Murder Saves Face

by Haughton Murphy

  “Do you think Richardson got angry when he found the typo?” Frost suggested.

  “That’s possible, but I really don’t know. Anyway, once she’d given me the opinion to fix, she went back in and closed the door, like before. Again they raised their voices, but I still couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “About five minutes, I guess. Then Mr. Richardson came out, acting a little impatient. I remember he said as he was leaving, ‘There’s an end to it, Juliana, there’s an end to it.’”

  “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “I assumed he meant the On-Line merger would be over the next day.”

  “Did Ms. Merriman seem upset?”

  “She was very tired, and, yes, a little tense. Maybe because of arguing with her boss, or maybe because she’d had a hard day with those characters down in the conference room.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Frost asked.

  “Right after Mr. Richardson went back upstairs. She talked with Beth Locke for a few minutes about setting up a conference call to Tokyo for later in the evening. After that she got ready to leave and said she was going to eat at her apartment, but expected to be back by eight.”

  “That was when, around five-thirty?”

  “Almost exactly, I’d say. Jennie Sage, a secretary down the hall, always leaves on the dot of five-thirty. I remember she stuck her head in the door to wish me a happy New Year just as Ms. Merriman was leaving.”

  “How long did you stay around?”

  “By the time I’d made the correction, and gotten the new page run off in duplicating and inserted in the opinions, it was almost seven. Frankly, I waited around until exactly seven so that I could take a cab home.” Frost doubted that Ms. Coward would have confided her stretching of the office rule—paid-for taxicabs home only after seven o’clock—in less grave circumstances.

  “So you didn’t see Merriman after five-thirty?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She had not returned from dinner by the time you left at seven?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see any strangers wandering around before you went home?”

  “Only Mr. Wylie. The one they call Skip. He’d come up to use the telephone just before Miss Merriman went out.”

  “In her office?”

  “No, he used Mr. Loveman’s, too. He was on the phone for twenty minutes or so and then he took off.”

  “Well, Mary, thank you. Can you make me a Xerox of this?” he asked.

  Ms. Coward copied the change of beneficiary form and handed the copy to Frost. “Do you think this means anything?” she asked.

  “I wish I knew, Mary.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  More Questions Than Answers

  Frost went immediately to Charlie Parkes’ office and was pleased to find him in. In the excitement of his discoveries, Reuben had given up all thought of lunch and wanted to press forward.

  “Come in, Reuben,” Parkes said. “What have you found out?”

  “Plenty,” Frost replied.

  “Does it lead us anywhere?”

  “Yes. We’ve got two roads. If we go down either one, Merriman’s killer may be at the end of it.”

  “You’re talking in riddles.”

  “I was only trying to pick up on your question about where things have led us. Here’s the situation.” He related to Parkes the gist of Merriman’s draft complaint, and told him of the recent change in the beneficiary of her insurance policy.

  “So you think it may be either Bill Richardson or Marshall Genakis?”

  “Don’t push me too far—all I’m saying is we’ve discovered something adverse, something unfavorable, about each one—not enough to send either of them to Dannemora, but leads worth pursuing.

  “Here’s what I propose to do, if you agree,” Frost went on. “I think we should talk to the three partners Merriman worked for—Straus, Heyworth and Richardson—just as we discussed this morning. I doubt that either Straus or Heyworth will have anything to tell us, but it’s an unobtrusive way of getting to Richardson, without half the office buzzing that he alone was summoned to talk to us.”

  “You want me involved in this?”

  “I think so, Charlie. I think we need to lend your weight as the Executive Partner, so it’s not just an old man fishing around.”

  “Whatever you think. I’m at your service. What about that detective you hired? You want him here, too?”

  “No, not at this stage. I want to keep things as low-key as possible.”

  “Shall we start now?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  Frost and Parkes saw the three partners for whom Juliana Merriman had worked in chronological order. As Frost had predicted, the first, Bernie Straus, had little to relate.

  “I knew she was a bright girl, right from the start,” he said. “She was just about the best first-year associate I ever had. She got along with everybody as far as I could tell.

  “Who killed her? My daughter asked me the same thing—she’s down at U.Va. law school. When I told her I didn’t have any idea she said the firm better hurry up and find out, if we ever want to hire anybody again.” Parkes grimaced as Straus repeated his daughter’s observation.

  Frost asked if he could ask his former partner “a final question.” “This is a touchy one, Bernie, but what do you know about her sex life?”

  “Nothing, really. Except that she was a real knockout. While she was working for me she took up with some guy she’d known from California. I think they were living together.”

  “Did she ever make an advance towards you?”

  “Lord, no. A sexy girl like Juliana sure could do better than an old plug-ugly like me. And to anticipate your next question, I never made a pass at her.”

  “Oh, Reuben, before Brian gets here, there’s one thing I thought of,” Parkes said. “You know about the Carson Group?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “The ‘hotline’ people.”

  “Oh, yes,” Reuben answered. It was a development since his time as an active partner, but the firm now had a contract with Carson, a group of psychologists and social workers who maintained a hotline that all employees of Chase & Ward, lawyers or not, could call at any hour of the day or night to get expert referrals for their personal problems. Frost had heard about it only indirectly, but he had been told that Dr. Carson, himself a recovering alcoholic, had made a convincing presentation to the partners and persuaded them that Chase & Ward was probably not as invincible as they complacently thought—its personnel might be exposed to drugs, alcohol, child abuse, suicide, depression and all the other maladies of late twentieth-century living.

  Charlie Parkes and the members of the firm had decided to try out the Carson Group for a year. The cost was minimal and the benefits, if Dr. Carson were correct, quite real. To the surprise of the partners, the service had been called with some frequency, though the identity of the users, and even the breakdown between lawyers and non-lawyers, was kept from the members of the firm. But the description of the purposes of the calls had shocked the partners into voting to renew the Carson retainer each year.

  “I think I’ll call Dr. Carson and see if Juliana ever used their services,” Parkes said. He did so, and Reuben, overhearing one side of the conversation, could tell that it was not going smoothly.

  “But she’s dead, Dr. Carson,” Parkes said, impatiently. Then, later, “You want to talk to me in person you say? Can you come over now?”

  Parkes hung up the phone. “He’s coming over, as you probably gathered. He’s a bug about secrecy and confidentiality, but I guess that’s what makes his service work.”

  Brian Heyworth, as expected, had already told Parkes and Frost what he knew the previous Friday.

  “Let me ask you this,” Frost said to him. “All these characters who were here for the On-Line closing. They were in the office the day Juli
ana was killed. Did any of them strike you as suspicious?”

  “As I told you, I hadn’t really dealt with them until Friday morning, when Julie didn’t show up. Our client, Alan Lovett, can be pretty blunt, but basically I’d say he’s a laid-back Californian. Skip, the youngest of the Wylie brothers, was sort of a hood, but more a diamond-in-the-rough than a gangster.”

  “How about the other brothers?” Frost asked.

  “Harmless. No, the only other possibility would be their investment banker, Harvey Rawson. He was obnoxiously aggressive, but that’s true of about half his profession, wouldn’t you say? Overall, it didn’t strike me as a murdering bunch, Reuben.”

  “Shall we call in the golden boy?” Parkes asked, once Heyworth had gone. Frost smiled at the reference to Bill Richardson’s sub-rosa nickname. He had been tagged with it by those of his own generation in the office, who had observed early on that the socially impeccable Richardson was favored by the more traditional senior partners of the firm; it had not had anything to do with the young man’s flaxen hair.

  Chase & Ward had always been a meritocracy. Every partner, by instinct in some cases, out of principle in others, had realized since the earliest days of Charles Chase that advancement within the firm must depend on ability; that it would sink into mediocrity if nepotism or other irrelevancies entered the advancement process and the brightest law school graduates shunned it because of a lack of commitment to merit. This is not to say that those who formed the traditional, WASP backbone of the firm did not rejoice when one of their own showed the ability to compete fairly and squarely with his peers.

  Such had been the case with the young Bill Richardson. A varsity tennis player at Yale, and an enthusiastic member of Fence Club, he had not had a distinguished academic career in New Haven, to the point where he had been rejected by the Yale Law School. This had come as a great shock to the moderately well-to-do young man, who had never encountered such a heavy setback before.

  Disappointed, he had enlisted in the Army and wrangled an assignment in the elite Special Forces, which then formed the glamorous vanguard of President Kennedy’s ill-fated intervention in Vietnam. Richardson spent three years as a Green Beret, two of them in Southeast Asia.

  After his discharge, a more sympathetic admissions committee at Columbia Law gave him a slot, and he reciprocated by compiling a distinguished record, graduating as a Stone Scholar. From law school he went immediately to Chase & Ward, where the resident barons looked upon him as a comer almost from the day he first walked in the door.

  Bill Richardson had not disappointed them and, after eight years (the usual minimum at the time), was elected a partner. More recently he had developed a special niche in the firm’s busy mergers and acquisitions practice, advising both borrowers and lenders on the intricacies of the imaginative, complicated and often risky financial instruments used to raise borrowed funds for mergers, buyouts and what were euphemistically called “recapitalizations.” Richardson was in the forefront as Wall Street continued to reverse the traditional capitalistic goal of increasing equity and decreasing debt.

  At forty-nine, he was universally thought to be Charlie Parkes’ logical successor as Executive Partner, the only fear (by some) being the facetious one that, once in charge, he would impose his fanatical notions of exercise—jogging to work when the weather permitted and early-morning tennis three days a week—on his more flabby colleagues.

  There were also reservations about his wife, Nina. She was a glacial blonde who, but for a wrinkle or two, still looked like the Mount Holyoke coed she had once been, complete with straight hair, headband, matching sweater sets and modest strings of pearls. She had married Bill the year after he had started work at Chase & Ward, thus merging his modest Philadelphia inheritance with her own Boston one.

  Huskily enthusiastic, in the way of women who may have played too much field hockey when young, she had sought a cause to take up her considerable energies once her three children had gone off to boarding school. Planned Parenthood had seemed a likely possibility and she had plunged into its activities and fund-raising with both ability and enthusiasm. Like so many activists doing good works, she soon could talk about little else except her new charity, whether her listener was a goggle-eyed young associate (is this senior partner’s wife really talking to me about condoms?) or one more aged, such as Reuben or Cynthia, to whom the procreative issues obsessing Nina were somewhat remote.

  “Sitting next to that woman at dinner is like being trapped in a gynecologist’s office,” Reuben had once sputtered to Cynthia after a dinner party where Nina Richardson had been placed beside him.

  “How on earth would you know that?” Cynthia had asked.

  “I don’t. But a visit to the gynecologist can’t be any more clinical than talking with her,” Reuben had replied, vowing to avoid being trapped with her ever again.

  Bill Richardson, whose office was on the same floor as Parkes’, appeared immediately when the Executive Partner called. He strode in, awash in his usual self-confidence, and arranged his lanky, athletic frame as he sat down, crossing his legs and draping an arm over the side of Parkes’ sofa. Frost’s examination of him was not without envy: Richardson exuded good health and his blonde hair was only now starting to be interspersed with patches of gray. He was wearing a dark tie with yellow and light blue stripes, which Reuben correctly identified as the winter tie of the Brook (as its members called their club).

  “What’s new, gentlemen?” he asked jauntily.

  “I think I filled you in pretty well when we talked yesterday,” Parkes said. “What’s new is we’ve got to find Juliana Merriman’s murderer.”

  “Is that where I come in, Charlie?” Richardson asked, smiling.

  “At this point, I don’t know where anybody comes in,” Parkes said. “I just want to get this whole thing behind us. Every additional hour that it’s hanging over our heads means more worry, more anxiety, more damage to our reputation, more lost work time. That’s why I’ve asked Reuben to come in and help out.”

  “Good idea. A little experience at a time like this can’t do any harm.” Richardson raised his shaggy eyebrows and smiled at Reuben. As if on cue, Frost picked up the conversational thread.

  “One thing we’re trying to do, Bill,” he said, “is find out as much as possible about Juliana Merriman. The logical place to start seemed to be with the three partners she worked for. We’ve already talked to Bernie Straus and Brian Heyworth, and now it’s your turn.” Frost’s approach was relaxed and non-confrontational.

  “What did Bernie and Brian have to say?”

  “Frankly, not much,” Frost said.

  “I’m afraid I’m about in the same position. Julie was rotated to me after her second assignment, with Brian. What can I tell you? She was a very good lawyer.”

  “Bernie said she was the best first-year associate he’d ever had.”

  “I don’t disagree with that. Her work on the Triumph recapitalization was above average and she was doing this two-bit On-Line thing all by herself. My only reservation was about her handling of a consent problem with a Japanese bank.”

  “How did you find out she was missing on Friday?” Frost asked.

  “Her paralegal called me and said she couldn’t be found either at her apartment or the office. That’s when I got Heyworth to swing into action.” The notion of Brian Heyworth “swinging into action” was an ironic one, but all three lawyers refrained from further comment.

  “I suppose I should have known something was wrong Thursday night,” Richardson continued. “The consent I referred to involved the Machikin Bank in Tokyo and there was a conference call about it that evening. She was meant to call me out in East Hampton to tell me what happened, but she never did.”

  “Triumph,” Reuben said, shifting the subject. “That’s the company in Dallas you represented last year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you work with her closely on that?”

  Richardson looked w
ary, but answered without hesitating. “Yes, I did. I was the Expert, capital E, they kept wanting to talk to, but Julie did much of the work. And finally it got to a point where she’d gained their confidence and they talked to her directly.”

  “When exactly was that?”

  “The first half of last year. I remember the deal kicked off with a meeting in Dallas just about a year ago now and finally closed in July. Mid-July.”

  “You mentioned a meeting in Dallas. Where did the work take place, here or there?”

  “Hard to say, Reuben. Maybe there was more Dallas involvement than usual—they insisted on using a local printer down there for the proxy materials. And they were big on meetings—always down there. So I guess, yes, to answer your question, we were in Dallas a fair amount.”

  “Were there other associates involved, or just Julie?”

  “Only Julie. Lean-and-mean Chase & Ward staffing, Reuben. No slack.”

  “What do you know about her personal life?”

  “Not much. She was living with a guy in the apartments next door, I believe.”

  “Do you know him—Marshall Genakis?”

  “I guess I’ve met him a couple of times. Didn’t make much of an impression.”

  “One detail, Bill,” Frost said, shifting the focus again. “Her secretary, Mary Coward, had the idea you and Juliana were quarreling last Thursday.”

  “Quarreling?”

  “Yes. Apparently you’d gone down to her office to sign some opinions.”

  “Oh, that,” Richardson said, equably. “It was over that damned consent. Machikin Bank had to give its permission for the On-Line merger. She’d let the matter slide somehow and there she was the night before the closing with no piece of paper in hand. I chewed her out for that. I’m sure that’s what Ms. Coward overheard.”

  “Bill, there’s one very delicate matter I’d like to raise in total confidence,” Frost said. “We have reason to believe that Merriman may have been subject to sexual harassment by someone in this office.”

  “Whose wild idea is that? The boyfriend? Or that secretary of hers?”