Chapter 35: Fourteen Postcards - Lucidity

ZANDER BELL LIVED IN A FIVE-STORY BROWNSTONE ON WEST 84TH Street. The building was similar to Fremmer’s, only nowhere near as well maintained. He pressed the intercom button marked 5B and smiled at the intercom camera. Zander was expecting him. He hiked up the five flights with his backpack on, slowing down for the last two. He was slightly winded by the time he got there, which disappointed him a little. He thought he was in better shape.

Bell greeted him at his door.

“Hello there,” he said with a warm smile. “Sorry about the walk up.”

“Drew Masters,” Fremmer said, shaking his hand.

Zander’s appearance shocked Fremmer. The man looked nothing like the guy in the handful of videos Fremmer had found on the Internet. In those he had a round, slightly chubby face and a full head of dark curly hair that he parted on the left. The guy in front of him looked older, his face was narrow. He looked gaunt. Although he was wearing a baseball hat, Fremmer noticed he had no hair above his ears below the border of the cap. His head appeared to be shaved.

Fremmer was also wearing a hat, a knit beanie. It wasn’t much of a disguise but he wanted to change his appearance in some way in case Bell recognized him from somewhere. So he shaved, put on a hipster cap and a New York Rangers track jacket. He also wore an LG collar-style wireless headphone with retractable earbuds wrapped around his neck. All he had to do was double-tap the call button to redial the last person he’d called. Deliberately, Chu.

They sat down at a small table in the middle of the small living room. It was a nice day. Bell had the window wide open, a nice breeze blowing in.

“So, are you at all familiar with how this works? Have you been to intuits or psychics before?”

“Now and then,” Fremmer said. “I can’t call myself a regular, but I’ve had some trauma in my life recently and wanted to speak to someone. I poked around on the web, saw you were close by and highly rated on Yelp. Your reviews are really good.”

Bell thanked him for the compliment. “So what I do is I have my oracle,” he said, “which is this stack of cards.” He pointed to a shoebox on the table next to him. “I’m a little different from other intuits in that instead of standard Tarot cards I use artwork postcards I’ve collected from around the world.”

“I saw that,” Fremmer said.

“Everything can be interpreted in different ways. I read what I see in the cards and intuit how it applies to you and your life. A lot of my impressions are meant to be taken symbolically, but some of it may be taken more literally. It’s also important what you see in the cards. I’m here to help you find your way around obstacles, understand the circumstances and relationships you’re in, help you make positive decisions that have positive outcomes. I want to be clear, I can tell you what I see in your future but I can’t predict exactly what your future will be. I’m here to help you see your life more clearly and recognize your strengths and weaknesses and bring out your talents. Make the most of them.”

“That sounds good,” Fremmer said.

“OK, then. There’s the matter of payment. I don’t take cash, only credit cards. I have no money in the apartment.”

“Oh,” Fremmer said. That was a problem. His credit card said Max Fremmer on it, not Drew Masters. “I only brought cash. I thought all you guys only took cash. You know, for tax reasons.”

“No, this is a completely above-board business. I pay taxes.”

“Well, how about I give you $200 instead of the usual $175 to make an exception this one time. You can still report it if you want.”

Bell thought about it a moment, then agreed. He talked a good game, but he didn’t seem like the inflexible type, especially when it came to getting paid. Fremmer handed him the money.

“I flip 14 cards,” Bell said after he put the cash in his pocket. “We talk about each card for a short time. After I flip them all, we’ll have a longer talk.”

“So it’s kind of like therapy?” Fremmer asked.

“Very much so,” Bell said. “But unlike with a therapist you’re free to record our session and take it with you. Most of my clients do.”

“I can record this?”

“Sure.”

Fantastic, Fremmer thought. When he and Chu talked about this meeting, Fremmer got the sense that Chu was choosing his words carefully and trying to guide Fremmer into making suggestions for Chu to follow. From what he knew of the law, Fremmer gathered that Chu didn’t want him to become an agent of the police, which could create appearances of entrapment if not handled correctly.

The cops didn’t have enough on Zander to get a warrant for Fremmer to wear a wire. If Chu didn’t play it right, a defense attorney like Morton could pick their case apart, argue they had illegally obtained key pieces of evidence.

So Fremmer told Chu exactly what he wanted to hear: He’d go fishing, put whatever he caught on ice, and bring the catch back to the detectives. After the reading with Zander, Fremmer would meet Chu at the Lenwich sandwich shop a block away, on 84th and Amsterdam. Chu was there now, waiting for him. If things got testy, Fremmer said he’d call and alert him. Otherwise he’d meet him there.

Zander’s offer to let him record the session just made it a lot easier for Fremmer to report on the meeting. He could simply play the file back for Chu. And there’d be no question whether he was lying or coloring his story.

So Fremmer put his iPhone on the table, opened the Voice Memos app and hit record. Then he asked Zander to state that he was allowing him to record the session.

Zander complied, then started the session.

“So why’d you come to me today, Drew?” he asked. “What’s troubling you?”

“Well, about six months ago my fiancée had an accident and is now confined to a wheelchair.”

“What kind of accident, do you mind my asking?”

“We were on vacation and we were bodysurfing—I’d encouraged her to come out with me, I pushed her to do it—and she ended up in the curl of the wave and it drove her into the sand. She broke her neck.”

“Wow,” Bell said. “I’m sorry. That’s really tragic. And you feel responsible for the accident?”

“Yes, there’s that. And then I’m not sure I want to marry her anymore.”

Fremmer left out the part about hating himself for feeling that way. He spoke flatly, not trying to give Bell too many additional hints. Fremmer wanted to see how much of a fraud he was, but he’d probably already told him too much.

“OK,” Bell replied confidently. “I understand. Let’s flip a card then, shall we, and see what I see.”

Bell pulled out a hefty stack of postcards from the shoebox—maybe fifty—and gave them a good shuffle. He was pretty deft at it; he could have been a casino dealer.

He turned over the top postcard. Fremmer found the image arresting: A photo of a man, his eyes looking downward to his right, shot from the chest up. The paper the photo was printed on was damaged and discolored. It had water stains all over it, like it had accidentally become a coaster. Of the several moisture rings left by glasses placed on the photo, two stood out prominently: one over the left side of the guy’s face, the other high on his chest circling his heart. The subject of the photo looked like a depressed Hemingway in his early forties. But it wasn’t Hemingway.

“Ah, the Rudolph Stingel self portrait,” Bell said. “I got that one in Venice. 2013. Palazzo Grassi. During The Biennale.”

Fremmer looked more closely at the card. He realized then that it was a painting, not a photograph. He got the sense that the artist had found the photo sitting on a cluttered desk buried amongst other papers and decided it was the perfect subject for a painting. Now that he knew what it was he found it quite striking.

Bell turned his gaze on the card for a few seconds, then lifted his head and stared straight ahead in silence, letting whatever thoughts came into his mind take over. Or at least it looked that way to Fremmer.

“This speaks to your forlornness,” he said. “Your head and heart are in conflict. Have you been drinking?”

Fremmer conceded that he had.

“I see you drinking to excess,” Bell said. “It’s discoloring your thinking. You are no longer sure of who you are and what you stand for. You seek to lower yourself, even destroy yourself, so she will push you away and make the decision for you.”

Damn, the guy’s pretty good, Fremmer thought. He was starting to like him.

“What should I do?” Fremmer asked.

“For starters, stop drinking.”

He flipped card two. Another realistic painting. Equally provocative, of a young woman leaning back in an ornate chair, her dress open at the top to expose her bra. Bell told Fremmer it was by Balthus, a Polish-French modern artist, full name Balthasar Klossowski de Rola.

“You are concerned about the sexual aspects of your relationship. You no longer feel sexually inclined toward her. You don’t see her as she once was, a sexual creature.”

There was some truth to that, too. But it was more complicated than Bell’s simplistic explanation. He’d always found her attractive and always would.

It went on like that for a while. Fremmer began to realize that Bell could read anything he wanted into the cards. Their reverse meaning had meaning. A tiny portion of an artwork could represent a big, overarching theme. It was quite remarkable.

Finally, Fremmer had enough. It was time to do what he came to do, what he’d told Chu he was going do. It was time to go fishing.

Before Bell flipped card eight, Fremmer said, “How about I flip the next one?”

“Come again?” Bell said.

“I’m going to flip the next one. And tell you what I think about your current predicament.”

Fremmer reached over and did just that.

Card eight was a painting of a human skeleton riding the skeleton of a dog. Fremmer recoiled a little. Bell stared at it, slightly alarmed.

“Another Stingel,” he said. “An ominous sign. The same artist rarely comes up twice in one session.”

Stingel? The same guy that did the self-portrait? The two paintings looked nothing alike. Fremmer turned the card over and looked at the inscription. Bell was right. It was another Stingel.

“Who are you?” Bell asked.

“You know what I see in this image,” Fremmer said. “I see a woman walking her dog into an intersection on Central Park West—”

“She’s riding the dog.”

“Or maybe the dog is riding her,” Fremmer countered. Two can play this game, he thought. “Or it’s Cerberus. The dog that guards the entrance to Hell. Which is where you’re afraid you’re going.”

Bell stood up. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Candace. She died this morning. Did you know that?”

Bell didn’t acknowledge anything. But he also didn’t deny it. He just stood there, looking angry. “You need to leave,” he said. “You’re not welcome here anymore. The session is over.”

“I found something interesting online, Zander. It looks like in your spare time you’re an actor, aren’t you?”

“I used to be,” he said. “Many years ago.”

“I found your acting reel on Vimeo. The ‘Zander Bell Acting Reel’ is its title, I believe. Entertaining stuff. You do some really nice character work. Very convincing. Especially that student film where you played a homeless person.”

“I was a hobo. There’s a difference. And that was close to ten years ago. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You took money from the Lucidity Center. You were working with them to bring people in for workshops from around the country and around the world. You were good at it. Except you were skimming money. Thousands of dollars. They thought Candace took it. But it was really you. And Candace figured it out and told you she knew.”

“Get out,” Bell said. “I’ve heard enough of this shit.”

“Here’s something else. You were arrested four years ago for scamming foreigners looking for short-term rentals in the city.”

“That was a misunderstanding.”

“A sixty-thousand-dollar misunderstanding? Right. Here’s how I’m intuiting it. As part of your plea arrangement, you were put on probation for five years. But your next offense was mandatory prison time. Something tells me you really didn’t want to go to prison.”

“If you don’t get out right now, I’m calling the police. I run a legitimate business. I pay my taxes. I haven’t skimmed anything from anybody.”

“Go ahead. Call the police. I dare you.” Fremmer stood up and picked up the stack of cards from the table—the stack Zander had been flipping from—and threw them in the air. They rained down all over the room.

“Don’t touch my cards,” Bell said.

“Your precious oracle? I thought you were The Oracle, Zander. Isn’t that what you told Ronald? It’s over, Zander. The police found you on a surveillance video. You were taking pictures of him. You know they can find those even if you delete them from your phone.”

The mention of “phone” reminded Bell that Fremmer’s was still recording their conversation. The screen had gone dark but Bell knew enough to know it was still going. He went to snatch it but Fremmer got to it first.

That little battle lost, Bell told him to leave again. He pulled Fremmer’s cash from his pocket and handed the bills back to him.

“Here’s your money.”

Fremmer took the money. Why not?

“I’ll go. But not before I have a look around and make sure you aren’t still holding on to your homeless person outfit.”

Fremmer made for the door that looked like it led to the bedroom. He went into the room and headed straight for the closet. Bell was smart enough to have shed any evidence, so Fremmer didn’t expect to find anything; he’d leave that for the police to sort out. His job, like it always had been, was to rile the opposing team.

He began poking around the room.

“What are you doing?” Bell asked. “This is my bedroom. You’re not allowed in here.”

“It’s in the cards, Zander. Isabelle sold you out. She was the one who told me you worked together in the aquarium shop downtown.”

That struck a nerve.

“She told you that?”

“And a lot more. The detectives went to see her last night.”

“You’re lying.”

“You knew Candace’s whole routine,” Fremmer said. “You knew she walked her dog every morning at a certain time. Maybe you even walked the mutt with her a couple of times. You and Candace hooked up. That’s what Isabelle said.”

“Isabelle didn’t know abou—” He caught himself at the last second, but it was too late. Fremmer had given him a tiny length of rope and he just hung himself with it.

“Give me the phone,” he said.

From the look on Bell’s face Fremmer realized it was time to call mayday. With his right hand he double-clicked the call button on his headset. He looked down at the phone in his left hand and thought it was dialing. But before he could confirm it was, Bell came at him full tilt, smashing him backwards into a set of drawers that had a flat-panel TV on top of it. The middle of Fremmer’s back met the top edge of the bureau. His shoulder blades knocked into the TV, toppling it against the wall. It hurt like hell, but he held onto the phone.

Fremmer came right back at Bell and body checked him, sending him sprawling, regrettably, onto the bed, a much more comfortable landing spot than Fremmer had encountered. Soon it was a full on cage match with table lamps and glass shattering, books falling off their shelves, and the shelves themselves falling. Most of the damage was Bell’s doing. Fremmer, still guarding the phone, was mainly trying to evade him and delay.

“You came into my apartment and now I’m defending myself from your vicious attack,” Bell said to Fremmer, circling him in a wrestler’s hunched stance.

“I’m not taping the conversation anymore,” Fremmer replied, struggling to get away from him.

“I’m recording it,” Bell said. “I record every session.”

He suddenly got Fremmer in a chokehold, dragging him toward the front of the living room. He was stronger than Fremmer thought. The dude had moves. He’d trained. He probably wrestled in high school.

Fremmer grabbed onto the table they’d used for the session. The shoebox fell, the postcards scattering onto the carpet. Fremmer thought Bell was trying to get him to the front door. But the window was what he was after.

“Put the knife down,” Zander shouted.

Fremmer didn’t have a knife. He wished he did. Come on, Chu, he thought. Was he hearing this? What was taking him so long? Could he not get in the building?

Fremmer suddenly realized he was in a very bad spot. He still had a hold on the table leg but his head was halfway out the window. He’d fit through the window, but the table wouldn’t. It was the only thing keeping him inside the apartment.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Zander said.

Fremmer hit him with the phone, trying to gouge his eyes with the corners. Finally, Bell wrestled it out of his hand and chucked it out the window. Fremmer heard it land in the street below. He screamed for help.

Just as he was losing his grip on the table leg he heard someone or something slam up against the door. But breaking down a front door in Manhattan was easier said than done. Finally, on the third try, the lock broke. One more slam and Chu was in the apartment, his gun drawn.

Bell took a step toward the door, allowing Fremmer to get his head—and the rest of his body—safely away from the window.

“On your knees,” Chu said, gasping for breath.

“I didn’t do anything,” Bell said. “We were having a session and this man attacked me. I was just trying to defend myself.”

“You OK?” Chu said to Fremmer.

“Not really,” Fremmer said. “But I’m a lot better than my iPhone lying down in the street. I hope it can be resurrected. I recorded everything.”

“What’s on it?” Chu asked.

“Enough,” Fremmer said.

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to put you on the cover of the Post and the Daily News, Detective,” Fremmer said.