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Discretion is the better part of valor.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I
Blossom Taneesha Jones RN of Brooklyn, New York had no difficulty obtaining work. The nursing temp agency called her twice a week with better offers than anyone else because she was the best.
The best temporary private duty nurse in the boroughs. She was temporary only in the sense that life is. Temporary.
She refused a steady job, citing the boredom of a permanent position and her antipathy to the huge mistake of being under any supervisor's thumb who might insist on inferior methods or require lesser standards of care.
Not Blossom.
Her standards were high, her mission the protection of her patients from physicians and other nurses of any stripe or specialty.
She earned $80 an hour plus a variety of benefits cheerfully paid by the various private wealthy clients and their caretakers.
Nobody fired Blossom. Her patients all eventually moved on or died, but not from lack of spectacularly good nursing.
Her spotless white nurse's uniform was adorned with her school pin. Her hair, long her crowning glory, was a large rather bouffant mass of beautiful black curls, which she removed on Tuesdays and Fridays and dropped by Rita's Beauty Salon for cleaning and maintenance.
She picked up her second wig at Rita's and put it on before she left the shop. She was a favorite at the shop since their business from her wealthy patients was substantial and because she was who she said she was.
At work she wore a white nursing cap with two black stripes and long white nursing hose. Blossom's immaculate white shoes got polished daily at home and carried in a plastic bag to work.
She did not wear jewelry. Not a ring. No earrings. No bracelet. A slim silver nursing watch was all there was in that line.
She was trained to avoid perfume. Sick people didn't always appreciate strong scents.
Blossom had been hired before this private duty case actually started by the Nursing Star agency of Brooklyn. The agency had been approached by two lawyers some months ago who had asked for help hiring round the clock nurses for a wealthy client in a coma.
The unusual part of this gig was that the hire date was immediate, the start date was in the future and uncertain. She would be paid now whether called or not for the indefinite time being.
The lawyers wanted female nurses who were discrete, needed work (as opposed to working to get out of the house or to have a work family or for some extra pocket money) and efficient.
None of the nurses were to know each other or to have worked with each other in the past.
The agency head immediately thought of her cousin Blossom. Quiet, efficient, but not a pushover, Blossom Jones didn't take anything from anybody, was in charge of herself and her family and was initially taciturn at work.
Employers had found a knockout in Blossom. She had a spotless RN record in Pennsylvania and New York. Her mother had raised her daughter to listen and listen carefully. She didn't raise a fool and Blossom soon learned that she didn't learn quickly while talking.
She had taken the day shift, substituting as needed on other shifts and weekends. Although a lifelong Adventist, she didn't take to the notion that she ought not to care for patients on the occasional Saturday, reasoning that if the Lord meant for the sick to be sick on that day, she ought to take her turn at caring for them.
Otherwise, she finished her routine work for the week by sundown on Friday, had her Sabbath cooking done, attended choir practice (alto with perfect pitch) at church, and played the piano on her old upright Kimball at home.
Her two children, John and Marcus, ages eleven and fifteen, sang along with their mom, were situated for the night, and fell into bed to wake excited for Sabbath services.
Four months after being hired, she was called to duty. Carol Roberts, her one and only patient, had arrived and needed care.
Blossom learned a great deal about Carol over the next few years. And felt she had more to find out.
For some reason, Blossom didn't like a lot of her job from the first day on.
She had met the two attorneys, Jack Cooper and Bob Stutlin, on a cold day after first being assured by the Nursing Star Agency that they were interested in her.
Interested especially in her, a fact which caused the hairs on her neck to rise straight up for a bit. Creepy. She had expected the routine story about being one of four hundred candidates for the position and all.
Those same hairs rose a second time when she heard the salary and benefits the total of which tripled her previous pay.
The final inducement from the agency, beside the immediate pay for no work until the start date at least, had been a contractual agreement to pay for 4 years of college for each of her two sons at any school they could manage to enter given whatever grades and scores they presented by their freshman year of college.
The agency attorney reviewed the agreement and assured Blossom that the longer tail consequences of this contract were designed to survive any length of employment over three years.
She was vested soon enough in that three years and once a week allowed her the occasional grin in the mirror.
She had shivered when she understood this part of her contract. She reminded herself what her mother had said years earlier about if something sounds too good to be true, it might be.
Blossom had prepared herself for the worst and found, at first, a straightforward nursing case, and a thirty-five-year old woman now comatose after a traffic accident somewhere.
The patient came with no medical records.
That was odd enough.
The patient had no family of which Blossom was aware. Blossom was struck by the circumstances of her care.
An entire floor of the Cherry Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side had been closed for renovations some months prior to Carol's admission.
Except for two rooms, quickly remodeled into a hospital suite nicer than any other hospital room on the island of Manhattan, the rest of the hospital floor remained empty.
Strange indeed, she thought.
Hedging their bets should official attention be paid to poor treatment of a patient by her attorney 'caretakers', someone had decreed the suite be gussied up with thick Aubusson carpets and original oil paintings (one Renoir and one smallish Picasso).
Quiet classical music (Chopin etudes, Debussy, Haydn piano sonatas) was heard most of the day. By Blossom, that is.
Technically speaking, Carol's brain received the musical sounds, converted the sound through her tympanic membranes, through the bones of her middle ears, and finally sent biochemical nerve impulses in her inner ear to the brain through her two vestibulocochlear nerves.
In other words, Carol heard sound just like before the accident. Her ears were OK. Her brain simply wasn't processing the impulses received in the normal awake sensory mode. For now.
Blossom reviewed the hearing process in her mind to help pass the time. She devoutly believed that the sense organs such as taste, smell, hearing, and touch rang bells in the brains of the comatose patients.
She didn't know if patients thought about those inputs but figured any vocal input couldn't hurt.
If her singing got through and encouraged her patient at any level, she was willing to try. She made a hobby of memorizing hymn texts. Her rich alto (sometimes contralto) singing filled the room most days.
Blossom soon set up her daily care routine and in the remaining hours each shift, she sang.
Her repertoire included both hymns of the church (Blessed Assurance) and Eagles hits (Hotel California) and she could sing all of them on pitch.
A high-definition flat-screen television hung in the nursing station area; another had been placed in the patient's room. Blossom left it off.
A humidifier tempered the bits of dry cold winter air that snuck in the room. The air conditioning worked during the worst of New York heat.
Blossom had taken care of patients at their luxurious homes. The things in the suite didn't impress her. The patient's story did.
Carol remained in her bed. Oblivious.
In addition, there was a telephone without a dial or buttons.
When the hand piece was lifted, a secretary answered at Cooper, Stutlin and Baker.
Blossom had no idea that Cooper and Stutlin were taking no chances with some functionary removing them from their Guardian ad Litem position and jeopardizing the flow of income to them and the family and especially the use of Rainier, which they loved to distraction.
The jet, they had to acknowledge, was much nicer and a ton easier than those nasty, tedious TSA lines at airports. Feeling naturally superior to other attorneys, the jet reinforced that notion and besides it got them to the ambulance faster than the next esquire, so to speak.
Blossom, the stunned and perhaps lucky nurse, felt as chosen as if she had been touched by the divine to have the honor to take care of Carol Roberts (the job itself). For the first few weeks. But she still didn't like a lot of it for some reason.
The first days were unremarkable. An older internist came in weekly, rarely ordered anything new, and left without comment. The nutritionist never visited but performed her analysis of electrolytes, protein concentrations, and other tests at another site.
Blossom found the IV box at the front door of the suite filled every day with the proper IV equipment, TPN (total parenteral nutrition), and other medications for injection.
The patient initially didn't speak, didn't respond to stimuli of various kinds including Blossom's ongoing purposeful one-sided dialogue and loud alto hymns of praise. Carol's Glasgow Coma Scale numbers performed every shift showed at first, well...a coma.
Blossom turned her patient frequently and carefully watched with a hawk's eye for any sign of reddened skin, a first sign of skin ulcer. Not that she ever saw any sign of skin breakdown.
Decubitus ulcers didn't occur in any patient under Blossom's care. The ulcers didn't dare appear.
Normal vital signs, including no elevated temperature, normal blood pressure, normal pulse, normal urine output (clear yellow), prevailed. The patient required no drugs other than the injectable vitamins and TPN.
She received frequent turning care, oral care, and daily immaculate linen changes on the bed without a wrinkle in sight. Someone sent a beautician for a hair appointment each week. Carol was manicured regularly.
Her IV, a multiport technological marvel did not, as a rule, infiltrate and never was infected. Blossom kept the site surgically clean, touched up with a little Betadine ointment, and covered with sterile gauze over Tegaderm with paper tape to reduce skin tearing. The Foley catheter was changed regularly. Since Blossom was obsessed with sterile technique, a urinary tract infection had not developed yet in spite of the indwelling catheter.
Bacteria didn't swim upstream or hitchhike on catheters on Blossom's shift. They didn't dare.
There was a suite number on the door. There was no name. There were no guards. No hospital official ever dropped by. Other than her caregivers and the attorneys, nobody, including social workers, stopped by.
The name Carol Schuyler-Ross did not appear on the hospital census. Neither did that daily document show the name of Carol Roberts. The room she occupied simply wasn't referenced on the daily census.
The hospital administrator was grateful for an initial magnificent cash philanthropic gift with ongoing monthly cash donations from Cooper, Stutlin and Baker designated for the poor each month and delivered in an envelope directly to him.
He had taken the position, having duly considered the whole situation, that tinkering with the details wasn't going to bring the unfortunate patient back from a coma anytime soon.
His motto, from the aunt who raised him, was 'less said, the better'.
At Blossom's last stint, she worked at St. Luke's and in her limited experience VIP patients rated social workers and vice-presidents and patient representatives and all kinds of people playing doctor showing up every day.
At rounds twice a day at St. Luke's, a group of tired looking docs would shuffle into the room as a group ranging from young medical students to interns to residents to the God-like attending.
Here was a case of money and quiet luxury. No visitors whatsoever if one didn't count Cooper and sidekick Stutlin.
The surroundings said VIP...but the lack of the usual VIP treatment? Something didn't feel right about the whole thing.
There was little change over the next couple of months. The months stretched into years. Blossom enjoyed the paycheck, tolerated the work, and more than once thought about what kind of money it must cost to care for this lady and where it was coming from.
Mr. Cooper and Mr. Stutlin always visited once a month and always together. They did not address Blossom, ignored her presence, and after the first attempt at a report on her patient's condition, Blossom decided they either couldn't understand or didn't particularly want to know. C&S (as she came to think of them) never spent more than five minutes in the patient's room.
It seemed that their entire purpose was to ascertain for themselves that Carol was still in a coma and for some reason, reasonably healthy otherwise to casual 'attorney-quality' observation.
Blossom, after the first few visits, didn't address them but tagged along and carefully made sure they didn't touch any equipment or the patient. Her nursing license (mandating that she be an advocate for the patient against all enemies foreign and domestic, (i.e. family and doctors) was the same license that allowed her to feed her boys. She knew the state nursing code frontwards and backwards and kept track of any changes on the state nursing web site.
No one messed with her patients.
June 1, a Tuesday, was different. C&S showed up and they actually spoke to her. It didn't surprise her. She figured that no white men of her acquaintance could stay quiet for very long.
What knocked her socks off was the content and cold tone of what Coop said.
"By the way, I hope you know you are expected to call immediately if anyone visits the patient. Keep your mouth shut about your job. We know where you live and where your boys go to school."
"Revenge is Mine Saith the Lord." That was the title of the Sabbath sermon the next weekend and Blossom's alert mind began to mull that over while checking out the lady's hat in front of her, a kind of tall, black crepe and lace creation which together with a too-tall feather reminded Blossom why she didn't wear hats.
She couldn't see the preacher well due to the darn hat but had a pretty good view of John the organist in his stately wooden throne just behind the organ console. He was single, well off, and handsome. She had researched him more than a little, speaking to the head deaconess who told her that John worked as a paralegal. He had no kids or vices she knew about. She had given him a marriage prospect score of forty out of one-hundred, which score which he might have improved had he paid the slightest attention to her. He had failed to finish that task, let alone start it.
Marriage was not her first priority. She had enjoyed the process by which her boys had been conceived. A lot.
The man who had conjured up the genetic material for her boys had absconded with a tootsie from a cheap coffee shop nearby and insisted to the state of New York that he made no money.
Child support wasn't an issue. He didn't send any. She mentioned this to herself frequently when the thought popped into her head, more often recently but not distressingly so since her life was calm and ordered mostly now.
And today, sitting on the padded pew with her boys fidgeting some at her side, she pondered her response to Coop's orders.
Yeah, the guy paid the bills, but who paid him? Why the hassle? Why the attitude?
She would have talked back and told him to mind his manners except she didn't know if he had any.
In any event Blossom fell back on her rule which was to wait to respond to much of anything except for sass from her sons, managers at Target and altar calls at church.
First, no one threatened her boys.
They were all she had, family wise, since her mom passed away, and she took pride in making sure they were clean, excelled in school, stayed away from drugs, tobacco and alcohol, and chose friends that helped them reach their goals.
Keeping them safe was like the bottom line however.
Coop had gotten her attention. Her gut attention.
She didn't really have a problem with calling them about visitors. Mostly.
Or did she?
The nursing code didn't mention any professional duty to call the bill-payer for beans.
There was no power of attorney form in the chart, just a Guardian ad Litem form which she noted, was signed by a Judge in New Jersey. The date was written in a different hand.
She noted that the notary date was after the date of admission, a first in her career. What were the mechanics of that paperwork for a comatose patient to whom the notary had not been introduced? Never introduced!
Blossom shifted her weight on the seat, coming back to the sermon. She had just missed a few remarks and focused back again.
"The Lord Jesus," the preacher said, "reserved revenge to Himself because he has a thousand ways to take care of sin and not one of them necessarily involves hurting the people that He created and loves to distraction."
"The Lord's revenge is not the "I'm going to get you for what you did to Me."
"It is merely the word the Bible translators had at their disposal to describe what humans did said and did way back when."
Blossom listened to the preacher, "God's method is a careful, loving evaluation of the circumstances and a loving response. He will not force sinners (humans) to be present and unhappy in heaven and will bring a final conclusion soon to the controversy that Satan started long ago, claiming that God was unfair, unjust, controlling, partial to some and mean to others, etc."
"He, in love, will not torture bad people in hell forever, but mercifully end their torment quickly, never bringing them back to suffer again and not permitting sin to stain the universe again."
The preacher finished.
The organ played the last hymn, the benediction was spoken, the preacher and staff exited down the aisle of the large church.
She eyed John, the organist, once again, and noted that he must have been playing a familiar piece, since his eyes wandered over the departing congregants and for one flashing second it seemed as if their eyes met.
As Blossom & her boys walked out into the chill December air, she saw Cooper and Stutlin, of all people, standing on the sidewalk across the street by a shiny, long black car. They gazed up the stone stairs at her and her family, gave her a tight smile, waved briefly, entered the auto and were driven away.
Blossom got mad. Really, really mad. Her calm face and smile hid every bit of it.
Carol woke up finally at precisely 9:45 a.m. on a Thursday morning.
Five months after Coop and Stut's last visit as Blossom was checking Carol's IV and explaining her church's position on the state of the dead (the dead slept until Jesus came to wake them up at the last trumpet sound sometime in the future), Carol's right hand moved.
One by one each of Carol's right fingers lifted off the sheet.
Blossom's pupils dilated, and she felt a warm tingly feeling creep up her neck.
She glanced at the clock, watched Carol's vital signs on the monitor and saw a spike in pulse rate, which gradually slowed back down to her normal rate.
Blossom wasn't about to check her blood pressure if Carol was awake. It wasn't time to turn the rudder on this ship yet, she thought, and we'll see if the ship keeps going straight ahead.
Blossom wasn't about to chart that event.
She had learned over the years to chart trends in her patient's conditions, not every isolated breath. She knew good and well that no doctor ever read nurses notes in any hospital unless they had too much time on their hands or were medical students. Just watch, she told herself, and we'll if we see that again.
In any case, she thought if it happened off her shift it might be charted, and she would pick it up from looking at the other nurse's notes. Which she did scrupulously anyway.
When it occurred later in her shift, Blossom was still just mad enough to not call the jerks. She just kept talking, watching and singing through the next few days.
Carol opened her eyes one day, kept so scrupulously free of tears and secretions by nurses to whom she had never been introduced. It seemed to her that she had just woken up.
She did not speak. Her mind felt dusty. She thought it might be evening. She could see no one in the room with her. She saw only a dim shadow of a window with handsome, shiny perfect pale-yellow trim and narrow vertical blinds of a yet lighter yellow hue reflecting some light from behind her.
She was unable to move her entire body or lift her head but thought she could if she practiced maybe. Her name was Carol, she thought, and wondered nothing more that night.
The next morning, she heard a voice that sounded like a familiar friend singing and talking. She thought about it and when it sounded like the person had her back turned, she briefly opened one eyelid a tiny bit. The person was turning back toward her and she snapped her eye shut.
Blossom didn't miss much and out of the corner of her own eyes saw Carol's eye shut.
Not a muscle moved on the bed. No response. Blossom turned back from Carol and sang a hymn tune with far different words. A message to Carol to the rousing tune of "Shall We Gather at the River."
"Let's not awaken when the lawyers,
Visit here the very next time,
Let's pretend you're in a coma,
Sleeping soundly on the bed.
Shall We Gather at the River..."
She hoped Carol got it.
Carol understood.
Blossom had wondered why she couldn't find any details about the patient on the Internet. She told her son about her job offer and Marcus had instantly been lukewarm to the idea of a charity education and had told his mother that if she earned it, that was one thing.
If this was anything else, he wanted no part. His search of every major search engine produced no Carol Roberts, no accident within one year of the supposed event and admission to the hospital. There was no record of any wealthy person within two hundred miles named Roberts that had a missing daughter, wife, aunt or sister. Furthermore, no newspaper or Find Law proceeding in the time frames that might have been related was helpful.
Marcus told his mother that it wasn't over yet. He began to think over his process to date. He had hit the obvious. What about the costs his mom had mentioned?
Why was a law firm paying the bills on that one? He texted his brother John and asked for help.
"J, plz call me when you get a min. Not urg."
Less than five minutes later, John found himself deep in plans to figure out the mystery patient.
In the days that followed, both John and Marcus mentioned to each other that a story timeline might be helpful for clues. Neither did one. They thought the other had done that task and it did not get done.
They came up with the idea that even if the general public didn't know the patient, the hospital workers might have clues. They both began to meet and date workers at the hospital, finally drilling down to supplies clerks, billing types and housekeeping services, with whom they also spent some time. A changeable story of a ghost floor with only one patient emerged and a name. Carol Roberts.
From Blossom, they knew whose law firm was paying the bills. As far as Marcus and John knew, legal firms turned a dim eye on sharing client's names and details. One day they were having a coke and pizza with a guy from the mailroom at the law firm and he mentioned that Cooper and Stutlin seemed to get all the mail addressed to Carol Roberts.
Thieves must sit in prison.
Vladimir Putin
A well-constructed man with short black hair and celery-colored eyes, of medium height and straight posture had been taken to Rikers Island prison.
He was not a flight risk and certainly no danger to fellow inmates, but he was placed in solitary with leg chains during his exercise time outside his cell. No carpet was on the floor. He heard no music. He would have been surprised to see a painting on the wall other than a smear of fluid of some kind from some long-forgotten source. He wasn't mistreated exactly.
He wasn't treated at all, other than incoming edible slop three times daily, a very short trip to the solitary exercise room each day for exactly 20 minutes during which time he saw no one. For thirty minutes three times each week he met with a newbie "prison counselor" named Nick Salvetti. Albert knew only his first name.
Nick seemed more interested at first in the mechanics of prison process and the prisoner's adjustment reactions than the prisoner himself. It took some time to get to know the guy, but Nick eventually came to look forward to meeting with him; he saw a well-built guy with muscles, a great chest under the prison shirt and a long thick tube snaking down his left trouser leg.
Nick wasn't surprised one day when a few minutes into their private counselling session, Albert reached down and adjusted his junk. Nick noted the gesture but didn't say anything. Albert slowly swiped his foot up Nick's calf. Nick stared at Albert, licked his lips and pulled his own zipper down. Albert knelt in front of him, took Nick's cock out and did his best to make it happy, humming as he went. Nick was shocked at how good it felt and thought he might have discovered something. Nick had only a memory afterward; the evidence had been swallowed, delivering some needed protein and a little testosterone to Albert's diet.
Nick didn't know the prisoner's last name. Just his first name: Albert and his last initial T. This had been explained to Nick. Albert was a high-risk security prisoner.
Nick discounted this revelation and although willing to believe almost anything about anyone in the first few months of his professional practice, this didn't pass the straight-face test. That kind of prisoner would surely rate a senior counselor.
It seemed that Albert had been in an accident that didn't involve injury to himself in a car that he was driving.
He was astonished to be arrested at the scene and taken in a van straight to Rikers with a bag over head and in chains, protesting all the way. He did quit protesting after he arrived at Correctional Facility.
This could have been related to a fifteen-minute session with a sergeant and two guards and some rubber bats in a closed, soundproofed room after which he felt that keeping his mouth shut was probably a better option, would get him to his goal of getting out of there and be less painful.
Silence would work better for him.
The fledging psychologist's only client at Rikers was Albert. Nick didn't buy the story about how this was an introductory period for him and he was being tested for a larger caseload. Albert kept giving Nick signals, Nick kept accepting, however the venue didn't allow enough privacy for long enough to do much more.
All of his fellow psychologists had an overload of prisoners and when he mentioned this to his boss, he was told that he wasn't paid to think or talk. He was told that what happened at Rikers stayed on the island. He, in a fatherly sort of way, as an aside, was informed that it wasn't healthy to be curious on the Island.
"Check," Nick filed that one in his mind under "important to remember' folder.
Nick never found Albert to be talkative. He did learn a great deal about him however and knew that he had been employed as a chauffeur in Philadelphia for a family worth more than God and had somehow known the accident would happen although Albert didn't ever stray into details that might incriminate him.
Nor did he ever mention his last name.
At their first meeting, the sergeant and the two guards mentioned to Albert that repeating his last name or the names of his previous employers would result in the unfortunate loss of his eyesight through removal of his eyes and his hearing by ice pick therapy on the spot.
This was the same meeting that had impressed him so deeply on many different levels.
Albert liked to paint. His style was eclectic (to be kind) and favored sweeping circles, red, yellow, sometimes orange... using water colors. Most were interlocked like the Olympic logo but not always.
He gave one of his best to Nick to hang in his office. Nick didn't have the heart to refuse it. Nick pinned the 'art' up to one wall in his cubicle.
It was some months later that Nick, sitting staring off into space pondering Albert's magnificent cock, focused on a signature that he had eyed a hundred times. He sat bolt upright, heart racing, his internal alert meter operating just fine.
The signature on Albert's painting had a first and a last name.
Nick was nothing but curious away from Rikers. He had a laptop, which, in the absence of immediate family other than brothers, dogs, cats, and goldfish, served as his baby, his lover, his family and his pet.
The Internet was his passion and although he would never considered surfing in water, surfing the Net could have gotten him Olympic gold.
It didn't take but two minutes to establish that Albert Thomas had been admitted to Riker's within hours of several published news events.
The first was an opening in New York of a gentleman's club featuring tubs for rent for diverse groups of well, gentlemen, to take a bath with a hired friend in a porcelain bathtub with claw feet and an attendant of the opposite gender to the new bathing friend.
The second was the disappearance of a wealthy Pennsylvania family and chauffeur in New Jersey (case never solved).
The third was a group of sailings, ship arrivals, airplane take- offs and landings at La Guardia, JFK and Newark airports and other comings and goings at multi-state Port terminals.
It took a good hour of hacking for Nick to find the video surveillance cameras at the new club and more time that week for his face recognition app (purchased for fun) to scan those tapes and not find one Albert Thomas, whose face pic he took from his new spy camera on his coat.
Nick's brother Paul worked for TSA and although they were not close, the brother did have a friend of another friend who didn't mind searching for the name Albert Thomas in the public goings and comings at the major transportation hubs around the greater New York area. No Albert Thomas matched the jailed one.
Nick struck out. There was no data that he could find about the accident in New Jersey. No newspaper, TV, radio mentions. Only he didn't want to give it up. Not just yet. Something nagged at him about Albert. He painted, but the object Albert had given to him for his office wasn't professional.
Albert had just begun to use watercolors. His color washes were sloppy. His perspectives were awkward and, come to think of it, his colors were right out of tubes, no mixed colors. Nick knew enough from his watercolor class at Columbia to see that and he wondered why it taken him so long to notice. Had Albert wanted him to know his last name?
Nick shook his head as if to clear it. It didn't work. He thought of his brother's work. Angelo was a curious guy like he was. Maybe it was Angelo's turn to have a look at this.
Nick's brother Angelo was a private investigator by trade. Angelo's family consisted of Nick, another brother, Paul, and a cat. He wasn't married and never wanted to be.
His firm consisted of himself and a secretary named Joseph Weber, a man of indeterminate age and substantial weight who came to life only at work, then disappeared into the vast gray haze of the metropolis after hours and on weekends.
Joseph's life was an unknown to the Salvetti brothers other than the obvious office services he provided.
Joseph lived with his mother. He was unmarried without children. He wasn't ugly; his clothes were the same day after day, not appearing to spend his paycheck on travel, vacations or anything expensive.
Angelo Salvetti had hired Joseph twenty years previously and at the time checked out his executive assistant history and references and found them satisfactory. Angelo decided he would do a cursory private investigator kind of run on Joseph but had put it off in favor of real cases that brought in money.
Joseph had never given anything but faithful service without drama and their relationship worked.
Joseph liked his job. He didn't think it was his life or anything. On the other hand, he had promised himself not to be stupid. That promise dated from age sixteen or so when his classmates began to fall out of school one at a time as they drifted off to jail, juvenile detention, work programs and Sheriff camps.
He had seen that and recognized that time spent playing that game was unproductive use of his time. So, he concentrated on the rules and being smart.
In regard to his job with its great salary and benefits for his education, he promised himself to know everything that affected himself, the firm he worked for and anything else related.
When Nick's written request came to Angelo to review his amateur investigation of Albert Thomas arrived over Joseph's desk, he read it and memorized the details before putting it in Angelo's inbox on Joseph's desk.
There were no details, ordinarily, that Joseph missed. He liked his work.
The three brothers met at Rachel's, a small, quiet pub on 45th St on Sunday's at noon for lunch. They had done so for years with the normal exceptions for illness, being out of the country and hot dates.
Nick talked about his job and about Albert Thomas. Angelo told him to mind his own business and Paul reminded him that his boss had already said not to pursue it and so they argued back and forth until their food and beer had begun to digest and the argument over whose turn it was to pay had commenced.
A small electronic device behind the high red leather banquette listened in and transmitted the conversation to a vehicle across the street. The couple who were to have eaten there that day had taken another booth. The taped conversation was interesting to someone, however.
Monday morning, Angelo finished his Fruit Loops and sliced banana. He shaved and dressed for the office. A Mrs. Jane Graham was the only occupant of the waiting room. She was always there on Monday to inquire about the status of the search for her missing husband, a man who had never existed but inside the fragile corners of Jane's mind. Still, she did pay her $5.00 bill each week and was delighted with whatever assurances Joseph could give with regard to the search and the new leads developed each week requiring more time and effort on behalf of the company.
Mrs. G. was still more delighted with the 10-minute conference with Angelo Salvetti of Salvetti e Figli, who was, as far as she knew, the head of the firm. No matter that the "e Figli" part was fictional.
She was aware that she had been a valued customer from nearly the beginning of the firm and was determined to find her man, and though not eager to stop the search, she was not at all sure what to do if he was found.
Jane Graham was addicted to the chase, perhaps the horses, not the fox itself.
After Mrs. Graham left the office, Joseph rapped on his door. Angelo jumped. Joseph didn't ever knock on his door. Joseph never had had the animal strength to walk down the hall as far as his office and certainly not to rap on the door. That's why intercoms were invented, for heaven's sake.
"I should tell you about a call we got from Nick a few minutes ago." Joseph didn't sit down on office furniture. The problem of getting back up and the problem involving previous incidents in public of broken furniture still weighed on his mind. "I think you need to think about this call carefully."
He explained Nick's recounting of a morning call from a Rikers guard who overheard an inmate repeating some fresh gossip. Nick had shared coffee one day with the guard. The guard had wanted to repay the favor.
The repayment was Nick's life, as it turned out.
Three hours later the office was empty. Files, computers, receipts, records. The desk drawers were empty. The plant in the waiting room was left to die of thirst. The furniture remained.
Salvetti e Figli was out of business and more importantly the principal of the firm had gone to ground, having paid Joseph two month's salary with promise of more for future services.
Telephone, Internet, water and other services had been disconnected, the last month's rent and cleaning deposit gladly ceded to the landlord who would find out soon enough.
Mrs. Jane Graham's quest was on permanent hold.
Paul quit his job. He arranged with his attorney to collect his pension, to liquidate his assets including his New York apartment which he didn't think would be tough to sell and to deposit the lot in a new Bank of America account in Richmond, Virginia. The attorney was to get debit cards to him at Joseph's mother's house.
Nick didn't have an apartment to sell. He had some savings, his baseball card collection and clothes. He moved into Joseph's apartment temporarily. He didn't go out for some time. An arrangement with Riker's was made for safe ridesharing to work with a couple of Captains there.
Angelo had immediately instructed his broker to cash in his 401-K and to wire the proceeds to a bank in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
He had called the bank earlier in the day, confirming that an account could be opened for a large sum of money (with more expected) without an immediate personal appearance.
Angelo hired an attorney in Cheyenne and gave him instructions to open the account and buy a two-hundred-acre ranch with a fishing stream bordered by aspens, a large resort style house, with a guesthouse, a large adjacent barn and especially no close neighbors about 5 miles from any freeway.
He wanted a ranch on top of rolling hills with great views of the Grand Tetons. The ranch was to be purchased in the name of Arizona Corporation, a suitably anonymous sounding company, itself registered as an asset of another LLC.
It might have been three a.m. when Paul and Angelo turned off their cell phones, iPads and other electronic devices, dumped their beepers in a dumpster after removing the batteries, turned off `FindFriend', left their homes in Manhattan by taxi with a suitcase, drove to Joseph's mother's home in Queens, transferred to an old rented van with dark tinted windows, and drove north on I-95 toward Boston without stopping.