“Even the Lusitania’s almost a hundred years ago.”
“Nineteen sixty-four. Gulf of Tonkin. You don’t really think the North Vietnamese were stupid enough to have one of their PT boats fire on an American destroyer, do you?”
“Professor, that’s all a bunch of conspiracy gibberish.”
“Really? Well, before you go knocking my conspiracy theories, I suggest you take a look in the mirror. You, darling, are a conspiracy theory waiting to happen.”
“Me?”
Bonny nodded gravely. “Tomorrow or the next day, someone will walk up to you, put a gun in your back, and pull the trigger. Good-bye, Jenny. Good-bye, baby. The police will say robbery. Or just a random murder. All will agree it’s a tragedy. Case closed. Mention the club and see the look you get.”
“But… but…” Jenny felt stranded, violently alone. She reached over and drank the rest of Bonny’s beer. “Jesus,” she said, her breath leaving her.
“Somewhere there’s a record of it all,” said Simon Bonny, whispering now, his eyes gone buggy, his chin bobbing in seven directions at once. “Hamilton was specific about keeping the minutes so that posterity would know of his contributions. The Founding Fathers were such vain twits. All of them so concerned about how history would look back on them. All of ’em scribbling away in their diaries and letters and newspaper articles. Each one trying to outgun the other. Old Scotch Nat knows. He kept the minutes. He had to. Only one of them not in the government’s service. Apparently, they held quite a lot of meetings at his house, too. He lived on Wall Street, next to his best friend, Mr. Hamilton.” He stopped and fixed Jenny with a frightened, quizzical stare. “You’re not carrying one now, are you? A phone?”
“Yes, but it belongs to my doctor. I took it by accident when I left the hospital.”
Bonny took his wallet and began ripping out bills and throwing them on the bar. “Ten? That enough… oh bloody hell, give ’em a twenty.” He scooped his cap off the stool and grabbed his overcoat and scarf. “Get rid of it… might as well have a homing beacon planted on your head.”
“But they don’t know I have it.”
“How can you be so sure? They knew about you shooting your brother with a BB gun. I don’t even want to imagine how they found out that little nugget of information. Someone’s been on the phone with Daddy, haven’t they? Scale, my dear. Scale. Look around you. It’s the biggest government in the whole damned world!”
“But…”
“But nothing!”
With a final anguished sigh, Simon Bonny stormed out the door.
47
Dr. Satyen patel picked up the phone at the nurses’ station. “Yes?”
“This is Detective John Franciscus out of the three-four uptown. Shield M one eight six eight. I understand you’re the physician who attended to Jennifer Dance.”
“I treated her for a gunshot wound. It was a graze that required disinfection and debridement. Nothing too serious.”
“Everything went well?”
“Just fine,” Patel confirmed.
“Do you have her close by? I need to ask her some questions about the shooting.”
Patel stood at the nurses’ station in the ER, the phone held to his ear. “Miss Dance left the hospital a few hours ago.”
“Did you sign her out?”
“No. She left on her own. There was a man claiming to be her brother asking to visit her. She felt he meant to harm her. She insisted on leaving immediately.”
“And this man was there… at the hospital?”
“Yes, he was. After she left, I confronted him.”
“What did the man say?”
“Nothing. He turned right around and left. Did you want to get in touch with her, Detective?”
“Yes, I would.”
“I gave her my jacket to help her avoid the man’s attention. My cell phone was in the pocket. I hope she discovered it there.” Patel read off his number. “You might try reaching her. A woman in her condition shouldn’t be out in this weather fearing for her life.”
“I thought you said the gunshot wound wasn’t serious?”
“I’m not talking about the gunshot. Miss Dance is eight weeks pregnant. That kind of stress is more than enough to cause even the strongest woman to miscarry.”
A long silence ensued. Thomas Bolden stared at the phone, his throat scratchy from imitating the detective’s gravelly voice. It was his last shot. He’d tried to get through to Jenny a dozen times, but the switchboard had been prohibited from giving out information.
“Detective, are you still there?”
“Yes,” said Bolden. “I’m still here. Thanks for the information.”
Clad in his boxer shorts and socks, Bolden stood in the back room of the Ming Fung Laundry Company in Chinatown, Althea’s cell phone to his ear. “Answer the call, Jenny. Pick it up. Let me know where you are.”
After four rings, Dr. Patel’s recorded message began. “Hello, you have reached…”
Bolden hung up, exhaling through his teeth. Around him, several men and women guided giant canvas baskets filled with dirty clothing across the floor to industrial washing machines, arranged shirts on ironing boards, and transferred them to tall piles to be packed and moved up front.
As a freshman at Princeton, Bolden had looked at the Ming Fung Laundry as his own Barneys. Every few months he’d take a train into the city to sort through their left-behinds, finding Ralph Lauren shirts in perfect condition for five dollars, and dress flannels for ten. These days, shirts ran ten bucks, and pants went for twenty. The blue blazer he’d chosen had set him back fifty. If there was anyplace he might hide, it was Chinatown. A world within a world.
Eight weeks pregnant.
Why hadn’t she told him? He sighed, angry with himself. She had wanted to at lunch, but he’d been so busy going on about his own problems that he hadn’t given her half a chance to get to it. But, why not before? Why not after dinner last night? Or when they’d been lying in bed Sunday morning? Or anytime after she’d found out? What had he done to make her so reluctant to tell him? He knew the answer. He’d been himself. The emotionally remote, self-centered financial genius in all his blazing glory. She’d hinted at it last night, and what had he said? He’d called her a body snatcher. Good going, jerk! Bolden sat down and ran a hand over his forehead. A father. He was going to be a father.
Slowly, a smile lit up his face. Of all the things to learn on this day… he was going to be a father. It was wonderful. It was beyond wonderful. Eight weeks pregnant. The baby would be born in September. He shook his head. A father. He hadn’t expected to be so happy at the news. He hadn’t expected to feel like this… to feel liberated. Yes, that was it. Liberated. It was as if someone had turned on the lights ahead of him, and for the first time, he could see all the way down the tunnel. A father.
And then his joy dimmed.
Eight weeks pregnant. And they shot her. They aimed a rifle at her and gunned her down as if she were no better than an animal. A rage such as he had never known filled Bolden, causing him to tremble and grow red in the face. He would not let it stand.
Bolden sorted through the folder Althea had given him. It was all there, in black and white. Scanlon Corporation had belonged to Defense Associates, a company that named Mickey Schiff as a director, and James Jacklin, its chairman. When Defense Associates went bust, Schiff moved over to Harrington Weiss. Jacklin spun the dice again, starting up Jefferson Partners with Guy de Valmont, at that point a young partner at HW. Was it a trade? Schiff to HW. De Valmont to Jefferson. Some kind of payout to make up for the fifty million and change HW had had to write off when Defense Associates shut down? Common sense would dictate that Sol Weiss never put another dime in one of Jacklin’s ventures. But twenty years down the road, the ties between Jefferson and HW were tighter than ever. HW had invested in all of Jefferson’s funds and the investments had paid off richly. Returns of eighty percent, a hundred, higher even, were not uncommon. Until lately…