Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery

by Tatiana Boncompagni

  Wallace leaned back in his chair, his arms spread wide. “Well, anyone got any other ideas?”

  I looked up. “The Kravis Foundation. Olivia’s assistant might give us an interview, help establish a timeline for Friday.”

  Wallace rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Who’s got the timeline?”

  “I’m working on it,” I replied.

  “What else we got?”

  The team debated our strategy while I marked the time on the wall. I was itching to hit the pavement, but, as much as I didn’t want to be holed up in an airless conference room, meetings were an important part of my job. I couldn’t afford to be cast as anything but a team player.

  I’d worked my way up over the years, cultivating sources inside the New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco police forces, plus a Rolodex full of the best private investigators, psychologists, and medical examiners. I’d landed exclusive interviews in the investigation of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance, the Laci Peterson and Caylee Anthony stories, and countless other national crime sagas. If I was ever going to move my career to the next level, I needed to show my worth beyond landing the occasional blockbuster interview. I was on the wrong side of thirty-five, and even for those of us behind the camera, you can only be young and hot for so long.

  Sabine Weller was both. Diskin’s most recent hire, she was twenty-something and curvaceous, with a face that looked camera-ready at every angle. Suddenly she was in the doorway in a formfitting sweater dress, her cheeks flushed. “Alex just called,” she said to me. “He’s got a woman who says she saw Rachel arguing on Friday night with a man.”

  “What time did she spot them?” I questioned.

  Sabine shook her head. “Alex didn’t say.”

  “Take a camera,” Wallace said to me, standing up. “Meeting adjourned.”

  Running out the door, I grabbed my bag and jacket from my desk and met my team—minus Alex, who was already waiting for us at the scene—in the van. A few minutes later we’d gotten around the snarl of west Midtown traffic and were sailing uptown. I took advantage of the drive time to make a call. The neighbors Sabine had managed to corral for our show last night weren’t friends of Rachel and Michael Rockwell. They’d provided good sound bites, but little in the way of useful information. What we needed was a real Greenwich insider—or close friend—who could give us the skinny on the couple’s relationship. Why did they break up? Was he mean? Was she a drunk? Did they fight over money or sex or both? And did those fights ever get out of control?

  I dialed Sutton Danziger. She was the alumni-relations officer for my class at Livingston. Her husband did something arcane and extraordinarily lucrative in finance, and they lived in one of those gigantic homes you see listed in real-estate advertisements with an asking price equal to the GDP of a small country. Knowing Sutton, she belonged to the same posh Connecticut country club as Rachel and Michael Rockwell.

  Sutton answered her cellphone after a few rings. She asked me four questions with the space of ten seconds: Can you believe it? How are you doing? How is her family taking it? Have you spoken to Delphine?

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Diskin had just texted that Delphine was confirmed for a taped interview in one of our studios at three o’clock that afternoon. Alex was conducting the interview, which would then be edited in time to air during Topical’s broadcast at nine.

  “The school should do something in her memory,” Sutton sighed. “The alumni association will send a wreath for the funeral, but we should do something more substantial. I’m thinking a dedication during graduation ceremonies.”

  “I’m sure the Kravises would like that,” I said.

  “Would you be willing to give a speech?”

  I demurred. Most people assumed I was a natural public speaker because of what I did, but it actually terrified me to say more than three words in front of a large group.

  “Olivia and you were inseparable. You have to do this.”

  Sutton wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so I told her I’d do it if she’d answer a few of my questions.

  “What kind of questions?” she asked.

  “Did you see last night’s broadcast?”

  She hesitated before apologizing. “I watch Greta.”

  At least she was honest. “Well, then you probably already know that Olivia entertained a guest at her apartment the night she was murdered. A woman named Rachel Rockwell, who lives in Greenwich. Do you know Rachel?”

  There was a long pause. “I’m afraid I don’t know her personally,” Sutton began. “But I know who she is and I have a friend who knows her quite well.” The way Sutton said quite, I knew I’d hit pay dirt. “This friend of mine will be at a dinner I’m hosting tonight. If you want, I could ask her if she’s interested in speaking with you, and get back to you tomorrow.”

  Although a dinner party in Greenwich wasn’t how I wanted to spend my evening, I couldn’t rely on Sutton to land me an interview with Rachel’s friend. The stakes were too high.

  “Would it be possible if I came by and asked her myself? I don’t have to stay for dinner.”

  There was another pause as Sutton considered my request. I couldn’t blame her. The last time she saw me was about five years ago. I was thirty-one, sloshed out of my mind, wearing a face of smeared makeup and a dress that showed more than it should. I’d also just had sex on her bed with her twenty-year-old baby brother.

  “Sutton, I’ll be coming from work,” I said. “And on my best behavior.”

  She relented with a weary sigh. “As it happens, my numbers are off. One of my husband’s friends is recently divorced. You can sit next to him.”

  “Sounds great,” I lied.

  “We’re here,” Aaron announced from the front seat. The van pulled in to an open spot. I told Sutton I had to go and hung up. Alex opened the door from the outside. “What took you so long?” His face split into a wide grin. Damn, he was handsome.

  I looked up at the woman’s building. It was a five-story walkup. “Which floor?”

  “Fifth.”

  “Of course it is,” Dino grumbled.

  We all helped carry the equipment upstairs. Her apartment was one of those railroad units, a narrow row of rooms, front to back. High ceilings, old creaky floors, the stench of yesterday’s fish dinner mingling with the neighbor’s cigarette smoke. “Can someone open a window?” I asked, narrowly sidestepping a little dog that was yapping at my feet.

  “Bad Riley.” A woman, forty-ish, with short brown hair and a slender figure, scooped the dog up in her arms and held out her hand. “I was taking Riley for a walk when I saw that woman. I saw her picture on your show.”

  “Rachel Rockwell.” I motioned to the couch. We both sat down. “You sure it was her?”

  The woman nodded.

  “The man she was with. What did he look like?”

  “He was tall. Good-looking. Reminded me of that actor. The one on Sex and the City?”

  “Chris Noth?”

  She furrowed her brows.

  “He played Mr. Big?” Michael Rockwell bore a small resemblance to him, especially in the dark and at a distance.

  “No, the other one. Aidan.” The dog leaped off the woman’s lap and onto the floor. He sprinted toward the woman’s bedroom, at the back end of the apartment where Dino was setting up a shot with Jen and Alex.

  “What time was it?” I asked. I was reasonably sure I could get time of death from Panda. If this lady had seen Rachel after Olivia was killed, that could be significant.

  “Around eleven thirty.”

  “You told my colleague they were arguing.”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t really hear. It was late. I honestly just wanted to get home. I’m a nurse at a hospital and I’d been on my feet since five.”

  “How are you so sure it was Rachel you saw?”

  “It looked like her.”

  “Do you remember what she was wearing?”

  She shook her
head. “She wasn’t wearing that coat, if that’s what you want to know. Bet she ditched that at the crime scene.”

  She was a fan, one of our armchair detectives who watched every night and dreamed of meeting Georgia face to face. I raised my eyebrow. “Have you talked to the police?”

  He chin lifted an inch. “Not yet. I got up late this morning and saw that woman’s picture. First thing I did was call your hotline.”

  “You probably should go ahead and call the police after we’re done here,” I told her.

  “We’re all set,” Dino called from the other room. The woman stood, excitement flashing across her face. My gut told me she had convinced herself she saw something she hadn’t. For the network’s purposes, that didn’t matter. For mine, it sure as hell did. Either way, I needed to find out Olivia’s time of death.

  An hour later we were out the door. Another half hour and I was back at my desk, waiting for Panda to get back to me, chicken-salad sandwich in hand. I was about to unwrap it when a man appeared in my cubicle. He was dressed in a navy windbreaker and rumpled khakis. He had a buzz cut and a beefy build.

  “May I help you?”

  “Clyde Shaw?” he asked in reply.

  I visually scanned his jacket and hands for one of the stick-on visitors’ passes security would have given him downstairs. My posture stiffened when I realized he didn’t have one. “Who let you in here?”

  He unzipped his jacket. I clutched the sides of my chair, preparing to hurl myself out of it. There were plenty of nut jobs who blamed the media for everything wrong in our world, and a scary number of those would like nothing more than to gun a few of us down.

  The man produced a police badge. “Detective John Ehlers. We have a friend in common.”

  Ehlers. Panda’s partner. I’d never met him in person. My shoulders relaxed away from my ears. “So we do.”

  “There a place we can talk?”

  I led him to Conference Room A. It was located along a hall that didn’t get a lot of foot traffic. With any luck, my tête-à-tête with the detective would go unnoticed. I offered him a bottle of water and took a seat at the table. Ehlers chose to remain standing next to the window, looking out at the view over Seventh Avenue. “I understand you knew Olivia Kravis,” he said in a heavy Long Island accent. Panda had once told me that Ehlers was passionate about two things, sailing and dogs, and that he was the youngest of eight, most of whom worked in civil service or on the force. They were a tight-knit, community-minded, big family—the kind I’d always dreamed of having.

  “I did know Olivia,” I said.

  “She sent you a message the night she was murdered.”

  “What?” My hand reflexively went to the pearls at my neck. “No she didn’t.”

  He repeated himself.

  “Are you talking about the voicemail she left me?”

  Ehlers shook his head. “She sent you a text. May I see your phone, Ms. Shaw?” It was more command than question.

  Normally I wouldn’t let a police officer within ten feet of my phone—freedom of the press and all—but this was Olivia’s case, and Ehlers was my ally for as long as he was trying to find her murderer.

  I took my phone out of my jacket, entered in the security code, and slid it across the table. Ehlers sat down, picked up my phone, and began tapping and dragging his finger down the screen. He was either looking through my texts or emails.

  “When did it come in?” I asked.

  “How about you let me go first with the questions?”

  I spread my arms. “Be my guest.”

  His fingers stopped moving. He slid the phone back across the table. “Can you explain that?” There was a text from Olivia. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I read her message.

  WE NEED TO TALK.

  IT’S TIME YOU KNOW THE TRUTH.

  I read it again, noting the time stamp, 6:05 on Friday evening, about twenty minutes after she’d tried calling me. It’s time you know the truth. What truth? What did she want to tell me? I looked up at Ehlers. He had a small notebook open and a pen poised to write. “I didn’t get the text,” I said, my hands trembling so hard the phone slipped from them and skidded across the table. “I didn’t get it.”

  “Are you in the habit of ignoring texts from friends?”

  “No, of course not,” I replied, flustered and defensive. “But sometimes they get buried under a bunch of other texts and I miss them. I didn’t ignore her text. I didn’t see it,” I said, repeating myself.

  “And you didn’t think to check your phone after you found out your friend was murdered?”

  “What? No.” I shook my head. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that Olivia had wanted to tell me something before she died.

  “What does that text mean, Ms. Shaw?”

  “I don’t know. Obviously she had something to tell me. It sounds like it was something important. How am I supposed to know what it was when she never got the chance?”

  “You have no idea?” He sounded dubious.

  I scoured my memory for answers, for a clue, and came up with nothing. I thought I’d known all of Olivia’s deepest, darkest secrets. Clearly I hadn’t. “No,” I said at last.

  He nudged the phone closer to me. “Read it again.”

  I did, trying this time to set aside my emotions and think analytically. I read the whole thing aloud again to Ehlers.

  “Anything?”

  “It sounds urgent. We need to talk. That’s urgent, right? And the words, it’s time, makes it sound like this thing she wanted to tell me wasn’t something brand new, like she’d been keeping something from me for a while. My God, do you think this has something to do with why she was killed?” A chill shot down my spine. This was too much of a coincidence.

  “We have to investigate everything.”

  I felt the world bob and shift around me, my vision darkening. I was going to faint. Breathe, I told myself. Breathe.

  Ehlers didn’t give me long to find my equilibrium. “Did you recently have a fight with Ms. Kravis?”

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Two Wednesdays ago. I went to her apartment. We ordered in from an organic soup place and drank wine. I went home close to midnight. Everything was fine.”

  He wrote down what I said. “Was Ms. Kravis in a relationship?” he asked without looking up from his notebook.

  I froze. What did they know? “Not that I’m aware of,” I said plainly, keeping my tone in check.

  He sucked his teeth. “You sure?”

  “Olivia’s life, like mine, revolved around work. Her priority was the foundation, like mine is this network.” It wasn’t a lie.

  Ehlers got up. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Wait.” I jumped out of my chair, blocking the exit. “What about the time of death?”

  “It’ll be in the report later.”

  “That’s not fair. I just gave you information, now how about you return the favor?”

  “Actually, you didn’t tell me much I already didn’t know.” He zipped up his windbreaker. “And as for time of death, it’ll be in the ME’s report.”

  “What do you guys know about Rachel’s whereabouts? Has she fled the country?”

  He answered me with an annoyed glare.

  “Is she the only suspect?”

  Again, silence.

  “Where on the head was Olivia hit? Do the wounds indicate that the person who murdered Olivia was taller than she is, or the same height? Because Rachel is small, five-five, five-four, max. If the wounds are higher, there’s no way she could have committed this crime by herself.”

  Ehlers pushed my chair gently aside. “I’d ask if you ever heard of high heels, Ms. Shaw, but I can see that you’re wearing some.”

  I shut my mouth.

  “The department thanks you for your cooperation. I’ll let you know if I have any further questions.”

  Three p.m. I was in the lobby of the Fir
stNews building waiting for Delphine Lamont.

  Back at Livingston, I’d remembered my best friend’s older stepsister as one of the all-stars. She was an A student and a born competitor, a star athlete who excelled in every sport she tried. She had every gift known to mankind except for, perhaps, good looks, having inherited a prominent nose and diminished chin from her natural father, a French playboy who had died in a powerboat accident when Delphine was just a baby. Both the nose and chin had been fixed by the time she left high school, although neither seemed to impede her ascent to the top rung of Livingston’s student hierarchy. At sixteen, however, Delphine had showed enough promise as a skier to be sent to a Swiss boarding school, where she could train all winter long. Olivia, it was decided, was to be sent with her to keep her company, although I never understood why. They had never been particularly close, and Delphine wasn’t the type to get homesick.

  I, on the other hand, was rudderless without my best friend. I’d developed early, getting breasts and hips before anyone else in my class. The girls teased and alienated me and made me feel ashamed of my body. The boys had the opposite reaction. They loved my curves and gave me the attention I craved. I took to my role of sex object with gusto. At fourteen, I gave a boy a blow job in the bathroom of the Ziegfeld Theater. At fifteen, I met Ethan Wilcox.

  He was a senior at Collegiate with a fringe of dirty blond hair and a tall, athletic build that his school put to good use on the basketball court. His parents lived in an apartment on Park Avenue, a duplex with a grand staircase and long hallways paneled in dark wood. When he called—out of the blue—he said his parents were going to be gone for the night or out of town, I can’t remember which. What I do remember was that Ethan had invited a friend over, and that we played pool and drank something syrupy and potent from heavy glass mugs, and that midway through the game Ethan lifted the hem of my skirt with the end of his cue.

  “I see London, I see France,” he said, setting down his pool stick to lift me on the green-felt-covered table. Off went my sweater, down came my skirt. Ethan snaked his fingers beneath the pink lace of my bra, his head traveling lower, his tongue swirling between my legs. It wasn’t until he was inside of me, my legs straddling the air, that I remembered his friend. He was standing at the end of the table, dick in hand, waiting his turn.