Cold Open, A Sam North Mystery (21 page)

Chapter Fifty-Two

“No way in hell,” Freddie said as he pulled up next to a hydrant in front of the Manhattan Yoga Project on Prince Street in Soho. “Absolutely no way in hell Jack Steele was cheating on Robbie Steele,” he said.

“I’m not saying he was,” I said. “But he gets a prepaid phone so no one knows who he’s talking to. Now, my guess is, it’s related to his digging up dirt on McConnell, or—”

“Or something else,” he said. “Man would have to be nuts to run around on someone like her.”

I opened the door and stepped out as two women in great shape and dressed for a workout walked past. Freddie watched them go to the door that led upstairs to the yoga studio.

“If you’re not out in sixty seconds, I’m coming in,” he said.

I climbed the stairs to the studio and walked into a small reception area. I was greeted by a young gal behind the counter, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and wearing a gray tank top with enough signs of sweat to tell me she had just worked out.

I told her I was here to see Robbie, and she pointed to a class under way in a studio on the other side of a glass partition.

“The class will be over in a few minutes,” she said, and offered me something to drink.

“We have green or black tea, and water, of course.”

“Of course.”

“So … water?” she asked.

“Why not?” I said.

She got up and went into a little side room behind her desk, then emerged with a plastic bottle of water. The label on it appeared to be in French. I didn’t see an English translation. I thanked her and glanced in at the studio to see Robbie leading the group in a stretch that looked both painful and probably illegal in some states.

“She’s been through so much,” the young receptionist said, watching me watch Robbie.

I opened my bottle of French water and took a drink. I found the English translation. It said it was from a spring in the mountains. “She certainly has,” I said. “How’s she holding up?”

“Pretty good, I mean, let’s face it, her husband wasn’t universally loved,” she said.

“No, he wasn’t.”

I went over and sat down on a small couch in the corner that felt like it was filled with straw. I was willing to bet it was made with organically grown hemp from the Andes or somewhere.

“Did you know him?” she asked. “Jack Steele.”

“I did. Worked with him, as a matter of fact.”

Her eyes widened, and her little smile broadened. “Oh my God. You’re that guy,” she said. She was very excited now.

“Yes. Yes, I am that guy,” I said.

“The guy, you know …”

“Yes, I do know.”

“The guy on TV. On Liberty. You had the story on Jack’s death,” she said.

“I did.”

I had more French mountain water while she tried unsuccessfully to compose herself. “Oh my gosh, what was that like?” she asked.

She had been friendly and fun when I walked in, but she was close to crossing over into scary now.

“Not the most enjoyable story.”

“Oh, I can imagine,” she said.

Something told me if this conversation continued, I was going to be called “poor thing” at some point. It needed to stop, and thankfully it did when Robbie walked into the reception area. She was drenched in sweat but still managed to look great.

“Manhattan’s female elite adequately stretched out for the day?” I asked.

Robbie smiled at my new fan. “Heather, I’ll be in the office if anyone is looking for me.”

She led me into the little room behind reception and closed the door. She sat down on a low chair across the room, and I took a matching one by the door. The room was quiet and filled with little vases of bamboo plants. I expected we were either going to talk or meditate

“What do you need to know?” she asked. She was all business.

“I may have partially solved the question of the phone call that night,” I said. “The one there’s no record of.”

“Was never a question to me,” she said.

“Jack had someone at Liberty run out and buy him a prepaid phone about six weeks ago. He ever mention it?”

She shook her head.

“You have any idea it existed?”

Another shake of the head.

“It would explain why there was no trace, no record of a call, on any of the other phones,” I said.

“Can we find it, the phone?” she asked.

“I’ll try,” I said, knowing full well that was never going to happen. For all I knew, it could be sitting on the bottom of the East River.

Now that I had given Robbie the good news, I needed to get a question cleared up. What if Jack
had
been having an affair? Hell, what if he was actually going out to meet her that night, and maybe a jealous boyfriend or husband showed up?

It was a whole other direction, but I needed to make sure there was nothing there. I had a plan, a strategy, for bringing it up. Now, I’m not saying it was a good plan, but it was the only one I had.

“Robbie, the YouTube clip,” I said, of the embarrassing reminder of his slip with the production assistant.

She nodded. So far, so good.

“Were there any other …” I stalled and hemmed and hawed and was unable to finish the sentence. It was like my command of the language had slipped away.

“Any other what?” she asked.

“Any other … incidents?” I said, blurting it out.

“You mean other incidents of my husband making out with someone a third his age, like he was a drunken frat boy?”

“Yes, that’s where I was going.”

She glared and said nothing, and after a few moments it became even more uncomfortable. “May I ask why you want to know if he was screwing somebody on the side? That is what you’re hinting at, correct?”

There was something about the conversation that was upsetting the balance and calm in the room.

“Why don’t we call it ‘having relations’?” I asked.

“If you prefer the biblical,” she said.

“I need to know because if Jack bought a phone so no one would know who he was calling, well …”

I let it hang there, and she let it hang there, too, allowing me to twist in the wind. The room was silent, and oh how I longed for some distraction to end this little session of pain. Finally, Robbie took mercy on me.

“No,” she said, “as far as I know, Jack was not having an affair. Does that answer your question?”

“Yes.”

Chapter Fifty-Three

“Maybe Jack had strayed in the past,” Liz said.

“Could be. Would explain the hostility from her,” I said.

“You were flat-out asking her if her dead husband had been sleeping with anybody behind her back,” Freddie said. “Be enough for most people to be hostile.”

We were sitting in a booth of the Old Town Bar on Eighteenth Street. It was after eleven, and the place was quiet.

“So we know he wasn’t using this phone for extracurriculars,” I said.

“And Robbie says she’s certain he spoke to someone that night,” Liz said.

“Someone we think he was going to meet at Thirty-fourth Street,” Freddie said.

“And someone he was unthreatened by, being that he left the gun at home,” I said.

“But without phone records it’s all guesswork,” Freddie said.

And it was. But it felt like guessing was all we could do at the moment.

I took a long pull on my Guinness and glanced at the TV above the bar. It was tuned to CNN. The host of the ten o’clock show was sitting in the studio interviewing some guy on a subject neither seemed to be excited about. More “must-see” TV.

“Why Thirty-fourth Street?” Liz asked. She was sipping a glass of pinot noir from a winery out on the Island.

“What do you have over there?” Freddie asked.

“The heliport,” I said. “Bet you Jack was familiar with that.”

“But that’s long closed for the day by the time he got there,” Freddie said. “So it’s not like someone choppered in, pushed him in the river, and choppered back out.”

“So maybe Jack didn’t pick the spot,” Liz said.

Freddie was sitting opposite us, with his back to the door and looking at the TV at the other end of the bar.

“There’s your boy,” he said.

I looked up and saw more footage of Buck McConnell. It was new stuff: McConnell getting out of the back door of his car and walking into the IT&E headquarters in Houston. He had the confident stride of someone who actually believed he should be running the country.

On the banner along the bottom was the latest news:

“Buck McConnell expected to announce White House run in NY speech next week”

It was Friday night, and according to that, sometime soon the man I was sure was behind Jack Steele’s death was going to tell us all he was running for president.

“Water,” Liz said.

We both looked at her. She looked at me, then Freddie.

“Water,” she said again, like it was a major revelation.

“You thirsty?” I asked.

“Maybe access to water had something to do with the location,” she said.

I looked at Freddie, and he was already staring at me.

“Barnes,” he said. “The man was a boater.”

“The SoundSafe guy,” Liz said. “Maybe that’s who Jack was going out to meet.”

“The guy knew the waterways,” I said. “But it’s hard for me to believe one of his beat-up old boats would handle coming all the way down the sound, through Hell Gate, and into the East River.”

“You think that guy was going to shy away from a challenge?” Freddie asked. “Especially if he had a chance to nail Buck McConnell?”

I looked up at the TV again. The newsreader was talking, and a box over her shoulder displayed McConnell’s grinning mug.

“When I was on the boat with Barnes he said voters need to know what kind of person McConnell is,” I said.

“He’s the kind of guy who sells his equipment all over the world, making bribes for contracts,” Freddie said. “Real upstanding, by-the-book kind of guy.”

“But would that be enough for Barnes to try and come all the way down here in the middle of the night to meet Jack?” Liz asked.

“I think Barnes knew he had to act,” I said. “I think he realized now was time to even the score with Buck McConnell.”

“That a yes?” Freddie asked.

“It is,” I said.

Chapter Fifty-Four

“You think she’s going to show?” I asked as we drove down Water Street in Norwalk.

“Ladies always show up when I call,” Freddie said.

“Attracted by your modesty, I guess.”

It was just before eight on Saturday morning when we pulled into the parking area in front of the SoundSafe building. We were the only vehicle in the lot.

“We still have a few minutes,” Freddie said, reading my mind.

“Before you get stood up.”

“Before
we
get stood up,” he said.

“Oh, sure. Now it’s we.”

We sat and waited for Jennifer, Freddie’s new crunchy granola friend, to show up and give us access to Barnes’s phone records to see if he had placed a call to Jack the night was killed.

“How’d she sound, you know, when you spoke to her?”

“She was a mess,” he said.

“Lost a boss, maybe more,” I said.

“Don’t think so. Don’t think they were lovers. But that’s just a hunch,” he said.

We had the windows down, and I pulled in a deep breath of the saltwater air. Freddie turned and watched the handful of cars pass by.

“That’s the third time,” he said.

I looked over. “For?”

“That white van, one with the ladder on top.”

I spotted it at the light, heading away from the sound. “Like a painter’s van or something,” I said.

“I prefer the ‘or something.’ Guy was behind us on Ninety-five on the way up.”

“Where’d you pick him up?”

“Back around New Rochelle,” he said.

“Got Connecticut plates,” I said.

“I know. Must have had some business in New York early, then comes back up to Connecticut and happens to get off the same exit we do,” he said.

“And just so happens to need to come down here to Water Street by the sound,” I said.

“What a coincidence,” Freddie said.

“Or not.”

The light changed, and the van drove slowly away.

“So … follows us down,” I said, “sees where we’re parking, turns around, and heads on his way?”

“If you’re paranoid, that’d be what you’re thinking,” he said.

A tan Prius slowed at the entrance with its blinker on and took a left into the lot to join us.

“Here comes your gal,” I said.

“Our gal.”

The Prius pulled in next to us. We got out, and Freddie went over to greet Jen. She stepped out dressed in a sundress that was damn near the same as the one she’d had on the other day. Maybe it had been a buy-one-get-one-free promo or something.

They hugged, and Freddie comforted her like they went way back. He was good that way, making people feel relaxed around him, and you would have thought they had known each other for years, not days.

I went around to give my condolences and kept an eye on the street for the painter’s van. “Thanks for meeting us,” I said.

“I needed to get in here and go through the mail and sort through the messages that came in,” she said, wiping away a tear. “The funeral is Monday, you know.”

She seemed like a sweet kid.

She unlocked the door and we all walked in. She flipped on the lights and got settled at her desk and took out an Apple MacBook Air notebook computer for herself, then unlocked the lower desk drawer and took out another one for us. A minute later we were set up at one of the desks across from her, logged on to Barnes’s e-mail, and accessing his Verizon Wireless account.

She asked if we’d like coffee and went back to a little table to get the coffee things together, and a moment later Freddie and I joined her there as the coffee brewed.

“The police found a leak in the fuel line,” she said.

“And what, something triggered the explosion?” Freddie asked.

She poured a cup of coffee and added a little sugar and milk. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes.

“Mike liked to sneak cigarettes when he was out on the water,” she said.

I thought back to when I was out with him. I hadn’t seen any sign he was a smoker. No cigarette pack tucked in a cubbyhole anywhere. No ground-out butts anywhere.

“They think he may have been smoking and the cigarette fell on the deck, or somehow landed somewhere and sparked the explosion,” she said.

She seemed to take comfort in the theory, like it all made sense. I had a strong suspicion it
didn’t
all make sense, but I was not going to share that with her. I had no idea what, if anything, she knew about Barnes and his past and his connection to McConnell.

We went back to our seats, but this time Freddie pulled up a chair next to her. I had told her I was doing a story on dumping in the sound, and I needed to see when Barnes had contacted the suspected dumper. She seemed to buy it.

I started back in July and scanned the e-mails. There were a number of exchanges with people who had e-mailed him with sightings of dumpers. They all had a theme of, “I caught ’em red-handed.”

To all of them Barnes responded with businesslike politeness, thanking them for their tip and vigilance, and saying he would mark their info down on his list of places to check. The
e-mail traffic was light during early July, and I checked the Save and then the Sent folders for anything of interest.

It was when I was scanning the Sent folder that I saw the message.

To: [email protected]

Subject: B. McConnell

Barnes had sent it on July 14, a few nights after Jack’s first report on IT&E and their equipment winding up where it shouldn’t be. I wanted to jump up and shout but decided against it. I lifted my eyes and looked across at Freddie, and we made eye contact, then I opened the e-mail.

No way Buck McConnell makes it to the White House. Forget your story on that IT&E junk. I got something that that will really nail him.

I reread it, and it answered one question for me. Yes, Michael Barnes had contacted Jack Steele to tell him about the drug bust. But that was it. There were no other e-mails at least in the Save folder, that were related to this. No reply from Jack, no back and forth. Just a copy of the one sitting in the Sent folder.

I looked across at Freddie.

“Hey, look at this,” I said, “an e-mail to Liberty News. How about that?”

Freddie looked at me like I was mad, but Jen spoke up before he could say anything. “Yeah, Mr. Left Wing Environmentalist Mike Barnes actually watched Liberty. He would never admit it to anyone but me,” she said. “I mean, no offense to you guys, you seem real nice, but it’s not for me.”

“No need to apologize,” I said. “I get that all the time. Who’d he like?”

“Jack Steele. And that other guy, the younger guy on before him,” she said.

I nodded, and Freddie chatted her up while I went back to work. But I had confirmation of what I had suspected. Barnes was a closet Liberty watcher.

I brought up the window with the Verizon account info and clicked on the page listing all the calls to and from Barnes’s phone and scrolled back to July. None of these numbers jumped out at me. They were all just phone numbers I didn’t recognize.

It was on July 26 that I saw the number of an outgoing call from Barnes just a week after the email. It was a number that belonged to Liberty: 212-555-0133. It was called at 9:35 p.m. that night and then showed up again on July 30, around the same time, and then August 2 at just before ten p.m. It was called again at 9:47 p.m. on August 8, the day before Jack was found dead in the river.

It was the only sign of contact between Barnes and Liberty, and I stared at it and tried to place it: 555-0100 was the switchboard; 555-0140 was the assignment desk.

I looked across at Freddie, who was thumbing through a copy of the
Times
. I picked up the phone on the desk, and Freddie gave me a passing glance. Jen was tapping away at her keyboard. I punched in the numbers and it rang. Once. Then twice. On the third ring it went to voicemail.

“You’ve reached the desk of Marty Glover, executive producer of …”