Win

Chapter 10

I have over an hour before my app rendezvous with Mrs. 9.85.

The walk from Malachy’s Pub to the Beresford takes me about ten minutes. I head up Columbus Avenue and cut through the grounds of the American Museum of Natural History. When I was six years old, and my parents were still together, they took my siblings and me to this very museum. The Lockwoods, of course, got a private tour before the museum was open to the general public. One of my earliest memories (and perhaps yours) swirls around the dinosaur bones in the entrance foyer, the woolly mammoth’s tusks on the fourth floor, and mostly, the huge blue whale hanging from the ceiling in the Hall of Ocean Life. I still see that blue whale from time to time. At night, the museum hosts high-end gala dinners. I sit beneath the great whale and drink excellent scotch and look up at it. I try sometimes to see that little boy and his family, but I realize that what I’m conjuring up isn’t real or stored in my brain. This is true for most if not all of what we call memories. Memories aren’t kept on some microchip in the skull or filed away in a cabinet somewhere deep in our cranium. Memories are something we reconstruct and piece together. They are fragments we manufacture to create what we think occurred or even simply hope to be true. In short, our memories are rarely accurate. They are biased reenactments.

Shorter still: We all see what we want to see.

The doorman at the Beresford is waiting for me. He leads me to the security monitors behind the desk. There, cued up on the screen, is a black-and-white image of two people walking single file. I can’t make out much. The shot is from above, the quality not great. The person in front is likely Ry Strauss. He has a hoodie pulled over his head. The person behind him is totally bald. Both keep their heads down, walking so close together that the bald head looks to be leaning on Strauss’s back.

“Do you want me to hit play?” the doorman asks.

The doorman looks young, no more than twenty-five. The military-style uniform he wears is far too big on his thin frame.

I say, “This is the basement, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have any contact with” — I don’t know what to call Strauss, so I point — “this tenant?”

“No,” he says. “Never.”

“Did anyone ever call him by a name?”

“No. I mean, we’re trained to call our tenants by their last name. You know, mister or missus or doctor or whatever. If we don’t know the name we use ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am.’ But with him, I mean, I never even saw the guy, and I’ve been here two years.”

I turn my attention back to the screen. “Hit play, please.”

He does. The video is short and uneventful. Strauss and assailant walk with their heads down, single file, staying close together. It looks odd. I ask him to rewind and play it again. Then a third time.

“Hit pause when I tell you.”

“Okay, sure.”

“Now.”

The image freezes. I squint and lean closer. I still can’t pick up much, but this much seems clear: Both knew that they were on a security camera and at this point — the point where I’ve asked the image to be frozen — the man we now know is Ry Strauss looks up into the lens.

“Can you zoom in?”

“Not really, no. The pixels get all messed up.”

I doubt that I would pick up much anyway. The assumption, and I think it is a righteous one, is that the bald man behind Ry Strauss is the killer. Their manner is so off — stiff, short steps, staying so close — that I assume Strauss is being led at gunpoint.

“To your knowledge, did the deceased ever have visitors?”

“Nope. Never. We all talked about that this morning.”

“We?”

“Me and the other doormen. No one remembers anyone coming to see him. Not ever. I mean, I guess they could have come with him up through the basement like this.”

“I assume this visitor eventually left?”

“If he did, we don’t have it on tape.”

I sit back and steeple my fingers.

“We done?” the doorman asks.

“How about the footage of the tenant departing the building?”

“Huh?”

I point at the screen. “Before he met up with this visitor, I assume the deceased left the building?”

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

“Could you show me?”

“Give me a second.”

This video is even less eventful. Ry Strauss keeps his head down. He wears the hoodie. He walks by, though I do note that he seems in a rush. I check the time — forty-two minutes before he returns. This all adds up in my view.

“You said he never left in the daytime, correct?”

“Not that anyone remembers.”

“So this” — I point to Strauss walking out during the daytime — “would be unusual?”

“I’d say, yeah. Hermit normally only went out like super late at night.”

That piques my interest. “How late?”

“You’d have to ask Hormuz. He works the night shift. But really late, way after midnight.”

“Will Hormuz be on tonight?”

“Yeah. Whoa, someone is coming with packages. Excuse me a moment.” The young doorman departs. I take out my phone and call PT.

“Did your guys find a phone in Strauss’s apartment?” I ask.

“No.”

“No landline either?”

“No. Why?”

“I have a theory,” I tell him.

“Go ahead.”

“Someone called Strauss on a phone and told him something worrying. Perhaps that his cover was blown. We can only speculate. But someone called him and told him something so worrying that the hermit left his apartment during daylight hours. My suspicion is, it was a setup.”

“How do you figure?”

“The killer placed the call to Strauss and said something on the phone they knew would get Strauss to react. When Strauss leaves the building, the killer intercepts him at gunpoint and forces Strauss to bring him back to his apartment.”

“Where the killer shackles him to the bed and kills him.”

“Yes.”

“And leaves the Vermeer behind. Why?”

“The obvious answer,” I say, “is that his murder wasn’t about the stolen art.”

“So what else would it be about?”

“It could be a lot of things. But I think we know the most obvious one.”

“The Hut of Horrors,” he says.

We are silent for a while.

“The Bureau hasn’t put that part together yet, Win.”

I say nothing.

“They still don’t know why your suitcase is there. When they do, they’ll want alibis for your cousin. And for you.”

I nod to myself. His is a solid analysis.

“It seems likely,” I say, “that Ry Strauss was involved in some way with the Hut of Horrors.”

His voice is grave. “It does.”

I feel a chill at the base of my neck. “So I’m wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“Everyone has always believed that Uncle Aldrich and Cousin Patricia were random victims of serial predators. Uncle Aldrich was killed, so as to abscond with Patricia to the hut.”

“You don’t think so anymore?”

I frown. “Think it through, PT. It can’t be random.”

“Why not?”

“Because Strauss had the Vermeer.”

He takes a second. “You’re right. That can’t be a coincidence.”

“And that means Patricia wasn’t a random victim. She was targeted.”

We fall into silence.

“Let me know how I can help, Win.”

“I assume the Bureau will be analyzing these CCTV videos?”

“We are, but the quality is crap. And this has been a pain in my ass for years — why the hell do we keep all the cameras up high? Every criminal knows that. He just kept his head down.”

“So nothing else on him?”

“They’re still analyzing, but all they can tell us is he’s slight, short, bald.”

“It’s more important that you scour the nearby buildings for CCTV,” I tell him. “We need to figure out where Strauss went when he left the Beresford and who he encountered.”

“On it. Where are you going now?”

I check my watch. Enough work for the moment. My mind shifts quickly to the 9.85 rating.

“Saks Fifth Avenue,” I say.

I am nearing Saks when the phone rings. It’s Nigel calling from Lockwood.

“Your father heard about the Vermeer,” Nigel tells me. “He also heard that Cousin Patricia was in the house.”

I wait.

“He would like to see you. He says it’s urgent.”

I push the door open and enter Saks by the men’s suits department. “Urgent as in tonight?”

“Urgent as in tomorrow morning.”

“Done,” I say.

“One favor, Win.”

“Name it.”

“Don’t upset your father.”

“Okay,” I say. Then I ask, “How is he, Nigel?”

“Your father is very agitated.”

“Over the Vermeer or Cousin Patricia?”

“Yes,” Nigel says and hangs up.

I head into the basement of Saks and pass the Vault jewelry department.

The rendezvous app has a rather lengthy questionnaire to “discover your type in order to make the best matches.” I skipped answering the questions and went straight to the comment section.

What’s my type?

I wrote one word: Hot.

That’s my type. I don’t care whether she’s blonde, brunette, redhead, or bald. I don’t care whether she’s short or tall, heavyset or emaciated, white, Black, Asian, young, old, whatever.

My type?

I use one type of criteria and rank them thusly:

Super Super Hot.

Super Hot.

Hot.

More Hot Than Not.

That’s it. The rest, as I say, does not matter. I hold no prejudices or biases when it comes to hotness, and yet I ask you: Where are my laurels for being so open-minded?

I am first to arrive in the suite. The app tells me that my rendezvous partner is still fifteen minutes away. The shower is supplied with Kevis 8 shampoo and Maison Francis Kurkdjian Aqua Vitae scented shower cream. I take advantage of that. I strip down and close my eyes under the heavy stream of the propulsive-power-jet Speakman shower head.

I think chronologically for a moment. We have the Jane Street Six attack. We have the art heist at Haverford College. We have my uncle’s murder and my cousin’s abduction. Three different nights. The first two are connected by the Vermeer found in the possession of the most famous of the Jane Street Six. Then we add in the suitcase, and it becomes apparent that all three are somehow linked.

How?

Most obvious answer: By Ry Strauss.

We know Strauss was leader of the Jane Street Six. We know he was in possession of the stolen Vermeer (where is the Picasso, by the way?). We know that the suitcase, last seen when Patricia was abducted, was in his tower apartment.

Was he the mastermind behind all three?

I get out of the shower. Ms. 9.85 Rating should be here within minutes. I am about to silence my phone when Kabir calls.

“I found the security guard from the art heist.”

“Go on.”

“At the time of the robbery, he was an intern paying off student debts by working security at night.”

I remember this. One of the criticisms leveled at both the college and our family was that we had trusted two priceless masterpieces to shoddy security. It was a criticism, of course, that proved spot-on.

“His name is Ian Cornwell. He’d only graduated from Haverford the year before.”

“Where is he now?”

“Still at Haverford. In fact, he’s never left. Ian Cornwell is a professor in the political science department.”

“Find out if he’s on campus tomorrow. Also get a copter ready. I’m flying to Lockwood first thing in the morning.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“I need some information about Malachy’s.”

I start telling him what I need when I hear the elevator ping.

The 9.85 rating has arrived.

I finish up quickly and say, “No calls for the next hour.” Then, thinking about that rating, I add, “Perhaps the next two or three.”

I disconnect the phone as she steps out of the elevator.

I had assumed the rating would be an exaggeration. It isn’t.

She has always been — and remains now — at least a 9.85. For a moment, we just stare at one another. I am in my robe. She is in a crisply tailored business suit, but everything she wears always looks crisply tailored. I try to remember the last time I saw her in the flesh. When she and Myron ended their engagement, I gather, but I can’t recall the specifics. Myron had loved her with all his heart. She had shattered that heart into a million pieces. Part of me found the whole thing incomprehensible and tedious, this brokenhearted thing; part of me understood with absolute clarity why I would never let any woman leave me that way.

“Hello, Win.”

“Hello, Jessica.”

Jessica Culver is a fairly well-known novelist. After a decade together, she and Myron broke up because in the end, Myron wanted to settle down, marry, have children and Jessica sneered at that sort of idyllic conformity. At least, that was what she’d told Myron.

Not long after the breakup, Myron and I saw a wedding announcement in the New York Times. Jessica Culver had married a Wall Street tycoon named Stone Norman. I hadn’t seen, heard, or thought about her since.

“This is a surprise,” I say.

“Yep.”

“Guess it isn’t going so great with you and Rock.”

Immature of me to intentionally get the name wrong, but there you go.

Jessica smiles. The smile is dazzling and beautiful, but it doesn’t reach more than my eyes. I remember when that same smile used to knock poor Myron to his knees.

“It’s good to see you, Win.”

I tilt my head. “Is it?”

“Sure.”

We stand there a few more moments.

“So are we going to do this or what?”