The Wedding Guest

Chapter 43

Back at his office, he chewed on an unlit cigar and dove into Academo’s business records, sifting through layers of corporate camouflage.

High-Level, Inc., was a corporation duly registered in the state of Delaware.

Milo said, “Consider the wisecrack uttered.”

Click; save; print. Soon a four-inch paper stack sat next to his screen. He read each sheet and passed it along.

Proposals, prospectuses, other business filings.

The kind of small-print, preposition-clogged legalese that inevitably crosses my eyes and numbs my brain. Party of the first, party of the second; the Marx Brothers collaborating with a desk-jockey churning out municipal regulations.

The gist was that High-Level, Inc., functioned as the maintenance arm of Columb-Tech, Inc., the parent company of five other corporations, including Academo, Inc.

Goodsprings, Inc., owned and operated drug rehab centers in five states.

Vista-Ventures, Inc., owned and operated industrial parks and office complexes in seven states.

Holly-Havenhurst, Inc., owned and operated senior-care facilities in nine states.

Hemi-Spherical, Inc., owned and operated residential complexes in eleven states.

At the helm of each, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President Anthony Nobach and Chief Operating Officer Marden Nobach.

Below the brothers’ names, each company sported an impressive roster of legal counselors and board members. I’d barely unfogged my cerebral cortex when one name caught my eye.

Chief exploratory officer at High-Level, Inc.: Thurston Nobach, M.A.

A title I’d never heard of. Exploring what?

Then I realized if you compressed it to initials, you ended up with another version of CEO.

Exactly the kind of pretense I’d imagined for a psychopathic poseur.

I googled Thurston Nobach and scored on the first hit.

Full-color web page teeming with vertigo-inducing movement as holographic meshes furled, unfurled, and floated around the screen.

Then: utter blackness, followed by the oozing materialization of a red Enter button and an invitation to Traverse My World.

Accepting the offer brought me to a high-def, close-up photo of a good-looking fox-faced man in his thirties sporting wavy, black, shoulder-length hair, a flap of which obscured one eye.

The visible iris was gray and piercing. Below Thurston Nobach’s cleft chin, the silk collar of a peacock-blue shirt was visible, as was a silver chain around a bronze neck. A dyed-blond triangular soul patch shifted to the left by an off-kilter, thin-lipped smile and a left ear graced by a two-carat emerald stud filled out the picture.

Intense and not afraid to be noticed.

A Continue button led me to Ideations, Strivings, Journeys.

Thurston Anthony Nobach, M.A., ABD, thirty-seven years old, listed himself as an alumnus of Old Dominion Day School and The Pedagogic Preparatory Academy, both in Columbus, Ohio. Next came Brown University, where he’d earned a B.A., cum laude, in American studies, followed by Columbia University, where he’d earned a master’s degree in linguistics.

Next screen: bright-red italics on a gray, faux-granite background:

Those initials I recognized: “All But Dissertation.”

Cosmetic shorthand for Ph.D. students who’d either changed their minds or flunked their orals.

After almost-graduation, Thurston Nobach’s intellectual curiosity had “propelled me to seek distant harbors.” First was Maui, Hawaii, where “I autonomously researched the Multi-Ethnic Vox, e.g. the sometimes tenuous, sometimes tense, sometimes tensile kinship/autonomy/orthogonal flat-line between Collective Concept and Voice.”

Next: Auckland, New Zealand, “seeking an antipodal awakening as I continued to decompress after descending the depths of exploratory curiosity in the bathysphere of the crushingly rodent-like marathon masquerading as formal education.”

I.e., doing nothing.

For two years in Florence, “I honed my visual observational skills and eventually reached a place where I could rationally contemplate a carefree swan-dive into the reflecting pool of visual arts. My Da Vinci dream phase, if you will.”

That was memorialized by thumbnails of four pen-and-ink drawings. Broken lines, awkward composition, unclear subject matter.

“I traveled away from that world due to a near-Aortic constriction brought upon by a revelation regarding the ultimately futile process of rendering.”

I.e., I don’t know how to draw.

Nobach’s last recorded overseas trip had taken place eight years ago.

“After finding myself immersed in the Bob Cratchett / Uriah Heep tanning vat of the so-called business world, I discovered that my axons and dendrites were atrophying and returned to the world of ideas.”

I.e., an “endowed” year in Warsaw, Poland.

No university mentioned.

Financing courtesy a Holly-Havenhurst Liberal Arts Scholar’s Award.

I googled the fellowship. No mention of anyone else ever receiving it.

The subsidiary that ran old-age homes.

I.e., siphoning money from Daddy.

I pictured Thurston Nobach drifting the streets of Warsaw buttressed by a fat allowance. All that leisure time leading him to come upon the monster who’d given his life new focus.

Milo was ahead of me, breathing hard, frantically flipping pages of the murder book. He stopped, wide-eyed, slapped a page, reversed the binder, and showed it to me.

The Polish newspaper article Basia Lopatinski had given us.

Ignacy Skiwski pretending to play guitar. Surrounded by a small group of young people. Milo jabbed a face. He didn’t need to.

A figure sitting to Skiwski’s left. Long legs suggested height. Sitting low suggested a high waist.

Over eight years, the changes in Thurston Nobach weren’t radical. Back then his face had been a bit softer around the edges, the black hair even longer, bound by a leather headband. No yellow soul patch, diamond earring instead of an emerald, shabby-looking beige tunic in place of the bright-blue shirt.

John Lennon glasses perched atop a beak-like nose as he observed Ignacy Skiwski.

Just another Euro-hippie digging the street vibe.

Until you checked out the smile: razor-lipped, impatient. As if chafing for the opportunity to utter something clever.

And the eyes: hard, judgmental, challenging the camera. The only one of Skiwski’s acolytes to look away from the guitar and face the camera.

Jackal among the sheep.

I said so.

Milo grunted and returned to the documents, working faster, shoulders bunched. I moved on to the final page of Nobach’s website. My Manifesto.

I.e., See? I’m a modest guy.

The real subtext: I know how to rein in my arrogance and summon up a Humble Brag when it suits me.

I began reading, bracing myself for another shit-storm of jabberwocky. Found, instead, a surprisingly brief exposition.

I created a page link, emailed it to Milo’s computer. It pinged arrival just as he put down the papers.

He rubbed his eyes and flexed his fingers. “How about you sum up?”

“Don’t want to intrude on your consciousness.”

“What?”

“Do yourself a favor and read.”

When he was through, the cigar had been chewed to brown pulp. He tossed it, printed.

“Guy’s nuts. Toss in his dad’s dough and here comes the insanity defense.”

“I promise to testify otherwise.”

He laughed. “Least you didn’t say cart before horse.”

I said, “Notice his nickname?”

“Thirsty.”

“Amanda had a sticker saying that on the back of her textbook. Bet you he prints them up and hands them out as goodies to the faithful.”

“He’s running a cult?”

“Or keeping it personal — mind-games one-on-one.”

“Hmmph. Well, let’s get into his personal space.”

He pulled out his list of generally agreeable judges. No answer at the first two. The third, Giselle Boudreaux, first in her class at Tulane Law and the youngest sib of three New Orleans cops, said, “Now we’re talking. See? All it took was some elbow grease.”

“Doing my best, Your Honor.”

“Everyone claims that. Lucky for you, in this case it’s enough. Write up the address as a comprehensive and email it. I’ll give you telephonic authorization soon as I receive it but you know the drill: Someone has to come by and retrieve actual paper.”

“You bet,” said Milo. “There are two addresses I need access to.”

“Ah, the guy’s rich,” said Boudreaux. “What, something at the beach?”

“If only.” Milo explained.

“A crib in a dorm? You know he’s there for a fact?”

“It’s likely.”

“Sorry, then. Likely isn’t actual. All I need is you’re wrong and I’ve warranted a nonexistent location.”

I fought the impulse to break in. Ah, but there is no reality. No truth. No lies...

Milo said, “If I’m wrong, nothing really lost.”

“No? All I need is some bubblehead reporter having an orgasm over judicial overreach.”

“How ’bout this, Your Honor: I find nothing, the paperwork vanishes.”

“Hmm. I don’t know... all right, but only because my family would yell at me if they find out I wimped out on a murder.”

“Thanks a ton.”

“You’ve also got to give me two separate applications.”

“No prob.”

“For you. I’m the one has to read your sparkling prose, it’s my day off and I’m just about to tee off at Brentwood.”

“I’ll keep it simple—”

“Just funnin’ with you,” said Boudreaux. “This prick did what you say, I want to help fuck him up.”

As he uploaded the warrant applications, I re-read Thurston Nobach’s manifesto. “In terms of the raid, sooner the better.”

He wheeled forty-five degrees from his desk and faced me. “Why?”

“This.” I held out the page.

“Yeah, yeah, more gobbledygook, no good no bad. So what?”

“No self, no consciousness, no real death. I think there’s a message here. He’s making the case for suicide and tailoring it to depressed, impressionable victims like Cassy Booker. And now Amanda, riding her bike over to his place and sticking around. She’s isolated, depressed, has trouble relating to everyone else but worships him. Nobach sniffs that out, ropes her in by appealing to her intellect, and when the time’s right, he supplies the means — a little nip of an opioid cocktail — along with pseudo-intellectual encouragement.”

“You think that’s what happened with Susie?”

“Maybe that was Nobach’s intention. He figured her for a stupid stripper but she was older and toughened by life and less compliant. That could be why Nobach terminated the relationship. Or even worse, she did. In either event, she defied him and earned a nasty death. Something was supposed to happen at that wedding — a payoff, a fake reconciliation, we may never know. The important thing now is, he’s focusing on Amanda, and what Garrett just told us — shutting out her family — says he’s edging her closer to the end.”

He rubbed his face. “What’re you saying? I don’t wait for the warrant?”

“I’m just telling you the way I see it.”

He speed-dialed Giselle Boudreaux, began explaining.

She said, “Life-threatening situation? What the hell do you need me for, call it a welfare check.”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

Starting with DMV, he ran a search on Thurston Nobach. One vehicle, a silver, one-year-old BMW M5. Copying the info, he stood, slipped his gun into his hip holster. “Any psychological wisdom on which place to try first?”

I said, “Why choose?”