The Chessman

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  The two green eyeshades had been introduced to Hartzell, with a few chuckles from the no-named guest who was now running his life, as Smith and Jones. Smith and Jones stayed in his guest room, shared meals with him, came to work with him and, in other words, were on Hartzell like a fourth layer of skin. The three made the best of a bad situation and the two bean counters were plainly in awe of what Hartzell had accomplished.

  “Just think of me as the Coordinator,” the talking man with no name had told Hartzell that night of their arrival. Now, he stopped by every day or two, like today, and had a private chat with Hartzell, made sure all the gears were properly lubricated and that everything was running friction free. The Hartzells had been informed at the end of that first night that St. Nick’s project would be Lucy. That sometimes the pretty lady would see St. Nick, perhaps on a street corner or by the escalator at, say, Macy’s, or in the hallway at Juilliard. And although he’d always be around, most of the time she wouldn’t spot him. And as long as Lucy’s father played ball, St. Nick would never lay a hand on her. As for the phantom with the razor, Hartzell would never see him again unless Hartzell did something to displease the Coordinator, and then it’d be the last time Hartzell would ever see the phantom…or anything else, for that matter.

  As for Lucy on that night of utter bleakness, St. Nick’s demeanor had turned on a dime from arch tormentor to that of a clinging nursemaid. He’d gotten an ice pack for her forehead and mouth, made a quick call from his cell phone, and ten minutes later a short man with raccoon eyes and a doctor’s bag right out of a late 1950s Naked City episode was buzzed up to their high-rise unit. Raccoon Eyes shined a light in Lucy’s eyes for a minute, checked and cleaned her other wounds and bruises, gave her enough Vicodin for five days, told her to get a lot of rest and that even though there’d be pain for several days, as if she’d been bumped about in a car accident, there was nothing life-threatening or permanent. She’d be fine in a week.

  Hartzell bent heaven and earth to return The AlPenny Group’s original investment in its entirety, along with the strongly advised twenty-five mil in interest—a shenanigans’ fee, per the unnamed Coordinator sitting at Hartzell’s dining room table and reading the New York Times as if he owned the place. And, quite literally, The AlPenny Group did indeed now own Hartzell’s Manhattan condo. That sale had closed at the beginning of week two; they got it at a steal. The deed for Andrew Pierson’s Tuscany villa and vineyard had been transferred earlier this week. The Coordinator had been the perfect gentleman since the incident between Lucy and the tempered glass, but certain requests for additional nourishment with which to feed the insatiable beast were periodically delivered with a sly smile indicating that there’d be no negotiations. All closing transactions had gone smoothly—that is, except for the seller’s remorse on Hartzell’s part—largely due to the fact that no actual funds had changed hands.

  So Hartzell fought a rear-guard strategy, relinquishing the Tuscany assets as that property had already been tainted by the Chicagoans’ knowledge of his forged Pierson passport. Uncle Sam would have eventually seized Hartzell’s Manhattan throne in any case, so losing it wasn’t that bitter a pill for him to swallow. In fact, his unnamed companion, currently perusing the Sports section, had informed him that Hartzell morally and psychologically owed the penthouse apartment to Young Master Crenna, as it would help the kid get past his deep heartache over Lucy’s betrayal. The kid must have had one hell of a broken heart, Hartzell thought as he signed off on the paperwork in triplicate.

  Hartzell grumbled loudly, mostly for the benefit of Smith and Jones, over every shiny bauble he was forced to relinquish to the hungry Chicago swine, doing his damndest to make the trio believe the shakedown had done infinitely more than scratch the surface of the Drake Hartzell Empire. However, inroads with the Coordinator were all dead ends, as the more Hartzell groused about his losses the more the Coordinator would grin sheepishly and shake his head. The Coordinator wasn’t buying it.

  It became apparent to Hartzell early on that Smith and Jones—Vince and David, as they eventually shared their possibly authentic first names with him over breakfast bagels, what with living with him and all—weren’t merely mining his great knowledge of the financial markets, but also attempting to gauge how big a stack of gold old King Drake was perched upon. Hartzell felt like Penelope staving off the suitors in Homer’s Odyssey. Only in his case he didn’t undo the weave of a burial shroud each night, but rather used every sleight of hand in his arsenal to convince his particular suitors that more—much more—had been paid out to investors over the years and that he truly was a softy when it came to charity, with a great deal of currency being distributed to a wide-ranging list of worthwhile causes.

  And it was in filtering through his past charity work that Hartzell came across the name of that endlessly ravenous beast in Chicago, the man behind the curtain. He remembered Boy Crenna mentioning something about his dear cancer-surviving auntie, whom Hartzell may or may not have met at that now regrettable event he’d attended in the Windy City a few years back. Boy Crenna had referenced her as “Aunt Nora.” Amazing what a person could find on Google, right at your fingertips, truly an information superhighway. Hartzell was quickly able to find a most pleasant puff piece on the cancer event that night at the Belden Stratford. There was only one woman on the planning board for that fundraiser named Nora: Nora Fiorella.

  Hartzell next Googled Nora Fiorella’s name crossed with breast cancer awareness. His Internet search resulted in numerous hits of both her and her husband as sponsors-slash-donors for a variety of cancer research and fundraising to-dos. Her last name sounded slightly familiar and, peering at her online picture in one of the articles, he had a vague recollection of not only meeting Mrs. Nora Fiorella that night but also pressing flesh with her stocky barrel-chest of a husband. Hartzell didn’t recall the conversation from that evening and knew that on his end he would have mumbled the established template, perfected for such events, with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips and a heavy dose of ersatz empathy for the cause-du-jour.

  In fact, something about the Fiorella name had sounded hazily familiar at the time of the event, even though he’d not done any work directly with Boy Crenna’s dear auntie. Hartzell recalled pausing during the introductions, sifting through his memory as though trying to summon up the name of a forgotten stage actor or long-retired senator. The moment had been fleeting and then Hartzell moved on to meet and greet the next set of deep pockets with his prefab template.

  With mounting trepidation Hartzell cut and pasted the husband’s name into the search engine and smacked the Enter key. Crenna Sr. was a front, the Coordinator had admitted as much. Within five minutes of reading articles from his search results Hartzell discovered the true depth of what he was up against, and he now had a face as well as the identity of the starving creature he’d been feeding his assets to these past few weeks.

  Duilio “Leo” Fiorella.

  There wasn’t much meat in any of the Googled newspaper articles, but there were enough “alleged” this and “flimsy indictment” that and a federal witness’s testimony “recanted” over there and another “missing” witness here for Hartzell to read between the lines. What Hartzell found there sent a chill through to his bone marrow. One Sun-Times article provided great insight into a civil rights PR group that Duilio Fiorella had created to specifically apply pressure via political coercion, slap lawsuits, or in some cases even transporting a parade of union goons to picket and intimidate the offending party whenever anything besmirching regarding the Fiorella family appeared in the local media. All under the politically correct guise of these minor slights being discriminatory or anti-Italian in nature.

  Brilliant, Hartzell thought; Duilio “Leo” Fiorella was one cagey son of a bitch, likely a job necessity if one was seeking to direct organized crime in the most corrupt city in the nation. No wonder Boy Crenna was so cocksure of himself. It worked wonders for your selfesteem if your uncle h
appened to oversee the Midwest branch of La Cosa Nostra. Evidently, the Mack truck known as St. Nick had been dead right—Hartzell had really stuck his dick in it.

  Hartzell didn’t trust the phones at home or in his office anymore, figured the lines were tapped and frankly assumed everything he said above the lowest of murmurs was heard by whatever technical miscreants the Coordinator had working New York with him. He also assumed they had some kind of tracking software on his computers, the kind that reveals anything typed, as well as monitoring incoming and outgoing e-mails. They were probably able to review his browsing history in real time, but Hartzell figured this minor Googling would indicate that he was not an oblivious dunce cap—in fact, it would be expected, and make them feel they had him exactly where they wanted, which the bastards did—but he spent another half hour surfing cricket scorecards in order to bore any observing hired guns stiff.

  Children are often cautioned never to threaten animals, no backing a raccoon into a corner or tossing a rock at a hornet’s nest, which then forces the creatures to defend itself with everything in its god-given arsenal. Nothing good can come of that, children are warned. The same holds true for con men. Best to quickly fleece them or have them jailed and hopscotch down the boulevard. Caging Hartzell, forcing him to submit as though he were a common thief, stripping him, little by little, of the fruits of his labor not only rubbed against every fiber in Hartzell’s soul, but gave him time to pause, and think, and get a mental second wind.

  Remarkably, Lucy had been miles ahead of him in pursuing this line of thought. That very first morning after the Coordinator’s arrival, she had the gumption and grit in her to head off to her morning Juilliard classes, more to get away from these demented freaks than concern over any missed assignments. So with her locks combed over the bandage covering half of her forehead, one arm wrapped in a sling, a medicated look about her eyes, and the bald Hercules as her shadow, she stopped to give Hartzell a long and soulful hug. They draped across each other a full minute so that even the Coordinator turned to stare out the window in order to give them a brief moment of privacy. Hartzell was dead on his feet, having spent a nerve-wracking night making arrangements with the nameless gentleman from Chicago who would be coordinating his life into the foreseeable future, but her hushed words pierced through his foreboding. “Turn the tables, Papa,” Lucy had whispered, like a ghost in his ear that very first morning. “Turn the tables.”

  Blind with greed, that was Duilio “Leo” Fiorella’s critical character flaw, Hartzell had calculated. Having much the same defect, he considered himself an expert in this arena. To keep with St. Nick’s carnal metaphor, what if the tables could be turned and if, blinded by a burning greed, it was Duilio “Leo” Fiorella who had really stuck his dick in it?

  Hartzell knew the Coordinator wouldn’t budge one iota, but Vince and David, they were white collars from The AlPenny Group, that alchemist outfit charged with turning Fiorella’s common metals—steel, iron, nickel, and platinum, tainted black by racketeering, drug-dealing, narcotics, gambling, prostitution and god knew what else—into legal gold. These two were guys that Hartzell could deal with, worm his way in, wine and dine them into giving him some wiggle room in which he could maneuver.

  So Hartzell went on the charm offensive with a baker’s dozen of specialties catered from H&H Bagels every a.m. to be washed down with the Coordinator’s now-favorite coffee, Kopi Luwak—and for lunch, perhaps some French grub at Daniel or double-cut lamb rib chops at The Palm or, if you’re in the mood, off to Gramercy Tavern for some fish croquette, and, in case they were feeling homesick, end the long day with a feast at Da Nico. He even scored box seats at the new Yankee Stadium for the trio to attend an evening ball game—and all on Hartzell’s dime. He enthusiastically answered all of their questions, even the awkward admissions of his fraudulent activities, with about seventy-five percent truthfulness, a high-water mark for Hartzell.

  By the beginning of the second week, the three were best mates, three blokes in pretty much the same line of work sharing secrets between shits and grins. Hartzell would become energized in explaining to them in detail the twists and turns of the scams he’d perpetrated and who he’d stung. And for how much. The three would laugh endlessly about Hartzell’s genius tax evasions, accounting frauds, equity leveraging, layers of fees amassed at every level, capital kiting, and the psychological profiling of his rich victims.

  Hartzell set them up behind the solid African mahogany table in the large conference room on the thirtieth floor of his Park Avenue office building, Hartzell Investment, Inc.—an expensive front that filled his wealthy clients with an aura of Hartzell’s gravitas as they rushed to open their checkbooks for him. He gave Vince and David a tour of the building, buying them café lattes at the kiosk on the second floor lobby, and showed them the best nooks and crannies in which to inconspicuously people watch. He told the two how he’d determined the times when some of the office building’s knockouts in skirts came to the kiosk to refuel, which Hartzell had truly done for his own amusement some time back.

  So by the middle of the second week, when he pointed two fingers at the accountants and asked, “Normal and extra leaded?” to their nods of approval, he was able to disappear for twenty minutes. Of course it would only take a determined fellow ten minutes to grab three cups of java at the coffee kiosk and return, but, in Hartzell’s case, he grabbed Stephanie’s cell phone from the top of her purse on his way out, raised a finger to his lips to hush her and shake his head as he pointed back down the hallway and grinned mischievously, and slipped out to the elevator bank. Stephanie, his front desk receptionist, had been surprised by the two visitors, who had soon become regular fixtures at the firm. Although Steph knew nothing of Hartzell’s financial scam, she knew him to be a private person and performed her assigned tasks, for which she was highly compensated, with committed discretion. Hartzell didn’t know if they’d done anything to his cell phone, but he knew there were ways in which his cell phone signal could be monitored. Even in the days B.C.—Before the Coordinator—Hartzell only utilized clean phones, unconnected to him, to make certain calls.

  Hartzell took the elevator down two floors, making sure to press Lobby and a handful of other stops as he stepped off onto the lower floor. He swiveled his head left and right as he crossed the elevator bank, turned a corner, and quickly stepped inside the stairwell. He leaned his back against the door, shut his eyes, and counted slowly to sixty, listening for any suspicious noises or accompanying footsteps. He started swiftly down the stairs, taking them two at a time, while flipping open Stephanie’s cell phone. Speaking in the stairwell was nothing new to Hartzell, as he’d moved mountains in the privacy of the stairwell over the years on throwaway phones in conversations that would be meaningless to any potential eavesdroppers.

  He hurried down the staircase, making all sorts of blusterous phone noises—scoring additional box seats for yet another Yankees game for his visitors and himself to attend. When that call ended, he came to a sudden halt and listened in silence for another sixty seconds. Hartzell didn’t sweat the two accountants reviewing spreadsheets in his conference room several flights above; he knew those two would have to be directed to where the staircases were situated in case of an inferno. Instead, Hartzell’s excessive caution was due to that unknown third man, the goddamned phantom who had come out of nowhere and caught Hartzell in a death grip that first night. That was who Hartzell feared most, Fiorella’s number-one weapon. Assuaged of his concern that Fiorella’s trained killer had omnipotently hidden inside a potted plant on the floor Hartzell had randomly chosen to depart on and then transmutated into the east staircase as a dust bunny, Hartzell punched in a number he’d long ago memorized and spoke in a quiet tone for no longer than sixty seconds. Twelve minutes later, Hartzell returned to his office with three hot coffees and drank his cup while bullshitting with the bean counters.

  By the end of the second week, he dropped down to the twentieth floor, to the office of
a patent law firm where both senior partners had hefty investments with Hartzell’s firm, gave them a song and dance about changing computer systems and asked if they had a PC for him to use to log in to his Internet e-mail for a few minutes now and again until the IT gents buggered off. After a quick No Problemo and Anytime, Drake, they let Hartzell utilize a computer in a private conference room. Hartzell made a mental note to send both partners a handful of tickets to a comic musical that was soon to open at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre for them and their wives, or mistresses, to attend.

  Five minutes here and there with a clean phone or unmonitored PC, away from any prying green eyeshades, was all Hartzell needed to set events in motion. He had new passports to obtain, numbered accounts to shift, tables to turn, and one last mountain to move—and this particular Everest Hartzell was planning to move straight up one Duilio “Leo” Fiorella’s ass.

  The bastards should never have touched Lucy.

  Chapter 33

  “Are you sure you can walk away?”

  “It could take months to find him, Terri. Westlow planned for this day, so he’ll have a change of ID and looks. In the end, he’ll be burned by a friend or an astute motel clerk.”

  The two were in a couple of bench chairs at their boarding gate at Ronald Reagan National, sucking down Starbucks and waiting for the mid-afternoon flight into Minneapolis.

  “I’m torn.”

  “What do you mean?” Cady asked.

  “After looking through Dorsey’s photo albums, and knowing how her daughter’s death shattered that sweet, wonderful woman’s life, and how the Chessman’s victims were complicit in Marly’s murder. I’m torn.”

  “Is this the same girl I met in Cohasset? The one screaming for justice?”