'So?'
'So my father claimed the novel was his. He said that Raymond Lex stole it from him.'
'Jesus Christ.'
'No one believed him,' Stan added quickly. 'Like I said, he wasn't right in the head.'
'Yet you suddenly decided to investigate the family?'
'Yes.'
'And you're telling me that's just a coincidence? That your own investigation had nothing to do with your father's accusations?'
Stan leaned his head against the car window like a little kid longing for home. 'No one believed my father. That includes me. He was a sick man. Delusional even.'
'So?'
'So at the end of the day, he was still my father,' Stan said. 'Maybe I owed it to him to at least give him the benefit of the doubt.'
'Do you think Raymond Lex plagiarized your father?'
'No.'
'Do you think your father is still alive?'
'I don't know.'
'There has to be a connection here,' Myron said. 'Your story, the Lex family, your father's accusations—'
Stan closed his eyes. 'No more.'
Myron switched tracks. 'How did the Sow the Seeds kidnapper get in touch with you?'
'I never reveal sources.'
'Come on, Stan.'
'No,' he said firmly. 'I may have lost a lot. But not that part of me. You know I can't say anything about my sources.'
'You know who it is, don't you?'
'Take me home, Myron.'
'Is it Dennis Lex — or did the same kidnapper take Dennis Lex?'
Stan crossed his arms. 'Home,' he said.
His face closed down. Myron saw it. There would be no more give tonight. He took a right and started heading back. Neither man spoke again until Myron stopped the car in the front of the condominium.
'Are you telling the truth, Myron? About the bone marrow donor?'
'Yes.'
'This boy is someone close to you?'
Myron kept both hands on the wheel. 'Yes.'
'So there's no way you'll walk away from this?'
'None.'
Stan nodded, mostly to himself. 'I'll do what I can. But you have to trust me.'
'What do you mean?'
'Give me a few days.'
'To do what?'
'You won't hear from me for a little while. Don't let that shake your faith.'
'What are you talking about?'
'You do what you have to,' he said. 'I'll do the same.'
Stan Gibbs stepped out of the car and disappeared into the night.
Chapter 27
Greg Downing woke Myron early the next morning with a phone call. 'Nathan Mostoni left town,' he said. 'So I came back to New York. I get to pick up my son this afternoon.'
Goody-goody for you, Myron thought. But he kept his tongue still.
'I'm going to the Ninety-second Street Y to shoot around,' Greg said. 'You want to come?'
'No,' Myron said.
'Come anyway. Ten o'clock.'
'I'll be late.' Myron hung up and rolled out of bed. He checked his e-mail and found a JPEG image from Esperanza's contact at AgeComp. He clicked the file and an image slowly appeared on the screen. The possible face of Dennis Lex as a man in his mind to late thirties. Weird. Myron looked at the picture. Not familiar. Not familiar at all. Remarkable work, these age-enhanced images. So lifelike. Except in the eyes. The eyes always looked like the eyes of the dead.
He clicked on the print icon and heard his Hewlett-Packard go to work. Myron checked the clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Still early in the morning, but he didn't want to wait. He called Melina Garston's father.
George Garston agreed to meet Myron at his penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street, overlooking Central Park. A dark-haired woman answered the door. She introduced herself as Sandra and led him silently down the corridor. Myron looked out a window. He could see the Gothic outline of the Dakota all the way across the park. He remembered reading somewhere how Woody and Mia would wave towels from their respective apartments on either side of Central Park. Happier days, no doubt.
'I don't understand what you have to do with my daughter,' George Garston said to him. Garston wore a collared blue shirt nicely offset by a shock of white neck-to-chest hairs sprouting out like a troll doll's. His bald head was an almost perfect sphere jammed between two boulder-excuses for shoulders. He had the proud, burly build of a successful immigrant, but you could see that he'd taken a hit. There was a slump there now, the stoop of the eternally grieving. Myron had seen it before. Grief like his breaks your back. You go on, but you always stoop. You smile, but it never really reaches the eyes.
'Probably nothing,' Myron said. 'I'm trying to find someone. He may be connected to your daughter's murder. I don't know.'
The study was too-dark cherry-wood with drawn curtains and one lamp giving off a faint yellow glow. George Garston turned to the side, staring at the rich paisley wallpaper, showing Myron his profile. 'We've worked together once,' he said. 'Not us personally. Our companies. Did you know that?'
'Yes,' Myron said.
George Garston had made his fortune with a chain of Greek quasi-restaurants, the kind that work best as mall stands in crowded food courts. The chain was called Achilles Meals. For real. Myron had a Greek hockey player who endorsed the chain regionally, in the upper Midwest.
'So a sports agent is interested in my daughter's murder,' Garston said.
'It's a long story.'
'The police aren't talking. But they think it's her boyfriend. This reporter. Do you agree?'
'I don't know. What do you think?'
He made a scoffing noise. Myron could barely see his face anymore. 'What do I think?' he said. 'You sound like one of those grief counselors.'
'Didn't mean to.'
'Spewing all that sensitivity garbage. They're just trying to distract you from reality. They say they want you to face it. But really, it's the opposite. They want you to dig so far into yourself you won't be able to see how terrible your life is now.' He grunted and shifted in his chair. 'I don't have an opinion on Stan Gibbs. I never met him.'
'Did you know he and your daughter were dating?'
In the dark, Myron saw the big head silently go back and forth. 'She told me she had a boyfriend,' he said. 'She didn't tell me his name. Or that he was married.'
'You wouldn't have approved?'
'Of course I wouldn't have approved,' he said, trying to sound snappish, but he was beyond petty indignation.
