EQMM, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I had an appointment with Jason. He was supposed to sign some legal documents."

  Ellery raised an eyebrow. “From your use of the word ‘supposed,’ are we to understand that he did not in fact sign those papers?"

  With a slight slump of her shoulders, Friedman nodded. She turned to face Ellery. “It seems quite irrelevant to what you are investigating, but I suppose it won't hurt to explain matters. Friedman and Norr is an old-line establishment. When I say ‘old-line,’ I don't mean old-fashioned, or conservative. What I mean is that in an era of conglomerate control of merchandising, we buck the trend. When you shop at Macy's or Lord and Taylor or Lazarus or Hecht's you are buying from stores with a common owner. And individual merchandising personalities exist in those stores only insofar as they serve the whims of the conglomerate owner.

  "That has never been the case with Friedman and Norr, which always has been, and remains, privately owned. However, during the past few months we are, or I guess I should say have been, in the midst of a hostile takeover bid from Federated Department Stores."

  "Pardon my ignorance,” Ellery interjected, “but how could that be if the store is privately held?"

  Janiel Friedman sighed. “The store was founded by my grandfather, Davarian Friedman, and his partner, Jacob Norr. My grandfather owned sixty percent of the stock; Norr owned forty percent. Those percentages have persisted to this day. The Norr stock is voted by a trust established for Jacob Norr's grandchildren. I am the sole heir of my grandfather's stock and I vote his shares. Or at least I did."

  "You did?” Ellery asked.

  "This is a little complicated,” Friedman continued. “As part of my divorce settlement with Jason I was forced to agree that the earnings from half of my stock would be Jason's. He receives half of my income from the Friedman and Norr stores. I continue to vote the stock, except in certain limited exceptions."

  "I sense,” said Ellery, “that we are about to hear of one of those exceptions."

  "Yes, I am afraid that you are. At the time of our divorce Jason's lawyer was concerned that this source of income for Jason could be eliminated by my simply selling off the shares. Since I intended to live by my deal, no matter how odious it was, it did not particularly concern me when Jason's attorney insisted on certain protective clauses in our divorce decree. One of those clauses provides that in the event of a proposed sale of Friedman and Norr, Jason would have the power to vote fifty percent of my stock.

  "To make a long story short, the Norr trustees are enamored of Federated Department Stores’ buyout offer. It's quick money for them—beach time and ski chalets. That's not my style. What I am doing at Friedman and Norr is continuing a legacy. Normally I wouldn't care what the Norr family wanted to do, since their forty-percent holdings are a minority interest."

  "But not,” Ellery murmured, “when there is the possibility of Jason Tenumbra voting fifty percent of your shares in favor of a different outcome."

  "You have articulated the nub of my problem, Mr. Queen. I needed Jason's agreement to vote against the takeover. Typical of Jason, he agreed, but only when my lawyers also agreed to put one hundred thousand dollars on the table. My meeting with Jason was for the sole purpose of consummating that agreement. I arrived at his apartment with a cashier's check and with an agreement authorizing me to vote all of my shares in the takeover attempt notwithstanding the terms of the divorce decree. He was supposed to sign it that night."

  "But a problem arose?"

  "You might say that. When I arrived at Jason's apartment he told me that he had thought about it and decided he had sold out too cheaply. Something about a new Lamborghini that had caught his fancy. We argued, but he was insistent. The price, he announced, was now two hundred thousand dollars. He said that if he didn't get that amount he'd vote with the Norr heirs. I tried to reason with him. There was absolutely no reason for him to side with the Norrs. If the stock was sold to Federated I would get the proceeds of the sale, not him. And then his income from the store would cease. That was why he had his damned voting exception in the first place—to prevent something like that from happening. But Jason would hear none of that—he just smiled and shook his head as I talked. When I ran out of steam he said, ‘Janiel, this isn't about logic, it's about extortion. I have something you need.’ In the end, I swallowed my pride. I wasn't going to lose the stores for another measly hundred K."

  This time it was Burke's turn to question her. “And that's why Dr. Tenumbra refused to sign the proxy agreement?"

  "That's right. The bastard refused to sign because all I had with me was a cashier's check for one hundred thousand, not two hundred thousand. He wouldn't take my word that I would get him the rest the next day. So I left the apartment. In total, I couldn't have been there longer than fifteen minutes."

  "I wonder,” said Ellery, “whether you could tell us what you did afterwards?"

  "Afterwards?"

  "Yes. Did you in fact arrange for the additional hundred thousand dollars?"

  Janiel Friedman looked uncomfortable. “Well, actually, I did nothing. You see, my visit with Jason was on Sunday. I couldn't very well call my attorney that night. So I waited until Monday morning. But on Monday, by midday, I had been informed of Jason's ... demise. At that stage there was no reason to draw another check. The stock was again mine to vote."

  Harry, Ellery, and Nikki sat quietly watching Janiel Friedman, who had lapsed into silence. After several seconds she spoke again. “Look, after I left Jason's apartment I went home, poured a couple of stiff drinks, cursed the bastard, and went to bed. I wouldn't kill anyone, not even that scumbag, for a mere two hundred thousand. That's the truth, and that is also all that I am saying. I wish all of you good fortune in your investigation, since good fortune, if it leads to the truth, can only remove me from your list of suspects. But for now, gentlemen, and Ms. Porter, I have business to attend to.” With this Janiel Friedman pushed a button on the side of her desk and her assistant ushered the threesome out of the office.

  * * * *

  The marquee over the Majestic Theatre several blocks from Times Square announced the imminent opening of American Heroes, a “bold and rollicking musical salute to the comic-book superheroes of the 1940s.” Harry, Ellery, and Nikki walked through double doors and into the vestibule of the theater. A guard, lounging on a straight-back chair tipped back against the wall, rose and lumbered across the room intent on blocking their entrance. But once Harry explained that they had an appointment with Tabitha DuVal he gestured them through a double set of doors at the other end of the vestibule.

  The dressing rooms were in a musty warren of halls, scenery, and stage equipment tucked behind the stage. Harry Burke tapped gently on a door that bore the name “DuVal,” and the door swung slowly open on the force of his knuckles. Across the small room a slender blonde dressed in black tights and a cape sat in a director's chair hunkered over a well-annotated script. The young lady looked up.

  "Mr. Burke?"

  "Yes, Ms. DuVal. And this is Mr. Ellery Queen and Ms. Nikki Porter."

  Tabitha DuVal flashed a quick smile across the room. “I'm sorry we are a little short on chairs,” she continued, eyeing Ellery with some concern.

  "We shall do just fine,” Ellery assured her, resting on Nikki's arm.

  "We don't want to take any more of your time than is necessary,” Harry began. “I know that you are in rehearsals. But, as I explained on the telephone, we wanted to discuss certain matters relating to the death of Dr. Jason Tenumbra."

  "I'll be glad to tell you anything I can, but I actually don't know much of anything. I mean, I was sorry about what happened to Jason, but I didn't even know him all that well."

  "The apartment's records indicate,” continued Harry, “that you visited Dr. Tenumbra's apartment at around seven forty-five the night of his death."

  "I was there, all right. I sort of thought it was on business, but it kind of didn't end up that way. This musical we're working on, it's not fully capi
talized. I mean, do you know what it takes to open a musical on Broadway? I've got a share in this one, as well as a role in it. I met Jason through the producer—he was interested, or so he said, in investing in the show. He was pretty well known among the cast and crew. Apparently he hung around the stage lights a lot. Anyway, he started showing up during our rehearsals. He was a really charming guy, ultra suave. Serious older hunk, if you know what I mean. He was talking about investing half a million dollars in the show, but then he kept kind of putting it off.

  "The money is really important to us. During production of a show you end up burning a lot of funds before ticket revenue even kicks in. We're still two weeks from opening and we're basically busted. So I pushed Jason quite a bit and finally he asked me if I would like to stop by his apartment that Sunday. He promised that he would have a cashier's check for a hundred thousand as a first installment on his investment."

  "Didn't a Sunday-night business appointment seem a little strange?” Nikki said incredulously.

  Tabitha's smile receded a bit. “Look, I don't know what you're implying, but yeah, I guess I thought maybe it wasn't just business—sort of ‘business plus,’ maybe. Look, I'm single, unattached, and this is New York City. Jason could have been a great catch. I mean, the West Park Towers is to die for."

  "Perhaps,” observed Ellery.

  "I didn't mean it that way. Anyway, I showed up at his apartment around a quarter to eight. He made drinks and immediately started hitting on me. I'd try to talk money, and he'd change the subject and finger my blouse. At first that was sort of all right with me. But then I was like, exactly where is this going? So I pushed him away and said flat out, ‘What about the investment?’ And Jason comes right back and says he's not going to invest anything, he's got something else he's interested in. Some car. So I sort of blew up at him. Things were getting kind of tense, when all of a sudden the phone rings. Jason answered it, looked a little distressed, and then told me that the concierge desk had phoned to tell him that his fiancée was on her way up.

  "Well, that set me off even more. No money for the show and a fiancée to boot. So, I'm still tearing into Jason, but all the while he's bustling me back toward the bedroom, telling me to play it cool. I told him that I wasn't doing anything wrong, he was the one playing all of the scams, and what was this about a fiancée anyway? I mean, where did that come from? But he just kept shushing me and pushing me back toward the bedroom. So, what could I do? He closed the door and I sat down on the bed and fumed.

  "Well, I didn't end up waiting very long. I could hear this woman's voice in the living room screaming, really angry. A couple seconds later the bedroom door bursts open and in storms a really angry lady holding my glass in her hand. I guess she saw the two cocktail glasses in the living room and sort of added things up.

  "Anyway, I'm like, ‘How is all this happening to me?’ and then I sort of blew up again and started yelling at her and at Jason for having gotten me into the middle of their own damned mess. The woman was clawing at me, but I got past her and stormed out the front door. That was the last time I saw either of them. But I can tell you this—when I left, Jason was fine. I mean, he was really going at it with this fiancée woman, but they were both very much alive."

  "And you left the building immediately?” Ellery asked.

  "What do you think? I'm going to, like, hang around in the hall to see what else can go wrong?"

  There was a tap at the door to the dressing room and a turtle-necked man with a script under his arm said, “Your production number is up in five minutes, Tabitha.” She turned toward Harry inquiringly.

  "I suppose that's all for now anyway, Ms. DuVal, but we may need to speak with you again."

  "Before you leave,” Ellery said, “I wonder if you could just tell us a little about your new show."

  Tabitha, already headed for the door, stopped and turned back toward Ellery. “Like I said, assuming we even make it to opening night, it's a musical, set in nineteen forty-four. The characters are all based on Marvel comic-book superheroes."

  "And you play...?"

  "Sharon Shannon Kane."

  "Ah,” replied Ellery. “Sharon Kane. She was the ‘Spider Queen,’ wasn't she?"

  * * * *

  Rhonda St. Regis's apartment building, a lingering bastion of an earlier age, sat squarely in front of Central Park, defying encroachment with a dowager stubbornness that had calcified over seventy-five years of preeminence. Ellery therefore was not surprised when a uniformed attendant held the door of the elevator and then positioned the brass control lever to deposit them, not without some vertigo, on the thirty-ninth floor.

  St. Regis's apartment was a study in elegance. Expansive views of Central Park accented by overstuffed wool and leather chairs and couches, Chippendale end table, bookcases, and deep Persian carpets conveyed the impression of a living space at home with itself.

  And equally at home was Rhonda St. Regis, who greeted them in the vestibule and glided to what Ellery suspected was her accustomed throne, a wing chair situated in a corner where nothing in the room could escape her gaze. As a maid, dressed in a black-and-white uniform straight out of a New Yorker cartoon, placed a tray containing a teapot and four teacups and saucers on a walnut-and-brass coffee table, St. Regis smiled across the expanse of her domain.

  "As I told you on the telephone, I don't know what, if anything, I can add to your investigation. I already explained to Mr. Santos that when I last saw Jason he was alive and kicking. Kicking, quite literally. But it is, as they say, your nickel, Mr. Burke."

  "Well, it's really rather simple,” Burke replied. “We know that you were one of three people who, according to building records, visited Dr. Tenumbra on the night of his death. We need to know everything about your visit."

  Rhonda St. Regis eyed Burke. “Well,” she began, “I arrived at Jason's apartment unannounced just after eight. I decided, on a whim, to surprise him. Jason and I had been seeing each other for some time, although it had been a clandestine relationship until the week before his death. But by the night of my visit we were no longer a secret. I reveled in the fact that I was free to just drop in on him, without going through all the shenanigans that had been the hallmark of our prior arrangements."

  "The prior secretive nature of your meetings was, I take it,” asked Ellery, “occasioned by your engagement to Dr. Quinn Djuna?"

  The question hardly flustered St. Regis, who continued. “Quinn was a dear man; a dear but intense man. Looking back, everything just happened too fast between us. He was so certain that we were destined for each other that, I suppose, I sort of got caught up in the notion. But almost from the moment I accepted his proposal I had second thoughts. I realized that I had been carried to that point by momentum, but little else. And always, in the background, sort of hovering, there was Jason. He'd be there with a smile or a kind word. Very suave, self-assured, never pushy. Eventually I opened up to him about my feelings—or maybe lack of feelings would be more accurate—toward Quinn. He would respond with his own questions, you know, the way psychiatrists do, and as I continued to reach out to him, well, one thing just sort of led to another. Shared coffee progressed to shared dinners, shared evenings to shared nights. Each morning when I woke up with him there would be a wave of guilt, and I would resolve to try to work things out openly. But for weeks I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how I felt about Quinn, and I didn't really know how Jason felt about me.

  "Then, several weeks ago, Jason proposed. He was so eloquent, he told me that he knew it was wrong, that he felt terrible about what he was doing to Quinn, but that he knew, just knew, that we were soulmates, that we couldn't allow the opportunity to live our lives together to slip through our fingers. Even then I had to take some time to think about his proposal. As you probably know, my family was quite wealthy. As an only child I inherited everything. As a result, I've always been careful in relationships. I have to be sure people are interested in me, not in my money. But Jason was so
warm, so understanding. He seemed to have no interest in the St. Regis inheritance. And finally, I sort of looked inside myself and said, okay. This time it's real.

  "Once I decided that, I knew I had to come clean with Quinn. So I met with him and as gently as I could I broke the news. He took it even worse than I had expected. He cried. He begged me not to leave him. I explained that it took two to make a relationship, that it couldn't be a one-way street. And then he started cursing Jason. I told him that it really wasn't Jason's fault, that if it had really been right between us there would never have been a Jason. But he wanted none of it. Jason told me afterward that Quinn just got worse and worse. The two of them were arguing in the office, in front of patients. Jason said they were going to have to break up their practice—we even talked of how I might advance him the necessary funds to pay off Quinn's share of the practice, buy him out, so that Jason could carry on on his own."

  By now her voice was noticeably rising. “I'm telling you all of this because you might as well know my state of mind when I entered Jason's apartment that night. Finally, everything was right. I had found my life partner, everything was out in the open; I had come clean with Quinn, and we were moving toward a clean break in Quinn and Jason's partnership—a break that would have allowed each of them to begin rebuilding. I was absolutely at the top of my game until I saw that damned cocktail glass with lipstick on the rim in Jason's apartment. Then my world just crashed. What I had been guarding against all of my life had actually happened. The man I thought I was in love with was just another cad."

  Ellery, Nikki, and Harry Burke watched silently as a flush crept up Rhonda St. Regis's neck.

  "No one,” she continued, “can get away with that with me. I stormed into his bedroom, and there's this young blond wisp of a thing sitting on the edge of the bed, like she belongs. And then, can you believe this, she starts yelling at me. I tried to grab her, but she bolted for the door. I was calling Jason all of the ugly names I could think of, and through all of it he's whining, you know, ‘I can explain, I can explain.’ Finally I just yelled, ‘You bastard, explain this.’ Then I kneed him in the groin and stomped out of the apartment.