by Rosie Genova
You and me both. “Of course. I’m sorry about what happened to Mrs. Merriman. What a terrible thing.”
“It certainly was. She was an admirable lady, and to die in such a horrific accident . . .” He shook his head in an expression of sorrow. “It’s a real loss to me.” The dark glasses made it hard to tell if he was sincere. But he’d clearly been watching me behind those glasses, because he tapped the side of the black frames. “You’ll have to excuse these. I’ve had some recent surgery and my eyes are very light sensitive.”
“I understand.” There was an awkward pause, and I realized there would be no more information forthcoming. “It was nice to meet you.” I glanced back at the building. “And if I ever do want to have an event here, I know whom to call.”
He nodded. “You do that. Have a good day, now.” Though still smiling, Toscano crossed his arms in an I’m not going anywhere pose, and remained that way until I reached the parking lot.
On the ride back, I marshaled my thoughts to share with Sofia later on. Sally had provided crucial information about Kate and Dr. C. And Lacey had to give a statement, which was not so strange. But she hadn’t mentioned why she was headed to the second floor. And Jack Toscano had called Merriman’s death an accident. Did he know something? Or was it just wishful thinking?
• • •
By five I was sitting in our unofficial base of operations—Sofia’s office at the back of her dance studio. The infamous red folder already held a sheaf of printed pages.
“When did you have time to do this?” I asked her, leafing through the pages.
“I cut back a bit on some of my classes and combined some. It’s a little slower in summer, anyway, so I had some down time.”
“That’s good. And I guess you haven’t had time for the beach, either.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because by July, you’re usually darker than I am. But not this year.” I held my forearm next to hers.
“I told you, the heat’s been getting to me. And if you’re done comparing tans, we’ve got work to do.” She opened the folder and took out several pages of notes, including some handwritten ones.
“There’s a lot here, already,” I said. “How deep did you have to dig for this stuff?”
“Well, I found a lot of it on the Internet. But it also helps that Merriman Industries employed a ton of people in our area, including my uncle John.”
“Really? Good luck for us. What did he do there?”
“He used to work on one of their construction crews,” she said, “and he knows a lot about their operation. So here’s what I got: Elizabeth goes to work for Robert Merriman in the fifties; by 1960, she’s married to him. He’s, like, fifteen years older than she is, and they have no kids. He had started Merriman Industries from a single construction firm in the fifties; by the eighties, there are a bunch of businesses—construction, heating and insulation, asbestos removal, and some other stuff, too. In any case, he builds up one lucrative conglomerate. He dies in 1990.”
“And leaves everything to her, I take it.”
Sofia nodded. “And she takes over as CEO. And apparently alienates everybody, from her board of directors to the guys on the various jobs. She was a micromanager.”
“I can see that.” I thought about Elizabeth’s role at the Belmont Club; besides being president, she had appointed herself events manager as well. She was the kind of woman who needed to have her hand in everything. I could imagine her in a hard hat, visiting construction sites and making the crews miserable. “Was there anybody in particular who had a beef with her?”
“There’s probably a list a mile long, but my uncle gave me two pieces of information that I think could be important. First, when Elizabeth takes over, she immediately butts heads with her late husband’s right-hand guy.”
“Do we have a name?”
“Yup. William Fox. My uncle says he and Robert Merriman were friends, too, and Merriman relied on him for everything. He had a key position in that company—executive assistant to Merriman himself—and, for some reason, Elizabeth found him a threat. She pushed him out.”
“Did she fire him?”
“I think even the Iron Lady wouldn’t do that,” Sofia said. “He took an early retirement, at her strong suggestion, apparently. At the time of Robert Merriman’s death, Fox was only in his fifties, and not ready to retire.”
“What happened to him?”
“He didn’t take it well. He started drinking. Big time. Then his wife leaves him, he ends up on the outs with his kids. I mean, it all goes south for him.”
“Is he still alive?”
Sofia nodded. “Yes. In fact, my uncle thinks he’s still in the area.”
“Well, that’s good.” I wrote William Fox in my notebook. “He’s got a motive anyway,” I said. “I wonder if he was anywhere near the Belmont Club last Saturday.”
“But I’ve got more.” Sofia leaned across the desk, her eyes lit with enthusiasm. It was good to see her feeling better. “And here’s where it gets really interesting. According to Uncle John, when it came to running the companies, she started cutting corners. She got greedy and took shortcuts, even with safety issues. So their injury rates go up, along with workmen’s-comp claims. Then some workers bring a mesothelioma suit against Merriman Industries.”
“From the asbestos removal?” I knew that handling asbestos was dangerous, and that there were strict protocols in its removal and disposal. “It’s carcinogenic, right?”
She nodded and held up three fingers. “Three men brought suits against the company.” She pushed a sheet of paper my way and I read the three names: Lorenzo DePonti. Darnell Jones. Michael McBride.
“So it’s just these three. I’m surprised there aren’t more guys who brought suits against them,” I said.
She shrugged. “They were exposed to the stuff for the longest period of time. And they were able to prove that working with asbestos was directly responsible for making them sick.”
I looked at the names again. “They’re all dead, I take it.”
“Oh yeah. I don’t have exact dates, but I think by the mid-nineties they’re all dead.”
“And their families would have inherited that money.”
“Still,” Sofia said, “that doesn’t mean somebody connected with one of those families wouldn’t have carried a grudge.”
“But after all this time?” I shook my head. “Why wait almost twenty years to get back at her? And the same would apply to William Fox, right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe opportunity? Maybe somebody at that wedding was related to one of the men or William Fox, saw Elizabeth and took a chance.” She paused and looked at me. “You don’t think it’s a plausible, do you?”
“I wouldn’t rule anything out, but that time lapse is problematic. What else do you have?”
“Well, after the asbestos settlement, she sells off the different businesses, but because it’s the nineties, she makes money, despite the big payout to the families. By ‘ninety-eight, she’s a lady of leisure. Buys a fancy condo on the beach in Belmont, joins the country club, does charity work. By 2002, she’s president of the club and wields a lot of power in Belmont Beach.”
“Does she run for public office or anything?”
Sofia shook her head. “She was more a behind-the-scenes type, throwing her power and money around that way.”
I nodded. “That was certainly her MO around the club.”
“Speaking of the club, it’s your turn, Vic. What did you get there today?”
“So glad you asked, SIL.” I took my wallet from my purse and carefully extracted the glass bead. I set it on the desk between us. “Look what I found out on the platform over the seawall. It was cordoned off, by the way; I had to sneak under.”
Sofia, unfazed by my crossing a police line, rolled the bead between her fingers. “It looks like it’s from a dress.”
I nodded. “Merriman’s dress. It was stuck in a crack between the wooden boar
ds. Which is how I got this.” I held up my reddened palm.
“Pretty.” She took my hand. “Do you want me to operate?”
“I’ll do it, thanks.” Then I filled her in on all that I’d learned from Sally, as well as from my encounters with Lacey and Toscano. “But Toscano saw the splinter,” I said, “And noticed that I had grass in my hair.”
Sofia stopped writing and pointed her pencil at me. “Watch out for him. And be careful next time.”
“I’m hoping there won’t be a next time. Finding the bead proves she was out there, so we know for sure now how she died.”
My sister-in-law shook her head. “Not to burst your bubble there, Vic, but I would have thought yellow police tape made that one obvious.” She handed the bead back to me. “Sutton probably has a baggie full of these.”
“Thanks loads. But I’m not sure it’s as cut-and-dried as you think. I also saw a sensor light over that door that leads to the walkway. Those things are bright. Would a murderer take that kind of chance?”
“He—or she—could have loosened the bulb.”
“You’d need a ladder; it’s set pretty high. Putting the light aside for now, the question for me is how she got out there in the first place. One,” I said, holding up my pointer finger, “she decides to take a midnight stroll to look out at the ocean. Two, she goes out there to commit suicide. Three, she goes out there with someone she trusts. Four, she’s coerced in some way.”
“Hmm,” Sofia said. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume we can discount one and two and look at this from another angle. Who stands to gain by her death, Vic? What’s that Latin phrase you told me?”
“Cui bono. Now, there’s a question. This was a very rich woman. According to the newspaper article, she has no surviving relatives. Where would all that money go?”
Sofia frowned. “Her charities? The club?”
“Maybe. But just because she didn’t have any relatives doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a beneficiary. I’d love to find out if Toscano was named in her will.”
“Didn’t the bartender say he’d only been around about six months?”
“Yup. But if they were lovers? Women do awfully stupid things when it comes to men.”
Sofia looked back to her screen. “No argument from me there. I guess if you’re a lonely old lady and a guy shows you attention—”
“Six months might be long enough to name him in your will.”
Sofia jotted a few more notes and then turned back to me. “So, what was going on between Elizabeth Merriman and Toscano?”
“That’s something we need to find out. Because if he’s got a motive, Jack Toscano is the front-runner in the Belmont Club Murder Stakes.”
Chapter Ten
On Thursday, the Press ran an article indicating that Elizabeth Merriman’s body had been released and that a wake for was planned for Saturday. The cause of death was severe head trauma, just as Nina LaGuardia had said. I hoped that meant her sources were accurate about other things as well, such as the time she died. I sat in my bedroom, mulling over this news, as well as what Sofia had learned. During Elizabeth’s time as CEO of Merriman Industries, she had clearly made enemies. But would any of them have waited two decades to take their revenge? Was Sofia right? Was it merely a case of someone having an opportunity the night of the wedding?
As my mind worked, the cursor on my computer screen blinked at me reproachfully. My manuscript was open, but I hadn’t added a word. I wasn’t expected at the restaurant for a while yet, and I should have been writing, not detecting.
“Sorry, Isabella,” I said to my novel’s protagonist, “but you’ll have to wander the streets of nineteenth-century New York a little while longer.”
I closed the document and opened a Google search page. Sofia had already tried to track down the obituaries of the three men who had died due to asbestos exposure, but with no luck. Getting that information would require a trip to the library and a long slog with a microfiche machine. Was it worth that time? And even if I could track down their family members, what would I be likely to learn? Two decades had passed. While I couldn’t rule this piece out, neither could I afford to spend lots of time on it. William Fox, on the other hand, was still alive. My own curiosity and a sense of urgency spurred me on; I had to find out for myself.
I started a people search, cursing the commonness of his name. There were way too many people in New Jersey with some version of the name William Fox. I printed the list and grabbed a marker, crossing off any William Fox who was younger than seventy and older than eighty. That still left about a dozen candidates. Of those, four lived in the shore area. At least I was narrowing them down. We had only Uncle John’s word that Fox had stayed in this area, but those in a thirty-mile radius seemed the place to start. I highlighted the names and numbered them in order of proximity:
1. William Fox, Jr., Asbury Park
2. William Fox, Dover Township
3. William R. Fox, Barnegat
4. Will Fox, Cape May
What I needed was a picture. If I knew what William Fox looked like, I might remember seeing him on Saturday. But a Google image searched turned up several guys who were too young to be the Fox I was looking for. (However, two of them were looking for dates. Too bad they weren’t my type.)
What were my options? Call each one on a pretext and ask if he’d worked for Merriman Industries twenty years ago? Drive all over New Jersey on stakeouts in hopes of getting a peek at him? In my last foray into sleuthing, I’d used my position as a writer to talk to people connected to the case, but that was a hand I didn’t want to overplay. I made a note to ask Sofia to talk to her uncle again, but stopped suddenly, my pen still in the air. Hang on, I thought. According to Uncle John, Fox had become an alcoholic after he was forced out of Merriman Industries. Was he still drinking? Because if not, it’s likely he attended AA meetings.
Okay, so they were two big ifs, but it was worth a look. It took me all of thirty seconds to learn that there was only one place in our area that held regular meetings—and there was one scheduled for tonight. I texted Sofia: You up for another road trip, SIL?
• • •
That afternoon at the restaurant we had a full dining room for lunch, and since I was on alone, I didn’t have a moment to even think about William Fox or any of our other suspects. By the time the rush was over, I’d barely had a chance to rest my feet before Chef Massimo arrived. I found myself on peach duty, prepping the fragrant Jersey fruits for Nonna’s peach torta, the Italian version of peach pie, and tonight’s dessert special. While the smell of the fresh fruit was intoxicating, I’d have to get every last bit of peel and slice them perfectly, or I’d hear about it from my grandmother. But it wasn’t the worst job at the Casa Lido, and at least I got to enjoy the garden on a sunny shore day. As I was bringing in the tray of fruit, our head chef was arriving.
“Ciao, Massi,” I said, greeting him with a kiss on each cheek, Italian style.
“Ciao, cara,” he said. “Was our luncheon busy?” Massimo buttoned his chef’s coat, pushed his long hair behind his ears, and sat his toque on his head.
“Sì, maestro. Tim has the sauces going, and the fruit is prepped for the peach torta.”
He nodded toward the tray. “So I see. Bene. Nando will make the pastry when he comes in.”
I sighed. “He gets the fun part.”
“Good prep work is vital, cara.” He patted my cheek. “And you wanted to learn, did you not?”
“As everyone is fond of reminding me.” I followed Massimo into the kitchen, partially to observe his work, but also to ask him a few questions about his colleagues at the Belmont Club.
“Hey, Massi?” I asked. “Do you know Chef Boulé? I mean, before you saw him on Saturday?”
Chef Massimo stuck his Roman nose in the air and gave a small sniff. “By reputation only. He is il maestro when it comes to the French cuisine, I will give him that.”
“But not Italian, I take it.”
Our master chef gave me a look that would wilt escarole. “I would say that is obvious, Victoria, no?”
“What about Kate Bridges, Massi? Do you know her? Do you know her work?”
Massimo went to the sink, rolled up the sleeves of his coat, and started scrubbing up like a surgeon. “Again, we had not met personally. But she is known to be a skilled pâtissière,” he said, using the formal French term for pastry chef. “And she is not young; she has come through the ranks slowly but steadily. Ambitious, that one.”
That’s not surprising, I thought. Kate Bridges was tough, supremely confident of her abilities. I wondered about her garish makeup: didn’t she worry that her appearance might put people off? Or, worse, that she wouldn’t be taken seriously as a chef? “Has she always looked like that?” I asked.
He grimaced. “You mean like the clown from la commedia dell ’arte? I do not know. But many stories and rumors float about regarding Signorina Bridges—that she has been fired from half her jobs, that she is independently wealthy, that she studied in Paris with Fabrice Le Bourdat, that she is a self-taught genius—it is hard to tell which are true.”
Now, this was interesting. Did rumors swirl around Kate Bridges because of her outsized personality and tendency to alienate others? Or did she cultivate them herself to keep people guessing about her? “So she’s not an easy person to know.”
“No.” Massi looked up from the sink. “Still, I admire her, despite the attitude and the orange face. She works at her craft because she loves it; she is good at it and does not care what others think.”
“That’s for sure,” I said. And judging by her behavior to Elizabeth Merriman, she sure doesn’t care whom she offends, either.
He dried his hands on a clean towel and tucked it into a back pocket. Once he started tasting the sauces, I knew that would be the end of any conversation that didn’t involve tonight’s menu. I stayed long enough to taste the spicy arrabbiata sauce and to submit to a quiz from Chef Massi about the flavors. Then I insulted him by mistaking his use of red chiles for the dried variety, and ended up banished to the dining room. And who was sitting there quite cozily but Tim and his new lady love, Lacey Harrison.
