by Medora Sale
Sanders turned to his partner. “Did we know about this?” he snapped.
Dubinsky paused for a moment. “Yeah, well, we knew that the company was being investigated as a result of—”
“The fire,” said Randy gloomily. “The fucking fire.”
“That’s right, a fire,” said Dubinsky. “In a townhouse built by a construction company owned by NorthSea/Baltic. In which a woman and, I think, a couple of kids were killed.” Randy nodded in reluctant agreement. “The timing can’t have had anything to do with Neilson’s death, though. They’d been in front of a judge for days arguing over the court order.”
“That’s right,” said Randy again. “And now there are all kinds of things that have to be done because Mr. Neilson died, and no one can do them. But they don’t think of that, do they? I mean, it doesn’t matter to them what happens to a whole company that employs hundreds of people just because some lazy bastard in some subsidiary that Mr. Neilson bought didn’t check over the specs for wiring carefully enough.”
“Is that what happened?” asked Sanders. His face was expressionless.
“Sure. What else?”
“What happened where?” said a barely cordial voice from behind Sanders.
Sanders turned slowly to look at the man who had just entered the office. He was neat and compact, dressed in banker’s gray and oozing prosperity. Sanders had run into him before; in court on rare occasions—his practice did not ordinarily extend to criminal law—but more frequently at headquarters, where he dropped in on his pal Matt Baldwin from time to time. His voice grated harshly on Sanders’s ears, as it always did, and raised his hackles. “We were curious about the peace and calm around here, Mr. Fielding. I’d forgotten about the investigation.”
“Had you, indeed.” Marty Fielding’s incredulity quivered in his voice. “But given the absence of documentation, I doubt that you’ll be able to get much help from this department.” Randy shrugged his shoulders and opened his paperback again.
Carl Neilson’s secretary had been reduced to a state of sulky ineffectualness by her employer’s death. She was sitting at a word processor, staring at a voluminous pile of opened mail beside her, and buffing her nails. A small black-and-gold sign on her desk informed the world that her name was Miss S. Cavanaugh.
“I trust we’re not interrupting you,” said Sanders.
Her ear was deaf to sarcasm. “Oh, no,” she said. “That’s impossible. Because I really don’t know what I should be doing. There’s all this mail that Mr. Fielding told me to answer.” She flung a venomous look in his direction. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“For chrissake, woman,” said Fielding, “you were his goddamn private secretary—or administrative assistant or whatever else in hell he called you. You answered all his mail, didn’t you?”
“Not quite all.”
“Well, leave those letters for Mrs. Neilson—no, better leave them for me, and answer the rest.”
“When you two have settled all that,” said Sanders, flashing his identification in her face, “we would like to go over Mr. Neilson’s office. Is it locked?” She nodded sulkily. “Including his desk. Is it locked?” The secretary reached into her top drawer, pulled out a set of keys on a chain and flung them down on the desk in front of the two police officers. “Is this the appointment diary you kept for him?” She shoved it in their direction and picked up the first letter on the pile.
Carl Neilson didn’t seem to leave the clutter of his existence lying about in his office. Sanders looked around the large, tidy room and shook his head. “Have we already walked off with everything in here?”
Dubinsky shook his head. “Patterson sent a couple of constables down to do an inventory. Said there was nothing particularly notable in here for anyone to walk off with.”
“Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? Not after every goddamn thing of interest was seized by court order before we arrived.”
“Yeah, well, he pointed that out.”
Sanders pulled open the desk drawers one after another. They were almost empty. The deep bottom drawer was bereft of files. The middle drawer contained a small assortment of different sizes of notepaper. In the top drawer he found drawing instruments, rulers, pencils, drafting pens, and colored felt-tipped pens. The wide, flat drawer in the middle of the desk contained a large pad of squared drafting paper, a diary, a passport, and a folder wrapped around two plane tickets for Tampa, Florida.
Sanders picked up the tickets and the passport and carried them to the door. “Hey, you,” he snapped. “Miss Cavanaugh. What are these for?”
“They’re plane tickets,” she said crossly. “What do you think they’re for? I picked them up for Mr. Neilson the day before he died.”
Sanders ignored the turn of the worm. “No one mentioned that Mr. Neilson was planning on taking a trip.”
“Well, really,” said Miss Cavanaugh in tones of exasperation. “Why would we? He traveled all the time. Especially down to Florida. Some months he was hardly ever here. Anyway, this wasn’t a business trip or anything like that. He was taking his son for the March break.”
“And he needed a passport? To travel to the States? Since when?”
“Mr. Neilson had an accent,” said the secretary, picking up the next piece of mail on her desk. As if that answered the question.
“What?”
“He had an accent. And so the customs and immigration people were always stopping him. It’s easier to carry a passport than to spend all your time explaining who you are.”
“And when was Mr. Neilson planning on leaving for Florida with his son and his passport?” asked Sanders.
Miss Cavanaugh shrugged her silk-clad shoulders. “Around six, I think. The day he, uh, died. It’s on the ticket.”
“Was he planning to go home first? Get his stuff?”
She looked at him with scorn. “Certainly not. Mr. Neilson never carried luggage.” Clearly, in Miss Cavanaugh’s world, only peasants like Sanders carried luggage. “He kept everything he needed in his condo in Florida. He used to take a briefcase with him, that’s all. And I’d put everything in it that needed attention.”
“And that’s what you did on March the seventh. The day he died.”
The secretary paused a moment. “Yeah. Sure. That’s what I did.”
Sanders stared hard at her, considering that pause. Her face remained sulkily impassive. “Could you open the safe, Miss Cavanaugh?”
“It’s open,” she said. “The auditors opened it. There’s nothing in it.”
“Dubinsky!” yelled Sanders over his shoulder. “Look in the safe.” There was a momentary pause, filled with the soft rustle of feet over broadloom.
“It’s empty,” said his partner.
“What did he usually keep in there?”
“Not much. Cash sometimes, if he was closing a deal, or negotiable securities if we had them lying around. Or important papers. He never used it to store valuable stuff. That all went to the bank.”
“He wouldn’t have kept his will in there?”
“That would be in Mr. Fielding’s office,” she replied stiffly.
“Damn,” said Sanders. “Has Fielding left?” She nodded. “You got his address there?”
Instead of pulling her Rolodex over and looking up his address, she gave him another astonished look. There was apparently no limit to the ignorance of the police. “It’s on the sixth floor,” she said. “Suite six-oh-five.”
Fielding was containing his joy at the sight of Sanders pretty effectively. “Yes?” he said, drawling out the word insultingly.
“Simple matter, Mr. Fielding. I would like to know the provisions of Mr. Neilson’s will. In outline, for the moment.”
Fielding looked bored. “I doubt if it’ll give you much to go on. Basically he split his estate between his wife and his son. The
wife holds the son’s share in trust until he reaches twenty-one. If she dies at the same time, or close to the same time as her husband, her sister becomes the child’s guardian, with a compensatory sum for her troubles.”
“Like?”
“Five hundred thousand, I think. Not much when you consider the size of the estate. She would manage things for him with the assistance of two other trustees until he reached twenty-one. It’s a very safe, conservative will. I don’t encourage my clients to have wills that are guaranteed to be contested.”
“Did Mr. Neilson have any enemies?”
“I’ve been through all this, you know. You can look it up. Rivals, yes. Enemies, no. Good day, Inspector.”
“Now where?” said Dubinsky. “It’s almost lunchtime.”
“For chrissake, Ed, it’s nowhere near lunchtime. You trying to give me a heart attack? We’ve got a lot to do this morning.”
“Just trying to keep you moving. Where to?”
“Thornhill. I want to meet the grieving widow.”
Lydia Neilson had been sitting in her comfortable, cluttered study, dressed in tweed slacks and a cashmere sweater, in front of a pleasant fire, when the two men came in. She fussed gently, ordering coffee, removing magazines from chair seats, and in general settling them in as though they were refugees who needed reassurance and comforting.
“Yes, I knew about Carl’s will.” She stared into the fire as she spoke. “We discussed it at some length. Rather heatedly, I must admit. He wanted to leave everything to Mark, but Marty Fielding convinced him not to. My husband was a rather authoritarian sort of male, you know. Thought that Mark would look after his mother—poor child.” She glanced over at Sanders. “Actually the real battle was over Alice. My sister. Carl wanted his mother—who hates children and hasn’t been very well—to be Mark’s guardian. And if she couldn’t manage the responsibilities, then Marty Fielding. Can you imagine? Do you know him? He’d park him in a boarding school for the winter and a camp for the summer and never let him out.” Tears sprang up in her eyes, and Sanders remembered what Harriet had said about Lydia’s maternal instincts. “I won that one. Alice’s only disqualification was that she’s rather hard up. I said if he left her some money, she wouldn’t be. Eventually he saw it my way. I mean, he wanted what was best for Mark. He really was fond of him.”
“I gather he was going to take him to Florida for the March break.”
Lydia Neilson was now sitting erect and looking at Sanders with an expression of horror on her face. “To Florida! You’re crazy. He wasn’t taking Mark to Florida. Not out of the country. Not without me.”
“There were two tickets—”
“That doesn’t mean anything. He went down there all the time. He owned a development firm down in Tampa. A subsidiary of NorthSea. He was probably taking someone from the office—or that, uh, some friend—with him. He never said anything about taking Mark.”
Sanders eased away from the topic. “What private papers did your husband keep at home?” he asked.
“Private papers?” Lydia Neilson’s eyes slipped away from Sanders’s face again, and she returned to her contemplation of the fire. “Not much, really. He had a safe here. I had to get the manufacturer to come in and open it in case there was something important in it.”
“Was there?”
She looked up, startled.
“Anything important in it?”
“Oh, things like life insurance policies. You’re welcome to look at it. I don’t know what you consider to be important. It’s in his study.”
Carl Neilson’s study resembled his office. The light and expensive furniture in it was almost lost in the sweeping space. There were few books, fewer comfortable chairs, and a general air of chill joylessness in the surroundings. Lydia Neilson walked across the room and opened a door into a closet. “It’s in here,” she said, standing aside.
The door to the safe was swinging open. Dubinsky reached in, pulled out a tiny pile of documents and handed them to Sanders: house insurance, an insurance policy taken out on the life of Mrs. Neilson, a warranty on a recently installed furnace, and underneath it, a key to a safe-deposit box. Sanders took it and held it up in front of Lydia Neilson.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought it was the key for our safe-deposit box in our local bank, but I found that in his desk drawer. I looked in that one. I don’t know what used to be in it, but when I checked, it had been cleared out. I have no idea which box that would be.”
“Take it, Ed, will you? We’ll have to try to track it down.” She shook her head helplessly. “Did your husband have any enemies?” Sanders added casually, handing her back the insurance policies.
Lydia Neilson looked at him for a long time and then sighed. She walked over to her husband’s desk, set down the policies, opened the top drawer, pulled out two small, cheap envelopes, and handed them to Sanders. They were addressed to Carl Neilson at the Thornhill house, and each contained a single sheet of lined yellow paper with a few lines of writing on it. The script was unformed and messy-looking, and the words were chilling: “Your lawyer can protect you in court, Neilson,” the first one said, “but he won’t help you once you step outside.” The second was messier and more chilling: “A wife for a wife, Neilson. I’m sorry you only have one child. That doesn’t seem fair, does it? You owe me two children. How well will your house burn?” They were unsigned.
“How long have you known about these?” asked Sanders abruptly.
“I knew that the man whose house had burned down—you know about that, I suppose—had threatened Carl. He told me to be extra careful about Mark. But I always am. I didn’t know specifically about these particular letters until yesterday, when the man came to open the safe. They were in there. They’re sad, aren’t they?” Her eyes filled up with tears, and she turned her face away. “I’m sorry, but every time I think about them, they make me cry. That poor man.”
“You never mentioned to anyone that your husband had received threats? That poor man might be the person who killed him,” said Sanders.
“I guess he might,” she replied. “I didn’t say anything because I really didn’t think the threats were anything more than the cries of a very unhappy man. You can’t blame him for hating Carl. And I didn’t want to sic the police on him. He’s suffered enough already.”
“Jesus,” said Sanders. “There’s turning the other cheek if I ever saw it.” He slipped the letters in his pocket.
She paid no attention. “Two children,” she said, shaking her head. “They were just eight months old and three, you know. It was horrible.”
“And his wife,” said Sanders.
“And his wife.”
“We need to track that man down,” said Sanders as they drove away.
“Can’t be too hard,” said Dubinsky. “His picture was plastered all over the papers, television, you name it. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Do you think he shot Neilson?”
“How do I know?” said Sanders. “He probably hated him enough. But would he know enough about him to track him down to the hotel?”
“Sure,” said Dubinsky. “There were lots of articles in the paper about other buildings that Neilson owned or built. Just to make the people who lived in them feel secure. You know, ‘Developer of fatal firetrap subdivision renovates famous downtown hotel.’ That sort of thing. Neilson was probably about to be in big financial trouble. Would you want to move into one of his buildings?”
That day there was not even a pretense of anything for Rob Lucas to do. He walked around the woods again, checking back on Annie every thirty minutes or so, trying to convince himself that all she needed was more rest and she’d be fine. By six, he was dejected, tired, and cold. He picked up a grilled cheese sandwich to go and came back for the evening. Annie’s eyes were bright and her cheeks pink. “Hi,” he said. “I have a disgusting grilled cheese sandwich he
re for you.”
She shook her head silently.
“In that case,” he said with false heartiness, “you can try some of the other delicacies.” He opened the back window and took in the yogurt and a can of ginger ale, set them down beside her with a spoon and some melba toast. “There,” he said triumphantly. “Dinner. Eat some of it.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”
He looked sharply at her. All that bright color didn’t look very healthy anymore. “Well, then,” he said, “have something to drink.”
She took a minute swallow of the ginger ale and dropped her head back on the pillow. Lucas reached over and placed a hand on her forehead. It was burning; he felt her neck, her hands, her forearms. He walked over to the window and stared out into the gray parking lot. At last, he turned back to her, his decision made. “We’re getting out of here.”
Tears sprang up in Annie’s eyes. “Why?” she said at last. “I can’t do it,” she added. “I can’t move around anymore. I don’t care if they kill me, Robin. I don’t care anymore. Just let me stay here and rest.”
“To hell with that!” he exploded. “I haven’t dragged you all over hell’s half acre to have you fold up and die on me. Damn you, you’re going to pull yourself together! And shut up.” He stalked into the bathroom and began to throw things into his bag. He picked up the sack of groceries, grabbed the unopened tins and bottles, and tumbled them back in. In minutes he had the trunk filled with their possessions. He came back in, wrapped Annie in the blankets he had brought from the cabin, picked up the pillow he had brought along with them, and settled her into the backseat again. “Watch your foot,” he snarled, still unreasonably angry. “Don’t let it hit the side of the car.” And he pulled out.
Less than a minute down the road, he was stopped by a panicky and uncontrolled voice from the backseat. “The codeine. It’s still beside the bed. I can’t—I’ll never manage without it.”
