“Yes.”
“I did as much as I could.” Anastasia gave Scarne a wintry smile. “But I was often out of town on business, too.”
And the murder rate in San Francisco dipped, Scarne thought, and probably rose in other cities.
“Alana was basically on her own during her teens,” Anastasia continued. “Once she was in college, we rarely saw her.” He paused. “Anything about the videos bother you, Scarne?”
“Yes. She seemed too controlled. No fear. No hesitation reading the instructions.”
“Stockholm Syndrome,” Anastasia said.
Scarne decided that Anastasia was no mere henchman. There was a good brain behind the hatchet face. And age apparently had not slowed him down.
“That means Alana might still be alive,” Scarne said.” She’s been a captive so long, she may have identified with her kidnappers, and become dependent on them. Like Patty Hearst with the Symbionese Liberation Army.”
“That’s how I figure it. You?”
“Yeah.”
“But you didn’t say anything to Maura.”
“Have you, Vinnie?”
“No. I thought she might have too much on her plate. And I thought you could run it down. I have to stick close to Maura, just in case it was related to our business.”
Scarne poured them both more Scotch. If it wasn’t for the hamburger at Knickerbocker’s, he figured he’d be dead.
“Vinnie, you and Maura weren’t straight with me. I don’t like that.”
Anastasia eyed him coldly.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You both told me that mother and daughter weren’t close.”
“So?”
“Alana hated her mother.”
“Who told you that?”
“I spoke to some of her friends at school.”
“Kids. Shit.”
“Yeah, kids who will tell each other things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. You going to deny it?”
Anastasia started at Scarne.
“No.”
“So, you didn’t think it was important to tell me?”
“A lot of kids hate their parents at some time. They get over it.”
“Alana isn’t just any kid. And Maura isn’t just any mother. We’re talking Dallassio blood. Maybe it isn’t just Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe it’s also revenge.”
“You think Alana staged her own kidnapping?”
“No. But I don’t think it would have taken much for her to see it as an opportunity to get back at her mother.”
“Spare me the Dr. Phil crap, Scarne. What, are you some kind of psychiatrist now?”
“I could have earned a graduate degree in fucked-up women, Vinnie. Tell me it’s not possible.”
Anastasia shook his head, but not in denial. In resignation.
“Something else sticks in my craw,” he said.
“What?”
“The fucking diamonds. Assuming it’s not a mob job, normal kidnappers would ask for cash. Why would they ask for stones? They are not that easy to get in those amounts, unless you are in the business. Getting rid of them at a good price is also hard. It takes knowledge. And most people don’t know about the family’s diamond operations.”
“But Alana did.”
“It fascinated her. Other than me and Maura, she knows more about it than anyone else in the family.”
“Something else you didn’t mention.”
“Listen, we hired you to find the kid, not put your nose in the family business.”
“Do you know how screwed up that sounds, Vinnie? Withholding the two pieces of information that might have helped me. What did you want me to do, stand on every street corner in the Northeast and yell ‘Alana, come home’.”
“OK. Maybe we fucked up,” Anastasia said, putting down his glass and standing up. “But now you know. So, get back to business. Thanks for the drink.”
The old hit man walked out the door.
“You’re welcome,” Scarne said to the now-empty room.
CHAPTER 17 - BARRY
Scarne slept until almost 9 AM the next morning, and woke with a headache and a mouth that tasted like two-day-old roadkill. He put on gym shorts and an old Providence College sweatshirt and went to his kitchen, where he washed down three aspirins with half a bottle of Gatorade — destroying, he was sure, whatever lining was left in his stomach. Then, fighting an almost visceral urge to go back to bed, he called his office to say he would be “delayed”, set the timer on a pot of coffee and left his apartment. He took the elevator to the basement. An elderly couple that shared his ride stared at him, probably wondering how a vagrant got into their building.
The rudimentary basement gym, with its old-style weight benches and barbells, jump ropes, stretching pulleys and heavy punching bag was deserted, as it usually was. Most residents, with memberships in upscale health clubs, wouldn’t sully their $400 track suits in the room, with its dirty floor mats, and pungent odor, a combination of sweat, mold and liniment. Scarne, who also belonged to health clubs and had carte blanch at N.Y.P.D. facilities, used this gym for catharsis, and penance for whenever he poisoned his body as he had the previous night.
An hour later, soaked in sweat but feeling almost human, he took the stairs two at a time and returned to his apartment. After a long shower and a shave, he ate a modest breakfast of orange juice, coffee and two poached eggs.
***
After stopping by his office to tell Noah and Evelyn what he’d be doing, Scarne took a cab to the address he had for Luke Willet on McClellan Street in the Bronx, which would have been a quick drive from Columbia. The address turned out to be a run-down three-story apartment building three blocks from the new Yankee Stadium. From the looks of McClellan Street, Scarne doubted if many of its residents ever attended a game at the stadium, where the cheapest tickets were more than $60 and the average ticket ran more than $500, despite the fact that the Yankees received $1.8 billion in taxpayer subsidies to build their new sports coliseum. Scarne was a Yankee fan, but that did not prevent him from feeling guilty about it.
The door to Willet’s building was next to a bodega. On the corner a group of men and boys stood outside a bar smoking. They all looked over when Scarne got out of the cab. Two of the men put their heads together, then shrugged. Scarne looked like a cop, but cops don’t take cabs. Everyone soon lost interest.
It did not appear to be the kind of neighborhood where finding a cab would be easy, so Scarne told his driver to wait. The turbaned man did not seem too happy with the idea, so Scarne gave him $20 “for your trouble”. He heard the taxi’s doors lock when he walked away. The buzzers in the small vestibule all had paper name tags. All the names appeared to be Spanish, except one that was blank for apartment 2C and appeared new. There was no “Willet”. Scarne started pressing buzzers until a woman’s metallic voice came through the speaker.
“Quién es? Qué quieres?”
Scarne’s Spanish was rudimentary, but he gave it a shot.
“Busco señor Willet. Lucas Willet.”
“Él movió.”
The man was at the movies? No, he moved, Scarne realized before he made an ass of himself.
“Where did he … I mean, dónde mueven?”
“No lo sé. Pregunte al superintendente. En la bodega.”
***
The man behind the counter in the bodega thankfully spoke English, and yes, he was the superintendent of the building next door. No, señor Willet does not live in 2C anymore.
“He move out last week.”
“Did he leave a forwarding address.”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Maybe with the landlord?”
“I am also the landlord.”
“You own this place, too?”
“Si.”
“How long did Willet live next door?”
“Oh, maybe two years. He taught at the college, you know?”
The man seemed proud that one of his tenants was apparent
ly a college professor. Scarne decided not to explain what an adjunct was.
“Yes, Columbia.”
The man looked confused.
“Not Columbia. Bronx Community College.”
Scarne did not correct him. No reason Willet couldn’t have more than one teaching gig. The apartment was conveniently located near both schools.
An elderly woman using a walker came in the bodega and bought some lottery tickets. They were probably the only sure way out of the neighborhood. When she left, Scarne held the door for her. He went back to the counter.
“You said he left recently. Was it sudden? Did he have a lease?”
“Why you asking about the professor? You a cop?”
“Private.”
“He in trouble?”
“Not that I know. But I’m trying to get a line on one of his students. Thought he might be able to help me.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. He had a two-year lease but that ran out couple months ago. So he stayed month-to-month. OK with me, but I told him that if I got someone who wanted a lease I’d ask him to leave. He said no problem. He was planning to leave the city soon anyway. Said he hoped to give me a month’s notice, but said if he had to go sooner, I could keep his security deposit.”
“So, he’s paid up through the end of the month.”
“Si.”
“No notice?”
“No, just stopped by to drop off the keys.”
“What about furniture?”
“Most of it is mine. He added some small stuff. Told me to sell it if I wanted. But I think I’ll leave it.”
Two boys who probably should have been in school walked into the store and started fingering items on shelves.
“Listen, that’s all I know,” the bodega owner said, eyeing the kids suspiciously. “Try the college. Willet may be there if he didn’t leave town. It’s open all year round.”
“Thanks.”
Scarne was halfway to the door when the man said, “Listen, you find him, maybe you ask him what I should do with the stuff he left.”
“What stuff?”
“Looks like mierde, crap, that was lying around. Papers, books, mostly. I put it in a box. Nothing to sell.”
“I’ll take it. Give it to him when I see him.”
The man looked cagey.
“I don’t know. It’s his, you know.”
“You just told me you were going to throw it out.”
“Still ….”
Scarne took out some bills.
“I’ll get the box,” the man said. “You keep an eye on those kids so they don’t steal me blind.”
He turned to the boys and pointed at Scarne.
“Ver a este hombre? Él es un policía. Con una pistola.”
As the man left, one of the boys grabbed his crotch and yelled after him, “Chuparme la polla, imbécil!”
Great, Scarne thought, I’ve just been assigned to bodega security. He took out his phone and called Bronx Community College. He asked for Luke Willet, explaining that he was probably an adjunct teaching English. Amazingly, he was switched to the right department. A very nice lady told him that Mr. Willet had called in sick and probably was not coming back to finish the semester. It was the answer Scarne was half expecting.
The bodega owner returned with a large box with an Amazon logo. Nothing in it looked particularly promising, but Scarne thanked him and left. As the door shut behind him, he could hear the man yelling at the two boys.
***
When Scarne got back to the office it was empty. Evelyn had asked for the afternoon off for a doctor’s appointment and there was a note from Noah, saying that he’d gotten a line on a possible love nest used by a man whose wife needed evidence in a divorce case. He would be staking it out. Scarne had a tuna sandwich sent up from a nearby deli and sat down to go through the contents of Willet’s box.
It was, as he expected, mostly junk: receipts and menus from various Chinese and Sri Lankan restaurants; solicitation letters to “resident”, some opened, some not, from insurance agents and financial planners; paper clips, pens and pencils; two old New Yorker magazines; a half-used box of tissues; an acrylic paperweight with a Columbia University logo, several notepads with both Columbia and Bronx Community College imprints, and three Clive Cussler paperbacks. Scarne, who liked Cussler’s nautical thrillers, didn’t recognize the titles, so after riffling through the pages to make sure there was nothing stuck between them or written in the margins, put them aside. He flipped through each notepad as well. All the pages were blank. Then he traced a pencil lightly across the first page of each pad. On TV or in the movies, detectives who did that always uncovered the impression of a phone number or a clue. As usual, Scarne didn’t, and, as usual, he felt like an idiot.
He left the solicitation letters for last, throwing the unopened ones in his trash bucket after making sure nothing was written on the outside. He scanned the opened fliers and one-by-one they also went into the trash. Then he started checking the envelopes they came in. One of them had a phone number written in pencil on its flap, with the name “Barry Hine” next to it. Scarne copied it down. All the other envelopes were pristine. He dumped everything but the paperbacks into his wastebasket and called the phone number he’d copied. He got a generic answering message. After the beep, he said, “My name is Jake Scarne. I’m a friend of Luke Willet. I need to speak to him. It is important.”
Scarne finished his sandwich and poured himself another cup of coffee. Then he called Regina Russell at Barnard. Her secretary, whose name he remembered as Shana, seemed happy to hear from him.
“I’ll put you right through, Mr. Scarne.”
The dean was in her office talking to the school Provost on the phone when Shana stuck her head in the door.
“You have a call,” Shana said.
Russell was surprised. She’d told Shana to hold her calls. But before she could say anything, Shana said, “It’s Jake Scarne. I’m putting him through.”
“Leslie, can I call you right back,” Russell said into the phone.
As soon as she hung up on the Provost, her phone buzzed.
“Mr. Scarne, how nice to hear from you. Have you made progress on what we talked about?”
“In a manner of speaking. But that is not why I called. I know it is short notice, but will you have dinner with me tonight?”
Russell did not know what to say. Not because she did not want to have dinner with Scarne, but because she was not sure how anxious she should be. As if understanding her reluctance, he sweetened the pot.
“We could talk about the case, if you like,” he said.
“Well, then, I will cancel my plans,” she said lamely. “Yes, dinner would be very nice.”
“Wonderful. How do you feel about Marchi’s? I haven’t been there in a while, but they rarely disappoint.”
“I love Marchi’s,” she said, “and it’s not far from my apartment. Walking distance, actually. I could meet you there.”
They agreed to meet at 7 PM.
Scarne looked at his watch. He’d have plenty of time to go home and get ready for his date with Regina Russell. He found himself very much looking forward to seeing her. His on-again-off-again relationship with Emma Shields, now immersed in basically running the Shields media empire, was mostly off. The other women he really cared about, Sharon Ross and Kate Ellenson (whose married name was Vallance, but since she was now a widow, Scarne always thought of her as he first knew her) lived far away, in Florida and Illinois, respectively. More recently, Scarne had confined himself to brief, and rather unsatisfactory, affairs with two well-off divorced women his firm represented. They were well-off primarily because of what Scarne discovered about their husbands, and were properly grateful.
He decided to put the now-empty Amazon box on Evelyn’s desk. Fastidious as she was, she never liked to throw anything out that could be stored, and liked small boxes for that purpose. Scarne, who had dumped Willet’s pens, pencils and other detritus in
the garbage, hoped Evelyn wouldn’t notice. But as he picked it up, it occurred to him that the box might not have belonged to the bodega owner. Maybe it was just lying around Willet’s apartment and came in handy.
Scarne looked at the shipping label, which said “Psychofreak”. That sounded like a video game. Maybe Willet was a gamer. But Scarne sat down at his laptop and Googled the word anyway.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said when the description came up on the screen.
“Psychofreak” was a trade name for a wet suit favored by expert scuba divers.
***
At Barnard, Shana was again standing at her boss’s door, laughing.
“I will cancel my plans! What? You won’t see any more Castle or N.C.I.S. reruns?”
Russell also laughed.
“I’ll have you know that it’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Now, I’ll have to catch tonight’s episode On Demand.”
CHAPTER 18 - REGINA
In his apartment, Scarne showered and changed into a light-weight, charcoal-gray, fresco-wool suit. He almost decided against wearing a tie with his raspberry-colored dress shirt but at the last moment threw on a paisley silk tie.
He got to Marchi’s with 20 minutes to spare and was sitting at the bar arguing the relative merits of vodka and gin martinis with a young couple from White Plains when Regina Russell came through the front door. He was glad he opted for the tie because she was dressed to the nines, in a sleeveless blue cocktail dress with a flowered lace overlay. On her feet were a pair of two-strap high heels. She wore no jewelry except a pair of pearl-and-sapphire drop earrings. She walked over to Scarne and held out her hand as he stood.
“You look terrific,” he said, realizing that they had dressed up for each other.
“I’ll say,” the woman next to Scarne said.
He introduced Regina to the young couple, and asked Regina what she wanted to drink.
“Perfect Manhattan, with Jack Daniels, please.”
Another plus in her favor, Scarne thought, as the women started chatting about clothes. The other man rolled his eyes at Scarne and said, “How about them Knicks?”
FACETS (JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS Book 6) Page 12
