“Did she catch these ethical concerns from Belestrade?”
“That is the prevailing opinion,” Ms. P said. “With forty percent of shares remaining under family control, it’s possible that she could have found favor among the minority of other shareholders who held similar concerns.”
I swerved to avoid an errant pedestrian and presented him with a single-digit salute, our bumper passing within inches of his knees.
“So, who votes those forty percent now?”
“Once the estate is settled, the shares will be split evenly between the children but will be held under care by a trustee until next year, when they turn twenty-one. Would you like to wager who the trustee is?”
“No bet,” I said. “It’s Wallace.”
I caught Ms. P’s nod in the rearview.
“Where’s Uncle Harry stand?”
“He would not commit either way.”
I gave that some thought. It was a sure bet that guns were always going to remain more lucrative than staplers. A lot of money might have swung on that decision. If Mrs. Collins had been pushing for staplers, that was a grade-A motive. Then I thought about the picture in the office. Add into the money thing a history of illicit love?
I jumped off that train of thought and filled Ms. P in on my conversations with Becca and the cook and the thoughts inspired by the family photo. I left out the glimpse of bare back and the question about dancing.
“So what do you think?” I asked. “Could Uncle Harry be Daddy Harry? Or at least Lover Harry?”
“There was certainly the suggestion of strong emotions whenever he discussed Abigail, but he hides it well.” She twisted in the backseat, trying to find a more comfortable position. That meant she was aching, which meant she was tired, which meant I’d have to prod her to take a nap before dinner or tomorrow might turn into a bad day.
“Of course, it could be exactly what it looks like,” I conceded. “A working girl seduces the big boss, gets a pair of buns in the oven, and wins the Irish lottery. Hard to make that call without knowing a little more about what kind of woman we’re dealing with.”
“Unfortunately, both Mr. Wallace and his godchildren were unable, or unwilling, to provide many details about Abigail’s life prior to her marriage,” Ms. Pentecost said. “She arrived in New York City in 1924, obtained a position as secretary to Mr. Collins and Mr. Wallace that fall, and became pregnant within the year. To their knowledge, she kept no documents or mementos of her life prior to coming here.”
“What are the chances the dominoes that tipped her murder started falling that far back?” I asked.
No answer from the backseat. It was a rhetorical question, and besides, she knew I was aware of how she felt about missing chapters in victims’ lives.
“I foresee a considerable amount of research in my future,” I said.
“Not a difficult prediction.”
“Speaking of seeing the future, what about Belestrade?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“She was there that night. She orchestrated that whole show in the office. There are a lot of strong feelings bouncing around. Whether she had something to do with the murder or not, she definitely had her fingers in the Collins family.”
No response from the backseat. I glanced in the mirror and saw that she had her eyes shut. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking hard or pretending to.
“What I’m saying is this woman is possibly good as a suspect, and definitely good as a source of information, and since I’m not heading to Jersey until Friday, maybe we should pay her a visit tomorrow.”
More silence from the backseat. I was about to prod her again when she let out a slow, “No. I don’t think so. Not yet.”
“What are we waiting for? Honestly, boss. If I had the reins we’d be heading to her place right now.”
“I know. But you don’t have the reins, so we will wait before confronting Ms. Belestrade.” It’s not often she puts her foot down, so I stuffed a sock in any follow-ups.
“Okay. Fair enough. What do we do with the next two days?”
“I believe a visit to Professor Waterhouse is in order,” she said as the sedan descended into Brooklyn. “She was observing Ms. Belestrade. I’d like to know what exactly she saw.”
“I’ll call up the university and see if she’s available. That’ll eat up an hour or two. What else?” Yes, this was aggressively coy. I wanted to get on Belestrade and I wanted to get on her right then. My employer ignored it.
“I think you’ll save time during your visit to the plant if we know just where the police are in the tracking down of alibis and so forth,” she said. “Reach out to your contacts in the department. Save any homicide detectives for last. I don’t want to risk tipping our hand.”
I pulled the Caddy in front of the town house, edging the front bumper to within a few inches of a familiar unmarked sedan.
“I think we’re about to be saved a dime,” I said, throwing the car into park.
The cops were here.
CHAPTER 8
Lieutenant Lazenby was polite enough to wait in his car while we went inside and got a couple drinks poured—water for me, bourbon for Ms. P to take the edge off the ache. Not exactly doctor’s orders, but I had learned to choose my battles.
Three sips in, he rang the bell.
“Are you in with the family or the company?”
Squeezed into the largest of our guest chairs, Lazenby looked very much like the man I’d first met across an interview table. He’d added an inch or two to his waistline and a lot of silver to his beard but was still very much the NYPD’s sharpest blade when it came to cutting to the heart of their toughest cases. He also cut an impressive figure in a dark gray wool pinstripe, the color of which matched his eyes. Its quality probably made a few people wonder if he was on the take. He’s not. I happen to know he has a cousin who’s a tailor to the Madison Avenue crowd.
He repeated his question. “The family or the company?”
Ms. P leaned back in her chair and sipped her bourbon.
“So…you’re pursuing the company,” she mused, a twinkle dancing in her good eye. It was a statement, not a question.
Lazenby scowled and shifted his bulk. “We’re pursuing a number of leads.”
“But you prefer the company. You think the murder is business, not personal.”
“I think for a lot of people, business is personal,” the policeman noted. “But, again, what makes you think—”
“It’s simple.” Cutting him off midsentence infuriates him. But he knows she knows it infuriates him, so it doesn’t bother him as much when she does it, or at least he tries not to let it show. Follow? “You didn’t ask if I was investigating Abigail Collins’s death. You took that as a given. How you discovered as much, I’ll chalk up to your skill as an investigator.”
Lazenby snorted, though the compliment was sincere. I flashed back to the tail I’d spotted when we were leaving the morgue.
She continued. “Our paths have crossed during domestic cases before. Frequently to our mutual benefit.”
Another snort.
“Which suggests that your concern is that I am employed by Collins Steelworks, and thus that my involvement will interfere with an ongoing avenue of investigation.”
“You still didn’t answer the question,” he squeezed out through clenched teeth.
“No, I didn’t,” she said with a hint of an echo of a smile. “I am not compelled to release my client’s name. Unless you’ve come armed with a warrant.”
Lazenby started to object, but she cut him off again.
“However…In the interest of professional courtesy, I will answer. I am not employed by Collins Steelworks.”
The big man relaxed a hair in his seat.
“Which does not mean I will not search for a motiv
e originating within the company,” she added. “Will shall be interviewing executives at the Jersey City plant this Friday—focusing primarily on those who were at the party Halloween night.”
He tensed again.
“Yeah, it’ll probably be an all-day affair,” I added. “Might spread into Monday or Tuesday. Lot of people to talk to.”
I smoothed out some nonexistent wrinkles in my trousers. “Of course, if I had the nuts and bolts of who was where during the last inning of that party, I’d be in and out a lot quicker. Fewer opportunities for me to accidentally stick my nose into whatever you’ve got cooking.”
“Accidentally.” Something unpleasant was brewing behind his eyes. “Like either of you ever do anything accidentally.” After a few seconds of thundering, his face settled. “Let me see what we have. In the interest of professional courtesy.” This time he was the one who smoothed some nonexistent wrinkles. “So…why don’t you think this came from the company end?”
It wasn’t a throwaway. He really wanted to know. More than once, Ms. Pentecost had come sideways at a case and uncovered a culprit in a spot the police had never checked. It was natural that he was feeling snakebit.
“I did not say that. Merely that my involvement in the case comes at the behest of the family.”
“Yeah, you said. But you’re playing this too cute. If you thought the murder came out of company business, it’d be you heading to Jersey City and not your sidekick here.”
I prepared something indignant to fling at him, but Ms. P beat me to it.
“Ms. Parker is my assistant, not my sidekick, and an investigator licensed by the state of New York. Her talents should not be underestimated.”
He waved it off. “Sidekick, assistant, conspirator—whatever you want to call it. I’ve seen you operate enough to know where you’re looking. Why do you think this came out of the family and not the company? Our numbers men tell us that if Abigail Collins got her wish and the company went back to office supplies, it’d mean a nine-figure swing over the next decade. That’s a big, fat motive. What do you know that I don’t?”
“As far as this case is concerned, you assuredly know far more than I. You’ve been working on it for two weeks. I’ve been involved a single day. As it stands, I don’t have nearly enough to make an informed conclusion and so am working on instinct.”
“And your instinct says it’s not the company.”
She gave a noncommittal shrug. Even the great lady detective can play coy when she wants to.
“Have it your way. Just stay out of mine.”
He heaved his bulk out of the chair and headed for the door. I ran ahead, grabbing his coat from the rack in the hall and slipping him a couple questions of my own.
“I’m assuming you came up empty on prints on the murder weapon? Since it got tossed in the fireplace?”
The look he shot me was a nicely blended cocktail of annoyance and suspicion.
“We played some of our cards faceup,” I said, handing him his coat. “Play fair.”
“That you think this is a game is part of the problem,” he said. “We found prints. Not that it does us any good. They were all ones we expected: this spiritualist, her assistant, the daughter—the other guests she roped into playing her game. And some smudges our print guy says came from somebody wearing gloves.”
“Interesting,” I said. “The killer came prepared.”
He shrugged into his overcoat and opened the door. He was about to leave when I tossed him another one.
“Dig up anything interesting on Belestrade?”
He turned and glared. “Such as?”
“Her real name, for instance?”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but as far as we can tell Belestrade is her real name. Either that, or someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to fudge her paperwork.
“Not everyone walks around with a counterfeit moniker,” he added with a hangman’s grin.
So he knew Parker wasn’t what I was born with. I forget sometimes just how good a detective he had to be to keep his job as top homicide cop in the city.
“Try and keep your nose clean on this one,” he said. “Your knives, too.”
The jab stung and I felt every inch of my five foot nothing.
A lot of the time, Lazenby and his men treat me like a little girl playing at being a detective. More mascot than serious player. Three years of working cases, Ms. P vouching for me, but he never let me forget that the first time we met I was on the other side of the table.
Not that I let him know I was thinking any of that. Instead, I threw on a pout.
“Lieutenant, you wound me. I haven’t stabbed anyone in ages.”
But he was already three steps down the stoop and gave no sign he’d heard me.
Back in the office, Ms. Pentecost was standing at our little bar, pouring herself another bourbon. I shot her a disapproving look, which she deftly ignored.
“Not the company, huh?”
She didn’t respond.
“So, why not?” I asked. “Somebody pass you a note?”
She sat back down behind her desk, cradling her full glass of Kentucky gold.
“I did not say that I believed the murder was not related to Mrs. Collins’s relationship to the business.”
I got half a syllable of a protest out before she raised a hand.
“I merely told the good lieutenant that I was employed by the family, that I did not currently have enough information to make any informed conclusions, and that I was working on instinct. Everything else was inference on his part. And yours.”
I invested half a minute in thinking about that before responding. “So he leaves thinking that you’re going to be picking apart the Collins clan and that my trip to Jersey is just the standard nailing down of alibis. Which makes it a little less likely I’ll have one of Lazenby’s boys standing over my shoulder when I’m there.”
Her answer was a long, slow sip of her drink. I know you’ve only just met her, but my boss—in case you haven’t inferred as much—is a genius.
“What are the chances the lieutenant will relinquish any of his notes on the party guests?” she asked.
“Ten to one against,” I said. “Five to one if he’s really concerned about us tripping over something they’ve got going. Who knows if they really have a hook into anything. He might be flipping a coin and it came company-side up.”
She shook her head. “No, I think they are investigating in earnest. He said ‘our numbers men.’ That means he’s called in assistance from the fraud squad.”
“You think that’s what we’ve got here? Somebody had their fingers in the till and Mrs. Collins caught ’em?”
“I think in a company as large and turbulent as Collins Steelworks, a thorough investigation will find many fingers in many tills. Whether or not those fingers found their way around the murder weapon, I do not know.”
This time I only had to invest half a minute of thought to follow that line to its end.
“If it’s something like that—straight-out embezzlement—Lazenby’s going to get there before us.”
“Almost certainly,” she agreed. “We cannot match the NYPD’s manpower, nor do we have the luxury of seeking warrants.”
“And Sid’s good, but I’m not sure he’s up for a job this big.”
Sid was our numbers man and a former member of a certain fraternal organization. His job had been to move the club’s dough around in such a way that it became invisible from the feds. He did a little till-dipping of his own, got caught, and was moved to the top of the club’s agenda. Ms. Pentecost managed to get Sid out from under by solving the decade-old murder of the club boss’s uncle. Instead of payment, she asked for Sid to be spared. So he owes her his life and he was paying her back on the installment plan by providing assistance when we had finan
cials that needed combing.
“You’re right,” Ms. Pentecost said. “However, that does not mean you shouldn’t keep your eyes and ears open on Friday. Perhaps inquire about warrants and just what questions the police have asked and see who reacts and how.”
“Got it,” I said. “Ask questions. Get answers. Pay attention. I might even remember to bring a pencil and paper so I can write things down.”
My sarcasm went unremarked.
“Now, if our schedule is free, I’d like to grab lunch out and take a tour of some newspaper offices. See if there’s anything that wasn’t fit to print but which might be fit for us. I’m not worried about tipping off our involvement in the case. If the cops know we’re in the mix, it’s a sure bet the journos are only about half a step behind.”
“I agree,” she said. “But first, call the university and inquire about Professor Waterhouse’s schedule for tomorrow.”
I did and I found that she had a full day—two classes in the morning, two in the afternoon, with barely enough time to inhale a sandwich in between. We decided to hit her up after her last lecture. No warning her ahead of time. Who knew where she fit into this thing.
With that settled, I grabbed my coat and hat and left to put my underestimated talents to use.
CHAPTER 9
When I began the chore of writing all this down, I found I had to keep making the same big decision over and over again. What do I keep and what do I toss? There’s a lot that cropped up during this case that has no bearing on anything or anyone, or at least nothing worth committing ink to paper—the mundane stuff that accumulates during any big investigation. Those are easy tosses.
Then there are the things that aren’t so much relevant to the investigation as they are relevant to me or to my boss. Private things that would not otherwise see the light of day but that you might find illuminating. Those are harder. I’m taking those on a case-by-case basis.
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 9
