by Blake Banner
I approached the fire. “Thank you, Mr. Lee. We won’t keep you.”
“That was quite a coincidence, your breaking down right in my driveway.”
I sat and gave him my most blank stare. “About as much of a coincidence as your returning from your travels on the very day we come looking for you.”
“Touché. I understand you want to ask me about Dave.”
“Yeah, just a couple of questions. When did he give you his article and his laptop?”
He stared at me for a long moment, then frowned and swallowed. “Excuse me?”
I repeated very deliberately, “When did he give you his article and his laptop, Mr. Lee?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, detective. Dave never gave me any article or any laptop. What makes you think he did?”
I frowned. “You were his attorney.”
“So?”
“He was a very cautious, suspicious, security-conscious man. He didn’t give it to Bob Shaw…” I shrugged and shook my head. “So I assumed he gave it to you.”
He gave a small laugh. “That’s a pretty big assumption, detective. And a mistaken one. In fact, I had started to distance myself from Dave some time before he died.”
Dehan put down her cup on the coffee table. “Oh, why’s that?”
He sighed. “To be perfectly honest, he was starting to grate on me.”
She scrunched up her brow. “Grate on you? What does that mean?”
“He was a class A narcissist. He thought the entire universe revolved around him, and treated people accordingly. I had known Dave and Samantha for a few years. I liked her. She was a good person and frankly deserved a damn sight better than Dave. I got tired of the way he treated her.”
I asked bluntly, “Were you in love with her.”
He laughed. “Oh no, you don’t! No, I was not in love with her. I just liked her. And he was an ass. And when I heard that he had shacked up with that girl…”
“Katie O’Connor?”
“Yeah, Katie O’Connor.”
“Who told you he’d shacked up with her?”
He blinked at me a few times. “Well, um, he did.”
“How come? I thought he’d gone off the radar.”
His eyes flitted around the room for a moment, then he gave a small laugh. “It’s a long time ago. I don’t remember the details, but as I recall it, he had just had this girl move in with him. He called me and we met for coffee…”
Dehan interrupted him. “What for?”
“Excuse me?”
“What did he call you for?”
“To have coffee.”
I sighed. “What my partner means, Mr. Lee, is that David had gone undercover. He was immersed in his investigation and typically, when he was doing that, he would not contact anybody at all. So what made him contact you at that time, aside from having coffee?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I honestly don’t recall.”
“And that was the last time you saw him alive.”
“Yes, I suppose it was.”
“You suppose it was?”
“It’s a figure of speech, detective. It was in fact the last time I saw him, alive or otherwise.”
“Did he at any time give you any indication of what his article was about?”
He shook his head again. “No, he never discussed his articles with me. That was between him and Bob.”
I nodded. “I just have a couple more questions, Mr. Lee, and then we’ll leave you in peace. Back then you specialized in intellectual property rights, is that correct?”
“Sure.”
“That must be a very lucrative area of law.”
He smiled. “Very much so. When you think about the kind of properties you’re dealing with.” He spread his hands. “Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter… You are talking about hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars’ worth of property every year. And the property is all ideas! Whom do those ideas belong to? Well, that’s where I come in, to help the judge decide.”
“I see, yes. Well, that kind of answers my second question. Why does a reporter need a lawyer?”
“Oh, sure! With a journalist, not only are you dealing with intellectual property rights, but also libel. You have to be very careful as a journalist. You are treading a very fine line.”
Dehan was smiling at the fire. She knew what was coming next. I made appreciative noises and said, “Wow, yeah. On a paper like the Telegraph that’s pretty important. You must have saved his bacon a couple of times.”
He gave a self-deprecating smile. “More than twice.”
“And here’s the thing that confuses me, Mr. Lee. How could you help him, if he never discussed his cases with you?”
He froze. Then after a moment, he laughed. “Kudos, Detective Stone. Well played. Naturally he discussed his cases with me. And as his attorney those discussions were, and are, covered by client confidentiality. I did not discuss his last article with him because, as I have explained to you, by then I had started to distance myself from him.”
Dehan spoke up suddenly. “How well do you know Shelly Pearce?”
He pushed out his bottom lip and shrugged. “Our paths cross occasionally, socially.”
I added, “How about Carol Hennessy?”
He looked surprised. “Senator Hennessy? Hardly at all. Again, our paths cross from time to time…”
I stood. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Lee. As you see, it really wasn’t worth hiding from us.”
“I assure you, that was not my…”
Dehan stood and cut across him, “But next time, you might be wise to!” He looked at her in alarm and she laughed and slapped his shoulder. “Just kidding, Jackson. Thanks for the coffee. See you around.”
He managed to force a laugh and walked us to the door. I put the hat in Dehan’s head, raised my collar, and we made a run for the Jag. I slammed the hood closed and we climbed in and closed the doors. Warped through the water on the windshield, I could see Lee watching us from the door. I turned the key and gunned the engine, then watched him step into the house and close the door.
I reversed onto the wet road and we headed off, on our long, wet journey back toward the Bronx.
TEN
As we emerged from the upper-middle class, leafy perfection of Oyster Bay, the rain was like a funeral procession of giant, wet shrouds marching in across the sodden landscape from the immensity of the Atlantic. We followed Cove Road south as far as the North Hempstead Turnpike, then turned west, following the empty highway through tall pines and the naked skeletons of other trees I could not identify. We drove in silence until I said, “Questions.”
“I have a couple: why did he lie about Dave not discussing his work with him? And why did he want to avoid seeing us…?”
I made a face and sighed. “Those questions sound unanswerable, Dehan. But what happens if we change the interrogative particle?”
She laughed. “The what now? The interrogative…?”
“Interrogative particle. The ‘W’ word, what, why, where…”
“And whom?”
“Yes, and also whom.”
“Okay, I know you don’t like ‘why’. It’s too open, I agree. Let me try. What made him lie about Dave not discussing his work with him? Okay, you’re right…”
“Two things immediately become clear, don’t they?”
“Yeah, either he did discuss the article with him, and he didn’t want us to know…”
“Or they fell out over something. Something serious enough for Dave to break his rule of not meeting people while he was on a story,”
“And something, maybe, serious enough for Lee to kill Dave and take the story and the laptop.”
“So what is our next question, avoiding the very open particle ‘why’?”
She thought for a moment. “What did they fall out over, that could be that serious?”
I nodded. “Yes, tha
t, and also, if he did take the laptop and the article, what stopped him from publishing it?”
She frowned at me and nodded. “It has to be worth a lot of money to the paper. The way Dave described it to Bob Shaw, it could be worth millions.”
We lapsed into silence again, hypnotized by the rhythm of the windshield wipers and the steady hum of the Jaguar moving ever forward through the long tunnel of winter trees, stark shapes twisted against the low ceiling of ash-gray clouds.
Eventually Dehan sighed. “You know how it is, Stone. It always comes back to one thing.”
“Sex?”
She looked at me a moment, then shrugged. “I was going to say love, but I guess they’re not so different in the end.”
“If we believe William James and Donald Symons, love is a powerful cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones, primarily oxytocin, dopamine, estrogen, and testosterone, that drive the most powerful elements of love,” I glanced at her. “Attachment, partner preference, and sex drive. Dopamine can make a person very goal-driven, and testosterone can give a person the aggression and the focus to do almost anything to achieve that goal.”
She looked away into the gray light. “That has to be the ugliest view of love I ever heard.”
I smiled. “I’d have to agree with you. Unfortunately it’s a view that is backed up by a lot of hard science.”
“Doesn’t it miss something? Isn’t there a little more to it than that?”
“I think so…” I hesitated for a second. “But that’s another discussion, to be had over a steak and a bottle of wine or two. The point is, sex and love are part and parcel, at least where murder is concerned.” I paused a moment to think about what I was saying. “Mothers, siblings, even children, might kill to protect their family. But murder, that dark drive to kill, that is usually fuelled by the darker side of love, isn’t it? The desire to possess, to own, to dominate, they are all appetites that are woven into the sex drive.”
She was frowning at me, like she was four and I had told her that Santa Claus had just shot Bugs Bunny down a dark ally and stolen his money so he could get drunk at the local clip joint.
“What about nurturing, care, respect, honor, tenderness…?”
I smiled at her. “Hey, don’t get me wrong, Dehan. I’m not saying that’s all there is. I’m not even saying that’s what I believe. All I am saying is, as you know yourself, ninety percent of murders are committed for love. Love has a dark side, and that dark side is all about possession, ownership and domination.”
“I guess.”
I was silent for a bit. Outside, the rain had eased. The wipers had slowed to a steady sixty beats per minute. A voice in my head was telling me to change the subject, but somebody else seemed to be operating my mouth.
“Those other elements, respect, tenderness, I guess those are what we are capable of distilling from those darker drives.” I glanced at her and gave a small shrug. “There are things the mighty god of science has not yet explained, Dehan. Consciousness and love are two of those things.”
She studied my face for a while as we approached Little Neck Bay and crossed over the bridge.
“I guess we got a bit sidetracked, huh?”
“I guess murder is not mechanical. Murder is a huge step for any person. It’s the product of deep, powerful passions. There is no harm in having some understanding of those passions. Ronald Laing said that life was a sexually transmitted disease, and that the mortality rate was one hundred percent. He might have added that murder was too.”
She nodded and looked away again. “You’re deep, Stone. You’re deep.” I snorted quietly, but she ignored me. “So it always comes back to love, and more specifically, sex. Are we saying that Lee and Samantha might have started having an affair?”
“It’s one possible motive, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh, but it raises two questions.” She lifted her left hand with two fingers raised. “One, why’d she go… Sorry, what made her go and marry somebody else, not Lee, after Dave was killed? And two, once again, what happened to the article and his laptop?”
“In answer to your first point, maybe it wasn’t mutual. She was feeling abandoned and frustrated because of Dave’s neglect. Lee was there. They had sex. For her it was an escape, for him it was more.”
“Okay, and the article?”
I thought for a moment, as we approached the Throgs Neck Bridge. “He realized that publication of the article posed a threat, not just to Dave, but to Samantha as well.”
“Huh… So if this is right, they meet to discuss the article and the risks involved in publishing it. Lee is already having an affair with Samantha, and it’s getting serious for him. Dave reveals the nature of the article and Lee sees the risks involved—forty-plus people have died already as a result of crossing this dame. He tells him not to do it, that he is putting Samantha in danger as well as himself.”
“How is that exactly? Spell it out for me.”
“Okay, we are assuming that Hennessy has a long track record of eliminating people who threaten to expose her or cross her in some way. Lee sees a risk that if Dave goes ahead with the article, Hennessy could threaten him, but she could also go after his wife.” She spread her hands. “If they take him out, the article could go ahead anyway, and worse still, give more credence to the story. Let’s face it, the Telegraph has a reputation for not giving in to intimidation. The murder of a journalist could just boost sales. But if she threatens Dave’s wife, he may not publish at all. All I am saying is that Lee might have seen this possibility.”
I nodded. “Okay, it’s possible.”
“But Dave doesn’t give a damn. He’s going ahead anyway. So Lee goes to see him, kills him, and takes the article and the laptop and drops them in the Hudson.”
“Hmmm…”
“Hmmm?”
“It’s almost a perfect fit. How would we prove it?”
“That’s tricky. We would need a confession from Samantha that she had an affair with Lee, just to get started. We could get them both in for questioning and play them against each other.”
I shook my head. “Lee would plead the fifth, hire a team of lawyers, and long before we got to trial he’d see we had squat. And we’d never get to trial because the DA would also see we had squat. And before that happened, we wouldn’t even be able to charge him.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“For the moment I think the Lee-Samantha avenue is blocked, but if there is anything in it, it might open up if we approach from another angle.”
“What angle?”
“Hennessy. I think I’d like to poke Hennessy and see if she jumps.”
“Seriously?” She frowned at me. “What will you poke her with? You just said we had squat.”
I grinned. “Squat can hurt if you sharpen it enough. At the very least it can look scary.”
We joined the Cross Bronx Expressway and the traffic started to get heavier. Dehan said, “You want to put that into plain language?”
“You ever heard of Milton Erickson?”
“No. Should I have?”
“He was a surgeon, a psychiatrist, and a hypnotist. He came up with this idea of being ‘artfully vague.’”
“Artfully vague?”
“Yeah. If I say to you, ‘You are feeling all those feelings you get when you start to feel sleepy,’ even though I haven’t mentioned any of those feelings, your mind will automatically supply them. You might even start to feel sleepy.”
“Huh. Okay, so…?”
“I say to you, ‘In his study, he had all the things you’d expect from an old-fashioned gentleman.’ I haven’t mentioned a single stick of furniture, but your mind has produced all the images of what you would expect in an old-fashioned gentleman’s study. Right?”
“Yup.”
“So if I suggest something to you, but I am artfully vague about the details, your brain will unconsciously supply what’s missing. What I am curious to find out is, if I suggest, in an artfully va
gue way, to Carol Hennessy, that we have new information about David Thorndike and his article, what details will her brain supply? And how will she respond? If I poke her, how will she jump?”
“I agree that would be interesting, but, Stone, what precisely are we trying to find out?”
I took a deep breath. It was a good question. “I think what I would really like to know right now is, did Carol Hennessy know that David Thorndike was investigating her? And, if so, did she know that he was ready to publish his article? The answer to those two questions would focus our investigation.”
We had pulled onto the Boulevard and were approaching the turn off for the 43rd. Dehan grunted. “You’re a devious son of a bitch, Stone. You promised me lunch on the way. You got me soaked, made me lie to an attorney, filled my head with suggestive ambiguity, and never even bought me lunch.”
I spoke without thinking and an ugly gnome in my head started beating an alarm bell with an iron hammer. I tried hard to ignore it.
“You’re right. Tell you what, I’ll get some sandwiches and coffee from the deli. You find a number for Carol Hennessy, and tonight we’ll grab a couple of steaks and a bottle of wine to make up for lunch. Whaddya say?”
I thought she hesitated a moment. “Yeah, sounds good.”
“You got other plans?”
She shook her head. “Nope. No other plans.”
“Good.”
I pulled into the parking lot at the station house and we climbed out into the heavy drizzle. I watched her run across the road in her long coat with her hat squashed on her head and run up the two steps into the porch. Then I made my way down to the deli on the corner to get lunch.
All the way there and all the way back, I kept turning over a single fact. It didn’t tell me anything, it didn’t lead me anywhere that I could see, but I knew it was important; not just important, it was central. Yet I couldn’t see what it meant.
Jackson Lee had not stolen the article and the laptop. Because the article and the laptop had disappeared from the apartment before David had been killed. That meant that David—and by the looks of it, only David—knew where his laptop and the article were.
Whoever killed him, did not kill him to get the article. And that fact was crucial, but I couldn’t see how.