Gretchen’s experimentation with drugs and alcohol had begun during her junior year in prep school—she’d received a two-week suspension, as well as a two-week vacation with friends to Amsterdam. He could imagine that the boys had always lined up for her, falling at her feet. Perhaps she’d developed an addiction to their desire that proved stronger than her own ability to resist them. No doubt she had slept with dozens of college boys, always aiming for the older and more experienced. She had learned how to please. With an absentee father, who she knew took women on the side, Gretchen had became overcome with a need for more partners, more attention, more adoration. When they became complacent—even a whiff of complacency—they were out the door.
Some event had precipitated the move to professional call girl. One of her father’s glamorous parties where some drunken executive had cornered her, only to offer her money to keep silent about it? A drug habit that needed financing? A sex addiction that went bad? Blackmail? There was no evidence to explain this, and Alvarez was no psychologist. But the adoring, rich, absentee father certainly played a big part in this transformation of socialite into elite escort.
Perhaps her psychiatrist (she had seen him twice a week for nearly a year) had said she was trying to hurt her father through her actions. Whatever the case, she had stopped the sessions.
Alvarez believed that sometime around the summer before she headed off to Princeton, Gretchen Goheen had accepted gainful employment as one of the most sought after call girls in New York City. Five years later at the ripe age of twenty-three, she had checked in to an exclusive Arizona “spa”—a treatment center—probably for a cocaine addiction. Alvarez believed that Keith O’Malley had been Gretchen’s savior throughout. Perhaps O’Malley himself had slept with her, or still did, though Alvarez could find no proof of this connection. What seemed obvious was that O’Malley shielded Goheen from as much as possible, including his own family’s problems. It suggested a liaison between O’Malley and Gretchen that Alvarez hoped to exploit.
With Gretchen Goheen stripped naked and standing in front of him in nothing but a pair of black heels, Alvarez briefly felt tempted to help himself to her wares. He told himself that any male would feel the same, despite his moment of self-loathing for being so predictable. Grabbing her wide, sumptuous hips, as if ready to explore her, he instead backed her up to the bed, gently sitting her down on its edge.
“Whatever you like, however you like it,” she said in a warm, womanly purr. “My time is yours.”
He stood, intentionally blocking her way to the door. He stood so that he towered over her, gaining a psychological advantage. He swallowed, clearing his throat and gaining his courage, knowing that if successful this oratory might save hundreds of lives. Lives that would otherwise be on his conscience forever.
“Ms. Goheen,” he said, immediately having to reach out and force her back down to the bed, preventing her escape. “I’m not the police.” She continued to struggle, so he stepped aside and let her jump to her feet. “If you leave,” he called out loudly to her as she freed the skirt from the closet, not bothering with the underwear, “your father’s life is in your hands alone. I can’t help you.” That won a reprieve. She looked even more sexy to him, with her flushed, bare chest and the skirt cockeyed on her waist. Her rapid breathing was audible. Her lips trembled, and he realized she was trying to speak. He wanted this to be a soliloquy, not a discussion. He continued, “My name is Alvarez. I’m the one your father and O’Malley are after. I’m the one whose wife was killed at the railroad crossing in Genoa, Illinois. You know about this, right?” He saw no indication that she had heard so much as a word, but he stayed with his plan. “Your father and O’Malley must confess the truth of my family’s tragedy. That is all I ask—all I’ve ever asked: the truth. It’s not money I’m after, only the truth—and for all the world to hear. I have tried to get through to your father. I have failed. He has lost a great deal of property, and still he doesn’t listen. But he may listen to you.”
“Oh, my God.” Said like a person coming awake.
“I would listen to my daughter, I can tell you that. But my daughter is dead. Dead because of policies initiated by your father and carried out by O’Malley. You must make him listen. Do you understand? If there is no apology, I am going to derail this final test of the bullet train. You can tell him that. No matter what he plans, I will succeed—and with all the press and all the dignitaries aboard. With your father aboard. I will ruin him, ruin you, ruin anyone who stands in the way of the truth. You win that apology, a public apology, and no one will be hurt.”
“Who are you?”
He hoped that she had heard him, hoped the shock of his knowledge of her identity had not caused a blackout. He leaned into her, so their faces nearly touched, and raised his voice for the first time. “Do not test me!” He saw where his spittle clung to her cheeks. Numb, she was unable to move.
He crossed to the armoire, knocked the hotel’s notebook onto the floor, and quickly seized the small video camera that hid behind it. He held it out for her to see, for her to take it all in. “You see? You will go down with him, if it comes to that. I have no desire to bring you any harm. Yours is a pitiful life. The fate of that train, and all aboard, is in your hands, Ms. Goheen. The truth. Genoa, Illinois. Talk to him.” He reached into his pocket, counted out fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills and dropped them to the floor. The bills fluttered and rolled and made a carpet at his feet. Her eyes never left his face. She was crying now. Fear, he thought, not empathy.
“Whether or not he will listen to you is a test of your father’s love and trust. You must prevail, or accept the consequences.”
Alvarez turned his back on her.
“Wait!” she called out, as he reached the door.
He faced the small sign that showed a floor plan of the hotel hallway. A red dot indicated their room. He turned the brass doorknob and slipped out into the hall, already running, in case she phoned security.
CHAPTER 20
New York was a claustrophobic’s nightmare. The streets and avenues, crowded with high-rises, at times felt to Tyler like the floors of deep, granite crevasses. The United flight back from Chicago had been at capacity, and Tyler had agonized the whole way, longing for a drink to calm him. Having completed the requisite paperwork to carry a weapon and ammunition on board, Tyler was therefore forbidden by law to drink. Priest, who had checked her unloaded weapon, drank a vodka and tonic, basically torturing Tyler.
It took only the one drink before she admitted, “I’m not so sure this can work.”
“Us?” he asked, “or my idea?”
“The idea,” she answered. “Us?” she echoed, bewildered. “I don’t even want to go there, not now, anyway.”
“If there was, or is, a cover-up,” he pressed, “then chances are some personnel have been—”
“Promoted, transferred, or retired ahead of schedule,” she interrupted. “I got that the first time you explained it.” She added, “Incidentally, it made more sense to me the first time than it does now.”
“The company is too big,” he rationalized. “One man, even a Keith O’Malley, cannot keep something like this crossing guard accident buttonholed.”
“This company has been good to me, Peter. They’ve given me advancements that others might not have.”
“You’ve already chosen sides,” he reminded her. “They sent Harry Wells after Alvarez. They told you only half the story.”
“There might be explanations for that,” she said tentatively. “Need to Know. Fear of media leaks. Not wanting to put me in a position to lie to you—the feds.”
He didn’t want to get into a shouting match with her over whether withholding truth constituted a lie. To him, it did. O’Malley’s explanations in the hotel bar had been concise and well thought out but ultimately evasive and unconvincing. He said, “All you need to do is get me inside your Personnel department.”
“Human Services,” she corrected.
“I’ll ask the questions,” he said.
She didn’t look convinced.
“I don’t want you to lose your job,” he reminded her.
“No,” she snapped. “You just want me to help you bring down the whole company.”
God, how he wanted that scotch.
Northern Union Railroad owned the Art Deco, sixty-story office high-rise erected in midtown Manhattan nearly seventy years before. The lobby ceiling had been repainted by the WPA—a mixture of God, sky, and the Worker. The corporation retained twenty stories for itself and leased out the rest.
Tyler cleared NUR security, registering as an NTSB agent and a guest of Nell Priest. He rode up to her floor and drank a cup of surprisingly decent coffee while Priest got stuck on the phone.
Tyler wanted words with O’Malley about the Alvarez identity but knew he was unlikely to get any such meeting. His purpose instead was to do some quiet digging in Human Services in search of personnel changes in and around what Tyler thought of as the Genoa, Illinois, cover-up.
When Priest hung up, Tyler said, “If you help me with this, and they find out, and I’m right—” He didn’t bother to finish.
“I know,” she said.
“You want to think about that. They’ll either promote you to keep you quiet or fire you without benefits.” He recalled his own fate at the hands of Metro police.
“They promoted me,” she informed him.
“Already?” he said, surprised.
“Better salary, better bennies.”
“But you’re off the Harry Wells case,” he guessed.
“Not at all,” she contradicted him. “I receive a full briefing this afternoon from O’Malley himself. He wants me on the task force to bring in Alvarez.”
“There’s a task force already?” This felt much too fast for Tyler; he had underestimated O’Malley’s savvy.
“Apparently there will be by the end of the day.”
“So I need to work quickly,” he said. Then he sensed her reluctance. “You’re not going to help me,” he suggested.
“I want to hear O’Malley’s side of this first.”
“I don’t,” Tyler said, suspecting the worst. “He’s doing the Slick Willy, Nell. He’s probably got Rucker convinced he’s a team player. Believe me, he is not.”
“You smell conspiracy,” she said. “I’m thinking more like corporate bureaucracy. We were back on our heels after the Railroad Killer—same as everyone else in this business. Share price is everything these days, Peter. And it all turns on public opinion. The stock market is no longer just the engine of the economy, it’s everything. Cabbies are trading stocks on Palm Pilots; my hairdresser talks about valuations and IPOs. We were hammered by those killings—twenty-six percent off at one point. This, when we’re betting everything on F-A-S-T Track, our new bullet train. Over a hundred million dollars! Goheen’s pumped everything we have into this—he’s out on a limb, betting we can bring people back to mass transportation if the service improves. The country needs this. Who could afford to imagine that Alvarez was behind these derailments, that NUR, and NUR only, was a target of some bereft widower with a vengeance? You can see that, right? There’s no evidence, Peter. It’s all speculation. All I want is to hear O’Malley’s side.”
“I think I just did,” Tyler quipped.
She scrunched her nose, snorted, and crossed her arms.
He said, “If Alvarez is just some wacko, and there’s actually no evidence that he’s behind the derailments, then your point is taken. But if there was malfeasance, criminal negligence in that crossing accident, if that has been covered up to protect your sacred share price, what then? Umberto Alvarez loses so that the country gains? No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re just speculating!”
“So prove me wrong. Get me into Human Services and show me that no personnel changes were made soon after the crossing accident. Or better yet, get me the record of investigation for that accident. The file. I’ll bet you can’t find it. I’ll bet it was pulled by O’Malley before it ever reached whatever filing cabinet or computer directory it should have reached. Call me a skeptic. Get mad at me. But first, prove me wrong. That’s all I ask: prove me wrong.”
“I will,” she said, “after the meeting.”
“O’Malley’s going to get me pulled from this, Nell. He’s going to get his whitewash task force in place, and he’s going to get me pulled. I promise you. Your promotion is the first step. By the time your meeting is over, I’m out of here. And by tomorrow, he’ll be offering me a job. Guaranteed. I need this information,” he pressed. “Now.”
She clearly considered all he had said. “Okay,” she said, at first tentatively. Then repeating herself, she said sincerely, “Okay.”
NUR’s lower few floors were typical corporate rabbit warrens—office cubicles, interconnected like a maze in a French formal garden. Computers. Phones. Headsets. Wall calendars. Plastic travel mugs courtesy of Starbucks. Pictures of the kids. Felt pennants for the New York Yankees on thin wooden sticks. An election pin proclaiming Dave Barry for President. The only distinguishing feature was the preponderance of train memorabilia. Photos. Models. Posters.
Priest, self-conscious, concerned about the company’s security cameras, moved erratically and with her head down. She had no reason to be down in Human Resources and didn’t want to be answering embarrassing questions on the same day as her new promotion. She explained that where Goheen had a TV in his office constantly tuned to CNN, and another to CNBC, O’Malley had CNN and a display of six black-and-whites, each of them changing screens every few seconds, tracking the dozens of security cameras in the NUR work environment. She went on to explain that the security room—with eighteen monitors—conducted round-the-clock surveillance of the building and its employees and was currently on an even higher state of alert due to possible security breaches of late.
Hearing this, Tyler asked, “Alvarez?”
The inquiry briefly stopped Priest. She pulled Tyler to the side of the hall and kept her voice low. “It would explain the paranoid attitude,” she admitted. “Since I didn’t hear about Alvarez until yesterday, it hadn’t occurred to me they might know who was behind these security breaches.” Again she cautioned him, “No matter what, O’Malley finds out we’re down here asking questions, he won’t be thrilled.”
“He’s just a little bit busy today, Nell. I doubt he’s watching a lot of tube.”
“The things remain on all the time.”
“Got it,” Tyler said. They continued on, toward the cluster of offices ahead. Tyler kept his head down, if nothing else, to humor her.
“It’s not as if he can arrest you or something,” Tyler replied, walking alongside her.
“He can fire me,” she reminded him. “And he could do worse to you.”
“The Unit?” Tyler didn’t take this threat too seriously. It sounded to him as if O’Malley considered himself some kind of CIA Op instead of the chief rent-a-cop he was. Playing a version of the short-man complex, he’d clearly put the fear of God into his employees, but Tyler wasn’t one and would not play along.
She replied, “Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to see Keith O’Malley pushed into a corner.”
Tyler experienced a brief but convincing chill. She was right: rent-a-cop or not, O’Malley’s Irish temperament and Marine personality were nothing to mess with. In a dry whisper of a voice, he said, “Given what we now know, what choice is there but to keep pushing?”
“You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“No,” he answered. “I can’t.”
They entered Human Resources, arriving at an office occupied by a coffee-skinned woman named Selma Long. She had the bright face and booming voice of a southern Baptist, the body of a sumo wrestler, and looked to be somewhere between forty and sixty.
Tyler took a chair. Priest slid an in-box out of the way and perched herself on the corner of Selma’s desk, her legs facing, and distracting, Tyler. Priest han
ded the woman a piece of paper on which he’d written the date of the Genoa, Illinois, crossing accident. Priest said, “Selma, this is Peter Tyler of the National Transportation Safety Board.” Tyler half stood and shook the woman’s meaty hand across the desk. “Northern Union Security prides itself in cooperating with both local police and federal agencies, and Mr. Tyler had a few questions that I couldn’t answer and that I hoped maybe you could.”
To Tyler, the deep-voiced woman said, “Little Nell and I attend the same church. She tell you that, Mr. Tyler?”
“No ma’am, she did not.”
“She tell you she a choir girl? Voice like an angel, this one.”
“I can believe that,” Tyler replied, watching as Priest’s neck flushed below her ears.
“Selma—” Priest teasingly scolded.
Tyler said, “My agency is interested in which, if any, NUR employees may have received bonuses, added benefits, early retirement, or promotion in the month period that follows that date.”
Selma Long considered him thoughtfully. “Uh-huh,” she replied.
Tyler held his breath, every nerve alive and tingling. He believed this information key to the investigation, and there was no way he’d ever win a court order to obtain it. His future on this case, and the case itself, rested with Selma Long.
She started typing.
Tyler exhaled audibly.
Parallel Lies Page 19
