House of Secrets - v4

by Richard Hawke

  Resnick showed the detective into a room where a camera and tripods were set up in front of a pair of card tables. The camera was aimed at a bentwood rocker on which sat several pages of a script. Megan picked up the pages and took a seat. Resnick told his assistant, who was seated at one of the card tables, to leave the two of them alone for several minutes. Jeffrey Resnick pointed at the camera.

  “Do you want to record this?”

  Megan ignored the question. She was leafing through the pages. “Is this a comedy?”

  “That’ll depend on if anybody laughs.”

  Megan cocked an eyebrow, setting the pages aside. “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  Resnick had flipped a folding chair backward and lowered himself into it. He was a foot-tapper. Nerves. Caffeine. A generally high-octane system. His shoes were doing a real number on the wooden floor.

  “It sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Were you two close?”

  Resnick shrugged. “I’d say moderately close. We didn’t hang out together or anything like that. We’re both… we were both busy people.”

  “What were your thoughts when you heard your sister had been murdered?”

  “You mean, did it cross my mind that Robbie might have done it?”

  “Did it cross your mind?”

  Resnick’s shoes shared an exchange. Megan studied the man’s face. From the photographs she had seen of Joy Resnick — when she was alive — she could see the family resemblance. Soft brown eyes. Narrow nose. Resnick scratched hard at a spot on his head.

  “I don’t think about Robbie all that much. If Joy and I hardly hung out together much, I can tell you Robbie and I never did.”

  “Did you have a theory about the murder?”

  Resnick shrugged again. “My theory was that Joy must have pissed off the wrong man. There are a lot of wrong men out there. I’m sure in your business you know all about that.”

  “I’ve run across a couple,” Megan said. She shifted in her chair. “So, let’s talk about your cousin.”

  From the transcripts of the interviews with the Suffolk County police, Megan had the vague outlines of Jeffrey Resnick’s cousin.

  Megan asked, “What can you tell me about the death of Robert’s parents?”

  Resnick answered, “I was fourteen when that happened.”

  “How old was Robert?”

  “Same age. Robbie and I were born the same year. He’s the older by three months.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was ugly. Uncle Ray shot Aunt Vivien while she was taking a bath. I mean, can you imagine?”

  “And then your uncle shot himself?”

  Resnick held a finger pistol up to his temple. “Correct.”

  “What kind of man was your uncle?”

  Resnick gave her a confused look. “What difference does that make?”

  “A father resorts to murder, his son resorts to murder. Catches my interest.”

  “He was pretty distant. I mean, he wasn’t exactly one of your piggyback-ride-giving uncles. Uncle Ray never seemed particularly happy.”

  “And your aunt?”

  “Sexy.” Resnick’s shoes tapped a snappy beat.

  “Do you want to elaborate on that for me?”

  “We’re off the record here, right?”

  “I’m not a reporter, Mr. Resnick.”

  “I know. Just kidding.” His feet finally stopped moving. “To put it bluntly, Aunt Vivien was a fox. I’d be lying to you if I didn’t tell you I had a crush on her. Maybe not a crush, but I know I was always jazzed whenever I saw her. You remember when you were fourteen, Detective? A sexy adult can be pretty powerful stuff at that age. Aunt Vivien was a number.”

  “I understand that your uncle killed his wife because he thought she was having an affair.”

  “That’s the word on the street.”

  “And what about your cousin? How did Robert respond to losing both his parents in that way?”

  Resnick paused a moment before answering. “I guess I’d say that he went inward. Except the thing is, Robbie was always inward. So… more inward.”

  “Prior to their deaths, what would you say was your cousin’s relationship with his parents?”

  “Easy. Closer to Aunt Viv than to his dad.”

  “And after his parents’ death, Robert moved in with your family.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me about that?”

  “Not really. Except that I was snotty about it at first. The idea was that I would share my room with Robbie, but I refused. So we redid the TV room, and that’s where Robbie stayed. The TV went into the basement. That always kind of pissed me off.”

  “You were snotty.”

  “Guilty. What can I say? Having Robbie move in with us was definitely not a bonus. But if you’re asking if he caused trouble or anything, the answer is not really. He read a lot. He didn’t really interfere with me. Frankly, Joy was a lot friendlier to him than I was.”

  “That’s how you’d characterize the relationship? Friendly?”

  “Sure. Joy had more patience than I did. She’d also been pretty tight with Aunt Viv.”

  “Did Robert have any friends?”

  “A few.”

  “Any friends in particular that you remember?”

  “I’d say his closest friend was this guy named Jonathan Cole. He’s the one I remember who’d actually come over to our house to hang out with Robbie. An okay kid. Kind of a suck-up. A lot more talkative than Robbie. But then, so is that chair you’re sitting in.”

  Megan jotted down the name. “Do you have any idea if the two maintained the friendship?”

  “I guess it’s possible. I seem to recall that Cole became, like, a chiropractor, I think. Or a dentist. Something.”

  “Any idea where he lives now?”

  “Jonathan Cole? Not a clue.”

  Megan questioned Resnick a little longer. Resnick answered her as best he could, but the fact was that as soon as he went off to college he pretty much severed ongoing contact with his cousin.

  “Joy saw him now and then, I think. She felt sorry for him. Robbie took that job at the museum, and we all just figured he’d stay there forever. Not much of a life, if you ask me.”

  Megan had one final question.

  “Do you have any idea why Robert might have taken the Foster girl? Any idea at all?”

  The feet came back into the act. Resnick tugged thoughtfully on his chin. “Maybe he’s looking for a friend.”

  The little wannabe starlets all looked up as Megan and Jeffrey Resnick emerged from the audition room. Megan produced her card and handed it to the casting agent. “Anything at all comes to you, don’t hesitate. Call me.”

  Resnick tucked the card into his shirt pocket. “I understand that Robbie got a raw deal in life, but that’s no reason to take it out on others. Especially not Joy. Do me a favor, Detective. When you find him, I’d like the first crack at strangling him.”

  Three days after nineteen-year-old Lillian Burkett arrived in New York City from South Carolina she was date-raped by a sailor from Moscow. Idaho, who was in town for the annual Fleet Week festivities. Memorial Day weekend. The two had met on the Staten Island ferry, when the sailor hit her up for a cigarette. He carried a gold-plated lighter and showed off a fancy move of flipping open the lid using the palm of his hand and striking the flint all in the same maneuver. Fast. Like a seasoned gunslinger. He told her his name was Carl.

  The two had some drinks at the Bridge Café, tucked beneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, before venturing into Chinatown to find something unusual to eat. Lillian insisted that unless a steamed pig was hanging in the window she would not consider the place unusual enough. One of her girlfriends back home in Blacksburg had tucked this bit of wisdom into the gregarious brunette’s head. They found a place on Pell Street (no pig, but a wire draped with leathery red ducks) where no English was spoken, not even on the menu. The only English
word in the entire place was Coke, and Lillian and the sailor ordered some of that to go along with the bottle of Bacardi that Carl had picked up at a liquor store on Pearl Street.

  Lillian Burkett was a broad-shouldered skinny Minnie in those days, tall and seemingly weightless, except maybe for her thick nest of chestnut hair. Her face was nothing less than stunning. Pale as a pearl, sharp-lined nosed, and large dishy eyes the color of violets. She had moved to the city, she told Carl, to meet interesting people.

  Carl would not turn out to be one of them.

  After dinner, they went to the top of the Empire State Building, where Lillian screamed like a child at all the lights on display so far below her. In her flamboyance she accidentally knocked a quarter out of the hand of a man who was about to feed the coin into one of the viewing telescopes, and the man and Carl nearly got into a fight about it.

  Carl took her to Roseland, where he turned out to be not a half-bad dancer. Lillian had to admit to herself that her date was not exactly the most loquacious log in the pile. But so what if he was a little moody? Plus, he was only a few degrees shy of handsome, and she knew from their slow dancing that he was as strong as a cannon. How nice, she thought, that a chance cigarette had opened the door to a fun little evening.

  Then it all went awry.

  Carl had been keeping Lillian’s glass filled. Eventually the dance floor began to spin. The sailor took her outside for some air, and the next thing Lillian knew she was sitting at a table in a brick-walled club listening to a trumpet player and a hulking black man who was practically draped over his weathered stand-up bass. She and Carl had switched to wine, thick and red and too sweet for Lillian’s taste. The music was disorienting. By the time Lillian told the sailor she wanted to leave, the walls of the small club seemed to be listing sideways.

  They left, and for some reason Lillian allowed the sailor to accompany her to her room, which was a weekly rental near the river. While he was off in the bathroom, Lillian tried to raise the stubborn window so that she could maybe get some air into the place. Carl emerged from the bathroom, and that’s when he attacked her. At first she thought he was just playing some not-so-funny joke, but he wasn’t. Not the way those mean hands were working. He had way too many muscles for Lillian to combat him, and her sputtering Please don’t do this had only seemed to urge him on.

  “Say it in Southern,” he grunted at her. “Come on. Let’s hear it.”

  He was rough. And when he finally finished, he hitched up his pants and said to her, “Listen up, girl. For the record. It ain’t Carl, and it ain’t Moscow.” Then he left.

  The experience didn’t throw Lillian Burkett off for long. She was not about to distrust all of humanity on the basis of one lout. Soon enough, she found her interesting people. Writers. Painters. She found a nice-looking lawyer who worked in the district attorney’s office downtown and who had family money and no problem figuring out ways to spend it. He appreciated Lillian’s vivacity, and she found him refreshingly clever and outspoken.

  After their first night together, Lillian was thrilled. It would be a month and nearly a dozen more sleepovers before Lillian would discover that her lover was engaged to be married. Lillian was more furious than she was heartbroken.

  To the surprise of no one who was close to the situation, the lawyer’s engagement fell apart, and after a period of resistance, Lillian accepted the rascal back into her bed. But she had wised up.

  “You and I are strictly recreational,” she informed him. “Fun’s fun, but I am looking for Mr. Right and now I know you’re not him.”

  For months the arrangement worked well enough for the both of them. Lillian truly enjoyed the man’s company but never entertained any second thoughts concerning his ultimate viability. He was not for her. The two tore up the sheets with gusto every now and again and then happily pillow-talked away into the wee hours. But that was the extent of it. Both were in agreement.

  During this same period, Lillian had enjoyed several chaste dates with a new prospect, a lithe and handsome colleague of her lover’s. This one seemed much more grounded than her randy lawyer, and more of what Lillian considered an “authentic” gentleman. Not to mention insanely well-off. Within months of their meeting she accepted his offer of marriage. Her fiancé promised Lillian that if she stuck with him she would one day find herself in the White House.

  “As sure as you are the most beautiful woman I have ever come across,” Whitney Hoyt said to the ravishing twenty-year-old, “I’m going to be president one day. It’s my destiny, and there’s not a single person who is going to stop it from happening.”

  Whitney promised her that the wedding would be huge. The guest list would include the mayor and the current governor, as well as a number of noted national politicians. Hoyt saw to it that there was a smattering of celebrities included, as well as some of the usual suspects from Manhattan’s A-list. “Diamonds and dragons,” in Lillian’s vernacular.

  Lillian and Whitney had not yet slept together. Hoyt had surprisingly old-fashioned notions in that regard. It was just under a month before the wedding when Whitney Hoyt began chastising his fiancée behind closed doors for the “overexuberance” of her behavior at the most recent set of social outings. A social columnist for the Times had recently written that Miss Burkett “could charm the paint off a wall,” while in another publication she had been referred to as “Dixie dynamite.” The specific occasion of Whitney Hoyt’s complaint to his fiancée was a reception held for the Italian ambassador to the United Nations in the Rainbow Room, atop Rockefeller Center. Too many martinis had loosened Lillian’s tongue, and she had embarrassed her fiancé by launching into battle with the ambassador’s attaché, a man with whom Lillian had been gregariously flirting earlier in the evening. The finer points of Lillian’s disagreement with the Italian had been lost in the sheer physicality of her explosion, which had concluded with her removing her shoes and aiming them at the astonished attaché.

  Whitney had read her the riot act in the taxi afterward.

  “We’re not in some movie here! I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to work, you running around spouting every fool thing that pops into your head! You threw your shoes at that man! We’re not going to have that, is that clear? I’m not saying you can’t be the life of the party, but what you cannot be is its jester! I won’t allow it.”

  Lillian was furious, and she ordered the driver to reroute the cab to her apartment, where she leaped out and slammed the door shut with all the melodrama she could muster. Her roommate was away for the weekend, so Lillian unloaded her fury to the silent walls. “We’re not going to have that? You’re not going to allow it?” Her fiancé had treated her like a child, and she was livid.

  Lillian opened a bottle of wine and drank it down well past its label. She was not able to recall later if it had been during one of the spells of self-pity or fire-spitting anger that she had picked up the phone and called her lawyer friend. She knew only that she called him and that he showed up and that for the next thirty-six hours the two of them slipped coolly into an alternate reality. Or not so coolly. Her demands on her friend were outsize — even by the standards of their history together — but he endeavored to meet them. He knew her mind well enough. She was not going to call off the wedding. That wasn’t what this was about. Lillian Burkett was going to marry Whitney Hoyt, and she would be at his side when he began making his moves in earnest. But first she had to rage. She had to generate this secret and then slip it into her pocket. Over the course of their marathon weekend the lawyer warned Lillian that Whitney Hoyt was going to come to control her, that he was going to dull her edges. If he were to achieve his goals, he counseled, this was inevitable. He told her further that if she wanted to share in those goals, she would have to accept the costs. An honest look at how things had been going since her engagement to Hoyt would have revealed to the young beauty that she had already begun to pay some of that price. But Lillian was not particularly interested in taking h
onest looks.

  Six weeks later Lillian Burkett married Whitney Hoyt. The reception was held at the Pierre Hotel. After the toasts and the speeches and the endless series of first dances, the newly minted Lillian Hoyt sought out her lawyer friend, who was seated at one of the large tables holding forth to an audience of beautiful people.

  Lillian called him away from the table, as she had something she wanted to tell him.

  “State secret,” Lillian crooned, bringing him close so she could whisper hotly in the man’s ear. “Guess what? It looks like we’re going to have ourselves a baby.”

  The lawyer pulled back. “That’s great, kiddo. You and Whit might as well get that dynasty under way.”

  Lillian was already shaking her head. Her violet eyes lit with mirth.

  “You and me.” She put her finger to her lips. “State secret.”

  Chris Wyeth was speechless. A rare moment in the young lawyer’s life.

  On her way to Katonah, Megan put a call into headquarters to get the sniffing under way for any trace of Robert Smallwood’s high school friend Jonathan Cole. Technically, Megan knew that she should be passing the name along to Armstrong. Nonfamily were the FBI’s charge. Of course, there was the possibility that Armstrong had picked up the name already on his own. If Cole was still living anywhere in the area, the FBI would want to talk with him. It wouldn’t be too pretty if Armstrong were to make his way to Jonathan Cole only to find Megan already sipping tea with the man.

  Megan terminated her call and squeezed down on the accelerator.

  Screw pretty.

  Philip and Judy Resnick lived in a quiet tree-filled neighborhood just under half a mile from the Katonah train station. The house had been built in the thirties, a two-story colonial with a two-car garage, an oversize bay window, and an ancient elm dominating the front yard.

  The Resnicks were expecting Detective Lamb, and they led her through the house to the stone patio off the kitchen, where a perspiring pitcher of lemonade sat on the outdoor table. As the three settled in, a newly clipped poodle made the rounds, anointing knees and ankles with her runny nose.