by Stuart Woods
“Al, the five hundred was for the D&B report.”
“Picky, picky, picky!”
“Okay, if this story flies with my editor, you’ll get the other three hundred.”
—
Gloria sat in her editor’s office, a hip slung on the woman’s desk. “What do you think?”
“I think what I thought at the time,” the editor said, “that Barrington had nothing to do with his wife’s murder, that Rutherford did it.”
“Hazel,” Parsons said, “how do you know that?”
“Well, I don’t know it, it’s just what the police and everybody said at the time.”
“A Podunk sheriff’s office in rural Virginia—they could have screwed up the physical evidence a hundred ways. Don’t you remember the O.J. trial? The prosecution had him on the physical evidence, then Johnnie Cochran shredded their handling of the blood!”
“You’d have to handle this very, very carefully, Gloria.”
“Listen, I’m never going to say outright that Barrington murdered his wife, I’m just asking the questions that the public will demand be answered.”
Hazel looked at her appraisingly. “Gloria, tell me the truth, did you fuck Barrington?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Have you got some sort of ax to grind here? Did he dump you, or something?”
“Hazel, if I answered that question, you’d have every right to fire me for being too forthcoming. I’ll answer your first question, though. Did I fuck Barrington? Yes, I did, and it was great! But by the time anybody who reads my story gets around to asking that question, my work will be done. Half the world will think that Barrington could have murdered his wife.”
“Just like O.J.,” Hazel mused. “Okay, do a first draft, and we’ll go over it together word by word.”
“You’ll have it tomorrow morning,” Parsons said. She went back to her office, fired up her computer, and wrote with abandon, spinning out her story, innuendo by innuendo, and finishing with one short paragraph: “Is Arrington Calder Barrington’s murderer still on the loose? And if so, who might he be?”
She printed the story and sprinted down the hallway to her editor’s office.
Hazel looked up at her. “Already?”
“You said you wanted to see a first draft. Here it is.” She slapped the pages on the desk.
The editor read through the manuscript slowly, making an occasional mark with a grease pencil.
“Well?”
“Here,” Hazel said, “address the places I’ve marked, being sure that any insinuations we make are justified.”
Parsons looked over the story quickly. “That’s it? That’s all that worries you?”
“That’s it.”
“Tell you what, we’ll license the Architectural Digest photos and splash them all over the story, including the murder spot.”
“That’s a brilliant idea, Gloria, it will give our readers just the verisimilitude they need to draw just the conclusion we want them to. Also, see if you can get crime-scene photos from the Virginia cops, and talk to the investigating officer, too.” She picked up the phone. “I’ll get the lawyers in here right away. You clean up the manuscript and we’ll feed it to them, page by page, and get an opinion.”
“I’m on it!” Parsons cried, and ran back to her office. “Hazel,” she said under her breath to herself, “before a year has passed, I’ll have winnowed you out of your job, and I’ll use this story to do it!”
23
Sitting in the coffee shop, Bob Cantor used his iPhone to do searches on Gloria Parsons and Alphonse Teppi. He found no criminal charges or arrests, but Teppi had been questioned many times by the police. There had been two libel suits filed against Parsons and her magazine, Just Folks, but both had been settled out of court. He paid his bill and went back to his van, but he didn’t think to check his automatic recorder. The red light glowed entertainingly behind his head, but he just didn’t notice.
—
Gloria got the Virginia sheriff on the line; she was surprised that he had so readily taken her call. “Sheriff?”
“Sheriff Rudolf Sweat,” he replied.
“Sheriff Sweat, this is Gloria Parsons from Just Folks magazine.”
“Oh, yeah, Gloria, I know your stuff.”
“I’m so pleased to have a reader in Albemarle County.”
“You got lotsa readers down here.”
“Thank you so much. May I call you Rudy?”
“Nobody else does, but you can.”
“Do you mind if I record our conversation, so I won’t misquote you?”
“You go right ahead.”
Gloria switched on the recorder. “Were you the investigating officer on the Arrington Calder Barrington murder?”
“I was one of ’em. Old Sheriff Bates took the lead on everything, until I beat him at the polls last election.”
“Well, congratulations, Rudy.”
“Thank you, Gloria. Like I was saying, I was on the scene the whole time, first officer present, in fact. Sheriff Bates got there half an hour later.”
“And what did you find?”
“Dead woman, shotgun to the back of the head. It was a mess.”
“Did you follow crime-scene procedure after that?” Gloria asked.
“Crime-scene procedure around here at the time was to wait for Sheriff Bates to get there and don’t let nobody touch nothing.”
“Tell me what happened from the beginning.”
“Well, Mr. Barrington called nine-one-one and got transferred to us. I was in a radio car a few miles off, and I took the call. The sheriff was in Charlottesville, and it took him a lot longer.”
“What did you do in the meantime?”
“I taped off the scene and got Barrington and the two kids into the library and started asking questions.”
“Did you like the answers?”
“They seemed right to me, and the three of them had the same story. Wait a minute, there was some difference. The kids had taken their saddles into the tack room, and Barrington heard the gunshot while they were gone, I think.”
“Then what?”
“Then they went up to the house, found the front door open and Mrs. Barrington there, dead.”
“Was there a lot of blood?”
“Blood and brains—it was a shotgun.”
“Did you form an opinion about when the gunshot was heard?”
“Yeah, less than five minutes before Barrington got there.”
“Let me ask you, Rudy, is it possible that the gunshot came earlier than that?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, Barrington was the only one who heard it. Could he have been wrong?”
“I think I see where you’re going, here, Gloria. You mean he might have just made up hearing it?”
“Is that possible?”
“Well, anything’s possible, I guess.”
“Suppose you had evidence that somebody else heard the gunshot earlier?”
“Wasn’t nobody else in the house when I got there.”
“What happened when Sheriff Bates got there?”
“He started all over—that was his way, he didn’t trust nobody else.”
“Did he get the same answers?”
“Yep.”
“And did he accept them as true?”
“I guess. He did spend some time with Barrington on what he heard and when he heard it.”
“Tell me—this is just hypothetical—while the kids were in the tack room was there time for Barrington to go up to the house, shoot his wife, hide the shotgun, and come back to the stable before the kids came out of the tack room?”
“Well, that’s hard to say. I didn’t write down no timeline, and neither did the sheriff. I guess we just both t
hought the murderer had come and gone. There might have been time for Barrington to do that, though.”
“How did you settle on Rutherford as the murderer?”
“Barrington suggested him, said he had been bothering his wife for several days, calling her up and the like.”
“Did you consider anyone else?”
“Well, no, we had eliminated Barrington, and there wasn’t another person who had had contact with her in the days before. Also, Rutherford ran. He was out of his house and gone by the time we got there. Why else would he have ran if he wasn’t guilty?”
“How did Stone Barrington act while you were there?”
“He was stunned, sort of, and then he was quiet and calm—I think he wanted to keep the kids quiet and calm, too.”
“He wanted to keep them quiet?”
“Yeah. He talked to them a little bit and then left them in the library while he came out and talked to the sheriff and me.”
“What was his reaction to the dead body in the hall?”
“I’d say, kind of clinical, professional. I heard later he used to be a police officer in New York. I guess it wasn’t his first shotgun to the head. Come to think of it, he did better than I did.”
“How long were you and the sheriff at the crime scene?”
“Must have been a couple of hours. We had to wait for some people to come from the hospital and look at the body and do what they had to do.”
“Were blood samples taken?”
“I expect so, but since we never needed them for a trial, they didn’t seem so important. By the time we left, the body was gone, and the servants were cleaning up the mess.”
“Who asked the servants to do that?”
“Mr. Barrington did. I couldn’t blame him, and the sheriff told him to go ahead.”
“Rudy, a personal question—did you ever, at any time, consider that Barrington might have been the killer, instead of Rutherford?”
“No, but the sheriff did—we talked about it.”
“And what was his opinion?”
“He thought we ought to keep an open mind until we had found Rutherford and questioned him. He was like that, real thorough.”
“Rudy, how can I get in touch with Sheriff Bates? I’d like to talk to him.”
“You can’t. He had a heart attack when he heard about the election results and died on the way to the hospital.”
“Do you know if he made any statements about the Barrington murder before he died?”
“No, I wasn’t there when he collapsed. I went to the hospital, but like I said, he had died on the way.”
“Rudy, thank you so much. Can I call you again if I have any further questions?”
“Sure, Gloria, anytime at all. If you want to come down here and look around, I’ll be glad to escort you.”
She thanked him again and hung up. She had enough.
24
Gloria Parsons switched on her computer, pulled up her first draft on the Barrington murder, and began going through it, line by line, inserting fragments of her interview with Sheriff Rudolf Sweat. Half an hour into the piece she called Hazel Schwartz, her boss, and said, “Hazel, I’ll be ready for the lawyers in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll have them here,” Hazel said.
Parsons finished her piece, spell-checked it, printed four copies, and walked down the hall to Hazel’s corner office. Two lawyers, Jim and Martina, were just sitting down. Parsons distributed the copies to her boss and the lawyers and waited while they read it.
Jim looked up. “This looks pretty clean to me. Are these quotes with the yokel cop accurate?”
“I have him on tape,” Parsons replied.
“I’ve got a couple of nitpicks,” Martina said. She brought up her points and Parsons made the changes on the spot. “I’ll put in the corrections and e-mail them to you in ten minutes,” she said.
Hazel spoke up. “I got the Architectural Digest photos licensed. An art director is working on the layout now. We’ll go over it together when he’s done.” She gave Parsons his e-mail address. “Forward it to him, and he’ll have full-blown comp ready for us to review.”
Parsons went back to her office, and in ten minutes she was done, and, she reckoned, so was Stone Barrington. She went back to Hazel’s office, and they went over the layout on her giant computer screen that could show half a dozen pages at once.
They settled on a headline:
COULD THE BARRINGTON MURDERER BE BARRINGTON?
“Love it,” Hazel said. “Gloria, I’m giving you a two-hundred-dollar-a-week raise, effective next pay period.”
“Thank you, Hazel,” Parsons gushed. She had expected a five-hundred-dollar raise, but she could lie in wait for a while longer. She left Hazel’s office whistling a little tune.
There was a cocktail party uptown that she had been thinking of passing on, but she was thirsty and horny, and one never knew who would be there, did one? She phoned for an Uber, and did her makeup in the backseat on the way.
The party had been under way for an hour when she got there, and it was more elegant than she had imagined. The apartment was on Fifth Avenue and had a low-floor view of the park, like a close-up, and the people were well dressed. Then she looked across the room to a corner bar and there, all alone and looking depressed, was the governor of the State of New York, one Benton Blake. She made a beeline for the bar and set herself on a stool right in front of him, not bothering to pull her skirt down. She was wearing a black Armani suit and a silk blouse that showed an impressive amount of her creamy breasts, and his eyes went directly there, just as they were supposed to.
“Hi, there,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m Benton. Who are you?”
“I’m Gloria,” she said; she didn’t want to mention her last name, in case he recognized it and got cautious. She squeezed his hand for a second longer than he had expected. “And I’d like a very dry vodka martini.”
“Certainly,” he said.
“Will you join me?”
“Of course. He ordered from the bartender and held up two fingers.
Parsons reviewed what she knew about him: his wife had left him two weeks ago for another man, a real estate developer. It wasn’t public yet, but Parsons knew a few details. The wife had pretty much moved into the man’s penthouse, and Governor Blake wouldn’t speak her name to his staff. The man was tall, slim, and fit, and once he started to recover, he would have the ladies lined up and waiting. Parsons decided to accelerate his recovery.
She accepted her martini, raised her glass to him while locking in on his eyes, and took a man-sized gulp. He followed suit.
“There,” he said.
“Is everything all better now?” she asked, licking the vodka from her lips.
“I’m getting there,” he said.
“What can I do to help?”
“That’s a leading question,” he replied.
They both took another gulp of martini.
“Then lead on,” Gloria said.
“Where would you like to be led?”
“All the way past my better judgment,” she replied.
That got a good laugh. “It sounds like an inviting place,” he said. “Where would we find it? Your place?”
“That’s way downtown,” she said, “and I don’t think I can wait that long.” She ran a fingernail from his knee up his inner thigh. “Isn’t there a bedroom in this apartment?”
“Well, let’s see,” he said. “The one with the coats is right over there, but that doesn’t offer much privacy. On the other hand, there’s another just beyond it that’s much better.”
“Does it have a lock on the door?” she asked.
“If it doesn’t, we can jury-rig something.”
“You go ahead, I’ll be sixty seconds behind you,” she said, downing what was left o
f her martini.
He did the same, turned and walked away. Gloria consulted her watch, then followed. The door was slightly ajar, and she went in and closed it behind her. She leaned on the door and kicked off her Manolos, then slipped off her suit jacket and hung it on the doorknob.
Blake was sitting on the bed, leaning back on his hands, watching. His coat was already off, and he loosened his tie. She strolled across the bedroom toward him, unbuttoning her blouse and unhooking her bra from the front. She put her hand under his chin and kissed him, using her tongue to good effect, and dropped her handbag on the bed.
He took a breast in his hand and pinched the nipple lightly.
“You’ve just found the hot button,” she said. “Where’s yours?”
He pulled her gently to her knees, and she could see the growing bulge under his trousers. “You’re getting warm,” he said.
She unzipped his trousers, liberated a very attractive penis, and kissed it a few times, while he made appreciative noises. “Before we go any further, there’s something I want,” she said, caressing him with a hand.
“You don’t look like that kind of a girl,” he said.
“Thank you, I’m not.”
“Then tell me what I can do for you,” he said, breathing faster.
“I have a young friend who is doing three years at Fishkill,” she said, “for a crime he didn’t commit. He’s being, ah, abused daily by other inmates.”
“And how can I help your friend? I can’t do a pardon.”
“Just commute his sentence to time served, for exigent family reasons.”
“Done,” he said.
She reached into her purse and produced her little recorder. “Repeat after me,” she said. “I, Benton Blake, in return for the best sex of my life . . .”
He repeated.
“. . . do promise to commute the sentence of Daniel Blaine to time served . . .”
He repeated.
“Within forty-eight hours of this time.” She recited the date and time.
He completed his promise. “Now come here,” he said.
She dropped the recorder into her purse, stripped him, then returned to her original work.