Vanished (16 page)

41.

O
kay,” I said gently. I kept my tone light, casual, nonconfrontational. I wanted her to feel safe about finally opening up to me. “Tell me.”

“Roger did mention something.”

“About what?”

“Just that he’d found something he wasn’t supposed to know about. Some kind of corruption, it sounded like.”

“Which is precisely what Marjorie Ogonowski told me. Did he say whether it involved Gifford Industries?”

“I don’t know. He said it involved a lot of money, but other than that, he was completely vague about it. The more I pressed him on it, the more he withdrew. He could get that way. He’d retreat into himself.”

“He didn’t give you any specifics? Nothing at all?”

“Nothing. But—well, he was afraid that something might happen to him. That he’d gotten threats.”

“That’s pretty vague, too.”

“He admitted it sounded paranoid. Like he was some conspiracy theorist. I asked him if he wanted me to talk to Leland—to see if Leland could do something, help in some way. But he told me never to say anything to Leland about it. He made me promise.”

“And did you keep that promise?”

“Of course.”

“And he never said who was threatening him?”

She shook her head again. “He never said, and I gave up asking. He said he wanted to protect Gabe and me, and the less I knew, the better.”

“So that e-mail he sent—that InCaseOfDeath thing—that didn’t really shock you, did it, what he was telling you?”

A beat. Then, ruefully: “No.”

“So why did you keep this from me?”

“Ohh, Nick.” She sighed, then hugged herself, shivering as if she were cold. “Because what if he—I don’t know, surrendered.”

“Surrendered? To whom?”

“I mean, what if he gave himself up? I mean, they’d threatened him, threatened his family, and he knew he couldn’t unring the bell, you know? He couldn’t pretend
not
to know whatever it was he found out. So maybe he made a deal with them. These guys, whoever they are, they attacked me and he saw that and he said, in effect, ‘Hey, why her? I’m the one you want. Take me.’ To spare me and Gabe. Do you follow? Am I making any sense?”

“I think so,” I said. “But what do you think happened to him?”

Very quietly, she said, “He might have sacrificed himself.”

She lowered her head almost to her chest, then put her hands on each temple. From the way her head was moving, I knew she was crying. After a moment, she looked up, tears streaming down her face. “You see? Do you understand why I’m so scared?”

“Yes. I do.” I reached over and held her in a tight embrace, felt her damp heat. “But I’m not going to let anything happen to you or Gabe.”

“What if that’s beyond your control, Nick?”

“It’s not,” I said, and I was instantly ashamed because that was a transparent lie. Plenty of things were beyond my control.

“And you know, just listening to you talk about what happened that night, the night I was attacked—well, maybe you’re right. Maybe there
was
something strange about it. And then there was that e-mail from him, and now there’s this video, and it all seems to add up to something very different from what I thought it was.”

I held her for a long while.

“Lauren,” I said, “did he ever tell you why he talked to Victor so often?”

“He called your dad? When?”

“Victor called him, to be precise. Collect calls. Five times in the last month.”

“He never said anything about that to me. Are you sure about this? I thought he hadn’t talked to Victor in almost a year.”

______

I SAT
there for a few minutes in front of the TV set after Lauren went to bed—Kyra Sedgwick in a rerun of
The Closer,
saying to a bunch of sullen male cops, in a treacly Southern accent, “Why thank you
very
much, gentlemen”—and then I thought of something.

I went to the entry hall by the front door. The spare key to Roger’s car—really, a keyless entry fob—was in a green ceramic Japanese bowl on the hall table. His S-Class AMG Mercedes was parked in the garage, black and gleaming. Inside, it smelled like new leather. I started it up, pressed the navigation system button on the LCD touch screen, hit
DESTINATION MEMORY
, then
LAST DESTINATIONS
.

A beautiful car, that Mercedes. A six-liter V-12 engine with 604 horsepower and incredible torque. Invoice price probably around a hundred eighty thousand dollars. And the crappiest navigation system in the world.

But it told me what I needed to know.

Roger had not just talked to Dad on the phone a bunch of times in the last month. He’d also visited him in prison. He’d driven to upstate New York, and at least once he’d used the Mercedes’s navigation system to get him there.

The question was why.

The one person who might know what had happened to Roger was the last person I wanted to see.

P  A  R  T   T  W  O

A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.

—
JOSEPH CONRAD

42.

T
he Altamont Correctional Facility had originally been built as a hospital for the criminally insane, a hundred and fifty years ago. The Altamont Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, was a grand Victorian Gothic complex of spires and crenellated towers. Its forbidding red-brick walls were stained dark with soot from a century of internal-combustion engines. Some forty years ago the mental hospital was shut down and converted into a medium-security prison, but it still looked like the sort of place a homicidal maniac escapes from, then terrorizes the nearby summer camp. It also reminded me a little of the high school I’d gone to in Malden.

They’d done some renovation since the days of straitjackets and lobotomies. There was a concrete perimeter wall thirty feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, watchtowers, and banks of high-mast lights. Inside the walls, the old Gothic prison complex was surrounded by a luxuriant green lawn that wouldn’t have been out of place at Pebble Beach.

I’d flown from Washington to Albany, rented a car, and driven a few miles to the outskirts of the town of Guilderland. The nav system was one of those separate portable things that sticks to the dashboard by means of a suction cup. It spoke in an officious, nasal female voice, which might have been tolerable if she hadn’t got me lost for twenty minutes. So I bore her some resentment for making me a little late. Though it wasn’t as if my father was going anywhere.

I filled out a form, showed a driver’s license, went through a metal detector, then an ion scan, for drugs. I had to empty my pockets, leave cell phone and keys in a paper bag with my name on it. The visitor-control system was fairly automated—they took my picture and printed out an adhesive pass with my photo on it and a bar code.

After I passed through a second metal cage, I turned to the guard who was scanning my pass with a barcode reader and said, “Pretty high-tech.”

The guard, a bored-looking, obese black guy with sad eyes and a wide mouth, nodded.

“Big old scary building like this, I was expecting, you know, one of those huge ledgers and a quill, right?”

He broke out laughing. It obviously took very little to amuse him.

“Hey, so I guess that means you keep track of every visitor in your computer.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Anyone can see I visited?”

“Not unless they have access to the computer,” he said.

I nodded. “Okay.”

“You visiting Victor Heller?”

“Right.”

“Who’s that, your brother?”

“Father.”

“Father, huh? Been inside a long time?”

“A while.”

“Guess you got scared straight, right?”

“You could say that.”

THE VISITORS
’ room looked like the cafeteria in my high school—the same molded-plastic chairs, the same greenish linoleum floor, the same high ceiling with stained white drop-in panels. The same smell of ammonia mixed with human sweat and desperation. A long, undulating counter snaked through the room, bisecting it: prisoners on one side, visitors on the other. On the visitors’ side, a cheery mural was painted on the wall, primitive art depicting the countryside, probably done by inmates. There were maybe half a dozen visitors. A couple of little kids were running around, oblivious to the setting. Only three prisoners.

Sitting at the far end of the counter was my father.

In the twelve years since I’d last seen him, I’d aged, of course. But he seemed to have aged at the speed of light. Victor Heller, the Dark Prince of Wall Street, was an old man. His shoulders were stooped. He had a big white beard and looked like an Old Testament prophet. His eyebrows were heavy and unruly, like steel-wool pads that had seen too much use. He was wearing a dark green shirt and matching pants, his prison outfit, which looked like a janitor’s uniform.

He looked up as I approached. His eyes were rheumy, and he looked lost. His chronic psoriasis had gotten much worse since I’d last seen him: large flakes of skin were coming off his cheeks and forehead. He reminded me of a molting reptile, a snake shedding its skin, as if the scales were falling away to reveal his corrupt inner core.

But then he smiled when he saw me, and the old familiar glint was in his eyes.

He waited for me to sit down, adjust my chair, the legs scraping against the linoleum. Then he said, “They must have told you.”

“Told me what?” I said.

“About the cancer.”

“The cancer,” I repeated, then I understood. The reason he and Roger had spoken five times. But why hadn’t Roger said anything to me, or at least to Lauren? Why hadn’t my mother called to tell me the news? The old man was dying. Suddenly, I felt hollow.

I looked down. “Dad, I—my God, I had—”

He was laughing raucously, his head thrown back. His beard extended down his neck. That hollow place inside me filled slowly with something ice-cold.

“Why else would you lay down your arms and come visit your poor old Dad?” he said, his words half-choked by laughter. “No, I’m not dying. But there’s gotta be one hell of a reason why you’re here. I figured you must know something they’re not telling me.”

“No, Dad, I don’t.”

“You’ve never been here before, have you?”

I shook my head.

“Of course you haven’t. The day I reported, Roger drove me. Your mother was quite ill.”

“She was too depressed to get out of bed.”

“Yes, that’s right. And you—you had a
study
to finish at McKinsey, was that it?”

“I’d enlisted by then.”

“Ah, yes. The few. The proud. Nick Heller.”

“It was the army, not the marines. Special Forces.”

“Special,” he said. He rolled the word around in his mouth like the first sip of a Château Lafite. His lips curled at the edges. “Hooah.”

The day he entered prison, Dad gave Roger his most prized possession, a gold Patek Philippe watch that Mom had given him when he made his first hundred million. Inscribed on the back was a line from Virgil in Latin:
Audentes fortuna juvat
. Fortune favors the bold. He’d been bold all right, but Fortune hadn’t gotten the memo.

“So to what do I owe the honor of your presence?”

“I want to know what Roger’s been talking to you about.”

His eyes went blank. “What’s he been
talking
to me about? What do sons talk about with their fathers?” A slow, mirthless smile. “Been so long, you’ve probably forgotten.”

One of the inmates down the row was arguing with his visitor, a young black woman who appeared to be the mother of the two little kids running around. Maybe he was the father. I wondered whether the prisoners were allowed conjugal visits.

“He’s been in touch with you a lot recently.”

“He calls his dad. He worries about me. He sends me packages. Your mother sends me packages. Everyone else does.” He cocked his head, raised his heavy brows, looked at me through drooping lids. “Maybe it’s a financial hardship?”

Of course, I knew that Roger hadn’t actually called Dad. Incoming calls weren’t allowed. Dad had to place collect calls to Roger.

“Roger’s come to visit you, too.” The nav system in his Mercedes confirmed it.

“They allow visitors between seven thirty and three. They encourage visits, in fact. They say visits can be a positive influence, you know that? They say inmates who receive regular visits adjust much better once they’re released from prison. Which, in my case, is a mere eighteen years from now. When I’ll be, assuming I’m still alive—”

“Why?”

“Why does he visit me? Maybe because he’s concerned. Silly, I know. An old man like me locked up with rapists and child molesters and perverts—what’s to worry about?”

“I mean, why so often?”

“Often? That’s a relative concept when you’re in here.” He licked his lips. They were chapped, startlingly red against the snow white of his Methuselah beard.

I tried again, came at it head-on. “When did you last see him?”

He frowned, folded his arms, leaned back. “I haven’t seen your brother in, well, easily a year.” He looked up and to his right. One of the telltale indicators that he was lying. Another one, some might say, was when he moved his lips. “Roger’s got a family and a serious career. It’s not so convenient—”

“He was here last week,” I said.

He slowly shook his head. “I think I’d remember that, Nicholas. There’s not much to do here if you don’t lift weights, and you’ve seen all the
Law and Order
reruns.”

“Roger’s name is in the prison visitor-control system three times in the last ten weeks.”

He hesitated only a split second while he decided whether to brazen it out. His smile spread slowly, eyes gleaming.

“You know me too well,” he said with a laugh.

43.

T
he summer before Roger went off to Harvard, we were hanging out in the body shop of Norman Lang Motors, the used-car dealership owned by a buddy of mine.

Timmy Lang was watching a guy spray-paint an orange-and-yellow flaming pony on the side of a red Mustang. The paint fumes smelled bad, and we’d always thought that Timmy, not the brightest bulb, had probably breathed too much of them over the years, so Roger and I were standing as far away as we could get. I was going on about how unfair it was, what they’d done to Dad. The way he’d had to go on the lam, become a fugitive somewhere in Switzerland, and all because he’d made some powerful enemies. He was innocent: He’d told us so himself.

Roger cut me off. “Look, Red Man,” he said, “you really shouldn’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“All I’m saying, Nick, is that sometimes things are . . . complicated, that’s all.”

“What are you saying?”

“Figure it out,” he said.

Then I did something I’d never done before: I slugged Roger in the stomach. He doubled over, came back up a minute later, red-faced. But he wasn’t angry. He smiled. “You’re the last true believer, aren’t you, Nick?” he said. “You’ll learn.”

If a cynic is just a bruised idealist, then Roger wasn’t really a cynic. He was no idealist. He was just more clear-eyed than me.

See, I’d taken Dad at his word.

______

“
ALL PHONE
calls here are monitored and recorded,” I said to my father. “So if you want to talk about something sensitive, it’s got to be in person. What did Roger want to talk about?”

He raised his chin slowly, pursed his lips a few times. “Yes, why in the world would he waste his time coming all the way out here to talk to an old fart like me?”

“Dad,” I said, refusing to give in to his rancor, “this is important. It’s for Roger’s sake.”

But he didn’t want to be deterred from his tirade. His voice rose steadily. I could smell the goatish fug of his body odor.

“There was a time when you worshipped your brother. You thought he peed Perrier. You thought he hung the moon. But I understand why you despise him now. You can’t stand the fact that he stood by me all these years while you did the easy thing and succumbed to all the peer pressure and turned against me.”

“Are you finished?” I said patiently. The mother with two little kids had stopped arguing with her boyfriend or husband. Her kids had gotten tired of exploring the featureless room and were sitting on the floor with markers and coloring books.

“Do you know that I still get producers from Fox News and CNN and even
60 Minutes
calling the prison and writing me, wanting to interview me? MSNBC wants to feature me on some show called
Lock-up.
And do you know why I refuse? Because of you. And your mother. And Roger. And my grandson. Because I don’t want to stir things up. I don’t want to embarrass you. I want people to forget. I know what they want. They want a nice juicy video segment, a tight close-up of the billionaire in his prison uniform, brought low, humiliated and
filled
with regret and expressing remorse for his terrible crimes. They want a morality play. So their viewers can feel a little better about their lives of quiet desperation.”

“Dad—”

“Do you know—do you
know
—that I’m locked up in the same cell-block as murderers and rapists? I’m in here for
thirty years
, Nicholas. There are
child molesters
who will be out long before me.”

“You can be released early for good behavior,” I said.

He smiled bitterly. “If I’m very
very
good, they’ll put me on a prison bus and let me pick up garbage on the side of the road. Are you aware that there’s a man in here who murdered his own father? Beat him with a baseball bat, then gutted him with a fish knife and put the body in the woods, and this lovely fellow was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree, and he’s serving five years.
Five years
. While I’m in here for three decades. And do you know why?” A gob of spittle had formed at the corner of his mouth.

I nodded. “Securities fraud and grand larceny.”

He waggled a finger. “Wrong. I’m here because of ambition.”

“I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”

“Oh, not my own ambition. Believe me. I’m here because some very greedy and grasping young turks in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan wanted a scalp. They wanted to advance their grubby little careers. They wanted to land a plum job at some white-shoe law firm. Or run for mayor. Or governor. It’s all about ambition, Nicholas. Theirs versus mine. I was merely a stepping-stone on their path to greater glory. There’s no more Mafia, so now they go after the rich guys. ‘White-collar crime,’ they call it. Isn’t that what you do for a living now? Some sort of gumshoe? A private dick? You don’t think that’s beneath you, Nicholas? A little déclassé?”

I let my eyes roam the visiting room slowly, pointedly. “It’s hard to measure up to your accomplishments,” I said. “You set the bar awfully high.” I smiled. “Also, Stoddard Associates wasn’t too déclassé when you wanted them to save your ass.”

“When you need a plumber, you call a plumber. Doesn’t mean you become one.”

I shrugged.

“And yet you dare to pass judgment on me,” he said.

“Not at all. I don’t need to pass judgment on you. I already know what I think of you.”

He gave me his raptor’s smile.

“Anyway, I wasn’t asking about you,” I said. “Fascinating as you are. I need to know what Roger came here to talk about.”

He licked his lips very precisely, with just the tip of his tongue. “Your brother and I spoke in confidence. I won’t betray that confidence. You can ask him yourself.”

“I wish I could. But he’s gone. And I’m thinking it had something to do with whatever you two talked about.”

“That’s between father and son.” He said it with a cruel twist, as if he and I had a different, less privileged relationship.

“Okay,” I said. I pushed back the chair and got up. The guard looked up from his small wooden table at the door. “Nice to see you, Dad. A pleasure as always.”

“Sit down,” he said. “Don’t be silly. Your brother can tell you whatever he chooses to tell you.”

“Not likely. He and Lauren were attacked in Georgetown a couple of days ago, and when she woke up in the hospital—”

“Hospital? Is Lauren all right?”

I nodded, backed away from the counter a few steps.

My father stared at me levelly. Blinked a few times. “And Roger?”

“No one’s been able to find him since then. No one’s heard anything from him.”

A look of panic darted across his eyes, and he suddenly gave a loud, guttural cry. “No! Dear God,
no
! God damn it, I told him not to do it.”