The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Chapter 20

It rained all day Monday. It had held off until I got home the night before, but it was coming down hard when I woke up.

I never left the hotel. When I moved in there was a coffee shop off the lobby, but it went out of business years ago. There had been several tenants in there since then; the current one sold women’s clothing.

I called the Morning Star and ordered a big breakfast. The kid who delivered it came to my door looking like a drowned rat. I ate my breakfast and got on the phone, and I stayed on it all day long. I made call after call, and when I wasn’t talking to someone or biding my time on Hold or drumming my fingers waiting for a callback, I was staring out the window and trying to figure out who to call next.

I spent a lot of time trying to chase down MultiCircle Productions, the previous owner of the Holtzmann apartment. It took a lot of digging to establish that their corporate charter had been written in the Caymans, which meant there was a veil there I could forget about penetrating.

The building manager for the condominium didn’t know much about MultiCircle. She had never met anyone connected with the company, or indeed anyone who had occupied the premises prior to the Holtzmanns. It was her impression that the Holtzmanns had been the first people actually to live there, but she might be wrong about that. Nor had she had anything to do with the sale of the apartment, or of any of the units. The building had had a sales agent who had used one of the unsold apartments as an on-premises office, but of course all the apartments had been sold long ago and the sales agent had moved on. She could probably find out the agent’s name, and a number that might or might not be current. Would I want her to do that?

The number wasn’t current, as it turned out, but getting the right number wasn’t any harder than calling 411 and asking for it. The hard part came when I tried to find someone at the sales agency who knew anything about the building at Fifty-seventh and Tenth. No one who’d sold space there still worked at the agency.

“There ought to be someone who can help you,” a cheerful young man told me. “Hold on a minute, okay?” I held, and he came back with a name and a number. I called the number and asked for Kerry Vogel, spent a few more minutes on Hold, and was given another number to call.

When I reached her, Kerry Vogel had every bit as cheerful a voice and manner as the fellow who’d steered me to her. I have a feeling it’s part of the job description. She remembered the building vividly, as well she might; she’d lived in it for a year and a half.

“We’re gypsies,” she said. “All of us in this business. It’s a crazy life and not everybody can stay in it. You get a building and you pick an apartment. That’s one of the perks, free rent, and it means you’re there all the time, you can easily make appointments to fit the prospect’s schedule. Also you’re encouraged to pick one of the nicest units and fix it up attractively, because it’s good psychology, your prospect right away sees himself living there. You rent good furniture, hang some nice art on the walls, and have the cleaning service come in once a week. And you’d be surprised how many times you’ll take the person all over the building and they wind up, like, I want your apartment. So you write up the sale and you move.”

She had occupied five different apartments in the Holtzmann building, three of them in the same vertical line as the Holtzmann apartment, each of them in turn sold out from under her. She had trouble recalling the name MultiCircle Productions, but she remembered the apartment. I don’t know what there was to remember, since she hadn’t lived in it and since it was substantially identical to the ones above and below it, but then I’m not in that business.

She remembered now. A man had come by himself to look at apartments. He looked foreign, but he could have been European or South American, she couldn’t tell which. He was tall and slim and dark and he hardly said a word. She’d rushed the sales pitch and didn’t show him everything because he made her nervous.

And you had to follow your instincts, because the job was a dangerous one. For a woman, anyway. Because men were hitting on you all the time, and that was okay, it got to be a nuisance but you learned to live with it. But sometimes it wasn’t just hitting on you, it didn’t stay verbal, it turned physical. Sometimes it was rape.

Because it was easy for them. You were alone, you were in your own apartment, there was even a bed there to help them get the idea. And the building was generally half-empty at the very least, so there was no one around to hear you scream. Not that they could hear you anyway because that was a big selling point of the better new buildings. They were completely soundproof, and wasn’t that a great thing to tell a potential rapist?

She’d been lucky so far, but she knew women who hadn’t. This guy had spooked her some, so quiet and watchful and all, but nothing happened, he never hit on her at all. And when he left she was sure she would never see him again.

Which was true, actually, because she didn’t. From then on the only person she saw was his lawyer, who was Hispanic. He didn’t have an accent but his name was Spanish, and no, she couldn’t remember it. Garcia? Rodriguez? It was a common Spanish name, that was all she remembered. She didn’t remember the buyer’s name, either, and she had a hunch she had never heard it, or else she probably would have known whether he was South American or European, wouldn’t she? From the name?

She was pretty sure all anybody ever told her was MultiCircle Productions, whatever that was. See, anybody could buy a condo. With a co-op you had to go before the tenants’ board and satisfy them that you were a decent person and you wouldn’t be giving loud parties or being an unwelcome presence in the building. They could turn you down for any reason at all, or for no reason. They could discriminate in ways that were illegal for either a landlord or a private seller. Why, there was one East Side co-op that turned down Richard Nixon, for heaven’s sake!

Condos were different. If you had a pulse and your check was good, you could buy a condo, and the other tenants couldn’t keep you out. And once you had it you could sublet it, which a lot of co-ops didn’t allow. So the luxury condos were very popular with foreigners who wanted a safe investment in the United States. And buyers of that sort were in turn quite popular with people selling condos, because they didn’t expect you to finance their purchase, nor did they want a clause in the sales contract making the sale contingent upon their getting a mortgage. They generally wrote out a check and paid the full sum in cash.

Which was what this buyer had done. She remembered the closing, because nobody showed up for it, not even MultiCircle’s lawyer. He sent the check by messenger.

Come to think of it, had she ever met the lawyer? They’d spoken on the phone several times, and she had this mental picture of him that looked like the lieutenant on Miami Vice, but had she ever seen him?

She didn’t remember the selling price, but she could ballpark it. All the apartments on a line varied in price — the higher you went, the more you had to pay — and that floor on that line would be, let’s see, three-twenty? Well, give or take ten or fifteen thousand dollars, but that was close, anyway.

Probably a third of that was the view, and wasn’t it spectacular? You didn’t mind sitting around by the hour waiting for prospects when you had that to look out at. She’d enjoyed living there, although she hadn’t been crazy about the neighborhood to begin with. But she liked it better as she got to know it more.

“There’s a place right across the street,” she said, “that’s really super. Jimmy Armstrong’s? Looks like nothing much from the outside, but it’s nice and the food’s sensational. Serious chili, and the selection of beers on tap is outstanding. You ought to check it out.”

I assured her I would.

I called Elaine. “I had a hunch you’d be home,” I said.

“I was out earlier, though. I went to the gym. Of course there were no cabs to be had, but I put on that plastic shmatte and I carried an umbrella. And I still got soaked going and coming, but it didn’t kill me. You’re home, I take it?”

“And staying put.”

“Good, because it doesn’t look as though it’s going to quit soon. If I lived on a lower floor I’d start building an ark.”

I told her what I’d learned about MultiCircle. “Foreign money,” I said, “and no easy way to tell where it came from. One principal or a whole slew of them, and no way to tell that, either. A condo’s an attractive investment, a good hedge against inflation and a way to shift some money here to guard against political or economic instability at home.”

“Wherever home is.”

“Although that probably wouldn’t have been a big consideration, not if they were already incorporated in the Caymans and could stow the money in a dollar account there. Still, it’s a good investment and you can rent it out. There’s usually a minimum rental period, it’s not like a hotel, although some resort condos have the minimum down to three days. In New York it’s generally a month, sometimes longer.”

“And in the Holtzmanns’ building?”

“A month, but it didn’t matter to MultiCircle because they never had a tenant in there. Glenn and his wife” — interesting how I avoided saying her name — “were the first people to spend a night there.”

“And they’d been married all of a week at the time? I bet they did a good job of christening it.”

“MultiCircle paid cash,” I said. “They sent over a check in full payment.”

“So?”

“So how did they lose it? I was thinking foreclosure, but how can you foreclose on a nonexistent mortgage? Sometimes a corporation has its assets seized to satisfy creditors, but this was some kind of shell in the Caymans. What kind of creditors would they have?”

“Their lawyer could probably tell you.”

“Could but wouldn’t. Assuming I knew who he was, which I don’t. She didn’t remember his name. It’s probably on a piece of paper somewhere, and I’ll try to find it, but even if I managed to find the guy I wouldn’t get anything out of him. MultiCircle. You know what that sounds like to me?”

“Like going around in circles?”

“Like wheels within wheels,” I said.

“Does it even matter who they are, or why they lost the property? I mean, if you were investigating me, would you want to know who lived here before I did?”

“This is different,” I said. “There’s something strange about MultiCircle Productions, and there’s something strange about US Asset Reduction Corp., and God knows there’s something strange about Holtzmann. All that strangeness, you’ve got to assume a connection.”

“I guess.”

“I have a feeling it’s right in front of me,” I said. “But I just can’t see it yet.”

I called Joe Durkin. “I actually tried you an hour ago,” he said. “Two, three times. Your line was busy.”

“I’ve been on it all morning.”

“Well, just to set your mind at rest, Gunther Bauer was not the hired agent for an international conspiracy. I was lucky, guy I talked to was polite as can be. I could tell he wanted to laugh in my face, but he managed to control himself. Gunther’s beef with George was personal and deeply felt, according to him. He was nobody’s guided missile. Unless God told him to do it, which is possible, but he wasn’t taking orders from any intermediary.”

“I didn’t really have much faith in that theory anyway.”

“No, but you thought it was worth checking, and you’re an overly stubborn son of a bitch but you’re not stupid.”

“Thanks.”

“The idea was somebody put him up to it to keep George from talking, right?”

“Well, George wasn’t much of a talker. But to close out the case.”

“It was already closed out, though I’ll grant you this slams the door. But if you’re thinking about somebody pulling strings inside Rikers—”

“Which has been known to happen.”

“Oh, no question, but it’s not something your average citizen can do. You can’t take a course at the Learning Annex, ‘How to Arrange a Homicide Behind Prison Walls.’ Might be a popular course, but they haven’t offered it yet.”

“No.”

“So you’re thinking in terms of somebody with reach. You must’ve found something indicates Holtzmann’s dirty.”

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

“Bought an apartment from a foreigner that nobody was living in.”

“Well, Jesus, that’s just as suspicious as hell, isn’t it?”

“Why would a foreigner buy an apartment and not live in it or rent it out? You got any idea?”

“I don’t know, Matt. Why would a foreigner do anything? Why would a foreigner join the police force?”

“Huh?”

“You didn’t read about that? There’s a proposal to do away with the citizenship requirement on the NYPD.”

“Seriously? Why would they want to do that?”

“To make the department more representative of the population at large. Which is a worthwhile goal, don’t misunderstand me, but that’s a hell of a way to do it. You should hear the PBA delegate on the subject.”

“I can imagine.”

“ ‘Go all the way,’ he says. ‘Why should they even need green cards? Take illegal aliens, take wetbacks. Hang a fucking sign on the Rio Grande, You too can be a police officer.’ He was in rare form.”

“Well, it’s an unusual idea.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” he said, “and it won’t do what they want it to, because what you’ll wind up with is half the male population of Woodside and Fordham Road, donkeys fresh off the Aer Lingus flight. Remember when they did away with the height requirement? That was supposed to get more Hispanics on the force.”

“Did it work?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not. All it brought in was a lot of short Italians.”

I called Holtzmann’s previous landlord, owner of the building in Yorkville where he’d been living when he met Lisa. When I was downtown I’d found the address in an old city directory and got the landlord’s name and address from city real estate records. That’s not always easy, a lot of landlords hide behind corporate shells as hard to penetrate as MultiCircle, but not this fellow. He owned the building, lived with his wife in one of its sixteen units, and served as its superintendent himself.

And he remembered Glenn Holtzmann, who had evidently lived there ever since he moved back to the city from White Plains. The landlord, a Mr. Dozoretz, had only good things to say about Holtzmann, who had paid his rent on time, made no unreasonable demands, and caused no problems with other tenants. He’d been sorry to lose him as a tenant, but not surprised; the fourth-floor studio was a tight fit for one person, and far too small for two. A great shock, though, what had happened to Mr. Holtzmann. A tragedy.

Sometime after noon I called down to the deli and asked them to send up some coffee and a couple of sandwiches. Fifteen minutes later I was so lost in thought that the knock on my door came as a surprise. I ate my lunch dutifully, without really tasting it, and got back on the phone.

I called New York Law School and spoke to several different people before I managed to confirm the dates of Holtzmann’s attendance there. No one I talked with remembered him, but his records indicated an unremarkable student. They had the name of the White Plains firm where Holtzmann had gone to work after graduation, and his address there, the Grandview Apartments on Hutchison Boulevard, but that was as recent as their information got; he hadn’t bothered to keep them up to date.

The Westchester Information operator had no listing for the law firm Kane, Breslow, Jespesson & Reade, but under Attorneys she had a Michael Jespesson listed. I called his office but he was out to lunch. I thought, in this weather? Why couldn’t he order in from a deli and eat at his desk?

I might have tried the Grandview Apartments but I couldn’t imagine what I might ask whoever took my call. Even so, it was a struggle to keep from calling them. There is an acronym in the New York Police Department, or at least there used to be. They taught it to new recruits at the Academy, and you heard it a lot in all the detective squad rooms. GOYAKOD, they said. It stood for Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors.

You hear it said that that’s how most cases are closed, and that’s not even close to true. Most cases close themselves. The wife calls 911 and announces she shot her husband, the holdup man runs out of the convenience store and into the arms of an off-duty patrolman, the ex-boyfriend has a knife under his mattress with the girl’s blood still on it. And of the cases that require solution, a majority are closed through information received. If a workman is as good as his tools, a detective is no better than his snitches.

Now and then, though, a case won’t solve itself and no one will be obliging enough to drop a dime on the bad guy. (Or on the good guy; snitches lie, too, like everybody else.) Sometimes it takes actual police work to clear a file, and that’s when GOYAKOD comes into play.

It’s what I was doing now. I was employing a foul-weather version of GOYAKOD. I was sitting on my ass and using the phone, waging the same kind of war of attrition on the blank wall of Glenn Holtzmann’s death. The only thing wrong with it is that sometimes it becomes pointless and mechanical. You’re at a dead end, but rather than admit it and try to figure out where you took a wrong turn, you keep on knocking on doors, grateful that there is an endless supply of doors to knock on, grateful that you can keep busy and tell yourself you’re doing something useful.

So I didn’t call the Grandview. But I didn’t throw their number away, either. I kept it handy, in case I ran out of doors.

When I reached Michael Jespesson, he was shocked to learn that Glenn Holtzmann was dead. He had been aware of the murder but had paid very little attention to it; it was, after all, a street crime committed on streets well removed from his own. And it had been several years since Holtzmann had been associated with his late firm. Somehow the victim’s name hadn’t registered.

“Of course I remember him,” he said. “We were a small firm. Just a handful of associates plus a couple of paralegals. Holtzmann was a pleasant fellow. He was a few years older than the standard law-school graduate, but only a few years. The first impression he made was that of a real self-starter, but he turned out to be less ambitious than I’d guessed. He did his work, but he wasn’t going to set the world on fire.”

That echoed what Eleanor Yount had told me. She’d initially seen him as a likely successor, then realized he lacked the drive. But somehow he’d driven himself all the way to the twenty-eighth floor. Add up the cash and the apartment and he’d left an estate well in excess of half a million dollars. Imagine what he could have accomplished if he’d had a little ambition.

“Maybe he was just in the wrong place,” Jespesson said. “I wasn’t surprised when he left. I never thought he’d stay. He was single, he hadn’t grown up in the area, so what was he doing in White Plains? Not that he was a born New Yorker. He was from somewhere in the Midwest, wasn’t he?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Well, that’s not the Midwest. But he wasn’t from Philadelphia. He was from somewhere out in the sticks, if I remember correctly.”

“I think Altoona.”

“Altoona. New York is full of people from Altoona. White Plains isn’t. So I wasn’t surprised when he left us, and if he hadn’t left then he’d have done so a few months later.”

“Why?”

“The firm broke up. Sorry, I took it for granted that you knew that, but there’s no reason why you should. Nothing to do with Holtzmann, anyway, and I don’t think he could have read the handwriting on the wall. I don’t think there was any handwriting on the wall. I certainly didn’t see it.”

I asked if there was anyone else I should talk to.

“I think I knew him as well as anyone,” he said. “But how do you come to be investigating? I thought you had a man in custody.”

“Routine follow-up,” I said.

“But you do have the man responsible? A homeless derelict, if I remember correctly.” He snorted. “I was going to say he should have stayed in White Plains, but we have our share of street crime here, I’m sorry to say. My wife and I live in a gated community. If you wanted to visit us I would have to leave your name with the guard. Can you imagine? A gated community. Like a stockade, or a medieval walled city.”

“I understand they have them all over the country.”

“Gated communities? Oh yes, they’re quite the rage. But not in Altoona, I shouldn’t think.” Another snort. “Maybe he should have stayed in Altoona.”

Why didn’t he?

Why had he come to New York? He’d gone to college not far from home, returned home after graduation, and very likely fallen into the job selling insurance at his uncle’s agency. Then when he came into a few dollars he moved to New York and went to law school.

Why? Didn’t Penn State have a law school? It would have been cheaper than moving to New York, and would have been a logical preface to taking the Pennsylvania bar exam and practicing law not far from home. He could even have gone on selling insurance in his free time; he wouldn’t have been the first person to work his way through law school in that fashion.

But instead he’d had a clean break. Hadn’t looked back, as far as I could tell. Hadn’t taken his bride back home, hadn’t introduced her to his family.

What had he left behind? And what had he taken with him when he made the move? How much had his parents left him?

Or had they left him anything at all?

Start with the uncle. I called Eleanor Yount to see if the firm’s records had him listed by name. She had an assistant pull Glenn’s résumé and reported that he had not been specific in listing his job experience prior to law school. Like his after-school jobs and summer employment, his career in insurance had been merely summarized. Sales and administrative work at uncle’s insurance office, Altoona, PA, he’d written, along with the dates.

I got through to the Information operator in Altoona and had her check the Yellow Pages listings for an insurance agent named Holtzmann. There were a lot of Holtzmanns in the region, she told me, most but not all of them spelling it with two N’s, but none of them seemed to be in the insurance business.

Of course your uncle doesn’t necessarily have the same last name as you. And there was a fair chance the uncle had died, or retired to Florida, or sold the business and bought a Burger King franchise.

Still, how big was Altoona? And how many insurance agents could it have, and wouldn’t they tend to know each other?

I asked the operator for the names and numbers of the two insurance agencies with the largest Yellow Pages ads. She seemed to think that was an amusing request, but she gave me what I wanted. I called them both, in each case managing to get through to someone who’d been there a while. I explained that I was trying to contact a man who had been in the insurance business in Altoona and who may have been named Holtzmann, but who in any event had employed his nephew, whose name was in fact Holtzmann, Glenn Holtzmann.

No luck.

I called Information again and got the names of half a dozen of the two-N Holtzmanns. I took them in order. The first two didn’t answer. The third was a woman with a voice like Ethel Merman’s who assured me that she knew all the Holtzmanns in town, that they were all related, and that there was no one in the family named Glenn. Nothing wrong with the name, but no Holtzmann had ever used it, and she would know if they had.

I said I thought he was from Roaring Spring.

Now that was a different story, she said. She didn’t quite say it, but she gave me the impression that people in Roaring Spring had tails. She knew there was a Holtzmann family in Roaring Spring, although she hadn’t heard tell of them in years and couldn’t say if any of them were still around. One thing she did know was that the Holtzmanns in Roaring Spring were not in any way related to the Holtzmanns in Altoona.

“Unless you go clear back to the Rhineland,” she said.

I called Information and asked for Holtzmanns in Roaring Spring, wondering why it hadn’t occurred to me to do so earlier. No matter. There weren’t any.

I called Lisa. Did she happen to know the name of the uncle at whose insurance agency Glenn had worked in Altoona?

She said, “What a question. Did he ever mention any of his relatives by name? If he did I don’t remember. The thing is, neither of us talked much about our families.”

“What about his mother’s maiden name? Did he happen to mention that?”

“I’m sure he didn’t,” she said. “But wait a minute, I just came across it on his group insurance policy. Hold on a minute.” I held, and she came back to report that it was Benziger. “ ‘Father’s name — John Holtzmann, Mother’s maiden name — Hilda Benziger’ ” she read. “Does that help?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I called Altoona Information again looking for an insurance agent named Benziger. There was none listed, and I didn’t bother chasing the Benziger name any further than that. The uncle in question could have been an uncle by marriage, husband of the sister of one of Glenn’s parents. He could even have been an honorary uncle, the father of a second cousin. There were just too many ways he could have a name that was neither Holtzmann nor Benziger.

I hung up the phone and sat there trying to figure out what to do next. It seemed to me that I was knocking on plenty of doors, but I kept getting them slammed in my face.

Was I going to have to make a trip to Altoona? God knows I didn’t want to. It seemed a long way to go to chase down information that wasn’t very likely to lead anywhere. But I didn’t know if I could manage it from a distance. Up close, I could chase his parents’ names through old city and county records, find out who all his relatives were, and come up with a name for the uncle in question.

Assuming the people I encountered were cooperative. I knew how to ensure cooperation from record clerks in New York. You bribe them. In Altoona that might not be possible.

Was I going to have to find out?

I glared at the phone, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t pick that moment to ring. It was Lisa. She said, “After I hung up I started thinking. Why insurance? Because he never told me he was ever in the insurance business.”

“He told Eleanor Yount.”

“He told me he sold cars,” she said. “He sold Cadillacs and Chevrolets. And something else. Oldsmobiles?”

“When did he do that?”

“After college,” she said. “Before he moved to New York, before he went to law school.”

“Under Auto Dealerships,” I said. “Do you see the name Holtzmann anywhere? Holtzmann Motors, Holtzmann Cadillac?”

They were remarkably patient at Altoona Information. While she checked I pictured Glenn Holtzmann stretched out on the pavement in front of a Honda dealership and across the street from a muffler shop. The city’s largest Cadillac dealer was only a block or so away.

There were no Holtzmanns in the Altoona listings. I asked her to try Benziger. That rang a bell, she said, but she couldn’t say why, or find a Benziger Motors on the page. I told her I was looking for a dealership that sold Chevrolet, Cadillac, and possibly Oldsmobile.

After a brief search she reported that only one local dealership listed itself as an agency for Cadillac. They had the other lines I mentioned, and GMC trucks, and Toyota as well. “Sign of the times,” she said of the last. “That would be Nittany Motors,” she said, “out on Five Mile Road.”

I took the number and dialed the call. The woman who answered didn’t believe there was a Mr. Holtzmann present, unless it was a new man in the service department whose name she didn’t know as yet. Was that who I wanted?

“Then I guess Mr. Holtzmann’s not the owner,” I said.

The idea seemed to tickle her. “Well, I guess not,” she said. “Mr. Joseph Lamarck is the owner and has been as long as there’s been a Nittany Motors.”

“And how long has that been?”

“Why, quite a few years now.”

“And before that? Was there a time when it was Benziger Motors?”

“Why, yes,” she said. “That was before my time, I’m afraid. May I ask the nature of your interest?”

I told her I was calling from New York, that I was involved in the investigation of a homicide. The deceased seemed to have been a former employee of Benziger Motors, and might have been a relative of Mr. Benziger.

“I think you ought to talk with Mr. Lamarck,” she said, then came back to tell me he was busy on another line. Would I hold? I said I would.

I was lost in space when a deep male voice said, “Joe Lamarck here. Afraid I didn’t get your name, sir.”

I supplied it.

“And someone’s been killed? Used to work here and a relative of Al Benziger’s? I guess that would have to be Glenn Holtzmann.”

“Did you know him?”

“Oh, sure. Not well, and I can’t say I’ve thought of him in years, but he was a nice enough young fellow. He was Al’s sister’s boy, if I’m not mistaken. She raised young Glenn by herself and died about the time he went up to State College. I believe Al helped them some over the years, and then took Glenn on after he graduated.”

“How did he do?”

“Oh, he did all right. I don’t think he had any real feeling for the automobile business, but sometimes that comes with time. He left, though. I couldn’t say what it was he was tired of, Altoona or the automobile business. May have been Al. Damn good man, but he could be hard to work for. I had to quit him.”

“You used to work for Benziger?”

“Oh, sure, but I quit, oh, musta been a couple months after Glenn started. Nothing to do with Glenn, though. Al chewed me out one time too many and I went down the street and worked for Ferris Ford. Then when Al had his troubles I came back and bought the place, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.”

“When did that happen?”

“Lord, fifteen years ago,” he said. “History.”

“That was after Glenn left.”

“You bet. Several months after that Al had his troubles, and it was some time after that before I took over.”

“What kind of troubles?”

There was a pause. “Well, I don’t like to say,” he said. “All just history now, anyway. There’s nobody around played any part in it. Al and Marie left town soon as they could, and I couldn’t guess where he is now. If he’s alive at all, and it’d be my guess that he’s not. He was a broken man when he left Altoona.”

“What broke him?”

“The damn federal government,” he said with feeling. “I wasn’t going to say, but I’m not hurting anybody and you could find out easy enough. Al was keeping two sets of books, been doing it for years. His wife Marie was his bookkeeper and I guess they worked it out between them. He had an accountant, of course, Perry Preiss, and he was in trouble there for a while, until it turned out that Al and Marie had kept him in the dark all along. Still, I understand it hurt his practice.”

“What happened to the Benzigers?”

“They settled. No choice, was there now? IRS had ’em cold. It was out-and-out tax evasion, too, with a fraudulent set of books and some secret bank accounts. You couldn’t say you made a mistake, you didn’t report this and that because it slipped your mind. IRS wanted to, they could have put the both of them in jail. Had ’em over a barrel, and didn’t show a lot of mercy, my opinion. Took Al Benziger for everything he had. I wound up buying this place. Somebody else bought their house, and somebody else got their summer place down by the lake.”

“And Glenn was gone when this happened.”

“Oh, sure. Didn’t come back to rally round, either. If he even heard about it. Where was he at the time, New York?”

“New York,” I said. “In law school, paying his way with the money he came into when his mother died.”

He asked me to repeat that. When I’d done so he said, “No, that part’s wrong. Glenn Holtzmann grew up in a trailer in Roaring Spring, and they didn’t even own the trailer. I don’t guess his mother ever had a dime aside from what her brother gave her.”

“Maybe there was some insurance money.”

“Surprise me if there was, but anything like that would have been long gone. Didn’t I say Glenn’s mother died about the time he started college?”

“I guess you did.”

He said, “Raises a question, doesn’t it? Where’d he get the money?”

“I don’t know. How did the IRS know to come after Al Benziger?”

“My Lord,” he said.

“Who knew about the second set of books?”

“An hour ago I’da said nobody knew. Perry Preiss didn’t, I know that for a fact. I didn’t know about it. I’da said Al and Marie and nobody else.”

“And now?”

“Now I’d have to wonder if maybe Glenn knew,” he said. “My Lord, my Lord.”