“Sure, that’s possible, David. Or maybe there’s another envelope stuck inside a book or taped on the underside of a drawer.”
“But Mrs. Weinman will be gone tomorrow morning and won’t be back for weeks. Luke, I think we’re stuck.”
“I wasn’t thinking of asking her about it, David. She seemed clueless anyhow and clearly wanted to distance herself from the whole affair. I was thinking of going back to the house and doing our own...investigation.”
Winkler was aghast. “Are you kidding? You mean breaking and entering? I’m a lawyer, Luke. I couldn’t be involved in anything like that.”
“Who said anything about breaking and entering?” Rollins reached down into his pants pocket and pulled out a single key on a chain with a label, with the rabbi’s street address on it.
“What the hell?! Where did you get that, Luke?”
“While you were saying your goodbyes to Mrs. Weinman, I spotted a rack of keys by the front door. There were actually three with the house address. I figured she wouldn’t need them all, now that the rabbi wasn’t going to be using one. So, I plucked it off the rack and stuck it in my pocket—just in case. We wouldn’t be breaking and entering if we entered with a key. It would be as if we were invited guests,” Rollins said.
“Not by a long shot, Luke, not without at least talking to Mrs. Weinman about going through her stuff. I doubt she’d agree. Remember, she’s really uncomfortable—”
Suddenly, they both fell unconscious as their heads slumped down onto the table and the music continued to blare in the restaurant around them.
CHAPTER 23
IT WAS NEARLY TEN THE NEXT MORNING when Winkler slowly opened his eyes, head throbbing, to find himself in a hospital bed. He was in a double room, with Rollins sitting at the end of the next bed, pulling up his pants. A man in his late forties, well built with a brush cut, wearing a dark suit, entered the room.
“You guys Winkler and Rollins?” he asked.
“That’s us,” said Rollins. “And you?”
The man flipped open his wallet and showed them a shiny gold badge and identification card. “Detective Gino Balducci, NYPD. Welcome to the Big Apple. You guys landed in the ER here at Elmhurst Hospital in the middle of the night. The hospital got your ID off your driver’s licenses. The intake report says a limo driver dropped you off just after three this morning, both out stone cold. Said you’d been boozin’ it up around town. We don’t want any ‘tourists’ dying of excess alcohol. So, they pumped you out and let you sleep it off here.”
“That’s a crock,” Rollins said as he tucked his shirt into his pants. “We were in a Russian restaurant, had one drink and were in the middle of talking over something, then the lights went out. I’d guess it was a little after nine o’clock. I don’t know what happened.” He threw some water on his face and ran his fingers through his hair to straighten it out.
“You guys missing anything?” asked the detective. “Whatever you had on you when you got admitted is in these plastic bags. Which one’s Winkler?”
Winkler raised his hand slightly, still feeling weak, and the detective tossed him a white plastic bag with his name on it in black marker. He pulled his wallet out of the bag and opened it.
“Let’s see. I’ve got my driver’s license, American Express card, Blue Cross card, and some cash. Sweet.” He counted the cash. “I had at least five hundred after we left Ginsberg,” he said, turning to Rollins. “Couple hundred left. Guess he felt he was worth three hundred for the day—”
“Plus whatever he wants to charge to the credit cards,” added Rollins.
Winkler dug further into the plastic bag. “Nice guy. He left me my briefcase.” He unzipped his black leather envelope-style briefcase and fanned it open, looking in each section. “Left my notepad, some maps and my cell phone. The CD J.B. Winston gave us is gone. Damn! My Platinum VISA and Mastercard, State Bar ID, U.S. passport, and business cards are gone. But I guess he didn’t see my Canadian passport, which I kept in this little side pocket just in case. I’m a dual national; never can tell when that could come in handy. How about you, Luke?”
Rollins dumped the contents of the other bag onto the bed: Wallet; cell phone; car keys; house key; drugstore reading glasses; shirt; belt; socks; and shoes. With a final jiggle, loose change rained onto the bed.
“Wallet’s got my cash, but there wasn’t that much to start. Just some twenties. All my credit cards but my Amex are gone. Passport is gone. Still have my driver’s license, car keys, and house key, so if we ever make it home, I can get in! I have my Blue Cross card and some of my business cards, too.”
“Where’s the manila envelope and the letter?” Winkler asked. “It was right there on the table in the restaurant. You’d just finished reading the letter, remember?”
“Not in my stuff, David. How about your bag?”
Winkler turned his plastic bag upside down and shook it frantically. “Nada. Nothing else, Luke. It’s gone. Poof! We were so close. But what about that other key, Luke? The one we were talking about?”
“Nope, David, not here. Gone, just like the letter. Slipped right through our fingers.”
“Detective, I’d like to file a complaint for theft, or whatever it is when someone steals your credit cards and other stuff,” Winkler said. “I know the guy’s name, the driver who took us to the restaurant—Igor—he must have been behind this.”
“Actually, he left his business card,” the detective replied. “Not Igor. Gives his name as Nikolai Tabatchnikoff. Big Apple Cars. The company name is bogus—it doesn’t exist—and the phone number on the card is the city morgue. Some sense of humor these guys have. We’ll run Nikolai through our system and see what we find, but I’ll give you odds the name’s bogus, too. You fellows pick the restaurant he took you to?”
Winkler paused a moment, still a bit groggy, trying to remember. “Nope. Come to think of it, he suggested the restaurant. Said it was his favorite.”
“You remember the name?”
Winkler and Rollins looked at each other.
“I don’t think he ever mentioned the name,” said Winkler. “Just said it was a good one, his favorite, in Forest Hills. Then he took us there for dinner. The food was great. But I don’t remember the name. To tell the truth, I didn’t pay much attention. It was late, and raining hard. Russian place. The name was on the front window, but it was in Russian, and if there was any English, I didn’t pay attention. I paid cash and didn’t take a receipt.”
“Did the driver come into the restaurant with you?”
“No,” said Winkler. “Looked and acted very professional. He just stayed in his car. Later, he suggested we go back to the same place, for a drink.” Winkler was questioning how he could have let himself be taken advantage of this way.
“Gents, this wasn’t a random one-off. I’ve seen other cases, and this one’s very similar, could be part of an identity theft operation. How many drinks did you say you had the second time you went to that restaurant?”
“Just one apiece. David had a beer, I had a vodka tonic,” said Rollins.
“Yep, I suspect the driver marked you, steered you—literally—to the restaurant, and his comrades spiked your drink with a knockout drug. I’ve seen it before. You’re lucky they didn’t just dump you in an alley. They took their sweet time deciding what to do with you before they brought you here.”
“Do you think you can go to the restaurant and see if someone there would say something?” asked Winkler. “There was an important document on the table, and it’s missing.”
“Waste of time, I’d say,” the detective answered. “First, you don’t know which Russian restaurant, and there are more than I can count. Maybe it was Forest Hills, maybe it wasn’t. He could’ve just said that to put you off track. Then there’s the matter of who’s gonna say anything. All of a sudden, no one speaks English, if you know what I mean. You know how many times I’ve heard ‘Ya ni panimayu pa Angliski’? You actually think someone’s gonna tell
a cop who spiked your drink and ripped you off?
“We can go through the motions and write up a report, but when it’s all said and done, we won’t know much more than we know right now. Unless you guys have some other suggestions—”
“Detective,” said Winkler, “I’m not so worried about the identity theft. I can deal with that. But there was an important letter on the table, and I had a house key, marked with the address. I can’t tell you much about it, but it’s really important that we get that back. It’s a big deal—a really big deal—I assure you.”
“Everything’s a big deal,” replied the detective. “You’ve been assaulted. Robbed. Identity probably stolen. But you’re alive and probably won’t have any lingering side effects. And we’ve got limited resources. What makes you think these guys are interested in any more than your credit?”
Winkler felt he had to get the detective to help them. “The driver, Igor, or Nikolai Tabachnikoff—whatever his name—was constantly yacking on his cell phone in Russian while he was driving. He probably overheard what we were talking about and passed that information to someone else. It probably had to do with the letter. Why would some Russians—and let’s assume for a moment they were Russians—leave us with cash and take a letter in Spanish? And why would they take our business cards and passports? Sure, I suppose the passports are worth a few bucks on the black market, but mine could also be useful in connection with the letter.”
“How did you get to the driver?” asked the detective. “Just a name in a phonebook? Or an ad on the Internet?”
“I just asked the bellman at the hotel,” replied Rollins. “Now that I think of it, he was Russian. He said we shouldn’t take a cab; it would be too expensive. He had a friend with a car service that would be much cheaper. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and made a call. And within a couple of minutes, a black town car pulled up in the alley next to the hotel. I wondered why it didn’t park in the front, where the regular cabs do, but didn’t think any more about it.”
“Like a gypsy cab,” said the detective. “Unlicensed. Unregulated. They charge whatever they want. Sometimes foreign visitors who don’t speak English trust them to take the right fare from their wallets, and they pluck hundred dollar bills without giving it a second thought. Scum of the Earth.”
“Detective Balducci, it’s really important that the house—the house whose key they took—be checked to make sure they didn’t rob it.” Winkler figured they weren’t going to search the place on their own, especially since now they didn’t have the key. And it bothered him that Rollins had taken it in the first place. “Do you think you could take us by the place for a minute, just to have a look?”
“I really shouldn’t do this. I’m assigned to your case, not to investigate other situations, and your case, as a practical matter, can be closed.”
“Detective, please, it’ll just take a minute, and it really is related to what happened to us,” said Winkler, pleading.
“OK, sure, we can take a run over there. But whose house is that anyway? You guys aren’t from here,” probed the detective.
“A friend—a widow—gave us the key, just in case we needed to drop by when she wasn’t there,” said Rollins.
“So why don’t you just call your friend and make sure everything’s OK and tell her you lost the key and she should get the locks changed?”
“We would do that, but—” said Winkler.
Rollins quickly interjected. “She’s out of town, and no one’s home.”
They both knew if the detective spoke to Mrs. Weinman, they would be exposed, but they also knew they had no choice. They couldn’t tell the truth. And they were fairly certain she wouldn’t be there to greet them.
Winkler grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote down the address. “84 West 119th Street, Forest Hills. It’s etched in my memory.”
“OK, get yourself dressed,” the detective said to Winkler. “When I came in, the head nurse said you could leave anytime you wanted. I’ll bring my car around to the main entrance in a couple of minutes. Black unmarked. Swing by the cashier’s office—just before you reach the main door, on your left. No doubt they took your insurance information off your Blue Cross cards, but I was told you should button things up before you leave.”
After passing by the cashier’s office, Winkler and Rollins rushed to the main entrance, arriving just as Detective Balducci was pulling up to the door. Winkler took the front seat.
“84 West 119th. Not far, maybe twenty minutes if you were driving,” the detective said as he pushed a button that triggered his flashing blue lights and siren. He stepped on the gas, and his car raced out of the hospital driveway. “Sorry to be in such a hurry, but I’ve gotta check this out as quickly as I can, write up my report, and move on to another case with some potential. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but yours is about as low a priority as jaywalking.”
CHAPTER 24
IN UNDER TEN MINUTES, the car pulled onto the rabbi’s street and screeched to a stop. Winkler jumped out of the car, address in hand, and looked at house number 86 on the right, and 82 on the left. Between them was a heap of bricks and plaster, sticks of wood, shingles, and gutters. The wrecking ball had finished its work, and a bulldozer was just starting to remove the rubble. The pile of ruins was what used to be the rabbi’s house, number 84.
“Are you sure we’re on West 119th Street?” Winkler shouted to the detective, who’d gotten out of his car and was looking at the scene in amazement, looking for number 84.
“No question about it. This is the right street,” he replied. “Let me find the crew chief and see what’s going on here.”
Detective Balducci spotted a tall fellow with a hard hat standing off to one side, who seemed to be directing the action with a Nextel phone. He walked over to him and introduced himself.
“No doubt you have some paperwork that authorizes demolition of this house?” he asked.
“Sure do, back in the truck, and the place was posted as well,” the crew chief replied.
He walked back to his truck and pulled out a clipboard with a work order on it and a court order with blue tape on the corners.
“Here’s our work order, and this is the court order, which was right on the door. We pulled it off before we started, and also rang the bell to make sure no one was home.”
“There was no court order on the door when we left here last night,” said Winkler. “Look here, it says EIGHTY-TWO West 119th Street, not EIGHTY-FOUR!”
“Holy shit!” exclaimed the crew chief, pulling the papers from Winkler’s hands. “I can’t believe it. My guys with the heavy equipment must have pulled up to this house this morning, saw the order on the door, and assumed it was posted on the correct house, and I assumed they knew what they were doing. I guess none of us looked at the house number on the work order. In all my years—” He immediately ordered his crew to stop working.
“I don’t think this was an error in posting the notice,” said Winkler. “It definitely wasn’t posted on number 84 last night, and according to the notice, it had to be posted two weeks prior to demolition to allow time for an appeal.”
“Something’s rotten here,” said Rollins. “Let’s take a close look at the door to number 82.”
Winkler, Rollins, Detective Balducci, and the crew chief walked over to number 82, and Rollins carefully examined the front of the door without touching it. “You can see here as the light is hitting the door,” he said, turning his head at an angle to catch the light just right. “There are three shiny spots—my guess is, they’d have some adhesive on them from tape—just about where the corners of that court order would have been posted. And look here, there’s still a corner of white paper with blue tape on it. How many corners does your court order have?” he asked the crew chief.
“Three corners with tape, one corner is ripped off,” said the crew chief.
“Gentlemen, I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but no one is to touch that door unt
il our crime lab folks are finished with it,” Detective Balducci instructed.
“Tell your guys to stop working and leave everything as it is. No clearing of the rubble. You can remove your equipment. I’ll need names, addresses, and phone numbers of all your crew in case there are questions—and there’s sure to be a lawsuit. And give me that court order. We’ll have to check it for prints—and the doors—both number 82 and number 84, which is probably buried in the rubble.”
Winkler and Rollins walked with Detective Balducci towards his car.
“This can’t be a coincidence,” said Rollins. “Last night we visited an occupied residence, and I’d swear there was no court order on the door. We have reason to believe there may be some important information in the house and someone else knows that and has the address—and the key. Sometime late last night—or maybe early this morning—the court order was switched from number 82 to number 84. Whoever did that may have also entered the residence, to look for the information—and maybe the owner, Mrs. Weinman, was still there—or maybe she’d already left.”
“Are you suggesting the guys who may have drugged you two are behind all of this—and there may even be someone in the rubble? I thought you said your friend was out of town and that’s why she gave you the key?” asked the detective.
“Actually, she was going out of town. She was supposed to leave for Florida on a very early flight this morning,” said Winkler.
“Did she live alone?” asked the detective.
“I think so. When we visited her last night, there was no one else there,” replied Winkler.
“Do you know where she was going, if she was going to visit someone, so we could check and see if she made it there safely? That would be better than having to sift through all that rubble and bring in the dogs.”
“She just said she was going to visit her sister-in-law, in Ft. Lauderdale. I don’t know the name,” said Winkler. “Can you check the passenger lists of all flights leaving La Guardia for Ft. Lauderdale this morning? The passenger we’re looking for is Sarah Weinman.”
To Save the Nation Page 15
