Day One, Two, and Three post-attack there were no credible sightings of any of the Jane Street Six. Pretty remarkable when you think of the manhunt. On Day Four, there was finally a break. The FBI received an anonymous tip that Arlo Sugarman was holed up in a brownstone in the Bronx. Alas, we know how that turned out—Special Agent Patrick O’Malley ends up being shot and killed on the stoop. I jot this incident down next to Sugarman’s name because it is his first known sighting. The second sighting, according to what I just learned from Lake Davies, places Arlo Sugarman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as a student at Oral Roberts University in 1975. I mark that down too.
That’s it on Sugarman. No third sighting.
I move on to Billy Rowan. According to the FBI file, Rowan was spotted only once since the attack—two weeks later—by Vanessa Hogan, the mother of one of the victims, Frederick Hogan, a seventeen-year-old from Great Neck, New York. Vanessa Hogan, a devoutly religious woman, had gone on television almost immediately after her son’s death to say she had forgiven those who harmed young Frederick.
“God must have wanted my Frederick for a higher purpose,” she said at the press conference.
I hate this sort of justification. I hate it even more when it’s reversed, if you will—when a survivor of a tragedy claims something to the effect that “God spared me because I’m special to Him,” the subtle implication being that God didn’t give a damn about those who perished. In this case, however, Vanessa Hogan was a young widow who had just lost her only child, so perhaps I should cut her some slack.
I digress.
According to the FBI report, two weeks after Vanessa Hogan’s press conference, when the intensity of the search had waned just enough, Billy Rowan, who had also been raised in a devoutly religious home, knocked on Hogan’s back door at approximately nine p.m. Vanessa Hogan was home alone in her kitchen at the time. Billy Rowan had purportedly seen her on TV and wanted to apologize in person before he went fully underground.
Okay, fine. I note this next to Rowan’s name. First and only sighting.
I move on to the rest. Edie Parker, no sightings. Lionel Underwood, no sightings. And of course, when I was handed the file: Ry Strauss, no sightings.
I tap my lip with my Montblanc and mull it over. Let’s suppose that they had all successfully stayed underground for all these years. Do I really believe that they never, not once, reached out to family members?
I do not.
I scan through the file and jot down the names of close relatives I could potentially question. Ry Strauss had a quasi-famous brother, Saul, a progressive attorney who represents the downtrodden. He’s a television talking head, but then again who isn’t nowadays? Did Ry never contact his brother Saul, even though they lived in the same city for perhaps forty years? It’s worth an ask. Saul Strauss, I know, has been on Hester Crimstein’s news program, ridiculously named Crimstein on Crime. Perhaps Hester could offer an introduction.
The Strauss parents are deceased. In fact, of the Jane Street Six’s potential twelve parents, only two are still alive—Billy Rowan’s father, Edie Parker’s mother. I write their names down. Next I go through surviving siblings besides Saul Strauss. That adds another nine people, though two of those belong to Lake Davies, so I won’t need them. I add those names to my list. If I have more time or help, I might spread my family tree out—uncles, aunts, cousins—but I doubt that I will.
There are a lot of names here. I will need help.
My thoughts naturally gravitate to Myron.
He is down in Florida, taking care of his parents and helping his wife settle into a new job. I don’t want to take him away from that. Those who know us well would note that I always came through when Myron would engage in similar quixotic quests and ask for my help—that in fact, after all the times I marched into battle for him without question or pause, Myron “owes” me.
Those folks would be wrong.
Let me clue you in on the advice Myron’s father, one of the wisest men I know, gave his son and his son’s best man—that would be yours truly—on Myron’s wedding day: “Relationships are never fifty-fifty. Sometimes they are sixty-forty, sometimes eighty-twenty. You’ll be the eighty sometimes, you’ll be the twenty others. The key is to accept and be okay with that.”
I believe this simple wisdom is true for all great relationships, not just marriages, so if you add it up, how my friendship with Myron has improved and enhanced my life, no, Myron owes me nothing.
My phone pings a reminder that I have not yet responded to my rendezvous app. I doubt there will be time tonight, but it would be rude to not reply. When I click the notification and scan the request, my eyes widen. I quickly change my mind and set up a meet for eight p.m. tonight.
Let me explain why.
The rendezvous app has a rather unusual “bio” page. No, it’s not like the dating apps where you spew out exaggerated nonsense about how you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. This page starts about akin to ratings one might give an Uber, but because most members use the app on rare occasions (unlike yours truly), the developers have supplemented personal ratings with what could crudely be called an appearance ranking. It’s a far more complicated algorithm than that, scoring in many specific physical fields and on many levels. One of the app rules states that if you ask another client about your ranking—or if that client tells you—you are both immediately forced to relinquish your membership. I, for example, do not know what my rankings are.
I am confident that they are high. No need for false modesty, is there?
To give you an idea, Bitsy Cabot’s aggregate ranking was an accurate 7.8 out of ten. The lowest I would go for is a 6.5. Well, okay, once I went with a 6.0, but nothing else was available. The app’s scoring is very tough. A six on this app would be considered at least an eight anywhere else.
The highest ranking I’ve seen on the app? I was once with a 9.1. She’d been a renowned supermodel before she married a famous rock star. You know her name. That was the only woman above a nine I’d ever seen.
The woman who had currently pinged me for a rendezvous?
Her ranking was a 9.85.
There is no way I was passing that up.
PT calls me. “How did it go with Lake Davies?”
I start with the obvious: “She lied about Strauss being dead.” I then fill him in on the rest of our conversation.
“So what’s your next step?”
“Go to Malachy’s Pub.”
“Forty years later?”
“Yes.”
“Long shot.”
“Is there any other kind?” I counter.
“What else?”
“I have compiled a list of people I may want to interrogate. I need your people to get me current addresses.”
“Email me the list.”
I know how PT works. He gets the information before he gives the information. Now that I’ve done my part, I prompt him: “Anything new on your end?”
“We got week-old CCTV footage from the Beresford. We think it’s from the day of the murder but…”
I wait.
“We don’t know how helpful it will be,” he says.
“Is the killer on it?”
“Likely, yeah. But we can’t really see much.”