ER - A Murder Too Personal (18 page)

I flung the walkie-talkie against the steel
door and walked away down what seemed like the longest corridor in
the developed world.

***

I put in a call to Laura when I got back to
the office that afternoon, but she wasn’t home. I left a message on
her machine telling her that I hadn’t been able to get to Jergens
but I’d keep on trying. Then I called Tanner to see if he had any
luck in locating Wheelock.

“I tried an on-line search through Nexis to
get an address change on his driver’s license and his broker’s
license, but all I came up with was a dead end,” I told him.

“Don’t fret, old buddy. I tracked down
Murdoch in Vegas,” he said with a note of pride. “He was shacked up
with some chorus girl from the Luxor and he was still flogging
penny stocks to old ladies. He said he thought Wheelock was
somewhere in Connecticut, maybe Westport.”

“Outstanding,” I said. “Now get me some
coordinates.”

“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll make some more calls.
We’ll tree the SOB yet.”

The super opened the apartment door without
using a key and turned back to look at me.

“It was not locked, mister,” he said. “Just
slammed shut. Solamente cerrado.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that,” I told
him.

I gave him a twenty. “Thanks for your
help.”

He nodded several times rapidly. “Gracias,
mister.” He was a small man with smooth movements and a friendly
smile. I’d told him I was Laura’s brother-in-law and that I was
worried because I hadn’t been able to contact her. It didn’t take
much to persuade him I was telling the truth. Maybe he was just a
newcomer to New York and hadn’t had time to develop that
gimlet-eyed instinct that protects the city dweller.

I shoved open the door and stepped into the
living room.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary. The
apartment was cute, spotless and comfortable. It always smelled
like lilacs. Only this time there was another smell and it wasn’t
good. It was the stench of death. It was an odor as familiar in the
triple-canopy jungle as the screech of the birds.

The words came back.

Man is conceived in sin and born in
corruption. He passes from the stink of the didee to the stench of
the shroud.

My stomach started to clench up. The super
was a step behind me. He touched my sleeve in a tentative way.
“Senor, something does not smell good.”

“I know.” I hoped he didn’t hear the tremor
in my voice. “Wait here. I’ll take a look around.”

She was lying on her back on the bedroom
floor next to a Chinese rug. There was a small bloodstain on her
chest. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with a pattern of red
flowers. If you looked quickly, you might have mistaken the
bloodstain for one of the flowers except that it was a little
larger and a little darker. That innocent face was twisted into a
rictus of surprise and fear. There was a thin line of dried blood
at the corner of her mouth.

I kneeled beside her and touched her cheek.
It was cold. Colder than anything I’d ever touched.

I cleared my throat and got up and looked
around the room. There was nothing unusual. The bed was neatly made
and all the clothing was in the proper place. There was a night
table next to the bed with a thin vase and a single rose,
wilting.

I stepped back into the living room. The
super stood there, looking out of place in his work clothes in the
middle of this delicately furnished setting. He was trembling
slightly.

“She’s dead,” I said in a low voice, not
wanting to spook him. “You better call the police.”

“Yes, mister. I will call right now.” He
rushed out of the apartment, leaving the door open.

There wouldn’t be much time before the cops
got here. I did the standard search but didn’t turn up anything.
The apartment was a junior one-bedroom with a cramped kitchen, a
large living room and a bedroom half the size of what a bedroom
should be. But it wasn’t out of line with the square footage
allotment of a typical New York apartment. Every inch of space was
put to good use.

The kitchen was clean. No dishes in the sink.
I opened the dishwasher. It was empty. When had she put away the
dishes? When was the last time she’d eaten? What was her last meal?
The M.E. would know. But I would never know. Who did she have her
last meal with? Did she laugh that sweet little laugh when she
cocked her head to one side?

Laura knew the killer and had let him in.
Three to one it was the same guy who killed her sister. And for the
same reason. Whatever the reason was. I didn’t have the answer. I
wasn’t any closer than I’d been when Alicia died.

I waved my hand at no one in particular.
There was nothing in the kitchen that could help me. I went back
into the living room. There was a wall unit with a bookcase. Her
taste in reading matter ran to romance and biographies of show biz
folk. You could forgive her for small weaknesses.

There was a magazine rack next to the sofa.
In it was a large manila envelope with Laura’s name written on it.
The handwriting was familiar. I recognized it immediately. It was
Alicia’s.

I opened the envelope. It was empty.

I folded the envelope twice and put it in my
inside breast pocket. I didn’t know what it meant. But it would
mean more to me than it would to the cops.

***

“Listen, scumbag,” the seamstress said. “How
do we know you don’t have another piece stashed away somewheres?”
He ran his fingers over his mustache. “And you used it to whack
these sisters for some reason for which we don’t have figured out
yet.”

His partner winced. Maybe it was the tortured
syntax. “Shut up,” Black said. “You make more noise than a cow
pissing on a flat rock.”

The seamstress looked hurt. His fingers kept
doing their twinkletoes dance in the air. “I still say this scumbag
is the best lead we got. He knew both sisters. Had access to both
of them. I say he killed both of them.”

I stared at Forgash across Black’s beaten-up
desk. “Go stand in the corner with your thumb up your ass like
little Jack Horner,” I said.

The seamstress started across the room toward
me, but Black’s words stopped him. “Get the fuck out of here,” he
yelled. “Get back to your desk.”

Forgash halted, torn between his desire to
make a mark on me and his fear of disobeying his boss. Discretion
won out. That, plus the risk of suffering some serious basic bodily
injury. He shot me a dirty look as he left.

Black waited a couple of minutes before he
spoke, as if he were running the facts of the case over in his
mind. While he thought, he rubbed the back of his hand across his
mouth, over and over. He closed his eyes.

Finally he spoke. “This is my last case
before I retire.” He opened his red-rimmed eyes and studied me. “I
don’t want to leave the game on a strikeout.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked out
through the slits in the venetian blind into the squad room. The
seamstress was sitting at his desk, his shoulders hunched forward,
his chin in his hands. He looked like a kid who’d been caught by
the principal pulling his pecker in the little boy’s room.

I looked back at Black. His face was one of
those that tell you they’ve seen every crime in the book—and some
that aren’t in the book. Every crime that can be committed will be
committed. I felt sorry for the old bastard, but not sorry enough
to give him Jergens. Black was telling me the cops hadn’t been able
to crack two perfect murders. Neat and clean.

“I wish I could help you, Gene,” I said, “but
I don’t have a goddam thing. Not even an angle. I can just tell you
what you already know.”

He nodded. “OK. Same gun. Clean entry. No
struggle. Killer was known to both girls,” he rattled off in his
raspy voice.

He rose heavily, like a man old before his
time. “Coffee?” he asked.

“Sure, if it’s strong.”

“Curl your toes,” he said. He walked around
from behind his desk over to a hot plate sitting on a low file
cabinet. He poured two cups black and steaming from one of those
round glass pitchers restaurants use. This one had an orange
top.

“Is that decaf?” I asked.

He glanced at me sheepishly and then looked
down. “My wife says regular coffee makes me jumpy.”

“A cop’s supposed to be jumpy.”

He grunted. “Not if your wife’s twenty-five
years younger than you.”

“You having troubles at home?”

“Nothing that a smaller prostate and a
stiffer stick couldn’t cure.”

It was my turn to grunt. I took the coffee
and drank some. It was hot but it was still decaf and it tasted
bland.

“The angle of entry was different,” I
said.

“Yeah.” Black nodded. “Your wife was sitting
at the computer with her back to the shooter. She got it in the
head. Her sister was standing, facing the guy. It was easier to hit
her in the chest.”

“You think they both knew something and the
guy was trying to shut them up?”

“That’s my guess,” he said. “Only I’ll be
damned if I can figure out what it was they knew in common.”

“It could have been a grudge,” I said. I was
thinking out loud, trying to probe what he knew. Maybe the cops had
picked up something he wasn’t telling me.

“About what?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? Feminism, political
correctness, new age philosophy?”

He raised an eyebrow. “People kill over
that?”

“Hell,” I said. “People kill over parking
spaces.”

There was a message on my machine when I got
back to the office. It was from McCormack.

“Mr. Rogan, it’s Friday afternoon about two
forty-five,” said the neat clipped voice. “I’d like to meet with
you as soon as possible. I just came across something in a filing
cabinet I shared with Alicia that I think you’ll find
interesting.”

I called him faster than a hooker could drop
her panties.

“It’ll take me a half-hour to get uptown from
Wall Street,” he said.

“OK, fine. Meet me by the information booth
in Grand Central at four-thirty.”

He showed up on time, wearing his Armani suit
and Gucci tie with the little stirrups and suspenders with little
bulls and bears. His face was pale underneath his salon tan. He was
carrying a brown manila envelope.

The huge waiting room was starting to fill up
with homeward-bound commuters threading their way between the bums
and the tourists. You could tell the commuters. They strode
purposefully, always looking straight ahead, heading for the 4:35,
the 4:41 or the 4:45…

I took the envelope. “What is it?”

His tone was tentative. “It’s a disk. I
thought Alicia had cleaned out all her files and taken them with
her. I was going through a file cabinet we shared. She had the top
two drawers and I had the bottom two drawers. I needed some more
space for my files and I found this disk in the back behind some
empty folders. It must have been a back-up copy.”

“Did you run it?”

He bit his lip. “Just enough to know what was
in it. I didn’t want to see any more than that.”

“And what was it?” I prodded to get his
reaction.

He took half a step backwards. “I’d rather
you answered that for yourself.” He took another half-step
back.

I put my hand square on his shoulder. “Come
upstairs to my office while I run it. You can explain it to
me.”

He pulled his shoulder away from my grip.
“You’ll understand it when you see it.” He widened the distance
between us. “Besides it’s late and I have to run.” He glanced at
his tank watch without noting the time.

Then I guess he had a sudden change of heart
because he leaned in toward me and whispered, “I’m in this too
deeply already. I don’t want to be part of it anymore. I’m scared.
You’ll see why when you run the disk.”

He did a brisk half-turn and blended into the
crowd of well-dressed yuppies on their way to their health clubs
and juice bars.

I stopped off at the Roy Rogers to pick up a
bacon cheeseburger and a cup of coffee with skim milk and took the
elevator back up to my office.

I pulled off my jacket and tie and threw them
over the back of a chair. Then I slipped the disk into the computer
and started my dinner as the computer went through its opening
routines.

What I saw was halfway to finding the Rosetta
Stone. Page after goddam page of Jergen’s financials corrected for
cash flow deficiencies and reconstituted statements showing
fraudulent or non-existent cash flows. All of the financials
combined indicated that Jergens had a negative net worth.

Alicia had done a masterful job. What a
competent gal she was. She’d taken all of his financials and recast
them using the figures she’d generated from her own investigations.
This was the weapon that would bring Jergens down. Here was one of
the biggest real estate operators in the country skewered like a
shish kebab. No wonder he wanted to get her fired…or worse.

I didn’t waste any time. Jergens was probably
still in his office. Maybe I should have waited and planned a
strategy. But there was one thing I learned in the Corps and it was
the only strategy they had—find the bastards and pile on.

I called Jergens’ office, got his fax number
and faxed five of the most damaging pages together with a note
asking him to give me a call at his earliest convenience, if it
wasn’t too much of a bother.

The clock said 5:36. I finished my bacon
cheeseburger and waited for his call.

It came in exactly seventeen minutes.

A female voice, free of regional inflections
and well-modulated, said, “Mr. Jergens would like to speak to you,
Mr. Rogan. Please hold the line.” She sounded like one of those
computer ladies on the voice mail.