Death's little helpers jm-2

by Peter Spiegelman

  I put the phone down and wondered what Nina Sachs would have to say about my meeting with Turpin. Giving him her name seemed like a small thing to me, considering that the folks at Pace-Loyette already knew that Nina was trying to locate her husband, but I wasn’t sure she’d see it the same way. I punched her number and Ines Icasa answered. She spoke quietly, and told me in her precise accented English that Nina was not available. She asked if I’d like to leave a message. I declined.

  I stood and stretched. I was stiff from too much phone time and jumpy from too much coffee and I needed a run to work it all out. And then I needed to go uptown, to Danes’s apartment building. But before that, I had two more dots to connect.

  I slid my laptop over and opened a file I’d saved two days ago. In it were the links I’d found when I’d been studying up on Nina Sachs. They consisted mainly of reviews of her shows and announcements of significant sales of her work. I scanned a few of them. In the last three years, Nina had had a half-dozen shows at a SoHo gallery called I-2 Galeria de Arte. I put the gallery name in a search engine.

  According to its Web site, I-2 Galeria de Arte had been around for a dozen years and dealt in a wide variety of contemporary art: painting, sculpture, even video. It specialized in works by women and by Latin American artists, and it maintained three exhibition spaces: in SoHo, in Brooklyn, and upstate on the Hudson River in Kinderhook. I looked at the gallery’s Brooklyn address. It was the same as Nina Sachs’s. I looked at the picture of the gallery’s owner. It was Ines Icasa.

  Peter Spiegelman

  JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home

  4

  Gregory Danes’s brick and dressed-stone apartment building squatted prosperously on 79th Street, between Lexington and Third avenues. I stood with Christopher beneath its green awning, out of the rain. Christopher was my height- just over six feet- and skinny, and he looked twenty-something going on sixty. His narrow face was pale and pocked with acne scars, and his bony fingers were cigarette-stained. His gray doorman’s uniform hung off him like skin sloughing from a snake, and his thick hair struggled beneath his uniform cap.

  Christopher was happy to take my money and happy to talk to me in return, but he was nervous just then. His small eyes flitted around and he looked through the glass doors behind me, into the building’s lobby. He stiffened, locked a polite smile onto his face, and barely moved his jaw when he spoke.

  “Here’s that motherfucking super; that fucking guy hates my guts. Does nothing but give me the evil eye all day. Do me a favor, man, take a walk around the block. Give it ten and come back. He’ll be gone then and we can talk.” I looked past him and nodded and headed west on 79th Street. The rain made a gentle patting sound on my umbrella.

  I walked up Lex and looked into the small handsome shops that lined the street. They were full of delicate wicked-looking shoes, and stationery made from butterfly wings, and French baby clothes that were hand-stitched by blue-eyed virgins. The window displays were intricately wrought and exhibited the merchandise with fetishistic devotion, and they all made me think of Joseph Cornell. I crossed Lex at 83rd Street and went west toward Park Avenue. I meandered slowly down Park, past big old buildings of the sort Danes’s building aspired to be, and went east again on 75th. And then I headed back.

  Christopher gave me a relaxed nod as he pulled open the heavy door. The lobby was wide and deep, with a vaulted ceiling and Persian rugs on the polished stone floors, and it was empty but for us. We stood in a vestibule near the entrance and Christopher’s eyes scanned the sidewalk out front. I slipped him a twenty and he made it vanish.

  “That prick should be out for twenty minutes at least,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “You work here long?” I asked.

  “About a year, part-time. I fill in for the regulars when they’re on vacation or out sick. I end up pulling eight, maybe ten, shifts a month.”

  “All daytime shifts?”

  Christopher snorted. “I wish. Usually they shuffle the duty so I work the overnights- midnight to six.” I nodded.

  “How’d you get lucky with daylight hours today?”

  Christopher gave a wry smile. “Super-Prick is short-staffed the next few weeks; he had no choice.”

  “You know the tenants at all?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. Working the late shift I don’t see much of them, plus a lot of them are real assholes- wouldn’t piss on ’em if they were on fire.” A bronze elevator door slid open at the back of the lobby. A fiftyish woman in a Burberry trench coat got out, trailed by a dachshund in matching outerwear. She glanced at the empty concierge station and sniffed. She eyed Christopher and sniffed more loudly. She looked at me. My hair was shorter, my clothes fit better, and I had no acne scars, but she was unimpressed. Christopher said hello and held the door and she sniffed once more as she went through.

  “See what I mean?” he said. I nodded sympathetically and pulled out a photo of Danes.

  “You know him?”

  Christopher looked at the picture and looked at me. His small eyes got smaller. “Danes, right?”

  I nodded. “Seen him around?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Not for a while- I don’t remember when the last time was. I told this to the other guys.”

  I looked at Christopher and took a deep breath. I slipped the photo back into my pocket. “What other guys?” I asked quietly.

  Christopher shuffled his feet and looked away from me. His eyes were nervous when they finally came back to mine. “I guess you’re not with them, huh?” he said.

  “What other guys, Christopher?”

  “The two guys who asked about Danes before.”

  “When before?”

  He shrugged. “Ten days ago, maybe.”

  “What did they ask?”

  Christopher ran his eyes around the lobby. “The same as you. They showed me a picture, asked if I’d seen him around and when I’d seen him last. Asked if I knew his friends in the building.”

  “And you told them…?”

  “Same as I told you. I haven’t seen the guy, and I don’t know shit about the tenants.”

  I nodded. “Who were they?” Christopher shook his head and looked confused. “Were they cops? Were they lawyers?”

  “Not lawyers… not cops, either. They were private, like you.”

  “These guys have names?”

  Another headshake. “Not that I remember.” I stared at him, and he ran a stained hand over the back of his neck and said nothing.

  “You remember what they looked like?” I asked.

  “They just looked like… two guys.”

  I sighed. “Were they short, tall, black, white?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. They were… medium. They were white, the both of them, and I think they had brown hair. They were about the same height- maybe six feet, maybe a little shorter.”

  I shook my head. “Did they say anything about calling if you happened to see Danes?” I asked. “Did they give you a phone number?”

  Christopher tugged at his ear and rubbed the back of his neck again and looked around the lobby. “No, bro, they didn’t say anything about that. They just asked their questions and split.”

  I looked at him some more. I was fairly sure that Christopher was not being entirely truthful with me. I was fairly sure, in fact, that he was lying through his teeth. But I still needed him, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. “And you haven’t heard from them since?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Christopher said, and looked at his watch. He craned his neck to check the sidewalk, east and west. “Not to rush you or anything, but that prick’ll be back soon.”

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re just about done. Anybody working here who knows the tenants well?”

  “The guy I’m subbing for today: Paul Gargosian. He’s been here since they opened the place, and he knows everybody. He’s an okay guy, too- you grease him and he’ll talk to you.”

/>   “When’s he back?”

  “Couple weeks.”

  “Know his number, or where he lives?”

  “In the Bronx someplace- I don’t know.” Christopher looked at his watch again, more nervous now. “I don’t want to rush you, but… ”

  I nodded. “No problem, Christopher, you’ve been a big help. How much to get into Danes’s apartment?”

  Christopher looked at me and winced. “Shit, bro, you don’t want much, do you?” He shook his head and tugged on an ear. “That could be my job, for chrissakes.” I nodded and let him keep talking and thinking about it. “Oh, Christ, what the fuck are you going to do in there?”

  “I’m just trying to find the guy, Christopher. I’m not interested in taking his stuff.”

  “Shit… it’d need to be at least a hundred- no, two hundred.” I nodded.

  “Two hundred’s fine,” I said. “When?” Christopher was looking paler.

  “It’s got to be next week- Monday afternoon. Super-Prick will be out then.” I wasn’t happy with a six-day wait, but I didn’t have a lot of options. I nodded. Christopher checked the sidewalk again. “You’ve got to split.”

  “Just one more question,” I said. “Where do the tenants garage their cars?”

  “I know two places people use,” he said, and gave me their names. “Now get out of here, man.” I went.

  The parking garages Christopher told me about were each within four blocks of the building, but in opposite directions. I went north and got lucky.

  It was off Third Avenue, tucked between two worn apartment buildings, and its entrance was a narrow oil-stained ramp leading down. I found a small quiet man named Rafe in a glass booth at the bottom of the ramp. His hair was black and wavy and his dark eyes were set deeply in a weathered intelligent face. He recognized Danes’s picture and identified him as “black ’04 BMW Seven-fifty.” He told me the car wasn’t in and hadn’t been for a while, and for twenty bucks he looked through a stack of wrinkled papers and gave me its plate number and the date and time it had last gone out. It was five weeks ago, the day after Nina Sachs had last spoken with Danes, at nine-twenty in the morning. I asked Rafe where the nearest gas stations were. He told me, and I thanked him. I turned to leave and then turned back.

  “Has anyone else come asking about this?” I said.

  A look of calculation passed quickly across Rafe’s face and he nodded at me. “One guy, a week and a half back.”

  “What did he ask about?”

  “About the car and the customer- like you- and I told him the same things. I got twenty-five out of him, though.”

  I fished a ten from my pocket. “You remember what he looked like?”

  Rafe tucked the bill away. “White guy, in his thirties maybe, skinny, about five-ten, with dark hair and a mustache.”

  “He give you a name or show some ID?” He shook his head. “He give you a number to call, in case Danes showed up?”

  “He tried to. I told him no thanks. It’s one thing taking cash and answering questions, but being a spy is something else.”

  I nodded. “Has he been back since?”

  “Nope,” Rafe said, and then the phone rang in the glass booth and he picked it up and started talking. I made my way back up the ramp.

  The closest of the gas stations was north, near an on-ramp to the FDR Drive. I was still feeling loose from my run and the rain was still soft, and I walked uptown and wondered all the way about who else was searching for Gregory Danes.

  The station was on the corner, and a steady stream of cars pulled in and out, veering dangerously across many lanes of traffic as they did. It was not quiet. Besides the pumps there were two greasy repair bays with car lifts and a cramped store that sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, and soda. Jammed between the bays and the store was a filthy glassed-in office. It smelled of gasoline and cigars and dirty socks. I waited at a chest-high plywood counter for Frank to get off the phone.

  Frank was black, about sixty and mostly bald, and he looked like he’d spent much of his life moving heavy things around. He was just under six feet, with a massive chest and shoulders and no neck to speak of. He wore a gray uniform shirt with an open collar, his name on the pocket, and the sleeves rolled up over beefy forearms. He hung up the phone and ran a hand over his broad, tired face.

  “Let me see that again,” he said. I gave him the picture of Danes, and he fished a pair of half-glasses out of his pocket and peered at it. After a while he shrugged.

  “He drives a black BMW Seven-fifty, if that helps,” I said. “An ’04.”

  “I don’t know… maybe. He’s not one of my regulars- not one of my weekly guys- but I’ve seen him before.”

  “You remember when the last time was?” He shook his head. “Were you here five weeks ago, around nine-thirty in the morning?”

  Frank snorted. “Buddy, I own this place. If I’m not asleep, I’m here. But I don’t remember if he was in or not.”

  “Would any of your guys remember?”

  Frank laughed. “I’d be surprised but go ahead, knock yourself out.” Frank was right.

  It was after five when I got home. My apartment was full of gray light and my head was full of questions. There was a phone message from Jane, telling me she had a dinner with the buyers that night, and another, from my brother Ned, reminding me of my nephew’s birthday party that weekend and telling me to expect some e-mail: three rA©sumA©s and a schedule of interviews.

  Klein amp; Sons was in the market for a security director. Ned had tried to sell me on the job and wasn’t happy when I’d run in the opposite direction. In a momentary spasm of familial conciliation, I’d offered to interview the candidates on his short list. It was one of those good deeds that had certain punishment written all over it.

  I checked my e-mail and found the rA©sumA©s there. I also found reports from the search services. I poured myself a cranberry juice and sat down to read them, wondering if they’d shed any light on where Gregory Danes had driven to when he’d driven off the map.

  Peter Spiegelman

  JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home

  5

  Richard Gilpin was calling himself Gilford Richards these days, at least at the esteemed investment firm of Morgan amp; Lynch of Fort Lee, New Jersey. His voice was deep and ripe with sincerity, but he went quiet when I used the name Gilpin and hung up when I said I was calling about his half brother, Gregory Danes.

  Finding Gilpin hadn’t been hard; he was in the book, at an address somewhere in Englewood. I’d called that number and an answering machine there told me I’d reached the residence of Gilford Richards. I’d plugged Gilford Richards into a search engine and come up with Morgan amp; Lynch’s cheesy Web site. According to the site, Morgan amp; Lynch was a Cayman Islands company that operated half a dozen hedge funds- microcap stock and foreign equity funds mainly. They claimed steady growth in assets under management, and remarkable returns, and they made elaborate and incoherent statements about the mathematical models used to manage their investments. The whole thing reeked of Ponzi.

  No one named Morgan or Lynch seemed to be associated with the firm, but Gilford Richards was listed as one of its principals. Richards’s CV was impressive but curiously failed to mention his earlier incarnation as Gilpin or his run-ins with the SEC. An oversight, no doubt. After five attempts, I gave up trying to reach him again, and resigned myself to a trip to Fort Lee. But not today.

  Today, Dennis Turpin was on my calendar. I’d called Nina Sachs last night, to get approval to disclose her name to Turpin. It was a surprisingly painless experience. And from what I’d heard on the phone, the whole gestalt at Sachs’s place had taken a definite uptick.

  Nina had answered. Her voice was light and her mood was expansive. There was music in the background, and Billy was laughing and calling to Ines.

  “Come on, Nes, I put on that Miami shit you like.” He sang “Turn the Beat Around,” badly.

  I told Nina about my talk with
Turpin and about his offer to trade information, and she didn’t think long before agreeing.

  “Hey, what the hell- they already know I’m looking for Greg.” She thought longer about my conversations with Christopher, the doorman, and Rafe, the garage attendant.

  “It wasn’t the cops?” she asked after a while. She was quieter and worried.

  “It doesn’t sound like them.”

  “So, who then?”

  “I was hoping you might have an idea.”

  “Fuck, no. People from work, maybe?”

  “Could be,” I had said. “Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow.”

  I had some time until my afternoon meeting with Turpin- time enough for lunch and more phone calls. I punched Simone Gautier’s number.

  She had no word for me yet on the hospitals and morgues, but that’s not why I was calling. I gave her Danes’s plate numbers and a description of his BMW and agreed on a fee to have her check out the longterm parking lots at Newark and LaGuardia and JFK. I’d already searched for Danes’s car in the NYPD’s online database of impounded vehicles and come up empty, and I didn’t hold out great hope for the longterm lots- Danes struck me as the type to use a car service for his airport trips- but I’d feel stupid if I missed something so obvious.

  My next call was to Paul Gargosian, the vacationing doorman from Danes’s building. I’d found him in the book, too- the only Gargosian with an address on City Island, in the Bronx. Mrs. Paul Gargosian answered. She had a heavy Brooklyn accent, and she was friendly and forthcoming.

  “Paulie’s away, hon, down in Sarasota the next couple weeks, with his brother, Jerry. They’re out on Jerry’s boat most of the time, and I don’t know when he’s going to call. You want to leave a number, maybe he’ll get back to you.” I gave her my number and thanked her.

  Then I went to the kitchen, made two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread, and poured a tall glass of milk. I sat at my long table and opened up my laptop, picking up where I’d left off last night, reading the reports from the search services.