Partners In Crime (8 page)

"I disarmed her. Walked right up to her and
demanded she hand over the scissors. She did, too. Meek as a lamb.
Then I let her sit in the office until the police arrived. It was
too late for the Albanian, of course."

Of course. Auntie Lil figured prominently in
all of her stories. He had no doubt that most of them were
true.

"And you surmise from this that Robert
Cheswick was stabbed by a woman?"

"Yes, I do."

Their drinks arrived and they sipped for a
moment in silence, Auntie Lil making a great show of testing the
degree of spiciness before dismissing their waiter.

"I believe I'll have the shepherd's pie
tonight," she announced to T.S. out of nowhere. It had never been
her habit to follow the conventional confines of a conversation.
"All this excitement has me feeling very much the pheasant."

"You mean peasant, don't you?"

"No. I had it once and it was far too dry."
Auntie Lil refused to admit that she was slightly deaf in her left
ear. "You have the liver and onions," she ordered. "Tell them not
to overcook it."

"I was thinking more along the lines of the
prime rib," T.S. protested.

She snorted at this. "You need the liver.
Look at you. Your color is terrible."

"Yours would be, too, if you'd spent all day
with disagreeable detectives."

"Yes, aren't they? Think they know
everything. What did they withhold from the press?" she asked, her
eyes glittering.

T.S. paused to let her squirm a bit, not
above getting his petty revenge when he could.

"Well, come on. What is it?" She spoke
almost like a man when she had to wait, her already husky voice
deepening and taking on a certain kind of power from
impatience.

Abromowitz had said nothing about keeping
quiet. Probably thought him too unimportant to matter.

"They found him with his fly unzipped."

"I knew it," she crowed. "They always
withhold some important detail. They always do. And now I know it,
too. How exciting."

"There was also a dead boutonniere placed on
his desk."

"A dead one, you said?" She leaned forward,
eyes glittering.

"Yes. Wilted and brown."

"How curious. Symbolic, no doubt." She
leaned back to consider the information. "He could have been on the
way to the bathroom," she finally said. "That's why his fly was
down."

"It's half a flight up."

"Perhaps he was, um, playing with himself,"
she ventured.

"Auntie Lil!"

She waved the waiter over to take their
orders. "I'm teasing you, Theodore. I'm sure it's a significant
development."

She ordered for them both, then suddenly
scrutinized him closely. "Where is your tie tonight, Theodore? You
look like you're on the way to a golf game."

"I'm retired now," he virtually moaned.

"Yes. I quite forgot." She eyed him again
closely. "I think it's quite suitable in that case. You pull it off
well. What a lovely sweater. I gave it to you, didn't I?"

"No, you did not." She was forever taking
credit for his best clothing. "I bought it in Ireland last
year."

"Hmm. Didn't bring me back one."

"I brought you that lovely shawl," he
protested.

This mollified her. "So you did," she said,
settling the subject.

She began again. "I am positive it was a
woman."

He had known even before she arrived that
the murder would be the sole topic of conversation at dinner. If
truth be told, he had looked forward to the opportunity to discuss
it all with her. Auntie Lil's observations tended to be remarkably
perceptive and correct, although collectively they presented a
bleak view of human nature.

He started at the beginning and told her the
entire story, from Sheila's recounting of the event to his own
observations to his conversations with lieutenant Abromowitz and
the lobby guards.

"The lieutenant sounds like a pompous ass,"
she noted briskly, having listened carefully to his entire account.
Even her chewing, normally lusty and quite an event, had been
hushed and unobtrusive.

"He seems positive that money is behind the
killing, or some sort of insider trading scandal. He's equally
convinced that the killer could easily have slipped by the
guards."

"He may be right," she conceded generously.
"But I doubt it. Pompous people don't have hunches, you know.
They're too full of themselves to see things clearly."

"Unfortunately, his hunch, correct or not,
means that I must go in tomorrow to pull together all the records
he's requested. It's quite a lot. Personnel files on all partners
and top executives. The financial records will have to come from
the treasurer."

"Tomorrow is Saturday," she pointed out.

"All the better. No one will be there but
the security and cleaning staff."

He could tell immediately he was being set
up by the careful way she raised her Bloody Mary, staring into it
as if an image might materialize in its murky depths. For a moment,
he thought she might even have fluttered her eyelashes, but then,
she was far too forthright for that. Bluntness was her only
approach.

"I want to come," she announced.

"Whatever for?"

"To see the crime scene."

"The body has been removed."

"Of course it has." She was insulted by his
assumption that she knew nothing of such techniques. "There may be
something the police have overlooked."

"I don't know if they'll let us back in." He
wondered if the police guard would still be posted.

"I'll take the chance." She stared at him
sternly, almost daring him to refuse.

She would be a monumental pain in the ass at
the office. Her normally inquisitive nature would no doubt go wild
faced with rows of personnel files containing the most minute
information on well over fifteen hundred lives.

"Aren't you busy tomorrow?" he asked.

She snorted and speared her last forkful of
shepherd's pie with gusto. "Doing what? Who'd want to bother with
an old woman like me?"

This he knew not to be true and merely
another symptom of her rather dramatic approach to life, but he
also knew when he was beaten. "Fine, then. I think I can manage
it." He would surrender with grace.

The change in her was astounding. She
briskly wiped her mouth with the linen napkin, folded it neatly at
the side of her plate, pushed away her Bloody Mary and reached for
the ice water. She threw it back like whiskey, slammed the glass
back down, then reached into her cavernous black cloth bag for her
notebook and gold fountain pen. "This is what we're going to do,"
she began.

T.S. stared, a half-chewed chunk of cold
liver dangling from his open mouth.

"For god's sake, Theodore. Close your mouth.
You're going about it all wrong. And so is that Lieutenant
Abromowitz, bless his arrogant heart."

"You planned this," he accused her.

"Of course. When will we ever have the
chance again?" She leaned forward and whispered urgently to him.
"When will we ever have the chance again, Theodore? You have the
time. I have the time. We both have the brains."

"Thank you for the benefit of the doubt," he
interrupted.

She snorted again. "Of course you have the
brains. You inherited them from me."

He did not attempt to explain that it was
impossible for him to inherit anything from his father's sister.
Besides, his own mother made the same accusation: "You're just like
that Hubbert woman," she would spit out in scathing tones.
"Bullheaded."

Auntie Lil had thought it all through.
"They're on the wrong track. But they're also not going to listen
to us."

"Who are we?" she asked just as the waiter
approached. He paused, startled, as Auntie Lil threw out her hands
and proclaimed, "We're a couple of crazy people to them if we try
to intervene in their investigation! You are maybe useful to some
extent, but me, I'm an unknown."

She again leaned forward, this time shaking
her fist and whispering, "We have the power. Compared to the
police, we're invisible. We can find out things they can't." She
sat up straight again, fixed the waiter with a piercing gaze and
nearly growled, "No dessert tonight. Get us the check."

He stared at her in surprise and walked away
muttering, his tip in danger.

"People talk to you. I know they do. You're
always telling me of someone's marital problems. Or someone
preparing to run off with someone in accounting."

He nodded and pushed his plate away. "Yes,
employees do talk to me."

"They know," she said wisely, nodding her
head in full expectation of his agreement.

"What do you mean, they know?"

"There is a reason why Robert Cheswick was
stabbed and that reason is at Sterling & Sterling. I can feel
it."

"How?" he asked her, genuinely puzzled.
"What do you mean?"

"They left him there on purpose, Theodore.
Out of sheer contempt. Left him cold and lifeless and totally
without power, stripped of all life and dignity in front of his
colleagues." She shook her head angrily. "And they exposed him,
too."

"His skin wasn't showing," he corrected
her.

"Oh, who cares if his dingus was hanging out
or not? That's not the point. The point is passion. Ugly passion.
It's not financial." She snorted again. "What poppycock. Those men
are cowards. Do you think Ebenezer Scrooge would have had the
courage to murder? I think not. All they care about is money and
earning more of it. It's a game to them. They're not going to risk
the pleasure they get from the game to obtain a little bit more."
She nearly rolled her eyes at the very notion.

"So what is the reason?" he asked her,
wishing he could share in her conviction. It was true the older
partners would never murder for money. But what about the younger
ones? Did he really understand the new generation of Wall Street
whiz kids? T.S. was no longer so sure that he did. He was old and
getting older every day.

"The absence of an apparent reason makes it
all the more important and difficult to discover," Auntie Lil
insisted. "It will be something small to us. But very large to the
murderer."

"Where do we begin?" He was intrigued by
this notion. As usual, he found himself beginning to be swept along
by her enthusiasm for life, one trait he had regrettably not
"inherited" from her.

"Tomorrow, we go in. You gather up your
files. I want to look them over before we give them to that
detective. Then we take a look at the scene of the crime."

When he nodded, she made a small check on
her notebook and flipped to a new page. "Now, we also must get Anne
Marie Shaunessy over to my house for brunch on Sunday. She was his
secretary and may know more than anyone those things that no one is
supposed to know." While T.S. was translating this convoluted
statement in his head, she moved briskly onward. "Can you call up
Sheila?" she asked. "And get her over for brunch as well?" Auntie
Lil was familiar with T.S.'s fondness for Sheila and knew all about
her family.

"Certainly," he said, happy to be able to
offer something to the cause. The thought of having brunch with
Sheila on an otherwise dull Sunday was appealing.

"But just the women," Auntie Lil made
clear.

"Not me?"

"Certainly you. I meant tell them both to
leave their husbands at home. We don't need a bunch of overgrown
boys masquerading as policemen butting in with suggestions and
acting superior."

He quite agreed with her assessment of
Shaunessy and O'Reilly. "Fine," he said.

"We also need to talk to Cheswick's widow,"
she decided. "I remember her well. I last saw her at that benefit
luncheon in 1986. Lilah is her name, correct? She has quite a
sensible mind."

"Correct." He thought of Lilah again. A
tall, athletic woman with strong features and a frank demeanor who
had grown old with grace, refusing to dye her hair and standing out
as the only gray-haired wife at the infrequent partner social
functions. An island of honesty in a sea of silver and tinted
coiffed ladies.

"You had a thing for her once, as I recall,"
she reminded him needlessly.

T.S. sighed. Auntie Lil never forgot a
single fragment of his nearly nonexistent personal life. His
"thing" had consisted of a minor crush nearly thirty years ago,
shortly after he joined the firm, when he had met Lilah at a party
for the young turks at Sterling & Sterling. Not yet married to
Robert Cheswick, she had arrived on one of her first dates with the
partner-to-be. T.S. had spent the evening talking opera with her,
delighted at her intelligence and daring.

Appalled she was going to many a horse's ass
like Cheswick, T.S. had made the mistake of mentioning their
encounter to Auntie Lil, who, even then, was a terrible busybody
when it came to his life. She'd championed the banner of Lilah
Cheswick until months after the wedding, only dropping it
reluctantly when he fabricated a pert young secretary in the
Foreign Investment area simply to gain some relief from being
constantly reminded of what he did not have.

"It's never too late," she announced to
T.S., interrupting his thoughts.

He stared at her. "What are you suggesting?
That I call her up and say, 'Sorry your husband was stabbed and by
the way, would you like to get married?'"

"Of course not." She sniffed, offended at
such implied bad manners. "That would be inexcusably rude. I meant
that it's still not too late to get married to someone."

"You never got married to anyone," he
pointed out.

She shot him a steely glance and her eyes
snapped with brilliance. "That, my dear Theodore, does not mean I
was never asked."

Having put him in his place, she switched
subjects again. "Finally, I want you to tell me in great detail
what happened at your retirement party, and we'll need to go over
the list of employees who left late last night."