These pictures, yes, and something else, a question, the question that Earl Dante had asked, trying and failing to hide the keenness of his interest. Who is behind the debt? he asked. Who is behind the questions? He wanted to know, and so did I. It was time to find out. It was time to meet Eddie Dean.
But before I did, I needed to know exactly what I was dealing with, I needed to peer into a dead man’s past.
Chapter 19
“I HAD BEEN warned you would darken my doorstep,” said Jeffrey Telushkin as we sat in his time warp of a living room.
“Detective McDeiss informed you of all my faults, no doubt,” I said.
“And more, I can assure you,” said Telushkin, his eyes bright, his hands coming together in a clap of glee. “He was positively savage. All of which, of course, only peaked my interest. So I made inquiries of my own, just to learn what I could.”
“Nothing too awful, I hope.”
Telushkin didn’t respond, he just chuckled and sat back in his chair. Telushkin was nothing like I expected for a former special agent of the FBI. He was short, round, with a bristly gray mustache, circular black glasses, and very shiny, very small black shoes. And he was cheerful, oh my yes, so very cheerful.
“You’ve come to talk about Tommy Greeley, from what I understand,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Any particular reason?”
“His name has come up in a case I’m involved with, concerning something that happened many years ago.”
“Can you give me a clue, at least, as to what it’s about?”
“No, I’m sorry, there is a privilege I must abide, but anything you can tell me about Tommy Greeley will be much appreciated.”
“Tommy Greeley, the one that got away. Can I get you some tea? Maybe some Earl Grey?”
“That would be wonderful,” I said.
As Telushkin bounded to his kitchenette, I took a swift gaze about and then stood to get a closer look. I was recovering from the night before, but slowly. The bruise on my ribs had turned a fine shade of yellow violet, my wrist still ached whenever I pressed it back, so I pressed it back constantly to be sure it was still aching. But I was here on business, so I tried to ignore the pain as I examined Telushkin’s living room.
The walls were covered with familiar Picasso prints, a colorful outline of a rooster, the silhouettes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, along with original and badly painted abstract and cubist paintings of naked women, paintings whose colors had dimmed over time. I peered at one of them more closely. Yes, of course, a tiny J.T. painted in the corner. There was a spinet piano wedged into one section of the modest one-bedroom but the rest of the furniture would have been considered stylish fifty years ago, rounded chrome legs and arms, square cushions, thin slabs of wood. Henry Miller, I assumed. And Henry Miller was on the bookshelves too, the other Henry Miller, along with Joyce and Bellow, Mailer, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett, early Updike, early Wouk, a massive biography of Ben Gurion, oversized picture books on Surrealism, the Impressionists, Picasso, Picasso, more Picasso. I recognized the decor and the ambiance, yes I did. I could imagine old copies of the New Yorker stacked thigh-high in the bathroom.
There were bunches of photographs in silver frames scattered here and there on side tables, on the piano. A younger Telushkin and a prim little woman, undoubtedly Telushkin’s wife. A middle-aged Telushkin with the same wife and some children, presumably his own. Assorted wedding pictures as the children hitched one after the other under the chupa. An older Telushkin alone with his grand-children. A widower now, or had the wife simply had enough of the Henry Miller and just upped and left? Along with those family mementos were the expected trophy photographs of a man who had spent his career in public service one way or the other: Telushkin with Robert Kennedy, with Johnson, with Carter, with Clinton. Was I detecting a pattern?
“Ah, Mr. Carl, yes.” He brought in a wooden tray with a ceramic teapot, two cups on saucers, a sugar bowl with sugar cubes, a small milk pitcher. “How do you like your tea?”
“Just plain,” I said, sitting down again.
“I like mine with milk and sugar, in the British way. There now, how is that? Yes.” He stared at me over his teacup as he took a sip, as if he were sizing me up for some unknown purpose. “So. Mr. Carl,” he said, continuing his appraisal. I grew uncomfortable under his stare, looked around.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Thank you. I try to keep modern.”
“You said that Tommy Greeley was the one who got away.”
“Yes, I did. Of them all, he was the only one not to pay the piper, don’t you see? Which is unfortunate, since he was the main target all along.”
“Target of what, Mr. Telushkin?”
“Jeffrey. Call me Jeffrey. I’m retired now, no need to stand on ceremony any longer. The target of my inquiry. My great success. It was I who stumbled on it all.” He looked at me, waited for admiration to show on my face, was disappointed. “How much don’t you know?”
I took a sip of the tea, dark and biting. “Pretty much everything, I’m afraid.”
“Well, let me see. Perhaps I’ll begin at the beginning, a novel idea, no? It started with Babbage, Bradley Babbage. A noted entrepreneur, young and successful and much the hit with the ladies. You must have seen his picture in the paper at the time. He was a star at all kinds of political and civic functions.” His eyebrows rose with a genuine merriment. “He raised money for Rizzo, Specter, and then for Reagan.”
“Unless he was in Highlights for Children, which was all I was reading at the time, I would have missed him.”
“Well, too bad then, he put on quite the spectacle. But things in the Babbage empire were not entirely as they seemed. There were questions about the profitability of a building he owned, and another enterprise he ran, a limousine service actually, and about a small publishing house he had purchased that was slow in paying its royalties. It was the complaining authors that put us on the track, imagine that? Babbage was claiming losses in everything, so no taxes were paid, and yet he was constantly buying and expanding. It seemed, well, peculiar. It seemed to deserve looking into, yet it seemed also to be an avenue not so interesting for the agency to vigorously pursue. And, because of the administration then in power and the subject’s connection to it, not an investigation designed to enhance the career of any agent who took it on. So they gave it to me.
“I was with the department then, of course, but I was mostly considered a mid-level drone, ushered into a corner cubicle and ignored. A bit of excess waste kept on by civil service regulations,” he said, his eyes trying to twinkle but unable to hide the angry pride underneath, “not up to normal department standards. You see, I was never one of those agents who charged about with my gun drawn. It is the hero types who get the press, the big cases, who rise to heights in the department. Yes, I understood that, but that didn’t always make them the most effective agents, despite their swaggered steps and deep voices.
“Do you know how Rockefeller became the richest man in America?” he asked. “He kept his books more carefully than anyone else. He bought and sold things, that is all, but he knew to the penny the profit on each and every transaction and made his decisions accordingly. You can change the world with an eye on the books, you see. I am an accountant by training. I was not thought much of by the hierarchy or the heroes, but I could read the books better than anyone. And when they gave me the Babbage case I started with the books and that’s how I discovered him.”
“Discovered who?”
“The secret investor. There had to be a secret investor. Babbage was losing money, but he was still buying businesses. So slowly, carefully, I traced the money that was keeping Babbage afloat, traced it back from one account to the next, the whole trail. I found the checks, the shifting accounts, the wired deposits, traced it all back to the source. Cash deposits, you see. Some were made by Babbage himself, receipts from his business, he told the bank. But the receipts didn’t match the books, they were higher than his cash flow could have possibly allowed. Something was wrong. And then there were others, from other accounts, cash deposits straight into the bank, all less than ten thousand dollars, the amount that triggered financial reporting, but adding up, when you took them as a whole, to far far more. That is a crime, you know, Mr. Carl, dividing up a single cash deposit into many to avoid reporting requirements. So it was a snap to get the warrant to find the name behind it all, the hidden investor who was laundering his money through Babbage. And there he was, as if his picture itself was painted in the various columns of the various ledgers.”