The Guilty: (P.I. Jack Marconi No. 3) Read online

  Truth be known, I had indeed heard about this case, after all. It made the local vine not necessarily because of Sarah’s injuries, which were very bad, but because of the suspicious nature under which they might have been sustained on the property of one of Albany’s richest and most eligible bachelors.

  “You think Robert David Jr. hurt your daughter on purpose?” I posed to Sanders.

  He nodded.

  “The young man claims that she slipped on the ice outside his West Albany home at two in the morning. Which would be a fine explanation had he immediately called 911. She was unconscious and bleeding from a ruptured cranial cap, for God’s sake.”

  Ruptured cranial cap . . .

  “But he didn’t bother to call,” I said, staring down at the photo of the happy couple, which was published along with the article. Robert David Jr. was young and clean looking with wavy, if not curly, reddish-blond hair and striking, if not spooky, green eyes. Sarah was also bright eyed, her brunette hair long and lush and parted neatly over her left eye, which was brown. The two reeked of optimism and youth, even if the paper cited David’s age as forty-one and Sarah’s as thirty-eight. Not exactly the youth of the world, but then, love is a many-splendored thing. Until the splendor spoils. Or in this case, splits a head open.

  “Why exactly didn’t he call 911?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here if I knew that.”

  “Who have you been speaking to at the APD?”

  “A detective by the name of Nick Miller. While the police have obvious evidence of a violent event, they have no leads or evidence of a violent crime having been committed. See how that works, Mr. Marconi? On top of all that, the Davids aren’t talking. That’s exactly why Nick Miller suggested I contact you.”

  “So I can do his work for him,” I said, not without a grin.

  “Perhaps that is a secondary motive on Detective Miller’s part. As I understand it, the police force is overextended these days, and the wealthy Davids are rather generous in their annual police benevolence contributions.”

  “I’m shocked that you’d suggest the Davids purchase their own particular brand of Albany law and order.”

  He recrossed his legs again. Did it with class and more than a little bit of joie de vivre.

  I once more sat back in my swivel chair. Did it with blue-collar toughness and cynicism. Keeper, the hard-ass gumshoe.

  “Your daughter is recovering from her injuries?” I pressed.

  “She is currently in Valley View Rehabilitation Center in Schenectady. She has no short-term memory nor any recollection of the event, which occurred nearly six months ago now.”

  “Is she still engaged to Mr. David?”

  “They have since ended their engagement,” he said, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his neck.

  “Who ended it?”

  “The young man did. It was the polite thing to do. Under the circumstances.”

  “In other words, you’re suing the shit out of him.”

  More bobbing of the Adam’s apple along with some rapid eye blinking. I’d definitely stepped on the architect’s exposed nerve endings.

  “Yes, I’ve entered into a civil suit with him.”

  “How much you going after?” I said, leaning back up against my desk, grabbing hold of a BIC ballpoint, jotting down the word lawsuit in neat Keeper Marconi scribble. Felt good putting that English degree to work.

  “Forty million,” he said, with all the casualness of a man revealing the score on a Yankees/Red Sox doubleheader.

  “I see,” I said. “Your lawyer’s name?”

  “I don’t think—”

  I slapped the pen down, raised my head, my brown eyes locking with his bespectacled gray-blue eyes.

  “Look, Mr. Sanders,” I said, “If we’re going to work together, we have to get something straight right off the bat. I’m going to have to trust you and you’re going to have to trust me. I’m going to be asking a lot of personal questions of you, your wife, and your grandmother if you’ve still got one. I might even interrogate the family dog. For sure I’m going to interview your daughter, for what it’s worth. But the point is, when I ask you a question, I expect a straight answer, and I expect it immediately. Got it?”

  He swallowed something. It looked like fear or respect or both. I went with both.

  “My lawyer’s name is Terry Kindler,” he said. “And I don’t have a dog at present.”

  I sat up straight, picked the pen back up, and jotted down the name Kindler, even though I’d personally known the litigator for years. Marconi, the conscientious.

  “I’m going to need to talk with Kindler right away. Miller too. In the meantime, do you have any theories as to what happened on that cold night in February? The love birds been fighting? They not been getting along the way the soon to be betrothed should?”

  “I believe Robert David Jr. hit my daughter over the head many times with a blunt object and did so in a heavily inebriated state. He then tried to cover it up by saying she fell on the ice.”

  “Why was she trying to leave at two in the morning on a cold winter’s night? She have children from her first marriage?”

  “A sweet little boy named Sam. But he was staying with his father at the time.”

  “The novelist,” I said.

  “Yes, the novelist. I suspect she was leaving because she and Robert were fighting. Robert has himself one heck of a temper.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes, it is so. A devilish temper. I believe he hit her and nearly killed her. But instead of calling 911, what does he do? He calls his father, Robert Sr., who drives to the house, stuffs my daughter into the backseat of his car, and then proceeds to the emergency room not at the more capable Albany Medical Center, but to a smaller, very incapable hospital on the outskirts of town.”

  “Memorial Medical Center,” I said. “North Albany.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Stinks,” I said.

  “Overwhelmingly,” he said. “Positively pungent.” The way he pronounced pungent was with a hard g. An English major notices these things.

  “Two hundred per day, plus expenses. Under normal circumstances, I request a retainer of $2,500. I consider these normal circumstances.”

  His eyes went wide, but for only a brief second.

  “Seems a little . . . excessive.”

  “Not if you’re a world-famous architect who makes millions and who’s looking for forty million more.”

  We both chewed on that for a while, staring each other down from across my desk. Until he slowly grew a smile, obviously interpreting my crack as a compliment masked in sarcasm. He cocked his head forward as if he were going to have to be good with my prices or else hit the bricks.

  “Get what you pay for, I suppose,” he said, reaching into his leather satchel and pulling out his checkbook and a genuine Montblanc pen.

  “Money sings like an angel, Mr. Sanders,” I said, “and I love to listen to those angels.”

  He wrote out the check, leaned forward, and set it on my desk beside the newspaper clippings. Then he stood back up.

  I got up and came around the desk. I asked him for a card. He found one in his wallet and handed it to me.

  “My cell is on there. Call me day or night. I’m not traveling right now so you can find me either at my Albany office or at my home in Bethlehem, just outside the city.”

  I didn’t need for him to explain where the little town of Bethlehem was located. I knew it as a rich suburban haven filled with upwardly mobile and liberally educated white people like Sanders. I took a quick glance at the card.

  Sanders Architects, Engineers, and Interior Designers. Offices in Albany, New York City, and Hong Kong. I thought about my own humble business: Marconi Private Detective Services, with its office inside a formerly abandoned Sherman Street warehouse in downtown Albany, where the locals sold cocaine and ecstasy right outside my front, solid metal, door. But I wasn’t complaining. At least it was all
mine. My little kingdom on this big, blue, bitter earth.

  I stuffed the card into the interior pocket of my blue blazer, my hand brushing up against the butt of my shoulder-holstered Colt .45 Model 1911.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  He held out his hand. I took it in mine and squeezed. Soft, thin, sweaty . . . maybe even metrosexual sweaty.

  “Oh my,” he said. “You must work out.”

  “I train with weights and run.”

  “How often?”

  “Every day.”

  “Explains your exceptional shape for a man having solidly reached his middle years.”

  “I try, and I still feel like I’m twenty-one.”

  “Keep trying,” he smiled, releasing my hand. “We don’t get any younger.”

  “Not unless India is right about reincarnation.”

  I was still staring down at the perspiration Harold Sanders left behind on the palm of my hand as he casually exited my office.

  Big Trouble in Little Paradise? Manny’s Owner, Son Sued for $40M over Brain Injury

  By Ted Bolous, Albany Times Union Senior Food Blogger

  Have you heard about Albany’s most popular high-end eatery owner, Robert David Jr., being sued up the wazoo for a whopping $40M? The lawsuit comes in the wake of the serious brain injury suffered by his squeeze du jour, the beautiful and very wealthy Sarah Levy, which left her in a coma for nearly six months. You might have read the many articles about the rather fragile situation published by the crime desk at this very paper. The lawsuit states that Robert did not attempt to assist Sarah when she allegedly “slipped on the ice” outside his West Albany home and, on top of that, actually exacerbated her injuries by not calling 911.

  Wow, ya think?

  Not only has Robert David Sr. and Robert David Jr.’s version of the incident been inconsistent with regards to Levy’s injuries, but it’s looking more and more as though the Davids are the creators of a rather insidious cover-up. According to Sarah’s doctors, Sarah’s injuries are more consistent with a fall from a great height or a serious head-on automobile accident, not just your garden-variety slip on the ice.

  But according to David Jr., after Sarah slipped and fell, he tried to pick her up, but then accidentally dropped her not once, but several times, thus compounding her head injuries. The admittedly inebriated (Go figure!) David then panicked and called David Sr. instead of doing the sensible thing and calling 911. The two Davids proceeded to shove the unconscious Sarah into David Sr.’s car, driving her not to the Albany Medical Center (Huh!?!) but to the more out-of-the-way and far smaller Memorial Medical Center.

  Okay, hold onto your bibs, but in short, it’s possible Robert David Jr., Albany’s richest and most eligible bachelor, has entered into a cover-up of Biblical proportions.

  Stay tuned, foodie readers. This hot and spicy beef is just heating up.

  2

  FIRST ITEM OF DETECTING business: Wash my hands.

  I stood in front of the old wall-mounted mirror in the small bathroom located down the hall from my office. The bathroom contained an old, white porcelain sink and a toilet that must have been considered state-of-human-waste-art when it was first installed in the early 1920s, back when this five-story building was home to a garment manufacturer. But now the garment manufacturer was gone baby gone, and the old porcelain god looked as though it belonged in a museum.

  I couldn’t help but think the same thing about myself.

  Releasing a heavy sigh, I looked at my face in the mirror. As the old Chevrolet television commercial used to say, “It’s not the years; it’s the mileage.” Not that I wasn’t still my handsome old self, but my head of thick, black hair had receded with age, leaving me with a retreating salt-and-pepper growth that revealed more and more of my scarred scalp every year. I knew I could invest in one of those expensive hair-for-men treatments, but there seemed to be something extremely dishonest about that kind of thing. Vain. Selfish. Self-absorbed. Or maybe other men cared more about their appearance than I did. Metrosexuals like Harold Sanders. At least I still worked out every day, or so the architect was kind enough to notice, even if his observation did send a slight chill up and down my spine.

  My face hadn’t fared much better than my head of hair over the years. A couple of hair-thin scars ran down the right side of my cheek, and it’s because of them that I now prefer to wear a perpetual five-o’clock shadow, lest I scare off every little kid who comes within five feet of me. Or maybe it’s my excuse not to shave every day.

  The scars were made by an inmate’s claw-like fingernails back in the mid-1990s while I was supervising Green Haven Prison, and they look like very thin lightning bolts. Never underestimate the quickness of an incarcerated killer who weighs only 120 pounds when wet. Let your guard down for even a single second and he can kill you with a quick swipe of his hand. I was lucky he didn’t remove one of my brown eyes. Then I’d be forced to wear a black eye patch, which might make me look tougher. Or even more sophisticated. Appearances aren’t everything or we’d all be mannequins.

  I turned on the cold water, cupped my hands under the flow, and splashed my face with it. Looking back up into the mirror, I had to ask myself out loud, “What is true love?”

  My voice sounded strange and hollow inside the old bathroom with the water dripping off my face and into the sink. I experienced true love in my life only once before. With my wife, Fran. But she’d been taken away from me by a bald-headed thug whom I eventually tracked down and sent to hell by tossing him into the business end of a raging white-watered waterfall only slightly less powerful than Niagara Falls. But what was it exactly that Fran and I had all those years ago that Robert David Jr. did not have with Sarah Levy?

  “Unconditional love,” I whispered to myself.

  That was true love in my book: When you could trust your mate implicitly and when you could forgive her for anything and everything that happened to go south in the past. Even forgiving the worst—adultery. The ultimate marriage miscue.

  But then I was getting ahead of myself already. Sarah and Robert weren’t married yet, and who knows if they were fighting or not on that cold night in February? Maybe her injuries happened as Robert David Jr. said they happened. Maybe she went outside to drive home at two in the morning in subzero temperatures and simply slipped on the ice, fell backward, and hit the frozen earth very, very hard. It happens to all of us eventually. That is, if you live long enough in a wintertime icebox like Albany.

  I dried my face with a couple of paper towels, crumpled them up in my palms, and tossed them into the bin. Then, giving myself one more look in the mirror, I inhaled and exhaled.

  “You don’t really believe Sarah innocently slipped and fell, do you?” I said.

  “Nope,” I answered. “I ain’t buying that shit for a minute.”

  “Don’t say ain’t. You’ve earned a degree in English. And you were raised better than that.”

  “Apparently so were Sarah and Robert. Both of them were raised with silver spoons in their pretty, little mouths.”

  “Go do some detecting, Keeper. And stop judging.”

  “Roger that.”

  I nodded and shot my image a quick smile. It perked me up a little to see that I still had all my teeth. So what if they were a little bit stained from the tobacco I used to enjoy on a daily basis? It’s the little imperfections that make us so unique.

  I exited the bathroom with a renewed sense of who I was as a human being at that very moment in time. Even if I did just finish carrying on an entire conversation with myself in the mirror.

  3

  DETECTIVE NICK MILLER WAS everything I could only hope to be.

  Tall, slim, with a full head of gracefully graying blond hair that was cut putting-green short. His face was narrow and concave at the cheekbones, and from what I could see, he couldn’t grow a full beard if someone pasted one on for him. He was also neat, dressed in pressed, navy blue slacks and a bone-colored button-down, his detecti
ve’s badge hooked to one side of his black leather belt and his department-issued .9mm Smith & Wesson holstered to the other. He bore the lean build of a man who liked to run on a daily basis and maybe lift a few light weights now and again too. He also wore no wedding band on his ring finger, which told me he was probably divorced, as so many APD cops are by the time they’ve reached his age. Keeper, the cynical.

  “You’re no longer wedded?” I said while sipping a tall-necked Budweiser at Lanies Bar and Grille in Albany’s far north end.

  “Why don’t you ask me if I’m still married?” he said, sipping carefully on a scotch and soda.

  We occupied the far corner of the bar, well out of the way of a sparse late-Monday-afternoon crowd made up of mostly construction workers juicing up their livers and attitudes before heading home to ignore the wife and kids.

  “I’m a pessimist when it comes to marriage,” I said. “Not sure why, but I just can’t help it.”

  Truth is, I had a happy marriage once that got snuffed out far too early by a man who had set his sights on murdering me, but who instead killed Fran.

  “I am in fact divorced,” he said. “Twice.”

  “Ouch.”

  He shot me a look over his shoulder.

  “Thought you knew that about me.”

  “Never thought to ask,” I admitted. “We haven’t worked together all that much.”

  “Now we are.”

  “Yup. Thanks for the referral.”

  “Figured you could use the business.”

  “Why didn’t you say, ‘figured you might be busy as hell but maybe you could fit this one in’?”

  He sipped his drink.

  “I’m a pessimist when it comes to work for private detectives. Good work anyway.”