Murder Saves Face

by Haughton Murphy

  After lunch he had dashed off in a foul snowfall to Brooks Brothers to buy a new black tie to wear to Anne Clifton’s on New Year’s eve, and then hurried home. Here the warmth of the silk paisley dressing gown his wife, Cynthia, had given him for Christmas, and the down comforter on his bed, were very welcome. He started reading an article in the magazine, a history of the helicopter by his old friend, Anthony Deere, but was soon fast asleep, not through any fault of Deere’s prose but rather the Gotham Club’s gin.

  Frost had not been asleep long when the telephone rang, just before four-thirty. He answered it groggily and was surprised to hear the voice of Charles Parkes, Chase & Ward’s Executive Partner, calling from the office.

  “Reuben, I’m sorry to disturb you so late on a Friday afternoon, but we’ve got a little crisis down here.”

  “That’s all right, Charlie. What is it?”

  “There’s been a murder.”

  “At Chase & Ward? Who, for God’s sake?”

  “An associate named Juliana Merriman,” Parkes said, going on to describe Henderson’s discovery of her body. “I’d already left for the day, but they caught me at the airport on my way to Palm Beach. I just now got back and decided to call you at once.”

  Frost shared Parkes’ horror at the news he’d been given, yet he couldn’t deny that he took satisfaction from the call. As a former Executive Partner, he always sympathized with his successors in the job, though in at least one case his feelings had not been reciprocated. He recalled with some bitterness the shabby, condescending treatment he had received at the hands of George Bannard during the investigation of the murder of Graham Donovan, their partner at Chase & Ward. How nice to be called while the body was still warm.

  “Could you come down here, Reuben?” Parkes asked. “The place is crawling with police. It’s a madhouse. We—I—need the benefit of your experience.”

  Frost sighed, but his adrenalin was already running. There was no way he would be kept away from Fort Bliss.

  “Of course, Charlie, I doubt that my ‘experience,’ as you call it, will be of much help, but I’ll be there as soon as I can get a cab. At this hour it may take a while, especially in this rotten weather.”

  “Come as soon as you can.”

  “Did I know her, Charlie. Merriman did you say?”

  “That’s right. You might have. She was quite senior. Been with us for over five years. And, I might say, very pretty. She was a lovely person and had a great future with us.” The Executive Partner sounded like he meant what he was saying and was not merely rehearsing for a future memorial service. “She was working for Bill Richardson at the end.”

  “I’m pretty sure I met her. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  Frost got a taxi outside his house on East Seventieth Street with surprising ease, even though it was still snowing. He directed the driver to go through Central Park—“this place is practically in the Hudson River and it’s easiest to cross the park”—and tried to think when he had met Juliana Merriman. He thought that he probably had done so at the recent Christmas party and one or two times before that; if she was the person he had in mind, she was indeed good-looking, with distinctive long hair. He shuddered to think of her corpse in the shelves of the firm’s library.

  Frost nodded to the long-time receptionist in Chase & Ward’s lobby at Clinton Plaza; her face pale and her eyes red from recent tears, she had obviously heard about Merriman. The forbidding desk behind which she sat and the high vaulted atrium, with its massive pillars and high walls encased in green marble, still daunted Frost; the idea of such a grandiose entry in a giant skyscraper would never have occurred to those running the firm back before he retired as a partner. (But, then, neither would having an office within blocks of Times Square.)

  Frost had hurried into the building and was still out of breath as he started up the escalator to the mezzanine, grasping the railing firmly. A young man he took to be an associate was riding in front of him. Unlike the receptionist, he seemed unaware of the horrifying discovery that had been made upstairs and attempted to make cheerful small talk with Frost.

  “Working right up to the end of the year, sir?” he asked jovially.

  Frost, who did not know his companion, replied, “I could say the same for you.”

  “You seem out of breath, Mr. Frost. You should get a key for the elevator and save the climb.” He gestured toward the remote ground-floor elevator, which bypassed the ride up the escalator to the regular elevator bank.

  “You mean the handicapped elevator?” Frost said.

  “Yessir.”

  “That’s for the lame, the halt and the blind,” Frost said. “I’m none of those, so I couldn’t get a key even if I wanted one. Which I do not, thank you,” Frost said, a bit grumpily.

  “Only kidding, sir.”

  “Well, happy New Year to you anyway.”

  Getting off the escalator, Frost slipped his personal magnetic identification card into the slot by the narrow turnstile and headed for Chase & Ward’s private elevators. Though he did not come to the new offices that often, and when he did it was to the retired partners’ enclave on the thirty-fourth floor, the receptionist on thirty-eight recognized him and greeted him almost with relief. She, too, had been crying.

  “Mr. Parkes is expecting you, Mr. Frost. Go right in.”

  Reuben hesitated, uncertain in which direction to go.

  “To the right, all the way to the end,” the receptionist said, pointing him in exactly the opposite direction from the one where he would have headed on his own.

  “Reuben!” Parkes called out, after Frost had negotiated the long, narrow and slightly forbidding corridor leading to the Executive Partner’s suite. “Thank God you’re here! This is one of the blackest days in the firm’s history. Can you believe it? One of our associates murdered right in our office? One of our better ones, at that. It’s absolutely ghastly! The police are tearing the place apart and everyone’s panicked. Or terrified.”

  “Tell me what you know,” Frost said, steadily. He was not without disturbed feelings himself, but felt that a business-like approach would calm his agitated successor.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll do that. Let me get Brian Heyworth up here. He knows part of the story.” Parkes got him on the telephone as he motioned Reuben to a seat on a long sofa.

  “Okay,” Parkes said, sitting down in a chair next to Frost. “One of our brand-new associates, fellow named Tom Henderson, was working in the library this afternoon—you know, there’s always somebody who has to have some grab-ass research done on Christmas Day, or the end of the year—and Henderson was stuck. About three o’clock he found Merriman’s body in the stacks—those new high-density ones, you know about them?”

  “Yes, one of the librarians gave me a demonstration a couple of months ago. I’d be afraid to go in them, for fear of being crushed.”

  “They tell me that’s impossible,” Parkes said. “All kinds of fail-safe releases. Anyway, Julie Merriman wasn’t crushed. The police say she was strangled and then dumped into those damned shelves. Right under the New Mexico Statutes Annotated, for God’s sake.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “No idea. We do know she didn’t show up for a closing this morning. Brian Heyworth can tell you about that—he had to close the deal for her. She was around yesterday, and last night, preparing for it. They alerted Joe Conklin, our security director, when she couldn’t be located, but he hadn’t turned up a trace of her before young Henderson found the body.”

  “She must have been killed sometime last night,” Frost said. “Even on a slow day before a holiday, I don’t think you choke somebody to death and drag the corpse around the office in broad daylight.”

  “That’s what the police think.”

  “What do we know about Merriman?” Frost asked.

  “I got her file just before you came. It’s right here somewhere. The police made everyone—or such few as were still around—leave their offices and
go to the cafeteria. There was hell to pay to extricate somebody who knew where the personnel files were. But anyway, here it is.” Parkes leafed through the dark-brown manila folder, seemingly relieved to shift from the grisly facts of Merriman’s death to the more neutral details of her biography.

  “She was thirty-two. Born in Portland, Oregon. Class of eighty-one at UCLA, graduated from Stanford Law School with high honors three years later. She came east in eighty-four and clerked for Ramsey Kendall on the Second Circuit. She joined us after her clerkship. First assigned to Bernie Straus and the bank group, then worked for Brian, then for Bill Richardson. Here’s her picture.”

  Parkes handed across a print of the ID picture of Merriman taken on her first day of work. “She was very beautiful, Reuben,” Parkes said. “Now, for Christ’s sake, she’s dead!”

  “Yes, I do remember her. Was she married?”

  “No. But Conklin’s already found out that she lived with a fellow named Marshall Genakis. Runs a restaurant a few blocks from here. Very original name, it’s called Marshall’s. Ever hear of it?”

  “I think so.”

  “If you’ve heard of it, Reuben, it must be very smart. Merriman and this Genakis apparently lived in one of those apartments next door.”

  While Parkes was speaking, Brian Heyworth came into the office. The two men were both around sixty, and had been admitted to partnership in Chase & Ward at the same time. This meant that they were in the same “class” and received exactly the same percentage of the firm’s profits; there the similarities ended. Parkes was the respected leader of the firm; he was slightly bumbling, which was endearing but deceptive, since it was conceded by even the most egotistical of his partners that he had a brilliant, incisive mind. Heyworth, on the other hand, was a marginal producer and required watching, and “respect” was not a word that came to mind when his partners discussed him.

  Frost thought the differences between Parkes and Heyworth were now evident in their appearances: Parkes tall and healthy-looking, Heyworth short and stocky; Parkes greeting all comers with a friendly, open countenance, Heyworth, with his turned-down mouth, facing the world with suspicion.

  “What a mess!” Heyworth exclaimed, once he had greeted Frost and sat down beside him. “I’ve never had such a day.”

  Frost assumed he was talking about Merriman’s death. As he chattered on, it became clear that the “mess” he was referring to was a combination of the necessity for him to close the transaction on short notice and having to stay around the office as the New Year’s weekend was beginning.

  “What happened, Brian?” Frost asked him.

  “Let me start at square one. Bill Richardson got hold of me earlier this week and said he might need some help on the On-Line transaction Juliana Merriman was working on. He said he was going to be in and out—traveling to Detroit—and wanted very much to take today off. He thought I was the logical choice because Merriman had worked for me before she switched over to him. My schedule wasn’t that full, so I told Bill I’d help out if necessary.

  “Then, this morning, about ten o’clock, I got a panicked call from Bill, out in East Hampton. He’d been called by Beth Locke, the paralegal working on the deal, who’d told him that Merriman hadn’t shown up this morning. Locke had tried her at her apartment and was told—I guess by the guy she lived with—that she wasn’t there. He said he’d assumed she’d been here all night getting ready for her closing.”

  “She hadn’t gone home to bed? Even though her apartment was less than a block away?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “When had he last seen her?”

  “Dinnertime last night. He said they ate at home and then she came back to work. Since he didn’t know where she was, and since no one else had a clue, I was stuck trying to glue the damn closing together.”

  “It had to be done today, I suppose?” Frost asked.

  “Oh, yes. There were tax-loss carryforwards that would expire if we didn’t close.”

  “Just what was the On-Line deal?”

  Parkes and Heyworth filled him in and Parkes explained how the firm had come to represent Alan Lovett and Applications Unlimited.

  “Pretty good, Charlie, having new business brought in by your associates,” Frost commented when they had finished. “You did get it closed, I assume?” he asked, turning to Heyworth.

  “Yes, Julie and Beth Locke had all the papers laid out in a conference room downstairs. The merger documents were pre-positioned in Delaware, so we were in good shape there. But it was still bloody confusion. We barely made the fund transfer cutoff of two o’clock. The usual bankers’ screwup.” Heyworth recounted his “war story” of getting the “dumb bankers” to transfer the funds involved to the right account at the right time. Reuben tuned out to contemplate the career of Brian Heyworth.

  He reflected that, in the years he had seen it operate, the system for selecting new partners at Chase & Ward had worked pretty well, consistently producing a flow of new blood to uphold the firm’s top-drawer reputation. But no system was perfect, he reasoned, and Brian Heyworth was living proof of that.

  Heyworth had been sponsored for partnership back in the late fifties by old Phineas Ward, one of the founders of the firm. He had served as Ward’s bag-carrier in the latter’s declining years and, out of gratitude, Ward had pushed hard for his admission. Because of Ward’s possessiveness, Heyworth as an associate had not had the broad “exposure”—working for and being Judged by a series of partners—that was customary in the selection process. Out of deference to Ward, Frost and his colleagues had elected Heyworth to their ranks largely on the old man’s say-so.

  The decision had been wrong. The qualities for being a sycophantic aide-de-camp did not translate into making Heyworth an independent partner with sound judgment. It was not that he couldn’t make up his mind—he could and did, free of all doubt; the problem was that the end product was often impractical, shortsighted or poorly reasoned.

  As his partners discovered Heyworth’s shortcomings, through veiled hints from clients or lawyers from other firms who had dealt with him, and through his own voluble and assured descriptions of his work at the “training table” where the partners gathered for lunch, he became more and more isolated in the firm. Most of his time was spent working on the affairs of two or three traditional clients whose legal problems were of the most routine sort. Or filling in for others, as he had done that day at the On-Line closing. He had become a timeserver, giving minimal attention to the problems that came his way. And, to the annoyance of Charlie Parkes and others, there was no sign that he planned to leave before reaching the mandatory retirement age, of seventy, a decade hence. Notwithstanding this, neither Parkes nor his colleagues had the stomach to attempt to force Heyworth out.

  Frost’s attention was redirected to Heyworth’s narrative when he changed the subject. “There was another screwup, too, which I’m afraid was of Julie’s making,” he said.

  “What was that?” Frost asked.

  “Merriman was a very good and usually very practical lawyer, at least she was back when she’d worked for me. But in this deal she’d gotten up on her high horse about getting the original copy of a consent from Machikin Bank in Tokyo. On-Line has a damned attractive long-term loan from Machikin, and Lovett, when he priced the deal, assumed it would stay in place. Under the loan agreement, Machikin’s consent to the merger was required. A fax of it came in last night, but it turns out Julie had been insisting that the signed original be turned over to someone acting for Applications. A guy from the First Fiduciary branch in Tokyo was supposed to pick it up and then call Julie to tell her he had his hands on it.”

  “That didn’t happen?”

  “No. Everything got tangled up with the New Year’s holiday. The V.P. at Machikin who signed the consent left for the long weekend—in Japan they tell me it’s really long—before he’d turned the thing over. He apparently thought sending it over the fax was good enough.”

&nbs
p; “What did you do?”

  “I talked to Bill Richardson in the country. He said Julie had told him Thursday night about her arrangements to get the original consent delivered in Tokyo and he’d gone along with that. He thought the way to save the situation was to get Schoonmaker, who’d been honchoing the consent with the Japanese, to guarantee the fax. I took that idea back to the meeting and almost got my head chopped off by Harvey Rawson, from Schoonmaker. He screamed at me that Schoonmaker wasn’t in the business of giving guarantees and wasn’t about to start and that it was damned insulting for anyone to question the authenticity of the fax. He also made it clear that the only person at Schoonmaker who could authorize such a thing was Tom Hanford, who’s the little tin god over there as we all know. He was at that very moment en route to St. Bart’s, so there was no way we could get his approval by our deadline. Rawson really abused me—said he’d been putting up with Julie’s crap for a month and now he wasn’t going to take any more from me.”

  “What did you do?” Frost asked.

  “I reported back to Bill. We got Lovett on the call with us and he finally agreed to take the fax. The deal he had was too good to blow away over a risk that was really far-out. I must say I agreed with him and was a little sorry Julie had tried to brainwash them all—Lovett and the First Fiduciary bankers, too—into thinking there was some big exposure they had to worry about. I don’t know what got into her. I’m afraid women lawyers are like that. Afraid somebody’s going to put one over on them, afraid someone’s going to take their pants off.”

  Frost recoiled at his former partner’s sexism. He had in his day often been involved in transactions where stupid, or stubborn, lawyers had made impractical or senseless demands. He had not found such demands the exclusive province of either sex; he doubted that there was some latent fear of being violated, as Heyworth suggested, that made women any more intransigent or unrealistic than their male counterparts. And from what little he had heard about Juliana Merriman’s ability, he wasn’t at all sure that her position regarding the Machikin document was in the senseless category.