Known to Evil

31

I walked eight blocks north, wandered a little to the west, and stopped at a rare phone booth I knew of on St. Marks Place. There I dialed a number that I shouldn't have known.

"Hello?" he said on the second ring.

"What's this shit about Russian gangsters, Twill?"

"Pops?"

"Answer me."

"Where'd you get this number?"

Twill had gotten a friend of his to buy a pay-as-you-go cell phone with a Utah area code nine months before. That was his secret line. The only problem with the secret was that Bug Bateman had built me a shadow Internet ID that could read any e-mail that the boy sent or received-all without his knowledge. One of those e-mails had passed on the secret number.

"I'm a detective, boy," I said. "It's my job to know things. Now tell me about this Gustav dude."

"Uh…"

I had to smile. It was a rare event indeed to catch my son so unawares that he was speechless.

"You got it, Pops," he said then. "Bulldog fell for this girl named Tatyana, and she was tied to this dude. She's Russian-kinda. But you got it wrong about Gustav-he's a Rumanian.

"Tatyana says that she did everything Gustav said but he got kind of a thing for her and wouldn't let go. So D tried to run with her but they got in too deep and called me."

"I thought we agreed that you'd come to me if there was serious trouble," I said.

"That was if I got in trouble, Pops. This was D's mess. You know Dimitri, Dad. If I called you he might'a done somethin' stupid."

"Where are you?"

"Up in the Bronx."

"At that gambling house?" I dealt out another secret so that Twill would worry.

"You know about that, too?"

"I need to see you, Twill. And your mother needs to see Dimitri. She's used to you runnin' around like you do, but she never saw D do anything like this."

"D's upstate with Tatyana. I got a friend up there put ' em up. I'll call him but he probably won't even get the message till tonight."

"Then you," I said.

"I'll meet you at Takahashi's at four, Pops. I swear."

AMERICANS BELIEVE IN STRAIGHT lines. They think that all you have to do is get out there and get the job done, one step after the other. If you don't do that then you're either lazy or incompetent. American men especially, and more and more women all the time, seem to think that life is like a mission. That's how they approach sports and war and sex-even love. That's what they think about when somebody's credit goes bad or there's an accident on the road: somebody veered off the straight and narrow.

Years of orphanages and foster homes, uneducated teachers and corrupt officials, from crossing guards to the presidents of entire nations, have shown me that Einstein was right: the connection between A and B is questionable at best, and there's no such thing as a straight line.

I couldn't wait for Angie's problem to be resolved while Dimitri and Twill were in trouble. And that was true for every other problem I was dealing with.

I FOUND OUT FROM a guy I know in the City Planner's office that the building Angelique lived in was owned by Plenty Realty. Plenty had their office on Hudson in the West Village. It was a one-room affair on the fourth floor of a building a few blocks south of Christopher Street.

I called the office, looking to speak to the owner, a Mr. Jeffrey Planter.

"Old Mr. Planter's dead," the young woman said in a flat tone, "and Jeff Junior is in Florida for the winter."

"It's not winter yet," I said, more in response to her tone than her words.

"Is that all you wanted?"

"Is there somebody in charge?"

"Mr. Nichols."

"May I speak to him?"

"He's not here. And he's old, anyway. His hearing aid always messes up when he holds the phone to his ear."

"When will he be back?"

"I don't know exactly. He's showin' somebody a place right now."

"Will he be back by noon?"

"That's when I go to lunch."

"I'm not coming to see you."

The nameless receptionist hung up on me. I couldn't blame her.

I GOT TO PLENTY REALTY at ten past twelve. The fourth-floor door was unlocked so I walked in without knocking.

It was a small office with three desks in a line against the far wall. Only the center desk was occupied. An older gentleman, a gray-haired white man, stood up when I walked in. He was barely taller and a lot thinner than I. He wore a baggy, dark-green suit, a brick-red-and-white-checkered shirt, and thick-lensed glasses rimmed with dull steel.

"How can I help you, Mr. Trotter?" he asked after I identified myself as a private detective working for Nyla Winetraub. "This doesn't have anything to do with that mix-up when we thought she'd moved to Florida, does it?"

"No."

"Because we were going on the information we received," he said, blundering on in spite of my assurance. "We were acting in good faith."

"You know that Ms. Winetraub is nearly blind."

"Yes," Mr. Nichols said. He smiled. I wondered at that. Was he happy that he had some kind of knowledge about his tenant? Or was it that he was relieved that he was almost as old as Nyla but still managed eyesight?

"Well," I said. "Miss Lear from upstairs takes care of Nyla's correspondence and other incidentals, but Lear's been missing for more than a week and Nyla is worried about her friend as well as herself."

"I don't see how I can help you, Mr. Trotter. I mean, I haven't seen Miss Lear for three years, not since she signed the papers on her unit."

"I tried to speak to your super, a Mr. Klott…"

Nichols grimaced when I mentioned the name.

"… but he wouldn't tell me anything."

"Klott is a sourpuss if ever there was one," Nichols told me. "But I still can't see where any of this concerns our office."

"I was wondering if Miss Lear had moved, or maybe that she was evicted."

"Oh no. Not at all. The rent on that unit is very low to begin with, and she doesn't pay full price anyway."

"No? The landlord supplements her?" I asked. "Maybe she's with him down in Florida."

"How did you…?" Nichols waved his hands around and then clasped them, the grin back on his lips. "Certainly not. And you shouldn't try to call him. He'd get very upset with me for divulging tenant information."

"I don't want to cause any trouble, Mr. Nichols. I'm just trying to do my job. A young woman is missing and nobody seems to want to help. Now, if there's somebody paying Miss Lear's rent, maybe a family member, then I could have something to give poor Miss Winetraub."

"There's really nothing I can do to help you there, Mr. Trotter. The money, sixty-six-point-six percent of her rent, came from a bank in Delaware. We've been told to keep that knowledge from her. They contacted us just after she called to see an apartment. They asked us to quote only the portion of the rent she was expected to pay. I'm just telling you this because I've said too much already. I do hope that you will keep the confidence."

"I'm working for Winetraub," I said. "And all she wants is for me to assure her that Miss Lear isn't in any trouble. I don't care who's paying the rent unless that leads me to the information I need."

"There was one thing," the nervous little man said.

"Yes?"

"A couple of weeks ago we got a call from Mr. Klott telling us that there was an incident in front of the property. It seems that two men accosted Miss Lear. I'd forgotten because nothing really happened."

"They tried to pick her up or something?" I asked, trying to seem as dense and as coarse as I possibly could.

"No. At least I don't think so. Two big strong men in suits tried to make her get into their car."

"What happened?"

"There's a building down the street tenanted by some, uh, long-haired men with tattoos and the like. They work on cars." Nichols sounded excited by these men. I was sure that he could describe the scent of their sweat. "They saved Miss Lear… drove the attackers off."

"That sounds promising," I said.

"Yes. Their place is three buildings east of our property."

"You seem to know a lot about that building, Mr. Nichols. Are you this familiar with all Plenty properties?"

"The senior Mr. Planter owned quite a few buildings," Mr. Nichols said wistfully. "His son has sold almost everything. Now we… I… am mostly a real estate agent for rentals and sales here in the West Village. But I go out to look at the three buildings we still own… at least once a month."

He took off his glasses and rubbed them clean with his blue-and-white tie.

"Can you think of anything else, Mr. Nichols?"

"No."

"There's no name associated with the money from the bank?"

"No."

"Maybe if I spoke to Jeff?" I suggested.

"The transfer was made electronically, and the original communication was made by phone-with me. Jeffy… Mr. Planter doesn't spend much time in the office even when he's in New York. It was a woman's voice but I'm sure it wasn't her money."

"How much is Lear paying?"

Nichols hesitated but then said, "Six hundred, but you can't tell anybody that."

"Wasn't she surprised that the rent was so low?"

"No," the elder man said, wincing at the memory. "She might have even tried to talk me down. I'm pretty sure she did. But when I wouldn't budge she accepted the price and signed a five-year lease."

"Five years?"

"The bank wanted it that way. They paid the full balance of their share up front. It was a good deal. We needed to do work on that building, and so it was all tax-deductible."

Nichols was looking very nervous. I got the feeling he wasn't used to having visitors and didn't really know how to converse without letting out too much.

"Don't worry," I said. "I'm not here to cause trouble for you. I'll go talk to the hippies. I'm sure that they'll be able to tell me something."

"Yes. Yes, I'm sure they will." But he didn't look very confident.