An Open Case of Death

by James Y. Bartlett

“I can’t tell you that,” he said. He paused again in what I hoped was an embarrassed silence. “Well, listen…I think the Warriors are playing the Celtics in January at the Garden. I’ll probably come east with them. Maybe we can get together, have a drink or two, catch up.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “Sounds good. Gimme a call.”

  “Will do,” he said. “And if that deal does go through, just remember: I know a lot of people out here. Be glad to help you navigate your way through the rocky shoals at Pebble Beach.”

  I laughed, forcing out some ha-has. “Ten four on that,” I said. “Thanks again.”

  I put the phone down, stood up and went to look out the window at the North End street scene below. There was nobody down there. There usually isn’t. It’s a quiet street.

  “Who was that?” Mary Jane asked from the kitchen.

  “Andre Citrone from San Francisco,” I said. “Calling to offer help with my research on the book on Pebble Beach’s history.”

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  “That’s weird,” I said. “Somebody told him I was doing this book. He wouldn’t tell me who.”

  “Is it a big secret or something?”

  “It hasn’t happened yet,” I said. “I haven’t signed anything. I haven’t agreed to do the book. Only me and Jake Strauss know about it, as far as I know. So who told Drey?”

  “I guess Strauss did,” she said.

  “Good guess, but I don’t think so,” I said. “Jake wants me to find this missing heir. The book is incidental to that. Why would he call the sports columnist for the newspaper in San Francisco and tell him anything about our arrangement? Makes no sense.”

  “So who else might know?” she asked.

  “No idea,” I said. “Maybe someone has bugged Jake’s office.”

  “Or maybe someone has bugged this place,” she said. She poured us both a bourbon on the rocks and put the drinks on a tray with some nuts, crackers and cheese and brought it into the living room. That right there is the difference between men and women. Or, one of thousands. Alone, by myself, I would have just poured a drink and grabbed the jar of nuts from the cupboard. Mary Jane did the whole presentation thing. With dishes. Yin and yang, right there. I liked yin. Or was she yang? Can never remember.

  “Or maybe I’m walking into a shit storm of Biblical proportions,” I said.

  She shrugged. We clinked glasses.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” she said.

  Thanksgiving reared its ugly head a week or two after my trip to New York. It has never been one of my Top Ten favorite holidays, along with Christmas. My parents had died in a car crash when I was just an infant, and the aunt and uncle who raised me were not into big family holiday dos. Or small ones, for that matter.

  Mary Jane, on the other hand, was big into the family thing, and so I found myself at an Italian Thanksgiving presided over by the patriarch of all patriarchs, my kinda-sorta father-in-law, Carmine Spoleto, the local Mob boss. About forty of us assembled on a cold, dreary afternoon at a magnificent mansion in Milton, perched atop a bluff overlooking an endless brown salt marsh that seemed to reach all the way to Boston Harbor. I tried to ignore the paisans all in black who took up positions at every entrance, no doubt heavily armed and ready to shoot holes into anyone bold enough to try and break in and steal our sweet potato casserole. And I tried to circulate, since Mary Jane told me, in the car driving out to the ’burbs, to do just that. “They’re ordinary, nice people,” she said. Except for the crime and the violence and the propensity for gunplay. Like that which had brought an early end to Mary Jane’s former husband, shot to death when Victoria was just an infant.

  I shook hands with Carmine when we arrived, grabbed a glass of grappa and tried to find a way to fit in with the rest of the family, who seemed to be moving around the three large rooms on the ground floor like meteors in space: seeing an old cousin or nephew or niece, they’d move together as if gravity bound, come together in a smacking loud embrace and begin to pound each other on the back as if they had not seen one another since Rutherford B. Hayes was President. Not being the world’s greatest hugger, except where my wife is involved, and not wanting to spill a drop of my grappa, because it was quite good and I wanted to utilize every drop of it to get through this afternoon, I found myself standing, back to wall, just watching the fun unfold before me.

  Mary Jane, who is one of the world’s great huggers, was having a high ole time greeting her cousins and step-relatives, catching up on gossip and news, and just doing the things that any large Italian-American family does. Victoria had run off with a posse of cousins and kids her age, and they were probably upstairs watching TV, smoking reefer and planning future hits and heists. Or not.

  Carmine snuck up on me, tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to follow him into his private den, well away from the crowds. He closed the door behind us and led me over to the bay windows and motioned for me to sit in one of the two upholstered tub chairs there. He sank slowly into the other.

  “Noisy bunch,” he said. I took it as an observation more than an apology.

  “They all seem nice,” I said. “Good family. I’m just not a crowd person.”

  He shrugged. Que sera and all that. “How’s Victoria doing in school?” he asked.

  “She’s smart as a whip,” I said. “Knows more math than I’ve forgotten, which is almost everything. Pretty good writer, and I had absolutely nothing to do with that. She likes to read books, which I understand is rare these days. Teachers all seem to like her. No reason why she shouldn’t get into a good college one day.”

  He nodded, pleased. “What about high school?” he asked. “I’ve been looking into prep schools. Boston Latin is okay, but it’s still a public school. No good. I’m thinking Andover, St. Paul, Choate, one of those fancy pants schools. Would make it easier to get into Harvard or Yale, am I right?”

  “No doubt,” I said, nodding. “But you have to get past Mary Jane first. Not sure she’s ready to let Vickie go quite yet.”

  He thought about that for a bit, his lips pursed, his brow furrowed. It was not a problem he could have solved by putting it in concrete overshoes and tossing it into the Charles River.

  “Yeah, well…we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess,” he said. He bridged his fingers and peered over the top at me. “What about you?” he asked. “Find some place to work yet?”

  Ah, I thought. The father-in-law interview. I smiled at him. “Yeah, actually,” I said. I told him about the meeting with Jake Strauss, the offer to do a book on the history of the U.S. Open, and my decision to accept the assignment, which I had done the previous week. I left out the part about tracking down a mystery heir. None of his business.

  “A book?” he said, frowning a bit. “Can you make any money doing that?”

  I explained that a publisher had agreed to pay me an advance upfront, betting that the book would sell enough copies for them to make their money back and then some. Jake had promised to make up the difference privately. We had signed a Contract for Services.

  “Will they?” he asked. I look confused. “Will they make enough money on sales to recoup what they pay you?”

  I chuckled. “Probably not,” I said. “It’s a stupid business. Book publishers make all their money on a handful of best-sellers—you know, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Nora Roberts, people like that. Then they use those profits to toss a few bucks at people like me, hoping to at least break even. Most of the time, they don’t. So they just wait for Stephen King to write another novel and let the money roll in. Crazy, huh?”

  He shook his head. “Imagine that! Like if I was making tons of cash from one neighborhood’s numbers racket, that mean I’m gonna let two other neighborhoods ride? Don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, the rules of the book business don’t translate well to other enterprises,” I said.

  “If it was me and your book don’t sell? I’d hafta break s
omeone’s legs. Probably yours.”

  I nodded sagely and felt a wave of thanksgiving that my leg bones were, as yet, unbroken. On the other hand, I wondered how many unsuccessful authors would be staggering around Manhattan on crutches if Don Carmine’s business model was in effect.

  “So I have to go out to California to do some research on the book,” I said. “I’m planning to make my first visit next week. You know anyone out there?”

  “Cali?” He sat up a bit and smiled. “Talk about the wild, wild West. When I first came into the business, Jackie Dragna was the man out in L.A. The fellas in New York tried to send Bugsy Siegel out to take over, but he got shot. His guy, Mickey Cohen, took over and ran a pretty solid organization against the Dragna people for years.”

  He fell silent, stroking his chin. “But there was a lot of competition out there, both in L.A. and Frisco,” he continued. “The chinks and the gooks each had strong organizations in those cities.” My semi-father-in-law was never one for political correctness.

  “They had to be dealt with, either by alliance or war,” he continued. “Made for interesting times. But of course, I had my hands full here at home, so I never got really involved. Just met some of the guys, knew who they were, that kind of thing. To answer your question, yeah, I know some people out West. Why? You need help to write a goddam book?”

  I laughed. “No, I think I can handle the writing part,” I said. “But some of the people I’m supposed to be talking to appear to have some connections, especially in San Francisco. I just wanted to know if things got tight, I could give you a call.”

  He nodded. “I see,” he said. “Be better if you don’t let things get tight.”

  “I know,” I said. “But sometimes those things are out of my control.”

  There was a soft knock on the door to the study. “Papa?” came a woman’s voice, “Dinner’s on the table. Come, mangia!”

  We stood up. Carmine rested a hand on my shoulder. “You’re a good man, Hacker,” he said. “I appreciate that you’re taking care of Mary Jane and Victoria. If you get in a box, let me know. I’ll do what I can to help.”

  The dining room had been rearranged and additional tables brought in to form a large U-shape. It was bedecked with candles, linens, sprays of fresh flowers and plates, bowls and platters of food. There was a roasted turkey at one end and a huge leg of lamb at the other, and in the middle were antipasti, stuffed mushrooms, and bowls of olives. Side dishes included tortellini, risotto with baked squash, rosemary roasted potatoes and red and yellow roasted beets.

  Mary Jane had saved me a seat next to her, while Victoria was off in another room with all the other kids. I sat down and we spent the next hour stuffing ourselves silly, drinking vats of wine and listening to this big happy family celebrate being together on a cold November day.

  Two weeks later, I found myself on an airplane chugging my way across the fruited plain en route to San Francisco. It had been a busy fortnight.

  First, Jake Strauss made an unannounced visit to Boston and we met for lunch at Parker’s in the Parker House Hotel downtown on School Street. I walked over in a drizzly late November rain. He was waiting for me in a booth in the large dining room with its honey-colored paneling and beams, complex chandeliers shedding a golden light in the space. He had ordered a cocktail and was busy buttering up one of the eponymous rolls.

  “Good to see you again, Hacker,” he said as we shook hands. “Park it at the Parker House, as they say.” I settled in and a waiter appeared almost instantaneously. I ordered a Sam Adams. “I miss Locke-Ober,” Strauss said. “Great old place. You just knew, sitting down there, that some great business deals had been made at those tables, over those dishes of lobster bisque and baked scrod. Too bad its gone.”

  “No deals being made here?” I asked, sipping my bottle of beer and motioning at the space around us. It seemed grand enough for deal-making to me. And I, a New England native and longtime city resident, had never eaten here.

  Strauss laughed. He pointed to a table against the far wall. “That booth over there?” he said, “Was where JFK proposed to Jackie. That was a pretty good deal, eh? And Ted Williams used to eat in here all the time, they said. Always had the pie.”

  “The pie?”

  “Boston cream,” Jake said, picking out a second roll, tearing it in half and applying an oversized slab of soft butter to it. “Supposed to have been invented here.”

  “Did I ever tell you I was a descendant of Paul Revere?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No,” he mumbled, his mouth full of Parker House roll. “I don’t think you did.”

  I shrugged. “Oh,” I said. “Maybe that’s because I’m not.”

  I got one of his patented laugh barks –haha--—and he began rooting around in his leather briefcase at his side, pulling out a folder of deep green and passing it across the table at me. I let it sit there, unopened.

  He motioned his butter knife at the folder. “That’s all the poop we got on Michael Newell,” he said.

  “The missing heir?”

  He nodded. “Some generalized stuff and the Baruch report,” he said.

  “Baruch report?”

  He slathered butter on the second half of his roll and popped it into his mouth. His eyes closed in pleasure as he chewed. I envisioned his cholesterol level increasing by about ten points, and hoped he didn’t stroke out before I got my first check.

  “At Baruch Brothers, we’ve got our own internal intelligence systems,” he said when he was done. I noticed he was talking as if he was still employed at the investment bank, not the USGA. “As you can imagine, we do a lot of deals in a year. Always good to know who you’re dealing with and what’s in their background. So we have our own investigators who can do a deep dive on virtually anyone in the world.”

  “Got one on me?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, but looked across the table at me with an amused expression on his face.

  “I don’t know whether I’m honored or appalled,” I said.

  The waiter reappeared and took our orders. Jake had the scrod, probably in memory of Locke-Ober, while I went for the fried clams. When the waiter left, I reached over, picked up the green folder and opened it up.

  It was pretty thin. But I expected it would be. The Baruch investigators had run down and printed out data on four Michael Newells they had found in Eureka and the rest of Humboldt County in northern California. None of the four appeared to be connected to J.J. Udall in any shape, manner or form. There was another three-page spreadsheet which listed every Michael Newell in California. There were two hundred and twenty-seven of them.

  “Are your gumshoes going to track down the Michael Newells in the rest of the state, or is that part of my job?”

  “We’ll do some more poking,” he said, “But we don’t think that’s his real name.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged. “We’ve had plenty of cases like this, when someone tries to pose as an heir to scoop up a big payday,” he said. “They usually use a fake name, to throw investigators like you and the boys at Baruch off the scent. About sixty percent of the time, the first name turns out to be real; the last name is usually fake, but just over fifty-five percent of the time, the last initial matches the perp’s real last name.”

  “So I’m looking for somebody named Michael N?” I said.

  “Possibly,” he said. “And with a probability of just over half.”

  “What about Eureka?” I asked. “Real or fake?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Probably fake. Eureka is infamous for its missing persons.”

  “How come?”

  “Humboldt County is in the Golden Triangle,” he said. “It’s one of the prime marijuana growing places in North America. Thousands of people go up there hoping to strike it rich in the pot business. Or maybe they go hoping they can get a job with free weed as a side benefit. I don’t know. Even though weed is mostly legal now
, it’s still a rough place and a rough business. Several hundred persons a year are reported missing in Humboldt. Most are never seen again.”

  “So if you’re tracking a missing person in Eureka, there’s a long line of cases ahead of you,” I said. “Smart place for a missing person to hide, or pretend to hide.”

  Our lunches arrived, so I kept quiet and we ate. My clams were great—tender and sweet. I’m sure they’re not the healthiest food in the world, all battered and deep fried, but I only allow myself the pleasure once or twice a year. They came with French fries, cole slaw and lots of tartar sauce, and I needed another Sam Adams to wash it all down.

  “Do you have any idea how you’re going to look for this guy?” Jake asked when we finished.

  “Not a clue,” I said. “California is a pretty big haystack, and I’m looking for a needle with no name.”

  The waiter came by with coffee and asked if we’d like to try a piece of the Boston Creme Pie, invented in the hotel’s very kitchen by a French pastry chef named Sanzian in the year of our Lord 1856. Strauss passed, but I asked for a nice big piece. Happy, the waiter wiped the table and danced away.

  “Do you know Andre Citrone?” I asked.

  Strauss thought about that for a minute, then shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said.

  “The sports columnist for the San Fran Chronicle?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, sitting forward. “Yes, I have met him once or twice. Can’t say I know him that well, though.”

  “So you didn’t tell him that I was going to be working on a book project about Pebble Beach for the USGA?” I pressed. “Or that I might be going out west soon?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head firmly. “Of course not. Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But somebody told him all about it. He called me right after we met down in New York and offered his help with the book.”

  “How did …?”

  “Yeah, that was my question,” I said. “Still is.”

  Strauss couldn’t shed any further light on the mystery, so after I ate my piece of pie and drank my coffee, we shook hands and parted.