A dark-haired man holding a Starbucks cup opened the passenger door for me.
Hardy got out of the car, and handed his keys to the man. I followed him into the building, and we signed in at the security desk in the brightly lit lobby. Hardy led the way down a hall and into a room with a blue couch, a few chairs, and soft lighting.
“I’ll see if they’re set up for you,” he said, and opened the door to an adjoining room.
I perched on the couch, terrified by what I might see…and learn.
Hardy held the door open for me. “All ready. Take as much time as you need.”
A bearded young man in jeans and a tropical shirt stood beside a monitor with a blank screen. He smiled and motioned for me to sit in the chair facing the screen.
“Okay?” Hardy asked when I was seated.
I took a deep breath and nodded.
“Here goes,” the clerk said.
A black-and-white image appeared in front of me. Eyes closed, dark hair combed back. The face looked as if it had been carved in marble. I sat there for several moments, mesmerized.
“Can you identify the deceased, Ms. Tierney?” Hardy asked gently.
“It’s Riza Santos.”
***
I was relieved that I hadn’t had to identify a friend. I had met Riza only a few times, and I hadn’t liked her. She was a con artist, and she’d bilked innocent people out of a lot of money. Still, she didn’t deserve to be murdered. No one did.
On the drive back home, visions of the irrepressible Filipina flooded my mind. Her cheeky grin, her blunt questions, her defiance of anything that stood in her way. I smiled at the memory of Riza wading out of a cottage-country lake in her birthday suit the previous summer. She’d turned to wave at two fishermen in an outboard. “They sure got an eyeful,” she said to me afterward.
Riza had been a force. If I hadn’t just seen her face on the screen, I wouldn’t have believed she was dead.
“Where was Riza found?” I asked Hardy.
“In the alley behind your office building.”
“My building!” I cried, letting that sink in. “What time?”
“She was found at quarter past 10 by one of the guys who runs the bookstore.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Hardy stood at the top of the fire escape and pointed to the alley below. “On the pavement at the foot of the stairs.”
In the bright morning sunlight, the alley seemed an unlikely crime scene. I leaned over the railing for a better view. A patch of pavement was cordoned off with yellow police tape. What had Riza been doing in the alley?
“Could she have been dumped there?” I asked.
“No. She died in situ.”
Riza had been trying to get into my office.
“We found Santos’s prints on the door.” Hardy inclined his head toward the metal door behind him, which was propped open with a plastic crate. The door’s exterior was filmed with white powder.
“She couldn’t get in,” I said. “The door only opens from inside.”
“Yup, keyless and self-locking.”
“How was she killed?”
“Shot. A bullet in the chest.”
My hand flew to my heart. “My God!” I said.
“’Morning, Pat,” I heard Sam call from inside the building. “I’ll get coffee on.”
“Let’s go into your office,” Hardy said.
At my doorway, he stepped aside to let me enter, then closed the door behind him. He crossed the room and closed the door to the reception area. “It looks like Santos was on her way to see you last night,” he said, taking the client’s chair.
I took my seat behind my desk. “At 10 p.m.? That’s when you said she was found.”
“Quarter past 10 was when she was found.” Hardy pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket. “Where were you between 9 and 10 last night?”
I gave him an exasperated look. “I went over that last night with Detective Mancini. I was at the opera house watching Cosi Fan Tutte.”
“Who were you with?”
“I told your colleague that, as well. I was with a client. Ben Cordova.”
“Ah, Mr. Cordova.” A smile flickered across his face. “Why was Riza Santos looking for you last night?”
“She wasn’t looking for me. She wanted to check out Dean’s e-mails. She asked me if she could read them, and I refused. I told you this.”
I remembered Riza’s proficiency with lock picks in cottage country. “She may not have realized the back door is keyless. Did she have lock picks on her?”
“That’s confidential police information.”
We stared at each other in silence for a few moments.
“She was after the e-mails between Dean and Gabe,” I said.
“Could be.”
He flipped through his notebook. “You told me Santos’s niece had been Monaghan’s client.”
“Riza referred her to Dean. Mindy—the niece’s name is Mindy Manuel—met with him on September 5. But she isn’t on Dean’s client roster, so she hadn’t started working with him.”
“Do you know where we can reach Mindy?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. We have her phone number.” I got Sam on the speaker phone, and asked her to bring me her office planner. She came into the office with it, looking surprised to see Hardy.
When the book was in front of me, I flipped the pages to September 5. I pointed to the phone number. “Here it is.”
He wrote the number in his notepad.
“Thanks, Sam.” My cue for my assistant to leave my office. Which she did, but not before giving me a questioning look.
I switched the topic to Lukas. “I know you’ve asked Lukas Monaghan about his whereabouts when his father was killed. You might want to ask him what he was doing last night.”
Hardy looked at me sternly. “Thank you for helping me do my job.”
Would he never ease up? “You’re welcome, Detective Hardy. Did Sam call you yesterday?”
“She did, and I went over to her apartment last night.”
I got up from my desk and looked down at the street through the window. Sam had helped her brother-in-law run a financial scam. She was a liar, and she had misled a murder investigation. But I was certain she hadn’t killed Dean.
I turned to face Hardy. “Sam freaked out when she found Dean dead in his office, and she took off without calling the police. Dean was her champion. He knew her background, yet he hired her and he was paying for her university courses, helping her build a career. He was the last person she would have killed.”
“We’ve been over that with her. She’s off the hook.”
What was he saying? I slipped back into my chair.
“Samantha Reiss signed for the Staples delivery at 3:10,” Hardy said. “The delivery man wrote the time on the receipt.”
“She told you that she signed Dean’s name?”
He nodded. “Employees often sign their bosses’ names. It’s no big deal. I spoke to the Staples driver. It was his second attempt to deliver the boxes that afternoon. He first came by at 2:50. He found the door at the top of the stairs locked, and heard shouting in the office. No one answered when he knocked.”
“But he came back.”
“Yup, about 20 minutes later, after he’d made another delivery in the neighborhood. He was parking his vehicle for the return visit when he saw Sam walk up the street and enter the building. She opened the door at the top of the stairs when he knocked, and she signed for the boxes.”
He smiled. “Besides, it’s all on video. Sam and the Staples guy were both seen arriving at Monaghan’s building on video footage from his neighbor’s camera. And Sam was seen leaving the building for the second time.”
I’d forgotten about the surveillance footage. “Nobody else on the video?”
“We didn’t see anyone else going into the building late that afternoon.”
In other words, there was no sign of Dean’s murderer on the videos. My heart suddenly f
elt a lot lighter. Sam had signed Dean’s name on the Staples receipt, but she couldn’t have signed the sale agreement. It had reached Dean’s lawyer at 2:45, and Sam didn’t get back to Dean’s office until 3:10. The driver saw her enter the building.
That meant the business was mine!
Hardy folded his arms over his chest. “I was with Sam between 9:30 and 10 last night, so she’s not a suspect in the Santos murder.”
“I didn’t think she’d be a suspect,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she didn’t know Riza.”
“I have a few questions for Sam. I won’t be long.”
“Go ahead.” As if he needed my permission.
Alone in my office, I exhaled loudly. Sam was in the clear. She hadn’t killed Dean or Riza, and she hadn’t forged the signature on the sale agreement.
And Riza, the trickster with a knack for wiggling out of tight situations, was dead. The people she had defrauded no doubt wanted to see her behind bars, but would any of them have gone so far as to murder her?
Riza had been trying to get into my office. She may have been after the e-mails between Dean and Gabe. Why would they have been important to her?
***
Sam crept into my office with a mug of coffee shortly after Hardy had left. “Riza Santos was killed last night,” she said, placing the mug in front of me. “D’you think whoever killed Dean—”
“I don’t know.”
She poked a finger into the soil of the begonia on my window ledge to see if it needed watering. I wasn’t going to make this easier for her.
“Did Detective Hardy tell you I called him last night?” she finally asked.
“He did.”
“We went over and over what happened that afternoon. Does he still think I killed Dean?”
“No. The Staples driver saw you return to the office just before he delivered the boxes of office supplies. You’re in the clear.”
I picked up the mug and took a sip of coffee. “Sit down, Sam.”
She took the client’s chair, her eyes downcast.
I surveyed her for a few moments. She looked frightened. Her job in my office meant a lot to her. It was more than just her livelihood; it was her ticket to a good career.
“Do you have anything more to tell me?” I asked. “Anything else you neglected to mention about what happened on the day Dean was murdered? Something else you lied about?”
She shook her head.
“Anything else you need to set straight?”
She ran her tongue over her chapped lips. “Nothing.”
“Because if I catch you in one more lie or omission, you are out of here. Out of here so fast you won’t know what’s happened till you find yourself and your belongings on the sidewalk in front of the building. I won’t work with someone I can’t trust.”
“There’s nothing more, Pat. I swear.”
“You had better be right about that, Samantha Reiss. Now get back to work.”
She gave me a hesitant smile as she left my office.
***
When I came up for air after two back-to-back morning meetings. I got myself a mug of java. My telephone was ringing as I returned to my desk. Roz Ramsay was on the line.
“Everything okay?” I asked. “Has Steven finished his school project?”
“Almost done. All that’s left is some fine-tuning.” Roz paused, then blurted out, “Catherine Monaghan called us last night. She and her son are starting their own financial planning business, and she asked us to join them.”
Catherine hadn’t been bluffing.
“Phil and I had a long and happy association with Dean,” Roz said. “He really cared about what was best for us. I’m sorry, Pat, but we’ve decided to go with Catherine and her son.”
I was knocked sideways. Catching my breath, I saw the flaw in the Ramsays’ logic. They assumed Dean’s wife and his son would take as good care of their clients as he had.
“Will Catherine and Lukas be working on a fee-only model?” I asked.
“Catherine didn’t mention it, but I assume they’ll be fee-only. Phil and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Working with a fee-only advisor is important to you,” I said, “so find out what compensation model they’ll use. I can’t stress this too much.”
“You’re right. It’s something we need to know.”
“Lukas has been working at Optimum Capital, and Optimum’s advisors are paid commissions for selling investment products to their clients. So they may follow that model. Catherine has taught personal finance, but she isn’t a certified financial planner.”
Not very subtle, but I had made my point.
“We should meet Lukas,” Roz said.
“You certainly should. Sit down with both of them, and find out what they intend to do for you. Ask them point-blank.”
“Good advice. Well…thank you for everything, Pat.”
She disconnected. I slammed the receiver into its cradle.
Would Roz and Phil be leading the stampede to Catherine and Lukas’s new business?
Chapter Twenty-five
Just after four that afternoon, the door phone rang. I hadn’t used it yet, but I took the plunge and answered it.
“Dahlink!”
I buzzed Ilona in. Her feet pounded up the staircase, and she burst into the suite in a riot of fall color: russet hair, burgundy cape and a pot of yellow mums in her arms.
She waved a hand in the direction of Sam’s empty desk. “Samantha is hard at work, I see.”
“She leaves at 2:30.” I took Ilona into my office.
With a jangle of bracelets, she set the mums on my desk and sank into the client’s chair. “We are going out on the town tonight.”
My mind jumped to what would be happening at home that evening. As far as I knew, Laura had no plans to go out. Kyle would probably come over, and they’d watch a movie with Tommy. And I needed Ilona’s advice.
I silenced the voice telling me I’d already had two evenings out that week.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
“We will start with a nice dinner at Baraka. And see how we feel after that.”
“Sounds good.”
“I’ll see you at Baraka at seven.”
When she left, I locked up the office and took a taxi home.
***
Tommy, Maxie, and I walked Farah to the bus stop. When the bus had whisked her away, the three of us set off on a short walk. We stopped on the Heath Street footbridge over the Moore Park Ravine. The forest around us was ablaze with color.
“Can’t you stay at home tonight, Mrs. T?” Tommy asked.
“Laura will be home with you. You told me she’s a good cook.”
“She’d be better,” he said with a pout, “if she didn’t put ketchup on everything.”
I gave his hand a squeeze. “I’ll be home all weekend.”
Back at the house, I put on lipstick and ran my fingers through my hair, coaxing it into a tousled style. Laura came in, and I gave her and Tommy hugs before getting into the taxi that was waiting outside.
***
I had been to Baraka, the upscale Hungarian restaurant a few blocks north of the Eaton Centre, several times with Ilona. I found her at her favorite table for two, a bottle of Hungarian red and two glasses in front of her.
She poured the wine, handed me a glass and clinked it with hers. “Egészségedre.” She’d told me that means “to your health.”
“Egészségedre,” I said.
We were familiar with the menu, and ordered right away. Dinner settled, I launched into my lament about the Ramsays.
“You didn’t want a non-solicitation clause, so there is nothing preventing Catherine and Lukas from contacting your clients,” Ilona said after our starters arrived. “It’s unethical for them to do that, but it is perfectly legal.”
I stared morosely at my bowl of lentil soup. “And my clients are free to go wherever they choose.”
Ilona nodded, and turned her att
ention to her soup.
“The onus is on you to stand out from your competition,” she said a few minutes later, tearing a slice of bread into pieces. “You must do something spectacular. A client-appreciation party!”
“Whoa,” I said, putting down my soup spoon. “Client-appreciation events are to thank clients for their business. I’m just getting to know my clients. I haven’t met them all.”
“In this case, you will put the cart before the horse. You will throw a fabulous cocktail party—drinks, hors d’oeuvres, music, the works—to tell these people that you are looking forward to working with them. In January, you will follow up by holding the first of five financial-planning seminars.”
I liked the idea of the seminars. I knew at least four people I could approach to give talks.
“I will speak on the importance of wills and other estate-planning issues,” Ilona said.
She could give the first talk. “Maybe I should start off with the seminars, and hold a party next summer.”
“As you just said, you don’t know your clients. A party is an excellent way to meet them and their significant others in a relaxed setting. No business, just food, drink and music.”
I didn’t reply. I was thinking of what a party for more than 100 people would cost.
She clinked her glass against mine. “So, it is a plan?”
“It’s a plan,” I said reluctantly.
“Tomorrow, you will draw up a guest list,” Ilona said when her bowl was empty. “Have Samantha design an invitation on the computer. I’ll speak to my nephew about a party venue.”
I sighed. “Couldn’t it wait a few weeks? My priority right now is to meet all my clients.”
“You’ll meet them and their partners at the party, and they’ll see that you’re a woman of taste and style.” She waved her hands, setting her bracelets jangling. “As for Roz and Philip Ramsay, you haven’t lost them yet. They want to work with a fee-only planner, which may not be how Lukas and Catherine intend to do business.”
“So…”
“Sit tight. Now, how is Samantha doing?”
I listed everything my assistant had neglected to tell me and the police since Dean’s murder. “I read her the riot act today,” I said. “She’s lied to me, and she’s misled a police investigation. Surely that gives me cause to let her go. I told her she’ll be toast if I catch her in one more lie or omission.”
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