by Stuart Woods
Stone thought he’d like to know the other half, but this didn’t seem like the proper occasion.
—
Later, when the party began to die, Stone called Fred and warned him they were on the way outside. As they were getting into the car, Stone looked across the street and saw Gloria Parsons and the lizard Teppi staring at them.
“They’re still around?” Holly asked.
“It’s funny, a couple of weeks ago I didn’t know they existed, and now they seem to be on hand wherever I go.”
20
On the Monday morning after Thanksgiving, Secretary of State Holly Barker stood on the sidewalk as Fred placed her bags in the trunk of the Bentley.
Stone stood with her. “Would you like Fred for the morning?”
“Thank you, yes. I have a meeting at the UN, and that’s my excuse for commandeering an official aircraft for the trip up here. Fred will drop me at the East Side Heliport when I’m done.” She hung an arm around his neck and kissed him. “You’ve been a dear,” she said. “I don’t know how the weekend could have gone better.”
He kissed her back, but he had an idea of how it could have gone better. He waved her off and went back into his office. “Joan,” he said, “please get Bob Cantor over here as soon as possible.”
“I’m on it,” she replied, picking up the phone.
—
Bob Cantor was ex-NYPD, an expert on everything technical, now a licensed private investigator of a high order. He was in Stone’s office half an hour later, and his van/tech shop was parked at the curb. “What can I do you for, Stone?”
“Bob, there are two people annoying me and friends of mine.”
“Shall I use a knife or a gun, or would you prefer to have it look like an accident?”
“It hasn’t come to that. Yet. I just want to know everything in their lives that is derogatory and, if possible, illegal.”
“What do you suspect them of?”
“For one thing, they’re working very hard to get a friend of theirs named Danny Blaine out of Fishkill. It would be very satisfying if they could be caught doing it.”
“I know of Blaine—a fashion heartthrob in Fishkill? He must be a very busy young man.”
“I expect so. The two people you seek are Gloria Parsons, who is a senior editor at Just Folks, and a cohort of hers with no visible means of support named Alphonse Teppi.”
“Parsons, I know—or rather, know of. The other one sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t place him. Where would I find them both?”
“You can find her at or around her magazine, and he will not be far behind. I don’t even know where they live.”
“And what would you like done to them when I find them?”
“That depends on what you can learn. I don’t want violence wrought upon them—I would be content with public disgrace, followed shortly by drawing and quartering.”
“So I’ll be working in the area of personal destruction, is that it?”
“You don’t have to destroy anybody, Bob, and I’m certainly not asking you to do anything illegal. It’s just that I’ve been attacked once by these people, and I feel another one coming on, and I want everything I can get to fight back with. If you could get a nice color close-up of Ms. Parsons being fucked by a donkey, that would be very helpful. Come to think of it, the same goes for Teppi.”
“Well, since you put it that way, I don’t suppose there’s anything in my moral code that would prevent me from helping you publicly humiliate them in a permanent fashion.”
“What moral code is that?” Stone asked.
“Exactly. I’ll go get ’em. Electronic surveillance okay?”
“As long as you don’t get caught doing it.”
“Daily reports?”
“Unless you get something sooner or more frequently.”
Cantor stood up. “I believe I grasp the scope of my employment. You’ll be hearing from me.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Just one thing, Stone.”
“What’s that?”
“You sound very angry with these people.”
“You could say that.”
“Someone, I forget who, once said, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ Anger can be self-destructive, Stone—be careful.”
“You be careful for me, Bob.”
“Gotcha,” and Bob Cantor left with a little wave.
Stone went back to work with a lighter heart.
—
Joan buzzed. “Dino on one.”
Stone pressed the button. “Good day!”
“You sound happy.”
“I feel happy,” Stone replied.
“Was that thing last night the bash to end all bashes, or what?”
“I would say it was the bash to end all bashes.”
“I don’t think I have ever seen a thing of that size carried off with such perfection!”
“How can I disagree with you, Dino?”
“You can’t.”
“Then I will hold my peace.”
“That girl Celeste is the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen. She could do just fine in Hollywood.”
“Once again, we are in complete accord.”
“And I didn’t know that you could serve that much food and drink to that many people and have it turn out so well.”
“Once again, accord.”
“Although, I think the wine could have used another year.”
“Sounds as if you’re beginning to have doubts.”
“Just another year, maybe two.”
“A damning judgment.”
“I mean, it was only three years in the bottle.”
“Not enough for a very fine Cabernet.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m just agreeing with you.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because I’m an agreeable guy.”
“Not that agreeable—you’re up to something.”
“You know me too well.”
“You sound like a man who is contemplating—no, relishing—revenge upon some unfortunate person.”
“That is a very astute judgment.”
“I want in on this—c’mon, who is it?”
“All right, it’s that horrible woman who said those terrible things about me in that magazine.”
“Stone, those were not terrible things. I’ve told you before, they were complimentary.”
“I didn’t view them that way.”
“What’s more, they sounded like they were judgments derived from a certain measure of personal experience.”
“I do not care to expand on what I have already said.”
“What are you going to do to her?”
“Them.”
“You mean Teppi, too?”
“Very likely.”
“What do you have on them?”
“I have Bob Cantor on them.”
“What has Bob found?”
“He has only just begun.”
“Well, if anybody can skewer them, it’s Bob. Do you think he can find something I can arrest them for?”
“Please, God.”
“You’ll keep me posted?”
“With pleasure. Good day, Commissioner.” Stone hung up.
21
Bob Cantor sat in his idling van, Mozart on the satellite radio, and watched as Gloria Parsons finally left her office building in Soho. He switched off the van and followed on foot for three blocks. Parsons rang a bell at street level, paused for the door to open, then went inside.
Cantor sauntered over to the door and checked the name on the bell: Teppi. Bingo! Two birds possible with one stone! Now all he needed was the right slingshot.
He took a credit-card-sized piece of clear plast
ic and slipped it into the doorjamb; a moment later the door popped open. Teppi was on the top floor, so Cantor ran lightly up the stairs. It was how he got his exercise. At the top he found an old, steel door wearing too many coats of paint, but it did have a peephole. He removed a small optical instrument from an inside pocket that, when pressed against the peephole, reversed its optical effect, allowing him to get a wide-angle view of Teppi’s living room, such as it was.
It was furnished with junk from garage sales and flea markets but still managed to be overdecorated. Parsons and Teppi sat on an old sofa with a blanket over it to hide the tears and cigarette burns in the fabric and sipped coffee from tiny cups. The distance between them supported Cantor’s theory about Teppi’s sexual persuasion. Parsons was a very nice package, and a straight guy would have already had his hand up her skirt.
Cantor removed a late-nineteenth-century stethoscope about four inches long from another pocket, pressed one end to the door and the other to his ear. The voices from the living room became instantly audible.
“C’mon, Al, what have you got for me?”
“He’s straight, good-looking, and rich—all a fella needs in this world to stay in clover and out of trouble. Anyway, you already know a lot more about him than I could ever come up with. I mean, how many times have you fucked him?”
“Several, on two occasions, but that is not relevant to our discussion.”
“What, exactly, do you want, Gloria?”
“It doesn’t have to be factual, just plausible.”
“Now you sound like a politician.”
“I didn’t come here to be insulted.”
“The hell you didn’t, you’re begging for it. Give me an example of what you’re talking about.”
“All right, you remember a few years back we did a piece on a guy named . . . well, I’ve forgotten his name, but his favorite charity was a dog rescue place on the Upper East Side. We managed to insinuate that he was taking two dogs out every day for a walk and having sex with them in the park. I mean, what could the guy say? ‘I don’t fuck dogs’? Who’s going to believe that, once the allegation has been made?”
“You’ve been inside the guy’s house, right, Gloria?”
“I told you, a couple of times.”
“Have you ever seen anything so impeccable? It looks like Ralph Lauren personally staged it for a photo shoot. All he needs is a few gorgeous people in tweeds sitting around, a dog or two, and it’s perfect!”
“What’s your point, Al?”
“All that is a metaphor for the guy’s personality. He’s squeaky clean!”
“Not in bed, he isn’t.”
“Just because he visited your every orifice doesn’t make him creepy, just enthusiastic.”
“I’ll grant you his enthusiasm. I need something, and it doesn’t have to be sexual.”
“Financial, then? I told you, he’s rich. I saw a Dun & Bradstreet report on him that was less than three months old, and while he’s no billionaire, he’s still rolling in it.”
“What has he got besides that house?”
“Two houses—he owns the one next door, too. The butler, cook, and secretary all live there.”
“What else?”
“A house in Paris and a country estate in England. A summer place in Maine, too.”
“You’re depressing me, Al.”
“Gloria, instead of trying to torpedo the guy, you should be trying to marry, then divorce him. That’s how a girl gets ahead in this city, if she’s not a tech wizard or a CEO.”
“That’s sexist, Al.”
“Maybe. I’m an equal opportunity sexist—I go both ways when it comes to marrying money.”
“Al, you just gave me an idea. Can you get me a copy of that D&B you saw?”
“Yeah, but it’ll cost.”
“How much?”
“That’s inside stuff, unless you’re a bank. Say, five hundred? Two hundred now.”
She reached for her purse, fished out two bills, and handed them over.
“What have you got in mind, Gloria?”
“Well, we already know that the bulk of his fortune came from his dead wife, and before that, from her first husband, the movie star Vance Calder.”
“That’s been published, sweetie, along with the details of her murder.”
“Maybe, but it hasn’t been mined for dirt.”
“What you need is pay dirt.”
“Where there’s enough money, there’s plenty of pay dirt.”
“What does it matter who he inherits from? An old man or an old lady—what’s the dif?”
“It’s sexy money, rooted in the movies. What’s sexier than Hollywood? Let’s start with who Vance Calder screwed to get it.”
“Okay, I can plow that field. Give me a week.”
“You can have three days.” Gloria stood up, smoothed her skirt, checked her hair in a gigantic mirror across the room, and headed for the door. “Oh, and one other thing, Al. Check out his wife’s murder and see if there are any holes in the story.”
“Whatever you say.”
Outside, Cantor looked around. Upstairs or down? He slipped out of his loafers, tucked them under an arm, went for up, the stairs leading to the roof. He had just crouched at the top when Parsons burst through Teppi’s door and started down the stairs, apparently unwilling to wait for the elevator. Cantor noticed that the phone box was there, and he quickly attached a remote device that would record any conversations in his van. Then he went after Parsons, got to the front door, and looked up and down the street to see her stopping at a shop window, then disappearing inside.
He started toward the shop, taking his time, window-shopping, using reflections to keep an eye on the door. He was nearly there when she emerged, carrying a tiny shopping bag. Cosmetics, he guessed.
She walked back to her office building and went inside.
Cantor figured the place to start on her would be in the pieces she had written. He found a coffee shop, ordered a pastry and a double espresso, and went to work on his extra-large iPhone, trolling for celebrity peccadilloes and journalistic outrages.
22
Alphonse Teppi sat in his corner computer station and Googled “Barrington Murder.” Instantly, he got acres of stuff from newspapers in New York and Virginia, where the murder took place.
The place was Arrington Calder Barrington’s recently completed country house in Albemarle County; there were four pages of photos in Architectural Digest showing nearly every part of the house, including the large downstairs foyer where the woman had been killed with a shotgun, allegedly by a former lover, an architecture professor at the University of Virginia named Rutherford.
He looked for details that were less architectural and more lascivious, and he found what he was looking for in a local Virginia newspaper, including a reconstruction of the crime scene. Barrington couldn’t have had anything to do with it because he had been out riding with his and Arrington’s son and the boy’s girlfriend, and they had all heard the shotgun go off from the stables, where they had just arrived. There was one loose end, though—the ex-boyfriend and alleged murderer had fled the scene and the state, and he had finally been shot in the head in Barrington’s office by Joan Robertson, his secretary. The dead man had never been charged with Arrington’s murder, and he told friends that he had been falsely accused and that the husband had done it. An idea began forming in Teppi’s fevered imagination. He called Gloria.
“That was fast,” she said.
“My brain got lucky,” Teppi replied. He recounted the details of the murder to her.
“Yeah, that’s about the way I remember it,” Parsons said.
“Do you remember that the alleged murderer, this guy named Rutherford, went to Stone Barrington’s office with a gun, ostensibly to kill Barrington, and for his trouble got shot in the head by
Barrington’s secretary?”
“Well, yeah, I think I remember that.”
“Thus closing the case?”
“The guy is dead—they could hardly prosecute him.”
“But there’s your opening,” Teppi explained. “Officially the murder case against him was never adjudicated. What if what he told his friends was true? That he didn’t shoot Arrington, that Barrington was persecuting him.”
“So, you mean that Barrington could have killed his wife?”
“The important words are ‘could have.’”
“But he had an alibi—he was with his son and the kid’s girlfriend in the stables when they all heard the gun go off.”
“They heard something that sounded like a gun. In fact, Barrington told the police that it sounded like a door slamming. And there was no one else in the house.”
“So, how could Barrington have killed her?”
“Maybe he shot her before they went riding, or something like that. It doesn’t really matter, all you want to do is to call Barrington’s story and the police report into question. Nobody actually saw Rutherford in the house at the time, and the police never got to question him because he scampered.”
“But the local cops would see that she was shot at the time Barrington said she was. The physical evidence, like body temperature, would have told them that.”
“Yeah, but it’s a Podunk sheriff’s office in rural Virginia. Can you imagine how many ways they could have screwed up the physical evidence? Don’t you remember how Johnnie Cochran took apart the LAPD at the O.J. trial? And that was a big-city, lotsa-science police department.”
“Jesus, Al,” Parsons said, “I believe you’re actually on to something.”
“Well, I mean, they’re not going to arrest Barrington for the murder, but there’ll be a lot of press, and half the people who read it will remember only that Barrington could have done it. Do I have to explain to you how the public thinks?”
“No, Al, you don’t,” Parsons said. “I’m going to have a word with my editor.”
“And don’t forget, you owe me another three hundred.”