ER - A Murder Too Personal

The New Ed Rogan Mystery

By

Gerald J. Davis

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Gerald J. Davis

Original Copyright © 2000 by Gerald J.
Davis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, without
the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed online, in a
newspaper, magazine or journal.

Any resemblance to actual people and events
is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

Insignia Publishing

Bridgeport, Connecticut

For Monica

Birth, and copulation, and death.

That’s all the facts when you come to brass
tacks.

T. S. Eliot

The last call she ever made to me came in
just before eight-thirty that night. I was still in the office
wrapping up the final details on the file I was scheduled to
deliver to the bank the next morning.

Working late gave you a chance to think in
the stillness. Think about the sad bastard vice-president who was
sweating like a stuck pig in front of his giant plasma screen
picture-in-a-picture digital sound HDTV right now, wondering when I
was going to hand over the file and how much damage it
contained.

What it contained was a ream of printout that
would put this joker away for a significant chunk of his active sex
life. The only hitch was that the bank didn’t like the sound of the
word embezzlement and the fact that it would besmirch their
lily-white reputation.

I knew what was going to happen. It didn’t
matter that this guy had lifted twelve million bucks because of a
minor infraction like unauthorized use of the access code. The
pantywaists at the holding company would have him make some kind of
token restitution and plead nolo contendere—I never did it and I
promise never to do it again.

The phone gave off its soft purring sound. It
was almost like an apologetic sorry-to-bother-you tap on the
shoulder. I still hadn’t gotten used to the new phone system. The
thing kept on malfunctioning, with its goddam chips and electronic
switching devices. At first I didn’t know if it was a real call or
another false alarm. Whatever happened to the old comforting
embrace of Ma Bell?

“Rogan,” I said into the speakerphone.

“Hello, Ed,” came her husky reply.

I didn’t answer for a long minute.

“Hello, Alicia,” I said finally. It had been
a long time between drinks.

“I’m sorry to trouble you like this, Ed.”

I knew she wasn’t.

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

“Oh, fair to maudlin, I guess.” It was an old
joke between us. She paused. “Actually, I’m doing very well on the
professional front. I’ve gotten a lot of recognition from my peers
over the last couple of years and my name is being mentioned on
some of the outstanding analysts lists. But that’s not why I’m
calling you, Ed. I’m calling because I’m having some personal
problems.”

She didn’t have to tell me that. She was the
kind of girl to whom the words interpersonal relationships were
mutually-exclusive.

“I see.”

There was a long silence, as if she expected
me to say more. When I didn’t, she said, “Ed, I’d like to hire you.
I’d pay you whatever your going rate is.” She stopped and then
added quickly, “It would be strictly a business transaction.”

She sounded just like she used to – bright
and brisk and full of phony bravado.

I loosened my tie, swiveled my seat around
and stared out the window at the darkening sky. You can get used to
anything – even the view out of the forty-eighth floor of the Pan
Am building looking north up Park. At least, what they used to call
the Pan Am building before the airline went deep six.

“I don’t do that kind of work, Alicia. My
clients are corporations. I do business investigations.”

I tried not to sound too harsh with her. Four
years was a long time to carry a grudge.

“Couldn’t you just make a single exception –
for me – for old times’ sake?”

Don’t push your luck, I thought. For old
times’ sake was the very reason I wouldn’t do it.

Instead, I said, “You couldn’t afford my
fee.” She didn’t know that was a load of guano. My fee was whatever
deal I could squeeze out of the unsuspecting client. And sometimes
even less than that. But she bought it. Why shouldn’t she? I’d
never lied to her before. I’d always been as straight as Mother
Teresa in the confessional.

My response surprised her. She hesitated.

I waited. The only sound in the office was
the muted whir of the laser printer. I felt like getting up and
pouring my eighty-third cup of decaf.

“Oh, Ed. You wouldn’t turn me down.” There
was a plaintive note in her voice I’d never heard before.

I didn’t think she could generate a response
from me anymore, but I guess I was wrong. Her tone was so different
from the self-assured mask she always wore.

“The hell I wouldn’t.” I wasn’t going to sing
that old song again.

“Oh, Ed. I’ll serve you linguini with white
clam sauce and a chilled bottle of Pouilly Fuisse.”

She remembered.

I didn’t say anything. It was becoming a
conversation of long pauses. I looked out the window at the June
evening and thought about another time and another existence. A
time when a man and a woman took endless walks of discovery through
the city.

“Please,” she managed finally, “I need your
help.” There was that note again. She never would have pleaded
before.

I thought about it for a while. About a
nanosecond. Then I said, “No, Alicia, I don’t think so.”

I could hear a sharp intake of breath on the
other end of the line. Then I couldn’t hear anything. She was
probably thinking about whether it was worthwhile to try to change
my mind.

The laser printer finished its work and fell
silent. Now there was no sound at all. It was strange to be in a
city of eight million and not hear a single sound. Like someone had
pressed the mute button.

Then she sighed. It was an anguished sigh
and, for a moment, I almost regretted the decision.

“All right,” she said. Silence again.
“Good-bye, Ed.”

She hung up.

Sure, it hurt. But I told myself it would
hurt less this way.

***

She crowded into my thoughts a lot the next
couple of days. You can’t be married for five years without
building up a storehouse of memories. They say you remember the
good times and forget the bad. But I remembered both the good and
the bad – mostly the bad.

I delivered my report to the CEO of the bank
the next morning at nine-thirty. Just the two of us in an
amphitheater that could have held the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and
had room left over for the third Roman legion plus its camp
followers.

As I sat opposite him at the boardroom table,
he kept shaking his bald head and flipping the pages of the
printout. His face was so ashen it looked like it was covered with
a layer of talcum. From time to time, he would murmur, “Son of a
bitch.” He said it maybe seven or eight times.

I wondered how many different ways he could
inflect those words. Here was a man making six point one million,
including bonus, according to the proxy statement, and that was the
extent of his vocabulary.

While he scanned the numbers, I thought about
her. Had she changed her hair? Probably. Why did women feel this
strange compulsion to change their appearance at regular intervals
like clockwork? When I knew her, she wore her blond hair long and
flowing, like her dresses.

She was a tall gal, six-one, almost as tall
as me and she always held herself ramrod straight. She liked to
have people stare at her. With her angular face and thin frame, she
was striking. When she wore those full-length dresses that she
loved, she looked like a Viking goddess here on a temporary visa
from Valhalla.

I knew she was fragile but no one else did –
and it wasn’t often that she let me see her frailty.

I glanced back at the CEO. He’d been reading
the report for the better part of an hour. As he read, I looked
around the board room. It was expensively but sedately furnished.
The style was some indeterminate historical period between
Periclean Athens and the Fall of Constantinople. The purpose was to
create an atmosphere of solidity and timelessness, even though the
bank was only seventy years old. The bank was medium-sized,
striving mightily to enter the top ranks, so nothing was
overstated. There was a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington on
the wall. How many of these damn things did Stuart paint? I’d seen
them in at least a dozen corporate headquarters.

Finally he looked up at me and blinked.
“Neat,” he said with a grim smile. I didn’t know if he meant the
scheme or the way I cracked it. The concept was neat. The
vice-president had used the bank’s access code to wire odd amounts
from an inventory of inactive private investment company accounts
in the Cayman Islands to his accounts in Curacao, Panama and the
Bahamas. He kept shifting the funds from account to account. Then,
before an audit, he’d wire funds back into the PIC accounts to make
them whole. The only problem was that he never took a vacation. He
never even took a piss. Then one day, because of the federal
regulations that no one ever pays attention to, the bank made him
take a vacation. A two week vacation that the regs required.
Someone noticed a discrepancy. That was the start of his slide down
that slippery slope. That was where I came in. My job was to make
sure he didn’t find a foothold.

“Outstanding job, Mr. Rogan.”

I nodded. “Glad to help the bank restore its
budget for fresh-cut flowers.”

He grimaced and smoothed his hand over his
head. It was tough to judge which was shinier—his bald pate or the
boardroom table.

“I want you to do one thing for me,” he
said.

“Sure.”

“I’m going to destroy this report, Mr. Rogan.
I want you to do the same with your copy and any back-up material
you have. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I understood. He didn’t have to
paint a me picture. They would take care of the bastard with their
own brand of retribution.

“I appreciate your discretion, Mr.
Rogan.”

“My pleasure.”

“Needless to say, your check will be in the
mail this afternoon.”

He extended his hand. I shook it. As they
say, one man’s misfortune is another man’s good fortune. The check
would be enough to keep the wolf away from the door until some
future and indeterminate date.

I got to the office earlier than usual that
Thursday morning. By seven-thirty I was making calls. This was the
best time to reach the guys who you couldn’t get to during the day,
before the hired help started tying up the phone lines.

Mr. Coffee was giving off his usual
sputtering sound. I poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup and
drank it, steaming and black. Then I went back to my desk, took
another sip, and slung my jacket over the back of the chair. One of
the fluorescent bulbs in the outer office was dying and flickering
on and off, but it was too early in the morning to replace it.

I hadn’t smoked in fifteen years but that
first cup of coffee always brought back the urge. Smoke ‘em if you
got ‘em.

It was about a quarter after eleven when I
started to get hungry. I was about to head down to Grand Central to
get a jelly donut to hold me till lunch when someone came into the
outer office. No knock. No salutation. Talk about your good
old-fashioned manners.

I swung the chair out and craned my neck
around the door frame to see who it was. A couple of times there’d
been clowns who wandered in where they didn’t belong, but they
didn’t come back again after they were politely disinvited.

This time it was different. There were two
men in moderately-priced suits, poly-wool blends with just a little
too much poly. They were cops. I recognized both of them.

Gene Black was a man I could deal with. He
was a worn-out cop with a new wife and a new baby and an old beer
belly. We’d worked together on a case back in the not-
quite-so-tranquil old days when I was in corporate security with
ITT.

It was the other son of a bitch I couldn’t
stomach. Forgash was his name.

Detective/Third Alfonse J. Forgash. He was a
thin sour-faced man of about thirty with a mustache and
slicked-back dark hair. His main problem was that he hadn’t learned
that a policeman was a public servant.