Unknown Man #89 jr-3 Read online

  “What is it you want?”

  “Tell me something. What year were you born?”

  “What year…” There was a pause. “You said call this number. What do you want?”

  “I want to know if I’m talking to Robert Leary, Jr.”

  “This is him.”

  “You in a bar?… You drinking?”

  There was a pause again and the background sound was blocked out, as though a hand had been placed over the phone.

  “Hey,” Ryan said. “You still there?”

  “What do you want?”

  The voice was low and husky. Ryan pictured it coming from an old man.

  “You want to see me?”

  “I want to see Robert Leary, Jr. Tell me what year you were born.”

  “Listen, you want to see me or not?”

  “All right,” Ryan said. “Where do you live?”

  “Meet me-you know where the bus station is?”

  “Downtown?”

  “Yeah. Nine o’clock tonight. Park on the roof of the bus station-wait a minute.” Another pause, silence. “What kind of car you drive?” Ryan told him. “Okay, park up on the roof, take the elevator down. Go over and stand-wait a minute.” Again a pause, longer this time. “Hello?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go over and wait by the door to the men’s room.”

  “How’ll I know you?” Ryan said.

  “Nine o’clock. You want to see me, be there.”

  “Let me ask you something.”

  Robert Leary, Jr., or whoever it was, hung up.

  Ryan called Dick Speed. He was out on assignment. So Ryan sat around again, wondering if he should bother going all the way down to the bus station. He was reasonably sure the guy on the phone wasn’t Robert Leary, Jr. In fact, he knew it wasn’t. The guy could have been calling for Leary, though, getting instructions from Leary during the pauses. That was a possibility. So he’d have to go down to the bus station, go through the motions, and put in the report.

  The second Robert Leary, Jr., called at five to seven, while Ryan was changing his clothes. This time he forgot to clear his throat before picking up the phone.

  “Your number 355-1919?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who am I talking to?” A slow, quiet voice; maybe a southern accent.

  “My name’s Ryan. What’s yours?”

  “You put that in the paper today?”

  “I’m the one,” Ryan said. “Are you Robert Leary, Jr.?”

  “I don’t know you,” the voice said.

  “No, I don’t know you either,” Ryan said. “Are you Robert Leary?”

  “Yeah. What do you want?”

  “You mind I ask you when you were born?”

  There was a silence as the man waited, still on the line.

  “I want to be sure I’m talking to the right party,” Ryan said. “If you are, all I need to know is where I can get in touch with you, or where you live.”

  The second Robert Leary, Jr., hung up.

  Shit.

  Ryan waited around until eight-fifteen. There were no more calls.

  Dick Speed returned his call at eleven-thirty that evening.

  “I’ve been trying to get you for a couple of hours.”

  “I had to go down to the bus station.”

  “The bus station?”

  “It’s a long, boring story.”

  “Well, this Robert Leary, Jr., I hope to shit you don’t have to serve him papers.”

  “Why?”

  “The guy’s a fucking beauty.”

  Ryan listened then for several uninterrupted minutes while Dick Speed read the sheets on Leary. Ryan listened and said, reverently, when he finished, “Jesus Christ.”

  Ryan didn’t get hold of Jay Walt until the next morning. He said over the phone, “I don’t think twenty bucks an hour is going to make it. The three hundred for openers, okay, you’ve spent that. But now, what I’ve found out so far, I think it’s possible I could get killed if I keep at it. But not for any twenty bucks an hour. We make another deal and you tell me what’s going on before I tell you anything.”

  Jay Walt got back to Ryan within fifteen minutes. He said he had to do a little talking, but finally arranged a meeting. Ryan was to go to the Pontchartrain Hotel and ask for a Mr. Perez.

  “Aren’t you going to be there?”

  “Well, not right away. He said he wanted to see you alone.”

  Jay Walt didn’t sound too happy about it.

  4

  “THERE’S NOTHING MYSTERIOUS about it,” Mr. Perez said with his soft accent. “My business is finding lost stockholders. People who own stock in a company but don’t know it.”

  “Why don’t they know it?” Ryan asked him.

  “We’ll get to that if you’re interested.” Mr. Perez uncrossed his legs and pulled himself out of the deep chair. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask you what you drink.” He picked up a glass from the coffee table and moved away.

  “Nothing, thanks,” Ryan said.

  “Too early, huh? I have my dinner at noon. So I start anytime a half hour before.” The way he said “my dinner” with the soft drawl sounded good, something he enjoyed, though he didn’t look like a big eater. He was bony, in fact, with a long, bony nose that was discolored with broken blood vessels. He looked more like a drinker than an eater.

  “Where’s your home?” Ryan asked him.

  “Baton Rouge, when I’m not somewhere else. I also have a home at Pass Christian, on the Gulf. But I haven’t seen much of it lately, been spending most of my time up this way.”

  Ryan sat in a straight chair with arms, his damp raincoat across his lap. He was having a hard time typing Mr. Perez. Light-skinned Cuban or old Louisiana Spanish maybe, with a halo of hair that had receded to the top of his head and an air of relaxed self-confidence. The man knew who he was. It didn’t bother him that his white shirt was rumpled or his necktie had slipped and was off-center. Ryan watched him go over to a low bookcase that was set up with several bottles of liquor and glasses and a silver ice bucket. Next to the bar, an alcove window of tinted glass reached to the floor, framing a view of the Detroit River and the Ambassador Bridge to Canada. It was still raining, coming down out of a washed-out gray sky that had been hanging over the city for days.

  Ryan wondered how much the hotel suite cost. There was a desk piled with folders and papers and a thick briefcase on the chair next to it. Beyond the desk, through an open doorway, he saw twin beds with gold spreads and gold headboards. He bet it was costing the guy a hundred a day, at least. He wondered if the guy was a lawyer. He looked like one: not the corporate lawyer, but the downtown city-hall lawyer.

  “What do you call what you do?”

  Mr. Perez was coming back with his whiskey over ice, taking his time.

  “My title? Well, my card says I’m an investment consultant. How’s that sound?” Mr. Perez smiled easily.

  “I suppose you’re a lawyer, too.”

  “Why do you suppose that?” He lowered himself carefully, holding the lowball glass in front of him, and sank down in the chair.

  “I guess I just assumed you were.”

  “You hire lawyers,” Mr. Perez said. “You don’t have to be one. Thank God.”

  “Can I ask you, how do you happen to know Jay Walt?”

  “I don’t know him. Least I didn’t,” Mr. Perez said. “I used him once before, he was all right. You see, locating people, a very good way to find out about them is through their credit rating. So I generally use somebody in the business. I believe he was the first or second one in the Yellow Pages, Allied Credit something or other. Let me ask you, are you a friend of his?”

  “No,” Ryan said.

  “You don’t care too much for him either.”

  Ryan didn’t say anything.

  “I have kind of a negative feeling myself,” Mr. Perez said. “Man talks out loud in elevators. I was thinking, there’s not much reason to keep him around. That’s if yo
u’ve got something to tell me.”

  “A few things,” Ryan said. “But I don’t know what I’m into yet. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “You’re trying to locate a lost stockholder who, I hope, doesn’t know he’s lost,” Mr. Perez said. “See, the way I go about it, I pick out a company that was around during the depression, when the value of their stock was quite low or maybe worthless. I go to the company and I say, ‘If you give me the names of any stockholders you’ve lost track of, I’ll see if I can locate them for you, at my own expense. Get the dead wood out of your stockholder list and bring it up to date.’ See, what happens from time to time, the company will get back a dividend check they sent out. Or their annual report comes back. Maybe the person died and the company wasn’t notified. Or moved and didn’t leave a forwarding address. The company usually doesn’t make much of an effort to find the person. They go through the motions, then after a while, if they still haven’t located the party, they put the name on their list of lost stockholders.”

  “What I was wondering before,” Ryan said, “the stockholder, I mean if he’s alive, he knows he owns the stock, doesn’t he?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Mr. Perez said. “He might’ve put it away thirty years ago and forgot about it. Or he thought the company went broke during the depression. Or, what happens, he inherits the stock but never looks at it to see what it is. Now it’s buried under some old papers in the bottom of a desk. So, I get the list from the company and go to work.”

  “They just give it to you?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Mr. Perez stared, interested in Ryan’s answer.

  “Well, I’d think it would be privileged information. I can’t see the company taking the chance, exposing their stockholders to, well, they don’t know what, do they?”

  Mr. Perez smiled. “You were going to say exposing them to some kind of con. Believe me, Mr. Ryan, there’s nothing questionable or suspicious about what I do. You’re right, though. Some companies are hesitant. They feel they have to consider my proposition very carefully, discuss it, get approval from the board, all that. Well, in those cases, what I do, I get on friendly terms with one of the third- or fourth-level executives of the company and ask him to let me have the list-he knows I’m not going to do anything illegal-and avoid a lot of red tape and confusion.”

  “What’s that cost you?”

  “Not a thing. Oh, I may send him a case of scotch, something like that.” Mr. Perez paused, but Ryan didn’t say anything. “It’s done all the time.”

  “So then you try to find the lost stockholder.”

  “That’s right. I locate the individual and I tell him I have knowledge of a certain property in his name that’s of some value.”

  “You don’t tell him it’s stock.”

  “No, that might be telling too much. I ask him to sign an agreement first, giving me a percent of the value as a finder’s fee. He does that, then I tell him what it is.”

  “Can I ask you, what percent do you get?”

  “Well, it depends. Sometimes, if there’s a lot of work involved, as much as half.” Mr. Perez took a sip of his whiskey and lit a cigarette. He was comfortable in the deep chair, at ease talking about himself. “So now the guy scratches his head and tries to think of what it is he owns or if something could have been left to him or what. Or he might want to talk to a lawyer first. That’s fine. Sometimes they’ll dig around and find the stock or remember it from years and years ago and I’m out of luck. I say thank you, I’ll be on my way. But if he doesn’t know what it is, then he signs the agreement and gives me power of attorney to handle the transaction. We sell the stock back to the company or on the open market, I take my percent, and everybody’s satisfied.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to sell it?”

  “That’s all right, he can pay me the equivalent of my percent.”

  Ryan was trying to picture it. He said, “I can’t imagine the stockholder being too happy, splitting something he owns with a guy walks in off the street.”

  “You get different reactions,” Mr. Perez said. “Most people are very grateful. I’ve found something that’s been lost and they look on it as paying a reward for its return.”

  “I suppose, if you look at it that way,” Ryan said. Like Mr. Perez was doing them a favor. Maybe he was. But there was something about it, something about warm, friendly Mr. Perez that bothered Ryan. He wondered about other sides of the man; what he was like when he was pissed off, or when a deal fell through, or when he didn’t like somebody. Mr. Perez had already, no trouble at all, crossed off Jay Walt.

  “Now tell me what you’ve got,” Mr. Perez said, “that’s worth more than two hundred dollars a day.”

  “I told Jay Walt a hundred and fifty,” Ryan said. “Not two hundred.”

  “Well, I guess he added on a commission, then.” It didn’t seem to bother Mr. Perez. “What you got?”

  Ryan told him that Robert Leary, Jr., first of all, was thirty-five, not sixty; had gone to school in Detroit, briefly, and had married a Denise Leann Watson a few years ago.

  “You see,” Mr. Perez said, “I assumed he was an adult back in 1941 when the stock was listed in his name. But he would’ve just been born then, wouldn’t he?”

  “We’re getting to that,” Ryan said. He told Mr. Perez that Robert Leary, Jr., was never listed as a resident of 146 Arden Park. But Probate records showed the owner and resident, a man by the name of Allen Anderson, died in 1941 and left his entire estate to his wife and children, with the exception of fifteen hundred shares of common stock, with a value at the time of a dollar a share, that was left to a Robert Leary, a household employee of the Andersons for some twenty years.

  “Did the record say what the stock is?”

  “I don’t think so. It said other considerations, including stock certificates.”

  Mr. Perez nodded. “So it was his father. The stock’s left to him, his son’s born about the time and he reassigns the stock in his son’s name. Pay for his college education, so he won’t have to be a servant like his father. That must be what happened.”

  “Well, I don’t know about college,” Ryan said, “but the man you want has spent some time in institutions.” He took folded sheets of paper out of his inside coat pocket and looked at Mr. Perez as he opened them. “I have a friend, he’s with the Detroit police.”

  “That’s a good place to have one,” Mr. Perez said.

  “I stopped off this morning, made these notes. You ready?”

  “I can’t wait,” Mr. Perez said.

  “Robert Leary, Jr., also known as Bobby Lear,” Ryan began…

  Born in Detroit. Both parents deceased by the time he was ten. Raised in foster homes…

  “I can get the names if I need them.”

  … attended Cass Technical High School, dropped out, was drafted and sent to Vietnam, where, according to U.S. Army psychiatrists, he suffered a severe nervous breakdown during a mortar barrage near Chu Lai. Leary was hospitalized and returned to duty on a “maintenance dosage” of Thorazine. Evacuated again for treatment and hospitalized for psychiatric disorders in Japan, in Hawaii, and finally at Valley Forge General, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, from which he was discharged as one hundred percent psychiatrically disabled. Leary was given an honorable discharge, and a guaranteed income for life, and returned to Detroit to begin killing people.

  “My,” Mr. Perez said. He was holding his glass, about to take a drink. “That’s what it says?”

  “That’s the way I put it down,” Ryan said.

  He beat a woman to death with his fists. Her name was Thelma Simpson and she was said to be his girl friend.

  Ryan looked up. “Leary was married at the time, but none of the police reports mention his wife.”

  Two days later he shot and killed Eugene Bailey, a known dope dealer who Leary believed was fooling around with Thelma Simpson. Leary’s attorney, at the trial, called in V.A. hospital psychiatrists to testify. Leary was
declared insane and sent to the state hospital at Northville. Within six months he was judged to be normal and released.

  Leary was arrested for armed robbery-charged, along with two others, with the holdup of a savings and loan company-then acquitted when the witnesses, in court, changed their previous testimony and could not make a positive identification of Leary.

  Leary was arrested for the attempted murder of Ronnie J. Hughes in a dope pad on Orchestra Place and released on bond. A week later Ronnie J. Hughes was killed in front of a bar on Twelfth Street by an unknown assailant. Three days later the two men who had witnessed the dope-pad shooting were found at the foot of Twenty-third Street near the river; both had been bound and shot through the head at close range.

  Leary walked into the Veterans Administration Hospital in Allen Park claiming to be the President of the United States. A week later he checked into the Battle Creek V.A. hospital and remained under observation five days.

  Leary shot and severely wounded a man in a bar on Cass Avenue over a ten-dollar gambling debt. The charge was reduced to felonious assault, and Leary was sent to Jackson to serve a three and a half to four. His lawyer appealed, basing his case on Leary’s history of mental illness, and he was transferred to the Ionia State Hospital. Three months later he was released.

  Leary shot and killed a man by the name of Teddy “Too Much” Smith in his white Eldorado while Teddy Smith’s three-year-old son, sitting in the front seat, watched.

  A police informant who knew Leary said, “Bobby told me one time he never had to worry about going to jail for very long on account he had a act he put on.” The man pointed to his head.

  Leary told a state psychiatrist he had probably killed twenty people. Following the shooting of Teddy Smith, he gave the police the names of ten victims after he was promised immunity from prosecution. The police believed he was telling the truth about eight of the victims and closed those cases. Most of the victims lived in Leary’s neighborhood and were involved commercially in narcotics. Few, if anybody, would miss them; especially the police. Leary was brought to trial for the murder of Teddy Smith, was again judged insane, and was committed to the state’s Center for Forensic Psychiatry at Ypsilanti.