Then, to my surprise, they each give me a hug.
“Michael,” says Rabbi Friedman, “thank you for all that you’ve done.”He pauses to clear his throat.
“I’m sorry I may have underestimated you. You’re a fine attorney.”
“I’m glad everything worked out, Rabbi,” I say. We all go back intothe house.
At seven-thirty, Wendy and Pete walk up the steps and enter to anotherround of wild cheers. They look bushed. Wendy comes right over to meand gives me a big hug.
“You did it Mike!” she shouts.
“We did it, Wendy. And we couldn’t have done it without you.” Pete’sbeaming.
“You son of a bitch,” he says.
“We heard it on the radio in our cab.”
“How the hell did you get the banker to talk?”
Wendy says, “Pete’s very persuasive. He held him by his ankles fromthe window of his office. It’s on the tenth floor.”
I look at her. She’s a good liar.
“You’re kidding, right?” I ask.
She grins.
“Yes, I’m kidding.”
Pete tells me, “Actually, Wendy came up with the plan.”
“Uh-oh,” I say.
“Wendy, you didn’t sleep with him, did you?”
“Of course not, Mike. That would be crude. My methods of persuasionare far more sophisticated.”
“So how’d you do it?”
“I offered to sleep with him.”
“Really?”
She laughs.
“No. It’s Pete who had the really sophisticated plan.”
Pete smiles.
“Bankers don’t like pain, Mike,” he says.
Oops.
“You didn’t hurt him, did you?”
“Not much. No broken bones.”
Jesus.
Wendy beams.
“And Mike, there’s one other thing. Guess what? Pete and I have spenta lot of time together the last couple of months. We’ve decided to getmarried.”
Jesus. Shit. Great. I think. How do you tell a woman her taste inmen still leaves a lot to be desired? How do I tell my brother I haddibs on Wendy? I know these people too well. I feel too close tothem. I know all their flaws.
There’s no purpose pointing them out now. Wendy shows me theengagement ring they bought in Nassau.
“That’s great, you guys,” I say.
“I’m very happy for you.” I raise my hand and shout at the top of mylungs that Pete and Wendy have an announcement to make. Wendy holds upher ring finger and the room bursts into cheers. I see my mother inthe corner of the room, her face glowing.
At eight-fifteen, I’m on the back porch. The sun has gone down and acool breeze is beginning to blow. After two beers and a glass ofchampagne, I’m starting to get lightheaded.
“Hi, Mikey.” Doris grins at me.
“You did a helluva job. I knew you’d pull it out.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you, Doris. Like always.”
“You’re a helluva lawyer.”
“Thanks. Now will you come work for me?”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“I might be able to afford you now.”
“I’ll let you know.”
We look out into the evening sky.
“So, Doris,” I say, “let me ask you something.”
“Anything, Mikey. It’s your night.”
“You won’t get mad at me, will you?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Well, there are a couple of things I’ve been wondering aboutfor a while now. Maybe you can help me piece them together.”
She drinks her champagne.
“Sure.”
“Well, for one thing, could you explain how you managed to get backupstairs after you ran your security card through the scanner and madesure the security camera showed you leaving? That was the key, right?To be certain that you had witnesses who saw you leave.”
There’s a pause. She sets her champagne flute on the railing. Thenshe says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I don’t say anything. I feel my jaws tighten. I wait.
The silence finally gets to be too much for her. She fingers herglasses.
“I
could lie to everybody else, but I never could lie to you, Mikey,” shesays.
“You figured it all out, didn’t you?”
“I think so.”
“When?”
“Just this afternoon. When I found out Jenny was going to get themoney from the International Charitable Trust. Bob was trying to amendthe trust. That’s when I realized there was a big financial stake forJenny in all of this. It gave you a motive.”
“Are you going to turn me in?” she asks.
I take a deep breath. I think of the day she came by and gave me thehundred-dollar retainer check that’s hanging in a frame in my office.
“No, Doris. I can’t. I’m your lawyer and you’re my client. Everythingwe say is privileged.” I look directly into her eyes.
“It doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”
She’s trying to hold back tears.
“Good,” she whispers.
There’s a big lump in my throat. I swallow hard.
“You killed two people, Doris,” I tell her.
“I know.” Tears roll down her cheeks.
We stand in silence for a few minutes, staring at the trees in Joel’sbackyard.
I think of Doris’s daughter, Jenny. I think of Diana Kennedy and hermother. I realize I’m standing next to a woman who has murdered twopeople, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.
The pain at the bottom of my stomach is excruciating. I’m speechless.I can’t stop thinking about Diana’s mother. And Joel. And Naomi andthe kids. Lives forever changed. Finally, I manage to say, “But youframed Joel. How could you do that to an innocent man?”
She grimaces.
“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know I had. That’s not what was supposedto happen.”
I wait.
“It was such a perfect plan, Mike,” she bursts out.
“I’d really read up on investigative techniques, planned it all out socarefully. I thought of everything to make it look like suicide. Bob’sfingerprints on the gun. A close shot, so there’d be residue from thegunpowder on his hands and shirt and tattooing around the entrancewound. Typing the suicide Email on his computer.
I didn’t miss a thing. And it would have worked, except for Joel. Noway I could have predicted all the goofy things that pointed towardhim.”
True enough.
“But you were willing to ruin his life for something he didn’t do,” Itell her.
“I know. I’m truly sorry about that—believe me. But I was trapped.Hell, if he hadn’t made such an ass of himself when he called Dianathat night, they probably wouldn’t even have brought charges. And thenhe went and picked up that damned gun—how could I have guessed anyonewould do something that stupid?”
She’s right about that. I even think she means it when she says she’ssorry.
But it doesn’t change anything, and I still can’t put it together.
She’s watching me uneasily.
“Look,” she says, “it was always supposed to be a suicide. That’s theway I planned it. And even with Diana turning up, it would have workedif it hadn’t been for Joel. It was such a standard script. She andBob were sleeping together and he was a jilted lover. Plenty of reasonfor him to kill her and then himself.”
“Were they sleeping together?” I ask.
“For a while. But she’d dumped him.”
I need to backtrack. I’ve got the /2ow—some of it, at least—but thewhy is missing. It doesn’t make sense. No matter how much of anasshole and a bastard Bob was, Doris had endured him for twenty-twoyears. What in Christ could have brought her to decide onmurder—coldblooded murder? And it isn’t as if she did it on impulse.She’d organized it like a military campaign: reading up on it, gettingall her ducks in a row. Nothing can alter the atrociousness of twodeliberate killings, but I think somehow it will help if I can onlyunderstand why.
That’s going to take a while. I know Jenny’s got to be at the heart ofit but I’ll wait on that. Best to begin with the timing.
I say, “How long did you plan all this?”
“For several months,” she says.
“I didn’t pin down the time when I began, but I knew I had to do it.”
“And that night Beth served Bob with the divorce papers, the time hadcome? You figured he might change his will? Maybe write Jenny out ofthe trust?”
“Yes.” She’s crying now.
Okay, I have the when. I decide to fill in the rest of the how.
“How did you get back upstairs?” I ask again.
This time she tells me.
“I took the freight elevator. There’s no security camera there. AfterI made sure everyone saw me leave at eight, I went downstairs to theCatacomb and took the freight elevator up to the new construction areaon forty-nine. I just waited there until one in the morning. Ifigured everyone else had probably left by then.”
“How did you know Bob would still be there?”
“I didn’t—I just took a chance he might still be finishing up onRusso’s deal.
If there was anyone else around, I wasn’t going to do anything. I’dhave just gone home.”
“And after you went to Bob’s office, then what?”
“I told him I came back to work on his bills. I started giving him aback rub, like I always do—did. Then I whacked him on the side of thehead with one of those heavy Plexiglas bookends on the shelf behind hisdesk chair. You know:
the ones with the scales of justice on them that say, “Justice,Equality and Mercy.” I’d put on gloves so there’d be no fingerprints.He just sat slumped over in his chair after I hit him, quiet as a baby.Then I put the gun in his hand and brought it up to his right temple,and I was set to make him pull the trigger …”
“And Diana walked in.”
I see her shoulders sag.
“And Diana walked in and fouled everything up.” She swallows.
“She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened in aflash—1 didn’t even stop to think, I just aimed at her and shot. Andthen I went back and made Bob shoot himself.”
The bloody photos of the bodies flash before my eyes. I shake my headtrying to get rid of them. I can’t. She’s keyed up too,remembering.
“I was shaking all over,” she tells me.
“I couldn’t keep my hand under control. The gun was jiggling when Ipressed his finger against the trigger. I wanted to get a cleanfingerprint on it, but I didn’t. I was too upset about Diana. I meantto press his finger on it again but I had to finish everything up—typethe E-mail message with my gloves on, wash the bookend to get rid ofany traces of blood—and I forgot about it.”
The smudged fingerprint—I have all the how now, except for all thekeyboard evidence that pointed toward Joel.
“What about the keyboard?” I ask.
“Was it Bob’s?”
“How do I know? I assumed it was. It must have been.”
“Then how did it get switched?”
She says she doesn’t know. But Art and Charles were certainly eager topin it on Joel, and even get him to confess before the case ever got totrial.
“Maybe Charles switched them or got someone else to do it,” shesuggests.
“You didn’t move it?”
“Swear to God, Mike.”
“Well, you almost pulled it off,” I say.
“If it hadn’t been for Joel…”
“Yes. If Joel hadn’t screwed it up, it would have gone down as amurder and a suicide. And that’s what I wanted: the suicide verdict onBob.” Then she says “Suicide” again, so emphatically that I’mstartled.
“That’s what mattered most.”
Well, sure, I think—that would have ended it then and there, unlike acharge of murder, which never closes until it’s solved. But so what?Doris was never under suspicion. It was Joel who was the unwittingvictim of that foul-up, but she was clean. Why is she so fixated onsuicide? I’m at a loss.
“Doris,” I say, “what difference does it make now? Sure, the officialcause of death is murder and that means they can reopen theinvestigation at any time, but I don’t think you’re in any danger. I’vetold you everything we’ve said here is privileged.”
“I know that.” She sounds impatient.
“You don’t understand. That’s not the reason the suicide verdict wasso important.”
I look at her blankly. Her eyes are on fire.
“Don’t you get it, Mike?” she asks.
“It’s the key-man policy. The suicide clause. I wanted Bobdead—Christ did I ever!—but I wanted the whole damn firm wiped outtoo. Just as dead as he was. Stone-cold dead.”
I’m stunned. The venom in her voice is palpable. I don’t understandit. Sure, Bob treated her like shit for years. And there’s Jenny toprotect.
But killing two people because she hates him? Bringing down the firmbecause she hates him? It doesn’t make sense. All I can manage is abarely audible, “Why, Doris?”
“Because I hate them all—every last one of them. They’re all scum. Iknew they were in trouble. I wanted to be sure there was nothing tosave them. I didn’t want them to get the twenty million from the keyman policy. I hope they all go to the poorhouse and rot in hell.”
I keep trying to bring some semblance of reason to all of this. Ican’t. I tell her she may get her wish about the firm—after theverdict, Skipper said Art told him they were going to shut down becausethey’d lost too many partners—but there’s still a chance of theirgetting the insurance money.
“The official cause of death is still murder,” I remind her.
She holds up her hands.
“It isn’t a perfect world, Mike,” she says.
“They’ll be fighting about it with the insurance company until hellfreezes over, anyway.”
I give up.
“Doris,” I say, “I still don’t get it. Why do you hate them so? EvenBob—Jesus, you put up with his shit for more than twenty years. Iknow he treated you like dirt, but murder? Even to protect Jenny’sshare of the trust, how could that justify killing him in coldblood?”
“Oh, Mike,” she says softly, as if she’s spent.
“It wasn’t the money. I couldn’t kill for money. You should knowthat. It’s Jenny.”
“Jenny?”
I see her take a deep breath.
“Bob was sleeping with her, Mike.”
Dear God. A married man more than twice her age preying on thedaughter of his secretary. Bob was an even fouler bastard than Ithought. But I still find myself thinking why the leap to murder?
“I begged him to stop.” She’s crying now.
“I begged him over and over, and he refused.” I can hardly hear herfor the sobs.
“Oh, Mike, I had to, don’t you see? He was Jenny’s father.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Did he know?” I ask softly.
“Of course he knew. From the very beginning. That’s why he left allthat money in the trust for her.”
“And Jenny?”
“No. I never told her. I didn’t think she had to know.” She’s tryingto pull herself together. She takes a deep breath.
“I asked him to stop and he wouldn’t. He was infatuated. He wouldn’teven acknowledge he was doing anything wrong. My God, I even went toArt Patton. He wouldn’t believe me. He said I was making it all up. Igot so furious I threatened him. I said I’d reveal things that wouldbring down the whole damn firm—and he he sneered at me, Mike, as if Iwas a piece of dirt. He said he’d crush me.
She looks at me imploringly.
“What was I supposed to do?” she asks.
“What else could I do? What would you have done if it were Grace?” Shetakes a deep breath.
“I did what I had to do, and I’d do it again. Twenty-two years ago Imade a mistake when I slept with Bob. He controlled my life. I wasn’tgoing to let him control Jenny’s. Destroy it. No way. So I didit.”
I realize Jenny was the new girlfriend that Bob talked about, the womanBeth’s investigator had seen at the Fairmont. I know why now, and Ifeel sick. We stare into the backyard and hear the joyous voices ofthe party behind us.