The Body In The Big Apple (26 page)

“Sorry, didn't know you were into bondage. I'll just be going now,” Faith said, trying to bluff as she backed out the swinging door. Tears were running down Emma's cheeks, but she wasn't saying a word. Faith
wouldn't have, either. Not with a Smith & Wesson stuck between her teeth.

Michael whirled around. The gun was now aimed at Faith.

“Get in here. And don't move.”

She took a step forward and let the door swing shut behind her. “How did you get in the apartment? Nobody called up!”

Faith sincerely hoped he had distributed his Christmas largesse to the staff already.

“They know me. I have a key. From when I catered your party,” Faith stammered.

“Shit!” he screamed over his shoulder at his wife. “You give the fucking key to everyone!”

A slight look of guilt crossed Emma's face. One more thing she'd done wrong. She probably should have kept better track of the keys.

“What are you going to do now, Michael? You can't very well stage two suicides,” she whispered.

Three, thought Faith. Three, counting Lorraine. All the names she'd written on the sheet were falling into place now. Falling, leaving only one suspended in the air: Michael Stanstead.

She glanced at the kitchen table. A table like the one where only a little over two weeks ago she'd seen the headlines about Fox's murder. Now she saw a piece of Emma's engraved stationery. She didn't have to read it to know what it said. It was one of those very polite notes saying it was really too much, that this was the end—one of those sincere missives that might have been dictated by the blackmailer himself, the blackmailer—her own husband.

I figured it out, Faith thought in despair, but not soon enough. She'd planned to come in, call until she found
out where the Stansteads were, then alert the police. They'd think she was crazy at first, but she knew she could prove it. The money had to be somewhere. And so would the wig he must have worn Friday night while driving the car in his first attempt—quick and easy—to kill his wife.

His wife! Why hadn't Faith gotten on to him right away? It's
always
the husband!

Emma's question seemed to be taking a moment to register with Stanstead. He was standing with the gun trained on Faith's forehead. A strand of hair worked its way down across one eyebrow, but she dared not push it back in place.

Then he exploded. Not moving the gun, he began to swear at Emma.

“You fucking bitch! You haven't been able to do one single thing right since the day I married you!”

Michael Stanstead was definitely insane—and he was on a roll.

“All you had to do was look pretty, smile, and say the right things—not the crazy shit that was always coming out of your mouth. And Jesus! You knew I was in the toilet after Black Monday, and you
still
wouldn't give me any money for the campaign! I'm running for office, in case you haven't noticed! What did you expect me to do!”

Kill me, my father, and two other women totally unrelated to either of us? seemed a wildly inappropriate answer, but apparently not to Michael, thought Faith. She was watching him intently, willing him to at least pace up and down, so she might have a faint chance of getting the gun away from him. But he kept it trained on her without budging. The man must work out—not a bicep was quivering, although it would have been
hard to tell through the coat. No bloodstains on his Armani—that would be for sure. Drop the coat in the river and no one would ever be the wiser.

“Wouldn't touch your capital! Wanted to keep it for our children! What children! You couldn't get pregnant if I drilled you from now until
next
Christmas.”

Both Faith and Emma winced.

“You and your pathetic little miscarriage! Lucy told me all about it the summer we got engaged. Wanted me to dump you and marry her. She would have been ten times the wife you've been! But no, I wanted you. Wanted the beautiful golden princess.

“My family warned me. Dad told me over and over again what a whore your mother was, but Nathan Fox! He wasn't even a Democrat! A Commie! Your father was a Communist!” Spittle dribbled down Michael's chin. He was literally foaming at the mouth.

“And then that Commie bitch of his tried to blackmail me! Me! Told me he left a book and it might hurt my wife's feelings. You were young. All sorts of crap like that. Said she didn't want any money. But they always want money, women like that.”

Michael was raving. Michael was insane. But he was the one with the gun and one of his victims was tied up.

“The whole world was going to know what color nipples my mother-in-law has, for God's sakes! This Lorraine said she was offering to sell it to me instead of a publisher. Had a list of Commie charities she wanted the money to go to. Sure, sure, I said. Right before I put the pillow over her mouth.”

Emma gasped. Faith remembered she hadn't told her that Lorraine was even dead. Lorraine, the person
who had spent the most time with Emma's father, the person Emma most wanted to meet.

Poor Lorraine, Faith thought. She was trying to do the right thing. Trying to make something good come out of the venomous manuscript Fox had left behind. Had she deleted the sections about herself? Faith hoped so.

“Okay, okay. You come across Emma trying to kill herself. There's a struggle for the gun and it goes off. Or Emma just kills herself and I take you for a ride.” Michael Stanstead was thinking out loud. He ran his free hand through his hair in agitation. “Emma comes home, thinks you're a burglar, shoots you by mistake, and kills herself when she realizes what's she's done.” None of the possibilities appealed to Faith.

Although Michael had been addressing his wife, he had been keeping his eyes on Faith. Now she realized that while he had been talking, Emma had been quietly inching her chair closer to him across the highly polished wood floor coated with many layers of polyurethane. Faith immediately leaned back against the door, swinging it slightly open.

“Stand up! Don't move or I'll kill you,” Stanstead screamed.

Emma scuttled closer.

“It's the same gun, isn't it? The same one you used to kill Fox.” Faith wanted to keep his attention focused on her. “Your wife had been despondent over her inability to get pregnant. You've been playing the caring, concerned husband all over town, all the while hinting that there has to be another explanation. Drugs? You've floated that idea? An eating disorder? When the police investigate, they're going to find erratic withdrawals of large sums of money. Her own personal dealer? Then
voilà, the same gun, and all the ends are neatly tied up. She killed Fox to prevent him from publishing his book. A book that would have wrecked your political career. She's eaten up with guilt over the patricide and in despair takes her life on Christmas Eve, unable to stand the happiness of others at the holiday. You become the object of sympathy and in a few years, find a more suitable mate.”

Just as Faith thought he had reached the point where her words had driven him to pull the trigger, Emma pitched forward and caught him off balance. He fell heavily onto the floor.

But he still held the gun.

Faith leapt forward and groped on the counter for the implement she'd seen out of the corner of her eye. She grabbed the wooden pestle with its sharp point and drove it directly into Michael Stanstead's left eye with all her strength. He screamed in agony, bringing both hands to his face and dropped to his knees. She picked up the gun and raced to the phone, punching in 911.

Emma was on the floor, too—a few feet away from her husband.

“You certainly know your way around a kitchen,” she said to her friend, and then she passed out.

 

The room was dominated by Maxfield Parrish's
Old King Cole
mural, which ran the full length of the wall behind the bar. The sky at the top of the painting was indeed the artist's signature blue, but the king, his fiddlers three, and other attendants were autumnal—browns, scarlets, and golds. Emma sat across from Faith, leaning back against the banquette, slowly sipping a martini.

“Well, I'm not in the Caribbean,” Emma said pensively, “but then, neither is Michael.”

“No,” Faith concurred, savoring her own drink. Some occasions—and places—call for martinis. Both this venerable Big Apple bar at the St. Regis Hotel with its vague suggestion of not just one but many bygone eras in the city's history and the chance to sort things out with Emma qualified.

No, Michael Stanstead was dressed in an orange jumpsuit or some other prison garb, far from any beaches. Even the Stanstead Associates team of lawyers hadn't been able to arrange bail. At the apartment, screaming in pain, Michael had alternated between cursing Faith and insisting he had the right to kill his own wife if she deserved it and that it was nobody's business but his. Hearing his Miranda rights seemed to incense him even further. Possibly a clever attorney might have been able to explain away the latex gloves, the rubber raincoat, his wife bound with bed sheeting so as not to leave marks, but even a neo-Clarence Darrow couldn't have done much with a client who kept insisting on this wild droit du seigneur. “Do you know who I am?” he kept repeating.

Bobby, the doorman, had come up before the police arrived, after Faith's frantic call, and had responded automatically with his boss's name the first couple of times, then given up, wide-eyed. His first act had been to untie Emma, who had come to almost immediately, while Faith kept the gun steadily aimed at Michael.

“Why don't you go to the Caribbean anyway?” Faith asked. It was the day after Christmas, late in the afternoon. Both Emma and she had been spending long periods of time both at police headquarters and with lawyers. And when they weren't there, neither of their
families had let them out of their sights. This was the first time the two of them had been alone together.

Michael's father and Jason Morris had had a long meeting Sunday night, which included Adrian Sutherland, and apparently all three men called in a lot of chits. The newspapers were busy covering the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania and trying to insert a bit of holiday coverage into the grim news of world affairs. Michael's arrest got buried in the Metro section of the
Times.
Faith knew the story would break sometime, but maybe not. Certainly not the whole story. Powerful people were involved. They'd decided there was no way Michael Stanstead would be running for anything except exercise under the eyes of guards in watchtowers.

“People kept asking me how I was in these very heavy, meaningful voices and I was getting all these flowers. I just thought maybe I looked a little tired and the flowers were because of the holidays. Now I know that Michael was spreading it all over the city that I was, you know, sick.”

It had been a clever plan, Faith reflected. Michael would rid himself of a wife he didn't want and get his hands on her money, which he wanted very much. Since Sunday, she'd learned it was true Michael had lost a great deal of money in the crash and that he hadn't recovered yet. His parents had always believed what was theirs was theirs. Emma's continued insistence on not touching hers was literally driving him crazy. So, spread a few subtle hints around about his wife's state of mind, add some “Puff the Magic Dragon” stories in the right places as well, and then all he had to do was play the part of the noble, bereaved husband after her tragic suicide. He'd had no idea his
wife was
that
seriously depressed. He'd make some tearful speeches about not ignoring warning signs and the need for more mental-health programs. Emma would at last become the perfect political partner—docile and quiet as the grave. With such a perfect plan in place, Faith had wondered why Stanstead had attacked what he thought was his wife with the car. Apparently, he'd meant to scare her, have the doormen see her distraught, but he'd gotten carried away in the actual act. It was part of the crescendo—resulting in her absence at the luncheon the next day, for one thing—that would lead to Christmas Eve and her “suicide.” Faith shuddered.

It was interesting that Emma, so compliant, had been stubborn about giving Michael the money.

“A couple of things have been bothering me,” Faith said, nibbling on one of the giant Brazil nuts from the assortment the bar provided—fresh, crisp, and not too many peanuts. “Wasn't the whole money thing arranged in your prenup? Michael must have known he couldn't touch it.”

“We didn't have a prenup,” Emma confessed. “Funny to think about it now, but he wanted one and I didn't. It seemed so unromantic, so businesslike.”

No prenup! With this kind of money involved! Then it hit Faith. If they had had one, Michael would have known that on one subject Emma was firm—financially safeguarding her children's future. She'd had the wind knocked out of her own sails and wanted to be sure no one ever did that to her offspring. Would Stanstead have married her if he'd known he could never touch her money? True, she was gorgeous. Every head had turned when they'd walked into the bar, and Faith was used to this happening when she was with
Emma. And yes, Michael must have thought he could mold her, but money was money. He probably wouldn't have married her and then…well, then none of this would have happened.

But it had.

“Easy for him to write the notes and plant them. He must have dropped the first one at that party, knowing someone would pick it up and give it to you, thinking you had dropped it. But how did he manage to make the call telling you where and when to bring the money when he was home at the time? Oh, I'm being stupid—”

“Separate line,” she and Emma said at once, hooked pinkies for luck, and ordered two more martinis, plus some very expensive food from the bar menu.

“I was really in love with him,” Emma said. “It's like there were two Michaels. Mine and the one, you know, the one in the kitchen. This last week, he was so affectionate, so caring—bringing flowers, little gifts. I was thrilled. His schedule has been so packed that these last months we haven't had that much time together, even in bed.” She looked a little embarrassed. “Not this week, though. It seemed to be all he wanted, which was fine with me.”