Von Oehson lowered the divider to the front seat as soon as we pulled up to his lawyer’s brownstone off Central Park West. I listened to the mechanical hum of the retracting glass as the back of the driver’s head slowly appeared.
“Jimmy, please take Dr. Reinhart home from here,” von Oehson said. Jimmy nodded and then waited until his boss was safely inside. We both waited.
There’s a time and a place for linear thinking. Sitting by myself in the back of a billionaire’s Rolls-Royce at midnight struck me as neither. I’d given back von Oehson’s check but held on to the copy of the one that Carter had forged to his bookie, although bookie seemed too quaint for the guy. Whoever he was, his signature on the back of the check wasn’t going to get me any closer to identifying him. In crayon, Annabelle could write her name more legibly. Of course, that was probably intentional on his part.
Now what? The next logical move was using the bank ID code to identify the branch.
Then gain access to the bank’s security footage based on the time and date.
Then rely on facial recognition software.
Then hope the guy’s last known address was also his current address.
Then go have a nice chat with him. A to B to C and so on.
But by D or E it could be too late.
“Slight change of plans,” I told von Oehson’s driver. “Do you know O’Leary’s bar in Midtown?”
Jimmy angled his rearview mirror slightly to make eye contact with me. “Does an Irishman piss Guinness?”
I took that as a yes.
Five minutes later, I was probably the only person on the planet who ever stepped out of a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce to walk into O’Leary’s. Not that it was a dive. It’s just that the place wore its “nothing fancy” appeal like a badge of honor. This is where you went to drink pints and whiskey and nothing else. Lest you be tempted otherwise, only two wines were listed on the menu: red and white.
“Holy crap, look what the wind blew in,” said Allen Grimes, spotting me from the corner of his eye while holding court at the end of the bar. He shifted an unlit cigarette to his left hand, pointing at me with his right. “Gentleman, may I present Dr. Dylan Reinhart, one of the greatest living minds in the field of human psychology. And if you don’t believe me, just ask him. He’ll tell you so himself.”
That got a hearty laugh from the circle of red-nosed men listening in. I laughed, too. It was funny. Allen Grimes may have had his detractors in some corners of the city, but no one ever questioned his sense of humor.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked. That I wanted to do so privately was easily assumed.
“That depends,” he said.
“On what?”
“How much am I going to regret it?”