ER - A Murder Too Personal (2 page)

They walked into my office without the
courtesy of an invitation.

Forgash spoke first. “Where were you Tuesday
night?”

“I was at the needlepoint show. Didn’t I see
you there stitching a throw pillow?”

Forgash looked at Black. “We got a fucking
stand-up comic here.” He squinted at me. “You’re in deep shit,
Rogan. You’re in big trouble, is all.”

“That a fact?” I said. “Somebody steal your
lollypop?”

A vein started to throb in his forehead.
“Listen, wiseguy…” He started to say something but Black put a hand
on his arm.

“We gotta ask you some questions, Ed,” Black
said. “Bear with us, OK?”

I nodded.

“Where were you Tuesday night, Ed?” Black
asked.

I tried to recall. I couldn’t think of
anything out of the ordinary, so I said, “Home, I guess.”

“What were you doing?”

“Reading, probably,” I said. “Reading before
I nodded off on the sofa. Nothing very exciting. What’s the furor
all about?”

Forgash couldn’t hold it in. “Somebody
whacked your ex-wife, Rogan. Blew her fucking brains out. We got a
good idea you did it. Whadda ya think about that?”

I hoped he didn’t see my reaction. First, I
couldn’t breathe. Then I felt like I was going to puke up my guts.
My knees had that weak feeling you get before you go into combat. I
looked down at the papers on my desk, papers arranged in neat piles
that didn’t seem to matter very much any more.

“Christ,” was all I could manage.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Black
asked.

When was it? I thought back. When the hell
was it? At the lawyer’s office? Soft leather furniture and deep
carpeting and a dozen brass nameplates on the door.

No. I didn’t see her there. Only her
lawyer.

It was at her sister’s… for a birthday party.
Bittersweet. Knowing we were going to split up. A glass of
champagne for a farewell toast. A last slow kiss goodbye.

“Four years ago, Gene,” I said. “That was the
last time. I hadn’t seen her or spoken to her till she called me
Monday night.”

Forgash was busy thumbing through his little
notebook. He had thin fingers that looked like they belonged to a
seamstress. The way he moved those little hands made the hair stand
up on the back of my neck. He was the kind of man whose fingers
never stopped fidgeting.

“Why’d she call you?” Forgash asked.

“She wanted to hire me.”

“What for?” Forgash said.“I don’t know. I
told her no.”

“Any idea who’d want to kill her?” Black
asked. He looked slowly around the office. It was evident he wasn’t
very impressed with what he saw. “What can you tell me, Ed?”

I studied his weary cop’s face with its deep
lines and rheumy gray eyes. “What do you have on it, Gene?” I
said.

He considered for a moment, glanced at
Forgash, then back at me. “She was coked up when she got it,” he
said finally.

I shook my head. “You got it all wrong,
buddy. Alicia never took drugs. “

Black sighed. He shook his head the way you
do with a kid who doesn’t get it. “She was coked, all right. That’s
the way it was.” He stared at me. “How long were you two
married?”

“Five years.”

“Guess you didn’t know her very well.” He
tried to be helpful. “What guy ever does?”

Forgash stopped playing with his little
notebook and waved a skinny finger at me. “We got it that a guy
name of Wheelock was screwing your wife before you got
divorced.”

I blinked. “Go to hell, Forgash,” I said.
“What does that have to do with anything.”

“It’s an old grudge, Rogan. Old grudges
fester, you know what I mean. They fester and then they boil
over.”

I didn’t like his mixed metaphor. “Go to
hell,” I said again.

“You better watch out, scumbag,” he shouted.
“You better respect the law.”

“Fuck the law, my friend.” Once more and I
was going to serrate his face.

Gene Black stepped into the breech. “This
ain’t getting us nowhere.” He spread his hands and flattened them
against the desk, like he was going to do push-ups.

“Tell me about her friends,” he said. “The
people she hung out with, you know.”

“She had a lot of acquaintances. She liked to
get out and around town. But she didn’t have any close friends, as
far as I know.” I ticked off a list of people she used to associate
with. “I don’t know who her friends are now. The way she was, she
didn’t maintain relationships.”

“Who was her latest boyfriend?” Forgash
asked, more tentatively this time. “Or was she still banging
Wheelock?”

“How the hell should I know? Maybe she didn’t
even have one.”

Didn’t have one? Not too likely. I couldn’t
imagine her without a current stud. Was he the bastard who killed
her?

“Can you give us some idea where she got that
coke, Ed?”

“Damned if I know, Gene. She didn’t even
drink when we were married. Claimed it was bad for her health. She
only ate healthy foods, exercised regularly, strictly by the book,
you know.”

Black nodded in acknowledgment. He was the
type who took in information slowly, processed it thoroughly, and
never forgot it. “Tell me about her,” he said. “What kind of person
she was…what she did…”

I considered his question. What could I tell
him? That she was elegant. It was the best word to describe her.
There wasn’t anything cheap or second-rate about her. That she was
loving. When she loved you, she gave everything she had without
restraint until she couldn’t give you any more. There was no
deception or artifice about her.

That wasn’t what they wanted to hear. There
was nothing useful I could tell them now. I’d been out of the
picture too long.

“Talk to her sister,” I said. “She can tell
you more about Alicia than I can.”

“We will, Ed. Only she’s been out of town.
She’s due back today.” Black’s eyes wandered over the top of my
desk, inspecting the folders and stacks of paper.

“Was she close to her sister?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They talked on the phone
almost every day. No one was closer to her.”

I finished the last bitter dregs of my coffee
and tossed the cup in the garbage.

Then I had a vision. Tall, thin, blond. Lying
on the floor with unseeing eyes and mouth open.

“What did she look like, Gene?”

He glanced at his partner with a pained look,
then back at me. “One slug through the back of the head. No
struggle. Her apartment was ripped apart though.”

“Forced entry?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“What was the time of death?”

“That’s enough, Rogan,” the seamstress cut
in. “We’re not here to answer your fucking questions. Now you tell
me what kinda gun you carry.”

“Glock seventeen. But I don’t carry it all
the time, my friend. It’s at home.”

He squinted at me. “Have no fear. We’ll check
it out.”

There were just a few peanuts left. Dave
Tanner rooted around absentmindedly in the bottom of the bowl. I
signaled the waitress for another round of Budweisers and held up
the bowl for her to see.

Tanner stared across the tables as the girl
sashayed away from us. He’d thickened some since our days of
humping through Thua Thien province, but he still played a mean
game of pickup basketball. And he still sported a crewcut.

Only now he was an institutional bond
salesman with a white-shoe Wall Street firm, one of those venerable
second-tier outfits you see in the middle of the tombstone ads.

“Too broad abeam?” he asked.

“What?”

“Her ass.”

I shook my head. “She’s a good kid. Studying
to be a lawyer.”

We were sitting underneath an oversized red
umbrella in the outdoor patio of Cafe Centro on East Forty-fifth,
surrounded by a barricade of shrubbery. It was a hazy late
afternoon with just a faint breeze stirring. All around us office
workers were scurrying home or out to an evening rendezvous. Men in
dark suits with stress lines creasing their faces. Women in
flowered dresses carrying shopping bags filled with credit card
purchases. A couple at the next table were hunched together, deep
in conversation. They’d had a few drinks already and, from the
snatches of conversation I could hear, the guy was laying a
full-court press on the girl to convince her to take him back to
her apartment. Their faces weren’t more than a foot apart. They
clutched each other’s hands and the intensity of his gaze would
have been enough to scald her on the spot.

I brought the subject up first. “About
Alicia…,” I said.

“What do you wanna know, old buddy?”

“Tell me what you know about what she was
doing.”

He shrugged. “Cops came to see me too. Not
too much I could tell them about her. I just saw her once or twice
a year. At parties, mutual friends, that kind of thing, you
know.”

He stopped talking and stared at the
waitress’ breasts as she came to the table. Her body was fleshy but
her waist was trim, so she carried some extra inches around her
bust and hips. Her breasts were well-rounded and they swung forward
as she bent over to pour our beers. She was wearing one of those
barely-visible bras, more for support than for coverage. Her thin
white cotton blouse didn’t hide very much.

She finished pouring and straightened up,
flashing a bright smile, first at Tanner and then at me.

“Care for some more peanuts?” she asked.

“You sure are one hell of a waitress,” Tanner
said.

She tossed her head and ran her fingers
through her spun-copper hair. “I’m not really a waitress. I’m
studying law at Fordham. Next year this time, I’ll be a
lawyer.”

Tanner and I exchanged glances. He scratched
his head and said, “Not a waitress. Well, I’ll bet you’ll be a hell
of a lawyer. Give me your number. I’m going to need a good lawyer
sooner rather than later.”

She laughed and tossed her hair again. She
wasn’t pretty but she had the kind of submissive air a lot of men
like.

“I won’t have the same number when I start to
practice law. I’m going back home to Boston.”

“Shame it is,” Tanner said as she walked
away, his eyes studying her backside.

“About Alicia,” I prodded him.

He considered for a minute. “I don’t know too
much about her life now. It consisted mostly of her job from what I
could see. You know how she was. She always put herself into her
work, body and soul. She didn’t have time for too much else.”

I took a swallow of beer. It felt good and
cold going down. “How was her work going?”

He shrugged and said, “I dunno. Hard to
tell—difficult to say. She never told me anything about it.”

Then I asked the sixty-four dollar question.
“Did she have a boyfriend?”

He polished off his beer and swiveled his
head around searching for an instant refill. “Yup,” he nodded, “if
it’s the same one I knew. A guy named Chisolm.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s chairman of a company called Insignia
Biotech in Norwalk. A solid, substantial citizen.”

I knew what he was referring to. “How long
had they been going out?”

“Maybe a year, I think.”

“Did she ever talk about him?”

“She once told me he satisfied her
needs.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“She didn’t go into any details,” Tanner
said. “You knew her. She was a gal who didn’t like to talk a lot—to
open up, you know.”

I nodded.

I remembered.

The morning of her funeral was clear. There
wasn’t a cloud in sight. The sun was so bright it reminded you of
the way the sky looks on a summertime afternoon in Spain. Colors so
vivid and whites like titanium dioxide whitewash on a canvas.

There were maybe thirty people at the
cemetery—mostly expensively-dressed, well-coifed professionals
wearing Swiss watches and English shoes. People like herself. They
were probably her friends and co-workers.

I recognized three or four of her family
members. They didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for me. As a
matter of fact, they studiously ignored me, preferring instead to
inspect the groundskeeper’s craftsmanship. Tanner was there. He
flashed a silent salute when he saw me.

Why was I there?

I owed it to her. For sure, I damn well owed
it to her. If I had said yes to her plea, would she still be alive?
If I had helped her, would they be putting her in the ground right
now? Goddamned if I knew. But one thing was as certain as night
follows day—I was going to do everything I could, and then a hell
of a lot more, to find the answer. And when I did, I was going to
tear off the head of the bastard who killed her. She was only
thirty-six. Too young to bring down the curtain.

As the hydraulic lift soundlessly lowered her
coffin, I thought back to a trip we’d taken to Spain. There had
been a small hotel in Barcelona, just off the Ramblas. We’d
strolled down the broad boulevard with all the brightly-colored
flower stalls and the locals had stopped and stared at her because
she was so tall and so blond. At the hotel, the concierge had told
me that she was so beautiful I couldn’t deny her anything.

And now they were covering her with clods of
earth.

And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

And it tolls for me.

After the gravediggers had finished and gone,
the mourners stood around and spoke in muted tones. Some birds were
chirping from a nearby stand of trees. The cemetery had become very
quiet. The scent of newly-mown grass mixed with the smell of
freshly-dug earth. Somebody put a hand on my arm. I turned to look.
It was her sister, Laura.

“Hello, Ed,” she said in a whisper. “I was
hoping you would come.” Her eyes were red and she sniffled into a
tissue she had wadded up in her hand.