Nice Place for a Murder (19 page)

“Not so hard with the hammer,” Alicia said. “You break the meat.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“These things you do are life and death,” Alicia said. “Who else even attempts such things? Who could do them better than you?”

“I could,” I said. “Fifteen years ago. Even five years ago. I’m not what I was. I don’t have the edge any more. The bad guys are getting ahead of me. I’m not thinking smart and I can’t run fast. Actually, I can’t run at all.”

“But it’s not over yet.” Now she took the two pots of calamari off the stove, put the shrimp on to boil. “Sometimes you don’t win right away, no. But in the end, yes.”

“I shouldn’t have to be dealing with this,” I said. “The thing is, I got out of this business. They keep dragging me back in. I don’t want to be in. I want to be out.”

“Yes, you should be out. I keep telling you. But right now, today, you are in. That’s the fact of it.” She held out her wine glass and I refilled it. “You don’t give in now, not in the middle,” she said, and turned back to the stove.

The veal was properly flattened now, and I took the scallops from between the sheets of plastic wrap. I ran out of things to respond to Alicia, and the whole world got uncomfortably quiet. I went into the living room and put a CD on the stereo, to fill up the empty spaces. I thought Errol Garner’s “Concert by the Sea” would lighten the mood, but the happy drive of Garner’s jazz piano was at such odds with how I felt, it didn’t do the trick. Not for me, anyway. But I let it play.

When I came back to the kitchen, Alicia had chilled the calamari and shrimp in icy water, and was assembling her seafood salad. She cut the squid bodies into rings and bathed them, together with the tentacles and chunks of shrimp, in a bowl of vinaigrette sauce, then with a slotted spoon divided the pieces between two serving plates. She did the same with lump crabmeat, and finally with lobster meat. She put a big lemon wedge and a sprig of parsley on each plate. Nothing more. It couldn’t have been simpler, but all you had to do was look at it and you knew it would inspire awe in anyone lucky enough to get some.

“We eat the salad of the sea now,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table. “The veal will take a few minutes, only.”

I refilled Alicia’s glass and my own, and sat -- guiltily, because I hadn’t ventured to speak for so long. I began on my seafood.

After a moment, Alicia said, “So? How is it?”

“I can’t find the right word,” I said. “Sublime doesn’t do it justice. Remarkable is an understatement. I think this may just be the best thing to eat in the entire solar system.”

“It pleases you. Good.” She raised her glass in a salute to me. That was a signature gesture of hers, to toast at every opportunity. Then, quietly, “You are a success. You built a business, and served clients well. It’s true you are not a young man any more, and for that I am grateful. Young men don’t know anything. You have the wisdom and the thoughtfulness of middle age. You know a great deal. And running? Why should you run, anyway? Fools run.”

“You know, it’s women like you who turn ordinary men into kings,” I said.

“You are no ordinary man.”

“Look, you’ve said to me that I should tell Teague to go to hell, just walk away, and whatever happens, happens,” I said. “Of course, what will happen is, he’ll find a way to stop paying me. You said you don’t care, that the gallery makes more than we need.”

“Yes. I said it and I meant it.”

“I haven’t decided, you understand. Just wanted to make sure you meant it.”

“I did then, but I don’t now.”

“Oh?”

“It amazes you,” she said. “So let me tell you why I say this. I know in my heart you mustn’t walk away from this thing with the big company now. You think you made mistakes, and maybe you did, but you haven’t lost, because it’s not finished. But if you leave now, it will be on your mind forever that you left because you failed. The money from the gallery won’t be because of love. It will be because of failing. You understand? If you lose your edge, as you say, you don’t give up. You find it again.” She leaned back in her chair, and with a wave of her hand, she said, “When this is all over, then we talk about how you tell Teague to go to hell.”

For a long moment, I could only look at her and smile. Finally I said, “I feel better already,” I said. “Did I tell you this seafood is marvelous?”

“You said you couldn’t find a word to describe it.”

“I found one.”

We finished our seafood down to the last shreds of crabmeat, and Alicia cleared the dishes. “Now the veal,” she said.

She heated some oil in a big sauté pan, dredged the veal scallops in flour and browned them quickly on both sides. Removing the scallops to a serving platter, she turned the heat all the way up on the sauté pan and added broth and Marsala wine, plus a generous chunk of butter. “A lot of butter, I know,” she said, with a shamefaced wince. “But just this once, OK?” She stirred the mixture as it bubbled, and seasoned it with salt and pepper when it had thickened slightly.

She poured the sauce over the veal. You could have taken a picture of it for one of those high-priced cookbooks.

We attacked the veal, mopping up the sauce with chunks of crusty bread.

“This is also a marvelous dish,” Alicia said. “I think we are attracted to each other because we do so well together in the kitchen.” She smiled her naughty smile. “Now you are supposed to say we’re good in the bedroom, too.”

“So you’re doing your lines, and mine, too,” I said.

“Look, this man who ran away from you today, can you find him again? He had to come from someplace.”

“He says he’s a doctor. Worked at a hospital in Utica. I was thinking I’d make a call, start there.”

“Good,” she said. “I know I have said too much already. But now you will forgive me if I tell you just one more thought. OK?”

“Say what you think.”

“It seems to me you fight this battle all by yourself. These people in the Julian company, they aren’t on your side. Teague isn’t on your side, either. It’s only you against everybody else.”

“You’re on my side.”

“Always. But I can’t run very well, either. And I don’t have a gun. But Wally, he’s a younger man, and smart. And he’s your friend. I think you must ask him to help you.”

“He has helped me,” I said.

“Then he must help you more. Just my thinking, that’s all.”

“Should we clean up the dishes?”

“One more thing, first.”

“You said the last thing was the last thing.”

“I lied. Now I want to see if a good meal has improved your kissing.”

She said it had.

CHAPTER XXI

Roger Teague used to say to me, “Why do you have such a morbid devotion to the truth?” He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t as dedicated to lying as he was. In Teague’s view of the world, lying was the stock-in-trade of investigators and security professionals, and he took absolute joy in deceiving people, often for the most obscure reasons, or no reason at all. He did it, I always thought, just to prove he was above the truth. He believed whatever he was doing somehow justified any lie he cared to tell.

So it wasn’t so much on moral grounds that it troubled me to lie. Compared to all the really nasty sins there are in the world, lying is often minor stuff. No, lying bothered me — a little, though not enough to stop me when I had to — because in my mind it tended to put me into the same low-life league as Teague. I would rather be compared to Vlad the Impaler.

Beside, the truth has, as they say, a ring to it. People recognize it when they hear it. Bullshit tends to smell, even from a distance. In my experience, people tend to believe me when I tell them the truth. Maybe it’s the sincerity in my voice. Or maybe it’s my homely face.

In any case, I felt telling the truth was likely to be my best shot at learning the whereabouts of Dr. James Giannone. That is, if I had any shot at all. If he really had been at Utica General Hospital as he claimed, that institution might take a dim view of releasing information about him, especially over the phone. Hospitals are sticky about matters of confidentiality. My strategy was to give them the real story, and impress them with my concern.

I told it as clearly as I could, stressing that Giannone was about to stumble into a dangerous situation. But the personnel director was not inclined to be patient. “What does this have to do with the hospital?” she kept asking with a raspy voice, once, twice, three times. I reviewed it for her again, while she continued to dispute, and in the end she responded with a long surge of liquid throat-clearing. As I listened to the spatter, I could picture an overweight lady at a messy desk, drinking coffee and hoping to sneak outside soon for a cigarette. “There’s no James Giannone here now,” she said, when she finally recovered.

“I know he’s not there. I thought you might have a forwarding address for him, someplace where I could contact him and tell him he’s at risk.”

“Well, wait a minute,” she said. I heard her walking away, clearing her throat all the while, and then the sound of a file drawer opening and closing from across the room. “He left here three years ago,” she allowed, when she returned. “That was before I came here. Can’t tell you more than that.”

“Didn’t he leave a forwarding address?”

“We don’t give out information about our people.” She said it as if she’d suddenly remembered a hospital rule. I was beginning to get the feeling she was sitting there with Giannone’s file open in front of her, looking at information that made her uneasy.

“James Giannone is in danger. I must find him.”

“You should send us a letter,” she said, without conviction.

“I understand your wanting to keep information confidential,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble. Maybe there’s somebody else who could approve this. There’s a lot at stake here for Dr. Giannone.”

“Dr. Waldrup is the only one,” she said. “Chief of staff. I report to him.”

“Fine. Can I speak to him?”

“He’s not here this morning,” she said, tidying up her throat again, with great determination. “He’ll be in his office at noon.”

“I’ll call.”

“No, let me ask him to call you. I’ll explain it to him.”

Don’t push any harder or I’ll spook her, I told myself. There are no more options. “That’s very kind of you. I’ll wait for his call.” And I gave her my number, fearing a callback would never happen.

But it did. By the sound of him, Dr. Waldrup was the big daddy of hospital chiefs of staff, with an Alabama drawl that made me wonder what he was doing in upstate New York. And there he was returning my message at 12:15, as a decent gentleman would, and anybody else might or might not.

“You want to know about Jim Giannone,” he said. “What are you, the
police?
” Emphasis on the first syllable.

“Dr. Waldrup, did you hear about the killer on Long Island who ambushed a ferry boat right out on the water and shot a man to death. It was on the news.”

“Read about it in the paper. Hell of a story.”

“I’m Ben Seidenberg, an investigator. I was on that ferry.”

“You the private detective? You the one who shot at the fella in the other boat?”

“Yes.”

“And missed.”

“Yes, I did,” I admitted. “Look, the killing on the ferry wasn’t just some random thing. I’m convinced it was part of a complicated plot. And James Giannone is about to blunder right into the middle of it. He doesn’t know it, but if he gets mixed up in this, it could cost him his life. I have to find him and keep him away.”

“This doesn’t make sense to me. How did Giannone get involved in this, anyway?”

“All I know is that it probably had something to do with a patient in your hospital years ago. That same person was on the ferry. He was with the man who got shot,” I told Waldrup. “Giannone thinks he knows something valuable, and he’s looking for a payoff. I can’t be certain what he thinks he knows. But I am sure James Giannone is unstable, and an easy mark for people who don’t mind killing.”

“You’ve met Giannone, then?”

“Once, yesterday,” I said. “He was totally unbalanced. He said there were ferrets chasing him. He slipped away from me, and I don’t know where to find him. And now I’m afraid he’s headed for a disaster. You’re my last hope. Please help me find him.”

“How do I know you are who you say you are? Maybe you’re the one wants to make trouble for him.”

“Tell you what, Dr. Waldrup. I’m calling from my home in Greenport, New York. I’ll hang up. Then you call information and get the number for Ben Seidenberg. You ring that number, and I’ll answer. Is that fair?”

“All right, then. I believe you. I sure wouldn’t want anything to happen to Jim. He’s been through enough. They’ll never let him be a doctor, you know.”  He took a long pause, and I could feel the climate shift from positive to negative. “But you understand we don’t turn over information, just like that. I mean, no matter what the background, what the circumstances — never mind what Jim’s been through.” He was talking in code. There was something behind Giannone’s departure from the hospital that he didn’t want to spill. But it was in there someplace.