Chapter 31: Repercussions - Lucidity

DETECTIVE THOMAS CHU DID FREMMER THE COURTESY OF CALLING him before visiting him this time, but it turned out to be not much of a warning.

“Instead of trying to track you down at one of the seven Starbucks in the area, I thought I’d call first and arrange a meeting,” Chu explained. “We need to talk, Max. I think you know why.”

“I agree, Detective,” Fremmer said. “I was actually going to call you today. Where do you want to meet? Don’t say the station house. That didn’t end so well for me last time.”

“How ’bout your apartment?” Chu said. “Right now. I’m out in front.”

Fremmer was on the third floor of a six-story brownstone, standing in his large eat-in kitchen, the nicest part of the apartment. He opened the window, stuck his head out, and looked down to the sidewalk below. Chu wasn’t kidding.

“So you are,” Fremmer said, talking into the phone as he looked down. “You bring me a coffee?”

“I thought you’d make me some,” Chu said.

“Just give me a few minutes to get properly dressed.”

“And call your lawyer buddy Morton?”

“That, too,” Fremmer said.

He debated going down to meet Chu, but after having a quick conversation with Morton, who he told to stay close to his phone, Fremmer decided to let him come up. He looked at his watch. Nine-fifteen. He’d been all set to meet Madden. Now he was sorry he delayed his departure to prepare his gym bag. While he wasn’t currently teaching any classes, he still had a free membership at the gym and was allowed to work out after the morning rush was over. He thought it’d be a good idea to show his face, try to make amends with the head fitness manager, who was based at the 76th Street Equinox.

But now here was Chu, once again showing up at an inopportune moment.

“Hey, bro,” the detective said when Fremmer let him into the apartment. “Good to see you again.”

He shook Fremmer’s hand, then looked around, tilted his head up, and keenly and audibly sniffed the air.

“You cleaned up nice,” he said. “Place smells a lot better than it did the other night. I heard they found you lying in your own vomit. I read the police report.”

“Yeah. Not one of my finer moments,” Fremmer replied. “I’m sorry you weren’t here to witness it.”

“I was worried about you.”

“I’m sure you were. Coffee?”

“No, thanks, I already had some.”

Fremmer decided to make a cup for himself. If Chu had wanted one, he would have made a full pot, but since it was just him, he fired up the Keurig one-cup machine instead.

Chu asked him if he could record their conversation.

“No,” Fremmer said. “Let’s keep this off the record. I’m doing that for your benefit, because you’re going to end up telling me some things you don’t want to.”

Chu laughed. “Why would I do that?”

“Because I’m not going to tell you anything unless you do. It’s called quid pro quo.”

“I’m not sure you’re in any position to make deals, bro.”

“You don’t know my position, so I don’t think you’re in any position to judge what deals I can make.”

“Last I checked you’d OD’d on something and were texting your ex-fiancée and lawyer about killing yourself. And last night you got into a fight in the street with a one-armed man in his sixties. You ended up breaking his nose.”

“You ever been hit with a prosthetic hand? I got news for you. It hurts.”

“What were you doing there in the first place?” Chu asked. “He says you were upset you had to pay back your client’s advance. He says you wrote them a check a few days ago but you now regretted it and said you felt conned. There was a woman involved.”

“Yeah, the same one who slipped me some GHB and then texted my lawyer and my ex-fiancée telling them I wanted to pack it in. Did he mention that?”

“Any reason you didn’t tell me that sooner? I told you to call me anytime.”

“I was busy trying to recover from a hefty dose of GHB and everybody thinking I tried to kill myself.

Fremmer checked the Keurig to see if the water had heated up. He retrieved a Green Mountain K-cup from his coffee drawer, stuck it in the machine, and hit the button for a medium-sized brew.

“Sorry, Max, but I’m having a hard time buying that.”

“If I were you, I would, too,” Fremmer said. “But hear me out for a minute.”

He then began telling Chu about his dealings with Braden and Rochelle—aka Isabelle. He told him about how she’d virtually kidnapped him in an Uber at the Starbucks on Broadway and 75th Street and brought him to the Lucidity Center, which Braden, in case he wasn’t aware, ran out of his home.

He then described his experience of having a drink with her at ‘Cesca and what transpired afterwards, almost nothing of which he remembered. When he woke up in the hospital, he’d theorized she wanted to get into his apartment so she could lift something from his computer. But it turned out she just wanted him to write a check. And he hadn’t realized he’d written one until several days later, when the check had already cleared. He showed Chu a digital copy of the cashed check he’d obtained two days ago.

“It’s my handwriting, it’s my signature, but I can tell you I would never have made out a check to those scumbags had I not been drugged. That’ll teach me never to keep much money in my checking account. Before this, low interest rates gave me no incentive to put money in a savings account.”

“Tell me about it,” Chu said.

Fremmer thought he detected a slight smirk. “You’re not believing any of this, are you?”

“I’m listening,” Chu said. “What I have learned over the years is that when someone tells you a story that’s so outlandish that you don’t think it could be made up, it may not be.”

“Look,” Fremmer said, “I’m trying to get ‘Cesca, the restaurant I was at when she drugged me, to give me security footage from that night. They’re not exactly eager to do that. I was going to pay someone off but I’m a little short on cash right now. But I bet you could get it without a problem.”

“Oh, we got it already,” Chu said.

“You did?”

“Yeah. It shows you guys having drinks and then sucking face pretty hard. She’s a hot little number. I met her last night. She said you guys boned.”

That threw Fremmer.

“She told you that?”

“Yeah, she said it was part of the deal. Said you agreed to pay back the advance on the condition she have sex with you. She had some video. On her phone.”

“Was I awake in the video?”

“Frankly, I wasn’t looking at you too much, bro.”

“What’d she say her name was?”

“Isabelle, Rochelle, I’m not sure,” Chu said. “I gotta check my notes.”

“That’d be a good idea. She tell you what she did for Braden?”

“Helps manage the business,” he said. “Been working for him for about four years.”

Fremmer looked at his watch. Christ, he’d forgotten about Madden. It was nine-forty.

“Pause it there for a minute,” Fremmer said. “I’ll be right back. Just have to go to the john.”

He quickly ducked into the bathroom down the hall, turned on the water, and called Madden.

“Where were we?” he asked Chu after he returned to the kitchen.

“We were talking about what your girlfriend did for Braden.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. If she were my girlfriend I wouldn’t have to pay her $50,000 to have sex with her, would I?”

“So you admit to that?”

“I can’t admit to something I don’t remember, can I? She give you any theories as to why I might have wanted to kill myself?”

“You got depressed, bro.”

“Over what?”

“Paying a woman $50,000 to have sex with you.”

“I agree. That would depress me. If I knew I’d done it.”

“No joke,” Chu said, “I had a guy who paid a woman that kind of money to have sex with him. If I told you who he was, you’d know the name. He wasn’t depressed about it, though. He’s a billionaire.”

“Thanks, Detective. That makes me feel better. If I wasn’t missing a few zeroes off my self worth I’d be a happy clam and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Look, bro. I hear you. I’m listening. But you’re not doing yourself any good going around punching people in the face. You’re lucky the witness said Braden pushed you down first. And you’re lucky it didn’t happen in his apartment.”

“You seem to be aware he’s running a business out of his home. It’s practically a hotel. He tell you about that?”

“The downstairs is permitted for a business. When he bought the building a long time ago it had a business down on the ground floor. It’s grandfathered in. And frankly, we got bigger fish to fry than worrying about what he’s running through there. It’s not like he’s selling drugs—”

“Well, in a way he is,” Fremmer countered. “He peddles those supplements. And the whole promise of learning how to lucid dream is kind of drug, right? And then he’s got this electrostatic doohickey headband coming out. That’s apparently why he needed the quick cash infusion. He’s gotta be mortgaged to the hilt.”

“What I’m saying is he’s not doing anything illegal. The lucid dreaming stuff is real, bro. I’ve had them. They’re awesome. If I could take a pill and have one every night, I’d sign up for that program right now. Wouldn’t you?”

Great, Fremmer thought. Braden had another a disciple. “Hey, maybe after his German visitors leave you can cash in your discount coupon for the Center’s four-day workshop.”

Chu didn’t appear too happy with that comment.

“Look, I’m not going to arrest you,” he said. “But this is a warning. You can’t go on behaving like this and expect no repercussions. You have a kid. You end up messing up your life, they’ll take him away from you. I had a buddy it happened to. He lost custody of his kid. It was sad.”

Chu made a good point, which Fremmer couldn’t fully appreciate at that moment. “You understand these people conned me,” he said.

“I don’t know what to believe, bro. Maybe you conned them. I don’t know. I gotta keep an open mind. We’re looking at everything. You may not think we are. But we’ve got a lot of people working on this case.”

“How much video have you looked at?” Fremmer asked.

“A lot. We went back. Days. It takes hours. We got footage from at least six cameras. It’s a lot of work.”

“What are you looking for?”

“These guys—a lot of these homeless guys, they’ve got their little territories. They move around in a limited area. They sleep in the same spots. In his case, he slept over there on CPW, sometimes on the bench, sometimes just inside the park on the other side of the wall. And then he spends time on Columbus. And a little on Amsterdam. So we’re looking at the area, the radius he moves around in. We’re looking for him, seeing who he interacted with. Making sure there’s no red flags. You’ll see soon enough. It’s tedious work.”

“You look for Braden?”

“Sure. We looked for you, too.”

Fremmer took his phone out his pocket and started swiping through the images in his photo library. “How ’bout this guy?” he asked, turning the phone over to Chu.

“Who’s he?”

“He’s an associate or former associate of Isabelle’s. They used to clean fish tanks together and occasionally rob people. Isabelle Hruska is her full name. His name is Zander Bell. Nowadays he specializes in a different kind of rip-off—psychic readings from his apartment. I have an appointment to get a reading from him tomorrow afternoon. He look familiar to you at all?”

Chu looked at the phone and shook his head.

“Never heard of him.”

“Well, you need to look for him in the video. And you need to ask Isabelle about him. My investigator put the screws into her a little bit last night and she got uncomfortable, which is saying a lot for a woman who’s as put together as she is. Trust me. You need to run some checks on both of them.”

He stopped talking and wrote their names on a piece of paper for Chu, just as the owner of the aquarium shop had done for him. Then he told Chu to hold on, he had something else for him.

Fremmer left the kitchen and went to the little alcove he used as his home office. He retrieved one of the USB thumb drives with Candace’s hard drive stored on it. He’d made multiple copies and given a thumb drive to Morton to pass on to his investigator.

“You guys never took her computer,” Fremmer said, handing him the thumb drive. “You got her phone but you never took her laptop. This is a copy of what was on her hard drive.”

“Her whole computer fit on that?” Chu said, taking it from him. “Yeah, it’s a 128GB drive. Normally I’d bill you the forty dollars it cost me. But this one’s on me.”

Chu sighed. It was another thing to do. More paperwork.

“I’ll have my guy take a look,” he said.

“Look, I know the situation,” Fremmer responded. “You think you’ve got an open and shut case. But it’s more complicated than you think. I have some information I can’t disclose right now that would change the way you think about everything if I told you what it was. You gave me a warning. Well, now I’m giving you a warning.”

Chu looked him in the eyes. Fremmer looked right back. They held each other’s gaze for a good five seconds.

“You’re bluffing, bro,” Chu declared after the stare down.

“Not about this.”

“Then give me the information. Make me believe you.”

“I can’t,” Fremmer said. “Not yet.”

“Well, when you’re ready, we’ll talk. You know how to reach me.”

“And you know where to find me.”