Confessions of a Murder Suspect (9 page)

Funny moment in the middle of a tragedy
.

Detective Ryan Hayes sat down on the Pork Chair and it let out a snuffle, a snort, and a ringing squeal.

He jumped up. “What the…?”

“Art,” I told him with a smile. A real smile, this time.

“Does the sofa bark or anything? Let me know now.”

“The sofa is mute,” I said.

“Fine,” Hayes said, but he eased himself down gingerly anyway. “Sit down,” he told me. “Please.” He looked through the Plexiglas top of the shark tank that served as a coffee table.

“These are real sharks?”

“Pygmy sharks. Hugo won them.”

“He won them? Like, at a carnival?”

I paused and decided it would be too hard to explain “Grande Gongos” just then. So I said, “These are real pygmy sharks. At an average of nine inches long, they are the second-smallest sharks in the world. Their stomachs glow green because they’re bioluminescent—they have special phosphorescent cells in their skin. It’s possible that the green light attracts prey to them. The sharks can’t see you because the tank is specially designed to block light—”

Hayes interrupted my monologue. “Your mother was a bit like a shark, wasn’t she, Tandy? No disrespect, but that’s what I’ve heard. She worked all the time, but still, she had some pretty unhappy customers lately. Very unsatisfied customers.”

“She wasn’t exactly Bernie Madoff. My mother was honest. Honest people can have enemies. My mother said whatever she believed to be the truth.”

“There was a massive lawsuit pending against her for manipulating investor returns. A man named Royal Rampling is at the helm of it. Ever heard that name before?”

My stomach lurched, but I ignored it. “ ‘In volatile times, not every client is a satisfied client,’ ” I said, quoting my dead mother. “Still. Let’s say she had a particularly disgruntled client who happened to be a homicidal maniac
as well. How could this… Royal Rampling”—I forced the name out with some difficulty—“have gotten in, killed her and my father—”

“We’re looking at every possibility,” said Hayes, again cutting me off. “Let’s talk about something else. I wanted to apologize for my partner, Tandy. Caputo is a hound. Did you know that hare hounds can pick up the scent of a rabbit on concrete?”

“I did, actually,” I said truthfully.

“Then you know that if a rabbit runs across the road, an hour later a hare hound can still smell that the hare has been there. Cap Caputo’s like that. If there’s a trail, he’ll find it.”

“Thanks for sharing. When will we get the autopsy report?” I asked.

Caputo was coming down the stairs and overheard me.

“There’s no ‘we,’ Tammy. We’re the cops. You’re a suspect. Prime suspect, in my opinion.”

“You may call me Tandy. You may call me Ms. Angel. But please don’t ever talk down to me again.”

“Or what?”

“Don’t bother testing me, Sergeant,” I warned. “Angels always,
always
ace their tests.”

“All the more reason you make an ideal suspect. As far as I can tell, Angel is a pretty ironic name for this family.”

“We don’t particularly relate to the spirits, if that’s what you mean.”

“You know what I mean. You guys don’t exactly wear halos.”

“Neither do the thirty-four other Angels in the Manhattan white pages. Halos are
so
last season, anyway.”

My attempt to sound like a normal teenager went over well. He smirked.

“Cute, kid. We’re leaving now, but don’t skip town. We’ll be seeing all of you Angels again very soon. Especially you, Miss Indian Cooking Stove. Especially you.”

18

The police and CSI techs finally pulled down
the crime-scene tape at the top of the stairs and left our home, taking with them my parents’ computer hard drives and notebooks, as well as cardboard file boxes filled with objects from my parents’ bedroom.

A wave of inexplicable anger washed over me, which I immediately quelled. If only I had someone I could commiserate with about this invasion of privacy, about the way everyone was treating us like murderers instead of grieving children.

But I had no friends to call. I hadn’t even thought about what it would be like to go back to school after everything that had happened, and I didn’t trust anyone there,
anyway. Since the murders, Harry and Hugo had been spending most of their time in their rooms. I was a loner, like they were, but I had never before felt loneliness quite like this.

I went to the semicircular bay window behind the piano and looked down onto Seventy-second Street to watch the police load up their vans with my parents’ belongings. It was unlikely I would ever see these things again; I was certain they were doomed to languish in storage in some dark police facility.

A herd of reporters stampeded toward Hayes and Caputo, and then followed the cop cars and crime-scene vans on foot, shouting for attention as the police vehicles took off toward the precinct on West Eighty-second.

The band of reporters reassembled at the front gate, and I watched the attractive newscasters flipping their hair and fastening microphones to their collars, using the backdrop of the Dakota for their on-air reports.

I tried to imagine what Maud would have thought of all this, if she’d ever imagined her death at all. Surely she would have chosen something dignified at the age of ninety or so—maybe a quick cerebral hemorrhage after a full day of work. She wouldn’t have wanted the
Post
, the
Daily News
, Fox News, and
Entertainment Tonight
fluttering around the building, picking at the details of her
life. As much as she revered success, she detested the mass forms of communication that reported on the successful. Call it yet another contradiction that my parents embodied.

I went across the hall to our home theater, with its plush velvet seats lined up in front of a gargantuan screen that doubled as a television when we weren’t watching movies (strictly educational films, of course). I clicked to a news station, and a reporter that I had actually just seen from the window was now looking out at me from the TV screen, saying:

“With his brother, Peter, Malcolm Angel owned Angel Pharma, a multinational drug company. Maud Angel was founder and CEO of a successful hedge fund, Leading Hedge, which has come under SEC scrutiny in the last few weeks.

“Still, the Angels died at the pinnacle of success. Their motto was ‘yes we can,’ long before Barack Obama campaigned with that slogan.

“The Angels leave four children ranging in age from ten to twenty-four. The oldest is the celebrated athlete Matthew Angel, who plays for the New York Giants. All four children are known to be high achievers—or, as some say, overachievers.

“But that figures into the Angel family reputation.
Malcolm and Maud Angel were referred to in their social circle as ‘Tiger Mom and Tiger Dad.’ And now the tigers are dead.

“The police have no comment, but if you’re just joining us,
Inside News
has learned that the Angels’ deaths have been termed ‘suspicious.’ We’ll be bringing you further news on this story as it unfolds. Stay tuned to this station.…”

No. I’d had way too much of the news already.

I turned off the TV and wandered out of the theater. The apartment was still cloaked in an eerie silence. Matthew and Hugo were in Hugo’s room. Samantha’s door was closed. And my twin typically sleeps late on Saturdays. That day, I thought, Harry might not get out of bed at all.

If I closed my eyes, I could almost pretend it was a normal weekend at the Angel house, with Malcolm and Maud off at work, putting in overtime. And I wondered: What would a
normal
family be doing less than twenty-four hours after discovering their parents had been murdered?

I suppose they’d be
together
, for one. There would still be a lot of tears, runny noses, wailing, and grinding of teeth. Lots of visitors coming over making sure everyone was okay, bringing food and things to make sure the
grieving family members didn’t have to worry about feeding themselves. Does that sound about right?

I wouldn’t know. All I know is that we will never be normal. Because I wasn’t thinking about any of that. Here’s what I was thinking:

It was a perfect time to search the house—especially my parents’ room. The scene of the crime.

19

I have to admit
that by that point I had already become obsessed with solving my parents’ murders. I should also confess that I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive anyway.

I took a self-guided tour of the downstairs rooms just to make sure that no stone had been left unturned, that no obvious forced entry had been missed. I thoroughly checked the family rooms: living room, hallways, library, and kitchen. I double-checked the laundry room and the back door and the elevator. I saw no nicks or breaks in the door frames, no scratches on the locks. I saw nothing out of place. Disappointing.

Everywhere I looked, I saw Angel family perfection.

I took to the stairs and noticed right away that I was finding it a little difficult to breathe. This was my parents’ suffocating world, after all. But I was having an uncharacteristically emotional reaction to it.

Halfway up, I passed Mercurio, the larger-than-life sculpture of a merman hanging from his tail by a chain and a hook screwed into the ceiling. “Blood” was dripping down his chest, and there was a look of pure anguish on his face. Fitting.

Mercurio was another of Hugo’s Grande Gongo “prizes,” and another parental indulgence with a message:
Life is serious. You win or you lose, and winning is a lot better.

My father had told us about the actual, real-life
Grande Gongo
, a cutting-edge container ship docked in Korea and flying the Italian flag. He’d said that the
Grande Gongo
was an “an intrepid craft on a mission—with no boundaries.” And that was how he thought of his children.

Certificates of excellence had been hung on the stairwell wall, alongside mottos that my father had found important enough to frame. The one he never let us forget was written by a poet and priest who had died almost four centuries ago:

ONE FATHER IS MORE THAN A HUNDRED SCHOOLMASTERS.—GEORGE HERBERT

There was another framed item that I rarely passed without stopping to read it again. It was an envelope and letter from Hilda Angel—my father’s mother—who died just before Malcolm and Maud were married.