Seven Ways to Die (11 page)

Bergman held up the black book, which he pointed out, was a literal biography of the dead man.

“So much for the skin and bones,” Cody said. “Now let’s get to the heart of the matter.”

He described Amelie Cluett, the fact that she was in bed a scant twenty yards across the hall from where someone was butchering Handley, and played parts of his interview with her, including her sudden and voluntary autobiographical outburst, which earned a few chuckles from the crew.

Cluett: “Well, he also…uh…maybe I shouldn’t be telling some of this. You know, it’s very personal.”

Cody: “Raymond’s dead, Amelie. You can’t hurt his feelings.”

Cluett: “No, but there are others. Like his fiancée, Linda. She’s really sweet. I bumped into them in the hall once or twice. He’d talk about her.”

Cody: “Intimate things?”

Cluett: “Yes.”

Cody: “Such as?”

Cluett: “She wasn’t very…sexually oriented, I guess you could put it. She wasn’t into sex. Raymond was very much into sex. Raymond was a power player. Power players are always sexual people. Men and women. It’s an attitude. You can tell. I remember once he said, ‘Jesus, you’re a twice a week girl and I’m a twice a day guy.’ But he wasn’t talking to me. It was like he was having a dialogue with her. Then there were the weekends when they weren’t together and he’d talk about the clubs.”

Cody: “What clubs?”

Cluett: “Weird stuff.”

Cody: “Weird stuff?”

Cluett: “Sex clubs.”

Cody: “Did he mention them by name?”

Cluett: “Only once. It was really a disgusting name.”

Cody: “I’m a big boy, Amelie, I’ve heard it all.”

Cluett: “The Tit for Twat Club was one. I remember that because it really upset me. But he had no idea. It was like he was confessing and I wasn’t there.”

Cody: “Did he ever bring people home with him?”

Cluett: “Not that I know about. I’m in bed at eleven and I’m asleep before the news ends. If I start to doze? The ear plugs go in and I’m out for the night. Sometimes I TiVo Letterman and watch it the next night when there’s nothing good on.”

Cody: “Did he mention anyone by name?”

Cluett: “Made-up names. Wonder Woman. Bat Lady. Trapeze Girl.”

Cody: “Trapeze girl?”

Cluett: “That was another club he mentioned. The Sex Circus.”

Cody: “Did he ever say where these clubs were?”

Cluett: “No. But he calls one girl the Staten Island Fairy. Said she’d come if he put a hundred dollar bill under her pillow, whatever that means. Sounds like a mixed metaphor to me.”

Cody: “Was he a switch hitter?”

Cluett: “No.
No.
It was always about girls. And not all the time. I mean, maybe once a month he’d go off on one of his tantrums.”

Cody stopped the tape.

“The Staten Island Fairy?” Butch Rogers said and there were a few chuckles in the room.

Kate Winters cautiously raised her hand.

“Yes, Kate?”

“Did she know you were taping her?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said.

Cody smiled. “Back to the business at hand. Once everybody gets past the freak factor here let’s face the implications. We’ve got a high profile victim, V.P. of a prestigious brokerage firm with offices across the street from the Stock Exchange and engaged to the boss’s daughter. He had a sex jones and was murdered in what looks like an S&M game that was set up for the purpose of smoking him. This case is going to be on front pages and will resonate all over this squad when it does break. What you just heard stays in this room. I know the stuff about the Staten Island Fairy is juicy gossip over a drink but we have to handle this one very tenderly. Kabish?”

“Is the Cluett woman a suspect?” Larry Simon asked.

“I don’t think so. Whoever killed Handley knew what the hell they were doing. This was a very clean homicide scene, including the absence of blood. I doubt that she would have been as frank as she was if she was implicated in any way. But…she was the closest person to him when he was killed so she’s on the list. Witness, not a suspect.”

“Funny she brought up all the sex stuff when she didn’t know how he was killed,” Hue said.

“All she knew—all I told her—was that he was dead and it wasn’t an accident. I think she got started and let it all out. But, you got a point, Vinnie. Si, run a background on her and the maid while you’re at it. She had a key to the place.”

“Already on it,” Simon answered.

“Okay, let’s finish the briefing, there’s more. Cal?”

Bergman ran the timeline:

“Handley stopped by his office on the way home for about twenty minutes. He discharged his limo driver on the east side Hudson Street, the 520 block, that’s between West 10th and Charles Street, at 11:50 p.m. The sign-off slip was in Handley’s coat pocket.”

Hue picked it up: “I talked to the dispatcher at Metro cab who says one of his cabbies was off-duty and driving south on Bleecker between 10th and Christopher when Handley waved him down. Says Handley looked well-heeled so he figured him for a good tip and picked him up. That was at 12:25 a.m. He let him out at the 73
^rd
Street address at 12:55. Handley gave him a twenty buck tip.”

“And we know the killer was waiting for him when he got there,” Cody added. “We also know he went straight to the bedroom, undressed, showered, and walked naked to the library where his murderer was waiting for him. He apparently had a drink before the messy stuff started. The glass was on the table beside him. And he submitted to the handcuffing.

“And we have the mask.”

“Maybe he was gonna get a cup of coffee and stick up a convenience store on the way home,” Ansa said with a snicker.

“It was a full moon last night,” Wow said. “You know how crazy people get when the moon is full.” More snickers.

“Hey, next Wednesday’s Halloween. Maybe him and the Staten Island Fairy were practicing,” Butch Ryan added.

Cody smiled, accustomed to the insouciant gallows humor of the group. But he cut it off by turning to Hue. “Give us a satellite shot of that block in West Village.”

The crew watched as the satellite map moved over Greenwich Village then panned down until the block bordered by Hudson and Bleecker Streets and Charles and West 10th filled the screen.

“I’m glad you guys have a good sense of humor about this,” he said. “Let me tell you what I have. I have a self-made, thirty-five-year-old man who discharged his limo here,” he pointed at the spot on Hudson Street, “and hailed a cab here,” he pointed to spot on Bleecker where the Metro cab picked up Handley. ”That’s a block and a half. A five minute walk. I got a guy who’s wearing a three thousand dollar overcoat, a seventeen thousand dollar Tag Heuer watch, and more than a grand in his wallet. So he wasn’t taking a midnight walk in the moonlight. He went straight to somewhere to meet somebody probably to give that somebody a key to his apartment to arrange a little fun and games. And that’s what he got.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the ghoulish photo of Handley’s corpse.

“I’m open to any other cogent suggestions.”

Silence.

“Wolf’s next door by now doing the autopsy. I want to take Kate and talk to Victor Stembler. Can he make the official ID, Kate?”

She thought for a moment. “Any immediate family members nearby?”

“Stembler will know, but we’re getting that he had no family left. If we have to, we’ll call the fiancée. I think we can count on Stembler to soft peddle any details we give him.”

 “Wow, you, Butch, and Jonée work the phones. You’ve all been in vice. Call any old contacts, find out everything you can about sex clubs in Manhattan until Wolf is ready to brief us on the autopsy. After that I want Jonée on RR. Wow, you and Butch take on the area in Greenwich Village. I want to know where he went. What he did. Who he saw? Any clubs in that neighborhood? If so, shake ‘em but don’t break ‘em. We’re interested in Handley’s activities, who he might have connected with during that half-hour or so. Our story is we need to talk to him about a case in progress.

“Si, start working on back stories. You know how far you can go with that.”

“Yes sir,” the little man answered.

Cody looked up at the timer.

“We’re two hours and twenty-four minutes into the show.”

“Same song, new verse,” Rizzo said.

“Maybe. But I have a feeling this is one song we’ve never heard before.”

11

Cody and Kate Winters took the elevator to the garage on the first floor. Rizzo was waiting, holding the rear door of a black Lincoln open for them. They crawled in and Rizzo got behind the wheel. The large steel garage door rolled up.

“Where to, Cap?”

“Financial district,” Cody said. “Exchange Place, across the street from the Stock Exchange.”

“Easy one,” Rizzo said. “We’ll cut over to Broadway and head down. Ten minutes.”

“No rush.”

Rizzo snaked his way through Little Italy, turned onto Broadway and headed south toward the few cramped blocks that formed an empire whose heart was the stock market; its blood, dollars, Euros, yen, and market shares; and brokers the jaded knights that jousted for power and control over its fortunes. Its main artery was Wall Street, which someone had once called Heart Attack Alley. And little wonder. Millions could dissolve in a day because of bad weather in Texas, a bad crop in Kansas, some sick cows in Canada, or a Ponzi scheme outed. Compared to this win or lose fiefdom, Las Vegas was a nickel-dime poker game.

Δ

Victor Stembler was one of the elite members of a round table of multi-millionaires who were major players on the street. He had inherited his seat from his father, Chester, who in turn had inherited it from his father, Sidney, Victor’s grandfather, a robber baron of the old school who had made his first fortune in the railroad business.

Victor’s genes came from Sidney, a ruthless but charming rogue who loved the competition almost as much as the money.

Chester was neither charming nor competitive, he was simply greedy. A humorless and stingy alcoholic bigot, he had forced one of his partners, Herman Marx, out of the business because he hated being in business with a Jew. He had endured Trexler, reduced to a junior partner because he was smarter than Chester. It was a known fact that Chester had kept the name Marx, Stembler and Trexler because he was too cheap to spend the money to change letterheads, logos, and various other accoutrements attached to the corporation. He had died in his private rail car traveling from San Francisco to New York. His death was attributed to a heart attack although Victor liked to say his father, “choked to death on his own gall.”

Victor had taken over the business and was soon known on the street as a man to be reckoned with. But his only son, Victor, Jr., had drowned in a yachting accident. And his daughter, Linda, had no taste for the business.

Raymond Handley had come along at the perfect time. He was handsome and charming, captain of the Princeton Lacrosse team, a top student and a ruthless competitor, who had worked his way to the top in the corporation with a combination of talent and an instinct for the jugular. And he treated Linda like a princess.

The perfect candidate for a future son-in-law.

Victor was delighted when his daughter fell head over heels for Handley. At sixty, Stembler was smugly successful and looking forward to shorter days in New York and more time on his backyard tennis court in Boston.

Δ

Cody didn’t know any of this background. Larry Simon would later fill him in with the details. He only knew he was about to give Victor Stembler a very hard kick in the head and he felt badly about it.

He and Kate exited the elevator on the top floor of the building across the street from the Stock Exchange. Stembler’s office was on northeast corner of an elegant hallway, its teakwood walls and floors subtly lit by antique lamps on pedestal tables. It was deathly still.