Eye of a Needle

by Lee Perry

  The heavyset older man firmly shook Jordan’s hand, “Agent Hawkins, please come in.”

  “Thank you.” Jordan stepped inside the mahogany paneled office, privately noting the heavy, dark-colored leather furniture and velvet drapes that hung in the windows. Tastefully gauche… she thought humorlessly, perfect for a lawyer to the super rich. “I appreciate your time Mister Stiger.”

  “Anything I can do to help,” his gesture was expansive, “please, have a seat.”

  Jordan noted he gestured for her to sit in a straight back New England library chair in front of his desk while he sat in the plush modern office chair behind it. Don’t get too comfortable, Agent Hawkins… She allowed a small grin; he’d rather you didn’t stay long. She sat and swung her briefbag from her shoulder onto her lap and rummaging in its contents, withdrew a sheaf of papers, “As promised, here is the warrant for your records regarding Miss Lynch.” She left them on his desk and he nodded, pressing a button on his phone,

  “Stace…” he called on the intercom, “Stacy, come in here a minute.”

  William Stiger’s secretary quietly entered and he handed it to her, “Have these processed as soon as possible, will you?” She nodded and left and he smiled at Jordan, “I have bunch of interns who can get this done pretty quickly.” He leaned back in his chair, “So what else can I help you with?”

  “Mainly, I have questions about your history with Helga Lynch.” She took her phone from her jacket pocket and placing it on the desk, clicked on the audio recorder, “This is Special Agent Jordan Hawkins’s interview with William Stiger…”

  The lawyer held up a pudgy hand, “I didn’t say you could record this.”

  Jordan’s brows arched innocently, “Oh, okay, then I will need you to come down to the bureau where we can do this in a more official setting.” She rummaged in her bag again, pulling out another warrant and placed it on the desk facing him, “This warrant allows me to make a video recording of the interview.” Her eyes were flat and neutral and she counted silently as he returned the stare for only two seconds before his eyes flicked at the warrant.

  “Fine,” he gestured for her to continue, “let’s proceed here in my office.”

  She made sure her phone was still recording then asked, “How did you become Helga Lynch’s lawyer?”

  Mr. Stiger looked surprised; he expected the when question first. “I worked with Helga’s previous attorney, Marvin Womack, I was already familiar with her needs as a client, and when Marvin was ready to retire, he recommended me for the job.”

  “And that was when?”

  “That was back in 1989.”

  “Would you say you and Helga were friends?”

  “I never even met her face to face until a couple of months ago when she signed her first will.”

  Jordan tamped down on the surprise she felt, “Two and a half decades and you never met your client?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Why?”

  “She was a very private person, we only spoke on the phone and exchanged written correspondence.”

  “You know the Manhattan District Attorney has assigned Helga’s estate to the surrogate’s court because of the two conflicting wills she signed in her last weeks.”

  “When you read her files, Agent Hawkins, you’ll see how many times I and Marvin tried to get her to sign a will over the years, for such a reclusive person she was astoundingly vulnerable to the influence of the people around her.”

  “Who?” Jordan looked perplexed, “She lived the last quarter century of her life in a hospital room.”

  “Precisely,” he nodded, “as evidenced by her extraordinary gifts to her nurses and their families, any sob story would have her searching for her checkbook.” He leaned forward, leaning his elbows on his desk, his fingers interlaced, “Just wait till you see who benefited from Helga’s generosity over the years, what they got,” his voice dropped to a low murmur but each word was crisply enunciated, “and how much it added up to.”

  She wanted a comfortable place to sit and imitating Jordan; she first knocked and then peeked inside the auditorium across the hall from their office. Finding it empty, she slipped inside and flicked on some lights as she made her way down to the podium, plugging in her tablet and grabbing the remote. She sat in the cushioned theater-style seat and pointed it at the screen, clicking open the first link sent to her by Agent Hargrove. It navigated her to the D.A.’s database of subpoenaed records and she copied then pasted in the user name and password Mattie included in her email to access the files. Her head dropped back on the seat while the document loaded, filling the wall-sized screen, “And here we go…” she muttered aloud, “now opening Pandora’s Box, Number One.”

  The first file she opened was a detailed bank statement for the last month of Helga’s life, and her eyes slammed opened wide as she quickly scanned the laundry list of handwritten checks, “Holy merde.” She groaned when her eyes fell on a check written for five million dollars to Hannah Babcock, “That was the angry Asian woman who tried to throw us out that day...” she said aloud, remembering the nametag she saw on Helga’s nurse.

  Tired of getting the runaround from the spectacularly unhelpful staff, Jordan tapped her badge wallet sharply on the tall counter at the nurse’s station, “Excuse me,” she held it open for the two women seated on the far side of the small office area, “I need to talk to you.” They just looked at her and she added, “Now.” Jesus, she marveled, watching them as they rose, arching their eyebrows at each other, are they specially trained in rudeness and disdain here? When they finally stood at the counter opposite, she introduced herself, “Good afternoon, ladies, I’m Special Agent Hawkins, I’m looking for Doctor Martin Hanover…”

  “Did you check his office?” The older nurse inquired, her tone condescending.

  “I need to speak to your floor supervisor,” Jordan smiled humorlessly, “right now.”

  “I’m the lead nurse on this floor,” she smiled pleasantly, “may I help you?”

  “I understand Doctor Hanover is on shift now and he’s neither in his office or in surgery, so you are going to find him for me, or I’m going to conduct a search for him by flooding this posh place with FBI agents…” She grinned, “and I’d rather not upset your clientele, now… where is he?” She leaned on the counter, watching as the lead nurse, Edna Babich, according to her nametag, picked up the phone and called the operator,

  “This is Eight West; page Doctor Hanover to this extension, Code Green.”

  Jordan arched a lone brow at the younger nurse, “What’s Code Green?”

  “Call right away.” She answered, looking uncomfortable.

  “So,” Jordan leaned over the counter a little to read her nametag, “Wendy, did you work on this floor when Helga Lynch lived here?”

  She looked scared, “Yes?”

  “What did you think about her? Was she nice? Or was she a pain in the butt?”

  “She had a private nurse from the agency, we weren’t allowed in her room. She only came out of there once, and that was when they took her to the ICU before she died.”

  “None of us ever saw her,” Edna Babich had hung up the phone and turning to one side, half-sat on the desk extension below the counter, “and Hannah Babcock would certainly never let any one of us near her precious Golden Goose.”

  “Really?” Jordan asked, surprised by the sudden one-eighty in the woman’s attitude. “Hannah Babcock was privately employed?”

  “Oh yeah, and Hannah never took breaks.” She snorted, “She was terrified that old woman would talk to another nurse, like her better and fire Hannah.”

  “Huh….” Jordan snorted, fishing a notepad and pen out of her jacket pocket, “So who took care of Miss Lynch on Hannah’s days off?”

  The younger nurse, Wendy, uttered a derisive snort, “What days off?”

  Jordan could see a slightly stooped older man in a white labcoat approach and the lead nurse waved him over,

  “D
octor Hanover? The FBI is here to see you.”

  Jordan held up her badge wallet and introduced herself and he shook her hand, “I can guess who you’re here to talk to me about,” he smiled, “let’s go to my office shall we?” He pointed down the hall and Jordan turned back to the nurses,

  “Thank you…”

  Edna waved a hand dismissively, “Anytime.”

  Jordan turned to follow Dr. Hanover down the hallway and rolled her eyes, “Your staff here are quite helpful… after an initial butting of heads.”

  “Really?”His eyebrows arched innocently and Jordan couldn’t tell if he was being facetious or not.

  They entered a modest office and Jordan noted the complete absence of filing cabinets and paperwork on the desk. “Doctor Hanover, I’ll be recording this interview today so I won’t have to take notes…”

  “That’s alright.”

  “How long were you Helga Lynch’s physician?”

  He shed the labcoat, tossing it onto a sofa on the far side of the room, “I bought Herman Edelman’s practice from him when he retired, he was Helga’s physician for decades and his wife, Suzanne, who was friends with Helga, recommended me.” He sat behind the desk, “That was back in 1990. Helga Lynch had outlived two physicians and when Herman retired, she simply stopped going to the doctor... Well,” He shook his head and sighed, “I believe she had stopped going out at all long before the seborrheic keratosis started appearing.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Seborrheic keratosis, it’s a common skin growth. They are benign growths that often appear in middle-aged and older adults. I believe Helga thought she had skin cancer and was too frightened to have them diagnosed. They aren’t contagious, most often seborrheic keratoses start as small, rough bumps that slowly thicken and over time get a warty surface. Unfortunately, Helga had developed one on her eyelid and another large one at the corner of her mouth, making it difficult to eat, so she didn’t. She was down to eighty-five pounds when she called Suzanne and she convinced her to see me.” He folded his hands on his desk, “I walked into that place…”

  “Her apartment on Fifth Avenue?”

  “Yes, it was early afternoon and all the drapes were drawn, so it was dark in there and when she came down the hall…” he shook his head, “it was like seeing a phantom coming out of the shadows at me. Anyway, I convinced her to go to a hospital, she chose Manhattan Dominican chiefly because it was close to where Suzanne lived and also because I had privileges here at the time. She was transported by ambulance and a plastic surgeon removed the growths and performed the necessary reconstructive procedures to allow her to close her right eyelid and eat properly.”

  “And now you have an office here.”

  “Since 1991.”

  “That was quick.”

  He stopped, openly appraising her, “Am I being suspected of something?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Jordan said, “Helga Lynch was a very wealthy woman who came here to this hospital and never left…”

  “That’s right.”

  “Because she preferred living in a hospital room over her luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment...”

  “Yes.”

  “For twenty-four years.”

  “Look, Agent, now that Miss Lynch has passed you can subpoena her records and see for yourself that we did encourage her to go home, but she refused, every time. I even told her we required her to be seen by a psychiatrist to make sure…”

  “You had to protect yourself legally.” Jordan finished for him, “Yes, I know. We have subpoenaed her medical records, but I need to know why you think she wanted to stay here.”

  He emitted a soft harrumphing noise, “When she came here she was a gaunt, emaciated eighty-five pound eighty-five year old. She had no children; she had outlived her doctors, most of her servants were dead or retired. I think she thought she was going to die soon and what better place to do that than in a hospital?”

  Jordan returned to the bureau in time for lunch and she and Catherine got Cameron from daycare and ate in the cafeteria. When they returned to their office they grabbed their tablets and crossed the hall to the auditorium,

  “You wanna’ go first?”

  Jordan lifted a shoulder, “Okay, are you meeting with Bea today?”

  “No, although she did call to say her techs were unable to recover anything helpful from the apartment building’s security videos, other than the fact they were absolutely tampered with.”

  “How?”

  “She said there’re chunks of video missing from every camera during the time of the theft. I’ll have a look at them but I doubt I’ll be able to recover anything.”

  “So someone on the inside, so to speak, stole that sculpture.”

  “Or someone remotely hacked into the building’s security cameras and deleted the files.”

  “Maybe the cleaning girl let them in.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay, that rabbit hole’s way too deep to jump into right now.” While they spoke, Jordan set up her tablet on the podium and clicked open files with the remote, arranging them on the wall-sized screen, “Hopefully evidence will start rolling in so we can close this sucker.” She had transferred the interviews recorded on her phone to her tablet, and she began by playing the interview with Helga’s lawyer, William Stiger, and then clicked open a document center-screen. “I’m making a chart to help me understand the flow of people through Helga’s life and so far this is what I know; William Stiger is Helga’s present attorney, he more or less inherited the job from Marvin Womack, the other partner in his firm, when Marvin retired.”

  “It was a law firm of only two partners?” Catherine asked.

  “I don’t think they needed more when they had Helga Lynch as their primary client.” Jordan said drily. “According to her present physician, Helga also outlived her doctors; one died the next retired, so when she became ill in 1990 she called her friend, Suzanne Edelman, wife of Helga’s retired physician, Herman. She convinced Helga to let the doctor who took over Herman’s patients to see her.” Jordan clicked up a picture from Manhattan Dominican’s website, “This man, Doctor Martin Hanover…” She played the recorded interview and when it finished Catherine remarked,

  “I guess I can see why she would have stayed there. He did say she had already become a recluse, she was so old… maybe the thought of leaving that hospital room was too much for her.”

  Jordan moved her flowchart center-screen again and described her conversation with the two nurses, Edna and Wendy, “So I entered their names too in case I need to talk to them again, and I added Hannah Babcock and Susan Hale; they came from a private nursing agency. Both worked twelve-hour shifts; Hannah the day, Susan the night and from what I gather so far, they worked seven days a week for years before taking a day off.”

  Catherine muttered, “I think I can see where this is going.”

  “When the agency balked at them working so much, both women quit and Helga paid the agency a five thousand dollar penalty each for hiring Hannah and Susan privately.” She clicked the files closed, “And that, Doctor Bernard, is what I have so far.”

  Catherine joined her at the podium, “Excellent presentation, Agent Hawkins.” She said, tilting her head for a kiss, “Am I up?”

  “Definitely,” Jordan kissed her adding, “and you’re next too.”

  Catherine snorted and Jordan took her seat while she set up her tablet, “Remember what the lawyer told you about waiting till you found out how much money Helga’s nurses got?” Jordan nodded and she pointed the remote at the screen, “Well, like that funny Annuelle commercial says, ‘go to a store, buy a hat, and get ready to hold the eff onto it.’”

  “Oh, lord…” Jordan muttered and Catherine opened her first file.

  “I’ll jump to the chase first then give a little back-story; this is a list of checks Helga wrote to her day nurse, Hannah Babcock in her final year…”

  Jordan’s brows rose high, disappearing beneath dark
bangs, “You’re kidding me.”

  “I am not, during her last year she wrote thirty-eight checks to Hannah Babcock and her children totaling ten million nine hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars.” She pointed at the screen, “On January tenth she wrote five checks in one day; three to Hannah, and one each to two of her children. On February fifth, she wrote three. May twenty-first, two… In fact, you can see there were several occasions when Helga wrote more than one check to Hannah Babcock in a single day and here…” Catherine used the laser pointer feature on the remote, “these two checks were written to Hanna for five million dollars each.”

  “Holy crap.”

  Catherine agreed, “To say the least… I decided to write a quick program that would allow me to crunch all Helga’s bank statements for the past twenty years into one giant file that allows me to see her statements all at once. It lets me sort the data into separate lists of checks handwritten by Helga, by her lawyer… and I can also group them by the check recipients and so on, so trends over the course of time are easier to see.” She clicked another file open, “This is another list, a master list of checks Helga wrote Hannah during the twenty-four years she worked for her; they total four hundred and sixty-seven checks and add up to more than thirty-five million dollars.”

  “Jesus…” Jordan breathed, stunned.

  “Would probably be slack-jawed by these numbers too.” Catherine said drolly and shook her head, “I couldn’t believe it when I accessed these records, it’s so… excessive.” She clicked open another file. “This is my master list of all checks handwritten by Helga during that twenty-four year hospital stay; every check on this list has the word, ‘gift’ written in the memo section… and of these gifts, most were written to individuals… some to organizations. Like this one,” she pointed the laser, “for ten million to the Graham Dance Theater and School. All of the checks on this list total just over one hundred million dollars.”