Sovitch had been having a thingand an ongoing thing, at that. If that was so, it would cast a different light on what Sovitch had said to me- and maybe explain her distinct lack of journalistic curiosity. I wouldn’t know until I had another chat with her, and maybe not even then. Maybe I’d find that the underwear belonged to someone else altogether. Maybe it belonged to Danes. I called Nina Sachs’s number and let it ring twelve times before I gave up.
Jane had called too. “I’ve got time off for good behavior tonight. Want to do something? I’ll ring when I’m ready to leave.”
I flicked on my stereo. WFUV was playing Freedy Johnston, but I wasn’t in the mood. I put a Ry Cooder disc in, something Cuban with guitars, poured a big glass of water, and carried it to the table. I took off my coat and emptied its pockets of souvenirs: my handwritten list of phone calls and messages, the business card, and the wrinkled collection of months-old documents- the bank statement, the brokerage statement, and the credit card bills.
I’d tried pressing Christopher for more current mail when I’d come downstairs, but he was no help, telling me only that Danes’s box was empty and his mail was being held at the post office. He hadn’t been completely useless, however, even if he was unwilling at first.
It had taken the threat of withholding the rest of his cash, and the suggestion that I might stick around and talk to the building super, to get Christopher to admit that this wasn’t the first time he’d sold access to Danes’s apartment. That had happened almost ten days earlier, he told me- the week before our first conversation- and the buyers were the same two nondescript guys he’d told me about before. But despite my arm-twisting, Christopher had continued to insist that he knew neither their names nor how to contact them. At least he was consistent. I drank some water, pushed up my sleeves, and picked up the bank statement.
It was six months old but illuminating nonetheless. For one thing, it explained why the lights were still working in Danes’s apartment. Most of his regular bills- for phone, cable, electricity, condo common charges, parking, even his maid service- were paid automatically, by direct debit from his checking account. His paychecks came in the same way, two times a month, fat and automatic. If his current balance was anything like the one he’d had six months ago, his cable service was assured for years to come.
For another, the statement rendered Nina Sachs’s concern for her ex-husband in concrete terms: six thousand a month in alimony and another six in child support. Nina would have to sell a lot of paintings to generate that kind of cash flow, and she would definitely notice when the check was late.
Danes’s brokerage statement covered roughly the same period as the bank statement. His portfolio was a conservative mix of stocks, corporate bonds, and government bonds, with a market value at the time in the high seven figures. The companies he owned were big household names, and there were none on the list that I recognized as technology firms. Buy-and-sell activity in the account was quite low.
None of that was particularly surprising; as head of research at Pace-Loyette, Danes’s personal investing would be constrained by layers of rules and regulations laid down by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Association of Securities Dealers, the New York Stock Exchange, and his own firm. His holdings would be subject to scrutiny by each of those parties, and every buy or sell order that he placed would require the prior approval of Pace’s compliance department. Active trading- short-term speculating as opposed to longer-term investing- would be difficult, if not altogether prohibited, and for all intents and purposes, he’d be barred from owning shares in the technology companies that his department issued reports on and maybe even in companies in the same industries.
I looked at the month-to-date and year-to-date returns calculated on the statement. Its lack of flash had not inoculated Danes’s portfolio against the vagaries of the market, and its performance, at least as of six months ago, was decidedly anemic.
A gust of wind sent pages flipping across my tabletop and I rose to shut some windows. Day was fading and the sky was pink and vaguely tropical looking. Sixteenth Street was in shadow. The sidewalks had filled and traffic was backed up behind a van parallel parking in a space across the street. It was a tight spot, but the van’s driver was deft and traffic was soon moving again. I worked the kinks from my neck and looked at the van. Its taillights went out but no doors opened. I rolled my shoulders and wondered what color it was. Gray? Silver? Light blue? It was impossible to tell in this light.
I sat down at the table again and slid Danes’s credit card bills over. They weren’t quite as old as the two statements but they weren’t current either, so there were no convenient, week-old charges from the Hideout Hilton or the like to be found in them. Scanning the pages, I saw that for the most part Danes took his meals on the Upper East Side, bought his clothes on Madison Avenue and his music on the Internet. But it wasn’t all eating and shopping. There was a three-month-old charge, over a weekend, from a pricey bed-and-breakfast in East Hampton. There was another charge, four months back, from an inn in Lenox, Massachusetts. And earlier that same month, there had been what looked like a weekend trip to Bermuda.
I stacked the credit card statements together and put them next to the bank and brokerage statements. Like them, these had been illuminating but not immediately useful. My eyes felt gritty and dry. I was tired of looking at numbers. I picked up the business card.
I’d never heard of Foster-Royce Research, but I assumed from the name that it was a stock research outfit or maybe a corporate headhunting firm. I found it on the Web and found that I was wrong.
Research was apparently a polite English way of saying private investigations. Foster-Royce was a London- based detective agency and, apparently, an up-market one. Besides its headquarters on Threadneedle Street, the firm had offices in Paris, Zurich, Madrid, Rome, Hong Kong, Toronto, and New York- all the better, I guessed, to support its self-proclaimed specialty in international assignments. According to its Web site, Foster-Royce investigators had broad experience with such outfits as Interpol, the Metropolitan Police, the Gendarmerie Nationale, the RCMP, the FBI, and others, and maintained deep local contacts in all the countries where Foster- Royce kept offices. They promised thoroughness, professionalism, integrity, and, of course, discretion. I hoped that last bit was just talk. The corporate directory told me Judith Pearson was assigned to the New York office and gave me the number.
Judith Pearson took my call without delay. She had a pleasant southern voice and a friendly manner, and she was discreet to the point of mute. She wouldn’t tell me if she’d ever met Gregory Danes or even heard his name before, much less admit that he was a client of Foster-Royce. But she did invite me to call her again if there was anything else she could help me with. Her good-bye was cheerful and self-satisfied. I sighed.
I got up and stretched and stood by the windows. The sky was dark now, and tinged with purple. The evening rush had merged seamlessly with the leading edge of the dinner crowd, and traffic was, if anything, worse. The streetlights were lit, and I saw the van still parked across the way.
I filled my water glass, turned on the television, and switched to BNN. Market Minds was on, and Linda Sovitch’s blond image filled the screen. She was saying something about housing starts and mortgage refinancings, and I turned the sound off and watched her full lips move and her blue eyes shift back and forth. She gestured with her left hand, and the big yellow diamond on her ring finger flashed under the studio lights. I thought of something I had read somewhere.
I opened my laptop and went online, back to LindaObsession. com. I found what I was looking for on the bio page: a mention of Sovitch’s marriage, ten years earlier, to real estate developer Aaron Lefcourt. It got just a single line- as if the Web site’s authors couldn’t bear to contemplate it any longer. It was the only reference to Lefcourt anywhere on the site, and I had to look elsewhere to learn more.
I didn’t have to look hard. Aaron Lefcourt, while not a household name, was by no means anonymous. For the last dozen years, he’d been CEO of Royal Court Development, a real estate company started by his father back in the sixties. When Aaron took over, Royal Court specialized in cheesy “vertical malls” in New York City’s poorer neighborhoods. Twelve years later, Royal Court had interests all over North America, including hotels, convention centers, golf courses, and ski resorts. According to a recent interview in BusinessWeek, Aaron had plans to expand into Asia and to take the company public “any day now.” According to a companion piece that ran alongside the interview, Lefcourt’s success in real estate was his second act. Before that, he had achieved a sort of fame in another sphere altogether- television.
Fourteen years earlier, Aaron Lefcourt had been an executive at AXE- one of the first of the upstart television networks- and a wunderkind in a business of wunderkinds. He’d developed such landmark series as Showmom, a sitcom about a kooky single mother, her smart-aleck teenage daughters, her lovable ex-con grandma, and her life as a Vegas showgirl, and Taggers, a drama about an attractive and racially diverse troupe of LA graffiti artists who
