Entombed (41 page)

What was this man
thinking? "I'd rather have a life sentence without parole, Judge, and
so would all of my witnesses. A long, miserable life upstate."

"You know how
expensive it will be to mount a trial like this, and then pay for sixty
years of prison time?"

"The way I figure,
Judge, is that the mayor eliminated the long-time exemption for
diplomatic parking plates last year, so the thousands of dollars the
city gets in fines from the UN neighborhood and all the consulates
around town can pay for Mr. Maswana's bologna sandwiches till he
croaks."

Tarnower was silent.
"Can you forward me to Battaglia?"

"Sure."

"And Alex? Foster-that
guy you were talking about-he's the one at the Midtown Community Court,
right? I wouldn't spend too much time on that press release. The
Dumpster your cops took all their evidence from is MCC property. They
should have thought to get a warrant. Your case against him might go
right out the window."

The judge cut me off
before I could forward his call to the district attorney. I hung up and
sat down in my chair as Ellen approached me.

"Rumor has it you guys
made a big score last night."

No point asking how
she knew. Battaglia had undoubtedly told Pat McKinney about Maswana,
who was incapable of keeping professional secrets from his main squeeze.

"Fingers crossed. As
soon as the lab has a preliminary read on the DNA, we'll know," I said.

"I tried calling you
at home around nine o'clock."

"There were no
messages on my-"

"I hung up after three
rings. Silly to bother you when you weren't available."

"About what?"

She smiled at me.
"Gino Guidi. He's coming around a bit."

"How do you mean?"

"He'll be here any
minute. I pushed his lawyer to give us more, just like you asked me to."

I returned Ellen's
smile. "Nice work. Conditions?"

"You know there always
are, Alex. Sort of a queen-for-a-day," she said, referring to a deal
prosecutors often dangled before targets of criminal investigations. A
onetime offer of the opportunity to come in and tell what they know,
with the guarantee nothing they say can be used against them in the
courtroom.

"What do you figure
he's got to hide?"

"Kirby says only his
morbid fear of publicity. He thinks if Guidi can point us in some
useful direction, you won't need to involve him if you wind up with
someone to charge in any of these crimes. I tried calling Chapman when
I couldn't reach you."

"You won't get through
to him, Ellen. He's withdrawn from all of us."

"Oh? Maybe I assumed
something I shouldn't have. I thought Mike would have told you about
this by now. He got right back to me early this morning."

I couldn't conceal my
surprise. "Mike?"

"Yeah. I mean, I
understand he took off for the week, but he reached out to Scotty Taren
for me. I feel so badly for him," Ellen said. "We obviously want a
detective in on this meeting, so Scotty's here in my office. And I
reserved the conference room down the hall. All this okay with you?"

I was still stuck on
the fact that Mike had returned Ellen Gunsher's messages but wouldn't
respond to any of mine.

"Alex?"

"What?"

"You ready to have
another go at Gino Guidi?"

"Sure. Did you say
we're doing it in your office?"

"No. He and Roy Kirby
are in the conference room."

"Give me a few
minutes, okay?" I asked.

Ellen walked out and I
dialed Mike's home number. I left a message on the machine, telling him
that if it was too difficult to discuss personal things, I wanted to
give him the good news about Maswana and get some direction in dealing
with Guidi. Then I beeped him and tapped in my number, followed by 911
to tell him it was urgent.

"I'll be in a meeting
with Ellen," I said to Laura. "Hold everything-except Mike or the boss."

The three men got to
their feet when I entered the room. Guidi and Kirby were seated
together on one side of the rectangular table, facing Ellen Gunsher and
Scotty Taren. I took my place at the far end and let Kirby go through
the usual spiel about how forthcoming his client really wanted to be
but how little he had to contribute.

"Here's a list we've
prepared of some other people who were in the SABA program at the same
time as Mr. Guidi," Kirby said, passing each of us a photocopy. "Mind
you, Ms. Cooper, these are nicknames. There are only two with complete
surnames."

"They were guys I ran
into later on. The others I never saw again."

"Did you keep a
journal at that time?" I asked.

"Well, not exactly a-"

"He's struggled to
remember what he can," Kirby said, interrupting his client when he
realized I was going to ask for the original paperwork-apparently more
than Kirby wanted me to see.

Scotty was taking
notes. Guidi had something in writing that his lawyer was holding back
and we would angle a way to get it.

"You want to flesh out
something about these people for us?"

Guidi's answers were
bland and fuzzy. I'd bet that the two SABA members identified
specifically led lives cleaner than hounds-teeth by now or he wouldn't
have put them forward. The ones who might be more useful-and
potentially more embarrassing to him-remained obscure and would be
impossible to find.

"Let's go back to
Washington Square. The guy from your program who sat next to you on the
park bench-Monty-that time he confessed to you that he killed a girl,"
I said. "You told us last week you didn't know he was referring to
Aurora Tait then, is that right?"

"Absolutely. I had no
reason to then."

"But when, exactly
when, did that occur to you?"

"Oh, I don't know, Ms.
Cooper. I hadn't thought about Aurora in years, until I read the story
and saw those initials in the newspaper. The approximate time of her
disappearance, the fact that the building where the skeleton was found
was owned by the university-and frankly, it reminded me of Monty's
story-another addict, another rich boy like me who'd screwed up his
life."

"You mentioned he
talked about boarding school in some of your sessions. Do you remember
where? What school or even what part of the country?" I asked.

Guidi shrugged and
held his hands in the air, palms up. The sun gleamed off the gold on
his cuff links. "Maybe New England. Either Andover or Exeter. Could
have been St. Paul's. In the boonies, it was. I remember he talked
about how he liked being near the woods and the peacefulness of the
more remote countryside."

"He was orphaned, you
told us. Do you know how or when? Any details about his family that
would help us figure out who he is?"

Guidi looked at me.
"That's mostly what he talked about in the meetings. Typical junkie's
denial, blaming all his problems on everyone else. He never knew his
father. I think his mother had a menial job, working as a servant-maybe
even the housekeeper- for the scion of an old industrial family. When
she died-some blood disease, it was-he was still a kid, taken in by the
fat cat who'd been her employer. Richest man in town, that's who sent
him off to boarding school and paid for his education."

"This man who adopted
him, didn't Monty talk about him at all?"

"That was part of his
resentment. He was never adopted."

Neither was Edgar Poe,
I remembered. The Allans wouldn't give him their name. I had to wonder
whether Monty knew the parallels between his own life and the tormented
poet's.

"Was he bitter about
it?" I asked.

Guidi checked with
Kirby, who must have given him a green light to keep talking.

"Remember when I said
that Monty told me he had killed a girl for betraying him?"

Ellen and I both said,
"Yes."

"I-uh-I guess after I
left the station house last week I began to think more about it. I
thought of a few other things I-uh, I guess I asked him at the time.
Sorry I didn't press myself a little harder that night." He tried to
muster an earnest smile.

"That's all right, Mr.
Guidi," Ellen said. "Anything you give us now will be helpful."

I wanted to kick her
under the table to keep the pressure on him rather than try to use her
short supply of charm to stroke him, but I restrained myself.

"I know I asked what
he meant by betrayal, by what this girl had done to him to make him
fantasize about killing her," Guidi said, focusing his attention back
on me. "You must understand that at the time I heard his story, Ms.
Cooper, I assumed it was a fantasy, a product of his dope-induced
hallucinations. We all had them."

I looked away from his
face and while he continued to talk, gesturing to me with his left
hand, I noticed the thin shape of a rifle barrel forged out of gleaming
eighteen-karat gold in the fold of his French cuffs.

"He knew I came from a
wealthy family. For me, starting over after I screwed myself up meant
getting a job in a mail room in a fancy firm, as I think I mentioned.
For Monty, it was out on the street doing physical labor, some kind of
construction work. Here was this guy who came to every meeting with a
book of poetry jammed in his back pocket, quoting everything from the
classics to Philip Larkin and James Wright-but meanwhile his hands
looked like he'd been sentenced to dig ditches ten years earlier."

"But the girl," I
asked, "Aurora-what did she do to him?"

"Monty's benefactor
had given him one last chance. He'd flunked out of boarding school,
managed to get into college from public school, but then hit the skids
with drugs and booze once he got here to the city. When Aurora found
out who had been supporting Monty, who had enabled his lifestyle-not
knowing all the money was going down the toilet-she got on a bus and
went up to his home, wherever that was, and spilled the beans."

"Why?"

"To try to shake down
the old man. She'd guessed wrong, was the problem. She thought if she
told him the truth about Monty's addiction, she could score enough
money-pretending it would go for private rehab and readmission to
school-that she could take off and leave Monty in the dust," Guidi
said. "With the rest of us."

"The straw that broke
the camel's back?" Ellen asked.

"Exactly. The old guy
had been threatening to disinherit Monty anyway. Even though he had
never adopted the kid, he had pledged the dying mother that he'd secure
her son's financial future. As a result of what Aurora told him, he
wrote Monty out of his will- not a single cent of inheritance-and
before Monty could clean himself up and plead for another chance, the
fat cat had a stroke and died a day or two later. Revenge," Guidi said,
his voice dropping to a whisper.

"What did you say?" I
asked.

"Revenge, Ms. Cooper.
That's why Aurora Tait wound up in a brick coffin. I might not have
been as creative in disposing of her, but more than a few of us who
crossed her path would have been only too happy to have had our
revenge. I'm sure that's what Monty had in mind."

He tugged at the tip
of his shirtsleeves to align them with each other and rested his
clasped hands on the table.

"Do you shoot, Mr.
Guidi?" I asked.

"Sorry?"

I pointed to his cuff
link. He twisted his wrist to look and remind himself what he was
wearing.

"Oh, these? Upper
Brookville Hunt Club. It's their logo."

Ellen Gunsher found a
new purpose for herself, trying to make her pathetic little firearms
unit relevant. "Are you a good shot?"

"Been shooting all my
life."

Scotty Taren looked
puzzled. "In the Bronx? What are you, a friggin' squirrel bagger?"

"Quail, mostly. Game
birds. At the club. But my first kill was back when I was a teenager,
Detective, right in Van Cortlandt Park. D'you know it?"

"North Bronx, right
next to the high-rent district in Riverdale."

"That's where I grew
up-Bailey Avenue," Guidi said. It was still a neighborhood of large
fieldstone houses that looked more like suburbia than New York City. "I
was fourteen and had just gotten a new puppy for Christmas. We were in
the backyard and I was throwing sticks for him to fetch. A coyote came
out of the park-"

Little Miss Texas was
incredulous. "A coyote?"

"There's eastern
coyotes all over the state," Taren said. "Sometimes they slip down here
through the woods when they get cold and hungry farther north. Real
pain in the ass for Emergency Services to tranquilize them and ship 'em
out before they start running in packs and attacking domestic
animals-and little kids."

Guidi went on. "I
thought it was a German shepherd running into the yard to play so I
didn't panic at first. Then I saw that grizzled gray neck and the tail
hanging down-you know the way coyotes do?-and he just snatched my
puppy, a small brown Lab, and made off into the park. I went after him
with one of my father's deer rifles, hanging in the garage, and dropped
him before he could do any serious damage to the dog."

Ellen seemed pleased
with the story's happy ending. Scotty Taren raised an eyebrow at me and
moved his lips. I made out the words "Professor Tormey." Aaron
Kittredge was no longer the only marksman on our list. Guidi could just
as easily have been the one who shot at us that day at the Hall of
Fame, and Kirby didn't know enough to stop him from telling a story of
his childhood that set up his marksmanship for us.

There was a knock on
the door and Laura opened it. "Excuse me, sorry to interrupt."

"It's fine," I said,
getting to my feet with the expectation that she had Mike Chapman on my
phone line. "I can step out."

"It's for Ellen," she
said, shaking a finger at me. "Mr. McKinney needs to talk to you, dear."

There was a pause
while Ellen left the room, and I decided to wait for her before going
on with any more questioning.