Chapter 55: What He Remembered
The name landed and then kept landing, the way certain names do when they carry enough history.
Robert Durst.
Andrew stood on the sidewalk outside Corleone's building and let himself think through what he knew, sorting it in the order it had happened rather than the order he'd remembered it.
The Durst family was Manhattan real estate royalty — not the flashy kind, the structural kind. Fifteen buildings in midtown alone. The redevelopment of Times Square in the early nineties had Durst money in its foundation.
Seymour Durst had built the national debt clock on 42nd Street. The family wasn't wealthy the way people who'd recently made money were wealthy. They were wealthy the way certain buildings were load-bearing: quietly, fundamentally, with consequences if you tested it.
Robert was the eldest son. He should have inherited everything. Instead he'd been standing in the driveway at age seven when his mother fell from the roof of their home in Scarsdale, and something in him had never quite recovered from that. Whether she jumped, fell, or was helped — nobody had ever established. Robert had spent the next several decades operating on the assumption that his father had arranged it and made him watch.
The family had eventually passed the business to his younger brother Douglas instead. Robert had received a legal settlement — two million a year from the family trust, which was enough to live extremely well while being told you were not wanted — and had spent the intervening years becoming progressively more untethered.
He'd married Kathie, a medical student from South Salem. They'd been tabloid material for a while — the eccentric Durst heir and his respectable wife, the fights, the disappearances, the rumors. Then in January 1982, Kathie had vanished. Robert said she'd taken a train back to the city. Nobody had ever found her.
He'd been the primary suspect. The investigation had gone nowhere.
Then Susan Berman — his closest friend since college, daughter of a Las Vegas mob boss, crime writer, the person most likely to know what he'd done and who'd helped him cover it — had been found shot execution-style in her Benedict Canyon home in December 2000. A letter had been sent to the Beverly Hills police, no return address, tipping them to a "cadaver" at her address. The handwriting matched Robert's. No charges.
The following year Robert had surfaced in Galveston, Texas, renting a room and presenting himself as a mute woman named Dorothy Ciner.
His neighbor Morris Black had been found dismembered in Galveston Bay, his head never recovered. The body parts had washed up in bags. The crime scene was Robert's rented room. Robert had fled, been arrested in Pennsylvania shoplifting a hoagie and a Band-Aid from a Wegmans despite having eight hundred dollars cash in his pocket, and had eventually stood trial for Morris Black's death.
He'd testified that Morris had broken into his room, that a struggle had followed, that the gun had discharged accidentally, and that he'd dismembered the body in a panic. The jury had acquitted him.
It wasn't until HBO came calling in 2010, proposing a documentary series about his life, that the whole architecture had finally cracked. Robert had agreed to participate — nobody had ever established exactly why, whether it was vanity or senility or some need to have the story told correctly. During a break in filming he'd gone to the bathroom without removing his microphone and had been recorded muttering to himself: What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.
He'd been arrested in a New Orleans hotel room the night before the finale aired. He'd died in prison in 2022, ninety-six years old, oxygen tank, wheelchair, still technically appealing his conviction.
Andrew knew all of this the way you knew things you'd read about compulsively for an afternoon once and never forgotten. Robert Durst had been one of those true crime figures that accumulated detail the more you looked — not because the crimes were elaborate, but because the escapes were, and because the portrait of a man who had lived inside wealth and impunity long enough to believe they were the same thing was genuinely instructive about something.
The year was 1994. Kathie had been gone for twelve years, her case technically open and technically cold. Susan Berman was still alive, writing, living in Los Angeles. Morris Black was still alive somewhere, going about his life, not yet aware he would one day be in bags in a Texas bay.
Robert Durst was, at this moment, a man that most people who recognized his name thought of as an unfortunate heir whose wife had mysteriously disappeared. Eccentric. Possibly troubled. Not a proven anything.
Andrew knew better. Andrew knew the whole shape of it.
He also knew that Robert had looked at him twice in Central Perk this morning, from a seat chosen for maximum sightlines, and had held the look a beat too long both times.
He didn't want to be on Robert Durst's list of things worth looking at.
He took the 1 train back uptown, running through priorities.
First stop was the apartment. Christie was in the kitchen doing homework with the television on, the specific teenage configuration of apparent distraction that Andrew had learned actually indicated she was absorbing both simultaneously.
"Hey," she said, without looking up.
"Hey." He sat down at the counter. "I need you to not open the door for anyone you don't know for a while."
She looked up then. "Why?"
"Someone I bumped into." He kept it level. "Probably nothing. But I'd rather tell you now than explain later."
Christie had a good instinct for when he was actually serious versus performatively cautious. She studied him for a moment and apparently decided this was the former.
"Okay," she said. She went back to her homework.
He checked the skill panel.
[Observation (Proficient): 51/100]
[Boxing (Proficient): 63/100]
[Cooking (Proficient): 78/100]
The food truck license was processing. He'd passed the health department exam on the first attempt — the cooking knowledge had made the food safety portions almost insultingly straightforward — and the paperwork was moving through City Hall at the pace paperwork moved through City Hall. A few more weeks.
He went back to Central Perk at two in the afternoon to verify. Robert was gone. Lily was behind the counter, getting an order wrong for a man in a Fordham sweatshirt who seemed inclined to let her. The friends were filtering in for the afternoon — Joey arriving with the unhurried confidence of a man whose afternoon had no real obligations, Phoebe behind him with a canvas bag that was making a sound that suggested it contained something alive.
Everything was normal.
He stayed an hour. Nothing happened.
He made one more stop before dinner — the gym, where Jade was finishing a yoga session in the third-floor studio. He waited outside until the class cleared, then walked her out and suggested dinner, which she accepted without requiring a reason.
Over pasta on Columbus Avenue he told her a version of it. Not the full version — not I have detailed foreknowledge of this man's future crimes across three decades — but enough. Robert Durst. Old money. His wife had disappeared in 1982. He'd been seen near Andrew and near Susan, twice now. Andrew had a feeling.
Jade listened the way she listened to most things, which was completely and without interrupting. When he finished she was quiet for a moment.
"You think he's dangerous," she said.
"I think he's someone who's been dangerous before and gotten away with it," Andrew said. "Which is worse."
She nodded slowly. "Okay. I'll be careful."
"Don't open the door to—"
"Strangers, I know." She stole a piece of his bread. "You've mentioned that."
She didn't think he was overreacting, exactly. She just thought he tended to see angles that weren't there. He'd let her think that, for now.
The next week was quiet. And the week after that.
No Robert at Central Perk. No figure at the edge of his vision on his block. Susan, when he asked with what he hoped was appropriate casualness, said she hadn't been contacted. Monica hadn't mentioned anything. The room Corleone occupied in Andrew's mental landscape of threats had, apparently, been addressed.
His friends teased him about it gently. Joey suggested he'd been watching too many procedurals. Chandler made a remark about the five stages of paranoia that was genuinely pretty good. He took it graciously.
He stayed alert anyway. Alert had no downside.
December 22nd.
Andrew stood at the City Hall window and received his food truck license and his certified food handler's permit and felt something clarify that had been building since he'd arrived in this life. He had a vehicle.
He had the legal right to operate it. He had a cooking skill that the panel currently assessed at 78 out of 100, Proficient, and climbing. He had recipes that didn't exist yet in this decade, flavor combinations that wouldn't be mainstream for another fifteen years, and he had Christie's proven palate as a testing apparatus.
He called Jade from the steps of City Hall.
"It came through," he said.
"I know," she said. "You've been checking the mail every day for three weeks."
"I'm not going to dignify that."
"Dinner tonight to celebrate?"
"Yes."
He took her to Bouley, which was the right call for the occasion. David Bouley was doing things with French technique and Hudson Valley ingredients that were, genuinely, extraordinary for 1994, and Andrew ate with the appreciation of someone who could identify exactly what was happening at a technical level and found it instructive rather than intimidating.
[Cooking (Proficient): 81/100]
Eating well counted, apparently. He'd wondered about that.
He walked Jade home, watched her window, waited for the wave, turned toward his own block.
He was at his apartment door, key already in the lock, when a voice came from behind him. Unhurried. Warm. The voice of someone who operated on the assumption that interruptions would be tolerated.
"Mr. Sanchez."
Andrew finished unlocking the door before he turned around. That part was deliberate.
Robert Durst was standing in the hallway, hands in his coat pockets, his dark eyes doing the thing they did — the warmth on the surface, the measuring underneath. He was dressed as he'd been at the restaurant. Completely ordinary. Completely controlled.
He smiled.
"I think we should talk," he said.
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