David Duffy - Last to Fold

“No company, just me. I get paid to find things. Sometimes people. Sometimes valuables. Sometimes information. I work for all kinds of clients—individuals, corporations, insurance companies. Even, when I have to, for lawyers like Bernie.”

Nobody laughed at my attempt at levity. I reached into my jacket and found a business card, which I handed across. He looked it over and scowled.

“‘Vlost and Found?’ What’s that—a joke?”

“A lot of Russian humor is based on wordplay.”

His expression indicated Russian humor was a waste of time. Dislike was winning the war with curiosity. I’d just about had enough of him.

“Tell me about some of your clients,” he said.

“I don’t talk about them.”

“Surely you have references.”

“Bernie here will vouch for me. At least, I think he will.”

I looked at Bernie, who clearly was not happy with the way things were going.

“I cannot proceed on this basis,” Mulholland said.

“Fine by me.” I picked up my jacket again.

“Wait,” Bernie said. “Rory, be reasonable. You wouldn’t want Turbo to talk about you. He’s done work for a number of clients of the firm. They all speak highly. No one has ever complained.”

I suspected few people got away with telling Rory Mulholland to “be reasonable,” but there were plenty of reasons Bernie had a successful second career as one of the top lawyers in New York, not least among them was he knew how to play his clients.

Mulholland made a show of thinking it over. The whole morning so far had been for show—I wouldn’t have been there if he hadn’t already decided to talk about his problem—but the playacting had gone on long enough.

“Please sit, Mr. Vlost,” Mulholland said. “Tell me this. Turbo doesn’t sound Russian—is it really your given name?”

“Some of it,” I said. Mulholland waited for me to continue, but I’d said all I planned to. I saw irritation in his eyes and exasperation in Bernie’s—with me this time. I got ready again to leave.

“All right, Mr. Vlost, have it your way,” Mulholland said. “I take it that what we discuss here will remain between us.”

“That’s right.” I still didn’t like him. I was now ninety-eight percent sure I didn’t want to work for him, but he’d still get the same deal I gave everybody.

He made one more show of thinking it over, rose and walked to the desk again. “Dow’s down two fifty. We’re off four. Screen’s solid red.” He reached in a drawer and returned holding a photograph and a piece of paper. He handed both to me.

“Our daughter. Eva.”

The photo showed a blue-eyed, auburn-haired young woman. A crude snapshot, printed on a home printer, but her beauty was hard to obscure. She was seated on a chair, against a dark brown wall, chest forward, hands behind her back, as if tied there. A New York Times covered her lap. The front page was from a few days before. She stared straight at the camera. A man’s hand held a gun to the girl’s left temple. Glock 9 mm. She didn’t look scared or worried or in pain, but there’s always a surreal quality to hostage photos that makes them hard to judge. The picture did capture a funny look in her eyes that took me a minute to place. The look kids in the orphanage got, the orphanage I spent my childhood in, on the rare day when another child’s parents miraculously appeared. A look of longing mixed with hopelessness. A look that said, Why can’t that be me? and knew it never would. Not a look you’d expect on a beautiful young woman, daughter of Rory Mulholland, even if she did have a gun to her head.

The note read,

DAUGHTER VERY PRETTY. I VERY HORNY. FRIENDS TOO. WE ALL FUCK HER SOON.

$100,000. USED MONEY—$10 AND $20. WE CALL, BE READY.

NO POLICE. NO TRICKS.

OR WE ALL FUCK HER, THEN KILL HER.

ASSHOLE.

The “asshole” didn’t ring right somehow, but I often have thoughts like that. I ignored this one.

“When did you get this?” I asked.

“Yesterday.”

“You haven’t heard from them since?”

“No.”

“You will soon. They won’t give you much time to think about options. When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

“I… I’m not sure. A few weeks ago. She has her own apartment.”

“How old?”

“Nineteen.”

“Student?”

“Marymount Manhattan. She’s in their theater program.”

The way he said “theater program” indicated he thought it a waste of time and money. He was fidgeting now.

“Any idea why they’d pick on her—or you?”

“None. Eva… she’s my wife’s daughter, from her first marriage. Her husband died.” He had to add that, I suppose, to protect his moral purity. “I adopted her, and… I feel about her as if she were my own.”

That sounded sincere, as much as I didn’t like to admit it. I didn’t doubt his concern—Even so, nothing about this felt right. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

“I thought that was obvious. Find the kidnappers. Bring Eva home. How do you work? Hourly like Bernie? Lower rate, I hope.” He laughed at his second attempt at a joke.

I shook my head. “I charge a percentage—thirty-three percent of what I recover. Plus expenses.” Bernie winced. He knew “plus expenses” meant I didn’t want the job.

The financier came to the fore. “Thirty-three percent—that’s aggressive.”

“Same as a headhunter.”

“But how… In a case like this… How do you put a value on… Eva?”

“I don’t. You do.”

He looked at me squarely for the first time since we’d started talking. I had a mental image of an old-fashioned adding machine in his brain, the kind with rows of buttons and a big arm on the side, toting up sums, calculating how much he could get away with.

“They want a hundred thousand,” he said after a while.

“They’re testing the waters.”

He nodded, as though he hadn’t expected that gambit to work. “I like round numbers. Let’s say a million.”

“If she was my daughter, I’d say two.”

He was halfway out of his chair, sputtering. “That’s six hundred sixty—”

“Plus expenses.”

“That’s…” He searched for the word he wanted as he eased back into his chair. “Usurious.”

I shrugged. Bernie looked pained. “The eighteen percent your bank charges on credit card debt is usurious—especially when the money costs you three—but people pay it.”

“That’s completely different. That’s…”

“The market economy?”

He was scowling again. Bernie was pretending to look out the window—through the drawn curtains.

“I may have been raised on Marxist-Leninist claptrap, as you call it, but I understand the market economy as well as the next guy, including the law of supply and demand. There’s only one of me. I don’t have partners or associates or employees. What you see is what you get, but that by definition limits the supply. I also have one-of-a-kind technology that’s not cheap. On the other hand, people lose things all the time. You’re the first one today. Could be a half-dozen more by sundown. I choose the cases I take on. Usually because they interest me or they pay well.”

“I gather I’m in the second category,” he said.

“You’re not in either category yet.”

A new look came over Mulholland’s face, one that said I’d finally hit home. “All right, Mr. Vlost, have it your way. Good day.”

He stood and walked to his desk. He had the same look on his face when I left, but I didn’t know if it was for me or the sea of red on his computer screen.

Bernie caught up as I was waiting for the elevator, his round face several shades of red and purple.