Black Maps

Chapter Fifteen

“Let me fill that,” Lisa Welch said. She took my glass and moved serenely across the slate floor of her sunroom, into the adjoining kitchen.

She was a calm, almost ethereal woman with straight, straw-colored hair that fell halfway down her back. She had an open, fine-featured face and, though December was closing in, her prominent cheeks and broad forehead were tanned an attractive golden color. Her large eyes were an odd shade of blue that changed with the changing light-from gray to nearly violet. Her mouth was broad, and in repose fell into a faint, sad smile. She was five foot seven and maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, including the change in her pockets. She wore jeans and a sleeveless blue T-shirt that said “Sanibel Dive Shop” on the front. Her arms were firm and lightly tanned. She was about my age.

I heard her bare feet pad across the wide plank floors of her kitchen. I heard her open the fridge and pour water from a pitcher. I heard her open the oven to check the bread baking inside. The phone rang, and I heard her soft, even voice speaking, though I couldn’t make out the words. An indolent chocolate Lab named Jesse slept near the wrought iron and glass table where I sat, and I heard him sigh heavily.

While I waited for Lisa, I watched her children play on the big back lawn, just beyond the stone patio that lay outside the sunroom. There were two of them-a boy and a girl, ages five and three, blond-haired, blue-eyed, broad-faced, long-limbed, like their mother. The girl seemed to have something of her mother’s serenity. She was feeding two baby dolls in a toy stroller, and occasionally wheeling them around the patio. The little boy was more frenzied. He was climbing and jumping all over a backyard playground, doing imaginary battle with pirates, or robots, or robot pirates… it was hard to tell.

It was Thursday afternoon, and a warm day for late fall, in the low sixties. Birds twittered softly, and between their singing and the warmth of the sunroom, and the mild breeze through the open windows, and the muted sounds of the children’s play, and Jesse’s slow, heavy breathing, and the aroma of baking bread, and the gentle murmur of Lisa’s voice, the whole place exerted a powerful soporific effect. Some cookies and milk, and I’d be ready for nap time. But that’s not what I’d come for.

I’d spent yesterday morning winnowing down my list of names. Of the two Steven Bregmans left on my list, only the one in Pound Ridge was in finance. And of the three Nick Welches, only the departed Mr. Welch, late of New Canaan, fit the bill. I’d spent yesterday afternoon making contact with Steven Bregman and the widow Welch, and convincing them to see me.

My story to Bregman was the same as I’d used with Lenzi: his name had come up in connection with a confidential investigation, and I wanted to meet and ask some questions. He’d reacted predictably: wary silence, wary curiosity, a wary, grudging acquiescence. I’d told the same story to Lisa Welch, except with her husband’s as the name that had come up. Her response surprised me.

“I thought this was over with,” she’d said. “I got the check four months ago, and I thought that was it. My lawyer told me that was it.” She wasn’t nervous or upset, just puzzled. So was I.

“Mrs. Welch, I have no clue what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You’re not from Connecticut Mutual?” she asked after a moment.

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh… I apologize,” she said, and agreed to see me.

New Canaan and Pound Ridge are neighboring towns, separated only by the state line, and I’d arranged my meetings for the same afternoon-Lisa at two, Bregman at five. I’d risen late this morning and gone for a run. Then, clean-shaven and breakfasted, and dressed in black pants, a maroon polo shirt, and a gray sweater, I’d picked up my rental car. It was 12:45 when my Taurus and I set off.

Getting out of the city was the usual hell-lunatic traffic, cratered streets, highways that ended without warning, road signs written by liars and idiots. I took 95 North, itself a nightmare of construction and careening trucks, and got off in Darien. Then I took 124 through the pristine, suburban splendor of Darien, and into the pristine, suburban splendor of New Canaan. The terrain grew hillier and the traffic lighter as I drove, and the houses and their properties grew larger.

The trees were bare in New Canaan, just as they were in New Yorkbut they were much neater about it. Behind the artfully tumbled stone walls, the high-priced landscapes were brown and faded and buttoned up for winter. Leaves had been blown, bagged, and hauled away, perennials had been cut back and blanketed in straw, shrubs were swaddled in burlap, and deer fencing was strung. Lisa Welch lived off of 124, on a road that climbed up a ridge and went from hardtop to washboard about a mile before it got to her place.

The house was an old colonial with white clapboards, black shutters, and a shiny red door. It sat close to the road, on several acres of lawn, mature trees, and stone walls. It was not a huge house-four bedrooms, I guessed-but it had been meticulously renovated and updated. The double-hung windows were new and set with insulated glass. The plasterwork and wainscoting were unblemished. The floors were bird’s-eye maple and perfectly laid. Halogen lights were mounted unobtrusively in the ceilings. The kitchen was outfitted with the latest high-end appliances-clad in the same cherry wood as the cabinets. And the security system was state of the art. The decor was simple, comfortable-looking, and expensive.

She’d told me to call her Lisa and ushered me through the kitchen and into the sunroom, where we’d watched her kids play outside and where she’d told me a little about Welch. He’d been fourteen years her senior. They’d met at a wedding-a cousin of hers had married a friend of his. They’d known each other less than a year when they’d gotten engaged. She’d quit her job as a preschool teacher, and they’d moved to Connecticut right after the honeymoon. They’d been married just six years when he died. He was, she said, a devoted father, and active in the church and local charities. It was a second marriage for him. The first had ended a decade before-no kids. Lisa had never met number one and didn’t know where she lived. She glided across the sunroom and set the water glass down in front of me and folded herself back in her chair.

“I don’t know how much I can tell you about Nick’s business, John. He didn’t bring it home with him. We didn’t talk about it much, and I didn’t know the people he worked with.”

“No socializing?”

“No. Work just wasn’t an all-consuming thing with him, not while I knew him.”

“It used to be?”

“Oh, yes. When I first met him, it was his life. But his priorities changed.”

“How so?” I asked. She smiled a little.

“He found other things. More important things. Like his family, like being a part of the community.”

“Big change,” I observed. She smiled again, but said nothing. She sat with one leg tucked beneath her, motionless except for her eyes, which followed her children.

“He’d been with his firm a long time?”

“Yes. He’d spent his professional life there. Over twenty years.”

“Ever hear of MWB-Merchant’s Worldwide Bank?” I asked. She shook her head. “How about Gerard Nassouli, or Bernhard Trautmann?” Lisa thought for a moment and shook her head again.

“As I said, I didn’t know a lot about his work.”

I drank some water. Outside, far away, a dog yipped. Jesse sighed, but did not stir. Lisa was perfectly still. The ball of her right foot rested lightly on the stone floor. It was a nice foot, tanned and high-arched, with well-kept toes. Silence settled over us like dust, and it was only with some effort that I spoke again.

“Lisa, forgive me for asking, but from what you said on the phone I wondered if there’d been problems with your husband’s life insurance.” She turned her head to look at me, her eyes a slate gray.

“We did have some, yes,” she said.

“They paid off on the policy, what… four months ago, you said?” She nodded. “That’s over a year after your husband passed away.” Another nod. “That’s a long time.” She looked down at her longfingered hands, resting lightly on the edge of the table.

“They had questions,” she said, softly. “It took them a while to satisfy themselves.”

“What kind of questions?” She pushed her hair back behind her ears and cleared her throat.

“They didn’t come out and say it, not right away, but they wondered if Nick hadn’t committed suicide,” she said. She let out a deep breath.

“Why did they think that?”

“I really don’t know, John. There was something about an exclusion period, and they said something about statistics, and the boat’s service records… I don’t know. Neither the police nor the Coast Guard shared their doubts.” Jesse was dreaming, about chasing something or being chased. He growled and snuffled and whined, then settled back down. A slow, regular pulse beat in Lisa’s long neck. She was otherwise motionless.

“What did you think?” I asked. She looked at me and then turned back to her children.

“I thought the suggestion was offensive and obscene, John,” she said evenly. “My husband would never have taken his own life. Never.” Her little girl pushed her stroller up to the French doors and waved at us. We waved back. “I don’t know much about my husband’s life in the time before we met. I never cared to. We were focused on the here and now, and on the future. I know he wasn’t happy, back then. I know he was a… different person. Maybe not always a good person. But Nick changed his life when we met-for the better. He found his center, John, in being a husband and a father, in the church, in the volunteer work he did. He’d worked hard to find that. He would never have thrown it away.”

“There’d been nothing odd in his mood, in how he behaved, in the days and weeks before his death? Nothing that had happened at work?”

“Nothing.” She let out another sigh and looked up at the glass ceiling. “I can’t tell you how many times I went over all this with the insurance people. Please don’t ask me to go through it again with you.” I nodded.

Jesse roused himself. He sniffed my shoes and circled the table and finally shambled over to the French doors. He looked back at Lisa and whined. She got up and let him out.

“Is any of this relevant to your case, John?” she asked. There was no reproach in her voice. She mostly sounded sleepy.

“I don’t know,” I said, and I meant it.

Lisa walked me to the door and gave me a warm, firm handshake. She stood, motionless, under a big, bare-limbed linden, and watched as I drove away.

I had two hours until my meeting with Bregman, time enough to grab some lunch and make some calls. I got back on 124 and continued north, over the state line. Pound Ridge is more serious money than New Canaan, and a lot of it is spent on privacy. The big houses and their parklike grounds are tucked far from the eyes of curious motorists, and all you see from the narrow, twisting roads are dense woods, empty fields, fences in studied disrepair, and, only occasionally, a nameless mailbox standing by an inconspicuous drive.

Pound Ridge doesn’t have the same sort of Norman Rockwell Main Street as New Canaan. The closest it comes is Scott’s Corners, a wide place on 124 with a firehouse, a high-end supermarket, and a surprising number of eateries. I parked my Taurus and went into a pizzeria. I got two slices and carried them outside and sat on a bench in the fading sunlight.

I spent the next half hour, and much of my cell phone battery, finding out that the senior claims investigator for Connecticut Mutual Insurance was one Stanislaus Kulpinski, that he had personally handled the investigation of the Welch claim, and that his office was in Stamford. Finally, I found Stan himself. He was hoarse and wheezy and old-sounding, and he chewed a lot of gum. I introduced myself and told him what I was interested in, but he wanted references before he would talk.

“Who do you know that I know? Anybody on the job in Connecticut?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “You know anybody in New York?”

“I know a lot of people,” he said, and reeled off a bunch of names. None of them rang a bell, but I gave him the names of some guys I knew in the NYPD who didn’t think I was something sticky on the sidewalk. “Give me your number, I’ll call you in a half hour,” he said. And he did, by which time I was back in my car, with my phone hooked up to the lighter.

“You want to know why I thought there was something funny with Welch? Okay. You know anything about boats?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’ll need some background, but I’ll go light on the technical stuff,” he said. He didn’t go light enough. Twenty minutes later I knew more than I wanted to about the dangers of fire and explosion on boats with inboard, gasoline-powered engines, about how these boats were designed and equipped to ensure proper venting of volatile fumes, and about the safety practices employed by even the greenest power boater to prevent incineration. He told me about automatic sniffers, and exhaust blowers, and duct positioning, and rates of airflow through the engine compartment at various speeds. It was apparently a topic of great fascination to certain segments of the insurance industry.

“From which I gather that a boater blowing himself up in a power-boat is not a rare event,” I said, when Stan had finished his discourse.

“No, not rare,” he said, with a wet laugh.

“Which takes me back to my question. What got you interested in Welch?”

“Besides there being four months to go on his policy’s suicide exclusion?”

“Besides that.”

“Not much, at first,” he began. “What happened with him wasn’t so different from shit that happens every weekend. Guy took his boat out on a Saturday morning to fish. Went out real early, way before dawn. Topped off his tanks before he left. Stayed out a few hours. Then, just after sunrise, he starts up the engines to head back in andka-boom. Huge explosion. It’s bad, but it happens. But you look a little closer, and you start to wonder.” Stan paused to clear his throat. It sounded like a lung coming up.

“First, there were the stats. In insurance we keep statistics on all kinds of stuff, and the frequency of that kind of accident, on boats the same make, model, and age as Welch’s, is low. Real low. I mean, besides Welch, it’s never happened. The boat was designed so it wouldn’t happen. By itself, it means nothing, but it’s an attention-getter.

“Then, there was the service history. Welch took good care of that boat, and kept meticulous service records. A year before the accident, he’d had the engines overhauled, the fuel tanks checked, and the fuel lines replaced. He’d used the boat for the next year with no reported problems. Then, out of the blue, on his way back in… boom. That gets me wondering a little more.

“Next, there was Welch’s experience with boats. This guy was no weekend skipper-he knew his way around, but good. This was the fifth boat he’d owned, and he’d worked in marinas from when he was twelve years old, all the way through college. Why is that important? Well, for his boat to go up like that, the buildup of fumes must’ve been intense. It’s hard to believe he didn’t smell anything topside, and impossible that he’d miss it when he checked below. Unless he didn’t check below. Unless Mr. Experienced forgot the most basic safety precaution in a gas-powered boat and didn’t check for fumes before he started up. Now I’m really getting curious.

“Finally, there was the fishing. Turns out that Saturday-morning fishing was a regular thing with him-spring, summer, and fall. He’d been out ten weeks in a row prior to the blast. Eight of those ten weeks, his fishing buddy-guy lives over in Wilton-went with him. In fact, best I could tell, this guy had gone with Welch twenty-one of his last twenty-five Saturday-morning trips. But the Wednesday before this last one, Welch calls his pal to cancel. Said something had come up. Still don’t know what that ‘something’ was.” Stan paused again. I heard gum wrappers crinkling, and his chewing got more vigorous. “Now I’m thinking so much, it makes my head hurt.”

“Nobody else-the local cops, the Coast Guard-get a headache over this?” I asked. Stan chuckled a little. It turned into a wheeze.

“Just me. ’Course, the local cops got, what, fifteen guys on the force, oldest one has maybe a dozen years’ experience. And I think one of ’em had actually been on a boat once. As for the Coasties… well, they know their shit, no question. But they’re kind of jaded. They see so many people doing such incredibly stupid shit on the water, there’s nothing they won’t believe about how dumb a person can be. And to tell the truth, I didn’t have much else to go on. To all appearances, the guy was happily married, in good health, had more money than God. No evidence of depression or mental instability. No sign that he or his wife was a cheater. And the wife-she had no interest in the claim. Didn’t give a damn if she got paid or not.”

“Any sign that somebody else was involved?” I asked.

“Not a one.”

“You talk to the fishing buddy?”

“Till I was blue in the face. He said the same as everybody elseWelch was a happy guy with everything to live for.”

“So, you finally convinced yourself it was accidental?” Stan laughed, more loudly this time.

“Hell no. After thirty years of this, I know the guy did himself in. I just got tired of trying to prove it.” His laughter dissolved into a fit of coughing. It sounded like the other lung was coming up.

Steven Bregman lived a few miles from Scott’s Corners, on a bumpy lane that ran off of Old Stone Hill Road. A pair of brick columns and a scuffed red mailbox marked the entrance to his property. It was almost five and dark out, and I passed by three times before I found it. The gravel drive was smooth and bordered by a line of tall firs. I followed it for half a mile, and then I saw a clearing, and light from spots mounted high in the trees.

The drive ended in a large, brick-paved circle. In the center was a stone fountain surrounded by curved stone benches and well-groomed shrubs. The main house was at twelve o’clock. It was a handsome, Italianate pile in brick and stone, two generous stories tall, with a slate roof and decorative brackets on the overhanging eaves. There were lots of windows, all tall and arched and framed in dressed stone. There was more stone along the foundation, and around the entrance portico too. A tower with four windows and a dangerous-looking finial rose above the roofline at one end of the house. At the other, there was a deep, arcaded porch that wrapped around to the back. The windows were dark.

At nine o’clock, set well back from the circle, was a carriage house. It was long and low and built in the same style as the residence, but with six pairs of wide, wooden doors dominating its facade. One pair was opened, and I saw a Bentley resting comfortably inside. There were lights on at the end of the building closest to the main house. I pulled the Taurus up to the opened bay. Someone called to me as I climbed out.

“You March?” I recognized Bregman’s nasal voice and heavy New York accent from the telephone. He was standing in a narrow doorway at the lit-up end of the carriage house. “I’m in the office,” he said. He made a “come on” gesture and went inside. I walked across the bricks and through the opened door.

The end of the carriage house had been partitioned off from the car bays to make Bregman’s big office. The walls were brick, three of them broken up by tall windows. The long wall on my left was mostly high, built-in shelving, packed with glass bric-a-brac and with a wet bar at the far end. Bright lights hung amid the old beams and rafters.

There was a desk across the room, with a polished stone top. There were two flat-screened monitors on it, and two keyboards, and some neat stacks of paper next to an open metal briefcase. Bregman stood behind it.

He was a tall, skinny guy of about fifty who looked like a vulture. He had rounded shoulders and a long curved neck with lots of extra skin around his large Adam’s apple. His head was narrow and topped with wiry black hair. His brows were black and wiry too, and his dark eyes were set deep and close to his bony nose. The shadow of a heavy beard darkened his sallow skin. His mouth was small and mean and lipless. He wore tan trousers, a green sweater over a blue shirt, and brown loafers. He sat, and eyed the inside of his briefcase as if it were a carcass.

Bregman didn’t look up as I crossed the room, or offer me his hand to shake or a place to sit, either. I sat anyway, in one of the two yellow leather chairs that faced his desk.

“You said you had some questions. Go ahead and ask them. But make it quick; I’m pressed for time.” He spoke fast and didn’t look at me.

“I’ll get to it, then,” I said. “You know Gerard Nassouli?” Bregman was silent. He kept picking through his briefcase, and after a while I thought he hadn’t heard me. I was about to repeat the question when he responded.

“Am I supposed to?” he said. He managed to make it sound bored, distracted, and snide, all at once. He was annoying me.

“Well, I suppose you do-that’s why I’m here. But I wanted to hear you say it.” He glanced up at me.

“Your tone’s kind of arrogant for someone who’s sitting in my house, asking for my time,” he said, but there wasn’t much force to it, and he seemed more interested in his briefcase. I didn’t say anything. “Where am I supposed to know this guy from?” he asked.

“He ran MWB in New York, and maybe you did some business with him fifteen years ago or so.” Bregman glanced over at me again, still distracted, and nodded a little-I wasn’t sure at what.

“And if I did know the guy, so what?” he asked, his eyes flicking back to me again.

“Then I’ve got other things to talk to you about,” I said.

“Other things like what?”

“Other things like blackmail.”

He nodded to himself some more. He took a small stack of business cards from his briefcase, squared the edges, and put them next to a stack of papers on the desk. His long, pale hands were shaking a little. He pulled a few more papers from his case, put a few others in, closed the case, and stood it on the floor. Then he opened a drawer in the desk, and took out a slim, black semiautomatic pistol and pointed it at me.

“You greedy bastard,” he said. His voice was quavering with rage and fear and a rush of adrenaline. “What’s the matter, motherfucker, you didn’t bleed me enough the first time? You want more?” His thin lips were white, and so were his nostrils and the fingers of his right hand around the pistol grip. It didn’t look like he’d had a lot of experience shooting, but that didn’t matter much. I’d be awfully hard to miss at this range. He was swallowing a lot and his big Adam’s apple was jumping up and down. His hands shook more. Mine might too if I moved them, but I didn’t. I kept them, and the rest of me, perfectly still.

“You’ve got the wrong guy, Bregman,” I said slowly, but Bregman cut me off.

“ I got the wrong guy? You got the wrong guy, motherfucker. You got the wrong guy.” His voice was tight, like he was trying to yell but couldn’t get enough air to do it. He got up and came around the desk. His movements were stiff and jerky, but he kept the gun on me the whole time, pointed mostly at my head. He stood in front of me.

“You think I’m going to take this shit? Get up, you cocksucker,” he said. I started to rise, slowly, and as I did he backhanded me across the face with the gun. At least, he tried to. But I don’t think he’d ever hit anyone before, and he didn’t do it well or quickly. I sat back down as he pushed the gun at me. I drew my head back a little and with my left hand grabbed his wrist and the gun as they passed by my face. I twisted hard and felt something snap and Bregman screamed. I stood up and as I did I brought my right knee into his crotch. I got him dead on and with a lot of momentum behind me, and his scream turned into a weird bellow, like his intestines were going to come out of his mouth. He went down on his hands and knees, and then screamed again and collapsed on his right elbow, with his right hand out at an odd angle. Then he threw up.

My chair had tipped over, and Bregman’s gun was underneath it. I righted the chair and picked up the gun. It was a Beretta. The new ones have this cool automatic safety that engages if you drop them, and it had worked as advertised. I set the manual safety too and slid the clip out. There was nothing in the chamber. I put the clip in my pocket and stuck the gun in my belt behind my back. My hands and knees were shaking now. I took some slow, deep breaths.

Bregman was in a fetal position and still retching. He was crying too. Shit. I got a glass of water from the wet bar and drank it. Then I drank another. I filled it again and got some ice from the little fridge and wrapped it in a bar towel and brought it and the water and some more bar towels to Bregman.

I got him into one of the yellow chairs and helped him clean himself up a little. When I was sure he wouldn’t retch anymore, I gave him some water and wrapped his wrist in the bar towel with the ice. Then I pulled the other yellow chair over and sat down facing him.

“Now, would you care to tell me just what the fuck your problem is?” I asked.