Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (30 page)

No doubt these symptoms of dementia had set in before Jonathan’s introduction to Andrew Polk. Previously, this man had been an ultraconservative investor and a wealthy one, but now his wife informed Charles that they had been forced to decamp from their old apartment. With a promise to stop by for drinks one evening, Charles wrote down their new address, still a good address. “But we’re renters now,” said Amanda.

He already knew that their fortune, generations in the making, had been decimated in a single day of trading. Dotty old Jonathan must have been such easy prey for a con artist like Polk. But Charles’s greatest concern was for Amanda, still so clear of mind, so aware of what had been done to them—and fearful of how this day might end. She wore a false smile. He thought she might cry.

Another Social Register blueblood sat down at the table. The atmosphere changed. The flesh crawled. Zelda Oxly’s coal-black eyes fixed on Jonathan Wright, who retained enough of his sensibilities to recoil. And his wife, a woman of grace and good manners, refrained from making the sign of the cross as she led the old man away.

Now they were two, Charles and the Vampire of East Sixty-ninth Street.

Zelda did her best to live up to this legend begun on a playground when they were both ten years old. All these years later, at the age of forty, she was as unwrinkled as the undead; her lipstick and summer frock were her favorite color, that of freshly let blood; and her eyes still mesmerized in the sense that one dare not look away for fear of fangs to the neck. Still scary as hell.

Early into their conversation, she recalled the funerals of Charles’s parents. “Lovely people.” Zelda Oxly was not. Malicious lawsuits were the source of half her wealth. She seldom had legal grounds for
litigation, but she always won. She had staying power for the drawn-out court battles and a knack for tying people’s guts into knots. It was rumored that more than one of her victims had been killed by the stress.

In an all too obvious ploy to seek common ground with him, Zelda confessed to fantasies of a slow death for Mayor Polk, though she had less reason for spite than most of these people. According to Mallory, this woman was hardly down to her last million or two, and definitely not feeling the pinch of last season’s designer shoes. Her detractors claimed that her handmade stilettos were fashioned to conceal cloven hooves, but Charles stuck with the bloodsucker analogy, a better fit.

However, she would not fit in with this crowd of bilked investors—not if he believed in Mallory’s theory of hush money, and he did. He could never envision Zelda settling for restitution of losses at nickels and dimes to the dollar, not when she could sue. Litigation for a bad investment had not been an option for others, the ones who had ensnared themselves in a conspiracy of silence. But a lack of corroboration would never have stopped the vampire. Might a test of this idea raise a blush in his face to give up a bluff? No, he thought not. He was on sure ground when he looked about him, and then turned back to her. “Do the rest of them know about your out-of-court settlement with Polk? They only got a pittance. But
you
—
”

When Zelda abruptly stood up, he had his answer. She must have signed her own agreement of silence. Only the forfeiture of a great deal of undeclared money would trump this opportunity to gloat. She left the table without another word, leaving no doubt that she had recovered all her stock losses. And so, though she met the standard for a sociopath who could cheerfully sanction the murder of innocents, Charles eliminated her as a suspect.

And now for the rest of this group, rather than weed out the least likely, one by one, Charles did his gardening en masse, cutting out
those who showed anxiety. These people had broken federal laws and taken terrible risks to do it, but not all of them were comfortable with the risk of criminal acts.

He pulled out his pen to make a few notations and then folded his newspaper just before Riker entered the room. The detective paused at Charles’s table, glanced at the names scrawled above the front-page headline and walked away.

Ten minutes later, the best candidates were called. Charles and three others were led down the hall to the interrogation room, where they were directed to take seats beneath sputtering tubes of fluorescent light and facing the wide mirror on the wall. Mallory sat alone on the other side of the table, her eyes cast down as she opened one of four manila file holders.

Among those voted most likely to hire out murder and mutilation was Susan Chase. The brunette had switched to a less expensive hair salon, so said Mallory’s notes on this woman, and Ms. Chase was doing her own nails these days, but she was otherwise keeping up appearances at charity functions and other important network sites for investment bankers. She nodded to him, for that was the sum of their relationship, their only mode of congress in passing one another’s tables in the dining room of the Harvard Club. He had intuited enough about her psyche to avoid any closer association. The banker had a bit of a slither to her walk, and his feelings for her were akin to a phobia of snakes.

The man seated next to her was Charles’s age, but he looked ten years older, a side effect of excess in all things. Martin Gross’s source of money was tied to his extreme good looks and the art of fleecing wealthy women, though his boyish charm had begun to sag at the jawline. But narcissism would never allow Gross to see any flaws as he admired himself in the mirror, a looking glass for him and a window for the watchers in the next room. The man straightened a tie that had gone out of fashion.

One thing Charles shared with Mallory was an eye for the sartorial faux pas.

In a bizarre psychological twist to financial reversals, those who still held multimillionaire status had made cutbacks in small areas of personal spending, which did not extend to limousine service. None of these people had arrived on a bus. And Mallory had ascertained that, like Susan Chase, Gross’s credit rating was still triple A.

The third suspect was the anomaly. The heir to the Brox Mills fortune was two years out of Yale and still unemployed. He lived on credit, lacking sufficient funds to pay outstanding debts, never mind the cost of murder for hire. Yet he was spending freely and cutting back on nothing. He wore a suit of fine white linen with lines in the style of the season, and he owed his blond highlights to the salon where Mallory said he had bought his suntan as well.

Charles, a devout pacifist, wanted to smack this young man. But they had met before, and this was nothing new.

Only an urge. It would pass.

Dwayne Brox’s head was held a bit higher than need be, and so he could not help but literally look down his aquiline nose at everyone present. And last, he took notice of Charles, an acquaintance of his late parents’. Brox nodded an acknowledgment and stared at the psychologist for too long with eyes that had ceased to recognize him anymore.

Unsettling? Oh, yes. Way past that.

Dress up an insect and style its hair, and there you are.

All three had a look of boredom about them, and this was not affectation; it fit their pathology, the need to fill time with stimulation. Quiet minutes dragged by as fingers fussed with items of clothing and hair. In a collective breach of self-absorption, furtive glances were cast in Mallory’s direction.

The detective ignored them, only showing interest in the paperwork on the table. The suspects were invisible to her. And when two of them voiced grievances, she was deaf to them, outclassing them in
utter disregard for her fellow man. Next came their silent appraisals and nodding approvals of her costly attire and tailoring. How confused this gang of sociopaths must be, for she was so obviously one of them—and
not.

—

THOSE WHO HAD NOT
been singled out for interrogation, the lunchroom escapees, stepped into limousines. Only Zelda Oxly waved off her own driver. She lingered on the sidewalk steps away from the entrance to the SoHo police station, waiting for the chosen four to emerge. Charles Butler was the first to come through the door. Ah, he saw her. His head inclined a bare inch in his idea of a bow, and then he turned toward the curb, maybe hoping to get away from her with that minor courtesy.

“Not so fast, Charles!”

He stopped on command. Such a gentleman. Even as a little boy he had always displayed good manners under torture. He turned around to show her a sad face of resignation.

“They let you go—and so quickly.” She made a wide show of bared teeth, not
exactly
a smile, when she asked, “Were you the police mole . . . or the Judas goat?” As if she had already caught him in a lie, he blushed. “I pick . . . the
mole,”
she said. “I’d bet my portfolio that you never invested with Andrew Polk. That firm was strictly for high-risk players, the kind who were
hoping
that Andrew was dirty. That’s
so
not you, Charles.” He walked away from her, and she called after him, “I’m
insulted
that I didn’t make your list!”

After he had disappeared into the delicatessen across the street, Zelda remained near the door to the police station. Charles Butler was not the one she had wanted. She waited for the other one.

—

RIKER SAT DOWN
beside Jack Coffey in the watchers’ room, and he turned up the volume for the interrogation on the other side of the glass, where Susan Chase, tired of being ignored, had just demanded to know why Charles Butler was released.

“He’s been cleared,” said Mallory, without looking up from her paperwork. “He had his accountant fax us five years of tax returns. No FBARs. We don’t think he was hiding offshore assets.”

Jack Coffey turned to the detective beside him. “No
what
bars?”

“
F
BARs,” said Riker. “
F
, as in, you’re fucked if you didn’t report an offshore account. Mallory says, if these people wanted to hide Polk’s hush money from the SEC—and they did—that cash had to spend at least six minutes in undeclared accounts.”

“Why are they smiling at her?”

“They think cops are stupid. It also means their accounts were in countries with no U.S. tax treaties. By now that money’s somewhere else, maybe three shell corporations removed from their names.”

In the next room, Mallory was saying, “It’s amazing how many ways there are to distance yourself from your money. Some are even close to legal. Offshore hedge funds, trusts. But let’s say you had an offshore account of your own . . . and you lied about it. A lie to a federal agent—about
anything
—that’s jail time. So before we invite the feds in,” she said, as if that would ever happen, “would any of you like to volunteer undeclared assets? . . . No? . . . Your attorneys are still downstairs. Would anyone like to lawyer up?”

Three hands were raised.

In the watchers’ room, Riker said, “That means everybody’s dodgy.”

“Okay,” said Jack Coffey, “I’m losing the drift. Didn’t the feds interview the investors?”

“Yeah, all of ’em, years ago.”

“If they’d squeezed hard enough, one of them should’ve caved by now and implicated Polk.”

“Well, the feds didn’t try all that hard. Polk ran a sweet scam, smart as they come.” Because Riker knew his boss played the ponies, he opted for racing parlance. “Say that old stock deal’s a nag in the Derby, okay? Polk’s been juicin’ that horse to make it run real fast, and now it’s a favorite to win. But him and his buddies at Banter Capital, they got long-shot bets against that win. So Polk’s horse is outta the chute, and he tips off the feds on the fixed race. Then the government boys show up . . . and shoot that nag before it crosses the finish line.”

“That’s why the SEC let him skate with that settlement deal? He embarrassed the crap out of them?”

“Oh, yeah. He couldn’t have done it
without
’em. . . . Polk could only win with a dead horse.”

—

THE LAWYERS FILED INTO
the interrogation room to pair up with their clients, and the peepshow was over for Jack Coffey.

He walked down the hall to the incident room, where, only this morning, every bit of paper had been fixed to the cork in neat rows of perfect alignment. But now lopsided notes, photos and layered sheets of text gathered by the rest of the squad had spread around the walls.
Mallory’s
walls. Oh, the horror. The lieutenant watched her move from one crooked sheet of paper to another, righting every wrong-hanging thing in her path.

Quiet, stealthy, he crept up behind her. “So the investors—where did that get us?”

Unsurprised, she never lost her momentum of pins and papers. “If Polk goes to jail for insider trading, those people go down, too. It’s all about complicity in bad acts. He lied to the feds, but so did every—”

“I
got
that. And this ties to murder and kidnapping . . .
how?”

“The hit man’s client is using Polk’s own playbook. If the perp goes down, he takes the mayor with him in a plea bargain. That was probably spelled out in the ransom demand.”

Coffey nodded, as if this made sense—as if he did not plan to nail her for a money motive based on a probability shored up by a string of ifs. “So . . .
if
the killer is one of those investors, and
if
he gets caught hiring out the kills—”

“He—can—take—down—Andrew—Polk!” Her last pin was
stabbed
into the cork wall. “And
that’s
how I know the hit man’s client is one of the investors . . . because Polk doesn’t
want
him caught.”

Very nice—almost a perfect fit for the mayor’s lies and lack of cooperation.
Almost
. The lieutenant tapped the picture of Dwayne Brox. “So what’s
he
doing on the list? Polk can’t be worried about this one. Riker told me Brox’s parents were the only ones who could’ve signed the nondisclosure. And they’re both dead. So their kid’s got no leverage on Polk—unless Mom and Dad put a confession in writing. What are the odds on that?”