Murder at the Kennedy Center (16 page)

“Because of her profession? Which is?”

“We can discuss that when we meet. I repeat, Mr. Smith, time is of the essence.”

“Yes, I’m sure it is, Mr. Greist. By the way, I assume you’re the attorney handling the disposition of whatever estate Andrea Feldman left.”

“That is correct.”

“She had a will?”

“Well, she … her affairs are in good order, Mr. Smith.”

“I’m sure they are. You’ll hear from me … or from someone on my staff. Good-bye.”

Smith hung up and left the room, never noticing that the tape recorder on the shelf above him had begun recording the moment he lifted the receiver.

Downstairs, Smith checked his watch; he wanted to run home before going to the gathering at Roger Gerry’s house. He’d asked Annabel to go with him, but she was busy, which was okay with him. He didn’t intend to stay long, wasn’t in the mood for polite parties.

He strolled to the rear of the house and found Marcia Mims in the kitchen. “I’m leaving now, Marcia. Thank you for everything.”

She looked up from salmon filets she was garnishing for dinner that night and said, “Anytime, Mr. Smith.”

“How are you holding up under all of this, Marcia?”

She looked down at the glistening pink flesh beneath her hands and slowly shook her head. “I don’t know, Mr. Smith, how all this will end up, but I know this household is full of mess. There’s serious trouble here.”

Initially, Smith thought she was referring to the trouble caused by Paul’s arrest, complicated by Janet’s disappearance. But then he realized she was referring to something beyond that. He asked what she meant.

“It just makes me so sad to see this mess—and a wonderful family destroyed.”

“Because of what happened with Paul?”

“Yes, and …”

“And what, Marcia?”

“And lots of other things that most folks just don’t know about.” She didn’t give Smith a chance to press the question. “Excuse me, Mr. Smith, I have a lot of work to do.”

Smith stared at her until she looked at him again. “I’ll be back, Marcia. Maybe we could find some quiet time to talk.”

She went back to working the fish.

Smith sat with his dean, Roger Gerry, in a comfortable study in Gerry’s home. The sound of the guests mingling in the other rooms was agreeably muffled.

“I need time off,” Smith told him.

Gerry, whose round, pink, and pleasant face belied a leg-trap intellect and rock-hard convictions, raised his white eyebrows. “A leave of absence?”

“Maybe not that formal, Roger. Without going into too many details at this stage, let’s just say that my involvement with the Ewald family is going to keep me occupied for a period of time.”

“How long do you anticipate this will go on?” Gerry asked.

Smith shrugged. “Could be a couple of months. I possibly can handle an occasional class, but I can’t be bound to it. How about Tony Peet covering for me when I can’t make it?” Peet was the youngest member of the law school faculty, a brilliant Harvard scholar who made no attempt to hide his aspirations to one day become a justice of the Supreme Court. Few doubted he’d achieve his goal, except those who knew what a roulette wheel court appointments were.

“All right, Mac, but you discuss it with him. If it’s okay with him, it’s okay with me. I need you both. Tell me, is the Feldman murder something you really want to be involved in?”

Smith laughed. “I’ve been asking myself that question ever since she was killed, and Ken and Leslie Ewald asked me to advise them. Annabel has been asking that question, too, and I’m not sure we’ve come to the same conclusion. She says she understands why I feel compelled to do this, but I don’t think she really does. We both left the active, hectic practice of law to pursue things that were gentler and longer term. I suppose I can view this as a momentary digression, sort of keeping my hand in something. Besides, I’ve known Ken and Leslie for years. And …”

Gerry’s white eyebrows peaked again like mountaintops, and a smile crossed his face. “And Mackensie Smith was getting bored, needs a little action in his life, sort of like an older man taking up with a young woman. Just remember one thing, Mac—old men who have flings with young women enjoy it for a brief period of time, but find that if
it lasts for any duration, against all odds, it loses its appeal. And I’m not speaking legally.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, and please refrain from using that analogy with Annie next time you see her.” Smith checked his watch. “I really can’t stay long, Roger. It was kind of you to take time from your guests for this discussion.”

“You will have something to eat with us?”

“Would you be offended if I didn’t?”

“Of course not. I know you have many things to do, all of them undoubtedly due yesterday. Go on. Just say good-bye to Charlotte, and promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“To keep me informed on all the sordid, inside details as they develop. I may be a law school dean, but I haven’t lost my interest in the hectic, active practice—or in gossip.”

“I’ll give you a regular report, Roger. And thanks again. I appreciate your understanding.”

Mac took Rufus for a long walk. Such a pleasant and easy conversation with Gerry seemed out of place, almost perverse. The son of the man likely to become the Democratic presidential nominee was a prime murder suspect, and he, Mac Smith, had accepted the responsibility of trying to keep
suspect
from becoming
accused
.

As he headed back toward the house, he said to himself, Pull out, pull out before it’s too late.

That was as long as the thought lasted. He wouldn’t pull out. The surge of purpose—and, yes, he admitted to himself, importance—would override any cautious evaluation of the situation in which he’d placed himself. He was in, all the way in, and there was a lot of work to do, the contemplation of which was full of mess, as Marcia put it, but also of an odd, fulfilling pleasure.

“Are you awake?” Smith asked Annabel, looking over at her. The sight of her copper hair strewn over a pillow never failed to delight him.

She mumbled and buried her head a little deeper in the pillow.

“It’s important.”

“What’s important?”

“We should have made coffee last night,” Smith said.

“Uh-huh.”

They’d decided to stay at her place Saturday night to avoid the constant ringing of the telephone in Smith’s house.

“I’ll get up and make some,” he said.

“Good,” she said, and sank into sleep again.

He kissed a small exposed portion of her cheek, rolled out of bed, and went to the kitchen, where he prepared the coffee using the various blends that he had made certain were always stocked there. He found fresh eggs, scrambled them expertly, popped oatmeal bread into the toaster, poured orange juice, and when everything was ready, shouted, “Get up! Eat. Breakfast is ready. The world is waiting.”

They finished breakfast by eight, and sat at the dining room table drinking second cups of coffee and reading the Sunday paper, enjoying an interlude both sensed must be brief. There was a long feature on the Feldman murder, including pictures of Paul, his mother and father, and the deceased. There was also a shot of Mac Smith taken outside the Ewald home.

Annabel giggled. “I never knew you had a double chin, Mac.”

“Shadows from the lighting,” he said.

She laughed again. “Since you’re going to be the subject of media attention, maybe you should hire a media adviser, like politicians do.”

“Or a surgeon, for a tuck or tug.” Smith went to the funnies. He was reading
Doonesbury
when Annabel said, “Mac, time to fill me in on everything.”

Which he did, in as much detail as he could summon. He told her about the call from the New York shyster Herbert Greist, replayed his interview with Paul Ewald, his conversations with Ken and Leslie Ewald, what had transpired during his meeting with Joe Riga at Riga’s office, and his brief talk with Ken Ewald in which Ewald had said he hadn’t stayed in his office the night of the murder but had instead gone to the Watergate Hotel for a tryst with an unnamed woman.

“Interesting, that he would tell you about that but not tell you who she is,” Annabel said.

“Dumb but not unusual,” Smith commented. “It’s known that Ken has had a proclivity for pretty faces other than Leslie’s, but he’s always been mostly a model of discretion, thank God for her sake.”

“Aren’t you curious about who she is?”

“Yes, I’d like very much to know who she is. I need to know everything so we are not surprised, caught off base. I’ve learned too much from the radio so far. I’ll have to know eventually. Unfortunately, so will too many other people.”

“Think he would tell you if you asked him again?”

“Yes. I will—ask him, I mean. I also want to ask you a favor.”

She cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. “My dear … asking for my favors on this Sunday morning?” Sunday mornings were a favorite time with them for making love, like the rest of the world, with the alarm clock turned off.

“That’s favor number two,” he said. “First, I want to set up a meeting in New York with this Greist character as quickly as possible. I thought I’d try to call him today and see if he’s available sometime tomorrow. His type can be in the office Sundays—not always working. My problem is that I
have
to spend time here getting organized, hiring a temporary secretary to work out of the suite, lease some word-processing equipment, get a couple of extra phones in there, a copying machine, all the things I used to take for granted when I had the office. Would you go to a meeting with Greist in New York?”

“Mac, I own an art gallery, remember? I
used
to be a lawyer.”

“Once a lawyer, always a lawyer, and you know it. Look, if you’re really jammed up at the gallery, I’ll try to figure out something else, but if you could go to New York as a representative of my …” His voice took on a certain pomposity. “As an associate in my law firm”—his voice returned to normal—“I would be forever grateful.”

She poured them more coffee, and the sight of her voluptuous body beneath her robe, hair hanging loose and natural, pretty bare feet with red-tipped toes on white terra-cotta tiles, took his mind off murder for the moment. When she sat down, he repeated his request, adding, “I’ll make it up to you.”

“How?”

A shrug. “I don’t know, a long trip somewhere exotic once this is over.”

She sat back and looked at him. What she saw was a different man. Always intelligence itself, he now had the look of someone with a large commitment, almost religious in intensity. He was very much alive. She liked what she saw, even if she didn’t like the reason for it. “How are things going with Tony Buffolino?” she asked.

He laughed. “He’s as big a character as ever, but no matter
what Tony is or isn’t, he’s a damned good investigator, very creative.” He told her of how Tony had used the movie-star photo.

She shook her head. “You’re an amazing man, Mac Smith. You have Ken Ewald, who, if he were to become president, would want you as his attorney general. You’ve counseled the rich and famous, and you’ve become a distinguished professor of law at a leading university. At the same time, you hire a foul-ball ex-cop, put him up in a suite at Watergate, and pay him probably a lot more than he, or any other private investigator, is worth, I’m sure. What’s next, a limo and dancing girls?”

“I hadn’t thought of that, Annabel. I will … think about it … the dancing girls part. For Tony. In the meantime, will you go to New York and talk to Greist for me? I’m going to get Tony moving tomorrow on checking into Andrea Feldman’s past. I think I’ll send him to San Francisco.”

She assumed a pout. “He gets to go to San Francisco, and I end up in New York talking to some sleaze?”

“Do it for me and do a good job, and we’ll go to San Francisco together. Soon.”

“When?”

“As soon as …”

“All right,” she said. “James can handle things at the gallery while I’m gone. He’s working out very nicely.”

“Good.”

“I’ll stay an extra day or two in New York. There are some pieces I’d like to track down, and I may as well do it on your generosity.”

“Of course.” She was having fun at his expense, and he found it amusing.

“You will put
me
up in fancy digs, of course.”

“Of course. The Y on Forty-seventh Street. No, seriously, Annabel, you name it. Then you’ll go as my associate?”

She flashed a wide and warm smile. “I’ll go as
your partner
. I’ll name the hotel—and my fee. Count on it.”

With favor number one out of the way, they proceeded to favor number two, fell asleep in each other’s arms for a half hour, then showered and went about their individual
projects for the day. For Annabel, it was to sort out clothing to get ready for Washington’s infamous heat and humidity, a season that would surely arrive soon. Smith settled by a phone in the living room and called the number he had for Herbert Greist. He thought he might get an answering machine, but Greist answered.

“I’m impressed, Mr. Greist,” Smith said. “This is Mac Smith. You must have a heavy caseload to be working on a Sunday.”

Smith’s attempt at conciliatory chitchat fell on deaf ears. Greist said only, “Yes, I do.”

“Mr. Greist, one of my associates”—he glanced at the bedroom—“my partner, Annabel Reed, will be in New York tomorrow on other business. I thought it might be a good time to make contact with you and to see whether there is some field of understanding that could be established.”

“I’d rather see you, Mr. Smith.”

“Well, as you can imagine, being the Ewalds’ attorney in this matter is going to keep me anchored to Washington for quite a while. You seemed anxious to move on this. Ms. Reed has my total confidence and can speak for me.” He wanted to add, “Take it or leave it.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. Will four o’clock be convenient?”

“Yes, I’m sure it will be. Her other appointments are in the morning.” They made the date, and Greist gave Smith his address on Manhattan’s West Side.

Smith picked up the phone and called an old friend in Connecticut, Morgan Tubbs, a partner in a Wall Street law firm. He reached Tubbs at his home, and after the smallest of small talk, got to the point. “Morgan, could you have someone up there run a background check for me tomorrow morning on a New York attorney named Herbert Greist?”