While Ezra Prentice battled an individual war within the skies of Korea, all the while it stormed another, more restrained war within the grimy streets of the Big Apple. And Ezra was not on the offensive.
Frank Donovan, the private eye whose services were retained by the valet's daughter, was a man tempered in an entirely different crucible. A former NYPD detective, he had been kicked off the force for being stubborn, for asking too many questions regarding a case involving an influential Tammany Hall politician. A man with the persistence of a bulldog and with an abiding hatred of the kind of power that felt it was beyond the law, he had moved on after being forced out of the NYPD.
The campaign of gentle harry by Sullivan had not intimidated him; it had emboldened him. The surprise audit of taxes, the anonymous complaint at the state licensing board, the witnesses with curious amnesia—to Donovan, all of it were not obstacles. They were flashpoints, giant blinking lights that he was closing in on some fact that someone very powerful had wanted buried forever.
He turned his attention to the murder of Thomas Riley, the valet. He knew that it was impossible to find a solitary, individual grain of sand on a huge beach. The genuine story, he could tell, was not the victim. It was the person the victim had served. He set out to dig into the life of Ezra Prentice.
He rooted through the archives of the New York Times for weeks, sifting through each of the articles he could find. He read of an unpretentious but good corporate lawyer who had mysteriously evolved into a financial behemoth of dark foresight some years ago. A man who had bet against the world and won. A man whose every movement seemed blessed with an uncanny prescience.
By using his ex-policeman contacts, men for whose judgment he still had respect and whose indignation he shared at having been ejected by the very establishment, Donovan set about pulling on the strings of the Rockefeller family itself. He listened for the whispers, the high-society gossip of the fratricidal war, of the mutual hatred between the self-righteous John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his talented, hard-hearted brother-in-law.
He had finally found his first real chance in the person of an embittered, estranged cousin on a lesser branch of the Rockefeller family. The cousin was someone who had felt pushed aside by the rising star of Ezra. The cousin was looking for any break that he could have. Donovan had promised to meet him for a whiskey in a dark Midtown bar.
"Prentice?" the cousin sneered, stirring the amber liquid in his glass. "The man's a changeling. One day he's some tranquil lawyer proud enough to manage Alta's book of muny bond holdings. The next, he's some goddamn Nostradamus foresensing every turn of the market, buying companies, conversing with my uncle John D. Sr. as if he's on the same wavelength. My father says he became... unhinged. Taken over, borderline."
The cousin, keen on causing trouble, then murmured a revealing piece of news. "The peculiarity is, he shares the same surname as that poor girl whose father used to be his valet. Sarah Prentice. A terrible coincidence, I suppose."
Donovan's instincts, honed by twenty years of detective work, kicked in. It was not coincidence.
He set out in search of Sarah Prentice again. But now, he did not encounter her as the murder detective of her father, but as some sort of chronicler. He did not question her about the death; he questioned her about the life. He asked her questions about the man her father had worked for twenty years.
"Describe the old Mr. Prentice," he said quietly, at coffee in a small diner. "Before the change."
Sarah, a reserved woman with her father's mournful eyes, talked. She talked of a gracious, formal, and rather distant man. A man who was fastidious, predictable, and eminently conventional. A man who valued books more than commerce, who felt more comfortable in a library than in a boardroom. The man she described lived in a far-off world away from the hard-headed corporate giant that stared out of the volumes of Fortune magazine.
Donovan listened, and in the depths of his mind, an outlandish, impossible explanation was taking shape. An explanation so ridiculous he barely dared ponder it. What if the motive for murder was not something the valet did? What if it was something he knew? What if Thomas Riley, who had known the "old" Ezra so intimately, was assassinated because he alone might unmistakably recognize that the man now going under the name of Ezra Prentice was an imposter?
Sullivan's surveillance team, of course, all of it was reported back to Ezra. The reports were increasingly frantic day by day. Donovan was no longer just a pesky detective; he was a bloodhound on the scent. He was tying together dots that were getting dangerously, unimaginably close to the true story.
Ezra, however, remained bound by the decision he had made in his study. He had established limits for himself, limits he would never cross again. The option of having Donovan "disappear" was not an option. He had to fight on his opponent's turf, by harassment and misdirection. But, it was not having any impact again. Donovan was too stubborn.
The private eye, as the walls of Ezra's covert campaign of terror closed in, decided on a drastic, dangerous gamble. He would confront the man head on.
He scoped out an elite restaurant in Manhattan where he knew Ezra was having dinner with a group of senators. He waited outside in the cold for hours, across the way. When finally Ezra emerged, accompanied by Sullivan's vigilant bodyguards, Donovan made his move.
He stepped out of the darkness, trench coat buttoned up to the blowing wind, and stood in the path of Ezra's access to his waiting limo.
"Mr. Prentice," stated Donovan, whose voice was steady and controlled, cutting through the sounds of the city. "Frank Donovan. A private eye."
Sullivan's men stiffened at once, their hands going into their jackets. They began closing in on Donovan with the intention of wiping out the threat.
"Stand down," Ezra instructed, his voice hard. The bodyguards did not budge, but remained vigilant.
Ezra looked at the detective. He saw a man not intimidated by his wealth or by his power. He saw a man driven by cheap coffee, stubbornness, and an uncomplicated, unwavering sense of right and wrong.
"I've been looking into the murder of a man named Thomas Riley," said Donovan, gaze locked on Ezra's. He was going out of his way to address the valet by name, and it made it personal. "He worked for you for an awfully long time. Spoke very highly of you. But some people that I've talked with, people who knew him... they say that, in the last couple of months of his life, he was confused. Thought you had changed. Said you weren't the same person."
Donovan drew nearer, close enough that only Ezra would be able to hear the next of what he said. "Funny thing, change. Sometimes it's for the better. Sometimes... sometimes it's a reason to murder old men who know too much."
He rummaged through his pocket and pulled out a worn business card. He jammed it into the grasp of one of Ezra's bodyguards.
"Next time, I'll know what it was," he said, his voice a gentle promise.
He nodded once, then turned and disappeared, going back into the shadows of the city. He left Ezra standing alone on the sidewalk under the bright lights of the restaurant marquee, the city sounds now raging in his mind. The specter of his past, the ghost he had tried to bury, had a face. It had a name. And it had an unyielding hunter on its tail.