Nice Place for a Murder (12 page)

“That how she got this far?”

“She was a junior executive, a nobody. Then Felix, the brother, notices her, and right away they’re an item. No secret, everybody talking. Next thing you know she’s director of the department, leapfrogging Newalis, who was in line for the job, and who is now very pissed. He finally gets the promotion, but only when they move Harper up into a VP spot.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’m an investigator, remember? I make it a point.” A smug look that stopped short of being a smile.

“So Newalis  wasn’t exactly crazy about Harper,” I said.

“I don’t know if they ever made peace, or what. Remember, Ingo is handing out stock, and there’s heavy talk about going public. These people are hoping to get very rich. You can put up with a lot of shit for a million bucks.”

“So now you think maybe because Felix is gone, she’s for Ingo?”

“You said. Looks like, maybe. I don’t know,” he said.

“I thought you made it a point.”

“Felix wasn’t smart enough to keep his affair quiet. If Ingo’s doing the nasty with Harper, he’d never make that mistake. So it’s hard to tell.” Teague stood up from the stair and dusted off his seat. “It would be a good idea for you to stop zinging me and give some serious thought how you’re going to handle this Sosenko guy. Empire’s ass is hanging out a mile here. You could lose big time.”

“Before I forget, let me thank you for making me a part of this,” I said, standing.

“Alzarez asked for you. You’re into it,” he said. “Want some advice?”

“Absolutely not.”

“The only way we’re going to come out looking good here is if you can persuade Sosenko to go away. You know what I mean?”

“You always did want everything nice and simple,” I said. “But I don’t think this is as simple as it looks.”

“Get the job done, Ben. And do it quick. You stay in touch with me. I want to know everything. Every day.” He started down the stairs.

“Let me leave you with this thought, Teague,” I said to his back.

He stopped and turned. “What?”

I was going to call him a prick one last time, but I didn’t have to say it. He knew what I meant.

CHAPTER XII

Every player in this affair had an ax to grind. Including Teague, who you’d think would be on my side, cheering me on instead of threatening me. Truth was, nobody was on my side. I’d been hauled into this thing against my will, and instantly become the lightning rod. Goes to show you.

If I were smart I’d have headed crosstown, to Penn Station, and caught the next train back to Long Island. But nobody said I was smart, so I headed back up Fifth Avenue, my overextended heart trying to ignore the competition between the demands of walking and the struggle to digest two all-fat hot dogs. Was it by any stretch possible that Hick Sosenko had chosen this particular time, with a six hundred million dollar Julian Communications deal hanging in the balance, to act on a hatred of the company that had been stewing in that Neanderthal mind of his for six years? Could be. But it was a story only a ninny would buy, and I liked to think that wasn’t me. Clarification, I believed, was likely to be found at the offices of Julian Communications, where my weary legs appeared to be taking me.

Ingo Julian was the biggest question mark, I thought. He had the most to win, by far, when the stock went to market, and, strangely, he was the only one openly eager to shut me up and make me go away. Too late now, Ingo. Arthur Brody, at least, was ready to admit there was a problem, and to put some money on the table to solve it. Paying fifty thousand to me wasn’t all that much, considering the payoff waiting for him and the others. But it would buy a lot of fish bait for me. If I kept it.

I found it hard to keep from watching the slender girl with the long black hair and shapely ass making her way up Fifth in front of me. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she had an attitude, just from the way she walked. Plus, there was that intriguing naked space between where her halter ended and her low-slung jeans began. I pondered what she might look like from the front, but she turned west onto Forty-Fifth, and my pondering was over.

I knew Hector Alzarez well enough to believe he’d been telling me what he knew, without holding back. Still, he stood to become a wealthy man himself. That kind of money could taint the truth so subtly you’d hardly notice. And anyway, I knew a client can’t help but put his own spin on a story, trying to sell the scenario that makes him come out clean and righteous. Even Hector.

Lisa Harper was a mystery. There were so many angles to her, so many places she fit in, or might fit in, it was hard to know how to think about her. She watched Newalis go under the water and helped pull his body out of the bay. Showed up at my house before Sosenko started shooting. Had a history with Ingo’s dead brother. Almost certainly having a go with Ingo right now. Never, ever feels remorse about anything, don’t forget that one. She’d been around Julian Communications longer than Hector. She knew things I wanted to know.

At Forty-Sixth Street I crossed to Madison and stopped in front of Crouch & Fitzgerald’s leather goods store, where the window was filled with attaché cases that started at four hundred dollars. I called Lisa’s office on my cell phone, talked my way past a terribly British secretary, told Lisa I had to talk to her and I was almost to her office.

“Just leaving,” she said. “It’s my forty-five minutes at the health club. After that, meetings.”

“Take a pass on the treadmill this time,” I said. “You won’t turn to flab in one day.”

“Impossible. My body cries out for this. I told you, Seidenberg, I’m a fanatic.”

“This is life and death,” I said.

“Really? Whose?”

“Yours. Mine, probably. People like us, among others. Our friend Mr. Sosenko is in town. Parted company with him on Fifth Avenue not twenty minutes ago.”

“And who is Mr. Sosenko?”

“The guy with the gun who shot up my house.” A old black man walking by heard me talking and stopped, intrigued, waiting to hear more. “You know,” I said clearly into the phone, playing it now to him, “when you and I were so cozy up in my bedroom. You wouldn’t forget that, would you? Anyway, he’s roaming the streets, and though I haven’t actually seen it, I think he’s brought his gun with him. So we have to get together.”

“All right,” I heard her say. ”Then meet me at the club. We can talk in the exercise room while I do my routine.”

“Will I have to strip down to my shorts.” I said. The black man grinned in a kindly way.

“Optional,” she said, and told me how to find her health club in the Met Life building. I rang off.

“That’s some story,” the black man said.

I pointed at the phone. “Gorgeous woman,” I said. “Crazy about me.”

He looked me up and down, stopping at my waistline. “How bout that?” he said. “There’s hope for everybody, then.”

And thank you for that, I thought, as I headed for Met Life.

For all the sweaty people working out, the place didn’t smell like a gym. At these prices, members expected the tang of their bodies to be whisked away before they or anybody else could get a good whiff. There were exercise machines in clusters along aisles that went on forever. Some of these contraptions, I could only guess how they worked or what they were supposed to do for, or to, a human body. There were big-screen TVs everywhere, tuned to the endless financial news on CNBC. The whole place was immaculate and upbeat and nicely carpeted. Health playground for the carriage trade.

Trotting along effortlessly on a treadmill, Lisa Harper stood out. Among the men and women attired in drab grays and blacks and faded workout clothes of vague colors, only she was dressed in gleaming white spandex, a one-piece exercise suit cut to expose all of her thighs, plus maybe three inches higher. It clung to her so tightly, it might have been sprayed on. Blond hair tied back in a pony tail, she looked like the club’s resident goddess.

I stood on the treadmill next to hers, leaning against the side-bars trying to look nonchalant and hoping no one would start the damn thing up. I told her what I knew about Sosenko.

“So you think. He wants to kill me?” Lisa looked straight ahead, chin up, as she moved on the machine, timing her talking to the breath control she needed to run. “I thought we decided. It was you he was after. Otherwise he’d have. Shot me before you got there.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t advise betting your life on that theory.”

“I think it’s you he wants. But anyway, what. Can I do?” Speeding up the machine and running faster now. “Ingo won’t let anything. Get in the way. Of the IPO. Why don’t you just. Catch this Sosenko? Do that and you’ll. Solve everything. Come on Seidenberg. Be a hero.”

“What I’ve trained my whole life to be,” I said. “But what do I do with Sosenko when I catch him? Give him a really good talking to? Put him in a cage? What?”

Sweat running down her face. “That’s your business. Leave it up to you.”

Another player in this game who was perfectly willing for me to put my ass on the line. Just go track down this Sosenko, and then — what? Well, they don’t like to talk about these things. But they wouldn’t be terribly upset if I sort of killed him, somehow. Shouldn’t be too hard to arrange. Take care of it, Seidenberg. This was not a subject I cared to dwell on. “You’re expecting a lot,” I said. “How about you giving me something?”

“What.  Do you want?”

“Reality. I get this annoying feeling I don’t have the whole picture. I can’t understand why our friend Sosenko decides to get even with the company all this long time later. Why Ingo and Brody aren’t buddy-buddy any more. There are things you and your pals aren’t telling me. You know what? I hate that.”

Lisa reached forward and touched the controls of the treadmill. The machine slowed, then stopped. She stepped off, wiped her face with a towel, moved close to me. I could sense the warmth of her body. Was it just the exercise, or did she always glow like an ember from a bonfire when she got this near?

“I don’t have any secrets,” she said. “Ask me anything.” She crossed to a StairMaster, and I followed. She got on and started climbing to nowhere. I stood to her side.

“I want you to tell me about Felix Julian.”

“Felix? What does he have to do with this? He’s been dead for years.”

“You said ask you anything.”

She stopped her climbing and stared at me for a moment. Then, “Felix was Ingo’s younger brother. But you know that. Felix started a business
of his own .“

“How much younger?” I interrupted.

“A year, I think. Yes, just a year. Why?”

“I’m trying to get the picture here. Go on.”

“Felix had this idea for a new system to deliver flowers by mail. This was before I ever knew him. He used start-up money from the family and got the business going down in Orlando. But somebody else came up with essentially the same system at the same time, and did it better, as it turned out. Felix struggled from day one and had to shut down after a year and a half. Not only did the business fail, but his marriage went bad, too. He’d married some bimbo in Orlando, a nut-case, they say. It took some more Julian family money to make her go away. All this was no secret, Seidenberg. Felix told it to me himself.”

“You were pretty close to him, then?”

“You know that, already. Everybody does.” She started climbing again, slow and steady. “We met in the office one day. We liked each other.”

“So Felix went to work for his brother at Julian Communications.”

“Ingo had decided to start a licensing and merchandising division. Felix was available, so Ingo put him in charge.”

“Is that the way it happened?” I said. “Or did Ingo feel sorry for Felix, and invent a job for him?”

“Ask Ingo,” she said.

“What’s licensing and merchandising, anyway?”

“It’s selling the rights to use the names and likenesses of Julian properties on other products,” she said. “You know the ‘Clown Town’ television series for children that we distribute? If you’re a marketer who makes lunch boxes for kids, say, and you want to use a picture of Cashew the Nutty  Clown on a box, we’ll let you do that. For a price.”

“Is this a big business?”

“It can be. Depends on the economy, on what you have to sell. We sold our kid stuff. And the logos of our women’s magazines — for use on cosmetics, cookbooks, vitamins.”

“Sold? You saying you don’t do it any more?”

“The division just shrank and disappeared when Felix was killed.”

“So Ingo really did dream it all up to make work for his brother.” I saw Lisa was about to put me down, so I held up my hand and said, “I know. Ask Ingo.” I waited a moment, processing what she’d told me so far. It wasn’t much, and none of it came together for me. “And so you were in love with Felix, is that it? A company romance?”

“Where is this going, exactly?” she said. “You’re getting very close to things that are nobody’s business but mine. I suppose next you’ll want to know if I prefer the missionary position.”

I moved to stand directly in front of the StairMaster so she’d have to look at me. “You want to talk about your sex practices, save it for another time. Dangerous situation we’re all facing. Not as simple as everyone seems to think. And it didn’t just suddenly happen. Reasons for it go back a long time. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you could be deeply involved. I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out. So answer my questions, please, and I’ll do my best to keep Hick Sosenko from shooting you.”