Forgive Me: A Xanadu Marx Thriller

by Joshua Corin

  Konquist pulled over beside a meter and shifted into park. The engine shut off, but the thumping of the rain on the roof continued, turning it into a steel drum.

  “Hello, Mrs. McCormick, this is Detective Konquist. It’s good to hear from you. How’s the City of Light?”

  “It’s…nice.”

  What had prompted her to call? She sounded off, but that could be anything.

  “Anyway, so, I wanted to tell you…I remembered another name from the list.”

  Konquist and Chau shared a glance that was equal parts surprise and disbelief.

  “What’s the name, Mrs. McCormick?”

  “Jorge Samorrasa.”

  Chau took out his phone and opened his notepad app. “Can you spell that, please?”

  “J-o-r-g-e. S-a-m-o-r-r-a-s-a.”

  “This is great, Mrs. McCormick,” replied Konquist. “You’ve been such a help. How’s your husband doing?”

  “He’s…we’re good. Tired. It’s almost eight A.M. But I thought you’d want to, um, know this information as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you,” Detective Chau said.

  “Well anyway, I should, you know…if I remember anything else, I’ll call…”

  “Oh, before you go, Mrs. McCormick, remind us again which hotel you’re staying at? We’re going to need it for the report.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “Yes, please.”

  More silence.

  “The Hotel Zola.”

  “Right, right. I think Officer Hoyt mentioned that to us. He’s the one who drove you to the airport, didn’t he? He was one of the guys who interviewed you in your hotel room the other night. He left his gum in the trash can—”

  “Oh! Yes. He offered me and Scott some gum when we arrived at the airport.”

  “Always good to chew gum on an airplane,” Konquist remarked. “It helps with the air pressure in the ears. Gosh, I wish Officer Hoyt were here. I could ask him this myself. When he drove you to the airport, no one else was with him, right?”

  “Just the other guy,” answered Crystal. “He stayed in the car.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “His…what do you mean? Don’t you know it?”

  Konquist cringed. Damn it.

  “Oh sure, sure,” he said. “I’m just terrible with names. I’ll check Officer Hoyt’s report.”

  “Anyway, I really should go. I’ll call if I remember anything else.”

  “Au revoir, Mrs. McCormick.”

  End of call.

  And then, immediately after, another phone call. It was their LT.

  “Hey, boss,” said Detective Chau. “You’re on speaker with me and Abe.”

  “We’ve found the McCormicks,” LT told them. He was obviously ecstatic. “You know how we’ve got Meadow cross-checking all flights leaving Atlanta for Paris? She got a hit. It’s them. British Airways Flight 77 arriving at five thirty local time.”

  “That’s…great.”

  “Why don’t you sound excited?”

  Chau and Konquist took turns informing him why they weren’t excited.

  When they were through, LT hummed for a moment and then followed up with, “I had one highlight today, gentlemen. One.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “And tell me again why you fine detectives didn’t ask for a physical description of the guy who was with Officer Hoyt?”

  “Mrs. McCormick assumed we authorized her transfer to the airport,” explained Chau. “If we prodded her for a physical description, she would’ve gotten suspicious and then she would’ve gotten worried.”

  “Maybe she should be suspicious and worried,” Konquist said. “I know I am.”

  “Because of this name she conveniently provided you out of the blue?”

  “She remembered Xanadu Marx,” Chau pointed out.

  “Yeah, I think we need to see where the name ‘Jorge Samorrasa’ leads us. I’ll feed it to the feebs. Have them chase it awhile. What did you get on the other disappearing couple?”

  “We’re at the hotel now.”

  “Yeah, OK. Keep me posted. In the meantime, I guess it’s time to have the unit that’s been house-sitting Officer Hoyt bring him in.”

  Konquist spoke up, “Boss, I also think we should get the French police to check up on the McCormicks.”

  “Yeah, OK. You know, I had one highlight today. One.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  End of call.

  Konquist and Chau trotted through the rain toward the Peachtree Marriott’s spacious front awning. They identified themselves at the front desk and the on-duty manager met them in her office. She already had a printout of the Van Dykes’ information on her desk and handed it to them as soon as they sat.

  Friedrich and Alice Van Dyke had paid for their room in cash. There had been no corporate discount. The address they had listed put them in Clearwater, Florida. Their emergency contact was an Irving Sikitis. For shits and giggles, Chau dialed the number.

  “Domino’s Pizza!” greeted a male voice on the other line.

  Of course.

  “There wouldn’t be an Irving Sikitis there,” inquired Chau, “would there?”

  “Nope, but would you like to try our cheesy bread?”

  Nope.

  The on-duty manager then led them to another room so they could watch some of the security feed. They already had perused the pertinent portions of the feed during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but that was when they had been searching for sightings of Phillip Wilkerson and Father Dacy. Now they were on the hunt for the Van Dykes.

  With the help of the hotel’s chief of security, an Afro-peaked chap named Durrell, they located the Van Dykes descending in an elevator at 7:18 A.M. The pair did not appear especially hurried; in fact, at one point, Alice Van Dyke—or whatever her name was—yawned quite aggressively. The security feed didn’t offer audio, as per surveillance laws, but even if it had, the Van Dykes did not speak, not to each other, not to anyone in the lobby when they finally emerged from the elevator, and not even to the blonde in the VW Bug idling in front of the hotel. The blonde exchanged her position in the driver’s seat with Friedrich. Alice took the passenger position. The blonde then strolled away up the sidewalk, head down and face hidden, until she exited the view of the camera.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. and Mrs. Van Dyke,” Konquist chirped, while his partner jotted down its Georgia license plate into his phone. What had been a setback, the vanishing of the Van Dykes, had flowered into a new lead. Maybe this case wasn’t so deplorable.

  Konquist and Chau thanked Chief Durrell for his assistance and returned to their car. Chau called in the plate while Konquist hurried across the street and picked up two cupcakes to celebrate their potential win. They ate the cupcakes in their car, in the rain. The only sounds were the pitter-patter of raindrops on their roof and the grunts and moans of delight from Detective K and Detective C as the giant cupcakes—red velvet and vanilla creme, respectively—were devoured.

  Next on the agenda: Find out who tipped off Phillip Wilkerson. Wilkerson’s personal secretary back in Portland had forwarded his boss’s calendar for the past three months. On the day in question, the late broker had arrived in Atlanta at 3:30 P.M. He had flown first class. He had a scheduled dinner at 5:15 P.M. at the Marietta Diner with someone named Mc. and then nothing else until the following morning, when he would be attending the convention for which he had flown in.

  Detective Chau had emailed the secretary back with one question: “Who is Mc.?”

  And this was the secretary’s reply:

  “Mc. is a longtime friend of Mr. Wilkerson’s who lives in Atlanta. Full name is Ross Berman.”

  The secretary then went on to list Ross Berman’s phone number and address, and it was that address to which Detective Konquist and Detective Chau were now headed.

  Chapter 23

  Ross Berman was lying on his couch, staring up at a water stain on his stucco ceiling, staring up into, h
oping to be sucked into, hoping to disappear. The stain was a brown blemish against an endless span of white that constituted the heavens of his studio apartment. The stain was a dark aberration. It was currently his most favorite thing in the whole wide world.

  But then his buzzer sounded and he had to shut down his imagination and, oh joy, let reality go another fifteen rounds with his existence. He pressed the button on the intercom to unlock the apartment door. Ross didn’t need to ask who it was. He knew who it was. She had told him she would be back this evening and it was this evening, quite late in the evening, and now she was back.

  After peeling out of the parking lot of the Airport Motel, they had stopped at a Waffle House for a late lunch. All Ross ate were the ice cubes in his water, but Jessabelle ate enough for the both of them. Chicken fried steak, waffles, two scrambled eggs, and a slice of peach pie for dessert. She was pregnant, she explained, with Baby #3. Ten weeks. Could he tell? She stood up and posed for him, but her jumpsuit only suggested the curves underneath, and no curve whatsoever at her midsection. Strangely disappointed, she sat back down and forklifted another bite of pie.

  “Who’s the father?” asked Ross as dispassionately as he could muster, which came across pouty and sullen.

  “Well, now, not to be rude, but that’s none of your business.”

  “Do you love him?”

  Jessabelle put down her fork, took out a bundle of cash, and left it on the table. She then gave herself one more bite of peach pie before excusing herself to go to the restroom.

  Ross took out his car keys from his pocket. How easy it would be to leave her here, at this greasy spoon in the depopulated dregs of the airport. How easy and how right. She deserved nothing less. She deserved more. This woman. This…bitch. How could he ever have felt anything positive for such a selfish, manipulative creature? Had he been that desperate?

  Yes, he had been that desperate.

  But he knew better now.

  Run, Ross, run.

  And abandon a pregnant woman?

  No. He was better than that. He was better than her. He would take the high road.

  In the meantime, he finished off the rest of her peach pie.

  When Jessabelle finally returned, she noticed her plate was empty and she smiled. As if she had been expecting it. As if she was proud of him. She paid the bill and they hopped in his station wagon.

  “Back to the motel?” asked Ross.

  “No. That ship has sailed. Take me back to the city.”

  He drove her back to midtown. He assumed she meant the Peachtree Marriott, but instead, she directed him into Buckhead and the parking garage adjacent to the office building in which could be found a suite of offices belonging to the Serendipity Group—and Ross obeyed. The past twelve hours had conspired to bring him here, and here he was. He turned off the car but kept his hands on the wheel. He wasn’t scared. Well, not any more scared than he had been. He was resigned. Yes, that was the word. He felt resigned.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  Jessabelle lowered her sun visor and adjusted her hair in the mirror. “I’m troubled, Ross. I have troubles. Our client is dead. He flew in from Haiti and now he is dead. Murdered. Don’t get me wrong. His blood is not on my hands. It’s on your friend Phillip’s hands. It’s on your hands, Ross. We were only trying to help him out. We’re altruists. You got him killed. You got both of them killed. But what troubles me most of all, Ross, is this list.”

  “What list?”

  “Shh. Please. Ross. I want to skip the evasions. Can we? I think I might be getting a migraine. We know you gave your friend a list of names and we know at least some of the names on the list match up with our internal records and we need to know how you obtained this list, Ross. Tell me how you obtained the list. Please.”

  She turned to Ross and cocked an eyebrow. Her lips formed a wet pout.

  And Ross realized suddenly, triumphantly, that he had leverage.

  Never mind how she knew he had obtained the list at all. She needed to know—they needed to know—how he’d obtained the list. They needed to know how vulnerable they were. They probably had people scrambling around, shredding documents and erasing file servers. They needed to know how he had penetrated their defenses, learned their secrets. But most important, oh-so-important, they needed to know who might have helped him. If he had acted alone, that would have been a relatively simple fix and he already would be dead, but they knew he lacked the necessary skills to hack into their mainframe.

  Their fear, he realized, was that these hackers, whoever they were, had also seen the list, and that they knew what it portended.

  “You want to know how I obtained the list?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  She blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “I said I’ll think about it,” Ross repeated. “Now get out.”

  She didn’t get out.

  “I’m not kidding, Jessabelle.”

  “This hostility doesn’t suit you.”

  “You saw me beat a guy nearly to death!”

  “Yes, but that was him. This is me.”

  “Get out.”

  “I want to warn you. I have Mace in my pocketbook. I carry it with me at all times. And a switchblade.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a woman living in a world of men.”

  “Get out,” he repeated, but quieter now. Pleading.

  And so she did.

  “We’ll give you eight hours,” she said. “And then we’re going to find you.”

  “And then I’ll either tell you what you want to know…or I won’t.”

  She shut the car door and walked away and Ross watched her go.

  A pleasant sight, for so many reasons.

  He spent the rest of the rainy day feeling better than he had since…since last spring in Piedmont Park when he first fell victim to Jessabelle’s charms. He wasn’t expected back at work—after all, his best friend had died—so now the question was what to do. He considered a brisk walk through the park, for old time’s sake, but then rejected that idea. More rain was in the forecast. So instead, after a stop at Chick-fil-A to sate his returned appetite, Ross whiled away the afternoon hours at the midtown branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library. He found a novel of psychedelic fantasy by Michael Moorcock, sat cross-legged in a quiet corner by the oversized art books, where solitude was nearly always guaranteed, and disappeared.

  Continuing the theme of spoiling himself, Ross paid top dollar and scarfed down a plate of sashimi at a noodle house two streets over. Neither the rain nor the traffic, exacerbated by the rain, rankled him. He trucked home and he changed into a sweatshirt and sweatpants—just for Jessabelle—and he fell into his sofa and he waited for the intercom to buzz.

  Would he spill his secret to her?

  Maybe.

  Oh, if only Phillip had witnessed Ross stringing her along in the car. “I’ll think about it.” Ha! Phillip would have been so, so proud. And maybe he had witnessed it. Plenty of people believed in the afterlife. Maybe Phillip was right now up in heaven, gazing down and—no, strike that. Heaven? Hardly. If there were an afterlife, after all, then Phillip would not be in heaven. No, sir. No, ma’am.

  But he still might be watching.

  And he still might be proud.

  If Phillip were here, Ross knew what advice he’d give: Everything has its price. But how much was this tidbit worth? It wasn’t only admitting to a hack. She would want to know the identity of the hacker. Ross would have to, quite literally, sell away the safety of another person. Sure, this person wasn’t exactly a friend, but who knew what sort of retaliation Jessabelle and her gang might perpetrate? To have another murder on his conscience? No, no.

  But if he said no, the next murder might be his own, retaliation and all that.

  Maybe Jessabelle would be arriving here with friends.

  Ross’s euphoria was gone. This was the hangover. He fixated on the water stain on
the ceiling above him. It had been there for a few months now. He had notified the super when he had first spotted it, but what if it had always been there and he’d only noticed it a few months ago? It wasn’t as if he checked out the ceiling during his initial walk-through. And yet there was something beautiful about it, in its own way. Shapeless, dun. Ugly. Imperfect. He wanted to caress it. Stucco was coarse. Would it be soft? Would it be wet? Would it be—

  His intercom buzzed.

  So be it.

  He’d let them come up. Can’t fight the inevitable. That was what made it inevitable. He would tell them what they needed to know. He always was going to, in the end, wasn’t he?

  Knock, knock, knock.

  He rolled off the couch and to his feet.

  If there was an afterlife, then there had to be a God. Thanks a lot, God.

  He opened the door.

  “Ross Berman? My name is Victor Chau. I’m a detective with the Atlanta Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Konquist. We saw your light was on. Do you mind if we come in and ask you a few questions?”

  Chapter 24

  They were standing on Ross’s meager back porch, so meager in fact that Konquist had to remain on the threshold. They were standing out there, under a limp roof, at Ross’s insistence. Two minutes into their mild Q & A and the man needed some air. Well, his best friend had died, so there was that. And some people just got squirrelly in the presence of cops.

  Nevertheless.

  “Mr. Berman, you’re telling us that your friend Phillip, a man worth more money than, frankly, I can count, flew across the country and his special dinner with his oldest friend was at…the Marietta Diner?”

  Ross nodded, avoided eye contact. “Yes, sir.”