Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (14 page)

“The police took it.”

“Were they in here early yesterday morning? Like around seven?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I got a call from her line.”

“From here?”

“Yes.”

Emma was quiet before responding. “I got here at maybe five past eight. Doors were locked. The police hadn’t arrived yet.”

“Does anyone else have keys?”

“Sure. Lots of people. But nobody was in yesterday besides me and a couple of other folks later on. I was here alone most of the day.”

I could tell she was spooked. “I’m sure it was a mistake,” I said, trying to assure her. “Maybe the cleaners came in and mistakenly hit redial. Can we check the last calls that came in to her phone on Friday?”

“Oh gosh,” Emma stammered. “The system only stores a limited number of calls, and I’ve been fielding calls from donors at her desk since yesterday.”

I pulled open the top drawer. “Where’s her agenda?”

Emma looked at me like she didn’t know what I was talking about. “I keep track of her schedule electronically.”

“Olivia keeps a date book at work. It’s green. Leather. Did the police take that, too?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

I rifled through Olivia’s desk drawers and file cabinets. There was no agenda anywhere. “I give up,” I finally said, throwing my hands in the air.

Emma offered to email me Olivia’s work schedule from the past weeks. With it, I’d be able to see everyone she’d met with recently, and start cold-calling the ones that seemed out of the ordinary.

“You have my email address?” I confirmed.

“I think so.”

“I’ll give it to you again, just in case.” I opened the top drawer of Olivia’s desk and found a pen and a pad of paper. I flipped through it looking for a clean sheet. Midway through, a piece of paper fell to the floor. I bent over to pick it up and froze. It was a Xeroxed copy of a birth certificate.
My
birth certificate.
How did she get it?
I’d never given it to her. The only copy I had was in a lockbox in my apartment, along with my mother’s death certificate and other important documents. My heart pounded as I wrote out my email address for Emma and handed the pad to her. Then I slipped my birth certificate in my purse without her noticing.
Why, Olivia, did you have this?
First the text and now this. Exactly how many secrets were you hiding from me?

I had dinner at my desk, watched Georgia’s show from the control room, and piled into the van with Aaron and Dino to go ambush André, otherwise known as Andrew Kaminski. We planted our van around the corner at half past ten. I spotted him about ten minutes later, coming down the street on foot, from the direction of the subway. This time he was dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and a beat-up brown leather jacket. As he came near us, two thoughts popped into my mind. The first was that André Kaminski was sexy enough to lure an unhappy Connecticut housewife away from her husband. The second was that our viewers would love him, no matter what he had to say—or what he’d done. A sick fact about the American viewing public: Good looks trump all. Take Scott Peterson, for example. He received two marriage proposals and bags of love letters
after
he was convicted of killing Laci, his pregnant wife.

I jumped out of the van, a mic gripped in my left hand. Dino slid out on the other side of the van, waiting for my signal.

“Hey,” Kaminski said, slowing to a stop. “I was hoping I might see you again.”

I motioned to Dino, who came out, the camera hoisted on his shoulder. He gave me the thumbs up sign with his free hand. Kaminski shaded his eyes from the bright light of the camera. “What the hell? What’s going on?”

“You don’t mind if I ask you a few questions, do you?”

He glanced toward the Haverford. “I thought I told you. I’m not supposed to talk to the press anymore.” His voice was low and edged with panic. “You’re gonna get me fired.”

“Is it true that you were sleeping with Rachel Rockwell?”

He glanced at the camera. If it hadn’t been there, I might have had a shot at hearing the truth. Instead Kaminski dug his hands in the front pocket of his jeans and tried to shoulder past me.

I moved to the side, blocking his path, and tried again. “I heard you used to train Rachel Rockwell in Connecticut. Is it true that you two were having an affair?” He pivoted, stumbling into the street. Two taxis screeched to a halt, the first nearly knocking him down. Once he’d made it safely to the other side, I called out to him, “I know your name isn’t Andrew.” He turned to look at me, just for an instant, but I knew I had him. He jogged the rest of the distance to the Haverford.

I turned to Dino. “You get that?”

“Sure did.”

“Good,” I said. “Sit tight in the van for a few minutes, will you?”

Dino lowered his camera off his shoulder. “He’s not going to talk, Clyde.”

Eyeing the front of the Haverford, I checked my watch. “We’ll see about that.”

Fifteen minutes later, Kaminski appeared at the Haverford’s front door. I scuttled across the street and under the building’s awning before he could head me off. The pristine marble lobby glistened through the gilt and glass doors. “Not here,” he said gruffly, gripping my arm. “I need this job.”

“Then tell me the truth. Were you sleeping with Rachel?”

A forty-something woman with a fluffy white dog appeared behind the door. She rapped on the glass twice, her thin lips displaying her displeasure. “Sorry, Mrs. Himmel,” Kaminski muttered as she walked past us, disappearing into the night. “Go now. I mean it,” he said into my ear.

“I’m not leaving until you tell me what you know.”

A vein surfaced beneath the skin of his neck. “I get off at seven. There’s a diner on Lexington a few blocks south.”

I knew the place, a diner on a busy corner.

“I’ll meet you there at seven-thirty.”

“And when I see you there, what will I call you? Andrew or André?”

“It’s Andrey. With a y instead of a w. They got it wrong at the uniform shop.”

Wednesday

O
n Wednesday morning, Andrey Kaminski was seated at a red-leather booth at the back of the diner, dressed in the same street clothes he had been wearing the night before.

I threw my bag in the booth. “Have you ordered yet?”

He nodded at his coffee. Even tired and disheveled he was hot.

I reached for my scarf. Suddenly he was out of his seat, helping me out of my jacket, lifting my hair gently at the nape. The gesture sent chills down my spine—the kind I shouldn’t have been feeling.
No
, I told myself,
this is totally inappropriate.

He motioned to the waitress behind the countertop. She came over with a pot of coffee, leaning over our table to treat Andrey to a glimpse of her cleavage as she refilled his mug and splashed some in mine. “What ya want?” she asked, not even bothering to look at me. I went with my usual eggs and sausage. “Yours will be out soon,” she almost cooed to Andrey, evidently in no rush to get my order in.

I shook my sugar packets together loudly. She got the picture and skulked off. “Am I really supposed to buy that your name change is all because of a mixup at the uniform shop?” I asked, pouring a generous amount of cream in my coffee.

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Then why didn’t you correct me before I put you on TV.”

“Seemed like you were in a hurry.”

It was true I had been in a rush to get him on camera. “So why not correct me later, when we talked on the street?”

“I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“I wouldn’t have been embarrassed.”

He scratched the back of his neck. His sleeves, this time, revealed more of the green tattoo. “Are you going to use that footage from last night?”

“I have to. Unless you agree to sit down for us.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“You did it Sunday morning.”

He shrugged again. “That was a mistake.”

“Well, there’s no camera on you now, and all this is off the record.” I was giving him the highest amount of protection possible, but he had to give me something in return. “I need to know everything you know. Everything. Tell me something I don’t already know, Andrey, and I promise, I’ll make it up to you. Believe me when I tell you I can be a very powerful ally.”

“Everyone’s got to answer to somebody.” He stared at the paper napkin he was twisting in his hands. “Who’s your boss?”

It was a strange question, but sometimes sources liked to be coddled and indulged. One source of mine would only meet in the housewares section of a department store; another source required a lobster salad and porterhouse to get him talking. Andrey apparently needed to know whom my boss was before he would give me what I wanted. “Georgia Jacobs is my immediate boss,” I told him. “But I have others, including the bureau chief and the network president. Anything that goes to air, especially on a story as high profile as this one, has to be approved by one of those three people, plus a slew of lawyers from our legal team.”

Our food arrived. Andrey had ordered pancakes and bacon. The waitress, who had applied a fresh and very unnecessary coat of lip-gloss in the interim, lingered once again over our table. “Let me know if you want more maple syrup, or anything else,” she said, flirting with all the subtlety of a lap dancer.

“I think she likes you,” I said after she left.

Andrey cut into his pancakes and ate without further comment, his head down and focused on his food. His manner reminded me of a little boy sitting at his mother’s table. All that was missing were the flannel pajamas. I ate a few bites of my eggs and bacon, my appetite still not what it used to be, and pushed my plate to the center of the table to make way for my spiral notebook. Andrey finished his food, took a slug of coffee, and planted his elbows on the table. “She was a referral,” he said finally.

I picked up my pen. “I assume we’re talking about Rachel Rockwell?”

“Rachel has a great body, but she wanted to be more toned. She came to me in the spring, about two years ago. Her second child was about a year old. We started working out in the gym, but then we worked out a deal where I would come to her house a couple days a week. It was easier for her, and I didn’t have to give half my fee to the club. I trained Rachel Mondays and Fridays at the club, Wednesdays and Saturdays at her home. Her husband built a huge gym in their basement, so we had everything we could ever need.”

“She’s in good physical shape?”

“That woman is 115 pounds of pure muscle.”

I had to rethink my previous assumption that Rachel Rockwell might not be strong enough to kill Olivia on her own.

Andrey moved his plate to the side. “We were friends at first. That’s how it started. After we trained together, she’d invite me to stay for coffee or breakfast and we’d talk. Then one day one thing led to another.’”

“How long did it go on like that?”

“A year,” he said.

“And then what happened?”

“Her husband found out and had me fired. The club had a rule—not against sleeping with your clients, because they’d have no trainers left—but against working with clients on the side.” He paused, threw his napkin on the table. “Then she dumped me.”

“Rachel broke up with you?”

“She said she had to put the kids first. Michael had served her with papers. Her lawyer said it wouldn’t look good if she was shacking up with me.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“At the time, yeah. I guess.”

“But that was the end of it?”

Andrey looked down into his coffee cup, his shoulders sagging beneath his flannel shirt. “It’s what she wanted.”

His sudden vulnerability reignited my attraction to him, but I couldn’t afford to get distracted. Not now when I was finally getting somewhere. “Tell me how you got the job at the Haverford,” I said.

“After I got fired from the club, I trained a few clients at their homes but mostly I was sitting on my couch for three months pissing away my savings. Rachel knew I was hard up for cash. She offered to try and help me find something.”

“As a building worker?”

He nodded once. “I’d worked as a doorman before. Right out of high school I was a porter at a building downtown. I became a trainer because I wanted to leave that shit behind. The life sucks, but the money ain’t bad.”

“How did that work? Aren’t there unions involved?”

“I was part of the union already. All Rachel had to do was get me on the interview list.”

Our check arrived. It was time to stop circling around the question. “When did you realize that Olivia and Rachel were sleeping together?”

He reached out for the check, pulled out his wallet. “I’ve got to go.”

“No you don’t.”

Andrey climbed out of the booth.

I reached for his forearm. It felt warm and strong, and for the briefest of moments I let myself imagine what his body looked like beneath his plaid shirt and worn jeans. “Put your money away and sit back down.”

He ignored me, throwing a ten and a twenty on the table.

I stood up and faced him square. “Then you give me no choice. I’m reporting that you and Rachel had an affair,” I said. “People are going to assume you are still carrying a torch for Rachel and that you killed Olivia out of jealousy. Do you know where Rachel is, Andrey?”