Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery

by Tatiana Boncompagni

  I snapped my fingers next to my face. “Up here, perv.”

  His ears turned pink. “What? I wasn’t—”

  “Yes you were.”

  He swallowed and readjusted his spectacles, leaving a trace of cream cheese on the rims. “Sorry, geez.”

  “Go. Away.”

  He took a backward step, his hands in the air. “Nice attitude. No wonder you’re out on your ass.”

  “You’re next,” I shouted after him.

  It was time to go, but I wanted to see one more person before I left. I turned to Eugene. “Any chance you could turn your head for five minutes?”

  He barely hesitated. “I’ll be by the elevators.”

  Georgia was in her office, staring at her computer screen. “Get the fuck in here,” she hooted, getting out of her chair to shut the door behind me. Then she gave me a hug. “I’m so sorry, girl. I tried to intervene, but you know how these things go. I’m gonna fight for you to get back here. As soon as the merger’s final. Diskin knows you’re a valuable part of my team.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that.”

  Georgia’s gold bangles clinked together as she crossed her arms over her chest. “What did you do?”

  “I called him a spineless hypocrite. There may have been more.”

  “Oh, Clyde.” She shook her head.

  I leaned against her bookshelf. At least once a week she asked me when I was going to finally get my act together and write a true-crime book. My answer had always been the same: When I’m not working from nine in the morning to nine at night, Monday through Friday and sometimes on weekends, I’ll think about it. Maybe now was the time.

  “Will you do me a favor and let me know if you see anyone from the Kravis family around the office today?” I asked.

  She scrunched her face. “Why?”

  “The network’s buying me off. HR offered me fifteen months of severance in exchange for my silence. Olivia’s murder may not have had anything to do with the merger, but they’re covering up something. I can feel it.”

  She lifted her brows as her phone rang. Georgia craned her neck to check the caller identification. “Diskin,” she muttered. I hovered by the door. Georgia glanced up at me and mouthed the word sorry. “Taped not live, I got it. Exclusive to us?” There was a long pause. “OK.” She replaced the phone. “Delphine and Monica Kravis apparently just agreed to go on Topical.”

  I couldn’t believe it; I’d been hounding Delphine for days to tape another interview with us, and Monica had been totally off the table since the get-go.

  “Charles Kravis was admitted to Lennox Hill last night,” she added. “They think he may be on his last days. They want to talk about that and refocus the media attention on their family to what Charles did, his accomplishment in building this network and changing the cable industry and how Americans get their news. With the merger pending, it’s smart strategy.”

  “You don’t think Diskin made a deal? An interview for my head?”

  Georgia rubbed her temples. “I don’t know, honey. You think you know someone, but truth is anything’s possible. Not too many people you can trust in this world.”

  I found Eugene near the elevator bank. Waiting with him was Alex.

  “I just heard.” Alex put his hands on my shoulders. “You OK?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, but inside I felt uneasy, and not just because my future was entirely up in the air. There were still too many unanswered questions churning in my head about the merger, about the message on my computer screen, and about Olivia’s last text to me. It’s time you know the truth. It dawned on me then that had she been referring to Andrey and Rachel, she would have worded it differently. Whatever she had to tell me was personal, like the message the perp had left on my computer. The truth. My past. But what did one thing have to do with the other? Did they have anything to do with each other?

  Eugene and I stepped inside the elevator.

  Alex put his hand up against the elevator door. “Any word from the cops about your apartment?”

  “They said I could go back and pick up some clothes with an escort if I wanted.”

  “So I’ll see you at home tonight?”

  “I promised Sabine I was leaving.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said.

  “Oh yes I do.”

  “She understands.”

  He was wrong about that. “I wouldn’t.”

  Alex let the elevator go. A few minutes later I was in a cab heading uptown. Panda was about to go on his lunch break. I was planning on hitting him up for a ride to New Jersey.

  I secured the corner table at Pastrami Queen and ordered us a couple of sodas and a knish for Panda. He hobbled inside, his knee acting up again. Before he could say anything I told him about getting canned.

  “These people never hear of probation?” he asked in reply.

  I slid him a root beer. “Probation’s for cops, criminals, and teenagers. I’m none of those.”

  “Well, they made a mistake. They’re gonna beg you to come back, kid.”

  “When pigs fly.” I nodded at his choice of cravat. “Like your—”

  “Nah, try again.”

  I shook my head.

  “Swine flu.”

  I hung my head. “Second one I’ve gotten wrong. I’m losing my touch.” Panda’s knish arrived at the table in a red plastic basket. I pushed it to his side.

  He picked up a fork. “You not eating?”

  “I had a late breakfast.” Truth was my stomach was in knots. I was nursing a ginger ale, but it hadn’t done much good. “How’d you pin Andrey?”

  Panda dusted some crumbs from his mouth. “DNA.”

  “The baby?”

  He nodded. “Our break was finding Rockwell’s body, and linking up the DNA. It took some time to get Kaminski’s sample though. And then another twenty-four hours to get it tested.”

  “That can’t be all you got. All that proves is he was the baby’s father.”

  “You’re right. But he also left plenty of his DNA around the apartment. Hair and clothing fibers, bodily fluids.” I thought back to the two squares removed from the carpet in the living room. “There were also fingerprints on the suitcase and all over Rachel Rockwell’s clothing.”

  “Couldn’t that all be circumstantial? He could have helped Olivia with her suitcase the last time she came home from a trip, and he was having an affair with Rachel.”

  “It’s a lot of evidence, Red.”

  “Is he talking?”

  “Kaminski claims he didn’t know about the baby. And we think Rachel was not planning on keeping it.”

  I sloshed the ice around in my glass. “Had she made an appointment at an abortion clinic?”

  “No, but she’d had a conversation with her gynecologist, who had referred her to a clinic in Stamford.”

  “Olivia would have wanted Rachel to keep the baby. She wasn’t a staunch conservative like her Dad, obviously, but she did share some of his values.”

  “We don’t even know for sure Olivia knew about the pregnancy.”

  “But they were fighting, remember? The neighbors overheard them.”

  Panda sighed. “They could have been fighting about anything.”

  “I’ll buy that Rachel didn’t want the baby. I’ll even give you the possibility that Olivia didn’t know about it, but I think Andrey was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know about it, either. So if he didn’t know about the pregnancy, he couldn’t have known Rachel was planning on getting an abortion. And if he didn’t know that, what’s his motive? Why kill two women?”

  “We know Rachel liked the lifestyle. So it fits that the pregnancy could have been her wakeup call. She realizes how reckless her affair with Kaminski is. She tells him again that it’s over between them. Maybe she’s mean about it and maybe this time he decides he’s not going away quietly.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”

  “It’s the only way it could have happene
d. But to tell you the truth we hardly need motive with all the physical evidence we’ve got. I’m talking phone records, fingerprints, DNA, and if that ain’t enough, a personal history of anger-management issues. One of Kaminski’s ex-girlfriends called 911 on him a few times. No restraining order, but cops showed up on their doorstep and there’s a record of him threatening her and that crap is admissible in court. It’ll go a long way with a jury.”

  Michael Rockwell also had a history of roughing up his women. Rachel had a type, just like I did; and so did Olivia. There was never a romantic spark between us, but Rachel and I were one in the same—broken little birds attracted to trouble and prone to self-destruction via men and booze.

  “I’m a fool,” I whispered. Why had I believed Andrey? Of course he killed Olivia and Rachel.

  Panda patted my hand. “You’re not the only one. Rachel trusted Kaminski, too, and there were probably plenty more before her.”

  It was because he was good looking. Like Scott Peterson and Joran van der Sloot, Natalee Holloway’s presumed killer. Or Ted Bundy, who murdered, raped, and battered more than forty women before they caught him the first time, or Charles Manson, whose body count is still unknown. By the time their victims saw the monster behind the good-looking face, it was too late.

  We got up to leave. Once we were outside, I asked Panda where he was heading. “New Jersey with Ehlers,” he said. “To that lab, actually.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Orchid Cellmark?”

  He nodded.

  “Can I go?”

  Panda rocked on his heels. “No way, kid. I can’t take a reporter on a fact-finding mission. This isn’t even technically my case.”

  I clenched my molars. “I’m not a reporter anymore.”

  He flashed me a look. “You’re close enough.”

  We walked together to his squad car in silence. At the curb he promised to let me know what they found out at the lab, but I had to make him a promise. “Anything,” I said.

  “We can’t be sure Kaminski was the one who drugged you and broke into your place. Whoever was in there was real careful not to leave behind any prints. It’s gonna take some time to sift through everything they bagged and figure out if they’ve got anything useful. In the meantime, there may still be someone out there who wants to hurt you. For the time being, you can’t stay in your apartment. I know they’re gonna tell you that you can go back there tomorrow. But you gotta promise me you won’t.”

  I offered my hand for a shake. “You have a deal.”

  That night, I had Alex’s place to myself. He arranged to stay with Sabine again. I imagined she’d put her foot down with him after what she’d witnessed that morning. I showered and ate a dinner of takeout Chinese while watching Georgia’s taped interview with Monica and Delphine. There were no surprises. Mostly the women talked about Charles’ career, Olivia’s philanthropic endeavors, and how the family was coping in the aftermath of such a terrible loss and with Charles’ failing health. At the end of the interview, I changed the channel, disheartened.

  My phone buzzed on the coffee table with a text from Sutton Danziger. She wanted to know if we could have lunch after Olivia’s memorial service the following morning. I picked up my phone. There was one more favor I had to ask of her.

  Thursday

  Thursday

  I woke up at eight a.m., groggy from a restless night of sleep. I showered and dressed in the black skirt suit and pumps I’d been allowed to pick up from my apartment along with a few other necessities. By the time I left the apartment, Alex hadn’t made an appearance. After what had almost happened between he and I yesterday morning, I couldn’t blame her for keeping him on a short leash. I locked the door behind me, made a stop for coffee and a bagel, and took the subway uptown to Lexington and Seventy-seventh, walking the rest of the way to the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Eighty-first and Madison.

  I was two blocks away, on a quiet street between Lexington and Park when I saw Michael Rockwell striding from the opposite direction. At the corner, I crossed Park. He followed. I kept walking uptown, quickening my pace, but he stayed in step. “I want to apologize,” he said, catching up to me.

  I stopped abruptly. We were on a stretch of open sidewalk. It was broad daylight, plenty of eyewitnesses around, and there was a cop car not more than fifty feet away. Rockwell wasn’t stupid enough to try anything on me right there.

  He ran a furry hand down the length of his blue silk tie. He was dressed in a dark suit and starched white shirt, his hair slicked back with an overabundance of gel. I surmised he was headed the same place I was. “I said some things the other day in the woods behind my house that were uncalled for.” That was an understatement, but I let him finish muddling through his mea culpa. “Rachel and I didn’t have the perfect marriage, but I loved her. I never wanted anything like this to happen to her.”

  I crossed my arms. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Her parents are fighting me for custody.”

  In other words, Rockwell was afraid I was going to testify against him in court, that I’d tell the judge what a brute and bully he was. Rachel’s parents had been on Georgia’s show almost every day since I’d wrangled them for our show, and Rockwell, not knowing that I wasn’t working for the network anymore, had assumed that I’d been getting close to the Harts, possibly commiserating with them about the upcoming custody battle.

  I decided to make use of his fear and vulnerability. “Why didn’t you tell me Rachel and Olivia met through you? Why hide that?” I asked.

  “The Kravises were clients of my firm. They find out I’m blabbing to the press about how their murdered daughter stole my wife from me, how do you think that’s going to blow over with my partners? Lawyers are paid for their discretion.”

  “That’s cliché.” I felt a slight wind at my back. The forecast predicted heavy rains, but not until the afternoon. “So is being the husband who threatens to take away the kids when his wife decides she’s had enough. You roughed her up, didn’t you Michael? Did you fool around, too? Good for Rachel for having the courage to leave you.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping with anyone and I never once hurt her. Not once. That’s what she told people to make her affair with that trainer of hers seem less awful,” he protested, his voice rising. “I found her with him. Did you know that? And he was such a sleazebag. I couldn’t let a guy like that near my kids. I was hoping she’d tire of him and come back to us. But the next thing I knew, she’d hired a lawyer and was spending nights with Charles Kravis’s daughter.”

  “You filed first.”

  He nodded soberly. “On advice of counsel.”

  “Did you know Rachel liked women?”

  Rockwell looked at his feet. “I knew it wasn’t the first time.”

  “But it was for the money, right? She was attracted to Olivia because she liked her lifestyle?”

  He looked back up at me, squinting in the morning sun. “Rachel grew up on an American Indian reservation. She was the third girl in a family of five. She wore hand-me-down clothes, played with hand-me-down toys, and she had an uncle who couldn’t keep his hands off her when he had too much to drink, which was every week, like clockwork, right after he got his paycheck.”

  “The Harts, they never said anything.” And Olivia had obviously never mentioned it to me. I wondered if she’d even known.

  “Why would they? Rachel got out, but not without her demons. She liked to drink; she liked to shop. It made her feel like she was a million miles away from being that little girl on the reservation, clutching her one-armed Barbie, hoping her uncle would pass out before he got to her bedroom door.” He stood there, his massive size somehow diminished, like a balloon that had come back down to earth after spending a long time lost in the clouds.

  “Then why Kaminski?” I pressed. “He has no money.”

  He shrugged. “I guess there’s only so much you can truly understand about a person.”

  Sutton was waiting for me ou
t in front of the funeral chapel, her face pinched and pink from being made to wait for me outside. She knew nothing about what I’d been through the last week, and met my somewhat haggard appearance—the dark circles under my eyes and patchy skin—with a disapproving stare. “You have got to take better care of yourself,” she hissed in my ear, linking her arm in mine as we filed in line to make our way inside the home.

  Sutton craned her neck to look around as I did the same. By the looks of it, there were over 150 people crowded into the receiving room. We spotted Delphine and Monica, who were seated next to Delphine’s husband, Naomi Zell, Mitchell Diskin, his wife, and a few members of the FirstNews board. Noticeably absent was Charles Kravis.

  Sitting down on an empty bench near the back of the room, we put our phones on mute as a string quartet began to play a somber piece by Mendelssohn. Then Monica read a poem and Delphine recalled memories of their childhood. Naomi Zell spoke of Olivia’s tireless efforts at the foundation and all the lives she’d touched. I would have liked to say a few words, and kicked myself for not insisting on it when I spoke to Delphine.

  At the end of the service, the Kravis clan began to make their way down the aisle and out of the chapel. Monica, Delphine, Naomi, and Diskin filed past us, ignoring me deliberately. Sutton nudged me in the ribs. “You should say hello.”

  “Another time,” I whispered back.

  I hadn’t told Sutton about losing my job. I’d have to explain the circumstances, and Sutton, despite her best intentions, wouldn’t be able to keep from passing along the news to our former classmates. By sundown, everyone would know I’d almost had sex with an alleged murderer. And not just any murderer, but the one who’d killed our friend.

  Outside, the block was littered with reporters and news vans, including one belonging to FirstNews. Alex spotted us coming out of the funeral home and beat a path through the crush of onlookers and mourners. “Are you ready?” he asked Sutton. In lieu of having lunch with me, I’d gotten her to agree to give FirstNews a quick on-camera after the service. It was my parting gift as Alex’s producer. Not that the network deserved my help.