Widow’s Walk s-29

by Robert B. Parker

  “I agree,” Kiley said. “So?”

  “So Smith is on the board of a company named Soldiers Field Development, which had some of its employees following me after I started the case. We talked with them, and this morning we went out to talk with them again. They had packed up and left.”

  “Suspicious,” Kiley said.

  “There’s a guy who came in as Smith’s partner at the bank not too long before Smith was shot. Guy named Marvin Conroy.”

  Kiley frowned a little. As if the name meant something.

  “Marvin Conroy is an acquaintance of your daughter’s.”

  Kiley glanced neutrally at Ann. “Yeah?”

  “And Ann was representing DeRosa when he told us that Mary Smith hired him to kill her husband.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Kiley said. “But I was hoping you might sort of get around to why you are here talking to my daughter.”

  “This is the preeminent criminal law practice in the city. Maybe on the East Coast. What the hell are you doing with Jack DeRosa?”

  “He was Ann’s client,” Kiley said. “Ask her.”

  “That’s where we were when you came in,” I said.

  Kiley smiled and didn’t say anything.

  “So,” I said to Ann, “how’d you come to represent DeRosa?”

  “I decline to discuss my clients with you,” she said.

  “Tell me,” Kiley said.

  “Bobby,” his daughter said, “I am not going to talk about this with these men.”

  “I want to know, Ann.”

  Father and daughter stared at each other. I stayed quiet. Hawk leaned placidly against the wall, looking at the view. Then Kiley shifted his gaze to me.

  “There any connection between this guy Marvin Conroy and DeRosa?”

  “Conroy was in the bank with Smith,” I said. “DeRosa was asked to kill Smith.”

  “That’s hardly a connection,” Kiley said.

  “Yet,” I said.

  Kiley shifted his glance to Hawk. “I been in the criminal defense business for a long time,” Kiley said. “I know what he does.”

  “And well,” I said.

  “He watching your back?”

  “Yes.”

  “So this is serious business,” Kiley said, probably to himself more than to me. He pointed his chin at Ann Kiley. “You think she’s in danger?”

  Ann said, “I’m not a she. My name is Ann.”

  I nodded. “I think Ann’s in danger,” I said.

  Kiley said, “What do you think, Ann?”

  “I think it’s preposterous,” she said.

  “No,” Kiley said. “I know this guy. He thinks you’re in danger, we need to take it seriously.”

  “For God’s sake, Bobby-”

  “And cut the Bobby shit, for the moment. It’s fine while we’re colleagues, but I’m also your father, and I want to know what the fuck is going on. How come we represented Jack DeRosa?”

  Ann Kiley’s face got very tight, and colorless. Her jaw clamped, but do what she would, she couldn’t stop it. She began to cry. She stood and walked to the window and stood beside Hawk and looked out. Her shoulders shook, though not very much. In the quiet room we could hear the stifled sound of her fight for control. Bobby Kiley didn’t move. Hawk looked at me. I looked at Hawk. We decided that quiet was the way to go.

  After a time Ann turned from the window. She had stopped crying, but her eyes were red and her face was stiff. She leaned her hips against the window ledge and folded her arms and looked straight at her father.

  “I’m having an affair with Marvin Conroy,” she said.

  Kiley nodded. Ann Kiley took in a long slow breath with a hint of vibrato.

  “It’s a serious affair,” she said.

  Kiley nodded again. Ann tightened her folded arms as if she were hugging herself in a cold place.

  “He asked me to help him,” she said. “He was in trouble.”

  Nobody said anything. The phone rang on Ann Kiley’s desk. Bobby Kiley picked it up and said, “No calls,” and hung up.

  “He asked me if I could find him someone to pretend something. He said I was a criminal lawyer, and I should be able to find someone.”

  “And you found DeRosa,” Bobby Kiley said.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I was doing my annual pro bono, for the public defender’s office, as required by the firm, and I drew DeRosa, some sort of auto theft, I believe.”

  “So when Conroy wanted a mug you remembered DeRosa.”

  Kiley appeared calm. He seemed entirely focused on the questions he was asking and the answers he was getting.

  “And Marvin asked me to be DeRosa’s lawyer, this time, too, to see that he stayed on message.”

  “The message being?”

  “That Mary Smith had approached him to kill her husband.”

  “Which was not true,” Kiley said.

  “No. I don’t believe it was.”

  Kiley sat back in his chair. Hawk and I remained where we were.

  Ann Kiley said, “Daddy.”

  Kiley stood and went to her and opened his arms and she fell against him and began to cry. As he hugged her, he looked at me.

  “We can talk later,” he said.

  “You will need security for her,” I said.

  “I know,” Kiley said. “I can arrange that.”

  “There’s more I need to know,” I said.

  “She’s got nothing else to say,” Kiley said.

  “I think she does,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter what you think,” Kiley said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  It was Sunday. I was drinking coffee with my right hand and driving with my left. Pearl was asleep in the backseat, and Susan was beside me drinking coffee from a big paper cup which she held in both hands. We were on the road to Newburyport, and we had chosen to take the old Route 1, through the slow rural landscape north of Boston.

  “How’s your lawsuit?” I said.

  “I think the insurance company plans to settle,” Susan said.

  “Thus leaving you neither vindicated nor convicted.”

  “But they’ll probably cancel afterwards,” she said.

  “Insurance companies are fun,” I said. “Aren’t they.”

  Susan nodded. She dipped into her coffee, her big eyes gazing at the road across the top of the cup.

  “And the boy is still dead,” she said.

  “And it’s still not your fault,” I said.

  She was quiet, her face still half hidden by the coffee. In the backseat Pearl snored occasionally, the way she had begun to do as she got older.

  “Fault has little to do with sadness,” Susan said. “One of the things that helps kids get through the difficulty of being a gay adolescent is to have someone. I don’t mean a shrink. But a friend, a lover, someone. But the thing they need help with prevents them from getting it.”

  “Because they’re too conflicted about being homosexual,” I said.

  “I hate that word,” Susan said into her cup.

  “Homosexual?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too clinical?”

  “Makes me think of grim men in lab coats,” Susan said. “Studying a pathology.”

  I had nothing to say about that, and decided in this case to try saying nothing. Susan drank her coffee. I drank mine.

  “Where’s Hawk?” Susan said.

  “I thought we’d have Sunday alone together.”

  “Except for the baby.”

  “Except for her.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Even without Hawk,” I said, “I am not an amateur.”

  “True,” Susan said. “Have you ever considered that your person might have been suicidal?”

  “Nathan Smith?”

  “Yes. A closeted gay man. Trying to pretend.”

  “There was no gun,” I said.

  “Too bad, he so fit the profile. A life spent in deception, f
inally too much.”

  I shrugged.

  “How are you with this kid’s death?” I said.

  “I’ve gone over every therapy session ten times.”

  “You remember them all?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And I did what there was to do,” Susan said.

  “And better than most people could have,” I said.

  “How do you know,” Susan said. “You’ve never been in therapy with me.”

  I smiled.

  “Why, this is therapy,” I said. “Nor am I out of it.”

  “Hamlet?” Susan said.

  “Mephistopheles,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Marlowe,” I said. “Doctor Faustus.”

  “Smarty-pants.”

  “So how come I can’t figure out what’s going on with the Nathan Smith thing?”

  “I’ll bet you could if Christopher Marlowe did it.”

  “A slam dunk,” I said.

  “Have you thought about what kind of woman marries a gay man?” Susan said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a conclusion?”

  “No. I can’t figure her out.”

  “Maybe you need to,” Susan said. “Maybe you need to find out more about Mr. Smith’s life as a gay man. Maybe you need to find out why Mrs. Smith married him.”

  “A tip?” I said. “A crime-stopper tip?”

  “Two tips,” Susan said. “I have a Ph.d. from Harvard.”

  “A hotbed of crime-stopping,” I said.

  “A hotbed,” Susan said.

  We drove on to Newburyport. Susan shopped. Pearl and I stood outside each shop, and waited. Pearl slept in the car while we ate lunch at the Black Cow. Susan and Pearl and I went for a walk on the beach at Plum Island. None of us talked about business for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  I went over to Pequod Bank on Monday morning to talk with Marvin Conroy. He wasn’t there. I said I would wait. They were cool with it. I sat in a chair and watched people discuss checking accounts and loans for three hours. At noon I asked if there was a number for Conroy. There was. But they couldn’t give me his home phone number.

  “Could you call him for me?” I said.

  The acting second assistant junior auxiliary vice president who was working with me looked startled.

  “Me? Call him at home?”

  “Y. Yes.”

  “Is it, ah, an emergency?” she said.

  “Life and death,” I said.

  “Not really?” she said.

  “Really,” I said.

  She hesitated. I fixed her with my gleaming blue stare. She shrugged and opened her Rolodex and picked up the phone. She gave her hair a little toss to get the phone in under it, and dialed a number. I waited. She was wearing one of those thin, loose-fitting ankle-length flowered dresses that women sometimes wore in Cambridge, I assumed in tribute to a long-gone hippie past. Hers was especially sporty, tan with brown flowers. Whether there was any kind of worthwhile body going on underneath there was difficult to say, but I was ready to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  She hung up the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s no answer. Would you like to leave a message for him?”

  “You have an address for him?” I said.

  “Certainly not,” she said.

  I glanced at her Rolodex and she grabbed it and clutched it to her as if she were protecting its virtue. I smiled at her.

  “You’ve been more than kind,” I said.

  Back in my car I called Bobby Kiley’s office. Argued with the switchboard operator, and the receptionist, and Kiley’s secretary until I got through.

  “It would be easier calling the Pope,” I said, when he was on the phone.

  “But less useful,” Kiley said. “What do you want?”

  “How’s Ann?”

  “She’s lousy.”

  “I need to know Marvin Conroy’s address,” I said.

  “I’ll call you back,” Kiley said.

  I gave him my car phone number, which I could never remember and therefore had written on a piece of paper tucked over the sun visor. Then I sat and looked at life in East Cambridge for maybe ten minutes until Kiley called back.

  Conroy lived in an apartment in the North End on Commercial Street across from the Coast Guard station and a little ways down the street from the old garage where the Brink’s Robbery had taken place. I went up four cement steps and looked at the small sign that said NORTH CHURCH REALTY. LONG AND SHORT TERM RENTALS. I read the names on the mailboxes. Conroy was on the second floor. I rang. No luck. There were seven other names on the mailboxes. I rang all of them. Only one person, a woman, who sounded sleepy, answered through the speaker.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m from the cable company. We need to check some terminals.”

  “Well, check them some other time, pal,” the woman said. “I’m trying to take a freakin‘ nap.”

  The speaker went dead. Okay, if the terminals went bad it wasn’t my fault. I leaned my fanny on the black iron porch rail and thought about it. As I was thinking a young man in a gray suit and big glasses came up the steps with his key out. I fumbled in my pockets.

  “Oh God,” I said. “I’m staying in 2B and I can’t find my keys.”

  He smiled blankly and nodded and opened the door. I walked in right behind him. He disappeared into the elevator. I took the stairs. When I got to Conroy’s place, I looked around in the small hallway. There was only one other apartment. I went to it and knocked on the door. No one answered. I went back to Conroy’s door and kicked it in.

  Inside was bedroom, sitting room, bath, kitchenette. It was charmless and impersonal. It showed little signs of occupancy. Cereal in the kitchen cabinet and half a loaf of bread, orange juice, and milk in the refrigerator. Two utility bills on the kitchen counter, both overdue. There were no clothes in the closet. No toiletries in the bath. A bath towel was crumpled on the floor. I picked it up. It was wrinkled, but no longer damp. There were no credit-card receipts, no answering machine with phone messages, no personal computer with e-mail messages. No clue at all about where Marvin Conroy had gone, or who he was.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Maybe I should do what Susan said. I had rarely gotten in trouble doing that, and I had absolutely nowhere else to go. Susan had designated two areas of possible interest: Smith’s sexual orientation, and his marriage. Since Larson Graff was an associate of Mrs. Smith, and pretty surely gay, I thought I might as well start with him. Given what I had, I might just as well have started with Liberace if he were still with us.

  I took Larson to lunch at Grill 23. I was quite sure that Hawk would make Larson nervous, so he had a sandwich at the bar while Larson and I took a table against the Stuart Street wall.

  “Things have changed,” I said. “Several people have died. I’m going to need some truth here, Larson.”

  “I’ll try to be forthcoming,” he said.

  “You’ll need to be more so than you have been, I think.”

  I gave him the hard eye. Larson looked around the room.

  “How did you come to know Mary Smith?” I said.

  Larson ate a shrimp from his shrimp cocktail. He leaned back a moment to savor it, breathing in as if there were a bouquet to experience. I waited.

  “Oh, I’ve known Mary forever,” he said after he’d experienced his shrimp sufficiently.

  “How long would that be,” I said.

  “Oh.” He paused and sipped a small swallow of ice water and experienced that for a while. “Twenty years or so.”

  Since Mary was thirty that meant he’d known her as a child.

  “You from Franklin?”

  He didn’t answer for a while. I waited. He couldn’t stand the silence.

  “Yes.”

  “You went to school with her?”

  Again the pause. Again the wait. Again he capitulated.

  “Grammar schoo
l, middle school, high school. Then I went on to college and she stayed in Franklin.”

  “Friends?”

  “Oh yes. Tight. Buddies, really. Franklin wasn’t the easiest place to grow up.”

  “There may not be any easy places,” I said.

  Larson carefully dabbed a little horseradish into his cocktail sauce. It bothered me that I hadn’t come across his name.

  “You know her other friends?” I said.

  He smiled. Apparently he’d decided that frank disclosure might relieve tension.

  “Sure,” he said. “Roy, Pike, Tammy? Sure.”

  “How about Joey Bucci?”

  Larson had ordered a glass of Chablis with his appetizer. He sipped a small sip of it, savored it self-consciously, and smiled at me.

  “Why do you ask about Joey Bucci,” he said.

  “He was described as part of her group,” I said. “Nobody mentioned you.”

  Larson had another shrimp. He looked thoughtful, but it might have been just his savoring look. He took in some air and let it out slowly.

  Then he said, “I used to be Joey Bucci.”

  “You changed it,” I said.

  “I just didn’t feel like a Joey Bucci,” he said.

  “You felt like a Larson Graff?”

  He smiled. “In my business more Larson Graff and less Joey Bucci is a good thing,” he said.

  “Mary says you came to her through her husband.”

  “Only indirectly,” Larson said. “He called and said Mary was looking for a public relations advisor and had asked him to call me. That’s how I met him.”

  His shrimp cocktail was gone, leaving him more time to fully examine the remaining Chablis. It was his third.

  “Through Mary?” I said.

  My head was beginning to hurt.

  “Yes.”

  “And you became friends independent of her?”

  Larson smiled and tilted his head.

  “We shared a common interest,” he said.

  “Young men?” I said.

  “S. You know about Nathan?”

  “I do.”

  “Poor old queen,” Larson said. “Still deep in the closet in this day and age.”

  I nodded. He sipped his wine.

  “Pathetic, really,” Larson said.

  “Mary says she met her husband through you.”

  He laughed. “That’s Mary. She can’t string five words together and make sense. She probably said it backwards from what she meant. I met Nathan through her.”