Murder Saves Face

by Haughton Murphy

  “That’s an interesting sermon, Reuben, but I really don’t have time for character guidance. They’re calling my flight …” The announcement was indeed being made and could be heard through the wall.

  “Let’s turn from the sermon to real life,” Frost said, in the same calm and even voice he had been using since Richardson first entered the room. “Can I review the events of the last few months? Not to refresh your recollection—I’m sure there’s no need for that—but to let you know you’re not operating in the dark anymore. Almost a year ago, you and Juliana Merriman were constantly thrown together, working on the Triumph recapitalization, traveling together to Texas. You became infatuated with Merriman, a smart, sexy young woman who led you on by accident or design—I don’t know which. You tried to seduce her in Dallas, I believe without success. Your luck and timing were very bad. Merriman was a first-rate associate and everyone knew it, so there wasn’t any way you could make up an excuse to get her fired, or even transferred to another partner. And you didn’t know that she was living with an unstable cocaine addict who badly needed money to support his habit and prop up his failing restaurant. But you found out pretty fast, and learned that he was quite capable of good, old-fashioned blackmail.

  “Many men in your position would have brazened things out, oblivious to what others might say, but you couldn’t bring yourself to do that. The notoriety would have been too unpleasant—you know as well as I do the gossip that still goes on at Chase & Ward about Dick Langdon’s peccadilloes, twenty years ago. You couldn’t face that, or the disgust and anger of Nina and your children. So when Genakis made his threat, saying that Merriman would bring a harassment suit against you if you didn’t pay up, you gave in and paid him nine thousand dollars last September. In cash, drawn out of your money-market account. Then another nine thousand dollars in October, and again in November. There was nothing you could do except pay or dare them to expose you. The night of the office Christmas party, you met with Merriman and Genakis at their apartment. Did you threaten them? That I don’t know. Did they threaten you? I don’t know that, either. But at some point, my guess is after Genakis’ quarrel with his old California backer, Alan Lovett, on December eighteenth, when he turned him down for a loan, Genakis raised the stakes.

  “The night Merriman was killed, you left the office and made certain you were seen leaving. You took your car out of the garage and again made sure you were recognized. Then you parked the car and returned to the office, avoiding being recorded on the computer by using the handicapped elevator that’s partly hidden at the back of the lobby at Clinton Plaza. You had been issued a key for the elevator when you had your skiing accident last winter and had never returned it. Joe Conklin confirmed that a few hours ago. You met Genakis in your office—he had used Merriman’s ID card to get through the electronic security—and paid him twenty-seven thousand dollars in cash. My guess is you thought that would be the end of it—or so you had told Merriman that afternoon—but Genakis must have said something, or acted so strangely, that you realized he would never be satisfied. The only solution was to silence Merriman, to murder your ultimate accuser. So you waited around and killed her—you knew she would be back in the office and staying late—and then escaped, unseen once again on the handicapped elevator.

  “Then, yesterday afternoon, Genakis called you in Chamonix. He was in a state, panicked at being squeezed by the police. He was out of control and there was no telling what he might say to them. So you flew here on the Concorde this morning and silenced him, too.”

  Richardson sat bolt upright as Frost spun out his tale, staring straight at his accuser.

  “Is that all, Reuben? You don’t want to know how I got rid of the necktie and the knife?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Knife? I don’t believe I mentioned a knife.”

  Richardson put his head in his hands and, when he raised his head again, he was crying.

  “What will Nina think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Bill.”

  “I suppose they arrest me now?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “No chance of delaying that until I can talk to Nina—and the kids? Can’t you give me twenty-four hours? Twelve hours?”

  Frost did not know how to answer. He realized the situation was in his control, that no arrest would be made unless he signaled with his handkerchief. He knew now that there was no question of Richardson’s guilt. Could he dare risk giving him a reprieve?

  “I promise you I’ll surrender by noon tomorrow. You just tell me where. That’ll give me a chance to get a lawyer and talk to the family,” Richardson pleaded.

  “You’re asking an awful lot, Bill.”

  “I give you my word.”

  Frost calculated the odds. What was the likelihood Richardson would try to disappear?

  “Don’t our years as partners mean anything, Reuben? Aren’t they worth something?”

  “Give me your passport and your credit cards. And your word that the police can pick you up at your apartment at noon tomorrow,” Frost said, finally.

  Richardson did not fight Frost’s demands and handed over his passport and wallet, after extracting several bills. “The credit cards are in there.”

  Frost checked and found American Express and Visa cards.

  “I’ll have Bautista take you home. I’d be uneasy leaving you here at the airport, passport or no passport.”

  “Reuben, my life is ruined. But you’re a gentleman, and I’m grateful to you for letting me have time to sort things out.”

  There was a knock on the door. It was the lounge attendant, pleading “Please, messieurs, you will miss the flight.”

  “I’m not going,” Richardson said.

  “Then may I have your boarding pass? We have stand-bys tonight.”

  As Frost and Richardson left the confining room where their face-off had occurred, Frost resolutely kept his hands at his side; there was no signal to the plainclothes detectives, trying to look inconspicuous on the other side of the now deserted departure lounge.

  Frost quietly instructed Bautista to take Richardson home and then to come over to his house.

  “You’re not coming with us?” Bautista asked.

  “I’ll go back by myself.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you when we’re alone.”

  “How did he explain himself?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  A Sad Ending

  “Reuben, you’re an idiot,” an angry Luis Bautista said later Thursday evening, after Frost revealed the bargain he had struck with Bill Richardson. “If he gives the police the slip, they’ll have you up for obstruction of justice. And what the hell do we tell Dave Petito?”

  Frost was exhausted; his encounter with his former partner had not been easy and he had missed his nap that afternoon. And he was dismayed at Bautista’s anger.

  “It’s done, Luis. I probably am an idiot, but please give me credit for being human,” he said sharply.

  “It can be undone, and ought to be. They should go in for him right now.”

  “He gave me his word,” Frost protested, weakly.

  “His word! The guy’s a double murderer and you take his word? I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t want to be disbarred for being your accomplice. I’m going to call Petito.”

  “Please don’t, Luis. I’ll take full responsibility. Wait till tomorrow morning. Do that for me.”

  “Reuben, we’ve worked together for a long time and I’ve never seen you do anything as brainless as this.”

  “Thanks for the compliment. But please remember this is the first time I’ve had one of my old law partners accused of murder.”

  “Petito’s going to be on the phone when he hears from those Port Authority guys.”

  “We’ll have to take our chances on that,” Frost said.

  Tired as he was, Frost finally cajoled a reluctant and fearful Bautista
into going along with his arrangement. When Bautista left Frost’s house, it was agreed that he would brief Petito the very first thing in the morning and arrange the noon arrest at Richardson’s apartment.

  Reuben’s plan almost collapsed near midnight when a harried Petito called to find out what had happened. Cynthia answered the phone and told the detective, on her husband’s whispered advice, that he was sound asleep and could not be disturbed. Petito demanded that Cynthia wake Reuben up, but relented when she insisted that Reuben must sleep. The detective muttered that he would call back in the morning.

  There were some advantages to being old, Frost decided.

  Petito was furious when Bautista told him what Frost had done. His fury increased exponentially when he and his partner went to the Richardson apartment at noon on Friday and there was no one there. Mr. Richardson had gone out around eight that morning, the doorman explained, and had not returned.

  Frost was not used to the abuse he took from Petito, who called him from the lobby of Richardson’s apartment building.

  “There has to be some mistake,” Frost said quietly, though the queer feeling in the pit of his stomach told him that his former partner had betrayed him.

  The next thirty-odd hours were miserable for Frost. Richardson had disappeared, after last being seen at Chase & Ward’s offices at mid morning on Friday. Bautista, camped out at the Frosts in case there were developments, was unsympathetic, though out of consideration for his old friend he did not once say, “I told you so.”

  Cynthia did her best to relieve Reuben’s distress.

  “You did what you thought was honorable and decent,” she told him.

  “I was a fool! Luis is absolutely right. I took the law in my own hands just the way Bill did.”

  “Not quite, dear. After all, you didn’t murder anyone. Besides, they’ll find him. I don’t see Bill Richardson stowing away on a freighter or going underground to wash dishes in a diner.”

  Shortly after noon on Friday, when Petito was discovering Richardson’s absence, the police in the Fifth Precinct were called to the Clocktower, a McKim, Mead & White landmark on Leonard Street, in downtown Manhattan, where a man had jumped from a window off the stairway leading to the art gallery at the top.

  The suicide bore no papers containing his name and it was Saturday night before the body of William Denning Richardson was identified from his fingerprints, on file with the FBI in Washington from his more heroic days in the military.

  Sunday morning, at a hastily called meeting of Charlie Parkes’ “executive committee,” Reuben sadly recounted the events leading up to Richardson’s suicide. Later, separate notes to Nina and each of his three children were found in his desk. And the next morning, Monday, a “confidential” envelope had arrived for Reuben in the inter-office mail. It contained a tape recording and a note from Richardson, explaining that he had indeed met Genakis at his office early in the evening on December 29, hoping to make an incriminating tape on a primitive “voice-activated” recorder he had bought for the purpose.

  “As you will see,” Richardson’s note to Reuben said, “Genakis was not rational. I knew then that further dealings with him were hopeless, which set me on the disastrous course that will come to its end in a matter of hours.

  “I know that I have come to a point where anything I do will cause pain for those who have sustained me over the years—Nina, the children, my friends, my partners. The way out I am taking is the only one that I can now see clearly. I hope it is the one that will cause the least pain to those who survive.”

  Bill Richardson’s suicide received extensive press coverage, but like most such stories, it was a short-lived phenomenon, covered heavily one day, ignored the next. The word was quietly passed at Chase & Ward and among Richardson’s friends and clients that he had been suffering from depression. His death was in no way linked with either Merriman or Genakis.

  The few who had known of Richardson’s troubles managed to keep the secret. There were others at Chase & Ward who thought they were being very shrewd in concluding that Marshall Genakis had killed Juliana Merriman. The fact that this did not explain Genakis’ own murder did not bother the office theorists at all.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Epilogue

  Cynthia Frost waited for several days after Bill Richardson’s death to ask her husband a question that had been troubling her. Finally, one night, at the end of dinner, she asked him outright if he thought Juliana Merriman had been a party to Marshall Genakis’ blackmail scheme.

  “I’ve been brooding about that ever since Bill killed himself,” Reuben answered. “We’ll never know the answer for certain. But I’m awfully afraid it’s yes. I think at the beginning, when she went to see Ramsey Kendall, she didn’t know what to do. She probably hadn’t even told Genakis what had happened. Then she did, and he forced her to draft that harassment complaint, which he used when he approached Bill.

  “My guess is that by Christmas time, when she and Genakis met Richardson at their apartment, she was in the thick of it, right up to when she loaned Genakis her magnetic ID card the night she was killed, so that he could have an undetected meeting with Richardson.”

  “But why, Reuben? She was a woman with a brilliant future. Why would she jeopardize it for a crazy boyfriend?” Cynthia asked.

  “Love does funny things, my dear—it even brought us together, and has kept us going for forty-five years. My own theory is that it all goes back to that scar on her lip. You remember her mother told me that it had troubled her right from childhood—it was a constant reminder of how narrowly she’d escaped having a speech defect, and she was convinced it marred her looks. It didn’t, as I can attest, but it was there; remember how that pig Rawson called her a ‘harelipped bitch.’”

  “So there was a scar and she was self-conscious about it—to the point where it made her uncomfortable with men. Marshall Genakis was apparently the first man she thought had accepted her as she was, scar or no scar. At least that’s what I made out of what she told Mary Coward, her secretary.”

  “Oh, Reuben, do you really think that scar made such a difference—that she would risk everything because Genakis ignored it?”

  “I brought that up with Dr. Lygian at the Club the other day. You remember him, the psychiatrist. He said the answer to your question was a definite yes, that self-consciousness as a child about even such a trivial blemish can affect behavior for life. She was beautiful, but she had this one flaw, and that is what she dwelt on, not her beauty or her brains.”

  “That poor, poor woman,” Cynthia said.

  Reuben could not shake a depression that lasted all winter. He still went to the Gotham Club nearly every day, but he seemed to read less, to show decreasing interest in the world around him.

  Was it just old age? Cynthia did not think so—his health seemed fine—and she eventually confronted him with her worries.

  “I’m fine, dear, really I am,” he told her. “But, yes, I am depressed. I’m haunted by knowing that Bill Richardson would still be alive if I hadn’t given in to his tragic request for more time before he was arrested. I could have prevented his suicide.”

  “Reuben, you mustn’t blame yourself,” Cynthia insisted. “You did what you thought was the humane thing. There’s no cause to be depressed about that.”

  “I know, but I still am.”

  “Are you sure there isn’t more to it, my dear? Can I speak frankly?”

  “I don’t believe you’ve ever done anything else.”

  “Isn’t it just possible that you thought, when you gave Bill those hours of freedom, that he would kill himself? That he would fall on his sword and spare his family and the firm embarrassment and agony?”

  Reuben’s eyes opened wide as he took in what his wife was saying. He rubbed his face, and took a long time before answering.

  “My dear, I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times, searched my conscience a thousand times. I think the answer is no, but ma
ybe there was something at work at some deeper level that made me do what I did.”

  “Reuben, dearest, you mentioned forty-five years. Knowing you for that long, does it help if I say I believe you? That tempting Bill to kill himself would have been absolutely out of character for you?”

  Frost took his wife’s hand and did not speak.

  “And, Reuben, look at it this way,” Cynthia went on. “Even if you knew you were giving Bill a chance to kill himself, think about what would have happened if he had lived. He would have been tried, in the newspapers as well as the courts, and sent to jail. Would that really have been easier for his family? And wouldn’t his lawyers have dragged Juliana Merriman’s name through the mud as well? His suicide was a terrible thing, but you’ve got to recognize that the alternative would have been worse. Does that help?”

  “Yes, my dear, I think it does.”

  In April, with Reuben still very low, Cynthia persuaded him to spend a week in Paris. They took the same Air France flight on which Bill Richardson had tried to make his escape. Waiting in the departure lounge at Kennedy was painful for Reuben, but once he’d left it and the plane was in the air, he began to snap out of his depression. The week in Paris, where he and Cynthia both delighted in its springtime beauty, completed the cure.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Reuben Frost Mysteries

  CHAPTER

  1

  Getting There

  “It’s like old home week.”

  “What did you say, Reuben?” Cynthia Frost asked her husband as they stood in line at Charles de Gaulle Airport, waiting to board the Monday morning Air France flight from Paris to Venice. “You’re muttering and I can’t understand you.”