The James Deans

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Hence the name change.”

  “You got it, Moe.”

  “Sounds fascinating.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it could bore you to tears. Depends on the search.”

  “Makes sense,” I agreed. “How comprehensive are your searches?”

  “Again, that depends.”

  “On?”

  “The parameters the client sets and the depth of his or her pockets.”

  “How’d I know you were going to say that?”

  “Because you’re a perceptive man,” she said with a bit of flirt in her voice.

  “Which only an obviously perceptive woman would spot. How big a search would a hundred and fifteen bucks have bought me two years ago?”

  “Sounds like a limited-area-old-newspaper search. Something like a search for stories about how the influenza epidemic in the teens affected Des Moines, Iowa. See what I mean?”

  “I get it. Listen, Judith, if I give you a reference number, could you-”

  “Sorry, Moe, no can do. Confidentiality is as important to us as to you. And even if I were inclined to break the rules, I couldn’t help you. The warehouse we store our old records in was gutted by fire about a year ago.”

  “Fair enough, but can you at least tell me if the reference number is one of yours or not?”

  “Sure.”

  “HNJ1956.”

  “It’s not one of ours. We don’t use letters in our system, and our file numbers all have at least six digits. Sounds more like a license plate number. I wish I could be more helpful.”

  “Thanks anyway. One more question before I let you go, okay? And it’s kind of goofy.”

  “Sure.”

  “What would a package from your firm look like?”

  “That’s not so goofy,” Judith assured me. “You’d get a tasteful brown envelope stuffed with dated newspaper clippings and/or photocopies thereof. It’s that simple. We don’t do any analysis. We just provide source material.”

  I thanked her and asked that she mail me some material about her company. I thought I might have use for her services someday, and if not, I knew a journalist or two who might be interested. Okay, I had some answers, but they were the kinds of answers which led only to more questions. Moira Heaton had spent a chunk of money to have a company search old newspapers. What about and where those newspapers were located were still unknown to me. And what on earth did that reference number on the notation line in Moira’s checkbook mean? Was Judith Resnick right? Was it a tag number? If so, from where? The biggest question of all remained: Did the search, whatever it was for, have the slightest significance in the scheme of things? Moira was dead, and nothing was going to change that.

  I called Rob Gloria over at One Police Plaza and asked him to run HNJ1956 in all fifty states. I was careful not to mention the connection to Moira Heaton. Cops like their beer cold and their cases closed. They want nothing to do with poking around in the past, especially when their promotions are based on old, closed cases. I needed to be very careful with Larry Mac and Rob, so I lied to Gloria about this being a liability case. He said he was glad to run the tag number for me, but that it would take a while. I knew it would.

  My next call went to Sandra Sotomayor at Senator Brightman’s community affairs office. She was in a very upbeat mood these days, and why not? She’d hitched her cart to a man whose potential could now finally be realized. When Brightman moved into the governor’s mansion in Albany or the Senate Office Building in D.C., there was bound to be a high-level position and a fat paycheck waiting with Sandra’s name on it.

  “Mr. Prager, how good to hear from you.”

  “Thank you. Things pretty busy these days in the Brightman camp?”

  “Busy, yes, but good busy. If you know what I mean?”

  “I do. Listen, Sandra, Moira’s family has asked me to do a little research on her. You know, they’re curious about how she spent her last few months, what kind of stuff she was working on. I guess they want to feel she wasn’t wasting her time. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Prager. I’ll be happy to help you any way I can.”

  “Does the reference number HNJ1956 mean anything to you? Could it be a file number related to Moira’s work?”

  “Sorry. That number don’t match anything in our office. Sounds like a license plate, no?”

  Well, we were building a consensus on the license plate theory, but not much else.

  “Sandra, what kind of work was Moira doing before—Was it anything that required her to do private research?”

  “I’m not sure I understand. All research we do is for the people who live in our district and is funded through our budget. Now if Moira was doing some related research on her own, I would have no way of knowing that.”

  “Okay, Sandra, thanks a lot. Do you think if I needed to, I could come down one day and look over the stuff Moira was working on when she disappeared?”

  “It’s pretty boring stuff, but sure. Anything for you, Mr. Prager. You’re a big hero around here.”

  Sandra was nice enough, but she needed a major priority readjustment. I was no hero. Heroes rescued people, not political careers.

  Two pitches, two strikes. I was way behind in the count. I tried Moira’s mom down in Florida. She, too, was glad to hear from me and asked if the package she’d sent had done me any good. I told her it was too soon to tell. I asked about Moira’s apartment in the months after she disappeared. I wondered who cleaned it, who picked up her mail. She explained that she could never bring herself to clean the place. She thought it bad luck.

  “We paid Moira’s rent for the first year,” she said, her voice quivering. “John and I took turns with the other stuff like collecting her mail. Why, is there something in particular you’re interested in?”

  “A large brown envelope from a company called Headlines Search, Inc. I know it’s a long shot, but—”

  “Would it have been filled with newspaper clippings?”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. “That’s the one.”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you remember what the clippings were about or where they were from?” I asked, gripping the phone hard enough to crack it.

  “I’m sorry, but no, Mr. Prager. I don’t think I even looked at them when I saw what they were. They were just old newspapers to me.”

  “That’s okay. You had a lot on your mind.”

  “Is it important?”

  “To tell you the truth,” I confessed, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just really curious about Moira and maybe those clippings could have told me something. That’s all.”

  “Maybe you should talk to John. He might know what happened to that envelope. I don’t remember throwing it out or anything.”

  I tried the reference number on her and she voted for the license plate theory as well. We said our good-byes, each wishing the other well.

  Well, I hadn’t struck out. Not yet, anyway. There was a package. It had clippings in it. Where it had gotten to, however, was now to be added to the mystery list. I picked up the phone to call Brightman and put it immediately back in its cradle. Maybe Moira was working on a special project for him, but Brightman, I realized, would be even less interested in me stirring up the ashes of this case than either Rob Gloria and Larry Mac. The cops had only been promoted in rank, while Brightman was on the threshold of political beatification.

  KATY WAS INTRIGUED as to why I was begging off dinner, but she knew not to press me on it. I promised to fill her in when I got home. Aaron, on the other hand, would not be so easily placated. It was one thing to have me miss work in order to save the business. It was something else again to have me blow off work to go chasing mysteries of my own creation. And that’s what this was, a creation of my own curiosity. Moira’s confessed murderer would be safely behind bars until the Second Coming. Ivan Alfonseca had been meticulously detailed about the whys and hows of his crimes against Moira. So there was nothing about this missing p
ackage of news clippings that would shine any new light on Moira’s death. Enough light had been shined there, anyway. I guess I was hoping the package would shine a little light on her life.

  Adonis was back at the door at Glitters. He remembered my face, waving me in without even bothering to ask for the ten-buck cover. I’m not sure I liked that. It’s one thing to get a free pass at Madison Square Garden or the Metropolitan Opera. It’s quite another to get one at a third-rate strip joint in Times Square. Hopefully, I wouldn’t be making any more return trips and I’d be removed from the most-favored-clientele list.

  John Heaton was at the bar, and one didn’t need blood work to tell he was hammered. Either the rules about drinking on the clock had changed or he was done with his shift. Under almost any other set of circumstances, I would have avoided further contact with him. Frankly, I didn’t much like him, and my distaste for the man had only worsened since the confession. Whereas the news about Moira had come as a sad relief to Moira’s mother and given her some sense of closure, it had had quite the opposite effect on John Heaton’s already charming personality. If anything, it had shortened his fuse and made his drinking worse—not a good thing for him or anyone else. He’d shown up to Moira’s memorial plastered out of his gourd with Domino in tow, nearly coming to blows with a reporter.

  “Well, look who it is,” he sneered, waving his scotch at me. “Tawny, pour the man a Dewar’s.”

  My initial reaction was to refuse the offer, but if I was going to get him to talk to me, I couldn’t afford to piss him off, at least not right away. I noticed Heaton kept looking at the empty stool to his right. There was an unfinished beer and a half-smoked cigarette burning in an ashtray in front of the empty stool. Domino’s stuff, I supposed.

  “Thanks for the drink.” I accepted it with a smile and a nod.

  “So what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to—”

  “You wanted to what?” He raised his voice, edging forward on his stool.

  “To ask you—”

  Now he was up and in my face. “Ask me what?”

  “Why don’t you sit back down, John?”

  “Fuck you. You and your fuckin’ friends all made fistfuls a cash off my daughter’s bones. What, you come sniffin’ around to see if you could pick up some spare change?”

  “Why don’t you shut your mouth and look in the mirror, Heaton? I just came here to ask you a question about a package Moira re—”

  He grabbed my shirt, balling my collar inside his fists. “See, I fuckin’ knew it. You and your buddies—”

  “This has nothing to do with my buddies, John, so leave them out of it. Now if you don’t take your fuckin’ hands off me, I’m gonna have to—”

  He didn’t wait to hear the end of my threat and let go of my collar with his right hand. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing given he still had hold of me with his left. He cocked his right arm, but because most of his red blood cells had been replaced by scotch, his movements were slow and cumbersome. The punch, however, was quick enough, his knuckles grazing my cheek as I forced my head against his restraining hand. If he hadn’t still been holding on to my collar, I might have been able to avoid the punch altogether. The near miss just pissed him off, rage twisting his face into something ugly and barely recognizable as human. He reared back, but never got the second punch off. The cavalry had arrived in the body of Preacher “the Creature” Simmons.

  “What the fuck you think you doin', John?” Simmons’s voice cut a wide swath through the din and darkness. His massive hands locked on to John Heaton’s shoulders. Heaton, no shrimp himself, looked like a scale-model human against the backdrop of Preacher’s six-eight frame. I was suddenly very happy the empty barstool hadn’t belonged to Domino.

  “Thanks,” I said, rubbing my neck where Heaton’s left fist had dug into my flesh.

  “What you want?” Preacher asked impassively.

  “To ask your friend a question.”

  “Ask it,” Heaton spoke up.

  “Your ex-wife says you received a package of newspaper clippings just after Moira disappeared.”

  “Yeah, what about it?” he wondered, shaking free of Simmons’s grasp to reach for his drink.

  “You remember it?”

  “Yeah, so … Why you wanna know?”

  “Your ex sent me some of Moira’s things because I was interested in getting to know who she was,” I confessed, figuring the truth might be worth a try. “It’s not any more complicated than that.”

  “I threw it out. It was just a bunch of old newspaper shit, nothing at all to do with my girl.”

  “Can you remember where the clippings were from or what they were about?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to forgive me,” he mocked, swigging the remainder of his scotch, “but I wasn’t paying much attention.”

  “Anything, do you remember anything?”

  “Something about a bike, I think, a kid and a bike. That’s all. Something like that, a kid and a bike. I’m not sure. Now if you don’t fuckin’ mind …”

  I left, nodding good-bye to Preacher Simmons.

  If that drunk asshole was right, and the clippings were about some kid’s bicycle, I really was just chasing my own tail around for no good reason. On the other hand, Heaton was currently so liquored up, it was impossible to know if he had been telling me the truth in there or if he even knew what the truth was. Walking to the car, I found myself wishing John Heaton was correct. I was way too distracted by this, and even my industrial-strength curiosity couldn’t build much of a mystery out of old newspaper stories about a kid and his bike.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IF THE LICENSE plate theory wasn’t dead, it was probably a dead end. HNJ1956 was indeed a current tag number in six states, but five of the states were west of the Mississippi, three of the plates had been issued since Moira’s death, and two of the plates were assigned to cars owned by women over sixty years of age. Even if I had been inclined to look into it any further, I couldn’t see how a license plate issued to a sixty-year-old grandmother in Wyoming or Utah related to old newspaper clippings about a kid and a bicycle.

  Klaus came back to the office to take his lunch break. As he was clearing off the desk, he noticed the pad on which I’d written down the information about the license plates.

  “Utah, huh?” he kind of mumbled to himself.

  “What about Utah?”

  “If there was any what in Utah, boss, I wouldn’t be living in New York,” he said, his turned-down lips hinting at the pain behind his flippancy. “What’s this, HNJ1956?”

  “I thought it might be a license plate number.”

  “Well, 1956 was the year my brother Kirk was born. Maybe it’s somebody’s birthday. You know, Harold Nance Jacobson, born 1956. Or maybe it was the year someone died.”

  Bells didn’t quite go off in my head, but Klaus had a point. It’s an amazing thing how the human mind works, how different minds process the same information to divergent ends. I’d been focused on HNJ1956 for over twenty-four hours, yet it had never occurred to me that HNJ could be somebody’s initials, nor had I seen 1956 as anything other than the individual numbers 1-9-5-6. Once Judith Resnick had suggested it was a tag number, my mind seemingly closed off other interpretations. I’d have to be careful to keep that lesson in mind.

  There was more to recommend Klaus’s analysis beyond its simply being different from mine. It resonated. I didn’t have to perform mental gymnastics to see the potential connection between someone’s birthday and newspaper stories about a kid and a bike. But what kid? What bike? Whose birthday? Like everything else since I’d first flipped through Moira’s checkbook ledger, each possible answer gave rise to more questions.

  As I walked the aisles of the store, distractedly dusting and straightening bottles, I tried imagining how I might be able to replicate the newspaper search Moira had paid for a few weeks before Ivan Alfonseca had strangled the life out of her. Even if Klaus w
as exactly right that HNJ1956 was a group of initials followed by a year, it wasn’t enough. Or as my old philosophy professor was fond of saying, it was necessary but not sufficient. I tried anyway.

  Judith Resnick, though happy to hear from me, wasn’t very encouraging. Even if I could tie the initials HNJ to the year 1956 and could further tie those two elements to newspaper articles written about a kid and a bike, it probably wouldn’t do me any good, not as far as her company was concerned. Not only would it take an eternity to search through all the archives, but it would cost a fortune. “Certainly more than a hundred and fifteen bucks,” she said.

  The bottom line was this: I needed to come up with a specific name or geographic region in order to replicate or approximate the search Moira had paid for. Until then, I was just spinning my wheels.

  The other line started ringing before I hung up with Judith. I told her I had to go. She apologized for not being more helpful and let me know she’d already mailed out that brochure I’d asked for.

  I picked up line 2: “Bordeaux in Brooklyn.”

  “Hey, you gimpy Jew fuck, how you doing these days?” It was Larry Mac.

  “Don’t tell me you got promoted again. What is it now, chief of the Sioux Nation or grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan?”

  “Shut up or I won’t take you and Katy to dinner this evening.”

  “Call 911.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m suffering from auditory hallucinations. I could swear you just said you were inviting Katy and me to dinner.”

  “Asshole, that’s what I said.”

  “Then call 911 anyway, because now I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

  THE BLIND STEER, located only a few blocks away from 10-9-8, was one of the oldest steak houses in New York City. I suppose, like 10-9-8, it had been trendy once, probably around the time Lincoln was giving the Gettysburg Address. Even if you didn’t know its exact address, you could spot the life-size red, white, and blue neon steer swinging above its front door from all the way down Ninth Avenue.