SIXTEEN
Clevenger flew into Islip
Airport, rented a car, and drove out to Southampton, on the tip of Long Island. Whitney McCormick had arranged a 5:00 P.M. meeting for him with the family of Ron Hadley, whose body had been found nine weeks before, buried in a shallow grave on the beach near his oceanfront estate, wrapped in a plastic sheet, his heart exposed and neatly dissected.
Southampton is the summer playground for Manhattan’s rich and famous. Steven Spielberg, Billy Joel, Lauren Bacall, fashion phenoms Calvin Klein and Tory Burch, and former Time Warner chief Steve Burns all have second or third homes there. Many properties are valued in the tens of millions.
Clevenger had researched Hadley on the Web before leaving the Boston Forensics offices.
When he died at sixty-one, Hadley was chief executive officer of National News Corporation, which operated newspapers and radio and television stations across the country. In his forties he had served two
terms in Congress, representing New York’s Fourteenth District, including most of the Upper East Side. He left his wife, Patrice, a former model, and two adult daughters, Nicole and Amy.
Clevenger was prepared for splendor when Mc-Cormick told him the Hadley estate was located on Meadow Lane, the premier street in Southampton, bordering the ocean. But he was taken aback when he drove onto the property.
By Southampton standards, the house itself was not enormous—about eight or nine thousand square feet, not the twenty thousand allowed by town zoning. What made it remarkable was that it sat on at least six acres of rolling lawn, with hundreds of feet of beach front and dramatic views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Peconic Bay.
It was also striking for its design. The facade comprised three gray, shingled rectangles, separated by two round towers of slightly darker gray stone. Four chimneys of the same stone pierced the charcoal gray slate roof. The windows were trimmed in lead-coated copper, yet a fourth shade of gray.
The house looked like a charcoal drawing of itself , a work of art on display under the clouds.
Clevenger rang the bell at the front door.
A pregnant woman with auburn hair, about thirty-five, wearing a black one-piece bathing suit, a black pareo, and black Gucci sunglasses answered it a minute later. “Dr. Clevenger?”
“That’s right”
“Fm Nicole,” she said, with a smile. She extended her hand.
He shook it.
“Everyone’s by the pool.”
He followed her through the house, no less gracious on the inside, with beachwood floors and ceilings and gray granite fireplaces. A row of six-by-six-inch windows ran along the top of every wall, like a transparent crown molding, allowing sunlight to flow through the entire structure. “This way,” Nicole said. She opened a glass door and walked outside.
Acres of lawn, bordered by beach plum and dwarf juniper trees and tall, deep English gardens, rolled toward the ocean. Clevenger could hear waves crashing onto the beach.
He walked with Nicole along a curved bluestone path that gradually widened until it embraced an infinity pool and a pool house shaded by wind-bent jack pines and finished with the same gray shingles, gray stone, and lead-coated copper as the main residence. Two women sat at one of three weathered teak tables at poolside, beneath a sky-blue umbrella. In the distance, fields of wheat-colored beach grass swayed in the wind.
“Mom, Amy, this is Dr. Clevenger,” Nicole said, as they reached the table.
Patrice Hadley was in her late fifties, a picture of elegance, with longish, graying hair tied in a ponytail, a magnetic smile, and skin that most women half her age would envy. She was dressed in tennis shorts and a pink T-shirt.
Liz Hadley, on the heavy side, with the prettiest face of the three, shared her sister’s auburn hair and sunny disposition. She looked like the older of the two, but
only by a few years. She was fidgeting with a diamond solitaire engagement ring that had to be five carats. She wore no wedding band.
Clevenger shook hands with each of them. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He noticed they were drinking red wine. His gaze drifted to the bottle.
“Please, join us,” Patrice Hadley said.
Clevenger and Nicole sat down.
“May we offer you a glass of wine?” Amy Hadley asked.
Clevenger told himself that accepting the invitation would break the ice, that he could wait until morning to get sober. A new day, a clean start. “Why not?” he answered. “That’s very kind of you.”
She poured him a glass.
He took a sip, pictured Ted Pearson sitting in his study, heard his words: “Show some courage yourself.”
He took another sip.
“How can we help you, Doctor?” Patrice asked.
“I know how difficult this can be to speak about,” Clevenger started, addressing himself mostly to her, “but I’d like to know anything about Ron’s life you think could be a clue to his murder.”
Patrice smiled at her daughter Amy, who smiled back.
Nicole laughed.
Clevenger wouldn’t have thought it possible to witness stranger grief reactions than the Groupmanns”, but here he was the very next day, sitting with a widow and her two daughters sharing an inside joke about their murdered husband and father. “I must be missing something,” he said. He took another sip of wine.
Amy and Nicole deferred to their mother.
She drained her wineglass, refilled it. “I loved Ron very much, but he made life very difficult for almost everyone he met,” she said. “I’m sure dozens of people are breathing easier now.”
“Difficult, in what way?” Clevenger asked.
“He was a very powerful personality,” she said.
“Overpowering,” Clevenger said.
“I know our partners in News Corp. found it very hard to challenge the direction the company was headed,” she said. “My husband was vindictive when anyone disagreed with him. He felt attacked. I think that’s the dynamic that ended his political career. He made it impossible for the people closest to him to tell him when he was wrong.”
Clevenger was struck by Patrice Hadley’s seeming lack of emotion—no sadness, no anger. She sounded like her husband’s biographer, not his widow. Just like Shauna Groupmann. “Was he as difficult to live with?” he asked, looking around the table.
“At least,” Patrice said. She folded her hands in front of her.
Nicole laid her hand atop her mother’s.
Clevenger glanced at Amy, saw her twisting her engagement ring round and round.
“We didn’t know any different,” Nicole said. “But it wasn’t a normal situation.” She checked to make sure her comment hadn’t injured her mother.
It had.
The three women fell silent. The whole setting—the gray house, the wind, the crashing waves—seemed to change from peaceful to foreboding.
“Abnormal, in what way?” Clevenger asked Nicole.
She shrugged.
Clevenger looked at Amy, who reached for her wineglass and took a sip.
Several more seconds passed.
Patrice finally broke the silence. “He ran our lives,” she said. “It was my fault, no one else’s. Not even his. Ron was a force of nature. It was my responsibility to get the girls out of his way. I didn’t.”
Out of his way
. Where was this headed? “What did that cost them, exactly?” Clevenger asked her.
“Their lives,” Patrice said.
“Mom,” Amy said, shaking her head.
“It’s not like...” Nicole started.
“Yes, it is,” Patrice interrupted. She looked warmly at Nicole, then back at Clevenger. “They could have started living much sooner than they did.”
“It’s not the end of the world. I caught up,” Nicole said, running her hand down her stomach.
“How many weeks are you?” Clevenger asked Nicole.
“Seventeen,” Nicole said. “I got pregnant two weeks after Dad died.”
“Any connection?” Clevenger asked her.
“He hated my husband,” Nicole said. She shook her head. “I know it sounds stupid, but that’s why I waited. I’ve been married three years. He made it obvious he had no use for Saul from day one. And that bothered me. I cared what he thought. I didn’t respect it, but I couldn’t get past it and start a family. Saul almost divorced me over it.”
“But now that he’s gone,” Clevenger said, nodding at her stomach, “you’re free.”
“I feel guilty about that, but that’s how it feels.”
“You have nothing to feel guilty about,” Patrice said.
“Neither do you,” Amy said to her mother.
“That’s not true,” Patrice said. “I knew it wasn’t healthy, the way he controlled all of us, for so many years. I should have left.”
Clevenger looked at Amy, his gaze settling on her engagement ring. “Did you get engaged recently?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“How long after the murder?” Clevenger asked.
“Seven weeks.”
“Your father disapproved of your fiance?” Clevenger asked.
“He disapproved of every boyfriend I ever had,” Amy said flatly. “Jack isn’t the first man who asked to marry me.”
“No one was good enough,” Clevenger said.
“No one was ever
any
good. They were the ‘stupidest,” the ‘laziest,” the ‘ugliest.” He literally wouldn’t speak to half the boys who took me out.”
Clevenger was sitting with three traumatized women, seemingly liberated only by the death of Ron Hadley. Each of them had a psychological motive for murder.
“Ron would never have gone for help,” Patrice said, “but I should have. I was weak. Zero self-esteem. But do you want to know the really...
T
She stopped, suddenly choked up.
Now it was Amy who put her hand on her mother’s.
Nicole’s eyes filled up.
Patrice cleared her throat. “The really strange thing,” she went on, “is that sometimes I do miss him... quite a lot, which is ... sick.” She bit her lip. “Because we really are much better off without him.”
SEVENTEEN
A knock
.
West Crosse walked to the door of his suite in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, a nineteenth-century Beaux Arts dream with a three-story Louis Pierre Rigal lobby frequently compared with the Sistine Chapel. It made him feel profoundly at peace, even in a city now partly defined by its Millennium Park, home to a sixty-six-foot-long, thirty-three-foot-high sculpture of a bean and to Frank Gehry’s monstrous, stainless steel Pritzker Pavilion.
“It’s me.” A woman’s voice.
He opened the door.
Chase Van Myer, twenty-two, stunning in a white baby T and black leather miniskirt, stood outside. “May I come in?”
He nodded.
She walked in. The room glowed with light from dozens of candles. “All for me?” she asked, looking into his eyes.
“Yes.”
“It’s been so long.”
He pushed the door closed and pulled her to him, stroked her long, black hair. “I couldn’t wait any longer.”
They kissed deeply.
He could taste the bitter residue of cocaine on her teeth and gums. He grabbed hold of her wrists and pushed her against the wall, pinned her hands over her head. He kissed the scars that crisscrossed the undersides of her forearms, lingered on the freshest ones. He ripped open her T-shirt, kissed her naked, pierced breasts. Then he turned her around, roughly pulled her hair away from the back of her neck, and bit the delicate rose tattooed there.
She groaned. “I need to be fucked so bad.”
He kicked her feet apart, ran his hand up between her legs. No panties. Wet.
“Please,” she said.
He knew she wanted him to make her beg, to humiliate her, to agree she was worthless, not an heiress, ugly, not beautiful. He yanked up her skirt, spanked her until she was red.
She arched her back for more.
“You know what I want to see,” he whispered in her ear. He pulled her away from the wall, pushed her toward the bedroom.
He had arranged more candles inside, surrounded the four-poster with white rose petals and myrtle. Handel’s
Messiah
played softly on the bedside stereo. Four lengths of gold silk rope lay on the bedspread.
She stood beside the bed, facing him, and pulled off
her top. She unzipped her skirt, let it fall to the ground, stepped out of it.
He watched her, stone-faced.
She never looked away from him as she climbed onto the bed, lay down, then spread her legs wide.
His gaze traveled from her breasts, down her lithe torso, her pierced belly button, her smooth crotch, stopped on her right inner thigh, tattooed with the word “FUCKED.” That was new in the six months since they had been together. If, in his quietest moments, he had wondered whether her soul could be salvaged, those six letters inked into her skin convinced him once and for all that it could not.
Crosse had met Chase Van Myer a little over two years before, while redesigning the interior of her parents” $20 million, 1922 mansion on Astor Street, in Chicago’s prized Gold Coast. Her father, Scout, a venture capitalist, city councilman, and Bonesman, had confided in him that Chase suffered with borderline personality disorder. “She cuts herself,” he had said, looking nauseated. “Says it doesn’t even hurt. She’s in and out of rehab for booze and cocaine. Can’t control herself with men. It’s all part of the syndrome.”
“Men take advantage of her?” Crosse asked.
“She’s constantly in a tailspin over one guy or another. Ready to kill herself. Hates him, never wants to see him, then can’t live without him, ready to elope, have his baby. She’s a mess.”
“Has she gotten pregnant?” Crosse asked.
Van Myer looked down. He had just turned fifty, but looked much older. Part of it was the gray at his temples,
the crow’s-feet beside his piercing blue eyes. But part of it was emotional exhaustion. “She’s had three abortions,” he said.
Crosse nodded solemnly.
“It’s notoriously hard to treat—this borderline thing. Her doctor says she may never snap out of it. It could get worse.”
It had gotten worse. In the eleven months Crosse worked on the Van Myer project, Chase’s cocaine addiction blossomed into addictions to cocaine and heroin. She became pregnant with her drug dealer’s baby, had her fourth abortion.