I looked down at him and remembered George L. Gerber and his murdered dog out in LA, and thought about booting Pflug in the nuts once more. But his face was bloody, his wrist was bent and likely broken, and he was altogether too wretched. I picked up the crystal sphere, which had come to rest, unscathed, against the console, and I looked at Hauck.
He was still seated at his desk, with his fat hands clasped before him. His brow was furrowed and his mouth was a blister of concentration. His eyes were fixed across the room on the weathered stone face of Kubera. I set the glass ball on the table and closed the door behind me and left him there, waiting for a sign.
29
The Surrogate’s Court is at the end of Chambers Street, near Centre Street and in the wide shadow of the Municipal Building. It’s a frilly Beaux-Arts palace with a huge mansard roof, arched entranceways, Corinthian columns, and plenty of statues of dead city elders. The lobby is multicolored marble and lavish in its adornment, and the sweeping double staircase looks like something out of the Paris OpA©ra. I went through security, up one side of the staircase, and down a long hallway. I followed signs and asked directions, and the farther I went the less things looked like Paris and the more they resembled Motor Vehicles.
I found my way to a green high-ceilinged room and a table stacked with requisition forms. I filled out a form and went to the end of a very slow line. At the other end of the line was a file clerk named Larry. He was tall, thin, and dusty, and he might have been forty or seventy. He stood behind a high counter, at the head of a phalanx of filing cabinets arranged in long shadowed rows. He took my form without comment and pointed to a bench. I took a seat with the paralegals and junior associates who’d preceded me in line, and while I waited I took out my subway map.
That’s what it reminded me of, anyway. Intersecting colored lines, tick marks, lots of names and numbers- it could have been a diagram of the Fulton Street station. In fact, it was the time line I had drawn that morning- my graphic rendering of the little I knew about Gregory Danes’s disappearance and of the many questions I couldn’t answer. The theory was that in putting it down on paper, I’d see something I hadn’t seen before. It had worked for me in the past, but not this time. This time, it was the subway to nowhere. I unfolded the paper and took another look.
It started eight weeks ago- in mid-March- with marks for Danes’s lunch with Linda Sovitch, his argument with Dennis Turpin, and his abrupt exit from the offices of Pace-Loyette, and it ended on the present day in a big question mark. In between were Danes’s call to Nina Sachs, canceling Billy’s weekend visit; his call to Irene Pratt, telling her he was going on vacation; his departure from New York the next morning; his periodic calls to retrieve messages from his answering machine; his calls to Billy; and his final call for his phone messages. I’d recorded Danes’s activities in blue ink. I’d used green for Pflug’s men- their trip to see Gilpin, out in Fort Lee; their presumed visit to Nina Sachs’s place; the breakin at Pace-Loyette; the tails on what seemed like half the city; the photographs. The questions were in red.
My meeting with Hauck yesterday had given me a few more tick marks for my picture, but it had added at least as many question marks. I knew now that Hauck, too, was searching for Danes, and that he had no better idea of where to look than I did. And I was all but certain that Hauck and Danes were into something together. But I had no idea of what that something was, or why Hauck wanted Danes, or what he might do if he found him.
I scanned the time line again, but repeated viewings didn’t help. It remained history without narrative, a massing of dates and events that told no story. It captured nothing of Danes’s barren personal life, and it caught none of the pressures that had been driving him in the months before his departure- the golden career turned to lead, the thwarted attempts at professional redemption, the failed relationship with Sovitch, the custody battle with his ex-wife, and the death of the man who might have been his only friend. Danes had ridden a long stretch of bad road before he’d ever gotten in his car that morning, and I couldn’t believe that where he’d gone had nothing to do with where he’d been.
I’d drawn a red circle around the mark for Danes’s last call home. Whatever else went on before- whatever his reasons for leaving, whatever he had going on with Hauck- that was when he’d stopped calling; that was when something had happened. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something bad.
Neary had called this morning to say that Hauck had made good on his promise to pull the surveillance from my place, and I’d tried some of my questions out on him. He’d been no help with them, but he had a couple of his own for me.
“Where do you go from here?” he’d asked.
“The doorman, Gargosian, gave me something about Danes’s neighbor, a guy named Cortese. He was a music buff, and maybe the single honest-to-God friend Danes had- until the old guy died. It’s the only lead left, and I guess I’ll see what I can make of it.”
“Why?”
“I told you, it’s the only lead.”
Neary sighed. “I know it’s the only thing left to do. I meant, why are you doing it? Pflug and Hauck have backed off, and I doubt they’re coming around again anytime soon, on top of which you have no client. And while I’d be pleased as punch to know where the hell Danes has gone, I just don’t see that you have a dog in this fight anymore.”
I’d been quiet for a while, looking around at my empty apartment, thinking about Jane and about Billy, and finally I’d said nothing. It was another answer I didn’t have.
I’d spent the rest of the morning looking for Joseph Cortese, and though he’d been dead over six months, he wasn’t a hard man to find.
Cortese was seventy-eight when he passed away, widowed, childless, and very rich. The money had come from the sale of his plastics company, over twenty years before. Since then, Cortese had been a generous patron of the arts and had served on the boards of half a dozen museums, music conservatories, and dance companies around the city. According to the Times obituary, he had maintained homes in Manhattan, on Sanibel Island, Florida, and in Lenox, Massachusetts. He was survived by his nephew, Paul Cortese.
Besides the obit, I’d found traces of Cortese on the Web sites of cultural institutions all over town- in meeting minutes, on lists of major donors, and in dozens of testimonials and expressions of sorrow. They all said essentially the same thing- that Joseph Cortese was a great guy, whose company and generosity would be greatly missed. If I wanted more, I’d have to go downtown. And so I had.
Larry beckoned with a dusty finger, and I folded my map, hoisted myself from the unforgiving bench, and hobbled to the counter. He had a single sheet of paper in his hand.
“You got no standing in the case, and no court order,” he said. His voice was wheezy and soft. “So you can’t see the whole package. This is what I can give you.” He handed me the sheet. “Come back when you got some standing.” He disappeared down one of the aisles and left me to my reading.
It was the top sheet of Joseph Cortese’s estate package, the cover page of his probated last will and testament. What it revealed wasn’t much, but it was what I had come for: the name and address of his estate’s executor.
30
“We didn’t do the will,” Mickey Rich said. “Jerry Litvak- over at Litvak, Gant- did that. We do real estate here, exclusively real estate.” He was a stout man with a deep weathered voice, a warm smile, and a cool gaze. There was a little brown left in his wavy white hair, and a little more in his thick beard, and he looked to be somewhere in his middle sixties. He was the senior partner at the law firm of Rich amp; Fiore and the executor of Joseph Cortese’s will.