Conroy walked to the window and stared through it at the shabby cityscape below him. For the first time since we’d come into the room, Ann Kiley raised her head. Her father’s arm still around her, she looked at Conroy. He kept looking out the window. Then, as if he could feel her look, he turned back toward us. None of us said anything. He looked at Ann Kiley. After a long moment Conroy nodded his head.
“Okay,” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Conroy said.
“You just had it done,” I said.
“No. That was Shawcross.”
“He had it done?”
“Yeah.”
The gloss of Conroy’s CEO manner was sloughing off rapidly.
“You were just the middleman,” I said.
Conroy shrugged. “I worked for Felton Shawcross,” he said.
He was sitting on the edge of the hard chair, his forearms on his thighs, his hands clasped between his knees. Ann Kiley, still in the hotel bathrobe, sat on the bed. Bobby Kiley sat beside her.
“We were working a loan-to-value scam on Pequod,” Conroy said. “You need me to explain that?”
I looked at Bobby Kiley.
“I know what a loan-to-value scam is,” Kiley said.
“Later,” I said.
“Good,” Conroy said. “Smith didn’t like it, but we knew he was gay, and we knew he was hiding it. So we squeezed him.”
“Which is how you got to be president of Pequod,” I said.
“Yeah. Smith was chairman, but that was just for show. He did what we told him.”
“And?” I said.
“And we were making a fucking fortune,” Conroy said.
“But?”
“But Smith wouldn’t stay squeezed. He finally said if we didn’t move on and let go of his bank he’d go to the cops.”
“So?”
“So Shawcross had him killed, and rigged it to look like a suicide. But somebody fucked it up.”
“Mrs. Smith,” I said. “She thought it was suicide and didn’t want to forfeit her insurance and decided to make it look like a murder.”
“Which it was,” Bobby Kiley said.
Conroy shook his head, thinking about it.
“Ain’t that great,” he said. “And we didn’t know why the suicide setup went wrong, but it did and we had to go to plan B.”
“Which was to frame Mary Smith for the murder.”
“Yeah.”
Conroy looked at Ann Kiley again. She looked back at him. Something went on between them for a moment. I waited for it to stop.
Then I said, “What about Amy Peters?”
“That was bad,” he said. “She told me she’d talked to you, asked if there was anything going on she should know about. Said she could serve the bank better if she knew what was up so she wouldn’t be blsided.”
“Good employee,” I said.
“Yeah. She was very career-driven,” Conroy said. “I mentioned it to Felton and that was it for her.”
“Just for asking?” Ann said.
Conroy looked at her again for a moment.
“Felton is a really smart guy,” Conroy said. “But he’s… he’s like Stalin or somebody. Any suspicion, you’re dead.”
“Must have been fun to work for,” I said. “What happened to Brink Tyler.”
“I don’t know. I mean, I know Felton had him zipped, but I never knew what for. Maybe Smith talked to him about his situation-you know, had a problem related to money, so he talked with his broker? Guys like Smith sometimes don’t have anyone else to talk to.”
“How about guys like you?” I said.
