Partners In Crime (3 page)

"So I checked his pulse. Definitely dead."
She shivered again. "His hand was very cold and very heavy. Well,
Mom, of course, was just standing there aghast that I would touch a
dead person. She opened her mouth like she was going to scream
again, but no sound came out. Then she started whispering something
like, 'Go get help, get help, get help.' Over and over again. Which
was almost as creepy as Mr. Cheswick being dead. So I made her shut
up and sit down and catch her breath, then I went out the swinging
doors to look for a guard. But I couldn't find anyone that early
and I was afraid Mom might faint if I left her in the same room as
a dead man, so I went back to her. She was just sitting there
clutching her pocketbook, mumbling to herself. I led her out of the
room and called the police. At first the operator wouldn't believe
me. She kept asking me to repeat the address. It was really quite
irritating. She wanted me to stand in the drizzle to direct the
ambulance. I told her an ambulance wasn't going to do much good and
that my catching pneumonia wouldn't help things, either. Just then
I saw Frank coming down the hall."

"Frank?" T.S. asked.

"You know, the security guard who still
wears a crewcut. I sent him to the side entrance to flag down the
cops and warned Mom not to let anyone else in the Partners' Room,
not that she would have been any help, since she was still
practically in a trance. Then I got her some hot tea from that
little closet they have hidden away off the Partners' Room." Sheila
leaned forward and dropped her voice slightly. "Did you know
there's three bottles of scotch stashed in there behind the
Styrofoam cups?" She lifted her eyebrows.

"Yes, I did." They'd been there for years.
But they belonged to an old partner without any real duties and
T.S. didn't begrudge him his snorts.

"Anyway, I brought Mom her tea. She had
turned into a zombie at this point so I tried to call my father to
tell him he better come get her. She can be Miss Efficiency, you
know, but if anything upsets her routine, she turns into a
three-year- old." She delivered these observations with the knowing
air of a pop psychologist on a talk show. "Dad wasn't home and by
this time it was about ten minutes to eight and I heard the
elevator start moving. I knew people would be arriving soon and I
didn't want them asking Mom a lot of questions and upsetting her
more, so I made her sit in that little reception area right by the
Partners' Room. Fortunately, Mr. Hale was one of the first people
to arrive and since he's the Managing Partner, well, no one is
going to argue with him or ask him stupid questions. I let him take
a look and explained to him that the police were on their way and
it was crucial no one disturb a thing. I know that because of
Brian, of course." Sheila's husband and father were both NYC
policemen and she loved to contribute gruesome details about their
run-ins with occasional murders and soured drug deals as part of
her coffee cart conversation.

"Mr. Hale was a mess himself, of course.
Kept staring at Mr. Cheswick. Seeing his own face on the corpse, I
suppose." She shook her head. "You know, for partners, they can
really be a bunch of little kids sometimes." He knew exactly what
she meant. "I happened to make a remark about what you might say to
all this and Mr. Hale jumped right on it. Said we had to call you
right away. Insisted I phone. I reminded him you were retired but
he didn't want to hear it. As soon as he grabbed the phone from
me—I hate people that do that—the other partners started arriving.
You know how they are about trying to get in earlier than each
other. One by one, they walked in through the swinging doors and
stopped dead in their tracks." She was nonplussed by her choice of
words. "I finally told Mr. Hale that he had to stand outside the
swinging doors and keep everyone out. They were all quite angry
that they couldn't get at their desks."

She fiddled with her empty ashtray and
tapped it against the desk. "I always thought it was silly how they
all had to work in the same room anyway. How can they get anything
done there? It looks like Ebenezer Scrooge time. All those rolltop
desks."

"I expect they do most of their work at
lunch and visiting clients and on the banking floor anyway," T.S.
explained. It was like Ebenezer Scrooge time. She had an excellent
mind for capsulizing the truth.

"The cops were here within ten minutes. I'm
surprised it took them that long. To hear Brian talk, you'd think
they always got there when the body was still warm." She rolled her
eyes again. T.S. had discerned over the past few months that her
marriage was going steadily downhill and that she was not
particularly disturbed about the trend. "This big fat lieutenant or
something took over. He was really very pushy. Didn't even say
thank you or anything that I'd preserved the scene of the crime.
Just grilled me like I was a suspect or something. Wanted to know
why I wasn't more upset. Practically accused me of disturbing
evidence. I told him I was married to a cop and knew better and
that if not for me, he'd have found a room full of fourteen alive
partners and one dead one, with all the evidence trampled and them
working as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened."

"Good thing it was Cheswick," T.S.
interrupted. "With some of the others, it might have been days
before anyone noticed they were dead."

"I beg your pardon?" She stared at T.S. with
wide eyes.

"I'm making a joke, Sheila."

"Oh." She plunged back in. "Anyway, the fat
lieutenant started right in on Mom, didn't care a bit that she was
so upset. But she snapped right out of her trance, sat straight up
and informed him that she was married to Tommy Shaunessy, who
outranked him by a mile, and that he better treat her with a little
more respect. That stopped him dead. He backed right off,
apologized to Mom and told a guy to take her into one of the
conference rooms to wait until they could find Dad. I tried the
same thing—telling him I was married to a cop—but I guess Brian
didn't impress him as much as Dad because I had to give my
statement to this policewoman who acted totally bored and obviously
thought I was some kind of an airheaded secretary. I don't know who
she thought she was." She shook her head angrily. "They do have
nice uniforms, though. Gray slacks and blue blazers. She had a gold
shield, too. Looked very smart. I noticed that her hair was curled
into this braided bun."

He could think of nothing to say to this and
simply sighed.

"But they finally said I could go if I
promised to stay on the premises in case they had more questions.
Let me tell you it was quite a relief to walk through those
swinging doors. And you know what?" She waited patiently for T.S.
to ask.

"What?"

"It was disgusting." Her eyes glittered with
excitement.

"What was disgusting?"

"The Main Floor was swarming with employees
kind of loitering by the entrance to the Partners' Room. Pretending
they had to run an errand past the place."

T.S. nodded. He knew the syndrome well. It
also happened when someone was fired and word got around. Coworkers
seemed overcome by lemming-like urges to visit the scene of the
incident and rubberneck.

"All these partners' secretaries were trying
to get a peek and pump me for information—especially Mrs. Quincy.
The executives were trying to act real cool, but you could tell
they were trying to look in between the doors. Desperate to know
what was going on." She shook her head. "I was practically mobbed
and my phone's been ringing off the hook. But to tell you the
truth, I didn't feel like talking to anyone."

If these words betrayed her enthusiastic
narration, T.S. wasn't going to let on.

"I holed up in here and waited for you to
arrive. It really hit me hard. It was ugly seeing a dead man. With
a knife sticking out of him and all."

"Yes, I can imagine." The knife intrigued
him. It nudged at his memory, but he couldn't quite pinpoint
it.

"Perhaps you should go home early?" he
suggested.

"Yes. That might be nice. If the lieutenant
will let me." She made no move to go. "Someone has to get Mom home
after she gives her statement. She is very upset. I doubt she could
find her own way to the bathroom right now."

"She worked for him for many years," T.S.
reminded her. "She probably saw as much of Mr. Cheswick as your
father."

"More, I expect." She shook her head again.
"Anyway, she ought to be in bed right now with a mug of hot
lemonade and rum. That would take care of her."

"Sounds pretty good to me," T.S. remarked.
"Perhaps you should consider it yourself. Is Brian on duty?"

She stared at the wall. "I can take care of
myself." Suddenly she grinned wickedly. "Do you suppose anyone
would notice if we went and looted one of those bottles of
scotch?"

He could think of one partner who would.
"Probably not," he said.

"You know what the worst part of the whole
thing was?" Sheila asked.

"What?" He had the feeling that he was about
to hear something very important. He often got this feeling during
an interview, when he had let several moments of silence pass
before asking a question. Silence made people nervous, made them
spill their guts, and he'd developed antennae for when something
big was about to pop out.

"His fly was open," she nearly
whispered.

"Whose fly?" he whispered back, before
catching himself and switching to his normal tone of voice. "Whose
fly was open?"

"Mr. Cheswick's." She leaned back and
explained. "Not that I'm in the habit of inspecting these things,
of course." T.S. shook his head and murmured something nonsensical
in agreement. "But there it was. I couldn't help but notice. I
could even see that he had on white boxer shorts with these little
green bows printed on it. Pretty silly for a partner. I couldn't
see any flesh, but something about his fly being open really gave
me the creeps."

T.S. nodded in agreement. He knew what she
meant.

"It just seemed so nasty," she said.

It was time to see for himself. He heard the
murmur of employees' voices as he strode down the Main Floor, a
cavernous marbled cathedral-like space divided by a large center
aisle that led to a smaller, oak-paneled foyer manned by alert
valets who hovered about an enormous pair of swinging doors. Behind
these doors lay the inner sanctum—the Partners' Room itself.

He wondered briefly if he would even get
past the swinging doors, but he need not have worried. Jimmy
Ruffino, loyal valet to the partners for more than two decades,
stood guard beside a uniformed cop and grabbed T.S. by the elbow at
once.

"Thank goodness you're here, Mr. Hubbert,"
he cried, as if expecting T.S. to somehow raise Cheswick from the
dead.

"Yes, well. Thanks, Jimmy." He could think
of no other suitable reply. The cop stared at them curiously.

"It's Mr. Hubbert, Personnel Manager," Jimmy
explained.

''Former Personnel Manager," T.S. corrected
with a weak smile.

"The one that Mr. Hale has been insisting be
present," Jimmy added.

"Oh yeah? Boy, can that old
guy howl." The cop seemed infinitely bored with his role. "If you
being here means the old codger will leave us alone, you're welcome
to
entre vous.
Anyone would be an improvement over that guy." The uniform
jerked his thumb in the air and gave a sign that T.S. could enter
the inner sanctum. He was so fat, T.S. had trouble squeezing past.
What had happened to fitness requirements?

On the other hand, though the cop was
overweight and spoke bad French, he was absolutely right about
Edgar Hale. Just about anyone was an improvement over the Managing
Partner.

T.S. pushed through the swinging doors. The
body was screened from general view by an expensive Moroccan
leather screen usually reserved for decoration. Forensic
technicians moved about the screen quickly and dispassionately in
an efficient choreography of detached involvement. Mesmerized by
the clinical dance unfolding before him, T.S. stood in the doorway
and stared until a familiar, booming voice interrupted his
reverie.

"It's about time, Hubbert," Edgar Hale
barked by way of greeting. "What took you so long?"

Edgar Hale, Managing Partner of Sterling
& Sterling, stood stiffly at attention under the portrait of
Samuel T. Sterling and his four sons that was displayed over a
never-used fireplace at one end of the Partners' Room. Hale bore an
uncanny resemblance to the founder himself, down to his tubby
pugnaciousness, scowling face and hair that remained stubbornly
dark despite his age. Yet he was related to Samuel Sterling by
temperament and station alone. Perhaps it was the constant diet of
power that had shaped their images in such a like fashion.

If so, Edgar Hale was hungry. Obviously
relegated to his spot, he stood with his arms folded, glaring at
each and every man and woman who dared move around him as if he
wasn't there. His grim expression made it clear that he suspected
they were purposefully tramping mud and sludge onto Sterling &
Sterling's impeccable rose carpet. He glared at the crowd with
curious, smoky green eyes that smoldered with barely suppressed
anger and frustration. "What a day for Boswell to be out," he
finally shouted to no one, cracking under the unexpected strain of
being ignored. John Boswell was in charge of the firm's Management
Committee and second in importance only to Edgar Hale himself in
the partner pecking order.

"I understood he was taking a small vacation
this weekend," T.S. dared to say.

"So what the hell is your excuse?'' Edgar
Hale demanded. He had found a target. "Where have you been? I
called you over two hours ago."