“It does.”
“Have a car waiting for me at LaGuardia in three hours.” Spocatti gave him the flight number. “We’ll discuss any further details later. Oh, and can you do me one little favor?” he asked. “Just the one?”
“What’s that?”
“This Russian bullshit of yours is growing old. I want to hear Iver. Can you go back to your sheep roots and give me a taste of Iver Kester, but without the cheese? I want to hear what the real Iver sounds like. The one who is willing to murder his family, especially his mother. It will give me insight into who I’m really dealing with.”
Katzev severed the connection and wired the money.
CHAPTER TW
ENTY-TWO
In his townhouse on 118 East Sixty-First Street, James Gelling was seated at a desk in his parlor, a telephone at his ear, listening. When there was a break in the conversation, which he considered long-since finished, he said, “Thank you, Bonzie. This time you were helpful. It won’t go unnoticed. As soon as I hear anything about either stock, and I expect to hear something soon, I’ll be sure to give you a call and share the information before the market opens in exchange for your kindness. No, no. I don’t do suppers anymore. I can barely swallow. And I’m in a fucking wheelchair, Bonzie. You know that. I’m one-hundred-and-three years old. These days, I can manage broth and tea, but not always the former if it has too much salt, which causes my throat to seize up. It’s hell being me. Good-bye.”
He hung up the telephone, wrote a few notes with one of his arthritic hands and then tried to read what he’d written through the haze of his milky green eyes. The test was simple. If he could read his handwriting, which he could, but just barely, then others could.
He had two more telephone calls to make and his job would be complete.
“Frank,” he said. “I need Piggy French’s telephone number. She has homes in Paris and in New York. I hear she’s in New York now. I can’t read the book that contains all of my numbers in it, but I know her numbers are there. Would you mind finding her New York number for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Frank, who was so tall, it fascinated Gelling, took Gelling’s private book that he kept locked in a safe and fanned through it. “Piggy French, you said?”
“Awful name, but that’s what I said. They saddled her with it at Vassar, because when she first arrived at school, she was a bit too fat for that crowd. When she lost the weight in a matter of months and became svelte, she decided to keep the name as a reminder of not to gain it back and also not to bow to her bullies. When her transformation was complete, a beautiful girl was revealed. She and her name became chic. The irony! But then everything went to hell for her when she married and divorced and became a drunk of the highest order. This is the sort of useless information I’m filled with.”
Frank gave Gelling her number and Gelling, in the meantime, tried to read the time on the watch stitched into Frank’s eyepatch. Not great, but he did have some time left. “Would you like me to dial it for you?” Frank said.
“That would be helpful, Frank. My fingers are like pretzels. Here. Give me the receiver. At least I can hold it.”
Within a few moments, he was speaking to Piggy French.
“Piggy,” he said. “It’s James Gelling. How are you?”
“Right now, a little drunk, James. Peter left me.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Probably for the best.”
“Was is the drink?”
“Was it the what?”
“What it the drugs?”
“Was it the what?”
“Never mind. I assume—”
“Don’t worry. This time, I had an air-tight pre-nup. What’s left of Daddy’s money is safe. I learned all about that after Dick left me.”
“Why did Dick leave you again?”
“He called me a ‘cunt’ at Maisie Van Prout’s swank dinner party for that sheik everyone loves. Whatshisname Quelquechose. Can’t remember right now. But I remember the scene as if it were stamped on vellum. Can you imagine? That language hurled at me in front of the sheik and everyone else at the table, which included the legendary Broadway actress, Eve Darling? When that prick left the room, I excused myself and immediately stuck my nose in some peonies Maisie had arranged in a vase in her living room. I just breathed them in. The scent calms me. So sweet. When he took me to court and got his ten million, I did it again at my own house. Stuck my nose straight in a vase filled with my own peonies. They didn’t work as well that time, probably because losing ten million to a bastard like Dick Weatherbee is worse than being called a ‘cunt’ by him in front of a popular sheik and a Broadway legend who was in the bathroom snorting coke throughout the evening.”
She was slurring her words. “What are you drinking, Piggy?”
“Little bit of everything.”
“Pills?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t do the pills.”
“I loved him, Jamesie.”
“You’ll feel different in a week. You need to focus on that. You need to think, ‘rebirth.’ Get through the week and you’ll see things differently.”
“A week will feel like a year. A lifetime!”
“No, it won’t. And don’t get all hysterical on me. I’m too old for it. I need you to do this.”
“OK.”
“And as long as I’m still here, which could end at any point, as in minutes—seconds!—I’m available if you need to talk.”
“OK.”
“Piggy, I hate to call you when you’re so down, but I need some information.”
“OK.”
“You know I’m discrete.”
“It’s why I love you. And why I confide in you. Everyone confides in you. Some still think you’re still a practicing shrink.”
He hated the word ‘shrink,’ but he went with it because she was in no condition to be corrected. “Sometimes, I think I still am. But I’m not, though my ethics have remained when it comes to honoring that profession. My lips are tighter than a priest’s, which isn’t saying much these days. Let’s just say they’re tighter.”
“You’ve got a filthy mind and I love you for it. What do you want to know, Jamesie?”
He hated it when she called him ‘Jamesie,’ but now was not the time to ask her to call him “James” or even “Gelling.” He needed information from her, so he just went with it. “You and I both know that you had Dick Weatherbee dealt with. You told me so yourself in one of our many unplanned sessions.”
There was a silence. “I don’t, uh, remember that. Was I drunk when I told you?”
“Sloshed. You were on the floor of your room at the Ritz Carlton in Paris and called me about an hour after it happened. You said you had crackers, good vodka and cheap potato chips all around you. You said you were on a binge.”
“Jesus.”
She said it like, “Hey-Zeus,” which surprised him. “Piggy, are you part-Hispanic?”
“No, no. I just love the Romance languages. I use them often.”
“Anyway, your secret has and always will be safe with me. But I seem to remember that you mentioned a woman’s name in connection with the whole thing. It was Greek. Do you remember her name?”
Piggy said nothing.
“Now’s not the time to go all quiet, Piggy.”
“OK.”
“If I read you the list of names I have in front of me, would you recall the name you used to off Dick?”
“What’s this about, Jamesie?”
“It has nothing to do with you. I promise you that. I’m investigating a syndicate, which you mentioned to me that night when you were drunk and eating cheap potato chips at the Ritz. You said they were instrumental in bringing down Dick. I just need her name because I’m being threatened by her through them and I need to have her handled, if she’s who I think she is.”
“Why are you being threatened? You’re an angel.”
She said “angel” like “an-hell.”
“OK. But you are an angel.”
“Apparently, someone feels otherwise.”
“Who do you think it is?”
“I have it narrowed down to three names. I know she belongs to that syndicate. Does the syndicate ring a bell?”
“Right now, bells are clanging all around me, Jamesie. Let’s just cut to the chase and quit the guessing games. I want to help. This list of yours. I’m assuming Hera Hallas’s name is on it? The Greek shipping heiress? The one I went to for...uh, you know...assistance?”
“She is.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences, Jamesie. Why are you in trouble?”
“I have no idea, but now I can find out. I can threaten her with exposure. I owe you one, Piggy.”
“If it gets bad, this thing with me and Peter, who left me with that cruel look on his face and that hateful barb I refuse to repeat because it’s beneath me, I might need to call you a few times. Talk things through. Clear my head. Is that OK?”
“Did he also call you a ‘cunt’?”
“He said it four times. Is that what I am, Jamesie? Am I really that? Two men have called me that now. Two men! And then guess what he said? He said that word wasn’t even low enough to describe the monster I am.”
“You’re no monster,” he said. “And, yes, call me. Just not when I’m sleeping. At my age, I might be having my final rest, which I’d rather like to enjoy. Call late mornings or afternoons. We’ll see if I’m still around. At my age, it could be lights out at any point, Piggy. I could drop dead after this phone call.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.”
“I can’t bear it.”
“You’ve got to face it sometime.”
“Not that.”
“And Piggy,” he said.
“Oui?”
“Ne prenez pas les comprimés.”
“What?”
“Don’t take the pills.”
CHAPTER TWEN
TY-THREE
“Frank,” Gelling said. “Would you help me find another number. Yes? Sims Cliveden. This will be the last one. No time for others. Sims will know what I need to know because I happen to know he didn’t kill his mistress himself, all those years ago, on that awful night is Sagaponack, when it happened by a hand that wasn’t his. He’s a coward. He hired it out. Guilt brought him here one evening and he told me all about it in such a gushing, blubbering rush, I think he thought I could offer him atonement. All I could do was listen and not judge, which is what I do best. But what I remembered earlier today while thinking about this syndicate angle I’m pursuing was being confused at the time of Sims’s breakdown because it was the first time I heard mention of the syndicate, which he talked about. Sims used them. He must have. And it has to be the syndicate we’re after. I mean, how many syndicates are there?”
He looked at Frank as the man raised an eyebrow and then he held up his frail hand as far as he could lift it, which wasn’t far, given the arthritis that had consumed it. “Don’t answer. You’re a former Marine chock-full of intelligence and it might ruin this for me. Here’s the book. You’ll find his number in there.”
“Would you like me to dial again for you, sir?”
“That would be great, Frank. You know I can’t see shit. And I’ve got pretzels for fingers. Sometimes I’m surprised when I whizz around this joint in my wheelchair that I don’t crash into things.”
“Sometimes, I worry about that, sir.”
“Don’t. I know every nook. Every cranny. It’s my racing track and it’s my escape.”
“Here’s the number.”
“Perfect. You know, Frank, once this is finished, I’ll have all of the names of those who comprise the syndicate. Or at least a good deal of those names. There’s likely more, but this is a good start and if Carmen uses the list correctly, which she will, it will rattle the cages. And then we’ll see what Illarion Katzev does then. I’m giving the list to her and I know she must have it soon, so time is of the essence. I must get these names to her. Beyond helping her, I think this Katzev person will piss in his kilt when he finds out about the list because he’ll know that when it’s in Carmen’s hands, it’s a game-changer.”
He saw the confused look that crossed Frank’s usually stoic face and explained. “Katzev was born Iver Kester on a second-rate Aberdeen sheep farm before he turned Ruskie, hooked a flight to the States and started watching too many American mafia movies, the lot of which informed who he is today. He’s a Scot through and through, but he’d deny it in a minute. An old acquaintance once told me that he spent years with a personal tutor, who taught him how to speak perfect, fluent Russian, and also how to speak English as if his native language was Russian. Who thinks like that? If I was younger and still publishing for the journals, I’d write a case study on him in a second.”
He looked up at Frank’s bum eye, checked the time on the sapphire-colored watch that gleamed there, then switched to the other eye to be polite. “This has been invigorating. All this sleuthing. Thank heavens I once treated so many wealthy, murdering swells. It’s exciting. You realize, this might have even bought me another year. I can feel my heart beating like a young man’s again. Can you read my handwriting here?”
He showed Frank the piece of paper with the list of names, addresses and other information.
“I can.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Perfect. Let me talk to Sims and remind him what I know about him and his mistress. He’ll talk. Like Piggy French, Sims Cliveden always talks. The good news is that you just don’t need him to be drunk or on pills to do so.”
* * *
Later, Sims Cliveden of the Pittsburgh Clivedens, told Gelling the name of the person Sims used to knock off his mistress, Jacqueline, nine years ago, before she came through with her threat of causing trouble between Sims and his wife of twenty-three years, Florette.
Gelling knew the story because at the time of Jacqueline’s death, Sims was his client and, guilt-ridden Catholic that he was, he blushed when he told him everything during one of their sessions.
Gelling went to his files and found his old notes. The man Sims used was named Conrad Bates. For some reason, the name was familiar to Gelling—he sensed there was a Northeast connection—though he didn’t know why and it certainly didn’t matter now.
What mattered is that he had compiled eight names, and while he doubted that covered all who belonged to the syndicate, it was plenty to arm Carmen with the information she needed to disarm Katzev now.
He read the list over again and, with pride, he placed it back on the desk. In a moment, he’d call Carmen with the information and have her come pick it up. This was her trump card against Katzev and the syndicate. And he’d made it happen.
Even at my age, he thought with a thrill.
In a whirring rush, he backed away from his desk in his electric wheelchair and looked around the room for Frank, who must have left either to use the bathroom or to grab himself something to eat.
Leave him alone, he thought to himself, a whiff of an idea already forming. Opportunity knocks.
Five months after his ninety-sixth birthday, James Gelling was told by doctors that he’d never walk again. His hips, replaced twenty years earlier, had worn out, as had his replaced knees, which now locked whenever he went up or down stairs.
He wanted to undergo surgery to replace his hips and his knees, but due to his age, his doctor warned him against it. “It’s unlikely that you’ll make it,” the woman said. “It’s too risky.”
“Why?” Gelling asked.
“You know why.”
“The gas?” he said.
“That’s right,” she said. “The gas. And also your age. You’re not young anymore, James. It’ll be too much for your body to handle, especially given the length of the surgery. It will kill you. You know that. Unless I’m misreading you, I don’t think you want t
hat to happen.”
“You don’t know what I want.” He paused as a sense of defeat overcame him. He wanted a normal life. He wanted to continue his practice, but she also asked him to end it because he needed his rest. The idea infuriated him. She was taking away everything that mattered to him. “Are you suggesting I spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair until death carries me out of it?” he asked.
“What I’m giving you is my best advice,” she said. “And, no, that’s not what I’m suggesting. With assistance, you still can have a meaningful life. What you need to figure out is what that life will be in your current situation.”
He remembered looking out a window and losing himself in the rainy gray gloom of the Manhattan skyline.
“I’ve started to shit my pants,” he said in a distance voice. “I haven’t told you about that. I wear a diaper now, which I can’t change myself, so there’s the added humiliation that someone has to change it for me and wipe my ass because I’ve become incontinent. The man who does it is Frank. He’s a gem. A great guy, former Marine, taller than is genetically possible, though he has only one eye and I’m dying to see what’s beneath the patch. He won’t show me. Probably humiliated. Obviously, embarrassed. I get it. What I love about him is that he’s an eccentric. He has a watch stitched into the front of his patch. Can you imagine? I think he does it to put people off—they don’t know where to look when they address him. I know I’m lucky to have him, but I want to walk again. I don’t want to be in a fucking wheelchair.”
From Manhattan With Revenge Boxed Set Page 19
