Fare Play

by Barbara Paul

  “No.” He was very firm about that. “They’re two of my best detectives.”

  At least he’s protective of his men; that’s good. “Then go light a fire under them. Get this taken care of.”

  “Oh yes, ma’am, Lieutenant, ma’am.” He turned to go.

  “Sergeant!” He stopped. “Close the door.”

  It took him forever, but he closed the door.

  Marian stood up and asked, “Do you have a problem working for me, Campos?” When he didn’t say anything, she snapped, “I expect an answer when I ask a question.”

  “I don’t have a problem … ma’am.” He was dangerously close to sneering.

  “I think you do. And I think you’re having trouble remembering that it’s your problem. Because I’m not going to walk out of this job just to make you happy, Campos. Did you get that? I’m not. Ever. Going. To go. Away.” She took a breath. “Accept it, and adjust. And do it fast, will you? I don’t have time for this horseshit.” She walked over and opened the door. “Go on.”

  She stood in the doorway watching him make his way back to his desk, a lot more rapidly than he’d left it. He was going to have to learn to take orders from a woman or transfer out. Marian had no intention of putting up with his sulks.

  At the nearest desk, Detective Dowd was on the phone. “Call for you, Lieutenant—line one. Guy named Holland.”

  She went back to her phone and pressed the button. “Holland?”

  “I’ve come across something rather interesting in our search for the mysterious Laura Cisney,” he said without preamble. “I can show you on the computer better than I can tell you. Do you have time to come here?”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said, and hung up.

  13

  The only other time Marian had seen Curt Holland’s suite of offices, it had been brand-new and bare of furnishings; now it looked like a flight control center at NASA. Holland was one of the ever-increasing new breed of private investigators, the computer detective. “Don’t even mention a trench coat in my presence,” he’d once snarled. Yet he still saw a need to keep street operatives such as Zoe Esterhaus on his payroll.

  Marian didn’t have to ring for admittance. A scanning camera mounted outside the office had picked her up as she walked down the hall corridor; the door buzzed open and Holland was waiting inside. “Come look at my table,” he said with a smug smile.

  “Table?” Marian slipped out of her coat and folded it over one arm. She glanced down a hallway where two men, talking loudly in Computerspeak, left one office and went into another.

  Holland led her inside the reception area. A woman wearing a prim pearl-gray dress with a white collar and seated behind the one desk there gave Marian a frank looking-over, this woman for whom her boss had stood waiting by the door. Holland pointed to a small leather-topped writing table. “We keep that for clients to use when signing contracts and writing checks and the like. André says that the mysterious Laura Cisney wrote her phony name on our agreement form while sitting right there. Mrs. Grainger,” he nodded toward the receptionist, “says no one else used the table that day.”

  Marian’s eyes widened. “Prints.”

  He nodded. “Almost a full set.”

  André Flood walked by, carrying an armload of printouts. “Hello, Lieutenant Larch.” He disappeared into an office down the hallway.

  Holland’s eyebrows shot up. “Well. You must have created quite an impression, if André remembers you after only one meeting.”

  “I don’t see how,” Marian said. “He never once looked at me during the entire interview.”

  “That’s our André. Let’s go to my office.” Holland led the way.

  Inside the office, Holland took her coat and hung it in a closet. “I looked in AFIS,” he said—and laughed at Marian’s expression. A former agent, Holland knew his way around the FBI’s computer set-up, including its Automated Fingerprint Identification System. And he never seemed to have any trouble getting through its constantly changing security.

  Marian sighed. “What did you find?”

  “What do you want? Name? Age? Address?”

  “Holland!”

  “None of which will do you the least bit of good,” he added blandly. “Her name is Rosalind Bowman, for all the help that’s going to be, and she’s forty-five years old.” He stepped over to a small conference table and picked up a folder. “Here’s what we found.”

  “Rosalind Bowman,” Marian repeated as she opened the folder. “Why was she in AFIS? She must have a record.”

  “Bowman was a political activist back in the sixties. She took part in a sit-in demonstration against a Midwest university holding government contracts for chemical research, and along with a hundred others she refused a police order to vacate the premises. Rosalind Bowman spent one night in jail, and now Big Brother has her prints on file forevermore.”

  “That’s all she did?” Marian was skimming through the file, impressed at how much Holland had learned about Bowman in so short a time.

  “That’s all. She’s led a completely ordinary life until recently. Came to New York after college, worked as a newswriter for local radio and television, worked her way up to producer-writer on features, all on the local level. Got married. No children. Stopped working to stay home and care for her husband, who’d had a stroke. Widowed last year.”

  “So what happened recently?”

  “She dropped out of sight,” Holland said. “Deliberately. That’s what I want you to see. Sit here.” He pulled a chair in front of a computer.

  Marian sat, acutely aware of the hand he dropped casually on her shoulder as he stood behind her. “What am I looking at?”

  “Bowman’s bank accounts.” There were three open on the screen. “One checking, two savings. She cleaned them out. Notice the dates.”

  “All the same day.”

  “Now look at this.” He tapped out a command with his right hand and another window opened on the screen. “She closed her Con Edison account the next day. And these.” More windows.

  His hand was burning a place on her left shoulder. “Closed all her other utility accounts, canceled phone and cable,” Marian read from the screen. All within, what—three or four days?”

  “It took her five days altogether … department store accounts and the like.” Holland reached around her and used both hands on the keyboard. The screen cleared and a new set of windows appeared. “Credit card accounts. She closed every one of them.”

  Marian frowned. “She wouldn’t cancel credit cards if she was just moving away, leaving town.”

  He called up a new screen. “Havery Van and Storage. Bowman paid their minimum three months’ storage fee but made no arrangement for her household goods to be shipped to another city. What do you want to bet that’s the last Havery Van and Storage ever hears of Rosalind Bowman?”

  “She’s just abandoning everything?” At the back of her mind, a thought was born: He could have told me all this over the phone.

  Holland had both hands on her shoulders now. “This morning I sent Zoe Esterhaus over to talk to Bowman’s neighbors. She found one neighbor who’d been especially friendly with our missing lady. The neighbor says Bowman moved back to her hometown—Lansing, Michigan. The last she saw of Bowman, she was waving goodbye from the backseat of a cab.”

  “No forwarding address.”

  “Right. Bowman said she’d be staying with relatives until she found a place and then she’d write. But she won’t.”

  Marian stood up to escape from those hands. “You checked airlines.”

  “Right before I called you. No Rosalind Bowman or Laura Cisney on any flights to Lansing. Or to anyplace else. But we already know she never left New York. She was here in this office on Friday.”

  “As Laura Cisney.”

  “Probably a name she concocted in the elevator on the way up. If she has another identity established, it won’t be in the name of Laura Cisney. No, she’s been too thoro
ugh to reveal her new identity that casually.” Holland smiled wryly. “What she’s done has been to commit an act of symbolic suicide. She’s killed off Rosalind Bowman and written finis to the life that Rosalind Bowman lived. It’s as if she’d died.”

  “The lady doesn’t want to be found,” Marian said with a nod. “But why hang around here if she wants to start a new life elsewhere?”

  Holland cocked an eyebrow. “Perhaps the lady had one more account to close before she left,” he suggested.

  Marian nodded. “Oliver Knowles. Did you find any connection between the two of them?”

  “Not even a trace of one. And believe me, we looked.”

  Marian believed him. “Yet somehow Knowles had a big enough impact on her that she abandoned everything and everyone she knew in her life … and hired your agency to follow him before she made her final escape. What do you suppose she wanted to do? She wouldn’t have had him followed if she’d already hired a hit man.”

  Holland agreed. “But whatever she had in mind, she’s probably gone now—now that Knowles is dead.”

  “I suspect you’re right. Anyway, this does tell us that Knowles was not the simple toymaker he appeared to be.” She picked up the folder containing the information Holland had gathered about Rosalind Bowman. “May I take this?”

  “Of course.” A sardonic smile. “Well, Lieutenant, am I now off the hook with the NYPD?”

  “Oh, Holland, you were never on the hook,” she said with a laugh. “I’m grateful for all your help. Thank you.”

  He got a glint in his eye. “So, are you willing to admit there are things a private agency can do that the police can’t?”

  There it was: the sore spot that never quite healed. “I’ve always admitted that,” she said mildly.

  “Yet you chose to stay with the police rather than work with me,” Holland said tightly. “Saint Murtaugh dangles a lieutenancy in front of your nose and you go for it without a second thought.”

  “Of course I went for it,” Marian said a little less mildly. “It’s what I’ve worked toward all my adult life. I never told you I’d join your agency.”

  “No, you never did. I offered you anything you wanted—and you turned me down.”

  “And you’re never going to let me forget it, are you?”

  He was silent a moment, and then said softly: “You betrayed me, Marian.”

  “What?” She was astounded. “I betrayed you?”

  “I thought I had finally found one person on this earth I could trust,” he said. “But you turned away from me at the moment I needed you the most.”

  Marian was furious. “Needed me? God, you can be so melodramatic! All I did was choose one job over another job. Only you would turn that into a personal betrayal!”

  “What was I to think? You turned your back on me.”

  “Oh, Holland,” she said with a sigh. “I never turned my back on you. It was you who shut me out.” They stared at each other wordlessly a moment, and then Marian said, “Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere. And I’ve got to get going. Where’d you put my coat?”

  He took his time about going to the closet door and sliding her coat off the hanger. He opened his mouth to speak, but then shut it again. He brought her the coat and held it as she slipped into it … and then shot both arms around her from the back.

  Marian gave in to a rush of pleasure. God, he felt good! She relished the feel of him, his weight against her back, his cheek pressed against hers, his arms circling her like iron clamps. With an effort she got him to loosen his grip enough for her to turn to face him. And then they were locked tightly together, as if trying to get inside each other; they couldn’t stand that way long before it began to affect them physically. He even tasted good.

  When they came up for air, Marian realized she had her hands bunched into fists pressing against his back. She forced herself to relax and took a step away, examining his face. He looked as tense as she felt. She gave a self-deprecating laugh and said, “Whew. I thought we were done with that, but I guess we’re not.”

  “Not by a long shot,” he agreed, wiping the palms of his hands on his trousers legs. “We’ve wasted a lot of time, you and I.”

  Yes, you have. “Well, I’m willing to do some catching up … in case I didn’t make that clear just now.”

  He laughed and reached for her.

  This time they almost ended up on the conference table. But Marian-on-duty was still Marian on duty. “No time, no time,” she moaned. “I’m supposed to be investigating a murder, remember? I think I’d better wash my face.”

  Holland went with her into his private restroom. He watched her reflection as she washed and applied lipstick, the only make-up she wore … when she remembered it. “We’re linked, you know,” Holland said quietly.

  “I know.”

  “Whether you like the idea or not, we need each other.”

  “Oh my, don’t say that.” She dropped the lipstick into her bag and made eye contact with him in the mirror. “Promise me one thing, Holland. Promise me you’ll never say ‘I need you.’”

  He looked surprised. “All right. But tell me why.”

  Marian sighed. “Because more women have been trapped by those three little words than by ‘I love you.’” She edged past him, back into the office. “Let’s not need each other,” she said. “Let’s just, well, choose each other.”

  “Ah, a linkage forged by preference rather than by necessity … I see. Does that make a stronger chain?”

  “I think so. But we’ll have to finish this image-making some other time. I really must go.”

  He led her back to the office’s outside entrance. “Dinner tonight?” he asked. At the reception desk, Mrs. Grainger’s head snapped around.

  “Not tonight,” Marian said regretfully. “My former partner is taking me to meet his future mother-in-law.”

  “Malecki? Ivan Malecki’s getting married?”

  “Yep.” She hesitated. “I’m going to be his best man.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Best … man?”

  “Holland,” she warned.

  He swallowed his laugh and raised both hands, palms outward. He was still standing that way when she left.

  14

  Marian stopped at a quick-service lunch counter on her way back, but she was only half-finished when her beeper sounded. She used the pay phone on the wall to call in. It was Campos, telling her he’d put a tail on the man suspected of being a fence. He’d waited until lunchtime to disturb her with that bit of nonessential news.

  “Shithead,” she said out loud as she sat back down at the counter; the two men on either side studiously ignored her. Marian finished her lunch in a hurry and then set her empty coffee cup down so hard she broke the handle off; the counterman told her she’d have to pay for it. With a long-suffering sigh, Marian paid up and left. The weather outside was so miserable she was glad of the tights under her trousers. The wind blowing in her face was wet and cold, but the next wave of slushy snow was holding off.

  Back in her roasting office, Marian yelled for someone to call Maintenance about the heat. She checked her messages; long one from Perlmutter, but no word from O’Toole. Perlmutter’s visit to Elmore Zook, Oliver Knowles’s lawyer, had resulted in no surprises. Trust funds for housekeeper Ellen Rudolph and secretary Lucas Novak, as Austin Knowles had said. A generous gift to the ASPCA and another to a local animal-rescue group. Everything else went to the son, Austin Knowles. David Unger had an option to buy additional shares of O.K. Toys. Zook had said that Austin Knowles was offering to sell a majority of the shares to Unger, more than the will required him to dispose of. Perlmutter left word that he was going to grab a bite and then come in.

  Feeling fidgety, Marian stood up and stretched. The only personal item Oliver Knowles had carried in his billfold was a photo of a cat, and he’d left bequests for two animal-protection organizations. So he liked kitties and he made toys for children. Santa Claus.

  Then why did someone a
rrange his murder? And what threat did he pose to Rosalind Bowman that she should go to such desperate lengths to make herself untraceable? And having done so, why didn’t she just go? What was that last “account” she wanted to settle before she left New York? There had to be money involved in this—not the inheritance, that seemed aboveboard. What kind of records did that toy company keep? If Holland could get into the O.K. Toys computers—

  Whoa.

  Had she really thought that? If Holland could get into the O.K. Toys computers … good god. She’d actually thought of asking him to do one of his illegal snooping jobs? She’d been trying not to think about Holland at all. But it was hard not to think about Holland. It was very hard not to think about him. Well, impossible, actually. She’d been doing pretty well at pushing him out of her head for the last month, until the Oliver Knowles killing brought him back into her life. But now he was back, oh yes, just as intrusively as ever. The truth was, her encounter with Holland that morning had left her with an unscratched itch and she wasn’t in the best of moods.

  So when Detective O’Toole came barging in, she almost bit his head off. “What?” she roared.

  He took a step back. “Report on David Unger and O.K. Toys.”

  “I told you to call in.”

  “Yeah, Lieutenant, but I got something here you’ll want to see.”

  Marian counted to ten and sat at her desk. “Show me.” O’Toole placed on O.K. Toys catalog in front of her. “A toy catalog.”

  “That’s their current catalog. Look at the date. Inside front cover, small print at the bottom.”

  She looked where he said. “It’s four years old.”

  O’Toole was nodding. “Toy companies put out several catalogs each year. They have to, to compete. But O.K. Toys doesn’t bother. Don’t you find that interesting?”

  Marian nodded. “Very interesting. Where’s their factory?”

  He pulled up a chair and sat down. “They don’t have one. Not anymore. They stopped manufacturing a few years ago, David Unger says, and sold the last factory in New Jersey. Now they buy from vendors and resell, catalog sales exclusively. Except that their catalog is four years old.”