The Trophy Wife (15 page)

“Dear Walter, Do what this man tells you. He's treating me very nice. If you pay him, he will let me go. If you don't, his friends will kill me. Don't talk to anyone, and don't call the cops or you will never see me again. I love you.”

His hands began to shake and a flood of nausea pushed up into his throat until he thought he was going to be sick. He was still listening to the terror in Emily's voice even though her words had gone silent. “Jesus, this can't be happening,” he whispered to himself. Then he shouted, “This can't be happening…”

A
NDREW
H
OGAN HEARD HIS
telephone ringing while he was still asleep. He was a kid in Brooklyn, hitching rides on the back of the old DeKalb Avenue trolley. For an instant, the telephone became the trolley car's bell. He sat upright in his bed and blinked at the phone as if it didn't belong on his night table. Then he lifted the receiver and managed a growl.

“Well, I'm certainly happy that I didn't take you up on your offer if this is the way you wake up,” Helen Restivo told him.

“And I'm thrilled you refused my marriage proposal. I'd hate to be living with someone who begins each day with a smile.” Hogan looked at his clock and saw that it was only a few minutes after five. “Jesus, it's
five o'clock!
I hope you've found Mrs. Childs, because otherwise there would be no reason for calling so early.”

“No, but we have the kidnappers,” Helen answered. “The two guys who lifted the lady from her bathtub. I think we should talk.”

“Now? At five o'clock.”

“I managed an appointment with the young Miss Childs. Her house, at nine. So I can't hang around for your bath and breakfast.”

Andrew was already padding across to his bathroom. “How about Rosie's in half an hour?”

“Okay! Last one there pays for the bagels.”

He stepped out of his doorway into the deserted West Side street. The pink light of the rising sun reflected in the top windows of the high-rise apartment buildings. But down in the caverns, it was still dark. He liked this time of day when the city was empty except for the occasional limo that carried the very important to their aircraft-carrier desks and the morning television personalities to their still lifeless sets. In his
years as a policeman, the early morning hours were the only moments of peace. Crime, which was a nuisance during the day, seemed to flourish in the late night hours. It reached its crescendo around two in the morning, when the drunks staggered into their apartments and confronted their families, when the partygoers stepped out into streets mined with muggers, when the addicts awoke from euphoria and found themselves twisted in agony. From midnight to 3:00
A.M.,
the air wailed with sirens and crackled with gunfire. There weren't enough ambulances to answer all the cries or enough gurneys to carry the bodies.

But then the frantic pace of violence suddenly exhausted itself. A blissful quiet settled over the city. Crime seemed to fall into a deep sleep, resting up for the next night's celebration. It was in this sunrise interval that a policeman could close his eyes and steal a moment of rest.

Rosie's was an all-night delicatessen in the theater district that Ed Sullivan had once credited with the best bagel in New York. Its owner didn't have time to shut everything down and then start everything up again in the few fleeting hours between the departure of the stage hands and the arrival of the financial types, so he just kept open around the clock. Helen was already at a table when Andrew arrived and she held up her bagel to remind him to pay for it.

While Andrew used both hands to align his first cup of coffee with his mouth, Helen briefed him on the night's activities. The fingerprints in the shower had identified two minor hoods with thick rap sheets filled with misdemeanors and small felonies. One had been picked up losing his fee for the kidnapping at an all-night poker game. “He should thank us,” Helen commented. “We got him out before he lost everything.” He had told them where to find his partner, who was picked up as he got off a bus from Atlantic City.

Hogan shook his head. A defrocked lawyer. A couple of gutter gamblers. How in hell could these guys be involved in a hundred-million bank fraud? It didn't make any sense.

Like the lawyer, the kidnappers had been hired by a computer voice over the telephone that had offered them a chance
to make ten thousand each. All they had been told was where the lady could be found and what they were supposed to do with her.

“They took her exactly the way we figured it,” Helen went on. “They cased the place and decided to get her in the garage as soon as she stepped out of the car. But they were late getting there.”

“Unbelievable,” Hogan interrupted.

“It gets worse,” Restivo said. “The lady was in the bathtub when they broke in and apparently she kicked the stuffing out of our boys before one of them finally managed to stick her with the needle. Then they rolled her in the shower curtain and carried her out to the car.

“They were supposed to leave her in a blue van that was going to be parked in one of the far-off sections of the Paramus Mall. But when they got there, they found two blue vans in the section and they didn't know which one she was supposed to go to. They drove around for a while, waiting for someone to move one of the vans, and then they loaded her into the one that was left. Last they saw of her, she was stuffed down on the floor between the seats, still wrapped in the curtain.”

“I don't suppose they noted the license plate.”

“No, and they're not even sure whether it was black or blue. One thinks it was a Ford. The other is sure it was a Dodge Caravan.”

Andrew scratched his head. “Do you think the people behind this are intentionally hiring idiots? Maybe making sure that they're jerks who would never get any ideas of their own? Either that, or they're amateurs themselves. It could be that whoever is running the show is picking his people off the post office wall. But what infuriates me is that it's working so well. We've nailed half of the people involved and still we're no closer to finding Mrs. Childs or the people who wanted her lifted.”

“Not so,” Helen said, smiling at the delicious secret she had been holding back. “Guess what the last entry on both of their rap sheets was?”

He looked suitably bewildered.

“Breaking and entering,” Helen told him. “At a home less than a quarter of a mile from the Childs residence.”

“What?” It was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a connection.

“And guess who rushed in to provide the two lads with defense counsel?”

Hogan smiled. “The Urban Shelter. Walter Childs' favorite charity.”

“Bingo!” Helen told him. “That damn charity is the link between the messenger, the kidnappers, and the victim. And the person it ties in to all three is the cheating husband.”

They sat for a moment staring at each other. Then Hogan said, “Why? He doesn't need to do this. He can have his trophy wife for the price of a divorce settlement. Expensive, but he can afford it. Why would he risk everything? Why would he associate himself with small-time crooks?”

“Maybe so he can show the directors just how much he loves the bank,” Helen said, reminding Hogan of a motive that he had dabbled with himself. “Maybe he's found the sure path to the top.”

Hogan allowed the possibility, but he didn't think any sane man would put everything in jeopardy just to get the edge in a race for the chairman's chair. “Unless,” he allowed, “the lovely Angela was getting tired of waiting. Could she be having second thoughts?”

“No way! Remember, I read all her computer mail. This lady wants the gold ring.”

“So then why does Walter Childs play games with his wife's safety?”

They fell into a morose silence. Then they began a meticulous, step-by-step review of the other possible suspects.

Angela came first. It was certainly possible that she had heard Walter talk about the disgraced lawyer who was involved in his charitable work and about a burglar who had been caught on his street. Small talk, to be sure. But if someone was thinking about accomplices in a kidnapping, it could be information that she would have noted carefully. And there
was no doubt about her motive. She wanted to become Mrs. President of the Bank and wife of the world's most brilliant financial light. Suppose Walter was dragging his feet about throwing over the mother of his children. Might she have not decided that he needed a little assistance? The fact was that Angela had the most to gain if Emily should turn up dead.

“We're forgetting the most obvious motive,” Andrew warned his friend. “There's a hell of a lot of money involved here. Let's, just for the minute, forget sexual favors and boardroom politics. Let's look at this as an uncomplicated kidnapping where someone is hoping to collect a record ransom.”

“Our tennis star,” Helen filled in. “He certainly has cased all the rich ladies in the neighborhood. So maybe he got tired of balling for dollars. He's counting on Emily Childs getting a big divorce settlement so that they can live happily ever after. And then Emily tells him that she'd rather spend the money herself, thank you!”

“Yeah,” Hogan said. “For a while, he was the obvious choice. But I can still see his face when we told him that she had been kidnapped. His jaw damn near fell off. He certainly looked surprised to me.” But then he added, “On the other hand, he probably gets a lot of acting practice pretending that he's madly in love.”

Helen got up to refill their coffee cups. She was thinking out loud when she returned to the table. “What about the other banker, Childs's rival for the presidency?”

“Mitchell Price,” he filled in.

“He was at the restaurant where Childs signaled that he'd pay the ransom,” Helen reminded him. “And Walter seems to think that Mitchell would do anything for the top job.”

That was true, Hogan admitted. Price, according to insiders, was slipping behind in the race. It might be that he would have absolutely no intention of harming Emily and no thought of ever collecting the ransom. He would simply count on his rival violating bank policy to save his wife, which would knock Walter out of the running. “What makes Price a reasonable suspect is the ransom note,” Walter told her. “The
kidnapper was positive that he would know instantly if Andrew called in the police. Price is one of the few people who would have that kind of access to top-level information.”

“What he doesn't know is that Walter might prefer the top job to his wife,” Helen interjected.

Andrew shook his head. “Who could figure a guy acting that way?”.

He noticed that Helen quickly broke off eye contact, busying herself with her purse and briefcase. And then he realized what he had just said. Once, many years ago, he had put his career ahead of the woman he loved. She was sitting right next to him. He had broken off their affair because of the risk to his professional reputation. He could have told the department to go to hell. He could have found another fine of work. But he had picked his career in preference to her. Wasn't that the root of Walter Childs's dilemma?

They parted company in the street, Andrew hailing a taxi that would take him crosstown to the bank and Helen headed toward the New Jersey hills and her meeting with Amanda Childs.

As she walked to her car, Helen thought about the one suspect that they hadn't discussed. Andrew Hogan was sick of his demeaning position at the bank, where he was clearly an employee who would never be admitted to the inner circle. He couldn't stomach being treated as an inferior. Nothing would give him greater satisfaction than to take one of these movers and shakers to the cleaners and fatten his pension at the directors' expense. Andrew would be the only one close to the affair who would have access to people like the two lowlifes she had just interviewed. And he spent his days studying all the loopholes in the banks security systems. Helen could imagine the joy that Andrew would have in orchestrating the perfect crime and then putting himself in a position to enjoy its intricacies. She hoped to God she was wrong but, to her mind, Andrew had fallen quite a way from the dedicated public servant who had addressed her graduating class.

* * *

Hogan knew that something was wrong as soon as he reached his office. There was a security guard standing beside the open outer doorway. Inside, his secretary was sitting perfectly upright at her desk, her head twitching toward the open door to the inner office. “Mr. Childs,” she whispered, identifying the subject of her pantomimed warning. “He had security let him in. He was here when I came and then he made me open your office.”

Hogan smirked, and slowly shook his head. “Who can understand people who love power?” he said to the woman, causing her stunned expression to relax into a smile.

But Andrew stopped chuckling when he saw Walter Childs. The man was pacing in aimless circles, his eyes black against the white pallor of his face. He stopped moving when he realized that Hogan had entered the office, but stood dumbly as if Hogan were the last person he expected to find.

“Are you all right, Walter? What happened?”

Walter's response was to hold out a tape cassette that he had been carrying in his hand. Hogan reached out and took it.

“What is it?” he asked, turning toward his cassette player.

“It's a phone call I received last night. Emily's machine copied it while I was listening to it on her extension.”

Hogan snapped on the player and listened impatiently to the hiss. Then the smug, self-assured voice resonated through the office. He felt weak as he listened to the ransom demands and the threats. When Emily Childs's voice came on, Andrew Hogan collapsed into his chair. “Jesus,” was the only comment he could think of.

“What do we do now?” Walter said, his voice cracking from fear and fatigue.