by Marvin Kaye
I was back staring at the beige carpet and thinking about that and wondering why he had asked me to come down to his office and meet with him when a door in the mahogany-paneled wall popped open and a heavyset man with a shaved head glanced at me.
“Doherty?”
I nodded my head.
“Let’s go, the Commissioner’s waiting.”
The blonde receptionist looked up at me and smiled.
I followed the husky man down a long hallway, carpeted in the same plush beige as the reception area. At the end was another open area with a large desk and a young black woman with designer glasses and a blue silk pants suit sitting behind it.
“Is he on the phone?” the husky man asked her.
The young woman glanced down at the phone bank on her desk and shook her head.
Motioning for me to follow, the husky man opened the door and went in.
The office was large, long would be a better word, with a huge mahogany desk with a leather bordered ink blotter, phone bank, a copy of the Wall Street Journal and a thin manila folder on it. There were no ink stains on the blotter and the Journal appeared to be well-thumbed. There was a pair of leather captain’s chairs in front of the desk and a huge executive chair behind it. The walls were paneled in a rich walnut and a mahogany credenza lined one wall and a long burgundy Chesterfield sofa was backed up against another. Ready, in case Shanahan needed to think.
Shaded light from a large smoked-glass picture window filtered across the room, only broken by the elongated shadow of Shanahan who was looking out over the skyline at the City. His city. On the East River, I could see the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond that span, the Manhattan Bridge. His bridges.
“Doherty is here, Commissioner,” the husky man said, and left, closing the door behind him.
Shanahan didn’t move, kept looking out the window at the view. The sun was high and the summer air surprisingly sharp and clear. He was making the most of the moment. I took a seat in one of the captain’s chairs and waited.
“You wanted to see me?” I said after a long moment.
Finally, he turned and looked at me as if he was realizing for the first time that I was sitting there.
I glanced at my watch.
Shanahan ignored my gesture. “It’s a magnificent view, don’t you think?”
“Magnificent,” I said. “Is that why you asked me to come down here, to enjoy the view with you?”
He laughed. It was hearty laugh, an infectious, I’m on your side, boys, laugh.
I didn’t laugh with him. I knew bosses like Shanahan were never on my side.
He walked over to me, a big smile still on his face, and extended his hand. I stood politely and shook it. His grip was warm, political, just like his laugh.
“Good to see you again, Doherty. I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure of really conversing together.”
“Well, this is the first time I’ve ever been down here on unofficial business. Usually, I’m trying a case with your investigators.”
“Ah, the daily grind,” he said, pushing out a soft chuckle, waving his hand for me to sit back down. He went around to his side of the banquet table he called his desk and eased his six-two frame into the executive chair. His face was well-tanned and unlined, making him look twenty years younger than the just over fifty I knew him to be. His hair was exquisitely barbered with a part on the left side and he was wearing a lightweight three piece dark wool suit. I knew that even in this summer heat, he’d be cool. Guys like Shanahan always are. His shirt was white and unwrinkled and framed by a blue silk tie with a pattern of silver sailboats. Like his bridge and his city, I just knew the Atlantic was his ocean.
He gestured over at the credenza where there was a small pile of trial folders. “I spent the morning reading through the files of the cases that you’ve tried for us,” he said. “You know, Doherty, despite the fact that you were never with the Manhattan D.A.’s office, you do good trial work. You’re tenacious … and quick on your feet. I like that. And you spend a lot of time preparing your cases for trial.”
“You can do that when you don’t have anything else on your desk.”
“Such is the life of an attorney in private practice.” He shook his head slowly. “Well, maybe …” he let the words drift slowly across the desk, then continued easily. “Perhaps, we can help you with that. The reason I asked you to meet with me, we have a case that might best be suited to an attorney with your strengths.”
“Which would be?”
Shanahan rubbed his chin. “To be blunt, you no longer work for the City. You’re an outsider. And that’s a good thing. This case is a highly sensitive matter, otherwise I would have just referred it along the usual channels. The parent involved, however, is very high profile and very powerful and he’s a valued friend of the mayor.”
“He?”
“I’m going to introduce you to him in a few minutes. This is a missing witness case, the kind you’ve had some familiarity with, I believe. His daughter’s been abducted.”
Outside, the view was truly magnificent, Shanahan had been right about that; the sky was eggshell blue and the sunlight gleamed off the stainless steel frames surrounding the smoky glass of the skyscrapers, and all the cars on the Brooklyn Bridge looked like ants scurrying to and fro. The day was just too nice for me to sit here and let Shanahan shovel me a bucket of bull.
So I said, “I thought you said this was a missing witness case? If the girl’s been abducted, why hasn’t her father reported it to the police or the FBI?”
“Well … it’s not exactly an abduction.” Shanahan leaned back in his executive chair. “It’s not a kidnapping, maybe not even a crime; as a matter of fact, the mother may have taken the little girl. The parents have separated and are going through a nasty divorce and custody is an issue. I’m sure you’ve read about it.”
“Not unless the story is sandwiched in between the race results at Saratoga.”
Shanahan ignored my remark and continued. “So Mr. Stevens really doesn’t want the authorities involved. He is desperate to avoid any more adverse publicity.”
“Stevens?”
Shanahan sat up and lightly brushed the side of his head. “Oh, I didn’t tell you his name, did I? It’s Armstrong Stevens … the Third. I’m sure you’ve heard of the financial firm of Morton Stevens.”
I had. Who hadn’t? One of the largest investment banking firms in the world. They had their fingers in every financial pie, whether half-baked or fully-cooked. But while I was impressed, I wasn’t convinced.
“So why doesn’t Stevens hire a professional security firm to retrieve his daughter?”
“The better the firm, the more resources. The more resources, the more personnel. The more personnel, the greater the chance that the news will leak out. It’s as simple as that.”
“As simple as that.”
Shanahan nodded. “And Stevens is a very close friend of the Mayor, and his wife is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She’s also an expert in Korean art. Very high profile people.”
My turn to nod. “Therefore, the Mayor has come to you?”
He laughed slightly. “It seems that for all their wealth and connections, the Stevenses believe in public education. No Philips Exeter or Choate Rosemary Hall or Miss Porter’s for their darling little princess. No, PS 41 in Greenwich Village is good enough.” He shook his head and laughed again.
“So where does the missing witness angle come in?” I was curious now.
“Apparently the little girl—Suzie—Suzie Stevens was walking down the corridor when she saw a hypodermic needle fall out of a teacher’s handbag. And she mentioned it to another girl who told her mother. And the mother called the principal . . .”
“And the principal called you.” I cut him off. “How ol
d is the girl?”
“Seven.”
“So it’s her word against the teacher’s? Tough case to bring charges that will stick. They’ll say she’s making it up.”
“Except that she’s a Stevens. Hard put to show a reason for her to lie.” He leaned forward and flipped open the thin manila folder. “Here’s her description. Light brown hair with hazel eyes, just under four feet, thin but not skinny, last in school on May twenty-third, wearing tan slacks, a red blouse and red and blue swoops, not the fancy kind. Seems she was waiting at the entrance for the chauffeur to pick her up when Mrs. Stevens arrived in a silver Lexus. The girl ran toward the open door and got in. Hasn’t been seen since.”
“That’s almost two months ago,” I said. “Why the delay in looking for her?”
“Stevens figured as long as she’s with her mother, she would be safe. But he hasn’t heard from his wife all this time and now he’s very worried. So worried he went to the Mayor for help.”
“And billionaire to billionaire, the Mayor couldn’t refuse, of course.”
“Something like that, I suppose.” He slid the manila folder over to my side of the desk.
I let it lie there. “So why me?”
He rubbed his chin. “As I said, you’ve done good work for us in the past …”
“And you don’t want your staff involved.”
“The Mayor thinks it would be better that way.” He took a deep breath. “This case could do a lot for you, Doherty. What do you clear now, handling misdemeanor cases, maybe three or four felony trials a year? Five, six thousand a month? We could triple that if this works out.”
“What? Come to work for SCI?”
“No, but the Department of Education has a large legal staff. Think of that. Better money, a health plan, nothing too taxing, lots of time off, and a hefty pension at the end. You know you’re not getting any younger.”
“You make it sound like heaven.” He was giving me the soft sell, sweet and slow. I wondered how he’d sound if I said I wasn’t interested. But I knew I’d never find out. I had two mortgages to pay—one for the apartment in Brooklyn Heights, one for the country house; a car note on the Porsche I never should have bought, two cats to feed and rent on my office space downtown. I was doing better than Shanahan supposed, but not that much better that I could afford to turn him down.
“Let’s back up a little ways,” I said. “You mentioned a divorce action. Won’t Mrs. Stevens eventually have to show up in court? Stevens could make a big stink with the judge.”
“Eventually. That’s the key word, Doherty. No one has seen hide or hair of her or the little girl except …” He tapped the manila folder and arched his eyebrows.
I picked the folder up. Inside were three typewritten pages, single-spaced on plain paper with no letterhead. I glanced at them quickly. There was the description of little Suzie that Shanahan had just read to me as well as the details of her supposed abduction, including a synopsis of an interview with the teacher who witnessed the girl getting into her mother’s Lexus along with a complete description of the car and its license plate number.
A brief discussion of Armstrong Stevens III followed. While his grandfather had been a founder of Morton Stevens and Armstrong had inherited a sizable chunk of the corporation’s stock, he was not involved in the firm’s business. Instead, he ran a private commodity investment fund, speculating in gold, oil and just about every raw material it was possible to wring a quick buck out of. He had offices in New York, Hong Kong and Bermuda and the report listed the addresses and phone numbers for all of them. I folded the sheets of paper up and put them in my jacket pocket and slid the folder back across the desk.
“Can I speak to Stevens?”
“He’s here now, waiting in the conference room.”
I followed Shanahan through a side door and into a long room with a large table and a dozen comfy leather chairs. The room was also richly paneled in dark wood and lush drapes covered a bank of windows, giving everything the air of hush-hush secrecy. He walked over to the chair at the end of the table and said, “Mr. Stevens, this is Doherty, the attorney I told you about.”
The man seated on the end chair looked up at me, his well-tanned face lined with worry. His hair was close-cropped, graying at the temples and he sported a salt and pepper mustache, clipped to a military trim. His jaw was prominent, almost commanding and his lips were set with a firmness that undoubtedly devolved from his blue blood. Stevens was dressed for the summer weather in a striped seersucker suit and white shoes. Even though it was against the law in New York City to smoke in public buildings, there was a lit Churchill resting in an ashtray next to him.
Stevens picked up the cigar and puffed on it. When he exhaled, tiny wisps of smoke circled and climbed in tribute toward the ceiling air-conditioning.
“My little Suzie will be eight in a few weeks,” Armstrong Stevens III said to no one in particular, looking at the cigar in his hand. “I don’t want to miss her birthday.”
His speech had that amorphous Continental tone that the East Coast Brahmins sometimes would pick up through cultural osmosis, usually leaving the cultural part behind. I sat down next to him and pushed the ashtray to the other side of the table.
“I’ll leave you both to talk,” Shanahan said as he opened the door to his office. I watched him step inside and close the door without a sound.
“I want to know more about your wife,” I told Stevens.
He took another puff on the Churchill and set it back down in the ashtray, exhaled slowly and gazed at me with ice blue eyes, as if he was seeing me for the first time. “Do you want names? I could call her plenty, half of them would be true, half of them false. The problem, Mr. Doherty, is that I wouldn’t know which are which. The closest I could come to an accurate description would be to say that she’s my bitter half. Before Suzie disappeared, I was sure our attorneys would work out everything with the best interest of the child in mind. But I guess that’s out now, with Andorra having run off with her.”
“What have your attorneys said?”
He glanced at the manila folder in my hand. “I told them what I knew and they made some brief, very discreet inquiries. You have the report in your hand.”
I opened the folder and looked at the top page of the report. “It’s not on any law firm letterhead,” I said.
“As I said, my attorneys are very discreet. They adopted the position that if I didn’t want to take up the matter in court or hire an investigative agency, there was little else they could do.”
“Do you think your wife has left New York? This could be an interstate matter; the FBI might take it over.”
Stevens picked up the cigar and puffed again. “Mr. Doherty, if I had wanted the FBI involved, I could just pick up the phone and call Washington.”
I nodded. I knew that when he said Washington, he meant the White House. And Stevens knew that I knew it.
“Could this be about money? Is your wife trying to hold you up?”
Stevens laughed. “Andorra was a Winstead before she married me. Does that mean anything to you?”
I shook my head. “Should it?”
He laughed again, a bitter tinge to the sound this time. “Her ancestors didn’t just come over on the Mayflower, they owned it; her blood is bluer than blue with a dozen generations of amassed New England mercantile wealth to keep it pumping. She’s as well-off as I am. No, it’s not about the money, it’s about power, control. As I said, she’s my bitter half.”
“Was the marriage always like this?”
Stevens set the cigar back down on the ashtray and fell silent. After a while, he said, “No. Funny thing, in the beginning, it was love, real love. But somehow we grew apart, I was spending more time on business and Andorra had the museum and her art connoisseurship. She’s an expert in ancient Kore
an art, did you know that?”
He said that last bit with obvious pride in his voice and I wondered where the love had gone. And when.
“Do you think she might have taken Suzie to Korea?”
Shock registered on Steven’s face, as if the idea was brand new to him. “Gosh, Mr. Doherty, I hope not. The teacher who saw them leave said Andorra had recently talked about spending several weeks up in Newport, at her family’s summer cottage. She inherited the place when her mother died.”
I opened up the folder and glanced at the second page of the report. The teacher, a Ms. Padavan, stated that she had overheard Andorra Stevens talk about Newport and sailing.
“How would this Ms. Padavan overhear your wife’s conversations?”
Stevens blinked. “Oh, she was also tutoring Suzie in French; they were specializing in nineteenth-century poetry. She was often at our Park Avenue place.”
“You mean you and your wife still live together, even though you’re going through a divorce?”
“It’s not as strange as it sounds, Mr. Doherty. The Park Avenue apartment is a duplex with fourteen rooms. I also spend a significant amount of time in my Hong Kong and Bermuda offices, and when I’m in New York, I stick to my floor and Andorra stays on hers.”
“And little Suzie?”
“She has the run of the house, of course.”
I looked at the report again. “It says here that Ms. Padavan thought she saw your wife on the Upper East Side recently.”
Stevens puffed his cigar. “Thought she saw Andorra’s Lexus to be more exact, and a woman driver who looked somewhat like my wife.”
“So New York City would be a good place to start?”
“You tell me, you’re the professional.”