“Tell me you’re okay,” I said.
The photo was a digital pic I’d taken on the Brooklyn Bridge several months ago while on a walk. The sun was bright on her face and the wind was in her hair. We had walked to Brooklyn for lunch. That was a great day, one of the few truly great days during our relatively short relationship. Ellen had dressed in a pink tank top that really showed off her amazing figure. I remembered she had been crazy good in bed that night. That was a Saturday. We wore ourselves out in bed, then slept in late on Sunday and didn’t talk for a week. That’s how it was with us. Hot and cold. I had burned a lot of calories trying to figure her out and wasn’t any closer now than when I’d started.
The cops had said her car was found burned out somewhere in New Jersey. I rolled that image around inside my head for a few minutes. They hadn’t found a body yet, so I decided to remain optimistic. I had every reason to believe that her car had simply been stolen, stripped of anything of value, and left to burn. That probably happened a hundred times a week in this part of the country. I dialed her cell number again but again no one answered.
Even that part wasn’t totally unusual. Ellen had her moods. Sometimes it took days to get her to answer my calls. I spent many days debating whether a relationship with her was worth the effort. It was a lot of work, but to be honest, I was kind of addicted to her. When it was good between us, it was really good. She was significantly younger and packed full of energy. That energy carried over into everything, especially sex. It was off the charts with us. The thought of giving that up was not terribly appealing. The problem with the sex was that it came with everything else, and that was a hefty price tag.
I struggled to remember the last time we were together. The only thing I remembered was the fight over the phone. If there had been anything else between then and now, it was lost with everything in the dark hole from the past few days.
I logged onto my desktop Mac. I smiled remembering my password: myboynate.
I opened my email and the inbox was stacked with unread messages. I wasn’t interested in anything work related, but that’s exactly what most of it was. I did a quick scan and spotted a note from Ellen. I opened it. I glanced at the timestamp and was startled to see it had been sent within the hour. It said simply: Don’t worry, I’m fine.
I pushed the keyboard away and leaned back in my office chair, rereading the note another dozen times. Don’t worry, I’m fine.
What an interesting thing to say. As if she thought I might already know what had happened to her car and would obviously be concerned. I scrolled through the rest of the unread messages in my inbox looking for more emails from her but this was the only one.
Don’t worry, I’m fine.
I wanted to feel relief but wasn’t quite there yet. No matter what her little email message said, her car had been burned and abandoned. I needed to hear her voice and have her give me an explanation for what exactly had happened.
At least it sounded like she was alive, and that would be the second stroke of good fortune for me on a day that had started out in some crazy, messed up territory. Veronica Wagner’s body was gone and I was really hoping I had simply imagined that she’d been in my apartment at all, and now my fear that something terrible had happened to Ellen appeared to have been a false alarm as well.
I replied to Ellen’s email with a simple, What happened to your car? Very concerned. Call me ASAP. Nick.
I heard a knock at my door and glanced up. Adam Winscott, a member of my creative team, was staring at me through the glass. He attempted a nervous smile and I waved him in.
“Nick, we are putting in a lunch order and wondered if you wanted anything,” he said. Adam was typical of young creative types in advertising. He dressed like a sales person at Old Navy. His brown hair was unkempt and he shaved about every two weeks.
I shook my head no and he closed the door and disappeared.
I opened the contacts list in my email application and found Carmen Burgess’s phone number. I dialed it from the phone on my desk. The call went straight to voice mail but I wasn’t shocked since she was vacationing on another continent. I wasn’t even sure what time it was in Sydney. My second attempt was more successful.
“Hello,” she said. She always sounded so bored. Always, in every situation. I think she was bored with life in general. It was no secret that Terry had bored her to death. She had married his money. She’d been too young for him and there had been just too little in common between them to fill the years with anything more than infidelity and empty materialism. Physically they were a good match, in as much as they looked good together, but there was clearly nothing in her eyes for him.
“Carmen, this is Nick.”
“Nick? Where are you?”
“I’m in New York.”
“Did you realize I’m still in Sydney?”
“Yes.”
“Where is Terry?”
“That’s why I’m calling. Something has happened. There has been an accident.”
“I don’t understand, what kind of accident? Where is Terry?”
Accident was the wrong word and I realized it immediately and attempted to clarify.
“Carmen, are you sitting down?”
“I’m with friends, Nick. This is a terrible time to talk. Have Terry call me later, or I can call him after dinner.” I could hear her growing impatient with me. Carmen was that breed of woman who was blessed with beauty from birth and raised in affluence and, for lack of a better term, had always been spoiled rotten. The world revolved around her and she had very little patience with anybody.
“Carmen, are you listening?”
“Seriously, Nick, can’t this wait?”
There was obviously a breakdown in communication. A few thousand miles of ocean between two people can have that effect, regardless of technology.
“Terry is dead,” I said bluntly.
She was silent a beat. For a moment I was fairly certain the connection had been lost, but the call time on the phone display was still rolling.
“What did you say?” Her tone had shifted.
“Terry passed away this morning. I’m sorry.”
There was another beat of silence.
“Hold a minute,” she said.
When she returned to the line the background noise was gone. She had been with friends and I assumed she had excused herself and gone in search of someplace a little more private where she could talk.
“Nick, what is going on?”
“Terry’s body was found this morning in the apartment. He’d hit his head and drowned in the bathtub.”
The next few minutes of conversation were awkward. Carmen was clearly stunned. Her enjoyable evening down under had been jolted. I filled in a few details but didn’t want to overwhelm her. Her voice dimmed. Carmen was not an emotional woman, but I think she still cared for Terry in the way that she would have genuine feelings for a close friend. I also knew that the shock and emotions would soon pass and her mind would quickly shift to concerns over Terry’s money and her future well-being.
She ended the call by saying, “I’ll be on next flight home. I can’t believe he was so stupid. I can’t believe he did this to me.”
Ellen’s email was still open on my desktop.
Don’t worry, I’m fine.
I opened an email from Keith Potts. He was one of the executives from Kellogg’s that Terry and I had taken to dinner last night. Everything from last night was still part of the black hole but I had a long history with Keith. He was a decent guy though he could be a hard ass.
My stomach dropped as I read his note:
Nick, thanks for dinner. Loved meeting Veronica. Have to admit to major crush on her. Hate her movies but she’s amazing to look at.
All best,
Keith
* * *
It didn’t take long to remember exactly who she was, and I felt like a moron for not putting the pieces sooner. The name Veronica Wagner finally meant something to me.
I used the IMDB website to look her up. She was a B-list actress who had been in every other forgettable romantic comedy from the past five years. She had a very recognizable face but wasn’t a household name.
Suddenly, I was having trouble breathing, the dynamics of my morning having taken a hard left turn. Veronica Wagner was not some mystery woman or prostitute. She was a well-known Hollywood actress who had been hired by our agency for a series of Lexus commercials. It was a major campaign and represented major exposure for her career. There would be people looking for her. The circumstances of her death would become headline news and would be scandalous.
It wasn’t unusual at all to use a minor celebrity to impress a client at dinner. It was an easy way to dazzle the client and keep their minds off business. Apparently, Keith Potts had been sufficiently dazzled. Mission accomplished. I had no memory of any of it. I scanned through her list of acting credits and the photos listed on her IMDB page. The contrast of the sexy twenty-something beauty on the Internet with the strangled corpse on my bedroom floor that morning was startling. The photos showed blonde hair and green eyes and I remembered those green eyes staring vacantly up at the ceiling.
How could she have possibly ended up inside my apartment last night? The question rattled through my brain like an echo. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Was it just a bizarre coincidence that both Terry and Veronica had ended up dead within hours of our dinner together? Terry had drowned and Veronica had gotten choked out and I had no way to track any of my actions during the times of their deaths.
I was still clinging to the fragile hope that Veronica’s body had been a hallucination. The way my head had felt that morning it certainly wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. It was hard to get a firm grip on what was real and what wasn’t.
I touched the bruise on my forehead. It was still tender but the swelling seemed to have gone down if only slightly. I wanted to know how the bruise had gotten there. Perhaps the bruise was connected to my memory loss.
My office had an amazing view of the Empire State Building. I stood at the window with my arms folded over my chest and stared. The sky was cloudy. The streets below teamed with traffic. I tried to clear my mind of clutter and allow the logical side of me to take over.
The question looming large in my brain at the moment was why had Veronica Wagner been at my apartment? It was clear that I had called her at midnight. But why? Why would I have called her? We had only met a few times, and this particular dinner had been purely professional. Obviously something had happened between dinner and midnight that I simply couldn’t remember.
I decided to talk to someone who might be able to fill in the missing information: Hopper.
CHAPTER 15
Ellen heard the door open again. She had managed to work herself around into a sitting position and shivered as she listened to the disturbance in the space around her and became aware of the sounds of movement. She heard the shuffling of feet and labored breathing. Her body temperature had dropped significantly from being in the refrigerated locker for so long. She could barely feel her arms or legs, and her hands and feet had gone numb.
Everything was still dark under the bag over her head. She turned her head in the direction the sounds seemed to be coming from. Again she tried to scream but her voice was muffled by the tape over her mouth.
Where am I?
She felt their presence nearby and sensed them place something on the floor beside her. Then suddenly, there were hands tugging at the canvas bag over her head and an instant later the bag came off and light was in her eyes. She squinted up at the face of a huge Mexican man, her mind reeling. He stood over her a moment, then backed away, turning for the door. There was someone with him she did not recognize, and then in a flash both men stepped out of the locker and slammed the thick metal door shut behind them and were gone.
In those short few seconds before the door shut, cutting off the light, Ellen had glanced over at what the Mexican and the second man had carried inside and placed beside her. Her heart filled with horror. Beside her lay a dead body wrapped in a sheet of plastic. The body of a young woman with vacant, lifeless eyes. Then the lights cutout and Ellen could see nothing at all. She tried to call out through the tape but realized no one beyond the door would be able to hear her screams.
* * *
Hopper’s real name was Ronald Franco. I had known him twenty years and had never heard anyone call him by his birth name. He had dropped Ronald in junior high school when the older kids started calling him Grasshopper because he would deliver weed for them, house to house on his bicycle, like a delivery courier. Eventually Grasshopper was shortened to Hopper and the nickname stuck. He was no longer in the dope transport business but was still a shady character. I can’t even remember how I met him, but we play poker every couple of weeks out back of a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. He is not the typical crowd I run with. He can get you just about anything if you’re willing to pay for it, including information.
My brief conversation with him that morning still had me puzzled. He had chased me down and asked me about Veronica. I couldn’t make any sense of that. Why would I have any reason to expose a beautiful minor celebrity to a low-life character like Hopper? Apparently, he had some sort of client with an interest in her, and for some bizarre reason I had agreed to bring her to Grand Central. I couldn’t imagine what I had been thinking.
Hopper wasn’t answering his cell phone. He spent about half his life hanging around a dive called the Black Goose. I called the bar and spoke to a guy named Reggie who poured drinks.
“Nah, haven’t seen him today,” Reggie said.
“If you do, tell him Nick is looking for him.”
I didn’t trust him to remember to deliver the message. Reggie barely remembered his own children’s names. He’d been punched in the face too many times to do anything but pull a tap for a living.
More than anything I wanted to talk to Hopper just to confirm that our conversation that morning had really happened and that I hadn’t misheard when I thought he mentioned Veronica by name. Maybe he would know something about Veronica being at dinner with me last night.
First, I had to find him.
CHAPTER 16
Barry Blackwell glanced out the window of his limousine at the city skyline in the distance. He wasn’t a fan of New York. He hated the Jets and the Giants and had never been impressed by Manhattan in the least. He had been raised on a farm a thousand miles away many decades ago and had never understood the appeal of urban life. He lived where he lived now because of business, but planned someday to retire to a place where he could encounter as few people as possible. He always said he liked people just fine, and liked them best when they weren’t around.
Barry Blackwell rode alone in the back of the limo. The divider was up so he didn’t have to make conversation with the driver. The sun was bright but the windows were tinted. He wore a chalk-gray suit with a black shirt open at the collar. He finished his cigarette and lit another and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling an inch above his head. Blackwell was a physically imposing man. Six feet eight inches tall and broad across the shoulders. Seventy years old. Lean through the middle and still muscular, so he didn’t show his age. His health was great except for the cancer the doctors had discovered twisted around his spine. That was five years ago, and for five years they had told him he had six months to live. The idea of death didn’t set well with him. He ignored all suggestions of chemo and surgery, and still smoked and drank like a Marine.
The limo had picked him up at JFK. He had flown into town on short notice to clean up a mess. He had zero tolerance for shoddy work or excuses. He had always been nasty and mean but the cancer had made him even nastier. The past twelve hours had been a living hell because he was being paid a ton of money to make a problem go away and his people on the ground in New York had managed to botch it like a fumbling bunch of amateurs. Blackwell was good and pissed, and ready to kick some ass.
The limo turned in at a cemetery and followed the narrow lane through the graves until a second car came into view. The cemetery was overgrown with weeds and looked like it hadn’t been properly tended to in years. There were a few old rotten, lifeless trees with twisted branches like something out of a gothic painting and garbage was strewn among the tombstones. A mound of freshly turned dirt signified the most recent arrival. The sky darkened as thunder rumbled in the distance. A light mist began to fall.
Two men stepped out from the second car and approached the limo. Blackwell watched them while he finished his cigarette. Let them wait out there in the rain a few minutes, he thought. Make them stress over their incompetencies. He was in no hurry to hear their lame excuses. The cigarette was down to the filter and he snubbed it out in an ashtray in the armrest of the door. He tugged at his sleeve to check his watch. Rain beaded on the window.
Blackwell lowered the divider and spoke to the driver.
“Pull up beside them.”
The driver nodded and edged the limo up another thirty feet.
Blackwell raised the divider back up. Santiago stared in through the mirrored glass. Blackwell checked out the Mexican’s jeans and cowboy boots. The other guy, Carolla, looked benign by comparison, dressed like an average business man, with prescription eye glasses, navy slacks, and a necktie. They looked like an odd couple standing side by side, framed against the backdrop of the rundown cemetery. Blackwell had wanted to meet in person for this update because he didn’t trust telephones. Too many ears listening.
Blackwell glanced at his cell phone and stared at the digital image Carolla had sent him. It was a photo of Ellen Ingram’s face with tape over her mouth. He had received the photo a few hours ago and then forwarded it to his client for confirmation that they had grabbed the correct woman this time. It had been a dangerous move to pluck her off the street, but that had been necessary after the screw up at Nick Cortland’s apartment.
Dead and Gone (A Thriller) Page 7
