Once again, they went over the day’s interrogations, reaching no new conclusions. As they talked, Frost noticed Bautista looking intently out beyond their table. “What do you see?” he asked.
“A pretty good crowd,” Bautista replied. “Our friend Genakis seems to know them all. He’s also pretty cozy with his sidekick.”
“Cozy enough that she might have given him an alibi for last Thursday?”
“We’re probably going to have to drop that one,” Bautista replied. “Unless last Thursday was different, he would have known most of the customers. She and the rest of the help could have covered for him, but there’s no reason the customers would.”
“You haven’t tried to talk to any of them?”
“No, but I did get a Xerox of the Thursday pages from their reservation book.”
“You think of everything.”
“I try.”
“Luis, what would you say to having an after-dinner talk with Genakis?”
“To confront him, you mean?”
“No, I don’t think we’re quite ready for that. Just to, ah, very quietly go over some details. Like the menu for last Thursday’s dinner.”
“No harm in it, if he’s willing.”
Genakis, making the rounds as they finished their entrees, gave them a chance to pose their invitation.
“Sure,” Genakis said. “I don’t have to say I’m curious about what’s going on. The only thing, the best time would be now. Everybody’s seated, but I like to be here when they start leaving. So if you ace dessert we can go up to my office. You can have coffee there. Brandy, if you like.”
“Coffee’s fine and no dessert is fine. Espresso?” Reuben said.
“We’ve heard of it,” Genakis said.
“Shall we go? I need to get the check.”
“Dinner’s on me.”
“That’s not necessary,” Frost said, thinking of the owner’s cash bind.
“But that’s the way I want it,” Genakis replied. “Come on. I’ll have the coffee sent up.”
Genakis’ stylish decorator had not done his office, a utilitarian cubicle upstairs next to the rest rooms.
“Sorry about the mess,” he said, as the three of them crowded in. “What’s going on?”
“Not much, I’m afraid, but I’ll try to bring you up to date. And maybe you can be helpful, filling in some of the gaps,” Frost said.
Genakis rubbed his nose and said, “I’ll try.”
“We’ve got an interesting lead we’re pursuing,” Frost went on. “It may not get us anywhere, but there apparently were some bad feelings between Juliana and the people she was working with on the On-Line deal.”
“Alan Lovett’s deal.”
“That’s right. Did she ever talk to you about it?”
“Oh, sure. Lovett and Julie and me go back a long way. Alan even tried to steal Julie away from me once. That was a long time ago, and it never interfered with our friendship. We all had dinner together when Alan was here in town. Over at Orso.”
“When was that?” Bautista asked.
“Sunday night. The eighteenth, I think it was,” Genakis said, looking up at the three-month calendar on the wall. He seemed to tense up as he apparently realized he was on the griddle once again.
“Have you seen Lovett since?”
“No.”
“Talked to him?”
“No.”
“Either before or after Juliana was killed?”
“Neither.”
“Maybe you could tell us what Juliana said about the deal,” Frost said.
“Not much, really. She said one of the guys involved was pretty obnoxious and one was absolutely gross. But she never said she’d had a quarrel with anybody. Julie didn’t get into fights.”
“What about the Thursday night before she died, when you had dinner with her?” Frost asked. “The big trouble she had—it was with an investment banker named Harvey Rawson—was that very afternoon. Didn’t she mention it? Wasn’t she upset?”
“Not that I recall,” Genakis said. Then he suddenly got up. “Sorry to interrupt, but will you excuse me for a minute? When you’re on the door downstairs you never get to take a leak.”
Frost and Bautista studied the disorderly array of account books, letter boxes and miscellaneous office detritus while Genakis was out of the room. Nothing visible was revealing.
“Sorry about that,” Genakis said, returning. “Where were we?”
“I was asking about your dinner with Ms. Merriman the night she was killed, and whether she’d said anything about her quarrel with Rawson,” Frost said.
“Nothing like that,” Genakis answered. “I just tried to help her relax before she went back to work.”
“By cooking her a dinner, is that correct?”
“Yes. Blanquette de veau. My blanquette de veau is great.” Genakis laughed as he spoke, again scratching his nose.
“Mr. Genakis, I asked you last Saturday about the lawyers Juliana had worked for. There were three—Bernard Straus, Brian Heyworth and, most recently, William Richardson. You said on Saturday she’d never had any complaints about them. Is that still where you come out?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Surely she must have had gripes from time to time. These men were my partners but I know they’re not perfect.”
“Chase & Ward partners not perfect? That’s hard to imagine,” Genakis said, laughing again. “Julie wasn’t a complainer. That wasn’t like her. She got along with everybody.”
“Did you ever meet any of the lawyers I mentioned?”
“Probably. She took me a couple of times to your annual dinner dance. I could’ve met them there, but I don’t really remember.”
“Would you recognize any of them if they came in here?”
“I doubt it.”
“Let me change the subject,” Bautista said. “Chase & Ward has a referral service their people can call with personal problems, like drug or alcohol abuse. Would it surprise you to know that Juliana consulted this service about a drug problem?”
“Julie? A drug problem? You’ve got to be kidding!” Genakis said, then burst into laughter that was almost out of control. “She experimented a little back in California—doesn’t everybody in California?—but she’d become a real just-say-no-person here in New York. She hated drugs.”
“She wasn’t calling about herself, but for a friend. Any idea who it might have been?”
“You’ve got me there. She didn’t have any druggie friends that I know of.”
“Reuben, I think we’d better go,” Bautista said.
“Yeah, I’ve got to get back to work,” Genakis added.
“Mr. Genakis, thanks again for the fine dinner,” Frost said. “I enjoyed seeing your handsome restaurant.”
“Glad you like it. We’re doing great. Knock on wood. And good luck to you guys.”
Bautista accepted Frost’s invitation for a nightcap, and the two of them took a taxi uptown.
“If Juliana Merriman didn’t like druggies, I wonder what she was doing messing around with that guy,” Bautista said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s a cokehead if I ever saw one.”
“Really? I’m so naive about such things he could have fooled me.”
“He had all the symptoms, Reuben. His hoarse voice, pulling at his nose. Depressed when we got there. Talking to you about Alan Lovett when you’d asked him about Lovett’s deal. Then he left us to go to the john and came back as happy as an Inca chewing coca leaves, laughing his head off. I’m not a betting man, but I’m sure he was on something, probably cocaine.”
“Maybe that’s where the restaurant’s cash is going,” Frost said.
“Yeah, right up his nose. Except after his hit he said the place was doing great.”
“Which was not what he told me last Saturday. It was only doing okay then.”
“I can see my work’s cut out for me. We’ve got to find out more about this character.”
> Cynthia Frost was waiting up when her husband and Bautista came in. “How was boys’ night out?” she asked.
“Reasonably interesting,” Reuben answered. “Come and sit with us and we’ll tell you about it.”
After preparing a round of drinks, he asked Bautista what he thought Merriman had had to eat the night she died. “Was it blanquette de veau or a tuna fish sandwich?” He explained the reference when Cynthia looked puzzled.
“What do you think?” Bautista countered.
“I’ve got a theory I just worked out on the way up here,” Reuben said. “Let me try it out, starting with the two contrary bits of evidence we’ve got about Merriman. First, there’s the record that she returned to Chase & Ward at six-fifteen Thursday evening. But there’s the contrary record that she called in from her apartment at six-fifty.
“Now let’s look at Genakis. He claims he was at the apartment, too, cooking dinner for her. Yet she told Ms. Locke that all she’d had to eat was a tuna fish sandwich. So I say Genakis was lying. He wasn’t slaving over a hot stove making blanquette de veau at all.”
“But why would he lie?” Cynthia asked.
“Because, my dear, he doesn’t want it known that he’d borrowed Merriman’s ID card and used it to get inside Clinton Plaza.”
“But this was before the girl was killed,” Cynthia said. “She wasn’t even there.”
“I know that, Cynthia,” Reuben said, impatiently. “I didn’t say he went there to kill her.”
“Then why did he go?” Cynthia asked.
“To see his old friend Lovett, perhaps. To hit him up for money so he could keep up appearances as a successful restaurant operator.”
“That doesn’t fly, Reuben,” Bautista said. “Lovett told us he’d gone out for drinks. And that guy Lane confirmed it.”
“You’re right, Luis,” Reuben said, deflated. “It was just a theory.”
“It’s not a bad one,” Bautista said. “It’s the first explanation that makes any sense of that computer entry showing Merriman going back to the office at six-fifteen. But who the hell was he going to see?”
“How about Merriman’s harasser?” Cynthia asked. “No mention of him again this time?”
“He said she’d had no complaints about her bosses—including Richardson,” Bautista said.
“I still find that very odd. If what Merriman said was true about being harassed, he must have known about it.”
The three were quiet for a time, before Reuben told Bautista that they should talk in the morning.
Bautista looked discouraged and Frost noticed it. “Don’t be down, Luis. Remember the slogan I keep seeing on kids’ T-shirts all over town.”
“Which one?”
“‘Don’t worry, be happy.’ Something’s bound to break soon, you wait and see.”
CHAPTER
18
The Birthday Boy
“Do you think this is authentic enough?” Cynthia Frost asked her husband the next Saturday night, as they dressed for Bill Richardson’s fiftieth birthday party. The invitation had said “Dress: Black Tie and Vintage Sixties,” and Cynthia was now proposing to wear a bright purple short dress.
“I was going to give this to the legal aid thrift shop years ago,” she said, “but I always hesitated, because I liked it so much. And so did you.”
“I still do, my dear. It’s very festive.” And would show off his wife’s well-preserved legs, Frost thought proudly. He himself felt no reason to modify his usual formal uniform, though he decided against the brocade vest he had worn on New Year’s eve.
“This will be interesting,” he said, “a party at the American Crafts Museum. We’ll probably eat off Amish quilts on the floor.”
“Let me ask you something, Reuben. Who there will know about Bill’s … difficulty?”
“As far as I know, it’s been kept completely quiet, except for Charlie, Ron Crutcher, Keith Merritt and Simon Isaacs. And me and Luis.”
“What about the police?”
“Luis told them either Wednesday or Thursday. Dave Petito, the detective on the case, was supposed to interview Bill yesterday at the office—not at home, thanks to Luis’ intervention. As for tonight, I doubt that anyone there will know Bill’s under suspicion except those I mentioned.”
As his wife left him alone to tie his new dress bow tie, Frost remembered with rueful amusement the first time he had encountered the fiftieth birthday phenomenon, far too many years before. He remembered very well a huge party for George Lawrence, a Chase & Ward partner now long since dead, when he was fifty and Reuben was forty. Viewed from that perspective, Lawrence had seemed very old indeed, his life largely spent. Now, of course, time had done its work, and a party for Bill Richardson at fifty seemed to Reuben an affair for a young man. Not a teenage sleep-over exactly, but still an affair for the young.
The decor of the handsome museum, hung with colorful artifacts from the American past, had been enhanced with flowers everywhere, centerpieces on the tables for the sit-down dinner, and huge, exploding bouquets placed at intervals around the walls. Frost speculated at how Nina Richardson’s straitlaced Boston trustees (which he was sure she had) would react to the bill for flowers.
The crowd gathered near the bars for drinks. It was altogether unsurprising. Perhaps half the Chase & Ward partners, leaning to the senior side of the masthead. A good sprinkling of the “M&A” community, more youthful than the lawyers’ delegation (mergers and acquisitions being a young man’s game) and distinguished by wing-collared shirts under their dinner jackets and more trendily dressed female companions at their sides. Then there were Bill Richardson’s Yale classmates and club-mates, who laughed a lot and talked almost exclusively to each other. And two men that Frost learned during the evening had been in the Green Berets with Bill, and their wives, one couple coming “all the way from Denver, Colorado.”
It was a prosperous group, all white, though by no means all Anglo-Saxon Protestant, drawn primarily from the Ivy League ranks of Wall Street and the legal profession. With a quick change of venue and costume, from black tie to Ralph Lauren tweed, it could have easily become an oversized tailgate party at the Yale Bowl before the Harvard game. No artists, writers or rebels (scarcely a Democrat, for that matter) need apply.
Reuben, drink in hand, circulated through the room, greeting those he knew. He was sure he recognized the piano player, a venerable black man churning out Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart tunes at a grand piano in the corner. He moved closer and indeed recognized John Darmes, the now-retired doorman at the Gotham Club for most of the years Reuben had been a member.
“John! What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Why, Mr. Frost, how are you?” the pianist said, as he continued to play. “Excuse me for not getting up.”
“You’ve taken up a new line of work.”
“That I have. Retirement was no good for me. And the work I do at my church is just fine, but I need some diversion now and then. So I do gigs like this.”
Frost noticed the small plaque by the keyboard: “JOHN DARMES: FROM NEW ORLEANS TO NEW YORK.”
“I didn’t know you were from New Orleans, John.”
Darmes winked broadly. “Oh, that’s just advertising, Mr. Frost. I’m as New York as you are, maybe more so. I was born and raised in Harlem, back when a body could live there.”
“Well, it’s good to see you.”
“My son Jasper tells me things are right good at the Club, even with the women coming in.”
“It hasn’t changed things much, John. Besides, we had to enter the twentieth century sometime.”
Frost moved along, delighted to have seen Darmes, and to know there was at least one person at the party in his age bracket.
The dinner which Nina Richardson had arranged was not a success. The Craft Museum did not have its own stoves, so the beef dish the caterers served had been prepared on portable kitchen equipment. A weird combination, somewhere between boeuf Stroganoff and Chinese orange
beef, it had suffered from its makeshift preparation. The wine was good, however, so the meal was not a total disaster.
And Frost had what turned out to be a merry time at his table, sitting next to Richardson’s daughter, Aline. At first glance, Aline had seemed a younger version of her well-scrubbed but slightly austere mother, an impression reinforced by her horn-rimmed glasses. But on closer inspection—or maybe it was the cumulative effect of the drinks and the wine—she seemed downright pretty, her long, golden hair the same color her father’s had been as a younger man.
Reuben quickly found a common bond with his companion. She was a junior at Princeton, his alma mater, with outspoken but politely and even humorously presented views on the role of women at the University.
“It’s not a plantation, exactly. Or even a collective farm—you know, where the women have their babies in the morning and go back to picking the crops in the afternoon. But it’s not utopia, either. There’re still some old Tigers around, and the sons of some old Tigers, who have to be convinced that we can function in the classroom as well as the kitchen.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s all right. It’s funny, really. And besides I’m used to it. You didn’t grow up with Dad and his buddies without learning to defend women’s rights.”
“What do you mean?” Reuben asked, toying with his glutinous beef.
“Just that they think it’s a man’s world. Even when they see the evidence to the contrary all around them.”
“I think I know what you’re saying. They see a threat to the Old Blue network. But what do you expect from Yale men?”
Reuben’s companion on his other side, Keith Merritt’s wife, Ruth, was deeply enmeshed with her other partner, a young banker holding forth about a recent trip to India. Ruth, about to go there herself, was enthralled. Reuben, never having had the least desire to visit India, wanted to avoid being caught up in the travelogue and, besides, Ms. Richardson was much more fun. And he had taken Mrs. Merritt for a spin around the floor (to “Mountain Greenery”) between the first two courses.
Murder Saves Face Page 18