“Because Ry Strauss has never been caught.”
“And you’re looking for him?”
“I am.”
“Almost fifty years after the fact?”
“Yes,” I say. “Can you help?”
“Wish I could.” She is trying too hard to act disinterested. “Be good to see a killer like that get what’s coming to him.”
“You think so?”
“Damn straight. You a cop?”
I arch an eyebrow. “In this suit?”
She gives another tobacco-laced laugh as Frankie Boy hops back on his stool. “Fun talking to you,” Kathleen says. Then, tilting her head, she adds, “I got customers.”
She saunters away.
“Man,” Frankie Boy says, watching her with awe, “I could watch that caboose all day. You know what I’m saying?”
“I do.”
“You a private eye, Win?”
“No.”
“Like Sam Spade or Magnum, P.I.?”
“No.”
“But you’re cool like them, am I right?”
“As rain,” I agree, watching Kathleen work the tap. “As rain.”
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 stilclass="underline" 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.”