by Adam Mitzner
“This past Saturday?” Jamali asked.
“Yes.”
“Your husband called you at”—Velasquez looked at his notes—“4:53 yesterday, and at that time he said that he was going to Washington and spending the night there. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say why he was going?”
“Yes. He had a business meeting. James is . . . was an art dealer. He took the Acela to DC last night to meet a buyer and promised me he was going to take the first train back in the morning.”
The man’s face twitched. It was almost imperceptible, but it suggested something was amiss.
“Was he traveling with Mr. Warwick?”
“No. He was with a woman named Allison. But Mr. Warwick was working on the deal too.”
“What is Allison’s last name?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know her last name. But ask Reid. He should know it.”
“Any tension between your husband and Mr. Warwick?”
The question struck Jessica as odd. Were they thinking Reid killed James?
“No. Not as far as I knew. Reid came to our anniversary party last week. And like I said, they were doing this art deal together.”
She thought for a moment about whether it looked good or bad for her to be interested in the police’s suspect list. Of course she would be, she concluded quickly.
“Do you think maybe Reid . . . ?”
“We don’t think anything at this point. But I will tell you that Reid refused to cooperate with us.”
“He did?”
“Yes. And that’s never a good look for an innocent person.”
Jessica was still wrapping her mind around the fact that Reid had refused to cooperate with the police when Detective Jamali asked, “Can you think of anyone else who would want to harm your husband?”
It was the else that struck her. Apparently, Reid had joined the category of potential murderers merely by his refusal to cooperate.
She took a deep breath and then said aloud what she hadn’t said to anyone, other than Wayne. “James and I were both married before, and we had an affair and then left our exes.” She could see the look in her inquisitors’ eyes, judging her. She might as well be wearing a scarlet letter. “My ex and I get along well, probably because we share custody of our son. But James’s ex, Haley . . . she’s crazy. He had to take out a restraining order against her. She showed up at our house on the night of our anniversary party. We hadn’t invited her, of course. But she was there and made a scene.”
“What is Haley’s last name?” the lieutenant asked.
“I think she still goes by Sommers. I’m not a hundred percent sure, though.”
“What type of scene did she cause at the party?” Jamali asked.
“During the toasts, she started cursing at James. Me too. Then, just the other day, I got this strange phone call. It was from a man, but I knew that Haley was behind it.”
“What did the caller say?” Velasquez this time.
“He said I should ask James about the short-haired woman he was . . . allegedly . . . having sex with. Of course, he didn’t phrase it like that.”
“What short-haired woman?” Jamali now, continuing the tag team.
“She meant Allison. The woman James was working with on the deal. James said that Haley must have seen the two of them together at dinner and decided to try to make me jealous. Or maybe she was hoping it’d cause a fight with James. Who knows what goes through her mind?”
The two police officers looked at each other. Now Haley was a suspect too.
Good, Jessica thought. It couldn’t happen to a nicer person.
At 3:45 p.m., school was finally over, and Wayne left the Sheffield Academy for the day. He had seen from the window that it had been snowing all day, but once he was outside, he realized that it was heavier than he had thought. Unfortunately he was wearing his loafers with the soft soles, which meant that he’d be sliding on the slick streets with each step.
It was only a few blocks to the subway. If he stayed under the scaffolding for the next block, he’d make it there without becoming fully soaked.
A few steps into the walk, he reached for his cell to call Owen again. At last, he saw that he had a text.
But when he clicked on it, it was not from Owen. Instead it was from PayPal, telling him that a thirty-seven-dollar Uber had been charged to his account. That was the fare to go from Manhattan to Queens, which meant that his son was now at his house.
This wasn’t one of his normal nights with Owen, though. Yesterday had been. Moreover, the timing wasn’t right. Owen had gone straight from the doctor, apparently, which meant he had missed the rest of the school day. And although Owen taking an Uber to Queens wasn’t unprecedented, he knew better than to blow that kind of money during daylight hours when the subway provided perfectly suitable transportation.
He called Owen again, hoping he’d pick up. No such luck. Straight to voice mail. Same thing happened when he tried Jessica.
It took Wayne more than an hour to get home by train. (A thirty-seven-dollar Uber was outside his commuting budget.) Owen was on the living room sofa when Wayne walked in. He was playing the violin. A new piece, Wayne thought, given that he didn’t recognize it.
There were few things that Wayne enjoyed more than his son’s playing, which always made it seem that everything was right in the world. Like that old saying about music having charms to soothe the savage breast . . . Hearing Owen made Wayne’s dread disappear.
“Hey, O. You know how much I love to see you, but I still need to ask—what are you doing here?”
“Mom told me to come here. James was killed.”
Leave it to Owen to impart this news with the emotional detachment of an anchorman reporting on a natural disaster. But that’s what life as a teenager was like, Wayne knew. Or maybe only for his teenager.
Wayne didn’t verbally respond, though his mind was going a mile a minute while his son continued in the same flat inflection. “Someone broke into his office and killed him. Mom left me at the doctor because she got a call from the police or something. After I was done, I met her at James’s building. There were cops all around, and they weren’t letting anyone inside. Mom went to the police station to . . . answer questions, I guess. She told me to come here.”
“That’s terrible. I’m . . . sorry.”
“Yeah. It’s . . . I mean, who would want to kill James, you know?”
Wayne didn’t respond. He assumed that Owen knew perfectly well that Wayne would be at the top of the list of people who wanted James dead.
“First impressions?”
The question was aimed at assessing Asra’s detective skills, as Gabriel had already formed his own first impressions about the case. From the look on her face, Asra intuited as much, which meant that she had actually passed this test before even answering his question.
“Whether it’s murder or not, I don’t know, but someone was definitely with him when it happened, and that’s not a good look for them not being guilty of something.”
Gabriel nodded for Asra to continue.
“If you’re asking me to speculate on who might be the person who was with Mr. Sommers at the time of his demise, certainly the business partner looks good for that. He’s big, so I could see him landing a punch like the one that took Sommers down. I also got the impression that Reid’s the kind of guy who’s not opposed to starting a fight. And given his refusal to cooperate, he might as well have put a target on his forehead.”
“What do you think about the wife?”
“Seems legitimately distressed to me. And I don’t see her going to his place of business to kill him.”
“Maybe she showed up at the office and saw this Allison person and her husband going at it. There’s a scuffle and he winds up dead.”
“How does Allison make it out alive?”
“Maybe she ran the moment Jessica arrived, and that’s when the marital discord turned deadly. Then aga
in, this might be a classic Occam’s razor situation.”
“How so?” Asra asked.
“We’ve got someone who’s made a death threat against the vic. His ex-wife. Hard not to conclude that Haley Sommers is our murderer when the guy ends up dead less than a week later.”
They’d used James Sommers’s face to unlock his phone. Nothing was suspicious about his phone activity, no obvious mistress or dispute with anyone. They called the number listed under the contact Allison a few times, but no one answered. Gabriel was certain that when they checked the number, they’d find it was a burner.
The one outlier in this perfectly normal, enemy-free life was a voice mail James Sommers had received from his ex-wife on the day of his wedding anniversary to Jessica:
“James, you miserable fuck. I hope you and that skank bitch of a wife of yours both die. But don’t worry, after you’re dead, I’ll be sure to dance on your graves.”
Reid knew that Allison would call. It was only a matter of time.
It came at 10:00 p.m. that night.
“Why the fuck didn’t James meet me at the train?” she said. “And why won’t he return my calls and texts?”
“I wouldn’t take it personally, sweetheart.”
“Where the hell is he?”
“Six feet under.”
“What?”
“You heard me. James is dead. He was murdered.”
“Did you kill him?” she asked.
He laughed. “Yeah. I killed him. Had to. I was really upset about the shitload of money he was going to make me. The better question, Allison, is why you killed him.”
“Don’t be an idiot. Why would I kill him?”
“Let me see if I can think of a reason. Off the top of my head, I’ve got two-point-seven million of them. Where the fuck is the money, Allison?”
“James never met me at the Acela. So I never got the Pollocks, which means I never went to DC, so I never sold them to my client, and that means that I never got the money. So let me ask you, Reid: Where the fuck are the Pollocks?”
14
Jessica had no interest in going back into James’s office. The police had told her that she could, but that wasn’t the issue. She knew someday she’d have to return, if for no other reason than to empty it out when the lease expired, whenever that was. But she wanted to put that off for as long as possible.
Reid clearly had a different timetable. He hadn’t raised the issue the day they learned James was dead, but a one-day moratorium was apparently all he could abide.
“I know this is terrible for me to ask, Jessica,” he’d said over the phone earlier that morning, “but I figured you’d understand that it’s the nature of the work James and I do that we need to sell pieces when we have a willing buyer because they just don’t come along every day. So I need the keys to both his office and the credenza inside it so I can get access to the Pollocks. And don’t worry, I’m still going to honor my deal with James. You’ll get your fifty thousand dollars for each one I can sell through Allison because she’s James’s connection.”
James had earned $90,000 on the first sale, but Jessica decided not to raise the issue. Reid wouldn’t be Reid if he wasn’t trying to screw her over.
“If you come down here, I’ll give you the keys,” she’d told him.
Reid wasted no time in showing up at Jessica’s home.
“Thank you,” he told her. “I’m really sorry to ask you for this before the funeral, but like I said, I have this buyer and I’m afraid he’ll go on to something else.”
“I understand. The world moves on.”
She excused herself to go to the bedroom to retrieve James’s keys. As he waited for her, Reid decided to get out in front of things. So when she returned, he said, “I need to tell you something, Jessica.”
She looked at him with fear in her eyes. He wondered what she thought he was going to say that would make her that afraid.
“You probably heard that I didn’t talk to the police about the work James and I were doing. You need to do that too, Jessica. Not cooperate with them, I mean. I know that’s hard for you, and it’ll make the cops suspicious if you shut them down, but the sale of these Pollocks . . . they’re not, strictly speaking, legal. I need this deal badly, to get out of a very deep hole I’ve dug for myself, and I know that James needed the deal to pay for Owen’s treatment, or he wouldn’t have done it. The thing is, we can’t sell them if the police are in our business. That’s why I didn’t tell them anything about Allison, and I suggest you don’t either. I’m sorry to put it this way, but it’s the truth: Would you rather help the police contact Allison or get the money to pay for Owen’s treatment?”
She looked as if she didn’t understand. “What are you saying, Reid?”
“I’m saying that we both want whoever did this to James to be caught, but I also know that we both really need the money that’s going to come out of these sales. And I’m saying that those two things are in direct conflict right now.”
“I don’t need the money that badly,” she said.
That wasn’t what James had told him. But there was no reason for James to lie about his need to raise funds. More likely, Jessica was lying about being flush now. Or maybe she just didn’t know how precarious their financial position was.
“That’s not what James said to me,” Reid countered. “But, look, even if that’s true, I need the money that badly. And to make this deal happen, I need to keep the cops away from Allison. She has a buyer on the hook for all three pieces. Once she knows I’ve told the police where to find her, she’s gone.”
Jessica looked at Reid hard. He didn’t have the faintest idea what she was going to do next, but she handed him James’s keys.
“I don’t know anything about Allison,” she said. “But there’s no way I would ever put money above finding who killed James.”
“Understood,” Reid said.
He saw no need to posture any longer. He’d come for the key, and now he had it. He didn’t care what Jessica thought so long as he could sell the Pollocks.
Which was why immediately after leaving Jessica, Reid headed uptown and let himself into James’s office. To his surprise, the blood was still on the floor. He’d thought the police would have cleaned it, but of course they hadn’t.
He stepped around the red stain that had soaked into the rug and went over to the credenza. He fumbled a little before finding the key that fit the lock. When he opened the credenza, all three Pollocks were still there.
He pulled out his phone and dialed. Allison answered right away.
“I’ve got the Pollocks,” he said. “When can we meet?”
Haley’s doorman alerted her to the visitors. “Two police officers are coming up,” he said.
That was fast, she thought. It had been less than twenty-four hours since James’s death, and they were already onto her.
Jessica no doubt had pointed the finger in her direction. Of course, she had done a pretty good job of incriminating herself too, what with her one-woman show at the anniversary party and her text messages that the police must have considered akin to a confession.
Haley had done some acting in high school. She remembered the nerves she’d felt before going onstage. This felt like that, only the penalty for failure was not being ridiculed by your friends in homeroom the next day, but rather lifetime imprisonment.
Haley opened the door before they arrived. She thought that would make her seem more open to them.
There were two of them. A man and a woman.
“Good morning, Ms. Sommers. My name is Lieutenant Velasquez. This is Detective Jamali. May we come in?”
Haley wondered if the NYPD sold a beefcake calendar at Christmas for fundraising, and if so, whether Lieutenant Velasquez was Mr. December. She wished he weren’t so good-looking. She found it much easier to manipulate men who were appreciative that she was giving them the time of day.
“What’s this about?” she said, hoping it came off as if she
really didn’t know.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Ms. Sommers, but your ex-husband, James Sommers, was killed.”
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed and brought her hands up over her face, the way someone who had found out for the first time that their ex-husband was dead might do. She tried to force out a tear, but it was beyond her skill set.
“You didn’t know?” Lieutenant Velasquez said.
She shook her head, as if it were less of a lie if she didn’t speak it. “No. We don’t have any friends in common any longer.”
“May we come in?” he asked.
“Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.”
She led them to the living room, with its panoramic view of the Hudson River. She had purchased this place before marrying James. The thing she liked best about it now was that it didn’t have a single piece of art on the walls.
Once they were seated, the cops in the armchairs and Haley on her sofa, the interrogation resumed.
“We know there’s been some animosity between you and your ex-husband,” Lieutenant Velasquez said. “Obviously, that makes you a suspect in all of this.”
He stopped there. No question. Just stating as an indisputable fact that Haley hated James, and they thought she might have killed him as a result.
There was no point in denying her animosity toward James, of course. Every guest at the party would testify that it was true. Not to mention her emails and text messages and voice mails and various violations of the restraining order.
“Yes. James left me for Jessica, and that kind of betrayal is hard to forgive. At times, I have acted . . . let’s just say inappropriately. I’m sure you heard about my outburst at his anniversary party. Not my finest hour, by any means. But I did not kill him. I swear that I didn’t. It wasn’t that way between us.”
“What way was it?” Detective Jamali asked.
“It’s hard to explain. I loved James and I hated James. I wanted him to know both those things. That’s why I acted out from time to time. But killing him? No, I’d never do that. It would end things. Forever. And I didn’t want them to end. That was my problem: I wanted a relationship with James, albeit a destructive, one-sided, and completely dysfunctional one. But still . . . Now that he’s gone, that’s over for me. And, believe it or not, it makes me incredibly sad.”
