A Murder Too Personal (ed rogan) Read online

  A Murder Too Personal

  ( Ed Rogan )

  Gerald J. Davis

  Gerald J. Davis

  A Murder Too Personal

  CHAPTER I

  The last call she ever made to me came in just before eight-thirty that night. I was still in the office wrapping up the final details on the file I was scheduled to deliver to the bank the next morning.

  Working late gave you a chance to think in the stillness. Think about the sad bastard vice-president who was sweating like a stuck pig in front of his giant plasma screen picture-in-a-picture digital sound HDTV right now, wondering when I was going to hand over the file and how much damage it contained.

  What it contained was a ream of printout that would put this joker away for a significant chunk of his active sex life. The only hitch was that the bank didn’t like the sound of the word embezzlement and the fact that it would besmirch their lily-white reputation.

  I knew what was going to happen. It didn’t matter that this guy had lifted twelve million bucks because of a minor infraction like unauthorized use of the access code. The pantywaists at the holding company would have him make some kind of token restitution and plead nolo contendere-I never did it and I promise never to do it again.

  The phone gave off its soft purring sound. It was almost like an apologetic sorry-to-bother-you tap on the shoulder. I still hadn’t gotten used to the new phone system. The thing kept on malfunctioning, with its goddam chips and electronic switching devices. At first I didn’t know if it was a real call or another false alarm. Whatever happened to the old comforting embrace of Ma Bell?

  “Rogan,” I said into the speakerphone.

  “Hello, Ed,” came her husky reply.

  I didn’t answer for a long minute.

  “Hello, Alicia,” I said finally. It had been a long time between drinks.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you like this, Ed.”

  I knew she wasn’t.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked.

  “Oh, fair to maudlin, I guess.” It was an old joke between us. She paused. “Actually, I’m doing very well on the professional front. I’ve gotten a lot of recognition from my peers over the last couple of years and my name is being mentioned on some of the outstanding analysts lists. But that’s not why I’m calling you, Ed. I’m calling because I’m having some personal problems.”

  She didn’t have to tell me that. She was the kind of girl to whom the words interpersonal relationships were mutually-exclusive.

  “I see.”

  There was a long silence, as if she expected me to say more. When I didn’t, she said, “Ed, I’d like to hire you. I’d pay you whatever your going rate is.” She stopped and then added quickly, “It would be strictly a business transaction.”

  She sounded just like she used to — bright and brisk and full of phony bravado.

  I loosened my tie, swiveled my seat around and stared out the window at the darkening sky. You can get used to anything — even the view out of the forty-eighth floor of the Pan Am building looking north up Park. At least, what they used to call the Pan Am building before the airline went deep six.

  “I don’t do that kind of work, Alicia. My clients are corporations. I do business investigations.”

  I tried not to sound too harsh with her. Four years was a long time to carry a grudge.

  “Couldn’t you just make a single exception — for me — for old times’ sake?”

  Don’t push your luck, I thought. For old times’ sake was the very reason I wouldn’t do it.

  Instead, I said, “You couldn’t afford my fee.” She didn’t know that was a load of guano. My fee was whatever deal I could squeeze out of the unsuspecting client. And sometimes even less than that. But she bought it. Why shouldn’t she? I’d never lied to her before. I’d always been as straight as Mother Teresa in the confessional.

  My response surprised her. She hesitated.

  I waited. The only sound in the office was the muted whir of the laser printer. I felt like getting up and pouring my eighty-third cup of decaf.

  “Oh, Ed. You wouldn’t turn me down.” There was a plaintive note in her voice I’d never heard before.

  I didn’t think she could generate a response from me anymore, but I guess I was wrong. Her tone was so different from the self-assured mask she always wore.

  “The hell I wouldn’t.” I wasn’t going to sing that old song again.

  “Oh, Ed. I’ll serve you linguini with white clam sauce and a chilled bottle of Pouilly Fuisse.”

  She remembered.

  I didn’t say anything. It was becoming a conversation of long pauses. I looked out the window at the June evening and thought about another time and another existence. A time when a man and a woman took endless walks of discovery through the city.

  “Please,” she managed finally, “I need your help.” There was that note again. She never would have pleaded before.

  I thought about it for a while. About a nanosecond. Then I said, “No, Alicia, I don’t think so.”

  I could hear a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. Then I couldn’t hear anything. She was probably thinking about whether it was worthwhile to try to change my mind.

  The laser printer finished its work and fell silent. Now there was no sound at all. It was strange to be in a city of eight million and not hear a single sound. Like someone had pressed the mute button.

  Then she sighed. It was an anguished sigh and, for a moment, I almost regretted the decision.

  “All right,” she said. Silence again. “Good-bye, Ed.”

  She hung up.

  Sure, it hurt. But I told myself it would hurt less this way.

  She crowded into my thoughts a lot the next couple of days. You can’t be married for five years without building up a storehouse of memories. They say you remember the good times and forget the bad. But I remembered both the good and the bad — mostly the bad.

  I delivered my report to the CEO of the bank the next morning at nine-thirty. Just the two of us in an amphitheater that could have held the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and had room left over for the third Roman legion plus its camp followers.

  As I sat opposite him at the boardroom table, he kept shaking his bald head and flipping the pages of the printout. His face was so ashen it looked like it was covered with a layer of talcum. From time to time, he would murmur, “Son of a bitch.” He said it maybe seven or eight times.

  I wondered how many different ways he could inflect those words. Here was a man making six point one million, including bonus, according to the proxy statement, and that was the extent of his vocabulary.

  While he scanned the numbers, I thought about her. Had she changed her hair? Probably. Why did women feel this strange compulsion to change their appearance at regular intervals like clockwork? When I knew her, she wore her blond hair long and flowing, like her dresses.

  She was a tall gal, six-one, almost as tall as me and she always held herself ramrod straight. She liked to have people stare at her. With her angular face and thin frame, she was striking. When she wore those full-length dresses that she loved, she looked like a Viking goddess here on a temporary visa from Valhalla.

  I knew she was fragile but no one else did — and it wasn’t often that she let me see her frailty.

  I glanced back at the CEO. He’d been reading the report for the better part of an hour. As he read, I looked around the board room. It was expensively but sedately furnished. The style was some indeterminate historical period between Periclean Athens and the Fall of Constantinople. The purpose was to create an atmosphere of solidity and timelessness, even though the bank was only seventy years old. The bank was medium-si
zed, striving mightily to enter the top ranks, so nothing was overstated. There was a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington on the wall. How many of these damn things did Stuart paint? I’d seen them in at least a dozen corporate headquarters.

  Finally he looked up at me and blinked. “Neat,” he said with a grim smile. I didn’t know if he meant the scheme or the way I cracked it. The concept was neat. The vice-president had used the bank’s access code to wire odd amounts from an inventory of inactive private investment company accounts in the Cayman Islands to his accounts in Curacao, Panama and the Bahamas. He kept shifting the funds from account to account. Then, before an audit, he’d wire funds back into the PIC accounts to make them whole. The only problem was that he never took a vacation. He never even took a piss. Then one day, because of the federal regulations that no one ever pays attention to, the bank made him take a vacation. A two week vacation that the regs required. Someone noticed a discrepancy. That was the start of his slide down that slippery slope. That was where I came in. My job was to make sure he didn’t find a foothold.

  “Outstanding job, Mr. Rogan.”

  I nodded. “Glad to help the bank restore its budget for fresh-cut flowers.”

  He grimaced and smoothed his hand over his head. It was tough to judge which was shinier-his bald pate or the boardroom table.

  “I want you to do one thing for me,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to destroy this report, Mr. Rogan. I want you to do the same with your copy and any back-up material you have. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. I understood. He didn’t have to paint a me picture. They would take care of the bastard with their own brand of retribution.

  “I appreciate your discretion, Mr. Rogan.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Needless to say, your check will be in the mail this afternoon.”

  He extended his hand. I shook it. As they say, one man’s misfortune is another man’s good fortune. The check would be enough to keep the wolf away from the door until some future and indeterminate date.

  CHAPTER II

  I got to the office earlier than usual that Thursday morning. By seven-thirty I was making calls. This was the best time to reach the guys who you couldn’t get to during the day, before the hired help started tying up the phone lines.

  Mr. Coffee was giving off his usual sputtering sound. I poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup and drank it, steaming and black. Then I went back to my desk, took another sip, and slung my jacket over the back of the chair. One of the fluorescent bulbs in the outer office was dying and flickering on and off, but it was too early in the morning to replace it.

  I hadn’t smoked in fifteen years but that first cup of coffee always brought back the urge. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

  It was about a quarter after eleven when I started to get hungry. I was about to head down to Grand Central to get a jelly donut to hold me till lunch when someone came into the outer office. No knock. No salutation. Talk about your good old-fashioned manners.

  I swung the chair out and craned my neck around the door frame to see who it was. A couple of times there’d been clowns who wandered in where they didn’t belong, but they didn’t come back again after they were politely disinvited.

  This time it was different. There were two men in moderately-priced suits, poly-wool blends with just a little too much poly. They were cops. I recognized both of them.

  Gene Black was a man I could deal with. He was a worn-out cop with a new wife and a new baby and an old beer belly. We’d worked together on a case back in the not- quite-so-tranquil old days when I was in corporate security with ITT.

  It was the other son of a bitch I couldn’t stomach. Forgash was his name.

  Detective/Third Alfonse J. Forgash. He was a thin sour-faced man of about thirty with a mustache and slicked-back dark hair. His main problem was that he hadn’t learned that a policeman was a public servant.

  They walked into my office without the courtesy of an invitation.

  Forgash spoke first. “Where were you Tuesday night?”

  “I was at the needlepoint show. Didn’t I see you there stitching a throw pillow?”

  Forgash looked at Black. “We got a fucking stand-up comic here.” He squinted at me. “You’re in deep shit, Rogan. You’re in big trouble, is all.”

  “That a fact?” I said. “Somebody steal your lollypop?”

  A vein started to throb in his forehead. “Listen, wiseguy…” He started to say something but Black put a hand on his arm.

  “We gotta ask you some questions, Ed,” Black said. “Bear with us, OK?”

  I nodded.

  “Where were you Tuesday night, Ed?” Black asked.

  I tried to recall. I couldn’t think of anything out of the ordinary, so I said, “Home, I guess.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Reading, probably,” I said. “Reading before I nodded off on the sofa. Nothing very exciting. What’s the furor all about?”

  Forgash couldn’t hold it in. “Somebody whacked your ex-wife, Rogan. Blew her fucking brains out. We got a good idea you did it. Whadda ya think about that?”

  I hoped he didn’t see my reaction. First, I couldn’t breathe. Then I felt like I was going to puke up my guts. My knees had that weak feeling you get before you go into combat. I looked down at the papers on my desk, papers arranged in neat piles that didn’t seem to matter very much any more.

  “Christ,” was all I could manage.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Black asked.

  When was it? I thought back. When the hell was it? At the lawyer’s office? Soft leather furniture and deep carpeting and a dozen brass nameplates on the door.

  No. I didn’t see her there. Only her lawyer.

  It was at her sister’s… for a birthday party. Bittersweet. Knowing we were going to split up. A glass of champagne for a farewell toast. A last slow kiss goodbye.

  “Four years ago, Gene,” I said. “That was the last time. I hadn’t seen her or spoken to her till she called me Monday night.”

  Forgash was busy thumbing through his little notebook. He had thin fingers that looked like they belonged to a seamstress. The way he moved those little hands made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. He was the kind of man whose fingers never stopped fidgeting.

  “Why’d she call you?” Forgash asked.

  “She wanted to hire me.”

  “What for?” Forgash said.“I don’t know. I told her no.”

  “Any idea who’d want to kill her?” Black asked. He looked slowly around the office. It was evident he wasn’t very impressed with what he saw. “What can you tell me, Ed?”

  I studied his weary cop’s face with its deep lines and rheumy gray eyes. “What do you have on it, Gene?” I said.

  He considered for a moment, glanced at Forgash, then back at me. “She was coked up when she got it,” he said finally.

  I shook my head. “You got it all wrong, buddy. Alicia never took drugs. “

  Black sighed. He shook his head the way you do with a kid who doesn’t get it. “She was coked, all right. That’s the way it was.” He stared at me. “How long were you two married?”

  “Five years.”

  “Guess you didn’t know her very well.” He tried to be helpful. “What guy ever does?”

  Forgash stopped playing with his little notebook and waved a skinny finger at me. “We got it that a guy name of Wheelock was screwing your wife before you got divorced.”

  I blinked. “Go to hell, Forgash,” I said. “What does that have to do with anything.”

  “It’s an old grudge, Rogan. Old grudges fester, you know what I mean. They fester and then they boil over.”

  I didn’t like his mixed metaphor. “Go to hell,” I said again.

  “You better watch out, scumbag,” he shouted. “You better respect the law.”

  “Fuck the law, my friend.” Once more and I was going to serrate his face.<
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  Gene Black stepped into the breech. “This ain’t getting us nowhere.” He spread his hands and flattened them against the desk, like he was going to do push-ups.

  “Tell me about her friends,” he said. “The people she hung out with, you know.”

  “She had a lot of acquaintances. She liked to get out and around town. But she didn’t have any close friends, as far as I know.” I ticked off a list of people she used to associate with. “I don’t know who her friends are now. The way she was, she didn’t maintain relationships.”

  “Who was her latest boyfriend?” Forgash asked, more tentatively this time. “Or was she still banging Wheelock?”

  “How the hell should I know? Maybe she didn’t even have one.”

  Didn’t have one? Not too likely. I couldn’t imagine her without a current stud. Was he the bastard who killed her?

  “Can you give us some idea where she got that coke, Ed?”

  “Damned if I know, Gene. She didn’t even drink when we were married. Claimed it was bad for her health. She only ate healthy foods, exercised regularly, strictly by the book, you know.”

  Black nodded in acknowledgment. He was the type who took in information slowly, processed it thoroughly, and never forgot it. “Tell me about her,” he said. “What kind of person she was…what she did…”

  I considered his question. What could I tell him? That she was elegant. It was the best word to describe her. There wasn’t anything cheap or second-rate about her. That she was loving. When she loved you, she gave everything she had without restraint until she couldn’t give you any more. There was no deception or artifice about her.

  That wasn’t what they wanted to hear. There was nothing useful I could tell them now. I’d been out of the picture too long.

  “Talk to her sister,” I said. “She can tell you more about Alicia than I can.”

  “We will, Ed. Only she’s been out of town. She’s due back today.” Black’s eyes wandered over the top of my desk, inspecting the folders and stacks of paper.