The Anonymous Man Read online

  The Tuesday dinners were expanded to other days when they became a curious threesome at various entertainment and sporting events. They bought a 20-game package for the Buffalo Sabres though none of them knew anything about hockey, and rarely missed a Broadway musical at Shea’s Theatre of Performing Arts. That summer, Jeff dragged Jerry out to his small cabin in the middle of nowhere to lay around a couple weekends, drinking beer and fishing in the creek a mile or so into the woods behind the place. That was when Jerry decided there was a quirky, lonely side to Jeff, an emotional vacuum the result, at least from an armchair psychologist perspective, of an unloving and demanding mother. But once again, Jeff refused to confide anything beyond the superficial, the names and places from his childhood, but nothing else, and so their relationship remained friendly though not particularly deep.

  It was nearly a year later, after one of those Tuesday night dinners as they lazed around the living room in front of a blistering fire a couple weeks before Christmas, having drunk way too much wine, Jeff finally brought up his crazy plan to fake Jerry’s death.

  Chapter Nine

  The first thing any decent private investigator masters, after many long and arduous hours of on-the-job training, is how to conduct an effective and discreet stakeout.

  Jack Fox had learned over the years that a professional, high-quality surveillance depends first and foremost upon one’s vehicle. Windowless vans were best, preferably with a fake logo of some home service contractor, followed by vans with darkly tinted windows, then SUVs or cars similarly equipped. Of course, if a regular car was all you had, then you needed to augment your efforts to make it, and yourself, inconspicuous. The bottom line was that your car should, ultimately, blend in with the surroundings. No matter what kind of vehicle was used, it was crucial that it be parked in a location that would not arouse curiosity or suspicion in the mind of some nosy neighbor, or of course, the target.

  The next thing, of course, was to learn how to kill the inevitable long stretches of time, hours or days perhaps, when absolutely nothing happens.

  Last, but certainly not least, it was important to take note of suitable, nearby places with a clean public toilet in the vicinity of the stakeout where you could run and pee or crap; or, if leaving the stake-out was not possible, a suitable container that would at least hold the piss and not stink up the car was essential.

  Believe it or not, such items are available for purchase. The couple of surveillance vans belonging to Global’s Fraud Unit back in Philly were equipped with mini porta-potties but Chief Reynolds had told Fox that they were unavailable for this job. So he would do, as he had done countless times before, with an ordinary rental sedan and have to rely on the nearest public restroom.

  Jack Fox had probably conducted a thousand stake-outs in his thirty-two-year career as a detective, then a private investigator, and now insurance fraud agent, and thus, he had become adept at the art of surveillance. He knew exactly where to park his vehicle in order to best observe the target, and, once there, to remain unnoticed for hours or days or weeks. He always grabbed several newspapers, some magazines (specializing in hunting and fishing), and a couple bestsellers to kill the time, provided there’d be enough light to read anything at all; and, in the last few years, Fox had even taken along a Walkman and listened to music (country in his case) on CDs or, more recently, his iPod. A small cooler filled with sodas and ice had also become a part of his supplies.

  After flying into the relatively small, subdued and dreary Buffalo airport late Sunday night, Fox rented a basic model, inconspicuous navy blue compact sedan. The clerk apologized that despite his request, the model available did not have tinted windows. Fox thought a moment, then said it was no problem.

  He checked into a decent enough hotel near the airport and got his usual bad night’s sleep on a queen-sized bed with a hard mattress and pillows the size of dishrags. His wake-up call came at 6 a.m. sharp. Bleary-eyed, he brewed a pot of weak, lukewarm coffee in the mini-coffee maker in the bathroom and drank it while sitting on the edge of the bed thinking how lousy it was to grow old. In five years, six months, he’d be seventy. His father had died at seventy-one. And where had all the time gone?

  Fox took another sip of coffee, sighed and clicked on the TV to get some light in the room. He turned down the volume so low he couldn’t hear the banter among a pair of chirpy hosts of a local morning wake-up show. Finally, after a deep yawn, Fox trudged into the bathroom and took a quick hot shower, shaved, and brushed his teeth. Still groggy, he slipped into new, gray dress pants (disgusted that the waist had bulged out to size 40—in his heyday, he had been a 34), and tossed a sweater over his head. With the outside world still in the grip of cold darkness, and only a few unlucky souls moving about, Fox visited the bathroom one last time and relieved himself just to make sure the urge would not hit him the first minute of the stake-out. Then he threw on a jacket and stumbled out of the hotel.

  In an insufficiently lit parking lot, Fox walked around in circles a minute, trying to remember where he had parked the rental car, found it, then finally began his journey out to Northview Lane in Hamburg, New York, wherever the hell that was, to stakeout the very house where the insured, Jerry Shaw, had burned to death. Along the way, contrary to his best intentions, he stopped at a McDonald’s and ordered the Sausage and Egg McMuffin breakfast value meal with a cup of strong black coffee.

  With all that grease sludging around in his gut and bowels, Fox found his way to the target residence. Initially, he spent some time driving up and down the plain, mostly treeless wide streets of the newer subdivision, which, in addition to Northview, included other unimaginative names such as Southview, Westview and Eastview lanes. Fox spotted a decent place to park to watch the comings and goings of the insured’s house—an access road to a deserted parcel of land about a tenth of a mile across from the main subdivision. The parcel had been plowed into a rough-strewn mud and rock heap but that was it. The access road was a narrow dirt path that led nowhere. The builder had likely run out of money, or run off with it, and no one had yet thought there might be a profit in picking up the slack.

  Fox did a U-turn and parked along the curb on the access road to nowhere. He nodded to himself, pleased that he had a straight, clear view of the insured’s former house where he could watch his widow come and go either with the naked eye, or as was more likely, with a pair of top quality Spytek 4-in-1digital camera surveillance binoculars. Fox also had with him a decent enough digital video recorder but, being an old-timer, he preferred the glossy permanence of a photograph of a target caught in the act. His most lucky and famous was snapped twenty-five years ago while working as a part-time private investigator for a Philadelphia firm to supplement his measly Police Department salary. He had been following a particularly nasty guy, Dan Goss, for a couple weeks before finally catching him late one night in his Jaguar getting a blowjob from his latest paramour in some lonesome public park. As Fox snapped a series of incriminating photographs for use by his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Goss pointed a silver revolver at him. The lawyer who had hired Fox to follow Goss had framed the photograph and given it to Fox and Fox stuck it on his wall.

  By the time Fox parked, it was already eight-thirty. Only three days after the funeral, Fox doubted Mrs. Shaw had gone back to work for the law firm where, he already knew from the police arson report, she had been employed as a paralegal for the past five years.

  Fox picked up his binoculars and brought the Shaw house into crisp focus. It was a decent-sized, nicely manicured raised ranch with white vinyl siding with a large deck attached to the back overlooking a fairly bland yard. All told, Fox guessed the house probably measured something like twenty-two hundred square feet of living space, with a fair-sized kitchen and living room, a den, and three upstairs bedrooms. In short, it was a decent spread. But it was unlikely the insured’s bride of seven plus years would stay there once the nearly four million plus dollars of life insurance proceeds was paid. In that new life, this house
would seem more like a servant’s quarters.

  Fox snapped several shots and looked back at the camera screen to make sure it was working. An old dog, high-tech gimmickry had never been his forte. Satisfied that it was working just fine, Fox resumed what he did best, watching. The sun was, by now, hovering above the rooftops and some of the residents of this sleepy subdivision were just starting out to their tiresome jobs.

  The garage of the insured’s house was still boarded up with a sheet of plywood. Fox would have loved at some point to sneak inside and have a look around. Sometimes the local arson team was a bunch of incompetent chumps who hurried through the job so they could go to the nearest donut shop and kill a few more hours of another boring shift talking about the local football team’s chances that coming Sunday.

  But Fox had to admit that this case seemed a cinch anyway. It was more likely than not that the arson guys weren’t chumps, but decent enough cops who had gotten it right by calling the scene a tragic accident. According to their report, what had happened was that some hapless yokel, Global’s deceased insured, had the bad luck of finding himself lying next to a small pool of gasoline that had leaked from an eight-year-old Pontiac Sunfire he had purchased just a week earlier for a couple grand as a second car. An atomic bit of electronic charge chose that very instant to arc from an old water heater and ignite the pool of highly flammable gasoline, causing the spontaneous explosion and fire that burnt him to a proverbial crisp. The arson report had mentioned that the fellow who sold Jerry Shaw the Sunfire was adamant in his statement to one of their investigators that the car he had sold to Jerry Shaw had never leaked gasoline. Fox’s eyebrows had raised upon reading that and he jotted down the name and address of the former owner of the Sunfire for a possible interview.

  Not two minutes into Fox’s surveillance, a pickup truck with ladders along both sides with the name “Bandario’s Construction” blazoned along the driver and passenger doors pulled up in front of the house. Then Fox finally saw her, the grieving and potentially rich widow, Holly Shaw.

  She had sauntered out of the front door in a long, securely fastened bathrobe to greet a crew of three leather-tanned workers in greasy coveralls with disheveled hair under ancient, dirty baseball caps. She pointed to the garage and they nodded dumbly. They must be there to clean it out and fix it up. Not a minute later another Ford pickup truck came rumbling down Northview pulling a long, dented dumpster. The dumpster was backed all the way up the small driveway of the house to what used to be the garage door but was now simply a section of fiberboard.

  Fox quickly aimed the digital camera at Mrs. Shaw, zoomed in and immediately started snapping pictures as she watched the construction crew get started. She was a lovely blonde, with a slim, sexy body even under her thick, velvety white bathrobe, and she seemed amused by the almost comical banter among the crew as they shuffled around the back of the truck pulling out whatever equipment they needed to tear down walls and remove burned out gunk from the irreparably damaged garage. Finally, she left them to do their jobs and walked back to the front door and into the house. All the while, Fox kept snapping photographs. He even caught every one of the five or six workmen giving Mrs. Shaw’s slender behind a glance before she had safely gone back into the house.

  Whatever potential evidence of arson and murder that had remained in the garage after the fire would soon be lost forever. Fox cringed as he watched, for the next hour or so, needing only a single trip to the Noco public restroom, as Bandario’s crew tore out the remains of the inside of the garage and tossed the melted, warped walls, charred two-by-fours, and other blackened, unrecognizable stuff into the dumpster. Finally, at around ten thirty, Fox decided that there was nothing else worth watching. He snapped his binoculars into a case and tossed the digital camera onto the passenger seat. With a sigh, he started the car and drove away, returning to the hotel. The plan was to get a few hours shut-eye, then return that evening to see if what the widow was up to, if anything.

  For some reason, Fox was confident there’d be something. Back at the hotel, he was more sure of it than ever as he picked up the digital camera from the desk at the far corner of the room and examined the photographs he had taken that morning of Holly Shaw outside the house. By the look of her, by the way the grieving widow sashayed within eyesight of the construction crew, Fox sensed this one was up to no good. Or maybe he was just imagining something that wasn’t there. A sashaying widow is hardly proof of murder. He sighed, set the camera on the desk, and thought about finally doing what his wife had been telling him he should do after Dick Reynolds had called him and pleaded that he take the job with Global—retire and spend some time travelling with her, visiting his daughter in Seattle, finally seeing Europe, before the Grim Reaper paid him an inevitable visit. But he craved the craft of investigation, working up a case. It was more than a job; it was an addiction.

  With a yawn, Fox decided he wasn’t ready to retire. Not just yet. Not in the middle of this case. No, it was more than a widow’s sashay that bothered him. Dick Reynolds was right. There was something just too neat about this case. An electron arcing from a hot water heater and igniting a pool of gasoline right where the insured was laying was just too damned neat. There had to be more.

  After another yawn, Fox stripped to his skivvies, lifted the covers off the bed and slid under them onto the crisp, cold sheets. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the pleasure of being overwhelmed by the wallowing security of sleep. Despite the hard bed and bad pillows, Fox could not recall ever falling asleep so fast. Perhaps, that was another sign of his age.

  Six hours later, he woke with a start. After a moment of consciousness, he started cursing. He tossed off the covers and jumped out of bed and quickly showered and dressed and rushed back to set up another stakeout of the insured’s house at 320 Northview Lane. This time, he parked several houses down from the target address because after dark it would have been foolish to conduct the surveillance parked along the deserted access road. For one thing, he’d stand out like a sore thumb at this hour of the night and might become a prime interest for a sheriff’s patrol, not to mention that it would be next to impossible to see anything going on in the Shaw residence from that vantage point. But parked where he was just a few houses down on Northview from the Shaw residence, far enough away from the closest street lamp to keep the car bathed in darkness, all Fox had to do was slink down below the steering wheel and the car would look empty, just like the three or four others parked on this or the other side of the wide, otherwise deserted street.

  But within an hour after resuming the stakeout, Fox began to doubt his certainty that the Shaw woman was up to no good. She was home, somewhere in the living room, watching television. Through the closed curtains of the wide picture window, Fox observed her shadow move about every now and then, walking somewhere, likely into the kitchen for a snack. The alternating glow of whatever she was watching on the television changed from scene to scene. It surprised Fox that Mrs. Shaw had remained at the house this close to the disaster, with her husband’s horrible demise so close at hand. Perhaps, thought Fox, she treasured this time alone. That she truly was grieving.

  And then Jeff Flaherty arrived.

  Fox was nearly snoozing when, at about eight that night, a silver Lexus turned onto Northview and slowed as it passed the target residence. Fox came alert just in time and ducked his squat frame and head low and then laid sideways across the front seat, completely below the steering wheel. He held his breath as the Lexus finally sped up and passed, continued down Northview. But then the Lexus turned around in a driveway several houses down, came back in his direction, and pulled into a parking space just ahead of his along the curb in front of the house next door to 320 Northview.

  A tall, athletic-looking young man, in his late twenties or early thirties or so, exited the Lexus. He was wearing tight blue jeans and a jean jacket. He stood outside the car a moment and used the driver’s side window as a mirror to comb his right hand through a th
ick wave of dark brown hair. After some moments, satisfied with his appearance, he strode confidently up the driveway and onto a short walkway to the front door of the target residence. After smoothing his hair, then rolling his neck, the young man knocked on the front door.

  Fox edged up in his seat and peered through the spokes of the steering wheel. He lifted his digital camera binoculars from the passenger seat onto his lap as he waited for someone, Mrs. Shaw, no doubt, to answer the door. Finally, the door opened and light flooded the porch.

  Fox lifted the camera and started shooting. He caught everything—the way the Shaw woman raised up on her toes to wrap her arms around the unknown man’s shoulders; the way she then lifted her left leg and nuzzled his right thigh; and, finally, the long, deep kiss she pressed onto his lips. The camera also caught the way, after a moment, the man resisted her advances and turned to look across the front yard worrying over someone like Fox catching sight of her display of passion. But it was too late. He—and they—had not been careful enough.

  The man did not see Fox, hunched low behind the steering wheel in the front seat of his inconspicuous sedan in the shadows of the streetlights. After another moment, the man edged with Mrs. Shaw into the house. He remained there for the next two hours.

  Fox didn’t move for fifteen minutes after the silver Lexus with the unknown man drove out of the subdivision. He memorized the license plate, of course, and after hurrying back to his hotel room, he immediately tapped into Global’s database and soon learned that the Lexus was registered to one Jeffrey David Flaherty. After a few more keystrokes and mouse clicks, Fox learned that Flaherty was a lawyer and that he was an associate at Curtis and Rowe, the same firm where Holly Shaw, the grieving widow, had worked the past five years.