And Sometimes I Wonder About You

17

“Mardi?” I said over the intercom.

“Yes sir?”

“Find a number for Sergeant Peter Morton of the NYPD in Queens, then call him for me.”

“Through regular channels?”

“Fast.”

“Okay,” she said. “Mr. Domini was here. He looked at the door and the wall. I told him about your door, too. He said he’d be back with a crew this afternoon.”

After getting off the phone with my brave assistant I stood up and walked most of the length of my deserted hallway. I made it all the way up to the hole gauged through the wall and stuck my head through to peek out at Mardi. She was just putting the phone down.

“It’s so strange to see you come through the wall like that,” she said.

I didn’t respond, just pulled back in and walked almost to my door. I did an about-face and went all the way to my utility closet. I had a bottle of Cuban rum in there but I didn’t reach for it.

“Peter Morton on line seven,” a disembodied voice called out over the office PA system.

I picked up a phone at a vacant cubicle and said, “Sergeant?”

“Are you really Leonid McGill?”

“Yes I am.”

“Wow.”

“Glad to see you know who I am.”

“Know who you are? I’ve had papers calling for your arrest on my desk half a dozen times.”

“I hope that’s not the case right now.”

“Not from this morning anyway.”

I liked the banter. Had I my druthers we’d have gone on like that for a minute or two and then I’d have downed a glass of rum, gone to Gordo’s, and watched the boxers whale on each other.

“What can I do for you, Leonid?” Sergeant Morton asked.

I didn’t like the familiarity. It meant that he was treating me like a suspect or a snitch.

“Josh Farth,” I said.

“He’s an um... friend of mine from Boston... he, uh, called me a couple of days ago asking for a PI who didn’t mind looking under slimy rocks. Like I said — you’re famous.”

Morton wasn’t a very good liar. Josh Farth, I was pretty sure, had called his cop friend to cover his story, whatever that was.

“You don’t know me, Sergeant. Why throw him my name?”

“He asked a question and your name was the answer.”

“What’s his business?”

“Security and research for some big company.”

“Which one?”

“I forget.”

“You forget.”

“Yeah. One day I’ll get so old that I won’t even be able to recognize my own shoes unless I’m wearing them.”

The buzzer to the front door still worked. It sounded and I said, “I have to go, Sergeant. Thanks for the referral.”

“Anytime.”

I was wondering if the NYPD had a file on me that included the layout and the general security systems of my office. They’d be sure to have my address.

I went through the wall into the reception area and gave Mardi a questioning look.

“It’s a man in a suit,” she said, looking up from the monitor in her desk drawer. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Grabbing the front door by the handle and bracing it up high with the palm of my left hand, I dragged the portal open and leaned it against the wall.

“Mr. Farth?”

“Mr. McGill?” He wore a light-colored pearl-gray suit with a dark green dress shirt — no tie.

“That wasn’t even ten minutes.”

“Less than an hour.”

I couldn’t argue with his math so I said, “Come on in.”

He walked through looking at the loose door and the tarp that mostly covered the dark stain on the floor. His face was that odd combination of unsightly and yet well manicured. The nose was too big but he’d had a facial, the hair was too thin but his barber was a hairdresser too. His knuckles were like mismatched stones though the nails and cuticles had been trimmed and varnished.

He turned his gaze on me with eyes that were the color green you expected a frog to leap from.

“Redecorating?” he asked.

“Something like that.”

“So what can I do for you, Mr. Farth?” I asked when we were ensconced in my almost unmolested office.

“I wanted to hire you but you look busy enough already.”

“Just a break-in. The cops have already made their report. What do you need?”

“Was that blood on the floor?”

“No. There was a gallon jug of molasses on my receptionist’s desk. The burglars must have knocked it over.”

Farth paused for maybe ten seconds or so. He was trying to look as if maybe there was too much happening in my office and he should take his business elsewhere. If he did that I’d forget him.

“I’m looking for a young woman,” he said at second eleven.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Her name is Coco Lombardi,” he said, ignoring my lame joke. He reached into his jacket pocket, taking out a three-by-five glossy. “She’s dropped out of sight and her family is quite worried.”

I took the picture and studied it. Sitting on a barstool she was lovely the way strippers are lovely, all decked out in glitter and little else. Her eyelashes were over two inches long and her makeup was thick enough it might have stopped a bullet. Maybe someone with no experience would have been fooled, but I could see that the twenty-something burlesque dancer and the teenager in the photo Hiram had showed me were either closely related or one and the same.

“Girls like this go missing every other day,” I said. “They usually turn up — one way or the other.”

“It’s the other that her family is trying to avoid.”

“Boston family?”

Feigning surprise, the well-put-together and ugly man said, “I didn’t know I had an accent.”

“Peter Morton,” I said.

“You’re thorough.”

“Rich family?”

“My client is.”

“Who’s that?”

The ugly man tried to put on a sympathetic-but-sorry expression and failed.

“That’s one thing I can’t tell you,” he said. “My client likes privacy. That is my first concern.”

“So how do I know that you aren’t using me to wipe out a state’s witness or to get revenge for a jilted john?”

“You watch too much television, Mr. McGill,” Farth admonished. “People do things like that in old books. In the new world criminals stick among themselves. Anyway, I just need you to find Ms. Lombardi and tell her that I’d like to have a conversation with her. You can set that up any way that makes you comfortable.”

He was very good. If I hadn’t met Hiram Stent, seen the photo of Celia Landis, had my office invaded by professionals, and been the cause of two innocent men’s deaths, I might have believed about 2 percent of what he was saying.

“The reason I’m here,” Josh said, now affecting honesty, “is because Coco is in trouble with some bad people. She knows some things that she shouldn’t know and maybe has taken things that don’t belong to her.”

“From your client?”

“No, no. My client is close to the family. I’m here on a mission of mercy, not vengeance.”

“And how do I fit into this mission?”

“Peter told me that you are often a person of interest to the police.”

“And yet you want to hire me anyway.”

“I believe that I will need a man like you to find Coco.”

“A man like me.” I was liking our back-and-forth. It was a way to hone my skills.

“A professional who isn’t afraid of the law,” Farth explained.

“Do you have an ID, Mr. Farth?”

“Why?”

“Just so that I can say, if asked by the constabulary, that I at least checked that you were who you said you were.”

He smiled and took a wallet from his back pocket. From this he produced a Massachusetts driver’s license. Joshua Farth, DOB December 1971.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

“What?”

“Ten thousand down payment for the search and another ten when I find the girl and facilitate your talk.”

“Twenty thousand dollars for a simple missing person case?”

“That’s the going price for a man not afraid of the law.”

“That’s outrageous,” he said in a tone that carried no outrage whatsoever.

Farth or Shonefeld, or whatever his name was, gave me a frown that ever so slowly turned into a smile. I doubted if this man ever had an honest expression in his life. Everything he said, every response he gave, was planned. Too bad for him his plans were scrawled in crayon.

He reached into the same pocket that held the stripper’s photograph. From this he brought out a stack of hundred-dollar bills bound together in thousand-dollar packets. He counted out ten of these and put them on the desk, returning the rest of the treasure to the all-purpose pocket.

Gathering up the cash I asked, “What else can you give me about Coco?”

“Since she’s come to New York she’s been an artist’s model, a topless dancer, a personal assistant to a painter named Fontu Belair, and once she was arrested for kiting checks. She got out on bail and disappeared.”

“So the police are looking for her,” I said.

“Maybe in their sleep. She’s been in New York nearly a year.”

“What about before then?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Did she live in Boston?”

“Possibly. The only information I have about her is since she moved to New York.”

“What about her family?”

“My client is protecting them from the complete truth about the girl. I haven’t even met them.”

“Is Coco her real name?”

“I doubt it,” Josh said. “Like I said, I don’t even know if she’s originally from Boston. One guy said that she told him she came from out west somewhere.”

“What guy?”

“A man called Buster who worked at the Private Gentleman’s Club on Thirty-ninth Street.”

It’s funny how a word can trigger a deeply felt response. Josh said “Buster” and I suddenly had the strong desire to jump across my big black desk and bust his head. Killing him would have given me great pleasure but that’s not what Hiram had posthumously hired me for. He hired me to get his 10 percent and use that to bring Lois and the kids back into his life, such as it was.