Chapter Eight: KNUCKLING DOWN

I powered up my laptop computer, unplugged my phone, and switched the line over to my modem. I logged onto the Internet and brought up a search engine.

I started by searching on some of the names I’d come across so far. I began with Sayre Rauth.

Nothing.

I next tried Rauth Realty in Manhattan.

Again nothing.

I tried words at random, typing in “spinach manifold,” and got six hits. So the search engines were working, if not properly, at least to form.

Next I typed in, “Paul Windmann.” I got several results, but none that were relevant. Most of them pertained to a Water Board commissioner in Melbourne, Australia. There was even a picture of the guy, a dark-complexioned man in his late fifties.

I was beginning to feel like I was wasting my time, so I typed in a name I knew would at least get me some direct results. Law Addison.

This time I got thousands of hits, which presented the new problem of too much information—Forbes and Vanity Fair magazine articles before his arrest, newspaper articles after, Lincoln Center patrons lists, SEC filings, miscellanreous blogs—forcing me to skim and put my Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics to work.

Lawrence Addison, age 39…born in Taunton, Massachusetts…attended Boston University… worked in now-defunct Boston-based brokerage firm as a financial analyst before starting Isolde Enterprises, a financial management firm based in Manhattan…a roster of A-list celebrities as clients, supporting his intoxicating international lifestyle…“Stockbrokerage is as much an art as painting a picture or writing a sonnet,” said Addison in a recent…adhering to a conservative investment strategy… $100,000 on corporate credit cards for airline tickets… trips to Rome, Switzerland, Bahamas… $80,000 sky-blue Mercedes-Benz… avid opera buff…$20,000 donation to Lincoln Center Performing Arts… web of fraud… over 100 wrongfully endorsed checks from client accounts… unapproved transfers… deposited funds in Isolde’s corporate bank accounts… mingling personal expenses and the firm’s operating costs… managed 250 portfolios… assets with a market value of over $2 billion… among those who trusted Addison with millions… star-studded clientele included Oscar winners, rock musicians… allegedly paid complaining clients with funds siphoned from other clients’ accounts… were said to be held in escrow, trust, or sub accounts, but Isolde had no escrow, trust, or sub accounts… Ponzi-type scheme… Manhattan federal grand jury indictment… separate civil action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission… forensic accounting probe revealed… MONEY GURU TO THE STARS ARRESTED… faces up to 20 years in prison on three federal counts stemming from his alleged… prosecutor argues flight risk… Addison released on a $2 million bond… CELEBRITY BROKER SKIPS BAIL, MAY 11… fugitive thought to be in the company of the wife of one of his former clients…

All of it seemed useless until one name sprang out at me. Michael Cassidy.

I scrolled back. Estranged wife of one of Isolde’s former clients, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ethan Ore, Ms. Michael Cassidy was Law Addison’s live-in lover at the time of his disappearance and was thought to have fled with him.

Ms. Michael Cassidy.

I started a new search, typing in “Michael Cassidy.”

Again, there were thousands of results. Some were for a male actor by that name, but more for the woman. She was famous, apparently. Hundreds of jpeg images of her, and though the hairstyle and coloring were different, I recognized her from the first shot. Those crazy green eyes were unmistakable. She was the woman from Owl’s hotel room.

I clicked on her bio. Her father was Kimble Cassidy, lead singer of the ’70s rock band Leavenworth. She was the child of his third marriage, this one to a back-up singer he met on the band’s fourth reunion tour. He died of a brain aneurysm when she was eleven.

In the mid-1990s, she’d risen to what passes for fame nowadays as part of a reality TV show featuring children of dead celebrities, and gained notoriety from two drug busts on heroin possession, which got her booted from the program.

Shortly thereafter, Michael Cassidy met and married a young actor and wannabe Orson Welles by the name of Ethan Ore. Ore subsequently rose to fame of his own for writing and directing an independent film called Dazey Miller.

I checked the IMDB listing and read the synopsis: “Daughter of has-been rock star gets turned onto drugs by members of her father’s band and becomes a call-girl in Milwaukee until a Rwandan cab driver helps her get clean.”

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay that year, but it didn’t win. Maybe because Ore’s screenplay, far from original, had mirrored his wife’s true story. The week before the Oscars, Michael Cassidy had been busted again buying heroin from an undercover cop in L.A. The couple separated shortly after, but there was no record of their divorce being finalized.

I started a new search, this one on Ethan Ore. Fewer hits this time, but the very first one surprised me with another unexpected connection. Ore’s new film, Reneg, was being screened this week at the same West Side Film Festival that had premiered the unfortunate Craig Wales’ new star vehicle. In fact, Ore’s film had been rescheduled at the last minute to provide a more prominent time slot for Wales’ movie. It was after that screening that Craig Wales had overdosed.

Law Addison, Michael Cassidy, heroin, Craig Wales, Ethan Ore, and Owl. I was trying to wrap my mind around it, wondering what it all meant, wondering if it meant anything at all. It didn’t have to. Nothing had to mean anything. After all, this was New York City and there was the random element to take into account, the six-degrees effect; always layer upon layer of non sequiturs to wade through. I should’ve known that by now, but I persisted in seeking out connections.

I was still turning all of it over in my head, like a wire cage of bingo numbers, when my downstairs doorbuzzer buzzed.

I got up, went over to the intercom, pushed the SPEAK button, and asked who it was. But I got no answer. I shrugged and went back to my desk.

I was just clicking on a browser link to the West Side Film Festival when I heard a key turning in my lock.

I looked up as my office door swung open.

“What the hell? Come right in, why don’t you?”

No point in my saying it, he was already inside.

My old boss, Matt Chadinsky, had lost weight, but he was still built like a concrete traffic divider, with a hard expression on his face I wanted to veer away from.

“I called,” he said. “Your fucking phone’s been busy.”

“I was on the Internet.”

“What, you still using dial-up? Shit, Payton, churn your own fucking butter, too?”

I ignored it. I logged off the Internet and folded down the lid of my laptop without turning it off. I said, “You’ve lost weight, Matt. And shaved off your mustache.”

Matt touched his bare upper lip like someone checking his wallet on a crowded subway.

“Yeh, over a year ago.”

He sat on my couchbed, planting his ass down on my pillow. Where I put my head at night. Not the stuff dreams are made of.

I asked, “How’d you get in?”

He held up his hand, my other spare set of keys dangling from his forefinger. He tossed them overhand to me. I fumbled catching them and had to stoop to pick them up off the floor.

Matt said, “Time you got ’em back. What’s with your fucking place anyway? Moving out or did Goodwill repo you?”

“I’m keeping to the essentials these days.”

“Sure, whatever. How come you didn’t return my calls?”

“I was out.”

“Where the fuck’ve you been? I told you to stay put. What the hell’s going on, Payton? I talked to my guy over at the Ninth, and he said the responding unit didn’t have your name. Who’d you talk to on scene?”

“No one. I didn’t stick around. I had a job to do.”

“Yeh, right. I can see how busy you are.”

“The job Owl hired me for.”

“Job? What job?”

“Doesn’t matter now, it’s been taken care of.”

“No. No-no-no, that’s not how this is goin’ to work. I ask questions, you answer. Now what job?”

“Tail job. So I—”

“How do you know when—”

“I told you, I called my precinct guy. He finally helped me track down where they took Owl’s body. No fucking help from you there. As usual.”

Heat seeped up my neck into my face. So much for the happy reunion. Nothing had changed in five years between us; it might as well have been the last time we spoke, after my final assignment for Metro.

It was a simple job, all I had to do was watch a door, a door without a handle that never opened, an outside utility door set flush in a blank two-story-high brick wall at the rear of the Baruch Houses apartment complex below Houston, from midnight to 5 a.m., Tuesday thru Saturday, in late March of 2003.

And still I managed to screw it up…

I was seated behind the wheel of an agency car, a blue Honda Accord, parked south of the access ramp to the FDR Drive.

It was temp work Matt had fielded to me to help me get by, never telling me what I was there for, except to verify that the door always remained closed.

It wasn’t much of a door, especially after hours and hours of looking at it. If not for the outer hinges, it might’ve just been an immovable steel plate. The hardest part of the job was not falling asleep while listening to the sough of traffic on the FDR. But looking back, I’d’ve been better off if I had fallen asleep. That at least would have been understandable in the eyes of Matt, more than what actually happened.

It was about 4:30 a.m. when I caught sight of the girl rushing down the road, first in my rear view mirror and then as she passed by at an awkward half-run, a willowy white girl in her late teens casting quick looks over her shoulder. In the mirror, a car came into view approaching at a slow roll, a green late-model Impala with a rusted undercarriage and its headlights switched off. It passed by, closing in on the girl until a bend in the road ahead cut them off from view.

None of my business, literally. My business was to stay in the car, my job was to keep watching that door. But I didn’t.

“There a problem here?” I called out.

Rhetorical question, because as I came jogging round the bend, the passenger door of the idling Impala stood open and a tall guy with straggly hair and a Pharaoh’s beard was in the road trying to push the girl inside. She’d lost one shoe.

The guy favored me with a scowl and some choice words about my mother. The girl uttered nothing but a low, pleading Nooo as she shook her head from side to side.

Just as a goof really, I said to the guy, “Unhand her.” Never expecting he would, but he did and the girl who’d been leaning back trying to pry herself away fell flat on her ass.

The guy took three quick strides to me. He looked like he meant business, so I cut out the comedy and raised my right hand fast. The telescopic steel baton sprang open to its full length with a satisfying snick and the tip sank deep into his crotch. He went down and over and did his lima bean impression.

I stood over him. My right shoulder was hit by something soft but heavy. Green and brown, it fell to my feet.

A clump of grass and soil. The next hit me in the neck, not so soft.

I turned my head and the girl was digging her hands into the grass bordering the sidewalk to my right.

I said, “Hey, quit—”

She flung another clump at me. She had good aim. This one hit me in the chin, some of the dirt went down my shirt. I backed away, putting up my arms to block the next one.

But she’d found an empty quart bottle of Colt 45 malt liquor on the verge. Before she threw it I took off running. The bottle shattered at my heels.

My last look back, she was kneeling beside him in the road, cradling his head in her dirt-blackened hands. I had to admit they made a perfect couple.

When I got back to the agency car, my relief was waiting. Except he was anything but, a relief that is. He’d come early and found the car empty. For a beefy guy he had a surprisingly high-pitched voice as he laid into me.

I looked over at the closed door in the brick wall. It was still closed. I doubted it had opened while I was gone, doubted it would ever open. But that wasn’t the point, I understood that—whatever this surveillance had been meant to prove, I’d invalidated it and all the man-hours put into it. But I didn’t need this guy screeching at me like a macaw parrot on crack.

I snicked open the baton again and held it up in front of his face. I wasn’t going to hit him or anything, I just wanted him to shut the fuck up, and he did. I gave him the car keys. I closed the baton and handed it to him (I’d gotten it from the car’s glove compartment), and then I walked away as he started shrieking at me again in his whiny falsetto.

Matt didn’t shout when I called and told him all about it later that morning. He didn’t even swear, which was the worst sign of all; Matt Chadinsky couldn’t whistle without cursing.

I got my last check from Metro the very next day. It was messengered to me, probably costing more than what I got paid, but the messenger was the message. I was out for good and no mistake about it. The end.