Chapter One
Paul Artisan did not expect to need his gun that day, but you never knew. Sometimes things got very personal very quickly.
People reacted strangely when they were caught in squalid little lies. Sometimes their posture drooped and their faces slackened, and they seemed almost relieved to be found out, to have their cheesy deceptions discovered and ended. Other times people seemed almost proud of themselves for being recognized as liars, cheats, adulterers, and frauds; confronted with their sins, they couldn't quite squeeze back sick and twisted hints of smiles, nasty twinkles in narrowed eyes. Look at me. I'm hell-bait!
But sometimes people did get violent. Like cornered animals, they soon ran out of subtle options. If they couldn't slink away and hide, they saw no other possibility but to stand and fight, to the death if necessary. It was better to take the gun.
The problem was how. This was an incognito job. A country-club job. The disguise was tennis clothes. There was no room to stick a 9 mm pistol in a pair of tennis shorts; there was no place to hide a holster underneath a natty, cabled tennis vest. Artisan decided to stash the gun in the zippered bag that held his racquets. This was not ideal-it would take time and a bizarre ruse to free the weapon from a tennis bag-but it would have to do. He called down to the garage to liberate his car, took his cell phone off the charger and stuck it in his pocket, and locked up his tiny office.
It was August, and an excellent day to get out of Manhattan. The air had an unwholesome brownish-orange tinge; a deep breath felt grainy in the nose. The softened asphalt of Tenth Avenue seemed to suck at the tires of Artisan's old Volvo. Heading uptown toward the George Washington Bridge, he used red lights as opportunities to review the small folder that held a photo and some background information on his intended target.
Her name was Sally Handler. Age forty-eight. Occupation: Housewife and investor. Divorced from a midlevel executive in the telecom business. Two grown children. She did not look like a criminal, a would-be perpetrator of a multi-million-dollar fraud. She looked like a lady from Teaneck. Hair a fraudulent blonde, though if that were a crime, the jails would be as crowded as Calcutta. Friendly seeming eyes with some moderate wrinkling at the corners. A bit of thickening beneath the chin. A woman you might meet in any supermarket in America, especially in the aisle where they sold the low-carb crap. Not a crook. Artisan gave his head a small involuntary shake. With human beings you just never knew.
On the Jersey side of the river, he found his way past shopping malls and town-home developments to the Palisade Pines Golf and Tennis Club. The club was miles from the Palisades and Artisan did not see any pines. Then again, there hadn't been any towns where the town-homes were. What there were, on this weekday morning in the parking lot of this midlevel suburban club, were a lot of Acura and Lexus SUVs, the usual sprinkling of BMWs and Benzes. Retired men in unforgivable trousers bent painfully to retrieve their golf clubs from their trunks. Knots of chattering ladies adjusted their visors so as not to squash their beauty parlor hairdos. Artisan slung his unnaturally heavy tennis bag over his shoulder and headed for the door.
Inside, a chipper desk clerk wished him a good morning, tentatively reached a towel in his direction, then asked if he was a member.
The simple question allowed Artisan to do one of the things he was very good at, namely, gain admission to places where technically speaking he did not belong. The scary part was how easy this usually was. In recent years, people had gotten crazy about security, but security tended to be yet another fraud, at best a comforting illusion. Put a bouncer at the door. Give him a stun gun and a walkie-talkie. So what? Even locked doors had to open now and then. There were plenty of ways to get past the velvet rope. Bribes still worked, though they were crass and seldom necessary. Usually all it took were a few magic words suited to the particular occasion and said in a calm, unthreatening manner.
For example, Artisan now confessed that he was not a member. Then he said, "I'm new to the area. Still seeing what's available. I've booked an eleven o'clock lesson with Ryan."
New to the area was a magic phrase. It conjured images of initiation fees, a nice commission for the membership rep, a few bucks for the clerk who'd made first contact. Booked a lesson was a magic phrase. It meant some poor bastard of a teaching pro would make seventy-five bucks on a Tuesday morning when things were generally dead.
"Ah. Welcome!" said the clerk, and extended the towel. "If you don't mind, there's this liability form-"
"No problem." Artisan knew from liability. He filled out the form, even signed his real name.
The clerk stuck the paper in a drawer and looked at a clock behind him. "It's only ten thirty. Would you like to have someone from Member Services show you-"
"Maybe later. I'd really like to hit some serves. Little rusty."
"Sure, sure. Have a good hit."
With that, the clerk gestured beyond the little pro shop to the tennis courts. And Paul Artisan, whom no one knew from Adam, and who had a 9 mm pistol nestled in his tennis bag, went out to find his quarry.
He had no doubt she'd be there. The papers from her own lawsuit confirmed she was a member of this club; one of her lies was that she could no longer use the facilities for which she'd already paid. She had a doubles game at 10 a.m. Ryan the teaching pro had in all innocence confirmed that when Artisan told him he wanted to schedule his lesson so he could say hello to her, as she was a friend of a friend. Didn't people realize how easy they were to find, how readily they could get nailed?
The tennis courts were arranged in a double row, with low wooden bleachers in between. Artisan strolled down the middle aisle, glancing left and right. There was a fair bit of suburban tennis going on; it wasn't pretty. Bandy old men with giant racquets, slicing and dicing and making bad calls. Matronly foursomes sending lob after lob into the humid Jersey sky. As at every club, a macho guy in too-tight shorts, trying to play like he'd seen on television.
Sally Handler's court was the last one on the left. Very casually, Artisan sat down on the bleachers that faced it. The women briefly looked up at him. Idle curiosity: a new man at the club. Then they went back to their game. Artisan put his tennis bag on the bench beside him; he partly opened the zipper to the compartment that held the gun.
For a couple minutes he watched them play, and he felt almost bad about what he was about to do. They seemed like nice ladies. They made little jokes between points. There was something sweet and heartbreaking about the little pleated skirts encircling tummies that were no longer flat; about the pastel bloomers stretching around soft thighs struggling to run; about the wristbands on plump arms trying so hard to be strong. They were just regular people of a certain age wanting to enjoy their lives. How had one of them turned out to be a would-be criminal? Was her ex-husband a total deadbeat? Was one of her kids in trouble or sick? Had she just messed up with her own investments, put herself in jeopardy of losing the modest privileges and comforts she'd forgotten how to live without? It was sad, but sympathy was a different thing from justice.
Finally it was Sally Handler's turn to serve. Artisan took his cell phone from his pocket.
She moved to the service line. He gently snapped open the phone. She bounced the ball in front of her, once, twice, three times. With a practiced lack of hurry, Artisan raised the phone toward his ear but then subtly shifted it in front of his face and focused it on Sally Handler.
With her left hand she tossed the ball a few feet above her head. Her right arm lifted, dropped into a backswing, then came up high above her visor and her hairdo to strike the yellow ball. Artisan snapped the picture at the moment of contact.
And that was it. That was the end of Artisan's workday and it was the end of Sally Handler's fraudulent five-million-dollar suit against her orthopedic surgeon. She'd had her rotator cuff 'scoped just under a year ago. Her suit alleged that the doctor had screwed up and she could no longer raise her arm beyond the level of her shoulder. Did she really expect not to be found out? Artisan would now send the photo to the orthopedist's insurance company. The company, most likely, would forward the image to Sally Handler's lawyer with a terse note saying they were not inclined to settle and would gladly meet her in court. Sally Handler would drop her case and Artisan would receive his day rate of five hundred bucks from the insurance company.
The detective slid the phone back into his pocket and secured the zipper of his tennis bag. He hoped to slip away without a confrontation, and he more or less succeeded. As he rose from the bleachers, Sally Handler's gaze locked onto him and irresistibly drew his glance in return. Their eyes locked only for an instant of mutually abashed communication. Sally Handler's eyes told him she knew that she'd been photographed; that she didn't want her tennis-lady friends to know what she had done. Artisan's eyes sent back the lame message that it was nothing personal.
Then he walked away. It was just after ten thirty when he got back to the front desk. He actually had time to take the lesson he had booked. But he didn't feel like it. He felt bad for Sally Handler. He felt bad, also, for himself. He paid for the lesson and he left the club.
Chapter Two
Driving back to the city, with the Empire State Building seeming to pinwheel in front of him with each bend in the highway, Artisan reflected for the thousandth time that this was not why he'd become a private eye. He took no pleasure in saving millions of dollars for the insurance companies; like everyone else, he hated the insurance companies. For that matter, he wasn't crazy about doctors either. But that was where the work was, that was mostly how he paid the rent.
Besides, if the malpractice gigs were dreary, the matrimonial cases were downright sordid. Catching investment bankers soliciting blow jobs underneath the remnants of the West Side Highway or sneaking out of cheap hotels with buff young men in sleeveless shirts; enduring endless stakeouts to see if their wives back in Greenwich were consorting with the gardener or some other swarthy fellow whose low social status only enhanced his forbidden allure. No, this was not why he'd become a private eye.
He'd become a private eye because he was a certain type of hopeless and incurable romantic.
He would never have said it aloud, and would have been embarrassed even to let the words take firm shape in his thoughts, but the fact was that Paul Artisan saw himself as a new version of a very old breed-a righter of wrongs, a champion of those who needed help. He believed-or desperately wanted to believe, which is nearly the same thing-that things made sense, that effects had causes, that locks had keys, that if you truly got to the bottom of something, logic would be satisfied and justice would be done; logic and justice would converge, in fact, and that would be the definition of a kind of earthly paradise.
As some people are fools for love and others are even bigger fools for money, Paul Artisan was a fool for truth. He was addicted to it and was miserable without it. And if-as lots of hip and cynical people proposed-there was no such thing as truth, if it was all subjective and dependent on the situation, then Artisan would be not just obsolete but ridiculous.
He'd become a private eye to prove the cynics wrong. And to protect himself against becoming one of them.
So it was no small irony that Paul Artisan, friend of the underdog, crusader for the real, spent the great bulk of his working hours doing the bidding of powerful interests that used their size and their resources so that the fields they played on were never quite level; so that truth itself ceased to be the smooth and lovely and simple thing it was meant to be, and became warped, the way space and time are warped by the presence of very massive objects. This affronted Artisan every working day-but what could he do? He was part of an old breed that was not much in demand these days.
Still, each morning when he went to work, the detective rekindled the ever-fainter hope that a very different sort of case might fall his way. A case that mattered. A case that would sweep his ideals off the shelf of fine sentiments and into the realm of action, that would blow the dust off his largely untested courage, and would show what he was made of.
Driving east on the George Washington Bridge back toward the grainy sepia air of New York, Artisan had no way of knowing that a case like that was waiting for him on the other side. Or that, before it was concluded, he'd have ample reason to recall the Chinese proverb that counsels caution in what one wishes for, just in case the wish comes true.
Chapter Three
"Good game?" said a voice behind him, just as Paul Artisan was sliding the key into his office door in the third-rate building that was too far west on Fifty-seventh Street.
He turned to see a man in a beautiful suit. The suit was the first thing that registered. It was pearl gray, made of some mysterious mix of linen and silk that draped with boundless confidence and somehow managed to look crisp and cool even through the urban miseries of August. Beneath the suit was an immaculate shirt of slate blue with a businessman's contrasting collar of perfect white, set off by a silk tie festooned with tiny paisleys the size of teardrops.
"Actually," the detective said, "I've been working. Can I help you?"
The man in the splendid suit seemed unconvinced about the working part. But he nodded toward the door and said, "May I come in?"
Artisan unlocked it, then held out a hand and introduced himself. The visitor answered with a firm though not overly emphatic handshake. He didn't offer his name, which came as no surprise. Prospective clients often withheld their names or started out with fake ones. Artisan preferred the former. That truth thing again. He gestured the visitor past the office door, with its archaic pebbled window.
The detective seldom met with clients at his office-most of his gigs came in by phone or e-mail-and if he had, they would not have been impressed. The space was small and badly lit, and appeared dustier than it really was because of the dinginess of the stale paint on the walls. There was a tiny anteroom where a secretary might have sat, but there was no secretary, just a ghostly desk and an old-fashioned appointment book that Artisan seldom bothered writing in. Beyond a narrow doorway, the detective's inner office was maybe twelve feet square, graced by a single window that faced out on what was fancifully called a courtyard but was in fact an airshaft. Artisan slid around his dinged-up wooden desk and directed his guest toward one of two plain chairs on the far side of it. "So," he said, "how can I help you?"
The visitor paused a few seconds before he answered. It seemed he needed to get more familiar with his surroundings before he spoke. This did not take long. His surroundings consisted of a couple of deeply unattractive file cabinets, one of which had a closed laptop computer perched on top. On one wall was an immensely detailed map of the borough of Manhattan. On the opposite wall was a grade-school sort of map of the entire world. That was it for furnishings, but the visitor seemed satisfied. "I want to know," he said, "if you can find someone for me."
Artisan leaned back in his chair and tried to appear confident and businesslike. This was not so easy, as he was still wearing tennis shorts and sneakers in the middle of a working day. Also, he had to labor just a bit to avoid feeling cowed by the splendor of his prospective client's suit. "Finding people is what I do," he said. "Who is it you're looking for?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bad Twinby Gary Troup Copyright © 2006 by Touchstone Television. Excerpted by permission.
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