SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  I watched Hogan’s face, remembering how he told me once that, when a truly rich man talks about “losing everything,” he usually means being reduced to a standard of living that most people could only covet from afar. Keeping one beachfront manse instead of four fully staffed houses worldwide, selling the Jaguar but holding on to the Mercedes, sacrificing the 18th-century portrait collection at auction for a few million bucks. It was enough to bring tears to your eyes.

  “Angela, your first wife,” Hogan said, “do you still see her?”

  “When she brings Melissa around. Or when we both attend events at Missy’s school.”

  “How did Amanda feel about that?”

  “Not pleased, I’m sure. I can’t really recall. We were never able to have children of our own. I think something had happened to her.”

  “Did Mandy give you grief over all this—enough that you could have stood in the middle of your loft downtown and aimed a gun at the back of her head?”

  “Well, I’m a very good shot. Very steady on target. Ask Jack.”

  “That’s right. With a rifle and scope anyhow,” I said. “In Montana last fall, I watched him drop an elk at two hundred yards.”

  “This is your wife, Philip, not a trophy buck. And she was shot with a handgun, from behind, at a range of six feet. Could you do that to a woman you loved once?”

  Philip looked blank, then deeply uncertain.

  “Do you even own a handgun?”

  “No,” he hesitated. “But Mandy did.”

  A small grimace played across Hogan’s features.

  “After I took up with Claudia, poor Mandy grew rather paranoid. She kept a pistol in her bedside drawer, because she was worried that someone might break in to steal her precious paintings. Or try to rape her.”

  Poor Mandy, indeed. Someone should have warned her that it’s not strangers you need to fear so much as the people who love you.

  “Now you tell us about the gun,” Hogan said. “Do you know what sort it was?”

  “Something quite impressive. An automatic. My wife was that kind of woman.”

  “Really, what kind?”

  “Assertive.”

  Hogan shook his head and leaned forward. “Don’t mess with me, Phil. I’m not one of your stooges.”

  Philip blinked. “Hogan,” he said. “Edward Hogan. Don’t you work for me somehow?”

  “That’s right. And take my word for it, boss, I’m doing you the biggest favor anybody ever could. Talk real to me now—no lies and no holding back—or you just might end up with a Murder One rap.”

  “Amanda’s lawyer has the gun registration, no doubt,” Philip offered.

  “That isn’t the question,” Hogan said tightly. “You hunt, Philip; you know what a bullet does when it breaks through a skull. I want you to picture the impact of two nine-millimeter rounds, to imagine the raw exit wounds—and tell me if you could do that to the person you lived with for eight years.”

  “Possibly. I can’t remember.”

  “Did you hate her that much?”

  “I didn’t hate her at all; I just wanted her dead. For years, every time she took a trip, I’d picture the plane dropping out of the sky. She’d be screaming and falling, and the plane would go down and down. Then it would smash, usually in the mountains, and everything would be quiet—forever. I would never hear her voice again. There would be a funeral, and chaps would come up to me and say what a good woman she was, and that I was so tragic and brave. Afterwards, beautiful women would pity me and find me eerily attractive, because—deprived of my great love, poor man—I was going through life heartsick and silent.”

  “Very touching,” Hogan said. “But routine.” He had a look of bored irritation. “Me, I usually imagine my wife getting smacked by a bus.”

  Hogan’s voice drifted; his words were addressed to no one in particular. “Everybody thinks about the death of their spouse; everybody fantasizes a nice clean escape from the trap. There’s a tricky thing about marriage, though. Once you’re in it, you never really get out.”

  “But the things I wish for come true,” Philip said.

  “Here, sure. You own the company.”

  “Not just here. Everywhere, all my life. I wanted to be rich, and I am. I wished for Angela, then Mandy, and now Claudia. I got them all.”

  At that, I had to break in. “It was wishing backed up by some very intense campaigning, don’t forget.”

  “Lots of people work hard,” Philip replied. “How many actually get what they want?”

  Hogan sat back abruptly, with a hint of subdued violence.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Look at me. I wanted to solve a murder, and instead here I am listening to your bullshit. Why can’t I get what I want?”

  “What’s that, Mr. Hogan?”

  “The straight story.”

  “I already told you: I think I killed my wife.”

  “And is that your way, just maybe, of sheltering Claudia? Because you figure that, with Bernstein and his crew of associates, you can beat any rap the cops lay on you? Especially since you were in California at the time that Mandy was shot.”

  “I don’t remember being in California; I don’t like it there.”

  “So what do you remember, precisely?”

  “Last Thursday, I came back to the SoHo loft in the early afternoon. When I got off the elevator, I saw Mandy’s legs sticking out from her favorite chair. She never sat so still in her life, not like that. Then I saw blood on the carpet. I walked up and looked at her face—I mean, where her face should have been. Her head had slumped forward and her forehead was gaping open. There was something hanging over her cheeks that looked like the insides of a chicken.”

  “Was it what you wanted to see?” Hogan asked. “What you paid for?”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  “But you remember it, so you must have liked it. Isn’t that how your mind works these days?”

  “I have no idea. Do you understand your own mind, Mr. Hogan? That would be most impressive indeed.”

  “Just answer my question. Did you like it?”

  “It was…irresistible. Have you ever seen a wreck on the highway?”

  Hogan stiffened. “I’ve been in combat.”

  “Then you know. It was ghastly, frightening. But also exciting. Terribly exciting. There’s no denying the truth.”

  “Isn’t there? People do it to me all the time.”

  “Did I like it?” Philip repeated. His voice had taken on a singsong cadence. “Did I like it? I dreamed about it, and it happened. Maybe I’ve found the power to make all wishes come true. Money is like that, quite fascinating. Look how my staff attends to me now. Claudia embraces me. And you, sir, why else are you here? A private detective in my own office. How extraordinary.”

  He seemed to be drifting, his mind wandering.

  “Philip,” I said. “Philip, are you in there somewhere?”

  Hogan rose slowly to his feet. “We’re finished here. I’ve got no time for this dog-and-pony show.”

  “Don’t you want the truth?” Philip pleaded. “We’re alike, you know. I want only the truth. The truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “The truth is,” Hogan stated evenly, “I’ve got a case to settle. You want to get yourself put on trial, so you can feel better deep down inside, or get your girlfriend off the hook, or cover your own ass with an insanity plea—fine. But for any of that you’ve got to come up with some solid evidence, things the D.A. can work with. If McGuinn goes traipsing in with the story that Mr. Philip Moneybags here says he’s the killer, but he can’t place himself within three thousand miles of SoHo on the day of the crime, the captain will toss him out of his office like a slice of stale pizza. I’m not playing that game with you.”

  “If only it were a game,” Philip said. “If it were a game, I would win.”

  “Are you playing with us now, Philip?” I asked.

  “No.” He peered at me beseechingly, like a man long marooned
. “Games don’t make you feel so guilty.”

  15

  That night, lying alone, I talked to Nathalie for a long time in the dark. There, my French was perfect, and I had not yet seen my wife lying dead on a hospital gurney. I had never been maimed; my left arm was whole.

  Nathalie and I sat outside at the Café des Phares, looking across the roundabout to the Bastille column as the evening traffic thinned out. We talked about Philip. I knew our conversation was pure fantasy, even while I too clearly heard it, because many of the events we discussed lay still in the future, which is now the past.

  We laughed at the way Philip had transformed himself, under Angela’s sharp teasing, from an eager MBA grad with a fledgling microchip business to a would-be man of the world—complete with a taste for London tailoring and the occasional clichéd Brit inflection in his speech.

  The waiter came a second time, saying monsieur/dame?, as he stood with one finger crooked in the pocket of his black vest. A group of young people went by, laughing on their way to the bars on the rue de Lappe.

  Nathalie and I switched from Pernod to red wine and tried to guess how the first date had gone, back when Angie was an art student at Goldsmiths and Philip was a young entrepreneur visiting England in pursuit of foreign investors and corporate insurance from Lloyds.

  “He acted, I think, a big baby,” Nathalie said.

  “A big baby with a very active brain, full of ways to make money.”

  “Yes, he was like that. Very fast in the head.”

  After a two-year courtship, Philip and Angela settled as husband and wife in the U.S., where they spent the next ten years together—though not together enough. The company absorbed Philip day and night, while Angela puttered in larger and larger studios, getting nowhere with her career, in houses farther and farther away from New York. Finally, she found herself rambling around a modest Westchester estate while Philip was on the road—or “at work” in Manhattan, being swept along to gallery openings and dinners by the svelte, athletic Amanda Wingate.

  Late in the process, Angela began to plead for a baby, in the mad hope of saving her marriage and, pathetically, binding Philip to his dependents, mother and child, with a sense of paternal duty if nothing else.

  She and Philip had been married for five years when he first started to stray with other women out of town, eight when he took up with Amanda, ten when he walked out on Angela and their infant daughter.

  “Still, Angela is fiercely strong,” Nathalie insisted. “It’s the other wife—Mandy, the spoiled one—who could not bear a desertion.”

  “Claudia Silva would be hard for any woman to take.”

  “Perhaps, but one has to expect such things in time.”

  “With a man like Philip, yes.”

  Nathalie breathed a long stream of smoke. “All men are like Philip,” she said. “Given the chance.”

  I had learned long ago not to question Nathalie’s expertise on masculine failings and vices. In Philip’s case, she certainly had a long bill of particulars. As his wealth increased, Philip’s lovers multiplied, and the women in his life got successively better looking—a progression from cute to lovely to stunning. Remarkably, the age of his wives and lovers stayed more or less the same as his own years advanced. Angie was precisely his age, Mandy eight years younger, Claudia about a quarter of a century his junior.

  Nathalie shrugged, and flipped the blue cigarette box in her fingers. “It’s banal,” she said. “Cruel and banal.”

  No doubt, yet I reminded her that Philip had paid a steep price for his pleasures. Is there anything sadder than a man who longs madly for something, and suddenly gets it, only to discover that his dreams amount to the wreck of his life?

  “You think he suffers now?” Nathalie asked.

  “Many would.”

  Her lips made a small puffing sound.

  “Knowing Philip,” I said, “he probably has little choice.”

  I saw the scene as though I had been there myself. When Philip came into the room, discovering Mandy’s body and seeing how the blood had run down her face and soaked into the brocade of her hand-stitched dressing gown, something inside him gave way. The break was at the center of his being, and he could not repair it. Claudia would try, poor girl, but what could she do?

  In his murdered companion, her head thrown forward as if bowed in shame, Philip saw the demise of his best self and the end of the long partnership—mixing great passions and fortunes and hopes—that he once thought would preserve him from the worst ravages of passing time. His citadel, the walls he had built to repulse the uglier aspects of, well, everything, had been fatally breached. Age, disease, and death now rushed in on him, and all he could do was name them, one mundane assault after the other, as they afflicted his malfunctioning brain.

  “What else could you expect?” I asked.

  “A little discretion,” Nathalie said. “Philip could have kept quiet about his adventures, as politeness demands.”

  “There comes a time, darling, when you can’t. When the whole histoire, even the worst, must be told.”

  “For what?” Nathalie, her hair as dark as the night, looked away. “You said nothing to me when it mattered. Now I can barely hear you anymore.”

  Her pale hand was steady as she finished her wine. “It’s getting very late.”

  Then I knew I was coming to the end of my dream of Nathalie, because that is how all the visitations from my dead wife conclude.

  16

  “We just got some interesting test results from the autopsy,” Hogan said on the phone the next morning.

  “Such as?”

  “Mandy had sex on the day of the murder, probably an hour or so before she was killed.”

  “Good for her.”

  “Apparently not. When Philip was in the police station for his big confession, he was very cooperative. The cops did a gunpowder residue test and took a mouth swab.”

  “Let me guess. Powder burns and the DNA match put Philip in the apartment, in Mandy’s bed, shortly before the murder? Bernstein will never let them bring the findings into evidence. No court order, no Miranda warning, no proper handling safeguards—crap like that.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Actually, there were no gunpowder traces, buddy boy, and the saliva wasn’t a match. They took more samples—from Mandy’s bedsheets this time. All the same, none of them Philip’s.”

  “McGuinn let you know?”

  “Just now.”

  “That was big of him.”

  “He’d better. It’s the least the jack-off owes me. They’ll have to disclose all the evidence to Bernstein anyhow, if they ever charge Philip.”

  “We can’t let them.”

  “We won’t. Even a jerk—even McGuinn—will go out of his way to help a guy who saved his hide once.”

  Given my history with the Olivers, this was a principle worth contemplating. “So now Philip is off the list?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Unless he arranged a hit. Or unless he walked into the apartment too early and made a really nasty discovery. He wouldn’t be the first guy to freak out at the sight of his wife getting porked.”

  “What? Then strolled her at gunpoint to the chair before killing her? While the boyfriend watched? No, my money says Mandy’s stud did her in when Philip was away.”

  “Your loyalty is admirable. So who’s the boyfriend?”

  “I never knew Mandy had one.”

  “I’m disappointed in you. If you want to clear Philip, find out. Ask around.”

  He hung up.

  I was at a loss. This was not the kind of information I ordinarily traded in. There were no dollar figures attached.

  However, I knew the right person to ask.

  That night, after work, I invited Laura for a drink at the Temple, a stylish, low-lit establishment not far from the gallery. We passed the L-shaped bar with its retro chrome stools and went to the back room, a quiet den of heavy wood-lined walls, small tables, and darkness. For years my favorite s
eduction lounge, the Temple always made me feel I was living inside a Sinatra song. It was a pity to waste it on Laura, but I was still deeply drawn to the place from time to time—out of nostalgia, I suppose.

  You see, I was like an addict trying to go straight. Don’t drink alone, don’t think too much—especially about Nathalie—and don’t have random sex. Hogan’s moral prescription. It sounds easy, but just try it sometime—especially when your business is selling art. I live in SoHo, not Bedford Falls.

  “I picked up a funny rumor today,” I said to Laura.

  “What’s that?”

  “Did you ever hear that Amanda Oliver had a boyfriend?”

  Laura laughed and clinked the ice in her glass. “Of course.”

  “What do you mean ‘of course’?”

  “I mean Philip was doing her dirt for years. She was a vibrant woman with scads of money. What do you expect?”

  “Not much. Just to be told who my friends are screwing. It’s common courtesy, you know.”

  “You’re Philip’s sidekick. The opposing team, so to speak. Mandy wasn’t about to share that little tidbit with you.”

  “Who did she share it with?”

  “Me, for one. We used to get facials together at Arden’s. There’s something about lying back with all that glop on your face.”

  “And she gave you some details?”

  “Some? Have you ever heard women talk, Jack?”

  “Don’t remind me.” I swirled my drink. “I just can’t believe I didn’t sense anything.”

  “Look, Philip is all right in his man-on-the-make way. Nice manners, good hair. I might do him myself, if he asked politely enough.”

  Philip’s executive playboy crap.” Laura smirked. “The lady was bored. She went shopping for something new, something hotter.”

  “How did I manage to miss this?”

  “It’s genetic. Most men just aren’t very bright that way. They don’t realize what’s going on with women until something hits them head-on like a garbage truck. Really, it’s a wonder you guys can find your way to the bathroom.”

  “All men or just your ex-lovers?”