The James Deans Part 15

Wit liked that. "Okay, Moe it is."

Maybe because I had been ceded the flag, all the other attendees stopped by to reminisce. Two consistent themes emerged: Joe Spivack was one tough motherf.u.c.ker and loyal as any man who'd ever lived.

"Even last year when the company started taking on water, he wouldn't let any of us go," Ralph Barto, a fellow ex-marshal and former Spivack employee, wanted me to know. "Anybody else would have started throwing anything that wasn't nailed down overboard, but not Joe Spivack. Somehow, he pulled us through. Even when he shut us down, we all got two weeks' severance. I bet you it came out of his own pocket. I don't know what you did to deserve that flag, mister, but it must've been something special."

"Hey, do you know why he rated such a nice funeral?" I wondered.

"No. I know he was early in 'Nam, even before Kennedy was shot, but that's about it. Listen, I'm out on my own now," Barto said. "Here's my card. If you ever need backup, I'm there."

On the way back into the city I asked Wit if he thought there might be a story in Spivack's suicide.

"No story for me," he said, "but there might be one for you."

He didn't volunteer a further explanation and I didn't ask him for one. I had a comfortable life that needed getting back to.

Chapter Twelve.

SARAH'S THIRD BIRTHDAY had come and gone when the package from Florida arrived at the Brooklyn store. At first, I was as surprised by it as I had been by Joe Spivack's flag. Then I remembered that I had asked Moira's mother to send it up to me. Inside was a hodgepodge of the personal effects her mother had held on to during the nineteen months of her daughter's disappearance: pictures, a college ID, a ring of keys, her checkbook, some mail. Her mother had attached a handwritten note which included her good wishes that I find whatever it was I was looking for.

Although I considered it a blessing to have finally been involved in a case that I could hold at arm's length, I was daunted by my inability to make any emotional connection with Moira Heaton. I suppose I was saddened, too, by her inability to connect with people in life as she had in death. She would be remembered now, if only through the scholarship that bore her name. It had seemed painfully important at the time, just after the case had come to a head, to somehow discover the essence of Moira Heaton. Six or so weeks had surely numbed the ache, but I flipped through her things anyway.

I don't know what I had expected to find when I asked to see these things. Whatever it was, it continued to elude me. Flipping through her checkbook ledger, I did find one entry from a few weeks prior to her murder that got my attention: CK NO. DATE CODE TRANSACTION PAYMENT/DEBIT.

426 11/7/81 HNJ 1956 Headlines Search, Inc. 115.00 It stuck out for several reasons, not the least of which was the size of the check. After her rent, this was the biggest check she'd written in months. What could be so important to a woman making barely ten grand a year, I wondered, that she'd be willing to spend almost half a month's rent on it? Second, Moira was nothing if not consistent. She wrote the same checks for roughly the same amounts in the same order for months at a time. There was her rent, her phone bill, her electric, her student loan, and an occasional check written to the local supermarket. Page after page had the same entries, then, a few weeks before she disappears, bang! Naturally, I was curious about exactly what goods and/or services Headlines Search, Inc., had provided to Moira for her money. I didn't waste the time guessing and let my fingers do the walking.

"Media Search, Inc.," a woman answered, "how can we help you?"

"Was your firm once known as-"

"-Headlines Search, Inc.?" she completed the question. "Yes, sir. We are in the process of making the changeover, but unfortunately some of our ads continue to display our former name."

"What is it you do, exactly?"

"Why, are you from Dun and Bradstreet or something?"

"No, no, nothing like that. I'm actually a private investigator and I'm looking into a missing-wife thing," I lied casually. "I'm going through her financial records and I see she wrote a check to you guys about twenty months ago. I guess I'm just curious."

"Oh, you're an investigator. We do a lot of work with you guys."

"That's great, but it doesn't tell me what kinda work that is," I said, letting her hear a hint of impatience.

"Sorry. My name's Judith Resnick, by the way."

"Moe Prager."

"Well, Moe, as our name implies, we do searches. You give us a locale, a date, a subject, any sort of reference, and we'll look through the search area's media and collect related materials. Let's say a freelance reporter is relocating from out of state and he has to do catch-up on local politics. He names some names and we search available archives for his info. It saves him a lot of time and legwork. For years after my dad founded the company, we only did newspaper searches. These days we've expanded to include radio and television as well. We even have computer hookups to libraries and a few police departments. Only public-record stuff, of course."

"Hence the name change."

"You got it, Moe."

"Sounds fascinating."

"Sometimes. Sometimes it could bore you to tears. Depends on the search."

"Makes sense," I agreed. "How comprehensive are your searches?"

"Again, that depends."

"On?"

"The parameters the client sets and the depth of his or her pockets."

"How'd I know you were going to say that?"

"Because you're a perceptive man," she said with a bit of flirt in her voice.

"Which only an obviously perceptive woman would spot. How big a search would a hundred and fifteen bucks have bought me two years ago?"

"Sounds like a limited-area-old-newspaper search. Something like a search for stories about how the influenza epidemic in the teens affected Des Moines, Iowa. See what I mean?"

"I get it. Listen, Judith, if I give you a reference number, could you-"

"Sorry, Moe, no can do. Confidentiality is as important to us as to you. And even if I were inclined to break the rules, I couldn't help you. The warehouse we store our old records in was gutted by fire about a year ago."

"Fair enough, but can you at least tell me if the reference number is one of yours or not?"

"Sure."

"HNJ1956."

"It's not one of ours. We don't use letters in our system, and our file numbers all have at least six digits. Sounds more like a license plate number. I wish I could be more helpful."

"Thanks anyway. One more question before I let you go, okay? And it's kind of goofy."

"Sure."

"What would a package from your firm look like?"

"That's not so goofy," Judith a.s.sured me. "You'd get a tasteful brown envelope stuffed with dated newspaper clippings and/or photocopies thereof. It's that simple. We don't do any a.n.a.lysis. We just provide source material."

I thanked her and asked that she mail me some material about her company. I thought I might have use for her services someday, and if not, I knew a journalist or two who might be interested. Okay, I had some answers, but they were the kinds of answers which led only to more questions. Moira Heaton had spent a chunk of money to have a company search old newspapers. What about and where those newspapers were located were still unknown to me. And what on earth did that reference number on the notation line in Moira's checkbook mean? Was Judith Resnick right? Was it a tag number? If so, from where? The biggest question of all remained: Did the search, whatever it was for, have the slightest significance in the scheme of things? Moira was dead, and nothing was going to change that.

I called Rob Gloria over at One Police Plaza and asked him to run HNJ1956 in all fifty states. I was careful not to mention the connection to Moira Heaton. Cops like their beer cold and their cases closed. They want nothing to do with poking around in the past, especially when their promotions are based on old, closed cases. I needed to be very careful with Larry Mac and Rob, so I lied to Gloria about this being a liability case. He said he was glad to run the tag number for me, but that it would take a while. I knew it would.

My next call went to Sandra Sotomayor at Senator Brightman's community affairs office. She was in a very upbeat mood these days, and why not? She'd hitched her cart to a man whose potential could now finally be realized. When Brightman moved into the governor's mansion in Albany or the Senate Office Building in D.C., there was bound to be a high-level position and a fat paycheck waiting with Sandra's name on it.

"Mr. Prager, how good to hear from you."

"Thank you. Things pretty busy these days in the Brightman camp?"

"Busy, yes, but good busy. If you know what I mean?"

"I do. Listen, Sandra, Moira's family has asked me to do a little research on her. You know, they're curious about how she spent her last few months, what kind of stuff she was working on. I guess they want to feel she wasn't wasting her time. I'm sure you understand."

"Absolutely, Mr. Prager. I'll be happy to help you any way I can."

"Does the reference number HNJ1956 mean anything to you? Could it be a file number related to Moira's work?"

"Sorry. That number don't match anything in our office. Sounds like a license plate, no?"

Well, we were building a consensus on the license plate theory, but not much else.

"Sandra, what kind of work was Moira doing before-Was it anything that required her to do private research?"

"I'm not sure I understand. All research we do is for the people who live in our district and is funded through our budget. Now if Moira was doing some related research on her own, I would have no way of knowing that."

"Okay, Sandra, thanks a lot. Do you think if I needed to, I could come down one day and look over the stuff Moira was working on when she disappeared?"

"It's pretty boring stuff, but sure. Anything for you, Mr. Prager. You're a big hero around here."

Sandra was nice enough, but she needed a major priority readjustment. I was no hero. Heroes rescued people, not political careers.

Two pitches, two strikes. I was way behind in the count. I tried Moira's mom down in Florida. She, too, was glad to hear from me and asked if the package she'd sent had done me any good. I told her it was too soon to tell. I asked about Moira's apartment in the months after she disappeared. I wondered who cleaned it, who picked up her mail. She explained that she could never bring herself to clean the place. She thought it bad luck.

"We paid Moira's rent for the first year," she said, her voice quivering. "John and I took turns with the other stuff like collecting her mail. Why, is there something in particular you're interested in?"

"A large brown envelope from a company called Headlines Search, Inc. I know it's a long shot, but-"

"Would it have been filled with newspaper clippings?"

I couldn't believe my luck. "That's the one."

"What about it?"

"Do you remember what the clippings were about or where they were from?" I asked, gripping the phone hard enough to crack it.

"I'm sorry, but no, Mr. Prager. I don't think I even looked at them when I saw what they were. They were just old newspapers to me."

"That's okay. You had a lot on your mind."

"Is it important?"

"To tell you the truth," I confessed, "I don't know. I guess I'm just really curious about Moira and maybe those clippings could have told me something. That's all."

"Maybe you should talk to John. He might know what happened to that envelope. I don't remember throwing it out or anything."

I tried the reference number on her and she voted for the license plate theory as well. We said our good-byes, each wishing the other well.

Well, I hadn't struck out. Not yet, anyway. There was a package. It had clippings in it. Where it had gotten to, however, was now to be added to the mystery list. I picked up the phone to call Brightman and put it immediately back in its cradle. Maybe Moira was working on a special project for him, but Brightman, I realized, would be even less interested in me stirring up the ashes of this case than either Rob Gloria and Larry Mac. The cops had only been promoted in rank, while Brightman was on the threshold of political beatification.

KATY WAS INTRIGUED as to why I was begging off dinner, but she knew not to press me on it. I promised to fill her in when I got home. Aaron, on the other hand, would not be so easily placated. It was one thing to have me miss work in order to save the business. It was something else again to have me blow off work to go chasing mysteries of my own creation. And that's what this was, a creation of my own curiosity. Moira's confessed murderer would be safely behind bars until the Second Coming. Ivan Alfonseca had been meticulously detailed about the whys and hows of his crimes against Moira. So there was nothing about this missing package of news clippings that would shine any new light on Moira's death. Enough light had been shined there, anyway. I guess I was hoping the package would shine a little light on her life.

Adonis was back at the door at Glitters. He remembered my face, waving me in without even bothering to ask for the ten-buck cover. I'm not sure I liked that. It's one thing to get a free pa.s.s at Madison Square Garden or the Metropolitan Opera. It's quite another to get one at a third-rate strip joint in Times Square. Hopefully, I wouldn't be making any more return trips and I'd be removed from the most-favored-clientele list.

John Heaton was at the bar, and one didn't need blood work to tell he was hammered. Either the rules about drinking on the clock had changed or he was done with his shift. Under almost any other set of circ.u.mstances, I would have avoided further contact with him. Frankly, I didn't much like him, and my distaste for the man had only worsened since the confession. Whereas the news about Moira had come as a sad relief to Moira's mother and given her some sense of closure, it had had quite the opposite effect on John Heaton's already charming personality. If anything, it had shortened his fuse and made his drinking worse-not a good thing for him or anyone else. He'd shown up to Moira's memorial plastered out of his gourd with Domino in tow, nearly coming to blows with a reporter.

"Well, look who it is," he sneered, waving his scotch at me. "Tawny, pour the man a Dewar's."

My initial reaction was to refuse the offer, but if I was going to get him to talk to me, I couldn't afford to p.i.s.s him off, at least not right away. I noticed Heaton kept looking at the empty stool to his right. There was an unfinished beer and a half-smoked cigarette burning in an ashtray in front of the empty stool. Domino's stuff, I supposed.

"Thanks for the drink." I accepted it with a smile and a nod.

"So what the f.u.c.k are you doing here?"

"I wanted to-"

"You wanted to what?" He raised his voice, edging forward on his stool.

"To ask you-"

Now he was up and in my face. "Ask me what?"

"Why don't you sit back down, John?"

"f.u.c.k you. You and your f.u.c.kin' friends all made fistfuls a cash off my daughter's bones. What, you come sniffin' around to see if you could pick up some spare change?"

"Why don't you shut your mouth and look in the mirror, Heaton? I just came here to ask you a question about a package Moira re-"

He grabbed my shirt, balling my collar inside his fists. "See, I f.u.c.kin' knew it. You and your buddies-"

"This has nothing to do with my buddies, John, so leave them out of it. Now if you don't take your f.u.c.kin' hands off me, I'm gonna have to-"

He didn't wait to hear the end of my threat and let go of my collar with his right hand. That wasn't necessarily a good thing given he still had hold of me with his left. He c.o.c.ked his right arm, but because most of his red blood cells had been replaced by scotch, his movements were slow and c.u.mbersome. The punch, however, was quick enough, his knuckles grazing my cheek as I forced my head against his restraining hand. If he hadn't still been holding on to my collar, I might have been able to avoid the punch altogether. The near miss just p.i.s.sed him off, rage twisting his face into something ugly and barely recognizable as human. He reared back, but never got the second punch off. The cavalry had arrived in the body of Preacher "the Creature" Simmons.

"What the f.u.c.k you think you doin', John?" Simmons's voice cut a wide swath through the din and darkness. His ma.s.sive hands locked on to John Heaton's shoulders. Heaton, no shrimp himself, looked like a scale-model human against the backdrop of Preacher's six-eight frame. I was suddenly very happy the empty barstool hadn't belonged to Domino.

"Thanks," I said, rubbing my neck where Heaton's left fist had dug into my flesh.

"What you want?" Preacher asked impa.s.sively.