by Lee Goldberg
She had an eleven thirty a.m. appointment at the local beauty salon. She set the alarm when she departed at eleven, then deactivated it thirty seconds later, perhaps to retrieve something that she forgot, then neglected to reset it again when she left the house a second time.
When she got to the beauty parlor, she discovered that her appointment had inadvertently been canceled and that there were no openings, so she returned home, where she apparently surprised an intruder, who hit her over the head with a rolling pin as she walked into her kitchen.
Disher then went over what we knew about her husband’s movements during that same period.
That morning, Joel took the 7:16 a.m. train from Summit into Penn Station, then walked to his office at 475 Park Avenue South, where he hosted a live, interactive video webinar at ten a.m. that lasted an hour.
According to Joel’s secretary, after that he remained in the office all day working on his next book. He left the office early, taking the 5:17 train out of Penn Station, arrived in Summit at six p.m., and walked home with his next-door neighbor, Ellen Morse, whom he ran into on the street.
Disher’s initial theory was that one of the day laborers that Joel had picked up before to work on his garage remodel might have come back to the house to burglarize it and Pamela walked in on him.
But Disher never had a chance to pursue that line of inquiry because the MO of the crime fit the string of burglaries that Lindero and Woodlake committed—and they were arrested for the crimes within a few hours of Pamela’s body being discovered. It was assumed, wrongly we now knew, that Lindero and Woodlake killed her when she returned home unexpectedly and caught them in the act.
“I think we’ve got to track down the day laborers who were helping Goldman convert his garage into a home office,” Disher said.
Monk tipped his head from side to side, as if he had a stiff neck. But he was actually trying to work the kinks out of his thinking on the mystery.
“I’m not convinced that Joel didn’t kill his wife,” he said.
“He might have had an accomplice kill her for him, but he couldn’t have murdered her himself,” Disher said. “Goldman was doing a live Web broadcast from his Manhattan office that morning. You can see it for yourself. It’s archived on his Web site.”
Disher went to his computer and called up Goldman’s Web site, where there were screencaps of the dozens of video webinars that Goldman had done, arranged in chronological order. All of the webinars were shot at his desk, against the backdrop of a bookcase full of the books that he had written and paisley wallpaper as green as the quick cash he promised his followers. Disher clicked the most recent webinar and played it.
Goldman started talking energetically and with confidence about some investing strategies. I’d tell you what he said but, to be honest, I didn’t understand a word of it. He might as well have been speaking in Japanese.
He hadn’t spent any of his wealth on the video. The production values were strictly bare-bones efforts. He didn’t have a fancy set, there were no snazzy graphics, and the only sound track was the street noise of a police siren passing by outside.
“How do we know this wasn’t recorded in advance?” Monk asked.
“Because it was interactive,” Disher said. “People were asking him questions in real time, participating either by video, instant messaging, or voice calls, from all over the world. I’ll show you.”
Disher scanned ahead and some viewers with video-chat capability showed up in pixilated, jerky windows in the corner of the screen while texts from people with questions crawled across the bottom of the frame. Goldman responded to each one individually.
“This doesn’t prove anything. The program was over at eleven a.m. but Pamela Goldman wasn’t killed until around eleven forty-five,” Monk said. “Joel could have come home after the program and killed her.”
“Not unless he had a transporter beam,” Disher said. “There’s no way he could have gone door-to-door from his office on Park Avenue to his house in Summit in forty minutes.”
“How do we know for certain that he was in midtown Manhattan?” Monk asked.
“Well, his secretary vouches for him and we have security camera footage of him getting on the Manhattan-bound train in Summit at 7:16 a.m. and of him returning to Summit at six p.m.”
Disher hit a few keys on his computer and the two pieces of security camera footage came up on his screen. In one window we saw Goldman getting on the train with the parade of other business commuters holding their coffee cups, briefcases, and newspapers. And in the other window we saw Goldman arriving in Summit and getting off the train in the late afternoon.
“How do we know his secretary isn’t lying and that he didn’t just get off at the next station instead?”
“Because that’s his office in the Web video,” Disher said, tapping his screen.
“You can do amazing things with special effects now,” I said. “Goldman could have been standing in front of a green screen somewhere in the next town and had his image superimposed over footage of his office.”
“That’s true, but there’s a simple way to find out,” Disher said. “You two can go into Manhattan and pull the security camera footage from Penn Station. In the meantime, I’ll have this webinar checked out by an expert to see if any video compositing was done. But I guarantee you that Penn Station will have Goldman on their security cameras coming and going and that he was in his office when the webinar was shot.”
I had a feeling he was right.
We could have driven into the city in a patrol car, but I didn’t know my way around or the procedure for going through the tollbooths in a police vehicle. It just seemed easier and more convenient to take the train. Besides, that was the method that Joel Goldman used, so it made sense to replicate his movements.
We stayed in our uniforms and Disher called ahead to Penn Station security to let them know that we were coming so that they could queue up the surveillance footage to the proper train arrival and departure.
Taking us off patrol in the middle of our shift meant that Disher had to bring the officers for the next shift in early to cover for us. I wasn’t looking forward to their glower of resentment the next time we saw them.
The ride on the New Jersey Transit train into Penn Station was fast, smooth, and uneventful. We traveled in silence, alone with our thoughts. But as we got closer to the station, I could sense Monk tensing up even more than I could see it.
“It’s going to be all right, Mr. Monk,” I said.
“There’s going to be a lot of people in there, pushing and shoving and breathing and sneezing and sweating,” he said. “It’s a good thing I have pepper spray.”
“You aren’t going to use it,” I said. “Or your gun or your Taser. You won’t need any of it. You’ll have plenty of space around you.”
“I’ve been to New York once before,” he said. “It’s choked with people.”
“But last time you weren’t in a police uniform,” I said. “Trust me, people will keep their distance.”
I was right. When we emerged from the train, a path seemed to naturally open up in front of us, and as we moved through the crowd on the platform, it was as if we were walking in an invisible bubble.
Monk relaxed a bit, but not entirely.
Although he wasn’t in danger of bumping into anyone, he could still see all the grime on the floors and smell the thick odors of fast-food grease, human sweat, coffee, chlorinated cleansers, train exhaust, and stale air that built up in the windowless subterranean warren.
A very pale, short-haired woman in a dark, masculine suit, and wearing an earpiece with a cord that disappeared under her jacket, approached us. There was a photo ID clipped to her lapel and I could see the bulge in her jacket created by the gun holstered on her belt. There was no question that she was some kind of law enforcement agent.
“Officers Monk and Teeger?” she asked in a monotone.
“That’s us,” I said. “What gave us away?
”
She frowned, clearly not appreciating my humor. “I’m Agent Lisa McCracken, Homeland Security. Come with me.”
We followed alongside her as she moved quickly and with determination through the crowd.
“We’re investigating a murder,” I said. “It has nothing to do with terrorism.”
“But our surveillance matrix does,” she said.
I had no idea what a surveillance matrix was, but I nodded like I did. She led us to an unmarked, knobless door between two Doric columns, and swiped a key card into a reader that I hadn’t even noticed was there. I heard the door unlatch internally, she shoved her shoulder against it, and it opened.
McCracken led us down a long, empty hallway to another door with another key card reader. This time, the door opened into a very dark room filled with dozens of flat-screens showing different angles of Penn Station. Agents with headsets monitored the activity and spoke in low tones, presumably to agents throughout the station.
“This way,” McCracken said, moving to an unoccupied workstation with a bank of four monitors, all showing multiple angles of a New Jersey Transit train. She sat down and tapped a few keys on a very slim keyboard. “We pulled Joel Goldman’s photo from the Department of Motor Vehicles database. Using facial recognition software, we scanned the faces of passengers arriving at Penn Station on the train from Summit at 7:53 a.m. to see if he was among them.”
The image on the monitors zoomed in on one face in the crowd, which we saw from multiple angles.
It was Joel Goldman.
“So that’s what a surveillance matrix is,” I said.
“One part of it,” she said. “I inputted this target manually, but the matrix automatically and continually searches for known terrorists among the hundreds of thousands of people who go in and out of Penn Station every day. Picking Goldman out of the crowd and following his movements was easy.”
The cameras continued to track him as he made his way through the station up to Thirty-fourth Street.
“Do you know where he was heading?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “He told us he went to his office at 475 Park Avenue.”
“Let’s see if he did.” She typed on her keyboard. “Since 9/11, we’ve added thousands of closed circuit television cameras. We’ve got ’em at most of the major intersections in Manhattan, the train and bus stations, and all the freeway tollbooths into and out of the city. We’ve also got ’em at all the bridges, museums, tunnels, tourist attractions, landmarks, government offices, and the UN, of course. We don’t have the city covered as extensively as London is yet, due to budgetary constraints and public privacy restrictions, but we’re getting there.”
The screens showed us Joel Goldman, in an almost animated sequence of still images, emerging from Penn Station on Thirty-fourth Street, then getting caught up in the flow of people on the sidewalk heading to the corner of Sixth Avenue. The cameras picked him up again two blocks south and tracked him as he made his way east, capturing him at the intersections of Broadway and Thirty-second, Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second, Madison Avenue and Thirty-second, and finally Park Avenue and Thirty-second.
“Joel Goldman definitely came into the city when he said he did.” McCracken typed some more. “And here he is getting on the 5:17 train back to Summit. So he left when he said he did, too.”
Once again he appeared on-screen, from multiple angles, stepping onto the train.
“I can backtrack and see if he came to Penn Station from Park Avenue,” she said.
“That won’t be necessary.” I turned to Monk. “It’s obvious that his alibi holds.”
Monk nodded and sighed. “So there’s no question anymore.”
“That he’s innocent,” I said.
“That he killed his wife,” Monk said.
25
Mr. Monk in the Big Apple
We walked Goldman’s route to his office on Park Avenue and Thirty-second Street. The skyscraper-lined streets were teeming with people and clogged with cars. Even I felt a little claustrophobic, despite the invisible bubble around us that continued to give us breathing room.
I found the enormity of the city and the density of people and vehicles powerful and exciting. The monumental towers and the long streets that seemed to stretch out into infinity conveyed a strength, a confidence, and a certainty of purpose that was emboldening. And all the movement around us generated a kinetic energy that was as catchy as a musical beat.
It was no wonder New Yorkers felt like their city was the center of the universe. San Francisco exuded character and charm but New York radiated power.
The city didn’t have the same effect on Monk. I’m sure he felt many of the same things that I did, but he didn’t like it. It was too much like physical contact, even if there wasn’t actually any.
He withdrew into himself, lowering his head, holding his arms tight against his sides and hunching his shoulders, as if he were walking into a strong, icy wind.
Goldman’s office was in a tall, imposing building. Luckily for us, he was on the fourth floor and not the twentieth, since Monk was afraid of elevators.
We took the stairs. Because Goldman’s business was basically a one-man operation, he shared the floor with an insurance agency, a literary agent, and several accountants.
We walked into a waiting area, the secretary’s desk serving as the gateway to the conference room and two closed office doors behind her. The space was decorated with green paisley wallpaper and furnished with heavy wooden pieces, all of which combined to evoke the Dickensian feel of an old, established bank or law firm, only without ink-stained wretches scratching on mounds of yellowed paper with quills.
Instead, we were met by an artificially blond woman in her thirties wearing a tight red V-neck bandage minidress with cap sleeves that hugged all of her zaftig curves and shoved her bosom into her chin. She reminded me of a canister of Poppin’ Fresh dough that had just popped.
“May I help you, Officers?” she asked, getting up from behind her desk to greet us, which was no easy feat in a dress like that.
“We’re with the Summit police,” I asked. “Are you Joel Goldman’s secretary?”
“Trina Fishbeck,” she said. “I spoke to your chief of police on the phone the other day.”
“Yes, we know,” I said. “He sent us here just to confirm a few details face-to-face before we close the file. It’s standard procedure. He could have been talking to anyone on the phone.”
“I understand,” she said. “Ask away.”
“How long have you worked for Mr. Goldman?”
“A year and a half,” she said.
“What do your duties entail?”
“Besides the usual secretarial duties, I stay on top of his book deadlines, arrange his travel, coordinate his schedule. I also answer fan letters, send out review copies of his books, that sort of thing.”
“I’m surprised you’re not at the funeral this morning,” Monk said.
“Only Mrs. Goldman’s immediate family was invited,” she said. “Mr. Goldman, her parents, and her brother and sister.”
“What was Mrs. Goldman like?” I asked.
“I didn’t really know her. I only saw her when she came into the city for shopping or dinner with her husband. She seemed very nice to me. Was there something specific that you needed?”
“We understand that Mr. Goldman did a live broadcast from his office at nine a.m. on the day his wife was killed,” Monk said.
“No, that’s not correct,” she said. “It was at ten and ended at eleven. He does one every month. I’m the producer and director.”
She bobbed a little bit with pride.
“What’s that involve?” Monk asked.
“Well, there’s only one Web camera, so I just make sure that he’s nicely framed, leaving enough room for the chat feed at the bottom of the screen and space at the upper edges for the video. My biggest responsibility is selecting the questions and integrating them into the show.”
> “May we see where it was shot?” Monk asked.
“Of course,” she said. She turned and opened one of the doors behind her. “This is his make-believe office, the one we use for the webinars. It’s what they call a practical set in the movie business. His real office is the room next door. It has a big window that looks out on Park Avenue.”
I immediately recognized the desk, the paisley-papered wall, and the bookcase. There were lights, the kind used for taking pictures or movies, positioned at either end of the desk and a tiny Web camera mounted on a tripod in front of it, a cable running from it to a desktop computer in the far corner. On another desk there were three screens, two of which faced Goldman’s desk.
“That’s where I sit during the show,” she said, gesturing to the corner desk. “I send him text messages on the screen, letting him know what questions have come in, whether they are live video, voice calls, or e-mails. The other monitor shows him the live feed that’s going out on the Net.”
“Who needs a television network anymore to be a star?” I said. “All you need is a broadband connection, a computer, and a YouTube account and you can be Oprah Winfrey.”
“That’s exactly the way Mr. Goldman looks at it,” she said. “He calls it snipercasting, aiming for a specific target audience and striking a direct hit with your full message rather than broadcasting and splattering everyone indiscriminately with message shrapnel.”
Monk walked around the room, tilting his head, framing the scene between his outstretched hands.
“Looks like he wants to be a director,” she said.
“You said the show ended at eleven,” I said. “What did Mr. Goldman do after that?”
“He went back in his office to proof the galleys of his next book.”
“You were here the whole time?” Monk asked.
“Yes, I was, right outside this door.”
“What did you two do for lunch?”
“We had salads,” she said.
“Did you go out for them or were they delivered?”
“They were leftovers from the day before that we had in our refrigerator,” she said. “What does what we ate have to do with anything?”