by R. G. Belsky
I wasn’t judging her, and I didn’t think she was a terrible person. I didn’t think much of anything about her. All I wanted from Melissa Hunt was information—anything I could pry out of her—about Charles Hollister in the days and weeks before his death.
I told her about Hollister visiting a lot of the people from his past including his ex-wives and Laura Bateman’s mother.
I asked her if he’d ever talked about that with her—or if she remembered anything else like that he’d told her.
“Oh, my God, yes, he talked about it constantly,” she said. “All about taking a hard look at his past and all the things he’d done wrong over the years. I didn’t understand a lot of it. But he was on a wacky self-analysis trip, all right. Did you know he even went back to Vietnam?”
“I did not.”
“He flew over there for a few days. Said he wanted to revisit the places he’d been there, see that country again.”
“Did he tell you any more about the trip to Vietnam?”
“He said he had a lot of regrets about his life. Vietnam was a part of it. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. But he did tell me he’d done something really bad over there. And how that haunted him now. It didn’t make sense to me that he’d be so upset now over whatever happened that long ago. I mean, it was a war. People do bad things in a war, right? But I just let him talk. He didn’t even seem to be talking to me anyway. More like he was talking to himself. I did ask him what was the point of traveling all that way back there now. I said it just didn’t make sense to me. He said a strange thing then. He told me:
“‘I had to go back to Vietnam in an effort to understand myself better. What I was like back then. What influence everything that happened to me there in the past had on me. And how I got to be the person I am today.’ That’s what Charles said. Weird, huh?”
During my conversation with Melissa Hunt, she got a phone call. It was from Wayne Kanieski, her estranged husband who had threatened Charles Hollister over her. The one she said she did not need once she met Hollister.
She was friendly to him now. After she got off the phone, she told me they’d gotten back together since Hollister’s death. That they were talking about living together again. I guess it was like she’d said to me earlier: “A woman’s gotta look out for herself, she has to move on.”
Yep, Melissa Hunt had moved on from Hollister now that he was dead. I felt sorry for her. I didn’t think her marriage to Wayne Kanieski would survive. Or that she’d ever be a star in movies or TV. But none of that had anything to do with me.
I did have one more question I wanted to ask her before I left.
“You told me last time Hollister was obsessed with his newspaper at the end. That he talked about it all the time. Was there anything else besides the newspaper—and the stuff about his past—that you remember him talking about before his death?”
She laughed now.
“Well, there was the cheese …”
“Pardon me?”
“I happened to overhear one of his calls. It was actually the last time I saw him. He was talking about cheese.”
“Cheese?”
“I think the conversation was about cheese. Swiss cheese. It must have been. He was talking to someone on the phone and he kept saying the word ‘Swiss.’ Didn’t make sense to me—and he wouldn’t answer when I asked him about it. But what else could he have been referring to? What else is Swiss besides Swiss cheese?”
“Lots of things. Swiss clocks. Swiss Army knives. Swiss Alps.”
“I guess it might have been one of them. The only thing I thought of was Swiss cheese. But yes, I suppose Charles could have been talking about something else that was Swiss.”
He sure could have been, I thought to myself.
Because I just remembered something else that was Swiss.
Swiss bank accounts.
Charles Hollister must have been talking to someone on the phone that last day about the missing money from the company funds.
But who?
“Do you have any idea at all who was on the phone with him?” I asked Melissa Hunt
“He never told me. But Charles sounded very agitated. Very upset. Very angry with the person on the other end of the line.”
“You don’t know who that was?”
“No.”
“Is there anything else you remember at all about that last phone call?”
“Just that Charles said a strange thing to the person on the phone before he hung up. It didn’t make sense to me. At the end of their conversation, he said: ‘Don’t call me Charlie anymore.’”
CHAPTER 60
BERT STOVALL WASN’T at his office in the Hollister Towers building when I tried to reach him there. Or, if he was, he wasn’t letting me know about it. Maybe he figured out that sooner or later I would be back with more questions about his longtime friend Charles Hollister. I mean, Stovall was the only person that Hollister ever let call him “Charlie.”
Just to be sure, I left Stovall a voice mail message that said:
“I want to talk to you about Charles Hollister. And about Swiss bank accounts. I understand you had a big argument with him about that right before he died. I also want to talk to you about Victor Endicott, the private investigator. Specifically, about that security video from outside Hollister’s townhouse on the night before he was found dead. The one where everything else was deleted except the footage of Charles Jr. I’m betting Endicott might have had more footage of that beyond what we found in his office that showed someone else—maybe someone like you—there that night.”
I thought that would get Stovall’s attention, one way or another.
I was able to track down a home address for Stovall, a posh high-rise on Sutton Place, and checked that out, but he wasn’t there.
I even went back to the Hollister townhouse on Fifth Avenue in case he was there meeting with Laurie Bateman, his new boss, about business matters. No luck.
Finally, I wandered back to the office on Park Avenue South of Victor Endicott, the private investigator. I wasn’t exactly sure why I did that, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to look for Stovall. Besides, Endicott had worked for a lot of people involved in the Hollister company. Charles Hollister. Laurie Bateman. Charles Jr. So why not work for someone else, too? Someone like Bert Stovall?
I didn’t think I’d be able to get into Endicott’s office this time without the police. But it was open. That should have been my first clue something was wrong. It certainly wasn’t very smart to go in there without knowing who was inside. But, from long practice of not doing smart things, I pushed the door open and walked into Endicott’s office.
I heard sounds coming from one of the rooms. I pushed open the door and saw a shadowy figure in there, holding a flashlight. A man was at a filing cabinet, going through files. He suddenly realized I was there, whirled around, and turned on the lights.
It was Bert Stovall.
“Find anything you’re looking for?” I said.
“What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“You’re the one who murdered Charles Hollister, aren’t you? That’s the real story here. The story I’ve been missing for the whole time.”
Stovall reached into his pocket now, took out a gun, and pointed it at me.
The gun was a surprise.
He hadn’t brought a gun the time he murdered Charles Hollister; he’d used Laurie Bateman’s, which was already there.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you tell that story on the air,” he said.
Suddenly, my cell phone started ringing. I’d had it in my hand when I walked into the Endicott office and so I was able to look down and see who was calling me. It was Nick Pollock. We’d talked about getting together after I finished work for another conversation about the case.
“Don’t answer that!” Stovall snapped.
“It’s the Treasu
ry agent working on your case.”
“Even more reason not to answer.”
I tried to think of some reason to make up that would convince him to let me answer Nick Pollock’s call.
“I told Pollock I was coming here to search Endicott’s offices again,” I blurted out. “If I don’t answer, he’s going to come here looking for me. I don’t want him hurt, too. At least let me convince him not to come.”
It worked. Stovall hesitated for a second, then nodded. “Okay, take the call. But don’t tell him anything. Just say you can’t meet him right now.”
I answered the phone. Stovall kept the gun pointed at me as I talked with Nick Pollock.
“Don’t come over to Endicott’s office like we talked about,” I said. “There’s nothing here. It’s a waste of time.”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
I tried to think of how I could send him a message that I was in trouble. I’d already let him know where I was. But I needed to convince him something was terribly wrong about the situation.
Something that wouldn’t tip off Stovall to what I was doing.
“Look, how about you come over to my place later and we can spend the night together. Just the two of us in bed. That was amazing what we did last time. My body is still tingling all over from the way you touched me. Honey, I want to screw your brains out. I’m going to give you the best sex you ever had. Doesn’t that make you hot, Nick?”
I hung up before he could answer.
Now I could only hope that it worked to tip him off I was in trouble. And, if it did, I had to buy enough time for Nick Pollock to come and save me. The only way to do that was to keep talking with Bert Stovall. Which is what I did. Stovall didn’t say a lot at first, just a few words here and there or nodding to acknowledge that I was right about everything.
But I think he wanted to tell his story to someone.
Even to a woman he was planning to kill.
He’d held onto his secrets for a long time.
“You found out that Charles Hollister had been in contact with federal Treasury investigators,” I said. “Hollister had discovered that it was you who’d been stealing money for years from the company account. He was ready to make a deal with the feds.
“You couldn’t allow that to happen. You argued with him, first over the phone and then you went back to his house that night. And you killed him. Then you probably paid Endicott to remove that security video from the townhouse—and delete you from it too—so no one would ever know you were there that night.
“Even more importantly, you got Endicott to put together that phony phone message from Hollister, made up of previous audio he’d collected during his surveillance. Then you or he called his office and left the message with that audio so it sounded as if he was still alive in the morning. Which pointed the finger of guilt at Laurie Bateman—instead of you—when she showed up at the apartment the next morning.
“You must have had to pay Endicott a lot of money to do all that dirty work for you. But it was worth it, right? I mean look at the results …
“Hollister was dead and unable to talk to the feds; Laurie Bateman was in jail and couldn’t claim any inheritance or position in the company once she was convicted; Charles had already been written out of the will and his mother was dead and his sister ostracized from the family. That left you to take over the entire Hollister business, which was probably your dream for a long time as you watched your old friend Hollister get richer and more famous and more powerful. Yep, this would have been the perfect crime for you. Until I came along and messed everything up.”
Stovall still had the gun in his hand, but he was holding it casually now, not pointing it at me anymore. He didn’t say anything. He seemed lost in thought.
“Did I get it all right?” I asked him now.
“Not everything. You see, I never wanted Laurie to be blamed for the murder. That was a mistake—it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. That’s why I even testified in her defense at the murder hearing. I’m glad it was Laurie who wound up taking over the company. I would never do anything to hurt Laurie Bateman. My God, Laurie is the most important thing in the world to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m her father.”
CHAPTER 61
I’D BEEN LOOKING for the Vietnam connection between Laurie Bateman and Charles Hollister since the beginning of this story. I’d suspected that Hollister might actually have been her birth father, as crazy as that sounded. But it wasn’t Hollister who was Laurie Bateman’s father. It was Bert Stovall, his lifelong friend and business partner. Which seemed even crazier.
“Charlie and I spent two more years in South Vietnam after the U.S. combat forces pulled out in ’73,” he said. “No one was supposed to know we were there or what we were doing. It was all top-secret. We were both in Army intelligence, and the idea was that we’d work with the South Vietnamese government as long as we could to get information—military, scientific, technological—that we could take with us when the last remnants of the U.S forces left the country. That’s why you—or anyone else—never found out we were still there until the end of the South Vietnamese government in 1975.”
The missing two years in Charles Hollister’s life, I thought to myself.
“One of the things we found out about early on while we were there was the work in colleges being done by Pham Van Quong and his friend Le Binh. They were studying at one of the universities in Saigon, and their idea about computers was so exciting that we didn’t tell anyone else about it. We knew how valuable it could be.
“We decided we would try to team up with them and be a part of it. But, in order to keep it secret, we needed to get them out of Vietnam so no one else could find out about the microchip. That’s why we arranged to have Pham sent to college in America. To get him out of the picture and make him dependent on us. But Le Binh said he was going to stay in Saigon until the war came to an end—and even deal with the Communists, if it came to that.”
“Except he died before he could do that,” I said. “Charles Hollister killed him.”
Stovall shook his head no.
“Charlie didn’t kill him. I did. Oh, I know he got all the awards and hero stuff for it, but it was me. I shot Binh, created the story about him trying to bomb the U.S. facility—and let Charlie take all the credit. He was happy to be the hero, even if he never knew the real story of what happened.”
“Why would he do that?”
“That’s the way things always worked between Charlie and me. He liked to be famous, he liked the notoriety, he always wanted to be in the spotlight. It was like that back in Vietnam and it’s been like that for us all these years ever since. He has always been the face of the Hollister business, the ultimate celebrity tycoon—while I remained in the background. I preferred it that way.”
“What about the little girl who grew up to be Laurie Bateman?” I asked. “Tell me about her.”
“After Pham Van Quong went to the U.S., his wife was left alone in Vietnam. She was a beautiful woman. And, when it became clear the Communists were going to take over soon, she was willing to do anything to get someone to help her—someone like me—make plans to get to America.
“I took advantage of that. I slept with her after her husband was gone. She became pregnant and gave birth to a little girl. It was mine, she told me that—and I know she was telling the truth. So, at the end of the war just before I left for good, I made good on my promise to her. I got both of them out of the country and relocated to Los Angeles.
“I thought that was the end of it. But after she came to America with a baby that her husband knew could not have been his, Pham started asking a lot of questions. About the identity of the father, about the death of his friend in Vietnam—and demanding answers about how we were going to split up the big profits we all believed were coming with their microchip idea.”
“So you ran him down in front of the college one night,” I said. “You kil
led him. Or thought you killed him. It didn’t matter though, did it? Because, one way or the other, he was out of the picture now. You and Hollister were free to make yourself rich on Pham’s idea. Just out of curiosity, how much did Hollister know about all this?”
“I never told him much. Not until the end. Until then, I let him think whatever he wanted to think, while I did the dirty work. I even managed to convince him that the microchip really had been our idea, not that I had stolen it from Pham Van Quong and Le Binh. He didn’t know about the Los Angeles hit-and-run either. And especially not about Laurie Bateman. That he was married to the ‘daughter’—or at least she was supposed to be the daughter—of the man he stole his billion-dollar idea from.”
“But how did the marriage happen?”
“I never talked to Laurie’s mother after they settled in America. But I followed her and my baby over the years. It was hard not to once Laurie Bateman became so famous. One night a few years ago, Charlie and I were at that event in LA with a lot of celebrities that I told you about, and one of them was Laurie Bateman. There she was, my baby—all grown up. I made a point of making sure Charlie and she got introduced. I remembered how much Charlie loved beautiful Vietnamese women back when we were in Saigon—hell, I was lucky I got to sleep with her mother instead of Charlie. I guess I was hoping something would happen between him and Laurie that night. And it sure did. I’m not sure why I set their romance all in motion like that. At first, I guess I just thought it was funny. He wound up married to my daughter. Even though he didn’t know that. It gave me an edge on him, I guess—just in case I ever needed it.”
“Did she know?”
“No, Laurie had no idea.”
“And Hollister?”
“He never knew either.”