Restitution

by Lee Vance

  “Listen,” she says, snapping her notebook shut. “Stop telling me what to do. I haven’t got a shred of jurisdiction here, and there hasn’t been a fed born yet who will cooperate with the local cops unless there’s something in it for them.”

  “Then what the fuck are we doing?”

  “We’re not doing a goddamned thing. You’re going to sit in the car while Ellis and I work the phones, see if we can figure this thing out.”

  “And how long is that going to take?”

  “You’ll know when we’re done.”

  Time passes. I fret in the back of the car, feeling completely helpless as Tilling and Ellis pace outside, making calls. Tilling hands me the phone once, asking me to confirm her identity to an unhappy Pongo. More time passes. Tilling gesticulates vehemently as she argues with someone. It’s after ten when both women get back in the car. Ellis starts the engine and begins driving.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “Manhattan,” Tilling says.

  “Why?”

  “Lyman’s registered at the Marriott Marquis, in Times Square.”

  “Davis and De Nunzio gave him up?” I ask, amazed.

  “That’ll be the day,” Tilling says. “The DA agreed it was a waste of time to talk to the feds before we had something to trade. I called the duty officer at Kennedy and told him I mislaid Lyman’s phone number. He checked their sign-out sheet for me. Lyman left the Marriott as his contact number. We’ll chat with the feds after we’ve got their boy.”

  The ride into Manhattan seems to take forever. At the corner of Forty-ninth and Broadway, Ellis pulls up behind a parked blue-and-white New York City patrol car. She and Tilling get out and confer with the city cops on the sidewalk for a few minutes before getting back in the car. Tilling briefs me over her shoulder as the patrol car pulls out slowly from the curb, Ellis following.

  “Here’s the deal. Ellis and I are going to go upstairs with the uniforms and talk to Lyman. We’ll tell him you’ve had a change of heart. You’re saying you want to give Andrei up, and we don’t know what to make of it. We’ll ask him to go to the local precinct house with us. Your job is to sit in the car and identify him when we bring him out, make sure we got the right guy.”

  “And what happens when he gets there?”

  “Pongo’s cooperating. We’ve got another set of uniforms driving him in from Staten Island. If Pongo makes Lyman as the guy who killed his dog, we’ll book him on some bullshit animal cruelty charge. It’s late enough that he won’t get a bail hearing before morning. We’ll take his prints and search his person, figure out exactly who he really is and whether he’s got any kind of record. With a little luck, we might even tie him to your house. We’ve got the shoe prints from the crime scene, and some hair and fiber. If we get any kind of match, a judge will issue a warrant for his hotel room. It’s a start.”

  It’s a lot more than a start. It’s the moment I’ve been living for. I’m looking forward to seeing Lyman on the wrong side of an interrogation table, his ankle cuffed to a chair.

  The city cops drive beneath a cement porte cochere extending from the Marquis’s front entrance and pull to the curb. Ellis parks about thirty feet behind them. All four cops get out and confer again by the bellman’s station. Tilling walks back and speaks to me through the open window.

  “We’re going to bring Lyman out that door there,” she says, pointing. “You stay in the car and give me a thumbs-up when you recognize him. If he looks toward you, just turn your head the other way. You got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can see okay, right? You don’t need glasses or anything, do you?”

  “I can see fine. Just please go get him, Grace.”

  She nods and walks away, leaving me on my own. I clench my hands between my knees, rocking slightly with anticipation. For the first time in months, I’m playing offense instead of defense: If Lyman’s the guy, I’ll learn the truth. And then I’ll find some opportunity to blow his fucking brains out.

  Five minutes later, Tilling and one of the city cops come hustling through the door, double-timing toward the parked patrol car. She beckons to me urgently, her phone to her ear. I throw my door open and step into the path of an oncoming taxi. The driver honks and swears as I jump out of the way. Tilling’s standing next to the patrol car, one foot propped on the driver’s doorsill while the cop behind the wheel talks on his radio.

  “Wait one,” she says into her phone as I approach, smothering it against her coat. “It looks like someone grabbed Lyman. His door was forced, there’s blood on the carpet, and his stuff is scattered everywhere. This is going to be a huge cluster fuck. I don’t even want to think about how many agencies will be involved. I want you in New York, where I can get hold of you. Where are you going to be?”

  I feel stunned, as if I’d walked into a glass door.

  “The Harvard Club, I guess,” I say. “What do you think—”

  “Just stay put until I call you.”

  She’s already talking into her phone again. I hover nearby, trying to eavesdrop. She lowers the phone and glares at me.

  “I want you out of here,” she says. “I’ll call you.”

  I start to protest, but the uniformed cop climbs out of his car and catches hold of my upper arm, walking me forcibly toward Broadway. Two more police cars turn into the Marriott’s entrance and I stop to see what’s happening behind me. The cop gives me a small shove and points south.

  “I believe the Haaavard Club is in that direction, old sport,” he says in an affected drawl. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  24

  A SHUDDERING BANG startles me awake, a shaft of light from the hall penetrating my darkened bedroom. Someone’s opened the door, catching it against the security chain. I bolt out of bed and trip over the desk chair, hitting my face hard as I fall.

  “Señor, señor.”

  I groan, knocked semiconscious. Opening my eyes, I find myself beneath the chair, my nose and cheek throbbing. A round-faced maid is peering anxiously through the narrow gap between the chained bedroom door and the jamb.

  “Dispénsame, señor. ¿Está bien?”

  I touch my face and turn my hand toward the light from the hall, relieved not to see any blood.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Pushing the chair aside, I stagger to my feet, trying to get oriented. I’m in a small white-plaster bedroom at the Harvard Club, the draperies drawn, my dirty clothing in a heap on the floor next to the upended chair. Glancing into the framed mirror over the desk, I see myself naked and emaciated in the dim light, hair wild. Crimson letters emblazoned on the glass spell out VERITAS.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “No speak,” the maid says, her eyes averted.

  “¿Qué hora es?”

  “Once y media.”

  “Bueno. Gracias. Come back later, please.”

  She closes the door, muttering to herself. It can’t be 11:30. I fumble for the clock radio that fell from the bedside table. It reads 11:34. Turning on the light, I check the room phone for messages and call my voice mail. The only message is from Katya, informing me that she has a call in to William about Andrei, and that she spoke to her mother, who didn’t have anything to add. I dial zero.

  “Harvard Club,” the operator says.

  “This is Peter Tyler in five twenty-one.” My cheek aches as I speak. “Do you have any messages for me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you mind calling me back? I want to make sure my phone’s working.”

  The phone rings a second later. I thank the operator and ask him to send up a bucket of ice and some ibuprofen.

  I left messages for Emily and Grace before going to sleep, leaving the Harvard Club’s number. Dialing both again, I get voice mail twice more. Shit. I slam the phone down. I can’t believe Lyman vanished when we were so close to picking him up. Sitting on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands, I try to conjure next steps, figure out what I can do
other than simply waiting for my phone to ring. I’ve still got Andrei’s file, and Dmitri may have given me the clue I need to decrypt it. First things first, though: I’ve got to get cleaned up, buy some fresh clothes, and clear the cobwebs from my head with a large cup of coffee. Standing, I catch sight of the crimson letters on the mirror again. VERITAS. I wonder what the Latin is for vengeance.

  I’m sitting on a stool in a tiny haberdashery on Forty-sixth Street an hour later, wearing my Burberry coat over fresh underwear while an efficient Hasidic man hand-hems a pair of charcoal slacks for me. I’ve got a new cell phone in my pocket and a new plastic watch on my wrist. My face throbs as I sip coffee from a thirty-two-ounce cup. I shouldn’t have left the impromptu ice pack I made in my bathroom sink, no matter how self-conscious it made me feel. I notice my coat sagging on one side and check the pocket, finding the paperback I took from Andrei’s bedside table. The binding’s been replaced with a piece of duct tape; the immigration cops must have ripped it open, searching for contraband. I flip through the inscrutable pages, noticing a sentence that’s both highlighted and underlined, an ink star penned into the margin. An idea occurs to me as I wonder what Andrei was reading.

  “There’s a public library around here, isn’t there?” I ask.

  “Forty-seventh, west of Tenth,” the shopkeeper says, talking through a mouthful of pins. “On the north side. My nephew owns the kosher Chinese on the corner—Shalom Hunan. Tell him I sent you. You should eat something so your pants don’t fall down.”

  A sign identifies the library as the Clinton Branch. It’s only two narrow brownstones joined together, but the interior is surprisingly busy, twenty or thirty people of all ages working at long tables, about half seated in front of IBM workstations or laptops. A uniformed security guard stops me as I enter, informing me gruffly that I can’t take my coffee inside.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Rozier,” I say.

  “Your name?” he asks, picking up a phone.

  “Peter Tyler. Tell him I worked with his granddaughter, Keisha.”

  An elderly black man in a navy sweater vest approaches moments later, bushy-browed eyes framed by tortoiseshell glasses.

  “Mr. Tyler,” he says, offering me his hand. His palm is as calloused as a mason’s, an unexpected contrast to his bookish appearance. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” I say. He has a trace of an accent that I can’t place.

  “I want to thank you again on behalf of the children, and to tell you how grieved my family was by your tragedy. It was kind of you to remember us during a time of such tribulation.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I’d sent him the fifteen hundred dollars a few weeks after the funeral, my hoops game with Tigger seeming as distant as Little League. “I got the card the kids made. Keisha’s well?”

  “Very. She got a big new promotion she’s all excited about.”

  “Good,” I say, glad to learn my intervention on her behalf eventually bore fruit. “She deserved it.”

  “What can I do for you today?”

  “Two things. First, I was hoping you might have someplace private where I can use a computer connected to the Internet.”

  “Of course,” he says. “And second?”

  I shift my coffee from one hand to the other and dig Andrei’s paperback out of my pocket.

  “This book belongs to a friend of mine. It’s in Russian. I’m wondering if you can tell me what it is, and whether you might have an English copy.”

  He lifts an eyebrow quizzically as he takes the book from me, flipping it over to look at the photograph on the back.

  “Tolstoy,” he says immediately. He opens it carefully, knobby dark fingers caressing the pages. “Too short for a novel, too long for a short story. Probably one of the religious essays he wrote. Come with me. This shouldn’t take long.”

  “Is there somewhere I can get rid of this?” I ask, holding up my coffee.

  “You can take it upstairs if you’re careful,” he says, smiling. “We try to accommodate friends of the library.”

  Mr. Rozier settles me in a battered armchair in his windowless second-floor office, excusing himself to gather some reference works. An ancient Apple laptop on his desk is surrounded by neatly stacked correspondence and periodicals, a blizzard of yellow Post-its stuck to every surface. Plastic-framed family photos cover the walls. I pick out Keisha as a tall teen on a pony, in her confirmation gown, and on the arm of her fiancé. There’s a holly-bordered photo of Mr. Rozier in a Santa hat, a baby in each arm. Jenna always saved the Christmas pictures people sent us of their families. She used to enclose vacation photos of us in our cards when we were first married, but she gave it up some years ago. I never asked why.

  “You have a lovely family,” I say as Mr. Rozier reenters the room, a couple of large books under his arm.

  “Four children, eleven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. I’ve been very blessed. Here.” He offers me a Styrofoam cup filled with ice cubes and a small stack of paper towels. “You should ice that bruise on your face. You’re going to have a shiner.”

  “What have you got?” I ask, helping him clear space on the desk for two hefty volumes.

  “A Russian-English dictionary and Tolstoy’s collected essays. I’ll need a minute to figure out the Cyrillic alphabetization.”

  “You want some help with that?”

  “No,” he says. “I enjoy puzzles. I do a unit on code breaking with the kids. Mainly just number substitution, but we have fun with it.”

  I fold ice cubes into a paper towel as he pores over the dictionary, jotting notes in a cramped hand on a piece of scrap paper.

  “I thought so,” he says, looking up. “The title’s ‘A Confession.’ Tolstoy wrote it in—let me see.” He opens the collected essays and runs a finger down the title page. “Eighteen eighty-two.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Years ago. Do you know anything about Tolstoy?”

  “Not really.”

  He steeples his hands against his mouth and thinks for a moment.

  “Tolstoy was born a Russian aristocrat sometime around 1825. He served in the military before becoming a novelist, and was known as a playboy in his youth, but then he became depressed as he entered his middle years. The first half of ‘A Confession’ is about his struggle not to commit suicide. The second describes his discovery of a personal faith in God outside the ritual of the Orthodox Church.”

  I never knew Andrei to be religious. Picking up the book, I turn pages until I find the sentence he underlined and starred.

  “Any chance you can tell me what that says?”

  Mr. Rozier flips through the English and Russian texts simultaneously, comparing chapter headings and counting down paragraphs. He refers back to his dictionary and then turns the English copy toward me, indicating a sentence with his finger.

  “ ‘What meaning has life that death does not destroy?’ ”

  A chill runs down my spine, the ominous words somehow calling to mind Davis’s wild accusations of biological terrorism.

  “What was Tolstoy’s answer?”

  “Love of mankind. Tolstoy renounced his wealth, spoke out against social inequities, and became a prominent pacifist. Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy’s writings.”

  I nod solemnly, suspecting it might alienate Mr. Rozier to tell him it all sounds like crap to me. Everyone’s responsible for themselves. Utopianism is a philosophy for losers.

  “Perhaps you’d like to borrow this,” Mr. Rozier says, nudging the book toward me.

  “Thanks for the help, but no, I’m not much interested in religious texts,” I say. Tolstoy isn’t going to help me solve Jenna’s murder. My time’s better spent on Andrei’s files.

  “A secular spin might have it that life can be made meaningful only by helping others,” Mr. Rozier says. “Maybe by doing things like donating money to library programs for kids you don’t know.”

  “It’s a thought,” I say, impatient t
o get on with my research. “I’d be grateful if you could show me where I can get on-line.”

  “Of course,” he says, standing. “I’m here to help.”

  25

  MR. ROZIER walks me down two flights of stairs and into a dim basement filled with racks of books. It’s musty but dry, and comfortably cool. A scarred wooden desk sits beneath a high barred window at the far end of the basement, a computer and a banker’s lamp with a cracked green shade resting on top of it. He turns on the lamp, a rhomboid of yellowish light illuminating the desktop.

  “Anything else you need?”

  “A pen or pencil and some paper?”

  He slides open the desk drawer, revealing some chewed pens and a few pieces of cheap stationery with the letterhead of a marine-supply store.

  “People leave all sorts of stuff behind,” he says. “Funding’s tight. We try to live off the land as much as possible.” His laugh is a creaky chuckle.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I really appreciate this.”

  “My pleasure. I’ll check back in on you later.”

  He climbs the stairs slowly as I take my new cell phone out and check for reception. Weak but serviceable. I dial the Harvard Club and my voice mail. Still nothing. Frustrated, I turn on the computer, log in to the mail account I created on Yahoo, and download Andrei’s file. I click on it and get the dialogue box demanding a password.

  Dmitri said that Andrei’s alarm code was the same as his network password, except that he’d changed the letters to numbers. If he used the same password to protect this file, I might be able to figure it out. I enter the numeric alarm code first—8657869—thinking I might get lucky. Nothing. Using my cell phone as a reference, I write the letter groups associated with each number on a piece of marine-store stationery and then stare at it. TUV-MNO-JKL-PQRS-TUV-MNO-WXYZ. Hopefully, Andrei’s underlying password is English, and not Russian or German. While there are thousands of potential letter permutations, only a limited number of vowel, prefix, and suffix combinations make sense. I mouth fragments silently, determined to be patient. A recognizable combination suddenly rolls off my tongue and I sit bolt upright. T-O-L-S-T-O-Y. My heart thumps with excitement as I tap the name into the computer and press enter. An Excel spreadsheet opens on the screen in front of me. The spreadsheet contains dozens of interlinked pages, with hundreds of entries in each. They look like financial statements. Excited to have discovered something I understand, I pick up a pen and begin taking notes. Maybe Tolstoy’s going to help me solve Jenna’s murder after all.