I filled my water glass, turned on the television, and switched to BNN. Market Minds was on, and Linda Sovitch’s blond image filled the screen. She was saying something about housing starts and mortgage refinancings, and I turned the sound off and watched her full lips move and her blue eyes shift back and forth. She gestured with her left hand, and the big yellow diamond on her ring finger flashed under the studio lights. I thought of something I had read somewhere.
I opened my laptop and went online, back to LindaObsession. com. I found what I was looking for on the bio page: a mention of Sovitch’s marriage, ten years earlier, to real estate developer Aaron Lefcourt. It got just a single line- as if the Web site’s authors couldn’t bear to contemplate it any longer. It was the only reference to Lefcourt anywhere on the site, and I had to look elsewhere to learn more.
I didn’t have to look hard. Aaron Lefcourt, while not a household name, was by no means anonymous. For the last dozen years, he’d been CEO of Royal Court Development, a real estate company started by his father back in the sixties. When Aaron took over, Royal Court specialized in cheesy “vertical malls” in New York City’s poorer neighborhoods. Twelve years later, Royal Court had interests all over North America, including hotels, convention centers, golf courses, and ski resorts. According to a recent interview in BusinessWeek, Aaron had plans to expand into Asia and to take the company public “any day now.” According to a companion piece that ran alongside the interview, Lefcourt’s success in real estate was his second act. Before that, he had achieved a sort of fame in another sphere altogether- television.
Fourteen years earlier, Aaron Lefcourt had been an executive at AXE- one of the first of the upstart television networks- and a wunderkind in a business of wunderkinds. He’d developed such landmark series as Showmom, a sitcom about a kooky single mother, her smart-aleck teenage daughters, her lovable ex-con grandma, and her life as a Vegas showgirl, and Taggers, a drama about an attractive and racially diverse troupe of LA graffiti artists who were also undercover cops. Lefcourt had had the network’s top spot all but locked up when his genius overreached.
According to the article, industry insiders now judged the show to have been far ahead of its time- a forerunner of reality television. Back then they had called it “shocking” and “beyond bad taste.” The show had been Lefcourt’s pet project, his brainchild, and it was called Me! Me! Me! Its premise was simple: three adorable orphaned children would compete in games of chance and skill and vie for the affections of a wealthy childless couple. At the end of the segment, the couple would choose one child for adoption and send the others back to their orphanages. It aired only once. A firestorm of angry print and chatter ensued, and culminated in Lefcourt’s dismissal two days later.
The articles mentioned Linda Sovitch only briefly, and then only to speculate about her husband’s influence on the steep upward trajectory of her TV career- a subject her husband declined to discuss.
I looked at the photo of Lefcourt. He was forty-three now. His face was full and shiny, with rounded features and deep dimplescherubic but for the hint of anger around his small mouth, and the watchfulness in his dark eyes. His brown hair was wavy and gleaming.
I rubbed my eyes and drank my water. Market Minds had ended and two paunchy bald guys in expensive suits were yammering silently and pointing at each other. I turned the television off and walked back and forth in front of my windows and looked down at 16th Street, at the van still parked there.
So what if it is light blue? I asked myself. There are plenty of blue vans in New York, and nothing sinister about them, right? I slipped on my coat and went downstairs.
It was cool outside, and the sidewalks were full of couples and loud groups. The van was up the block, about forty yards away. At street level I could see that it was light blue and that its windows were smoked. I walked away from it, to the corner, and crossed the street and came up on the other side. I was half a block away when the van’s tailpipe smoked and its lights flared and it pulled out of its tight spot and drove off. I tried to read its rear plate but it was caked in mud.
Plenty of light-blue vans in New York. Right. The jumpy off-center feeling that had hung behind my eyes like a nascent migraine since I’d spotted the tails last Friday blossomed now into full-blown paranoia.
I looked at the cars parked on the block, and at the crowd that filtered past, and I thought about how I might do it. I wouldn’t leave it to just one car, and I wouldn’t leave it to cars alone. I looked up and down the street, but I knew it was no use; if anyone else had been watching, they’d seen me make the van and seen the van take off. They would’ve dropped far back by now. Assuming the van had been watching me in the first place. Shit. Someone took hold of my arm and I reached out and spun around.
“Jesus Christ!” Jane said. She yanked her wrist from my grasp. “What’s the matter with you? You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “You surprised me.”
Her brow was furrowed, and a patina of anger lay over her tired, pretty face. She rotated her wrist and massaged it with her other hand.
“Sorry,” I said again.
“You look like you just stuck your finger in a light socket. What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing… I was going to the store. I thought you were going to call before you left work.”
“I was in a hurry to get out of there.”
I took Jane’s arm and walked her across the street and up the stairs to our building. Her eyes were narrow.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. What do you want to do for dinner?”
Jane shook her head and went inside. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me shower and change first.” I nodded. She pressed the elevator button and looked at me some more.
“Let me see the hand,” I said. She held up her hand and I took it in mine and inspected it elaborately. I turned it over and kissed her palm. “Better?” I asked.
“It’s a start.”
Peter Spiegelman
JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home
15
Tuesday morning was wet and windswept- more like March than nearly May- and I was soaked by the end of my run and chilled to my fillings. My apartment was quiet and full of rainy light, and though her perfume hung faintly in the air, I knew that Jane had gone. I tapped some wall switches and the overheads came on, and the place was brighter but just as empty. I stripped off my clothes and toweled myself dry and stretched.
A shower and a decent meal had restored Jane last night, and the prospect of the days ahead, full of lawyers and wall-to-wall meetings, had filled her with a taste for freedom, and so we’d stayed out late. A jazz trio was playing at Fez, and we’d gone there after dinner for the ten o’clock set. We lingered for the midnight show as well, and then we’d strolled up Broadway and had dessert at an all-night place off Union Square. Then we’d come back here and taken off our clothes and made love until we were insensate.
And we did not once discuss my case or mention the scene on the sidewalk. Don’t ask, don’t tell. I finished stretching and got into the shower.
I was drinking coffee when Neary called. He was on his cell and he spoke loudly over traffic noise.
“I talked to some people about your pal out in Jersey,” he said. He told me what some people had to say.
“His name is Valentin Gromyko, and he’s from the Ukraine by way of Paris and Madrid. And apparently he’s a real comer. He started here a few years ago with a crew of Slavs, doing hijack work around the Port of Elizabeth. From there he got bigger and branched out into protection, gambling, and loan-sharking. He’s moved north too, into Passaic and Paterson and, lately, Fort Lee. And he’s been giving the old guys a real pain in the ass- crowding them, undercutting them, stopping just short of out-and-out war. He took over a boiler-room operation from one of them a couple of years ago. Could be that’s what you saw.”