The Fregoli Delusion (24 page)

“Karen, that's not fair and you
know it.”

“Fair? You're telling me
I'm
not being fair? The fucking chief doesn't want me questioning rich people, but
I'm
not being fair? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And then you bring in that
fucking Truly,” she went on, “who couldn't find her ass in the dark with both
hands and hasn't made an arrest in her fucking life, and I'm supposed to sit
there quietly like a nice little psycho and watch Miss T-Square analyze and
disseminate? What the fuck's up with that? You—”

“Don't hold back, Karen. Tell me
what you really think.”

She stared at him. “Are you making
fun of me? Are you making
fun
of me? You fucking
bastard
!”

She stepped forward and pulled
back her fist to hit him right square in the mouth.

He didn’t move a muscle, waiting.

She locked eyes with him, upper
lip quivering, fist cocked.

He held his breath.

Her mouth opened. Her cheek
trembled.

Then she threw her arms around him
and began to cry into his chest.

27

He held her while she cried. It
took a while.

Then she began to talk while she
cried but it didn't make any sense, so he continued to hold her until she
finally grew quiet.

She held him for a while longer and
then let go. “Now
I
need a fucking handkerchief.”

Hank took one out of his other
pocket and gave it to her. “I always carry a back-up. Something I learned from
a very good detective.”

She laughed into the handkerchief.
The laughter turned into more crying and she walked over to a chair and sat
down. He followed, pulled another chair around, and sat down next to her. He
watched her wipe her face and blow her nose. Her eyes were closed and her
shoulders were slumped. After a moment she took a deep breath, pushed back her
shoulders, and sat up straight.

“I'm really, really sorry,” she
said. “I didn't mean any of that. I don't know what happened.”

“It's all right. I could see it
was coming.”

“It's
not
all right. I care
more about you than anybody else alive. Other than Sandy. And maybe Darryl and
Del. You’re like a brother to me.”

“Number Four, with a bullet.”

She laughed, wiping her mouth.
“Yeah. I guess. But I can't be saying shit like that to you. It’s not true,
none of it. I'm so, so sorry.”

“It's all right. You're upset.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about it. We’ve got some
time.”

“I dunno.”

“Pretend I'm Father Hank,” he
kidded. “Tell me what’s troubling you, my child. After all, we're in the right
place.”

She frowned, looking around at the
chapel furnishings. “Fuck, I never even noticed. Shows you how out of it I am.”

“What's wrong?”

“This case. That smug bastard
Holland. Moneybags Parris, who thinks he can pick up the phone and screw my
career and, hey, that’s okay because he’s got money and I don’t, which means
he’s got power and I don’t.” She looked at him. “I work real hard, Hank. This
is my life. I’m not going to stand by while some fucking worm like Parris tries
to fuck me over.”

“And you don’t think Truly belongs
with us.”

“Shit. Sorry. She’s okay. I see
why you brought her in for this. I’m not a complete fucking idiot. She’s an
intel wonk and a lab geek, but she’s doing a good job with the info.” She
tucked hair behind her ear. “I just feel like I’m being pushed aside on this
thing. The fucking Powers That Be don’t like the way I do my job.”

“Don’t worry about them,” Hank
said.

She smiled at him without humor.
“Ordinarily I don’t give a rat’s fucking ass about them, but they’re putting
the squeeze on me, Hank. I found a home with you in Homicide, and they’re messing
with it. Martinez cut me a huge break by pulling me out of Family-Related, and
she knew what she was doing when she paired me with you. You saved my ass.
Hell, you saved my career. I’m not going to give that up without a fight.”

“You’re not being asked to give it
up.”

“No, but it could be taken away
again, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I wasn’t exactly in love with
Family-Related, but it was my job, right? I do my job. I’m damn good at it. But
Paup took it away from me because Williams gave me an order that was fucking
out of line, and I told her so.”

Hank waited. He’d read the reports
in her jacket, of course, but wanted to hear about it from her.

“The kid was only six years old,”
she said. “The father would beat him with a piece of garden hose on the soles
of his feet, then lock him in a little closet with no food or water, sometimes
for more than a day. The mother wouldn’t say anything and neither would the
kid. His teacher was concerned, which is how we got it, but the problem was,
the father was a lawyer and I couldn’t get into the end zone. He started filing
complaints and harassment charges and everything else against me he could think
of, and I said a few things to him I shouldn’t have, which of course gave him
the ammunition he needed. Williams, the chickenshit, was intimidated by the guy
and ordered me to drop it. I told her to fuck off. We happened to be outside at
the time, in front of the main entrance. Paup was walking in just as I really
got going on Williams. She stuck her nose in, and the next thing I know I’m on
suspension. At my hearing, Williams drags in a lot of other crap on me and I
thought for sure I’d get busted back down to uniform and have to spend the rest
of my career directing traffic in Bering Heights or some fucking thing, but
Martinez spoke up and offered to take me into Homicide.

“I still don’t know why she did
that. It saved my ass, though. Paup decided not to bust me down from detective,
but I had to sit at home for three months watching TV, and my days in Family-Related
were over. I didn’t really want Homicide, you know? In Family-Related, you’ve
still got a chance to save the kids and put things right, or as right as
they’ll ever be, but in Homicide it’s too late. The victim’s dead. It’s over.
So I didn’t want to move, but I had no choice, especially with the service
record Williams and Paup were writing for me. So, I know what it feels like to
lose my job because of my mouth. I don’t want to go down that road again. I
don’t know what else there is for me than this, Hank. I really don’t.”

“To get to you,” Hank said,
“they’ll have to go through me. And Ann Martinez isn’t Elspeth Williams.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“She likes you. She’ll stand up
for you.” Hank paused. “Look, getting back to Truly, she’s a bit of a project.
I think she could be a very good cop, but she’s got a lot to learn. You could
help me bring her along. She’ll probably end up in Intelligence, as you say,
but we could help her be a better cop before she gets there.”

“Might not be a good idea,” Karen said.
“You wouldn’t want her turning into another Stainer, now would you?”

“You really have to let that go.
Peralta was drowning, lashing out, trying to survive. You don’t usually take that
stuff personally.”

“Struck a nerve, I guess.”

“I can see that.”

“I’m just—” She looked around the
chapel for a moment before coming back to him. “I can look you in the eyes,
right? Like right now? I make eye contact, right? With absolutely no problem?”

“Sure. Of course you do.” He
smiled. “You’ve got that cop stare that scares the shit out of people. You
probably practice it in the mirror.”

“Yeah. That’s a good one. But you’ve
noticed it with them, though, haven’t you? With Brett, and with the girl just
now? That they can’t make eye contact? It’s a thing with a lot of schizophrenics.
They can’t do it. It’s not possible. Brett fastens on my rack like it was the
buffet at Golden Corral, but he doesn’t mean anything by it. My mother would
never look at my face, either. Up, down, anywhere but at me. Some of them say
that when they look at you, they see your whole body at once, like looking down
the wrong end of a kid’s telescope, instead of just your face. Some of them,
it’s just because they know they stare at people funny and they just want to
avoid trouble. Whatever. But I don’t do that, right? When I look at your face,
I’m looking at your damned face, right?”

“Yes. Of course.”

She stood up and walked over to a
little stand against the wall that held religious brochures and booklets. She
began riffling through the brochures without seeing them. “Daddy didn’t know
what to do anymore. They kept finding her out on the highway, walking along the
side of the road. Thinking she was going back home, to her parents’ place. Who
were both dead. And she’d have these long conversations with nobody, all this
crap about learning to ride a horse and being a famous artist and raising
canaries for money. None of which she did. Just random stuff. You know, while
she’s hallucinating that someone’s sitting in the chair across from her.”

Hank waited.

“If that happens to me,” she said,
turning around and putting her hand over her holster, “if I get like that, I
swear—”

Hank’s cell phone vibrated. He
kept his eyes on Karen. She nodded and used the handkerchief to wipe her face. He
took out the phone and answered it. “Donaghue.”

He listened for a moment. “Go
ahead.”

He listened, then frowned. “Spit
it out, Maureen.”

He looked at Karen as he listened.
She was watching him intently. It went on for a while, until he said, “Anything
else? All right, good job. Thanks.”

He put the phone away. “Something
interesting. Marcotte found a draft e-mail on Jarrett’s home computer from
Thursday morning. It was one that wasn’t sent. It was auto-saved and stored in
his Drafts folder. Apparently he didn’t notice when he cancelled the message.”

“What’d it say?”

“It was to Emory Raskin. It said, quote,
‘Did you take care of the Crocker thing? I want you to,’ end quote. He started it
at six twenty-seven and logged out at six twenty-nine. Marcotte figures he sat
there for a minute, trying to decide whether or not to put it in writing, then
changed his mind. Probably decided instead to speak to Raskin directly about
it, so he shut the computer down but didn’t realize the draft had been saved.”

“The Crocker thing,” Karen
repeated. “The little weasel didn’t mention any Crocker thing when I was
squeezing him on Thursday.”

“Then let’s go see him again.”

Karen didn’t move.

“He’s your witness, Karen. I’ll
take notes. Sound like a plan?”

She whacked him on the shoulder,
hard. “Fuckin’ A, Lou. Let’s roll.”

28

Emory Raskin’s office was on a
corner of the twentieth floor of Jarrett Tower, but unlike most corner offices
it was sparsely furnished and completely unimposing. Raskin shook their hands
and invited them to sit at a tiny, oval table with two cheap-looking chairs on
either side. As they sat down, he scooted his chair around his desk to make a
third at the table.

“What can I do for you? Got
another meeting in ten minutes. Everything’s nuts around here right now. All
hands on deck.”

Karen sat sideways on her chair
and crossed her legs as Hank took out his notebook and pen. “You usually work
on Sundays?”

“Seven days a week until further
notice,” Raskin said. “For my bunch, anyway. This is a publicly-trading
corporation and share prices are falling. We gotta stabilize the ship as quick
as we can. Legal’s pulling overtime checking every last thing six times before
it gets signed, no matter what it is.”

“We won’t take too much of your
time, then,” Karen said. “Just a couple of questions.”

“I thought I answered everything
the other day, but okay.”

“You left one thing out, come to
find out. The Crocker thing.”

“Crocker thing?”

Karen uncrossed her legs and
leaned forward, her forearms across her thighs, hands folded between her knees.
She looked at Raskin with cool blue eyes. “Your boss was typing an e-mail to
you the morning he was potholed, Emory. ‘Did you take care of the Crocker
thing?’ We want to know what the Crocker thing was, and whether or not you took
care of it.”

“Didn’t get an e-mail from Mr.
Jarrett like that. Sorry.”

“Of course you didn’t. He never
sent it. Now answer the question: what was the Crocker thing, and did you take
care of it?”

Raskin looked away, out the
window. “There’re things I took care of for Mr. Jarrett that were off the
books. Nothing illegal, mind you. Just off the books.”

“You were Jarrett’s janitor. That
what you’re saying?”

“More or less.”

“That’s interesting, Emory. Very
interesting. So what was the Crocker thing, and did you take care of it?”

“I’d rather not talk about it, if
you don’t mind.”

“I do mind, Emory. In case you
didn’t notice, we’re in the middle of a homicide investigation here. It would
be a good idea not to withhold information relevant to that investigation, if
you know what I mean.”

“Off the record.”

“Christ. What do you think we are,
goddamned reporters? We don’t do off the record.”

“You’re asking me to break a
promise of confidentiality I made to Mr. Jarrett a long time ago. I don’t talk
about this stuff to anybody. Just him and me.”

“He’s dead,” Karen said. “He’s not
going to fire your ass now, is he?”

“It’s not that. It’s a matter of
professional integrity. He could always trust me never to say a word about any
of the things I did for him, this way. Ever.”

Karen sat back. “It’s too late to
care about keeping your promises to him now, Emory. He’s dead. Maybe Crocker
did it. Maybe this thing you won’t talk about was his motive. Maybe if you keep
your mouth shut, he’ll get away with it. Maybe your loyalty isn’t worth jack
after all.”

Emory bit his lip, looked out the
window. “Okay. But I don’t see how it could be connected to someone killing
him. I don’t see how Mr. Crocker could be the one who did it.”

“Just tell us the damned story,
Emory.”

“All right.” He rubbed his jaw.
“Mr. Crocker had approached me with a proposal for Mr. Jarrett. That sort of
thing happened all the time. People came to me with stuff before they talked to
Mr. Jarrett. Sensitive stuff, I mean.”

“You were the gatekeeper for
off-the-table business. They talked to Peggy Kelly about regular stuff, and
they talked to you about the hinky stuff.”

Raskin nodded. “This was a
business proposal, but it was a personal matter. Mr. Crocker wanted to make Mr.
Jarrett an offer. A lot of stuff I just turned down myself, if I knew Mr.
Jarrett wouldn’t like it or be interested in it, but this one I passed on. Mr.
Jarrett listened to it and didn’t like it one bit, and he got pretty pissed off
with me, but it was something I knew he needed to hear.”

“Why was that, Emory? Why did he
need to hear it?”

“Well, you know. Because of the
relationship between Mr. Crocker and Mrs. Jarrett.”

“Which you’re aware of.”

Raskin said nothing, not
interested in belaboring the obvious.

“What was the proposal?”

“Mr. Crocker wanted to buy out
Mrs. Jarrett’s prenuptial agreement.”

Karen blinked. “He what?”

“He made Mr. Jarrett a cash offer
equivalent to Mrs. Jarrett’s prenuptial agreement. He didn’t know what the
actual amount would be, but that was his offer. Whatever it was worth.”

“In exchange for what?”

“That Mr. Jarrett would divorce
Mrs. Jarrett.”

Karen glanced at Hank, who raised
an eyebrow and shook his head. “That’s a good one, Emory,” she said. “So you
passed on Crocker’s offer, Jarrett hit the roof and tore your head off. What
next?”

“I met with Mr. Crocker to give
him Mr. Jarrett’s response.”

“Which was no.”

“Correct.”

“So how’d Crocker take it?”

Raskin shrugged. “He’s a
businessman. It was negotiation. He made a better offer.”

“Christ. What was it this time?”

“The cash equivalent of the prenup,
plus a twenty-percent interest in his business.”

“In CrocComm? Are you kidding me?”

“No, of course not.”

“So how did Jarrett take it this
time? Blow up in little pieces again?”

“No. He took a while to consider
it. I imagine he checked out CrocComm in more detail.”

Karen looked at Hank, whose eyes
were down as he wrote in his notebook. She shook her head. “You people are from
another planet. You know that, right?”

Raskin shifted in his chair,
irritated. “Look, Detective, these are very successful business people. At the
top of the heap, okay? They’re not like you and me. They get offers every day
to do things they don’t necessarily want to do, but a lifetime’s worth of
training tells them to look at these things from every angle. ‘Act in haste,
repent at leisure,’ right? Even with very personal stuff, that’s how Mr.
Jarrett was. He took a step back and checked it out. Due diligence.”

“Okay, okay. So he thought about
it, and he did his due diligence. I get it. So then what?”

“He instructed me to tell Mr.
Crocker the answer was still no, and that it wasn’t up for negotiation. Mr.
Crocker should just drop it and wait until he, I mean Mr. Jarrett, passed away
before trying his luck to get Mrs. Jarrett to marry him. That he intended to
stay married to Mrs. Jarrett for the rest of his life.”

“Is that how you told it to
Crocker? Like that?”

“Yeah, that was the message I gave
him. Just like that.”

“That he should wait until the old
man was dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Sounds to me like you put the gun
in Crocker’s hand and invited him to pull the trigger. Doesn’t it sound that
way to you?”

Raskin shook his head
emphatically. “No. I don’t like Mr. Crocker, but he wouldn’t do something like
that. He’s not crazy.”

“How’d Crocker take it, getting
the door slammed in his face like that?”

“He was a bit frustrated. I’ve
seen it before. He gave me a little speech about Mrs. Jarrett and how they
loved each other, and all. Then he said Mr. Jarrett was making a mistake.”

“Uh oh,” Karen said.

Raskin waved a hand in the air.
“No no, not like that. He didn’t say it like a threat. He was just frustrated.
He thought he’d made a really good offer and that Mr. Jarrett should have taken
it. Like I said, I’ve seen that sort of thing before, where people wanted to
make a quiet back-door deal with Mr. Jarrett of some kind or another, and when
he said no they’d always say the same thing. ‘He’s making a big mistake.’
People don’t like being turned down. But Mr. Crocker also told me to tell Mr.
Jarrett he respected his decision.”

“He said that?”

Raskin nodded.

“Okay, tell me something else. Did
Jarrett’s wife know all this was going on?”

Raskin raised his eyebrows. “I
severely doubt it. Mr. Jarrett wouldn’t say anything to her, I’d bet the farm
on that, and there’s no way she’d hear about it from me. I don’t know if Mr.
Crocker told her, himself, but I’d bet he didn’t. I’d’ve felt the aftershocks,
believe me. She would’ve raised the roof.”

“You think?”

Hank asked, “Exactly when did all
this take place, Mr. Raskin?”

“Last couple of months.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Raskin tilted his head sideways.
“Yeah, sure. Mr. Crocker first approached me the third week of March. The
twenty-first, something like that. I had to wait almost a week to meet with Mr.
Jarrett because he was in D.C., then New York. There was no urgency to it, you see.”

“Important, but not urgent.”

“Yeah, you got it.”

“So you spoke to him about it,
when?”

“That’d be the first week of
April. The Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“And what about the rest of it?”

“Let’s see.” Raskin looked out the
window. “I gave him Mr. Jarrett’s answer sometime near the end of April. Mr.
Crocker had been out of the country for a while. I gave Mr. Jarrett his revised
offer the first week of May. Then I met with Mr. Crocker the final time two
weeks ago, the twenty-eighth of May, to give him Mr. Jarrett’s final answer.”

“Interesting,” said Karen, “but
not the end of the story, right? There was something else you were supposed to
do, and Jarrett wanted to know if you’d done it yet just before he got himself
popped. So what was that last thing, Emory? Did Jarrett change his mind or
something? Were you supposed to reopen the bidding with Crocker?”

“I think maybe you misunderstood
something,” Raskin said. “When I told you Mr. Jarrett took a while to do his
due diligence on CrocComm, I didn’t mean he was actually thinking about
accepting the offer. That never crossed his mind.” He turned to Hank. “Mr.
Jarrett never explained himself to me, but he didn’t need to. I understood him
pretty well. He wanted to do his due diligence on CrocComm because he wanted to
know why Mr. Crocker’d be willing to give up such a big chunk of it. He wanted
to know if there were problems there, or what.”

He scratched his ear. “Mr. and
Mrs. Jarrett had a tacit understanding, see. They had an open marriage, far as
that went, which was in the prenup. Mr. Jarrett insisted I put it in there. But
there was also a tacit understanding he’d leave her boyfriends alone. Turned
out Mr. Crocker was the only one, in the end, and Mr. Jarrett was as good as
his word. He had me run background on him, sure, and all that stuff, but that’s
as far as it went.”

“But then Crocker crossed the
line,” Karen suggested.

“Yeah, and it really upset Mr.
Jarrett. His instructions for me on Monday were to put together a creeping
takeover of CrocComm. At least, the start of one.”

She frowned. “A creeping
takeover?”

“Yeah. It’s a gradual buy-up of
shares in a publicly-trading company. You pick them up through the open market
so you don’t have to make a formal offer to shareholders and pay a premium
above what they’re worth. Plus, you do it slowly, a bit at a time, so you don’t
draw attention and spike the price. With something like this you gotta be
careful not to violate the
Williams Act
, but I’ve done it before for Mr.
Jarrett and I know how to stay in that gray area where the SEC won’t have anything
to say. The point, though, is that I was supposed to get the ball rolling, get
up to a certain percentage, and then Mr. Jarrett was going to have a quiet word
with Mr. Crocker about his attitude.”

“His attitude.”

“Yeah. He didn’t have to say anything,
but I understood Mr. Jarrett was very disappointed in Mr. Crocker’s attitude
toward Mrs. Jarrett. He felt it showed a lack of respect for her as a person,
and he wasn’t going to just let it slide.”

“Interesting. So how far did you
get?”

“It was underway. I use certain
third parties, and I still had a few to get on board. If Mr. Jarrett was doing
that e-mail you mentioned, he was likely going to ask me for a status update.”

“Did you usually communicate in
writing about these things?” Hank asked.

“Good point, Lieutenant. We’re
always very careful, but in this case we weren’t going to go very far with it.
Just fire a warning shot across the bow, so to speak. There wouldn’t have been
anything to worry about from the SEC, so I guess Mr. Jarrett figured it would
be okay to send me an e-mail, particularly if we weren’t going to have a chance
to talk about it, which we weren’t, since we were both so busy with his
retirement plans and all that stuff, but I guess he changed his mind and that’s
why he didn’t send it.”