Thanks for the jump start, Courtney.
Phalen had listened calmly to everything I said at lunch, asking a logical question here and there, but mostly listening. He wasn’t about to print up any “Free Eddie Pinero” T-shirts, but he didn’t look at me as if I were crazy, either.
What he did do was take a pen from his pocket and write a phone number on a napkin.
“I know a guy out in Greenwich who might be able to help you,” he said, pushing the napkin toward me. “Call him and make an appointment.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Hoodie Brown.”
“Hoodie?”
“You’ll see when you meet him. Tell him you’re a friend of mine. That’s all.”
“What does he do?”
“You’ll see,” Phalen said again.
I shrugged my shoulders. Okeydokey.
The following afternoon I was on a Metro-North train out to Greenwich, Connecticut, for a two o’clock appointment with someone named Hoodie Brown. When I’d told him on the phone “Derrick Phalen sent me,” it was as if I’d delivered the secret password at the door of an underground nightclub. I was in.
“Follow me,” said the receptionist at his office.
Greenwich was the capital of the hedge fund world, but what I was doing in the lobby of one such company I had no idea. D.A.C. Investments? Why would Phalen send me to a trader?
He hadn’t. The receptionist, a tall, slender brunette who looked as if she’d stepped off the set of a Vogue magazine shoot, led me past a long, bustling trading floor to a quiet office tucked away in the back of the building. That’s where I met Hoodie Brown.
The name made sense immediately.
Not only was the man who shook my hand wearing a hooded sweatshirt – gray, with the Caltech insignia – he actually had the hood pulled over his head à la the Unabomber. Hell, this guy even looked a little like the Unabomber.
“So, who’s the P.I.Q.?” he asked, settling in behind his desk. I noticed there was no place for me to sit. No chair, no couch. Nada for visitors.
“P.I.Q.?” I asked.
“Person in question,” he explained. “Who are we investigating?”
Oh. “Dwayne Robinson,” I said. “The pitcher for -”
“I know who he is,” said Hoodie. “Or was.”
“Specifically, I’m looking to see if he has any ties to organized crime,” I added.
Hoodie nodded and began tapping away on one of the three keyboards lined up on his desk. At least twice as many computer screens stared back at him.
“Are you a private investigator?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t even acknowledge that I’d asked him a question.
“We’ll pull up all domestic bank statements and any police records to start,” he said barely above a whisper. “Then we’ll see if he has an FBI file. It shouldn’t take too long.”
My jaw literally dropped. An FBI file? It shouldn’t take too long?
“How are you able to do this?” I asked incredulously.
“One-hundred-and-twenty-gigabyte fiber-optic connection speeds,” he answered.
“No, I mean -”
“I know what you meant, friend. The answer is, you don’t want to know. You may think you do, but trust me, you don’t.”
If you say so, Hoodie… whoever you are.
I suddenly felt like a little kid swimming into the deep end for the very first time. Maybe I’d be fine.
Or maybe I was in way, way over my head.
And to be honest, I knew the answer to that one. Worse, I still wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest like Derrick Phalen had.
Chapter 52
I STOOD THERE quietly in Hoodie Brown’s office, watching and waiting, respectful. Nearly shivering, too. The damn room felt like a meat locker, it was kept so cold. Hoodie, of course, was dressed appropriately. I sure wasn’t.
Thankfully, the guy was right and the wait wasn’t too long. After another few minutes, Hoodie looked up from his slew of computers for the first time.
“Do you know a Sam Tagaletto?” he asked.
The name didn’t mean anything to me. “No,” I said. “Never heard of him.”
“Apparently Dwayne Robinson did. About a month ago, he wrote him two checks over the span of a week. Both were for fifty grand.”
“I didn’t think Dwayne had that kind of money anymore. I’m almost sure of it.”
“He didn’t,” said Hoodie. “Both checks bounced.”
Red flag, anyone?
“So who’s Sam Tagaletto?” I asked.
“Definitely not a Boy Scout, that’s for sure. He’s been arrested twice for illegal bookmaking, among other things, once in Florida and most recently here in New York,” he said.
“How recent?”
“A year ago. He got six months’ probation.”
“Anything about his having ties to the mob?” I asked. Hoodie cocked his head in my direction. “You mean other than his being a bookie?”
“Yeah, I know, but I’m looking for actual names. Maybe somebody I have heard of.”
“Give me another minute on that,” said Hoodie.
He went back to the keyboard, his fingers tapping away almost as fast as my mind was racing.
Think, Nick. What does all this mean? What could it mean?
Dwayne Robinson had owed a bookie a big chunk of change and couldn’t pay it off. He hadn’t bounced just one check to this guy, Sam Tagaletto, he’d bounced two.
Maybe that’s why Dwayne had killed himself. Or had gotten thrown out of a window by somebody. Because he’d owed money to a bookie and had showed disrespect.
But there had to be more to it than that. It was now officially impossible to believe that my being at the table next to Vincent Marcozza had been a coincidence.
But if it indeed had been a setup like Pinero told me, then who had set it up?
Dwayne Robinson? I doubted it. Dwayne had been a former major league pitcher, not a former brain surgeon.
Or had it been someone else and that’s what Dwayne had wanted to tell me?
All I knew was that it was time to get to know a certain Sam Tagaletto a little better. Presuming I could find him.
“Do you have a current address for this guy?” I finally asked Hoodie. “Tagaletto?”
He was already two steps ahead of me. I’d no sooner finished the question than the purr of a printer filled the room. Hoodie handed me not only Tagaletto’s last known address but also his latest mug shots.
“Anything else I can do for you?” he asked.
Yeah, you can tell me what the hell you’re doing working for a hedge fund firm. On second thought, never mind. I probably don’t want to know that, either.
“No, that’s more than enough,” I answered. “Thanks a lot, man.”
I shook Hoodie’s hand, thanked him again, and was about to show myself out the door.
“Oh, one more thing,” he said. “It goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway. This meeting never took place.”
I nodded. “What meeting?”
I WAS NEVER one to keep secrets from Courtney, personally or professionally. Nonetheless, I felt I owed it to Hoodie Brown – not to mention Derrick Phalen – to keep mum on the meeting that had supposedly never happened.
What I did plan to tell Courtney was that Phalen had promised to try to help me out, albeit on the down low. That wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t the entire truth. A sin of omission, as they say. Or, as one of my journalism professors at North-western used to put it, “The truth may set you free, but it’s the little white lie that will save your ass.”
Now if Courtney would only return my call.
There was no answer on her cell, and when I rang her secretary, M.J. told me Courtney had left the office without saying where she was going.
Of course, the last time Courtney did that, Thomas Ferramore had stopped by the office with news of a certain supermodel’s YouTube video.
Why was I suddenly getting a weird feeling again?
The answer came soon enough as I stepped off the train back from Greenwich. Walking through Grand Central Station I passed a newsstand just as a guy was stacking the late edition of the New York Post.