Long Way Down (15 page)

B
arneys on Madison sells clothes, but the restaurant in the basement is the main draw for the ladies who lunch. The sign says
FRED’S AT BARNEYS NEW YORK,
but I never heard anyone call it Fred’s. It was “Barneys.” I was not the only man in the dining room—most of the staff was male and there were two men eating at a table on the far side of the room.

Selena Haley was checking her watch as I approached. Her lunch date was already five minutes late.

“Mrs. Haley?” I said. “May I join you?” My voice sounded strained, nasal, and flat. I promised myself a nap just as soon as this was done.

She looked up and for a moment she was beyond speechless. Guilt, anger, and fear fought for top billing. But she was good. Breeding and training. She recovered almost immediately.

“Mr. Stafford? I’m so sorry, but I’m waiting for someone. She should be here any minute. But thank you for asking.” I was dismissed.

“Dolores Cutler? I’m afraid she’s been held up.” I pulled out the chair and sat.

At that moment, Dolores Cutler was most likely still desperately trying to convince the painting crew that I had sent to her apartment that she had not hired them, did not want her apartment painted that day, and that she had no time to discuss colors with the short, pushy man with the sad face. Roger would be sure to buy me at least half an hour.

This time it took Selena a bit longer to recuperate. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and closed once more. She reached for her purse and pulled out her cell phone. I waited until she had finished dialing before hitting the button on the jammer in my jacket pocket. McKenna’s friend had assured me that it was efficient, well-charged, and illegal. She scowled at the phone, tried again, and finally dropped it back into her purse.

I forced my scratchy voice to sound as calm and forceful as possible. “If you try to leave, I will stand up and make a scene. I will make loud entreaties that you not abandon me, and think back on all we have meant to each other. There will be references to specific sexual acts that you enjoy.”

Her face lost all color. “How dare you? Lies! Who would believe it? Or even listen?”

I looked around at a hundred or more well-dressed, Botoxed, and surgically enhanced women shoppers. “I’d bet most of them. You’ll be on Page Six tomorrow.” I smiled politely. “I’m having the crab and shrimp salad. What about you?”

“You’re insane.”

“But only north-northeast, and today the wind is southerly. Bear with me. I only need your attention for a few minutes. Then I will go and you may never have to see me again.”

“I’m leaving.” She pushed her chair back.

I stood up and leaned over the table. “Selena!” I cried. “You can’t! Please. I left my wife and child for you.”

Her head rocked back. I had the attention of everyone within
three tables of us. If I turned up the volume just a bit, I would have the whole room hanging on every word. Some women were already smiling in anticipation of a coming scene. No one was even bothering with being too polite to listen.

Selena spoke through clenched teeth. “Please sit down, Mr. Stafford.”

The headwaiter was approaching. I winked broadly at the women at the next table. They giggled like seventh graders. I grinned and sat down.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” I said.

“May I be of some assistance?” The headwaiter hovered, now unsure if he was intervening or interrupting.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m having the lump crab and shrimp salad. Mrs. Haley will have her usual.”

He took it in stride. “Mark’s salad, no dressing. And to drink?”

“Water for me.” I turned to her. “A glass of Sancerre?” Amazing, the depth of information that Internet search engines maintain.

She stared the waiter down for a moment. “No. I will have a vodka martini. Up. No fruit.”

“Certainly, Mrs. Haley.”

We waited for him to get out of range. There were still a few surreptitious glances from the crowd around us, hoping for a bit more of a show, but the background murmur began to grow again, the sounds of silverware on plates, the small laugh suddenly overwhelmed by the catty crow.

“What in hell do you want?”

What I wanted right then was a fresh pack of tissues so I could blast a clear path to my sinuses and stop feeling like I was drowning on land.

“Yesterday, your husband came close to torching his whole career and earning himself an extended stay with the BOP. And look at you. Out celebrating?”

“That’s vile.”

“Did I get too close? To the truth, I mean.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Then I’ll just keep the conversation going on my own, shall I?” I felt a sneeze coming. I twitched my nose to divert it. It didn’t help.

The drinks arrived. I sipped my water. She took a long slug of the martini.

“I hired a hacker. He got into your home computer—your address book, calendar, email. That’s how I was able to find you here and arrange for Mrs. Cutler’s apartment to be painted.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

I ignored the question. She knew the answer. “My guy is not quite as slick as the crew you used, but he found their footprints. They’re good. You got your money’s worth.” I gave a small cough in the hopes of persuading my nose that a sneeze really wasn’t necessary.

She took another slug. Two-thirds of the cocktail was gone. “There’s no connection.”

“Legal connection? No. I’m sure of that. Still, they’re hackers. Hackers don’t bribe bank officers and that’s what someone would have had to do to set up the account in the first place. You had help there.”

The salads arrived.

“Mrs. Haley would like another martini,” I said. She didn’t object.

“But that was a minor hurdle,” I continued. “It’s sad. The banker is probably going to be the only one to take a dive on this. Once I show your husband’s lawyer the evidence of hacking, he’ll be in the clear. Unless the banker has someone to roll over on, he’s going down.”

She gave me a long appraising look. “What do you think you know?”

The urge to sneeze was becoming unbearable. “Excuse me,” I said, grabbing the white linen napkin just in time. I squeezed my nose as hard as I could and let the spasm rock me. I refused to sneeze into the napkin. The back draft sent pinwheels spinning across my eyes. For a moment, I was deaf, blind, and stupid.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s a cold.”

“Take your time,” she said, smiling happily at my discomfort.

“I know the story. I know how your friend works. I know who helped you on this.” I wasn’t lying. I did know. The story about Penn had given me everything I needed to know about him—about the way he worked. Proving it was another story. It wouldn’t hurt to exaggerate just a bit. “I have the proof, and when I’m ready, I will sink his boat and let the news-reporter sharks pick over his remains.”

I thought I had her. I could see her waver. She finished the drink and looked around for its replacement. The prospect of a second martini must have restored something in her. The steel in her voice came back. “You can’t touch him. And don’t waste your sympathy on the banker. He was a cipher.”

So much the better, I thought. Once we found him, he would be that much easier to flip and give evidence.

I took a bite of the crab, amazed that I could taste it. Taste anything. It was good. She ignored her salad.

“Were you involved in the negotiations?”

“No. I just picked up the tab.”

The shrimp was good, too. I finished the crab first.
Feed
a cold? I thought that was right.

“Then you waited until the special board meeting. Who called it? You? Or did someone else front it? Your special friend? Or someone else. It wouldn’t have been difficult for you to talk one of the others into calling for it. Your husband didn’t want to go public with the test results, but you forced his hand. You must have enjoyed
watching him gloat two weeks later when the news had been absorbed, forgotten about, and the stock was back where it was in the first place. Of course, by that time, you had already set him up quite nicely.”

The second martini arrived.

“Keep your voice down.”

“Sorry,” I whispered. “But I’ll only be more conspicuous if I start whispering.”

“How much do you want?”

“To bury the story? To let your husband go down for something he didn’t do? I don’t think even you can afford that.” I could feel another sneeze coming on. If I held that one in, too, I might possibly blow my eardrums out or burst a blood vessel.

“Then what
do
you want?” She still hadn’t taken a bite of her salad, but was already well on her way to finishing the second drink.

“Tell him. Or I’ll tell him myself. I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Tomorrow at noon I start dialing the newspapers.” I stood up, took some bills from my pocket, and dropped them on the table. “Lunch is on me.” I took the napkin—I was going to need it.

V
irgil called while I was trying to flag a cab on Madison. I decided to walk while I talked.

“What do you mean, ‘He didn’t do it’? What else do you know?”

I blew my nose again before answering. I tucked the despoiled napkin into my back pocket. “So I’m still working for you?”

“Goddamn you!”

“Is that a yes?”

He took a minute before answering. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was wrong. If you had given me that information earlier, I might have sold our shares and opened the firm up to insider trading charges. Thank you.”

It was a nice speech. I tried to match it. “And I’m sorry I didn’t trust you with the information, but it’s not all bad. In fact, it’s very good. Someone had to bribe a bank officer to open that account. And they had to have hacking skills way beyond anything Haley might have come across.”

“You can prove this?”

“Get me the lawyer’s email and I will make sure he has all he needs by tomorrow afternoon.”

“So who’s behind it? Is Haley right? The Chinese?”

“I think the answer is a lot closer to home. I’ve learned a few things in the last twenty-four hours. I’ve guessed at a few more. And I just had lunch with one of the major co-conspirators.”

I filled him in on my lunch. He didn’t interrupt.

“Penn and Selena working together?” he said at the end. “They’re an unlikely couple.”

“This is how Penn works,” I said. “He seems to have a knack for finding unhappy women and using them to get where he wants to be.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“I leaned hard. Not everything I said is, how shall I put it, verifiable. But I think she bought it. I gave her a deadline of tomorrow. Though I doubt it will take her that long to make up her mind. I give it eighty-twenty she confesses the whole thing to him tonight.”

“How much can I tell the lawyer?”

“Right now? I gave her twenty-four hours, Virgil.”

“And the stock is off twenty-four percent.”

“The goddamn markets can wait a day,” I heard myself say.

“Hah! I never,
never
, would have expected you to come out with that statement.”

“I’m serious. You tell the lawyer, and ten minutes later the stock will be trading up like a rocket.”

“What about the banker? Can we start trying to identify him?”

I couldn’t see the harm in getting that process moving. I gave Virgil the name of the bank and the banker’s authorization code. “They’ll probably put up roadblocks if you go straight at them. And to get a court order in Bermuda could take an eternity.”

“I’ll use my contacts in London. I’m sure I can get someone to finesse this our way.”

I checked my watch. “London’s closed. They’ll all be gone from their offices by this hour.”

Virgil chuckled. “Then I’ll call them at home.”

“Once Selena talks to Haley,” I said, “I see this whole thing splitting wide open.”

He gave a sad sigh. “She may end up doing time.”

“Come on, Virgil. She’ll write a check and take a plea. Rich women don’t go to jail.”

“Martha Stewart. Leona Helmsley,” he said.

“All right. Point taken. Will the wife be our next client, then?”

“She is the single largest shareholder. We can get along without her for a while if we have to, but I think we owe her our support.”

“And you do run a full-service firm,” I said.

“Left to its own devices, money makes enemies. If you want to be around for the long haul, you need to work hard at making friends.”

I
rarely turned on my phone before the Kid was at school. Mornings were just for us.

Besides, the cold had traveled into my throat while I was sleeping. I felt better, but I sounded like I’d been singing death metal all night.

The Kid finished his cereal—Cheerios with a few slices of banana—and left the table as soon as he could. My cold scared him, and the sound of my voice made him doubly uncomfortable. Luckily, he was on remote that morning and went about getting ready without much fuss.

My iPad beeped at me while I was reading the
Journal
. Haley and Arinna Labs were still a big story. They were about to get bigger.

I opened my email. Virgil.
Your phone is turned off.

I wrote back.
I know.

CALL ME.

I was sure that Virgil would know that the use of all capitals indicated that he was yelling. It was very early in the morning for him to be yelling. I thought about ignoring the message, but that
would only put off the inevitable, and had a good chance of making it much worse.

“Virgil here.” He sounded more defeated than angry.

“What’s up?” I said, trying not to sound like an escapee from
World War Z.

“Haley’s been arrested.”

“Damn. That was fast.”

“Not for insider trading. For murder. His wife was found late last night. Dead on the beach by their house on Long Island. At the bottom of the steps on the cliff.”

A cold, strong hand was squeezing my heart and there was a deafening rush in my ears. I had set that woman on the path that got her killed.

“Any chance it was an accident?” I was a coward.

“Not unless she accidentally shot herself on the way down.”

I felt no grief—I barely knew her—but a mountain of guilt was bearing down on my chest. Angie had been killed because of my actions, and now this stranger. If Haley had pulled the trigger, I vowed that I would see him pay. And if he hadn’t, I was going to find out who did.

“What can I do?”

“The lawyer is going in to see him in an hour. Go with him. Carry a briefcase and no one will question you.”

“Should I bring the evidence I found?”

“I don’t think it makes a difference at this point, but why not?”

“And the lawyer’s okay with this?”

“He doesn’t like it, but he’s not in charge. Haley wants you there.”

That was interesting. Did Haley think he could con me? Or did he think he needed me? “Where is he?”

“NYPD found him coming out of some downtown club at four
this morning. They’re giving him the VIP treatment. He’s at One Police Plaza until they take him out to Nassau County.”

“I’ll be there.” I went to hang up and another thought came to mind. “Wait! Virgil. Are you still there?”

“What is it?”

“The banker. Any luck from your London people?”

“They say they’ll have an answer this morning.”

—

An hour later,
I met Haley’s lawyer in front of One Police Plaza. Though he had been up since Haley’s call soon after the arrest, he still looked ready to argue an appeal in front of the Supreme Court. His starched white shirt whispered when he moved.

I gave him a CD with McKenna’s and my work on the insider trading case. “I know there are bigger issues right now, but this might come in handy down the road.”

He didn’t look at it or ask any questions. The CD went into his briefcase. “If anyone asks, I will tell them that you are my investigator. Do not try to pass yourself off as a lawyer.” He scanned my suit, overcoat, and briefcase. “Though you do look the part. Maybe no one will bother to ask.” He looked the part, too. Tall, hawk-nosed, pale-eyed, and expensively dressed.

No one did bother to ask me anything. A grim-faced, overweight uniformed cop ushered us into a cramped conference room.

The room was so small that the mild claustrophobia that I had developed while in prison advanced to a state of aches, itches, tics, and an ocular migraine that threatened to transform into a headache capable of putting me in bed for a week. Haley wasn’t looking much better. He was red-eyed, hungover, and his sweat and breath smelled of alcohol.

“I didn’t do this thing.” He was speaking to me—desperation and grief mixed with the all-night partying made his voice more
hoarse and strained than mine. The last time he had proclaimed his innocence, I had been much too skeptical. It had blinded me. I was afraid to make the same mistake again.

The lawyer made one more play for getting me out of the room, but Haley shut him down. “This is the man who has been working to prove to the prosecuting attorney that I am innocent of insider trading. If I remember correctly, your advice was to plead guilty to a lesser charge. You’re here because you have to be. He’s here because I want him to be.”

The lawyer took defeat gracefully. He gave me a brief smile and turned back to Haley. “This is not my usual type of case. I’ll have someone else from the firm at your arraignment in Hempstead. At this point, my only advice is to say nothing. To anyone.”

I didn’t bother with the niceties of the law or the advice of a specialist in corporate law. “Just tell me what happened.”

Haley had spent the day in his office out at the lab, and trying not to watch what the market was doing to the price of his stock. He stayed there late—the rest of the staff had all left—when security told him that Selena had just driven onto the grounds. This was a rare event. He left the lab, watched her drive up to the main house, and followed.

He found her in the sitting room at the back of the house. Her territory. The room had a broad view of the Sound and the steps leading down the cliff. On the rare times she visited the house, that was where she would stay for hours at a time, drinking glass after glass of white wine.

Haley confronted her. He was going through this gauntlet of reporters and prosecutors and he expected her support. She had already opened a bottle and was defensive and prepared for an argument, rather than a reconciliation.

“Did she tell you that you were set up? That she did it?”

“How did you know?”

“Because I saw her yesterday afternoon and told her that she had to tell you or I would.”

He nodded sadly. “I asked her straight up why she did it. She told me that I knew why.”

“Did you?” I found that if I focused entirely on Haley’s face, the room dimensions remained stable and I was able to function.

He looked down at his hands and after a moment twisted his wedding ring. “Selena was complicated. Her grandfather was a monster. The longer we were together, the more those issues came between us.”

The lawyer cleared his throat and spoke. “One thing that I know about murder inquiries is, they tend to uncover layers of secrets. If there are issues that you think may be relevant, this is the time to air them. Before the prosecution finds them.”

I gave the guy credit for loosening up enough to see that I really was trying to help and that Haley’s full cooperation might be key.

Haley stared at him as though trying to read his mind. Then he seemed to make a decision. “Our marriage was in trouble for a very long time.” He stumbled over the last couple of words and stopped. When he began again, he spoke very quietly. “Early on, she was very into me. I mean, she was very into sex with me.” His temples flushed a deep red. He was blushing. It was both funny and touching and it made me believe that I was hearing the truth. “Anyway, it was great. I’d always had an easy time with women, but this was something else. We were living in Cambridge after grad school. Things began to go wrong, though, as soon as we moved back here. I didn’t put it together for a long time. I blamed her drinking, but that was just another symptom, not a cause.”

I had been married to a drunk also. It’s an ugly word, an ugly way to describe someone you love, but if you’ve lived through it, you know just how accurate it is.

“Meanwhile, you’re trying to start a business together.”

“We never had any problem working together. I set up the lab, Selena worked her contacts, put together a board, began exploring future distribution avenues.”

“But?” I stifled a sneeze. Someone had once told me that you can’t sneeze with your mouth closed. They were wrong, you can. But you can just about give yourself a concussion. My eyes were already seeing strange patterns in the air from the migraine; now I had added butterflies and spinning stars.

“Eventually, she moved back to Park Avenue. There were just too many ghosts at that house.”

I concentrated and forced my brain back on track. “We’re back to the grandfather?”

He nodded.

“Was it abuse?” I asked.

He looked up in surprise.

“A guess,” I said.

He looked down again and spoke to his hands. “It was rape.”

“When did you find out?”

He shook his head to dispel a cloud of ugly images that all of us could see. “Last night. She told me last night.” A single tear ran down his cheek.

“Jesus Christ!” the lawyer said, blowing up his patrician reserve in one explosive breath. “You were married to her for fifteen years and she never told you?”

“I was a bastard to her. When she stopped sleeping with me, I blamed the booze and gave myself permission to sleep with anyone I chose.”

“But eventually you came back,” I said.

“She promised to stop drinking.”

“How many times?” I’d heard the same line from Angie, but never when she was drinking. Only when she was hungover or sick with remorse about the fight the night before.

“It worked for a while.”

“This was after the affair with what’s-her-name, the actress?”

He sat straighter and pulled his shoulders back. “Jo Harris. I take full blame on that, and I earned it, but I did not break up a marriage. There never was one. It was all image. The two of them hardly ever slept together. Their marriage was cooked up by publicists and agents. Give it another year or two and the Hollywood machine will start working and they’ll be reconciled and remarried and
People
will pay them a few million for exclusive pics of the wedding.”

“The pregnancy?”

“That was real.”

“And that’s what your wife couldn’t forgive.”

“Selena couldn’t have children.”

“Finish the story. What happened last night?” I said. “Did she tell you how the setup worked? Who helped her?”

He shook his head. “She was barely intelligible. We screamed at each other for a while and I left.”

I was sure that I knew who her accomplice was, but until I had proof I wasn’t prepared to say anything.

“What time did you leave?” I asked.

“Ten, maybe.”

“And she was alive?”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“We had run out of ugly things to say—the fight was getting repetitive. I got in the car and left.”

“Who found her?”

“I don’t know.”

The lawyer answered. “Security. The housekeeper heard two people—a man and a woman—arguing on the rear porch.”

“No one heard a shot?” I said.

“The gun could have had a suppressor.”

“What’s the timeline? When was this?”

“Just before midnight,” he said.

“So where were you at midnight?” Turning back to Haley.

“Sitting on my boat—at the dock—trying to decide whether to go back home or go get drunk.”

“Anyone see you? A watchman, maybe?”

“I doubt it. And it was coming down sleet, snow, and rain. I stayed down below.”

“Below? The boat has a downstairs?” The boat that Penn bought for his son had at least three levels.

“A cabin,” he said.

“How long were you there?”

“I don’t know. Until twelve-thirty or so. One, maybe?”

My throat was on the verge of giving out. The rasp was getting noticeably worse, and I could feel another giant sneeze building. “That’s a long time to be just thinking about it.”

“I had a lot to think about.”

“Okay.” I stopped and did a preventative nose blow. The nose still tingled, but I had deferred the explosion. “Tell me about the security at the house. The camera at the front gate. It must show you leaving three hours earlier.”

“It also shows another car coming in and leaving again later on,” the lawyer said.

That was the first bit of good news for our client.

“Have you seen the tape?” I asked the lawyer.

“No. I called out there and spoke to Carl Jenkins. He’s head of security.”

“How would anyone get in? Don’t you have to be buzzed in by security?”

“Not if you have the code. It changes daily,” Haley said. “But there are only four people on the distribution list. Selena, me, my secretary, and Jenkins. Anyone else needs to be cleared every time.”

“All the staff?”

“Jenkins keeps security tight.”

Not tight enough. But that wasn’t the time or the place to start explaining how my friend, Dr. Benjamin McKenna, was exploring all the loopholes in the system. “How is the code delivered?” I said.

“Email.”

“So any one of you could have been hacked.” I turned to the lawyer. “I hope you’re taking notes. I can see alternative versions of the crime heading in at least eight different directions.”

“I will pass all of this on. Any one of them could have added someone else to the distribution list,” the lawyer said.

“Your wife could have let her killer in,” I said.

Haley broke. He gave out a single strangled sob and then began to cry again. The lawyer and I sat back and took turns staring at the ceiling until Haley pulled himself together.

“Can you get a call to this Jenkins?” I said. “I’ll want to go out and talk to him and he won’t see me without your say-so.”

Haley looked to the lawyer.

“Here,” he said, reaching into his briefcase, “use my phone.”

I left them there, dialing the security guy. A deep, phlegm-filled, angry cough caught up with me halfway down the hall. I wanted to be back in bed.