Murder Saves Face

by Haughton Murphy

  Frost stared out the window after his departure. “She had this teasing streak, and I decided to avoid her whenever I possibly could.” Richardson’s remark, made so coolly a week before, came back to Frost over and over, as he tried to decide what to do now.

  CHAPTER

  21

  An Information Explosion

  “I know you think we haven’t been moving fast enough, Reuben,” Bautista said Wednesday morning, as he met with Dave Petito and Frost at Chase & Ward. He had called Frost earlier to make the appointment, saying that “We’ve put together some interesting stuff we’d like to pass on to you.”

  Frost was expectant, given Bautista’s enthusiastic mood. He did not know Petito well enough to assess how he felt, but he thought that the relaxation of his stern features was probably a good sign, too.

  “You’ve been pretty busy yourself,” Bautista said to Reuben. “Your hot date Monday night, and then the visit from that guy in your office yesterday.”

  “I’ve tried to keep my hand in,” Frost said. “So what have you got?”

  “The one thing we struck out on was the autopsy report,” Petito told Frost. “The M.E. didn’t show what the stomach contents consisted of. They were too far digested to be specifically identified.”

  “It was only a shot, Reuben,” Bautista added. “Once food has turned into chyme—that’s the mush that forms when the digestive juices go to work—you can’t tell whether it’s tuna fish or—”

  “Luis, I get the point. We can’t prove Genakis was lying about dinner the night of the murder. Let’s go on to something else.”

  “Okay, let’s start with Rawson,” Bautista said, opening his notebook. “His finances first. He makes one-ninety grand at Schoonmaker. His wife works for an ad agency in midtown, Vickery and Carpenter, and pulls down another hundred G’s. They’ve got two kids, both in private grade school. He’s got a Porsche he’s buying on time. And that ain’t all. He’s in hock up to his ears. A mortgage on his co-op here in town—nine hundred thousand—and one on the house in Connecticut—a cool million on that one.”

  Frost did a quick calculation while Bautista spoke. Assuming a ten percent rate—no Machikin preferences here—the interest on the two mortgages alone would eat up most of the couple’s combined after-tax salaries. Before maintenance charges on the apartment, or the swimming pool cleaner in the country—or private school tuitions.

  “You have any idea what the bonuses are at Schoonmaker?” Frost asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve got that here. Two years ago, Rawson’s bonus was double his salary. As near as I can tell, they haven’t set the bonuses for last year yet—the personnel woman I talked to was pretty frank that they’d had a lousy year, and the figures—which they’re going to announce any day—are still being worked out. They’re going to be down from last year. Or rather, she told me, they’re going to be paid partly in stock.”

  “That will be rough for Rawson,” Frost observed. “As I calculate it, he needs his bonus to live on.”

  “It looks that way. His wife gets a bonus—fifty grand last year—but their situation’s damned tight.”

  “So our Mr. Rawson really did have an interest in getting the On-Line deal closed,” Frost said. “If Schoonmaker’s in trouble—and that’s what everybody says—he needed every brownie point he could get. That’s good work, Luis.”

  “What I don’t understand is how he got those mortgages,” Petito said.

  “Who are they with?” Frost asked.

  “Both with savings and loans, one upstate in Buffalo, one in Connecticut.”

  “There’s your answer,” Frost said. “He got his money the same way the real estate speculators and the junk bond artists did. By standing in front of the window and scooping up the cash that was pushed at him. Those S&L’s were probably glad to shovel money out to him—his loans counted as lending for housing, which is what they were supposed to be doing, not speculating on high-fliers. And who knows, with all the deals Rawson’s been involved with at Schoonmaker, there could have been all kinds of back-scratching.”

  “When I think about the trouble I had getting a mortgage on my duplex in Brooklyn …,” Petitio said. “But we’re not here to talk about that.”

  “It’s the American way, Mr. Petito, at least these days.”

  “Rawson’s not the only guy who’s overextended,” Bautista continued. “There’s Genakis. His business is really going to hell. The restaurant’s busy—we know that—but he’s short of money all the time. It’s much worse than that D&B report you got. He even had trouble making the payroll about a month ago.

  “We can’t find a personal bank account for him—everything goes through the restaurant account at First Fiduciary, which he apparently draws on for his personal expenses. Including some pretty regular cash withdrawals we suspect he uses to buy cocaine.”

  “You’re now sure about the cocaine part?” Frost asked.

  “Yeah. Tell him, Dave.”

  “We got one of the bartenders and a guy in his kitchen to open up,” Petito said. “They say there’s no question he’s a user. And it has gotten worse in the last few months.”

  “I don’t understand that,” Frost said. “If he’s got a drug habit, how can he run a restaurant?”

  “You know what a functioning alcoholic is, Reuben?” Bautista asked. “A guy who’s half-drunk all the time, but he still functions? Maybe not on all eight cylinders, but he gets by? Same with a dope addict. You don’t just collapse instantly the first time you blow the stuff. You fall apart little by little.”

  “It looks like that’s what’s happening to Genakis now,” Petito added. “You know, reputation’s very important in the restaurant business—to creditors, to the staff, to customers. It’s such a risky business nobody wants to take chances with most of the guys who’re in it. At the rate Genakis is going, he’ll be out of business in another couple of months. I saw it happen in another restaurant, and a club downtown. The owner gets crazier and more paranoid and his staff begins to leave. Except those who stick around to steal from him. Then, if he’s out front, like Genakis, pretty soon he alienates the customers, too. Right on to the bankruptcy court for the restaurant and the dry-out farm for him.”

  “So Genakis is a cokehead going deeper into debt and taking his restaurant down with him,” Bautista said. “But that’s not all, right, Dave?”

  “Right. We ran his name back through California—Ted Genakis this time. He had a couple of pot busts in Palo Alto. Low-level dealing, for which he got a suspended sentence the second time. Then there’re the records here at the State Liquor Authority. When Genakis applied for his license, another fix he’d gotten into came out. The DEA—Drug Enforcement—had a major operation going on in Palo Alto about six years ago. Genakis got swept up in it. He wasn’t dealing then, but he was trying to blackmail an assistant professor at Stanford who was. The Feds picked him up on their wiretaps but the prof wouldn’t press charges and the whole thing was dropped. That required a hell of a lot of explaining to the SLA.”

  “I believe they call that extortion,” Reuben said, impassively, looking up from the yellow pad on which he had been making extensive notes. “I wonder … no, let’s go on.”

  “Now comes the beauty part, Reuben. A triple-chocolate dessert,” Bautista said. “You ready?”

  “Of course I’m ready,” Frost shot back.

  “You remember you were impatient with me when we talked on Monday, and I was a little short with you? A little short because I really was working on the case and had a long night ahead of me. Staking out Marshall’s to see what they did with their cash at the end of the night. As I expected, when the restaurant closed, Genakis and a buddy jumped into a cab and took a bag to the night depository at the First Fiduciary branch in Rockefeller Center. I wanted to know if Genakis deposited his cash right away, and I found out.”

  “Why did you want to know that?”

  “Because, the night Merriman was killed, the cash deposit in
the restaurant account was enormous.”

  “You’ve seen his account?”

  “I sure have. An old buddy at the bank got the records for me and left them on a table in his office when he went out to make a call. Very convenient.”

  “Convenient, but not very nice,” Frost said.

  “You may change your mind when you hear the rest. These days restaurants don’t have a whole lot of cash at the end of the night. Nearly everybody uses credit cards. And the management has to pay out to its help the tips on the credit card slips, using up even more cash. The deposits for Marshall’s run about fifteen hundred dollars a night, except that on the Thursday when Merriman was murdered, the deposit was twenty-eight thousand—way, way high, especially when you consider the lousy weather that night. There were also three blips—not as big as the December twenty-ninth one, but still big—on the last days of September, October and November.”

  “What are you saying, Luis, that these were proceeds from peddling dope?”

  “Negative. What I’m saying is that these blips match cash withdrawals from Mr. William Denning Richardson’s money-market account at the Mercantile. I’ve seen that account, too, and it shows withdrawals of nine thousand dollars each on September thirtieth, October thirty-first and November thirtieth. And—and—three withdrawals of nine thousand dollars each on December twenty-third, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth. You realize the significance of the amounts.”

  “You mean that each one was under ten thousand dollars?”

  “Right. All three were under the cutoff below which the bank doesn’t have to make a report of a cash withdrawal to the Feds. It looks like Mr. Richardson was being a good, careful lawyer, trying to avoid calling attention to his transactions.”

  “Are you telling me he was being blackmailed by Genakis?” Frost asked.

  “It’s an interesting coincidence, don’t you think? Take the sequence. Richardson makes a move on Merriman. Genakis finds out about it, and he—or he and Merriman—put the squeeze on Richardson. They work out a scheme for easy monthly payments. Then Genakis gets into money trouble and gets greedy, tripling the ante. Probably at a meeting the night of your office Christmas party, when your nosy friend saw Merriman and Richardson going up to her apartment. Then …”

  “Yes, then?” Frost said. “What comes next?”

  “One of two things. Richardson decides to cut off the blackmail by killing the witness—Merriman. Or Merriman comes to her senses, sees her boyfriend getting crazier, and threatens to pull the chain on the whole operation.”

  “Whereupon Genakis kills her?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But we know that Genakis was at the restaurant when Merriman was killed.”

  “Do we? We’ve now talked to a couple of the customers that were there that night and they support his story, that he was around all evening, but I still think he could have slipped over here and done it. Remember, you were told he knew his way around this office.”

  “But how would he get in here, unrecognized?” Frost pressed.

  “Maybe he borrowed her ID card.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. She came back in here at seven forty-five and used the card. How could he have used it an hour or so later?”

  “Okay, okay. We’ve still got work to do, I’ll admit that.”

  “What he could have done is used her ID card at six-fifteen, as we agreed the other night,” Reuben said. “And on your theory that he was blackmailing Richardson, Genakis might have gone to Fort Bliss to see him. But we’re pretty sure Richardson left the office around five-thirty, and there’s no record on the computer of his returning. So he didn’t come back to meet Genakis—or to kill Juliana Merriman.”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Bautista said. “Obviously we’ve got work to do on that as well. But don’t you think Genakis and your partner look like good prospects?”

  “Except for the little matter of proving it. And let’s not forget about Harvey Rawson. Did I tell you this? Ms. Teabury calling him a rutting pig,” Frost said, imitating Teabury’s British accent.

  “Yes, we’re going to keep an eye on the pig, too,” Bautista said.

  “You boys certainly have been busy,” Frost said, with a sigh. “It’s amazing—not to say appalling—what you can dig up on people.”

  The three men fell silent as they pondered the next step.

  “I think I’m going to have a talk with Genakis,” Petito finally said. “Just a friendly visit to discuss his finances. Maybe tell him he should get in touch with those S&L’s Rawson uses.”

  CHAPTER

  22

  A Shocker

  Dave Petito was back in Frost’s office by four o’clock Wednesday afternoon. Genakis had agreed to see him, in the upstairs retreat at Marshall’s, as soon as his lunch customers had been seated.

  Describing his encounter to Frost and Bautista, who had returned to hear the officer’s report, Petito said he had asked Genakis if he wanted to change anything he had told the police earlier. The answer had been no.

  “The guy was really wired.”

  “Not just nervous about another visit from the cops?” Bautista asked.

  “I said wired. Bad shape. His emotions up and down like a roller coaster. I started asking him about the restaurant’s bank account. He hit the ceiling when he realized I knew about the activity in it.”

  “I don’t know as you have to be a drug addict to get angry at that,” Frost commented.

  “When he calmed down, I took him through the three bumps in the account last fall,” Petito went on, ignoring Reuben’s comment. “His only explanation was that some nights were better than others. Then I hit him with the big bump on the twenty-ninth. Another explosion, after which he said it was a loan. From a friend in California.”

  “Any name?” Frost asked.

  “He said it was private. He wouldn’t tell me. He dared me to arrest him and said flat-out that the loan had nothing to do with Merriman. He also said he’d sue if we didn’t leave his staff and customers alone.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him we’d be happy to see him in court.”

  “Dave, did you ask him if the person who loaned him the money was Alan Lovett?” Bautista asked.

  “No. There didn’t seem to be any point. He wasn’t rational. I didn’t bring up the tuna fish sandwich or Merriman’s insurance policy, either.”

  “What about our other guy, Richardson?” Bautista inquired. “What do we do about him?”

  “He’s in France, skiing,” Frost said. “He’s due back on Sunday.”

  “Should we pull him back?” Petito asked.

  “I don’t think you’ve got enough to do that,” Bautista said. “Besides, you’d be lucky to get the French red tape unraveled by Sunday.”

  “That’s true,” Petito said, glumly.

  “You’ll just have to wait and have a welcoming party when he returns,” Bautista said.

  “Suits me,” Petito said. “I’ve caught three new homicides and can use the time.”

  “What about me?” Bautista asked. “Back to my thriving law practice?”

  “Gentlemen,” Frost said, “years ago our senior partner, Charles Chase, gave some good advice to an ambitious young turk in the office. He said that if you’ve finished your work, and don’t have anything to do, play hooky and go to the movies. Maybe that’s what we all should do—except for the checking I assume you’re going to continue on Genakis’ alibi.”

  Petito and Bautista laughed.

  “I’d add only one thing,” Frost went on. “Chase also said there’s no surer way to make certain you get hit with more work than playing hooky. Let’s try it.”

  Frost glanced at his watch as his guests departed. It was five forty-five. Two forty-five in California. He called Alan Lovett and reached him as he was returning from lunch.

  He asked at once about developments before Frost could pursue his questioning.

  “Not much that I can
report, I’m afraid. Lots of bytes—your kind of bytes, with a y—but nothing’s fallen into place. I do know the police are taking a hard look at Marshall Genakis. Which brings me to my question to you. Did you ever make a loan to him?”

  “Sure, when he first got started. I put up a hundred fifty thousand. It was a little tricky. Genakis’ lawyer told me that if I made a loan directly to the restaurant corporation, I’d have to go through a lot of sweat with the liquor license people. So I lent the money to Julie and she put it in the business. How she explained the source of her funds, I don’t know—maybe she said it was her savings out of those fat salaries you pay—but Genakis’ lawyer handled the whole thing. I know Julie wasn’t too happy about it, but Genakis has always been a persuasive guy, especially where Julie was concerned.”

  “Did you make a loan more recently?” Frost asked. “Like last month?”

  Lovett hesitated before answering “No.” Then he paused again and added, “But not because he didn’t ask me.”

  “When was that?”

  “In the middle of the On-Line deal, when I had dinner with him and Julie. She’d gone back to the office after dinner and then he sprung it on me. Said he had a cash crunch and needed thirty grand.”

  “And you refused?”

  “Right.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Off the record, I’ll tell you. I didn’t give him the money because I figured it would go straight to his dealer. His coke habit was getting worse and costing him more. I could afford what I’d put into the damn restaurant, and I’d already chalked that up to friendship. For Julie, as much as anything. But there was no point in being a chump and sending good money after bad.

  “Ted was very angry—so angry I haven’t talked to him since. One more nice thing that happened to me in New York. Not to mention my recent all-expense paid trip to Tokyo—all expenses paid by me.”

  “I was glad to hear you worked out your problem with the Japanese. Did you ever meet the mysterious Mr. Wesray, by the way? How did he explain what had gone on?”

  “We never saw him. They told us he was still in Singapore, which was very convenient—for them. Maybe he’ll stay there permanently.”