A Killing Gift (5 page)

Stony-eyed, she stared right back. She remembered that Bill happened to be a judo expert himself. Then her eyes went furry on her, and she took a little nap.

B
irdie Bassett got in from her meeting with her husband's estate lawyers before noon and went straight to the phone in the library.

"You have ten new messages," the flat-toned female on voice mail reported.

Birdie sighed. It had been three weeks since Max's sudden death, and the phone was still ringing off the hook. Ten calls already, and she'd been gone only a few hours. She was still in shock, dizzy from hunger, but not yet up to eating. People told her she was depressed, that there was a book she could read about the stages of grieving. But she didn't think there was anything in the book about being a really prominent widow whose husband had taken care of everything.

She took a few deep breaths to calm herself after the unpleasantness in Silas Burns's office. Max's lawyer of thirty years had informed her this morning that Max's two kids were going to contest the will. They were going to hold her up, fight her for a bigger piece of the pie. And that did depress her.

"You have three options, Birdie." He put up three arthritic fingers to emphasize them. "You can fight, you can make a deal, or you can try to wait them out. You're young, and you have your allowance." He lifted his shoulders. "They could hold you up for a very long time, but so could you. Why don't you take a few days to think about what you want to do and let me know."

She opened her mouth to speak, but he stopped her.

"There's no hurry, dear. Take your time."

Birdie had left the office and headed uptown. Back in Max's favorite post in the paneled library of his fifteen-room Park Avenue apartment, she picked up the last photo taken of him, taken only a few months ago in Palm Beach. He'd looked strong, healthy, and a good fifteen years younger than eighty-one. He was still a handsome man with a full head of hair. "Max, what do you want me to do?" she whispered. "Fight or flight?"

Max's desk was a huge
bureau plat
of the Louis XIV period with lots of ormolu. The desk was genuine. The large leather chair behind it was of a more recent vintage. The library table and club chairs were English. The rugs were two complementary Persian garden carpets with blue borders. The curtains that framed the eight-foot French windows were made of shimmering red-and-gold silk damask and edged with two varieties of silk tassels and braid. Everything was too ornate and grandiose for her taste, but had suited Max perfectly.

Birdie still couldn't believe he was gone. She'd expected him to remain vigorous for another ten years, then fade slowly for another five. She'd fully expected them to scale down during his lifetime. Simplify. She had no interest in the three houses he'd left her or the antiques his children thought belonged to them. Max didn't give her a sign, so she began listening to her messages.

"Mrs. Bassett, this is Carla in President Warmsley's office at York U. President Warmsley asked me to call you to confirm for Monday night. Could you give me a call at nine-nine-five-six-four-eight-two. Thank you."

Birdie punched three for delete, then listened to her next message.

"Birdie, this is Steven Speel at MOMA. I'm calling to set up a lunch with you and Marilyn. She's available Thursday of next week. Would you give me a call when you have a moment? Seven-five-one-four-four-eight-nine."

Steven Speel reeled off the numbers at twice the speed of the rest of the message, and Birdie got only the first three. She had to listen to the message again and again before she got them all. She hated it when people did that.

The next two were personal requests that she take tables at forthcoming benefits to which Max had supposedly pledged his support. But how would she know if he really had? Twenty thousand for the Emerald Dinner at the Museum of Natural History sounded possible. They'd gone before. But fifteen thousand for BAM? Birdie could not recall ever seeing the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Max's foundation's donor list.

Another call was from the Psychoanalytic Institute. What the hell was that? She listened to it with Max's heavy pen suspended over his ornate message pad. The pleasant voice of a Dr. Jason Frank invited her to lunch so that he and the foundation chairman could personally thank her for Max's generous bequest last year and encourage her to consider taking his place on the board. What? Birdie hadn't even known that Max had been on such a board. She shook her head at the latest revelation.

Max had been retired, but he'd been busy every day, running his own sizable foundation with virtually no staff and no board members to keep track of his activities. The foundation had no brochure, no guidelines for grant proposals, no procedure for donors, and far fewer documents than there should have been.

While he'd sent out letters with his foundation checks, the terms for the use of his sizable grants were often vaguely stated. Worst of all, Max had left her the reins of his foundation but no mission statement, no written pledges, no clues to his intentions. He hadn't bothered to groom her for this. All Birdie had ever done for the foundation was attend the functions of organizations he supported. She'd never been asked to participate on the board of any of them. Even on the occasions when Max had been honored, or had served as honorary chairman, all she did was lend her name. And she'd always understood that she had taken the place of a first wife with whom she could never compete. Her predecessor's name had been Cornelia, pronounced
Cornelllya,
and Cornelllya had never gone anywhere without a hat and gloves even in the summer. Forty years her senior, after all. The original foundation had borne her name. The Max and Cornelllya Bassett Foundation. Now Max's name stood up there alone.

As sole trustee, Birdie could rename it the Birdie Bassett Foundation, and the thought of that made her smile for the first time all day. She'd been snubbed and overlooked so many times for so many years, it was bittersweet to think of the power she had now. But she didn't know where to start.

Birdie Bassett was thirty-seven years old. She'd married Max when she was only twenty-six and he was seventy, a crazy thing, but not unheard of. For the eleven years they were together people would talk over and around her at dinner parties, as if she were still the temp who'd filled in at his home office after his previous secretary went on vacation with a handful of his dead wife's jewelry and never came back. Birdie's stepchildren, both older than she, had loathed her from the start and never tried to hide it. Still, she would never have dreamed of begrudging them their wretched houses and wretched furniture.

The Bassetts lived on Park Avenue, in Palm Beach, and Dark Harbor, off the coast of Maine. Max's bequeathing her the Bassett family enclave in Dark Harbor was a truly appalling move. In Florida all types mingled with relative ease. Even among the social set whose roots in Palm Beach predated air-conditioning, May-December relationships between the socially unequal were common. Lovely blond women of any origin, the young second wives of ancient gentlemen, were part of the scenery, a social set of their own. But Dark Harbor was another story. The houses were handed down from generation to generation, and new people just weren't welcome. Next message.

"Hi, Birdie, it's Al Frayme. Just calling to reschedule our lunch. By the way, the funeral was beautiful, and I thought you were very dignified in a difficult situation. Do you have time for lunch this week? I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Sweets. Paris. Tahiti. You name it."

Birdie smiled again. Sweets was downtown in the Fulton Fish Market, close to the Wall Street lawyer's office where she'd been earlier. The phone rang, distracting her from the rest of her messages.

"Hello, this is Birdie."

"You're next," a soft voice said.

"What? Hello? Hello?" A dial tone buzzed on the other end.

Jesus.
Birdie felt so ill. She couldn't eat a thing. Nothing appealed and nothing stayed down. She was almost paranoid enough to believe she was being poisoned. Max's kids hated her; that much was clear. And people with money were always at risk. She glanced around the elegant room, wondering which things could hurt her. She knew that people could be poisoned by their clothes, by their toothpaste, by the air they breathed. Again she had that nagging worry. Max had not been sick. He'd died without warning. Everybody, including his doctors, had thought he was just old. But she wondered. The voice on the phone unnerved her. She wasn't sure anymore. She just wasn't sure.

A
s far as catastrophes for April went, second only to not witnessing what went down between Bernardino and his killer and not being able to save him was not being able to ask any questions about it. She'd recovered quickly enough from her exhaustion to tackle Bill Bernardino with a pad and pen. He wasn't answering her questions any better than she'd answered his.

Bill, what had your father been working on these last weeks?
she wrote and passed over for him to read. As with the earlier questions she'd posed to him, this one sat heavily on the page, giving Bill ample opportunity to twist his mouth into any number of disgusted shapes while he pretended to decipher her perfectly legible handwriting.

There was no nuance to the written word, no tone of voice to temper her line of questioning. The questions looked like something out of a survey, not a personal exchange between two people who'd lost a loved one. With April's side written down, the interview was between Bill and the page, not between her and him. So he was having an easy time avoiding her.

His eyes looked down, away from her, when he tossed back, "How would I know what he was working on?"

He might have said something. You two talked,
didn't you?
There was a time lag while she wrote this. There was another time lag while he read the reply.

Worse than using sign language, this was like instant messaging with both people in the room. And one of them was determined not to help. April knew that Bill's mind was still on the blame track, but she wasn't going to stop trying to engage him in a dialogue.

Her expression was neutral as she strung her questions out like beads on a necklace she would never get to wear. Several times she exchanged glances with Mike. April could read in his face that, like her, he was annoyed and hiding it well. Whether or not Bill had meant his threat of a scandal, it was on the table, putting the cops and prosecutor on different teams. It was clear that neither Mike nor Bill was going to share information, so she had to do the talking, because she was the one who'd been close to Bernardino. Too bad. Now the investigation might have to go needlessly deep into the grieving family's private affairs. Unless they found the killer soon, Bill was going to get less happy as the days went on. He certainly wasn't making it easy on himself now by dismissing her queries.

"Yeah, we talked, but not about business. Look, I have to go." He tapped his watch and got to his feet, looking at them angrily as if one or both of them might try to keep him there. But neither Mike nor April made a move to delay him. He had come to them, after all. He could go when he pleased.

"Look, we're going to have to go through his things at the house," Mike said as he opened the door.

"Fine. The place is a fucking mess, though. He was getting ready to move." Bill paused long enough to shake his head. Then he made a point of checking his watch again. "Kathy will be here in a few hours."

"I'm really sorry," Mike murmured.

Anger flashed in Bill's face. "Yeah, well, something's wrong here. To get through thirty-eight years on the job and die like this." He shook his head. "It shouldn't happen."

April agreed with him. It shouldn't have happened. She gripped the pen in her hand, wanting to add something, but Bill glared at her, triggering a guilt she didn't want to feel. It wasn't her fault that his father left the party alone. It wasn't her fault that she'd followed him too late. It wasn't her fault that he was dead, and she was still alive.

She didn't want to feel it, but the guilt was there. Bernardino had been her boss, her friend. A part of her couldn't help believing that the timing of the events tonight and her position in them had some special meaning. And without her being aware of it, somehow the fault really was hers. Chinese guilt made for an extensive menu, and numbers one through a hundred were weighing her down at the moment.

Her cell phone rang almost immediately after Bill left, and she forgot that she couldn't speak. She punched talk, but only the sound of air came out of her mouth when she tried to say hello.

"What the hell happened to you?" It was her boss at Midtown North, Lieutenant Iriarte.

"Hahhhh," she answered.

"What? Where are you?"

"Pshhhh."

"For Christ's sake, speak up; I can't hear you." Iriarte's usual irritation sounded in his voice.

April rolled her eyes at Mike.
Iriarte,
she mouthed at him.

"April, I know you're there," the lieutenant said crossly. "What the hell is going on? When are you coming in?"

April passed the phone to Mike. "Hey, Arturo, it's Mike Sanchez. How ya doin'?"

"Mike. I heard about Bernardino. Terrible thing. What's with April?"

"Ah, she got into a little fight trying to apprehend the suspect."

"What! Nobody told me that. Where are you?"

"Well, she bolted from the hospital a while ago. Didn't anybody tell you she wasn't coming in?"

"She's supposed to call in. Let me talk to her, will you?" He barreled right ahead as if he hadn't heard the words
hospital, fight,
and
suspect.

"Really sorry about that, Arturo, but I told you some asshole tried to wipe her last night and she's lost her freaking voice."

"Huh?" For a second April's boss was speechless himself, not sure whether or not Sanchez was pranking him to get April a day off. Pranking was not uncommon. Finally he said, "No kidding."

"No kidding. She's lucky he just knocked her voice out. It's a woman's nightmare, right?" Mike winked at April.

"Jeez," Iriarte said. "Anything I can do?"

Thanks,
April mouthed at him.
Thanks a lot.

The rest of April's day was just as frustrating. Bernardino's daughter, Kathy, arrived in the afternoon, but April was not able to call with her condolences, to inform her that she and Mike would be out to talk to her and to look at the house soon. Mike had to make that call, and it was a tough one. In less than two months Kathy and Bill had lost both their mother and father. Bill needed someone to blame. So heaven only knew what ideas the prosecutor would pour into the ear of his sister the FBI agent over dinner tonight. Both were trained investigators. It was almost enough to make a person paranoid. April didn't want to be paranoid, and she didn't want the Department to be blamed.

Chinese philosophy for health called for the consumption of no less than twenty cups of tea a day. For once April was following it. Hot water and Lipton's tea bags were all she had, but she downed some every twenty minutes. She was wired with all the caffeine and desperate for the return of her voice.

In her early years as a cop, April had followed orders and kept her thoughts to herself. Silence had been a choice she'd made to stay out of trouble. Now all her thoughts were trapped inside, but it wasn't like the old days, when silence was her comfort zone. She wanted to talk to Mike, but she had no voice and she could tell he was shutting her out.

And sure enough, just before two p.m. Mike glanced at the clock on his wall. "Ready to go home now,
querida?"
he asked, trying hard to sound neutral.

April shook her head. She wasn't going home. She had things to do. She wanted to see Marcus Beame, who'd been standing next to Bernardino at the bar before he left, probably the last person to speak to Bernardino. Beame had the same job in the Fifth Precinct that April had in Midtown North. He was second in command in the detective unit. He'd know what Bernardino had been working on.

"Querida,"
Mike said slowly. "I want you to go home now, rest up." He said it
suavemente, con cariño,
but there was steel behind the sweetness.

She shook her head.

"I know you want to stay on this, but you know you can't."

She shook her head some more. She didn't know why she couldn't. Anger flashed in her eyes.

"You've got to move over," he said softly.

Victims didn't investigate their own cases. It was clear that was what he meant. She wasn't being asked to the dance.

April's anger came and went quickly as she considered her options. For every rule deemed unbreakable in the Department, there was always an exception. Long history had proved that nothing was set in stone.

Homicide investigations were like construction sites. In the beginning there was the body and the physical evidence that included everything the perpetrator left behind of himself-fibers from his clothes, hair from his head, saliva from a cigarette butt or a piece of gum. A footprint, a fingerprint. A weapon. The shape of his hand on the victim's body. And everything he took away from the scene that could later prove he'd been there, had had contact with the victim. The cause of death itself could be a signature. The principal investigator on the case was the architect who had to construct the murder from the crime scene backward to precipitating events that might have been set in motion days, weeks, or even years before.

In easy cases the plan of the house could be read right in a crime scene that told the whole story almost from beginning to end. Man came home, surprised his wife/lover/girlfriend in bed with another man, shot them both, then himself. The lovers were naked. The perpetrator was clothed. Double homicide/suicide. Case solved in a matter of hours. In hard ones the physical evidence didn't lead to the perpetrator. They called the hard cases mysteries. April moved over to Mike's desk and nudged him out of his chair.

"I knew the day would come when you'd try to take my place." He laughed, but a little uneasily. April was nothing if not hard to manage.

"Look,
querida,
I got people waiting for me," he told her.

She blew air out of her mouth and started typing on his computer.
Is IA investigating?

Mike read the words as they came up on his screen and nodded.
Of course. So?

Are they going to talk to me?
She typed some more.

"Probably."
So?

Who's on it?

"I don't know," Mike said. "What's your thought?"

Just thinking dirty,
she wrote.

"Any particular reason?" Reflexively, he lowered his voice.

Bill jumped on it,
she typed.

"That doesn't mean anything." But Mike shook himself like a dog shaking off a hurt. Then combed his mustache with his fingers. "One of us?" He said it softly, doubtfully.

April took a few seconds to go through the list of people who'd been there at Baci's last night. People they'd known for years. People Bernardino had known for
decades.
Friends. But that wasn't where she was going with it. She was thinking about all the posters that had been up on every floor of the puzzle palace. Must have been hundreds of people who knew about that party and didn't go. People on the job, but also people coming in and out of the building for dozens of reasons. Civilians could read, too. Everybody who could read knew about it. Everybody who'd ever worked with Bernardino knew about it. It hadn't been private. And probably a poster had been up at the Fifth Precinct, too.

I'm not suggesting it's one of us. It was just an odd time and place to make a hit,
she typed.

"Yeah."
So, they already knew that.

Anybody talk to Beame yet?
April changed tack.

"I'm sure. Why, do you want to talk to him?"

All this time he'd been standing next to her reading the screen. She swung around in his chair and looked at him.
Yeah, I want to talk to him.

Shit.
He sighed, shaking his head.

April turned back to the keyboard and typed some more.
Well, what do you think?

He put his arms around her and breathed into her hair.

"I feel lucky,
querida.
I could have lost you." He said this seriously. He didn't go so far as to blame her for what she did. But it was in the air. For a second she felt a deep chill.

"Look, April, even if you can't remember what he looked like, he knows you. He has an advantage. You don't know him, but he knows you. He knows Devereaux, too. Are you listening to me?"

Her face had become like stone. She was listening. He pulled over another chair so they both were facing the computer.

"Do you know who Devereaux is?"

Yeah, they'd told her who he was. April typed,
My hero turns out to be one of the richest men in America. What do you get a guy like that for a thank-you gift?

A little joke to make Mike laugh. He didn't laugh.

What was he doing out there anyway?
she tapped out.

"Walking his dog. You asked me what I think. Well, it doesn't have the look of a robbery gone bad."

April touched his hand. No, it didn't. And it didn't have the look of a stranger murder.

Mike echoed her thought. "If it's a stranger murder, what would be the motive?" He ticked off a list of possible motives. "Jealousy? Revenge? Money?" He scratched his chin. "That's about it."

Fear of discovery?
April typed.
Maybe Bernardino knew something.

"Or maybe he just did something to tick the guy off. A spur-of-the-moment thing."

April shook her head. The perpetrator hadn't run away. He'd attacked her, too. /
knew Bernardino,
she typed, then wondered.

Jealousy? Or had Bernardino just pissed someone off big-time, someone who felt this was his chance to get even. Someone he'd put in jail. Somebody he'd demoted. Somebody he'd hurt in some other way. Or was it about money? That led to the question, Who else stood to gain by his death? Anybody other than his kids?

"Sorry,
querida.
It's time for you to go home." Mike had already arranged for a car to take her home. April had her own plan. She didn't resist.