by Blake Banner
I nodded. “Of course. Mrs. Magnusson, I only have a couple more questions for you and then we’ll leave you in peace. How did you get from the community center to the party on Madison Avenue, in Manhattan?”
She stared at me for a long moment.
I frowned. “I’m assuming you didn’t drive.”
“No, no of course not. A friend from Boston came and picked me up.”
I smiled and my eyebrows told her I was surprised. “From Boston?”
“No, Detective, he was visiting for the book launch. He is an old friend.”
“This would be one of the friends you had lunch with. May we have a name?”
Her face seemed to dry and harden like plaster. “His name is in your original report. Do you need to trouble him again after all these years?”
“In a case like this, where there is no forensic evidence and there are no witnesses, we need to gather evidence from other sources. Often a simple comment can give us a clue that leads us to an answer. I am sure your friend is totally innocent, but he may know the killer without realizing it. We are trying to catch a murderer, Mrs. Magnusson, not cause you problems.”
“Of course.” Again the small sigh through her nose and the downcast gaze. “His name is Alornerk, Alornerk Smith. It is in my original statement.”
Dehan frowned. “That’s a very unusual name, Alornerk.”
“It is an Eskimo name. He is from Alaska. He lives and works in Boston. He is a senior lecturer in mathematics. I believe he has changed address since...”
Dehan wrote down his new address and phone number. When she was done, I said, “One last thing, could you supply us with a list of your students at Underhill?”
She sagged back in the sofa. “Now?”
I shook my head. “No, but if over the next day or two you could give it some thought and write down everything you can remember about them, that would be helpful.”
She gave a nod that was weary. “Yes, very well, Detective Stone, I’ll do what I can.”
I glanced at Dehan. She shook her head that she had no more questions and we stood. Helena rang a bell and we stood in awkward silence for a moment. Then Ebba opened the door and led us back down the stairs in a silent procession to the front door. There she smiled her bright smile and said she hoped we would have a lovely day.
The door closed and we walked without talking back to my old, burgundy Jaguar, where it sat in the mottled, spring shade of the green ash.
TWO
Dehan didn’t get in straight away. She leaned her forearms on the burgundy roof of the car, leaned her chin on her forearms and drummed her fingers. The dappled shade of the leaves lay across her face.
“In her original statement, she said that Alornerk came to visit and brought a couple of friends with him. She couldn’t remember their names, but they were visiting from Europe. She couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant either. She had never been there before and Alornerk’s friends had chosen it, somewhere in Queens.”
I listened to her, then unlocked the car door. “You think she’s lying?”
She drummed a bit more, then looked up at the young leaves in the green ash overhead. “It’s messy and unlikely enough to be true. It could also be a phony alibi.”
I climbed behind the wheel and she got in the other side. I asked, “What did Alornerk say when they interviewed him?”
She frowned at me and slammed the door. “Read the report sometimes, Stone. That’s what it’s there for.”
“I did, bits. I like to keep it fresh. Besides, I have you to read it for me. I like the way you tell it.” The big old engine growled and we pulled away. “What did he say?”
She sighed. “He confirmed her story. The friends had gone back to Europe that evening. It had all been a big shock. He couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant either. He would contact the friends and get them to tell him. He never did, and neither of them was ever a suspect, so it wasn’t followed up.”
I turned into Manhattan Avenue. “You want to go and see Seth Greenway?”
“Of course. Fifteenth floor, 667 Madison Avenue. It’s in the file.”
“Don’t judge me. My father used to judge me. That was what led me into a life of dissolute vice and profligacy, and ultimately self-recrimination and self-loathing. It took years of therapy and analysis to make me the man I am today. But the shadows are never far away. The shadows… and the nightmares.”
She watched me say all this from behind her aviators, with a small smile on her lips. When I’d finished, she said, “You know all about my family, my history, my childhood, but you never talk about your own past, or your parents.”
I shrugged. “Not much to tell. My father was an Austrian sadist with a small mustache and blond eyelashes. He used to pronounce Austria ‘orstria’. That always terrified me.”
She laughed. I smiled. After a bit I said, “Helena made the point that the killer could be a woman. You think that’s significant?”
She shrugged. “I noticed that. I don’t know. If she suspected a woman, why not say so? Also, ninety percent of murders are committed by men. So, statistically, it’s not likely.”
“Statistical probability is a misleading friend, Dehan. Statistically, he is very unlikely to have been murdered in the first place, and yet he was.”
“Still, I noticed the comment but personally would not attribute much significance to it.”
I made a left and a right onto Central Park West and was temporarily distracted by the beauty of the grass and the trees in the early spring light. At West 97th I turned into the park. “Would you say she was pedantic—in her speech, I mean.”
She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I guess so. She’s very precise. You get the feeling she was taught extremely correct English, and sticks to the rules.”
“I noticed she uses shall in the first person.”
She frowned at me. “What?”
“Not many people know that shall is the first person of will: I shall, you will, he will, it will.” I glanced at her and went on. “We shall, you will, they will.”
“You’re kidding.”
“She knew that.”
“Huh…” She frowned again. “Is that important?”
“Well, it makes her question a little more significant, because presumably she knows that in English ‘he’ is a neutral pronoun as well as a masculine one. That may not be popular in our politically correct age, but she struck me as a woman more concerned with propriety than political correctness. I may be wrong, but I think she thinks it was a woman.”
She shook her head as we turned out of the park and onto the Museum Mile. “One of these days, Stone, you are going to come out with one of these gossamer thin deductions of yours, and it will be totally wrong.”
I snorted. “See? And then you want me to share my thoughts. So that you can erode my ego with cruel stabbing words, like my mother when she used to make me lie under the floorboards, with the rats.”
“You’re out of your mind, Stone.”
“I must have spring fever.”
Five minutes later, I made two lefts onto Madison Avenue and parked outside J Safra. Dehan opened the door to get out, but I sat drumming the walnut steering wheel and staring at the FedEx van in front of me.
“What?”
“The killer knew where she would be at that time, so he could organize the special delivery.”
“Yes.”
“He also knew Jack was going for lunch.”
“Yup…”
I eyed her face a moment. “So, where did Jack go for lunch?”
“Let’s find out.”
“Yeah…”
I climbed out and we made our way along the sunlit sidewalk toward 667 Madison Ave.
We crossed the echoing, toffee-colored marble lobby to the bank of elevators along the far wall, which still evoked Orwell’s art deco vision of the future. There, we took a car to the fifteenth floor, in uncomfortable intimacy with a dozen other people, al
l trying hard to pretend it was normal to be this closely confined with a dozen strangers in a steel box fifteen stories in the air.
The doors slid back and we exited with relief into the reception of Connors Communication. Here the walls were also marble, but of pale oxblood hue that was oddly unsettling. A girl who had the kind of charm you learn at customer services school gave us a pretty smile and asked how she might help us.
I showed her my badge.
“I am Detective Stone. This is Detective Dehan. We are investigating a homicide and we would like to see Mr. Seth Greenway.”
She made a call on the internal phone and two minutes later, a young man in shirtsleeves with hair that looked as though it had been sneezed on came hurrying out of a passage and asked us to please follow him. We did, along a beige-carpeted corridor to a large mahogany door that was guarded by a large mahogany desk. The boy with sticky hair dropped behind the desk and picked up the internal phone.
“Mr. Greenway, the detectives are here…”
He hung up, flicked his eyes at us and said, “You can go right ahead, through that door.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow at him. “Don’t get up, junior, I’ll get it.”
She opened the door and we went in.
Seth Greenway was seated with his back to a floor-to-ceiling, panoramic view of New York City, giving the unsettling feeling that he might at any moment fall backward into empty space. The office was minimalist, with a round table and twelve chairs to one side, hardwood floors with rough-woven mats and furniture that had that Scandinavian feel which reminded you that comfortable was not the same as cozy.
He looked up from a dozen glossy prints on his desk and stood, smiling at Dehan, holding out his hand as we crossed the room.
“Detectives, forgive me, we are rushed off our feet at the moment with deadlines and the rest of it!” He laughed. “Much like any other time! Please, take a seat.”
He glanced at me to include me in the offer to sit and looked back at Dehan with a quizzical frown. “You are investigating a homicide…”
I said, “This is a cold case, Mr. Greenway. The murder of the former CEO of this company, Jack Connors.”
He flopped back in his big black chair, his mouth sagged a little and he looked back at Dehan with an oddly reproachful expression. “But that was, oh… five years ago.”
I answered, even though he was still looking at Dehan. “There is no statute of limitations on homicide, Mr. Greenway. We take a murder committed five years ago just as seriously as one committed this morning.”
“Of course!” He glanced at me, spread his hands and looked back at Dehan. “How can I help?”
She didn’t answer. I said, “How well did you know Jack Connors, Mr. Greenway?”
He gave a small shrug. “I probably knew him as well as anybody did. He wasn’t really one for sharing his feelings, you know…” He laughed at the thought. “He was very much a man’s man, a man of action. He was all about getting the job done, pulling in the clients, making the next million. He didn’t have time for what he called emotional horseshit.” He held up both hands, laughing, and spoke to Dehan again. “I’m not saying I agree. I am just telling you the kind of man he was.”
I saw a small frown crease her brow. I smiled. “Was he well liked at work? How did his employees feel about him?”
“Oh…” He nodded at me several times, like I had touched on an important point. Then he turned back to Dehan. “Make no mistake. His staff loved him. He was uncompromising, direct to the point of being blunt, sometimes rude, but always fair and a very generous employer. His staff loved him. He never forgot a birthday, if somebody got married the firm would be there to help out, mortgages, insurance, healthcare, deaths in the family… You name it, he was there, rolling up his sleeves, getting personally involved to make sure his staff were taken care of.”
Dehan gave a small snort. I rubbed my hand over my chin and said, “I’m more interested in what he would have called the emotional horseshit: his personal relationships, friends, enemies, jilted lovers, old girlfriends… Who was he close to?” I smiled again. “We are looking for somebody who would want to kill him.”
He held my eye a moment, then made a small, helpless gesture with his hands. “Who was he close to? Me and Helena is the simple answer. And I don’t think either of us really knew him. I am not being awkward, detective, but the truth is Jack never really got close to anybody. Friends, apart from me, I am not sure he had any. He had acquaintances who were more or less close, with a small ‘c’, but I am talking about people on his team, who he saw at work. I am not talking about people he socialized with. What little social life he had was all through his wife. You know she is a successful novelist, so often attends events, launches, galas. You know the sort of thing. He would usually accompany her.” He took a deep breath and sighed. “Enemies, jilted lovers, old girlfriends. He must have had them, I suppose, he was certainly a man who was attractive to women, but if he did, he never talked about them.”
I gazed out at the vast sweep of Manhattan behind him, with the Ed Koch bridge just visible, spanning the water. I spoke half to myself: “He never socialized…”
“Well,” he said quickly, “that would be inaccurate. He did socialize, grudgingly, when his wife forced him to.”
“What was your impression of their relationship, Mr. Greenway?”
He held my eye and shook his head. “Make no mistake about that, detective. They adored each other. I have never seen a couple more totally in love.”
Dehan spoke for the first time. “How can you know that if he never spoke about emotional horseshit?”
He laughed out loud and his cheeks actually flushed. “He didn’t need to talk about it. Whenever you saw them together…” He shook his head, searching for a way to express it. “They were both very reserved, neither of them ever made a public display of affection, but you could just see it in the way they looked at each other, smiled at each other, the small touch of the hand. Everybody agreed, even people who barely knew them. They adored each other. And she, I hardly ever see her now, but I know, she never recovered from his death. She used to be bright, lively, fun; but since his death she has just faded away. And her writing! It has become so dark!”
I gave a small sigh and rubbed my chin again. The picture I was getting, both from Helena and Greenway, was almost absurdly detailed and yet told me nothing about the man. I went for the question that had been playing on my mind.
“You say he never socialized unless it was with his wife. So, where did he go for lunch that Thursday at one PM?”
For a moment he reminded me vaguely of a goldfish, staring at me with round eyes, his mouth working on unformed words which never made it past his larynx. Dehan said, “Presumably he had a secretary, and a diary.”
He scratched his eyebrow and stammered, “Long, long… um… long since departed, I’m afraid…”
“You mentioned a team.”
“As I say, that was about five years ago. There was Jean Reynolds, Angie Byrne, Peter Heseltine… Those are the names that come to mind. Angie was the graphic designer, Jean and Peter came from backgrounds in CG, animation, special effects, that kind of thing. They all had creative input.”
“They still with the company?”
“Oh, yes, they are still with us, we value…”
“Could we talk to them?”
He gave a laugh that was more stress than humor. “They are actually engaged in a presentation right now that is worth several million dollars to the company. Let me arrange it and tomorrow, the day after at the very latest, you can sit down with them and have their full attention.”
I smiled like someone who wants to be cooperative. “We’d appreciate that.”
Dehan scratched the tip of her nose and asked, “Mr. Greenway, who benefited from Jack Connors’ death?”
He opened his mouth, his eyebrows moved in various ways and he blinked several times.
“Ah… Nobody benefited from Jack
’s death. Helena inherited a lot of money and property that was, in effect, already hers! She inherited controlling shares in this company, which she did not want, because she had zero interest in it; and she ended up selling me a bundle of shares. So there was no real material benefit there, but she did lose a man whom she was very much in love with.
“You are probably thinking that I benefited by becoming CEO, but you’re wrong. Jack was planning to take early retirement anyway, and we had already discussed how he was going to transfer the reins of the company to me, and with them a bundle of shares. As it turned out, I had to buy those shares from Helena, so I actually lost money, and also the support and guidance of a businessman who was frankly brilliant. I miss him every day as a guide and a mentor. Emotional horseshit no doubt, but true nonetheless.”
I stared at him a moment, chewing my lip and thinking that he sounded sincere. After a moment he spread his hands and said, “Detectives, forgive me for being blunt, but we are up against tight deadlines and I don’t see that I can be much more help to you.”
I nodded slowly a few times. Dehan turned to look at me. I said, “There is just one last question, Mr. Greenway. Who was he having the affair with?”
He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. “I don’t know, Detective Stone. I believe he strayed a few times over the years. He never talked about it, but there were telltale signs…” He gestured at me. “As you noted, going out for lunch, which was totally uncharacteristic, not collecting his wife from college to take her to the book launch. It was atypical behavior and strongly suggestive of an affair. But I cannot swear to the fact, nor do I know who he was involved with.”
Dehan narrowed her eyes at him. “Did she know?”
“Helena?” He hesitated. “She is a highly intelligent woman, very deep and very intuitive. I would be very surprised if she didn’t know, but I suspect they both accepted it. For him it was a biological need and she just accepted that that was the kind of man he was.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow. “A man’s man.”