The Heavens May Fall (14 page)

“I don’t suppose you have a chair that’s clean, by any chance?”

Max leaned forward to look at the brown splotch on the orange material. “Oh, that’s been there for years. It won’t harm you.”

“It’s disgusting,” she said, looking at Max as though he were trying to make her sit on a dog turd.

Max closed his eyes so that she would not see them roll. “Would you prefer my chair?” He stood up so she could inspect it.

“That would be very kind of you,” she said.

Max switched his chair for the stained chair, and Anna Adler-King sat down with her back straight—careful not to lean against the back of the chair—and her hands folded together on her lap. She didn’t touch the tabletop, as though contact with its surface might infect her with whatever disease pulsed through the veins of the many criminals who had been in that room before her.

“Detective Rupert,” she said. “I want to do everything I can to convict the man who killed my sister.”

“You know who killed her?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious? Ben Pruitt. It had to be him.”

“Why do you say that?”

Anna Adler-King appraised Max Rupert as if to discern whether he was playing stupid or if stupid was his natural state. Max waited.

“Who else would do something like this?”

“Mrs. Adler-King, how well do you know Ben Pruitt?”

“He’s my brother-in-law, but we aren’t close.”

“When’s the last time you spoke to him?”

She thought for a moment then answered. “It would have been at a fundraiser for the St. Paul libraries, just under a year ago.”

“When was the last time you saw your sister?”

“That same evening.”

“Would you say that you were particularly close to your sister?”

“We were sisters. Of course we were close.”

“But you didn’t talk to her for almost a year . . . and you live in the same city.”

“Detective Rupert, there are bonds between sisters that make us close. We didn’t need daily visits.”

“I understand, Mrs. King—”

“Mrs. Adler-King,” she corrected. “Unlike my sister, I chose to keep my maiden name. I am quite proud to be an Adler.”

“Okay. But if you haven’t talked to your sister in a year, you don’t know how things stood between the Pruitts. I understand that you may not like Ben Pruitt, but that gives me nothing to add to the investigation.”

“You want something to add to the investigation, I’ll give you something. Jennavieve and Ben had a prenuptial agreement. Ben Pruitt had every reason in the world to kill Jennavieve.”

“A prenup?” Max picked up his pen and slid a pad of paper off of a stack at the end of the table. “Tell me about it.”

Anna smiled and crossed one leg over the other, her skirt sliding up just enough to expose a hint of the lace garter at the top of her expensive hosiery. “To begin with, you should know that my sister and I are rich. Not our own doing. Everything we have comes from our father and his father before him. My grandfather made a fortune in paper milling, a business he handed down. Our father diversified and built on what Grandfather did, and now Adler Enterprise is estimated to be worth nearly a billion dollars.”

“Are your parents alive still?”

“Mother died five years ago. Father is fighting bone cancer right now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He’s a tough old bird. A lesser man would have been dead by now.”

“With him being sick, who runs the . . . enterprise?”

“It’s a closely held corporation. He still owns the majority of the shares, but he gave his proxy to Jennavieve and me. Jennavieve has one vote more than me, so we won’t tie.”

“Excuse me if this seems indelicate, but what happens to those shares, now, if your father should pass on?”

Anna cast her eyes down as she prepared her response. When she raised her head and spoke, she seemed to be channeling Lauren Bacall from
The Big Sleep
, her eyelids weighted and her voice a note or two lower than before. “Detective, I know you have to ask these questions, and quite frankly I thought I had prepared myself for this before I came in here. But it’s difficult for me to sit here and think that a part of you, even a very tiny part, suspects that I may have had anything to do with my sister’s death.”

“I didn’t say that.” Max said.

Anna looked at Max with a quiet intensity that cut through the pretense. “You wouldn’t care about the control of my father’s company if that thought hadn’t crossed your mind. Or am I mistaken about that?”

Max kept his face expressionless and didn’t answer.

She held her gaze on Max for a few beats, then smiled, bringing a touch of warmth to her otherwise-serious features. “It’s a valid question, I suppose. As the will is written right now, I become the sole owner of Adler Enterprise after my father passes.”

“‘As the will is written right now’?”

“My father may be sick, Detective Rupert, but he still has his wits about him. If he thought for a second that I had anything to do with Jennavieve’s death, he’d cut me out.”

“Did you kill your sister? I mean, you have a pretty understandable motive, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Ben Pruitt killed my sister, and the motive is in the prenuptial agreement.”

“How is a prenuptial agreement a motive for murder?”

Anna leaned forward and, for the first time, deigned to put her fingertips on the edge of the table. “Jennavieve and I have trusts set up for us. My father wanted to make sure that we would never want for anything. When I heard that Jennavieve was dead, that she’d been murdered, I called our family attorney, the one who handles all of this stuff.”

“You learn that your sister is dead and your first call is to an attorney?”

Anna recoiled a little at Max’s accusation, and he could see anger seeping out from behind the stony façade that she struggled to maintain. “I’ve never been the weepy, sentimental type. That was Jennavieve. That was her weakness, not mine. I’m more like my father. My reactions start in my head, not my heart.”

“I suppose it takes a great deal of detachment to run an empire?”

“It’s not detachment, Detective. I feel for the loss of my sister; I miss her dearly. But you will excuse me if I choose to grieve in my own way. I will honor my sister, not by curling up into a fetal position and bawling my way through a box full of tissues, but by getting the man who killed her. That’s why I came here today—not to apologize to you for being strong, but to bring you something that could help put Ben Pruitt in prison.”

This woman was a piece of work. Max couldn’t tell if she was the strong, take-charge woman as she claimed, or a heartless manipulator. Either way, Anna Adler-King was a woman of considerable discipline. There would be no Perry Mason moment with this one.

“Okay,” Max said. “What do you have?”

“I asked our attorney to look at Jennavieve’s prenup and tell me what would happen if Jennavieve died versus what would happen if they got divorced.”

“Was your sister thinking about getting divorced?”

“I’m not sure. She never said anything to me directly, but I got the feeling that she wasn’t happy.”

“So what did the attorney say?”

“He said that if Jennavieve and Ben were to ever get divorced, they would trace their assets to determine who paid what. In other words, if they both own a car, and they each paid half, they would split the asset. But if Jennavieve paid for it with money from her trust, and she put it in both their names, the car would go to Jennavieve. The idea being that if they ever got divorced, the stuff they bought with Jennavieve’s trust money would go back to her.”

“And if she dies?”

Anna looked coolly into Max’s eyes. “If Jennavieve dies, all of the jointly owned assets go, by statute, to the co-owner.”

Max leaned back in his chair to let those words sink in. He remembered Dovey’s instruction to get him a motive so he could start the grand-jury proceeding. This had all the markings of a first-rate motive. “Do you have any notion of what they bought with trust money?”

Anna smiled. “Everything. Over the years, Jennavieve and I figured out that our father could never say no to us. We were able to raid the trust to buy just about anything we wanted. I know that Jennavieve paid for their mansion in Kenwood with trust money. And then there’s the cabin up north, the condo in Aruba and another in France. I don’t know the extent of it, but Jennavieve paid for pretty much everything they owned.”

“And Ben Pruitt’s name is on all those titles?”

“Co-owner and heir.”

“But we don’t know if there was any discussion about a divorce.”

“I can’t say. We had very different lives. We were both so busy that it became hard to get together.”

“If she were going to tell someone about her plans to get a divorce, who might she tell?”

“Honestly, Jennavieve didn’t have many close friends, not the kind she might confide something like that to. She lived for that foundation she ran, the one trying to protect the wetlands. Every time we got together, that was all she talked about. I think that if she had any friends close enough to answer your question, I’d look there.”

“You’ve been a great help, Mrs. Adler-King.”

“Thank you,” she said with a slight nod of her head. “So, you think Ben did it, don’t you?”

Max pursed his lips and gave Anna a slight shake of his head. “I can’t discuss a pending investigation in that way. You understand?”

Anna’s reply came back soft but firm, like a mother coaxing a child toward a predetermined conclusion. “What I understand, Detective Rupert, is that my sister is dead and my niece is with the man who killed her. I will stop at nothing to protect that little girl—the same way that I expect you to do whatever is necessary to put Ben Pruitt in prison. I hope to hear, very soon, that you’ve arrested Ben for my sister’s murder.”

Anna Adler-King rose from her chair, so Max stood as well. She stepped toward the door and he opened it for her. He understood that she was finished talking to him, so he didn’t attempt to change her mind or make her stay.

“You can get me copies of that prenup?”

“I’ll have it delivered,” she said. Then she turned to face him one last time. “I like you, Detective Rupert, and that’s not something I say to many people. I get the feeling that, like myself, you know full well my sister was killed by her husband. I have complete faith that you won’t let me down.”

With that, she turned and left.

Chapter 20

Ben took a moment to check on his daughter before re-creating his movements on the day that Jennavieve died. He returned to Boady’s study, closing the glass French doors with a quiet click. He informed Boady that Emma seemed to be engaged in drawing something on the sketch pad, and he didn’t dare interrupt her as it was her first sustained distraction from the events of the previous Friday. He sat back down, and Boady touched his pen to paper to signify the official start of their endeavor.

“Let’s start with your alibi,” Boady said. “We lock that in and we nip all this in the bud.”

“I’ve been going over that in my head all weekend,” Ben said. “To start with, I parked at the park-and-ride on Lexington. I don’t believe they have cameras, but I gave Rupert a receipt that has the time and date. Shuttle to the airport and on my flight by 10:15 in the morning. Taxi to the hotel—the downtown Marriott—paid on my Amex card.”

“So for that part of the trip, there can be no question that you flew to Chicago. What about the hotel? Did you notice any surveillance cameras?”

“I wasn’t looking for them, but I’m sure they have some. It’s a nice hotel.”

“I’ll send a letter to the Marriott’s security director requesting that he preserve the footage. I doubt they’ll give it to us, but if I know Max, he’ll be requesting it, if he hasn’t already. So you get to the Marriott, check in . . .”

“I check in, go to the room, unpack, then I go for a walk.”

“A walk?”

“The opening speeches started at noon, but it was just an overview of recent court cases. They give you that material on CD, so I opted to skip it.”

“Where did you go?”

“Took a stroll down Navy Pier. It was a beautiful day.”

“Any paper trail?”

“Let’s see . . . I bought a hot dog from a street vendor, but I paid cash. That’s about all I did there. Just walked around, taking in the fresh air.”

“What time did you get back to the hotel?”

“Just before one p.m. I went to a panel on white-collar sentencing trends and then one on protecting client assets, and after that . . . let’s see . . . oh yeah, a panel on preserving appellate issues. That was the last one of the day.”

“Anybody see you?”

“You know Michael Tanner? From Dugan & Fitch?”

“We’ve met.”

“He sat next to me at the panel on appellate issues.”

“Okay, we have only a single gap in time so far. Between check-in and when Tanner saw you on that last panel of the day. Maybe the hotel has video of the conference center.”

Ben looked puzzled. “Why do we care about those couple hours? They’re not going to suggest that I could have flown back here and killed Jennavieve in that time.”

“No, but we’re going to leave no holes. So the conference gets over at . . .”

“Five. Tanner invited me to join him and some friends in the hotel restaurant for dinner and drinks. I gave him a soft yes, but I wasn’t big on the idea.”

“Why?”

“Tanner’s one of those guys who . . . well, he’s kind of a pig. I’m not saying he actually cheats on his wife, but he sure does try. He calls every waitress ‘honey’ and chats up the lonely hearts in the room. I’ve never liked socializing with him because I never want to be put in a position of being a witness to that kind of crap.”

“Okay, so you stay in.”

“Right. I order room service—club sandwich and some fries—and watch TV.”

“Make any phone calls?”

“Just the one to Jennavieve around five. I wanted to say hi to Emma. Got no answer, so I sent a text.”

“We can get cell-phone tower data to show where that call originated. Any others?”

“No.”

“Go online at the hotel?”

“No.”

Boady raised a hand to his face and began stroking his light beard. “Any contact with anyone?”