SoHo Sins (9 page)

“Yeah? You seemed awfully sure a second ago.”

“Phil is much too sensible, where business is concerned, to allow a little
peccadillo
to endanger his fortune.”

“I thought he was losing his mind,” Hogan said. Shifting slowly in his seat, he finished his coffee. “Seems to me that if a man is crazy enough to want to get married for a third time—especially to some hot number half his age—he’s probably crazy enough to kill for the chance.”

“You can’t possibly regard Phil as a suspect.”

“Right now I regard him as a guy with mental problems—a rich player who just suddenly got a whole lot richer, and more romantically available, than he already was. So the quickest way to eliminate him as a ‘person of interest’ to the police is to pick his crazy confession apart.”

“Of course,” Andrews said.

“Horror, panic, overreaction,” Hogan continued, “that’s all regular stuff. The cops are not about to arrest a man, sane or otherwise, for freaking out at the sight of his wife’s corpse.”

Absently, he dusted the sugar off the table.

“Where the situation could get sticky is if I’m suddenly denied access to Philip. Then I’d have to ask myself what might motivate the people who are keeping him penned up. What do they stand to gain from his confession? Or what do they have to hide that Philip, upset as he is, might blurt out to me face-to-face? Those are both very annoying questions because they get me into all kinds of things I know nothing about.”

Hogan glanced quickly over at me before he went on.

“I mean, we’d have to start looking at the effect that Phil’s gaining clear title to his wife’s fortune would have on Oliver Technologies. Like if he started buying up the company’s shares, the ones he doesn’t already own. And that involves looking at ownership structures and profit distributions and offshore operations and IRS regulations—all crap I don’t begin to understand. So then I’d have to bring in outside help, some sharpie like Charlie Mullens over at the D.A.’s office.” Hogan bent toward me. “What’s that place Charlie used to work before? STC? CES?”

“SEC,” I said. “The Securities and Exchange Commission.”

“Right. It’s all Greek to me, but I suppose you fellows here know what they do. Real fussy stuff, I hear. All those subpoenas for files and records, all those sworn depositions, all those plea bargains where people start double-crossing each other left and right.”

Andrew’s voice was flat when he answered. “We have some idea.”

The executive fixed Hogan with his gaze, as if calculating the odds on a high-risk investment.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to confer with my staff down the hall for a few minutes. Phil should be available shortly.”

Andrews rose in one quick motion and was gone.

In the sudden silence, I turned to Hogan. “Who the hell is Charlie Mullens?” I asked quietly.

“The bartender at Puffy’s Tavern.”

A few minutes later, the attractive young businesswoman reappeared.

“Mr. Oliver will see you now.”

She smiled at Hogan as we made our way out to the long corridor.

“You must have been very firm with Mr. Andrews,” she said.

“I just told him what he needed to hear. It’s my version of the Dale Carnegie method.”

“I wish I could learn your technique.”

“You can,” Hogan grinned slyly. “I give lessons.”

He slipped a business card from his jacket and handed it to the woman. “Might help you get your next raise.”

“Thank you, Edward.”

“My friends call me Hogan.”

“Do they? You must get around.”

“Sometimes. If I’m invited.”

The girl reddened faintly, laughing at her own forwardness and palming the card as we approached the end of the hall.

“I just try to help out where I can,” Hogan told her.

“In this place,” she answered, “a woman needs all the help she can get.”

We had come to the most privileged corner of the O-Tech layout. In a large outer office, the entire senior staff was gathered in a tight knot around the slim, wan-faced Philip. He stood very straight, his slight frame impeccably turned out in a bespoke English suit, the sort that Angela had long ago taught him to require. With his salt-and-pepper hair slightly ruffled, he had the air of a crown prince fallen among pool-hall hustlers. The management staff—men in their thirties and forties, all in expensive shirtsleeves—introduced themselves in a flurry of handshakes and single-syllable, all-American names: Chuck, Dick, Tim, Steve, Mike.

Hogan and I nodded, and proceeded to ignore them.

“Philip,” I said, “how are you? I’m deeply sorry about Mandy. My sympathy.”

He brightened suddenly. “Hello, Jack. So nice to see you here.”

“Are you doing all right?”

“Fine, fine. These gentlemen have been a great help to me. Especially Mr. Andrews. Have you met?”

“I’ve had the pleasure.”

“Coffee?”

“We’re good. I’d like you to say hello to an old friend of mine, a straight-shooter named Hogan. Bernstein asked him to clear up a few things about Mandy’s death.”

Philip extended his hand. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Philip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife.”

“So I’ve heard. I’m the private eye your lawyer hired.”

“Excellent. I’m all in favor of transparency, Hogan. Investigative work must be very gratifying that way. You start with a cloud of uncertainty and then, bit by bit, everything becomes wonderfully clear.”

“That’s the idea. Unfortunately, things don’t always turn out that way.”

“Ah, but the process, Hogan. The rooting things out, the dogged search. What sport!”

Philip had been using fake British phrasing so long—ever since he fell for Angela back in London years ago—that it had become natural to him now, even with his mind half gone.

“Well, you’ve got that part right,” Hogan told him. “It is a dog’s life sometimes.”

“But surely that’s nothing compared to the rewards,” Philip insisted. “So enviable, to live in pursuit of clarity—it sounds tremendously bracing. Do you know how many people try to make things needlessly muddy and complicated?”

“Yeah, most of them I meet.” Hogan glanced casually around the room. “This is some spread. You could hold the World Series in here.”

“It is quite grand, isn’t it? I told Andrews it was too much, but he insisted. He thinks I should be ensconced like an Arab sheik—to impress clients and scare the bejesus out of competitors. Or was it the other way around?”

“You’ve got it right,” Andrews said.

“Good. Some people think old Philip has lost it, that my brain has turned to mush or whatnot. But we know better, don’t we?” He paused, speaking next at a slightly higher volume. “We know better, don’t we?”

“Yes, of course,” Andrews replied. “You’re completely clear, Phil.”

“Thank you.”

“We should have a little chat,” Hogan said. “Just you, me, and Jack.”

“And Carl. I always have Carl Marks with me. He tells me exactly where Oliver Industries and I stand financially.”

Andrews leaned toward us. “Carl Martes, actually,” he explained. “The nickname started as a little joke among some junior staff members here.”

“It’s no joke,” Philip insisted. “Carl Marks keeps me fully informed. Constantly. I find it most comforting.”

Eyes downcast, the so-called Marks—a tall man in an anonymous navy suit—stood wordlessly at Philip’s elbow, one step behind. I had met him several times before, though we never spoke. He carried a black laptop, prepared, on his employer’s demand, to provide financial stats at any moment. Bristling with colorful graphs and flowcharts, the device tracked data streams from the two Oliver firms and Philip’s various personal holdings—stocks, real estate, art collection, foreign currency, precious metals—then correlated them with current market values, deducted liabilities and expenses, and gave him a net asset figure updated automatically every hour. Philip thus possessed—continuously, no matter what the markets were doing in any part of the world—an answer to the vital question that plagued him: “What am I worth?”

“We won’t need the kind of information Carl has right now,” Hogan said. “I just want to know a little more about you and Mandy.”

“She was my one true love,” Philip replied. “Now she’s dead.”

“That’s a shame,” Hogan said.

Philip blinked at the two of us in turn. “What did I do?” he asked. “What? Tell me. Am I a killer?”

“We’ll try to figure that out, Phil,” I said, nudging him toward the door of his inner office.

Reluctantly, glaringly, Andrews and the others parted to let us pass. As Hogan closed the door behind us, I saw the execs start to deposit themselves on various anteroom chairs and couches, like buzzards perching on the edge of a safari camp.

Philip’s inner office was the size of a three-bedroom SoHo apartment, wrapped by glass walls that made his desk seem to hover magically six hundred feet above the frenetic streets, free floating among the towers of Midtown. Nervously, he pointed out his “mascots,” the sleek metal eagles on the Chrysler Building, a dozen blocks distant, gleaming in the unclouded sky like the rims of Andrews’ spectacles.

“I can see nearly everything here,” Philip asserted. “Apartments, offices, hotel rooms—the whole mixed-up city at a glance. And everyone, if they only look, can see me. Total mutual exposure.” A chuckle escaped him. “Rather grand, wouldn’t you say?” He stared out at the steel-frame buildings, sharp against the sky. “Off we go,” he crooned softly, “into the wild blue yonder.”

Stepping quickly away, he motioned us to a small table, far from the windows and their vertiginous view. We sat awkwardly in black leather chairs with chrome legs, arranged beneath a suite of Motherwell “Spanish Republic” prints that I had sold Phil and Angie fifteen years earlier, when O-Tech first exploded with absurd growth and profits.

“I do imagine Jack told you about my Claudia?” Philip asked Hogan.

“Better than that. We paid her a visit.”

“How is she?”

“Worried about you.”

“Ah, the dear girl. Why does she put up with me? I called her right after I left the police station, you know. She took care of me for days on end, every minute. Then this week I started coming back to the office for a few hours at a time—because it was too strange, just the pair of us knocking around together in a suite at the Plaza. Like newlyweds on some macabre honeymoon.”

“Why there?”

“I couldn’t go to Williamsburg. The studio is pure Claudia—her work, her clothes, her music. All of it, like Claudia herself, so young.” He turned his face away. “She must be why I did it, don’t you suppose?”

“Did what?”

“Killed Amanda.”

“It’s conceivable.” Hogan measured his words. “Some guys would sell their mother to the Turks for a woman like Claudia. I just don’t think you’re one of them.”

“You don’t? That’s not good for my theory.”

“What theory?”

“That I shot Mandy to be done with her, once and for all. Done with the past, with our mutual friends, done with the stale married sex and the fights, free to have Claudia.” He looked down. “The odd thing is, I don’t feel very liberated right now.”

“Maybe you chose the wrong approach.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is such a thing as divorce.”

“Yes, if I wanted to lose everything—at least half my business and property. But I don’t. I love every one of my assets, my dear vulgar toys.”

“That’s a lot of love, from what I hear.”

“It is, isn’t it? A damned bloody lot, as Angela used to say.”

I watched Hogan’s face, remembering how he told me once that, when a truly rich man talks about “losing everything,” he usually means being reduced to a standard of living that most people could only covet from afar. Keeping one beachfront manse instead of four fully staffed houses worldwide, selling the Jaguar but holding on to the Mercedes, sacrificing the 18th-century portrait collection at auction for a few million bucks. It was enough to bring tears to your eyes.

“Angela, your first wife,” Hogan said, “do you still see her?”

“When she brings Melissa around. Or when we both attend events at Missy’s school.”

“How did Amanda feel about that?”

“Not pleased, I’m sure. I can’t really recall. We were never able to have children of our own. I think something had happened to her.”

“Did Mandy give you grief over all this—enough that you could have stood in the middle of your loft downtown and aimed a gun at the back of her head?”

“Well, I’m a very good shot. Very steady on target. Ask Jack.”

“That’s right. With a rifle and scope anyhow,” I said. “In Montana last fall, I watched him drop an elk at two hundred yards.”

“This is your wife, Philip, not a trophy buck. And she was shot with a handgun, from behind, at a range of six feet. Could you do that to a woman you loved once?”

Philip looked blank, then deeply uncertain.

“Do you even own a handgun?”

“No,” he hesitated. “But Mandy did.”

A small grimace played across Hogan’s features.

“After I took up with Claudia, poor Mandy grew rather paranoid. She kept a pistol in her bedside drawer, because she was worried that someone might break in to steal her precious paintings. Or try to rape her.”

Poor Mandy, indeed. Someone should have warned her that it’s not strangers you need to fear so much as the people who love you.

“Now you tell us about the gun,” Hogan said. “Do you know what sort it was?”

“Something quite impressive. An automatic. My wife was that kind of woman.”

“Really, what kind?”

“Assertive.”

Hogan shook his head and leaned forward. “Don’t mess with me, Phil. I’m not one of your stooges.”

Philip blinked. “Hogan,” he said. “Edward Hogan. Don’t you work for me somehow?”

“That’s right. And take my word for it, boss, I’m doing you the biggest favor anybody ever could. Talk real to me now—no lies and no holding back—or you just might end up with a Murder One rap.”

“Amanda’s lawyer has the gun registration, no doubt,” Philip offered.

“That isn’t the question,” Hogan said tightly. “You hunt, Philip; you know what a bullet does when it breaks through a skull. I want you to picture the impact of two nine-millimeter rounds, to imagine the raw exit wounds—and tell me if you could do that to the person you lived with for eight years.”