by Blake Banner
I stood as she came in and she approached our booth. Her eyes flicked over me and I got the impression she’d read me, figured she had my number and knew just how to play me. When she shook Dehan’s hand, her expression was more cautious. That was where she thought her problem would be.
She sat beside Dehan, facing me, and the waiter came over and asked her if she wanted the usual.
“No, Sam,” she said, like he was the man she’d always dreamed she’d come home to. “Today I’ll just have a white wine.” When he’d gone away, she turned to Dehan. “It was so kind of you to do this. I don’t know what Stephen would make of it.”
Dehan shifted into the corner, so she could look at Penelope. “Stephen is your fiancé?”
“He is, and he’s a darling, but he is not exactly broadminded. You know what lawyers are like! Everything has to conform to the rules.”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “In my experience, when they are not breaking a rule, they are trying to bend it. Miss Peach…”
“Penny, please, we’re old friends, remember?”
The warmth in her eyes said that she wished we were. It was a warmth that wanted to be believed, and would have been easy to surrender to. I smiled and said, “Right, Penny. What can you tell us about your relationship with Jack Connors, Penny?”
She shook her head. “My goodness, I didn’t think anybody knew about that.” She laughed and turned to Dehan, laying her hand on her knee. “You must be awful good at what you do!”
We both smiled without much warmth and waited. The laughter drained out of her face. “I’m not proud of what happened.” She sat back and laid both hands on the table. Her eyes rested on the diamond engagement ring on her finger. “I met Jack about six years ago. It was at a party in a penthouse somewhere in Manhattan. The owner was the director of a big corporation and they were paying Jack some absurd amount of money to promote their brand. I was there with one of the executives of the company. He had proposed to me and I was seriously considering marrying him. Mark… No, Mike. Sorry!”
She laughed like she was more amused than embarrassed. The waiter brought her wine and she made a point of making eye contact when she thanked him. Dehan prompted her. “So you met Jack. Did you meet his wife, too?”
“I saw her, but I didn’t meet her. We talked for a while, he fascinated me and I gave him my number.”
Dehan didn’t try to conceal the edge in her voice. “What happened to Mark, Mike, Micky, whatever his name was?”
Penelope gave a small sigh and held my eye for just a moment too long for it to be comfortable, before turning to Dehan.
“Let me be upfront about this, Carmen. I’m a gold digger, and I don’t pretend to be anything else. Most of the men I am with like to delude themselves into believing I am something I am not, but I never lie to them, and I never make them promises I can’t keep. That’s my own code. I am not apologizing, and I don’t honestly need your approval.”
I stepped in before Dehan could answer. “Penny, we’re not concerned with how you live your life or any of its moral implications. We are just interested in Jack, and what happened between you two.”
She played with the stem of her glass for a moment. “Jack was about twice my age. He was very successful and very rich. His company was already worth a fortune by then. He called me a couple of days after the party and we met a few times at my apartment in Brooklyn.” She smiled at the memory. “He didn’t like it—the apartment. He said it was too small and inconvenient. He wanted me somewhere where he could come over at lunch time. His attitude would have been offensive in anybody else. He made no secret of it: as far as he was concerned, he owned me.” She shrugged. “But somehow he pulled it off, and the truth is, I kind of enjoyed being owned by him. He was a rare man, powerful and magnetic. Irresistible.”
I said, “So he moved you to the Upper West Side.”
She nodded. “It was close to his office and close to his house.”
Dehan said again, “So what happened to Mike?”
“Frankly, he wasn’t in the same league. I broke it off with him and began to think seriously about the possibility of a future with Jack.”
I frowned. “You really think he would have left his wife for you?”
She hesitated, then gave her head a small shake. “No, but he was happy to keep me in style. We never talked about his wife. He gave me to understand that she would never question him. And he wasn’t all that interested in what I did, just so long as I was there when he called. It was a pretty good arrangement and a pretty good life.”
I sipped my Martini and asked, “Was he the only one? How many other men were you seeing at the time?”
“Two, Stephen and Grant.”
Dehan glanced at me. “Stephen?” She jerked her thumb in the general direction of Lantern Hill Lane. “The same Stephen?”
“Yes, I had just met him around that time.”
“At a party?”
The sarcasm was clear in Dehan’s voice and Penelope sighed. “Your judgmental attitude makes it hard to be cooperative, Carmen. You don’t approve of what I did. You’ve made that clear, but forgive me, that is your problem, not mine.” She paused a moment and went on. “I met him walking the dog in the park. He is a really nice guy and I actually started to have serious feelings for him. I found myself feeling happy at the thought of seeing him and spending time together. More important than that, I found I wanted to make him happy.” She gave a small shrug. “When Jack died, I was already thinking about breaking up with him, and Grant.”
I signaled the waiter to bring another round. “Did Stephen know what you did for a living?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because he would have dropped me like a hot brick. He comes from a very strict, New England Methodist family and he is very rigid in his morals. Twice he has come close to losing his job with the firm because he has refused to make false statements. He is like super moral. If he knew about my past, he would not be with me.”
Dehan drew breath, I gave her a look and she closed her mouth. I said, “Tell me about Grant.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Grant was a piece of work. Man, he was something else. He was South African, with this real kind of badass South African accent? He used to pronounce it ‘Seth Efrica’, real kind of harsh. He was seriously rich and well on his way to becoming a billionaire. Back then he was, I don’t know, thirty-five? And Jack was poor by comparison.”
Dehan was frowning. “Dot com?”
She shook her head. “No, arms, security, mercenaries. Offices in Manhattan and supplied private armies to warlords in Africa, Latin America, even the Middle East. A lot of it was real shady stuff, but man did he pull in a lot of money! Shaw Line Defense is the company.”
“He knew how you made your living?”
She gave her head a little twitch to the side. “He’d been around the block a few times. He wasn’t exactly naïve, you know what I mean? He knew there were other guys and I depended on them all for the way of life to which I had become accustomed. He didn’t like it, but he was coming around to the idea that if he wanted this all for himself, he had to put a ring on it.”
I said, “He wanted to marry you?”
“Yeah, we talked about it.”
Dehan said, “But?”
“Let’s say I was weighing my options.” She leaned back to allow the waiter to set another glass of white wine in front of her. Then he set out the Martinis and left. “On the one hand there was Stephen, who I was growing real fond of, then there was Jack who was generous to a fault, gave me the apartment and stayed out of my hair, and then there was Grant, who was headed for the Forbes five hundred and was willing to marry me; but I was beginning to ask myself, what price I would have to pay for being his wife.”
I asked, “How did you find out Jack was dead?”
“I called his office on the Friday morning.”
“You did that a lot?”
>
“It used to drive him crazy, but it was naughty fun and secretly I think he liked it.”
“And they told you he was dead?”
“His secretary was hysterical. She told me about his wife finding his…” She seemed to go slightly pale. “It still makes me sick to think about it.”
Dehan sighed and scratched her head. “What were you doing on Wednesday, late morning to early afternoon, Penny?”
“You can’t think that I…”
“I can think all kinds of things, just tell me what you were doing on the Wednesday morning to midday.”
She seemed to sag. “OK… I remember it quite vividly. It might sound trite, but I had a hangover. I’d had dinner with Grant the night before and one thing had led to another… It wound up being quite a wild night, lots of drink and… stuff, big row, make up sex and booze...” She shrugged. “So I woke up feeling rough, to say the least.”
She stopped talking and sat staring at her fingers on the table. I drew breath but she started talking again.
“Jack was not crazy like that. He knew everything and was right about everything and if you disagreed, he just ignored you till you saw sense. But Grant was wild. It wasn’t enough that you did what he wanted, you had to agree, and want what he wanted too! He was real intense.”
“What did you row about?” It was Dehan.
“Exactly what you think we rowed about. I told him I wanted to end it and that there was a man I was thinking of marrying.”
“Stephen?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d he take that?”
“How do you think? He once explained his philosophy of life to me: take it; if you can’t take it, buy it; if you can’t buy it, shoot the owner and take it.”
I grunted. “So did you tell Grant who you were thinking of marrying?”
“Of course not…”
She said it without much conviction, and left the words kind of hanging. Dehan said, “But?”
“Well, for about a week or two before Jack was killed, I’d had the feeling I was being watched or followed.” She shrugged. “Stalked, maybe.”
I leaned forward. “Anything more definite than a feeling?”
“Maybe. A few times I saw the same white van. It was parked outside my apartment on a couple of nights, and when I went for walks in the park, it was there two or three times. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and after Jack died, I stopped seeing it.”
Dehan scowled at her. “That could be really important. It’s a shame you didn’t come forward at the time.”
She stared at her wine and looked unhappy. “I suppose it is. It never occurred to me at the time.”
I gave Dehan a microscopic shake of the head and said to Penelope, “Did you notice anything particular about the van? Plates, logos, any kind of distinguishing feature?”
“No, just that it was white, it was dirty and it had no windows in the side panels at the back. No logos, no writing. I don’t recall the plates.”
“Where is Grant now?”
“As far as I know, he still lives in New York. His offices are at one eighty-four, 5th Avenue, above the printers. He has the seventh and eighth floors. They don’t look like much from the outside, but he’s the real deal. You should see his apartment and his country house.”
I nodded. “I believe you. You got a number for him?”
She looked down at her hands and gave her head a small shake. “You better contact him through the company.”
Dehan made a question at me with her face. I shook my head. She turned to Penelope. “I have only one more question, Penelope. On any of those occasions when you noticed the van, were you with Jack?”
She didn’t answer for a while. She didn’t look as though she was trying to remember. She looked more like she wished she could forget. Finally she sighed and said, “Yes. Twice it was parked outside the apartment when he was there. I told him about it and he dismissed it as silly paranoia.” She hesitated just a moment, then said, “Shaw, Grant Shaw.”
She took hold of her purse and made to stand. “Is there anything else?”
I shook my head and Dehan said, “Not for now, Penny.”
She stood and left.
FIVE
It wasn’t exactly a moon, it was a thin crescent sliver of a moon, suspended a couple of inches above the water: just enough to make the horizon translucent and dapple the inky liquid with a luminous splash. The spring weather was not warm enough for going barefoot, but we wandered along the shore and Dehan nestled comfortably under my arm, with both of hers around my waist, and we muttered quietly to each other as we went.
“You’d seriously consider retiring to a place like this?”
We paused, looking out at the black bulk of Tuxis Island silhouetted against the pale glow of the moon.
“Why not? It’s halfway between Boston and New York, it’s one of the safest communities in the country, it’s pretty, peaceful.” I kissed the top of her head. “Don’t you ever get tired of the in-yer-face hostility, and the vast, overpopulated dirtiness?”
She nodded, then looked up at me. “Be a hell of a change, huh? What does a Bronx girl, born and bred, do in Utopia?”
I gave her a squeeze. “I don’t plan to retire for a while yet, kiddo. But when the time comes, I can think of worse places.”
“Could we buy a boat?”
“Why not?”
“And will you promise me you’ll never join the country club or the yachting club?”
“You have my solemn oath.”
The delicate smell of cooking reached us through the dusk. A car parked and people climbed out, chatting, laughing. The lazy echoes of the car doors, and the voices, dispersed like chimney smoke on the evening air. We turned and started strolling back.
“I guess,” she said, “that men like Grant Shaw, and women like Penelope, are drawn to the big cities, where there are richer pickings.”
“This is your way of telling me we are about to talk shop?”
“You know it is.”
“Hit me.”
“Well, set me right if I am way off, Sensei, but it seems to me pretty obvious we’re looking at Grant Shaw as our prime suspect.”
I had my right arm around her shoulders. She released her right arm from my waist and took hold of my dangling fingers, then thrust her left hand in my back pocket. We walked like that for a moment, pushing through the sand as she watched her feet.
“It’s a pretty classic situation,” she said at last. “A tough guy hooks up with a prostitute, they have some kind of chemistry and he starts to form a dependency. He wants to own her, have her exclusively for himself. He thinks he’s in love, but really he just has a violent, emotional addiction. So he tells her he wants to marry her. She says no and so he either kills her, or the guy she’s with. It’s one of the reasons hookers have pimps.”
I grunted and sucked my teeth. She kept on going.
“In this case, our possessive John happens to be a billionaire with a private army at his disposal. He’s probably a guy with a lot of self discipline. So he hires one of his mercenaries to stake Penelope out. His hit man reports back that there is a guy seeing her on a regular basis, so he has him follow Jack and kill him.”
“By cutting off his head with a samurai sword?”
We had come to the road and now climbed the steps to the porch and made our way through the bright lobby to the dining room. There the waiter showed us to our table and handed us a menu each.
“We know what we want,” I told him. “We’ll have the Prince Edward Island mussels to start with, and then the prime New York strip. And let’s have a half bottle of Las Pizarras with the mussels, and a Snowden Cabernet Sauvignon with the beef. You could open that now, to let it breathe.”
He gave a little bow and went away. Dehan was watching me with a small smile. “You dig all that, don’t you, Stone?”
I shrugged. “My father, he had an interest in wine. He and my mother used to go on wine tastin
g holidays. He was a good man, a bit cold and distant, but he tried to instill good values in me: honor, honesty, and an appreciation of good things.”
“Is there a punch line coming? Is this the ‘Orstrian’ one with blond eyelashes?”
“No.” I laughed. “His ancestors were English, and he really was like that. So, you were going to explain about the samurai sword.”
She rolled her eyes. “OK, well, it’s not as odd as it may seem. If a guy like Grant Shaw employs a hit man, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be a mercenary of some sort. And a lot of those guys are into the martial arts in a big way. Kendo, Japanese sword fighting, is central to a number of Japanese arts, like Ikido, Budo generally. So the use of a sword may not be that odd after all.”
“It seems a little extravagant. He could have used a suppressed automatic…”
She was nodding before I had finished. “Yes, and that would have made sense if he had simply wanted him dead. Then he could have shot him at his house and be done with it. But that’s not what happened. He was drugged, kidnapped and killed while he was awake, by having his head cut off. Clearly the killer—or at least the guy employing the killer—wanted to make a statement.”
I nodded, then shrugged, then sat back so the waiter could deliver the Martinis. “All that makes sense, Dehan; what doesn’t make sense is that he delivered the head to Helena instead of Penelope.”
She sighed at her drink and sipped it. “That is kind of wrong, isn’t it? Unless…”
Her eyes became abstracted and she set down her drink carefully, as though she might spill it.
“Unless… OK, this sounds like reaching, but this guy is not only violent, he is also subtle and intelligent, OK?”
“OK.”
“So he wants to send a message to Penelope, but he also wants to claim her as his prize. He wants to own her—marry her. Obviously he knows that if he sends her her lover’s head in a box, it’s not exactly baubles and bangles and beads. What he needed is exactly the right degree of fear and horror to make her submit without making her run. So he sends it to the wife. That way he gets maximum publicity, ensures Penny hears about it, achieves maximum destruction of Jack’s reputation, but maintains enough distance so that Penelope can never be one hundred percent sure if it was him, or it wasn’t.”