Dearly Departed

by Hy Conrad

  “About the call . . .” Fanny picked up her cards again and pretended to study them. “I still think fifty thousand is too low.”

  “Mom.” They’d been over this again and again. “Fifty thousand is probably the most he can get out of his bank on short notice.”

  “But he’s not going to go to his bank, dear. He’s going to try to kill us—Marcus and you, to be precise. I was voted out. God forbid I should be around for the fun part.”

  “The fact that you refer to a murder attempt as fun is the reason you were voted out,” said Amy.

  Fanny waved away her concern. “Yes, murder isn’t fun. Got it. But the police will be there, so it’s not like he’s going to get a clear shot. Who knows if he even has a gun?”

  “He’s done pretty well without a gun,” Marcus pointed out.

  “No gun? Then why can’t I come along?”

  “Let’s all assume he has a gun,” Amy said, not wanting to lose any of her hard-won concessions. “And fifty thousand is the right number. Any more and he’ll want to delay the payoff.”

  “Why would he delay, since he’s not going to the bank in the first place?”

  “Fanny, dear.” Marcus leaned across the table and stared into her eyes. “If we ask for half a million and tell him the payoff is tomorrow, he’ll smell a rat. He’ll know that we know that no normal person can get that much cash in a day. He’ll know that we know that he’s going to double-cross us. And he’ll know that we must be laying a trap for him. Fifty thousand is reasonable.”

  Fanny shrugged. “I think we can get more.”

  “Get more what? He’s not bringing money.” Amy used the same tone of voice she would use on a dense and stubborn two-year-old. “He’s bringing a gun.”

  “I know he’s not bringing money,” said Fanny. “But it still feels like we’re selling ourselves cheap. Especially since he killed two people.”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t know that we know that he killed two people,” Amy said in the same tone. “As far as he knows, it’s just art forgery.”

  “Well, maybe we should let him know that we know about the murders. We can get him up to half a million, easy.”

  “Why do you care about the money he’s not bringing?”

  “It’s not the money, dear. It’s the principle. He should have to pay, even if it’s just symbolic.”

  They could go on like this for hours, Amy knew. And, honestly, there were worse ways to while away a late afternoon. But then the phone in the middle of the table rang shrilly, like a cheap, cheery alarm clock, bringing them back to the moment.

  Amy reached over to an old oak sideboard, retrieved a digital micro-recorder, and placed it next to the cell phone. A second later Fanny slid open the phone and pressed the speaker button.

  “Hello, Mr. Steinberg.” She tuned her voice half an octave lower, even though he’d never heard her voice before.

  “Who is this?” Maury Steinberg’s words filled the small wood-paneled dining room.

  “That’s not important,” said Fanny in her best baritone, “which isn’t to say I’m not important personally. I have a lot of friends who think very highly of me. But my identity isn’t important right now, for the purpose of this conversation. That’s what I meant to say. What is important is that I have something you want.”

  “I know that. How did you get it?”

  “Again, not important. But it will cost you one hundred—” Amy had been trying to kick her mother under the table for the past ten seconds. Finally she connected. “Ow! Okay, fifty. Fifty thousand. You have to admit that’s a bargain, considering what’s in your little note. Normally, I would demand a hundred thousand, you understand. Even that’s a bargain.... Ow!”

  “You sent me a copy. How do I know it’s the only one?”

  “I don’t want this getting out any more than you do, dear. That would defeat the whole purpose of blackmail. You’ll get the handwritten original. No copies. I want this to happen quickly.”

  “So do I.”

  “Good. So I’m thinking, since it’s late in the day . . . tomorrow? Tomorrow should give you the time to get the money together.”

  “I can get it tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Fanny threw the other two a worried glance. “Are you sure that gives you enough time? Fifty thousand?”

  “My bank has already authorized the withdrawal. There’s a branch staying open late, so I can get it in cash.”

  “Really? Which bank do you use, if you don’t mind my asking? Mine closes at five p.m. sharp. I’d love to switch.”

  “Let’s get this over with, all right?”

  Amy and Marcus had picked out several possible places for the exchange, locations that seemed to have the right mix of private and public, places where Maury would feel safe to talk but that would still afford Lieutenant Rawlings and his men access and good sight lines. Fanny started with the first one on the list.

  “Do you know the Irish Hunger Memorial? Down in Battery Park City? It’s kind of a park. Not used much in the evenings.”

  “I can find it.”

  They had expected this to be an involved negotiation, with Maury rejecting certain locations or making suggestions of his own. But he’d accepted the first one on their list. Just like that.

  “Nine p.m.?” Fanny asked.

  “Nine p.m.,” Maury agreed and hung up.

  Fanny, Amy, and Marcus continued to sit around the little table, staring at the disposable phone and the playing cards, now scattered in meaningless clumps.

  Marcus cleared his throat and said what everyone was thinking. “I think Maury found a gun.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The Hunger Memorial was a perfect little Irish hillside re-created on a half-acre lot in Lower Manhattan. The mossy hill began at street level and meandered up a rocky path, through the roofless ruins of a stone cottage imported from Ireland, through a field of wildflowers and vines, also imported from Ireland, to a fieldstone wall that looked out over the thin edge of a city park and the Hudson River beyond. It had been built to honor those who died in the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, in the same way that another, much larger, more famous memorial a few blocks to the south honored those who died in the attacks of 9/11.

  This was one of Amy’s favorite spots in the city, one that felt remarkably isolated in the midst of all the office towers and apartment buildings. Even at the height of the summer, few tourists took the time to wander up the stony, weedy path—which was why the memorial had been at the top of Amy’s list of blackmail spots.

  Marcus stood beside her on the crest of the artificial hill, leaning on the stone wall three stories above the occasional car passing by on the far end of Vesey Street or the late evening jogger running through the narrow riverside park. He watched as she shrugged uncomfortably and scanned the tinted windows in the offices facing them from three sides. “None of those windows can open,” he reassured her. “Plus, I don’t think Maury has a long-range rifle.”

  “Good to hear.”

  “You picked a great spot.”

  Even Lieutenant Rawlings had been impressed by the site selection. If Maury Steinberg was intent on killing his blackmailer, he would either have to expose himself on the street or try to do it at close quarters, which would mean entering the memorial from the single entrance directly under the fake hill and making his way up the path.

  A chilly breeze blew in off the river. Amy felt grateful for the Kevlar vest under her cotton blouse and light cardigan. True, it was uncomfortably tight and pinched under the arms, but it kept her warm—and safe. Presumably safe.

  “Thanks for being here.”

  “Hey.” His crooked smile got her every time. “We have a history of this.”

  It seemed odd, maybe a little sad, that they got along better when they were facing the prospect of a killer with a gun than they did in normal life. He was supportive, adventurous, and instinctively knew how to control her mother’s crazier impulses. In normal life, Peter Borg was a mu
ch better fit—predictable, honest, less exciting, but also less infuriating. And most of life, she had to admit, was the normal part. You couldn’t always count on a murder popping up just to rescue your love life.

  The phone in her left pocket startled her back to reality. It wasn’t the throwaway but her regular phone, which she should have turned off but had forgotten to. Amy checked the display, scrunched her face into a frown, and pressed IGNORE.

  “If that’s Fanny, you should pick up.”

  “It was Peter.”

  “Oh.” Marcus let the dead air between them grow. By the time Amy had counted to eleven . . . “How are the negotiations going? Does he still want to merge?”

  “I haven’t had much time to think about it, to be honest.”

  “You should watch out for him.”

  “Why? Because he wants to work with me and make my business a success?”

  “The way you phrased it, I don’t think that’s a serious question.”

  It was Amy’s turn to let the dead air grow. At the end of twenty seconds, she checked her phone again. “Maury’s late.” It was 9:17 p.m.

  “What if he doesn’t show?”

  “He’s got to show. Or do something. Even if he just walks by and tries to see who we are, Rawlings and his men will spot him.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?” asked Marcus. “Worst-case scenario.”

  “Okay, let’s say he somehow spotted us without us spotting him. Or he saw the cops and ran. We still have his confession.”

  Amy had taken a copy of the confession to Lieutenant Rawlings at One Police Plaza at approximately the same time that Marcus had slipped the other copy under Maury’s door at the Ritz-Carlton. The lieutenant had demanded to see the original, but Amy had refused. It was the only leverage she had. “It’s someplace safe,” she’d assured him.

  “That’s a criminal confession you’re withholding, Ms. Abel.”

  “I’m not withholding. You have a copy in your hands.”

  “That’s not the same, and you know it.”

  “I know.” She would deliver the original, she explained, after the lieutenant came through with a police presence at her proposed blackmail exchange. Rawlings was suitably outraged.

  “Do you honestly think you can plan a police operation and just have me go along with it? First, you’re not an officer. You’re not trained.”

  “You can say it was your idea. Plenty of civilians cooperate with the police in operations like this. I know that for a fact.”

  “And if it goes south? What then? I would be in a mess of trouble, endangering a civilian, not following protocol. Not informing my superiors, which I couldn’t do, because they would never approve in a million years. Meanwhile, you’d probably just be dead.”

  “But if it works . . . then you’d have a killer behind bars, in a case your superiors say was an accident. Don’t you want that?”

  Rawlings looked tempted. “It’s a very long shot, Ms. Abel.”

  “Can you think of any other way?” she asked, trying to sound braver than she felt. “The man committed two murders. All this note does is connect him to art fraud.”

  “So you want to goad him into a murder attempt?”

  “Basically, yes,” she said, sounding braver than she felt. “Although you’re making it sound scary.”

  “It is scary, Ms. Abel.”

  “Look, I’m not a district attorney, but if Maury shows himself willing to kill, it might be enough to change their minds about Joy Archer’s death.”

  Amy had expected the lieutenant to put up more of a fight. But she could see what was going through his mind as he continued to shake his head and think it out. If he stuck to protocol, the note would be turned over to a white-collar unit, and he would have nothing. But if he bent the rules a little . . . if he went out on a limb . . . if he could finagle some equipment and manpower for an hour or two . . . then he would be making front-page headlines not only in New York but also on the subcontinent of India.

  “Remember the last time you didn’t listen to me,” she reminded him.

  Rawlings continued to shake his head, only the shakes were getting smaller. Toward the end, some of them began to take on a vertical aspect.

  “The lieutenant’s going to be furious,” said Marcus, standing by the Irish wall, squirming in his own Kevlar. “If Maury doesn’t show? After all this?”

  It was now 9:19. “If you were Maury, what would you do? You’d have to do something.”

  “I’m not worried about him,” said Marcus. “I’m worried about Rawlings. What’s he got? Five plainclothes officers? Three on the street, one in the park, one at the entrance? Plus him?”

  “We played him the audio. It was his decision.”

  “And what if Steinberg is already on his way back to Hawaii?”

  “So, we gave it a shot. What’s the lieutenant going to do?”

  “Technically, we did withhold evidence. Isn’t there something called ‘interfering in an ongoing investigation’?”

  Amy snorted. “Is that a real charge?”

  “This is the guy who threw your mom and me in jail for impersonating lawyers.”

  “You’re aware that I can hear you, right?” crackled an unamused voice embedded in each of their left ears.

  The clock on Fanny’s old stove clicked to 9:10. She sat facing it, a cup of coffee warming her hands, then turned her focus to the beige phone hanging on the wall. Amy had said she would call the second Maury was in custody, but that should have happened ten minutes ago. Weren’t blackmail victims always punctual when they came to a drop-off? You’d think they would be.

  She had put on an old Henry Mancini CD, thinking the music might calm her down. This was some collection of his old movie themes—“Moon River,” “The Pink Panther Theme,” “Charade.” She hadn’t listened to it in years, not since Stan’s death. Her late husband had hated Henry Mancini, had sighed deeply every time she put the CD on the stereo, which was probably why she didn’t play it anymore. What would be the point? The CD had just finished the final track, “Two for the Road,” replacing the sea of soaring violins with an ocean of silence, wave after wave of silence.

  Fanny didn’t like a quiet house. She wondered what she would do when Amy and Marcus finally got married and moved out, or just moved in together somewhere else, which was more likely these days. She loved the muffled sound of life in the house’s upper half. Perhaps she could rent it out, she mused, perhaps to some young, single career woman who might need some judicious guidance in her life. And then she remembered. Oh, yes. Good. The bank would foreclose on the house soon enough, so she wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.

  She was only a few minutes into her musings when she heard the noises from upstairs. A muffled bump every now and then, like someone trying unsuccessfully to be quiet. For how long had that been going on? Had Amy come home without dropping by? Without calling, as she had promised to do? Here she was, sitting alone in the dark, worrying her heart out and staring at the clock—9:13—while her daughter didn’t have the simple decency... Fanny headed for the door.

  Well, Miss Amy Josephine Abel, you are about to get a piece of my mind.

  Eight thirty-two p.m.

  Maury Steinberg stood in the shadows, half hidden by the broad trunk of a ginkgo, and watched from across the street as Amy and her concierge boyfriend walked to the end of Barrow Street and disappeared around the corner.

  He waited another ten minutes, wandering up and down the nearly deserted block, just in case they might have forgotten something and turned back. He was in no hurry. It wasn’t a bad evening for this time of year, perhaps a little breezy, and he figured he had plenty of time. Their appointment wasn’t until nine. And they would probably wait a good half hour before giving up and heading home.

  From the moment he’d seen the search results for “Amy Abel crime,” Maury knew he had options. It couldn’t have been a coincidence, seeing Amy’s boyfriend just before finding the blackmail
note shoved under his door. And the more he read the online articles—the New York Times, the Daily News, a feature in New York magazine—the more it made sense.

  This couldn’t be a real extortion attempt. For one thing, Amy didn’t seem greedy, not like his old partner or MacGregor’s maid. But she and her boyfriend did have a history of playing amateur detectives. From what Maury could tell, the police hadn’t been involved in their previous escapade, not until the end at least. The fact that the blackmail amount was pitifully low served to confirm his suspicion. Amy and Marcus would be showing up at the meeting point with a video camera or a voice recorder, trying to force him to incriminate himself. The one thing they would not be showing up with, he knew, was the actual note. That damned note.

  Maury remained in the shadows while a middle-aged couple loudly argued their way down the block. The woman hated it, she said, when he drank too much at cocktail parties. Why did he always do that? He drank, he said, only because she refused to leave after two hours, which was the time limit they’d agreed on beforehand. What was he supposed to do? They were her boring friends. Maury realized that he didn’t have all the facts, but still he sided with the husband.

  The couple talked their way up the steps to their brownstone and let themselves in. Maury waited an extra two minutes, then crossed the street to Amy’s front door. At some point during the tour, she had described her beloved block of Barrow Street, with the rare communal garden in the center. It hadn’t been hard to find.

  As with many New York town houses, the door at the top of the stoop was unlocked. Inside the small vestibule, Maury found a pair of mailboxes embedded in a wall of red brick, a small mirror gracing the opposite wall, and two buzzers right next to the inner door. The lower buzzer had no name tag, as if everyone should automatically know whoever it was who lived here. The upper buzzer’s label said A. ABEL. There seemed to be no cameras, which was just what he was hoping for. From somewhere behind the mailboxes came the faint strains of “Moon River” being sung by a wistful Audrey Hepburn. Laila had always loved that song.