Part 7 The Third Wife #5
‘Georgy, what did Dmitri say to his father that freaked out the old man so much? Something to do with that darknet company, Modern Alchemical Solutions. What was the word he should never say?’
Georgy shifted uncomfortably.
He gave me a worried look.
‘It is Russian word. A frightening word. A superstitious word. Perevertyshe.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It is—um—old Russian creature. Monster. From tales to scare children. It is hard to translate. But you could say it means skinwalker. Or maybe more accurately: one who walks around in another’s skin.’
Midtown Manhattan
26 December, 1800 hours
Skinny, nervy and terrified of his own shadow, Georgy, it turned out, was a pretty darned good lawyer.
While I’d been making my calls during our drive earlier, he’d been making his own and they’d borne fruit.
Shortly after we left Roman Oberov’s tower, he got a return call.
The District Attorney’s office was allowing him, as Yasmina Ivanova’s authorised legal representative, to go to 59West to retrieve legally privileged belongings, including her laptop and diary, plus security footage for her defence.
(The laptop and diary were meaningless.
I’d asked Georgy to arrange this because I wanted to get inside the building again to: (a) speak to the superintendent named Lenny; (b) look at the building’s security camera footage; and (c) check out one other thing.)
We arrived in Midtown around 6 p.m. and pulled into the underground parking garage of 59West.
The supertall tower had an eerie quality to it now.
It was still under the evacuation order: all the owners and tenants were elsewhere, having been told to stay away until the cops and the structural engineers were finished with their respective investigations.
A uniformed NYPD cop met us in the garage and escorted us up to the penthouse.
The previously chic penthouse was still a grisly mess.
Dried blood speckled the walls.
Crime-scene tape was everywhere.
Small plastic evidence markers littered the floor.
A second NYPD cop stood guard by the elevators, idly perusing his cell phone beside the mega-expensive Superman and Batman comic books.
The first cop said, ‘Most of the forensic work’s finished. Now the DA is holding the place for a week in case follow-up inquiries are needed.’
I nodded.
This was standard procedure.
As I gazed around the $155 million penthouse, I couldn’t imagine Aristo King would want to move back into it any time soon, not after all the deaths and other stuff that had gone down here. People generally sell their homes after murders happen in them.
‘Mrs King said she left her laptop somewhere in the living area over there.’ Georgy pointed toward a corner of the penthouse.
‘Do what you gotta do,’ the first cop said.
As he followed us, we headed into the living area next to the master bedroom.
I peered into the bedroom as we strode past it.
Its windows—smashed to oblivion by the military drone—had not yet been repaired.
Huge sheets of clear plastic had been stretched over the floor-to-ceiling holes, held in place by heavy-duty tape. The plastic billowed and suctioned with the wind.
I, however, was looking at the mirror on the wall, positioned above the low bookcase.
The mirror that back on December 21st I’d noticed was a two-way mirror.
As Georgy and the cop continued, I lingered in the living area on the other side of the mirror’s wall . . .
. . . where I found a framed painting hanging in a spot that would be directly behind the mirror.
In a luxury penthouse filled with outrageously expensive art, this painting was odd because it was not obviously expensive or rare.
It was a child’s fingerpainting of a tall and ultra-thin tower.
And it was signed ‘Our home. Alexei, age 5’.
I quickly tilted the framed picture to see what was behind it.
And there it was.
A small shelf-like recess built into the wall.
With a tinted window at its back.
Through the little window—the rear side of the two-way mirror—I had a clear view of the master bedroom.
A compact cell-phone tripod stood on the recess’s shelf, but with no phone in it right now.
I’d been right.
Aristo King had been filming his sexual escapades.
And on his phone, too, which helped.
As I mentioned earlier, when a woman is set up, it’s usually by another woman in her man’s life.
When the Tech Detect eventually cracked the clone he had of King’s phone, we’d see who Aristo King had been bringing up to his Manhattan pad.
(It also made sense that Aristo King covered the secret recess with a simple framed painting by his son. He wouldn’t want to be lifting and replacing a priceless Picasso every time he set up his phone to record sex.)
I straightened the fingerpainting again and caught up with the others as they found Yasmina’s laptop in the adjoining kitchen.
When we returned to the elevator vestibule, I asked both cops: ‘Is the building superintendent around?’
The first cop made a call and a few minutes later, the elevator pinged and out of it stepped a slender young man with blond hair who was dressed in the same kind of white coveralls that ‘Lenny’ had been wearing on December 21st. Embroidered on his left chest was the name, ‘Tommy’.
‘You’re the super?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, Tommy Biggs. I’m the night super. How can I help you?’
‘We were hoping to speak with the other superintendent, the one with the moustache and glasses. His name was Lenny.’
‘You mean Lenny Grossman? Yeah, Lenny normally works the day shift. But he’s been out sick since all that stuff happened on the 21st. Freddy’s been doing the day shift since then. Can I help you?’
I’d wanted to ask Lenny about the time on December 21st when he’d gone missing, but that would have to wait.
Luckily, I had another thing to inquire about.
‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘We’re on Mrs King’s legal team. The security camera footage from the underground garage. I imagine the FBI got all that, right?’
‘They did, yeah,’ Tommy said. ‘Got everything from the last six weeks.’
‘If they obtained that footage, then we have to get it, too, for Mrs King’s defence,’ Georgy said, handing the man a request-for--evidence document.
(It’s like a subpoena. I’d asked Georgy earlier if we could get footage from all the CCTV cameras in the building, but he’d said that that would be more difficult since they weren’t public areas like the garage.)
The young superintendent nodded. ‘Sure. No problem. All that’s kept on the computer in our office down on 50. Wanna come down?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
Within minutes we were in a small windowless office on the blow-through level that was the 50th floor.
It was a dark room with a bank of closed-circuit TV monitors, racks of tools, three servers and a computer on a desk.
Tommy slid into his chair, started typing on the computer, and brought up a folder marked cctv records: garage.
‘What dates do you want again?’ he asked.
‘If the government got the last six weeks, let’s do the same, please,’ I said. ‘November 9 to December 21.’
Tommy turned to face me. ‘You sure? You’re talking forty-two days, twenty-four hours per day. That’s like . . .’
‘1,008 hours, yes,’ I said.
‘You’re gonna watch a thousand hours of security footage?’ he said.
‘A thousand and eight, yes,’ I said.
‘Glad I don’t have your job . . .’ he said, typing some more.
Then he connected his computer to Georgy’s laptop with a cable and transferred the footage.
‘Anything else?’ Tommy asked.
‘If Lenny Grossman comes in or calls, can you get him to give us a call?’ I said.
‘Sure.’
Georgy handed the young super his card and we left.
We returned to Georgy’s car in the underground garage.
‘Nice work, Georgy. You were awesome,’ I said.
‘I do my best, Dr Sam.’
I pulled out my phone.
After a quick online search, I found the address of Mr Leonard R. Grossman in the Bronx.
I also found his Facebook page (Facebook is alive and well with older people), complete with photos: Lenny with his bushy moustache and glasses at a Giants football game, Lenny playing poker with some buddies, and even one photo of Lenny standing in the sunshine on the roof of 59West in his white coveralls.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go talk with Lenny Grossman at his place.’
The Bronx
26 December, 2030 hours
Lenny Grossman wasn’t at home.
Grossman lived in a small one-bedroom walk-up in the Bronx, in among the projects that flanked Yankee Stadium.
I wondered how Lenny Grossman felt catching the subway every day from his little apartment in the Bronx to work at 59West with its billionaire residents and their entitled kids.
I left Georgy in the car and rang the doorbell.
When Grossman didn’t answer, I went downstairs and knocked on the door of his superintendent’s basement apartment.
‘You lookin’ for Lenny?’ the super said in a thick Bronx accent. He wore a white singlet and had body hair on his shoulders. ‘Lenny’s on vacation. Won’t be back till the first week of the New Year.’
‘Vacation? I was told he was unwell,’ I said. ‘Do you know where he went?’
‘Some lake resort in the Ozarks. Yeah, went just before Thanksgiving. Asked me to make sure his pipes didn’t burst in the cold.’
I paused.
Thanksgiving? That had been November 26th.
‘Wait?’ I said. ‘Lenny left for vacation a month ago?’
‘Yeah. Cashed in his leave. Lucky thing, too, if ya ask me, I mean, what with all the shit that went down at his building. Lenny’s gonna have a shit-ton of cleanin’ up to do when he gets back.’
When he gets back . . .
But I’d met Lenny Grossman in person at 59West on December 21st.
This was getting very weird.
I pulled out my phone and showed this superintendent Grossman’s Facebook photos.
‘Just so I’m certain,’ I said. ‘This is who we’re talking about. This is Lenny Grossman, right? The day superintendent at 59West.’
‘Yup. That’s Lenny.’
I shook my head, a flurry of thoughts racing through my mind.
First, something Roman Oberov had said: the Grandmaster had been missing since December 10th . . .
. . . only to turn up at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery on December 21st and get shot.