Nice Place for a Murder (22 page)

Last night I’d thought a chat on the phone would give me the information I needed, but what I heard was such a contradiction to what I expected, I felt I had to see this lady for myself.

Straight answers were in short supply in this whole matter. I’d found there were two stories about everything. A good story. And the real story.

It was pouring rain when we landed in Orlando, and by the time I got behind the wheel of a rental car, my blazer was damp all over, and the crease in my pants had melted away. It was clear that when I arrived at Mary Jean Christensen’s doorstep, I’d be forced to compensate for my bedraggled appearance with extra charm and charisma, both of which I had in abundance, according to a certain Italian lady who knew the real stuff when she saw it.

After a false start which took me to the wrong side of town, I finally made my way to Mary Jean Christensen’s address, a neat ranch house in a sub-division of neat ranch houses. There was a Spanish tile roof, which seemed to be de rigueur in this neighborhood, a handsome brick driveway, and three orange trees, loaded with fruit, in the front yard. It all looked so clean and sweet, it might have been a set for an old TV sitcom.

She must have been watching for me, because the front door opened as I rushed up the front pathway through the downpour. “You come right in this house,” she said, taking my hand and pulling me inside, out of the rain. “We’ve had nothing but sunshine and more sunshine for three weeks, do you believe that? Now, just because you’ve come, we get this, this cloudburst. Oh, you poor man. I am so, so sorry. Let me get you a towel.” She started toward a hallway, then stopped, turned, and smiled. “You are Mr. Ben Seidenberg, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” I admitted.

“Oh good,” she said.

She left, then quickly reappeared with a towel, which I used to wipe my face and head. She took my coat and hung it over a doorknob to dry, then led me into the living room and motioned me into a chair. “So, now, Mr. Seidenberg, you’ve come all the way from, where is it? Long Island, to talk to me. This must be important.”

“It’s important to me. And please call me Ben.”

“Ben, then. What can I tell you, Ben, that will be worth this long trip? You were rather guarded on the phone last night.”

Mary Jean Christensen was a elegant, raven-haired woman in her mid-thirties who moved gracefully and looked you right in the eye. She had a way of leaning forward when she spoke that gave you the impression she meant what she said, and meant it for you alone. She had a compelling presence, and I could see why Felix, or any man, for that matter, would be attracted to her. “I need to know what Felix was like, what you learned about him when you were married” I told her.

“Well now, Ben, I could have talked to you about that on the phone,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me why you flew here today, really.”

“I suppose I wanted to see for myself what kind of woman Felix married. I’m trying to get a sense of the man, what he liked, what choices he made, how he acted.”

“Why do you care?” she said.

I looked at her without replying. She watched me back in silence, and the wait began to get awkward. She expected an answer. Here I was, invited into her home, wanting her to tell me things she just might find painful. I had to level with her.

So I did. I told her the whole story — the murders, Sosenko, Giannone’s belief that Ingo was dead and Felix was alive. I watched her begin shaking her head slowly as I talked. “Don’t you believe this?” I asked her.

“Oh I believe it,” she said. “It’s just that I’m in awe at how perverse and bothersome the Julian family can be. No, I don’t doubt anything you tell me about them, and about their company. They are disruptive. They make people unhappy.”

“Did Felix make you unhappy?”

“Oh yes, he did.”

“I never knew Felix,” I said, “but I was told he was easygoing, too easygoing. People took advantage of him. He tried too hard to be a good guy. He wasn’t tough enough, and that’s why the business he tried to start down here failed.”

“Who told you that?”

“The woman he took up with when he got back to New York.”

“Lisa Harper, you mean?”

“You know her?”

“I know of her,” said Mary Jean Christensen. “I heard about her. The office assistant who somehow got to be a big executive. Well, if that’s what she told you about the man, maybe she and I aren’t talking about the same Felix. Maybe that fellow you told me about was right. Maybe there was a switch somewhere along the line.”

“What do you mean? You telling me he wasn’t the dear man she says he was?”

She held her left hand up in front of her face. I saw at once that her ring finger was badly misshapen, twisted sideways at the first knuckle, and again at the second. The little finger, too, was splayed away from the others, sticking out at an eccentric angle. They were ugly deformities. “A gift from Felix Julian,” she said.

“He did that? Can you — will you tell me about it?”

“Oh I’ll tell you,” she said. “The business was losing money every month, and he liked to take it out on me. One morning I got up and found him pacing around our apartment, muttering to himself. He’d been awake all night, worrying about bad sales and employees who detested him, and thinking up reasons why I kept him from being successful. It was a mistake to marry me, he said. He grabbed me and tried to pull the diamond ring he’d given me off my finger. It wouldn’t come, so he twisted my finger, first one way and then the other, till the finger broke. I was screaming in pain, begging him to stop, pulling away, But he still had hold of my little finger, and he yanked it back and broke it, too. He never did get the ring. They had to cut if off at the hospital.”

“Was he always violent, or was this the first time?” I said.

“This wasn’t the first time,” she said, “but it was the last. He had hit me a dozen times by then, and humiliated me every day. A marriage that turned into a nightmare. When I first met him, he was completely different. He was fun, he was charming, and nothing was too good for me. But after we were married, and the business started to go bad, the whole thing changed, turned dark. Felix took charge of everything, where we went, what we did, what we ate, even. No discussion. Just do it his way. That’s how he ran his company, too. He wouldn’t listen to anybody about anything.”

“Was he drinking? I said.

“Felix never touched alcohol. It wasn’t drink that made him the way he was. I guess way down deep, where you couldn’t always see it, he was mean.”

“You left him, after the ring incident?” I asked her.

“At the hospital, they realized my broken fingers couldn’t have been an accident, so they called in the police. The police wanted to charge Felix with assault.”

“Did you press the charge?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “That same day, Ingo showed up. Flew down right away to get his brother out of trouble. He told me he’d give me a quarter of a million dollars if I insisted the broken fingers weren’t Felix’s fault. Then I could have a quiet divorce. I was so crazy with pain, and so angry. I was lying there in bed with my hand bandaged, and I wanted to hit him, but I couldn’t. So I spit at him. I actually did. Ingo never flinched. He asked me, what did I want, then? I told him a half million dollars.”  She looked at her damaged hand. “In the end, we settled at four hundred thousand. Every man has his price, and that goes for women, too. I would never have let myself be bought if Felix hadn’t been so cruel. It just seemed to me that I earned that money.”

“I think you did,” I said.

“So now I have this house and a bank account,” she said. “And a left hand I try to hide.”

“What do you do? Do you have a job?”

“Yes. I am the maitre d’ at the best restaurant in Orlando,” she said, smiling. “I do for myself, and very nicely, thank you.”

“Let me ask you, do you think maybe this Giannone person is right, that Felix is alive, and that he’s been playing the part of Ingo since the airplane crash? I mean, you were married to Felix. Do you believe it’s possible?”

“I haven’t seen Felix since that day he broke my fingers, so I’m not sure. Yes, he looked a little bit like Ingo. I mean, you could tell they were brothers. But they certainly weren’t identical in appearance. And they were different in so many other ways. Ingo had discipline, intelligence, talent. Felix seemed always to be on his way to a defeat. He saw it coming, I thought, but he believed it was because of circumstances, other people — anybody’s fault but his own. He was constantly scrambling to find somebody or something to blame for his own failure. Could he take over for Ingo? Hardly. I can’t believe he could manage Julian Communications, not for a month, not for a day.”  She looked out the front window at the orange trees in the yard. The rain had stopped.

Then she added, “Unless he just sat there at the big desk, and let somebody else make all the decisions, I suppose.”

I saw a tee-shirt once that said ‘Life is too short to drink bad wine,’ But at thirty thousand feet, with the only wine available in little screw-top bottles from the flight attendant at five dollars a drink, I contented myself with the notion that bad wine was better than no wine at all.

In the air back to Long Island, I looked into my glass of too-young merlot and tried to assess what I’d learned for a day spent traveling and three hundred sixty-three bucks round-trip airfare plus another fifty-five for a cheap rental car. Now I knew Felix Julian was hardly the happy-go-lucky sweetheart Lisa Harper had made him out to be. How had she put up with him when it got to be her turn? I suspected she’d put up with anything, if she figured the payoff was a vice presidency.

The truth was, Felix was a frustrated loser with violent tendencies, a man desperate to emulate his brother’s success. But was he really part of a bold scheme by Arthur Brody to take over a dead brother’s company, prestige and fortune?

With the lights of New York City passing below, for the first time I began to realize that the switch of identities had never happened, that Felix Julian was indeed dead and buried.

CHAPTER XXV

It was nearly nine the next morning when I made it to Bruce’s for coffee and a raisin scone. I’d wiped the raspberry jam off my fingers and was dusting the crumbs from my stomach when Wally pushed open the door, strode quickly across the wooden floor to my table and stood there, rocking from side to side and rubbing his hands together, expressions of eagerness unusual for him. “Nobody at the house. Figured you’d be here,” he said.

“Want coffee?” I said.

“No time, compadre,” he said. “Your pal Sosenko is at Lulu’s, right this very minute. She gave me a quick call when he went into the crapper.”

“How long ago?”

“No more than ten minutes. He was waiting at the door with the early morning rummies when she opened up. Scared the monumental shit out of her, she says. Turned out he came in to brag, impress her, crow about his big deal to the love of his life.”

“What deal?” I said.

“Something in New York, she says. Flashing around a fistful of hundred dollar bills he got from somebody to do something in the city.”

“When? When does he go to New York?”

“Don’t know. Pretty soon, seems like,” Wally said. “Whatever it is he’s going to do, it’s today. That’s what Lulu says.”

“But he’s still at the bar?”

“Was, ten minutes ago. Having a couple of eye-openers.”  Wally made an impatient get-up motion to me with both hands. “We can be at Shinnecock in half an hour, if we go like hell.”

“Going to call Lulu first,” I said, taking the cell phone from my pocket, “see if Sosenko’s still there.” 

I got the number from information, and Lulu answered on the first ring. “This is Ben Seidenberg, Wally Prager’s friend,” I told her. “You remember me.”

“Oh sure,” I heard her say.

“Sosenko’s there, right?” I said. I got the sense that he was close and listening to her end of the conversation.

“Yeah, you said it,” Lulu said.

“So you can’t say too much, right?”

“Right,” she said.

“Is he going to stay there? Just say yes or no.”

“No.”

“Is he getting ready to leave, do you think?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Right now?”

“Sure, absolutely,” she said.

“For New York?”

“Yeah, you bet.”

“Be cool, Lulu. We’re going to get this guy. Just say goodbye,” I said,

“Goodbye,” said Lulu Lumpkin.

“He’s leaving now,” I told Wally. “He’ll be gone by the time we get to the south side.”

“What now?”

“We get to the Expressway before he does and pick him up. We’ll snag him at exit 70.” I stood up and dropped some dollar bills on the table. “Got to go back to the house, get my gun,” I said. We left in Wally’s bright red pickup, the one that read ‘Southold Marina, Sales, Service, Dockage’ on the doors. After a speedy stop for my .38, we took off for the North Road, the long way to our destination, but quick because it avoided nearly every stoplight and most of the in-town traffic.

You could tell from the reek of stale cigar smoke that this was Wally’s truck. “It smells like a pool room in here,” I told him, rolling down my window.