But when he withdrew the pencil and opened his mouth to speak, all that emerged was a tortured gasp.
His eyeballs bulged, and a gurgle escaped from his throat, flecking his lips with blood-stained foam. His body jerked with spasms that pitched him out of his chair and onto the floor. His limbs flailed on the carpet as a horrifying wheezing sound came from his mouth.
I rushed to the door, to get help or tell someone to call an ambulance, but then the room went silent behind me.
Slowly, I turned around.
Gallagher lay still on his back, his eyes wide and unseeing.
It was all over in a matter of seconds.
chapter nine
I f we’d been doctors instead of MBAs, I suppose one of us would have tried CPR or something like that, but it seemed very clear that there was no bringing Gallagher back. A smell of burnt almonds tinged the air. I’d read about that scent in Agatha Christie books and had thought it was more a mystery novel convention than the real smell of cyanide. It turned out that she hadn’t been making it up.
Jake crouched down by the dead man, checking awkwardly for a pulse. Mark stood frozen, motionless in the spot he’d been in when Gallagher took his fatal lick. We both watched as Jake rose slowly to his feet. He shook his head, a stunned expression on his handsome face.
Dahlia arrived on the scene just then. She took one look, dropped the coffee cup she’d been carrying, and then followed it to the floor in a faint. Rather than step over her to get to another phone, I reached over Gallagher’s desk to call 911. Then I called Winslow, Brown security to explain that there was a dead banker on the 39th floor.
Paramedics arrived within minutes, followed closely by uniformed policemen, who were followed in turn by plain-clothes detectives. A photographer captured images of Gallagher’s body sprawled on the carpet. Then a team from the medical examiner’s office zipped up the corpse in a black rubber bag and wheeled it out, but not before the presumptive murder weapon had been extracted from the dead man’s fingers and inserted into a labeled plastic envelope. My little joke about poisoning Gallagher by pencil no longer seemed so funny, although it had been surprisingly prescient.
Jake, Mark, Dahlia, and I were shepherded into separate conference rooms until we could each give the police a statement. By the time I reemerged, it was nearly noon, I’d spent way too much time on my own with nothing to do but think, and the authorities were clearing out. If it weren’t for the yellow crime scene tape barring the door to Gallagher’s office, you would hardly know that anything untoward had happened. Gallagher’s death and the police presence were enough to generate a few hours’ worth of buzz and gossip, but this was an investment bank, and there were deals to be done and money to be made—people were already busily at work, although there was an oddly hushed and sober feel to the floor.
I returned to my office in a daze. Jessica took one look at my face, followed me in, pulled a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator, and handed it to me without her usual lecture on how its various chemicals would rot those organs they weren’t mummifying. She even opened it for me.
Peter wasn’t at work when I called. “He had an appointment uptown,” his assistant told me. I left a message for him and then tried his cell, but it went right into voice mail.
I was staring unseeingly at my computer screen when Jake came in.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No. I mean, yes. A bit freaked out, I guess.” I’d seen dead people before, but I’d never actually watched anyone die. “How are you?”
He shrugged. “A bit freaked out, too. I rescheduled the call with Perry, by the way. He’s a real piece of work. He seemed more concerned that this might slow down his deal than anything else.”
I’d completely forgotten about the call, not to mention the laundry list of tasks Gallagher had assigned in his last minutes of life.
“Listen,” Jake continued,“Mark, believe it or not, is already working on the revisions to the Thunderbolt materials. I don’t think anyone would miss us if we skipped out of here for a bit. And I think we could both use a change of scenery.”
It had been a long time since I’d found myself drinking during the middle of the day, much less in the middle of the work week, but when Jake said,“To hell with it” and ordered a bourbon on the rocks, I changed my Diet Coke to a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé.
We were a few blocks from the office in the Bar Room of the 21 Club. The red-checked tablecloths and model airplanes and other trinkets hanging from the ceiling offered a cheery counterpoint to our less than cheery moods. We’d ordered food with our drinks, but neither of us could eat much. This was, for me at least, a clear indication that I really was freaked out. Our limited food intake, however, didn’t stop us from proceeding on to a second and then a third round of drinks. Jake was sticking to the Maker’s Mark, but I was alternating the wine with Diet Coke. Each beverage provided its own unique comfort.
“He wasn’t the nicest guy,” said Jake. “In fact, he was a total bastard. But nobody’s ever died in front of me like that. And it looked so…painful.”
I grimaced. I didn’t want to think about the convulsions, or the wheezing, or the strange cast to Gallagher’s skin as he lay dead on his office floor, but the images and associated sound effects kept playing in my head and had a lot to do with my lack of appetite. “At least you didn’t spend the last several days joking about how much you wanted him dead.”
“You were only joking. Somebody else must have been a lot more serious.”
“But who?” I asked. “I mean, it’s one thing to think the guy’s a schmuck or a bastard or whatever, it’s another thing to poison his pencil.” I couldn’t get over how surreal and somewhat ludicrous death by poisoned pencil truly was. If anyone ever chose to murder me, I hoped they’d do it in a more dignified way. “Speaking of which, it had to be someone who knew about the pencil thing.”
“And had recent access to his pencil supply,” Jake pointed out.
“Well, there’s us,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been too hard for one of us to sneak a doctored pencil into the mug on his desk. It was just a plain old Number Two, nothing fancy. Is cyanide readily available?”
“What makes you say cyanide?”
I explained about the smell of burnt almonds and Agatha Christie.
“Interesting,” he said. “I think cyanide’s a common ingredient in a lot of pesticides, but I don’t really know. Did you get a look at the pencil after the fact?”
“No. Why?”
“The entire tip was missing—I guess it came off in his mouth.”
“Ugh.” I pushed my plate of untouched food even farther away.
“Anyhow, we weren’t the only ones in Gallagher’s office lately. Dahlia’s in and out of there constantly. And she’s—she was probably in charge of his pencil supply.”
“Dahlia? You can’t be serious.”
“Everybody said there was something going on between the two of them.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” I told him about my conversation with her in the ladies’ room.
“So they weren’t having an affair. But his treatment of her was pretty abusive. Maybe she just flipped?”
“You think she’s seen Nine to Five one too many times?”
“Huh?”
“You know, Nine to Five? Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin? They’re all secretaries, and they have an evil boss, and they fantasize about how they’d kill him? And Lily Tomlin’s character fantasizes about poisoning his coffee, and then she accidentally does?”
He was looking at me strangely. “Forensic City, Agatha Christie, and Nine to Five?”
“I have eclectic tastes.” It seemed best not to mention the Dawson’s Creek reruns.
“I’m beginning to see that.”
“But I still can’t picture Dahlia poisoning anyone.”
“No, I have to admit, I can’t, either.”
“Then who did poison him?”
“Here’s an
idea,” he said, rattling the ice in his glass. “Gallagher’s daughter must be his primary heir—he wasn’t the type to leave much to charity, and he probably made his current wife sign a pretty rigorous prenup. Naomi was in his office. If she’d been married to the guy, she must have known about the pencil thing, and she had the opportunity to slide a poisoned one into his mug when he wasn’t looking. She’d probably be psyched for her daughter to come into her inheritance early.”
I thought about that. “Well, if she did, it wasn’t very smart of her to let half the department know that she would look so favorably on his dying. And when it comes to wives, his current wife was there, too. Annabel.”
“What motive would she have?”
“Gallagher’s money but no Gallagher. Sounds like a winwin to me.”
“I bet he was worth more to her alive than he is dead.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I became friendly with my divorce lawyer when my wife and I were splitting up, and in the process I learned a bit about pre-nuptial agreements.” He looked up with a rueful smile. “See—don’t let anyone tell you that divorce doesn’t have a silver lining—you get to meet new people and learn new things.” He was striving for a light tone, but he was only partially successful.
“Good to know,” I said, trying to match his tone, but I felt a pang of sympathy. Regular breakups were bad enough; I couldn’t imagine how people got through a divorce. It made you wonder how people ever had the courage to get married in the first place.
“Anyhow, what Naomi said was probably right. Annabel will likely only end up with a share of whatever Gallagher made during the course of their marriage. Anything he made beforehand was probably excluded. That’s how these things usually work. And they haven’t been married for very long—just a couple of years.”
“Gallagher must have made at least ten million just while they were married, though. That’s nothing to sneeze at.” Ten million was enough to buy a sufficiently large apartment that I’d never trip over Peter’s boxes again. In fact, it was enough to buy each of Peter’s boxes its own apartment.
“Not for most people. But a lot of it’s probably already spent, and as for the remainder—let’s just say, unless it was invested in something that really takes off, half isn’t going to be enough to maintain the sort of lifestyle the second Mrs. Gallagher has been maintaining for very long.”
“But were you listening to what Gallagher was saying this morning to his lawyer?”
“Hmm? No.” Jake shook his head as he sipped his drink.
“About the papers being delivered, and how he was sure he’d hear from ‘her’ when they were? Maybe he was going to divorce her.”
“In which case she’d end up with the same amount of money. Or maybe that’s not what he was referring to at all. He could have just been trying to screw Wife Number One in some new way. Or maybe another ‘she’ entirely.”
“Could be. He sure didn’t seem like the faithful type.”
“I still can’t get over the way he came onto you,” he said, shaking his head. “He really was a bastard.”
“It happens.”
“But in this day and age, and after all of the lawsuits you read about and diversity training and everything?”
“You’d be surprised.” Maybe it was the wine on an empty stomach or maybe it was the shock of that morning—either way, I found myself telling Jake about some of the other uncomfortable encounters I’d had with male colleagues and my “insurance policy.” It was nice to be able to talk to someone about it.
“It amazes me how sexist this profession still is,” Jake said in disbelief. “It makes me ashamed to be a guy, practically. But it’s a good idea, keeping a record like that.”
“I just hope I’ll never need it.”
“Does anybody else know?”
“About the notebook? Just my friend, Luisa. It was her idea in the first place.”
“Not even your fiancé?”
“Peter? No. He’s already upset enough about how hard I work. And he gets angry when I tell him about partners acting like assholes; he’d go ballistic if he knew they were acting like lecherous assholes.” I paused. “Why? Do you think I should tell him?”
Jake flashed his rueful smile again. “You’re asking the wrong guy. As my ex-wife would attest, not to mention everyone I dated before her, I’m not exactly an expert at relationships.” He took another sip of his bourbon.
“Me, neither.” My track record before Peter had been more than a little checkered on the good judgment front. Then with a jolt I remembered the other thing I’d wanted to talk to Jake about. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this,” I said.
“Tell me what?”
“Last night. There was an anonymous e-mail on my home account about Perry and the Thunderbolt deal.” I explained about the e-mail and what Peter and I had sent back.
“What a strange thing to happen.”
“Mostly it was just creepy.”
“I bet. I wonder why this Man of the People guy got in touch with you, specifically? How did he even know you were working on the deal? Do you think it’s somebody who knows you but didn’t want you to know who he is?”
“Could be. Although, I had another idea, too. Dahlia mentioned yesterday that two different people had called from Thunderbolt for a team list. Maybe one of them was actually this Man of the People guy and he was only pretending to be from Thunderbolt. She would have given out all of our names.”
“Names, yes, but how did he get your personal e-mail address? And why did he contact you, instead of me? Or Mark, for that matter?”
Peter and I had discussed this at length. “He may have tried different variations of all of our names at all of the likely e-mail services—AOL, Hotmail, Verizon. My home account is nothing clever—just my first name and my last name plus my broadband provider. He could have sent out dozens of other e-mails, most of them to addresses that don’t exist or belong to other people. And if they belonged to other people, they wouldn’t have responded—they wouldn’t have had any idea what the e-mail was about. And maybe he did try to e-mail you, and Mark, too, but he didn’t hit on the right addresses?”
“I definitely didn’t get anything on my Yahoo account. I checked it last night.”
“I just hope I did the right thing. It felt wrong not to follow up in any way. If the deal is dirty, then it seems like I have a professional obligation to do something about it. But I didn’t want to get anyone at the firm involved before I knew more, because I didn’t want to give Gallagher even more reasons to hate me.”
Jake nodded his head. “I think you did do the right thing. It was a bit of a catch-22, but you made the right decision. Even with Gallagher out of the picture, it’s probably better to find out what’s going on before making any accusations.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Will you let me know if you hear back from this guy?” he asked. “We should definitely get to the bottom of this, especially since Perry’s still so gung-ho on getting the deal done.”
“Sure,” I said.
It was good to know we were in this together.
chapter ten
W e left 21 a little after three. I’d only had a glass and a half of wine when all was said and done, but I could definitely feel it as we walked back to the office. The bourbon seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Jake.
His cell phone rang on the walk back, and while nothing he said into it was particularly revealing, there was something about the way he spoke that made me think he was talking to a woman. An uncomfortable feeling washed over me. It took a moment to identify what, precisely, it was, and when I did, I wished I hadn’t.
Jealousy.
This was inappropriate in every possible way, and I did my best to shunt it to the back of my mind, where it festered quietly for the rest of the day.
Four hours later I was sitting with another glass of white wine before me, but this time in the King Cole Bar at
the St. Regis Hotel on East 55th Street. The rich colors of the Maxfield Parrish mural that gave the room its name glowed from the wall above the bar, tarnished somewhat from decades of cigar and cigarette smoke. Now the place was smoke-free, thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, and while the nicotine-deprived might complain, business was still going strong. Every table in the small lounge was full, and a throng of people occupied the remaining floor space, drinks in hand as they vied for the next empty table.
Fortunately, my friends had arrived before me and secured a cozy corner spot for us. It wasn’t unusual for any of them to be in New York on occasion, but I couldn’t remember the last time they’d all been here at once. Luisa had trained as a corporate lawyer and was even affiliated with a local law firm, but mostly she did work on behalf of her family in South America. Their international holdings were extensive and complex, and their affairs brought her here regularly. Emma, an artist, was a Manhattan native, but she’d been living in Boston with her boyfriend, Matthew, for the last few months. She was in New York to go over preparations for a gallery show that was going up in April. Hilary was a journalist, and she’d been camped out in Jane’s guest room in Cambridge of late, putting the final touches on a true crime book about a string of serial killings that had occurred in the area. When she heard that Emma would be driving down, she hitched a ride and scheduled meetings with several publishers who’d shown interest. And when Jane heard that all of our other former roommates would be here at the same time, she’d arranged for a substitute at the school where she taught and insisted on coming along. “I’m nearly six months pregnant—this may be my last opportunity to go anywhere for a while,” she explained.
“When’s Peter getting here?” asked Emma.
“He’s not,” I said. “I thought it would be nice for it to be just us tonight.” Peter had been concerned when we’d finally spoken by phone that afternoon. I had filled him in on what had happened that morning and the possibilities Jake and I had discussed. He urged me to pack it in early and head home, but I’d wanted to see my friends.
The Key Page 5
