Nice Place for a Murder (9 page)

I thought Wally just might be right, so I spent the evening in Shinnecock, checking Lulu’s place three different times, with quiet looks inside, and watching the shack from my car the rest of the time. I stayed at it until midnight, but there was no sign of Sosenko or a rusty Dodge pickup. Wally was wrong on this one, and I was wrong for thinking he might be right. And for this, amigo, I gave up an evening with Alicia.

It was one in the morning by the time I climbed into bed, and I knew there was no way I was climbing out again at four-thirty to make the only morning train from Greenport at five-twenty. Driving the hundred miles to New York was another unappetizing option. Early morning traffic was wicked on the Long Island Expressway, and once you managed to get into Manhattan, impossible. Which only left driving an hour to Ronkonkoma, halfway to the city, and taking a train from there, where they run to Penn Station every half hour. Not my most enthusiastic choice, either, but at least I’d get to sleep till seven.

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.