1 Runaway Man (9 page)

And when that someone caught sight of me she came running out the door of the diner and threw herself into my arms, sobbing. “I’ve been waiting
hours
for you, Benji. I was afraid you were
never
coming home.”

“Sara, what are you doing here? How did you even … Mom, this is Sara Weiner.”

“I’m very sorry about your brother, dear,” Mom said gently.

“Thank you, Mrs. Golden,” she snuffled. “I-I sneaked out of the house and Trevor gave me a ride to the Willoughby train station. I caught the midnight Metro-North to Grand Central and took a cab here. I just
had
to get away, you know? I can catch the five a.m. train back.”

“Not a chance. I’m driving you home.”

“Whatever. First we have to talk, Benji.”

“I really meant to call you, Sara, but I was stuck with the state police until just now. I’m so sorry about what happened.”

“Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was. I should never have gotten you involved.”

“No,
listen
to me, will you? If anyone’s to blame it’s
me
.”

“Why you?”

“Because I wasn’t totally straight with you, okay? That’s why I’m here. I-I have to come clean about something right away or I’m going to flip out.”

“Let’s go back inside Scotty’s,” Mom suggested. “Normally, I’d invite you up to our office, dear, but I’m afraid our walls may have ears.”

I took Sara by the arm and steered her back through the door into Scotty’s. She was wearing a red ski parka and blue jeans. Her big brown eyes were swollen from crying. Mom escorted her to the farthest booth. I fetched us mugs of coffee from Hector and joined them there.

Sara dumped one, two, three spoonfuls of sugar in her mug. Took a nervous swallow, then ran a hand through her beautiful mane of honey-colored hair. “I have some money of my own. I want to hire you guys.”

“Hire us to do what?” I asked.

“Find out who killed Brucie.”

“The police will do that.”

“No, they won’t. They have no idea what’s going on.”

“And you do?”

She hesitated, her plump lower lip fastened between her teeth. “Remember that weird woman I told you came up to Brucie at the mall over Christmas?”

“I remember.”

“I think they were … connected.”

“As in romantically involved?” Mom asked.

Sara stared at her. “You do know my brother was gay, right?”

“I know that he was in a relationship with Charles Willingham,” Mom responded. “That doesn’t mean he hadn’t been in relationships with women, too. But let’s set that aside. What exactly do you mean by ‘connected?’”

“I mean…” Sara took a deep breath. “Maybe she was related to him somehow—unlike me. We weren’t really brother and sister, okay? My parents adopted Brucie when he was a baby. They told me they’d been trying to start a family for years, and couldn’t, so they adopted Brucie. And then, like out of nowhere, my mom got pregnant with me. I hear that happens a lot. But I’m never, ever supposed to mention that he was adopted. My folks are super private about it. That’s why I didn’t tell you, Benji. From the time I was a teeny-tiny girl they always said, ‘It’s strictly a family matter. No one else’s business.’”

“Which is perfectly understandable,” Mom said.

Me, I was thinking about that inheritance story Peter Seymour had walked in our door with. How he’d explicitly told me not to reveal his law firm’s name to Bruce’s parents. How Laurie Weiner had reacted when I had. “Sara, this woman who came up to Bruce at the mall—how old was she?”

“I told you last night. Thirty, maybe thirty-five.”

“Old enough to be his birth mother?”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “I thought she could be his older sister or something. His
mother
? I don’t see how, unless she had him when she was, like, twelve. Why, are you thinking that’s who she was?”

“I’m not thinking anything yet. Was there a physical resemblance?”

Sara thought this over, her small, soft hands wrapped around her coffee mug. “Real hard to say. She was such a total mess. Like she’d been sleeping out on the street for weeks. I do know Brucie wasn’t happy to see her.” She lowered her gaze, swallowing. “And there’s more. I told you I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. But I could. Only, it didn’t make any sense. What they were saying.”

I leaned over the table toward her. “Which was?…”

“Brucie said, ‘I’m not one of you.’ And she said, ‘Yes, you are. You’re a kid you always will be.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m
not
a kid.’”

I could hear Mom draw in her breath. My own pulse was already off to the races. My mouth felt dry.

Sara gazed at us imploringly. “That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

I looked at Mom. Mom was looking at me. Because it did make sense. All of it. Mr. Classy Guy showing up in our crummy little office. The nice, fat missing-person case he’d slipped us by way of the Aurora Group. The mystery client whose name he dared not speak. The professional grade skullbuggery that had turned me into a high-priced bird dog and left Bruce Weiner dead. All of it made perfect sense—provided you stuck a second letter
d
on the word
kid
and capitalized the letter
K
. Sara may not have grasped what it meant but we sure did: Bruce Weiner may have been born a Kidd. One of
the
Kidds. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, there was a whole lot more at stake here than a distinguished small college and its shining sports hero. Maybe, just maybe, there was an entirely different reason why someone had wanted Bruce dead. Make that somewhere around three billion reasons—depending upon the ups and downs of the stock market. It meant that maybe, just maybe, we were talking about the upcoming race to decide who was going to be the next governor of the sovereign state of New York.

Or maybe, just maybe, it meant nothing at all. That would be up to me to find out. No maybe about it.

CHAPTER FOUR

I KNOW ALL ABOUT THE LEGEND
of Black Jack Kidd. I grew up hearing it. Every kid in New York grows up hearing it. Black Jack Kidd was the flesh and blood embodiment of the impossible dream that was, is and always will be the engine that powers New York City.

He was born, fittingly enough, on the Fourth of July, 1902, in Rockaway Beach, Queens, which in those days was a seaside resort popular with New York City’s Irish immigrants. His father, Paddy, ran a saloon there and was also a boxing promoter, loan shark and business partner of Mayor Van Wyck’s bombastic police chief, William “Big Bill” Devery. According to popular legend, which in my experience is as good, if not better, than the truth, Big Bill presided over the single most corrupt police department in the history of New York City. And if you know anything about the history of New York City that’s saying something. One of Paddy Kidd’s joint ventures with Devery was buying up Baltimore’s professional baseball team, moving it to New York City, renaming it the Highlanders and selling it for three hundred thousand dollars in 1915 to a consortium headed by beer brewer Jake Ruppert. The team was renamed the New York Yankees.

Young Jack left school at age fourteen to work in Manhattan as a bellhop at the Plaza Hotel, which at the dawn of the Jazz Age was becoming
the
hot spot for the city’s wealthy young smart set. The Plaza’s high society clientele found handsome young Jack to be bright, eager and—thanks to his father’s contacts—very useful. If you wanted to place a bet on a horse or a boxing match, Jack was your man. If you wanted a clean, attractive girl sent to your room for an hour, or a night, Jack was your man. And, with the advent of prohibition in 1920, if you wanted a bottle of bonded whiskey, Jack was most definitely your man. Quickly, he became the go-to guy for booze among the flapper set. Which, if you’re keeping score at home, made him a thriving bookmaker, pimp and bootlegger by the time he was eighteen years old.

Black Jack was no ordinary bootlegger. The man was a true visionary. He tapped into his father’s powerful political and criminal connections and set up the fabulously lucrative operation off the Long Island coast that came to be known as Rum Row. It was Black Jack’s fleet of fishing boats that met up three miles out to sea with William “The Real” McCoy, the fabled rumrunner who was bringing up boatloads of the stuff from the Bahamas. Until, that is, the US Coast Guard broke up their whole operation in 1923.

Undaunted, Black Jack put his money and well-connected friends to good use by becoming a Wall Street stock trader. And a mighty shady one at that. The man was a gleefully unscrupulous engineer of elaborate price fixing and insider trading schemes. There was no scoundrel more skilled at artificially puffing up a stock price, making a killing and then bailing on it before it fell back down to earth. Most of the trading laws that were put into place after the crash of ’29 were put there because of Black Jack Kidd and his merry band of cohorts. Many of those cohorts lost their shirts in the crash. Not Black Jack. He sold out early and moved his money into real estate, eventually buying up large chunks of midtown Manhattan for pennies on the dollar from cash-strapped Wall Street titans.

By 1932 he was considered one of the five wealthiest men in New York City. He was a mere thirty years old and a true American success story. He wooed and wed the sensitive, lovely young Clarissa Lodge, a genuine blue-blooded Fifth Avenue aristocrat. They had one child, Tommy, a boy of fabulous wealth and privilege who went on to attend Harvard, where he was a classmate and friend of Bobby Kennedy.

Tommy Kidd devoted his entire adult life to atoning for the crimes and sins of his father, who died of a heart attack in 1950 while in the act of shtupping his mistress, Mabel Gray, age sixteen. Tommy’s life was an exemplary one of public service and philanthropy. He was an advisor to President John F. Kennedy. A diplomat, an ambassador. Also a good son to his mother, an emotionally fragile woman given to bouts of what was known in those days as “nervousness.” Clarissa Lodge Kidd died of an apparent accidental overdose of sleeping pills in 1964. Soon after that, Tommy, age thirty-seven, married a strong, sensible Bostonian named Eleanor Saltonstall, one of
the
Saltonstalls, and began to give away many of Black Jack’s ill-gotten millions to New York City’s major hospitals, libraries, and museums. He didn’t part with any of the vast chunks of New York City real estate that his father had left him. The man was generous. He wasn’t dumb.

Tommy and Eleanor had two children, which brings us up to the now generation. Robert, who is known to every reader of the New York tabloids as Bobby the K, just turned forty. His sister Kathleen is six years younger than he. Dubbed the “Quiet Kidd,” Kathleen hasn’t sought the Big Apple limelight. She attended school in Europe and has lived most of her adult life in Paris. She returned home to New York last year to be a comfort to her elderly mother, who has been a widow since Tommy’s death in 1994. Kathleen has never married, is discreet about her romantic involvements and avoids high-profile causes. She draws almost no attention from the media.

Her brother Bobby, Harvard class of ’93, sucks up enough of that for both of them. A flamboyant extrovert and world-class playboy, Bobby the K earned his PhD in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. And he inherited Black Jack’s swashbuckling entrepreneurial gifts to go along with Tommy’s vast fortune and social connections. Bobby the K was still in his early twenties when he started bankrolling a succession of downtown dance clubs, art galleries and restaurants. All of them chic, hot and hugely successful. Soon he was managing and producing rock bands, performance artists and comedy troupes. All of them—again—chic, hot and hugely successful. Next Bobby the K launched the Gotham Bus Company, a production and distribution hub for music, films, theater and television programming. Everything the Gotham Bus Company touched made money. He started buying up newspapers and magazines, too. By the time he was thirty, Bobby the K had transformed himself from a billionaire brat into a rapacious, unabashedly liberal media baron whose only rival on the New York scene was the rapacious, unabashedly conservative Rupert Murdoch. Bobby the K wasn’t a man burdened by a lack of self-esteem. He was incredibly sure of himself and he took whatever he wanted, same as Black Jack had. Handsome like his grandfather, too, with twinkling blue eyes and a boyish mop of hair that had turned gray while he was still in college.

Given the man’s constant need for attention, it was inevitable that he’d end up in politics. Which explained his choice of a wife. As a twentysomething man about downtown, he’d been linked with succulent supermodels, glam actresses, singers, tennis stars—you name her, he’d done her. Everyone in the tabloid press assumed he’d eventually marry a superbabe. But in 2002 he opted for brains and married Meg Grayson, a Yale Law School graduate and daughter of the late US Senator Andrew Grayson of New York, not to mention the niece of New York’s former governor Kenneth Grayson. The Graysons have been one of the most powerful families in Democratic politics for generations. And the two families were already related by marriage—Kenneth Grayson was married to a cousin of Bobby the K’s mother, Eleanor. Bobby and Meg had known each other since they were children. She was an accomplished downhill skier, horsewoman and skeet shooter. Not to mention a shrewd, sharp-elbowed campaign strategist. There’d been talk of Meg running for the US Congress, but she preferred to operate behind the scenes.

Which made them the ideal team. Bobby was the charmer who drew people into his orbit. Meg was the fiercely driven hard-ass who kept everyone in line. First, they started a family. A boy and a girl. And then, with great stealth and precision, they started recrafting Bobby the K’s flamboyant image. He divested himself of the Gotham Bus Company, selling it off for God knows how many billions. And then Meg joined him on his celebrated “listening tour” of New York State, where he logged face time with mayors, police chiefs and union leaders in decidedly unchic places like Buffalo and Syracuse. Bobby the K won over these longtime Grayson family loyalists one by one. The same traits that had made him a wildly successful entrepreneur translated easily to the political arena. He was a charismatic public speaker. He had top writers on his payroll. And he had a simple message: “Voters are tired of do-nothing politicians. I’m Mr. Do Something.”