The Sandler Inquiry

by Noel Hynd

  Grover held up a hand.

  "No need. You wear your identification.

  I can see your father all through you."

  "I understood you were pretty good" said Thomas.

  "Good?"

  "As a forger."

  The rotund man's eyes twinkled.

  "A man takes a certain pride in his work he allowed.

  "No matter what that line of work is."

  "I understand you were very good ' A smile crossed Grover's face.

  "Want to know the truth, Tom, if I can call you that? I was excellent."

  "Would unsurpassed' be the proper word?"

  "Maybe," he conceded. His deft fingers drummed on the wooden table in front of him. He paused and Thomas remained silent, sensing that Grover, out of pride or nostalgia or both, would say more.

  "I'll tell you how good I was" he added, his eyes twinkling.

  "I would forge a man's signature to a check, then take the check to the bank it was drawn on. I'd present it to the teller for payment, but I'd say to the teller,

  "Please. Take a close look at the signature. I don't know the man who signed it. I want to be sure it's genuine." "And?"

  "The teller would compare my forgery against the real thing.

  Then I'd be informed that the check was fine. No problem."

  "And that always worked?"

  "Never failed. Look, would I try to sell a product that wasn't perfect? I told you, I have my pride."

  "You also had your legal problems "For that I had your father," Grove recalled fondly.

  "One way or another, when push came to shove, Bill Daniels would get me off."

  "Like before the war?"

  Grover's eyes narrowed slightly and he was less given to elaboration.

  "Correct' he said.

  "And in 1954 "Correct again."

  "Can we talk about the war?"

  "I fought in Europe."

  "What's 'trash collection' mean?"

  "I have a cousin who's in refuse hauling. That's all it means to me.

  "That's not what Adolph Zenger said "Whatever Zenger said," said Grover calmly,

  "I wouldn't put too much faith in it. You must know yourself that he's an old liar,"

  Grover's thick brow furrowed.

  "Did he send you here?"

  "What about Arthur Sandler?"

  "What about him? He's dead' "No he's not."

  Grover gave Thomas a look which seemed to convey genuine surprise. He was thoughtful for a moment.

  "No," he said.

  "I saw the body myself I was his friend for a while, you know that, I'm sure. I viewed the body after he was shot. It was him" "What would happen," asked Thomas slowly, "if I told you I thought you were lying?"

  Grover's tone became more grave.

  "You'd be halfway out of here," he said.

  "Look, Daniels. As you probably noticed, I'm a respectable member of this neighborhood. For the first time I've got things people can't take away from me. Nobody except my wife even knows who I was. I plan to keep it that way. I'm not burrowing into the dirt of twenty or thirty years ago. I paid my debt to-" "How? You never spent a day of your life in jail" Grover's eyes were angry.

  "Why don't you look in your old man's files."

  "They were torched."

  "Pity." Grover glared at Daniels.

  "All right, I'll tell you anyway. I agreed to be an informer. I'd inform on a man the Feds wanted. I'd get a pardon, they'd arrest their man. Trouble is, the man they wanted got shot first. I still got my pardon."

  "Sandler?"

  "Yo.u're brilliant" He glanced at his watch.

  "I have a store to open in fifteen minutes. Saturday's my big day."

  Then, unable to resist a parting shot, he added,

  "Not all of us were lucky enough to have a wealthy lawyer for a father.

  Some of us have to work " He rose rudely from the table, pushing his chair back, and trying to end the visit.

  Thomas spoke, without rising.

  "How many governments did Sandler work for at once?" he asked doggedly.

  "What?" He looked at Thomas as if the attorney had won an uncontested divorce from his sanity. the repeated.

  "What about yourseIP" "What about me?"

  "Everything about you, right down to your current cloak of piety.

  Sorry," he said, starting to stand, 'but I'm innately suspicious of a man who disappeared in 1939 and surfaced immediately after the war. The real problem with you, what bothers me the most, is that you have no loyalties other than yourself. You sell to the highest bidder. I wonder how many people you sold to' ' Grover shook his head, calm and listening, and sensing no serious threat.

  "Your old man never trusted anyone either." He looked Thomas up and down. It wasn't a glare. Thomas had seen the look before. It was contempt, the contempt of the street-wise kid for the private-school boy, the dislike of someone who thought he'd had none of the breaks for someone else who seemed to have had them all. ll me something," said Grover.

  "You come busting in here bothering me, stirring up skeletons and asking me questions. Now you tell me something." It was posed as a challenge.

  "Who's this client of yours?"

  "Arthur Sandler's daughter."

  Grover looked at Daniels as if to wonder whether or not Daniels was serious.

  "Don't give me any crap," Grover warned, 'or I'll rearrange your dental work' "I'm serious."

  "Arthur Sandler didn't have a daughter. Or a son" "What would you say if I told you she was in a car in front of your house?"

  "I'd say you needed glasses "Be my guest" said Daniels. He motioned with an open palm to the dining-room door.

  Grover walked through to the living room and stood at the window, looking out. Thomas stood to his side, watching not the car m but Grover's expression.

  Grover's expression was unyielding for a second or two. Then for an instant the eyes seemed to go wide, as if in rude recognition, and the tight lips seemed to drop slightly. Almost as quickly, Grover gathered himself. But a man wears the face he has earned. Grovees expression now betrayed mystification, not hostility. Yet Thomas sensed that a full and complete story was not yet ready to be told.

  "She's a fake " he said softly and calmly.

  "Where'd you find her?"

  "She came to my office. Looking for help" Grover took a deep breath, almost a sigh of resignation. He looked up and his puffy eyes glared into Thomas's.

  "I'm going to do you a favor," he declared briskly.

  "I'm going to tell you the truth." From Grover, it seemed a major pronouncement.

  "Will it be at odds with everything else you've told me?" asked Thomas with evident sarcasm.

  "You know," said Grover, 'the only thing worse than a smart assed lawyer is a dumb-assed lawyer. Want to hear it or not?"

  "Sorry," said Thomas with conciliation.

  "Go ahead" "Yes, Sandler had a daughter," Grover said.

  "And no," he added, motioning toward the car, 'that's not her.

  Sandler's real daughter is in London. Dead. Buried. And you'll be, too, if you don't get away from that little cutie out there."

  Thomas searched the face of his father's one-time client, a man whose credibility vacillated between total and zero from in' minute to minute. Thomas could picture the rainy cemetery in Earl's Court.

  He could picture Whiteside. He could picture the tombstone.

  He could picture the scar across Leslie's throat.

  "Who's going to kill me?" Thomas asked.

  "She is," said Grover simply.

  "Would it surprise you that she's saved my life twice?"

  "Not at all" he said.

  "Perhaps she's biding her time."

  "Waiting for what?"

  "For the right time. For you to reveal some piece of information that she wants. Or for you to lead her to something. Bet. she questions you all the time about your old man's relationship with Sandler," he suggested with a grin.

  Thom
as was silent, not wishing to admit that Grovees guess was accurate.

  "See?" Grover said.

  "Why should I believe you?" Thomas asked.

  "You probably shouldn't. But if you're lucky, you will." He glanced at his watch. He motioned to the time with utter sincerity.

  "Now, really, Mr. Daniels. Please believe me. I do run a stationery store and it is Saturday."

  Daniels looked at Grover and looked at the door, thinking of the woman in the car waiting for him. Waiting? For what? He was torn between leaving and staying to badger Grover with further questions, just as he was divided over whom to believe. Him? Or her?

  Whiteside or Leslie?

  "Why would-?"

  "Please " said Grover quickly, raising a fat palm and shaking his head.

  His double chin shook gently, too. "I've told you everything I can.

  Really, I have' I., Their eyes met.

  "Please," said Grover again. He motioned to the door and a tone in his voice suggested that the next request would not be as polite.

  Thomas was halfway down the flagstone path when he passed Susan Grover.

  The little girl was in a buoyant mood. She'd been talking to the lady in the car, she said, and her daddy could talk just like that.

  "What?" asked Thomas, hardly slowing his step. Leslie sat in the car, facing away from the house.

  "Daddy can talk just like the Queen," said Susan.

  "The Queen of-' "Susan!"

  Grover stood at his front door and bellowed at his daughter.

  "Susan! Get in here!"

  The little girl was frightened. She turned and ran toward her father, not knowing what she'd done wrong. She'd never seen him like this. A man of many voices and faces, both voice and face now denoted one emotion: anger.

  Grover glowered at Daniels.

  "Get off my property, mister," he said.

  "When we meet again it will be on my terms." The fat man raised his hammy forearm to his face and bit savagely into what appeared to be a muffin. He glared and chewed simultaneously.

  Thomas turned and walked to his car. Leslie had witnessed the scene on the flagstone path. She'd heard Grover, but not his daughter.

  Thomas slid into the driver's seat. Leslie appeared disappointed.

  "Your exit didn't look friendly," she noted wryly. She had a pad and in her hand and was drawing an oval on it, and oval which, penci 11 as the basis of a sketch, would form a head.

  Thomas glanced away from the pad, back to the house where the door was slamming.

  "He wouldn't talk," said Thomas, turning the car key in the ignition slot.

  "It's back to New York."

  She nodded.

  They drove through miles of wooded forestland in northeastern Pennsylvania. Leslie continued to sketch, even in the moving car.

  He marveled that she could do it and occasionally glanced down at her work. A man's face was appearing on the paper. Thomas recognized it.

  Grover. De Septio.

  "Why are you doing that?" he asked.

  As you Americans would say," she said, "'for the hell of it' She continued. A strange sense was upon Thomas; miles had passed before he recognized it.

  He'd been here before. Not in Grover's house, and never within Grover's company. But the section of the country, along the way, he recognized from his early teens.

  On bitterly cold autumn mornings, when brown leaves crunched underfoot and formed coiled, hissing whirlwinds with the breeze, his father had taken him deer hunting.

  "Bag a buck before Christmas" William Ward Daniels had told his boy rhetorically.

  "Hunters built America" Daniels, Senior, had been a lethal shot.

  "Learned how to shoot in the war," he'd always explained. His father had never even seen a combat zone. But he'd taught kis boy how to shoot.

  "It could save your life someday," opined his father.

  "Like when?"

  Daniels, Senior, thought.

  "Like when a buck is charging you," he suggested.

  No buck ever charged them. Most of the bucks had wanted no part of them at all, but some had managed to fall within rifle range.

  For his part, Thomas was rooting for the deer and often missed his shot on purpose until quickly his father began to suspect.

  "You're as good a shot as I am, maybe better," the older Daniels concluded one day.

  "Now kill something, damn it!" he ordered.

  Thomas brought down his next deer, a clean kill through the shoulder and heart. The father was elated. The boy could shoot.

  Proficiency with a rifle, marksmanship that was accurate at hundreds of yards, had to be learned young. Then it would never be lost.

  "I hate blood sports'" Thomas said absently to her as the car passed out of the wooded regions into farming land.

  Leslie looked up from her pad, closed it on the likeness of Grover, and glanced at Thomas with interest.

  "Hunting?" she asked, mystified.

  He nodded.

  "You know how to shoot?"

  "I suppose," he said.

  "I haven't for a long time' ' She let it drop and the next two hours of the drive were passed in silence.

  Lincoln Tunnel brought them into Manhattan at Tenth Avenue and West Thirty-eighth Street. Thomas turned southward. Five minutes later he'd pulled his car to a halt in front of her building.

  The shabby block was remarkably quiet in the early hours of a Saturday afternoon. She realized immediately that only she would be getting out of the car.

  "You're not coming up?" she asked.

  He shook his head.

  "Why not?" Her question was sympathetic, not challenging. She knew the answer. The other man in her life, the one she'd revealed the previous night.

  "I don't think it would be a good idea. I need perspective."

  "Perspective on what?"

  On you, he thought, but he didn't say it.

  "On the case" he said to her.

  "Lawyer-client -relationships," he said, "shouldn't be at the mercy of personal relationships" She seemed nonplussed, a little hurt, and certainly surprised.

  "I … I don't understand the problem" she stammered, apparently more upset than she'd been when disposing of a body off the stern of the ferry. Or when slashing Thomas loose from strangulation in an elevator door.

  "The problem he said, "is you. I'm emotionally involved. And I shouldn't be" "Ah" she said, her accent apparent even with that single sound.

  She lowered her eyes as if embarrassed.

  "I see," she said.

  "You didn't know. Until now?"

  She shook her head.

  "I hacwt been thinking. Not about that."

  "Of course," he said, as if in resolution. His tone changed.

  "I have to get into. my apartment anyway," he said.

  "I have papers there.

  Briefs. Books. I have motions that have to be filed for you. Right away, if possible." He let a few seconds pass.

  "In other words" he said,

  "I'm still working for you. No matter what."

  "Be careful," she said.

  "In and out of your apartment, I mean."

  He nodded.

  "You're precious'" she said. She leaned to him and kissed him on the cheek, a gesture of both affection and gratitude.

  He watched Leslie McAdam disappear into the shabby building.

  He waited until she raised the window shade upstairs, signaling that she'd passed through the odorous hallway uneventfully.

  Then he drove back uptown, wondering if this last case in his legal career would ever make any sense. By Fifty-seventh Street his thoughts were drifting. He wondered how Andrea Parker was getting on with Augie Reid. How long could a man in his fifties hold her? New York was a young man's town, he tried to convince himself .

  Part Six

  Chapter 26

  It was quarter past six when Hearn returned to the Nineteenth Precinct from the downtown headquarters at One Police Plaza.

  He s
trolled casually through the squad room and continued upstairs to the cubicle where he and Shassad shared two desks.

  His red hair was disheveled. Half of this thoughts were on his nine-year-old daughter who had the measles. The other half were on the contents of a manila envelope which he carried under his arm.

  He arrived at Shassad's desk, found his partner, and tossed the envelope across the desk, where it nearly knocked over a paper cup holding dark lukewarm water and a tea bag.

  "Tea?" Hearn asked, seeing the untouched cup.

  "It's that idiot in the delil" answered Shassad.

  "I ordered coffee with milk. He gives me tea. Tea!" he repeated, playing with the word and trying to sound like an English butler.

  "He must think I look like a fairy." He picked up the envelope.

  "What's this?"

  "Drop a coin in the slot and see what you get," said Hearn.

  "Or send down a pair of thumb impressions and see what comes back "

  Hearn's expression was anxious, yet sober. Shassad instinctively knew that the folder within the envelope contained something new on the Ryder case.

  "It's the fingerprint readout for our buddy at 457 Park Avenue South'" added Hearn, sitting down on the edge of his own desk. You like it. I promise ' "It's about time Shassad answered. He opened the folder and frowned slightly.

  "It took a while they told me" Hearn continued, "because they had to go to a back-date file. The guy who belongs to that thumb died in 1965.

  Supposedly."

  Shassad examined ten different fingerprints on the master chart returned to him, ten small black-and-white squares enclosing mazes of gray lines. The left thumbprint matched jacobus's.

  But the name? The name on the file was all wrong.

  "I can't even pronounce this crap," said Shassad.

  He read. Sergei Sholavsky.

  "What the hell's this Sholavsky bullshit?" Shassad mumbled to his partner.

  "Jacobus's real name?"

  "In a sense," said Hearn.

  "Yes. I think it is." He paused as his partner glanced through the printout with considerably increasing fascination.

  "Aram, fella," he said, 'do you get the idea about what we're getting into?"