The Trophy Wife

by Diana Diamond

  “Maybe we can learn something by Friday. I’ve got to try to save my wife.”

  Hogan leaned forward, resting his elbows on the edge of the desk. “We’ve already learned quite a bit …”

  “What?” Andrew was shocked that the detective could know anything beyond what he had been told. “What do you know?”

  “First,” Hogan began, “we know that we’re dealing with someone connected with the bank. Someone who knows what you do and how you do it. These people don’t just know about financial operations. They know the extent of your authority. Your relationship with the Cayman bank. Where you’re apt to eat lunch. Where you live. It seems that they even know what your wife’s daily schedule is like.”

  “You think it’s someone I know personally?”

  “Maybe. But more likely it’s someone who knows you personally but who you don’t generally think of as a friend. Your secretary, for example …”

  “Miss Carey! That’s ridiculous. Why she’s …”

  “I said ‘for example.’ My point is that if I asked you to list your close friends, your Miss Carey probably wouldn’t make the list. You probably don’t even think of her as a business associate. Yet she knows your business activities intimately. Has probably spoken directly with the people at this Cayman bank, as well as the top people at every bank you deal with. And I’ll bet she knows your wife’s schedule better than you do.”

  Walter looked chastened. “You’re absolutely right,” he admitted. “There are probably a lot of people around the bank who understand my job. But … a kidnapper?”

  Hogan again touched the document. “As I read this, the people behind it aren’t doing any kidnapping. They seem to have hired the people who took your wife away and hired the people who are holding her. They even hired the guy who brought you the ransom note. And they’ve arranged it so that none of them knows either of the others. So this could be someone who has never done a violent deed in his life. Just a skillful manager with a few violent friends. Or with contacts among the underworld types who would do these things.”

  Walter was nodding. “So where do we start?”

  “We don’t,” Hogan said. “We follow procedure and take this to the chairman as soon as he comes in.”

  “And Emily gets buried in a cellar!” Walter flared. “For Christ’s sake, we can’t do that. Not while there’s any chance.”

  Hogan sat quietly for a moment. “You know what this could cost me. I’m paid to enforce security procedures. Your security procedures.”

  “It can’t cost you your life,” Walter came back. “We’ve got to at least try. Please, Andrew. I’m asking you as a friend.”

  Despite his years of training, Hogan couldn’t hide his disgust. “A friend …” he said slowly, weighing the irony.

  Walter had to turn his eyes away. “We’re not the most cordial people,” he allowed. “I suppose none of us has … seemed … particularly friendly. We just don’t know many police officials …”

  “I’m a cop,” Andrew interrupted, “and proud of it. I’ve gotten my hands dirty. All of you have made it pretty clear that you don’t want me cleaning up in the executive washroom.”

  “It wasn’t that …” Walter was about to say, that you weren’t good enough for us. But he knew it was exactly that. Andrew had no reason to think of him as a friend. He had every right to leave him and his fellow senior executives hanging on their own self-righteous policies. “I’m sorry. Truly sorry,” was the best Walter could manage. “I’m begging for your help.”

  Hogan rose slowly, lifting the ransom pages carefully and folding them into the envelope. “I’ll take these. And I’ll need the keys to your house. There are some lab people who owe me a favor and chances are that your messenger left prints all over the place.”

  “You’ll help me?” Walter was gushing with gratitude.

  “Yeah. Some of the people who dirtied my hands know what’s happening around town. We may just get lucky. In the meantime, you go have lunch in Casper’s window.”

  “What about my children?” Walter asked. “I have a son and a daughter. They’re close to their mother. I’ll have to tell them something.”

  “This is just until Friday,” Hogan reminded him. “On Friday, we go to the chairman with whatever we have. That’s when you can talk to your kids.”

  Walter nodded. “I’ll think of some way to stall them. Even if we have to go beyond Friday, I can probably come up with a plausible story …”

  “Friday!” Hogan cut him off. “There’s no way I can let you send that money.”

  “Of course. Of course,” Walter agreed. “Just so long as we try to do something.”

  Andrew Hogan found himself wondering why Walter made saving his wife sound like window dressing rather than a matter of life and death. But still, he was enjoying the moment. It was wonderful to see one of these privileged citizens begging for a cop.

  Helen Restivo had once been Andrew Hogan’s lover. She had been valedictorian in her class from the John Jay School of Criminal Justice at the same ceremony where then-Captain Hogan had been the guest speaker. Hogan had made police work sound so important that Helen had changed her career plans right on the spot, withdrawing her application for a position in social work and entering the police academy. With more than a little self-interest in mind, she had told Hogan how he had influenced her choice when he came to visit the academy. Later, when Hogan looked her up on her first patrolman’s assignment, they had both felt a magnetic attraction.

  At first, neither of them worried that she might be bestowing favors on a man who could influence her career and that he might be taking terrible advantage of a woman who couldn’t afford to incur his displeasure. They were simply two people in love. But then, their relative positions became an embarrassment. Hogan knew he was jeopardizing everything in his fondness for a woman twenty years younger than he. And Helen knew that she had little future in the department if word got out that she was bedding down with a very senior officer. It was easy for each of them to wonder if the other might be on the make. Maybe they could have overcome the difficulties, but they slipped apart rather than address the problem.

  They had avoided each other for nearly two years when Hogan heard that a street punk wielding a linoleum knife had cut up a woman officer named Restivo. He had rushed to the hospital and found her in serious condition with a slash across her face that threatened her eyesight and with three fingers missing from her right hand. His solicitude during her recovery had been much more than the police tradition of “taking care of our own.” But it wasn’t the same passionate love he had felt for her two years earlier.

  Helen had been retired on full disability, the department figuring that she couldn’t be a cop without a trigger finger on her shooting hand. At that point, Andrew had asked her to marry him, but she understood that the proposal was born in nostalgia and sympathy and promptly turned it down. He did the next best thing he could by helping her launch her own investigative agency and sending her any problems that shouldn’t involve the department. Helen now presided over a very large and successful security service and listed InterBank as one of her major accounts. She was the obvious choice when Andrew knew he couldn’t use the police or bank personnel in looking for Emily Childs.

  Helen had immediately assigned one of her investigators to keep tabs on each of the senior vice presidents. She had sent her best forensic people out to Short Hills to meet Andrew at the victim’s home. Then she had assigned herself to Walter Childs and now stood across the lobby from the executive elevators in InterBank’s building.

  She had picked Childs for herself because she considered him the most likely suspect. The sad truth about domestic crimes was that someone in the household was generally involved. More often than not, wives who accidentally shot their husbands thinking they were blowing away an intruder had known perfectly well who was in front of the pistol when they pulled the trigger. Disappeared children too often turned up buried in the backyard of
the family home. And in the cases of missing wives, husbands often proved to have the best motives.

  As soon as Hogan had described the case, Helen Restivo’s radar had locked onto Walter Childs. She certainly planned to look into the obvious motives, like the wife having a substantial estate of her own that Walter would inherit, or a major insurance policy that named him as beneficiary. That kind of information, quite frequently tied together with gambling debts, bad investments, or other losses that generated a need for a quick infusion of cash. Or the often present other woman. Many a man who wanted to change wives saw little sense in leaving behind all his material goods as part of a divorce settlement. Probably, Helen thought, it would be something as routine as one of those scenarios.

  But she was more fascinated by the well-publicized runoff for the leadership of InterBank. One of the senior people would win the gold ring and become the planet’s leading financial figure. The others would feel that they had been exposed as failures even though they would still be five-million-a-year executives. She guessed that Walter Childs had reached that elite level where he wouldn’t know what to do with more money and could have any woman he wanted without expending more than pocket change. Childs, she was nearly certain, wanted something far more significant.

  “How,” she asked herself, “could a senior vice president parlay the loss of his wife into the top job?” The answer was obvious as soon as Andrew Hogan explained the bank’s policy of no negotiations. If Childs sacrificed his wife to the interests of the bank … if he in effect announced that his concern for the bank’s depositors went beyond his concern for even his own wife … then how could they hope to find a more dedicated man to trust with InterBank’s fortunes? Was it possible that he had dragged the bank’s security officer into a charade, pretending to try and save his wife? And then, at Andrew Hogan’s Friday deadline, would he tearfully do the heroic thing and refuse to transfer the money as the kidnappers had supposedly ordered. Helen was playing a hunch that Walter himself might be the kidnapper and that he wouldn’t be overjoyed if they were to turn Emily up alive.

  Walter stepped out from behind the doors of an elevator, his eyes darting suspiciously from side to side. For an instant, he seemed genuinely frightened, but then he squared his shoulders and stepped out purposefully, looking involved and important. Helen checked his face against the black-and-white security photo that she had palmed in her good hand. Then she wandered out the door, settling a few hundred feet behind Walter. She wasn’t so much interested in Walter’s route. She knew where he was headed. What was important was the people in the streets around Walter. If what Childs was claiming were true—if Emily had really been taken away by an unknown person—then that person could well be standing in the street somewhere between here and Casper’s restaurant. Or, like Helen herself, the person might begin to follow Walter, seeing him to the door of the restaurant and waiting for him to claim his table as the signal that he would be paying the ransom.

  She was looking for anyone else who might be paying attention to her suspect. She planned to follow Walter all the way to the door and then station herself across the street to see if anyone was interested in who took the table in the window. And then she planned to take particular note of anyone who left shortly after Walter. The kidnapper, if there was one, would certainly make himself known by his interest in Childs. Helen’s problem was recognizing that interest.

  Andrew Hogan was standing in the door of Emily’s bedroom, reconnoitering the terrain before stepping into the crime scene. Right now, at this point in time, everything in the room should bear witness to Emily and her husband, and then to the kidnapper. If there was something to be seen he had to see it now, because once he and the forensic team stepped across the threshold the process of obliterating the obvious evidence would begin.

  The profession was filled with stories of evidence destroyed in the attempt to gather evidence. There was the tale of the FBI agent-in-charge who stepped out of the rain into the scene of a bank robbery and bent over a clear, powdered fingerprint. Rain from the brim of his hat had run down and washed the print away. A ranking Chicago detective had once hung up the telephone at a murder scene to silence the annoying off-hook signal, and in the process had hidden the fact that the victim had been talking to someone who might have heard the last words. Hogan wanted to take everything in before he threw the room open to the professionals.

  The first thing that struck him was the size of the room. It seemed sparsely furnished even though it contained two double beds flanking a circular marble-top night table, a triple dresser, a chest of drawers, an electronics entertainment center with an arrangement of leather furniture, and a vanity that was bigger than the chorus dressing room in some Broadway theaters. Hogan and his two brothers had grown up in an apartment that wasn’t as big as the bedroom.

  The two beds were his next observation. Apparently Walter and Emily didn’t fall asleep in each other’s arms. He’d have to check the other bedrooms for evidence that they might not share even the same room. Separate sleeping arrangements usually indicated nothing more than a husband with a jackhammer snoring problem, or a wife who needed to keep the fight on. But in his years of police work, Andrew found that men who had done in their wives had usually moved to the couch some time before.

  Next, he spotted the wineglass on the vanity. That set his eyes searching until he found the small refrigerator that was built into the base of the entertainment center. He remembered the wet bar in the pantry kitchen, stocked like the top shelf at a country club grill. Drinking was part of their lives. In Emily’s case, assuming Walter was correct about the time she had been kidnapped, there was no need to wait for the sun to cross over the yardarm.

  His eyes followed the trail of the clothes. The scattered tennis outfit pointed from the bed to the bathroom door. Andrew stepped across the threshold and moved carefully along the marked trail.

  The tennis shirt was sweat stained and seemed to have dried stiff. Whoever had worn it had certainly exercised vigorously, so if the trail of clothes had been laid down to mislead an investigator, the garments had been peeled off someone’s still-sweating body. The bathroom seemed further collaboration of Walter Childs’s story. The shower curtain had been ripped down forcefully. The hollow chromium bar was bent, with a screw pulled out of one of its end fittings. There were rings still attached to it that held torn-out eyelets from the curtain. There were broken rings in the tub and on the floor. Without doubt, the curtain had been involved in a struggle.

  Hogan noticed the thin, red stain that surrounded the tub drain. Blood had been shed, but he couldn’t tell how much. Someone had bled while the shower was still running and the water flow had carried the blood to the drain. He guessed that any wounds had been superficial. At scenes of carnage, bloodstains were usually splattered all over the room.

  The missing shower curtain apparently had been taken away along with Emily. The most logical explanation was that it had been wrapped around her, which, in turn, indicated that when she had left the bedroom, Emily had either been dead or unconscious. The battle in the bathroom didn’t suggest someone who would allow herself to be rolled in a curtain if she still had any fight left in her.

  There were footprints all over the bedroom carpet, created by wet shoes and sneakers. He figured the sneakers to be Emily’s, but then realized that she wouldn’t still be wearing her shoes when the water was spilled out of the shower. So, apparently one of her kidnappers was wearing them.

  Andrew found the entire scenario troubling. The letter that Walter Childs had given him indicated a very intelligent person running the operation, but the crime scene suggested amateur hour. Emily could have been taken much more easily before she ever entered the house. Kidnappers, who knew she would drive straight into the garage, would attack her as she stepped out of the car. It would be a simple matter to hold a drug-soaked cloth over her face, push her back into the car, and take her away. By waiting until she had gotten into her bedroom, they h
ad given her a greater opportunity to escape and had given themselves the problem of getting her back down into the car. If Andrew were hiring people to lift a wife from her home, these guys wouldn’t be his first choice.

  He called Helen Restivo’s lab men into the room and added specifics to their general procedure. Whose blood was in the tub? Emily’s? One of the kidnappers? Was there blood in the drain trap? Enough to suggest a serious wound? Or was it as superficial as it appeared? Was there any blood on the bedroom carpet? Or were the stains water marks only? What about fingerprints? Unless the attackers wore gloves, there should be prints all over the bathroom. Given the apparent violence of the struggle, no one could have been careful about where he’d put his hands.

  The forensics team hit the room like chambermaids, gathering linens, glasses, and other debris into plastic bags, dusting and sweeping in every crack and corner. Hogan left them to their work and began a very focused tour of the house. After checking the bedrooms, he went to the telephones, both the residential line and Walter’s business line. He noted the phone numbers and made recordings of the recorded messages on the answering machines.

  In the family room, he checked the television, stereo, and cassette recorders, noting the capabilities of the systems. Someone in the household was apparently an electronics freak. There was enough video and sound equipment to open a fair-size broadcasting station.

  The framed photographs and ornaments told of the family dynamics. There were dozens of photos of Walter with world leaders, some showing him shaking hands in front of portraits of kings, others of him squatting on the carpet in some sheik’s tent. He was depicted presenting a football to the Super Bowl’s Most Valuable Player and in a golf foursome with Jack Nicklaus. He shared two of the photos with presidents of the United States.

  There were plaques honoring his contributions to charitable foundations, crystal bowls expressing gratitude for his service to international financial institutions, and engraved bookends from federal reserve banks. The room was a deferential monument to the life’s work of a great man. The trophy honoring Emily as champion singles player of her tennis club, and the framed clipping of her triumph in doubles, were clearly afterthoughts, relegated to the periphery of the display. Walter apparently enjoyed the footlights and Emily obviously felt no need to share in the applause.