Murders & Acquisitions

by Haughton Murphy

  “Oh, Reuben, everything’s going to be all right,” she said, refraining from adding that she would have intervened with Bautista if she had thought her husband’s theory of the killings was half-baked.

  “And if the tabloids ever got hold of what I’m saying, I suppose it would be libel as well.”

  “Reuben, please. Just be calm. It’s almost over.”

  Frost fell silent, though the occasional movement of his lips indicated that he was practicing his remarks to the Andersen family group—and his confrontation with the murderer.

  Once in Connecticut, he asked Sally if he could rest until the evening’s participants arrived. Cynthia tactfully remained downstairs, allowing her husband to rehearse his role for the evening alone in the privacy of one of the Andersen bedrooms.

  By five minutes after eight, all those expected had arrived: Diana Andersen; Billy O’Neal, not surprisingly without his wife; Casper and Ditsy Robbins; and Nate Perkins. Laurance Andersen was the last to arrive, strolling across from his house accompanied by Winston, his Rottweiler.

  Frost was about to begin speaking when Billy O’Neal interrupted.

  “Reuben, is this damned gathering your idea? What the hell is it all about?” he asked, an angry edge to his voice. Or was it nerves? “Making us drop everything to come over here on a Saturday night. It’s outrageous!”

  “Yes, Billy, I’ll take the blame,” Frost said, trying to calm O’Neal. “I believe we have some new information about the murders of Flemming and Sorella, so I asked Sally to call all of you together.”

  “Oh my God,” Diana interrupted. “I don’t believe this—one of those tense confrontations in the family library where the killer gives himself away. Mother, how can you be a party to such foolishness?”

  “Your description is not quite accurate, Diana,” Frost said firmly. “We know who the killer is. It’s not a question of tricking him or her into an admission. I requested this meeting. I thought you would all want an explanation of the crimes, and I thought the murderer might as well hear that explanation, too.”

  Frost’s deliberately cold tone, as he justified his actions, created a palpable tension in the room. The others were totally silent and looked expectantly at the lawyer, as if he were about to begin a Sunday sermon.

  “My explanation will take some time. I apologize in advance for that, but I hope you’ll be patient,” Frost began. “Let’s go back three weeks, or almost three weeks. Flemming Andersen is killed right outside this house. Two days later, Sorella is killed outside the neighboring house. Each time a note is found, indicating that the killings may have been the work of a psychotic. And each time a second note is delivered to AFC’s offices in New York.

  “The first thing we were able to eliminate was any connection between the two sets of notes. The ones delivered in New York were written by an embittered former employee of the Company and the family named Oscar Brothers. I was able to talk to him and I satisfied myself that he knew nothing about the content of the notes left here in Connecticut.

  “The police both here and in New York continued to search for a deranged killer, but without any leads at all. Finally, we all decided that there probably was no such killer: our working assumption then became that the murders were somehow related to Jeffrey Gruen and his desire to take over AFC. When Sorella was killed within hours after announcing—announcing for the first time, I might add—that she would never let the Andersen Foundation sell out to Gruen, that assumption seemed more than justified.

  “And if we were right, the killer was someone at the family meeting where Sorella announced her opposition to Gruen, or someone very close to a person at that meeting. Such as Jeffrey Gruen himself.”

  No one questioned Frost’s linkage of the family to Gruen, though Casper Robbins looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “That means that I had to view all of you in this room who were at Sally Andersen’s lunch that day as suspects, painful though that was to me. Most of you had alibis. You, Diana, said you were at your New York gym when the murders happened. You, Billy, said you were at the New York Athletic Club. You, Casper Robbins, said you were at home in Katonah with Ditsy. And you, Laurance, said you were in California the night your father was killed, though you were back here in Connecticut two days later when your sister was murdered.

  “That left only three people unaccounted for at the time of both murders: you, Sally; you, Nate, and Jeffrey Gruen. Gruen has consistently refused to talk to the police at all. And Sally and Nate readily admitted that they were at the scene of the two crimes. Indeed, Sally allegedly found her husband’s body and Nate allegedly found his wife’s.”

  Frost’s audience stirred at his use of the word “allegedly.” Was this just careful lawyer’s talk or was he leading up to some revelation about Sally or Nate?

  “That’s where things stood last Monday,” Reuben went on. “Then a totally fortuitous event, which I’ll describe in due course, took place and led me to rethink where we were.

  “At my suggestion, the police retraced in minute detail the ground they had covered and tried to affirm or deny the alibis they’d been given. With greater or lesser difficulty, the police eliminated several of you as suspects.

  “For example, your presence at the time of both murders, Diana, was finally established at your gym in New York by other users of the place.” (He did not go into detail about the pressure Bautista had put on Toby Jervis, the manager of the gym. A not-so-subtle mention of his police record had overcome his earlier hostility and with his help four other customers had been found who recalled seeing Diana at the gym at one or both of the murder times.)

  “Billy, your presence was accounted for as well.” (Frost had delicately and tactfully handled O’Neal. After Frost’s repeated assurances that his statement would never be revealed publicly, O’Neal had admitted that he had spent idyllic matinees on the murder days with his new on-the-side girlfriend, one Esther McGrew. Frost was now honoring his bargain, and O’Neal’s face brightened noticeably as he realized Reuben was doing so. His latest dalliance was not going to be exposed to family censure.)

  “As for you, Casper, the Jehovah’s Witnesses came to your rescue, at least for the night when Flemming was killed,” Frost said. He explained how Ditsy Robbins had remembered that two Jehovah’s Witnesses had come calling in Katonah early that evening, and that Casper had sent them away peremptorily. He said that Bautista, working through the Witnesses’ world headquarters in Brooklyn, had located the door-to-door evangelicals and confirmed Casper’s alibi.

  “Now to the event of last Monday that changed my thinking,” Frost said. “By sheer good luck, I was riding uptown in a radio taxi when a call came over the radio to pick up ‘Andersen’ at the Union League Club and to take him to three twenty-four Park Avenue. Totally innocent, I know, but it stuck in my mind that this was Jeffrey Gruen’s business address. I diverted my dialcab there and saw you, Laurance, go up in one of the elevators leading to Gruen’s office.” As he spoke, Frost turned to Laurance, sitting in the corner with Winston.

  “Reuben, this is ridiculous,” Laurance interrupted. “You’re insulting everyone’s intelligence here. Don’t you realize there are other offices on that elevator bank besides Gruen’s? Christ, I could have been going to my dentist.”

  “Quite true,” Frost said. “And I was painfully aware that what I had discovered was hardly proof of a conspiracy between you and Gruen. But I seriously doubt, Laurance, that you go to Jeffrey Gruen for your dental work.” He explained, though not in explicit detail, how he had found out from Gruen’s secretary that Andersen had been there.

  “Once I had this obvious arrow pointing at you,” Frost continued, now talking directly to Laurance, “I began to question your alibi—your story that you had been in California—”

  “My confirmed story, as you know very well!” Laurance interrupted again.

  Frost, with calculation, ignored the interruption. “—and to look very carefully at you, Laurance
Andersen, suspected murderer. As I tried to concentrate my thoughts, I reviewed what I knew of you and your character—after all, I’ve known you practically since you were born. I was assisted in this by the manuscript of your sister’s book, which contained several details about you I had not known before.”

  The mention of Diana’s manuscript provoked an outburst from her, directed as much at her indiscreet editor as at Frost.

  “I don’t mean to suggest I developed any great Freudian insights into you,” Frost went on, “but several incidents fell into a pattern. There was, for example, your gambling in college—hushed up when your father paid off your debts. Then the totally unnecessary knee operation that kept you out of the draft—an operation you had the ill grace to brag to me about some years ago in this very room.” Frost, the navy veteran of World War II, had not been sympathetic then, nor was he now, to Laurance’s rich-man’s subterfuge.

  “Then there was the embarrassing pregnancy of the secretary in the AFC office where you worked, terminated by an abortion—then quite illegal—and a lifetime stipend from your father for the unfortunate girl. And then three marriages, each followed in short order by divorces that I think can be fairly characterized as sordid and messy. And then a close call with bankruptcy, with Flemming again coming to your rescue.

  “I repeat all these past deeds not to be censorious, but to indicate a pattern that can be interpreted as showing an evasion of responsibility and some easy escapes from hard problems. And, just perhaps, a contempt for the rules that the rest of us may feel bound to play by.”

  Laurance sat gripping the edge of his chair with white knuckles as Frost spoke. But he did not interrupt.

  “Once I came to this conclusion, Laurance, I did three things: I asked a very inventive legal assistant from my office to find out just as much about you as she could. I asked my friend Luis Bautista, a New York homicide detective, to recheck, in the most meticulous manner he knew how, your story that you were in California when your father was killed. And I asked Arthur Castagno to reexamine, with a great deal of skepticism, whether Sorella had been killed by her two Dobermans.”

  Frost was speaking deliberately but rapidly, and his narrative created an electrifying reaction among those in the Andersen living room. All eyes, which had been focused on Frost, had turned to Laurance Andersen.

  “Do you wish to hear the results of my inquiries in any particular order?” Frost asked Laurance.

  There was no response, only a slightly drooping jaw and a look of profound I-don’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing doubt.

  “Let’s start with my paralegal, Ms. Clare. She didn’t discover anything earth-shaking, Laurance. No ‘smoking gun,’ as they like to say in Washington. But some small details of an accumulative nature. Such as the fact that your senior thesis at Yale contained, three times, a misuse of the word ‘principle,’ just as in the note found after Flemming’s murder. ‘Principle ingredient,’ as in the note, means principal with an ‘-A-L,’ Laurance.

  “Or the fact, Laurance, that the biography you wrote for your tenth-reunion book at Yale said your hobby was karate—a useful skill when knocking out your father, I should think. And in your twenty-fifth-reunion book, it had changed to dog breeding and training.”

  “Jesus Christ, Reuben, you really are around the bend,” Laurance interjected. “How much longer am I going to have to watch you convince everyone here you’re totally out of it? You forget I was in California, C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A—California, the Golden State, the night the old man was knocked off.”

  “Can we go over that?” Frost said. “Several of us were present when you left the AFC board meeting the day your father was killed, announcing that you were going to Los Angeles. When the police questioned you, you told them you had indeed gone to L.A., on the noon American Airlines flight from Kennedy, and had stayed at the St. Martin Hotel. You said you hadn’t had a chance to see any of your business contacts there before you got word that your father had been murdered. The hotel personnel confirmed that you’d been there and American confirmed that you’d been on the airline’s noon flight, traveling first-class.

  “As I said, I asked Bautista to go over these details again. This proved to be a most rewarding exercise. Yes, indeed, someone calling himself Laurance Andersen had been at the St. Martin Hotel—a hotel, by the way, where you were a complete stranger, unlike the Wilshire or the Beverly Hills. Yes, indeed, someone calling himself Laurance Andersen had been on the American midday flight that Tuesday. But it was not you, Laurance—it was Jeffrey Gruen. The room clerk at the St. Martin identified his picture—identified Gruen as the man who had stayed there as ‘Andersen.’

  “After finding out about your meeting last Monday, I was not surprised to learn that Gruen was involved. Even without that meeting I shouldn’t have been. Looking back, why didn’t the superconfident Gruen announce his threatened tender offer the day Flemming was murdered? Wasn’t it because he knew Flemming would be murdered? There was no point in starting a tender offer if he knew it would be complicated by Flemming’s death.

  “Just to nail things down, Laurance. The ticket to Los Angeles in your name was issued by a travel agency in midtown for Gruen’s account. And then there was an unbelievable exercise in cheapness, much like Gruen turning out the lights in his multimillion-dollar apartment, a little quirk I observed when I met with him there. Your friend Gruen, Laurance, at the risk of exposing the plot to kill your father, used his American Airlines AAdvantage number with that ticket in your name! Just think, Laurance, he not only got you to rid him of his biggest adversaries at Andersen Foods, but he got credit for what I’m told are four thousand three hundred thirty-two miles toward a free trip on American Airlines! Now there’s one clever—not to say cheap—fellow! It’s only too bad American doesn’t fly to where he’s likely to be going!”

  Laurance Andersen was seething as Frost continued his narrative, yet at the same time he seemed all but mesmerized by what the lawyer was saying. Frost realized this and did not pause.

  “Finally, Laurance, let’s turn to the matter of dogs. Nate Perkins, you will recall, was totally baffled by the attack the Dobermans made on Sorella. She had worked with those dogs since they were puppies and, as far as anyone knew, there had never been any sort of ugly incident involving them. Oh sure, one of them had once nipped a delivery boy, but there had never been anything whatsoever to suggest that they would turn on their mistress and kill her. I believed Nate, and I think everyone else here did, too.

  “So once I had you in my sights, Laurance, I asked Officer Castagno to review the circumstances surrounding Sorella’s death, starting with a comparison of the teeth marks in her flesh with wax impressions from the teeth of the Dobermans. Fortunately, by the way, this could be done without exhuming Sorella’s body. The discrepancies turned out to be so obvious the police could establish them easily from the coroner’s photographs of her body—once they knew what they were looking for.”

  Frost seemed nervous for the first time as he pressed on. He paused, swallowed hard, and then continued. “So if those Dobermans were innocent, what animal killed Sorella? A little more investigation gave the police the answer—the Rottweiler sitting there next to you. Winston, I believe his name is, killed Sorella at your instigation. After which you led him away and released her own dogs from their kennel. Seeing the blood of their mistress—indeed, licking it off her dying body—they appeared totally crazed when discovered and everyone assumed they’d attacked Sorella.

  “Need I say any more, Laurance? Except you should know that your friend Gruen has been arrested in New York and has admitted everything—about your plot to kill your father and your sister and your joint plan to take over Andersen Foods,”

  Frost had paced the floor the entire time he spoke. He now sat down, well-distanced from his quarry, and grasped the arms of the chair. He stared unblinkingly at Laurance.

  “All right, all right, I’ve heard enough, Reuben,” Laurance said. “Right now I’m going
to leave, and if there’s any trouble, I’ll give that dog the same signal I gave it in Sorella’s backyard. He may not show it, but he’s been trained to kill. I’m getting out of here. And I don’t want any of you to follow. I’ve got a little money left, parked in Switzerland. I’ll go and be a beach bum in Brazil. There’s enough money for that, and that suits me just fine right now. So sit still and I’ll just leave quietly. And Winston will, too.”

  Laurance got up and went out, leaving stunned onlookers behind. Then the front door slammed and, within seconds, Castagno was heard ordering Laurance to put his hands up. Laurance screamed out “Kill, Winston, kill!” and those inside heard an unearthly growl, followed almost at once by two gunshots.

  The police had killed Winston, one of the murderers, but had his master and co-felon in handcuffs.

  Frost, his narrative of truth—and the lie about Gruen’s arrest—having produced the result he expected, went to Sally Andersen and put his arms around her.

  “I’m sorry, Sally,” he said.

  “So am I, Reuben,” she answered. “But thank you for bringing my nightmare to an end.” She pulled herself together as best she could and addressed the subdued band in her living room:

  “There’s food if anybody wants it. We really ought to eat, you know. The family fortune won’t survive very long if people don’t eat.”

  EPILOGUE

  24

  While Laurance was being arrested in Greenwich, Luis Bautista and two colleagues took Jeffrey Gruen into custody in New York. He was arrested while eating Saturday night dinner at Walter’s, a highly touted East Side restaurant favored by the newly rich, especially ladies with nicknames that sounded like kitchen-floor coverings (i.e., Keeka, Shashty and Tiley). Gruen did not go quietly, and Walter’s regulars talked of little else for weeks except his colorful exit.

  Early in the week after Gruen’s arrest, Norman Cobb announced that Gruen & Company’s tender offer for shares of Andersen Foods had been called off. Under all the circumstances, a predictable hitch had developed in the bank financing.