Hiram glanced my way and went back to his pay-perview. He raised his can of Heineken in a mock toast. “What’s doin’, bro?”
I glanced toward the bedroom. Saw the door was closed.
“Hiram? What are you doing here?”
“She didn’t tell you I was comin’?”
“She hasn’t said a word.” I set my computer bag on the floor and shucked out of my coat and walked to the refrigerator. Opened it. I had one beer left. One beer out of the two six-packs that were there when I left the apartment that morning.
Great. I come home at 2:30 in the damn morning to find a convicted killer sitting in my damn apartment, drunker than a damn lord on my damn beer.
I took out the last beer and popped the top. Walked into the living room and dropped into a chair. “I didn’t think your PO would let you leave the state.”
Hiram sipped his beer. “I been a real good boy. Not so much as a parkin’ ticket. I tol’ her I needed to come up here, check on my little sister, since she’d took bad sick and her husband wasn’t lookin’ after her like he should. Even a PO is a sucker for a line like that. You always work this late?”
“If I have to.” I looked him over. Prison tattoos he picked up doing fifteen in Tucker for second-degree murder. Stubble on his chin, just going to gray. Hair long and greasy and combed back. Wearing jeans and a wife beater. Alligator boots that looked to be older than he was. “You planning to stay long?”
“I might.”
“We don’t have a guest room.”
Hiram patted the couch next to him. “Yeah you do.”
“They don’t know what’s wrong with her, Hiram.”
“She done tol’ me that.”
“Could be chronic fatigue syndrome. Lupus. Lou Gehrig’s disease. She can barely lift her arms anymore. Has to take her food through a tube. Her immune system is for shit. She could get carried off by a cold if it was severe enough.”
“She done tol’ me all that too.”
“Your PO has no clue where you are, does she?” Hiram said nothing.
“Hiram? Why are you here?”
Hiram pointed at the television set. “Look at that ol’ boy go. He’s really givin’ it to her, ain’t he?”
“I’d appreciate an answer to my question.”
“She said she thought I ought to meet your all’s next door neighbors. They seem real nice.”
“You’re telling me you’ve met Stu and Carmen?”
“Me and Katy had a cup of coffee over yonder this evenin’. That Stu is one funny sumbitch. He talks like some guy in a gangster flick.”
I took a drink and thought, Jesus H. Christ
When I was done with my beer I slipped as quietly as I could into the bedroom. Undressed and got into bed. Listened to my wife’s breathing. I used to be able to tell by how she breathed whether she was asleep or not. Anymore, I had no clue.
She ended the guesswork by saying, “I was planning to tell you, Billy. It’s just that he showed up a week earlier than I thought he would.”
“You could’ve called me at the office.”
“You hate it when I call you at the office.”
“I like it better than I do walking into my apartment and finding Mr. Murder-Two drinking my next-to-last Heineken.”
“There’s nothing for Hiram in Arkansas. I’ve been talking to Carmen about him. She thinks her husband can help him out.”
I turned on my side, tried to see my wife’s wasted shell of a body by what little light there was from the clock radio. “Katy, I hate to be the one to tell you, babe, but that is a real bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Because the Spagnolettis are mobbed up to high heaven, is why.”
“You don’t know this.”
“Katy. Sweetheart. Everyone knows this.”
“Carmen has talked to me some about their family businesses. They sound very legitimate to me.”
“What businesses would these be?”
“Importing. Or exporting. Or something. I don’t know the details. Carmen says Stu will try to get Hiram hired on, doing some kind of work, maybe over in Queens.”
“Christ.”
“You’re too cynical, Billy. You weren’t that way when we met. You were sweet and trusting. This city, the bank—that woman—they’ve changed you.”
I leaned over and kissed Katy on her sunken cheek. “Well. I reckon. Now you should get some sleep. We both need some sleep.”
“Okay.”
But it was awhile before sleep carried me off that night.
Only to awake the following morning to a day that would start with a ride with Stu Spagnoletti, be punctuated by the Cough Drop Incident and a museum-quality Hell Bitch melt-down, and end with the Hell Bitch herself disappearing from the face of the earth.
The morning after all that happened we met for our 10 a.m. working group session on the Park Avenue deal, and that’s when we noticed we were short one Hell Bitch. When she hadn’t shown by 10:30, I left the conference room and chased her assistant down by phone. “Patsie, have you heard from Diane?”
“No. I haven’t seen or heard from her since last night when I called a Town Car for her just before I left.”
“Can you try her at home and on her cell, please?”
After that I had no choice but to go back in the conference room and get the meeting started. They were all there but the Hell Bitch, and by that I mean the Gerstens, their lawyers, and my client’s representative, Manhattan celebrity broker Donnie Dominick.
The Gerstens’ lawyer started right in about the Hell Bitch not being there.
“Where is she, anyway?”
“I honestly couldn’t say. Her assistant is trying to track her down now.”
The lawyer laid his pencil down on his stack of deal documents and crossed his arms over his chest. “Without her, we really can’t get much done, can we? I mean, unless you’re prepared to assure us that you speak for both her and your client.”
We all knew what he meant by this. Any deal we make with you, she’s just gonna un-make at the next meeting, hotshot. Why should we waste our time?
I looked at Donnie. He shrugged. I could tell he agreed with the Gerstens’ lawyer.
“You want to reschedule?”
“Maybe we should.”
Nods all around, and we broke up with plans to meet the next day.
Only, the next day? Still no Hell Bitch.
And at that point, I really had no choice.
I crossed my fingers and took control of the deal and gave the Gerstens’ lawyer the assurances he was looking for. Then I worked around the clock on the damn thing to resolve all the open issues, including the rescission clause.
Four sleepless days later, three things happened: I closed the Park Avenue deal; the Hell Bitch turned up graveyard dead, stuffed into a refrigerator in a vacant lot in the Bronx; and Katy was rushed to the hospital with full-blown pneumonia, damn near dead herself.
A week after they found the Hell Bitch’s body, I was taking a break from my vigil in ICU at Presbyterian, headed down to the cafeteria in search of caffeine, when two NYPD Homicide detectives badged me by the elevators.
“Your office said we would find you here,” said the older one, a short guy with a face like a basset hound, whose name was French.
“We’re working the Diane Martin case. We wanna ask you a few questions,” said his partner, a tall guy in spectacles with a prominent nose whose name was Reston.
“Can we do it over coffee?”
“Sure.”
Five minutes later we were down in the cafeteria sipping coffee and French was talking to me while he consulted his notebook. “Ms. Martin’s assistant says she called her usual Town Car service to pick her up the night she went missing. We checked with them, and they say they got that call all right, but then they got a second call canceling the car. Ms. Martin’s assistant said she made just the one call, the first one, so we’re wondering if something hinky went down.
&nb
sp; “Anyhow, Ms. Martin was seen by one of your colleagues getting into a Town Car at the west entrance to 200 Park at approximately 7:30 that night. George and me, we been all over this city talking to limo drivers who picked up at that spot that night. Yesterday we found a guy, says he remembers seeing Ms. Martin get into a car. He remembers her because he drove for her once and she lost her temper at him.”
I sipped my coffee. “She had a short fuse.”
“Our guy said he got a look at her driver when he got out from behind the wheel to open the door for her. The guy who was driving for her that night, he looked different.”
“Different how?”
“Different as in not clean cut like your typical chauffeur who drives rich lawyers around. Our witness sat with a sketch artist and this is what the two of them came up with.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper and laid it on the table.
Looking back at me was a perfect likeness of my brother-in-law, Hiram Redding.
French said, “You ever seen this guy, Mr. Carson?”
I swallowed hard and looked the cop in the eye. “Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
He nodded and peered at his partner. “We understand from talking to some of your colleagues that you had a nick-name for the victim.”
“A nickname?”
“A way of referring to her. Could you tell us what that was, please?”
“The Hell Bitch.” My voice came out a little squeaky. I cleared my throat and said, “I called her the Hell Bitch.”
“Not a very nice way to refer to somebody, is it?”
“It was a joke. Like I said, she had a temper. And she wasn’t afraid to use it. It was just a joke.”
“We talked to a Mr. Biallo in your office this afternoon. He says you once said you thought maybe it would not be such a bad idea if someone was to kill Ms. Martin.”
“I was kidding. For chrissakes—Frank knew I was just kidding.”
“Doesn’t seem all that funny now, does it?”
“No.”
“Do you know how she died?”
“I heard she was shot.”
“Once. In the back of the head.” The cop made quotation marks with his fingers. “‘Execution style,’ like they say in the papers. You know a Mr. Stu Spagnoletti?”
“He’s a neighbor of mine.”
“You were seen getting in a car with him the morning the victim disappeared.”
“It was snowing. I needed a ride to the office. He offered. I accepted.”
The cop tapped the sketch with a forefinger. “You sure you don’t know this person?”
“Positive.”
“Okay.” The two cops stood to go. “Before we go—”
“I know. You don’t want me to leave town.”
The two cops looked at one another. Then French said, “I was gonna say, we just want you to know, we hope your wife gets better soon.”
With that they turned and walked away.
When I knocked on his apartment door, Stu answered it himself.
“How’s the little woman doin’?” he said.
“Better. She’s regained consciousness and the doctors say they think she’s gonna make it. Thanks for asking. Now I have a question for you.”
He shifted his stance and crossed his arms over his chest. “Okay.”
“Did you have Diane Martin whacked?”
“Who is Diane Martin?”
“My boss. She was murdered last week.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“She wasn’t showing the flex you and the Gerstens wanted to see in the air rights deal. Maybe you decided she was the problem and that she needed to be gotten rid of. Knowing that I would take the lead in negotiating the deal once she disappeared and that I would come up with a reasonable compromise—with something we Texans call ‘rough justice.’ A deal that works for both buyer and seller, even if it’s not perfect for either one. Which is just exactly what happened.”
“Good for you.”
“You’re telling me you had nothing to do with her death.”
“I’m tellin’ you I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Where’s my brother-in-law?”
A shrug. “Gone.”
“Gone?”
“He worked a couple days drivin’ people. Then called in. Said he missed Arkansas. Was goin’ home.”
“Stu?”
“Yeah?”
“New York is a city with apartments by the hundreds of thousands. What made you pick this particular one to relocate to while your place in Great Neck was being redone? How is it that you happened to pick this very apartment, just a couple weeks after I started working on the Park Avenue air rights deal?”
Stu looked at me for a long moment. Then he walked back in his apartment and closed the door.
“Shithouse mouse,” I said to the closed door.
I went to my apartment, got out Katy’s address book, and tried every phone number she had for Hiram. No answer at any of them.
By this time my head was seriously spinning. I sat in my living room and looked out the window at a lowering sky that promised yet another winter storm before the night was out. I sat there for a long time, thinking.
It was full dark when I grabbed my overcoat and headed downstairs again.
On my way through the lobby the doorman called to me, a little sheepish. “Oh, Mr. Carson?”
“Yeah?”
“Thought you’d want to know, sir. A couple of detectives were in here before, asking me to look at a sketch of a man. He looked just like the man who stayed with you and your wife a couple weeks ago.”
I nodded. “Great. Thanks.”
Katy is awake when I get back to her hospital room. I pull a chair next to her bed, and brush her hair off her forehead and kiss her. “Hey, babe. How you doing?”
I get back a weak smile. “I’m feeling okay.”
“Honey? I need to ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“Where’s Hiram?”
Her face grows serious. “Sweetheart, I have no idea. I haven’t seen or heard from him since he moved out.”
“I talked to Stu today. He said Hiram went back to Arkansas.”
“Oh.”
“The police say a man who looks like him picked up Diane Martin the night she disappeared.”
“She’s not the Hell Bitch anymore?”
“Katy. I need you to tell me what’s going on here.”
She looks away. When she turns back she has tears in her eyes. “Stu heard me talking with Carmen about her. How awful she is—how crazy and paranoid and how she keeps you down. How you’re really a better lawyer than she is. A more reasonable person to deal with.”
“God Almighty.”
“Carmen said it was a shame and Stu said not to worry—that so much worry would only make me sick and there was no point in it. He said that this is New York, and people come and go all the time—to new jobs or new careers, or sometimes they, you know, get hit by a bus. Something like that. I didn’t argue with him.”
“You didn’t argue with him?”
Now she’s crying in earnest. “I said that would make me happy. Oh, babe, I was half kidding, but, my God, she treated you so badly. I just wanted her out of our lives.”
“Christ, Katy. Where did Hiram fit in?”
“I’d told Carmen about him. She said I should invite him to come to town. She said Stu might be able to find something for him. Something that would let Hiram make a little money, so he wouldn’t have it so bad back home.”
“Stu found something for him to do all right.”
“Oh God, Billy. I had no idea what she was talking about. Really and truly.”
“I gotta go to the cops with this, Katy.”
“Do you have to?”
“Katy. The cops are gonna think I brought Hiram to town to cap Diane. And you know why th
ey’re gonna think that? Because Stu set it up to look just that way.”
I sit listening to her cry, knowing I need to go.
Knowing I need to go now.
Knowing I need to say goodbye to my wife and go dime out one of the most dangerous men in New York along with my asshole brother-in-law.
I stand and say, “I’m sorry, darling.”
Two minutes later I’m walking out of my wife’s room, the back of my hand still wet from her tears. The sound of her voice as she pleaded with me still in my head. The taste of her skin still on my lips.
I speak to the cabbie but he makes no move to pull away from the curb. And as I watch the guy in the overcoat walk toward me, I think about my wife lying in her hospital bed and hope that Carmen will see to it that Stu does right by Katy, maybe with some of the money his family will make off the Gerstens’ condo deal.
And I suddenly realize that the City That Never Shuts Up is completely silent, that there is no sound to be heard at all, no chattering cabbie, no radio traffic report, no jackhammers in the street, no sirens, no blaring horns, no drunken laughter, and the guy keeps coming with his hand in his coat and now he pulls out his hand and there’s something in it that’s dark and heavy and he makes straight for the cab window and what I next hear in this first ever moment of total silence in this town is glass exploding and the quiet deadly cough of a silenced gunshot.
THE CONSULTANT
BY PETER BLAUNER
1313 Avenue of the Americas
As soon as she wedged her way off the crowded elevator on the forty-fifth floor, pregnant belly swathed in a navy Anne Klein duffel coat, with a sticker from the security desk on the lapel, she noticed the charge in the atmosphere. A mood of muffled tension and high-wire efficiency pervaded the reception area with its Oriental carpet, copies of Billboard and Variety arrayed on the coffee tables, and works of contemporary art hanging on the mahogany-paneled walls.
“Can I help you?” A receptionist with honey highlights in her hair and a small gold stud in her nose spoke to her from behind glass.
“I’m Nancy Arthur. I’m here to see Scott Locasio.”
“Have a seat, please.”
She went over and sank into a black leather sofa, her feet aching, her eyes drawn to a painting of a seated screaming man surrounded by a cage of lines. She studied it carefully, telling herself it couldn’t possibly be the original version of the Francis Bacon she’d written a paper on back when she was an art history major.
Wall Street Noir Page 13
