“You’re right.”
“He saved ME. But everything we’d planned, the months of work, went in the wastebasket.”
“Rusty went to Brazil—” Merry said.
“My father went to Greenwich for Christmas,” Peter added. “The SEC launched an investigation into Rusty’s activities—”
“—and a month later, I went to Max Mason’s funeral,” Scott concluded. “I have never felt so heavy-hearted and lost in my life as I did on that day. Nosir.”
The September sunlight faded early, and in the space of their conversation Betty Scott’s easel had moved into shadow. Peter drifted over to the window in the silence that followed Scott’s final comment. Betty was painting her roses. Her carriage was erect, and her grace, like the house’s, was built into the bone. As he watched, she reached for a copper-pink bud and touched it to her nose; the color glowed on her porcelain skin like sunlight on clear water. Betty must have felt his eyes upon her, because she waved at the window, with a smile meant for Malcolm that included him in its compass.
He felt a twinge of loneliness. These two had grown old together through the decades, in the certainty that their last years would be spent on these lawns, under the spreading trees and the lengthening shadows. And he had no one.
“That’s the hardest thing about learning to die,” Scott said, and his voice cracked. He had left the desk and was standing at Peter’s right elbow. “I don’t know what will become of her after I’m gone.” Abruptly, he abandoned them for the front hall.
“I guess we’re done.” Merry flipped closed her laptop.
At the front door, she offered her hand to Malcolm Scott. “Thank you for being so forthright. I’ll let you know what I learn about Rusty’s death.”
“And my apologies for taking so many years to ask,” Peter said.
Scott’s face wore a listening expression, but it wasn’t for them. There was the sudden sound of many wheels rolling on iron, and an instant later, a train’s plaintive blast rent the twilight air. Scott smiled the delighted smile of the very young.
“The evening train. I listen for it, any time of day. Can’t get to sleep the first week we’re in Florida, I’m so used to waiting for the whistle. Used to take the New Haven line into Manhattan in my foolish Yale youth, went to the debutante balls. Met Betty at one of those things, matter of fact.”
He took Merry’s elbow and shook it gently. “Walked down to that train every morning for forty-five years until I didn’t have to anymore. First day of the rest of my life, I walked down anyway. Bought a paper from Reggie, the station newsboy, and watched the rest of ’em getting off to Gotham. Hah! Newsboy. He’s seventy if he’s a day.”
He started to push open the screen door for them and then stopped. “You said you found some pictures and letters in Rusty’s things,” he said. “What’d they say?”
Merry hesitated an instant. “I’d like to talk to the people who received them before I discuss them,” she said.
“Blackmail, huh?” Scott said, an edge of satisfaction in his voice. “Figures. He knew how to turn a trick, that boy.”
Merry reached into her briefcase and pulled out the photograph that had washed up on the beach. “There’s no reason you can’t see this,” she said.
Malcolm Scott took the snapshot in a hand that shook slightly with age, and adjusted his spectacles. Then a curiously set expression came across his drawn features. He thrust the photograph back at Merry without a word.
“Any idea who she is, sir?”
“None at all,” Scott said. “It’s time you were going.”
Merry sighed as she steered the Toyota toward Manhattan and Sky Tate-Jackson. “My mother was painting a portrait of Billy when she killed herself. It’s still on her easel, in the middle of our hallway, unfinished. No one seems to know what to do with it. So we leave it there, like a postcard from the grave.” She looked over her shoulder and waved at Malcolm Scott. “He’s a canny old bastard.”
“He told us everything he knew.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Don’t you?”
“The most important thing is missing—the name of the person who told Rusty about Max’s merger plans, and the one who told Max that Rusty was doing him dirty behind his back.”
“The source,” Peter said. “My father would have punished that kind of betrayal. You think Malcolm Scott is protecting him?”
“Could be. You can check my notes, but I believe his exact words were that he couldn’t tell us, not that he didn’t actually know.”
Peter looked at her soberly. “Whoever it is has a hell of a motive for murder.”
Chapter 23
Night was falling over New York City, and pinpoints of light sprang into life behind a thousand office windows. The lawyers and the bankers and the raiders and their secretaries were getting their second wind before plunging on into the evening hours; in their minds, the day was still young. Peter had told Merry he’d never taken a train out of the city before midnight without seeing an endless tide of workers borne late into suburban homes. There was no meaning to rush hour in this place. Sky understood that, and lived by the same code. He would still be at his firm this evening.
They were sitting in the trim, modern, graphite-colored chairs that Mayling probably had chosen for Sky’s office. Peter was familiar enough with the place to enter it unannounced. Merry could barely make out his features: they hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. Merry saw a city skyline too rarely to miss this dazzling Manhattan view.
“Peter.” Sky shut his office door firmly and crossed the room with his lanky stride. He was admirably in command of himself. Perhaps, Merry thought, he’s known that he must face this sooner or later.
“I’ve brought Detective Folger with me.”
Merry rose and straightened her skirt, impossibly wrinkled after the long day of travel. Sky Tate-Jackson took her hand in his—a light, dry shake. He was like a character actor from a BBC production, she thought: fine features and height held together by good manners.
“You’ve seen Malcolm Scott?” He threw his suit jacket over the back of his desk chair and stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass that served as both wall and window, his hands in his pockets, surveying the city fifty-eight floors below. He had not bothered to turn on a light either.
“We have.” Merry reached into her briefcase and withdrew a piece of paper. “I’d appreciate it if you’d look this over, Mr. Tate-Jackson.”
“What is it?”
“A letter from Rusty Mason. The one he probably sent you sometime last week.”
“Did Mayling give it to you?”
“So he did send it,” Peter broke in. “I’ll be damned. When I told you he’d been killed, you let me think that you didn’t know he was coming to the island.”
Sky ignored Merry’s outstretched hand. She dropped the paper on his desk.
“No, Mayling didn’t give it to me,” she said. “Actually, this one’s a copy. It was found when Rusty’s things washed up on Siasconset beach, a few hundred feet from your door.”
“It’s like him to make a copy,” Sky said bitterly. “But you’re wrong about the timing. I didn’t read that letter until the morning after he died.”
“Labor Day.”
“I flew up to Nantucket on Sunday evening, if you remember. I didn’t bother to look at my few pieces of mail until the next day.”
“That’s a little hard to believe.”
“The truth sometimes is. Especially where Rusty’s concerned.”
“It’s far easier, for instance,” Merry said, “to envision you receiving this letter in New York instead of on the island, flying back to Nantucket to meet—and kill—him, then putting on a good face the next day when Peter found you fishing for blues in the fog. I have to take that scenario seriously.”
“What did he have on you, Sky?” Peter asked.
“What did Rusty have on anybody? Our collective stupidity, the fact that we were naive enough to care about someone who cared only about himself.”
“I assume it was your life at stake,” Merry said, “or at least, life as you know it.”
“That’s a good start.” He laughed. “Christ, it was brilliant. If you’ve met with Scott, you know what Rusty did. Or attempted to do. He shot the moon and got himself fucked.”
“Do you know where he got his inside information?” Merry asked.
“He had some sort of source within ME, that’s all I know.” Sky paused. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it was Scott himself. I’ve wondered for years if Malcolm got antsy in his old age and used Rusty to move against Max. It wouldn’t be the first time in corporate history.”
“I don’t think so,” Peter said. “Not after talking to Scott. He’s sick and he hasn’t much time left. I think he’d have told us if he had something that serious to get off his chest.”
“Whoever it was panicked when Hazlitt got involved. The source went to Max with the story. Max scrapped his takeover plans. No surprise. But it left your brother with nowhere to hide. That’s when he came to me.”
They waited. After a moment, Sky went on, his words coming more slowly now.
“I was clerking on the First Circuit. He showed up in Boston in the middle of the night, without a coat, in the middle of a snowstorm, looking crazed. He’d gotten himself in too deep. Hazlitt had ‘lent’ him the funds to buy a huge block of stock—”
“ME stock?” Peter broke in.
Sky shook his head. “The target of the takeover. I’ve forgotten the name.”
“Ultracom,” Merry said.
“A takeover bid drives up the price of the target company’s stock, as you know. It usually drives down the stock of the raider company—in this case, ME. Rusty bought his block before Max published his offer to Ultracom stockholders, and waited for the price per share to rise. He knew that when Hazlitt challenged Max’s offer, the stock would soar even higher. He figured he’d sell his block a few days later, at a huge profit, and repay Hazlitt’s ‘loan.’”
“But then Hazlitt went after ME and Max pulled out of the bid,” Merry said. “The Ultracom stock must have plummeted. No profit for Rusty, no payment for Hazlitt. I wonder if the creep called in the loan.”
“Why do you think he made it in the first place?”
“Sorry?”
“The loan,” Sky said impatiently. “Hazlitt gave Rusty that money for leverage. He wanted a way to get Rusty’s stock.”
“His ME stock,” Peter said, comprehension dawning.
“Exactly. The seven percent of voting shares held by each of Max’s children. Max had—what, thirty percent?—and he voted your shares with his own until you reached the age of twenty-five. Is that right?”
Peter nodded. “We inherited the stock from my grandmother, split three ways. A trust. I never thought about it until Max died.”
“So Max controlled fifty-one percent of the stock, with the rest held publicly. Even if Hazlitt was able to buy up the other forty-nine percent, he needed part of Max’s voting power. Otherwise the whole gamble was for naught.”
“He needed Rusty’s part,” Merry said.
“Rusty turned twenty-five that year.” Peter was thinking out loud. “Hazlitt gets him in debt, and then forces him to sell his shares.”
“Rusty refused, apparently,” Sky said.
“You’re kidding.”
“It was the only bargaining chip he had. He told Hazlitt he’d vote with him in return for Max’s job.”
“Jesus.” Peter’s voice held shock. “There wouldn’t have been a job. Hazlitt would have cut the company into bits and sold off the pieces.”
“None of that really mattered anyway,” Sky said. “The stock, the debt—they were the least of Rusty’s problems.”
“Max discovered he’d leaked the takeover information to Hazlitt,” Merry said smoothly.
“And turned his son in,” Sky concluded. “Rusty came to me for advice. As if an appellate clerk could help him.”
“You told him to leave the country?” Merry asked.
“I told him if Hazlitt didn’t get him, the SEC would. I told him to make a clean breast of it and take the consequences. I remember what he said to me: ‘I’ll be damned if I graduated from Princeton to rot in a federal jail. I’ll die first.’”
“And so he did,” Peter murmured. “On my doorstep.”
“A lot of twenty-five-year-olds have been made idiots by a love of money and power,” Sky said. “But none so completely as your brother.”
That horrible year, Merry thought. The year Peter lost Alison. And his brother. And finally, Max. He must have lost a bit of himself as well.
“Why didn’t Rusty come to me then, Sky?” Peter said.
“I should think that was obvious. Because he’d failed.”
The room was now wholly dark, the floor checkered with bars of reflected light from the office windows opposite and the glow of Merry’s computer. They had all fallen silent—Sky seemed lost in thought; Merry watchful; Peter oppressed by the weight of old disaster. The wind whined around the building’s height. Sky switched on a black metal desk lamp, flooding the lacquered wood with a disk of light.
“He called when he got to Rio,” he said. “I’d email once in a while, although less and less frequently as the years passed. He never answered me—I think he was afraid of cyber traces. It wasn’t until about two years ago that he started to rehash the past. Some business deals hadn’t worked out as he’d planned, and the tone of his letters changed; he seemed to have grown bitter. I don’t know. Maybe he realized this exile was endless.”
Merry glanced at Peter and mouthed the word “AIDS.” Peter nodded.
“He wrote and asked what the statute of limitations was for prosecuting insider trading, and God help me, I told him the truth,” Sky said. “I told him that when the subject flees the country, and a sealed indictment is handed down by a grand jury, there is no limit on the duration of liability. He’d be picked up at any border the minute he tried to reenter the US.”
“You wanted him to stay away, didn’t you, Mr. Tate-Jackson?” Merry said.
“Didn’t everybody?”
She ignored him and went on. “Because whether he was picked up or not, he was dangerous. He knew you’d lied to the SEC investigators who pursued the case, and then to a grand jury. You told no one what Rusty had done or where he was living. Withholding information from federal officials is not only a punishable offense; if you’re a lawyer, it’s grounds for disbarment.”
“I don’t know why he had to ruin my life, too,” Sky said quietly. “I’d tried to help him. It isn’t fair, dammit. It isn’t fair.”
“No, it’s not,” Peter said. “For what it’s worth, Sky, I’m sorry.”
“Do you believe me when I say I didn’t kill him?”
“I find it hard to believe that anyone I know killed Rusty. But Detective Folger doesn’t have that problem. And her mind is turning over a lot of facts about you and Mayling.”
“Mayling?” Sky was startled, and, Merry thought, really afraid for the first time. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”
“How did she damage the front end of her Mercedes, Mr. Tate-Jackson?” Merry asked. “There’s no accident report. She told me she picked you up at the airport around eight—but the attendant at Cape Air says you waited for almost an hour, then took a taxi. Is that right?”
Sky’s face had frozen.
>
Merry and Peter waited.
“Okay, yes, she damaged the car that night,” he muttered furiously. “The night Rusty died. I have no idea how it happened.”
“You weren’t in the car, then.”
“No. No—as you said, Mayling was supposed to meet me at the airport. I’d texted her my ETA, which was a few minutes after eight o’clock, and when she hadn’t shown by eight forty-five, I called a taxi. I got to the house—it’s only about a seven-minute drive—and neither she nor the car was there. I figured she’d somehow missed the message and had gone into town for dinner with friends. But when she came back at midnight, she was incoherent.”
His voice faltered, and he looked down at his clenched hands. “I don’t know how to explain this—she’s been having something like blackouts for some time, now. She functions normally, but she doesn’t remember where she’s been, who she’s met, or what she’s done.”
“Drinking?” Merry asked.
“I don’t think so. We ran her through a series of tests in the spring. The doctors were looking for a brain tumor. They’ve decided it’s stress.” He laughed hollowly. “Stress. She’s been on the island doodling in the sun for three months now.
“That night, she couldn’t tell me what she’d been doing or where she’d gone—she just fell into bed. The next morning, when I’d seen the damage and asked her about it, she couldn’t remember a thing. She said vaguely she’d probably hit a deer. Labor Day weekend, with no warning, and Rusty dead on the road. I don’t know what to think, I really don’t.”
Merry hesitated. She had bided her time to confront Mayling Stern with the evidence she was slowly, inexorably gathering. She had deliberately withheld her knowledge of the damaged car, so carefully hidden in the garage. By probing Sky, she could be sending his companion to New York on the next plane, and from there, anywhere on the globe. It was a risk she’d have to take.
“If she thought Rusty could destroy your life, would Mayling try to protect you, Mr. Tate-Jackson?”
Death in the Off-Season Page 21