmhouse and barn, gray and rotted. One of the dark blue silos had fallen and rested at a forty-five-degree angle, crumpling its brother like an old top hat. A quarter mile down the road, Niko turned and passed through a gauntlet of massive pine trees where a man in a leather coat sat on a lawn chair in the narrow strip of grass. The man took one hand off his gun to speak into a handheld radio as Niko went past. The trees spit him out into a twenty-acre clearing, and there it was.
Three stories high. The brainchild of Murat’s wife, an Albanian girl who had grown up in the Bronx and been influenced by the neighborhood in Scarsdale, where her own mother had cleaned homes. There was something of a Georgian mansion in its size and stature, but its narrow square columns and a brick façade that adorned only its face missed the note. The bulk of the structure was wrapped in white vinyl siding, like a regular suburban home on growth hormones. To one side of the long straight driveway was a man-made pond in the shadow of a massive gazebo. On the other side, a white rail fence cordoned off a long single-story stable and half a dozen horses no one ever rode.
Niko followed the blacktop around back and parked his Buick under the single shade tree next to a five-car detached garage. Beyond a white picket fence was the Olympic-size swimming pool, where a single faded raft floated back and forth according to the direction of the fickle breeze. Niko walked up the back steps and in through the kitchen. Through the archway that opened into the living room Niko heard Dardana Lukaj’s voice, bitching about the swelling in her legs and how the housekeeper had misplaced the special socks she’d ordered off the Internet.
Stepping lightly, Niko cut through the dining room, circumventing Dardana’s domain and winding his way through the house toward Murat’s study, where he was welcomed by the stale smell of cigarettes and the back of his client’s head. Murat sat at his desk, facing the bay window that looked out over the treetops. Niko paused to admire the panoramic view: the entire city of Syracuse, its suburbs, and most of the five central counties in upstate New York. On one side of the vista beyond the city, Oneida Lake lay sprawled between north country trees and a great swamp to the south. On the other, farmland stretched to the big lake, whose shore was marked by a burr on the horizon, a nuclear cooling tower with a plume like the embryo of a cloud.
Murat was on the phone, dressed in a midnight-blue velour sweat suit, but he spun around in his high-backed leather chair to face Niko. Small ears protruded from his moon face that might have been funny if it weren’t for the flicker of icy blue eyes and the wag of his head that told Niko to sit down. One wall of the office was lined with bookshelves that bore only a menagerie of souvenirs common to national parks, monuments, and theme parks. A model of the arch over St. Louis. A grizzly statue from Glacier National Park. Mickey Mouse. A trumpet lamp from Memphis. A salmon clock from Seattle. A vial of sand from Venice Beach.
A spectacular plasma screen nearly filled the opposite wall. It was divided into quadrants, and each section flickered with the images from one of four separate television stations. News, an MTV reality show, Maury Povich, and a skateboard competition on ESPN2. The keyboard remote that operated the system rested on the desk between Murat’s computer and an open ledger.
Niko set his newspaper down over the top of the remote, knowing that when Murat was finished with the call, his fingers would instinctively seek its buttons to either change the channels or restore the volume. Then he circled the desk to sit in one of two low-backed leather chairs facing Murat and waited for him to be finished.
“He went to the studio?” Murat said into the phone, his eyes passing over the newspaper, finding Niko, and offering up a wink. “Good. Yes. Follow him. I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
When he hung up, Murat opened his arms and said Niko’s name amid the jingle of bracelets.
“Is this you?” Niko said, pointing to the newspaper, folded to expose the three-column photo of the headless body on his golf green.
Murat glanced down, smiled, and laughed silently.
“Because that is where I live,” Niko said, knocking a fist into his palm.
Murat shook his head and clucked, removing a nickel-plated Glock from inside his Puma sweat jacket and examining it. “This is getting to be a dangerous place, this Syracuse.”
“I saw a boy I knew who is now with the police,” Niko said. “He told me the FBI is here, in town. He said they are looking for some Albanians.”
Murat wrinkled his lips and he leaned forward. “You work for me. When you work for me and you make a mistake, then you should feel what I feel.”
Niko felt his stomach tighten. “Is it the father?”
“The father?” Murat said, raising his eyebrows. “No, that’s your truck driver. The father has nine lives.”
“He got away from you?”
“He’s a lucky man,” Lukaj said, his lips parting to expose a row of crooked teeth. “I may have even found a temporary use for him.”
Then his face turned serious. He looked down the sights of the pistol at Niko and said, “But how long can his luck last?”
42
HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS LADY?” Sam asked.
Jake shut his car door and waited for Sam to join him. The lush green foothills of the Catskills crowded the river’s byway. Boat hulls crowded the docks and a sailboat puttered out toward the Hudson under the sunny blue sky. When Sam rounded the car, Jake started off across the gravel parking lot toward the tent awning in back.
“I knew her from Syracuse. Her husband flew a helicopter for the TV station I worked for. Now she writes for the Middletown paper. I ran into her by chance a few years ago.
“There was a high school teacher in Poughkeepsie, a woman, who was sleeping with her students,” Jake said, searching the plastic tables for his old acquaintance. “The teacher’s parents lived in Kingston and she holed up there during all the ruckus. Judy found her before anyone and she called me out of the blue.”
Sam looked up at him and nodded as if to say That’s just what people do.
“She got me that interview before everyone else. Wouldn’t take a dime. She’s different.”
As if on cue, a high-pitched hooting sound burst out from beneath the tent. In the depths of its shadows, Jake was able to make out the flutter of a pink silk handkerchief. When they got to the table, Judy rose to her feet, cackling with laughter and saying “hi” over and over until Jake gave her a one-armed hug.
“Oh, your face,” she said.
Jake waved it off and said he fell on an outdoor shoot.
Judy’s eyes were as black as her wild head of hair. The skin on her thin face was pale except for two spots of pink rouge and some fiery red lipstick. She wore a flowery silk dress and beside her on the plastic table was a wide-brimmed sun hat. He introduced Sam, who took her hand and surprised Jake when he gave Judy a kiss on the cheek that made her blush.
When they sat down, Judy’s face turned solemn. She reached over and put a birdlike hand on Jake’s arm, giving it a squeeze and telling him she’d heard about Karen, she hoped he’d gotten her card, and how sorry she was. They made small talk after that and learned that Judy’s ex was still flying for Channel Nine and that they got along better now, divorced and t
wo hundred miles apart, than they ever had before.
After they ordered crab cakes and salads Jake said, “So what can you tell us about the Van Burens?”
Judy smiled and took a sip of her white wine.
“The Kennedys of the Hudson Valley,” she said. “Closest thing we’ve got to royalty. I like that kind of thing. I’ve done six interviews right at Ridgewood.”
“That’s what they call the big mansion, right?” Sam said.
“Have you seen pictures?” Judy asked.
“On the Internet,” Sam said.
“You have to see it in person,” Judy said, gazing out at the river. “You can smell the gardens as soon as you’re through the gate. Four of my pieces were on Peter. Congressmen have to talk to the press, but I also did one with Jan and even one with Gretta when she sponsored the flower show for the hospital.”
“Here, look,” Judy said, digging into her purse until she came up with a pen that she handed to Sam. “That’s the family crest. Gretta gave that to me.”
Sam examined the crest and said, “Is that a lion?”
“The black-footed lion who brought death to its adversaries,” Judy said, taking the pen back and gazing at it. “It also meant that the knight who wore it wasn’t above a little treachery. The top half is red to symbolize courage. What do you want to know?”
“Something a little more recent than knights,” Jake said. “A woman in the family who might have been pregnant in 1992.”
“Pregnant?” Judy said. “You’re kind of between generations. The next wave of grandchildren are five or six at the oldest. Babies.”
“You’re sure?” Jake asked.
Judy shrugged and said, “Not one hundred percent. I got here in 2000, so anything before is just the stuff you’d read in People magazine or The New York Times. You know what happened around then, though? Clint Eggers. He was the big bass guitar player for Heroin Scream. The guy that made the rest of the band look like Smurfs. He married a Van Buren. She wasn’t even eighteen, I don’t think. They weren’t married much more than a month before he died in a car crash.”
“What was her name?” Jake asked.
“Mary, no, Martha,” Judy said. “I never heard of her until that happened. He died and it hit the news he was married to a Van Buren, a teenage bride.”
“I thought George was the oldest,” Jake said. “The state senator.”
“Well, she was from Peter’s first marriage,” Judy said.
“First? Isn’t he the spokesperson for that Family First movement?”
“Probably why no one really knew about her before Eggers died. Peter’s marriage to Martha’s mom didn’t last long. They kept her existence pretty quiet. Probably shipped her off to boarding school early on. You never saw her at the family things. I heard she was a little wild. Different. Then she married this rocker when she was seventeen.”
“Would the paper’s archives have anything on the family?” Jake asked.
“You bet,” she said. “They’re big news around here, and you should have seen the old coot who used to cover them before me. He died right after I got here. Bonkers over the Van Burens. They called him Van Bonkers behind his back.”
“Are the archives on line?” Sam asked.
“Microfilm,” she said. “I can get you into our library though.”
When lunch came, Jake asked Sam if he’d washed his hands. They argued about it for a minute until Sam gave up and disappeared inside.
“You okay?” Judy asked quietly, glancing at the door Sam had disappeared through.
Jake took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Not really. Karen’s death still feels like yesterday. Sam’s on this kick to find his roots.”
“You’ve got this crazy light in your eye,” Judy said.
“I got shot at, believe it or not,” Jake said.
“Over this?”
Jake nodded, but put his finger to his lips when he saw Sam coming and said, “I’m fine.”
After they ate, Judy showed them her thirty-two-foot sailboat she kept moored at the docks.
“In August I take it out to Nantucket,” she said proudly. “By myself.”
They walked through the boat before getting into separate cars to go to the library.
On the drive into town, Sam said, “She’s a little out there, huh?”
“Brilliant woman,” Jake said. “Used to teach English at Syracuse University. We met through her husband, the pilot. She’d have these fantastic dinner parties with poets and scientists and philosophers, all kinds of fascinating people. Your mom and I would go.”
“How’d she end up here?” Sam asked.
“She and her husband split,” Jake said with a shrug. “And this is something she wanted to do. She’s one of the few people in this world who do the job they do because they want to, not for the money, not for anything else.”
“Like you?”
“Yeah,” Jake said, “but you want me to be honest?”
Sam nodded.
“It’s both. I do what I do partly because I love it, but partly it’s the money and the other stuff, too.”
“People knowing you,” Sam said.
“And living on the beach,” Jake said. “The platinum card. I’m just being honest. I always try to do that with you.”
“I know,” Sam said.
When they arrived, Judy introduced them to the woman who ran the archives. She took them down the back stairs into the basement and set them up in a cubicle with a viewing machine and several canisters of microfilm that included everything from 1992, the year Sam was born.
Jake thanked Judy and asked, “Can I get your cell phone? I had an old number in my contacts. That’s why I called you at the paper.”
Jake inputted the number into his phone, then Judy left them to their research.
“Can we get another one of those?” Sam asked the woman, pointing to the viewer in the cubicle.
She hesitated, then said, “Of course.”
“It’s so my dad can help out, too,” Sam said, the serious expression never leaving his face.
When they got all set up, they each took a canister and began.
“Let’s not waste time right now on anything but the front and the local sections,” Jake said after he had a feel for the format of the paper. “We can go through and if we get nothing, we can always go back again, but whatever we need should be in one of those.”
“Okay. Just make sure you check the entertainment section on Sundays,” Sam said.
“Why?”
“They run this little society column there,” Sam said.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “That’s right. Good work.”
Sam never looked up, but he did hold up a thumb for Jake to see to let him know he was on board.
They sat there like that for more than two hours. Sam found three references to the family and Jake found one, but neither had anything to do with a baby. Jake’s eyeballs began to ache.
“Maybe we’ll knock off for today,” Jake said, massaging his tear ducts. “Come back in the morning.”
“How about going and getting a coffee while I do a little more?” Sam said, rotating the crank on his viewer and focusing in on a new section.
“You want a hot chocolate? Why don’t you come?”
“Maybe later.”
Jake shook his head and went back to work. It wasn’t twenty minutes before he felt a surge of adrenaline. Then a chill fell over him. He thought about what he’d said to Sam on the way over to the paper, how he tried to tell the truth. There was no way he could hide what he’d found from Sam.
He cleared his throat and said, “Hey, Sam, take a look. I think I found something.”
“You did?” Sam said, popping up out of his chair and crowding into Jake’s cubicle. “Let me see.”
Jake slid the viewer over for Sam to look at. He closed his eyes and could still see the image. A young girl with long dark hair, her swollen face hidden by sunglasses. The men in black suits. The wome
n with dark hats and veils. Flowers everywhere. And in the middle of it all, a gleaming white casket.
“A funeral,” Sam said. “And a bunch of the Van Burens. I don’t get it.”
Sam took his face away from the viewer and looked at Jake with alarm. “Who died? That rock band guy?”
Jake took a weary breath, shook his head, and grabbed Sam’s knee.
“I think. Maybe. You did.”
43
WAIT, I SHOULDN’T HAVE SAID THAT, Sam,” Jake said. “It could all be bullshit, a lie. Zamira, this woman I met. The Albanians. Just because they said it, we don’t know.”
“You know,” Sam said. “You’ve done this thing a million times. You always used to say that to Mom, about your instincts.”
Jake took the viewfinder back and looked at the young woman identified as Martha Van Buren-Eggers. The caption to the small article that accompanied the photo read ANOTHER TRAGEDY. It talked about the death of Clinton Eggers the previous December in a drunken car crash in Vail. It talked about their Las Vegas wedding on Halloween. It said little more about the death of the infant other than that he had been stillborn after Martha went into spontaneous labor at Ridgewood, the family estate.
“There should be a death certificate,” Jake said in a murmur.
“You mean there might not be?” Sam said.
“You’re here,” Jake said.
“Can we find out?” Sam asked. “Can we get it?”
“County courthouse,” Jake said, checking his watch. “We might make it.”
They picked up quickly and hustled out of the newspaper office with Jake thanking the woman in charge of the archives and telling her they might be back the next day. The courthouse was five blocks away, a cobblestone two-story colonial building with a white cupola. They dashed up the front steps and yanked open the broad white door. The woman in the clerk’s office rolled her eyes at the clock, but Jake knew they had two minutes to spare.
“I need a death certificate,” Jake said.
The woman sighed deeply and in a monotone asked, “Are you the parent, child, or next of kin, or do you have a documented legal action against the person?”
