“Jane Sebring was genuinely upset by all this,” Leigh commented after a moment.
“I’m not surprised. She probably thinks she’s the widow.”
Leigh looked sharply at her. Although Sheila’s chocolate wool suit was without a crease and her blond hair was swept up into a chignon without a hair out of place, there were dark blue smudges beneath her eyes, and her voice was taut with exhaustion and annoyance. “Why did you say that?”
“Because it’s perfectly obvious to me that Jane Sebring wants to be you. She can’t stand being second-best in anything. When she couldn’t make it on Broadway, she went to Hollywood, took off her clothes for the camera, and won an Academy Award. But that wasn’t enough. Now she’s come back to Broadway to claim what she regards as her birthright, and you’re in her way. In her mind, you’ve ‘stolen’ what is rightfully hers. She feels entitled to your, enormous talent, your success in the legitimate theater and everything else you have.”
“Unfortunately, that attitude is not all that unusual in my business, Sheila.”
Sheila crossed her feet at the ankles, and sighed. “I know. She’s just so damned greedy and competitive. I’ll never understand what possessed Jason to put her in his play in the first place. She has a reputation for causing trouble with everyone she’s ever worked with.”
“Money was the reason,” Leigh said wearily. “Jason’s backers wanted her because she’s a fantastic box-office draw.”
“Not like you are.”
“She draws movie fans into the theater, which is something I don’t. She was a bonus—an insurance policy the backers wanted.”
Sheila said nothing after that, and Leigh closed her eyes, trying not to wonder, to think, to place any particular significance on what Sheila had said. But she couldn’t do it. She drew in a long, unsteady breath and kept her eyes closed, but her voice was determined. “Sheila?”
“Yes.”
“Are you trying to tell me something you think I should know—”
“Like what?”
“Was Logan having an affair with Jane Sebring?”
Sheila was instantly apologetic. “I should have realized that we’re both too exhausted to put coherent thoughts together. I wasn’t trying to tell you anything of the kind. In fact, I watched her when she stopped by your party for a few minutes. She was hanging on Logan, but he did everything to cool her down, short of dousing her with the ice in his glass.”
Leigh swallowed and forced words past the knot of emotion in her throat. “Let me put the question a different way: Do you think it’s possible Logan was having an affair with her?”
“Anything is ‘possible.’ It’s possible Logan might have taken up hang-gliding next week or joined the circus. Why are you pursuing this, Leigh?”
Leigh opened her eyes and looked directly at Sheila. “Because the last time you developed a severe personal dislike for a woman that we all knew socially, it turned out Logan was having an affair with her and you knew it.”
Sheila returned her gaze unflinchingly. “That was a meaningless fling, and you understood why it happened. The two of you worked through that together.”
Leigh pushed that painful memory to the back of her mind. Logan’s fling had not been “meaningless” to her. “I’ve tried to convince myself that Logan’s murder was a random act committed by some homeless, local madman who thought Logan was trespassing or something,” Leigh said. “There’s just one thing about that theory that doesn’t work.”
“What’s that?”
“The gun they found in Logan’s car was registered to him. He bought it in March. Why would Logan buy a gun and carry it? Is it possible he was in some sort of trouble?”
Instead of giving her an answer, Sheila studied her intently and asked a question of her own. “What sort of trouble could he have been in?”
Leigh lifted her hands, palms up. “I don’t know. He was involved in dozens of business ventures, but he didn’t seem to be particularly worried about any one of them. Even so, there were times lately when he seemed distinctly worried about something.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“Of course. He said he wasn’t worried. Maybe ‘worried’ was the wrong word for me to use just now. He seemed very preoccupied.”
Sheila smiled knowingly. “Would you call it ‘unusual’ for Logan to be preoccupied about business or money?”
She meant that to be a reassurance, Leigh knew, but in her present, conflicted state of mind, Leigh couldn’t find much solace in anything. “No, of course not. You and I both know there isn’t enough money in the world to make Logan feel absolutely secure.”
“Because of his childhood,” Sheila reminded her.
“I know. But has Logan ever said or done anything that might have made you think—”
“I’m a psychiatrist, not a psychic. Let the police solve this. You and I aren’t equipped to do it.”
“You’re right,” Leigh said, but long after Sheila left, Leigh sat alone in the dark, asking herself questions she couldn’t answer, tortured by the fear that she might never have the answers.
For some reason, Logan had bought and carried a gun.
For some reason, someone had murdered him in cold blood.
Leigh wanted reasons. She wanted answers. She wanted justice!
But most of all—most of all—she wanted the same thing Jane Sebring wanted. She wanted to wake up and discover that this was all a nightmare.
Chapter 35
* * *
McCord slid a videotape of Logan Manning’s funeral service into a VCR on the credenza behind his desk, pressed the fast-forward button, and turned on the monitor. “As we already know, Valente wasn’t there yesterday, but it turns out he sent in an emissary who slipped right past us, unnoticed.” As he spoke he handed out three copies of a composite photograph to Sam, Shrader, and Womack. “This is his cousin, Dominick Angelini,” he said.
The composite contained several photographs of a male in his mid to late thirties, all of them shot from different angles and at different times. In one of the photographs, he was carrying a briefcase and walking up the steps of the federal court building. Sam didn’t recognize him, and she’d not only attended all the funeral activities, she’d also watched the videotape before she went home for the night.
“The photograph of him in front of the federal court building was taken in August, and it’s the latest one,” McCord provided. “A federal grand jury had subpoenaed him to testify about Valente’s accounting and business practices.”
“I don’t remember seeing this guy yesterday,” Womack said. At fifty, Steve Womack was five feet ten with thinning gray hair, a wiry, slender build, and a face that was completely forgettable except for a pair of pale blue, keenly intelligent eyes that looked even more so behind the powerful lenses of his silver-rimmed glasses. Despite his insistence that he was ready to return to work after his recent surgery, Sam noticed that he rubbed his left shoulder frequently, as if it were hurting him. He was unassuming but sharp, and she was inclined to like him.
“I didn’t see him either,” she said.
“He wasn’t there,” Shrader stated emphatically.
“You’re right, he wasn’t,” McCord said as he passed out three sets of pages containing nothing but signatures. “With the Widow Manning’s kind permission,” he explained, “I took the guest book yesterday and made copies of it last night. I thought it would make a handy list of Manning’s friends and associates for us, but if you’ll take a look at page fourteen, I think you’ll spot what will now be an interesting name to you.”
Sam spotted the signature at the same time Shrader did. “Mario Angelini?” he said.
“That’s the way I read it, too, so this morning I watched the videotape of each person signing the guest book, while I ticked off their names, and this is what I discovered. . . .” He turned to the VCR on the credenza. The videotape had already stopped at the end, and he did a quick, brief rewind; then he pressed the
play button as he said, “This is the best shot we have of Valente’s emissary, Mrs. Marie Angelini.” The tape showed a well-dressed, gray-haired woman with her hands in Leigh Manning’s.
“What’s the relationship?” Shrader asked.
“Marie Angelini is Valente’s aunt. She raised him along with her sons, Angelo and Dominick. Angelo died in a fight twenty-five years ago, when he was in his early twenties. Dominick, whose picture you have, became a CPA and has a firm of his own. Guess who his biggest client is?”
“Valente,” Womack said.
McCord nodded. “Right—Valente in all his many and varied corporate entities. One of those entities, a very minor one, is a large restaurant and market in the East Village called Angelini’s. According to the records filed with the secretary of state in Albany, Marie Rosalie Angelini is the sole owner, but when the Feds were investigating Valente, they discovered that he put up all the capital for the new restaurant and the expansion of the original market next door. He also owns the buildings they’re in.”
“I’ve heard of Angelini’s,” Sam said, startled. “It’s very popular. It takes weeks to get a reservation.”
“The market and the restaurant are both cash businesses,” Womack put in, “which makes them a very convenient place for Valente to launder some money.”
“That’s what the state prosecutors think, but they haven’t been able to prove it.” McCord paused to turn off the VCR; then he looked at the people gathered around his desk. “Now let’s talk about what we know, and what we need to find out. Right now, all we know is that someone held Manning’s thirty-eight to his right temple and blew his brains out. Then they wiped their prints off the gun, wrapped Manning’s hand around it and fired it again, this time through the open window on the passenger side of the vehicle.
“The lab is still going over all the fibers, hairs, and particles that CSU collected from the vehicle and the house, but that’s going to take time and I’m not counting on any great revelations from the lab. I think it’s possible, even likely, that Valente and Leigh Manning were at the cabin together at some point, cleaning up. We know Manning drank wine with someone before he died, but both glasses had been rinsed—with snow, I presume—and then carefully wiped clean of all prints. The floor in the closet was coated in dust, but the rest of the floor was freshly swept to make certain we couldn’t get any footprints.”
He reached for a yellow tablet and glanced at his notes before he said, “That’s all we know right now. In order to build our case against Valente, we need to establish that he’s involved with Leigh Manning. We also need to find out if Logan Manning knew about it. If he suspected his wife was screwing Valente, then he probably told somebody else. We need to find out who he talked to, and what he said. I’d like to know why he suddenly invited Valente to his home for a party, and I’d like to know the real reason he bought that gun. I think it’s possible he bought it because of Valente. It’s even possible that he invited Valente to the cabin in the mountains and threatened him with it. Or tried to use it on him.
“Leigh Manning isn’t going to talk to us about Valente, but you can bet she’s confided some of the tender details of her affair to someone else, probably another woman. I’ve never met a woman yet who could keep an extramarital affair a total secret. We need to find out who she’s talked to and what she’s said.
“On the other hand, I can guarantee you that Valente hasn’t talked to anyone about anything, so there’s no point in looking for his confidants. I’m getting Valente’s telephone records, but don’t count on seeing any calls to Leigh Manning on them. He’s too cagey for that. He’ll have used a phone that can’t be traced to him.”
Womack rubbed his shoulder as he said, “I just want to be clear on what we’re after, Lieutenant. Obviously, we want to hang Manning’s murder on Valente. But when I talked to Captain Holland this morning, I got the impression that we’re also trying to use the Manning murder investigation as a means to investigate Valente from other aspects, too.”
“The answer to that question has three parts, so listen very closely, Womack: One, we want to hang Manning’s murder on whoever killed him and whoever conspired with the killer. I have no doubt that Valente conspired with Leigh Manning in that murder. Two, we want to use this murder investigation as a means to investigate Valente from every possible angle. That should be easier for us to do than it was for the Feds because in the process of investigating a murder at the local level, we’ll be able to get our local judges to sign wiretap authorizations, search warrants, and whatever else we need. Three—and this is just as important as number one and number two—Captain Holland isn’t calling the shots in this investigation, I am. I report to Commissioner Trumanti, and for the duration of this investigation, you report to me, not Captain Holland. Is that clear?”
Womack looked fascinated and agreeable, but not particularly intimidated. “I hear you, Lieutenant.”
“Good. In the future, if you have any further questions or comments, you take them to me, not Captain Holland. I’ll keep him informed as I see necessary. Is that also clear?”
Womack nodded, and McCord looked satisfied. “We’ve already had one setback with Valente.”
“What setback is that?” Shrader asked.
“Ever since the media found out Leigh Manning was with Valente in his helicopter last week, they’ve been speculating and investigating on their own, and stirring up a stink in the process. Valente knows it, and he’ll be even more careful than usual. Our job is to get information about him from witnesses, without appearing to be too interested in him.”
“Too bad we couldn’t ask the media to back off,” Shrader said.
McCord gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Don’t even think about it. If you ask reporters to back off on an investigation like this one, they not only intensify it, they start investigating you, looking for a connection or complicity.”
He walked over to the chalkboard and picked up a piece of yellow chalk. “Okay, let’s start talking to people. Thanks to Mrs. Manning, we have carte blanche to question everyone she and Manning knew, including their shrink and Manning’s business associates. Let’s start with the names she mentioned, make out a preliminary list, and see where they lead us.”
He wrote down four names in the top left-hand corner: Jason Solomon, Sheila Winters, Theta Berenson, Sybil Haywood. “Naturally, we’ll want to talk to the people at Manning’s office as well.” As he said that he wrote Manning Development under Sybil Haywood’s name. He paused and looked over his shoulder. “There’s one more person we should talk to soon.” He wrote Jane Sebring’s name on the board, then turned and said, “I was watching that videotape last night, and it seemed to me that Miss Sebring seemed unusually sympathetic and distraught for an ambitious, self-centered sex goddess with a reputation for using everybody she knows to get whatever she wants.”
“Where did you hear that about her?” Shrader asked, his forehead furrowed.
“It was in the Enquirer last week.”
Shrader laughed out loud. “You read the Enquirer, Lieutenant?”
“Of course not. I happened to notice the article on the front page”—as he finished the sentence he looked at Sam and smiled as if sharing a private joke with her—“while I was standing in line at the grocery store.”
Instead of sharing his little joke, Sam lifted her brows and looked at him with an expression of “And so?”
He actually looked a little rebuffed by her distant reaction. “Shrader,” he continued, “you and Womack start interviewing the people at Manning’s office today—” He broke off to answer the telephone. “McCord,” he said irritably, but his expression cleared within moments. He hung up and looked at the three detectives. “The Good Samaritan who rescued Leigh Manning the night of her accident has just turned up.”
“Where is he?” Shrader asked.
“Downstairs with his attorney. He wants to make a deal before he’ll talk to us.”
“What kind of de
al?” Womack asked quickly.
“I don’t know, but let’s find out.”
Chapter 36
* * *
Shrader and Womack watched through the two-way mirror as the man they’d dubbed the “Good Samaritan” sat down with his attorney in the interviewing room. McCord and Littleton sat down across the table from them.
“I’m Julie Cosgrove,” the attorney said, “and this is Mr. Roswell.” Roswell was in his mid-sixties, with a dissipated, weathered face, bad teeth, and a guilty, nervous smile. His jacket was torn at the right elbow, and the soiled cap that he politely removed as he sat down proclaimed him to be an aficionado of Coors.
“Mr. Roswell has answers to all your questions,” the attorney continued. “However, we want your assurance that if he gives you a statement, nothing he tells you here will be used to prosecute him.”
McCord leaned back in his chair, idly tapping his pencil on the yellow pad he’d carried into the interview room, until Roswell squirmed in his chair and looked uneasily at his attorney. “Just what does he think we would prosecute him for?” McCord said finally. “Other than withholding information and leaving the scene of an accident.”
“He didn’t leave the scene of the accident, he brought the victim to a safe location and asked someone to phone for help. As far as withholding information goes, his Fifth Amendment rights allow him to withhold information that might be self-incriminating. He’s here now because Mr. Manning was found murdered, and it’s been on the news that you thought there could be a connection between the murderer and whoever found Mrs. Manning that night and then disappeared.”
“What is it that he’s afraid we will prosecute him for?” McCord repeated implacably.
The attorney cleared her throat. “For operating a motor vehicle without a valid New York driver’s license on the night of November twenty-ninth.”
In comparison to the things Sam had been imagining, that was such a minor offense it was nonsensical, and she pressed her lips together to hide a wayward smile. Even McCord’s voice lost its edge. “Since that offense was not committed within my jurisdiction, I can’t guarantee that. However, I can guarantee that I will not feel inclined to report what I now know to the local authorities in the Catskills or to the state police. Will that suffice?”