to shoot a man to stop him from killing Rita, back before she became Ceepak’s wife.
“Not seeing Little Arnie broke his heart. When I worked for him, Dr. Rosen was always asking me to clip out any newspaper stories about the Philadelphia Phillies. They were Little Arnie’s favorite team. Dr. Rosen hoped to give those clippings to his grandson the next time he came over. He had a whole file folder filled with those sports stories. But Little Arnie never came to the house. Not once. Not while I worked there. He was too busy at school or with little league or soccer camp.”
Christine pauses.
“What are you remembering?” asks Ceepak.
Christine scrunches up her nose and lips like she doesn’t want to cry. “How David and Little Arnie always had the time to go over to Philadelphia to watch a Phillies game in person. With tickets Dr. Rosen bought for them.”
Good thing there’s a box of Kleenex on the table. Christine grabs a tissue. Blots her eyes.
“So has anybody told you guys about the pendant?”
“No,” says Ceepak.
“You’ve seen the egg-shaped monitor Dr. Rosen wears around his neck?”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Ceepak.
“Michael, of course, paid for it.”
“And Dr. Rosen agreed to wear it?”
“Yes. But only because he agreed with what Michael said to convince him: he wanted to be around when Little Arnie graduated from high school and went on to U Penn for Dental school.”
We all smile. Come on. It’s sweet.
“Anyway, Michael picked the top-of-the-line model. He has all sorts of money.”
“Even more than your mother,” cracks Nussbaum.
We all shoot him a look.
He clears his throat. “Please continue, Christine.”
“Well, what makes this particular pendant better, and more expensive, is the fact that it has a motion sensor that can detect when you’ve taken a fall. It has something to do with your rate of descent. If you bend over to put a plate in the dishwasher, it won’t go off. But if you tumble to the floor, it’ll send a signal to the control center and they’ll contact you to make sure you’re okay.”
“Is that what happened when Dr. Rosen fell?”
“Yes. He slipped in the kitchen. Didn’t answer when the pendant people tried to contact him. But they knew he was in trouble because of that sensor, so they called nine-one-one and sent in the paramedics. Like I said, Dr. Rosen was alone in that house for long stretches of time. No one came by to visit him on a regular basis. He could’ve been there on the floor for days. He could’ve died.”
Christine looks down at her hands.
“Michael saved Dr. Rosen’s life.”
My mind drifts off to the boardwalk and that scary new ride where Mr. Ceepak works.
The Free Fall.
David and Judith got theirs; the fall that should have set them free, financially, for life. Unfortunately, brother Michael snatched away their windfall with his clever little pendant.
So maybe Judith and David decided to make Dr. Rosen take another tumble. And this time, maybe they made sure he couldn’t get back up.
Maybe this time they used cyanide.
47
“We understand you saved your father’s life,” Ceepak says to Michael Rosen.
We’re in his suite at the Sea Spray, the highest-priced hotel in Sea Haven. It even has bellhops and somebody to carve an S-S logo into the sand in all the outdoor ashtrays.
“You mean the pendant?” says Michael, offering us each a chilled bottle of Pellegrino water from his mini- fridge. I see one of those Toblerone candy bars sitting in a wicker basket on top of the fridge snuggled between a tiny bag of Famous Amos cookies, a jar of cashews, and a Pringles-style can of M amp;M’s. I’m guessing every item in the basket costs at least ten bucks.
Ceepak raises his hand to say no-thanks to the bubbly water. I do the same. But I’m seriously eyeballing those M amp;M’s.
“Dad, of course, thought the monthly fee for the monitoring service was too high. So I put it on one of my credit cards.”
Michael holds a drinking glass up to the afternoon sun streaming through his twelfth-floor windows and must see a spot, because he curdles his nose.
“Filthy. Can you believe this is actually considered the ‘nicest’ hotel on the island?”
He shakes his head to further convey his “what a world, what a world” disdain.
After chatting with Christine and her lawyer, Ceepak decided it would be best if we spent the rest of the day talking to the Rosens: Michael, David, and Judith. He is convinced that our suspect pool is similar to a kiddies’ wading pool: “very, very shallow.”
“And probably full of crap,” I added.
According to Ceepak, we need to look at the nurses and the family. Every single one of them, at some point in the days prior to Dr. Rosen’s fatal pill pop, could’ve had the means and opportunity to slip a cyanide-laced capsule into the Saturday-morning meds slot.
“The key, I suspect,” Ceepak told me on the drive over to Michael’s hotel, “will be determining who had the strongest motivation.”
And so we probe the richest son first. The one who dropped by Dr. Rosen’s house on the Friday before he died hoping to take “a walk on the beach” with his father.
“Over the years, you purchased many items for your father,” says Ceepak. “Is that correct?”
“Well, somebody had to,” Michael answers. “He was too cheap to buy what he needed himself. And my brother was bleeding him dry. That’s why I never gave my father money. If I wrote my father a check, he’d just deposit it in his bank account so he could write another check for David and Judith and Little Arnie. That reminds me. I need to hire somebody to take that 3-D TV out of Dad’s house. I didn’t give it to him so he could leave it to them.”
“So you were angry with your father about his preferential treatment of your brother and his family?”
“I could not care less about the money. Honestly. As you gentlemen have undoubtedly heard, I have done pretty well for myself since leaving home thirty years ago.”
“You’re being modest,” says Ceepak.
“You made fifty-two million last year alone,” I chime in. “They put you on that list in Forbes magazine.”
Michael feigns a modest blush. “Guilty as charged. But dear boy, you forgot to mention my Emmy awards.”
“Sorry,” I say.
He brushes it off. “That’s okay. If my father were still alive, he’d tell you about each and every one of them, over and over and over again. In his eyes, that’s who I was. The very wealthy, very important, award-winning son. Trust me, with Arnold Rosen, there was no such thing as ‘unconditional love,’ not like I finally found with my partner Andrew. With Dad-ums, you had to earn it every day. I found that wildly successful television shows, Emmy awards, and millions of dollars in the bank helped.”
“When did you leave Sea Haven?”
“When I was eighteen. I went to college in California. U.S.C. Fought and scraped for everything I have. And all that time, even when I was working as a waiter in some sketchy dive to make ends meet, I never once thought about coming ‘home’ to sunny, funderful Sea Haven.”
“Why do you think your brother stayed in Sea Haven?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he likes playing miniature golf or eating pancakes the size of manhole covers.
