Frost summarized what he had learned about the police investigation, and the substance of his conversation with Ramsey Kendall. He did not mention Kendall by name, and his listeners unsuccessfully pressed him on this. They showed impatience, though the real tension Reuben had created was not worry over his source, but the distasteful substance of what the source had said, assuming it was true.
Speculating over the identity of Merriman’s harasser—Isaacs actually took out his pocket office directory and worked down the list of partners—the group could not reach a conclusion, even when Frost said he was sure, based on what he had been told, that the list could be narrowed to Straus, Heyworth and Richardson.
“I managed to find an excuse to talk to all of them yesterday,” Parkes revealed. “They’ll all be in the office this morning except Bill Richardson, who’s coming in from the island around noon.”
“I think y’all have got to question them,” Keith Merritt said to Parkes. “You and Reuben.”
“Is that really going to do any good?” Ron Crutcher asked. “They’ll only deny it and if one of them is guilty, it’ll tip him off that you know about it.”
“That’s true, Ron—” Parkes said.
“But they are our partners,” Isaacs interrupted. “Don’t we owe it to them to confront them?”
The group agreed, the “executive committee” relieved that they had left the dirty work to Parkes and Frost.
Once at Clinton Plaza, Frost went to the cafeteria for a midmorning cup of coffee. Since many employees had left early the previous Friday to start their holiday weekend, they were now being briefed firsthand by those who had been caught up in the police dragnet. The buzz was audible as he passed crowded table after crowded table.
Parkes had requested the office manager to move Frost to a large corner office “for the duration.” Reuben did not object and told Bautista, when he arrived at eleven o’clock, that the larger office “might come in handy, might be more intimidating.”
Frost introduced Bautista to Joe Conklin, explaining his association with the former detective and saying that he had been hired “to help out.” (He had earlier passed along to Bautista Parkes’ admonition that Conklin was a trifle on the slow side.)
“I know they say too many cooks can spoil the broth,” Frost said. “But right now the broth we’ve got is so weak and insubstantial, I think we can use all the help we can get.”
“Boy, that’s okay with me,” Conklin said. “Murder’s a little outside my line.”
Conklin had been in touch with Detective Petito earlier in the day and reported that the medical examiner had fixed the estimated time of Merriman’s death between 9 and 11 P.M. on Thursday, and that the lab results had indicated that Merriman had probably been killed in her own office, down the corridor from the library shelves where she was found.
“It’s not conclusive, but they found threads on the carpet in her office that matched the dress she was wearing when she died.”
“Are the police still barricading the thirty-first floor?” Frost asked. “I still want to see where they discovered her—and her office.”
“We can do it,” Conklin replied.
The section of the library where Merriman’s body had been found was deserted when Frost, Bautista and Conklin arrived there a few minutes later. Looking around, Frost concluded that it probably never was very busy, housing as it did the firm’s collection of the statutory law of states other than New York. Young lawyers like Tom Henderson might wander there on assignment occasionally, but it was not frequently used. Had Juliana Merriman’s killer merely found an out-of-the-way corner to hide her body? Or had he known that it was not only out-of-the-way, but not visited with any regularity?
The hiding place in the library was perhaps forty feet from Merriman’s office; her assailant could have moved her there quickly.
Moving to the office area, Merriman’s secretary, Mary Coward, was sitting at her desk when the trio arrived.
“Mary, I was very sorry to hear about Ms. Merriman,” Frost said to the woman who had been at Chase & Ward as long as he could remember. Hadn’t he presented her with a twenty-five year award back when he had been the Executive Partner? Or had it been for thirty years? Whatever the number, Ms. Coward was one of the most senior Chase & Ward employees in point of service. “May we go in?” he asked, pointing to the closed door behind her.
“Of course, Mr. Frost. It isn’t locked.”
Juliana Merriman had attempted to dress up her space with two Mostly Mozart festival posters on the wall. The office was crammed with papers, left over from her preparations for the On-Line closing. On her desk was a color photo of Marshall Genakis, showing him standing tan and fit on an unidentified beach and looking heavier than Frost remembered him. As they looked around, Conklin’s beeper went off and he picked up the phone on Ms. Coward’s desk.
“There’s a drunk passed out downstairs by the entrance,” he explained when he had finished the call. “I’ve got to go down and see that he gets scraped up. Christ, what a neighborhood this is.”
“Before you go, where do they think the murder happened?” Frost asked.
“Over there, according to Petito’s description,” Conklin replied, pointing in front of the table.
After Bautista promised to catch up with Conklin later and the security director had gone out, Frost moved behind the desk to examine the IBM-XT personal computer perched atop it. He had become something of a computer fanatic himself a year before, though his interest had waned somewhat as the miraculous novelty of his own machine, a Compaq portable, had worn off. Nonetheless, he now considered himself reasonably knowledgeable about PC’s—certainly as knowledgeable as almost anyone else his age.
Reuben had observed that a number of associates had computer terminals in their offices, though he had not been sure how much or what kind of work they did on them. He asked Ms. Coward to come in. She did so, leaning on a cane because of a bad case of arthritis in her leg.
“Mary, this XT in here. Did Ms. Merriman ever use it?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Frost, all the time. The young ones do, you know. I was getting afraid for my job, she did so much of her work on it herself.”
“Revisions? That sort of thing?”
“Yes, and original drafting, too.”
“How does this work, Mary? What happens if Ms. Merriman wanted to revise a document—say, the On-Line Merger Agreement?”
“That’s easy, Mr. Frost. All she had to do was call it up on her screen from the central file, make her changes and transmit the new version back.”
“Is that all done internally? No disks involved?”
“No, thank God, we’ve gone beyond that, moving floppy disks around. We abandoned that system when we moved up here.”
“So any files that Ms. Merriman might have worked on herself are in central storage?”
“Yes, anything to do with the office or clients. Of course, she kept her personal things right here on her own hard disk.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t know what kind of material she had, but that would stay here, yes.”
“How do I get access to it?”
“I can do that for you. I know her password. Let me call up the directory of her files.” She put down her cane and turned the PC on. In no time the directory appeared on the screen. “Here you are.”
Frost glanced at the list of perhaps fifty files. Most were uninformative. BPARTY.DOC and CCARDS.DOC he guessed related to the guest list for a birthday party and Merriman’s Christmas card list. EUROPE.DOC could be anything, but then Frost’s heart pounded as he read the next entry: HARASS.DOC.
“Are you familiar with this one, Mary?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm, as he pointed to the entry.
“No. I never touched her personal files.”
“Can you call it up for me?”
“Of course.” Ms. Coward sat down in front of the PC and brought the contents of HARASS.DOC into view.
Frost
took the woman’s place in front of the keyboard. Already he could see he had struck pay dirt. The file was a draft of a complaint in a legal action in Federal District Court entitled “Juliana S. Merriman v. William D. Richardson.”
“How do I print this out?” Frost asked.
“Hit ‘cancel’ and then ‘P’ twice. It’ll print on the printer out by my desk.”
“Luis, will you go pick up the document as it comes out?” Frost said, managing to convey to Bautista that he should not let anybody see the pages as they appeared.
In no time Bautista came back with a ten-page printout, which he handed to Frost. Ms. Coward stood uncertainly near the door; Frost asked her to leave them alone and to close the door behind her.
Merriman’s office was cramped. Frost sat in her desk chair as he began reading. Had he been looking closely, Bautista would have seen Reuben’s face setting with anger as he read the draft complaint. It alleged a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in that Richardson, as Merriman’s employer, had created a “hostile environment” in the workplace.
The recital of the alleged facts centered on a business trip to Dallas in mid-March the previous year, where plaintiff (Merriman) and defendant (Richardson) were working on the Triumph recapitalization and staying, in separate bedrooms, at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. On the night in question, plaintiff and defendant had had dinner together at the hotel. After a postprandial drink, defendant, whose leg was in a cast after a skiing accident, complained that his leg was bothering him and asked plaintiff to help him to his room. She did so, where he made an attempt to kiss her, to stroke her hair and to fondle her breasts. She managed to break away—a comparatively easy task, Frost thought, given defendant’s physical condition—and leave the bedroom. Next morning, defendant apologized, but cautioned plaintiff that “it would go badly” for both of them if she told anyone what had happened. It was alleged that defendant had repeated his warning on three subsequent occasions.
Frost read the document with a sinking heart and, when he had finished, turned to Bautista. “If this document is to be believed, Bill Richardson was Merriman’s harasser,” he said. “He’s one of the firm’s most senior partners and a well-respected one. At least up until now.” Frost summarized the gist of the complaint for Bautista, who agreed that Richardson had suddenly become worthy of more than routine scrutiny.
“One detail, Luis,” Frost said. “Can that law office of yours find out if this damn thing was ever filed in District Court? I can’t ask our managing clerk without creating unnecessary gossip that we don’t want or need.”
“Sure, I can do that,” Bautista replied.
“Then what I’m going to do is go see Charlie Parkes. I think the two of us—Parkes and I—should talk to Richardson.
“And I think you should independently check out what Genakis has said about his activities on Thursday. We’ve got to cover all bases. Was he really at his restaurant from eight o’clock on? And let’s see if we can get a better fix on Merriman’s comings and goings the day she was killed. You’ve got carte blanche to talk to anybody, though I don’t think you should mention Richardson to anyone just yet. I’ll let you know if I get anything out of him.”
“Sounds good to me, Reuben,” Bautista said.
“Good. Then you get out of here so I can talk to Merriman’s secretary. She’s an ancient party like me and may know something helpful. Why don’t we plan to get together at the end of the afternoon.”
“In your office?” Bautista said.
“It’s not my office, but yes. Room 3433, where we started out this morning.”
Once left alone, he called in Mary Coward. “Mary, as I said before, I’m sorry about your boss.”
“I can’t believe it, Mr. Frost. She was a wonderful person. Very well-mannered, very considerate. I’ve seldom had a better person to work for.”
“Are you including me in that, Mary?”
“I never worked for you, Mr. Frost.”
“Of course you did. When did you start with the firm?”
“Right after the War. I got out of high school a month after V-E Day and began work at Chase & Ward the end of that summer.”
“Well, I returned from the Navy in the fall of forty-five and came back to the firm. If I’m not mistaken you were in the steno pool, as we called it then, and you did do work for me.”
“If you’ve remembered it all these years, I must have been terrible.”
Frost did not let on that it was indeed the woman’s youthful inexperience that had stuck in his memory.
“Anyway, we go back a long way, Mary,” he said, shifting away from the subject of her early skills (which in fact had improved greatly within a very short time). “As you might have guessed, Mr. Parkes has asked me to see what I can find out about Juliana Merriman’s death. The gentleman who was here with me is a detective we’ve hired and he’ll also be asking some questions around the office. But what I need to know right now is whether you have any bright ideas about who might have killed Ms. Merriman.”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about it, but I don’t have any answers. All I know is I’ve been sure there’d be some terrible trouble when we moved to this dreadful neighborhood. These offices are a delight to work in, Mr. Frost, everything up-to-date, like the computer system. And for a poor old cripple like me, they’re terrific—that special elevator downstairs, for example—I’m shriveled up enough that they gave me a key to use it. That’s a double blessing—it’s convenient and it means I don’t have to look at that appalling lobby when I come in and leave. But …”
“That lobby is outlandish, isn’t it?” Frost agreed. “More like a mausoleum for Mussolini than the entryway for our staid and proper firm.” They both smiled, old-timers remembering a better past.
“What about Marshall Genakis?” Frost asked, getting back to the subject. “What do you know about him?”
“Well, since you ask me, I’ll tell you. Or rather I’ll show you something. Will you excuse me?” She left the room and returned with a thin file that she handed to Reuben. It was labeled on the tab at the top, “J. Merriman—Personal—Insurance.” The contents were neatly attached inside the folder with metal clips.
“Look at the top sheet,” Ms. Coward advised. It was a copy of a change of designation of beneficiary for Merriman’s group life insurance policy. Dated the previous November, it named Genakis, rather than her father, Paul Merriman, as the beneficiary under her policy, which Frost determined, by looking further in the file, was in the face amount of $150,000.
“Do you know any more about this?” Frost asked.
“No. She asked me to type it up. She signed it, had it notarized and turned it in to Benefits.”
“Did she seem happy about it? Or concerned? Or apprehensive? Or angry? What, Mary?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Frost, I don’t recall her attitude. I don’t recall anything special at all.”
“Do you know Genakis?”
“Oh, yes. He used to come over now and then. Always a perfect gentleman to me.”
“Meaning that you think he may not have been with others?”
“No, no. I just meant I don’t know him very well.”
“They were getting along all right, weren’t they?”
“I can’t say. Miss Merriman kept a very tight rein on her emotions. Our relationship seldom changed from day to day, no matter how she was feeling or what she was feeling. That was one of the pleasures of working for her—there never were unpleasant surprises. The only time she ever let her guard down was several months ago when she told me Mr. Genakis was the only man she’d ever met who accepted her the way she was. Whatever that might mean.”
“Did Ms. Merriman have a will?”
“Yes, let me get the file. I know she had the trust and estates people do one up about two years ago, because I was one of the witnesses.”
Ms. Coward went outside again and returned with the file containing a copy of Merriman’s will. Reuben flipped
through it and noted that she left everything to her parents, except two $1,000 bequests, to the March of Dimes, earmarked for birth defects research, and to Stanford Law School, and except that her shares in Marshall’s, Inc., presumably the corporate owner of Genakis’ restaurant, were left to him. Satisfied, Frost asked Ms. Coward to recount what had happened the day Merriman died.
“She was terribly busy, doing that On-Line merger all by herself. I was working here most of the time and she was in the conference room. She’d call me down there when she needed me.”
“Did you notice anything unusual?”
“Only that there seemed to be a tension between her and Mr. Rawson.”
“The man from Schoonmaker?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of tension, Mary?”
“Oh, it’s hard to say. He’d say something perfectly innocuous and she’d contradict it. Or vice-versa. It was bickering. Picky. I didn’t think much about it at the time …”
“But you have since?”
“Yes, but I can’t make much out of it.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, there is one thing. Ms. Merriman and Mr. Richardson had some sort of quarrel, some sort of argument, late Thursday afternoon.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, Mr. Richardson called about five o’clock to say he was back from Detroit and wanted to sign the On-Line opinions as soon as possible, because he was in a hurry to get off to the country. Both the phones in the conference room were busy, I remember, so I went down and gave her the message myself.
“When she didn’t respond right away, Mr. Richardson came looking for her, just as she came up from downstairs. The opinions were all in piles in her office, so he stayed here to sign them. Her office was so full of papers he used Mr. Loveman’s over there. Mr. Loveman was away on vacation for Christmas week.
“Ms. Merriman took the opinions into Mr. Loveman’s office and closed the door. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but she and Mr. Richardson both raised their voices at one point and I could hear that. Then Ms. Merriman came out with one of the opinions. There was a stupid typo—my fault—and she asked me to correct it. She seemed quite shaken.”
Murder Saves Face Page 11
