Daddy's Gone a Hunting (16 page)

They left the apartment together, Justin carrying the plant. When they were outside the building, standing on the sidewalk, and before she could say good-bye, Justin said, “Hannah, it’s one thirty. If you haven’t had lunch yet, would you like to grab a bite with me?”

Hesitating for only a couple of seconds, Hannah said, “I’d like that.”

“Italian food okay?”

“My favorite.”

They walked three blocks to a small restaurant called Tony’s Kitchen. It was obvious that Justin was well-known there. He seemed to sense that she did not want to talk about Kate or the explosion and so, instead, he told her about himself. “I was raised in Princeton,” he said. “Both my parents teach at Princeton.”

“Then you’ve got to be very smart,” Hannah smiled.

“I don’t know about that. I went to Princeton, but for my master’s I was ready for a new setting so I went to business school in Chicago.”

They both had a salad. Hannah had an appetizer-size penne with vodka sauce. Justin decided on lasagna and ordered a half bottle of Simi chardonnay. Hannah realized it was the first time since the dinner she had with Jessie, celebrating her new designer label, that she could taste food. Justin asked her about her job, another safe subject. When they left the restaurant, he asked if he could call a cab for her.

“No. I’ll walk across the park to the hospital and check on Kate. I don’t think she knows that I’m there, but I just need to be with her.”

“Of course, but first please give me your cell phone number. I’d like to keep in touch and find out how Kate is doing.” He smiled, then added, “And report on the progress of her plant.”

When Hannah reached the hospital and went up to the intensive care unit, her father was sitting at Kate’s bedside. He looked up when he heard her footsteps. “She’s the same,” he said. “No change at all. She hasn’t said anything else.” He looked around, careful to see that neither a doctor nor nurse was within earshot. “Hannah, I’ve been thinking. The other day when Kate said to me that she was sorry about the explosion, I took it to mean she had set it.”

Hannah looked at him in astonishment. “You implied that Kate said she
had
set it.”

“I realize that. I wasn’t thinking straight. I meant that she said she was sorry about it, not sorry that she actually caused it.”

“I have never believed that Kate set that explosion,” Hannah whispered vehemently, “and you could have saved me a lot of heartache if you hadn’t implied the other day that she virtually admitted it. And anyhow the doctor said that anything she mumbled was probably meaningless.”

“I know. It’s just that what has happened in these last few days has brought back everything of the time I lost your mother and . . .” Douglas Connelly buried his face in his hands as tears began to form in his eyes.

Composing himself, he slowly got to his feet. “Sandra is in the waiting room,” he explained. “I know you didn’t want her to come in here.”

“I don’t.”

Hannah stayed for an hour and then went home. She later watched the evening news while she ate a peanut butter sandwich, all that she wanted for dinner. She started to watch the next episode
of a television series that she enjoyed but fell asleep on the couch. Waking up at midnight, she stripped off her clothes, put on pajamas, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and fell into bed.

The alarm woke her at seven on Monday morning. At eight she visited Kate for a half hour, then she spent a long day at work trying to concentrate on new designs for sportswear. It’s one thing for your name to be put on a fashion line. It’s another thing to keep it on, she reminded herself.

After work she visited Kate again, holding her hand, smoothing her forehead, speaking to her in the hope that somehow she would understand. She was about to leave when Dr. Patel came in. The deep concern in his voice was obvious when he said, “I’m afraid she’s developed a fever.”

35

O
n Monday morning, Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein were back at the scene of the explosion. They found insurance investigators meticulously sifting through the rubble. Frank knew both of them. Over the years they had been at other fires where arson was suspected. The difference in this case, Frank thought, is that if the fire can be attributed to Gus Schmidt acting alone, they’ll have to pay on the insurance claim. Even if Kate Connelly was involved, a good lawyer could lay the blame squarely on Schmidt. Unless, of course, she recovers and admits she put him up to it. Which is highly unlikely, Frank thought.

At the funeral home Friday, he and Klein had jumped up to assist when they witnessed Lottie Schmidt faint. They had carried her to the couch in the office. She had recovered quickly, but both they and her daughter had insisted that she rest on the couch in a back room for at least twenty minutes. An assistant at the funeral home had made a cup of tea for her.

Lottie’s absence had given Frank and Nathan a chance to speak with others at the wake who had worked with Gus. Speaking as one, they told the fire marshals that Gus had been fired after Jack Worth became manager, and that Gus hated both him and Douglas Connelly.

“Gus was a perfectionist,” was the way one of them put it. “It
would take a team of experts to tell the difference between the original pieces and the copies of the furniture he made. For them to tell him his work wasn’t up to par was a terrible insult.”

“Did he ever talk about blowing up the complex?” Ramsey had asked.

One of the men had nodded. “In a manner of speaking. I’m on a bowling team with Gus. I mean I
was
on a bowling team with him. He always asked how things were going at the complex. When I told him we were getting a lot of returns, he said something like, ‘I’m not surprised. Do me a favor and set a match to the whole place for me.’ ”

All of this meant that the fire could end up being blamed solely on Gus, which the worried insurance investigators admitted to Frank Ramsey on Monday morning. While they were speaking, drivers began to move the big furniture vans from under the shelter to be placed in storage. Except for the damage from smoke and flying debris, they seemed to be in pretty good shape.

“Connelly will never try to rebuild this place,” Jim Casey, the older of the insurance investigators, said. “If he gets the insurance money, he can live like a king. On top of that, the property alone is worth a fortune. Why would he bother to rebuild?”

Four undamaged vans, all bearing the name
CONNELLY FINE ANTIQUE REPRODUCTIONS
, slowly exited past them up the driveway to the main road. Frank Ramsey saw that there was still one left in the far back area where the vans had been kept. That area had an overhead roof and open sides. He walked over to inspect the remaining van and observed the battered doors, the cracked windshield, the rusting exterior, the flat tires. It was obvious to him that this damage had preceded the explosion and that this useless van had been left there for a long time. Why didn’t they just get rid of this thing? he wondered. Jack Worth impressed me as the kind who would be a good manager. On the other hand, he had not insisted on the need
for security cameras, so maybe he was all show. But Worth had told them that it was Douglas Connelly who wouldn’t let the money be spent. Either way, it wouldn’t have cost much to have this thing towed to a junkyard.

Frank walked around to the back of the van and then, not anticipating that it would open, turned the handle of the rear door. To his astonishment, he saw unmistakable signs that the van had been occupied. Empty wine bottles were scattered on the floor. Newspapers were haphazardly strewn throughout the deep interior. He picked up the newspaper nearest to the door and looked at the date on it.

It was Wednesday, the day before the explosion.

This meant that whatever vagrant was using this place to sleep might have been here that night. Frank Ramsey did not venture farther but closed the door of the van.

It was abundantly clear to him that the whole complex had become a complicated crime scene.

36

M
ark Sloane had made an appointment with Nick Greco for one o’clock on Monday afternoon. He had explained to Greco that he had just relocated to start a new job and did not want to take much more than a usual lunch hour to meet with him. The alternative would be to meet after 5
P.M.

“I get in very early but then I catch a five-twenty train home,” Greco told him. “May I suggest you come at lunchtime and we can order in from the deli?”

A man in his early sixties, Nick Greco was of average height with the disciplined body of a lifetime runner. His once-dark hair was mostly gray. Rimless glasses accentuated dark brown eyes that looked out on the world with a calm but piercing appraisal. A hopeless insomniac, Greco frequently rose at three or four in the morning and walked across to the room that his wife called his nocturnal den. There he would read a book or a magazine or turn on the television to catch the latest news.

Just after 5
A.M.
last Thursday, he had been watching an early news program and had seen the first pictures of the fire that was ravaging the Connelly Fine Antique Reproductions complex in Long Island City. As always, Nick’s mind had gone into search-and-retrieve. His near-photographic memory had been immediately flooded with details of the tragedy, almost three decades ago, when
Douglas Connelly, his wife, Susan, his brother, Connor, and four friends had been involved in a boating accident. Only Douglas had survived.

Tragedy seems to follow some people, Greco had thought. First, the guy loses his wife, his brother, and his friends. Now his daughter is in a coma and his business is destroyed. Then the media began to insinuate that Kate Connelly and a former employee, Gus Schmidt, might have conspired to set the explosion. Greco’s reaction was that he couldn’t think of anything worse than to lose your daughter, unless it was to discover that your daughter had not only destroyed your life’s work, but in the process had also contributed to someone else’s death.

But that was not on his mind when the receptionist announced the arrival of Mark Sloane, brother of the long-missing Tracey Sloane. “Send him in,” Greco said as he got up and walked to the door. A moment later he was shaking hands with Mark and inviting him to sit at the conference table in his roomy office.

They agreed on ham-and-cheese sandwiches on rye. Greco asked the receptionist to phone the order in. “I have a good coffee machine,” he explained to Mark. “So as long as we’re both having it black, we might as well have it as hot as possible rather than wait for a delivery.”

He liked the look of Mark Sloane with his firm handshake and direct eye contact even though the younger man was very tall. But he could also see that Sloane was somewhat tense. Who wouldn’t be? Nick Greco thought sympathetically. It’s got to be so tough to relive his sister’s disappearance. That was why he chatted about Mark’s new job for a few minutes before he opened the file that he had reviewed earlier in the day.

“As you know, I was one of the detectives assigned to the case when Tracey disappeared,” Greco began. “At first, by law, she was considered a missing person, but then when she didn’t show up for
work, missed two important auditions, and did not contact any of her friends, it was concluded that foul play was almost certainly involved.”