The Guilty: (P.I. Jack Marconi No. 3) Page 5

  Now, instead of becoming more aroused, I felt cute little Johnson shrink to even tinier proportions.

  “So what’s all this got to do with Sarah Levy falling on her head in the driveway? Or, quite possibly, Robert David Jr. beating her over the head or perhaps pushing her down a set of brick steps on a cold and icy night?”

  “Your boy, Robert Jr., has not only been sheltered his whole life, but he’s not independent and, therefore, not dealing with reality. He’s his own best avatar if you will. His own best invented persona. That’s why he has such a short fuse. You don’t buy into his painstakingly created fantasy, you’re discounting him as a worthwhile and important human being. He’s not responsible for himself, so he hasn’t matured the way responsible people are forced to. His sense of reality is all cockeyed, and his development is arrested.”

  I listened to the music for a minute, watched the blue neon light flicking on and off our skin, and watched the dancing shadows the flame from the burning candles made against the high-ceilinged walls.

  “He was pretty angry at my intrusion into his life of wine, women, coke, sin, and song.”

  “You knew he’d get angry. That’s why you introduced yourself so early on in the investigation. You’d make a crappy spy.”

  “You know me all too well.”

  “I do. You like to piss people off. See how they’ll react. I remember how you’d get information from inmates. By playing them against one another. Rewarding them after getting them to rat on other inmates who were selling contraband or hurting other prisoners.”

  “The best way to get a man with a short fuse to expose the truth about a given situation or himself or, at the very least, to let his guard down, is to simply piss him off. Thus far, I’ve succeeded in doing exactly that with Junior.”

  “The police don’t have that luxury of pissing Robert Jr. off, do they?”

  “No. If they piss off a rich forty-one-year-old brat like Junior, then daddy and the lawyer will step in and start screaming abuse. It could potentially lead to a mistrial, should that ever come to pass.”

  “Junior’s got to be arrested first.”

  “It’s not my job to come up with something tangible that proves what happened to Sarah was criminal. It’s my job to prove the kid was liable, and that’s all. That happens, Harold Sanders, AIA, gets his forty mil. If Junior ends up getting arrested, that’s just cream cheese frosting on the cake.”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Sounds deliciously simple and easy, doesn’t it?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Let’s see if I actually find any evidence that proves the kid is not only a vampire lover but an evil killer.”

  “Just because David is living a fantasy life doesn’t mean he harmed a hair on Sarah’s pretty little head or that he’s even semi-responsible for what happened to her on his property. She could have gotten drunk with him and slipped on the steps on the way out. Happens all the time. Could be that in the end, Junior’s only crime is owning a steep staircase constructed of brick.”

  I nodded and smelled the good aroma of the pulled pork and listened to the good, heartfelt-sounding trumpet. Pandora wasn’t all that bad. But I missed hearing the little pops and scratches that came from real records.

  “If she really did take an innocent header on the steps,” I said, “then why not call 911?”

  “You got me there.”

  “Thus the lawsuit, the liability negligence, and the nagging pit in my gut that tells me this thing really stinks.”

  Val lifted her head and rolled over to face me. Her angelic brown-eyed face beamed and touched my heart like no other. Not since Fran, anyway.

  “How do you intend to proceed now, lover?”

  Lifting my left hand, I stole a glance at my wristwatch.

  “It’s too late for investigating, angel,” I said. “I thought maybe we’d have some more wine and some dinner. In bed, of course.”

  “We could catch a vampire movie on Netflix.”

  “You mean like watch a movie on your computer?” It was a question.

  “Isn’t the digital world beautiful?”

  “I was thinking we’d eat, then make love again.”

  I cast one last glance at cute, little Johnson, who was most definitely waking up, regardless of our conversation.

  “You’re younger than you know, Keeper,” she smiled.

  “It’s what Dracula and I have in common,” I said, opening my mouth, going for her neck. “Youthful, good looks and an insatiable appetite for beautiful women.”

  8

  THE NEXT MORNING I got up extra early. While it was still dark out. I got dressed, came around to Val’s side of the bed, and kissed her on the cheek while she lay sound asleep. When I kissed her, she mumbled, “I love you, baby.”

  “I love you too, angel,” I whispered back.

  I let myself out and took the steps down to the street where my 4Runner was parked. I drove through the emerging orange dawn over the Hudson River via the tall, arcing, steel-span Congress Street Bridge. From there, I caught the riverside highway that would take me to the Albany city limits and the mean streets that would appear ghost-town empty until the rush hour when all the state workers poured into the Empire State Plaza like lemmings to the slaughter.

  I parked the 4Runner outside the Sherman Street warehouse and gave the three or four drug dealers who were still congregated at the corner of the old brick-and-concrete building a friendly wave. Then I grabbed the morning paper, unlocked the two heavy-duty dead bolts on the steel door and let myself inside.

  Sometimes when I came through the front door, I wished I had a dog to greet me. Maybe I would have trained him to fetch my slippers for me. Maybe he would jump up onto his two back paws, lick my hand, and bark about how he loved me and missed me so much. He’d be a loyal, doting, bushy-haired Labrador retriever maybe. Or a dog-wolf, like in Jack London’s White Fang. I’d call him Fang for short.

  Fran and I had had a dog we called Alex. She was a small terrier-and-Italian-greyhound mix, and she was so kind and loving that she grew to be the child we never had. When Alex suddenly died after getting hit by a school bus, Fran was too heartbroken to ever allow herself to get that close to another dog again. I couldn’t blame her at the time. Now Fran’s gone too. Been gone a long time. But the pain of our permanent separation . . . the aloneness I feel in my veins . . . somehow never disappears.

  Locking the door behind me, I entered the apartment living room and retrieved my cell phone from the inside pocket of my jacket before taking it off and tossing it onto the tom-tom of my vintage 1960s-era, blue sparkle Rogers drum set. Then I undid my shoulder holster and brought both the phone and the gun over to my desk, which was in the dining room. I sat down at the desk and opened up the lid on my laptop. Grabbing a USB cord from inside my desk drawer, I plugged my phone into the computer and clicked on the commands that would download the pictures I took at Robert David Jr.’s house.

  While the pictures downloaded, I made coffee and toasted a hard roll. When the coffee was done, I poured a cup and added some 2 percent milk to it. Then I buttered the hard roll and took it into the dining room and sat back down at the desk.

  The photos were set up on the screen like an electronic contact sheet. The software program that came with my computer allowed me to click on each photo and zoom in or zoom out. I could even pinpoint a specific area of the photo that I wanted to explore and zoom into it. Val was right: The digital age was a lovely thing. Or, it had its lovely moments anyway.

  I ate the warm, toasted hard roll and drank the hot coffee with milk and browsed the photos.

  I gazed at Junior’s house from the vantage point of my 4Runner out on the street. The lush lawn was greened by constant watering, even though we were in the midst of a hellish fifty-year drought. So much for abiding by the emergency water restriction laws. The stark black, newly seal-coated driveway glimmered in the sunshine. The crescent-shaped, brick-paver staircase started at the driveway and rose up a full story un
til it connected with the concrete landing outside the front door.

  My eyes shifted to the steps. To the close-up shots of the treads. I clicked on each picture, zoomed in on each one. Nothing special caught my eye. I then moved on to the few photos I took through the small glass embedded into David’s front door. The two lovebirds sleeping it off inside the scarlet-red living room. The empty beer bottles and cans. The coke on the mirror. The credit cards used for cutting the dope into neat, little lines. The girl on the couch. Her thong underwear exposing a lovely pair of smooth ass cheeks. The serpent image tattooed on her neck. An après-party scene lifted right out of “Hotel California,” but it was nothing that was going to lead me to the conclusion that Robert David Jr. pushed Sarah Levy down the steps or hit her over the head repeatedly with a blunt object.

  I got up from the computer, went into the kitchen, and poured more coffee.

  I looked at the small pictures of Fran I still kept tacked to the refrigerator with little magnets: Fran and me arm in arm on the beach in Cape Cod; Fran trying to blow out forty candles on a birthday cake, her big brown eyes wide, her shoulder-length black hair draping her face like a veil, her skin tan and lovely; Fran standing behind thirty little children who comprised the very last class she ever taught at Stormville Elementary School. All those memories were so fresh and vivid in my brain that I could still hear her raspy voice and smell her lavender scent. I saw her smile. Felt her touch, as if an angel were embracing me.

  “So what do you think about the case of Robert David Jr., Fran?” I said aloud. “Do you think it’s possible to love your future wife but at the same time find no problem with nearly beating her to death?”

  I waited for her answer. The answer came to me inside my brain. I heard the words as if she were speaking them.

  “You know as well as I do, Jack, that no one who loves someone as much as we loved each other would ever cause physical or psychological harm. That’s not love. True love means that you accept each other unconditionally. Accept each other for who you are and who you want to be. Anything else isn’t love at all, but obsession.”

  I drank some coffee and thought about it for a moment. As usual, Fran was right. You didn’t go around beating each other up in a loving relationship. I took a step back into the dining room, picked up the newspaper clippings set out on the desk, and looked once more at the photograph of the happy, “in love” couple. Junior was smiling, but there was no hint as of yet of his sculpted vampire incisors. Sarah was smiling too, and there was no hint of the brain damage she would soon incur as a result of a night gone bad with her fiancé.

  I knew then that from this point on if I focused my investigation on Junior’s obsession with Sarah, I just might be able to find a motive in his having attacked her. If all went well, once I discovered the motive, perhaps the method would simply fall into place.

  9

  AS I WAS SETTING the newspaper clips back down, I recalled Val telling me that the ongoing saga of Robert David Jr. and Sarah Levy wasn’t only being covered by the crime desk of the Albany Times Union, but also by the food blogger.

  That’s right . . .

  Food. Blogger.

  For a brief moment, I had to remind myself just what the hell a blogger was and what distinguished him from a writer or reporter. In the end, I wasn’t entirely sure, although I had a suspicion that a blogger was paid less than a real reporter. Back in the kitchen, I picked up the paper and scanned the local section for the food blog. The food blog wasn’t there. That’s when it dawned on me that, at present, there existed two different versions of the TU: the traditional paper version, which was very thin these days, and the electronic version. Bingo. So that’s at least one of the distinctions that separated a blog from a column and a blogger from a reporter.

  I would find a blog only online.

  I made my way back into the dining room and typed in the words Albany Times Union in the narrow box provided by my Google search engine. My search immediately brought up the link to the online version of the paper, which in this case was no longer a paper at all but a digitized representation of all the news that was fit to print in New York’s Capital Region.

  I scrolled along the toolbar and found that the food blog was listed under the Entertainment heading. It seemed odd, if not downright bizarre, to me that reports of Sarah Levy’s head injuries would be listed as entertainment. But then, I still read a real paper newspaper, and from what I was being told by people like Val, these days more people got their news off their smartphones than from either real papers or the television. Every day I felt more profoundly out of the popular culture loop than ever.

  I clicked on the food blog, which was penned by a man named Ted Bolous, or so Val had informed me. Bolous’s byline was located directly beneath a grainy, black-and-white headshot of an overweight, scruffy-faced, white male who obviously enjoyed the free meals that must have been the major perk of his online profession. That is, judging by his numerous chins.

  I scanned the first four or five blogs Ted had already written about the Sarah Levy and Robert David Jr. affair and quickly found that they didn’t contain any information that I didn’t already know. But Bolous’s most recent piece caught my attention since it not only contained a downloadable PDF of the David-Levy lawsuit, but it was accompanied by more than one hundred comments. Try getting that pot of gold from out of real paper newspaper. Exhaling a breath, I proceeded to read:

  Get Your Robert David Jr. Lawsuit Right Here

  By Ted Bolous, Albany Times Union Senior Food Blogger

  Don’t say I never give you anything for free, dear foodie. I have in my tobacco-stained fingers a copy of the very lawsuit that Harold Sanders has thrust upon the David boys. All two hundred pages of it. (Don’t ask me how I obtained my copy, but suffice it to say I have friends in . . . ummmm . . . high places!) Since I love you all so much, I have scanned it and attached it here as a PDF. Read away, dear food lover, and keep on churning out those comments. Reality television was never so good. We’re really cooking with Wesson now . . .

  Ted really had a way with words. Just by reading those sentences, I knew precisely why he had attained the coveted position of Senior Food Blogger. My God, what was next? “Double Senior Food Blogger?

  I double-clicked on the link that would download the official lawsuit. While it was downloading, I scanned the first few comments while drinking down what was left of my now lukewarm coffee.

  “Sounds fishy to me,” wrote one person.

  Another one wrote, “Maybe customers should stop going to Manny’s until the Davids cooperate and answer some questions. Maybe that would get their attention.”

  Someone else simply typed in two words that said it all: “Cover up.”

  Wasn’t so long ago when I’d have to stand in line at the Albany county clerk’s office and pay twenty bucks for the privilege of glancing at a copy of a particular lawsuit that might be relevant to some case I might be investigating. The whole process could blow a full workday. Sometimes more if I didn’t get through the document in a few hours. But all that hassle and expense had become ancient history in the new digital age. Now all I had to do was turn on my computer and do a proper search for the document I wanted. In this case, Ted Bolous was handing it to me and his readers on a silver food blogger platter while trying to make it look as though he and he alone were being entrusted with a top-secret document. Big fat liar that he was. Obviously Bolous had a flair for the dramatic.

  In any case, I proceeded to stuff my face with the lawsuit . . . so to speak.

  Turns out that the thick document was all presentation and not a whole lot of taste. Nothing much existed in terms of substance other than the amount Sanders was going after and a rather dry and legalized explanation of what might have occurred on the night of February 18th, along with the wrongfulness of David in calling his father to take Sarah to the hospital instead of doing the right thing by calling 911. Knowing I wasn’t about to find any concrete answers to the m
any questions I had by sitting behind my desk, I decided that the time had come to get back in the field in order to do some real detecting.

  I clicked off the PDF and looked at my watch. Going on nine in the morning. I wondered what time food blogger Ted Bolous arrived at work. Whether he worked days or nights. Assuming he wrote during the days and dined freely at night, I decided that I would pay him an unannounced visit. Heck, I might even bring him donuts. A couple of strawberry crème-filled donuts might get me on his good side.

  Standing, I strapped on my shoulder holster, pulled out the two-and-one-half-pound Colt .45, thumbed the clip release, and allowed the nine-round clip to drop into the palm of my hand just long enough for me to check the rounds. Slapping the clip back home, I thumbed the safety back on and returned the piece to its holster.

  Out in the living room, I grabbed my jacket from off the tom-tom and stole my keys from out of the pocket. Then with my open left hand, I came down on the crash cymbal as I would if I were drumming out the opening bars to the 1970s hit, “Jungle Boogie.”

  “Jungle boogie, get down,” I sang on my way out the steel door and onto an overheated Sherman Street.

  10

  AS I RELOCKED THE deadbolts on my front door, one of my neighbors approached me.

  “Beautiful morning, Warden,” called out a muscular black man who was dressed in a tight, black T-shirt, Levi’s jeans, and black lace-up combat boots. “Need a little pick-me-up, boss? Something for the nose?”

  “Just had my coffee, Blood,” I said. “Anything else would give me a heart attack.”

  “Was a time I could sell the Brooklyn Bridge back to the New York City if I wanted to,” he said.

  “But these days you are the patron saint of prison reformation, Blood,” I said, heading for the driver’s side door of the 4Runner, but not without pulling a twenty spot from out of my jeans pocket. I handed it to my former Green Haven inmate as I opened the door and got in. “Thanks for keeping an eye out on the ride,” I added. “My weekly payment.”