Lucidity Page 4

  “Madden,” he said.

  “Bender,” Bender said. “What’s up, dog?”

  “I think you know what’s up.”

  “I’m always trying to make the world a better place. And that includes your little world, Detective. How does it feel to be back in business? You stoked or what?”

  “Who’s Hal Shelby?”

  “Ever heard of Google? Use it much?”

  “I was about to. Then you called.”

  “Well, I’ll give you a hint. He had one dumb idea. Crowdfunding. We take it for granted now, but who’d have thought that you could stick your inane concept up on the Web and people, perfect strangers, would give you money for it?”

  Bender’s site was called OneDumbIdea.com—or ODi, as the site’s prominent red logo read. It covered start-ups and personalities of Silicon Valley. Its tagline, attributable to no one, was “Most smart ideas seem dumb at first. Just like this website.”

  Shelby was the guy behind an operation called Gushr, Bender explained. He’d sold it to Facebook about nine months ago and walked away with something in the neighborhood of four hundred million in cash and stock. Madden vaguely remembered reading about it in the papers.

  “How did it come up?” Madden asked.

  “What?”

  “This whole thing with me.”

  “I don’t know. I think he sent me a text. Or maybe it was an email. He only sends one-sentence emails, so they seem like texts.”

  The fact that Shelby had some sort of email brevity rule didn’t surprise Madden.

  “Sometimes you don’t even get a full sentence,” Bender went on. “A lot of the time it’s one word or even just a piece of punctuation or an emoticon. I think he just said, ‘What’s Detective Madden doing?’ That’s pretty verbose for him. He once told me that his dream was to be quoted in the press with a period, but the press refuses to quote just a period. They always say he had no comment. And he always calls up the editor of the publication and says that he had a comment. A period. ‘What’s that mean?’ the editor asks. It means whatever you want to it to mean, but it’s a comment, he says. I actually did a story about it. It was called, ‘Hal Shelby’s having a period.’ I thought he would hate it, but he loved it. He sent me three exclamation points. We’ve been friends ever since.”

  “Well, he certainly conducts himself a little oddly.”

  “It’s about gaining a psychological advantage,” Bender said. And then Madden heard him say it again. There was an echo on the phone. “That’s the way it is with these guys.” Again, the echo. And suddenly he realized Bender was there in the flesh, standing just behind him to the left, his phone in one hand, a dog leash in the other, his pug attached to it. He had sort of an Indiana Jones–style distressed leather man purse strapped across his chest, resting against his right hip.

  Bender was one of those guys who looked clean and well coiffed yet tired at the same time, his white pasty face framing the dark bags under his eyes while small clusters of spider veins nestled high on both cheeks. He’d put on weight since the last time Madden had seen him. He was a little more corpulent, and his usually spiky, gelled hair, was longer and slicked back. He stared straight ahead for a moment, gazing in the general direction of the El Camino, its lanes thick with traffic, before sitting across the table from Madden.

  “How much is Shelby’s deal worth?” Bender asked. He folded his hands on the table expectantly.

  “One million for finding the body,” Madden volunteered. “Another for finding the husband. And a million bonus if I do both.”

  Bender let a low whistle. “Not bad,” he said.

  “I’m telling you because you’ll find out anyway.”

  “That’s a given,” Bender said.

  “But if those numbers leave this table, there will be repercussions.”

  “Is that a threat, Hank? Because you know I don’t do well with threats.”

  “I don’t either,” Madden said. “And I bite. A lot harder than that mutt of yours.”

  “That’s low, Hank. Insulting the dog.”

  Madden looked down at Beezo, named after Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, one of the few people Bender seemed to truly respect. Beezo didn’t look insulted. Quite the opposite. Madden reached down and gave him a pat.

  “How’d you know I’d be here?” Madden asked.

  “Because you’re a creature of habit, Detective. You come here every Tuesday and Thursday at almost exactly one o’clock. You’re an easy mark. You’re lucky no one’s out to get you. Myself, I keep moving. I mix it up. I take precautions.”

  “Since when?”

  “It’s toxic out there. There were always haters. But now they’re bolder, more vicious. They actually want to harm you. And not only mentally. I’m talking physically. It’s the jihadification of the Internet. Extremism rules.”

  “I hope you didn’t write that anywhere.”

  “Of course I did. And I may have inadvertently disparaged several religions and the State of Israel in the process. There is no equivocation in provocation, my friend. Which is why I’m now wearing this bulletproof vest.”

  Madden looked at him more closely and realized that Bender really wasn’t heavier but was simply wearing something underneath his clothing, apparently the aforementioned vest.

  “Pretty good, huh?” Bender said. “You can barely tell, right?”

  Madden nodded his approval. It was better than the one he used to wear.

  “The truth is it wasn’t my idea,” Bender said. “I made some crack on Twitter about needing a flak jacket, and I got contacted by this company. Now they’re paying me twenty grand to wear this thing around for a couple of months and write about it. Which got me thinking about the whole self-defense market. You know, embrace the hate. We do a contest. Have someone win the chance to taze me. And we video the whole thing and give any money we make to charity. You know, little kids with polio in Cameroon or wherever the fuck that outbreak is. You can emcee the ceremony. Talk about your own bout with polio. Hank Madden, one of the last cases in the U.S. That’s real, man. Living proof. You can even throw a line or two in about overcoming your childhood sexual abuse at the hands of your pediatrician. What do you think?”

  Madden looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and horror.

  “Are you serious?”

  “By definition.”

  Madden shook his head. Alas, the rest of Silicon Valley wasn’t as colorful as Bender. In fact, it was pretty mundane, which Madden had been struggling with in his writing. He was OK laying out the bones of his story, but the flesh, the descriptions of people and places, that part always fell flat. He’d been having a hard time bringing the milieu to life. The generic niceness of the place, its pervasive pleasantness. The weather, the outdoorsy-ness, the proximity to so much natural beauty; the beach, mountains, Napa, Sonoma, Tahoe, Yosemite. That proximity was important. It was what California dreams were made of. But it also created pressure. If you weren’t taking advantage of it, there was something wrong with you. You weren’t living. How did you write about that? For Madden it wasn’t really sweetness but a concept of sweetness. Like Splenda. A yellow packet of Splenda. Healthy yet unhealthy.

  He’d thought about that one day walking up to The Dish, the radio telescope set in the foothills right off Stanford campus, one of those points of interests on the long list of points of interest. A series of paved paths snaked up into hills, and at the top—or even near the top—you could look down into the valley and see all the way to the bay. The first thing that caught your eye was the Hoover Tower, home of the conservative Hoover Institute (Herbert Hoover was literally the university’s first student), because it was the tallest building for miles, a monument amongst the sprawl.

  Staring out at that view, Madden could see something majestic about the place, the grandeur of man’s control of the land, almost every acre of which had been carved up and developed. But inevitably he’d find himself imagining it long ago, in its nature-wrought state. The buco
lic early days. The haciendas. The beginnings of towns. No cars. The real El Camino Real, when it was a dirt road, with no pavement, no cars. And instead of a university, he saw the farm where Leland Stanford bred his racehorses.

  Madden wished he could have been there. Strange, he thought, that as he got older he looked back—way back—instead of looking to the future. He didn’t care about the future. Didn’t care about the spectacular advances in technology, the ones he’d never see. Those were the things Bender cared about. Boldly declaring the next big thing before it was the next big thing—or as Bender once told him, “People don’t remember when you’re wrong. They just remember when you’re the first to be right.”

  “So that’s it?” Madden asked. “The next big thing—embrace the hate?”

  “You gotta zag when the world zigs,” Bender said.

  Just then the waitress came by with Madden’s salad and set it down in front of him. Noticing he had company, she asked Bender whether he wanted a menu.

  “It’s all right,” Bender said. “I’m not staying. I want to give this man his privacy.”

  He said it pretty loudly, so it came off sounding like he actually didn’t want to give him his privacy.

  Once the waitress left, Madden said, “Look, I’m not sure I’m going to take Shelby up on this offer. Unlike you, I don’t like to rip people off, even billionaires.”

  “I don’t think he’s a billionaire, Hank.”

  “Whatever. Two, three months from now, he’s going to ask me what progress I’ve made, and I’m going to say none. And he’s going to say why did you take this on if you knew you couldn’t do it. I know how these guys work. They may not seem like they expect results, but they do. And they get nasty when they don’t get them.”

  “Who cares,” Bender said. “And who says you won’t get results.”

  “I just wanted to write a book. You said it would write it itself, Tom. You encouraged me. You were one of the ones.”

  “This is the book, Hank. Write this. You’re having trouble because you aren’t a guy who lives in the past. So live in the present and write about the past while you’re at it.”

  That made some sense, even though it was completely contrary to his own thinking as of late.

  “I’d need to get a look at the case file. Refresh myself. There’s politics. I can’t just walk in and announce I’m working this case. It’s still active. It would rub people the wrong way, especially if they knew what I was getting paid on top of what I’m already getting paid from my pension.”

  “You’re looking at it wrong,” Bender said. “Start with the guy who’s already done the research.”

  “Who? Pastorini?”

  Pastorini was the detective who’d worked most closely on the case before he ascended to the job of Menlo Park Police Chief. He was Madden’s friend and former boss.

  “The guy had a stroke,” he reminded Bender. “He’s learning to walk and talk again.”

  “Nah. Not the detective. The guy who wrote that book about it. Frank Marcus. He did a lot better job investigating the case than you guys did.”

  Oh, Christ, Madden thought. The book. Madden remembered the bold red letters of its title all too well: Never Found Never Dead. And all of a sudden there it was in front of him. Bender had reached into his man purse, pulled out a hardcover edition and set it down on the table.

  Madden had read the book years ago, when it first came out. He even attended an author event at the old Kepler’s Books bookstore, which had since moved to the building right next door to where they were now sitting.

  “He’d be the first one I’d talk to,” Bender said. “He says people still come to him with tips.”

  Madden wasn’t sure whether Bender was ignorant or whether Bender was just being Bender. Possibly a combination of the two.

  “I don’t know if you know, but there’s some bad blood there. Some things he wrote didn’t sit too well with the guys working the case.”

  “Of course they didn’t. Which is why you should go talk to him. You’re not a cop anymore, Detective. You’re a mercenary.”

  “He embarrassed the MPPD.”

  “I embarrassed you,” Bender said. “You got over it.”

  “Not really,” Madden said.

  5/ Suspect in Custody

  FREMMER KNEW ATTORNEYS, PLENTY OF THEM, THOUGH ONLY A handful of criminal attorneys, two of whom he considered friends. He’d never given much thought as to who would do the better job representing him or who would charge less, but he had asked both whether he could count on them if he ever got into trouble.

  “You remember when I asked you whether I could count on you if I ever got in trouble?” he now reminded Carlos Morton, reaching him on his cell phone.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Max.”

  “Oh, hey, Max. How are you?”

  “Not well,” Fremmer said. “I’m being held at the 20th Precinct station house on 82nd.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. But you gotta get me out of here. The little patience I have left is about to expire. A client of mine was apparently pushed in front of a car this morning while she was walking her dog. They called me in for questioning.”

  “Was she killed?” Morton asked.

  “No. But she’s in bad shape. They don’t think she’ll survive.”

  “And they think you had something to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. I exchanged texts with her last night. They’re questioning people who’ve been in contact with her recently. For background info, they said. But I wasn’t so sure about that. Then I got antsy, partly because I got a little concerned with the tone of their interrogation, partly because I have to pick up Jamie from soccer practice. And I have a spinning class to teach. But when I told the cops I’d come back later, they suddenly pulled this crap about me having an outstanding parking ticket and that there’s a warrant out for my arrest. Apparently, I’ve been driving around with a suspended New York license, which seems odd since I have a Connecticut license. They read me my rights and everything. Is that bullshit or what?”

  “When you have an outstanding parking ticket they issue you a virtual New York license if you don’t have a New York license,” Morton explained. “They suspend the virtual license. Look, be very careful what you say over the phone. They’re probably listening. You get someone to pick Jamie up?”

  Morton knew the soccer-practice drill. Both of their kids played for the same club, though not the same team anymore. They practiced on Randall’s Island in the middle of the East River and the club provided bus service to and from practice—for an extra fee, of course.

  “No,” Fremmer said. “You’re the first call I made.”

  “They take away your phone? This isn’t your number.”

  “No. But I can’t get a signal in here. I wanted to live-tweet the whole thing. They handed me this cordless phone. I asked them to call the Equinox at 92nd for me, but I don’t know if they did.”

  “Hold on a sec, I’m in my car. Let me pull over. I’m just getting back into the city, just drove over the 59th Street Bridge.”

  The line went silent.

  “Where’d she get hit?” Morton asked after a moment.

  “Central Park West,” Fremmer said. “I don’t know what cross street.”

  “OK, I got something here. There are a few stories up already. No name released. But it says an unidentified woman was pushed into the path of an oncoming car this morning at CPW and 75th Street. Police are treating it as an attempted murder. Oh, and they’ve got a suspect in custody.”

  “In custody?”

  “That’s what this article on the Post site says. Timestamp on it is thirty minutes ago. How long you been there?”

  “I don’t know. An hour?”

  “Well, sit tight. I’ll call the Equinox and grab Jamie. He’s on that 6:30 bus, right? I’ll drop him off at your place and then come over there.”

  He said something else, but Fre
mmer didn’t hear him. He was too busy trying to figure out whether what he was doing—or rather where he was—meant that he was in custody. He was in a holding cell with bars on it. If that didn’t mean he was in custody, what did?

  “Max, you still live on 77th, right?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Thanks. And thanks for getting him. Just don’t freak him out. Tell him I’ve got an old parking ticket I’m trying to clear up, which is true.”

  “I got you covered.”

  “Carlos?”

  “What?”

  “I just want you to know I called you first. I had other options, but I called you first.”

  “Of course you did,” Morton said. “Why would you call anybody else?”

  6/ Killing It, Frankly

  WHEN HE WAS ON THE POLICE FORCE AND INVESTIGATING A CRIME, Madden would often show up at a person’s home or place of business without warning. In most cases it was best to retain an element of surprise and not leave a potential witness or suspect time to prepare.

  In his new role he wasn’t quite sure what the protocol was, but he decided to stick with his old script. So two days later, his bank account flush with the $20,000 from Shelby, he showed up unannounced at Marcus’s small office on Hamilton Avenue, a tree-lined street a few blocks over and parallel to University Avenue, the Main Street of downtown Palo Alto.

  The author of Never Found Never Dead was no longer a writer. Several years ago he’d joined his wife in the real-estate business. She’d left a larger firm to start her own boutique operation that, if the press clips were to be believed, had prospered mightily by catering to newly-minted millionaires of the tech boom and foreign clients, mostly Chinese.

  The office looked more like a furniture store or art gallery than a realty office, with wide-plank white wood floors and white walls. On one side of the room there was a pewter-colored modern leather couch facing two matching leather lounge chairs, a glass table sitting on a carbon-colored shag rug between them. A large-screen TV was mounted on the wall behind the couch, showing CNBC with the sound muted.