Nice Place for a Murder

by Bloom, Bruce Jay

  “Through your binoculars? What are you, some kind of secret agent?”

  “I take this stuff seriously, compadre. I’m just trying to ace this assignment so you’ll make me a private eye. You know, with a badge and all.”

  “Too much stress for you,” I said. “Make you old before your time.”

  “Look what it did to you,” he said.

  I wasn’t going to win this exchange. “But Sosenko didn’t put in on Shelter, did he, at Dering Harbor?” I said.

  “Why is it so hard to understand me when I talk? Try and watch my lips over the phone. I told you no. He went right past Dering Harbor. But Dering isn’t the only landing on the island. Or he could just wait for dark and then come back,” Wally said. “You want me to go over there, look around? ”

  “Not necessary right now. Teague’s got two strongarm types guarding the Julian place,” I told him. “Anyway, I’m going there myself. Time I had another talk with Ingo.”

  “I’m here to serve,” Wally said. “Call any time, day or night.” I could hear him waiting for me to end it, so I did, the best way I knew how.

  “Goodbye.”

  The Empire night-man at the front gate of Ingo’s place had blue eyes, close-cut blond hair, a chest the size of a bale of hay, and might have been a Nazi storm trooper, somehow misplaced in time. I had some hesitation telling him my name was Seidenberg, but evidently Teague had blessed me, because herr guard did everything but snap to attention and click his heels when I showed him my ID and asked to go inside.

  Lisa was in the great room, intent on a laptop computer balanced, appropriately enough, on her lap. Clad in jeans, a sweatshirt and tennis shoes, she sat cross-legged on a couch, transcribing data from the computer screen onto a pad lying beside her. Seeing her again, it occurred to me that she always looked athletic, even in repose. There was a certain coiled-spring aspect about her. I was convinced she might suddenly leap up and run around the room, just for the exercise.

  “Surprised you’re still here,” I said. “Thought you and Ingo would be back in New York, guiding the destinies of Julian Communications.”

  “We’re guiding them from here,” she said. “Your Mr. Teague persuaded Ingo to stay out here a day or two longer. Said security for us was less complicated here. Promised he’d have the problem solved by then.”

  Yeah, solved, I thought. “Where’s Ingo?”

  “I’m not certain. He was on the phone most of the day, and then he seemed to be getting antsy. I think he sneaked out for a run before the sun sets completely.”

  “A run? Without a guard with him? Why would he try to defeat the security?” I said. “That’s dumb.”

  She set the computer down and turned it off. “You’re probably right, Seidenberg. I think you should tell him. Tell Ingo he’s dumb.”

  “I wouldn’t presume to tell Ingo anything. But I do have something to ask him,” I said.

  “Oh? Why don’t you ask me? I know what Ingo knows.”

  I sat on the couch beside her. “I’m sure you do. All right, I’m going to tell you a story I heard, and I want you to tell me if it’s true.” I never mentioned Giannone’s name, but I went carefully through the scenario he’d revealed to me.

  Lisa never took her eyes off of me, but said nothing. Finally, “Are you telling me you buy this fairy tale? Do you actually think Ingo is Felix?”

  “It might explain a lot,” I said. “Brody pulling the strings, making all the key decisions for the company. The power behind the throne. After years of it, Felix coming to resent him. An argument. A falling out. I can see that happening.”

  “Except that it never did happen. Anyone who ever knew Felix will tell you he couldn’t possibly be the man who’s chief executive officer of the company today.”

  “You knew Felix.”

  “Well. Very well.”

  “And Ingo?”

  “I know Ingo. Very well, also. Better than anyone.”

  “Tell me exactly why you’re so sure he isn’t Felix,” I said. “What was Felix like? You two were together, weren’t you?”

  “Oh come now, Seidenberg. I was with Felix. Now I’m with Ingo.” She undid her cross-legged position and planted her feet on the floor with a thump, punctuating what she said. “Do you really think I can’t tell the difference?”

  “What are we talking about here? Pants on or pants off? Style? Technique?”

  “You are tactless,” she said.

  “We’re way past tact,” I told her. “What do you know about Felix?”

  “I told you that story. You know about his business — the mail-order flower thing down in Orlando. How it failed, so he came back to work in the company with Ingo.”

  “You told me what had happened, but you didn’t tell me much about Felix,” I said.

  “All right. Listen, then, and tell me if I’m describing the man you call Ingo.” She stood, thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans, and began pacing about the perimeter of the room. “Felix was younger, always in awe of his big brother. Ingo was the bold one, the aggressive one, the one who took a few thousand dollars and built a huge business. He offered Felix a piece of the company, but Felix wouldn’t take it. He felt he had to prove himself, do something on his own, just like his brother. Well, he tried, and you know what happened. He did everything wrong, let everybody take advantage of him — employees, suppliers, everybody. He was too nice, too easy, to be a boss. He trusted everybody. Even that woman in Orlando who roped him in, got him to marry her.”

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  “What does it matter? Lisa said.

  “Could you let me decide what matters?” I said. “I’m getting more than a little tired of people holding back on me. Just for one minute, I’d like to have a look at the whole picture.”

  “Now you’re making me feel guilty,” she said, in a way that told me she didn’t, at all. “All right. Let me think. It was Mary Jean. You know these southern girls. They all have two names — Betty Jo, Sally Mae. Anyway, she was a Mary Jean. Mary Jean Christensen. They were only married seven months, and she took him for four hundred thousand. Ingo paid it.

  “Anyway, the point is that Ingo and Felix couldn’t have been more different. Ingo’s a smart, shrewd, forceful man who knows what he wants and where he’s going. He was always that way, and he became even more determined after the accident. He drives tough deals, and sure, he’s made his share of enemies. He is not universally loved. Show me a successful leader at his level who is.

  “Felix was a decent guy. But in the game he tried to play, you don’t get any points for that. He was soft.”

  “Soft and decent. Is that why you loved him?” I said.

  “I suppose it was.”

  “If that’s the kind of guy who appeals to you, isn’t it strange that you’re with Ingo now? Being that the two brothers were so different.”

  Lisa stopped her pacing and faced me, her fists now on her hips. “You know what, Seidenberg? I’ve had enough of being forthright and open. My choices are my choices, and I don’t have to explain them. You think I care what you believe? I really don’t. You’re not the first one to think I traded my ass for a vice presidency.

  “Now let me tell you what I think. I think it’s time for you to go home. If you came in here believing Ingo is really Felix, you’ve been set straight by someone who knows the truth. I can’t think why your source would want you to believe such a preposterous thing. He — or is it a she? — has some agenda I can’t begin to understand. Ingo is Felix? It’s simply not possible. And goodnight.”

  Ingo had heard what she said. He’d evidently been standing just outside the archway leading into the room, and now he strode in with that peculiar rolling gait of his. Though there was a slight October chill in the evening air outside, his face glistened with perspiration. From his run, I assumed. “You think I am Felix?” he said to me. “That’s almost blasphemy. My brother died six years ago, yes?”

  “I think that point�
�s been made,” I said, nodding toward Lisa.

  “Still,” he said, “you have no cause to investigate my brother. I find it distressing, because his memory is sacred to me. I must tell you, Seidenberg, that your speculations are not strengthening Empire Security’s relationship with me. Am I being clear?”

  I don’t respond to pointless questions, so I let it slide by. I said, “I’m here to tell you that the man who shot Hector has been seen out here today. The Empire people can’t protect you if you insist on giving them the slip.”

  “Point taken,” Ingo said. “Is there anything else?”

  “We’re trying to keep you alive.”

  “I know that. Don’t think I’m not grateful,” he said. “But understand that I resent absurd stories about Felix. In any case, this situation today is not about my brother. Not in any way. Goodnight, Seidenberg.”

  I nodded at him and forced a smile, pointedly insincere. I looked to Lisa, but she was already back on the couch, playing with her computer again and refusing to meet my eyes.

  No sense telling them about Giannone’s payoff request. They’d already dismissed his story as a lie

  I walked back to the ferry, sharply aware that the truth was still being twisted. But I was getting close. All I had to do was hear Ingo say ‘blasphemy’ and ‘sacred’ in the same breath as his brother’s name, and I knew I’d struck a nerve. As the boat moved out into the bay toward the lights of Greenport on the other side, I suspected Ingo’s brother was key to this puzzle. And I had a good idea who might have the answers I wanted.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  There was an early morning plane to Orlando out of MacArthur Airport, an easy hour’s ride by car along the eastern half of the Long Island Expressway. By eight-thirty I was on my way to Florida, up above the clouds, drinking airline coffee from a plastic cup, and eating a Danish which was scandalously small and far too sweet. But what the hell. I always thought it was something of a minor miracle, anyway, that you were able to sit and eat as you flew through the air.

  As I looked down on the white billows below, I wondered just how much of a bimbo Mary Jean Christensen really was. To hear Lisa Harper tell it, she was a cornpone femme fatale who snagged Felix the innocent, chewed him up and then took him for a mound of his brother’s money. My conversation with the southern lady in question on the phone last night, however, didn’t reveal that degree of wickedness. Ms. Christensen, in fact, sounded like the very soul of consideration one expects of women in polite company, especially below the Mason-Dixon line. Given the unhappy way in which she’d parted company with the Julian family, I was surprised that she agreed so quickly to talk to me. I told her I was trying to clear up questions about Felix’s death, and she seemed eager to help, though she reminded me she’d been divorced from Felix for a two years before he died, so there probably wasn’t much she could contribute. But all nice, very nice. I’ve known some bimbos in my day, and none of them ever sounded like Mary Jean Christensen.

  Last night I’d thought a chat on the phone would give me the information I needed, but what I heard was such a contradiction to what I expected, I felt I had to see this lady for myself.

  Straight answers were in short supply in this whole matter. I’d found there were two stories about everything. A good story. And the real story.

  It was pouring rain when we landed in Orlando, and by the time I got behind the wheel of a rental car, my blazer was damp all over, and the crease in my pants had melted away. It was clear that when I arrived at Mary Jean Christensen’s doorstep, I’d be forced to compensate for my bedraggled appearance with extra charm and charisma, both of which I had in abundance, according to a certain Italian lady who knew the real stuff when she saw it.

  After a false start which took me to the wrong side of town, I finally made my way to Mary Jean Christensen’s address, a neat ranch house in a sub-division of neat ranch houses. There was a Spanish tile roof, which seemed to be de rigueur in this neighborhood, a handsome brick driveway, and three orange trees, loaded with fruit, in the front yard. It all looked so clean and sweet, it might have been a set for an old TV sitcom.

  She must have been watching for me, because the front door opened as I rushed up the front pathway through the downpour. “You come right in this house,” she said, taking my hand and pulling me inside, out of the rain. “We’ve had nothing but sunshine and more sunshine for three weeks, do you believe that? Now, just because you’ve come, we get this, this cloudburst. Oh, you poor man. I am so, so sorry. Let me get you a towel.” She started toward a hallway, then stopped, turned, and smiled. “You are Mr. Ben Seidenberg, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” I admitted.

  “Oh good,” she said.

  She left, then quickly reappeared with a towel, which I used to wipe my face and head. She took my coat and hung it over a doorknob to dry, then led me into the living room and motioned me into a chair. “So, now, Mr. Seidenberg, you’ve come all the way from, where is it? Long Island, to talk to me. This must be important.”

  “It’s important to me. And please call me Ben.”

  “Ben, then. What can I tell you, Ben, that will be worth this long trip? You were rather guarded on the phone last night.”

  Mary Jean Christensen was a elegant, raven-haired woman in her mid-thirties who moved gracefully and looked you right in the eye. She had a way of leaning forward when she spoke that gave you the impression she meant what she said, and meant it for you alone. She had a compelling presence, and I could see why Felix, or any man, for that matter, would be attracted to her. “I need to know what Felix was like, what you learned about him when you were married” I told her.

  “Well now, Ben, I could have talked to you about that on the phone,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me why you flew here today, really.”

  “I suppose I wanted to see for myself what kind of woman Felix married. I’m trying to get a sense of the man, what he liked, what choices he made, how he acted.”

  “Why do you care?” she said.

  I looked at her without replying. She watched me back in silence, and the wait began to get awkward. She expected an answer. Here I was, invited into her home, wanting her to tell me things she just might find painful. I had to level with her.

  So I did. I told her the whole story — the murders, Sosenko, Giannone’s belief that Ingo was dead and Felix was alive. I watched her begin shaking her head slowly as I talked. “Don’t you believe this?” I asked her.

  “Oh I believe it,” she said. “It’s just that I’m in awe at how perverse and bothersome the Julian family can be. No, I don’t doubt anything you tell me about them, and about their company. They are disruptive. They make people unhappy.”

  “Did Felix make you unhappy?”

  “Oh yes, he did.”

  “I never knew Felix,” I said, “but I was told he was easygoing, too easygoing. People took advantage of him. He tried too hard to be a good guy. He wasn’t tough enough, and that’s why the business he tried to start down here failed.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The woman he took up with when he got back to New York.”

  “Lisa Harper, you mean?”

  “You know her?”

  “I know of her,” said Mary Jean Christensen. “I heard about her. The office assistant who somehow got to be a big executive. Well, if that’s what she told you about the man, maybe she and I aren’t talking about the same Felix. Maybe that fellow you told me about was right. Maybe there was a switch somewhere along the line.”

  “What do you mean? You telling me he wasn’t the dear man she says he was?”

  She held her left hand up in front of her face. I saw at once that her ring finger was badly misshapen, twisted sideways at the first knuckle, and again at the second. The little finger, too, was splayed away from the others, sticking out at an eccentric angle. They were ugly deformities. “A gift from Felix Julian,” she said.

  “He did that? Can you — will you tell me about i
t?”

  “Oh I’ll tell you,” she said. “The business was losing money every month, and he liked to take it out on me. One morning I got up and found him pacing around our apartment, muttering to himself. He’d been awake all night, worrying about bad sales and employees who detested him, and thinking up reasons why I kept him from being successful. It was a mistake to marry me, he said. He grabbed me and tried to pull the diamond ring he’d given me off my finger. It wouldn’t come, so he twisted my finger, first one way and then the other, till the finger broke. I was screaming in pain, begging him to stop, pulling away, But he still had hold of my little finger, and he yanked it back and broke it, too. He never did get the ring. They had to cut if off at the hospital.”

  “Was he always violent, or was this the first time?” I said.

  “This wasn’t the first time,” she said, “but it was the last. He had hit me a dozen times by then, and humiliated me every day. A marriage that turned into a nightmare. When I first met him, he was completely different. He was fun, he was charming, and nothing was too good for me. But after we were married, and the business started to go bad, the whole thing changed, turned dark. Felix took charge of everything, where we went, what we did, what we ate, even. No discussion. Just do it his way. That’s how he ran his company, too. He wouldn’t listen to anybody about anything.”

  “Was he drinking? I said.

  “Felix never touched alcohol. It wasn’t drink that made him the way he was. I guess way down deep, where you couldn’t always see it, he was mean.”

  “You left him, after the ring incident?” I asked her.

  “At the hospital, they realized my broken fingers couldn’t have been an accident, so they called in the police. The police wanted to charge Felix with assault.”

  “Did you press the charge?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “That same day, Ingo showed up. Flew down right away to get his brother out of trouble. He told me he’d give me a quarter of a million dollars if I insisted the broken fingers weren’t Felix’s fault. Then I could have a quiet divorce. I was so crazy with pain, and so angry. I was lying there in bed with my hand bandaged, and I wanted to hit him, but I couldn’t. So I spit at him. I actually did. Ingo never flinched. He asked me, what did I want, then? I told him a half million dollars.” She looked at her damaged hand. “In the end, we settled at four hundred thousand. Every man has his price, and that goes for women, too. I would never have let myself be bought if Felix hadn’t been so cruel. It just seemed to me that I earned that money.”