Pardon my intrusion into your life but my name is Beatrice Summers and I believe that I have very important information for you. We are not unknown to each other. When you met me I was going by the name Nathali Malcolm. I fooled you into believing that I was the victim of a cruel man, seduced you, and then blamed you for sexual assault. You have always been in my mind since that time. I was forced to entrap you by a policeman named Adamo Cortez. He came to me after I’d been arrested with a large amount of cocaine and I was facing a long prison sentence. But since then I moved to Saint Paul, got off drugs and into a Christian community that knew my sins and forgave them. I am now married with two beautiful children and a wonderful husband from whom I hide nothing. We, Darryl and I, discussed what I had done to you and we agreed that I should write and offer to come back to New York and testify on your behalf. We were both sinners, Mr. Oliver, but I believe that you have paid for your transgressions while I have not. Below you will find my home phone number. I am a stay-at-home mother and housewife these days and there’s an answering machine. I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours in Christ,
Beatrice Summers
Reading that letter I felt both numb and jittery. I knew, of course, that there had been a conspiracy behind my arrest, but it was so well done and I had come so close to being locked in a cell forever that I let that truth fade until it was almost completely hidden behind the memory of those prison walls.
But here was an answer to a question that I was afraid to ask; afraid because I didn’t want to go back into that cell. I didn’t want to, but there was the evidence right there in my hand…right there.
The unstable mixture of rage and fear caused me to raise my head just as Representative Bob Acres was opening the back door of the hired transport.
I am a lifelong Democrat, as my father and his father had been. Bob Acres was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, but I would have cast my ballot for him right then. His appearance purged the past for a moment, allowing me to concentrate.
The limo made its way to the West Side Highway and then through to the Holland Tunnel. We crossed the state line somewhere under the Hudson River, but it was a short trip.
Exiting in Jersey City, New Jersey, the limo took the first right and pulled into the parking lot of the Champagne Hour Motel on Clarkson. I stopped across the street and snapped pictures with my high-resolution digital camera. The first-floor rooms’ doors opened onto the parking lot. Through the high-powered lens I saw Acres entering room number thirty-nine.
The limo drove off.
I waited seven minutes, then drove into the lot, parked, and went to the glass-encased office, which had a high pink desk, turquoise walls, and a ceiling paved with glittering red tiles. Behind the high counter stood a lovely young black woman with thick braids of dark brown and cherry red. Her face was broad, but there was no smile attending her beauty.
I had my go bag at my side. It might have been a travel bag.
“Good evening,” I said.
“Hello,” she replied without a hint of welcome.
I was glad to see her despondence. Happiness rarely wants to do business with a man in my trade.
I put a hundred-dollar bill down on the desk and said, “I have fond memories of rooms thirty-seven and forty-one.”
“That ain’t enough,” she said, sneering at the bill. “It’s a hundred eighteen dollars a night.”
“That’s for you,” I said, putting two more C-notes next to the one I’d already dropped. “This is for the room.”
She smiled, said “Forty-one is free,” and I secretly cheered for my country, where, over and over again, the almighty dollar proves its superiority.
There were a few sounds coming through the wall from thirty-nine. I opened my bag and took out a small hand drill with a one-eighth-inch bit. The device was almost silent, and when I just tapped the diamond-crusted bit every second or so against the locked door that connected the two rooms, there was hardly even a whine.
My room was dark, and when the light of thirty-nine shone through I took the surgical fiber-optic lens from my bag, connected it to the all-purpose digital camera, and then attached the camera to my iPad. I threaded the laser-wire lens through the hole and an image of what can only be called matchless debauchery filled the screen.
The pair of transgender prostitutes must have been waiting for him. The three of them were already naked and erect. I watched the play closely, mostly to avoid thinking about the intelligence that Beatrice Summers had bestowed.
The T-girls were good at their job. They played feminine very well.
Bob, for his part, was passionate and very, very happy.
I got about three and a half hours of video before the alcohol-and drug-induced mini-orgy was over. I waited until everyone from room thirty-nine had showered, dressed, and departed; then I went to bed with the most important item in my detective’s bag of tricks—a small silver flask filled with twenty-year-old hundred-proof bourbon.
My dreams were of solitary confinement and the iron rod I dropped while being dragged from that cell. In the nightmare I was beating Mink’s face in with the most powerful, the most satisfying blows I had ever delivered.
5.
I woke up at 11:07 by the digital clock next to the bed. The hangover was mild considering what it might have been. The room wasn’t spinning; it merely shook. And my head ached only if I moved it too quickly or looked directly into the light.
It was at least ten minutes before I even remembered Beatrice/Nathali’s letter. But there was no time to think about that. I got up so late I had to hurry if I wanted to get to the Gucci Diner in time.
My cell phone sounded halfway through the Holland Tunnel. I put it on speaker and said, “Yes?”
“Daddy?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school, A.D.?”
“It’s passing period and I wanted to tell you that I made an appointment for you and a woman named Willa Portman for four o’clock today. I sent you a text, but sometimes you don’t read them.”
“What’s the meeting about?”
“She wants to hire you to do some investigative work.”
“What kind?”
“She didn’t say, but she seemed nice.”
“On the phone?”
“Uh-uh. She walked in.”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
“See you then. I love you, Daddy.”
Between the headache, midday Manhattan traffic, and trying to compose the speech I had to deliver, there wasn’t much time to consider Beatrice Summers and the danger her confession might pose.
The Gucci Diner was pretty far over on the east side of Fifty-Ninth Street. It was a family-owned restaurant that had been there for decades. I knew the place because my father liked going there when he and my mother were still a couple. The patriarch, Lamberto Orelli, had the foresight to buy the three-story building, and so far no big-time real estate offer could buy them out. I parked my car in a lot and went to a bus-stop bench across the street—there to sit and wait. I wondered if I could somehow forget the letter, Beatrice, and Adamo Cortez (whoever he was). Maybe if I waited long enough, the rage and fear would subside again, leaving me to help raise my daughter and follow upstanding perverts back and forth across state lines.
There was aspirin in the go bag, bottled water too, but I preferred to feel the discomfort. It seemed an appropriate response to who and what I was.
Bob Acres showed up at exactly a quarter past one. He went to his usual table and sat down with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Daily News.
I allowed him to order and be served before jaywalking to the front door of Gucci’s and through to the politician’s table. I sat without invitation and looked into my quarry’s eyes.
“Yes?” he said.
“Who told you that you were being followed?”
Acres opened his mouth but did not speak.
“I mean,” I said, “that’s the only reason you’d put your lights on a timer just this week.”
I liked Bob. He was a deviant and a Republican to boot, but we all had our dark sides. I would have been a murderer if I hadn’t fumbled that iron rod.
“Who hired you?” Bob asked.
Instead of answering I took out the iPad, played around a bit, and handed him a screen showing a full page of thumbnail stills that I’d sorted out while he got fucked.
He worked his way through the photographs, studying each one. There was no expression I could read. This made me think that he’d probably won at that poker game he attended.
“Who hired you to take these?” he asked, looking up.
I liked the guy.
“She said her name was Cynthia Acres,” I replied.
That made his eyelids tighten.
“Cindy?” He might have been a child registering his mother’s first betrayal.
“That’s what she said, but when I looked into it I found out she was a ringer sent in through a third party to gather dirt on you for Albert Stoneman.”
“So it wasn’t my wife?”
“No. Not love, but politics as usual.”
“So Stoneman hired you.”