ER - A Murder Too Personal (8 page)

“Enough now. Sweet Daddy,” she said with a
note of bitterness. “But he left it in like a trust that I couldn’t
touch until I was thirty. So I had nothing for all those
years.”

“And then one day you had the entire
world.”

She laughed. It was a musical laugh. “Have
you ever been poor? And then, you know, hit the jackpot—rich
overnight?”

“Can’t say I have. How does it feel?”

“Better than the other way around.”

She turned and left the room, her nightgown
flowing behind. I watched her as she walked. She moved like nothing
could frighten her. At least, nothing conceived by man.

I stood and walked over to the window. Down
below on Park, the island in the middle of the street was bright
with yellow flowers. I couldn’t hear the traffic. The windows were
soundproof and the air-conditioning was humming low.

Inside of two minutes, she was back. In each
hand she had a Bloody Mary. I took one and raised it in a silent
salute. The glass was Baccarat. The drink wasn’t bad either.

I took another swallow and sat back down on
the sofa. She sat down next to me and curled her legs up under her.
It was the way the nightgown fell. She wasn’t wearing any
panties.

She took a long pull on her drink and looked
at me. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “I was just thinking how Alicia
described you.”

“Nuclear physicist and male model?”

She considered for a minute. “Well, she said
you were…you know. What was the word she used?” She rolled those
dark eyes up and to the side. “Unyielding—that was it. And she said
you were like well-informed about a lot of things—but in a
superficial way.”

I grunted. Nothing like being nailed by a
dead ex-wife.

“And she said you were good-looking.”

I examined her face. “Was she right?”

She giggled. “I’ll never tell.” She took a
sip, then a long swallow and finished her drink. Then she looked
hard into my eyes. “I always wondered if I’d ever meet you. From
the way Alicia spoke…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. The girl was
a curious amalgam of vulnerability and self-assurance.

I didn’t say anything. She got up and went
into another room and came back with a small filigree glass and
gold case. She put the case and a small mirror on the cocktail
table and looked up at me. Her eyes glinted.

“Want a line?” she asked.

I shook my head and held up my glass. “My
downfall. But you go ahead into never-never land.”

Her gaze took my measure. She seemed
undecided.

“What else do you do?” I asked.

“Whatever my shrink says I can do,” she said
with a tight smile, “and whatever he says I can’t do.”

She made up her mind. Abruptly she reached
over, opened a drawer in the table and put the coke away. “Maybe I
can convince you later, you know, when you’re more mellow.”

“Why do you go to a psychiatrist?”

“Why not? Who do you know that doesn’t go to
a psychiatrist?”

“Did Alicia know you went to one?”

“Know?” she chuckled. “Hell, I sent her to my
lovely, little sexy shrink.”

I shook my head. “Alicia never would’ve gone
to a shrink when I knew her. She despised them. Said they were
worse than useless.”

“Well, then either you were wrong or she
changed her mind, because she became like a devout analysand. You
know, the three-times-a-week kind.”

“And why did she go to your shrink?”

Rachel spread her hands. “Because either the
world was fucked-up or she was fucked-up and she wanted to know
which one it was.”

“How was Alicia fucked-up?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure she was. You’ll
have to ask our cute little Dr. Pasternak.”

Yes. In due course I would do that.

It was four-thirty Monday afternoon, but not
too late to get Stallings if he was still in his office. I’d called
his office before I headed down to Wall Street and given a name I
knew he’d recognize. His secretary told me he was in a meeting that
would probably run past six.

His office building was on William Street in
one of those Art Deco structures that had been renovated when the
real estate boys convinced themselves that Art Deco wasn’t such a
bad style after all. The building had turquoise and aqua highlights
to show it was trendy again.

I planted myself across the street next to a
construction site. It had just begun to rain, so I stepped back
under an overhang and pulled up my raincoat collar. There was a
clear view of the entrance to his building. I opened a copy of the
Journal and paged through it, keeping an eye on the people exiting.
When the downpour started, the street emptied quickly. The sky was
slate gray and it didn’t give promise of clearing anytime soon.

It took forty-five minutes. Stallings came
out of the building with another man. They talked for a minute,
then split up. Stallings opened his umbrella and headed toward Wall
Street and then turned onto Broadway. He went down the stairs to
the uptown Lex and I followed not too far behind. There were enough
people on the platform to give me cover.

In a couple of minutes, the express pulled
in. I got into the next car where I had a clear view of Stallings
through the glass window in the door. He didn’t read anything. Just
stared straight ahead with a glazed end-of- the-day New York look.
Behind me, two bums were arguing over who was going to finish off a
bottle of John Daniels. The riders cleared a space around them to
give them room to curse each other but otherwise didn’t seem to pay
too much attention.

When we stopped at Grand Central, Stallings
got off. He cut across the main waiting room, walking briskly, and
went through one of the passageways where a man was playing All Day
All Night With Maryanne on steel drums with a sound that
reverberated like it was in an echo chamber. I was fifteen paces
behind him on the other side. It was seven-fifteen and the terminal
was still crowded with commuters.

Without a glance behind him, Stallings left
Grand Central and headed west on Forty-third. His posture was
shameful and he would’ve gotten an F for standing up straight if he
were still in grade school.

Halfway between Ninth and Tenth, he ducked
into a decrepit six-story building. There was a hand-painted sign
next to the doorway with a stylized picture of a naked girl and the
name “Pussy Cat.” I went in half a minute later and saw the
elevator stop at three.

I knew where the sonofabitch was going but I
didn’t know why. It just didn’t suit him. Stallings was a wealthy
guy. His balance sheet put his net worth at five to six million.
And here he was patronizing a low-class cat house. He’d pay fifty
bucks for a bang instead of a couple of hundred for a decent hooker
that guys like him usually took advantage of to ease the stresses
of the workaday world.

Was he going here just to save a few lousy
bucks?

Hard to tell, difficult to say.

It wasn’t necessary to follow him upstairs. I
waited across the street in the doorway of a boarded-up storefront.
The street was empty except for an occasional well-dressed couple
huddled under an umbrella hurrying east toward Broadway and a can
man with a large plastic bag rooting around in the garbage for a
day’s income. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long. A man of
Stalling’s age and temperament wasn’t going to spend a lot of time
engaging in pleasant chit-chat with the staff.

Stallings came out a little more than a half
hour later. The rain had changed into an intermittent drizzle. He
opened his umbrella, stopped by the curb and looked both ways
before cutting across the street.

I let him walk half a block before I came up
behind him and slammed him into the entrance of a shuttered store.
He just stood there with his mouth wide open in disbelief.

That was all I needed. I shoved the muzzle of
the nine millimeter into his gaping maw. Nobody likes the taste of
hard polymer, especially a man who’s just been at heaven’s
gate.

He sputtered and blinked wildly, coughing and
trying to control his coughing at the same time.

“All right, my friend,” I said. “Now talk to
me.”

I took the gun out of his mouth and placed
the side of the barrel against his cheek.

“What…what…what…” he managed.

It’s relatively interesting to note how
quickly a man’s spunk disappears when he’s just spent his load. The
guy in front of me wasn’t the arrogant son of a bitch at the
cemetery. Instead he was just a soft sniveling gelatinous mess.

“What was the problem?” I said.

“Why? What problem?”

I figured there was always a problem
somewhere, human nature being what it was.

“The problem with Alicia,” I said.

He gulped and nodded. “Wait,” he said, trying
to stand straight.

I wasn’t going anywhere.

“Her work wasn’t good. She…”

“What was wrong with it?”

He nodded again. “I had just fired her. Just
a week before she…”

“Before she was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you fire her?”

“I don’t…” he said, flapping his hands
helplessly. “She lost interest. She was making bad calls, bad
judgments. Her stocks were down. Her earnings projections were
off.”

“Why was that?”

“I tried to talk to her like a father. But
she…she wasn’t working the way she used to. She antagonized a lot
of people. She didn’t seem to care…” His voice trailed off.

“Why was she doing that?”

“I can’t tell you. I just don’t know. Please
don’t hurt me. I promise. I swear.” He looked like he was going to
come apart like a cheap suit.

“Who did she talk to at work?”

He thought for a minute. “I guess
McCormack…Robert McCormack.”

“Who is he?”

“Our REIT analyst. He was her closest
confidant. At least, she spent the most time with him.”

In the dim light he looked like he was about
to cry. I let him go and holstered my gun. Stallings started to
rock back and forth against the metal shutter and made it rattle in
the night.

“Why would someone want to kill her like
that?” he asked me. “Nothing like this ever happened to one of my
employees before.”

“You just haven’t been in business long
enough,” I informed him.

Laura came back into the room with two mugs
of coffee and handed one to me. On the mug was some kind of logo
and the name of Stallings’ brokerage house in an antique script.
She sat down in an armchair and managed to give me a sad little
smile.

Her apartment was as large as an oversized
packing crate. That’s how people existed in New York. Each one with
his allotted ten square feet of space. In a research laboratory it
would have sent mice into convulsions. It was a junior one-bedroom.
Modest, to say the least. Calligraphers don’t make a great income.
But it was neat and well-furnished.

I was standing at the window looking out at
Seventy-sixth. The rain had stopped and the first stars were trying
to show through the clouds. The sidewalks were still wet and caught
the reflections of the streetlights. Diagonally across the street
on the far corner, an all-night grocery store cast shafts of light
through the mist.

Laura got up and stood next to me looking out
at the night. She held the mug in both hands and slowly brought it
to her lips. She took a small sip and then stared down into the
steaming coffee, as though she were searching for some meaning.

“Why did they kill her?” she asked finally.
“She never hurt anyone.”

“We don’t know that.” I wasn’t about to tell
her Alicia had nailed at least one person.

She started to say something, then bit her
lip and stopped.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Say it. Whatever it is,
you knew her better than anyone. At least you used to. You and
Rachel…”

She cut me off. “Rachel. That whore.” Her
eyes flashed.

“Why do you say that?”

“Never mind.” She waved a dismissing hand at
me. “Forget I said it.”

I let it go. “Tell me anything you can
remember.”

She chewed on her lip as she tried to think.
Then she remembered the cup of coffee in her hands and took several
sips. Finally she shook her head apologetically.

“I can’t think of anything that could help
you. We weren’t that close lately. I mean, she didn’t tell me
everything the way she used to when we were growing up. I guess she
entered a new kind of life and left me behind.”

“Was there anything different in the last
couple of months?” I prodded.

She was silent for a minute. Then she shook
her head. “We spoke maybe once or twice a month and she wasn’t very
specific about what she was doing. She did mention that she wasn’t
happy in her work. She…she did say that Steve Wheelock had called
her.”

“Was that unusual?” The bile started its work
carving craters out of my gut again.

“Well, yes. Because they hadn’t spoken for a
couple of years. And then, all of a sudden, he calls her out of the
blue.”

“Did she see him again?”

She considered the possibility. “I don’t
think so. She said we should never go backward—only forward. She
said that seeing him would be the same as going backward.”

The vision came back to me, as it had so many
times before. Alicia on her back, he ravaging her insides. I put
the vision out of my mind.

“Are you sure she didn’t see him again?”

“I can’t be sure, but I know she didn’t want
to see him. That was over a long time ago.”

She finished her coffee and grimaced as she
drained the dregs. “Do you still hate him?”

I didn’t answer. How do you know hate,
measure it, sound out its resonances? Do you need hate to keep you
going?

I put down my cup and got up to leave. She
walked with me to the door, moving with soft steps. When she turned
her face up to me, I put my arms around her and kissed her on the
forehead. She rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel her
heart beating. She was a delicate blossom.