by Linda Stasi
“Taped to it, you say?”
“Yes, my friend said it was taped to the side.”
“Ah. You see this?” he said, holding up the earring as Dane leaned over his shoulder to get a better look. I shot Dane a look in turn that said, “Back off.” Embarrassed, he did.
“The earring has a screw back,” Engles said, pointing out the minuscule threads on the earring’s gold post that spirled unusually from end to end.
“And?” I said. “Unfortunately it doesn’t have the earring back that must have screwed onto it.”
“Not necessary. I have a feeling…” He held up the tube and showed me two tiny holes that I hadn’t seen before. “May I?”
“I’m not sure what you mean … but whatever it is, you know best.”
Engles inserted the earring post into one hole and began turning. I heard a tiny click. But when he inserted it into the second hole, not only didn’t it fit, but it seemed to give Engles a shock—like the one I’d gotten. He jumped and dropped the tube on the desk.
As soon as the tube hit the desk, Dane clutched his chest, desperately trying to breathe. Panicked, we jumped up to help as Dane reached into his pants pocket and managed to pull out a vial and shake a pill under his tongue.
I grabbed Engles’ phone and began to dial 911, but Dane’s big hand slammed down on mine to stop me. “No, no. No ambulance. I’m fine. Fine,” he gasped, tapping his pocket. “Angina unfortunately can’t be cured with natural alternative medicine. Do you have any brandy, Mr. Engles?”
He sat in Engles’ chair while I ran to get him water and Engles ran to get a bottle of port that he must have had sitting around since the Eisenhower administration.
In the thirty seconds it took to get back across the shop, I saw Dane recovered, alert, and yes, looking at Engles’ computer screen.
“There’s another earring out there somewhere,” he said, as calmly as though he hadn’t just nearly had a heart attack and given us one, too.
When Engles came back with the bottle, he poured Dane a small glass, and said, “I will call you a car. I think we’d better finish our discussion at another time. Frankly,” he said, locking the tube up again with the earring post and handing it back to me in the tiny envelope, “even if I had the other earring or whatever, I could not open this without the owner’s permission, and in sight of that owner.”
“Oh, but…”
“I’m afraid that’s not ethical, Ms. Russo. But would you like me to keep the tube in my safe for you—until your friend can come back with you, and I can do my research on how such an antique tube may be opened and how to best secure the contents within?”
Dane, miraculously robust once more, said, “Well, you said you had a break-in once. I don’t think that’s very wise!”
“That was more than thirty years ago, Mr. Judson. Of course, I now have twenty-four-hour security and monitoring.” He shot me a look.
Going with my gut, I told Engles to lock it up for me, and he said, “All right then,” and took out an official-looking form—a hold receipt—filled it out, and called the notary upstairs to witness it. She was about nine hundred years old and probably had been using this same seal to make a living since she worked for the Mayans.
Dane was visibly pissed when we ran out to the car that Engles had called for us. It was still pouring. “I don’t trust that man,” Dane said as I climbed in. “He deals in the black market, and my friends, who are scholars, said last night that he wasn’t trustworthy.”
“Geez, calm down or you’ll have another coronary,” I said as Dane plopped down in the backseat next to me. “It’s not like he’s going to steal it. And your friends didn’t say he wasn’t trustworthy or in the black market. What they said about him, if I remember correctly, consisted mainly of anti-Semitic remarks.”
He ignored me and simply looked straight ahead like he was punishing me. “There’s another earring out there. What if Engles has it?” He huffed. “And that business about that book, the Voltaire Manuscript! Such nerve.” I knew he’d deliberately used “Voltaire” instead of “Voynich” to make Engles sound even more off-base for accusing him of wanting to buy it.
Now I was getting pissed. “Voynich, it’s Voynich, not Voltaire, and you’re getting yourself upset again for no reason.” He glared at me as we sat in an uncomfortable silence the whole way home. I felt like I’d been on a date that started well and went downhill from “Hi, I’m…”
Why did I ever let Mr. Buttinsky come with me in the first place? Big know-it-all.
Only thing is? Dane Judson did know it all, but I just didn’t know at the time that he knew it all.
11
By the time we’d black car’d it home in the pouring rain, Dane had calmed down and as soon as we walked into the apartment, he was back to being all yoga Zen. It occurred to me that I’d never been in his presence without Raylene before. Either she was his guru and calming influence or she scared the hell out of him when they were together, which seemed like all the time.
I walked in and smelled cookies baking. “I know he can’t eat them yet, but I’m practicing for when we can bake cookies together,” Raylene said, wiping her hands on her frilly long apron with WORLD’S BEST COOK spelled out in rhinestones.
“Isn’t that right, my sweet, little itty bitty, teeny boy?” Terry was so entranced you’d think he was sixteen and had just been kissed by Rihanna.
Raylene spun around to show off her rhinestone apron. “I love my BeDazzler! There’s nothing you can’t glam up with rhinestones.”
No kidding.
I picked Terry up off the play mat she’d obviously bought for him—thank God it didn’t have sequins for him to swallow—where he was happily trying to crawl, and attempted to drag him out of there and back home. He did not want to leave and started crying, “Mama! Mama!” at Raylene.
“Hey, kid, your mother’s over here!” I said, a little jealous of how dazzled he was by the BeDazzler lady.
I took his hysterical self back to our apartment, and got Dona to come over so I could head to the office for a few hours. Enough with Raylene. Dona was working the Fox and Friends morning show that week and luckily had the afternoon free.
Terry wasn’t any happier to see Dona than he was to see me. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him the last few days. He must be teething or something,” I said by way of excuse.
“Your neighbor Raylene must have the magic teething formula because you marveled that he never cries when she’s around,” Dona said, picking Terry up and bouncing him around, trying the Binky, a bottle, anything. I was feeling very guilty about leaving her with the fussy (OK, miserable) baby.
“I know. Weird, right? She told me she had a son who died.”
“Really … how old was he?”
“Don’t know. She wouldn’t really talk about it. But the woman’s a helluva babysitter. She must have been the best mother on earth. She sees Terry and she just lights up.”
“From what you’ve told me, he lights up even more when he sees her.”
“He does! I’m very lucky to have them around, what with my parents off saving the world and all.”
“Aren’t they due back?”
“Yes, thank God. Two weeks. Then I won’t have to rely on the Judsons so much. Not that my parents don’t work, but they swear they’ll cut back when they’re back in the States.”
“Good…” Dona said. “I kinda get a weird vibe off those two. The neighbors, I mean, not your folks.”
I told her how Dane had acted out at the shop and she gave me the mouth sneer plus head nod. That’s the big duo. “Oh no, not the look! You were so charmed by them in the park.”
“I don’t know.” She sighed. “Maybe I changed my mind.”
Time was a’wasting, so I gave her complete instructions, left Terry screaming his head off, and said, “If it gets really bad, I e-mailed you Raylene’s contact info, or you can just drag him down the hall to get her to calm him down if you need to.”
“Wasn’t it storming that night?”
“Jesus, Russo, I surf the Atlantic. ‘Get me outta here, it’s raining, and the waves are too high. I might get wet!’” he mocked. “Anyway, the cops were more interested in surfing than in the old man. They’re not digging him up so fast. Some of these guys surf. I recognized one or two back from the Long Beach competition.”
“Can I ask you a question?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “Why did it take you so long to call nine-one-one after you got to your dad’s house and he was already dead?”
“Why? I don’t know. First I freaked out, then I drank some of his nine-hundred-year-old Scotch, then I just, well, I sat there with him. I told him all the shit he did to me over the years that left me broken. I told him that I loved men, lusted for them, in fact. I told him how I wanted to kill him for hitting my mom.” Roy’s big, burly voice cracked.
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”
He actually started to cry, great, heaping sobs. “I think I’m gonna go out to Gilgo tonight. I have to … whatever.”
I asked him to just listen a minute as I was heading down the subway stairs and we’d be cut off. I explained about Myles Engles, the book shop, and all the rest of it. He said that he’d meet me there tomorrow if that was cool, and we’d see what the next step was.
Bob was all over me when he got back from lunch. In fact he found me kicking the never-working copy machine. PAPER JAM TRAY 3 kept flashing.
“They can send a probe to Saturn but no one can get a frigging copy machine to work!” I screamed, banging the top as though that would kick it into gear. “I called Boris.” I pointed to Boris the tech guy’s office, fuming. “But he said now we have to call India first to get a ticket number so that he, who sits twenty steps away, is allowed to fix the goddamned copier!”
Bob totally ignored me. “The ten-million-dollar-firefighter story is up to four hundred and fifty thousand—that’s thousand—Facebook shares and I don’t know how many retweets. Number one story online and it’s trending everywhere! What do you have for me? We gotta advance that baby!”
“Do you work for BuzzFeed or do you work for a newspaper called The Standard?” I said, stalling for time.
“Can it, Russo, whaddaya have?”
Luck was with me. At least for that minute. Before I could make anything up, Jerry “O’Drunken” O’Donnell, Pulitzer Prize–winning putz and the last of the old-time columnists, came wobbling out of his hole. He was one of the only writers with an actual office. I guess they were afraid if they let him out among the females, he’d say something like he was about to say to me.
Just as I bent down to pull out the paper clog from the bottom of the paper tray, he came up close behind my behind. “Russo!” he slurred. I stood right up and spun around like I’d been smacked, hands instinctively over my butt.
“Hi there, Jerry. How ya doing?”
“Great stuff you did, kid,” he said, but before I could thank him he slobbered onto my shoulder with Bob looking on, ready to explode. “Lemme ask you a serious question.”
“OK.”
“Why will a woman give you a blow job and then not use your toothbrush the next morning?”
“Jesus, Jerry,” I said, pushing him away. “If you smelled your breath you’d rather give yourself a blow job, too.”
That was enough to satisfy him, and he chuckled and sauntered back into his cave.
“That stupid son of a bitch,” Bob fumed. “If he wasn’t so brilliant I’d fire him.”
“You’d be a mere shell of a man without those old characters to keep you on the straight and narrow. I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah, yeah, anyway, you still haven’t told me what you’ve got.”
“I’m working on it. Remember investigative reporting? It was this thing that reporters used to do instead of putting up rumor and innuendo as fact.”
He ignored me as though I were speaking Olde English. “Whaddaya got? The News and the Post are all over this, and the News even found pictures of your guy when he tried out for the New York City Firemen’s calendar. Why didn’t you have that?”
“Because I don’t live with the guy and he never told me. Probably because he knew I’d laugh at him for being a schmuck.” Son of a bitch never told me—and I was ashamed to even tell him I always thought he should be a calendar boy. Remind me to kill him next time I see him. Just then my cell rang: Donald.
“They want me to take some pictures of Roy. He was in the firemen’s calendar.”
“No, he wasn’t. He never actually made it.”
“Yeah, he was. I need new cheesecake photos.”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” I said.
“Your boss Bob wants ’em.” Donald was freelancing for all the papers and news sites these days, which gave him the freedom to carouse—not to mention a lot more money to carouse with than he’d never gotten on staff. I shot Bob a look and hung up, telling Donald, “Let me get back to you on that, sir.” I turned on Bob. “Seriously? Cheesecake? The man has just suffered the loss of his father.”
“Oh, give me a fucking break, Russo. You told me the old man was a shit head.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“No, it’s not. We own this story, Russo. Own it! We can’t let anybody else find stuff like the calendar photos. You blew that one, big time.”
I pulled Bob into his office—which wasn’t very private because it had a glass front. I told him that I didn’t give a shit about some dopey, old pictures and that we’d have to keep it all under wraps or we’d lose the whole story. I alone had to find out what was in that tube, and keep it to ourselves until we could break it—the story, I mean. “Let them all scratch their asses while the story dies down. Then—bam!—I reveal the pages, the curse, all of it. Pulitzer, baby, Pul-it-zer!”
I got up and did the happy dance and Bob attempted to do something like it but he ended up swiveling his hips in the most upsetting manner. “Please, boss, sit down. The children can see you,” I said, nodding my head toward the wool hats who were staring open-mouthed.
My joy was short-lived, however. Very short-lived.
The world’s most disturbing sound broke my revelry: text alert by way of old car horn sound, to which Bob said, “Could you have found a more annoying sound?” It was annoying, but with the baby, I needed something loud that I could hear anytime, anywhere.
Text from Mad Dog: U know Roy surfs Gilgo @ midnight?
Me: So?
Mad Dog: U know the old story about the serial hooker murderer out there?
Me: And?
Mad Dog: 2 more tranny hookers found. Fresh kill. There’s a prossy serial killer on the loose for 10 years out there.
Me: I know. So?
Mad Dog: ur surfer boy told cops he left old man to surf Gilgo in storm. Same nite another hooker offed. Some kid found remains today.
Me: Shit.
Mad Dog: Worse: per randy—the 2 Gilgo hookers dug up last year were Morris Golden clients! No follow b/c old bastard had emphysema and half a lung, & couldnt have killed & dragged em across LI.
Me: How bad does this look?
Mad Dog: Glad Roy boy’s got $10 mil. Gonna need it.
Me: Shit.
Mad Dog: Shit on a board, baby.
Me: Where is he?
Mad Dog: Unfolding fast. He’s being interrogated Nassau/Suffolk task force. Going now. good side? morris left no will. tube’s roy’s.
Me: Where r they holding him? U didn’t say
That was it. Mad Dog was off the grid—to me, a reporter, anyway—even though Roy was my best friend—but Dog apparently thought he was straight. Maybe he was thinking we had a thing, Roy and me.
12
“What?” Bob was yelling and standing practically on top of me in his office. “What is it, Russo? What?” Not just the wool caps but even O’Drunken came out to stare at us.
Was I giving up my best friend for a front page? Would I instead compromise my journalistic ethics—a term some now call an oxymoron—if I didn’t spill?
I immediately called Roy. It went directly to voice mail. “Call me. Now!” I texted the same thing. Nothing.
I started to sweat. I knew what I had to do and it made my stomach turn.
EXCLUSIVE
Relic’s Curse Hits Millionaire Fireman
By Alessandra Russo
Two days ago he was the most famous fireman in the world. Today he’s being questioned by the police for the serial murders of at least seventeen prostitutes on Long Island.
World Trade Center hero, Roy Golden, 42, who’d inherited a mysterious cursed relic worth $10 million, has been taken in for questioning by a joint Nassau-Suffolk County homicide task force.
Cops want to question Golden in the unsolved, possibly decades-long case involving murders on Gilgo and Oak Beaches in Long Island.
Golden was originally called in to discuss the death of his father, ninety-year-old Morris Golden, a retired banker from Hicksville, Long Island, who had come into possession of the relic. Under questioning, the retired firefighter, an avid Long Island surfer, happened to mention in conversation with police, whom he’d recognized from various surfing tournaments, that he liked to surf Gilgo, one of the beaches where the remains of four victims were found in December 2010, and six more remains were discovered in March and April 2011.
Yesterday, the bodies of two recently murdered prostitutes were discovered by a teen on his way to the beach. They had been killed within twenty-four hours of the time that Golden had been surfing Gilgo alone.
In addition, two of the previously murdered prostitutes—one a transsexual—had been clients of the recently deceased Morris Golden. The cops had never followed up on the connection because according to a source, the aged Golden was too feeble to have strangled and dragged the bodies of these women from the middle of Long Island to the South Shore.
