by Stuart Woods
“Do you mean we’re suspects?”
“No, certainly not. I saw you get out of a taxi as I was crossing Park Avenue, and we entered the building at the same time, so we can vouch for each other.”
A tall, willowy young woman walked into the building and up to the desk. “Mrs. Lansdown, please,” she said to the doorman. “My name is Mia Meadow.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Meadow,” the man said, “you’ll have to wait here with these people.”
Stone introduced himself and the Whartons to the woman. “I’m afraid something is wrong upstairs. We’re waiting for the police.”
“Wrong?” she asked.
Stone was about to explain when a tall, handsome young man arrived and kissed the woman on the cheek. He looked like a young Jack Gunn, so Stone assumed he was the son. “David Gunn?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Stone Barrington, a friend of Adele’s, and this is Ben and Ann Wharton. Apparently, something is wrong in Adele’s apartment, and we’re waiting for the police.” As if on cue, the noise of an ambulance and a police cruiser could be heard approaching the building.
“Wrong? What do you mean?”
Stone explained what had happened, and as he finished the lobby became suddenly crowded with uniformed and plainclothes police officers and a pair of EMTs with a gurney. Dino was right behind them.
Stone introduced Dino to the dinner guests. “I’m glad to meet you all, and I’m sorry about the circumstances,” Dino said.
“Can you tell us what’s happened?” David Gunn asked.
“I will shortly,” he said. “You folks please have a seat over there,” he said, pointing at a seating area. “Don’t leave until a detective has taken your statements. Stone, you come with me.”
Stone excused himself from the group and followed Dino to an elevator, right behind the EMTs and two detectives. As the elevator went up, Dino introduced the two detectives as Salero and Bartkowski.
Dino led the way out of the elevator, with Stone hot behind. A woman in a white chef’s outfit was standing at an open doorway, holding a towel to the back of her head. “This way,” she called out, stepping back to let them in. “Mrs. Lansdown is in the dining room, to your right.”
An EMT stayed with her, checking her injuries, and Dino, Stone, and the detectives walked into the dining room. Adele Lansdown was lying on the floor beside an overturned chair and some scattered tableware. The detective Salero knelt beside her and held three fingers to her neck.
“No pulse,” he said. He lifted her head and looked under it. “At least one to the side of the head.”
“All right,” Dino said, “everybody in the living room, except you,” he said, pointing to the EMT. “Pronounce her and note the time. Salero, you go downstairs and get separate statements from the other dinner guests. But before you do that, call the ME.”
They went back into the living room, where the EMT was applying a bandage to the back of the cook’s head. “She needs to get checked out at the hospital,” he said. “We’ll put her in our ambulance.”
Bartkowski sat in the chair next to the injured woman. “Can you answer a couple of questions?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Your name?”
“Betty Hardesty. I’m Mrs. Lansdown’s chef.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I was standing at the stove, cooking dinner, and then, next thing I knew, I woke up on the floor with my head hurting. I got to my feet and called out to Mrs. Lansdown, and when she didn’t answer, I went to look for her and found her on the dining room floor. I called downstairs, and then I went to the door to wait for somebody to come. Will somebody turn the stove off, please?”
“Stone,” Dino said, “will you do that?”
Stone walked past Adele’s corpse and into the kitchen, where something in a copper skillet was sizzling. He shut down the large Viking range and looked around. There was a door at the rear of the kitchen, closed. He opened it and found a back hall with a staircase and an elevator, then he returned to the living room.
The two EMTs were helping the chef onto a gurney.
“Bartkowski,” Dino said, “go downstairs and help Salero with the dinner guests’ statements. I’ll hold down the fort here until the ME arrives. When you’re done downstairs, if nobody sounds like a suspect, send them all home and come back up here.”
Stone took Dino to the kitchen and showed him the service entrance.
Dino checked the door. “Unlocked,” he said. “Anybody could have walked in.”
“Whoever walked in was pretty businesslike,” Stone said. “Took out the chef, then Adele.”
The ME arrived and started his work.
NINETEEN
Stone and Dino sat in the living room while the medical examiner did his work in the dining room. They had worked the apartment and found everything in perfect order, except the dining room. The criminalist arrived, did his work, and reported no physical evidence. Salero and Bartkowski came back from the lobby to report.
“Tell me,” Dino said.
“They all had the same story,” he said. “They arrived at about the same time, and when the doorman called up, nobody answered at first, then the cook called downstairs. They all say they were invited for dinner.”
“I can confirm that,” Stone said. “Adele called me about one this afternoon and asked me to dinner, then told me that she had invited a couple visiting from out of town and her nephew David Gunn and his girlfriend. The Whartons and I arrived simultaneously, Mia Meadow a couple of minutes later, and David Gunn a couple of minutes after her.”
Bartkowski scribbled all that in his notebook.
“Okay, fellas,” Dino said, “get back to the precinct and start working this. Confirm all the names and addresses. I’ll vouch for Barrington.”
The two men left, and Dino stared at Stone. “You don’t look so good, pal.”
Stone sighed. “It’s not every day that my dinner date gets murdered.”
“How well did you know her?”
“Met her last week at Jack Gunn’s daughter’s wedding, and we spent the weekend together in Maine.”
“You got a witness who can put you in Maine?”
“The caretaker and his wife. Oh, and Lance Cabot.”
“Lance was visiting you?” Dino knew Cabot from several meetings at Elaine’s.
“No, it was really weird: I hadn’t told anybody where we were going, but I got a call from Lance on Dick’s line to the Agency, which, I guess, is still working.”
“How did he know you were there?”
“I went out to the airfield to check on whether there was any snow accumulation on the airplane, and this black helicopter shows up with Lance aboard. He practically kidnaps me and takes me to a nearby island where his people are interrogating some Chinese spy.”
“Why the hell would he want you there?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe he was just impressing me with how he could keep tabs on me. Turns out, he had flown over Islesboro earlier and saw my airplane there. He invited himself to dinner, but I nixed that, then the chopper flew me back.”
“So that was the first time you’d spent any time with Adele?”
“We had dinner at the Four Seasons before we went to Maine.”
“Anybody you can think of has anything against Adele?”
“No. Of course, I didn’t know her long enough to meet any of her circle of friends. The only nexus we had was Herbie Fisher, who was marrying her niece.”
“The son, David—I read he was on a sailing trip when the blowup at his father’s business happened?”
“Yeah, I saw him interviewed on TV in the marina, after he got back to Miami. Actually, I’m told he was a suspect in the missing-money scandal, which turned out not to be a scandal at all, since there was no missing money.”
“Would he have anything against his aunt?”
“Not that I know of. If he wasn’t on good terms with her, why did sh
e invite him to dinner, and why did he accept?”
“Makes sense,” Dino said. “What about the other couple?”
“She described them as old friends from out of town. I never even learned where they were from.”
Dino checked his notes. “Chicago. Neither of them was an investor of Gunn’s. How did Adele feel about Jack Gunn?”
“She liked him, trusted him. When the mess blew over she kept the proceeds of her husband’s estate with him, and recommended to me that I invest with him. No hard feelings there.”
“Late husband?”
“Yeah, she told me that she shot him, after he had blackened her eye and broken her arm. She was never charged with anything.”
“Lansdown,” Dino said, thinking. “Last year. I remember the case. They ran it by me, and I didn’t see any need for charges.”
“You think anybody had something against the cook?” Stone asked.
“If so, he would have shot her and hit Adele over the head, not the other way around.”
“Good point,” Stone admitted. “You know, security is pretty good in a building like this. Makes you wonder how somebody got in through the service entrance.”
The ME came in from the dining room, followed by two helpers and the corpse on a gurney. “Death by shooting, two in the head, small caliber, typical of a pro job. She’d been dead for less than an hour when I got here.”
“Fax me the full report,” Dino said. “Thanks, Doc.”
The man left.
“I think we’re done here,” Dino said, “and the smell of that food cooking makes me hungry.”
“Elaine’s?”
“Where else?” Dino said. “Let’s leave by the service entrance.” He led the way out the back, where Dino had another look at the door. “Doesn’t seem tampered with.”
“Probably when you live in a building like this, you think you can leave your door unlocked,” Stone said.
Dino rang for the elevator and it came quickly. “New elevator,” Dino said as they got on. “Probably faster than the building’s main elevators, unless they’re new, too.”
They got off on the ground floor, and Dino had a good look at the outside door and its lock. “Look at this,” he said, touching the door beside the lock and rubbing his fingers together. “Mucilage; looks like the bolt was taped back.”
The door from the lobby opened and a uniformed employee of the building stood there. “Oh, it’s you, gentlemen. Sorry to disturb you.”
“You got a camera back here?” Dino asked, looking around.
“Right up there,” the doorman said, pointing to a high corner.
“Let’s have a look at your tapes,” Dino said, and they followed him back to the front desk.
At Dino’s request, the doorman rewound the tape to seven-fifteen and pressed the play button. At seven twenty-two the door opened and a man in a dark hooded sweatshirt entered, his hands in the sweatshirt’s pockets. “Rewind and replay one frame at a time,” Dino said.
The doorman did so.
“The angle of the camera is too high. You can’t see the face,” Dino said.
The doorman made a note. “I’ll see to that.”
“All his clothes are dark,” Stone said. “I can’t see anything identifying.”
“Keep playing,” Dino said. “I want to see him when he leaves.”
The doorman played the tape forward at double speed. The man left the way he came, at seven twenty-six, and paused to pull a piece of tape off the door lock; then he was gone.
“You got an outside camera?” Dino asked.
“Not working,” the doorman said. “I called it in late this afternoon, but the repairman didn’t show yet.”
“Bad luck,” Dino said. “Let’s take a look at the street.” He led the way to the service entrance, and they stepped out onto Seventy-first Street. Dino pointed at a dumpster parked across the street, and he and Stone crossed to have a look in it.
“Give me a leg up,” Dino said. “You’re dressed too nice.”
“Sure,” Stone said, cupping his hands.
“It’s pretty full,” Dino said from above Stone. “Somebody’s renovating. Uh-oh.” He held up a black sweatshirt, then handed it to Stone. “Got some latex gloves, too.”
Stone held it by thumb and forefinger and checked the label. “Banana Republic,” he said. “Must be thousands of them on the street.”
Dino hopped down to the street, produced a large plastic bag, and stuffed the sweatshirt into it and the gloves into a smaller bag, which he placed in the larger bag. They walked around the corner to where Dino’s car was waiting and got in. Dino tossed the bag into the front passenger seat. “Take us to Elaine’s, then get that bag to Bartkowski and Salero at the precinct, and tell them to get it to the criminalist,” he said. “Sign the chain of evidence log, and I’ll do it when I get in later.” Dino called the precinct and told the two detectives to expect the sweatshirt and gloves, to check the gloves for fingerprints on the inside, and to get a copy of the videotape from the doorman at the building, then he sat back in his seat and sighed.
“Feels good when you’ve done everything you need to do,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
Stone agreed.
TWENTY
At Elaine’s their first drink was delivered.
“It has to be a pro job,” Dino said. “It’s too clean for anything else—no rifling of her drawers or jewelry box, just in, slug the cook, shoot the woman, and out.”
“He must have cased the rear entrance earlier,” Stone said, “or the outside door wouldn’t have been taped. He came through the lobby to get in.”
“He could have stood around outside and waited for somebody to open the rear door, then grabbed it before it closed,” Dino pointed out.
“I guess. I think your detectives ought to get all the visitors’ names for the day, though, everybody who isn’t a resident.”
“Good idea,” Dino said. “I’ll send them back for that. Any other thoughts?”
“I can’t help think that this had something to do with the blowup at the Gunn company,” Stone said. “That seems to be the only irregular event in the family.”
“Another thing,” Dino said. “She offed her husband; that must have offended somebody—his family, a friend.”
“Revenge served cold,” Stone said. “Maybe; I guess it’s worth checking out.”
“Had to be a pro.”
“Or somebody who’s watched enough TV to figure out how a pro works. If I’d been on time for dinner, maybe things would have been different.”
“Yeah,” Dino said, “maybe he’d have shot you, too.”
Herbie Fisher and his new wife walked into the restaurant and approached Stone and Dino’s table. “We just heard,” Herbie said, and they sat down without being asked.
“Hello, Stephanie,” Stone said. “I’m sorry for your loss. This is Lieutenant Dino Bacchetti. He’s in charge of the investigation.”
“Tell us what happened, Lieutenant,” Stephanie said.
“Somebody came into the building’s service entrance, having taped the lock back earlier, took the elevator upstairs, opened the service door to the apartment, which wasn’t locked. The chef was at the stove, cooking. He hit her with something substantial, like a gun barrel. She fell to the floor, unconscious. He walked into the dining room, where your aunt was standing near the table, shot her in the head. She fell, he shot her again in the head, then he left the way he came. We got a video of him at the back entrance, coming and going, but he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, and his face isn’t visible. We found the sweatshirt and a pair of latex gloves in a dumpster across the street. They’ll be checked for trace evidence. That’s about it, so far.”
Stephanie teared up and shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Who would want to hurt Aunt Adele?”
“Give that some thought,” Stone said. “Anybody angry with her? Even a family member?”
Stephanie shook her head. “Everybody lov
ed her.”
“Not everybody,” Dino said.
“Do you know anything about her will?” Stone asked. “Who would inherit?”
“She didn’t have any children,” Stephanie said.
“And her husband is dead,” Dino pointed out. “Did he have any close family members?”
“His parents are dead,” Stephanie replied, “but he had a brother. He’s a diplomat of some sort, stationed in London.”
Dino made a note of the man’s name. “Anybody else?”
“A younger sister. She lives in Hong Kong. Her husband works for an American bank there.”
Dino noted that, too. “Either of them in town?”
“Not that I know of,” Stephanie said. “I hardly knew them. I do know that they both liked Aunt Adele better than they liked their brother. He was a bad drunk, and everybody thought he was a real shit.”
“Was Mrs. Lansdown married before?”
“Once, in her early twenties. It lasted only a few months.”
“His name?”
“Karl Stein,” she replied. “Last I heard he was in LA, working in the movie business.”
“As what?”
“He started as a writer, but he produces and directs, too.”
“Any hard feelings there?”
“I don’t think so. They were young and stupid. I don’t think Adele ever heard from him.”
“You know who he works for?”
“Various studios. He has his own production company, Stein-ware Films. I read a magazine piece about him once.”
“Can you think of anyone else that Mrs. Lansdown had problems with? Former employees, that sort of thing?”
“No, she was a very likable person. Her chef had worked for her for years, and they’re quite good friends.”
“Tell me about David’s relationship with his aunt,” Dino said.
“They got along fine,” she replied. “I think between the two of us, he was her favorite.”
“How long has he been seeing Mia Meadow?”
“The better part of a year, I think. She was on the sailing trip with him. The family thinks they might end up married.”