WIN, Coben, Harlan [ebook and pdf reader .txt] 📗

tiny basement, Ry was really starting to unravel. I couldn’t stay with him anymore. It was just too abusive a relationship. No, he never hit me. That’s not what I mean. The woman who got us the room under Malachy’s? She saw it too. That kind woman—I’ll call her Sheila but that’s not her real name—Sheila could see I needed help. She became a sympathetic ear. I had to leave him. No choice. But where would I go? I thought about staying underground. Sheila knew someone who could sneak me into Canada and then to Europe. But I’d been on the run for two years now. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life this way. The stress, the dirt, the exhaustion, but mostly the boredom. You either travel or you hide all day. More than anything, I think wanted people turn themselves in to escape the monotony. I just craved normalcy, you know what I mean?”

“Normalcy,” I repeat to keep her talking.

“So Sheila introduced me to this sympathetic lawyer who taught up at Columbia. He thought that if I turned myself in, maybe I wouldn’t get that much time, you know, being so young and under Ry’s influence and all that. So we came up with a plan. I made my way to Detroit. I hid out there for a few weeks. When enough time had passed, I turned myself in.”

“Did you tell Ry Strauss what you were doing?”

She slowly shook her head, her face tilted toward the sky. “This was all done behind Ry’s back. I left a note with Sheila trying to explain.”

“How did he react to your departure?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Once a plan like that goes into effect, you can’t look back. It’s too dangerous for anyone.”

“Did you try to find out after the fact?”

“No, never. Same reason. I didn’t want to put anyone in danger.”

“You must have been curious.”

“More like guilty,” she says. “Ry was getting worse—and my answer was to abandon him. His hold on me had loosened, but…God, you can’t imagine what it was like. I thought the sun rose and fell on Ry Strauss. I would literally have died for him.”

Which raises the question, which I decide not to ask right now: Would you have killed for him too?

“You told the FBI he drowned in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.”

“I made that up.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? I owed him, didn’t I?”

“It was a distraction?”

“Yes, of course. Get the cops off his back. I also had to explain why I chose now to turn myself in. I couldn’t say it was because the great Ry Strauss was ranting at himself in a basement bar on the Upper West Side. Now we would diagnose him as bipolar or OCD or something. But back then? Ry used to go up to the bar at night, after it closed, and line up the liquor bottles so they were equidistant from one another with the labels facing the same way. It would take him hours.”

I think about the tower room at the Beresford. “Did he have any money?”

“Ry?”

“You said you were hiding in a basement below a dive bar.”

“Yes.”

“Did he have the money for nicer quarters?”

“No.”

“Did he have an interest in art?”

“Art?”

“Painting, sculpture, art.”

“I don’t…Why would you ask that?”

“Did you ever commit robberies with him?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“So you just relied on the kindness of strangers?”

“I don’t—”

“You know other radicals held up banks, don’t you? The Symbionese Liberation Army. The Brink’s robbery. Did you and Strauss ever do anything like that? I don’t care about prosecuting you. My guess is, the statute of limitations would be up anyway. But I need to know.”

A teenage boy walks by us with three dogs on leashes. Lake Davies smiles at him and nods. He nods back. “I wanted to turn myself in right at the start. He wouldn’t let me.”

“Wouldn’t let you?”

“Part of all worship is abuse. That’s what I’ve learned. Those who love God the most also fear God the most too. ‘God-fearing,’ right? The most devout who won’t shut up about God’s love are always the ones raving about fire and brimstone and eternal damnation. So was I in love with Ry or was I scared of him? I don’t know how thick that line is.”

I’m not here to get mired down in a philosophical discussion, so I shift gears.

“Did you see on the news about a stolen Vermeer being found?”

“Yesterday, right?” It slowly hits her. “Wait. Wasn’t someone found dead with the painting?”

I nod. “That was Ry Strauss.”

I give her a moment to take that in.

“He’d become a hoarder and a hermit.” I explain about the Beresford, the tower, the clutter, the mess, the painting on the wall. I choose not to go into my cousin’s predicament quite yet. There is a bench up ahead. Lake Davies collapses onto it as if her knees have given way. I stay standing.

“So Ry was murdered.”

“Yes.”

“After all these years.” Lake Davies shakes her head, her eyes glassy. “I still don’t see why you’re here.”

“My family owned the Vermeer.”

“So you’re, what, here to find the other painting?”

I do not reply.

“I don’t have it. When were the paintings stolen?”

I tell her the date.

“That was way after I turned myself in.”

“Did you ever see any of the other Jane Street Six after the murders?”

She winces at the word “murders.” I used it intentionally. “The underground divided us up. You can’t have six people traveling together.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Just one.”

When she stops talking, I put my hand to my ear. “I’m listening.”

“We stayed two nights with Arlo.”

“Arlo Sugarman?”

She nods. “In Tulsa. He was posing as a student at Oral Roberts University, which I thought was pretty ironic.”

“Why’s that?”

“Arlo was raised Jewish but prided himself on his atheism.”

I remember something I saw in the file. “Sugarman claimed he wasn’t there that night—”

“We all did, so what?”

Fair enough. “Wasn’t he a fine arts major at Columbia?”

“Yeah, maybe. Wait, you think Arlo and Ry…?”

“Do you?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know for