Murder.com (10 page)

“Yes.”

“With a credit card?” Reuben asked sharply.

“Yes, sir, I'm sure he did.”

“And what was his name?”

“I didn't get it.”

“What about lunch? Who paid?” Luis asked.

“I'm not sure,” Jerrod answered. “All I know was there was a pile of cash on the table to pay the check when they left. No credit card was involved.”

“Going back to dinner, with all your curiosity about Hallie's boyfriends, you didn't look at the signer's name, Jerrod?” Reuben had resorted to a cross-examining tone that was unlike him.

“Sorry. We were busy as hell, and they were in a big hurry to leave. I just didn't focus on his name. Wouldn't have meant anything to me anyway.”

“How does it work with your credit card receipts?” Bautista asked Gary. “Do you keep them?”

“Yeah, we keep one copy. The boss keeps them for about six months.”

“So you could examine the receipts for that night and figure out who was here?”

“At least the ones who paid with a credit card, yes.”

“Can we see those?” Bautista asked.

“I'm sure you can. But the owners keep them in the safe and I don't have the combination.”

“When will he be here?”

“There are two of them, Mark and Peter. At least one of them is usually here midafternoon, around three or four.”

Reuben had a sudden thought, and interrupted. “Did Hallie and her date have a reservation?”

“I'm sure they did. She was a favored customer, but on a Friday night, I'm sure there would have been a reservation.”

“How do we check that?” Reuben pressed.

“That would be in the book—I've got it here, right up front,” Gary said. He stood up, went to the reception desk and returned with a spiral notebook. He flipped through the pages.

“Here it is, Friday, the twenty-seventh,” he said, as he went down the list for that date. “Yeah—got it—eight o'clock, Hallie Miller.”

“Not her companion's name?”

“Nope.”

“And how about lunch?”

“No reservation at all for that.”

“Damn.”

Luis sighed. “I guess it's back to the credit cards. I'll be here tomorrow at four o'clock.”

“And you'll be here, too?” he asked Gary, who nodded affirmatively.

“And how about you two?”

“I'll be here,” Jerrod replied, “but I don't think I can be much help.”

“And you, Matt?”

“No, sir, I have a long drumming lesson tomorrow afternoon.”

Walking slowly down Seventy-Ninth Street, Reuben and Luis tried to make sense of what they had been told at the restaurant.

“Just what we need, three mystery men,” Luis finally concluded. “Hallie's lunch guest, her dinner partner, and the stranger who interrupted her meal.”

“I'm only surprised Darcy Watson wasn't there as well,” Reuben added with a bitter laugh.

Eighteen

A Preprandial Shock

The Bautistas and the Frosts had arranged to have a weekend dinner the next night. Francesca and Luis, as instructed, arrived at the Frosts' apartment promptly at seven thirty for drinks.

Francesca let out a long sigh as she sat down. She gratefully accepted a glass of Chablis from Reuben. “Don't ever have twins!” she said, then quickly added, “Actually, it's great. Fascinating to see how they're alike, how they're different.”

“I assume Rafaela Cynthia is the better behaved of the two?” Cynthia inquired.

“I'm not so sure about that. Manuel Reuben's a very good boy.”

“I should hope so,” Reuben said. “I would expect so.”

Reuben was anxious to get Luis aside, to find out what he had learned at Quatorze that afternoon. Once Cynthia and Francesca began conversing together, he took Luis by the arm and led him to his study. They sat down with their drinks—Reuben with a martini and Luis with a gin and tonic.

“How was the fishing?” Reuben asked. “Hope you had good luck.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure. There were more than fifty credit card charge slips for the night of April fifteenth. Gary, the guy we met, knew most of the signers and was able to eliminate them. Quite a few chits were signed by women, so those were out, too. In the end, we were left with six that could have been signed by the mysterious stranger.”

“Did you recognize any of the names?”

“No. But I put one of my guys to work trying to trace them. We'll just have to wait and see what he comes up with.”

“Do you have the list, by the way? I'm curious.”

“Affirmative. I brought a copy for you. I figured you'd want to see it. Here it is.” He handed Reuben a sheet on which were written six names:

Michael Rosen

Theodore F. Keith

Daniel Rense

Eskill Lander

J. Parke McLeod

Stuart Wiley

Reuben visibly started when he came to Lander's name.

“I do know one of these people,” he said hoarsely. “Eskill Lander is one of my partners. He's our senior trust and estates partner. He's the personal attorney for Marina's father. But I'm sure that's merely a weird happenstance.”

“Couldn't it be like a ‘chance literary coincidence'?”

Reuben shot him a cross look.

“Is he married?” Luis asked.

“Yes, he is,” Reuben answered. “Though I'm not sure how happily.”

“Ah, so maybe he was having a fling with Miss Courtland?”

“Impossible. Dan Courtland is a major, major client of Chase & Ward. Nobody at the firm in his right mind would mess with his daughter. You've met the man. With his views, he'd personally stone any adulterer fooling around with her. He'd fire Lander—and our firm—without a second thought.”

“But don't forget he thought he was with Hallie Miller,” Bautista offered. “That was the name she was known at in the restaurant.”

“Oh God, of course you're right.”

“No, maybe wrong. Your man Lander must have known Marina Courtland.”

“He told me he didn't when we talked about the murder the other day. Said he only dealt with her through correspondence. I hate to say it, but we better take a hard look at him.”

“Right. I'm also putting my guys to work on all fifty charge chits, to see if anybody has a recollection of Marina's date or the mysterious stranger with the cell-phone camera. And also to canvas the lunch ones to see if anyone might identify the
first
mysterious stranger who was with Marina.”

“That's all well and good, but let's see where we're at,” Reuben said. He retrieved a yellow legal pad from his desk. “Let's put down what we know, or don't know,” he said. “Or what we
think
we know.”

“Number one, Marina had lunch at Quatorze Bis on the day of her death with a mysterious stranger.

“Number two, we think that Lander might be the second mysterious stranger.”

“If I can get a picture of Lander, I can see if the guys at the restaurant recognize him,” Luis said.

“That's easy. God help us, there are pictures of each of the partners on the firm's website. How the powers that be think that those ugly mugs will attract business I don't know. But I can print a picture for you without any trouble. In fact, I'll do it right now.” He clicked to the Chase & Ward website and started his printer.

Luis took the photo when it was finished. “I'm pretty sure the restaurant's open tomorrow. I'll stop by and see if they recognize this guy.”

“Number three,” Reuben went on, “we think that Marina and Lander were seen by a third mysterious stranger that knew Lander. I wish the hell we could get a lead on him, but I don't know how—unless some other guest at the restaurant can help. Not very hopeful.

“All this depends, of course, on our guess that Waggerson444 on Meet.com was Lander. And we do think that, don't we?”

“Hard to say,” Bautista replied. “His self-description doesn't match what you're telling me about him. Lander's a lawyer, I assume with an LLB or a JD. Waggerson's a ‘private investor' with an MBA. Lander's married; Waggerson's divorced. Is the age right? The height? Eye color? Hair color?”

“Let's check the print I just made of Lander's picture,” Reuben said. Together they looked it over.

“Yes, those things seem right. Maybe a little fudging with the age. I think Lander's older than forty-five. But not by too much,” he said.

“Waggerson and Lander could still be the same. Nobody reading his profile would know if he changed some of the details,” Luis said.

“Luis, how can we prove that one way or another? For my own peace of mind, I need to know whether my partner is a cold-blooded murderer.”

“As I told you before, Meet.com, and all its software, is located in Bermuda. The NYPD or the DA would have to serve process there to get the background information on Waggerson444. And I don't even know if that's possible.”

“Damn. It would probably take weeks to go that route. But without it, I don't think you can just barge in on Lander and say, ‘Hands up! You're under arrest!'”

“That's for certain. I'm not about to tangle with a big New York legal honcho without a surer case than we've got.”

“Even if we prove he was at the restaurant that night with Marina, I suppose he could always say he was the family lawyer and he was talking some legal business over with her—”

“And with no idea what happened after they left Quatorze Bis.”

“I need another drink. How about you?”

“Okay.”

Reuben went to prepare the drinks, and also to apologize to Francesca and Cynthia for deserting them. “Press of business,” he told them.

“What do we do now?” Reuben asked when he returned. “I don't see how we advance the cause, beyond getting the restaurant people to identify Lander.”

“Yes, that's the first priority—which I told you I'll do tomorrow. But, Reuben, I'm surprised at you. With your new interest in electronics, there are a lot of ways to trace a perp. There are twenty-first century methods.”

“Please, Luis. I hate that twenty-first century stuff. All our damn politicians talk about twenty-first century ‘problems' or twenty-first century ‘solutions.' Now you have twenty-first century ‘methods.'”

“Well at least I didn't call them terrorist methods,” Luis retorted.

“Sorry for the outburst. Go ahead—what are the solutions you refer to?”

“Start with this, Reuben,” Luis said, taking up his friend's pad and pencil.

“The first one's easy. Taking the print you just made for me of Lander's photo to Quatorze.

“Then, second, Lander, or whoever, had car keys in his hand when he left the restaurant. If the car was rented, we should be able to trace that.”

“I doubt that's necessary. Eskill drives a brand-new Porsche, of which he's very proud. He commutes to the office you know. With his car.”

“Where does he live?”

“Greenwich, Connecticut.”

“Really? Greenwich not ‘Boston'? Good. That means there's a good chance he has an E-ZPass to pay the Triborough Bridge tolls. If Lander had one, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will have an exact record of when he took the bridge to go home to Greenwich, if that's what he did that night. So that's the second route to pursue.” Bautista wrote down
E-ZPass
.

“Then there's the computer in Lander's office,” he continued. “Again you may remember that all Waggerson444's messages were sent during the daytime, usually first thing in the morning, I assume when he got to work. So he was diddling her from his office. Not from a laptop or whatever he's got at home.”

“That sounds right. He was probably afraid his wife would find him out if he arranged his trysts at home, under her prying nose.”

“That was a pretty dangerous game, though,” Luis said. “What if somebody went snooping on his office computer, or what if his secretary did?”

“He could guard against that,” Reuben said. “There's a security system, and a password is required to open any office computer,” Reuben said. “And his secretary couldn't get in to his PC unless he gave her his password.”

“Who knows the password?”

“Just the person who uses the computer.”

“No one else? What if one of your eminent lawyers drops dead, does that mean no one can get into his PC?”

“Oh, I forgot. There's a master list,” Reuben answered. “The only copy is locked up in the office of the Executive Partner.”

“Can you find out Lander's password from your Executive Partner?”

“That would be very tricky. Why do you ask?”

“If you can get the password that's needed to open Lander's computer and if I get a search warrant for his office PC, we should be able to find out if he ever visited Meet.com. We may not be able to get into his Meet.com file without his password for it—same problem we had with Marina's file—but at least we can find out if he ever visited the site.”

Luis wrote down
Lander's office PC?

“Is there more?” Reuben asked.

“Yeah. His cell phone. He talked to Marina/Hallie on it. Unless he's destroyed it, that phone should have a record of his calls to—or from—her. And, even if he's gotten rid of it, we can get the call information from the provider.”

Cell phone
was added to the list.

“We might just check his credit card records, too. You have to pay a fee to use Meet.com and you do that with a credit card.”

Luis put down
credit cards
.

“Amazing,” Reuben said. “It looks like you can build an electronic fence to trap someone pretty easily.”

“Well put,” Luis said. “That's exactly what we want—an electronic fence around our murderer, whether it's Lander or one of our other candidates.”

“Right now I think we'd better get going or we'll be late for our reservation at Blue Hill.”

“Just let me add two more items: One, to check John Sommers's alibi and, two, to pin down where Darcy Watson was that night.” He noted these down.

“All right, let's go. What's Blue Hill?”

“A first-rate restaurant, where everything comes straight from the owner's farm. We've wanted to take you there for a long time.”

“I'm ready.”

“We can continue to talk there,” Reuben said. “It's small and quiet. We can converse in riddles, in case there's a
Page Six
spy nearby.”