Chapter 11

Whatever Gainer was hiding, it must be worse than what he’d told me—something in the present, involving the anonymous threat he’d been sent. I drove straight from his place to my office, needing to reassure myself that the police would find no proof that the e-mail had been sent to him by one of us.

We had an open network, meaning that from my computer I had full access to the hard drives of the other machines in the office. I started by searching the whole system for the file name, typing in the numbers I’d remembered and written down as soon as I was out of Gainer’s house. There were no hits, but all that proved was that whoever had sent the file attached to that anonymous e-mail hadn’t been dumb enough to save it locally. Or so the police would say.

I widened the search to include all picture files, which led me to a trove of pornography in Teddy’s Internet cache. I clicked through some of the pictures. None of what I saw struck me as potential blackmail material or as having anything to do with Eric Gainer.

I felt a momentary relief. Whoever had sent that e-mail, it didn’t appear that it could be traced back to this office. On the other hand, I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that the lack of an obvious connection put us in the clear.

I typed the file name into the search bar of my web browser, and my breath caught, a jolt of adrenaline going through me as the result appeared on my screen. The picture showed Eric Gainer with a wide smile, sitting on an Adirondack chair on a balcony over the ocean at night. A woman sat on his lap, her legs over his legs, her arm around his neck. She was a tall woman, big-breasted but with a small pixie’s face, teeth that had never been fixed, and an attractive mop of curly brown hair. She looked straight at the camera, her face seeming to glow with pride of possession and something else, like she was keeping a secret from him. Another girl knelt beside her, holding the camera out before her to take the shot.

The picture was on a photo-sharing website. There was no clue as to the women’s identity, no way to contact the poster. We could send a subpoena, but it was doubtful that the person who’d set up the account had used his or her real name. I could go to Car and ask him to try his contacts with the police to identify the woman. But I couldn’t see him getting anywhere without telling more than I wanted him to know about the blackmail allegations Eric Gainer had made against my father.

There was another option, but I didn’t like it. Something about the woman made me think she might be a prostitute. The next day, after Lawrence had gone for his afternoon nanny duties at Tamara’s, I walked across the reception area and leaned in my brother’s door. Teddy was absorbed in his work, three different binders open before him as he laboriously typed and rearranged his sentences.

“Hey.” He didn’t look up.

“Dad at your place?”

“Yeah.”

“Tam’s okay with it?”

“He gets over there, grabs the laundry basket and runs a load, cleans up the kitchen, takes out the diaper pail, whatever needs to be done. He’ll sit with Carly while Tam works or goes to her therapy group or yoga class. He’s good with her, Leo. You saw them together. He even made dinner the other night. Mac and cheese. Even Debra doesn’t seem to mind having him around.”

“Look, you want to help me out on something tonight?” I asked him.

He gave me a regretful look that took in the loaded desk, the boxes and boxes of documents. “I’ve got just about as much work as I can handle.”

“It’s not a brief. I want you to come with me to see someone. I need information, and there’s only one person I know who might be able to give it to me. Trouble is, I need your charming personality to ease my way.”

He laced his hands behind his neck, cracked his knuckles. “Yeah? Who?”

“Tanya.” Teddy’s old secretary, who’d run a small-scale prostitution ring under his nose for years and now had made pimping her livelihood. “She might be able to help me identify a potential witness.”

He frowned. “I don’t have a clue how to find her, but Car would know.”

I called Car and asked for her address. I didn’t tell him why I wanted it; uncharacteristically, he didn’t ask. Usually, getting information out of him required paying a toll of petty humiliation, but tonight he just said he’d call me back.

The address he wound up giving me was a condo overlooking Buena Vista Park. As we drove into the city Teddy studied the picture of the women with Eric Gainer. Finally he said, “So what’s the connection between this picture and Lawrence?”

I hesitated, wondering how much to tell him. “I met with Eric Gainer the other night. He’s being blackmailed, according to what he told me. He thinks the person doing it is Dad.”

“And you think that whoever’s blackmailing Eric may be the same one who killed Russell, or had him killed?”

“Maybe.” I hesitated. “On the other hand, if Lawrence has been lying to us, then we need to know the truth before we get any deeper in it than we already are.”

Teddy was shaking his head. “You’ve always thought the worst of him. You’ve always assumed he was guilty, that he was this contriving manipulator.”

He meant conniving, but it was a close enough miss. I didn’t correct him.

Teddy went on. “But I was right about him, wasn’t I, Leo? I’ve always been right about him. Just one time, you might want to think about reserving your judgment.”

I just gave a grunt that might have been agreement and might not, not wanting to fight with him, avoiding the issue as I’d always done, as I’d preferred to do for the last twenty-one years. I was tired of being the one who was always in the wrong.

We parked on the street, went to the front entrance, and buzzed the intercom. “Who is it?” Tanya’s voice said from the box. A voice as rough as the streets where she’d once walked nightly, before Teddy had hired her. I prodded him. “It’s Teddy,” he said with a husky depth of feeling, making me wonder again at the mystery of him keeping Tanya employed for so many years, giving her so much of himself. Their relationship had ended with the bullet that changed his life. But why it hadn’t ended previously, when she’d stolen money from the trust account of Ricky Santorez, Teddy’s most feared and dangerous client, I’d never understood.

We took the elevator to the third floor. I expected wariness, hostility, but Tanya embraced Teddy in the hall. She was short, barrel-shaped, and immodest, ugly but appealing in her refusal to acknowledge it. With a reluctant glance at me, she led us into her apartment.

“You’ve been doing well,” I said, taking in the tasteful décor, the city view.

She gave me a look like she wished she could blink and make me disappear.

“Forget it, Leo,” Teddy told me. Again I was struck by how my brother had changed. When someone had fucked him, the old Teddy never rested until he’d found a way to fuck him back.

I could tell that she also perceived the difference in him. “So what’s this?” she said. “He finally lets you see me, but you have to bring him as a chaperone?”

An awkward moment. “Leo never stopped me from seeing you, Tanya.”

She turned to the kitchen, her feelings hurt. “You still drink Manhattans, at least?”

She mixed two of them, adding to each a cherry on a plastic spear. She brought me a beer, like I was a child at the grown-ups’ table. But then, for so long, she’d known me only as Teddy’s kid brother.

“We’re here for me, not him,” I said. “I asked Teddy to come along. But if you two are ready to bury the hatchet, now’s fine.”

“I never had any gripe with Teddy.”

I’d told myself I’d keep quiet on the subject of old grudges but couldn’t. “You had a gripe with his old client Santorez, though, didn’t you? And because Santorez had some money go missing, and because Teddy was the one who was supposed to be holding that money, Santorez had a gripe with Teddy because of you.”

Her mouth barely moved as she spoke. “Santorez made an investment and he’s getting a good return.”

“So Santorez owns you.” Santorez was in prison, and he would remain there for the foreseeable future, but this didn’t stop him from operating a criminal enterprise. One that evidently included Tanya and her girls.

“No one owns me.”

“A piece of you, then. And in return, you have access to all the muscle you need.”

“I got my own muscles.” Tanya’s cell phone rang. “Excuse me.”

She went into the bedroom and closed the door, but not all the way, so that we could hear her end of the conversation. Tanya mentioned an address in the Sunset, a house number, a high price. She’d come a long way from the drug-addicted streetwalkers my brother had once represented.

I glanced at him, trying to gauge his reaction. The old Teddy had thoroughly despised pimps of all shapes and sizes. I wondered what his feelings were now about how Tanya earned her living.

She returned. “A busy night. Now what was it you wanted?”

I’d made a blowup of the picture, blacking out Eric’s face. By way of answer I handed it to her. “I need to know if anyone recognizes these girls. I’ve got a stack of these photos with my contact information. I was hoping you could hand them out.”

“One of these women is dead, isn’t she,” Tanya said, and I felt a chill. As she looked at the photo I studied her. I’d seen emotion there only once before, the day Teddy was shot, when she found me covered in his blood. Now for the second time I saw feeling in her eyes. She looked confused. Then her eyes narrowed and her empathy turned to offense. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“You’re in the business,” I said.

She thrust the photo at me. “You can’t blame me. These aren’t any of my girls. Even if they were, you can’t hold me responsible. I do all I can to keep them safe, but I can’t go with them through those doors. They choose this life.”

And you take the profits, I wanted to add. I took the picture back. “It’s just that we’re up against a dead end. You don’t need to get involved. You can just ask your girls to hand out the fliers. Someone recognizes them, they call, or they don’t.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Okay. If she’s been in the game, maybe I’ll find out. Maybe I’ll even find her if she’s still around. But I’m doing this on one condition, and that’s that you don’t go out and try to bother guys who’d as soon leave you with a hole in your head as answer your questions.”

She glanced at Teddy, and her voice softened. “You stay clear of my business, Leo, and I’ll stay out of yours.”