Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (7 page)

I took the last bite of my pastrami. I’d eaten the whole thing and barely tasted it. I could feel it in my stomach though, sitting there like a greasy tennis ball. Better full than famished—I didn’t know when I’d get to eat again, between the scheduled live shots and preparing for Alex’s recap of the day’s events for
Topical Tonight
.

Panda nodded at my empty basket. “Good. At least now I know you won’t be fainting from hunger.” He took a last sip of his root beer before standing up with some difficulty.

I helped him up.

“My knees are gone,” he said, shaking his head. “They say they’re the first thing to go.”

“For women it’s the eyes.”

He gave me a quizzical look.

I pointed to the crinkled skin at the outside corners of my eyes.

“You got nothing to worry about. Which reminds me, you dating anyone I should know about?” Panda regularly ran background checks on my suitors. I always protested and accused him of invading my privacy, but secretly I liked the idea that he was looking out for me.

“I haven’t had a date in months.”

“What happened to the economist?”

He was referring to Pinstripe Joe. We’d been dating for a couple of months when he left his razor and special shaving cream in my bathroom. I packed everything up in a small bag and dropped it off at his apartment when I knew he wouldn’t be there, with a note saying
You must have forgotten this
. Before him, I’d dated a bankruptcy lawyer, before that a museum finance director. All of them were setups by Olivia; all of them were nice guys. The museum guy said he’d tired of my boundary issues and the banker said he’d found someone more “emotionally available” to take my place. The economist blamed our breakup on my job, or my so-called unwillingness to put anything else before it. It had been six weeks since my last outing with Joe. I was lonely sometimes, but most of the time I was too busy with work to worry about my lack of a personal life. “We broke up. It was for the best.”

Panda opened the door and stepped down to the sidewalk. “This the truth?”

“Afraid so. It wouldn’t have worked.”

“Plenty ’o fish.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve got the wife and kids.”

“If only you’d take the silver spoon out of your ass, I’d introduce you to one of our boys in blue.”

I
t was true about the silver spoon, but it wasn’t something I advertised. In my experience, as soon as someone knew you were born into money, they jumped to the conclusion that you’ve had everything handed to you, you’ve never had to work a day in your life, and people have given you opportunities because of who you are and who you know—not because you deserve it. The word
sacrifice
is not in your vocabulary, nor is
hardship
or
struggle
. You are entitled, spoiled, immoral, and lazy. I liked to think that none of these things applied to me.

Nor should they; I’m a Shaw in name only.

My mother’s family, farmers looking for a better way of life, came to the United States from England in the early 1800s. They settled in Boston, made their money first in trade, then in oil and gas and railroads, and along the way had a lot of children. My forebears were a fertile bunch, and so over time, from generation to generation, the riches were spread thin between the various family branches. Some of my relatives did a good job, investing wisely and managing to add to their inheritances with their own fortunes. As you might have guessed, my immediate ancestors did not. They lived fast and died young; a real go-big-or-go-home crowd. My mother—her given name was Charlotte, but everyone called her Tipsy—was the last in a long line of unapologetic dilettantes.

Shaw was her surname, passed on to me. According to my father, Tipsy wanted me to inherit the one remaining piece of my birthright she thought was still worth something. In her New York, the right last name could open doors and clear paths and, given the option, she wanted her daughter to be in possession of one. Little did she know I would, years later, find it more of a liability than anything else.

My father, James, grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia. His father was a mechanic and his mother a receptionist at an insurance agency. He defied the local odds and won a scholarship to Columbia, which was where he met my mother. Although I wasn’t privy to all the details of their courtship, I did know that it was brief and romantic, and that my grandparents, all four, hadn’t been thrilled about the match. My father’s parents would have preferred their son marry a good Catholic, while my mother’s parents wanted their daughter to marry one of their own—someone moneyed and pedigreed, for whom social status was a given, never an aspiration. The Shaws were not strivers.

Love prevailed, however, and my parents—James Callaghan and Tipsy Shaw—married in a quiet civil service at City Hall. I’m told I arrived nine months later. It may have been less. What I do remember of my early childhood is that we lived in a beautiful apartment in a brown-brick building on Park Avenue and enjoyed a lifestyle made possible by the generosity of my maternal grandparents and my father’s Wall Street career. Life was an endless parade of niceties—chauffeured cars, fresh cut flowers, pressed linens that smelled of lavender and sunshine. I wore clothes my mother bought for me in Europe—leather sandals purchased in Rome, cashmere from London, smocked dresses and lace-trimmed socks from France—and my bedroom was a little girl’s dream, with walls painted ballet-slipper pink, a canopied bed draped in rose taffeta and my very own crystal chandelier. I had a nanny, a sunny Swedish girl who kept her coat pockets filled with black licorice and red candy fish. Another woman was employed to do the cooking, cleaning, and ironing.

But then one day, everything changed. My father lost his job working for a big buyout firm under circumstances never explained to me. Without his salary, we couldn’t afford the mortgage, to say nothing of the cars and vacations, clothing allowances and charity outlays. My mother appealed to my grandparents for additional help, but they refused to assist us with anything other than my school tuition, drawing back, even, on their former munificence. I imagine it was their way of saying
I told you so
to my mother.

I was six when we moved into a much smaller condominium overlooking a small concrete courtyard filled with old bicycles and unloved vegetation. Neither pre-war nor modern, the building was blessed with the advantages of neither. The ceiling in my bedroom was too low to accommodate the canopy on my bed, so that was disposed of or sold off, along with the chandelier, Mom’s party dresses and furs, and the BMW Dad had kept in a garage for weekend jaunts to Locust Valley, where my grandparents kept a Tudor-style mansion, pool, and clay tennis court hidden behind eight-foot hedges.

My nanny and the housekeeper were let go; and my clothing no longer came adorned with seed pearls and lace, or wrapped in crinkly tissue paper that smelled of talcum powder and faraway places. The only aspect of my life to remain unchanged was my enrollment in the Livingston School for Girls, one of the city’s more exclusive schools, one of those places where the kids are dropped off in chauffeur-driven Town Cars or SUVs and can trace their lineage back to either the Mayflower, the Forbes 500, or both.

“I know it’s been a tough summer,” she’d told me the following September, squeezing my hand as we made the ten-block walk to school, to my first day of kindergarten. “But don’t worry about your tuition. We can still afford to keep you at Livingston.”

She’d allowed herself to go downhill since we’d moved to the new place, favoring jeans and old sweatshirts and forgoing makeup and sometimes a hairbrush. But that day my mother had worn a fresh-pressed white blouse, flannel kilt, and dark brown boots. Her dark hair was combed into a neat chignon, exposing the pair of gold shells clipped at her earlobes. Her hand felt rough, though, no longer the texture of rose petals.

I wrenched my hand away from hers, furious. Was it too much for her to use a hand cream? It was the first day of school. I wanted everything to be back to normal. I resented her hangnails, our heavy mood, my ratty old backpack. As soon as we arrived at the school gates, I charged up the stairs without her.

But I was all bluff. At the top of the stairs I turned around, repentant. “See you later!” I called to her across the spiked tips of the wrought-iron gate.

She waved, her small white teeth bared in a brave smile, before turning to walk back down the block.

I
dialed Georgia’s cell as soon as Panda left my side. She took the call despite being in the middle of a session with her trainer. “I need an assistant producer to help me pull together the B-roll for my next package,” I explained.

“Hang on a sec.” I could hear the sound of weights clinking in the background as Georgia hunted for a private place to speak. “Now girl, how in the hell did we lose that first one to GSBC?”

She was talking about Penny’s scoop. “I had it, Georgia. She beat us to air.”

“All right,” she said. “So we move on. You remember what I always say on cases like this?”

“It’s a marathon, not a dash.”

“And right now we’re in fucking last place, Clyde. Find me something to dig my teeth into. You say you can do this, then do it.”

I’d been on the receiving end of Georgia’s tough love enough times to know not to take her words personally. All she wanted was for me to do my best work and perform to my highest potential, and sometimes I needed a kick in the pants to do that. Not that day, though. I was already miles ahead.

“An inside PD source says the cops have identified the woman who was in Olivia’s apartment Friday night. Her name is Rachel Rockwell. Lives in Greenwich. The PD is calling her a person of interest. She’s wanted for questioning but hasn’t turned herself in yet. I promised my source to keep her name and picture off the air until five o’clock. They want to bring her in first.”

“They establish probable cause?”

I turned off Lexington Avenue onto a quieter side street. “They’re getting warrants to search her house, computers, and car.”

“How sure are you that this won’t leak sooner? Greenwich police. Her family and friends. There’s any number of ways this could get out.”

Georgia had a point, but I’d given my word to Panda. “I can’t go back on a promise.”

She sighed. “OK, so we hold till five. In the meantime, do the research on Rockwell. Do we know what her connection to the victim is?”

“The source didn’t reveal anything.” It wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the truth either. I couldn’t tell her that without breaking my promise to Olivia. “The husband already hired Frank Uffizo.”

“Love triangle?” Georgia posited.

“I’m sure that’s where the cops are going with it.”

“You need to figure that out before we make any big statements,” she said.

“Of course.” Most networks, us included, wouldn’t bother with the due diligence. On a hot story, with everyone scrambling for a piece of the action, you could go live with speculation, and get away with it by framing the breaking news as a question rather than a statement. (i.e.
Was Rachel Rockwell, a pretty Connecticut mother of two and former beauty queen, the last to see Olivia Kravis alive on Friday night?... Was a scandalous love triangle involving a pretty mother of two and big city lawyer at the center of the brutal murder of Olivia Kravis in her own home?
) But this case was different. This was the daughter of the network’s founder we were talking about, and because of that, the bar for us was higher than normal. One screwup and I could be taken off the story or, worse, fired. FirstNews had to be the network of record on this case. Anything less would be considered a failure.

“What’s your next step?”

“I’m going to find out everything that’s public on Rachel Rockwell and her husband.”

“Good.”

“I need someone to case Rachel Rockwell’s neighborhood for sources.”

“You can have as many APs as you need.” AP stood for assistant producer. They were the lowest on the totem pole and made slave wages. I’d spent my four years in the job, running last-minute script changes between the producers in the control room and on-air talent in the studio and picking the cashews out of our 10 o’clock anchor’s Kung Pao chicken. I’d also spent those four years drowning my troubles in tequila and rum.