A Murder Too Personal (ed rogan)

by Gerald J. Davis

  His eyes made darting glances around the room. “You think you’re a real fucking hotshot, don’t you?” he said in a squeaky voice that rose as he kept talking. “I could bust you for a stunt like that.”

  “If you don’t have some sort of signed and sealed document from a judge in your sweet little hand, I’d suggest you depart the premises,” I said. “Right now, if not sooner, cretin.”

  He blinked a couple of times and started to talk. “Listen to me, Rogan…”

  I’d heard just about all I needed or wanted to hear from him. I slapped my right hand on his left shoulder and spun him around before he had a chance to get his balance, like I was going to give him a prostate exam. His muscles tensed. He was considering whether it was worth it to take me on.

  What were the odds?

  I was bigger and heavier. My hundred ninety-five to his, what? one sixty-five. I could probably put him away inside of a minute. Besides, how could he explain a fight in a premises he’d entered without legal justification?

  His body relaxed under my grip. That was my cue to grab his other shoulder and shove him out the door. He didn’t resist. One final push and he was halfway out into the hallway.

  “Your ass is grass, scumbag,” he yelled. “You ain’t quit with me yet. I’m gonna prove you killed her, Rogan. I’m gonna take you down.” A vein was throbbing in his forehead. Perilously close to a stroke, he was. He pointed his finger at me.

  I was sorely tempted to break it for him, but I didn’t know if he had a good medical plan.

  “Don’t let yourself get overexcited, my friend,” I said as I slammed the door in his face. “It’s bad for your digestion.”

  CHAPTER XII

  Rachel opened the door just a crack and peeked out. Her eyes were half-closed and it looked like she’d just been rousted from the comfort of her cozy bed. It was after noon and she was still wearing a nightgown. White lace with little pink roses, thigh length. She opened the door wide. It didn’t seem to bother her in the least to greet me like this. She didn’t even take the trouble to put on a robe. Her hair hadn’t been combed and she wasn’t wearing any make-up. Her face was dry and clear. She was barefoot.

  “I’m going to make a Bloody Mary,” she said. “Would you care for one?”

  “Sure, as long as you put in two shots of vodka.”

  She eyed me. “On the road to becoming an alcoholic?”

  “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

  She nodded. “Come with me,” she said as she led me down a long hallway. The place was huge and expensively decorated. To my practiced eye, the apartment was worth at least three million, maybe four. Two or three bedrooms and a maid’s room. The decor was classical-obviously professionally done. There wasn’t a jarring note. Everything fit together like one of those homes in the decorating magazines that you thumb through, looking at the glossy pictures of perfect rooms that nobody lives in. You figure it out. The girl lives like an empress and then goes downtown and smokes pot in a broken-down cold-water flat.

  She led me into the living room and I sat on a sofa that was as almost large as the H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth. Over the fireplace in front of me was a Constable. It was a pastoral scene of a countryside with cows grazing in front of a large hay wagon. If I were English, it would’ve put me in a real King and country mood. I didn’t have to get a close look to know it was an original. I whistled to myself without making a sound.

  She caught my reaction. “It was my Daddy’s, you know. He died a long time ago. Do you like the painting?”

  “Magnificent,” I said. “And your Daddy left you some money too?”

  “Enough now. Sweet Daddy,” she said with a note of bitterness. “But he left it in like a trust that I couldn’t touch until I was thirty. So I had nothing for all those years.”

  “And then one day you had the entire world.”

  She laughed. It was a musical laugh. “Have you ever been poor? And then, you know, hit the jackpot-rich overnight?”

  “Can’t say I have. How does it feel?”

  “Better than the other way around.”

  She turned and left the room, her nightgown flowing behind. I watched her as she walked. She moved like nothing could frighten her. At least, nothing conceived by man.

  I stood and walked over to the window. Down below on Park, the island in the middle of the street was bright with yellow flowers. I couldn’t hear the traffic. The windows were soundproof and the air-conditioning was humming low.

  Inside of two minutes, she was back. In each hand she had a Bloody Mary. I took one and raised it in a silent salute. The glass was Baccarat. The drink wasn’t bad either.

  I took another swallow and sat back down on the sofa. She sat down next to me and curled her legs up under her. It was the way the nightgown fell. She wasn’t wearing any panties.

  She took a long pull on her drink and looked at me. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “I was just thinking how Alicia described you.”

  “Nuclear physicist and male model?”

  She considered for a minute. “Well, she said you were…you know. What was the word she used?” She rolled those dark eyes up and to the side. “Unyielding-that was it. And she said you were like well-informed about a lot of things-but in a superficial way.”

  I grunted. Nothing like being nailed by a dead ex-wife.

  “And she said you were good-looking.”

  I examined her face. “Was she right?”

  She giggled. “I’ll never tell.” She took a sip, then a long swallow and finished her drink. Then she looked hard into my eyes. “I always wondered if I’d ever meet you. From the way Alicia spoke…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. The girl was a curious amalgam of vulnerability and self-assurance.

  I didn’t say anything. She got up and went into another room and came back with a small filigree glass and gold case. She put the case and a small mirror on the cocktail table and looked up at me. Her eyes glinted.

  “Want a line?” she asked.

  I shook my head and held up my glass. “My downfall. But you go ahead into never-never land.”

  Her gaze took my measure. She seemed undecided.

  “What else do you do?” I asked.

  “Whatever my shrink says I can do,” she said with a tight smile, “and whatever he says I can’t do.”

  She made up her mind. Abruptly she reached over, opened a drawer in the table and put the coke away. “Maybe I can convince you later, you know, when you’re more mellow.”

  “Why do you go to a psychiatrist?”

  “Why not? Who do you know that doesn’t go to a psychiatrist?”

  “Did Alicia know you went to one?”

  “Know?” she chuckled. “Hell, I sent her to my lovely, little sexy shrink.”

  I shook my head. “Alicia never would’ve gone to a shrink when I knew her. She despised them. Said they were worse than useless.”

  “Well, then either you were wrong or she changed her mind, because she became like a devout analysand. You know, the three-times-a-week kind.”

  “And why did she go to your shrink?”

  Rachel spread her hands. “Because either the world was fucked-up or she was fucked-up and she wanted to know which one it was.”

  “How was Alicia fucked-up?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure she was. You’ll have to ask our cute little Dr. Pasternak.”

  Yes. In due course I would do that.

  CHAPTER XIII

  It was four-thirty Monday afternoon, but not too late to get Stallings if he was still in his office. I’d called his office before I headed down to Wall Street and given a name I knew he’d recognize. His secretary told me he was in a meeting that would probably run past six.

  His office building was on William Street in one of those Art Deco structures that had been renovated when the real estate boys convinced themselves that Art Deco wasn’t such a bad style after all. The building had turquoise and aqua highlights to s
how it was trendy again.

  I planted myself across the street next to a construction site. It had just begun to rain, so I stepped back under an overhang and pulled up my raincoat collar. There was a clear view of the entrance to his building. I opened a copy of the Journal and paged through it, keeping an eye on the people exiting. When the downpour started, the street emptied quickly. The sky was slate gray and it didn’t give promise of clearing anytime soon.

  It took forty-five minutes. Stallings came out of the building with another man. They talked for a minute, then split up. Stallings opened his umbrella and headed toward Wall Street and then turned onto Broadway. He went down the stairs to the uptown Lex and I followed not too far behind. There were enough people on the platform to give me cover.

  In a couple of minutes, the express pulled in. I got into the next car where I had a clear view of Stallings through the glass window in the door. He didn’t read anything. Just stared straight ahead with a glazed end-of- the-day New York look. Behind me, two bums were arguing over who was going to finish off a bottle of John Daniels. The riders cleared a space around them to give them room to curse each other but otherwise didn’t seem to pay too much attention.

  When we stopped at Grand Central, Stallings got off. He cut across the main waiting room, walking briskly, and went through one of the passageways where a man was playing All Day All Night With Maryanne on steel drums with a sound that reverberated like it was in an echo chamber. I was fifteen paces behind him on the other side. It was seven-fifteen and the terminal was still crowded with commuters.

  Without a glance behind him, Stallings left Grand Central and headed west on Forty-third. His posture was shameful and he would’ve gotten an F for standing up straight if he were still in grade school.

  Halfway between Ninth and Tenth, he ducked into a decrepit six-story building. There was a hand-painted sign next to the doorway with a stylized picture of a naked girl and the name “Pussy Cat.” I went in half a minute later and saw the elevator stop at three.

  I knew where the sonofabitch was going but I didn’t know why. It just didn’t suit him. Stallings was a wealthy guy. His balance sheet put his net worth at five to six million. And here he was patronizing a low-class cat house. He’d pay fifty bucks for a bang instead of a couple of hundred for a decent hooker that guys like him usually took advantage of to ease the stresses of the workaday world.

  Was he going here just to save a few lousy bucks?

  Hard to tell, difficult to say.

  It wasn’t necessary to follow him upstairs. I waited across the street in the doorway of a boarded-up storefront. The street was empty except for an occasional well-dressed couple huddled under an umbrella hurrying east toward Broadway and a can man with a large plastic bag rooting around in the garbage for a day’s income. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long. A man of Stalling’s age and temperament wasn’t going to spend a lot of time engaging in pleasant chit-chat with the staff.

  Stallings came out a little more than a half hour later. The rain had changed into an intermittent drizzle. He opened his umbrella, stopped by the curb and looked both ways before cutting across the street.

  I let him walk half a block before I came up behind him and slammed him into the entrance of a shuttered store. He just stood there with his mouth wide open in disbelief.

  That was all I needed. I shoved the muzzle of the nine millimeter into his gaping maw. Nobody likes the taste of hard polymer, especially a man who’s just been at heaven’s gate.

  He sputtered and blinked wildly, coughing and trying to control his coughing at the same time.

  “All right, my friend,” I said. “Now talk to me.”

  I took the gun out of his mouth and placed the side of the barrel against his cheek.

  “What…what…what…” he managed.

  It’s relatively interesting to note how quickly a man’s spunk disappears when he’s just spent his load. The guy in front of me wasn’t the arrogant son of a bitch at the cemetery. Instead he was just a soft sniveling gelatinous mess.

  “What was the problem?” I said.

  “Why? What problem?”

  I figured there was always a problem somewhere, human nature being what it was.

  “The problem with Alicia,” I said.

  He gulped and nodded. “Wait,” he said, trying to stand straight.

  I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Her work wasn’t good. She…”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  He nodded again. “I had just fired her. Just a week before she…”

  “Before she was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you fire her?”

  “I don’t…” he said, flapping his hands helplessly. “She lost interest. She was making bad calls, bad judgments. Her stocks were down. Her earnings projections were off.”

  “Why was that?”

  “I tried to talk to her like a father. But she…she wasn’t working the way she used to. She antagonized a lot of people. She didn’t seem to care…” His voice trailed off.

  “Why was she doing that?”

  “I can’t tell you. I just don’t know. Please don’t hurt me. I promise. I swear.” He looked like he was going to come apart like a cheap suit.

  “Who did she talk to at work?”

  He thought for a minute. “I guess McCormack…Robert McCormack.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Our REIT analyst. He was her closest confidant. At least, she spent the most time with him.”

  In the dim light he looked like he was about to cry. I let him go and holstered my gun. Stallings started to rock back and forth against the metal shutter and made it rattle in the night.

  “Why would someone want to kill her like that?” he asked me. “Nothing like this ever happened to one of my employees before.”

  “You just haven’t been in business long enough,” I informed him.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Laura came back into the room with two mugs of coffee and handed one to me. On the mug was some kind of logo and the name of Stallings’ brokerage house in an antique script. She sat down in an armchair and managed to give me a sad little smile.

  Her apartment was as large as an oversized packing crate. That’s how people existed in New York. Each one with his allotted ten square feet of space. In a research laboratory it would have sent mice into convulsions. It was a junior one-bedroom. Modest, to say the least. Calligraphers don’t make a great income. But it was neat and well-furnished.

  I was standing at the window looking out at Seventy-sixth. The rain had stopped and the first stars were trying to show through the clouds. The sidewalks were still wet and caught the reflections of the streetlights. Diagonally across the street on the far corner, an all-night grocery store cast shafts of light through the mist.

  Laura got up and stood next to me looking out at the night. She held the mug in both hands and slowly brought it to her lips. She took a small sip and then stared down into the steaming coffee, as though she were searching for some meaning.

  “Why did they kill her?” she asked finally. “She never hurt anyone.”

  “We don’t know that.” I wasn’t about to tell her Alicia had nailed at least one person.

  She started to say something, then bit her lip and stopped.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Say it. Whatever it is, you knew her better than anyone. At least you used to. You and Rachel…”

  She cut me off. “Rachel. That whore.” Her eyes flashed.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Never mind.” She waved a dismissing hand at me. “Forget I said it.”

  I let it go. “Tell me anything you can remember.”

  She chewed on her lip as she tried to think. Then she remembered the cup of coffee in her hands and took several sips. Finally she shook her head apologetically.

  “I can’t think of anything that could help you. We weren’t that close lately. I mean, she didn’t tell me eve
rything the way she used to when we were growing up. I guess she entered a new kind of life and left me behind.”

  “Was there anything different in the last couple of months?” I prodded.

  She was silent for a minute. Then she shook her head. “We spoke maybe once or twice a month and she wasn’t very specific about what she was doing. She did mention that she wasn’t happy in her work. She…she did say that Steve Wheelock had called her.”

  “Was that unusual?” The bile started its work carving craters out of my gut again.

  “Well, yes. Because they hadn’t spoken for a couple of years. And then, all of a sudden, he calls her out of the blue.”

  “Did she see him again?”

  She considered the possibility. “I don’t think so. She said we should never go backward-only forward. She said that seeing him would be the same as going backward.”

  The vision came back to me, as it had so many times before. Alicia on her back, he ravaging her insides. I put the vision out of my mind.

  “Are you sure she didn’t see him again?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I know she didn’t want to see him. That was over a long time ago.”

  She finished her coffee and grimaced as she drained the dregs. “Do you still hate him?”

  I didn’t answer. How do you know hate, measure it, sound out its resonances? Do you need hate to keep you going?

  I put down my cup and got up to leave. She walked with me to the door, moving with soft steps. When she turned her face up to me, I put my arms around her and kissed her on the forehead. She rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel her heart beating. She was a delicate blossom.

  She answered my unasked question. “I’ll be all right. Even though I do miss her.”

  “Do you know where I can find Wheelock now?”