“He tried to. I told him no thanks. It’s one thing taking cash and answering questions, but being a spy is something else.”
I nodded. “Has he been back since?”
“Nope,” Rafe said, and then the phone rang in the glass booth and he picked it up and started talking. I made my way back up the ramp.
The closest of the gas stations was north, near an on-ramp to the FDR Drive. I was still feeling loose from my run and the rain was still soft, and I walked uptown and wondered all the way about who else was searching for Gregory Danes.
The station was on the corner, and a steady stream of cars pulled in and out, veering dangerously across many lanes of traffic as they did. It was not quiet. Besides the pumps there were two greasy repair bays with car lifts and a cramped store that sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, and soda. Jammed between the bays and the store was a filthy glassed-in office. It smelled of gasoline and cigars and dirty socks. I waited at a chest-high plywood counter for Frank to get off the phone.
Frank was black, about sixty and mostly bald, and he looked like he’d spent much of his life moving heavy things around. He was just under six feet, with a massive chest and shoulders and no neck to speak of. He wore a gray uniform shirt with an open collar, his name on the pocket, and the sleeves rolled up over beefy forearms. He hung up the phone and ran a hand over his broad, tired face.
“Let me see that again,” he said. I gave him the picture of Danes, and he fished a pair of half-glasses out of his pocket and peered at it. After a while he shrugged.
“He drives a black BMW Seven-fifty, if that helps,” I said. “An ’04.”
“I don’t know… maybe. He’s not one of my regulars- not one of my weekly guys- but I’ve seen him before.”
“You remember when the last time was?” He shook his head. “Were you here five weeks ago, around nine- thirty in the morning?”
Frank snorted. “Buddy, I own this place. If I’m not asleep, I’m here. But I don’t remember if he was in or not.”
“Would any of your guys remember?”
Frank laughed. “I’d be surprised but go ahead, knock yourself out.” Frank was right.
It was after five when I got home. My apartment was full of gray light and my head was full of questions. There was a phone message from Jane, telling me she had a dinner with the buyers that night, and another, from my brother Ned, reminding me of my nephew’s birthday party that weekend and telling me to expect some e-mail: three rA©sumA©s and a schedule of interviews.
Klein amp; Sons was in the market for a security director. Ned had tried to sell me on the job and wasn’t happy when I’d run in the opposite direction. In a momentary spasm of familial conciliation, I’d offered to interview the candidates on his short list. It was one of those good deeds that had certain punishment written all over it.
I checked my e-mail and found the rA©sumA©s there. I also found reports from the search services. I poured myself a cranberry juice and sat down to read them, wondering if they’d shed any light on where Gregory Danes had driven to when he’d driven off the map.
Peter Spiegelman
JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home
5
Richard Gilpin was calling himself Gilford Richards these days, at least at the esteemed investment firm of Morgan amp; Lynch of Fort Lee, New Jersey. His voice was deep and ripe with sincerity, but he went quiet when I used the name Gilpin and hung up when I said I was calling about his half brother, Gregory Danes.
Finding Gilpin hadn’t been hard; he was in the book, at an address somewhere in Englewood. I’d called that number and an answering machine there told me I’d reached the residence of Gilford Richards. I’d plugged Gilford Richards into a search engine and come up with Morgan amp; Lynch’s cheesy Web site. According to the site, Morgan amp; Lynch was a Cayman Islands company that operated half a dozen hedge funds- microcap stock and foreign equity funds mainly. They claimed steady growth in assets under management, and remarkable returns, and they made elaborate and incoherent statements about the mathematical models used to manage their investments. The whole thing reeked of Ponzi.
No one named Morgan or Lynch seemed to be associated with the firm, but Gilford Richards was listed as one of its principals. Richards’s CV was impressive but curiously failed to mention his earlier incarnation as Gilpin or his run-ins with the SEC. An oversight, no doubt. After five attempts, I gave up trying to reach him again, and resigned myself to a trip to Fort Lee. But not today.
Today, Dennis Turpin was on my calendar. I’d called Nina Sachs last night, to get approval to disclose her name to Turpin. It was a surprisingly painless experience. And from what I’d heard on the phone, the whole gestalt at Sachs’s place had taken a definite uptick.
Nina had answered. Her voice was light and her mood was expansive. There was music in the background, and Billy was laughing and calling to Ines.
“Come on, Nes, I put on that Miami shit you like.” He sang “Turn the Beat Around,” badly.
I told Nina about my talk with Turpin and about his offer to trade information, and she didn’t think long before agreeing.
“Hey, what the hell- they already know I’m looking for Greg.” She thought longer about my conversations with Christopher, the doorman, and Rafe, the garage attendant.
“It wasn’t the cops?” she asked after a while. She was quieter and worried.
“It doesn’t sound like them.”
“So, who then?”
“I was hoping you might have an idea.”
“Fuck, no. People from work, maybe?”
“Could be,” I had said. “Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow.”
I had some time until my afternoon meeting with Turpin- time enough for lunch and more phone calls. I punched Simone Gautier’s number.
She had no word for me yet on the hospitals and morgues, but that’s not why I was calling. I gave her Danes’s plate numbers and a description of his BMW and agreed on a fee to have her check out the longterm parking lots at Newark and LaGuardia and JFK. I’d already searched for Danes’s car in the NYPD’s online database of impounded vehicles and come up empty, and I didn’t hold out great hope for the longterm lots- Danes struck me as the type to use a car service for his airport trips- but I’d feel stupid if I missed something so obvious.
My next call was to Paul Gargosian, the vacationing doorman from Danes’s building. I’d found him in the book, too- the only Gargosian with an address on City Island, in the Bronx. Mrs. Paul Gargosian answered. She had a heavy Brooklyn accent, and she was friendly and forthcoming.
“Paulie’s away, hon, down in Sarasota the next couple weeks, with his brother, Jerry. They’re out on Jerry’s boat most of the time, and I don’t know when he’s going to call. You want to leave a number, maybe he’ll get back to you.” I gave her my number and thanked her.
Then I went to the kitchen, made two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread, and poured a tall glass of milk. I sat at my long table and opened up my laptop, picking up where I’d left off last night, reading the reports from the search services.
They held no easy answers. The apartment on 79th Street was Danes’s only real property; there was no weekend place in the Hamptons and no winter home in Florida; there was no summer cottage in Maine. He’d bought the apartment almost four years ago, and at the same time sold a place on 90th Street, in Carnegie Hill. He’d been in that place since the divorce, when he and Nina had agreed to sell the co-op they’d owned on Monroe Place, in Brooklyn Heights. And there was only the Beemer to look for; no other vehicles were registered to Danes, not in the fifty states anyway. There was, however, a long list of court cases and arbitration claims.
The search services had provided me with docket numbers, and now I was plowing through online court
