“Maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure. There were more than fifty credit card charge slips for the night of April fifteenth. Gary, the guy we met, knew most of the signers and was able to eliminate them. Quite a few chits were signed by women, so those were out, too. In the end, we were left with six that could have been signed by the mysterious stranger.”
“Did you recognize any of the names?”
“No. But I put one of my guys to work trying to trace them. We’ll just have to wait and see what he comes up with.”
“Do you have the list, by the way? I’m curious.”
“Affirmative. I brought a copy for you. I figured you’d want to see it. Here it is.” He handed Reuben a sheet on which were written six names:
Michael Rosen
Theodore F. Keith
Daniel Rense
Eskill Lander
J. Parke McLeod
Stuart Wiley
Reuben visibly started when he came to Lander’s name.
“I do know one of these people,” he said hoarsely. “Eskill Lander is one of my partners. He’s our senior trust and estates partner. He’s the personal attorney for Marina’s father. But I’m sure that’s merely a weird happenstance.”
“Couldn’t it be like a ‘chance literary coincidence’?”
Reuben shot him a cross look.
“Is he married?” Luis asked.
“Yes, he is,” Reuben answered. “Though I’m not sure how happily.”
“Ah, so maybe he was having a fling with Miss Courtland?”
“Impossible. Dan Courtland is a major, major client of Chase & Ward. Nobody at the firm in his right mind would mess with his daughter. You’ve met the man. With his views, he’d personally stone any adulterer fooling around with her. He’d fire Lander—and our firm—without a second thought.”
“But don’t forget he thought he was with Hallie Miller,” Bautista offered. “That was the name she was known at in the restaurant.”
“Oh God, of course you’re right.”
“No, maybe wrong. Your man Lander must have known Marina Courtland.”
“He told me he didn’t when we talked about the murder the other day. Said he only dealt with her through correspondence. I hate to say it, but we better take a hard look at him.”
“Right. I’m also putting my guys to work on all fifty charge chits, to see if anybody has a recollection of Marina’s date or the mysterious stranger with the cell-phone camera. And also to canvas the lunch ones to see if anyone might identify the first mysterious stranger who was with Marina.”
“That’s all well and good, but let’s see where we’re at,” Reuben said. He retrieved a yellow legal pad from his desk. “Let’s put down what we know, or don’t know,” he said. “Or what we think we know.”
“Number one, Marina had lunch at Quatorze Bis on the day of her death with a mysterious stranger.
“Number two, we think that Lander might be the second mysterious stranger.”
“If I can get a picture of Lander, I can see if the guys at the restaurant recognize him,” Luis said.
“That’s easy. God help us, there are pictures of each of the partners on the firm’s website. How the powers that be think that those ugly mugs will attract business I don’t know. But I can print a picture for you without any trouble. In fact, I’ll do it right now.” He clicked to the Chase & Ward website and started his printer.
Luis took the photo when it was finished. “I’m pretty sure the restaurant’s open tomorrow. I’ll stop by and see if they recognize this guy.”
“Number three,” Reuben went on, “we think that Marina and Lander were seen by a third mysterious stranger that knew Lander. I wish the hell we could get a lead on him, but I don’t know how—unless some other guest at the restaurant can help. Not very hopeful.
“All this depends, of course, on our guess that Waggerson444 on Meet.com was Lander. And we do think that, don’t we?”
“Hard to say,” Bautista replied. “His self-description doesn’t match what you’re telling me about him. Lander’s a lawyer, I assume with an LLB or a JD. Waggerson’s a ‘private investor’ with an MBA. Lander’s married; Waggerson’s divorced. Is the age right? The height? Eye color? Hair color?”
“Let’s check the print I just made of Lander’s picture,” Reuben said. Together they looked it over.
“Yes, those things seem right. Maybe a little fudging with the age. I think Lander’s older than forty-five. But not by too much,” he said.
“Waggerson and Lander could still be the same. Nobody reading his profile would know if he changed some of the details,” Luis said.
“Luis, how can we prove that one way or another? For my own peace of mind, I need to know whether my partner is a cold-blooded murderer.”
“As I told you before, Meet.com, and all its software, is located in Bermuda. The NYPD or the DA would have to serve process there to get the background information on Waggerson444. And I don’t even know if that’s possible.”
“Damn. It would probably take weeks to go that route. But without it, I don’t think you can just barge in on Lander and say, ‘Hands up! You’re under arrest!’”
“That’s for certain. I’m not about to tangle with a big New York legal honcho without a surer case than we’ve got.”
“Even if we prove he was at the restaurant that night with Marina, I suppose he could always say he was the family lawyer and he was talking some legal business over with her—”
“And with no idea what happened after they left Quatorze Bis.”
“I need another drink. How about you?”
“Okay.”
Reuben went to prepare the drinks, and also to apologize to Francesca and Cynthia for deserting them. “Press of business,” he told them.
“What do we do now?” Reuben asked when he returned. “I don’t see how we advance the cause, beyond getting the restaurant people to identify Lander.”
“Yes, that’s the first priority—which I told you I’ll do tomorrow. But, Reuben, I’m surprised at you. With your new interest in electronics, there are a lot of ways to trace a perp. There are twenty-first century methods.”
“Please, Luis. I hate that twenty-first century stuff. All our damn politicians talk about twenty-first century ‘problems’ or twenty-first century ‘solutions.’ Now you have twenty-first century ‘methods.’”
“Well at least I didn’t call them terrorist methods,” Luis retorted.
“Sorry for the outburst. Go ahead—what are the solutions you refer to?”
“Start with this, Reuben,” Luis said, taking up his friend’s pad and pencil.
“The first one’s easy. Taking the print you just made for me of Lander’s photo to Quatorze.
“Then, second, Lander, or whoever, had car keys in his hand when he left the restaurant. If the car was rented, we should be able to trace that.”
“I doubt that’s necessary. Eskill drives a brand-new Porsche, of which he’s very proud. He commutes to the office you know. With his car.”
“Where does he live?”
“Greenwich, Connecticut.”
“Really? Greenwich not ‘Boston’? Good. That means there’s a good chance he has an E-ZPass to pay the Triborough Bridge tolls. If Lander had one, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will have an exact record of when he took the bridge to go home to Greenwich, if that’s what he did that night. So that’s the second route to pursue.” Bautista wrote down E-ZPass.
“Then there’s the computer in Lander’s office,” he continued. “Again you may remember that all Waggerson444’s messages were sent during the daytime, usually first thing in the morning, I assume when he got to work. So he was diddling her from his office. Not from a laptop or whatever he’s got at home.”
“That sounds right. He was probably afraid his wife would find hi
m out if he arranged his trysts at home, under her prying nose.”
“That was a pretty dangerous game, though,” Luis said. “What if somebody went snooping on his office computer, or what if his secretary did?”
“He could guard against that,” Reuben said. “There’s a security system, and a password is required to open any office computer,” Reuben said. “And his secretary couldn’t get in to his PC unless he gave her his password.”
“Who knows the password?”
“Just the person who uses the computer.”
“No one else? What if one of your eminent lawyers drops dead, does that mean no one can get into his PC?”
“Oh, I forgot. There’s a master list,” Reuben answered. “The only copy is locked up in the office of the Executive Partner.”
“Can you find out Lander’s password from your Executive Partner?”
“That would be very tricky. Why do you ask?”
“If you can get the password that’s needed to open Lander’s computer and if I get a search warrant for his office PC, we should be able to find out if he ever visited Meet.com. We may not be able to get into his Meet.com file without his password for it—same problem we had with Marina’s file—but at least we can find out if he ever visited the site.”
Luis wrote down Lander’s office PC?
“Is there more?” Reuben asked.
“Yeah. His cell phone. He talked to Marina/Hallie on it. Unless he’s destroyed it, that phone should have a record of his calls to—or from—her. And, even if he’s gotten rid of it, we can get the call information from the provider.”
Cell phone was added to the list.
“We might just check his credit card records, too. You have to pay a fee to use Meet.com and you do that with a credit card.”
Luis put down credit cards.
“Amazing,” Reuben said. “It looks like you can build an electronic fence to trap someone pretty easily.”
“Well put,” Luis said. “That’s exactly what we want—an electronic fence around our murderer, whether it’s Lander or one of our other candidates.”
“Right now I think we’d better get going or we’ll be late for our reservation at Blue Hill.”
“Just let me add two more items: One, to check John Sommers’s alibi and, two, to pin down where Darcy Watson was that night.” He noted these down.
“All right, let’s go. What’s Blue Hill?”
“A first-rate restaurant, where everything comes straight from the owner’s farm. We’ve wanted to take you there for a long time.”
“I’m ready.”
“We can continue to talk there,” Reuben said. “It’s small and quiet. We can converse in riddles, in case there’s a Page Six spy nearby.”
Nineteen
Blue Hill
Before they left to go downtown to the restaurant, both Reuben and Luis told their wives about their suspicions concerning Eskill Lander. Francesca took the news calmly, not knowing the man and only glad—or hoping—that her husband’s open case would soon be closed. Cynthia, on the other hand, was incredulous.
“I’m shocked,” she said.
“No more than I,” Reuben replied.
“It really looks bad for him?”
“It’s too early to tell for sure. There are other possibilities Luis is still looking at,” Reuben said, not very convincingly.
Both men worried that they would probably be talking about the case over dinner, apologized for this, and cautioned Francesca and Cynthia not to speak Lander’s name aloud. He was to be known simply as “Mr. X.” And the mysterious lunch guest would be “Mr. Y.”
They were seated at a table in the back of Blue Hill, amply spaced away from other diners.
“I don’t know about any of you, but I need another drink,” Reuben declared. All agreed to join him except Francesca.
“I have to keep my wits about me to confront the you-know-whos when I get home.”
“If the truth be known, you probably need a drink more than any of us,” Reuben said.
Francesca laughed. “I would love to, but wine with dinner will be plenty for me. Mama-dos—that’s what my mother calls me—has to be careful.”
“And not papa-dos?” Cynthia asked.
“I can handle it,” Luis replied.
The foursome tried bravely to make small talk (mostly about the twins) but the conversation turned to the murder as soon as they had ordered their meals—New York State guinea hen for Francesca and Reuben, and poached Hudson Valley duck for Cynthia and Luis. Reuben also selected a 2003 Aalto Ribera del Duero as their wine.
“Luis,” Reuben began. “You wrote down a whole list of things you wanted to investigate. Can I ask just how you propose to go about it? The picture of Mr. X and the staff at Quatorze is easy. That’s the first.”
“Then there’s his E-ZPass,” Luis continued. “Assuming Mr. X has an E-ZPass, and it’s in his name, I can find out from the MTA when he used it, no problem. Then there’s the PC in his office. I can get a search warrant.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yes. Absolutely. Just have to clear it with my higher-ups and then go before a judge and show, as our manual says, quote, a reasonable belief that evidence of a crime will be found, unquote. Same with his cell phone. I can get a search warrant for that, too.
“There are only two little hitches,” he went on. “First, Reuben, you must get the password to open his PC from your Executive Partner. You say you can do that?”
“I hope so.”
“The second problem is: I don’t want to tip this guy off to what’s going on.”
“How can you avoid it?” Reuben asked.
“You don’t have to tell the person named in a search warrant about it. You just go to the premises listed—if the guy’s there, okay, but if he’s not, you don’t have to run around and find him.
“So here’s my proposal,” he continued. “You can serve a search warrant in New York anytime between six am and nine pm. So if I came to your offices around, say, seven pm on Monday and you are there to show me Mr. X’s personal office …”
“Oh my,” Reuben said. “I’m not very strong on the law of search warrants, but are you sure about what you’re saying?”
“Yes. Remember, all I want to do is to find out if Mr. X ever tried to reach Meet.com. Just that one thing. So I’m not interested in carrying off the PC, or the hard drive, or anything like that. So you show me his office, I find out the info I want and leave—probably in less than ten minutes. And it’s all copacetic, done under the protection of a search warrant.”
“It’s none of my business, but my guess is you may not find anything,” Cynthia interjected.
“You could be right,” Luis said. “But we have to start somewhere.”
“What if he’s erased the evidence? I erase hot stuff on our computer all the time. Like my love letters emailed to the Police Commissioner and the mayor,” Francesca said.
“Very funny, dear. There are about two dozen ways of finding out if someone has gone to a website and most people don’t know that. I don’t even know all the ways myself.”
Reuben sighed. “Well, Luis, I don’t like your scheme very much, prowling around my law firm, but I guess it’s necessary.”
“Good. I’ll get a search warrant from Criminal Court as soon as I can get clearance Monday and we can do the search at seven pm Monday night.”
“You, know, gentlemen, I haven’t heard a word about Mr. Y,” Cynthia said.
“That’s because we don’t know a damned thing about him,” Reuben grumped. “Just that he was older, like old enough to be Marina’s father.”
Each of the men had a touch of wine remaining in their glasses, so they raised a toast.
“Now, let’s have dessert. The chocolate bread pudding I saw go by looks de
licious—wonderful and delicious,” Reuben said. “And let’s talk about something else.”
“Now you say it,” his wife cracked.
“Just one other thing before we switch the subject. You had written down to investigate his credit card records. What about that?” Reuben asked.
“That’s a tricky one. It’s not clear when you subpoena credit card records if you have to notify the cardholder before you turn over information. We don’t want that to happen. It’s too bad Mr. X isn’t a Muslim, or a terrorist.”
“What do you mean by that?” Reuben asked.
“The FBI and Homeland Security, and probably ten other Federal agencies, snoop on people with Muslim names all the time. Just say ‘terrorist’ and all constraints are off.”
“Very attractive,” Cynthia said.
“I didn’t make the law, Cynthia. I’m just telling you the facts.”
“Let’s eat our dessert,” Francesca said.
They did, amid some further speculation about what the twins might be up to at the late hour.
“I just hope the sitter hasn’t been driven crazy by the two of them,” Francesca said.
Realizing how late it was getting, Reuben paid the bill and they left the restaurant.
“Call me after your visit to Quatorze,” Reuben said. “And try to get some rest.”
Twenty
A New Direction
“How did you sleep?” Cynthia asked her husband at breakfast Sunday morning.
“Very well,” he replied. “I dreamed of flocks of New York State guinea hens.”
“Well I didn’t. I was kept awake by a truly horrible thought. Made worse because it seemed so ridiculous.”
“Tell me.”
“It was just this: I remembered what you told me about your ‘Mr. Y’—Marina’s lunch companion. Didn’t you say that the restaurant people said he was old enough to be her father?”
“Yes.”
“My ridiculous thought was that maybe it was her father. Maybe it was Dan. Which puts him in New York the day of the murder.”
“Good God, Cynthia. That can’t be.”
“Think about it. Isn’t it possible he had a major confrontation with her over his romance with Darcy Watson? We know, or at least we think, she disapproved. And may even have been jealous. Wouldn’t be the first time an offspring resents a stepparent or potential stepparent. Just like Facini and Dan.”
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