Misfortune (44 page)

“Any ideas?” Meaty asked.

Frances shrugged. “But I’d like to see Renaissance Commons. If you wait here, I’ll be ready to go in five minutes.” She got up from the table. Her breakfast, and her apology to Sam, would have to wait.

A few minutes later, hair still wet, Frances was back downstairs. As she opened the door to leave, she gasped. Miles Adler stood on the threshold. The sleeves of his wrinkled trench coat covered his hands. Underneath, a well-worn T-shirt hung loose on his thin torso. She could see bluish veins through the pale skin of his face. His lips were cracked, and he had dark circles under his eyes.

“Miles!” Frances exclaimed.

Meaty, who stood behind her, stepped in front. “Miles Adler?” he said, picking up on the name.

Miles nodded.

“I’m Detective Burke. You’ve done quite a job avoiding me the last week.”

“Yes. I mean, no. I was out of the country,” Miles stammered. “I wasn’t aware that you were here.”

“I bet you weren’t,” Meaty muttered.

“Please, I need to talk to Frances. If I could just have a few minutes.” He looked at Frances.

“Take all the time you want,” Meaty said. “I’ll just sit and listen. I won’t be any bother.” His sarcastic tone offered Miles no choice.

“Fine,” Miles said softly. “I assume you’ll need to know what I have to say anyway, so you might as well hear it directly.”

Frances, still stunned, directed Miles into the kitchen. They all took seats. Frances offered coffee, but both men declined. Miles looked scared. He was thinner than she remembered, and sitting with his shoulders slouched, he looked smaller, too.

“Miles,” Frances said, trying to keep the quiver in her voice under control, “you should know before you say anything that you’re a suspect in the murder of Clio Pratt.”

“But this is not a custodial interrogation,” Meaty corrected.

“If it’s about my rights, I know what they are.” Miles looked directly at Frances. “I didn’t have anything to do with Clio’s death.” His eyes welled with tears.

“Why don’t you just tell us why you’re here,” Meaty said.

Miles picked at a cuticle on his left index finger. His foot tapped the floor robotically. “I’m sorry to have missed the memorial service,” he said. “I know I should’ve been there. It was a terrible lapse of judgment on my part.”

“Where were you?” Meaty asked. Frances glared at him, wishing for once he would keep his mouth shut.

“Mexico. Mexico City. I was closing a deal.”

“With Pro-Chem?” Meaty said.

Miles looked surprised. “How did you know?”

Meaty didn’t reply.

“Um, yes. Pro-Chem. It was a deal that I’d worked on for a long time. One I think is going to be extremely profitable. Clio called it off several weeks ago. I won’t deny that it made me upset. Very upset. She and your father are the controlling shareholders of Pratt Capital, so there was nothing I could do at the time, but when I learned last Saturday that she was dead, I wanted to try to revive the deal.”

Frances caught herself biting her lip in concentration. Meaty uttered a peculiar guttural sound but did not interrupt.

“I’m not proud of what I did.” Frances could see Miles’s chest rising and falling with his quick, shallow breaths. “But I didn’t kill her. I know that you and the police are suspicious of me, but you needn’t be. I had no reason to want Clio dead.”

“Why were you and Penny in Southampton over the Fourth?” Frances asked.

“That’s what I’ve come to explain.” Miles put his hands on his knees, seemingly to stop his body from moving. “As you probably know, or you’ve figured out”—he glanced at Meaty—“I wanted a controlling interest in Pratt Capital. I made no bones about it. I’ve worked hard for your father, and I’ve continued to work hard for Clio over the past year. But it was very difficult for me. She doesn’t, she didn’t, know the business. It’s that simple, and it was virtually impossible for us to continue in the manner that we were operating. It wasn’t fair to me.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper, and Frances had to lean toward him to hear. “I tried on several occasions to buy her out, to make some deal with her. She refused. Finally…I…I was desperate, you have to believe me.”

Frances looked at Meaty. He was scowling, but Miles seemed too upset to notice.

“Have you ever wanted something so badly that it clouds your common sense, your reason? It’s like you’ll do anything to get it, and you don’t care who you hurt or mistreat along the way. That’s what happened to me. I got frantic, obsessed with owning this business, with finally being in charge. Each time she turned me down just made me more crazed to see my plan through.” He looked at Frances, seemingly seeking reassurance that his tenacity was understandable.

“And under the terms of your partnership agreement, you had a right to buy out Richard’s share of the company if Clio died,” Meaty interjected.

“That’s right.” He looked back and forth between Frances and Meaty. “But it’s not what you think. I had a better plan. I found out some information that she and Richard had both tried very hard to conceal. I thought I could use it to negotiate a deal.”

“Was the information you intended to use about Katherine Henshaw?” Meaty asked.

Miles seemed to choke on his saliva. He coughed without covering his mouth and eyed Meaty, then Frances. “Well…yes. Mrs. Henshaw. She’s a very ill woman. Clio took great pains to hide her existence from the world. I figured I could use that to my advantage.”

“That’s extortion,” Meaty said bluntly.

“I didn’t think of it that way at the time.” He sighed. “Although it doesn’t matter now. Before I ever confronted Clio with the information, she told me that she had been rethinking things anyway. She wanted to sell the business.”

“Just out of the blue?” Meaty sounded skeptical.

“In early June, we had several extremely unpleasant encounters. She was as unhappy as I was with the current situation.”

Frances remembered the letter dated June 4 that Annabelle Cabot had given her when they’d met at the Plaza. Miles’s threat.
Stay out of my business….If you do not honor my request, you will not like the consequences.
Had that been part of what Miles now characterized as “unpleasant”?

“She called me in mid-June, said she changed her mind. She didn’t want the headache, the tension, the stress. She and Richard didn’t need the income anyway. She wanted to be with Richard all the time. She didn’t want to have to come to the city. She said in the last year, as she’d gotten more and more involved in business deals, it just didn’t seem right. It wasn’t the way she wanted to spend her remaining months, or years, whatever it would be, with Richard. Anyway, that was the plan. She was perfectly willing to let Pratt Capital be mine, mine alone.”

Miles slumped even farther in his chair, as if his chest would collapse onto his thighs. Neither Frances nor Meaty said a word.

“My lawyer, Ian Feldman, he’ll send you copies of the documents. Our buyout agreement. Transfer of shares was set for July thirty-first. The agreement we negotiated is much more favorable to me than a buyout under the partnership formula. She got half the money up front. The rest she would receive over five years payable in French francs. She had bought a place on the Riviera, Vence, Cannes, I’m not sure where, but she planned to live abroad when Richard passed away.” He looked up, as if to gauge Frances’s reaction to the reference to her father’s death. “The details probably aren’t of particular interest to either of you. Suffice it to say, her death is going to cost me money.”

“Why?”

“Ian tells me that since Clio died before our deal closed, Richard can legally demand payment under the partnership terms. If he insists, I’ll have to pay the higher dollar amount to YOUTHCORE.”

“Somehow, I doubt that’s foremost in his mind right now,” Frances mumbled, more to herself than the others. Then she asked, “Why were you in Southampton last weekend?”

“I went with Penny to make amends, I guess. We planned to go for quite some time, before this agreement with Clio had transpired. In all honesty, my original intent hadn’t been benevolent. When we invited ourselves out, I wanted to try to convince Richard to sell out. If that failed, I planned to use the information I knew about Mrs. Henshaw to force Clio to sell.”

“Why did you try to visit Katherine Henshaw in May?” Meaty asked.

“After I found out about her, I wanted to see it for myself, see how bad she was, to confirm the situation, but that hospital, or whatever it is, wouldn’t let me in.”

“Renaissance Commons,” Frances said.

“Yeah.” Miles fixed his gaze on Frances. “You’ve got to believe me, I didn’t kill her. I was as shocked as anyone else to hear she’d died.”

Shocked enough to get directly to the airport, Frances thought. “Why wasn’t Clio willing to let you do the Pro-Chem deal, then? If it was going to be your company anyway.”

Miles looked at the floor. He seemed to trace an outline of something on his thigh. When he spoke, his words came slowly. “The president of Pro-Chem was furious about the way Clio had treated him. We were very close to a deal before, and Clio had just decided, without even consulting me, to call it off. She was critical of him and his company, his products. He wasn’t going to have anything to do with Pratt Capital whether she controlled it or not. But when she died, I thought I might have a chance to rescue the situation. You know, I actually thought he might take some delight in her untimely death. Like it was a sign that our deal was supposed to happen.”

“But I’m asking you about Clio. Why would she have blown your deal if she was going to sell you the company anyway?”

“At the time Clio called off negotiations with Pro-Chem, she and I hadn’t come to our mutual understanding. I don’t think she had even decided to sell out. If I were to guess, she didn’t make up her mind to sell until after things eroded in June.” Miles seemed exhausted, as if the slightest push would send him toppling over. “I was hardly the gentleman, but I actually thought that my buying the company would be the best thing for everyone, including Richard and Clio.”

Frances felt a queasiness in her stomach at the thought of the sordid legacy of her father’s company, at the devious tactics of his prodigy. She hoped he would never find out all that had actually transpired.

“I’ve told Ian to answer any further questions you, or the police, might have.”

“You were at the Fair Lawn Country Club when Clio died,” Frances said.

“Yes. Well, sort of. Penny and I left the club early that morning, around nine, I’d say, but went back. I told her I needed sun-block. I’m really susceptible to burning. That’s why I like to go to the beach early. But actually, I had a conference call. She gets pretty sick and tired of my working on vacation, so I didn’t tell her. I dialed out, so I expect telephone logs from the club can confirm I was on the telephone from about ten
A.M.
until close to eleven-fifteen. By the time I came downstairs, Clio was dead and the police were already there.”

“How did you know?”

“I overheard someone mention Clio’s name as I was coming down from my room. I saw the cops. So I asked some guy I saw on the porch what had happened. He told me. Nobody knew I had any connection to Clio or Richard.”

“You made a business call on a Saturday?” Meaty asked skeptically.

“It was a call to London. I think the Brits like to schedule business with Americans on the Fourth of July. Spoil the holiday.” He laughed awkwardly. “I can give you the names and numbers of the two guys I spoke to if you want to check it out.”

“We will,” Meaty remarked.

Miles nodded. “Anyway, that’s everything. As I said, I’m not particularly proud of myself, but I’d never do anything to harm Richard. He’s been a father to me.”

And this was what he got in return, Frances thought.

Miles scanned their faces. He appeared to be searching for something, some consolation that he wasn’t as self-interested and malevolent as his conduct made him seem; but Frances was unwilling to provide the assurances. After several minutes of silence, Miles stood up. He reached into his back pocket, removed his wallet, and dropped Ian Feldman’s business card on the table. “As I said, I’ve authorized him to answer any questions you might have. And you know where to find me. I’m sorry I took so long to clarify this situation. I wasn’t particularly proud.” He looked down at the floor, then turned on his heels and walked out. Frances heard the screen door slam behind him, the purr of his Porsche as he started the engine, and the screech of his tires as he sped away.

The stucco structures of Renaissance Commons with their red asphalt roofs loomed up out of the landscape as Meaty and Frances made their way along the winding blacktop drive. Set back from the road, the facility seemed serene, surrounded by cut lawns and oak trees, with clusters of weathered cedar benches and chairs. However, in the distance Frances could make out what appeared to be an electric fence running along the perimeter of the property, partially concealed by rhododendrons, boxwoods, and Scotch broom, but there nonetheless, a reminder that the place was designed to keep its residents contained.

They followed signs to the main administration building. An attendant under the carport directed them to an appropriate parking space to the left of the entrance.

The reception area was a large, circular room with butter-colored walls, thick carpeting of green and gold, and overstuffed chairs arranged in squares. In the center of the room, a uniformed nurse sat at a small leather-topped secretary. An armed guard stood behind her.

“May I help you?” the nurse asked as Meaty and Frances walked toward her.

“We’re here to see Dr. Hamilton. Detective Robert Burke and Ms. Frances Pratt.” Meaty flashed his badge.

She pushed some buttons on an elaborate panel, then announced Dr. Hamilton’s visitors to what Frances assumed was the director’s assistant. “He’ll be right there,” a woman’s voice replied through the speaker.

The nurse-receptionist looked up at her audience and smiled. “He’ll be right with you if you would care to take a seat,” she said as if they hadn’t heard.

Frances and Meaty settled themselves, and Frances picked up a glossy brochure. The distinctive architecture covered the front page.
Renaissance Commons. A place you can trust with your loved ones
, it said in gold lettering. Inside there was a picture of Dr. Pierce W. Hamilton III, a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Medical School, a prize-winning psychiatrist. The list of his credentials, medical affiliations, and publications filled nearly the entire page.