Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery

by Tatiana Boncompagni

  A few minutes later, we were standing on a pair of zebra rugs in Sutton’s study, a vast distance from the living room. She lifted her gaze to the wall behind her desk. “Rauschenberg,” she said in a whisper, though her point had come across loud and clear: Sutton, like almost everyone else at the Livingston School, came from money, but nothing like what she had now, and she wanted to make sure I’d noted the difference.

  “Lovely.” I pretended to admire her painting before asking which of her friends knew Rachel Rockwell. “Vanessa Cox, the blonde,” Sutton said, repositioning a penholder on her desk.

  “They were all blond, Sutton.”

  She rolled her eyes. “She was sitting right next to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re not going to be rude, are you?”

  “Oh jeez, Sutton. No.”

  She tucked a strand of pin-straight hair behind her ear. “No talk about blood, semen, or child molesters.”

  “What about feces?”

  She scowled. “You know what I mean. Nothing gross. And easy on the booze. OK?” She gave me a knowing look that told me she hadn’t forgotten about her thirtieth birthday party, the one where I’d gotten plastered and screwed her twenty-year-old half brother.

  I crossed my heart. “You have my word.”

  My dinner companion had recently divorced and was a master golfer and successful businessman. He also had wandering eyes and, as the night wore on, hands. Thankfully Sutton had also seated Rachel Rockwell’s friend across from me, at a distance from which I was able to watch her get progressively more hammered with each glass of Chateau something. By the end of dinner, Vanessa Cox was, as they say, well into her cups. She excused herself from the table during dessert, and I followed, catching her on her way out of the guest bathroom. It didn’t take long to get her talking.

  “I heard you know Rachel Rockwell.” We stood side by side at a mirror in the hallway, reapplying lipstick. Hers was designer red, mine drugstore pink. “Everyone must be talking about her now,” I said.

  “Greenwich is a small town. People talk if you misbutton your raincoat.”

  I wondered if she was speaking from personal experience. In her current condition, I could imagine her having trouble dressing herself. “How do you know her?”

  “Like I said, Greenwich is small. We belong to the same country club and our kids go to the same school. My youngest is friends with her oldest.”

  “So you know her well?” I asked.

  She swayed beside me. “Pretty well. You got kids?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. My job’s pretty intense.”

  She gave me a look that was half pity, half envy.

  “Rachel’s the mom who makes the rest of us look bad. She does a million things for the school—carpools, bake sales, fundraising—all while maintaining a perfect house and full social calendar. And on top of that, she always looks impeccable. If there’s any chink in that armor, it’s that she tends to be a bit more flashy than most of us Greenwich girls.”

  I inched closer, lowering my voice a fraction. “What about the DUI?”

  “Oh that.” Vanessa looked down. “I’m not sure how that happened. Rachel doesn’t drink. I think she said someone in her family was an alcoholic. Really, it surprised all of us when that happened.”

  “And her husband? Michael? What’s he like?”

  “Oh, you know.” She shoved her lipstick into a sparkly clutch before dropping both at her feet.

  “No, I don’t.” I picked up the bag and handed it to her.

  “He’s controlling,” she said, taking the bag. “Like a lot of the alpha males out here. But Michael took it a step further. He put a lot of pressure on her, and he liked to know where she was at all times. He was always texting her. And Rachel told me once she thought he’d put a tracer on her car. Truth is none of us blame Rachel for what she did. Not one bit.”

  “What did she do?”

  Vanessa locked eyes with me in the mirror. “Rachel had an affair with her trainer.”

  “When?”

  “I guess it was about a year ago that it started. Michael suspected something was up—and when he found out the truth he went nuts. He got the guy fired and kicked her out of the house. Then he filed for divorce.”

  Murderers often display violent tendencies—frequently domestic battery or sex abuse—long before they commit homicide. Most of the time, warning signs go overlooked and unreported. Michael hadn’t been busted for beating up or raping Rachel—I’d already checked—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t guilty of it. And this certainly helped establish him as a jealous spouse. “Do you know if Michael ever laid a hand on Rachel while they were married?”

  “Rachel and Michael are still married, even though they’ve been living apart for almost a year. The divorce isn’t final, and at this rate, it won’t be for a while. In the meantime, Rachel has the house again and the kids most of the time, but Michael is suing for full custody.”

  She hadn’t answered my question, so I repeated it. “While Rachel and Michael were still living together, did he ever hurt her?”

  She shook her head. “I saw Rachel changing in the locker room at the club on a pretty regular basis. I would have seen a bruise if she’d had one.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 11:10 and I was suddenly exhausted. There was a train that left at 11:47 and if I hoped to make it, I needed to wrap things up with Vanessa in the next few minutes. “One more question: The trainer you mentioned, the one Rachel was sleeping with, is she still seeing him?”

  Vanessa leaned against the bathroom counter. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen Rachel in a while.”

  “She’s been missing since Friday.”

  “I meant before that. She hasn’t been to the club in months.”

  “Do you happen to know the trainer’s name?” I asked.

  She put a manicured finger to the center of her forehead and closed her eyes. “Something European,” she said at last.

  “Do you remember anything about him?”

  Vanessa opened her eyes. “He was hot. Blondish. Young. Killer body. That’s probably what pissed Michael off more than anything else. He’s used to being the tough guy in the room.”

  “Anything else?”

  She thought a bit. “He had a tattoo on his arm. A green dragon. Or maybe it was a snake.”

  Tuesday

  Tuesday

  I was in Diskin’s office, competing for attention with the four monitors on the back wall. They were all tuned to the Today show. Diskin, along with the FirstNews target audience, had just watched Matt Lauer’s interview with Frank Uffizo, the lawyer Michael Rockwell had hired to represent him and his wife. Diskin had called me into his office to tear me a new one, but I’d stopped him short with what Vanessa Cox had told me about Rachel and her personal trainer, a man with a tattoo on his arm who fit the description of the doorman from Olivia’s building. Except the doorman we’d put on camera went by Andrew, not André Kaminski, as he’d been known at the Greenwich country club before he was fired. That much at least checked out. It could all be yet another coincidence, but I didn’t think so.

  Diskin tapped his bottom lip with his pen. “Do you think the affair really happened?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. There’s a chance it could all be town gossip,” I said.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m going to ask Andrew or André or whatever his name is if he was having an affair with Rachel Rockwell.”

  Diskin nodded. “Ask him where the hell he thinks she is. And bring the crew.”

  I hadn’t planned on bringing a cameraman. People tend to freeze up as soon as they see one, and I needed Andrew—or André— to talk. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Diskin rapped his pen against his desk. “You’re going to go out there and catch that SOB in a lie on tape, and we’re going to put it on air and make news. That’s what people turn into on the TV to see. He turne
d his gaze back to the four monitors. “You should have had Uffizo. Rachel Rockwell is the police’s only suspect. And since she’s MIA, he’s the next best thing.”

  “Person of interest. Rachel isn’t a suspect yet. And we always lose Uffizo to Lauer.”

  “Screw that. You should have had him. Rachel’s going to be arrested, and MSNBC is going to cream us. Christ, Clyde. Georgia’s counting on you. So is Alex. Do you know what it will do to ratings if Lauer gets Uffizo every morning?” He shook his head. “Goddamn it, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “With all due respect, Mitchell, I think you’re overreacting.”

  Diskin laughed. “Oh really?”

  “There’s a possibility Rachel didn’t do it. There’s Michael Rockwell.”

  “Uffizo’s his lawyer, too.”

  “Well, what about the doorman?”

  His face turned grim. “Stop playing detective and get to work. Your job isn’t to solve the case but to cover it. Show me I was right to trust you with this assignment and land me an exclusive.”

  “What do you think I’m out there trying to do?”

  “Get out of my office.”

  When I had one foot out the door, Diskin dragged his eyes away from the monitors and announced, “I’m going to put in a call Naomi Zell to let the family know where the story is heading.”

  I stepped back into his office and shut the door. “Why her?” Naomi was the chairman of the company and Charles Kravis’s handpicked successor. She also had a seat on the board. That was the extent of what I knew about her.

  “Naomi is now acting as the family’s liaison with the press on this matter. Charles, Monica, and Delphine are grieving. They’ve decided to delegate the responsibilities to Naomi in the interim.”

  “Still, are you sure about reaching out to her? Don’t we have a protocol against this sort of thing?”

  “Oh please, Shaw,” he said peevishly.

  “Mitchell, I’m serious. This sets a dangerous precedent, giving a representative of the Kravis family inside information about our coverage plans. Naomi’s obviously not going to care whether we report that Rachel Rockwell was screwing her trainer, but what if something else comes to our attention, something the family won’t want made public?” My thoughts ran to my frustrating conversation with Delphine in the green room. “Are you going to put in a call to her then? Give her the opportunity to ask us to kill it?”

  “Why do you presume she’d want to kill anything we dig up?”

  I gave him a look. “You must be joking.”

  “The Kravises are used to being in the public eye.”

  “All that means is that they are used to doing what it takes to kill stories that don’t suit their personal interests.”

  He let out an exasperated sigh. “Let’s just say for argument’s sake we do end up with a scenario like the one you’re envisioning, Naomi knows how this business works, and she has an allegiance to the network. She also knows that we’ll spin the story to make it sound better than it would coming from any other network.”

  “I can see we’re not going to agree about this.” I was still uneasy about consulting someone with ties to the Kravis clan about our coverage. The family had its own agenda, one that involved keeping certain facts about Olivia’s life secret.

  “Here’s the thing, Clyde. Nobody here wants to be accused of a coverup, but the tawdrier this case gets, the stickier things are for us. Do me a favor and stop worrying about hypotheticals. Focus on your job. Find out what people are saying, and get them on air. And if what they have to say makes our founder’s daughter look like anything but the victim of a heinous crime, be 110 percent sure they’re not lying.”

  I pulled my cardigan closed, wrapping my arms around my torso. Diskin kept his office the temperature of a meat locker. “Are we talking about Kaminski now? Because my working hypothesis is that he was having an affair with Rachel Rockwell, not Olivia.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I nodded, but the truth was I didn’t feel sure of anything at that moment. Olivia had died with a secret, and I still couldn’t even fathom a guess to what it was.

  Kaminski’s shift didn’t start until eleven that night, which left me a whole day to start digging into Michael Rockwell’s background. My first move was to call Rachel’s parents in South Dakota. Maybe Rachel had complained to them about Michael hitting her, maybe she’d confided other things in them, too. And maybe that’s where she’d gone into hiding, a cave somewhere deep inside the Black Hills. But that couldn’t be the case because the woman who answered my call told me Rachel’s parents had already flown to Connecticut to be with the family.

  Damn it. I pressed my face into my hands. Behind me, I heard Sabine’s small voice. “You OK?” She stood in the doorway of my cubicle, holding a small cream envelope. “Clyde?”

  “I’m fine,” I muttered, taking the envelope from her and tossing it into my inbox.

  “It’s from Diskin,” she said, eyeing it. “I think you’re supposed to open it now.”

  I tore it open and tipped it over. A card sailed to the floor. It was an invitation to the upcoming benefit for the Charles S. Kravis Foundation. Stuck on it was a yellow Post-It note bearing Mitchell Diskin’s steeply slanted script. “The network gets a table every year. Be prompt and bring someone,” he’d written.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Another headache.” I tossed the invitation aside and turned back around to face my computer.

  Sabine left me to fret alone at my desk. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, now I had to worry about finding a date in six days’ time. And not just any date, but a man I wouldn’t be embarrassed introducing to the president of the network and a smattering of my most esteemed colleagues.

  I’d deal with the date problem later. Right now, it was time to get a face-to-face with Michael Rockwell. Unfortunately, I could think of only one way into his law firm.

  I’d met Jack Slane at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. I was thirty-three and not yet sober. It was a Friday in September and I was thirsty. Jack was tall and lean, with brown hair that curled at his ears and blue eyes that glimmered with mischief. Jack bought me a martini and we shared a dozen Blue Points while comparing workday horror stories. At a quarter to ten, he asked if he could walk me home. I knew that what I was supposed to do was hand him my business card and say good night. And if I hadn’t had three martinis and only a handful of oysters sloshing around in my stomach, I might have done just that. But I was drunk and he was cute, and I didn’t feel like calling it a night.

  On the sidewalk, Jack clapped a hand to his forehead. “I forgot some paperwork at the office. Do you mind coming up? It’ll only take a second.”

  I didn’t mind. Five minutes later we were up in Jack’s office at Bennett & Wayne, his hand inside the lace cup of my bra, his mouth on my neck. “I want to fuck you here,” he breathed into my ear, pushing me on to his desk, dipping his head between my thighs, his hands and mouth doing the work of three men.

  We continued to see each other, on and off, for the next six months. Then one night, after a particularly athletic session on Jack’s king-size bed, with my left breast exposed and a damp spot on the sheets between us, he broke the news that he’d met someone else. “She’s amazing,” he’d said, his hand reaching for my nipple. I wish I could say I handled the news with dignity.

  Pushing aside my memories, I dialed Gloria, Jack’s assistant, and pretended to have a sweater Jack had forgotten long ago at my apartment. I could drop it off while I was in the area. “Mr. Slane isn’t in yet,” she said, her voice barely concealing her disapproval. Apparently Gloria remembered me.

  “That’s fine. I don’t need to see him. Like I said, I just want to drop off a sweater.”

  She sighed wearily. “You are aware that Mr. Slane is engaged now.”

  “It’s a sweater, Gloria.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was in the elegant brown and cream lobby of Bennett & Wayn
e carrying the oversize cardigan I keep in the office for summer days when the AC was on full blast. It was possible that Michael Rockwell had taken the day off, in which case my whole lost-sweater charade would have been for nothing, but I was willing to take the chance. Rockwell wasn’t returning my calls, and even if I did manage to get him on the phone, he’d probably just hang up on me. It would be far harder to kick me out of his office if I was threatening to make a scene.

  The receptionist buzzed Gloria to come get me, and Gloria told her to send me back on my own recognizance. Without an escort, I had a brief window during which I could find Rockwell’s office and confront him without raising too much suspicion. After taking the internal elevator to Jack’s floor, I took off my visitor’s tag and asked a harried-looking associate where I could find the corporate department.

  The woman stopped, readjusted the box of files she was carrying on her hip. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Michael Rockwell.”

  “Oh.” Her face screwed up a little at the sound of his name. “He’s in M and A, down that hall, take a left at the bathroom. Third door down. Names are on the doors.”

  Sure enough, his office was marked with his name in brass letters. His door had been left slightly ajar, which allowed me to hear that he was inside, alone, and typing at his computer. I knocked once, went in, and closed the door behind me.

  “Can I help you?” He was tall and brawny, with thick dark hair, slicked back from his forehead. His pinstriped suit looked custom made, and two gold-and-onyx cufflinks flashed from each of his starched, white cuffs.

  I took a seat in one of the two grommet-studded armchairs facing his desk. “Hi Michael. I’m Clyde Shaw. We spoke on the phone the other day.”

  He furrowed his brows, not immediately connecting the dots.

  “I’m a producer for FirstNews.”

  Swiveling in his chair, he picked up the phone and began to dial what I assumed was building security.