by Al Roker
“Who do you think is paying Felix?” Lee asked. “And don’t tell me the Mossad or the CIA.”
“The dead guy worked for Carl Kelstoe,” I said.
“And Kelstoe is engineering all this because of his political convictions?”
“You’re asking who the guy is behind the guy behind the curtain? Hell, I don’t know.”
“It’s a bit speculative,” Lee said. “Well, Mr. Parkhurst? Care to fill in the blanks for us?”
“What are you talking about?” Ted said. “You’re as mental as he is.”
“This would be the time to unburden yourself,” Lee told him, “while you can still put some spin on the facts.”
“You don’t expect … What is it you want from me?”
“The truth,” I said.
He was staring at Lee. “The truth is what you don’t want to hear, that I’m an innocent man.”
“Why would an innocent man try to kill Bettina?” I asked. “We’ve got you cold on that. What made you risk that? Did she see you untied and roaming around that basement? Maybe Gault didn’t shoot her? Maybe it was you?”
“I was bound and gagged, you stupid hash slinger. You had to cut me loose.”
“There was somebody else in the basement,” I said. “Your partner had just enough time to put on your blindfold and gag, wrap a strip of duct tape around your ankles and wrists. Or you could have done it yourself, saving your wrists for last, wrapping the tape loosely and giving your wrists a final twist to make it look tight.
“But however you got tied up, just before you did, you made a stupid mistake.”
His eyes glared at me from behind his bangs.
“It was a thing you do a hundred times a day,” I said. “You brushed your hair back.”
“My hair?”
“When I found you on the ground, supposedly where you’d been for hours, your hair was pushed off your forehead. How could you have done that with your hands tied behind your back?”
He blinked, then said, “Gee, Billy, I think even Perry Mason would have turned up his nose at that kind of ‘evidence.’”
“They probably won’t need much evidence, Ted, with Bettina as an eyewitness.”
Ted looked at Lee. “There’s no proof of anything,” he said.
“We’ll just have to see how it all plays out, Mr. Parkhurst,” she replied. She leaned over him and used her left hand to brush his hair back.
His body stiffened, and he jerked his head away from her. The forelock flopped forward again.
Lee made a tsk-tsk sound and grinned at him.
Chapter
FIFTY-FOUR
The first police to arrive were several officers in uniform whose names I didn’t catch. They were followed by a pair of detectives. One of them, a young Hispanic-American woman named Juarez, read Ted his rights. She and her partner, an older black man named Gideon, asked the basic who-what-where-why questions. Then, satisfied that such action was appropriate, they and two of the uniforms took Ted off to the lockup.
A Detective Hawkline, a middle-aged white woman who was a dead ringer for the late Spencer Tracy, and her equally white partner, Detective Seestrunk, a thirtysomething beer keg with ears and bloodshot eyes, took more detailed statements from Lee, A.W., and, finally, me. Hawkline and Seestrunk, it turned out, were the lead detectives investigating the shoot-out at the Vosburgh mansion.
Since I had no idea how Lee had spun that situation, it was a good thing the detectives were working under the assumption that I had not been involved. They knew who I was. They knew I was a person of interest in the Gallagher murder investigation. They did not know why I wound up being a witness in what appeared to be an attempted murder in the hospital. That was the focus of their questioning, which was done primarily by Hawkline.
I kept my story as close to the truth as I could. Because I had received threats on my life, my employer, Commander Vernon di Voss, had hired InterTec to make sure I came to no harm. Bettina Noor was one of my bodyguards. When I learned of her misfortune, I decided to visit her in the hospital, where I and my other bodyguard, A.W. Johansen, interrupted Ted Parkhurst attempting to smother Ms. Noor.
Seestrunk seemed satisfied with my explanation. He appeared to have something more important on his mind, like hitting the nearest bar and grill. Hawkline, on the other hand, was one of those dog-with-a-bone investigators.
“Any idea why Mr. Parkhurst should want to kill Miss Noor?” she asked.
“No idea.”
“But you knew Mr. Parkhurst? Had what might be described as a friendly relationship with him?”
“I’d thought we were friends.”
“Was he a friend of Miss Noor’s, too?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She changed the subject, asking if Detective Solomon would corroborate my “story” about the death threats. I replied that I had not bothered to tell him about the threats, since we were in an adversarial situation and he didn’t seem to believe anything I had to say.
She nodded and looked at Seestrunk, who was focusing on a spider in a corner of the ceiling. She nodded again and asked if I knew why Bettina Noor had gone to a deserted mansion earlier that day.
I said that I did not.
She asked if I knew a man named Stephen Gault, and I replied that I did not know him.
“Could Miss Noor’s trip to the mansion have had anything to do with your death threats?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What about this Parkhurst guy? Think he might have been the source of the threats?”
“He’d be near the top of my list,” I said.
“Why do you think he’s got it in for you?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“And why would he have it in for Miss Noor?”
I was beginning to like Detective Hawkline and the way she threw those questions right across the plate. I actually wished I could lay it all out for her—Felix, the kidnapping, the whole works. Just unburden myself. But that would have been foolish. Instead I said, “I don’t know.”
“This gonna take much longer?” Detective Seestrunk inquired.
Detective Hawkline told him she thought it would and smiled when she said it.
Shortly after that, she got a phone call. She listened awhile, emitting little grunts of mild surprise. She made a few whispery comments behind her hand that I couldn’t hear, being neither a dog nor a teenager. Then she put away the phone.
“Good news for the bars in town, Seestrunk, you’re through here,” she said, rising. Her body was a little like Spencer Tracy’s, too.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Detective Hawkline gave me a look of bemusement. “Good-bye, Mr. Blessing,” she said. “I imagine Detective Solomon may be checking in with you to talk about those death threats.”
“I’d rather talk with you,” I said.
“I appreciate the compliment, if that’s what it is,” she said. “But we have nothing more to discuss.”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“The case against Theodore Parkhurst is no more. It expired with Mr. Parkhurst.”
“Say what?”
“Mr. Parkhurst died. Dead. Taking a dirt nap,” Detective Hawkline said over her shoulder as she followed Seestrunk out the door. “Good night, Chef Blessing.”
Chapter
FIFTY-FIVE
“You sure you’re up to this, chef dear?” Lee asked as she stopped her gleaming black Lexus in a passenger loading zone in front of Gin McCauley’s building.
“It’s better she find out from me than see it on the news.”
But we were too late.
Gin opened her apartment door, red-eyed, sniffling, and in her nightgown. The sweet-stale odor of whiskey floated on the air. A large TV monitor had taken over the living room since my dinner there just weeks ago. Filling its screen was footage of Ted Parkhurst in the Middle East chatting with soldiers, accompanied by voice-over biography.
/> Gin staggered back to the couch where she’d been watching her late fiancé’s life being picked to pieces by whatever gleeful talking heads the news channels had been able to round up during the dinner hours.
She muted the narration but continued to stare glassy-eyed at the roughly edited film clips. “What the hell, Billy?” she said. “They’re callin’ it a heart attack. Ted didn’t have any kind of heart trouble. And as for the other stuff, this talk about him tryin’ to kill somebody, where the hell is that comin’ from, anyway? It’s gotta be some kinda horrible mistake, right?”
“You have anything here to help you relax besides the booze?” I asked her.
“You mean drugs?” she said. “No. Ted got rid of mah stash. Called it mah pharmaco … pharma …”
“Pharmacopoeia,” I said.
“That,” she said, her eyes tearing. “Ted’s very anti-drug. Was very anti-drug. It’s all a mistake, Billy. The cops made a mistake. They arrested him by mistake and they did somethin’, you know, like, they overreacted and … did something that … caused him to …”
She shook her head. Then she grabbed a glass half-full of a very dark brown liquid and tried to down it in a gulp. I sat beside her and stopped her from inhaling the whole thing by twisting the glass from her grasp. Globs of whiskey hopped from the glass and spilled down her face and neck, staining her gown.
She didn’t seem to notice. “Why would he try to kill a friend?” she asked me.
“A friend?”
“He said the phone call was from a friend,” Gin said.
“What phone call? You didn’t mention a phone call when we talked earlier.”
“When we talked earl—Oh, yeah, we did talk. You asked about his middle name. That was a weird question, Billy.” The whiskey was slowing her down, sending those neurons on to the big sleep.
“About the phone call Ted got?” I prompted.
“Uh-huh. We’d just gone to bed when his phone rang. Ah was kinda groggy, only caught a little of what Ted was sayin’. Somethin’ like, ‘Why can’t you handle it by yourself?’ And then he was out of bed and gettin’ dressed.
“Ah asked him where he was goin’, and he said a friend needed help an’ he’d be back in an hour if not soonah.”
“You have any idea who the caller was?” Lee asked.
“A friend was what he said.” She started crying again. “Ah don’t even know who his friends are. Maybe ah didn’t even know him.”
Gin was in a bad place and was going to be there for a while. Once Bettina awoke, Hawkline or some other investigator would probably put together the full story of the kidnapping and Gin would become the main course in a media feeding frenzy, until the next hot story broke.
“Is there some place you can go to … rest for a while?” I asked.
“Go? Ah can’t go anywhere, long as Ted needs me …”
With that, she slumped against the couch. The whiskey had done its job.
“Well, what now, chef?” Lee asked.
“We put her to bed,” I said. “And I look for her cellular.”
The latter required no effort. It was on her bedside table. I pressed the number she’d designated as “Hildy.”
Gin’s manager, Hildegard Fonsica, arrived at the apartment within twenty minutes. She seemed curious about Lee and how she fit into the picture, but she didn’t let that get in the way of her concern for her client.
She leaned over Gin’s now-snoring body, sniffed the air, then wrinkled her nose. “This was just booze?” she asked. “No pills?”
“She said no. She’d thrown them all away.”
“Good. Booze is bad enough. Thank God you called, Billy. I’ve had the goddamned TV off, plowing through some crappy scripts. Missed the whole mishegoss about Ted. Caught some of it on the cab over. Tell me all.”
I told her if not all then at least most, including the kidnapping and the part Ted played in it.
“That friggin’ buttlick,” she growled. “I never liked that smart-mouth prick.”
Note to self: Hildy not standing by to give Ted’s eulogy.
I told her why I thought Gin should drop out of sight for a while. Hildy took only a few moments to ponder the problem. “I got a client with a fully staffed getaway home in Bermuda,” she said. “She’s stuck in L.A. filming the world’s unfunniest sitcom. A hit, naturally. Which means the place is just sitting there. Leave it to me. I’ll get Ginger on her feet and out of here.”
“The police will want to talk to her,” Lee said.
“They’ll have to find us first.” Hildy looked down at Gin. “Just leave everything to Mama.”
Gin was lucky to have someone like Hildy in her corner. I sighed and decided the next time I saw Mr. Wally “pay me to watch you on TV” Wing, I’d kick him in his karmic ass.
Chapter
FIFTY-SIX
The Bistro was dark and had been for at least an hour when Lee and I arrived at the rear door. Since I’d received no call or message from Cassandra, I assumed that the evening had progressed much less eventfully at the restaurant than it had out in the real world.
Inside, I tapped in the alarm-canceling code, but the warning beeper continued. Then I remembered—new code. My second try did the trick.
The cooking aroma was chased away from the main rooms and the kitchen by the cleanup crew, but it tended to linger in the alcove where Lee and I stood. My stomach growled. “You get anything to eat at the hospital?” I asked.
“Some kind of pudding,” she said. “White. Very sweet.”
“Tapioca,” I said. “A hospital favorite. I could whip up something a little more substantial.”
“It’s late,” she said, and headed up the stairs.
I cast a lingering look in the direction of the kitchen, then followed. That’s when I noticed she was carrying a slim briefcase. “What’s with the luggage?” I asked. “Planning on a work night?”
“It’s something you asked for,” she said. “Trina Lomax’s background check. I put an agent to work on it right after we talked.”
At the top of the stairs, to my dismay, she didn’t even hesitate in selecting the office over the living quarters. She clicked on the light and placed the briefcase on my desk. From it she removed several sheets of paper.
“This is just a quick first hit, but it includes some significant information.”
The biographical high points began with Trina’s birth on October 12, thirty-six years ago, in Tokyo, where her father, a designer in the automotive industry, had relocated. She’d attended the American School in Japan briefly before being sent back to the United States to board at Miss Porter’s in Farmington. There she did well academically, edited the school newspaper, played varsity tennis, yada, yada, yada.
I glanced at my watch. A little past midnight. The day had been a wearying one. I’d hoped that if I arrived on the set in a few hours yawning, it would be for reasons more romantic than reading up on Trina’s bio.
“What’s this note, ‘Farid Qedir at Avon’?”
“Qedir was a student at Avon Old Farms, a boys’ school near Miss Porter’s. He and Trina seem to have … bonded at joint socials,” Lee said. “They both spent their junior year abroad in Paris, cohabitating. They also attended Brown University.”
“And this is important because?”
Her face registered a mixture of sadness and regret. “It’s on the sheet, if you read further. Trina went on to join the news staff at CBS in Paris, and Farid Qedir returned to his homeland, Saudi Arabia. Am I boring you, chef? Would you prefer to discuss this in bed?”
“I would prefer to be in bed not discussing it.”
“This is important,” she insisted. “But I can summarize. While Trina’s star rose in the television news firmament, Farid was placed in a key position in Islamic World Health, a charity funded by a number of oil-wealthy Saudi sheikhs, chief among them his father.
“In 2002, customs agents in this country raided a web of so-called charities based in Herndon
, Virginia, that were suspected of helping to finance Islamic extremists here and in the Middle East. Many of these ‘charities’ had strong ties to similar Saudi organizations, including Islamic World Health. The following year, documents surfaced, including correspondence between Yasser Arafat and IWH, that linked the Saudi charity with several in the West Bank identified with Hamas. IWH was summarily closed down.”
I felt the yawn coming but was helpless to block it.
“Am I keeping you up?” Lee asked.
I was so tired I almost used the old punchline, “That’s what she said at the picnic.” But instead I managed, “No, please go on.”
“Well, here is the crux. The reason the documents surfaced is because a Mossad team captured an official of IWH and ‘convinced’ him to surrender them. That official was Farid Qedir. He died two days after he was released. A year later, to the date, the leader of that Mossad operation, Reuhen Fromm, a six-foot-two-inch muscular brute, was found in his home near Tel Aviv. His eyes, testes, tongue, and hands had been roughly removed. While he was still alive.”
Suddenly I was wide awake. “He just sat there?” I asked.
“He’d been injected with a drug. Vecuronium, of the curare family. Administered as it was there, without the proper sedation, it left its subject paralyzed but wide awake and in constant pain even before the ‘operation.’
“According to our sources, which are impressive, this marked the first appearance of the childish cat scribble, left in Fromm’s blood on his bed linen. The debut of our friend Felix.”
“I thought assassins were supposed to be dispassionate,” I said.
“I will spare you the description of what had been done to Farid Qedir,” Lee said. “Not that it justifies what Felix did.”
“I’m guessing that Trina was on assignment near Tel Aviv when Fromm was murdered?”
“She was preparing the special report on the West Bank for CBS that established her reputation,” Lee said. “It ultimately resulted in her being hired by INN as a sort of international roving reporter, given carte blanche to create her own documentaries. And to travel wherever she chose.”
