The Accident

TWENTY-THREE

“Get out,” I said, moving toward the door.

“Mr. Garber, please,” Arthur Twain said, rising reluctantly off the chair.

“I said get out. No one comes in here and says things like that about Sheila. I’ve listened to all the shit I want to about what my wife may or may not have done. I’m not listening to any more.” I opened the door.

When Twain didn’t move, I said, “I can pick you up and throw you out on your ass if that’s how you’d rather do it.”

Twain looked nervous, but he held his ground. “Mr. Garber, if you think you know everything there is to know about what your wife may have been involved in before she died, if you don’t have a single question left unanswered, then fine, I’ll go.”

I got ready to throw him out on his ass.

“But if you have any doubts, any questions at all, about your wife’s activities before she died, then maybe it would be worth your while to listen to what I have to say, maybe even answer a couple of my questions.”

I still had my hand on the door. I was aware of my own breathing, the coursing of blood through my temples.

I pushed the door closed. “Five minutes.”

We moved away from the door and went back to sitting in the living room.

“Let me start by telling you who, exactly, I work for,” Twain said. “I’m a licensed private detective with Stapleton Investigations. We’ve been engaged by an alliance of major fashion conglomerates to track down operations trading in counterfeit goods. Fake purses chief among them. You’re aware of the trade in knockoff merchandise, I assume.”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“Then let me get right to it.” Arthur Twain pulled an envelope from inside his jacket and withdrew from it a folded sheet of paper. He opened it up and held it out for me. It was a printout of a photo. “Do you recognize this person?”

Reluctantly, I took the photo from him and glanced at it. A tall man with black hair, lean and fit looking, with a scar above his right eye. The picture appeared to have been taken on a New York City street, although it could have been any major city.

“No,” I said, handing the photo back. “I’ve never seen him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. Is there anything else?”

“Don’t you want to know who he is?”

“Not really.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

“Your wife placed a call to him on the day of her accident.”

“Sheila phoned him?”

“That’s right.”

My mouth was dry. “Who is he?”

“We don’t know, exactly. He’s gone by Michael Sayer, Matthew Smith, Mark Salazar, and Madden Sommer. We think his name is Sommer. The people he works for refer to him as their solver.”

“Solver?”

“He solves problems.”

“My wife never knew anyone by any of those names.”

“She called Sommer’s cell in the early afternoon.” He reached into his jacket again. It was a small notebook, a Moleskine. He fingered through the pages until he found what he was looking for, then said, “That’s right, here we are. Just after one p.m. Let me read you a number here.”

He read off a series of digits that made my heart sink even if I hadn’t dialed them in several weeks.

“Recognize it?” he asked.

“That’s Sheila’s cell.”

“Your wife’s cell called Sommer’s at 1:02 the day she died.”

“She must have dialed wrong. And how the hell do you even know this? Where did you get these phone records?”

“We work in cooperation with several law enforcement agencies. They have provided some of their surveillance information. This number your wife called, by the way, it’s not a phone he has anymore. He goes through cell phones the way I go through cheesecake.” He gave his paunch a light pat.

“Okay, so Sheila called Sommer. Who the hell is he? I mean, what’s he do?”

“The FBI links him to organized crime.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“No, it’s not,” Arthur Twain said. “Sommer gets a lot of calls from women-and plenty of men, too-who are unaware he has those kinds of criminal connections. They may think he’s a little shady, but figure what they don’t know won’t hurt them. They just think he’s a businessman, a representative for a company that imports the items they’re interested in selling.”

“What items? When you walked in here you said purses. This guy moves purses?”

“Among other things.”

“He looks more like someone you’d go to to get guns or drugs.”

“He can get you those, too. Especially the latter. Of a certain kind.”

“I don’t believe any of this. I don’t get a ladies’ handbag vibe off this character.”

“Sommer moves whatever can make him money, and purses is one of those things.”

“So what are you saying? That my wife tried to buy a knockoff purse from this criminal?”

“It wouldn’t have been just one, if it was purses at all. Sommer’s people offer a full range of products. But knockoff bags are a distinct possibility. Have you ever heard of a purse party, Mr. Garber?”

I went to open my mouth, to say, “Are you kidding? We had one right here.” But I stopped myself.

“I’m sure you have,” he continued. “They’re pretty popular. Women get together to buy fake designer bags for a fraction of what the real things cost. It’s all a lot of fun, a girls’ night out, they put out some cheese and crackers, open some wine. A woman goes home with some fancy Prada or Marc Jacobs or Fendi or Louis Vuitton or Valentino bag that looks pretty darn close to the real thing. Only one who doesn’t know it’s real is her. And all the women at the party, of course.”

I studied him. “Don’t you have real crimes to investigate?”

Arthur smiled knowingly. “That’s what a lot of people say. But selling knockoff bags is a crime. A federal one.”

“I can’t believe police are wasting time on this when there’s people getting murdered out there and drugs coming into the country and terrorists plotting God knows what. So a few women walk around with bags that aren’t a real Marc Fendi-”

“Marc Jacobs, or Fendi,” he said.

“Whatever. So they’re walking around with a fake bag. If that’s all they can afford, then they weren’t going to buy the real one anyway. So who gets hurt?”

“Where would you like me to start?” Twain said. “With the legitimate companies that are having their copyrighted and trademarked work ripped off? The millions of dollars that are effectively stolen from them, and those who work for them, by this kind of crime?”

“I’m sure they’re getting by,” I said.

“Your daughter, Kelly, how old is she?”

“What’s this have to do with Kelly?”

“I’m guessing she’s what, seven years old?”

“Eight.”

“Can you picture her, right now, working nine or ten or more hours a day in a factory, making knockoffs? That’s what boys and girls her age do in China, working for a dollar a day. Working-”

“That’s right, play the exploited-children card when all those companies really care about is losing profits-”

“Working their fingers to the bone in some sweatshop to make a bag, all so some woman from Milford or Westport or Darien can stroll about trying to fool people into thinking she’s worth more than she really is. Do you know where the money goes, Mr. Garber? When a woman here in Milford drops thirty or fifty or a hundred bucks on some bag, do you know where the money ends up? The woman running the purse party will get her cut, of course, but she has to pay her supplier to get those bags. That money goes to produce other knockoffs, but not just other handbags. Counterfeit DVDs, video games, children’s toys-covered with lead paint with parts that can snap off and choke a kid to death-substandard building parts with counterfeit approval stamps on them, even knockoff baby formula, if you can believe that. There are even imitation prescription drugs out there that look like the real thing, even have the same product identification stamps on them, but don’t have the same ingredients, there’s no regulation at all. I’m not talking about less expensive drugs from Canada. I’m talking pharmaceuticals from India, China. Some of these pills, Mr. Garber, they don’t do anything. So you have someone on a limited pension, low income, he can’t afford his heart medication or whatever, he finds what he thinks is the same drug on the Internet, or he buys it off a friend of a friend, starts taking it, next thing you know, he’s dead.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know who’s making money from all that? Organized criminal organizations. Chinese gangs, Russian gangs, India, Pakistan. You name it. And plenty of good ol’ Americans, too. The FBI says some of this money even gets funneled to terrorist operations.”

“Really,” I said. “Some lady down the street buys a Gucci bag and suddenly we’ve got planes flying into buildings.”

Arthur smiled. “You make light, but I saw the expression on your face, a moment ago, when I mentioned building supplies. You’re a contractor, am I right?”

The words had registered with me, and I may have blinked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Imagine,” he said, “if someone working for you were to install into one of your houses, I don’t know, knockoff electrical components. Parts made in China that look, on the outside, exactly like name-brand ones manufactured and approved for use here, but on the inside they’re just junk. Made with wire of insufficient gauge. They overheat, they short out. Breakers don’t trip. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what might happen.”

I rubbed my hand over my mouth and chin. For a moment, I was back in that smoke-filled basement. “So why are you here? If this is such a big deal, why aren’t the police asking me about this instead of you?”

“We work with the police wherever we can, but they don’t have the resources to deal with this problem. Counterfeit goods are a five-hundred-billion dollar-a-year-business, and that’s probably a conservative estimate. The fashion industry has turned to private security and investigation firms to track down counterfeiters. That’s where I come in. Sometimes, it’s pretty simple. We find a woman who’s been holding purse parties, naively thinking there’s nothing wrong with what she does, and we let her know she’s committing a crime, a federal crime, and that may be enough. She stops, we don’t charge her. Sometimes. When we find shops that are selling these goods, we notify the merchants, and the landlords, that what they’re doing is illegal, and that we’re prepared to bring in the police to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. And we often do. But just the threat of it is often enough to get landlords to act. They get rid of those tenants and bring in ones that obey the law, that sell legitimate merchandise.”

“What about just buying a purse? Owning a knockoff? Is that a crime?”

“No. But would your conscience be clear, if you were a woman and were carrying around a knockoff, and knew that this kind of thing could be happening?” He was looking in the envelope for a couple more pictures. He handed them to me.

“What are-oh Jesus.”

They were crime scene photographs. If I was going to have to look at pictures like these, I would have preferred to see them in black-and-white. But these were in Technicolor. The bodies of two women, pools of blood beneath them. All around them, purses. On tables, hanging from the walls, from the ceiling.

“Dear God.”

I looked at the next picture. A man, apparently shot in the head, his upper body sprawled across a desk. I thrust the pictures back at Twain. “What the hell is this?”

“The women’s names are Pam Steigerwald and Edna Bauder. A couple of tourists from Butler, Pennsylvania. In New York for a girls’ weekend. They were looking for bargain-priced purses on Canal Street and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The man is Andy Fong. A merchant, and an importer of knockoff purses manufactured in China.”

“I don’t know anything about these people.”

“I show this to you because it’s an example of what can happen when folks get mixed up in this whole counterfeit business.”

I was angry. “This is disgusting, trying to make a point by showing me something like this, trying to scare the hell out of me. This has nothing to do with Sheila.”

“The police believe our man with the many names, the one we’ll call Madden Sommer, may have done this. The man your wife phoned the day she died.”