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

  Being the ever-nefarious detective, I raised the camera up and snapped some shots of the two lovebirds sleeping off their party. I made sure not to use a flash so that I didn’t accidentally wake them. At the very least, the photos would provide the proof I needed to present to both Sanders and the police that Albany’s wealthiest and most eligible restaurateur was indeed the partier that rumor made him out to be.

  That little, young piece of heaven lying on the couch beside him wouldn’t look too good for him either. But then, the death bell for his engagement to Sarah had already tolled, and what the hell? It’s a semi-free country. Who could blame the forty-one-year-old playboy for wanting to have a good time?

  I was about to turn and head back to the 4Runner when I got an idea. I didn’t come all the way out here just to take some pictures. Why not ask the kid a couple of questions? Catch him with his guard and his pants down. It’s exactly what I set out to do when I once more checked the Google map on my phone and saw that it not only provided me with Richard’s home number, but with his cell number as well. In fact, all I had to do was thumb the digitally displayed phone number on the touch screen, and Google would dial it for me.

  I touched the number with the pad of my thumb and a little red box appeared with the word dialing inside it.

  Don’t you just love the digital age?

  Is Manny’s Owner, Robert David Jr., Hiding Out? Let’s Get Your Take on the Matter . . .

  By Ted Bolous, Albany Times Union Senior Food Blogger

  Since my original post, the comments have been pouring in like maple syrup over a freshly grilled stack of buttermilk pancakes. Blueberry pancakes. What’s a food blogger like me doing reporting on what might be the most scandalous assault and battery case to strike Albany in decades? Just doing my job, which is to inform, even if what I’m informing about isn’t so tasty. And to make matters more interesting, it seems no one in the know (and I am in the know) has seen or heard from David Jr. since this Sanders lawsuit was officially filed in Albany County Court one week ago. Yikes! Must be the handsome Junior is spending a lot of quality time in front of the boob tube or cooking up something sexy with his new girlfriend. Remember you read it here first, and as always, buon appetito . . .

  6

  MY BROWN EYES PEERED through the small window embedded into the heavy wood door.

  I waited for the inevitable.

  When the cell phone blasted some rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” it startled even me. Robert David Jr. just about jumped off the couch, his body coming alive like a zombie prodded by a live electric cable. Mouthing a string of obscenities that were barely audible to me, he reached out for the phone. My cue to cut the connection and begin thumbing the doorbell.

  I saw Junior raise up his head, his youngish face going from deadly pale to seething red. It was as though I’d summoned Satan himself. He stood up, a bit wobbly, in his underpants. He shuffled to the other couch, reached down, and poked the woman. Other than her right arm, which she raised up high enough to wave him away, she never moved a muscle. As attractive as she seemed dressed in nothing but her underwear, I knew that, at present, she’d taken on the guise of the living dead.

  I hit the doorbell again. And again, just for good measure. Keeper, the persistent.

  Robert David Jr. peered down at the coffee table and the lines of coke that were set upon it, as if for a brief second he was considering snorting a line or two for a quick breakfast pick-me-up. But he shuffled away from it, knowing that doing drugs might not be the best idea should the intruder ringing his doorbell be a cop or perhaps his sugar daddy namesake. Or so I imagined.

  As he made his way painfully to the door dressed in nothing but a pair of white boxers with little red pitchforks printed on them, I was careful to take a step back and to conceal my smartphone inside the interior pocket of my blue blazer. He unlatched the deadbolt, and the door opened slowly, the hinges squeaking.

  “Hope I’m not disturbing you, sir,” I said, painting the widest Marconi smile on my face that I could possibly muster.

  He glared at me with that flushed, narrow face, his naked torso hard and toned as if he spent his entire privileged day alternating between the gym and the tanning booth. I couldn’t help but notice the mountainous bicep that belonged to his left arm. The word Sarah was tattooed on it in thick, blood-red capital letters, with little drops of blood dripping from each of the letters. Subtle. The tat seemed to go heartbreakingly well with the road map of blue veins that were popping out from his tight, thin skin. His body fat index could not have been more than 10 percent. Daily attendance to Gold’s Gym and coke will tend to do that to you. So will a wound-up personality and an explosive temper, the trigger of which is hair thin.

  I was determined to test that temper.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he barked, biting down on his bottom lip. Hard enough to maybe pierce it with his two very sharp top incisors. Sharper than sharp, as though they’d been professionally altered.

  I held out my hand, knowing he wasn’t about to shake it kindly.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Or is it good evening, Count Dracula?”

  “Listen, pal, dispense with the bad jokes. I work nights, okay? So I have no choice but to sleep all day. Tell me what you want or just fuck off.”

  I took a step forward and poked my head inside.

  “Excuse me?” he said. “There’s a lady in there, and she’s not exactly decent.”

  “Not decent at what?” I said. “She work nights too?”

  Junior inhaled, but he didn’t follow up with an exhale. Swallowing all that hot air made his face grow even redder. For a split second, I thought his cranial cap might erupt like it would if we were living inside a Looney Tune. But if that were to happen, I would have been out of a job, and I needed the money. So I decided to temper the situation with a little Marconi charm.

  “Pardon me,” I said, still wearing my smile. “Where are my manners?” I reached around to my back pocket for my wallet. “My name is Jack Marconi. I’m a private detective.” I showed him my license. He gave it a cursory glance with squinted eyes. When his eyes widened again, I returned the wallet to my pocket.

  “You’re kidding, right? A private detective? You for real?”

  “Flesh and blood.”

  He issued me a grin and another chance to glance at those pinpoint incisors.

  “And that’s a real ID?”

  “Bought and paid for.”

  “And I don’t have to talk to you.”

  He went to close the door, but I stuck my cowboy-booted foot against it. He tried to push it close. But it wouldn’t budge.

  “I train with weights,” I said.

  “So do I, old man,” he said. “Light weights for super quickness.”

  “Take my advice, Count,” I said. “Forget that light weight, a-lot-of-reps, cut-body nonsense. It will deprive you of real strength.”

  He tried to move the door again. But it wouldn’t budge.

  “Okay, stop calling me Count, and what do you want?”

  “I’ll start over again,” I said. “My name is Jack ‘Keeper’ Marconi. And I’m middle-aged. Not old.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve been hired to look into the true cause of why your former fiancée, Sarah Levy, nearly fell to her death right here on this very property this past winter. That is . . . if she fell at all.”

  If his narrow face were to grow any redder, it would have hurt my eyes to look directly at him.

  “I don’t have to speak to the cops.” He fake laughed. “And I sure as hell don’t have to speak to you. No evidence of a crime exists because no crime took place. Get it, Marconi? Now move your foot and get the hell off my property.”

  Daddy’s property, I wanted to say. But just then, there was some commotion coming from the living room.

  “Roberto,” the woman on the couch spoke. “Roberto, come stai?”

  I smiled again. “Gee, Count, I see you ar
e a multi-ethnic type of guy when it comes to romance.”

  “She’s as American as apple pie and gay marriage, and it’s none of your business who I date. Now please leave. Or I’ll call the cops.”

  “That’s just it,” I said, pulling a business card from my jeans pocket and handing it to him across the threshold. “You won’t call the cops at all. Because in an indirect way, I’m working for the same cops who also are looking for the truth behind the crime that took place here. Capisce, Count Roberto?”

  He exhaled, his head bobbing.

  “Are you through?” he asked, his voice now raspy and filled with acid.

  “For now,” I said. “I’ll be coming around now and again to talk. Preferably at a time that’s more convenient for your . . . ummm . . . alternative lifestyle. You know, when the sun has gone down and when it isn’t snowing in the summertime.”

  Acting on instinct, he stole a quick look over his shoulder at the coke that was still laid out on the coffee table. I removed my foot before he grew a pair of horns out from the top of his skull. The door slammed. Through the glass, I saw him about-face and pound his right fist into his open left palm. I heard the words “Mother! Fucker!” shouted out in frustration, as if he were undergoing a bout of road rage. He didn’t march back into the living room but into the kitchen. A few seconds later, he re-emerged with a cold beer in his hand. He saw me looking at him through the door light. He raised his right hand, his bicep flexing the name Sarah like a built-in exclamation point, and he flipped me off.

  I raised my right hand and tossed him a friendly wave. But what I really should have done was hold up the business end of a rosary to the glass. Turning, I made my way back down the steps to my ride, wondering how many times Sarah Levy’s pretty head might have bounced off these very same brick pavers.

  7

  SHE WAS THE ONLY woman since my late wife, Fran, who would leave me wanting more, even after we’d made love more than one time in the same hour. She was also the only woman I could trust and genuinely call a best friend and, therefore, a most trusted confidant. I loved the way she smelled, spoke, dressed, and casually brushed back her silky, black hair. In a word, she was my angel. The truth is that Val Antonelli and I had been working together for years now. We first worked together at Green Haven Prison, where I’d been the superintendent and she, my secretary. Rather, my assistant, I should say.

  And later on, when I became a private dick, she came to work for me on a part-time basis, managing the books and billing, paying my taxes, organizing the paperwork, on occasion answering the phones, and sometimes just being there for me as a sounding board and a voice of reason, especially at times when anger got the best of me.

  Once upon a time, she nearly became my wife, but things got in the way, and it didn’t work out. That’s not to say the brown-eyed, smallish-but-beautifully-built, long-haired brunette wouldn’t become my wife down the road sometime. But for now, we enjoyed what some people might refer to as a casual relationship in that she maintained her place across the Hudson River in Troy, and I maintained mine in downtown Albany. Whether she was working for me or not, we always got together a few nights a week for dinner and, on occasion, some love. This was one of those occasions when we were engaging in both.

  We were lying in bed, both of us naked and allowing the cool air from the portable air conditioner to blow onto our moist skin. The bedroom in her century-old, second-floor, downtown Troy brownstone apartment wasn’t large, but it had nine-foot ceilings, and the light blue walls were covered with an eclectic assortment of original artwork. The antique stand-up lamps had been turned off in favor of the gently flickering firelight that radiated from the thick, white candles that were placed on both of her two antique dressers. The neon light that originated at a quiet little bar called Footsie McGoos, which was located directly across the street, leaked in through the big double-hung window. It was a soothing blue light that worked well with the candlelight and that bathed our bodies in blue for a few brief moments at a time.

  I’d just told her about my day. About Harold Sanders, his $40-million civil lawsuit, and my new job trying to find out if Robert David Jr. did indeed nearly beat Sarah Levy to death or, at the very least, toss her down the front exterior steps and then cover up his actions by calling in his father to cart her to the emergency room instead of calling 911. I also told her about my little impromptu meeting with the young restaurateur and how easy it had been to work up his red-hot temper.

  We were sharing a bottle of red wine while our dinner of pulled pork simmered in the Crock-Pot in the kitchen and the sweet sound of Cliff Brown poured out of the stereo speakers, his classic jazz trumpet belting out a song called “Tiny Capers,” which was recorded back in the fifties along with the great drummer and Keeper Marconi hero, Max Roach. Roach and Brown were gone now, having entered the great heavenly pantheon of jazz musicians in the sky. But the songs remained the same.

  “First of all,” Val said, her head nestled on my chest, “he’s forty-one. He’s not that young.”

  “I’ve seen him up close. He’s one of those blond-haired, thin men who will always be young, even in his sixties. If he makes it that long.”

  “Drugs,” she said. “And that devilish thing with his teeth.”

  “Yah,” I said, smelling her rose-petal scent and feeling her hair brushing up against my arm and feeling myself getting aroused yet again. “What’s with those teeth? You think he’s a vampire? He sleeps all day, you know.”

  She laughed as the blue neon light flickered across her smooth skin and Cliff and Max played the jumpy “Tiny Capers” from the grave.

  “Lots of young people are having their incisors sharpened now,” she said. “Vampire-inspired tattoos are huge too. Dripping blood. Anatomically correct renderings of hearts . . . Jeez, Keeper, don’t you read?”

  “Read what?”

  “You know. Books.”

  “When I’m not detecting, I’m playing drums or working out. But to answer your question, yes, I have been re-reading the great Hemingway. I’m an ex-English major, you know. .”

  “Well, most kids these days aren’t reading Hemingway. They’re reading books like the Twilight series. Books about modern-day vampires who have become the new modern-day romantic ideal. They’re also reading heavy-duty erotic, like Fifty Shades of Grey.”

  “Vampires have been around for centuries. Remember Boris Karloff? And erotica is just another name for porn. I should know. I am in the possession of an English bachelor of arts.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s the second time you’ve reminded me in a single minute. But the new spin on vampires, erotica, and even zombies has caught on big-time with the youth of the world, which you most definitely would not know about since you are still so stuck in the 1950s, Mr. Gumshoe.”

  “I was born in the fifties . . . the mid-fifties.”

  “You’re old, Keeper.”

  “I just proved it by making love to you twice, angel. And I’m about ready to go a third time.” Staring down at my naked lap. “Soon as cute little Johnson wakes up from his cat nap.”

  She squeezed me and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Okay,” she said. “I take that back.”

  “Thank you. Now back to Mr. David. Despite his apparent youthful look, isn’t he a bit too old to be carrying himself like a pretend vampire?”

  I felt her shrug her shoulders.

  “Yes and no. People are younger today. You know, forty is the new thirty and all that. Especially with social media dominating people’s everyday existence. Anyone, no matter what his or her age, can create any persona he or she wants and broadcast it to millions. It’s quite incredible when you think about it. I’ve been keeping up on what’s happening between David Jr. and his ex-fiancée with the blogs the Albany Times Union food blogger, Ted Bolous, has been posting. Judging by their photos, Robert and Sarah seem to have had their pulse on the pop culture trigger. The most fashionable clothes, the newest music, the trendiest IKEA fur
niture, reality TV, the Internet, Gmail, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, blogs, memes, tweets . . . You get the picture.”

  “Sounds like a fantasy world to me.”

  “The paradox being that this fantasy world has become the major reality for the young and the not so young of the world today. Thus, the fascination with fantasy-like vampire literature and, frankly, all things erotica inspired and even borderline satanic. People don’t have to live in the real flesh-and-blood world anymore now that they can live inside their computers and smartphones. You don’t even have to speak on the phone anymore now that you can text. And did you further know that one-quarter of America’s married couples now meet through an online dating service?”

  “Match dot com,” I exhaled. “How sad. They probably get divorced online too.”

  “I can bet that if you were to search David’s house when he’s not home . . . and I’m not suggesting you pull a B and E here, my love . . . you’d see a bunch of books like Dominion, Breaking Dawn, New Moon, and maybe some fantasy and horror mixed in. Certainly David’s probably read Fifty Shades of Grey.”

  “I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m an English major.”

  “Nor should you, smarty pants. It’s a chick book.”

  On the stereo, “Tiny Capers” sadly ended, but happily, a song called “Walkin’” started in.

  “Hey,” I said, nudging Val, “this isn’t the song that’s supposed to come on next. I’ve listened to this album a million times or more over the decades, and the next song in the lineup isn’t this one.”

  “Keeper,” she said, her big brown eyes opening even wider. “You do realize that I’m not spinning an old-fashioned album on my old-fashioned turntable. We’ve been listening to Pandora off my iPhone, which is plugged into my very new-fangled receiving dock. Get with the twenty-first century already.”