The Bequest

by Nancy Boyarsky

  She rested her head against the back of the seat and thought about the events of the past week. When Reinhardt failed to meet her at Heathrow, as they’d arranged, she’d tried to call him but only managed to get his voicemail.

  Not knowing what else to do, she’d taken a cab to his Knightsbridge bachelor pad and let herself in. She’d slept there a couple of nights. Finding the place too lonely, she’d found a reasonably priced B&B and sent him yet another message, telling him where to find her. She kept herself busy with the usual round of museums, shops, and plays between attempts to reach him. But there was no response.

  She knew in her heart that he’d eventually turn up, explaining that he’d been called away for work—no details, no whats, whys, or wheres. Yet she couldn’t help fearing that something had happened to him. At other moments she felt aggrieved and abandoned. And, as disappointing as this week had been, she now understood that a much larger disappointment lay ahead. Their romance was doomed. He was in law enforcement, and he’d warned her from the beginning that his job came first. He had no control over when he’d be sent on an assignment or when he’d return.

  He’d been working for Scotland Yard when they’d met the year before, just as her marriage was coming apart. Since then, she’d gotten a divorce, and she and Reinhardt had met for a long weekend almost every month. The previous holiday had been four glorious days in Majorca before he’d been called away for work.

  It was on that trip when he told her he’d left Scotland Yard and was now working for another agency. He refused to say which one.

  “Is it MI6?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I think you watch too much television,” he said, still not answering her question. “This means I’ll have longer assignments, but also more time off in between. It will be a good thing—good for us.” He told her that he loved her. But what did that mean in terms of the future? She wanted marriage and a family. As far as she could tell, he wanted to keep on doing what they were doing between episodes of whatever mysterious activities he was involved in.

  She was startled when someone knocked on her window. It was a plain-clothes detective. Leonard was already out of her car. She opened the door and got out, too.

  “We’ve been through the house and taped it off,” the detective said. “Crime scene technicians should be here any minute. Come sit in my car so we can go over what happened here.”

  She followed him. He was middle-aged, balding, and somewhat overweight. He had an odd way of walking, holding his arms slightly out from his body, like a gunslinger getting ready to draw. She wondered if his odd gait was left over from years walking a beat, when he really did wear a gun on his hip.

  When they got into his car, it was uncomfortably hot, the air heavy with old car smell—a stale combination of cigarette smoke and air freshener. He turned on the air conditioner.

  He pulled out a notebook and poised his pen over a page. “I’m Detective Frank Miller, and you are?”

  She told him her name and handed over her driver’s license before he had a chance to ask.

  “So how do you know Mr. Blair?”

  “I worked with him at Bascomb, Rice, Smith & Di Angelo. It’s a law firm in Century City. I’m the office manager. He was our investigator. He didn’t show up at work last Wednesday, and he couldn’t be reached by phone. So I came out to check on him.”

  “Yeah,” he said. As he jotted in his notebook, he kept talking. “He used to be a cop. On vice. Kind of a famous guy in his day. You know that?” Then without waiting for an answer, he looked up at her. “You have a relationship with him?”

  The question took her by surprise. Robert was almost twice her age, tall and gaunt, with thinning gray hair. If he’d been good looking once, those days were long gone. But it was more than that. He was so basically closed off, so emotionally detached she couldn’t imagine him having a romantic relationship with anyone.

  “No,” she said. “I knew him through work. We were friendly but never socialized outside the office, except for an occasional lunch. And I helped him with cases when my own work was slow. That was it.”

  “O-h k-a-y” he said, drawing out the word as if he didn’t believe her. That comment and the skeptical way he looked at her put Nicole on alert. What was going on?

  “What kind of cases you work with Blair?” he said.

  “The firm mainly represents large corporations,” Nicole said, “So we handle their legal matters. For example, we research companies our clients might be in litigation with. We might take a look to see if they’re hiding assets through shell corporations. We also handle some matters for executives of the corporations we represent: divorces, prenups, that sort of thing. We do sexual harassment cases. Occasionally we’ll take on a minor criminal matter, usually involving someone connected with a corporate client.”

  “How do you get your information?”

  “The usual,” she said. “We use Internet searches plus several databases for background checks. We start there, find out what we can. Then we decide if we need to interview someone, locate witnesses—whatever.”

  “What about this house?” he said. “He own it?”

  “I don’t know. This is the address we’ve had in his file since he started at the firm.”

  “When was that?”

  “About six years ago. If you want an exact date, I can check,” she said.

  “So, how much do you pay your investigators?” He nodded toward the house, his meaning clear.

  “His base pay was around ninety thousand plus a year-end bonus, which could be as much as ten thousand if the firm had a good year. He also had his police pension, and he took on his own investigative cases on the side.”

  He nodded. “But a place like this? What’s it worth? Three or four million?”

  “Maybe there was family money,” she said.

  “OK. What about family?” he went on. “Who do we call?”

  “I don’t know. He never talked about his personal life.”

  “Could you call your office?” he said “Have them look up his personnel record and see if there’s someone we need to notify?”

  “Sure,” she said. She already knew what his personnel file said, but sensed that the less information she volunteered, the better. Detective Miller didn’t seem to believe what she was telling him, and she didn’t like his tone.

  When Robert first joined the firm, she’d been curious about him. She was always curious about the people she met. But he was such an enigma, she felt compelled to find out his story. She Googled him, then looked him up on one of the firm’s databases. It revealed his army record and his career as a police officer. There was no record of marriage or mention of family. Since then, in the years she’d worked with him, she’d never gotten to know much more than that.

  He was perhaps the most resolute loner she’d ever met—a self-contained unit with little use for other people and none for small talk with coworkers. The personnel record said he’d been with the LAPD for twenty years, the last ten as a detective in vice. In the line for next of kin, he’d written none, and he’d specified that the forty thousand dollar life insurance policy the firm provided go to a skid-row homeless shelter.

  In the rear-view mirror, she noticed several more vehicles pulling up behind them: an aging white minivan, a motorcycle with a helmetless rider, and a somewhat battered Toyota sedan.

  Miller glanced out the back window. “Paparazzi,” he said, with disgust. “Don’t look at them. Keep your head down, or you’ll be on XHN in a couple of minutes.”

  Nicole scrunched down in the seat. “Why would they be interested in this?”

  “Are you kidding?” Miller said. “This story is golden. Hero ex-cop, multi-million dollar house, murder. They can’t get enough of this stuff,” he said. “Of course it would be better if it was a movie star who got whacked, but on a slow news day, this’ll do. They’ll smoke it up, make it more sensational than it is.”

  The detective went on to ask more question
s: What time had she arrived? How did she get in? She explained that she’d taken keys from his desk but had found the gate and front door unlocked.

  “Can I have the keys?” he said. She dug them out of her purse and handed them over.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Now, do you mind if I have a look in your purse?”

  She knew what he was thinking. The bullet wound in Robert’s head, with no gun in sight. Silently she handed the bag over. He poked through it and handed it back.

  He had more questions: Had she entered the house? Had she ever been inside the house?

  When she answered “No,” she got that look again. “Did you touch anything?” he said.

  “No.”

  He stared at her a moment, then said, “Do you know of anyone who would want to kill him?”

  “No. I only knew him through work. As I said, he took on private clients on his own time. I have no idea what he did outside the office or who his friends or enemies might be.”

  A memory flickered, then a flashback of a scene she’d witnessed. “Wait,” she said, “Something happened a couple of months ago. I was coming back from lunch when I saw Robert heading toward our office building. I was across the street. A man walked up to him and started waving his arms and shouting. I didn’t catch what he was saying, but he looked really angry. He gave Robert a shove. This guy was taller than Robert and bigger, more solid. Robert is—was—fit, but thin and wiry. So I was really surprised when Robert grabbed this guy by the front of his jacket and slammed him against the wall. He leaned in close and said something to the man that seemed to deflate him. Then Robert let go and went into the building.”

  “What did the other guy do?” the detective said.

  “He turned and hurried off in the other direction.”

  “Do you have any idea who he was?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what did he look like?”

  “He was heavyset. Dark hair, a little long. Maybe in his thirties.”

  “Was he white? Black? Latino?”

  “White.”

  “If we showed you some photos, would you recognize him?”

  “I doubt it. I’d just walked out of the Century Plaza Hotel coffee shop. Our office is all the way across Avenue of the Stars. That’s a pretty wide street. I must have been seventy or eighty yards away. My eyesight is good, but that’s quite a distance.”

  Miller was writing this down in his notebook. Through the rearview mirror, she watched yet another batch of vehicles pull up: a coroner’s wagon, a second van with the LAPD insignia, and another two police cars. A couple of uniformed cops made the paparazzi move to the end of the block so the official vehicles could pull forward. Once everyone had reparked, the paparazzi—now numbering eight—scurried toward Robert’s house. They stopped just short of where two cops had been posted in front and began shooting pictures.

  Just then a shiny black Mercedes sports car with dark windows appeared around the corner and parked behind the fleet of vehicles. The driver got out and headed toward them.

  Nicole watched him in the rearview mirror. Miller followed her glance, then turned his head to look.

  “Who’s that?” Miller asked. “Someone you know?”

  “His name is Rick Sargosian,” she said. “He’s an attorney from work.”

  “You think you need an attorney?”

  “No,” she said, wondering why he was being such a jerk. “My boss thought I might be upset after finding a dead body, so he sent someone up here to look after me.”

  “You upset? You don’t look upset.”

  “Well,” she said, trying to hold onto her temper. “It was a shock. Robert was a friend. But I’m OK. I don’t think I need Rick. But—whatever.” Obviously, she thought, he was playing bad cop, but why? And where was the good cop? Wasn’t that how it was supposed to work? Could this guy possibly imagine she’d killed Robert?

  “We need you to come down to the station and make a formal statement about finding the body. How about tomorrow morning. Say, around eleven?”

  She agreed and he made more squiggles in his notebook. “Now, about the next of kin.”

  Nicole got out her phone and called Breanna at the office. She asked for Robert’s emergency contact information, then put the call on speaker and set the phone on the seat between herself and the detective. They could hear Breanna typing on the keyboard as she brought the record up. After a long moment, Breanna said, “There’s no next of kin. But, hey, this is weird. About a month ago, he went into the system and changed the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. It’s you, Nicole. He named you.”

  Nicole felt herself flush. She turned off the speaker and put the phone to her ear. “This makes absolutely no sense. Why would he do that?’

  “Don’t ask me,” Breanna said. “But he was always looking at you. Didn’t you pick up on that? I think he had a thing for you, Nicole.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. Then she recalled that he had asked her out. Just once, while her divorce was in progress, about nine months before. She’d refused, explaining that she was involved with someone. She remembered what Robert had said. “Fast work. Not even single yet and already taken. Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Someone I met in England,” she’d said, “when my marriage broke up.”

  Neither had mentioned it again, and Robert had gone on behaving just as he always had. The perfect gentleman.

  “Thanks, Breanna,” she said. “I’ll be back at the office in a half hour or so.”

  She turned to the detective. He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure there isn’t anything else you want to tell me?”

  She looked at him. “I’ve told you everything I know.” She opened the door of the car and stepped into the hot, gusty wind.

  Sargosian was waiting on the sidewalk. By now, the paparazzi had noticed and began rushing toward her.

  Spotting them, Sargosian put a protective arm around her and hurried her toward his car. “Don’t look at them,” he said. “Keep your head down.”

  The paparazzi began shouting questions: “What’s your name, honey?” and “You know the dead guy?” “Who is it?” and “You his girlfriend?”

  By now they’d reached Sargosian’s car. He opened the door for her, still shielding her from the paparazzi. Oddly, they seemed completely uninterested in Sargosian. As he walked around to the driver’s side, the cameras remained focused on her.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, as he got in and started the car. “They can’t shoot pictures through the tinted windows. You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks for driving all the way up here. The police are done with me. I want to go back to the office, but my loaner car is parked up near the house, and I don’t think I’m going to get to it any time soon.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “It’s almost one. You look like you could use a drink. There’s an Umami Burger over the hill on Ventura. We can get lunch, and they have a full bar.”

  She thought about it. She hadn’t eaten breakfast on the plane and was beginning to feel hungry. Her hands were still shaking; she was, in fact, trembling all over. A drink sounded like a good idea. As for having lunch with Sargosian, she knew how to handle men like him.

  At lunch he was mainly interested in finding out about the murder. He asked her what she’d seen and what she knew about Robert. He was openly dubious about Robert’s ability to afford the big house by any legal means. “A multi-million pad on that hill—doesn’t it seem a little strange to you?” he said. “One look at that place, and you know this guy was working some kind of angle.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, frowning at him.

  He hesitated, then said, “I’m just saying. It doesn’t add up. He used to be on the vice squad, right? Didn’t you hear about the flap last year when the police commission wanted to monitor the bank accounts of officers on the vice and narcotics squads? Those guys run up against temptation every day. Maybe Blair didn’t turn over evidence on
a regular basis. Maybe he put it in his piggy bank, saving up for his dream house.”

  She felt indignant on Robert’s behalf, even though she’d been harboring the same thoughts herself. “He might have had family money. Did you consider that? Maybe he had a trust fund. Is that so impossible?”

  He studied her face for a moment and his expression softened. “You’re right,” he said. “I was speaking out of turn. He was your friend, and now he’s dead. I’m sorry.”

  To her surprise, Sargosian turned out to be decent company. He seemed on his best behavior, having left most of his big-bad-wolf persona behind. She noticed, not for the first time, his good looks—the dark wavy hair, the expressive brown eyes. His nose was perhaps a little bigger than it should be, but the cleft in his chin made up for it. He wasn’t handsome like Reinhardt, of course, who was in a class of his own. Despite Sargosian’s effort at good manners, he still showed traces of his smarmy, womanizing self. But he was solicitous of her feelings and struck just the right note as a sympathetic listener.

  Before long, the image of Robert’s dead body, that wry expression on his face, and—almost as bad—the news about his life insurance started eating at her. Today’s events had pushed aside thoughts of her missing lover and her lonely stay in London. But now they surfaced again, and she found it hard to focus on the conversation. She’d taken only a few bites of her burger when she put it down.

  She waited for him to finish eating. Then she said, “I just got back from a trip, and I’m really jet-lagged. I think I’ll take the rest of the day off.”

  Sargosian insisted on driving her to her condo. He contended that the police and the paparazzi would still be at the murder scene where she’d left the car. “Besides,” he added, “you’re too upset to be driving. I’ll send a couple of interns up to Robert’s house to get the firm’s car. They can caravan back to the office.”

  “But I left my suitcase in the trunk,” she said.

  “No worries,” he said. “I’ll have them drop it off at your place.”

  She thought he was carrying things a bit far, but she was too tired to argue. He waited at the curb in front of her building while she unlocked the door to the lobby and turned to wave at him. He waved back, then drove away. She took the elevator to her second-floor condo and went straight to bed.