The Guilty Dead

by P. J. Tracy

  Magozzi wasn’t saying much, just listening, which meant Grace had something important and pertinent to say, or she would never have bothered him while they were working a case. It was intriguing, but it was also scary, because with Monkeewrench, you never knew what might be coming your way. But scarier was the look on Magozzi’s face when he hung up.

  “What? What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”

  “No. Monkeewrench thinks that City Hall might be a target of a terror attack.”

  “What? Are they sure? How do they know?” Gino squeezed his temples. “Oh, God, did I just ask that stupid question?”

  “Grace just told me this morning that they’ve been developing a new program to isolate terror threats the feds might miss. I had no idea they were already running a beta test, and that’s what the test came up with.”

  “Is this imminent? I mean, do I need to call Angela and tell her and the kids to stay out of downtown?”

  “The program is in its infancy so they don’t know about the accuracy, but the feds and our Joint Terrorism Task Force are on it. But, yeah, I’d call Angela and tell her they don’t need to be downtown.”

  “And we’re just supposed to mosey on along, business as usual, and City Hall might be a pile of cinders by the time we get back there? Are you kidding me?”

  “We do our job, the dedicated task forces do theirs. We don’t have anything to bring to that party, Gino. There are great people working this right now.”

  Gino stabbed the elevator call button again. “Christ. I thought we already got our bad news for the day.”

  “There’s a lot to go around. Come on, the Norwoods are expecting us.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  BETTY NORWOOD ANSWERED the door. She was an elegant older woman, deeply tanned, perfectly coiffed, and dressed in a dark linen suit appropriate for mourning, but her skeletal frame was startling. In the modern era, you could never be too rich or too thin and they often went hand in hand, at least if you were a woman. Historically, it was just the opposite: being plump and pale indicated your status as a member of the landed gentry. It was weird how things reversed course.

  The daughter, Rosalie, hovered behind her, equally well-dressed and coiffed, with brown curls arranged carefully to cascade over her shoulders. She was a more mature version of the beautiful young girl they’d seen in the family photos in Gregory Norwood’s office, but the striking brown eyes that had stared at them from the framed prints hadn’t changed. If anything, they had gathered intensity over the years.

  In stark contrast to her mother, she was fit, well-built and still blessed with the ephemeral beauty of youth, but despair and disbelief weighed down her pretty features. Both women’s eyes were red and swollen and their expressions utterly vacant, as if shock had leached away all capacity for emotion.

  “Please come in, Detectives,” Betty said, as perfunctorily as an automaton, stepping aside.

  “We are so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Norwood, Ms.…”

  “Norwood, but please call me Rosalie.”

  “Thank you for seeing us during this terrible time.” Magozzi repeated almost verbatim what he’d said to Robert Zeller, but the level of devastation here was a thousand times greater and the words fell flat.

  “Thank you for coming.” Betty gestured to a pair of wing chairs by a large window, a stoic hostess in spite of the circumstances. She was renowned for her elegant dinner parties ‒ gracious hospitality probably came as naturally to her as breathing. “Please, sit.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Father didn’t kill himself,” Rosalie blurted out, then started crying softly, defusing the room’s air of formality in an instant. “He would never do such a terrible thing. He would never leave his family, especially today of all days. We were going to spread Trey’s ashes in the river …” Her voice faded away as tears dripped steadily down her face.

  There was poignant honesty in her raw emotion, and Magozzi was reminded that grief was the cost of love and it pillaged everybody in exactly the same way, regardless of socio-economic status. It was the great equalizer.

  Betty placed a tender hand on her daughter’s shoulder and discreetly passed her a tissue. “I have to agree with Rosalie, Detectives. Gregory would never have killed himself. Not because of Trey and not because of cancer. He was murdered. It’s the only explanation.”

  She’d spoken with effortless authority, and Magozzi had to concentrate to keep his expression neutral. This was a very different narrative than Robert Zeller’s, who seemed resigned to the possibility of suicide. The challenge was figuring out which party really knew Gregory Norwood best.

  Gino leaned forward and folded his hands in his lap. “Mrs. Norwood, it’s understandable that your husband would be depressed on this day and his cancer diagnosis would have compounded that greatly …”

  “No, Detective. I understand what you’re asking and the answer is no. Gregory did not kill himself. We were married for over forty years and I would have known if he’d been having suicidal thoughts.”

  Magozzi disagreed with her on that point, but he remained silent.

  “Rosalie would have known, too,” she continued. “She’s been working very closely with her father in the family business for several years. She might even know his moods better than I do. Isn’t that right, dear?”

  Magozzi noticed a sudden shift in Rosalie’s demeanor and expression. It wouldn’t be remotely obvious to anybody who wasn’t watching closely, but it was definitely there. “Maybe from a business perspective, but you knew him best, Mom.” She sighed anxiously, mangling the tissue her mother had given her. “You were there, Detectives. Can you tell me unequivocally that my father committed suicide?”

  Gino gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s still too early in the investigation to make any unequivocal statements.”

  Magozzi decided to alter the course of the ship. “You both seem certain that Mr. Norwood wasn’t capable of taking his own life. Can either of you point us in a different direction?”

  Betty shook her head. “Who would want to kill him, you mean? I can’t imagine. He had no enemies. He’s never had any enemies.”

  “That we knew of,” Rosalie interjected, blotting her eyes. “But there are less dramatic possibilities, Mom, like robbery or home invasion. Isn’t that right, Detectives?”

  “It’s a possibility, but we don’t think so. We found a large sum of cash in his office, which would have been the most obvious mark for a robber. Do you know anything about that, Mrs. Norwood?”

  She hesitated. “Gregory always brought cash to Aspen to replenish the safe there.”

  “Did he usually engage the home alarm when he was home?”

  “Most definitely. He was very security-minded.”

  “The alarm system wasn’t armed this morning.”

  Betty Norwood looked confused. “It wasn’t?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “That’s not like Gregory. Not like Gregory at all.”

  “Could he have been expecting a visitor?”

  Rosalie looked at her mother. “Minerva? She might have been dropping something off for him from the office.”

  The elder Norwood’s face soured dramatically. “Certainly not. Not this morning.”

  “Who’s Minerva?” Magozzi ventured cautiously.

  “Father’s personal assistant.”

  “You might want to speak with her, Detectives,” Betty said, in a voice that chilled the room.

  “We can promise you both we will, and we’ll look at all possible angles.”

  She seemed temporarily appeased. “Chief Malcherson said you wouldn’t leave a single stone unturned.”

  “We’re giving this our full attention,” Gino reassured her. “Are there any other family members we might speak with?”

  “Gregory and I were both only children,” Betty explained. “It’s just Rosalie and me now.” She lifted her eyes and gave them both measured looks. “I suppose it’
s only natural to consider financial motivation when investigating the death of a man of Gregory’s means, but nobody had anything to gain from it: Rosalie and I will inherit in equal measure. There’s nobody else.”

  * * *

  “That was sad. And weird,” Gino commented, as they waited for the elevator to take them down to the parking garage. “Betty Norwood got pretty frosty when Minerva’s name came up. Maybe he was having an affair.”

  “It’s a place to look.”

  Gino clucked his tongue. “We’ve got Zeller crowing suicide, the Norwoods crying bloody murder, and we could go either way with what we’ve got so far. I don’t like it. Something’s off.”

  “The daughter has something on her mind.”

  “Yeah, I caught that.”

  Magozzi turned his head when he heard a room door close down the hall. He put a finger to his lips and listened to the muted fall of footsteps approaching, the sound almost entirely absorbed by the plush carpet. Just as the elevator pinged to a stop at their floor, Rosalie Norwood came around the corner. She was carrying an enormous snakeskin handbag. If you were killing off a destructive, invasive species, why not capitalize on the effort and make handbags out of them? It was probably a lucrative cottage industry down in Florida.

  “Do you mind if I take a ride with you, Detectives?”

  “Please.” Gino held the doors open.

  She stepped in and punched the lobby button. “I’m glad I didn’t miss you. I could have called but …” She fidgeted with the strap of her handbag and brushed imaginary lint from the front of her dress. “Do you have a few minutes for a drink downstairs? There’s a café, but I think I could use something stronger.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  ROSALIE NORWOOD WAS nervous. She twirled her curls around her finger while her eyes swept the hotel bar in random patterns. In Magozzi’s opinion, she wasn’t looking for anything more sinister than a distraction from her anxiety. The room was mostly empty, so their drinks arrived roughly thirty seconds after they’d ordered ‒ Scotch, neat, for Rosalie; two Cokes for Magozzi and Gino.

  She took a deep drink and leaned back against the banquette. “Thank you for speaking with me in private, Detectives. I didn’t want to upset Mom any more than she already is.”

  Gino and Magozzi nodded sympathetically and waited for her to start talking, which didn’t take long.

  “As she mentioned, I’ve been working side by side with my father for several years. He’s been grooming me to take over the family business ever since Trey’s troubles started.” She scoffed; bitterly, Magozzi thought. “That’s what we called them—his troubles. It was the only acceptable way to discuss the fact that he was a drug addict. As if words could alter reality.”

  “Addiction is a difficult thing to deal with,” Magozzi offered. “It’s complicated.”

  “It’s not that complicated. The family suffers, their hearts break every day, and they wonder what they did wrong and what they can do to fix it. And always they fear the obituary that might be coming. Ours finally did.”

  Magozzi thought she could just as well have been talking about suicide: the two were on the same continuum of misery where the toll it extracted from surviving family members was concerned.

  She looked down into her drink for a moment while she regained her composure. “But I’m going off-point. I want to tell you about my father … No, that’s not exactly right. I want to tell you about Gregory Norwood the businessman and let you draw your own conclusions.”

  Gino flicked a quick look Magozzi’s way, then focused on Rosalie Norwood. “Please. Go ahead.”

  “We called my father the Savant at the office. Not in front of him, but that’s what he was—a numbers savant. You could ask him about any transaction that had occurred in the business over the course of forty years and he could recite every single detail down to the last cent. He had this uncanny memory and a laser-sharp focus on everything he did, which was part of the reason he was so successful. None of us could hope to keep up with him, not even his most senior people. But something changed a few months ago.”

  “How so?”

  “He seemed wildly distracted. Totally unfocused, like I’ve never seen him before in my life. It was almost like he’d lost interest in his work. It was a complete departure from his personality. When things didn’t improve in the short-term, I pressed him about it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He finally admitted he was taking another look into Trey’s death. Well, actually, he’d hired a private detective to look into it. Father had gotten it into his head that Trey’s death wasn’t an accident. And, like everything else, he put all his energy into it.”

  “But your brother did die of an overdose, right?”

  “Yes. I know it doesn’t make any kind of sense, but Father was adamant about it. He wouldn’t tell me why. I know it’s probably nothing more than a desperate father wanting to exonerate his son of causing his own death, but I wanted to mention it to you, for what it’s worth. I imagine in your line of work, every piece of information can be crucial, no matter how insignificant it may seem.”

  Gino nodded. “We appreciate it. Did your father happen to mention the name of the detective he’d hired?”

  She let out a frustrated sigh. “I didn’t think to ask. I wish I had.”

  “That’s all right, Ms. Norwood,” Magozzi reentered the conversation. “No reason you would have. Earlier, your mother said she didn’t notice any mood changes in your father.”

  “He wouldn’t bring this sort of thing home, especially anything that was to do with Trey. His death destroyed her, but she’d finally come to some sort of peace with it. Father would never have done anything to cause her pain by reopening that wound.”

  “But people in the office noticed his change in personality?”

  “Yes, but not in the way I did as his daughter. Except Minerva. She’s been his assistant for almost twenty years.”

  “Your mother doesn’t seem to have warm feelings for her.”

  “That’s a delicate way of putting it. No, she doesn’t, although I have no idea why. Minerva is an angel, and Father and I have always considered her family.” She looked at her watch, then drained the rest of her Scotch, wincing a little. “I’m sorry, Detectives, I have to go. I promised Mom I’d pick up a few things for her and I don’t want to leave her alone for too long.” She fished in her snakeskin bag and withdrew a slender business-card case, also made out of some kind of reptile. “Call me anytime if you have more questions.”

  Magozzi responded in kind, giving her his own card. “And the same goes for you, Ms. Norwood.”

  Her brows dipped in consternation, maybe even in mild irritation. “I can’t convince you to call me by my first name?”

  “It wouldn’t be appropriate, ma’am.”

  Gino nodded. “It’s out of respect to you. We’re only on a first-name basis with criminals and hostile witnesses.”

  She seemed intrigued by the answer, possibly relieved for a distraction from her immediate reality. “So criminals and hostile witnesses don’t deserve your respect?”

  Magozzi was thrown off-guard a little. He’d never bothered to analyze the intricacies of proper salutation in law enforcement. “Our personal opinions are irrelevant. Using first names is a way of encouraging cooperation and trust.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Sometimes. It depends on the circumstances and the personality you’re dealing with. There are no hard-and-fast rules.”

  She absorbed that with a mild look of satisfaction. “Things aren’t any different in the business world. Call it whatever you want—conversational prowess, interlocution, charm, the gift of the gab—whoever does it best wins. It’s all just psychological exploitation in the end.”

  “You’re a born pragmatist.”

  “Pragmatists are created, not born. Thank you for your time, Detectives.” She gave them a gracious nod and retreated into the lobby.

 
CHAPTER

  17

  AFTER ROSALIE NORWOOD had left, Gino put his chin into his hands, pushing the flesh of his jowls up to his cheeks. “That was an interesting coda to an interesting conversation. She’s got an edge to her. I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Never underestimate the power of a glass of Scotch in the afternoon.”

  “Or taking Betty out of the equation. So, Norwood thought his son was murdered and his wife and daughter think he was murdered. What are we looking at?”

  “Rosalie Norwood is young and distraught, looking for answers that don’t involve her father blowing his brains out. Just like Norwood was probably looking for another explanation for his son’s overdose. Denial all around.”

  Gino swirled the ice cubes in his nearly empty glass and downed the dregs of his Coke. “Say somebody did kill Trey Norwood and the old man was getting close. That would be a great reason to kill him.”

  “The kid was a known heroin addict who died from an overdose. Tough to prove murder in that case.”

  Gino snuffled. “Yeah. It’s about as close to perfect as a crime could get. Except maybe for shooting a potential suicide in the head with his own gun. Tough to prove murder in that case, too.”

  “All right. We’ve got two motives for suicide. Let’s start looking for a motive for murder. Call Zeller and ask about Norwood’s will. Maybe there are other beneficiaries Betty and Rosalie didn’t know about who wanted to speed up their payday. I’ll get a hold of this Minerva. A personal assistant of twenty years might know him better than anybody.”

  * * *

  Magozzi had a hard time understanding anything Minerva Jones said because she was sobbing so hard when she finally answered her phone. He was finally able to make arrangements to meet her at the Norwood office complex, a seven-story affair in Golden Valley that housed an empire now without its emperor.