Nice Place for a Murder (13 page)

For a moment I heard only the whirr and clank of the climbing machine as Lisa continued her routine, and the modulated sounds of CNBC drifting over from the TV set nearby.  Finally she said, “Felix and I were serious about each other. He was a sweet guy, easy to like. It was a great loss when he died.”

“To you?”

“To me. The Ingo. To the company.”

“Yes, to the company,” I said. “Was he like his brother? Smart, tough, a good businessman?”

“No, none of those things.” she said. “He wanted to be like Ingo, but he never was. Ingo’s a killer shark. Felix couldn’t bring himself to think that way. He idolized Ingo, though, and Ingo loved him dearly.”

“The two brothers so different,” I said. “But now you’re with Ingo, isn’t that right?”

“And if I am?”

“Your business, as you say.” 

“Felix is dead,” she said. “We move on.”

I was weary, tired of standing and longing to be back on Long Island. “One more thing,” I said. “I understand Julian Communications really started to take off after the accident, after Ingo mended and came back. Acquisitions, new managements, tremendous growth. Why do you think that was?”

“Ingo and I have talked about that,” she said. “He says being so near death forced him to focus, gave him a new clarity of purpose. He was bolder, had no doubts about himself or his decisions. He says the whole world was new for him, bright and lucid and certain.”

“Lisa, that’s goddamn beautiful, really,” I said. “Does he give any credit to Arthur Brody? He was the guy who ran things while the doctors were sewing Ingo back together.”

“He made Brody president. I’d say that’s giving credit where it’s due.”

“What do you think, Lisa, about the growth of the company?” I said. “Was it Ingo or was it Brody?”

“I don’t make those kinds of judgments,” she said with a sense of finality, and doubled her speed on the StairMaster.

I had all the answers I was going to get this time. Now I had to make sense of them.

CHAPTER XIII

Not a hundred miles from the hurry of New York City there’s a village on the water where life is lived slowly and there’s a single traffic light on the main road. This is Southold, which comes after Cutchogue and before Greenport as you drive due east on the North Fork of Long Island. This is where Alicia lives, and where I always head for encouragement and affection and wonderful dinners.

Southold is lively with summer people, and tourists from New York, through Labor Day. But the village thins out once the weather grows cold, as it was about to do now, in October. By winter, Southold comes almost to a standstill.

I first saw Southold three years ago.

I used to drive out for the fishing at Montauk, on tip of the South Fork, and occasionally roamed through the nearby Hamptons to study the beautiful people and eat at the good restaurants. Late one summer afternoon I was walking through Southampton when I looked through an art gallery window and saw a dark-haired woman standing on a stepladder, trying unsuccessfully to hang a large painting on the wall. The canvas was simply too big for her to handle.

She saw me watching. She clutched the painting with both hands and motioned me, with a broad movement of her head, to come inside, which I did.

“You going to help a lady?” she said. “Why are you standing there? Take that end.” That delicious Italian accent. That cheeky, I-dare-you way she had of throwing the words at you. There was no resisting.

I helped the lady. Once the painting was hanging squarely the wall, we talked, and talked some more. She closed the gallery and we went for a drink. Then stayed for dinner. Then we walked the streets for an hour and finally went to her house in Southold. From that first night there was never any question. I was for Alicia Bianchi, and she was for me. I never thought anything like it could happen to a man with all my hitches and snags. But it did.

When the pressure at Empire Security started to trouble me, and I knew it was time to cash out, it made sense to move near Alicia, to be with her all the time, not just weekends. But I had misgivings. I was leaving Empire and New York City to get away from the fast pace, yet I feared that the slow pace out here, seven days a week, would bore the hell out of me. And it did, for a time. It took me a year and a half to get into tempo with the North Fork. I settled in, and it wasn’t bad. Trouble was, Teague refused to stop pulling my strings. He had this remarkable delusion that I worked for him now, and felt perfectly justified threatening my financial future, pulling me back in, giving me assignments that pissed me off and left my coronary system begging for mercy.

Alicia was my snug harbor. She was comfort and understanding. My advocate to anyone and everyone, no matter what. Yet not above telling me how she thought I should deal with the world. For my own good, she said.

At first I resisted her opinions. Getting advice from another person was something new for me at my stage of the game, and I resented it. But I came to find that this woman, a self-proclaimed Italian sorceress, after all, had an amazing talent for simplifying situations, sorting out lies and seeing right through people. I was a fair hand at those things myself, but Alicia was in a league all her own. One day I woke up to realize I didn’t resent her counsel any more. I required it.

It was nearly eight by the time I arrived at her house now, after a stop-and-go trip from Manhattan on a crowded Long Island Expressway.

“Going to be another hour before we eat, because I didn’t want to start before you got here,” she told me. “Maybe less. We’ll see. Wine in the refrigerator, and I think we drink some now, OK? Chenin blanc from Paumanok. Very nice.”

I opened one of the two bottles and poured us each a glass. She was right about the Paumanok Vineyards chenin blanc. Even better than very nice. Paumanok was coming along fast among the thirty wineries now at work on the North Fork. I was not unhappy there was a back-up bottle chilling.

She said, “Lemon chicken, you remember? With rice, also. We agreed on this, OK?”

“Waiting for it all day.”

“Good. Then you broil the bird. I do the lemon sauce, and the rice, too. Salad is done.” She reached into the refrigerator and handed me a whole chicken.

“Not split?” I said.

“I don’t like it when they’re cut apart,” she said. “The pieces don’t match sometimes. From different chickens. One side bigger than the other. You don’t want to cut it? I’ll do it. Give me.”

“I can handle it,” I said. I split the bird in two with a large chef’s knife on the butcher block top of the kitchen’s island. “Just one swift, precise cut. Did you notice?”

“I’m so proud of you,” she said. “How long to broil, you think? Remember, it’s only good rare for steak, not for chicken.” A reference to a pinkish chicken I’d served up once.

“Give me thirty minutes to cook the halves, five minutes to cut them up, another five minutes back under the broiler with the lemon. OK?”

“OK, then put them in now. I start the rice,” she said. I put the chicken in the stove’s broiler pan and turned the electric oven to broil. I slid it in, not too close to the glow. Don’t cook it too fast, I told myself. No more rare chicken.

Alicia diced a small onion and cooked it in butter on top of the stove. “You look tired,” she said. “Bad time in New York. I can tell. You shouldn’t go in there for these things.”

“Didn’t have a choice.”

“Always you have a choice,” she said, moving about barefoot on the kitchen floor. “You don’t need them. You got me. Tell them all to go to hell.” She added a cupful of raw rice to her pot, stirring with a wooden spoon to coat each grain with the hot butter. “You saw Teague, right? I can always tell when you get near that bastard. With all the gold all over him. Like a cheap criminal. Or a pimp, maybe.” She reached into a cupboard and took a bottle of dry vermouth, poured half a cupful into the pan with the onions and rice. It hissed and sent up a cloud of steam. “Paumanok wine too good for cooking. For drinking only. Vermouth is good enough for the rice.”

I sipped at the chenin blanc and told Alicia what had happened, who I’d seen, what they’d said to me. Listening to myself tell it, I was more aware than ever that there were vast gaps in the story.

Alicia stirred the rice. The alcohol in the vermouth had boiled away, and the rice had absorbed the rest of the wine. “So you were running around New York with a gun in your pocket, chasing a crazy person. Some kind of job you got.” She opened a can of chicken broth and added it to the pot. She saw my quizzical look as she stirred an orange-colored spice into the mixture. “Turmeric,” she said. “Turns the rice yellow. I make it very pretty for you.” She put a lid on the pot and adjusted the heat. “You think he’s still in New York, this Hick person? Or he’s sneaking back here?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “I don’t understand what’s driving him, so I can’t tell what he’ll do next.”

“You don’t think he’s mad at the company and trying to get even?”

“That’s what it looks like. But no, I don’t think so. I think maybe that’s what somebody wants it to look like.”

“Been out of jail three years, already, this person?”

“Yes.”

“Then of course you’re right.” She started on the lemon sauce for the chicken, squeezing fresh lemon juice into a bowl. “If he was going to get even, he would have killed his enemies long ago. In Italy, he would have done it the day they let him out. Fill my glass, please.”

I did. “Another mystery,” I said. “I don’t understand why a middling company like Julian Communications became such a hot item after Ingo returned. After all, they’d pasted him back together with duct tape. He was a mess, hardly in shape to put out the kind of effort you need to turn a big firm around. And he wasn’t that great to start with. Now he says being so close to dying made him focus, gave him new drive, all that crap. Hard to believe.”

She added olive oil, minced garlic and a splash of red wine vinegar to the bowl.  “Could only be one thing,” she said. “It wasn’t him doing the decisions, the work. Somebody else. The brother was dead, right? So then there’s this one who’s the president. Brody is his name?”

“The brother could never have accomplished it, even if he was alive, according to Lisa, and Hector, too. Didn’t have the strength, the skills, they told me.” I said.  “Brody? Well, he did run the company while Ingo was recovering. Ingo made him president. But the company didn’t start to move till Ingo took charge again, as CEO. I just can’t believe the accident made him into a different man. A killer shark now, that’s what Lisa Harper calls him.”

  Alicia came to me and kissed me lightly, “Just for nothing,” she said, and walked away. She stood quietly, thinking, staring at a cupboard.  Finally she took down a bottle of dried oregano, shook some into her hand, then dropped it into the sauce. She beat everything together with a whisk. “You know what I’m thinking?” she said.

“What?”

“You’re going to laugh.”

“Maybe.”

“But of course I absolutely don’t care,” she told me. “This Ingo, he was almost torn apart when the plane crashed, right?”

“Yes.”

“Even now it shows all over him where the doctors put him back together. That’s what you said, right?”

“Yes.”

“Would you say he looks like a different man then he did before the crash?”

“I don’t know. I’d say he looks like an Ingo Julian who’s been through a horrible accident.” I poured myself another glass of chenin blanc.

“But he has no hair now, none at all, you told me. And scars all over him,” she said. “Check the chicken. Tell me when you turn it.”

I opened the oven door, peeked in, then closed it. “Another minute,” I said. “What are you telling me? That it’s not Ingo Julian? That it’s somebody else pretending to be him? Sounds like a mystery novel, or a bad movie. I can’t believe it. I talked to the man.”

“But did you ever meet him before the accident?” She put a skillet on a low light and poured in some pine nuts. “Pignolis. I toast them and then they go into the cooked rice. For texture. My idea,” she said. “So? Did you ever see him when he was all in one piece?”

“No. Actually, I never met him until he’d recovered.”

“There you are,” she said. “OK, now, these two brothers, they looked alike, do you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should find out.”

“You think it’s really Felix, the brother, who survived the crash.? And Ingo who died? A plot for Felix to take over the company?” I opened the oven and turned the chickens. “But Felix didn’t have his brother’s instincts for business.”

“Who told you? This Lisa and this Hector person? Why should you believe them?” she said. “I asked you to tell me when you turned the chicken.”

“You just watched me turn it.”

She grinned at me. “I know, but I like when you do what I tell you. Do you resent doing what I tell you?”

“Depends what you have in mind.”

“We eat this dinner, we finish all the wine. Maybe then we negotiate,” she said. “I never lose at that, you know.”