Chapter 5
LAURIE
Everyone dealt with grief in their own ways.
Chary Wright’s way, apparently, was to try and be in three places at once. Possibly three states at once. Wright Glass was listed to also have a New Jersey warehouse, convenient to its second-most important resource: Standard Oil.
Laurie wasn’t going to Jersey. Maine had been bad enough. New York was plenty. He began on Fifth Avenue, just outside the Wright residence. A man had to sleep sometime.
Chary had said he had a mansion, but this wasn’t it.
Still Millionaire’s Row, of course, but this was a townhouse, red brick, three windows wide and three and a half stories tall, with a singlewide entrance door, no setback from the sidewalk.
It was like a newer, better-upkept, more-bulging version of Laurie’s own 37th Street apartment.
Probably more spacious inside. And, of course, with Central Park opposite.
Avoiding being seen was easier when there was half-a-century-old greenery across from your subject.
What was harder was avoiding coppers on the lookout for park vagrancy across from the brand-new concrete and new construction, coppers who were in the pocket of god knew which politician, probably a Democrat.
So, when Chary Wright at last appeared at his home at the beginning of the fashionable calling hours—on foot, slightly rumpled, unescorted—Laurie had already gone through two outfit changes.
Nobody called through all the fashionable hours. An unfruitful day for a millionaire. Then, almost on the dot of five o’clock, the front door opened, and out came Charles Edward Wright, Jr.
Laurie sat up fast, resetting his cap. Thus began his stalking.
Chary went east on foot for a handful of blocks before climbing to take the Second Avenue El southbound.
And south he went: past East 57th. East 42nd, East 14th.
He rode it all the way to the Bowery, getting off at the station at 1st and First. Laurie might’ve almost lost him except in the meantime, he’d watched the man transfigure: between getting on the El and leaving it, he’d switched his jacket and his shoes and his hat.
He wasn’t slumming it. This was a man used to the Lower East Side, who maybe wanted to preserve his shoes. And his person.
On First Ave, Chary went north, only a little ways. He crossed westward onto East 2nd. Laurie eyed the Russian Orthodox church looming and wondered: perhaps he was secretly Russian?
No. There was another red brick residence across from greenery (this time a cemetery), and there, Chary dipped into number seventy-five. Laurie revised his theory from secretly Russian to something simpler: Chary had a lover whom he kept housed with Ukrainians. Or was Ukrainian. Who knew.
Something simpler, though, was ordinary and boring and totally un-newsworthy.
Laurie lounged, sullen and grumpy on the corner, and settled in for a probably short wait.
Meanwhile, he acknowledged part of the reason for the grumpiness: surprise.
Chary Wright had not seemed the type to have a kept man on the side.
Between the two glass heirs, he’d have called out Tjofabier Raberding as being a regular Bowery visitor, little though he might’ve had to do so, with the Tenderloin more convenient.
Either man could do as he pleased. It was nothing to him. He’d only hoped for something juicier; that was all. Something he could actually write about.
Laurie pulled apart his tie, shoved away his collar, and undid his waistcoat, drawing several glances, which he avoided.
Now he looked like he was slumming, looking for trade, or worse.
It wasn’t the worst of tenements he’d seen—this neighborhood, if he remembered correctly, had been moneyed a handful of decades past—but not necessarily a place you wanted to be looked at twice.
Just as he had done that and had slumped, artfully casual upon a cemetery bench, a tall, spindly, familiar-looking man came out of number seventy-five.
Laurie blinked. He checked his pocket watch, a little lingeringly, and watched the man from beneath his lashes.
It couldn’t be. Chary’d just gone in. It would’ve been the quickest fuck on earth.
Besides that, this man had a beard. A cap.
A patched-up jacket, dark denim overall trousers, boots. In one hand, a lunch pail.
But the walk was the same: long-striding, self-conscious. The plain dishwater blond, now fluffed to untidiness. The slightly squashed nose and structured, concave slimness.
It was Chary, and he was up to something and doing it playing a workingman. Laurie couldn’t have done a better transformation himself, and he’d learned from drag queens. The rich man was gone, an exhausted shift worker in his place.
A fast one. Chary’s legs were long. Laurie scrambled up to follow.
The disguised Chary went east again on foot.
Past the El, past Avenues A through C, all through Little Germany.
On Avenue D he went north, close to the piers.
Twin furnace smokestacks, tall and tapered, appeared, the smell of their westerly smoke leading the way.
Laurie, very belatedly, considering he’d known the address, understood before the factory came fully into view.
Bright white all-caps lettering across the wood fence and the two-story brick exterior confirmed it: Wright Glass Mfg.
Laurie checked the pocket watch again. Nearly seven at night now. Not anything like a normal businessman’s hours, much less a boss’s. Chary wasn’t wearing a suit. And it wasn’t the office entrance he headed toward. That was around the other side of the block.
Laurie cursed his out-of-place suit again and found a place to safely surveil.
Chary walked up nearly to the gates, lining up with the mass of journeymen and boys awaiting shift change this side of the fence.
It sure didn’t look like he owned the place, nor that anybody knew it.
Nobody took note of his presence like they would’ve a boss, neither awkward nor deferential, though he was clearly recognized and welcomed.
No; to all appearances, Chary was one of them.
One worker ant of dozens gathering to await entry.
What the hell?
Glassworks shifts were anywhere from nine to twelve hours. This one, beginning at seven in the evening, was probably an overnighter. Did Chary Wright do this every week, or only as he felt like it? How long had he been getting away with it? How did he get away with it? Why?
Laurie needn’t have bothered settling in for surveillance.
It was over almost before it began. The gates opened, the men and boys and Chary streamed in, disappearing behind the tall fence, and the gates creaked closed again.
Laurie was cut off from observation and understanding. Shut out. Bewildered.
Shiftwork at his own factory. What the hell was this rich man up to?
All told, he spent two weeks (and far too much money on street-cart food) stalking Chary Wright, simply watching as the man punched overnight shifts at his own factory, like that thing was his actual job and the millionaire inheritance was for part-time play.
That first Monday, Laurie had returned to Avenue D in the early hours to confirm Chary’s exit from the glassworks gates.
Chary was there, filthy, sweaty, steaming in the cold, rising dawn; he hobbled back to 2nd Street.
He came out again a few short hours later, around one, beardless and be-suited for his rich man’s visiting hours.
He did this Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, too.
Friday and Saturday Chary spent wholly at his Fifth Avenue house, no exits, no visitors, a shut-in; Laurie imagined he mostly slept.
Saturday night, Chary snuck out to Grand Central and took the northeast overnight train to Maine.
Monday next, he was back at the Fifth Avenue townhouse again for fashionable hours, and the strange, exhausting cycle began again.
Laurie was worn down merely observing, and he got to catch sleep on benches where he was able, to dodge the police when he wasn’t.
As the second week stretched on, he felt a guilty envy pricking at him, that this silver-spoon man (however had-been disinherited) was able to disguise himself at hard labor, was doing what Laurie would have done, given the chance, while Laurie had to merely sit in a high tenement window and note down his coming and going and wonder why.
Penance? Necessity? Expectation? Revenge?
Spite? None of the usual motives seemed to fit.
Chary Wright didn’t seem beholden to anybody or anything except work and exhaustion, and as interesting as it was to Laurie, the man, it wouldn’t make for a good story for Laurie, the journalist. Chary wasn’t doing anything illegal or immoral or petitionable.
It especially didn’t make for a murdered brother.
If Chary had been doing this for some time—long enough to continue in a very skilled trade, perhaps even since having been disinherited at twelve?
—then why would he not cease once he’d gotten the whole kit ’n boodle?
If he had murdered his more-fortunate brother for his inheritance, why not stop his filthy work once he was filthy rich?
Men did murder and worse to claw themselves upward, but the whole point of violence born out of desperation was to try and change their circumstances.
Six months, millions of dollars, and a blueberry farm later, and Chary was still keeping on in his circumstances.
While it was fascinating and confusing, Laurie couldn’t see what it had to do with inheritance, a party boy’s death, or Brooklyn Glass.
For there was another thing. Surely, if Chary had meant to work to spite the memory of the father who’d disinherited him, he’d work anywhere else—but especially for the competition. Give trade secrets to Tjofabier Raberding like candy, especially once he had access to all of them.
But he hadn’t.