City Of Lies (43 page)

Duchaunak took three steps to the right and sat down in his armchair. Hadn’t slept, nothing to speak of. Had wrestled with the sheets for an hour or so and then got up, padded back and forth across the room for a while and then sat in the kitchen eating Cheerios from the box. If he’d had any sleeping tablets he would have taken some. Maybe too many.

Duchaunak smiled; wry smile, almost accepting of his own paranoia and perverse sense of irony.

Everything was fucked. That was the truth. That was as good a place as any to start.

He closed his eyes, leaned back his head, and starting to halfsing, half-speak something in a slow and mournful voice:

‘I want to be loved by you . . . just you . . . nobody else but you . . .’

After a while the light through his eyelids seemed to fade. Sleep took him silently, and he went without protest.

‘What’d they say?’

‘No visitors, no calls.’

‘No question he’s there?’

‘No, he’s there alright. Got back soon after he left us and hasn’t come out since.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘Walt—’

‘Okay, Cathy, okay. Just tell whoever you’ve got over there to let you know if he makes a move anyplace, alright?’

‘Walt, I’ve got it covered. Charlie Beck’s keeping an eye on the place. Trust me, okay?’

‘Good enough. Leave him be. Least we know where he is,
right? Come on back here and we’ll go over this stuff once more.’

‘Half an hour.’

‘No problem, see you then.’

‘Right.’ Cathy Hollander hung up the phone and stepped out of the callbox. She tugged her coat tight around her throat and started walking.

Twenty yards down the sidewalk and it started to snow. Christmas was everywhere – peoples’ faces, the bright eyes of children, storefronts, grubby-faced Santas ringing bells and collecting nickels and dimes at street corners and junctions, the vari-colored lights strung from doorways and fire escapes – but Cathy Hollander saw none of it.

Christmas, right now, was the least of her concerns.

Harper did not surface again until gone three p.m.

He could not remember when he had called the desk, when he’d requested no calls or visitors. Perhaps seven, maybe eight that morning. He lay there for a further fifteen or twenty minutes before he gathered sufficient will to rise and use the john. He dared not look at his own reflection in the mirror. He felt he’d confronted a little too much reality for one week.

He returned to the bed, sat on the edge of the mattress, thought to call down for cigarettes but didn’t.

Already far beyond the point of trying to determine the truth, he felt that perhaps there was no real or specific truth. There was merely the truth of individuals. Freiberg, Duchaunak, Evelyn Sawyer, and then the truth of his father, Edward ‘Lenny’ Bernstein: the conductor, the orchestrator, the criminal.

Harper smiled to himself. It was all so much crazy bullshit. Who were these people? What the hell had happened during this past week?

Suddenly he thought of Harry Ivens, the fact that he hadn’t called the man for . . . for how many days? Yesterday, the day before? He couldn’t remember. Harper reached for the telephone and dialled the number. He sat there patiently, the phone ringing four or five times before the answer service kicked in.

‘
Miami Herald
. . . how can I help you?’

‘Hi there . . . er, yes . . . I wanted to speak to Harry Ivens.’

‘I’m sorry sir, Mr Ivens cannot be reached today.’

Harper frowned. ‘Cannot be reached? But I need to speak with him . . . can you not get a message through to the service desk and let him know that John Harper is on the phone?’

‘I’m sorry sir, I can’t do that.’

‘Can’t? What d’you mean you can’t? I don’t understand . . . is there a problem with him? Is something wrong?’

‘No sir, there’s nothing wrong.’ The voice at the other end smiled sympathetically. ‘It’s Sunday sir. Mr Ivens does not come in on a Sunday. I can take a message and he’ll pick it up first thing tomorrow.’

‘It’s Sunday . . .’

A pause at the other end. ‘Yes sir. Sunday. All day. Right to the very end.’

‘Yes . . . right . . . of course.’ Harper laughed nervously. ‘Okay . . . thank you.’ He withdrew the receiver from his ear, looked at it quizzically. He frowned once again, shook his head, and then set the phone down.

‘Sunday,’ he said to himself. ‘Jesus. I’ve been here a week.’

Eleven minutes after nine, darkness shrouding the city.

An hour earlier Frank Duchaunak had been asked to leave by the lobby staff. He’d argued with them for a good fifteen minutes, argued with them to the point of losing his temper. He hadn’t lost it, hadn’t really created a scene. The threads that held everything together were fragile enough as it was. He knew he was close to the edge, knew also that no-one was really certain of the precise location of that edge until they went over it. Everything was catch-as-catch-can until someone was caught. No way was it going to be him.

John Harper called down for coffee, a ham and mustard sandwich, a pack of Luckies.

Hotel staff wondered who he was; why the mystery; why the cop had come late in the evening and demanded to see Harper, and yet when challenged, when asked for a warrant, some authority to go right on up to the tenth floor and disturb a hotel guest, he had backed down, been almost
too
polite, and then refused to say which precinct he was from.

This was New York; this was the American Regent, a hotel that retained a box of possessions left by guests that bore no description or comprehension of their use. A microcosm of all that was good and bad with the world. Such things came as no surprise, and yet still raised eyebrows, begged questions; questions that would remain unanswered because no-one really wished to know. The man on the tenth floor was Edward Bernstein’s son: enough said.

And Harper – his life broken up in pieces and scattered across New York – sat at the window and ate his sandwich. He watched the snow come down and thought of Christmas. Christmas, he figured, belonged to some other world, a world he’d once been part of, a world that continued to revolve somewhere like a
carousel. He’d stepped off. How, he didn’t know, but he had, and now he could not even find where he’d alighted, let alone reverse his footsteps. What was done was done. He knew that.

Later, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling, he wondered if he would ever see Miami again. He considered it for quite some time; came to the conclusion that he didn’t care.

A week had passed, seven days; everything had changed; nothing could ever be the same. Harper wondered if he, perhaps out of desperation, out of loneliness, had not brought all of this into being. He smiled to himself.
Perhaps if I sleep
, he thought . . .
perhaps if I sleep and dream, and wake tomorrow, I will find it has all been a nightmare
.

The man he’d become was not the man who’d left Florida.

The thing that unsettled him was that such a thought brought nothing but relief.

John Harper closed his eyes, and he knew, with as much certainty as was possible, that tomorrow he would have to make a decision.

Sol Neumann stepped back from the edge of the table and glanced to his left.

‘He’s dead?’ Ray Dietz asked.

‘Deader than Elvis,’ Neumann said.

‘What was his name?’

Neumann frowned and shook his head. ‘How the fuck would I know his name? What d’you think we got here? You think me an’ this schmucko were dating or something?’

Dietz laughed. ‘Fuck, Sol, I only asked if you knew his name.’

‘He was some guy,’ Neumann said. ‘He was some guy that sprayed cars for a fucking living. He was given a job, he did the job, and then he came to get his money. That’s all I fuckin’ know, okay?’

‘Hey, take it easy, would you? What the fuck you doin’ bustin’ my balls here? So it’s just some fucking guy, okay. Just some fucking guy who’s got a biro sticking out the front of his face. Fuck man, couldn’t you have shot him, maybe strangled him or something . . . you have to stick a biro through his eye? Jesus, we aren’t animals, Sol.’

‘Now who’s bustin’ whose balls, eh? Shut the fuck up,
Raymond. Just shut the fuck up and help me get him in a gunny sack.’

‘Where’s he goin’?’

‘Maurice is going with the Parselle kid. Down to Pier 46 and put him in the Hudson River.’ Neumann indicated the slumped form of the dead paintsprayer with a nod of his head.

Dietz took a step closer to the table. He looked down at the guy, the way his head was lolled to one side, the way that nothing more than an inch of biro now protruded from his right eye. His left eye stared vacantly back at Dietz. Dietz shuddered involuntarily. ‘It’s fucking brutal, Sol. Seriously . . . I mean this is just fucking brutal what you did to the poor bastard. There’s got to have been a more humane way to do this.’

‘Humane? What in fuck’s name are you talking about, humane? The guy was going to blab. The guy was all ready to be a fucking radio station. It is what it is, Raymond. He knows the deal. He knows how things work. He’s all grown up now, Raymond. He pulls a fucked-up stunt like that . . . hell, he was up for the big time, he was up for a good bundle of money. He knew what might happen when he started in on this thing.’

Dietz backed up, raised both his hands. ‘Enough already. The guy’s fucking dead, okay? We get him in the bag and take him outside, end of fucking story okay?’

‘Okay. Good. Don’t know what the fuck that was all about. Jesus, anyone’d think we were on a Girl fucking Guide outing.’

Dietz shook his head. He figured it would have been best to take the biro out of the guy’s eye before they folded him into the gunny sack, but he couldn’t do it. Just the thought made him nauseous.

Eight minutes later the guy in the sack was edging out of an alleyway in the trunk of a beat-up Plymouth Valiant. Name was Jimmy Nestor. Used to spray cars for a living, sometimes went out on a boost, sometimes smoked too much weed and got high and mighty ideas about stinging some dumbass motherfucker for a ten grand bonus and disappearing to California.

Jimmy Nestor, hophead that he was, didn’t know where the edge was. Not exactly. Went over it, as was always the case with those who were unrealistic about their own limitations.

Next place he would see would be the cool depths of the Hudson River – black, almost without end, and real fucking lonely. Much the same as the rest of his life, loser that he was.

‘But that’s not possible, Mr Harper.’

Harper shook his head. He glanced towards the window. The snow had come down thick and fast during the night. New York looked clean, perhaps for the first time in a year.

He turned back and looked at Frank Duchaunak. Duchaunak carried the shadows and ghosts of a man who had not slept for a very long time. He’d arrived early, called from down in the lobby, and Harper – without thinking – had lifted the receiver.

Seven minutes it had taken Duchaunak to persuade him; seven minutes and finally Harper had conceded defeat.

‘Okay,’ he’d said. ‘Come on up.’

And here they were – the lost one from Miami, the crazy one from Chicago.

‘I don’t see how you can be certain about any of this,’ Harper said.

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘The stuff I’ve heard.’ Harper once again turned towards the window. He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. ‘I hear one thing I think is true. An hour later I hear something else which sounds just as plausible.’ Harper directed his gaze towards Duchaunak and said nothing for some seconds.

Duchaunak was neither unsettled nor awkward in that silence. It seemed for a small while that neither of them breathed.

‘I don’t know what is true, Detective, and I am quite sure that no-one else does.’

Duchaunak smiled. ‘Are you saying that you’d take the word of someone like Walter Freiberg over a New York police detective?’

Harper tilted his head to one side and raised his eyebrows questioningly. ‘
What
you are is irrelevant, Detective, it’s
who
you are that matters.’

‘Who I am?’

‘Let’s be brutally honest with one another,’ Harper said. ‘From what I have heard and seen so far I don’t know who is the more crazy, you or Walt Freiberg.’

‘The Marilyn Monroe thing?’

Harper shrugged. ‘The Marilyn Monroe thing. The thing with the sugar sachets. The fact that you turn up here looking like a beat-to-shit wino—’

Duchaunak instinctively ran his fingers through his hair in a vague attempt to straighten it. His hand then gravitated towards his chin where he ran it across the rough stubble of his chin. ‘I didn’t have a great deal of time—’

‘It doesn’t matter, Detective . . . this is not a personal issue. You seem to me to be a very driven—’

‘I am Mr—’

Harper raised his hand. ‘Let me finish, Detective.’

Duchaunak nodded awkwardly. ‘Yes, sorry . . . please go on.’

‘As I was saying, you seem to be a very driven man. You seem very focused about what you’re trying to achieve here. I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that I have a father, a father I have been unaware of for more than thirty years.’ Harper paused, inhaled deeply. ‘A father that is a criminal, possibly a murderer . . . and the truth, Detective, the truth is that I have reached a point where I am having great difficulty finding a reason to stay.’

‘I need you to stay, Mr Harper.’

‘You
need
me to stay? You’ve spent most of your time trying to convince me to leave.’

‘Yes, I know. But now I need you to stay.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘To help me end this thing, to help me find sufficient reason to put these people away.’

‘Walt Freiberg?’

‘Walt Freiberg, your father, Neumann, Ben Marcus, all of them.’

‘But especially my father, right?’

Duchaunak nodded.

‘And why the change of heart?’

‘Because right now you seem to be the only link I have with these people.’

Harper frowned. He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand . . . this is your job, right?’

Duchaunak glanced to the left, a split-second reaction, perhaps involuntary.