Authors: Michael Palmer
The boat. The only place Dreiser felt truly safe and secure. It had to be Roundtable business.
“Of course,” Kevin said. He cleared some tension from his throat. “I’ll leave in just a few minutes.”
He put the DellaRosa obituary in an envelope and pushed it into the recesses of his desk drawer. Then he went upstairs, left a note on the kitchen table for Nancy and the kids, and headed for the garage.
“Hey, hotshot, did you forget something?”
Nancy called to him from the doorway. She was holding his briefcase in one hand and a bag of pistachios—his most enduring vice—in the other. She was dressed in the beige silk robe he had given her for Christmas. Early morning sunlight, dappled by the maples across the street, shone on her in a most appealing way. They had met in ninth grade at a church picnic and had fallen for one another immediately. Nancy Sealy was beautiful then; and now, twenty-four years and three kids later, Nancy Sealy Loomis was beautiful still. Suddenly, the vision of her was intruded upon by the image of Kelly, naked astride his thighs, stroking him patiently, expertly. For a moment, just as it had that night, his entire world consisted of her glistening, coal-black pubic hair. He had let her lick him some and even take him inside her mouth for a while—there was no red-blooded man on earth who could have said no to that. But just as with Desiree, he had drawn the line at intercourse. And for that restraint he remained grateful.
Accepting the briefcase and nuts, he kissed his wife on the cheek, then on the lips, then on the lips again—this time more passionately.
“Hey, is this an invitation?” she asked, nibbling at his ear. “Because if it is, I can call the office and tell Marty that—”
“Honey, I can’t. I’ve got a meeting with Burt. I’ll try to
get home early, though. Better yet, I’ll call. Maybe we can meet at the Starlight Motel.”
Nancy brightened immediately at the idea.
“You mean that?”
Meeting Kevin at a motel for sex had been her oftexpressed fantasy since the one time in college when they had actually done it.
“I’ll call early this afternoon,” he said. “If it’s possible, we’ll do it.”
He kissed her once more and trotted to his Lexus. That was the last time with Kelly or any other escort, he vowed. He was faithful, but he wasn’t goddamn Saint Francis. Sooner or later, if he kept playing with fire, he was going to get burned. He would discuss his decision with Burt—that was just a courtesy, given all the man had done for him. But he had made up his mind. Lancelot would have to invite one less girl to the party or else do two himself. Sir Tristram was out of
that
loop.
He cut through the neighborhood and headed toward the Midtown Tunnel. Dreiser’s boat, a magnificent forty-foot Bertram, was moored at a yacht club near the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin on the Hudson River side. Forty-second Street all the way across, then up the West Side Highway, he decided. At the last minute, he changed his mind and took the FDR. He could cross over at Seventy-second through Central Park. If he got lucky and made it there with a lot of time to spare, his laptop was on the back seat, and he had a ton of paperwork to catch up on. The portable computer had cost Crown $4500—more than he had made in six months when he was just starting out.
He slipped a Sinatra disc into the CD player and closed the windows. The custom-made sound system had twelve speakers and a twelve-band equalizer.
What a gas
, Kevin thought.
The dream machine. The dream job. The dream house
. His life was moving along like a well-oiled machine. And here he was, trying to mess it all up in his mind. He always was one to look for the catch in any situation—the cloud at the end of the silver lining. The business with Evelyn DellaRosa was probably nothing more than two
women with a strong physical resemblance, and his overripe imagination at work.
Traffic in town was lighter than usual. Kevin made the dock with almost half an hour to spare. Still, Burt was already on his boat, having breakfast on the stern deck. He was a handsome fifty-one, with graying dark hair and patrician features.
“I stayed in town last night,” he explained, motioning Kevin to help himself to coffee and juice.
In town
meant
on the boat
. And Kevin strongly suspected that
on the boat
meant
with Brenda Wallace
. Maybe she was what this meeting was about—Burt needed an alibi.
“If you have to stay in town,” Kevin said, motioning across the Hudson, “this is the way to do it.”
“Your house go through yet?”
“Today or tomorrow, I think.”
“Port Chester, right?”
“Yes.”
“Port Chester’s got some nice sections. Very nice sections.”
“The house is beautiful. Nancy’ll be crushed if the deal falls through.”
“Let me know if any problems do come up. I’m pretty good at finding ways to solve problems.”
“Thank you.”
Dreiser flipped what was left of his English muffin over the stern. A seagull snagged it in midair.
“So, what’s going on with you and The Roundtable?” he asked suddenly.
Kevin felt the color drain from his face.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Kevin, I was brought into The Roundtable five years ago, shortly after it was formed. After I accepted the chairmanship of Crown it became necessary for me to distance myself from the group. Our agreed-upon understanding is that should The Roundtable ever be investigated, the company CEOs would have to deny any knowledge of it. The knights wanted simply to eliminate my seat. Maybe look
into bringing in someone from another company. I can’t tell you how strongly I had to argue for them to allow me to choose a replacement from within Crown.”
“I’m glad you succeeded.”
“You should be. Let me give you an idea of what belonging to The Roundtable means to us. A year or so ago one of the knights got real bad food poisoning at some damn Chinese restaurant and then had a coronary at the hospital and died. His company CEO wasn’t allowed to recommend a replacement. There had been some problems with the man. The knights, myself included, felt he lacked commitment to what we were trying to accomplish. Nobody trusted him. If he hadn’t died, he probably would have gotten kicked off The Roundtable before too long. That would have been a first. But unless he changed his ways and his attitude, it would have happened. As a result of losing their representation, his company, Mutual Cooperative Health, lost something like nineteen million this past year. Nineteen million is a hit I don’t want Crown ever to have to take.”
“So?”
“Kevin, as I have told you many times, these men are very careful and very suspicious. This thing with that magazine reporter—what’s her name?”
“She called herself Desiree, but I believe her real name might be DellaRosa. She—”
“Yes, well, that thing with the reporter upset some people. They worried about what you might have said to her.”
“I didn’t say—”
Dreiser raised a hand.
“Kevin, please. Let me finish.”
“Sorry,” Kevin mumbled.
“It was no big deal, but you were the new kid on the block. They didn’t know you, so of course, they didn’t completely trust you. That’s understandable, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. The operative word here is trust. Kevin, if these men don’t feel comfortable with you, they don’t trust you. And if they don’t trust you, you’re out. And for all I know,
Crown may be out, too. That would hurt us, Kevin. Nineteen or twenty million a year, and God only knows how much more in the years to come, would hurt us badly.”
“I understand.”
“Then why in the hell did you call Lancelot to complain about the girl he sent you?” Dreiser’s voice raised just a bit.
Kevin was stunned that such a full report had been given to his CEO. He stopped himself at the last instant from making some sort of excuse or explanation. There was one thing and one thing only that Burt Dreiser wanted to hear at this point.
“It was a misunderstanding,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
“Excellent. Excellent.” Dreiser clenched his fist for emphasis and pumped it in the air. “Kevin, I don’t care what in the hell you do with those girls once they’re in your room. But the more the other knights feel you’re one of the gang, the quicker you actually will be. It may seem trivial to you. But believe me, when it comes to this group, nothing that goes on is trivial. There is just too much at stake.”
“I understand.”
“Good. You’ll be fine, just fine, as long as you never forget what’s on the line.”
Six days after Evie’s funeral, and exactly one day before his fiftieth birthday, Harry Corbett realized he was no longer a potential suspect in a probable murder case. He was the only suspect in a definite one.
The morning had begun like all of the others since Evie’s death, with Harry trying to appear focused and businesslike while his thoughts were swirling like a tornado. Although he felt almost certain that the man who had drugged and then interrogated him that night was responsible for Evie’s death, there seemed to be absolutely nothing he could do about it. After leaving the apartment, he had stopped by Paladin Thorvald’s shop. The two thugs who had attacked him had used Thorvald’s name. But the jeweler knew nothing about them and his manner suggested that he was becoming increasingly suspicious of Harry’s sanity. Harry sensed that before long, Thorvald would have company in that boat.
From Thorvald’s shop he had gone to the local police
station. He made it inside the front door. Then, knowing what lay ahead, he left and started for home. A block away, he screwed up his courage, prepared for yet another onslaught on his self-esteem, and went back to the station. With no keys to Desiree’s apartment, all he could do was file a report and wait an hour and a half for the officer to locate the building manager. Apartment 2F had been leased to one Crystal Glass, with six months rent paid in advance in cash. Harry wondered if Crystal Glass was another of Evie’s personalities or merely a display of her wit. He hoped against hope that something in the apartment might have been overlooked that would at least raise the possibility that he might not be a head case. But there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“Be sure to check with us if you get any further information, Dr. Corbett,” the investigating officer said, earning a 9.5 on the 10-point patronization scale.
“Sure thing,” Harry responded.
The two intruders at the apartment had to have been following him, he reasoned.
But for how long?
Harry worried that he might have inadvertently placed Julia Ransome in jeopardy and called to warn her. But over the intervening days, nothing had happened.
When Albert Dickinson arrived at his office to announce the new evidence that elevated his status to sole suspect, Harry was just completing a cardiac treadmill test on a seventy-six-year-old retired printer named Daniel Gerstein. Gerstein, a cantankerous survivor of the Nazi camps, adamantly refused to see any other doctor for the stress test to evaluate his persistent chest pain, so Harry had temporarily abandoned his policy of not doing them. His patient had sailed through the protocol with no symptoms and no changes on his cardiogram. Degenerative arthritis of the rib cage and shoulders, Harry told him. Gerstein demanded a more impressive diagnosis and the feel-good medicine his friends all got from
their
doctors. He settled for “advanced noncardiac thoracic arthralgia” and some Motrin.
As he watched the elderly man’s heart rate climb without any abnormality on the monitor screen, Harry wondered
if his own stress test would look nearly so good. The chest pain he had experienced in Evie’s apartment
had
prompted him to call a cardiologist. But when he was informed the man was out of town at a meeting, he had made no attempt to contact another. Instead, he ran especially hard during his next few workouts on the track. There was no recurrence of the discomfort. And each symptom-free day dulled the memories of the numbing sensation and produced any number of plausible explanations for it.
What was really happening, he decided, was that his family history—the Corbett curse he had created—had given him an abnormally high cardiac awareness. The minor aches and pains most people would simply ignore were gaining heightened significance in his mind. His brother had to have had some chest discomfort from time to time. There wasn’t a soul who didn’t. Yet Phil wasn’t running around checking calendars and calling cardiologists. It was because he didn’t believe for one second that his genetics had doomed him to an early coronary.
Sometime soon
, Harry was thinking as he wrote out renewals for Daniel Gerstein’s blood-pressure pills. Sometime soon he really would call someone and set up a stress test. But at the moment, curse or no curse, there were other, more pressing concerns in his life.
That was when Mary Tobin’s voice crackled through his intercom announcing that he had two visitors, an Officer Graham and a Detective Dickinson.
Dickinson directed Officer Graham, who was in uniform, to one of the chairs Harry offered, but remained standing himself, pacing as he talked. He still reeked of cigarettes and was dressed in what looked to Harry to be the same ill-fitting polyester suit he had had on at the hospital.
“So, Doc,” Dickinson began, surveying the diplomas and artwork, “I told you that night in the hospital I’d be back. And here I am.”
“Here you are,” Harry echoed sardonically.
“That’s a pretty full waiting room you have out there. You always that busy?”
“Lieutenant, do you think you could come back after five? A lot of those people out there have gone to a good deal of inconvenience to make it in for their appointments. I try to be on time.”
“I wish my doctor cared so much about being on time. Dr. McNally on Central Park West. You know him?”
“I don’t. Lieutenant, how long is this going to take?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On you, Doc. Does the name”—he pulled out his spiral-bound pad and read the word a syllable at a time—“me-tar-am-i-nol mean anything to you?”