It was raining in the early evening when I left to meet Joe Connors at the main Philadelphia Free Library on Logan Square. Not a hard rain, but one that nonetheless pattered loudly as it bounced off the heavy canvas that covered the large, deep hole that the city’s labor detail had dug in the blacktop in front of my Irving Street house. The forecast said the rain would last until early morning and get heavier as the evening progressed, suggesting the area’s sleeptime lullaby would sound like an endless hail of bullets.
I arrived at the appointed hour and for the umpteenth time stood in front of the library’s entrance in awe. The library is located on the Ben Franklin Parkway, about half-a-mile from the steps where Rocky made his famous ascent into self-actualization. In recent years it has become a kind of second home for me as I’ve attempted to educate myself up an evolutionary notch or two.
Philadelphia wasn’t the first American city to have a free library system and this
branch building in Logan Circle isn’t particularly historic. It was only completed in 1927. But what a classy joint! It’s got columns and statuary, marble and tile floors, plaster casts of all the old favorites from ancient Greece and Rome, a staircase fit for Gloria Swanson, and if you know where to look, the remnants of a pneumatic tube system that would have brought Fritz Lang to organism.
The library’s motto is “Liber Libere Omnibus.” Free Books For All. A lot of people in Philadelphia take that motto seriously, even if the state’s legislaters do not. Pennsylvania ranks forty-eighth among the fifty states when it comes to per capita funding on libraries. By way of contrast, it’s in the top three when it comes to funding stadiums and convention centers.
This is one of the very few public issues I really cares about. I’ve read hundreds of books in this library and taken hundreds more home for delectation. I’ve come for the free lectures and the political debates, for the musical performances and other cultural freebies. This calibre of library offerings saves people like me countless hours of honest work to support the entertainment side of our lives. Maybe that’s the reason the state has cut library funding.
As I’m standing under my umbrella and communing with this intellectual house of pleasure, Joe Connors finds me and introduces himself. He’s wearing a cloth cap and a battered old foreign intrique raincoat that gives him the look of a guy smart enough to protect himself from the elements but not inclined to make a fashion statement in the process. Joe is a large man, more than a little overweight, with slightly stooped shoulders and bags under his eyes big enough to hold golf balls. His handshake is firm but not overbearing. The good first impression he made on the phone is seconded.
We walk through the front entrance of the library building, past displays announcing upcoming events, and veer toward the elevators at the right of the grand staircase. Jay’s poetry reading is on the fourth floor.
There’s a librarian at a table as we emerge from the elevator. She asks us to write our names and addresses on a sheet of paper so we can get mailings about future readings. We pick up some biographical flyers that are on this table, left there by poets who will be reading this evening. Then we enter a large, high-domed room where the reading will take place.
Right off I’m feeling sorry for this evening’s poets. Ten are listed on the program and there are only about twenty people in a room that can hold several times that number. Half those present are the poets themselves, and I’m pretty sure that the other half are significant others or captive friends like me.
So much talent talking to itself. So sad.
Jay comes over to where we are seated. He seems depressed but resigned at the turnout. The name Joe Connors doesn’t mean anything to him when introductions are made. But when he hears that Joe is a vice-president at Bernstein Financial Broadcasting, his mood elevates dramatically. He gives Connors a look he probably should have saved for his wedding night, turns to the friend who brought him and gives me one that’s as close to reverence as one gets this side of beatification. Jay asked to be put him in touch with someone in authority at Bernstein’s. The requested person has been delivered promptly and with near perfect credentials.
Jay’s store of subtlety is about as large as his checking account. He immediately regales Connors with a litany of reasons financial verse should be part of Bernstein’s regular broadcasting. It comes out in a rush. A tale too long pent up and thought about from too many angles.
Any sensible person knows this isn’t the best way to pitch a perfect stranger. But Jay isn’t sensible. He’s a poet. To give Connors his due, he sits quietly and appears to be taking in Jay’s exhortations with great interest.
When the librarian at the elevator door leaves her post and steps to the front of the room to get the evening’s reading underway, having determined that no more poetry lovers are likely to arrive, Connors hands Jay his business card and asks him to call in a day or two. “If that’s convenient.”
Jay accepts the card like its a communion wafer. Then gets up and walks to the front row of chairs where the other poets are seated, waiting to be called to the podium. His face has taken on an expression you might see on a football team’s water boy who for inexplicable reasons has just been serviced under the bleachers by the high school’s homecoming queen.
Out of politeness, Joe and I don’t leave the reading until half the poets have done their number and the librarian calls a ten-minute break. Jay being the third poet up, we had the opportunity to fully experience his oeuvre. I think Jay read well this evening. What Joe thinks is anybody’s guess, though he takes pains to be attentive.
Jay’s offerings consisted of half-a-dozen of his financial verses. My favorite is called “An Option Withers Like A Rose,” rendered in the style of Emily Dickinson. It goes:
An option withers like a rose
Whose season has expired;
Its value lessens by degrees,
Time makes it less desired.
Unless the underlying stock
The right direction goeth,
The option shadow’s ticking clock
Its owner’s fortunes bloweth.
Each spring a rose bush mimes the sun
With flaming hues galore;
But once an option’s race is run
It don’t come back no more.
“That Jay Lombardi really tells it like it is,” I venture when Connors and I are again outside in the rain.
“No denying that,” Connors replies.
“You gonna give him a shot on Bernstein television?”
“Would that please you?”
Would that please me? Now why would Mitch Bernstein’s gofer and fixer, which Joe Connors appears to be, care about such a thing? I suspect I’ll find out shortly. For now I decide not to look a gift broadcast executive in the mouth, working instead to win some recognition for a friend.
“It would make me very happy, Joe, if Jay could appear on Bernstein television.”
“Consider it done. I’ll make the arrangements with one of our producers. When your friend gives me a call I’ll fill him in on the details. Let’s get a drink.”
On the other side of Logan Circle from the Free Library is the Museum of National History. Walk a few steps further around the circle and you come to the Four Seasons Hotel. Inside the hotel is the Swann Lounge, where we go for our drinks.
A smiling white doorman, uniformed, opens the hotel’s streetside door. A young black man, erect and unsmiling, in a full-length black coat and spit polished black shoes, opens the next bank of doors that lead into the lobby proper. A dozen or so other employees working at the hotel’s front desk or moving clothing carts from spot A to spot B check us out as we walk toward the lounge. I’m half expecting to be found wanting and asked to leave. This being a raining weekday night, however, it seems that the hotel’s standards have been lowered to the point where I go unchallenged.
Once in the lounge, Joe and I do the doggie shake to rid ourselves of some outdoor wetness, then take a table in the rear and order. Turns out we’re both beer drinkers. We chat about the upcoming mayoral election until the beers arrive and our waiter departs.
Joe makes an interesting point about the Bernstein candidacy. He says its a step in streamlining the local political process. Used to be that Philly’s rich bought power indirectly through proxy officeholders. Now Bernstein is using his own wealth to buy office directly, eliminating the middleman.
“Sound’s like a milestone for democracy,” I say.
“Mitch is a real pioneer,” Connors replies. Then changes the subject abruptly, getting to the point of this get-together.
“You like to play games, Bernie?”
“Not really.”
“Maybe you’ll like this one. We take turns telling each other things we know about the sad and sudden demise of Myron Hamish. When one of us passes along information the other player didn’t know, or finds especially useful, the receiving player pays the teller what he thinks the information is worth. Since you haven’t played before, I’ll start, and you won’t have to pay to hear me out.”
“Sure. Why not.”
Joe looks like a man who is tired onto death but has to go through this rigmarole anyway. Like he hasn’t slept in days. Life at the top, or at least life near people at the top, must be very demanding.
“Ever hear the name Lisa Sankerson?” he begins.
“No.”
“She worked in Myron’s department. One of his composers. We think he may have been screwing her.”
“Poor kid.”
“You got that right. Poor kid. She was murdered last night. Did you know that?”
“No I didn’t.”
“And you can’t provide me with any information that would link her death with Myron’s?”
“Sorry.”
Joe gives me a can’t-be-helped shrug. “Your turn,” he says.
My turn to do what? Tell him what? Or more to the point, why tell him anything at all?
For money, of course. Joe wants to buy some information, any information, something I haven’t told Ryman and Smith. Joe’s pal Frank Ryman must have told him I seemed to be holding back. Or Joe might only be fishing. The fact that he’s doing the fishing himself in a gin mill instead of having me third degreed by a pet cop at the Roundhouse suddenly makes me think that an investigation separate from the official one is being conducted by an in-house team at Bernstein’s.
Do I give Bernstein’s man the juicy tidbit I held back from Ryman and Smith because I didn’t like their poor manners? Why not? It might make me a few bucks. It might also lead to an interesting conversational exchange.
“Well,” I say, “Myron was scared that last time we were together. He’d been getting hints at work and even communications at home that made him think someone wanted him out of Bernstein’s and maybe even dead.”
Joe takes a sip of his beer and says nothing. Just waits for the flow to continue. He hasn’t heard anything that interests him yet. So he prods a little.
“Frank thought maybe Myron gave you a name. The name of the person he thought was out to get him.”
“No. Myron didn’t mention an individual. What he did mention...” how to phrase
this so as to seem terribly mysterious and valuable “...was a kind of group.”
Joe takes another sip and nods. “Like a quartet? Like the Fab Four?
Shit. He already knew that. So much for my big buck bombshell. This pessimism proves premature, however.
“You didn’t tell that Fab Four tidbit to Detective Ryman. You told me. That’s how you win in this game.”
Joe pulls out his wallet. It’s an old wallet, a bit ragged around the edges, but surprisingly bulky. Five bills are taken from the cluster inside and placed on the table. They’re all hundreds. He motions. Take. I don’t wait to be asked again.
“Even freelance intellectuals have to eat,” says Joe. Again there’s no snide edge in his voice. Nice. Rare, too, when someone doesn’t diss my self-proclaimed profession.
“My turn to tell you something you might not know about Myron’s murder,” says Connors.
“Shoot.”
“There’s all kinds of security devices monitoring goings on in the Bernstein Building. They’re supposed to be in operation all the time.”
“I guessed that. My last visit with Myron, he dragged me into a closed storage area to have a private conversation.”
“So you knew that,” says Connors. “Did you know that one of our employees, Leo Diamond, deliberately shut down the system for the half-hour during which Myron was killed?”
The name ‘Leo’ rings a bell, though I can’t quite place it immediately. “I didn’t know that,” I admit.
“Leo didn’t shut the monitors down because he planned to kill our music
meister. Leo wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not a big fly, anyway. Leo is a civil libertarian. Leo doesn’t believe we have a right to keep close tabs on our employees while they’re at work. So when someone sends him an email on one of the open intranet terminals we have all over the building, this message saying it’s time to save the Constitution with a building monitor takedown, Leo goes along on principle and allows a murder to happen without it being recorded.”
“I take it Leo is a dingbat.”
“Always has been,” says Connors. “Very clever with computers and security device maintenance, though, which is why we kept him on staff. One other thing about Leo and that message he received.”
“
Which is?”
“Though any employee can stop at any one of our building’s open intranet terminals and send a message to anyone else in the company, there’s a certain keystroke that’s only used by a handful of top executives when sending. Leo told our security man who questioned him that this stroke appeared in the message he got that suggested taking down the monitors at a certain time. Seems Leo had something called a ‘sniffer program’ that lets him pick out and eavesdrop on all messages that included this particular keystroke.”
“Kind of dumb,” I say. “If you’re getting ready to kill someone, why add the equivalent of a signature to the message you send to the person who’s going to make the killing possible?”
“Not exactly a signature,” says Connors. “More than one executive used that keystroke.”
“Even so...”
“Here’s the twist,” says Connors. “At one time that particular keystroke was used
by everyone in the company when doing in-house emailing. But a year or so back this same Leo Diamond eliminated it as a requirement for sending in-house messages and notified everyone in the company about the change—everyone except for our top executives.”
“And he did this because...”
“Because,” Connors continues, “it was one of the cutsie games Leo loves to play. See, one of his jobs was to regularly help our security chief look over the monitoring equipment. Since this equipment also monitors all Internet and intranet emails, by keeping our top executives in the dark that their own messages could be sniffed out, could be distinguished from all other traffic, even when sent from an open terminal, Leo had some totally inappropriate insights into what our top people were thinking and planning.”
“Gotcha,” I say. “Leo starts to get emails telling him he has support for his pet theories. He knows this support, or supposed support, is coming from a top executive, but the executive doesn’t know that Leo knows its a bigshot doing the sending. The bigshot thinks freedom-loving Leo the dingbat is under the impression these messages are from just another corporate flunky.”
“Mitch Bernstein doesn’t view his people as flunkies. Otherwise, you got it right.”
“Which is why you weren’t surprised when I mentioned Myron thought it was one of the Fab Four that was after his ass. You knew one of them sent the message that got Leo to temporarily take down the cameras.”
“Right again. Now you owe me some money. This is a pay-for-information game. Remember?”
Connors takes another sip from his beer, puts down his mug and places his hand on the table, palm up, but kind of playfully. I catch his drift. I take out my own wallet, leaf past the five crispy new hundred dollar bills recently deposited
there and extract instead a wrinkled and world-weary ten that I hand to my
companion who accepts it and favors me with a sad, basset hound smile.
“I’m hoping we can play some more,” Connors says after placing the wrinkled
low denomination bill in amongst its much bigger cousins. And in fact, I think this may be possible. The name Leo has now triggered another recollection from my last visit with Myron. Another recollection that wasn’t passed along to Ryman and Smith.
“As I was leaving Myron that last time,” I say, “he got a call.”
“From?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear either end of the conversation because Myron was talking softly into the phone. The call didn’t seem all that important anyway. Myron was actually chuckling when he got off the line. Then he said to me: ‘Don’t know why he bothers encouraging that jerk Leo.’ That’s what Myron said.”
Connors leans over the table so he can examine my face more clearly. “Repeat that for me, Bernie. Repeat, exactly, the words Myron said.”
“‘Don’t know why he bothers encouraging that jerk Leo,’ is what Myron said.”
“
You’re sure Myron said ‘he bothers encouraging’?”
I think about this for a few seconds. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I am sure.”
It’s clear that I’ve provided Joe Connors with an important piece for his puzzle. One of the Fab Four is a woman. If what I just passed along is correct, Myron knew someone was cozying up to Leo. That someone was likely the person who killed him a few days later. And that person was a man. Which narrows Joe’s search down to a Fab Three.
Connors is no longer doing a stare check on my face. He’s satisfied that what I’ve just told him is the truth. Once again he reaches into the cornucopia in his back pocket and counts out the goodies. When the count passes the five hundred mark I feel a warm glow spreading through my limbs. When it doesn’t stop until fifteen of these valuable engravings have been pushed in my direction, I find himself light-headed and amazingly well disposed towards my companion.
“Anything else you might be able to tell me,” says Connors, his bulging billfold still in plain sight.
“Sorry.” the word is mouthed with genuine regret.
Connors gives me a sad little smile. “I like the way you approach situations, Bernie. The way you put things together. Would you be willing to give us some more of your intellectual insights?”
“How would I do that?”
“Show up at the Bernstein Building tomorrow morning at nine. Our security man meets you downstairs and brings you to me. We go over a few things. Then you sit yourself in a place in the building we use for private chats and you interview the people Myron mentioned. The Fab Four. Maybe you come away with a little something extra that will help us solve this terrible crime. Naturally, I’ll clear this all with Frank Ryman beforehand. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up actually improving your relationship with the local police.”
I sincerely doubt that. Just now, though, I’m more focused on Joe’s still open billfold, next to his beer mug, oozing promise, than on future relations with the authorities.
Joe is obviously aware of this interest. “If you can spare us some of your time, we pay two hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Two thousand dollars for the day, which you get even if you don’t work the full eight hours. We also pay in advance.”
“Nine o’clock?”
“
If that would be convenient.”
“I think I can fit it in. “Another twenty crisp new hundred dollar bills are passed across the table.
It’s pouring when I leave the hotel bar. I couldn’t care less. Flagging down a cab with the panache of a man who has achieved a temporary but significant solvency, I’m driven to the corner of Irving Street in minutes. The ten dollar tip I give the Bengali cabby for a five dollar ride appears to make this cabbie’s evening. And why not? Shouldn’t everyone get a taste of happiness in a country where just associating with a functionary who associates with a billionaire can earn a freelance intellectual two months’ running money?
This euphoria lasts for only the few seconds it takes me to walk from the corner of Irving Street to my own front door. I actually hear the problem before I come upon it. Or to be more exact, I don’t hear what I should hear, and that’s the problem.
What I should hear is the sound of rain pelting the canvas that ‘s supposed to be covering the hole in the street directly in front of my house. I don’t hear that because someone has removed this canvas covering and dragged it down the street where it currently resides, crumpled and grotesquely mangled like some large dead animal.
I keep a small flashlight in his pocket. You never know when you’re going to encounter dark places that require a bit of illumination. Standing by my front door, bent over for a better view, I shine the light down into this newly excavated urban crevice and see with rising anger what I was afraid I would see. There’s a pipe down there, all right, but it’s not leaking water into the hole. It’s the unimpeded barrage of rain that has caused a two-foot deep puddle to form at the hole’s bottom. When I walk around to the other side of the hole and shine the light where the edge of this puddle faces my row house, I discover the reason the puddle’s water level hasn’t risen even higher. Rain water is seeping into my basement.
I’m through the front door and on the stairs leading down to the basement in
seconds. It’s defintely not the right time to try turning on the lights down there because water may have already gotten into the wiring. The beam from my little flash tells me all I need to know in any case. Stripping off my coat and rolling up my pants, I descend the stairs, find the fuse box, and cut the power to this basement-kitchen-breakfast table part of the house.
My dishes and glassware are safe. They’re stored in wall cabinets. My pots and pans are on a rack under the sink, but luckily the few inches of water on the basement floor haven’t yet risen that high. I cart pots, pans, and everything else under the sink that’s worth saving up to the first floor.
Though I strongly doubt the water will rise high enough to douse the pilot light in the stove, who knows for sure. Outside it’s still raining buckets. With difficulty I find the gas lead behind the stove and close it down.
With no electricity in the basement, everything in the refrigerator is going to be lost. I open the fridge door, whose light no longer goes on, and check the insides with my flash. A quart of milk, part of a half-gallon of orange juice, a few containers of yogurt so dated they might have been brought over by the first Bulgarians to come to this country on the Mayflower. The freezer contains some ice cream and frozen peas.
I love the ice cream in there. Godiva white chocolate with dark chocolate chips. But sometimes you just gotta let go.
That’s it. There’s nothing else I can do until the rain stops, so I retreat to the dry realms of a higher floor.
It doesn’t take a genius to know what happened here. The folks at the mortgage company decided to play a harder game of hardball. They somehow got a city agency to do some unnecessary work in front of my house when a major rainstorm was expected later in the day. They rigged the work schedule so filling and resurfacing this big dig wouldn’t happen until the day after the hole was dug and the rains had come. Someone then cropped by and stripped away the canvas that the city’s hole-diggers used—had doubtless been instructed to use—to cover the chasm they created.
Though angry, I’m not really surprised. I’m squatting in prime property that some connected local interests want to seize. They’re determined to force me out, even if it means a flood that causes damage they will have to pay for after I’m gone.
“So be it,” I mutter to myself with the stoicism of a true intellectual. Tomorrow I’ll earn the two grand Joe Connors paid me tonight. Or maybe not earn it, but keep it anyway. And sometime in the next few hours I’ll figure what to do with the marina in my basement.
