House of Secrets - v4 (13 page)

Andy stared down at the sliver of ice pinned beneath his finger. His mind was so many miles away that when a voice sounded suddenly, the jolt that went through Andy’s body was enough to topple the glass.

“Senator?”

Andy could only imagine what the expression was on his face as he wheeled about, but whatever it was, it seemed nearly to make the new intern wet her panties.

“I’m… I’m sorry. I…”

Andy bent down and picked up the glass, grateful for the few seconds to pull himself together. Drinking by himself in his office. For Christ’s sake, not terrifically SOP.

“No need to apologize,” Andy murmured. “I was just…” He trailed off.

The intern’s expression was not inquisitive in the slightest. She pushed her hair from her face.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to barge in like that. I just thought I should tell you. I’ve, um… I’ve gone through the day’s phone messages. Greg and Linda both checked over my report. Maybe I… some people really do call in for funny things, don’t they?”

Andy concurred. “They do.”

The intern continued. “There is this one message. Actually, it’s about five or six of them. I mean, they’re all from the same person. Greg said to just erase them. It’s some kook. But I haven’t erased them yet. I didn’t know if — if you wanted to hear them anyway? Just in case? Or is that just me being stupid?”

Andy slowly shook his head. “It’s not stupid at all, Lindsay. Why don’t we go give them a listen?”

He followed the intern to the outer office. Only one light remained lit, giving the room a snug feel. The two stood on either side of Lindsay’s phone, which was at the edge of her small desk.

Lindsay pushed a key on the phone several times. “Here. This is the first one.”

Andy allowed his eyes to settle on the intern’s face as he awaited the message. She watched him as well, to read his expression. There was a soft
beep
in Andy’s ear, followed by a man’s voice. It was thick with an Eastern European accent. It could have been from any of a dozen countries.

“This message is for the coward. You know who you are, and I know who you are. That is what is important. I know you. You will want to talk to me, Mr. Big Man. You will want to be good to me. In a very big way.”

The man interrupted himself to cough. A burbly smoker’s cough. Lindsay’s pert eyebrows rose, as if tugged from above by a pair of strings. The man continued.

“If I am your friend, you are free. No problems. But if you are a stupid coward, you will regret this. You want to be my friend. I will call back later, and I will want to talk to you. Make this happen.”

The call clicked off. Andy marveled that the young woman couldn’t hear his heart slamming in his chest.

“It’s silly, right?” Lindsay said. “I should just erase it.”

“The other ones?” Andy didn’t recognize his own voice.

“They’re pretty much the same. He seems to get a little angrier each time. Well, on the last one especially, he’s pretty annoyed. Greg said he sounds drunk. I wonder if—”

She was interrupted by the sound of a commotion in the hallway. People were hurrying by the open door. A head appeared in the doorway. It was Senator Cutler from Colorado.

“Andy! Turn on your TV. Wyeth is about to make a statement!”

Cutler disappeared. Andy turned stiffly to the intern.

“Delete them,” he said thickly. “Greg’s right. He’s a crank. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Delete them all.”

N
o one at Masters and Weiss had quite decided what to do with Joy Resnick’s administrative assistant. The simple fact was, nobody really wanted to absorb Marion Mann into their staff. Marion had always been considered competent as far as her work was concerned, but she was a divisive presence. Not a happy woman. Membership into the natural cliques and affiliations of the workplace had always eluded her, and as a result she tried too hard, pushing her way awkwardly into people’s paths, making herself even more unwanted. On more than a few occasions Marion had allowed herself to be taken advantage of by men in the company. Most recently it had been the new jerk over in IT: a bumbling one-night stand in his messy gadget-filled apartment in Queens. Struggling through her hangover the following day, Marion had been mortified to overhear the jerk bragging to some of his buddies in the company lounge that he had “thrown Marion the Man a real bone last night.”

The lukewarm feelings Joy Resnick had maintained concerning her assistant were known among the other account executives; everyone had gotten at least one earful over the past seven months. As Joy put it, the fit was just not fitting. In Marion’s year-end review, Joy had couched her assistant’s shortcomings as “a square-peg problem.” Although Marion had been considered mildly quirky when she’d first started at Masters and Weiss — those kicky glasses she wore, along with what had initially passed for an inspired fashion anarchy — much of that quirkiness had failed to prove anywhere near as endearing as Joy had hoped.

Plus all the flirting. The sleeping around.

The end result of all this was that in the wake of her boss’s murder, Marion Mann was now finding herself largely adrift at the office. A week after Joy’s death, nearly all of her active accounts had been passed off to other account execs, and Marion had spent most of the week filling the other execs in on various nuances of their adopted projects — at least, those aspects that Joy had shared with Marion. But aside from those meetings, Marion had been pretty much free to sit at her desk and grow moss.

Only four days since Joy’s funeral, the shock of her murder was still resonating throughout the office. People passing by Joy’s office still paused to take a hushed look inside, as if they were peeking into a holy place. Except for the specific files that Marion had disseminated, Joy’s office remained exactly as it had been the previous Friday when the pair of detectives from Suffolk County had arrived with their horrific news. Naturally, they had wanted to interview Marion. The interview had taken place in the company’s hangar-sized conference room. Sitting at its comically huge table, Marion had felt like Alice in Wonderland in one of her shrinking episodes. The detectives had wanted to know if her boss had shared with Marion her plans for that past weekend. For example, had Joy spoken about anyone joining up with her at the place out on Shelter Island? Did Marion know if Joy Resnick had been seeing anyone? Any recent ex-boyfriends? Any enemies? Had Marion ever overheard her boss on the phone arguing with anyone? Had she seemed upset lately? Distracted? Anything?

Unfortunately for the detectives, Marion had been unable to shine any light on who of Joy Resnick’s acquaintances could have possibly had anything to do with her murder. She did admit to the strained quality of her working relationship with her boss. Why bother trying to hide it? Any of a dozen or more other employees at Masters and Weiss would be telling them the same thing; the last thing Marion was going to do was put a false gloss on the matter. She told the detectives that her boss had been a perfectionist — which was true — and that as a result had not always been realistic in what she expected of other people. And not always so kind in the ways she demonstrated her disappointment when those unrealistic expectations went unmet.

“Would you say she had a temper?” one of the detectives had asked. The cute one. Detective Brown Eyes.

“You can write down the word
diva,”
Marion had replied pertly. “It’s shorter.”

She explained to the detectives that there had been a lot expected of Joy at Masters and Weiss. Joy had been the company’s golden girl, Mr. Masters’s very own plunder some years back from one of the rival firms.

“This job can have plenty of stress, of course,” Marion said sagely. “But that’s still no reason to treat people the way she sometimes treated them.”

Brown Eyes asked, “And this would include you? This sort of treatment you’re talking about?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely me.” Marion’s laughter erupted nervously. “Probably me more than anyone else.”

After the grilling, she had returned to her desk particularly proud of her interview. She had not hedged concerning her feelings about Joy. She’d spoken frankly, allowing the detectives to hear that there had been no love lost between her and her late boss. Certainly she had come off as a person with nothing to hide.

Which could not have been further from the truth.

M
arion’s hand was trembling as she hung up the phone. She paused, then lifted the receiver from its cradle and set it down on the desk. She didn’t want it to ring again. She didn’t want to hear that horrible syrupy southern voice again. Ever again. On the day after Joy’s murder, the man must have phoned Marion half a dozen times at the office, and she had hung up on him each time without a word. All that weekend she had screened all her calls, refusing to pick up when she heard the snaky voice on her answering machine. It had been wishful thinking to assume that after Joy’s murder the unnerving man would have simply evaporated from her life. It seemed that just the opposite was developing. He was not going away at all. Not in the slightest.

Marion removed her baroque eyeglasses and set them carefully down on the thick folder atop her desk. Her world went immediately blurry. As if she had descended underwater. Marion pulled a small plastic spray bottle from her top drawer, along with a blue chamois square, and methodically cleaned the lenses of her expensive glasses. Impressionistic blurs moved past her desk.

Looking down at the fuzzy telephone, her mind moved back three months to the night the unwelcome Dixie drawl first crept into her ear. For the umpteenth time that week, she wished with all her heart that she could undo the events that had followed that first phone call.

But of course it was too late for that. Her boss was dead.

And it was Marion’s fault.

Late January, and Marion had been home in her apartment in Murray Hill, watching the results show of
Dancing with the Stars
. She’d voted twelve times the night before for the soap opera guy. So
cute
, she couldn’t stand it. The phone began to ring and she had dragged it onto her lap, her eyes still pinned to the screen.

“Marion Mann?”

Male. Southern accent. Strong. Almost a parody.

“Yes, this is Marion.”

“I need to confirm here. The same Marion Mann employed at Masters and Weiss Consulting? Your immediate superior is a Ms. Joy Elizabeth Resnick?”

“That’s right. Who is this?”

“I need to speak with you, Miss Mann. In person. It’s quite important. This concerns Miss Resnick.”

On the television, the soap opera guy was goofing around with his dance partner while awaiting the judge’s scores. Marion wasn’t so keen about that girl. Each week she seemed more naked than the week before. Marion switched the phone to her other ear.

“Who is this?”

“I assure you, it is in your personal interest that you meet with me. Will eight thirty work?”

“Eight… You mean tonight?

“There’s a very pleasant Thai restaurant down at the end of your block. If I’m not mistaken, you are very fond of their pad thai?”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s nice and public there, as you know. There are plenty of other diners. It’s all perfectly safe.”

“Perfectly safe for what? What the heck is this about? I’m not going—”

“I don’t mean to frighten you, Miss Mann, but you most definitely want to meet with me. You’ll understand once we’ve spoken. And please don’t make any other calls after we hang up. I can tell you that if you attempt to, your call will be terminated immediately.”

“Terminated? What are you talking about? This is some sort of joke, right? I’m hanging up. I’m not meeting anyone anywhere!”

“If you prefer, we can as easily meet in your apartment. I had simply assumed the restaurant would be more comfortable for you.”

“My apartment? Oh, I don’t think so. Whoever you are, you’re not coming here, I can tell you that much.”

“I can be there in five minutes.”

“And what makes you think I’d let you in?”

“You wouldn’t have to let me in, dear.”

Marion’s blood went cold. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He didn’t answer right away. Marion thought for a second maybe he’d hung up. Just some strange crank call. But he hadn’t hung up. The man gave a little chuckle.

“Miss Mann, I have a key.”

M
arion replaced her eyeglasses. She returned the phone to its cradle, and opened the thick folder she had pulled from Joy’s files and began leafing through its contents. This was no longer one of the active projects; its termination date was the previous November. Joy had been a gigantic pain in the ass on the account. Marion had never seen such micromanaging from her boss before. Granted, it had been one of the highest-profile projects that Joy had commandeered in her four years with the firm. But even so, that was no reason to terrorize the hired help.

Marion continued flipping through the folder. The scripts, the thirty- and sixty-second spots, the print ads, insertion orders out the wazoo. Charts. Stats. The focus group analyses. Poll numbers. Joy’s “inspired” theme packages. Her precious strategy wheels.