Mystery Writers of America Presents the Rich and the Dead

by Inc. Mystery Writers of America

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Louis said. “We’re leaving soon.”

  Gerald put a hand on Breezy’s arm. “Forget about the coat; it’s part of the past. You have to let that go.”

  “How can I when it’s all laid out in front of me like a garage sale!” Breezy wailed. She dropped the coat sleeve and let Gerald lead her to a chair.

  “I’ll get you a glass of water,” Gerald said. He looked at me and I nodded. He headed for the kitchen.

  “Time to go, sweetie,” Louis said to Jen.

  “Fiiiiiiiiiiinally,” Jen said.

  Louis bent over and picked up one of the folders Jen had taken from her backpack.

  “Daddy’s going to borrow this, baby.” He put the papers from the corkboard into it.

  I noticed one of Katie’s drawings had been framed and hung beside the entrance to the family room. I took it off the wall and started to disassemble the frame. The tape didn’t want to come off as easily as it had on the other pictures in the house.

  Gerald reappeared with a brimming crystal glass monogrammed with a T, its red tag still attached. When I’d managed to extract Katie’s drawing, I smoothed out the creases where it had been folded so it could fit into the frame. This one showed a dog… or maybe a beaver?

  Katie saw what I was doing.

  “That’s mine!” she cried and ran full tilt toward me. Gerald tried to sidestep, but he wasn’t fast enough. Katie collided with him at knee level. The water in the glass arced through the air, dousing Louis’s folder.

  “Damn it, Katie! You need to watch where you’re going,” Louis said.

  He gingerly opened the folder. The first few documents were damp. The water had turned the marks on Jen’s math test into smears of red.

  Katie stared in shock at her father for a moment, then burst into tears.

  “Baby! I’m so sorry.” Louis dropped the folder on the table and knelt beside her. “Daddy said a bad word. And he didn’t mean it. Sorry, baby.” He hugged her gently and patted her back.

  “Daddy,” Jen said. “She made a mistake.”

  “Who did, sweetheart?” Louis asked, still cradling Katie. The little girl had stopped crying.

  “Mrs. Forgiani.” Jen held up the math quiz marked with red. “She wrote in the wrong answers.”

  “Sometimes teachers do that, baby.” Louis tucked Katie’s hair behind her ears. “Feeling better, sweetie? I really am sorry.”

  Katie’s eyes glistened, but she nodded.

  “Okay, girls, say good-bye to your grandparents and let’s go.” Louis closed the folder and put the wet papers on top of it. He picked up Jen’s backpack.

  “I’d like to keep that,” Nicky said, nodding at the math quiz that had been splashed with water.

  “But, Grandy, it got wrecked,” Jen said.

  “Doesn’t matter, Jennifer,” Nicky said. “Give it to me.”

  Louis picked up the folder and the wet papers. “Dad, I’ll make sure Jen brings you”—he caught himself—“that I bring you Jen’s next test.” Louis smiled at his daughter. “Another one with an A on it, right, baby?”

  “Louis, I said that’s the one I want.” Nicky’s tone was sharp, like crystal being struck.

  Jen backed away from her grandfather. She looked confused and a bit scared.

  “Dad, I said I’d bring you one later.” Louis’s tone was as forceful as his father’s. He reached for his daughter’s hand. “C’mon, baby. We don’t want to be late for your Mandarin lesson.”

  “Louis—” Nicky got out of his chair and started for his son, but Don stepped into his path.

  “Easy there, Mr. Taakall.” Don put a restraining hand on Nicky’s chest while Louis herded the two girls into the foyer. I followed them. I had Katie’s drawing, the one I’d just removed from the frame.

  “May I have the folder, Louis?” I said. He had stooped down to help Jen slip her backpack onto her shoulder.

  Louis slowly straightened. “The folder?” He turned to face me.

  I held out my hand. Louis glanced at the front door, as though he was contemplating making a run for it. Then he looked at his daughters, blew out a breath, and handed it over.

  “Here,” he said without looking at me.

  I took out the math quizzes and Katie’s drawings, so the only thing left in the folder was the sketch. The dancing lady looked a lot like some of the drawings I’d been tagging in the apartment all week. The ones signed by the famous name.

  I turned the sketch over, and there was the familiar signature with the big P. Picasso.

  “I don’t think you meant to take this one, Louis,” I said. “I think you meant to take the drawing that was hanging in the foyer, the one that didn’t quite fit in the frame.”

  He looked at me now but didn’t say anything. His breathing was ragged, as though he’d just finished running a marathon.

  I handed him Katie’s dog-beaver. “This is the real masterpiece.”

  I think I saw tears in his eyes as I handed him back the empty folder. He slipped Katie’s drawings and Jen’s math quizzes into it.

  “Daddy, can we please go to Mandarin now?” Jen said.

  Louis kneeled beside her. “What do you say we skip it and go to Dylan’s Candy Bar instead?”

  Jen frowned. “But I’m supposed to go to class.”

  “You don’t have to go, baby. Today can be”—he searched for the right words—“like a snow day. Our own personal snow day.”

  “Really?” Jen said. She let her backpack slide off her shoulder and drop to the floor. “Can I have Peeps?”

  “Me, too!” Katie said. “I want Peeps, too!”

  “We can all have Peeps,” Louis said.

  The girls cheered and raced to be first to the elevator button. Louis picked up Jen’s forgotten backpack.

  “I just imagined Dad’s tombstone,” he said. “Here lies Nicky Taakall. He knew the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” He turned and walked away to join his daughters.

  After I watched them get into the elevator and the doors shut, I went back to the family room. Breezy sat on a sofa, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. Gerald hovered beside her.

  “Breezy isn’t feeling well,” he said when he saw me. “The stress of today…”

  Breezy moaned.

  “Mrs. Taakall, do you really not feel well?” I asked.

  “My stomach…”

  I didn’t want her to be sick on the Turkmenian rug. I picked up the plastic trash can that was beside Nicky. It was half full of corrugated paper from the photo frames Don had dismantled for him.

  I put it at Breezy’s feet. She leaned forward; her hair hung like a golden curtain.

  Suddenly she screamed. I jumped back to avoid getting splattered.

  Breezy reached into the trash can and pulled out a small black and white photo. “It’s her!”

  I glanced at Don, who was turtled into his collar more than usual. If he could have withdrawn his head all the way, I think he would have.

  “You said it was over!” Breezy yelled at Nicky.

  He crossed his arms and looked annoyed. “It is,” he said. “I forgot that photo was in there.”

  “What are they talking about?” I asked Don.

  “There were photos of two women in one of the frames,” he said. “One was behind the other. Nicky said to toss that one, it came with the frame.”

  Breezy launched herself at Nicky. For a moment, I could have been watching The Jerry Springer Show.

  “I trusted you!” she screamed at him. Spittle flew from her lips. “I said I’d wait until you got out. You promised we’d have our old life back!”

  She was crying now. Nicky grabbed her wrists. Blood seeped from where her nails had scraped his cheek. So much for all that nice makeup work.

  “I told you—it’s over. It’s been over for a long time. For chrissake, Breezy, she was the one who turned me in. Why the hell do you think she did that?”

  “Do I look stupid, Nicky? I’ll be s
ixty when you get out! That little bitch won’t even be thirty. I bet you told her you’ll still be rich so she’ll wait for you!”

  Don helped Gerald pull a still-ranting Breezy off Nicky and back to the sofa. I opened my cell phone and dialed Grayson’s office.

  “I think you want to come down here and talk to the Taakalls,” I said. “Why? To ask them how they were going to be rich again as soon as Nicky got out. You don’t have to call Karius. He’s already here. Only thing is, I think he’s going to need a lawyer, too.”

  I closed the phone and regarded the couple.

  “Grayson is coming over. And by the way, it is just like on TV—the first one to talk gets the better deal ninety-five percent of the time.”

  It took the rest of the week to sort out everything. Breezy talked first, just as soon as she hired a new lawyer. Her jealousy over Nicky’s affair had turned into anger during the months of public humiliation in the tabloids. Anger that trumped even her desire for a return to the good life seven years from now.

  Gerald had helped Nicky set up the Cayman account as a red herring. They figured we would stop looking once we found it. So they made it easy by taping the account number to the bottom of Nicky’s desk drawer. They stashed the big bucks elsewhere.

  Breezy traded her testimony for immunity. Gerald got a year and disbarment. No big loss to the legal profession there. Nicky is facing additional charges—perjury, for starters, but I’m sure the U.S. attorney will think up a few more.

  No plea for him this time—he’s going to fight it out at trial. I guess the aggressiveness that made him rich is all he has left. The judge already invalidated his existing deal and sentenced him to a full term. So he’ll have lots of time to think about the women he’s pissed off—the girlfriend who turned him in to the feds because he wouldn’t pay her off and the wife who found out about the affair.

  What about the big money? Well, the account and password numbers were too long to memorize. So Nicky wrote them on Jen’s math quiz—the teacher corrections in red ink—right after he was indicted, before he was kicked out of the penthouse.

  Why didn’t he just give the numbers to Breezy? He isn’t saying. Maybe he wasn’t sure he could trust her, maybe he was testing her to see if she’d stick by him through the bad times—the tabloid headlines, the trial, losing all their stuff.

  Breezy’s only chance to pick up the account info was during the walk-through, because she’d had to move out after Nicky’s indictment, too. But she got distracted by the fight over the fur coat. Nicky never considered the possibility that Louis would take the papers off the corkboard. As a matter of fact, Louis cared about his daughters’ work only because that’s where he’d hidden the Picasso sketch when he came to get the stuff from his grandfather the prior week.

  But I think he’s different now. When Grayson picked up the math quiz, he wished her luck finding the money. “Don’t bother to let me know how much there is,” he said. “I don’t care.”

  I got the announcement last month. Louis and his wife are opening an art therapy practice for poor kids. Enclosed with it was one of Katie’s drawings.

  I taped it to my file cabinet. It’s a bear—or maybe a rhinoceros. Just to remind me of what happened on East Sixty-fourth Street that afternoon. Some of it was about money, but most of it was about what’s left after the money’s gone.

  ITERATIONS

  BY S. J. ROZAN

  The morning sun squeezed in the window and poked him in the eye. He rolled over, but he knew it was there and that was enough. He flopped onto his back, yawned, stretched. Yup, there it was, that sunshine, loitering at the edge of the drapes. Of course, he didn’t have to put up with it. The nifty control panel beside the bed had buttons for the blackout blinds right next to the ones for the heat, air-conditioning, lights, TV, DVD, and stereo. He supposed, with his money, he could probably hire a plane to haul a cloud across the sun until he was ready to get up. The hell with it. He got up.

  While he shaved, he thought about checking his schedule for the day, but he wasn’t interested. Since he’d sold the business—no, scratch that because it wasn’t true. Since it became obvious to him—screw what everyone else could see—that the processes were going to succeed, that the principles behind the processes (principles he’d patented as soon as he’d dreamed them up) would revolutionize this corner of the information industry—well, around then he’d begun to lose interest. It had been slow, because for a while, there was still a lot to keep him involved. First, they had to design and build the damn hardware to run the damn software to prove the damn principles actually worked, because the world was full of idiots who’d stand under a falling piano until it proved it would actually hit the ground.

  That hadn’t been so bad, though. He enjoyed the iterations, the refining: first, you get this bug out, and the hole it leaves reveals that one, so you get it out next. Better and better each time, until all the bugs were gone and the system was perfect. He’d never given a damn about the actual apps, but as long as the proof demanded devices, he’d patented them, too. In the beginning, he’d have been happy just selling his formulas, principles, software, and if anyone had been smart enough to buy, they could have saved themselves a lot of money. That the skeptical world had insisted on seeing it all in action first only meant that in the end he had more to sell. When he’d finally unloaded the business, it was to a consortium of his rivals. He’d forced those moronic behemoths to pull together for the first time in their sludgy corporate lives because they all feared him more than they loathed each other. He supposed that was an accomplishment in itself, one the business trades never mentioned in any of the glowing articles on him, but who cared? He’d never been in it for the fame, and the fame was part of the irritation now. By the time he sold it all off, he was thoroughly sick of it all. The fun was long past. He’d walked away from the business with no regrets and with more money than all but about a hundred other people on the planet.

  That was kind of the problem, though.

  Maybe money couldn’t buy you love, but it could damn near buy you everything else. Which meant there wasn’t really a lot of use for you. Until and unless he came up with another project, he had nothing to do, which would have been okay; he’d always been real good at hanging out. Except the people he got a kick out of hanging out with had to make a living. He could buy them off—sure he could, set his buddies up for life so they could play air hockey and go skydiving—but anyone who let him do that, he wouldn’t cross the street with.

  And those hundred others like him, what they called the super-rich, the ones who—like him now—needed bodyguards and security sweeps and had to build home theaters and gyms and be trapped behind their own walls?

  A self-impressed crowd of arrogant, skills-free assholes. Them he wouldn’t even stand on the corner waiting to cross the street with.

  Screw it. He tapped the touch screen in the bathroom console; heard Belinda’s patient, “Yes, Ray?”; and told her, “Cancel everything. Tell Tony to bring the car.”

  “Ray, you have—”

  “I don’t care. Reschedule. I’m going out.”

  He clicked off, knowing she was sighing, gritting her teeth, and doing what he told her: calling Tony, rearranging and rescheduling and canceling. Well, he didn’t care; that was why she got the big bucks. And that was it right there. Ray Derring didn’t have to care.

  He was lacing up his black oxfords when the surround sound blasted Belinda’s ringtone: she was Robyn Hitchcock, “I Got a Message for You.” He hit the button, said, “Yeah?” into the air.

  “A reporter, Ray. From Scoop.”

  “What are you talking about? Hello? I don’t do reporters.” Belinda had been with him for years. Maybe she needed a vacation.

  “He says—”

  “Who cares what he says? How did he even get as far as you?”

  “Amy thought this was one you’d—”

  “Amy was wrong.” Maybe Amy needed a vacation, too.

 
; That was the one thing Ray shared with the rest of the super-rich hundred: a loathing of these tabloid bloodsuckers, leeches who’d photograph you taking a crap, write the story up, and make it front-page news.

  Ray got out of the private elevator in the garage to find Tony lounging against the black-windowed Lexus. To rearrange the garage and put the elevator in, Ray had had to buy the building. Not to mention combining the top two floors into his giant skybox apartment and the next two down into apartments for his staff. Staff! Jesus Christ. Tony and Belinda, great; but who the hell needed all those other people, especially the security guys? Damn! Tony was trained and armed, though, and the car was hardened, so when he went out in the car he left the bodyguards home.

  Besides, he was the boss. He could leave anybody anywhere he wanted to.

  They exchanged greetings, Tony giving Ray his usual amused nod. Ray had interviewed a lot of drivers and most of them were good, but Tony Aletto was as good as any and got the job because he didn’t seem impressed that he was being personally interviewed by Ray Derring.

  “Where to?” Tony grinned. He opened the door and got in the shotgun seat. Ray slid behind the wheel and smirked back as he steered the car up the ramp. Tony turned out to have been a good choice; he was impressed by pretty much nothing, even by the fact that Ray liked to drive.

  And he could keep a secret.

  THE TAXI GARAGE was crowded, waiting for the shift change, but Ray Derring’s slot was empty as always when the Lexus pulled in. “Hey, Tony,” the guys around the poker table said, nodding but keeping an eye on their cards. They hadn’t been expecting Tony, but they hadn’t not been, either. Derring, like a lot of rich guys who lived uptown, sometimes got driven downtown. A bunch of them paid a monthly fee to keep their cars off the street and give their drivers a place to hang between when they dropped them off and picked them up. Otherwise, the drivers would have to drive home in the fancy car, then maybe turn right around and take it out again, exposing it to cabbies like them and all those drivers from Jersey for what? The rich guys chipped in for extra security, and the fleet owner liked that, but the drivers thought it was a crock. Like some mook was going to come in here and screw with a rich guy’s car. With them there? They were the real security. Especially for Derring. None of them had met him—of course not—but at both Christmases since he’d started here, Tony had shown up with envelopes for each and every one of them. He brought big bags of chocolate eggs for their kids at Easter and rosewater jellies for the Pakistani guys at the end of Ramadan. Those rosewater jellies were awful unless you were a Pakistani, but the point was, they all agreed Ray Derring was a stand-up guy, even if he had more money than God.