“Didn’t want to soil your clothes?”
“I never knew the driver would be shot. And Rudolph’s better off dead anyway.”
Still no sign of emotion. She might have been describing a boring dinner party to a friend. “But the driver could have identified you. You must have known he’d have to be killed.”
“It was George’s plan,” she shot back.
Somehow Joe D. couldn’t picture her as a passive participant. “Who else was in on this?”
“Stuart Arnot knew all about it, of course.” She said his name as if it hurt her lips to pronounce it.
“And Williams?”
“No, he knew nothing.” A surge of feeling seemed to overtake her momentarily. A second later it was gone. “He’s innocent, I assure you.”
“Did you know that your husband and Arnot were planning to leave the country tomorrow?”
She nodded. “They were planning to stop in Grand Cayman to make financial arrangements, and then they were going to some island nearby. George never told me which one. At that point he’d be as good as dead. Stuart was to stay only a week or two. When he got back he was going to resign from the Alliance and slowly end his life up here. Eventually he was to move to the Caribbean full time.”
“And you’d be free to marry Williams.”
“Oh, please. Anything but marriage.” But she sounded nervous and insincere saying this, as if afraid to admit that marriage was what she really wanted.
“Then why did you go along with this, if you didn’t want to remarry?”
She waited before answering. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with someone, even in separate bedrooms, who finds you physically undesirable?” She paused, as if waiting for a response. “Physically repulsive?” Her voice quivered over the word, and she put a reedy arm on the table for support. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt as if I were being reproached every day of my life. To half of New York I was the quintessence of style. To my husband I was a piece of baggage to have on his arm at social functions. But with Ken…with Kendall I felt like a woman. I felt desirable.” Her voice dropped to a gruff whisper. “Loved.”
As she spoke the polish in her voice peeled away to reveal deeper and deeper shades of Mississippi.
“I didn’t even love George, really. Or maybe I did, who knows? I know he didn’t love me. I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with was knowing that he found me loathsome. When he proposed his scheme to me I had no choice. I couldn’t go on living with him. One of us had to disappear.”
“You must have known when you married him that…”
“Oh, I knew, I knew,” she broke in. “I knew he had the money I needed to go where I wanted to go. When I met George he lived in three rooms in a high-rise on Third Avenue.” She shook her head, as if she’d found him in a ghetto. “With white walls and these framed posters all over the place. And he had millions! I may have been only an assistant at an ad agency, but I knew it was a sin to waste the kind of money George had. And I knew how to spend it, put it to its best use.” She smiled, and her eyes narrowed, as she recalled the pleasure of deploying her husband’s assets. “As for the sexual part, I knew after a few dates that he wasn’t interested in me that way. In any woman. I guess I figured I could, I don’t know, persuade him. As it turned out, I could as easily have persuaded him to take a ninety-percent markdown on his entire inventory as make love to me.” She chuckled bitterly at this. “Or maybe I thought I could live without that…that part of marriage. So, when no one was looking we went our separate ways. And when they were looking, George held my hand and smiled and pretended he wouldn’t rather be holding a dead cod.”
Her voice was all drawl now, less Southern than merely tired, spent. She seemed to be relishing the chance to explain herself, and Joe D. worried that she had much more to explain. He didn’t know how much more he could take, but he did have one more question.
“Still, Mrs. Samson, you drove up to Westchester and kidnapped Arthur Rudolph…then you delivered him to his murderer…all because your husband found you…” He hesitated before the word repulsive, and sought in vain for a gentler euphemism. “All because he was homosexual?”
“I suppose I could bear it so long as I saw no alternative. But once I’d met Ken…You know, dieters know that it’s sometimes easier to lose weight by fasting than by eating just a little. Abstinence is easier to bear than resisting temptation. Before I met Ken I was fasting. Then I got a taste of what I’d been missing and I became desperate. I’d have done anything to get out of my marriage.”
The door opened and a stocky, silver-haired man entered. Joe D. assumed it was Mona’s attorney. He looked confused until he spotted his client in the corner. Then he looked startled. “My god, Mona, what’s going on here?”
She looked broken, leaning against the table, her head bowed. She glanced up at her lawyer without betraying any relief at seeing him. “It’s over. All over.” Ova, owl ova, is how it came out. The dreamy quality of her voice made Joe D. think that she was referring not to the events of the past two weeks, but to her entire masquerade of a life. The houses. The clothes. The jewelry. The sham marriage.
Ova, owl ova.
Thirty-Four
Joe D. and Detective Rice left Mona Samson and her lawyer, who had requested a private conference with his client. They headed for a nearby office where Rudolph, Junior, was waiting. Joe D. excused himself and looked for a pay phone. He dialed directory assistance and got the number for Airways Charter. Karen Schmidt answered, as she had before, and after just a few questions, she confirmed a theory Joe D. had been developing for the past twelve hours.
He hung up and went in search of Rudolph and Rice. He found instead a commotion in progress. Three or four cops were milling around an open doorway while others were fanning out along the corridors.
“What’s happening?” Joe D. asked one of the cops.
“Guy bolted. A suspect or something.”
Joe D. looked into the room. Rice was talking to two other cops in a small room that looked like it had recently been someone’s office, but was now unoccupied. There was an oversized steel-case desk pushed against a wall covered with smudges where papers had once been taped up. Two guest chairs in flaking green vinyl were the only other pieces of furniture. “There you are,” Rice said when he spotted Joe D. “Rudolph’s gone.”
“Shit,” was all Joe D. managed.
“We’d’a had him under tighter security if we’d’a known he was a suspect,” Rice said. “I thought we was just questioning him. Was he a suspect?”
“Still is,” Joe D. said. “You searching the building?”
“My guys are. But we figure he’s outta here by now. You got his home address?”
Joe D. gave it to Rice, but he didn’t think Rudolph was headed home. He excused himself and walked quickly out of the building. He flagged a cab and gave the driver Joanna Freeling’s address.
Joanna had never struck him as the forgiving type, so he wasn’t surprised to find Rudolph in the vestibule of her building in Soho, whining into the intercom. He didn’t seem to notice when Joe D. opened the outside door and joined him in the tiny space.
“Joanna, please. Just let me up. Please.” His voice was faltering over every word. “Joanna, are you there?” He pressed the buzzer and held it for a few seconds. “Joanna, please.”
A moment later the voice of Rudolph’s Rapunzel crackled through the small metallic speaker. “Get the fuck out of my life,” it said. Rudolph, far from being put off by this, seemed encouraged by her response. At least it showed she was listening. “Just five minutes, that’s all. Five minutes and I’ll go.” But Joe D. had heard the intercom click off; she wasn’t listening any more.
“Give it up, Arthur,” Joe D. said calmly. Rudolph turned around slowly and looked at him, not a shred of surprise or anxiety evident. “I need to explain to her,” he said pitifully.
“She doesn’t want to hear.”
“I’ve
left notes for her, messages. Why won’t she listen?”
Rudolph seemed to have an almost childlike belief in second chances; he seemed incredulous that Joanna wouldn’t speak to him. And he seemed utterly convinced that five minutes with her would change her mind. Joe D. thought of her “paintings” and knew that Joanna Freeling was not a woman of vacillating convictions.
“You shouldn’t have run out on the cops,” Joe D. said evenly.
“But I had to see her.”
“You’re going to be arrested for George Samson’s murder, you know that.”
Rudolph nodded sadly. “How did you know?”
Joe D. was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the tiny, airless vestibule. And he couldn’t be sure that Joanna wasn’t listening in, not that it would make much difference. “How about I buy you a drink?”
Joe D. didn’t wait for an answer. He took Rudolph by the elbow and led him back onto Grand Street. He remembered seeing a bar on Spring Street. They walked there together in silence. Inside, he put Rudolph at a table and ordered draft beer for both of them from the bartender. The bar was new but had been carefully decorated to look like a dive from the early fifties. It was just noon and the place was empty, which enhanced the seedy atmosphere the owners so coveted.
Joe D. drained half his beer while Rudolph simply regarded his, as if it offered a clue to something he needed to know. “Mona Samson had an alibi for last night,” Joe D. began. “She was with her lover. Not the best alibi, I’ll grant you, but then she had no reason for killing a man who was already supposed to be dead. I was with Samson’s body when Arnot arrived. He’d have to be some actor to fake his reaction to seeing his lover’s corpse. The only other people with a motive for making sure Samson was really dead were you and your father. I had a hunch your father was already dead. That left you.”
“Process of elimination?” Rudolph said, almost fliply. “That’ll really impress the DA.” Joe D. was pleased that Rudolph was regaining some measure of self-defense. It was easier to take than moroseness.
“But I still had one question. How did you know that Samson was alive, and how did you know where to find him? Then it hit me. Samson was using your father’s passport to leave the country. He booked the plane using your father’s name. Your name, Arthur. So what I figure happened is this: Someone, either at the charter company or maybe Arnot’s secretary, Estelle Ferguson, tried to contact Arthur Rudolph Senior and got you instead. And that led you to the New York Art Alliance yesterday evening.”
Rudolph was nodding now, as if only dimly recalling the events Joe D. was describing.
“A while ago I called Airways Charter. Sure enough, the dispatcher had tried to contact Arthur Rudolph yesterday afternoon to confirm the flight that was supposed to take off this morning. Only the number she rang didn’t answer. It was the number Stuart Arnot had given her, the private number in his office. No one but Stuart answered that line. If he isn’t in his office, no one picks up. He must have been out of his office yesterday afternoon, when the dispatcher called. So she did the logical thing. She tried to call him at home. But “Arthur Rudolph”—Joe D. made quotes in the air—“hadn’t left his home number. So she looked it up in the phone book. And called you. She got Junior instead of Senior, but she probably wasn’t aware of this.”
Joe D. waited for Rudolph to respond, but he didn’t.
“That must have blown your mind, to find out that your father was chartering a plane to the Caymans. The dispatcher said she left a message on your answering machine, and that when you called her back it was almost six. Somehow you convinced her to give you your father’s’ office number—Arnot’s private line. You called that number, didn’t you? And who should answer but George Samson?”
“You have no proof of any of this,” Rudolph said. But he sounded defeated.
“My guess is that Samson answered the private line after business hours.” And why not? Estelle had told him it had only been installed a few weeks ago, more than likely in anticipation of Samson’s hiding out in the office. Arnot was probably the only person who knew the number, though he must have given it to the charter company. “Did you recognize Samson’s voice right away? Or did you just realize it wasn’t your father?”
Rudolph said nothing.
“Look, you might as well answer. We have proof that you’re one of only three people who knew where Samson was hiding out last night. The other two have alibis. You’re screwed any way you look at things.”
Rudolph considered this for a while. “I knew his voice the moment I heard it. It wasn’t a conscious thing. Joanna and I had dinner with him a few times. When he answered the phone he said something like ‘Is that you?’ I guess he was expecting someone. I said something like ‘George Samson, back from the grave.’ There was a long silence. Then he hung up. I called right back. It rang forever before he answered. He didn’t say anything, just picked up the receiver and listened. So I told him who I was, and that I knew who he was, and I was going to call the police. That’s when he finally spoke. He told me he had my father with him, and that he’d kill him if I called the cops. He told me to come over and he gave me the address.”
“You brought a gun with you?”
“No! I wasn’t planning on killing him. I just wanted to find my father. Samson opened the door for me and took me upstairs to that office he was living in. I asked him where my father was. And he told me. He told me everything. How Mona had taken my father from his nursing home. How he’d murdered him in that cab. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I guess I was too stunned to think what he was going to do next. What he did was pull a gun on me.”
Self-defense, Joe D. thought, relieved. Rudolph had killed in self-defense. “He couldn’t let you live, not when you knew he was still alive.”
“As soon as I saw the gun I went crazy. I wasn’t even scared, just crazy. Joanna, my father, now this. I went nuts. We were only a few feet apart and I just ran at him. He got one bullet off, but it missed me. I knocked the gun out of his hand and grabbed it. Then I shot him.”
Rudolph’s account of what happened jibed with the physical evidence—the scratches and abrasions on Samson’s wrist, which he’d gotten trying to hold onto his gun, and the bullet hole in the plaster on one wall of the conference room. “Sounds convincing,” Joe D. offered.
“It’s the truth! I don’t regret that I killed him, not after what he did to my father. He ruined his mind and then he killed him. I’d shoot him again if I could.”
“I’d keep that thought to yourself.” Rudolph was sweating now, as if, in recounting the events of yesterday, he was reliving them. “What did you do after you shot him?”
“I left the building and went back to my apartment. The gun’s there, by the way. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I took it with me.”
“The police will want to look at it. If it was Samson’s, it’s bound to be the same gun used to kill your father and the cabbie.”
“What do you think will happen?”
“I’d say you have a good shot at a self-defense plea. Samson himself was guilty of…”
“No, with Joanna,” Rudolph interrupted.
“Forget her, Arthur. She’s not worth it.”
“You don’t know her,” he shot back angrily, displaying genuine emotion for the first time since entering the bar.
Joe D. didn’t know her well, but he thought he understood her. If Rudolph wasn’t already broken he’d tell him that Joanna was like her paintings, easy to read but hard to admire. “We should head uptown,” he said. “And you should call a lawyer.”
Rudolph waited a few moments, lost in thought, doubtless of Joanna. Then he stood up abruptly, almost violently. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Thirty-Five
Seymour Franklin told Joe D. he’d send a check, but Joe D. insisted on picking it up himself. He’d spent ten days on the case at $300 each, plus expenses, which were minimal. After putting away a third for taxes
, he’d be left with two thousand dollars. Half of that would go toward his share of the monthly mortgage and maintenance payments. That would leave him one thousand dollars until the next assignment rolled in. April was, unfortunately, one of the shortest months, which meant that next month’s mortgage and maintenance payments would be due painfully soon. Maybe that’s why April’s the cruelest month.
Joe D. had called Franklin at his home. A maid had answered and said Mr. Franklin was at his office. At first Joe D. was surprised at how quickly Franklin had gotten a new position. Then the maid gave him the number and Joe D. recognized the exchange right away: Samson Stores.
“With Mona more or less out of commission, I was invited by the board to resume my responsibilities,” Franklin explained on the phone. “I have you to thank for that.”
Joe D. let this ride. There was nothing particularly satisfying about the resolution of the case. Samson was dead, for real this time. Arthur Rudolph, Junior, was free on bail, awaiting a trial in which he’d plead self-defense and probably get a suspended sentence; Mona Samson was also free on bail, awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit fraud and murder. Arnot was cooperating with the police and was awaiting sentencing for conspiracy to commit fraud but not murder. Estelle was dead, the true victim in this whole affair, along with the cabdriver. And Seymour Franklin was back in charge of Samson Stores. Somehow Joe D. just didn’t feel like celebrating. Franklin said he’d leave a check with his secretary.
Joe D. introduced himself to the receptionist on the executive floor of the Samson Stores Building, and waited a few moments for Franklin’s secretary to come get him. You’d never know from the orderly, efficient atmosphere of this place that its founder had just been killed while trying to escape with his male lover to the Caribbean, and his wife and largest shareholder had been indicted for murder. It seemed that Samson had after all created something bigger than himself, something that had a life of its own and would continue to churn out profits with or without him.
Vanishing Act Page 20
