Noble Chase: A Novel

by Michael Rudolph

  “Beth, there is another matter of some delicacy I need to ask you about. May I assume that our relationship is still attorney-client privileged?”

  “Of course.”

  “Shortly after we learned of Leonard’s death,” he began, “we learned that vital bank records were missing from our computers. To put it into perspective, without them our entire business is in jeopardy.”

  “What type of records?”

  “It is not necessary at this point to go into detail. Let me just say that they had nothing to do with the Jasco matter and therefore should not concern you.”

  “I see.”

  “We know that Leonard intentionally erased the records before he absconded with Erica. What we do not know, however, is whether he made any backup copies before erasing the information. We suspect that he did. We hope that he did. The information is crucial to us.”

  “As you said, what has that got to do with me?”

  “Since Leonard paid you twenty-five thousand dollars personally, we think that he may have also given you a copy of those records. A thumb drive or maybe a CD. If you have it, we must get it back.”

  “I sent you everything I had.” She looked at him calmly, suspecting more than ever that she had what he was looking for so desperately.

  “The files you returned were of no help.”

  “Then I don’t know what else I can do. And I’ll tell you something else, don’t make some absurd connection between the check and any other problems you might have.”

  “I must emphasize the crucial nature of these records. We need them back immediately.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t be of any help.”

  She looked at her watch and pushed her chair back from the table. “If you’ll excuse me, C.K., it’s later than I expected and I have to get back to the office for another appointment. I’m going to pass on the rest of the lunch.”

  “But Beth…,” he started to protest.

  She looked at his secretary and continued: “Please get my coat.”

  “I am sorry you must leave,” C.K. said. “If you should locate our missing records, I hope you will contact me at once.”

  “I do not have any of your records. I trust that I have made myself clear on that issue.”

  “Yes, you have. Perfectly clear. Thank you for coming over.”

  Beth picked up her attaché case and shoulder bag, looked C.K. in the eye, Oriental inscrutability to Hungarian tenacity, and walked out of the suite into the waiting elevator. Alone for a minute, she took Dieter’s card out of her pocket and saw he had written, “Bank codes are Arab $$,” under his address. She put his card back in her pocket before reaching the hotel lobby.

  C.K. closed the door to his hotel room, took out his cellphone, and quickly texted his brother Martin, “Renew your efforts more vigorously this time!” Martin, waiting in the lobby with Eddie Huang, nodded to Eddie, who immediately left the hotel by a side entrance. Meanwhile, Beth was in a cab and back at the office before two p.m.

  It was Carl’s turn to drive to the Giants home game, so Beth sat with Brian in the back, while Amy sat up front with Carl. Getting out of the city through the Lincoln Tunnel had been a breeze, but the late Sunday morning traffic on the southbound Jersey Turnpike out to the Meadowlands was rapidly filling up with carloads of fans heading to MetLife Stadium for the game against San Francisco.

  Carl had been playing leapfrog with a dark blue limousine since the tunnel. First it would pass his tan Volvo, then slow down until Carl passed back, and then it repeated the maneuver again. Two New Yorkers locked in infantile vehicular combat to pass the time away. Neither Carl nor his passengers saw anything unusual in that.

  “That limo doesn’t know what the hell it wants to do,” Carl said indignantly to his three passengers. “The driver speeds up, he slows down, he speeds up, he slows down. He has a cellphone glued to his ear and a big GPS screen on the dashboard. What an asshole!”

  “Take it easy, will you,” Amy protested. “Don’t get involved with him.”

  “He’s probably going to the game also,” Brian volunteered.

  “Its side windows are dark. Can’t see who’s in it,” Carl said as he passed the limo again. “Now he’s falling back.”

  Brian lost interest in the limo and turned to Beth. “Hey, did you have any luck with that CD?” he asked her.

  “What CD?” Thinking about Bob for a change, she was disconcerted by the question.

  “The one you called me about.”

  “Oh yeah. The CD.”

  “What CD?” Amy piped up.

  “I told you about it. It was stuck in the papers I got from Bob.”

  “So were you able to figure out what was on it?” Brian asked.

  “Still can’t ID the banks.” If they were Arab, money laundering might be involved, but she had no intention of making it the subject of a casual conversation on a Sunday drive with her friends. “Thanks for the help, though.”

  “By the way, how’re you doing with Bob?” Amy asked, twisting around in her seat to face Beth. “Spoken to him lately?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it later,” Beth replied.

  “Who’s Bob?” Carl asked from the front seat. “Some new boyfriend?”

  “No, just some new client,” Beth answered, trying to disarm a subject she preferred to avoid in front of the boys.

  “You didn’t tell me you were dating someone,” Brian said.

  “I’m not dating him. He’s a client, that’s all. I spoke to Amy about some mutual funds for him.”

  “Don’t forget to remind me about that,” Amy said, trying to backpedal helpfully. “I did some research on that fund he was thinking of buying.”

  “Great,” Beth said. “I’ll speak to you during the halftime show.”

  “It figures. We never get to hear the good stuff,” Carl moaned in protest, but he and Brian quickly got involved in their own conversation about the relative merits of the opposing quarterbacks.

  “When’s your mom flying in?” Amy asked Beth.

  “Thursday…Thanksgiving.”

  “What time?”

  “She lands at JFK around noon. We’ll probably go right over to my stepsister’s house for dinner. Don’t forget Mom’s taking us to the Met Saturday night.”

  “How come Max isn’t coming?”

  “They hit something last week and put a dent in Red Sky’s prop. He’s staying down to haul her and do some maintenance work.”

  “Am I going to get a dinner date with her?” Brian asked.

  “No. Every time Mom sees us together, she thinks it means something.”

  “So you stay home,” Brian said. “I’ll take her out by myself.”

  “Thanks. Not.”

  “Well, give her a kiss for me anyhow.”

  “You know I will.” Their breakup had devastated her mother. Beth only remembered the relief and was thankful she’d kept Brian’s friendship.

  Carl began to work his way over to the right as they approached the stadium exit. He looked over his shoulder and saw the lane jammed with trucks lumbering along at 70 mph without any intention of voluntarily letting him into their midst.

  After several abortive attempts, he succeeded in getting into the lane. At the same time, an eighteen-wheeler loaded with steel beams began to pass him on the left. Before completing the maneuver, the huge truck started to drift into Carl’s lane, as if determined to defy physics by occupying the exact same spot on the road as the Volvo.

  Carl sensed its massive presence, but Amy confirmed it with her startled scream. The driver of the rig was slowly moving it over, pinning the Volvo closer to the soft shoulder. The more Carl moved to his right, the more the eighteen-wheeler closed in on his left. He couldn’t slow down because of another truck pressing down on him from the rear, and he couldn’t speed up because of a truck in front. His Volvo was boxed in. The frantic sound of his horn was lost in the roar of the huge diesels surrounding him. Beth and Brian stared transfixed at the
unfolding scene, fearing the worst, unable to control the outcome.

  The driver of the eighteen-wheeler, sitting high up in the cab, was well past the Volvo when his monstrous tires ground into the left side of the car. The sickening noise they made was a cross between chalk screeching across a blackboard and a dull hacksaw blade cutting bone. The tires left thick streaks of black rubber along the entire length of the Volvo. The smell of burning rubber permeated its interior.

  Carl fought for control of the car as the full weight of the trailer’s load forced them inexorably toward the drainage ditch along the roadside. When the second set of trailer tires made contact, he completely lost control, and reflexively wrapped his right arm around the shrieking Amy. The left front of the Volvo was lifted violently off the road, causing it to swerve to the right.

  The Volvo skidded onto the shoulder, bounced in and out of the drainage ditch on two wheels, and twisted around, landing back on all four wheels before hitting a large rock. The eighteen-wheeler continued on its way, license plate obscured by mud, devoid of any logo or markings.

  The shaken passengers sat there for a moment, bruised and badly frightened. After checking one another for injuries, they got out of the car and simply stared at the driver’s side of the Volvo, streaked graphically with black rubber and deep gouges down to bare metal.

  “The bastard never saw us!” Carl said, dialing 911 on his cellphone.

  “Are you okay?” Amy asked him.

  “I’m fine,” he replied. “Anybody see his license plates?”

  “I tried, but he was too far away,” Beth answered.

  “Crazy son of a bitch!”

  Cars and trucks on the road continued to speed past. Because of the impenetrable wall of eighteen-wheelers surrounding them, the incident had been hidden from view. After a few moments, Carl and Brian got back into the car to check things out, while Beth and Amy waited outside for the police to arrive.

  The dark blue stretch limousine then reappeared. It passed them, slowed down, and suddenly braked, pulling off the road and stopping on the shoulder about fifty yards in front. Seated in the rear, Martin Leung told his driver, Eddie Huang, to go check on the Volvo’s passengers.

  Eddie got out of the limo and walked over to Beth. His sunglasses failed to hide the scar over his right eye. It jangled her memory, but under the circumstances, she didn’t immediately remember why. He asked solicitously if everyone was okay before walking around the Volvo to examine its damage and retrieve a GPS tracker he had hidden under one of its fenders earlier in the city. In the back of the limo, Martin looked out the window and smiled with satisfaction.

  As Eddie walked back to the limo, Beth finally made the connection and told Brian where she had seen Scarface before. She took a quick photo of the limo with her cellphone before it pulled back out into stadium traffic. Her life had just been threatened by somebody for something. She was fairly certain that the somebody was C. K. Leung and that the something was the CD she had. Now she needed to do something about it.

  The flashing lights behind them finally signaled the arrival of the state police, so they waited until the troopers were finished with them and then limped back to Manhattan. They had all agreed that going to the game was no longer on the table, so they decided to spend the afternoon recovering at Brian’s place.

  Before the first beers were finished, Beth had obtained the limo’s plate number from her photograph and had used Brian’s laptop to download a copy of its registration from the New York State DMV webpage. She was not completely surprised to see that the limo was owned by a Lenco Leasing. She was more surprised to see that Leonard Sloane had signed as president.

  By four fifty p.m., Beth was finished lawyering for the day. She locked her credenza, called Amy, and arranged to meet her over at the Oyster Bar for drinks at six p.m. She had plans for dinner with Bob, who was on his way in from Providence for another interview tomorrow. The cool, crisp air was a welcome respite. It elevated her spirits, turning the one-block walk over to Grand Central Terminal into a stroll.

  She elbowed her way through the bottleneck created by the narrow passageway under perpetual construction from the Park Avenue entrance into the main waiting room of the terminal. The waiting room was packed.

  She headed to the ramp leading down to the Oyster Bar on the lower level, following two middle-aged men headed in the same direction. As she approached the entrance to the restaurant, located in a quieter part of the station, the two men suddenly turned around, blocked her way, and then lunged at her.

  The one on her left violently shoved her up against the marble wall across from the restaurant door, pinning his body against hers. She reflexively threw out an arm to maintain her balance as he grabbed her attaché case. Then she pivoted, jammed her foot down on his instep, and drove her other knee up into his groin as high and as hard as she could. He dropped her attaché case and doubled over in pain.

  The mugger on her right grabbed her bag. She saw his fist arch viciously toward her stomach and instinctively flexed her abdominal muscles to absorb the punch. At the same time, she did her best to gouge out his eyes with her thumbs.

  In the face of such unexpected resistance, the two men broke off their assault and ran away in different directions. Beth was seething. Not scared, totally furious. As several commuters came to her aid, she chased after the man with her bag, who was sprinting for the subway entrance. After running a few yards, she stopped, hopelessly handicapped by her high heels. She started to take them off and then thought better of the idea. The muggers were gone anyway, lost in the maze of tunnels connecting the east side subways at Forty-second Street. She stood there alone, gasping for breath.

  It was all over in less time than it took to tell about it. The crowd that assembled around her after the mugging cheered her resistance. The Metro-North cops were solicitous. Amy arrived while she was talking to the cops. Beth wanted to go right back to the office to make the phone calls necessitated by the loss of her bag, but Amy insisted that they go into the Oyster Bar for a drink. She could take care of stopping the credit cards and changing the door locks when she got home. A drink would calm her down now.

  While they were having their drinks, it was Amy who commented on the bad karma of a trailer truck sideswiping them on Sunday and Beth’s mugging today. Beth was clear that karma had nothing to do with any of it. Her office had been searched by Leung’s people. Carl’s Volvo had been sideswiped and her bag stolen, all by Leung’s people.

  An hour later, when she got back to her apartment with Amy, the bag was waiting at the concierge desk. The doorman told her that some Oriental-looking guy had left it in the lobby. Everything was rifled through, but nothing was missing. She notified American Express and MasterCard anyhow. Amy insisted on staying in the apartment with her until a locksmith finished rekeying both locks. Then, and only then, she left.

  When Bob called her a little later, she begged off dinner. As soon as she mentioned the word mugging, Bob insisted on coming right over, quickly hung up, and was there within fifteen minutes.

  Sitting together on the couch, she started telling him about the assault and then segued into the near disaster on the way to the Giants game. The more she described each, the more Bob only wanted to make it all better for her. His own common sense pointed to more than happenstance connecting the sideswiping, the mugging, and then the return of the bag. When he told her so, Beth knew that the time for disclosure had come, so she told him as much as she felt she could about his father’s theft.

  “I’m amazed that my father could do something like that,” he said at one point. “I’m stunned. He was so passive. How come you never said anything to me about it?”

  Beth shrugged. “Your father pulled it off because I was a naïve, stupid asshole. When you and I first met, I had to be certain you weren’t in on it with him. I didn’t know what your relationship was with your father until we got to know each other.”

  “Our meeting wasn’t just a condolence call
, then, was it?” he asked quietly.

  “It’s not easy for me to tell you about this,” she said tremulously. “Our relationship didn’t exist when we met up in Providence. You could have been a part of the whole scheme.” She picked up a tissue from an end table and noisily blew her nose into it.

  “And if I was? Weren’t you taking a terrible chance?”

  “Sure, but it was a chance I had to take.”

  “You’re a tough cookie, aren’t you.”

  “Not so tough. Your father slickered me because I forgot the basic rule: Trust, but verify. I was also on an ego trip over a huge money victory. I’d be very surprised, though, if today there was some nefarious side of your personality you’ve hidden from me.”

  “You mean you’d have figured it out already?” His levity relaxed some of the tension.

  “You know, I’m a single woman living in New York. It was a calculated risk when I invited you up to my apartment the first time.”

  “You calculated right.”

  “It was just a little too soon for me.”

  “Is that an invitation?” he asked, his libido aroused by the thought.

  “It is,” she murmured, gently turning his face to hers with her hand.

  First came the hugging and kissing at the elevator, then Beth carried one of her mother’s suitcases into the apartment. Andi shoved the other one in herself and kicked the door shut behind them. “What time does Lynn want us for Thanksgiving dinner?” she asked.

  “We’ll go over around five p.m. We have plenty of time.”

  “The place turned out beautifully,” Andi said as she sat on the couch and looked around the living room.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you like it.” Beth walked over to the couch, picked up her mother’s outstretched hand, and pressed it to her lips and cheek, mumbling something about their sharing one heart, just as she used to do when she was four. “I’ve missed you so much since you moved down to the islands.”