"Just normal. You got the feeling he was pretty strong. His hair was dark but I don't think that was his natural color. Here's the card he gave me," she said, handing it over.
There was just a name, Oscar Shell, and a phone number with a 917 area code. I tried the number right then but the automatic operator told me that the line had been disconnected.
"Where was it that you met him?" I asked.
"The Leontine Building, on Park and Thirty-first."
After that she told me about the attack in front of her building. I pretended to listen as if this were all new information. I even asked a few questions about the men. But none of that mattered.
Three-quarters of an hour had gone by when we had finished with her stories.
"Three thousand dollars," I said, "plus expenses. You can pay me when I prove that you are innocent on all counts."
"But you don't even know what you're saying you'll prove me innocent of."
"Doesn't matter. I'm sure that this Shell is dirty. All I have to do is show him to the cops and they'll do the legwork."
"And if you don't prove it?"
"You save three thousand dollars and you can still run away."
"I never told you that I was going anywhere."
"Your bags did that."
"And so I should just stay here until I hear from you?" she asked rather hopefully.
"No," I said. "I don't think so. You need to go where nobody knows you. You need a new name and identity."
I fished a Visa credit card out of my wallet. It was in my daughter's name. This I handed over to Miss Lear.
"Michelle Constance McGill," Angie read. "Is this your daughter?"
"Yeah."
"Won't she mind?"
"She doesn't even know the card exists. It has a fifteen-hundred-dollar limit. But remember-every cent you spend will go for expenses. Go find a cheap hotel someplace and call me at my office every day at four-thirty. If I'm out, Mardi will put you through to me wherever I am."
"Why are you doing all this?" she asked.
"You look like a good kid," I said easily. "If it works out, I make my weekly nut and see that justice is done-for a change."
51
It only took a minute for Tiny "Bug" Bateman to disengage the lock on the shamrock-green, reinforced metal door to his underground apartment/workshop. This door was eight feet below street level on Charles, near Hudson.
The electronics lab that had once been a living space was now a series of rooms lined with worktables containing every sort of gadget that a spy-store devotee could imagine. Listening devices, hidden lenses, specialized walkie-talkie telephones, motion sensors, and a lot of things I couldn't even begin to explain.
I was walking down the hall toward the one-time master bedroom that was now filled with a dozen or more linked CPUs that combined to make one of the fastest civilian computers in the world.
Bug met me in the hall.
I had never seen Tiny outside of the hole cut into the round table that dominated his control room. There he always sat, surrounded by more than a dozen screens, swiveling this way and that between keyboards and other, more exotic, devices.
I had never seen his fat, cafe au lait feet before. As usual, he was wearing blue-jean overalls with no shirt and the red-and-blue iridescent glasses used to track the otherwise invisible spectrums that appeared on some of his more bizarre screens. He was four inches taller than I, close to three hundred pounds, and very, very soft. His curly hair was longish and unruly.
"Tiny?"
He lifted his hinged ultraviolet lenses, so that they flipped up over his forehead, and gave a rare smile.
"Did you talk to her?" he asked.
"What?"
"Zephyra," he said as if he were the pope and I a priest who had somehow forgotten the Latinate Lord's Prayer.
"No, man," I said. "I've been on a case. I've been working."
"You couldn't make a call?"
"Zephyra Ximenez is not a call girl," I said. "Not when it comes to something like this, anyway. I was thinking that if I survived the next few days I'd meet with her at the Naked Ear and we'd talk. But now that I see you got feet that actually work, maybe all three of us could meet there."
The look on the brooding young man's face was classic. He went from monadic particulate to an eight-year-old boy in no time.
"Um…" he said.
"I'll take that as a yes. Now can we get down to some business?"
EVEN ONCE HE WAS back in his hole, Tiny was still a little off at first. I kept having to repeat myself when explaining about the Leontine Building and the man named Shell.
In order to prime him for more challenging work, I had him look up the license-plate number I got from Lonnie, the redheaded ex-con, but that was just a rental to a guy named Bob Brown.
"And you want to know where this Shell is?" Tiny asked once we were back into the meat of my visit.
"If that'll help me find out who he's working for," I said. "I need to know who's behind all this."
After some time Tiny settled down to his usual brilliance and brought his bug-eyes to bear on the subject of Oscar Shell.
Problems showed up immediately when it became clear that no one by that name worked for any company situated in the Leontine Building. No Oscar Shell had ever rented space there. As a matter of fact, there wasn't an Oscar Shell that fit Angie's description anywhere in the tristate area.
"This isn't gonna work," Tiny said after an hour on the bully's trail. "How about we take another route?"
"The building?" I asked.
From there the fat genius went into overdrive.
T. D. Donnie and Sons were listed as the owners of the Leontine but they actually owned less than one percent of the building, making their money as absentee property managers. The corporation they answered to was Graski Incorporated, which was located in Chicago. Graski had gone out of business in 1955, however, though the corporate name was owned by a woman named Hedda Martins of Miami. Hedda had died three years earlier, and a Florida lawyer's report had informed her heirs that Hedda was a small partner in a company in San Francisco called Real Innovations. RI had listed among its properties the Leontine.
The trail might have ended there, except for one of Hedda's pesky heirs-a man named Thom Soams. Soams filed suits in New York, Illinois, Florida, and California in an attempt to receive payment for what he felt was the heirs' rightful due. After two and half years of wrangling with a new firm, Mallory Investments, Soams collected the sum of $22,307.31 in settlement.
Mallory Investments was a subsidiary of Regents Bank of New York, a private institution owned lock, stock, and barrel by a sometime socialite oddly named Sandra Sanderson III.
It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but at least I had a business, and maybe even a name.
The articles we pulled up on Sanderson painted her as a hands-on tyrant in her multibillion-dollar business. She fought long and hard against anyone who stood in her way. The New York skyline owed a lot to Regents Bank, which collected its interest with a stopwatch and a stable of lawyers.
Her son, Desmond, had died of a rare heart disease at the beginning of 2008, and Sandra had gone into seclusion, which was peculiar, because mother and son had been on the outs for years.
The structure of this story put me in a rather literary frame of mind.
If Desmond was Grendel, and Sandra Grendel's mama, then maybe Alphonse was Beowulf and this was all a reenactment of a classic masterpiece.
I smiled to myself, leaning on Tiny's round white table as I read the articles he'd produced for me.
"Uh-oh," the genius said.
"What?"
"Somebody's trying to track me down."