Copp On Ice, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (17 page)

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

The lights were on in Schwartzman's master suite
and it looked pretty much as I'd noted earlier except that the litter had been cleaned from the top of the desk and the videocassettes had been removed, all of them. The cabinet was still there, beside the bed, but it now stood empty where earlier it must have held fifty or more of the hand- labeled cassettes. Bed looked a bit rumpled, as though someone had maybe sat on it, but the linens were still clean and crisp, unused.

A sliding mirrored door on the huge walk-in closet stood slightly open. I went in there and looked about, was impressed again by the number of suits hanging in rows like in a men's store, the shoes all in a row placed neatly beneath each suit. The image of that jarred something in the brain, made me take a closer look. Those shoes were not all the same size. Neither, I discovered a moment later, were the suits.

Well, well.

Wondered what it meant.

The suits, I supposed, could mean that Schwartzman had a weight problem—kept gaining and dieting, gaining and dieting. I knew what a problem that could be for a guy of average means. But if you're a millionaire...

That did not compute, though, because the size range was just too wide. You could not study the man's clothing and come up with a picture of him in the mind.

The shoes did not compute either. One's foot may swell a bit wider and fatter with obesity, but I could not understand changes in shoe size from a seven to a thirteen.

I filed all that away for later cogitation and went to the desk. It had three drawers on each side and a slim one in the middle. All were totally empty. There was not even a piece of lint in those drawers, not a pencil, not a scrap of note paper. The drawers even had that new wood smell to them.

I was getting disturbed.

There was no personal signature to this room. Not that it felt unoccupied, but that it had that air of occupancy you get from a hotel room. No photographs, no odds or ends of keys or coins, no individual imprint.

The bathroom was no better. But now, this was one hell of a bathroom; don't misunderstand. Had twin, built-in vanities, two private toilets plus a bidet, giant bathtub with a Jacuzzi and a double shower, a long ell with exercise mat and massage table. But it had that same impersonal stamp to it, not because there was nothing personal there but because too much personal was there.

Both vanities were stocked with masculine accessories, the usual stuff like shaving cream and aftershave lotion, deodorants and colognes, hairspray and toothpaste and all that stuff, even a couple of grooming kits for a mustache. But there were four different brands of shaving cream.

three different aftershaves, maybe a dozen different deodorants and five or six colognes, four different brands of hairspray... you get the picture.

But there was no way to draw a picture of the occupant. So was that by design or... ?

It's no big deal, you might say—a guy with all those bucks probably doesn't do his own shopping anyway, maybe he isn't habituated to any one particular brand of aftershave, maybe he likes to smell differently every day, maybe.. .

Sure, you can run the list of maybes, and I did, but still I was left with a feeling of discomfort. I was going for a sensing of the guy, and you can usually get that from personal effects, from surroundings and decor, from the intimate items of bath and bedroom, if not anywhere else. Sometimes you can get it just from a car, from a profession, from a pattern of friends or colleagues. Most people put a stamp on who they are, and the stamp is made up of things they do or like or use or wear.

So maybe the stamp I was looking at had been built by a multi-faceted personality, and maybe that in itself was the stamp—but that did not account for the clothes closet.

The police mind often defeats itself by its own sensitivity. Sometimes we see patterns that exist only in our own minds, but it is our job to look for patterns because we are so often removed once or twice or thrice from the facts and events that produce or have been produced by the patterns we see—and sometimes those patterns are no more than phantom structures thrown up by the mind in a search for understanding.

So I was wondering, as I stood there in the center of that multi-personalized bedroom, if I was seeing a real pattern or merely creating one from my need to know. Either way it was bizarre, pal—really bizarre, and I did not wish to give it much credulity at the moment, so I squelched it, thinking maybe I was reaching for straws, and turned the mind to other things.

I sat on the bed and called my computer pal in L. A. The hour never mattered to him, he always told me—call any time—but I woke him up and he sounded a bit surly at first.

Yes, he had the package on Schwartzman but he'd have to go downstairs to get it, so would I mind calling back at about eight o'clock, he'd just been having a terrific dream in which he was cracking the access codes to the Kremlin and he'd love to get right back to that.

"Can you do that?" I asked him.

"Do what?"

"Go back and resume a dream?"

He said, "Sure. Can't you?"

I said, "Well, I guess I never tried it."

"I do it all the time," he said. "Sometimes from one night to the next. It's just a matter of focus."

I said, "Sure. So how 'bout focusing on my package for a minute, first. You don't have to get up. Just give me the gist."

I heard the click of a cigarette lighter, knew that was what it was because this guy lives in a cloud of smoke. He coughed and said, "The gist is this. Many, many me- gabucks scattered around the world under many flags and too many corporate covers to penetrate in a casual sweep. I could do that if you wanted to give me a week. Knowing you, you can't afford it—so this is the budget tour, my friend. Panama, Nassau, Zurich, Frankfurt—and maybe that's just the tip of the iceberg—all coded accounts with only very wispy links, but take my budget gut hunch, they're all Schwartzman and they are all with no visible means of support."

      
"What do you mean, no visible—?"

      
"It's a laundry route, Joe."

      
I said, "Okay. What's the source?"

      
"Your guess is as good as mine but I think maybe

Panama's the base."

      
"Drug money," I guessed.

      
"Well, there's a suggestion of arms too. The Frankfurt link. I think maybe Mideast connections but I haven't followed that."

      
I said, "This is getting wild."

      
"Well, you asked me for it."

      
"Yeah, but—I don't give a damn about—I've got a local problem here, pal. I'm thinking saloons and whore houses and porn shops, you're giving me international empires."

      
"Don't fault me, I started with your local problem. I only had what you gave me. He arrived in Brighton with a letter of credit good for two million dollars from this bank in Nassau. The rest fell out of that."

      
"Well, bring it back home for me."

      
"Can't do that. The man doesn't exist back home, only his influence. Doesn't have a social security account, no driver's license, no car registrations or loans or mortgages, no—"

      
"Hold it," I yelled, "You're making me dizzy. You're giving me the little man who isn't there."

      
"Exactly," he replied. "He's a fucking phantom, Joe. But he exists in the electronic networks. I suspect that he is not an American national."

      
"What would you guess, then?"

      
"I'd guess German, or maybe German by way of South or Central America. That's what I mean, though, when I say you can't afford it. It would take me a week to bust through all the protective layers. That house he built there in Brighton, for example..."

"Yeah?"

"Uh, yeah, the escrow shows...uh, I need to get the file."

I said, "Forget the damned file. Just give me the facts."

"The facts," he replied tiredly, "is that I need the file to read the facts. It's sort of squirrely. You know how these escrow things can get. Uh... he paid cash for the land and hired this outfit in Riverside to build the house... it's uh ... I can't remember the name of the builder but you should be able to get that locally and it probably isn't important except that he bought the land as Harold Schwartzman and paid the builder as Brighton Holding, Inc. But now Brighton Holding, Inc. does not appear as a California corporation so I'd have to search other states to get that. Meanwhile there is an account right now in the Brighton City Bank under Brighton Holding and there is close to a million bucks in that account. I got uh, I got electronic transfers out but none in, and those transfers are all to Frankfurt, another corporation. It seems that the Brighton account is being fed from local sources and then siphoned off to Europe. So—"

"Where does Panama come into it?"

"Well, that comes from the original letter of credit from Nassau. The Nassau account is electronically fed from Panama."

I said, "Shit."

He said, "Yeah, it's a regular spiderweb. I gotta go back to sleep, Joe, I'm getting too far from the dream. Call me back about eight o'clock."

"Screw the dream," I told him. "I'm in a God damned nightmare here. Give me a quick profile on Schwartzman."

"I just did," he said, and hung up.

He just did, eh?

I sat there on Harold Schwartzman's bed and gazed

around Harold Schwartzman's bedroom, drew up a mental picture of his clothes closet and his bathroom—and I realized that, yeah, he just did.

      
He'd gotten about as close to the guy as I had.

      
Patterns?

      
Sure. A spiderweb is a pattern, isn't it?

      
A wardrobe of suits and shoes in eight sizes is a pattern, isn't it?

      
A supermarket of colognes and sprays and lodons overflowing two vanities is a pattern, isn't it?

      
I went back into the closet and yanked two suits off their hangers, smelled them, turned the coats inside out and smelled them again—picked up a shoe and smelled it too.

      
Shit. None of that stuff had been worn much, if ever. The coats did not smell of sweat or cleaning fluid; the leather of the shoes had never been wrinkled, the soles never soiled or scraped.

      
Then I looked at a label inside a coat. The label was from Paris. Another was from Buenos Aires. One from Rome.

      
Okay. Okay.

      
What was the pattern? Courier? Many identities, many personalities, many disguises?

      
Was that a pattern?

      
Did it fit anything in Brighton?

      
It did not, no, fit anything in Brighton that I could see.

      
But, hell... I hadn't seen anything yet.