Nice Place for a Murder Read online

  I was about to leave the house in the morning when I saw the light flashing on my answering machine, something I’d overlooked in my hurry to get to bed the night before. I knew it had to be a message from Roger Teague, and it was. A bad-tempered communication delivered in his customary snotty tone. What did I find when I got to Shelter Island? What was I doing? Why hadn’t I reported to him? And had I forgotten how important Julian Communications was to all of us?

  Much as I wanted never to speak another word to Teague, I knew I’d better steel myself against his incivility and fill him in. I suspected I was likely to need his help before this business was over. And beside, a call to him on my cell phone would sharpen my wits for the rest of the day’s confrontations. Something challenging to pass the time once I got on the train.

  I knew he’d be at his desk. He was always conspicuously in place by eight AM, so he could cast a superior look at each staff member who arrived to begin the day’s work. If you walked through the door before nine, it still didn’t earn you any points from Teague. In his mind, the only thing that really mattered was: he was there before you were. He used to give me that look when I came in, too. And I was the boss back then.

  Everyone called him Teague. I’d been as close to him as anyone, and I never called him Roger. He wasn’t a first name guy. That would have implied some kind of cordiality, and it simply wasn’t there. From the first, he was cold, vulgar, egotistical and unfailingly severe. But he was smart as hell. Nobody could outwit him. And he was one of those rare people clients trust precisely because they’re so blunt. Five minutes with him, and you knew he wouldn’t take crap from anyone, and your company was safe with him. That’s why I’d hired him, then made him a partner four years later.

  Nevertheless, these days I thought he was a prick. The day we signed my buyout deal he started treating me not as a former colleague, but an indentured servant: Do what I tell you, or you don’t get your money. Hardly what an aging retiree with sluggish arteries likes to hear.

  I got on the train at the Ronkonkoma station and stood in the vestibule of my car to get what little privacy can be found on the Long Island Railroad. When we were well under way I took out my cell phone and called Teague.

  “Why didn’t you wait a few days longer to get back to me? After all, it’s only our biggest fucking client you’re playing around with,” he told me on the phone.

  “Is that what I’m doing, playing around? You’re right, Teague. It’s a kind of game with me. I really enjoy going on errands for you, getting the run-around from Ingo Julian, chasing after some evil son-of-a-bitch who keeps trying to shoot me. It’s comforting to know I can still be useful, even though I’m retired. Fills up my day for me. I get involved like this, I wonder where the time goes, sometimes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on a train just passing Jericho. On my way in to Julian Communications for a command performance. I’ve been summoned by Arthur Brody.”

  “Brody? Why?”

  “I won’t know till I get there,” I said.

  “I’ll meet you. Go in with you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I turned toward the window in the door and watched the Long Island countryside speeding past. “Because,” I said, in my most sincere, most measured tone, “everyone at Julian has made it very clear that right now they want only me. Maybe it’s because they share my view that you are a loathsome prick. I’m terribly sorry for you, Teague. It must be hard to accept that kind of rejection at your high level. But you did get me into this, so you’ll just have to let me handle it. I’ll call you if I need you.” There, I thought, that should push his buttons for him. And it did.

  “Don’t you fuck this up, you hear.” He was shouting now. “I want to know everything that’s happened, everything that’s going on. You come over here as soon as you’ve finished with Brody.”

  “Can’t do that,” I said. “I don’t work there, and don’t start thinking I do. You want to see me, you’ll have to come uptown. You know what? You could buy me a nice lunch. And we could talk. Say one o’clock?”

  “I don’t eat lunch. You know that.”

  “But I do.”

  I could hear him mumbling to himself. Then, “Meet me in front of the big library, by the lion on the right. I’ll buy you a hot dog.”

  “And a soda?” I said. But he was gone.

  CHAPTER IX

  When you come to New York City every day, it doesn’t seem to change. It’s like looking into the mirror each morning, and thinking you look exactly as you did the day before. But if somehow you looked in the mirror only once every six months, you’d know you’d changed.

  As I walked from Penn Station to the Julian Communications offices at Forty-Eighth Street and Park Avenue, it was like that. I hadn’t been in New York in six months, and all those little changes to the midtown area had added up. There was a new Korean greengrocer on Avenue of the Americas, with boxes of perfect fruits and vegetables displayed outside on the sidewalk. An old building on Madison Avenue had had an all-glass face-lift, and looked brand new. A busy lunchroom that had been on Forty-Seventh Street forever was now a jewelry store. The midtown that had always been so familiar to me was alien and unfriendly this morning. I couldn’t help but think I’d rather be fishing.

  I started out briskly at Penn Station, feeling confident that my coronary system was prepared for some walking. Mistake. By the time I reached Fifth Avenue I had slowed to a stroll, and when I finally got to Park and Forty-Eighth, I was experiencing what I knew as moderate distress — including the strong desire to sit down on the curb. But I remained upright, leaning on the handrail that led up the stairs into the building, trying to look as though I was in control, while I considered whether to take a nitroglycerin pill or not. I decided not, because I could feel myself beginning to stabilize. After five minutes of quiet standing, I made my way, shaky but resolute, up the stairs, through the lobby and into an elevator. I stepped out onto the thirty-sixth floor ten minutes late. Couldn’t be helped. Sorry.

  This was the topmost of the four complete floors Julian Communications occupied in this building. While there were units of Julian elsewhere in New York, and in a half dozen other cities across the country, it was from here that the Julian brass administered the complex of companies. Here on the thirty-sixth floor was where the big wheels turned, where Ingo and Brody and their staffs sent directives to the floors below, and from there out into the world. Here at the top it was all deep carpets and teak and marble and rich, muted colors.

  And intrigue. Which I was sure was about to swallow me whole.

  Hector came around his desk and closed his office door behind me as soon as I came in. “You look drained,” he said, motioning me into an armchair. “Something happen to you?”

  “Yeah. My father had a bum circulatory system, and he passed it on to me.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m dealing with it,” I said. “Did you get a computer hit on Hick Sosenko?”

  “Yes.” He pulled an armchair next to mine and sat. That was Hector’s style, to sit next to you rather than behind his desk. Put himself on your side right away, instead of putting a barrier between the two of you. “He used to work for us, at one of our companies.” He reached over to the desk and picked up a file folder, then handed it to me. “It’s all in here, but I can tell you the whole story in two minutes. Sosenko — his name is Herman Sosenko, by the way — worked as a warehouse grunt at Rainbow Graphics, a big printing shop on Long Island. We acquired Rainbow eight years ago to print our women’s magazines. Sosenko’s employee evaluation sheet says he was a horror story from the day he showed up. He fought about everything, threatened people, scared the hell out of every woman came near him. Finally his supervisor said no more of this, and told Sosenko he was fired. Sosenko went nuts, threw the supervisor off the loading dock, jumped down after him and beat on him with a hammer. Broke his collar bone and two ribs.”


  “That’s our boy. Fits with everything else I’ve heard about him,” I said.

  “There’s more,” Hector said. “At first the company didn’t want to make a big thing out of it. You know, don’t shake up the troops, just let it blow away. Even the supervisor finally agreed that the important thing was that the guy was out of the company.”

  Hector paused to take a breath, so I took the opportunity to say “But?” There’s always a but in stories like this.

  “But then Ingo heard about it,” Hector continued. “He was furious. He called in the police and insisted that Sosenko be prosecuted. Sosenko wouldn’t have had a prayer at a trial, and the public defender pled him guilty to assault with a deadly weapon. Bottom line, Sosenko got one to three. And he was such a bad-ass in prison that he served every last day of the three years.”

  “So? You telling me Sosenko is getting even now for the time he spent in prison?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “And this all happened when?” I said.

  “The assault?” He took the file folder back from me and thumbed through the papers inside. “It’ll be six years ago in January. That would make it just a month before I joined the company.”

  “So Sosenko’s been out of the slammer for nearly three years, now, right?” I said. “You have to wonder why he’s waited all this time to make his move.”

  Hector shrugged. “Maybe it’s been on his mind, preyed on him, finally pushed him over the edge.”

  “He had three years in prison to think about it. Why start killing people now, just like that? Something must have happened.” I got up and walked to the window. Hector’s office had a fabulous vista of the west side cityscape, to the Hudson River and beyond, into New Jersey. “There’s something else that mystifies me. Sosenko is an appalling excuse for a human being. He’s threatened people, beaten people, caused big trouble wherever he’s gone. But he hadn’t actually killed anybody that we know of, not till now.”

  “Matter of time,” Hector said. “It’s not as though he just suddenly turned vicious. Seems like he was born vicious. He was a killer waiting to happen.”

  “Maybe.” I looked down onto Madison Avenue, the faraway people and trucks and taxis. Up here you couldn’t hear a sound. Julian Communications was above all that street hustle. “How old is he? Do we know?”

  Hector searched through the folder again. “Six years ago he was thirty-five. He’s forty-one.”

  “On the old side to do a first killing. Guys like him, animals, mostly they’re younger,” I said. “Anyway, now we’re assuming he’s after Ingo, looking for revenge. That means when he drowned Newalis, it was by mistake. Thought it was Ingo out there for his usual afternoon swim. He must have been watching Ingo for a while, to know about that. But me, I’m a problem for him, because I got a look at him out there. That’s why he wants to make me go away, too, finish what he tried to do out on the water. And if I’m right, then he wasn’t after Lisa. It was me he wanted to shoot. He probably followed her to my door.”

  Hector got up and came to stand at my side. “Sounds right,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder as we looked out at the skyline together. “But it’s wrong.”

  “Me wrong, really?” I said. “Hard to believe.”

  “Sosenko was stalking Arthur Brody. That’s what Brody’s going to tell you about, why he asked you to come in today. It’s not just Ingo that this guy wants to kill. He has a hard-on for the whole company. It seems we’re in a war. Us against Sosenko.”

  “You believe that?” I said.

  “I think I do.”

  “If you’re right, we need help. I can’t protect everybody.”

  He gave me back the folder, and steered me toward the door. “Talk to Brody. I’ll take you to his office.”

  The huge corner office was a poem to minimalism. An endless expanse of carpet with only a pair of sofas in the way as I crossed the room. Unadorned windows looking on the west with the same view Hector had, and on the north all the way to the George Washington Bridge uptown. A massive desk, bare except for a pad of lined paper and a chrome cup filled with freshly sharpened wooden pencils, all exactly the same length. Evidently Mr. Brody did not have pencils re-sharpened. Used just once, then given to the needy.

  One look at the man and I understood the office. Nothing about him that might be considered adornment. Dark blue suit, white, medium-collar shirt, modest striped tie, and the plainest of black shoes, buffed to a shine that rivaled patent leather. In fact, the whole package looked so austere and perfectly turned out, put a coffin behind him and you’d take him for a funeral director.

  Which he wasn’t. He was the number two guy in a decent-size communications conglomerate, a player in publishing, broadcasting, telecommunications and God-knows-what else.

  He stood in front of his desk with his hand out to shake mine, drawing me toward him. When I finally got there, his grip was resolute and dry, firm without being overbearing. Presidential. My reaction in about a second and a half. “You’re good to come in. I know you don’t like to travel to the city,” he said.

  I didn’t protest, because it was true and we both knew it. Better to forget the niceties and get to the essential stuff. “Tell me why you wanted to see me.”

  He went behind his big desk and sat, and I took one of the three chairs facing him. I must have been ten feet away, looking across at him. “I know about Sosenko and the Newalis drowning and the shooting at your house. This man Sosenko has a vendetta against Julian Communications for the time he spent in prison. And I’m on his list — what do they say? his hit list. He’s been after me.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “Where and when did you see him? And how do you know it was Sosenko?”

  “I noticed him yesterday in the lobby downstairs. He seemed to take a great interest in me when I came out of the elevator. I didn’t know it was Sosenko, but I thought he was out of place around here. Dirty clothes and hair, unshaven, tattoos. A frightening look about the man. You don’t see that in this building.” Brody plucked a pencil from the cup on his desk and began writing on the pad as he spoke.

  “So why do you think it was Sosenko?”

  He set his pencil down and pointed to the folder in my lap. “That’s the file Hector put together for you? Look inside. There’s an employee identification photo of the man.”

  I did, and there was. Younger than he looked now, but no prettier.

  Brody started writing again. “Once Hector showed me the photo, I thought to myself it was the same person I’d seen in the lobby.”

  “Did you tell Hector?”

  “No. At that point I wasn’t certain. I didn’t see the picture until later.” Still writing, which was beginning to annoy me.

  “Forgive me, but I just have to ask this,” I said. “How are you able to talk and write at the same time.”

  He looked up and smiled, the first flicker of warmth I’d seen from him. Then he went back to his writing. “It’s something I’ve always been able to do, listen and talk with half my brain, and write with the other half. Everything important, I make notes as I go. Helps me to focus. And to remember. People I work with have learned to indulge me this practice. Right now I’m setting down the key points of our discussion. Does it bother you?”

  “It does, actually,” I told him, but he didn’t stop. “So, after you saw this photo, you thought the man in the lobby was the same guy. Were you sure?’

  “Absolutely sure? I suppose not. Reasonably certain? Yes. But then I saw him again, twice. Then I was sure it was him, and he was following me. He was outside on Park Avenue at six-thirty last night when the limo picked me up to drive me to my apartment. He walked right up to the car while I was getting in.”

  “Did he say anything? Threaten you?”

  “No. He just stood there, closer than you are now, and he watched me till the car drove off.” He set his pencil to the side of the desk and took a fresh one.

  “You saw him twice, you said.”

>   “Last night, again. My sister in New Jersey invited me for a late dinner. I took my own car out of my building’s parking garage and headed for the Lincoln Tunnel. I only went a few blocks when I had to stop for a red light. I saw him pull up right next to me. He was driving some old, beat-up truck. I thought I saw a gun, a rifle, in his hands. I didn’t wait to find out. I ran the light. So did he. I could see him in the mirror. I went through the tunnel, and he was maybe six or seven cars behind me. In the end, I finally lost him on the Garden State Parkway. It was quite an adventure.”

  “Adventure? Mr. Brody, you have to put down the pencil and look at me,” I said. He did. “We know how dangerous Sosenko is. We can’t play games with this situation, or more people are going to get killed. And you seem to be right up there at the top of the list. We have to call the police and they have to catch this guy.”

  “No, Mr. Seidenberg,” he said “You have to catch this guy. Quietly. I know you understand why.”

  “I can’t believe your attitude toward this situation, you and Ingo Julian and Hector. There’s a brutal son-of-a-bitch with a gun who’s out to kill everybody, and all you can think about is your stock offering.”

  “Six hundred million dollars, Mr. Seidenberg. Many people have risked their lives for a lot less. In any case, Hector’s told us how good you are. We think you can do it.”

  “Hector doesn’t know how good I am. He knows how good I used to be,” I said. “I’ve gone to fat, and I have a heart problem and I can’t run very fast any more. Are you willing to bet your life that I can get your bad guy for you?”