Vanessa Hogan ups the sickly-sweet smile.
“That parent,” I say, “being you, of course.”
“Of course. To be on the safe side, Billy had come alone to feel out the situation, leaving Edie hiding alone at a lake cabin owned by an English professor at SUNY in Binghamton. Nero and I drove up with Billy in the trunk. We found Edie Parker. We made sure she didn’t know anything more—which enraged me. I wanted to find them all, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen quite yet. Then we finished with Edie and Billy.”
“What did you do with the bodies?” I ask.
“Why would you want to know?”
“Idle curiosity, I guess.”
Vanessa Hogan’s eyes are on mine now, probing. A few seconds later, she waves her hand and says, “Oh, why not?” in a too-cheerful tone. “Nero had an alliance with a mob boss named Richie B who lived in Livingston. Richie B had a furnace on the back of this huge estate. We brought the bodies there. That was the end of that.”
Her story is pretty much what I had expected, and she relishes the telling of it.
“So two are dead almost immediately,” I say. “A few years later, Lake Davies turns herself in. She goes to Nero Staunch and makes a deal for Lionel Underwood. Were you aware of that?”
Vanessa frowns. “Nero told me—but after the fact. I wasn’t happy about it.”
“You wanted to get both of them?”
“Of course. But Nero said it wasn’t as easy as you see on TV to kill her in prison. For one thing, Lake Davies was being held in a federal facility. That makes it harder, he said. But between you and me? I think Nero was just an old-world sexist. Killing men? No problem. But his stomach couldn’t handle Edie Parker. I took the lead in that.”
I nod slowly, trying to put it together as she speaks. “So that’s four of the six accounted for,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And then, what, you heard nothing?”
“For over forty years,” she says.
“And then someone—maybe a man named Randy—comes to Nero Staunch with information on Ry Strauss’s whereabouts,” I say. “Nero is too old and sick to do anything about it anymore. He’s in a wheelchair. His power is all ceremonial. His nephew Leo is the boss now, and Leo’s against this kind of vigilantism. So Nero calls you. I can show you three calls coming from the Staunch family craft brewery to your home. Landlines, which, if you don’t mind me saying, is old-school.”
“That’s not proof of anything.”
“Not in the slightest,” I agree. “But I don’t need proof. This isn’t a court of law. It’s just you and I having a chat. And I still need answers.”
“Why?”
“I told you.”
“Oh right.” Vanessa nods, remembering. “The Hut of Horrors. Your uncle and your cousin.”
“Yes.”
“So go on,” she says. “Tell me the rest of your theory.”
I hesitate—I want her to say it—but then I dive in. “I don’t know if the information came to you directly from Nero Staunch or if Staunch sent this Randy to you. That doesn’t really matter. You ended up getting the contents of Ry Strauss’s safe deposit box. That told you what name he was using, where he lived, perhaps a phone number. Ry was understandably panicked about the robbery. You called him and pretended to be someone from the bank. What did you tell him exactly?”
She narrows her eyes, tries to look wily. “What makes you so sure it was me?”
I open the file I’ve brought with me and pull out the first still from the CCTV camera in the basement. “We thought the perpetrator was a small, bald man. But once I realized that the killer could be a woman, one who perhaps lost her hair because of chemotherapy, well, that’s you, isn’t it?”
She says nothing.
I pull out the second still and hand it to her. On it, a man with jet-black hair and a brunette are exiting via the front door.
“This is the CCTV from the lobby of the Beresford. It was taken six hours after the one I just showed you from the basement. The man”—I point—“is a building resident named Seymour Rappaport. He lives on the sixteenth floor. The woman with him, however, is not his wife. No one knows who she is. Seymour didn’t know either. He said the woman was in the elevator when he got in, so she had to have come from a higher floor. We checked pretty thoroughly. There is no sign of this woman entering the building. You were very clever. You wore an overcoat on the way in via the basement. You dumped it in the middle of Ry’s apartment. No one would notice it unless they specifically looked. When you put on that wig, the bald man vanished for good. Then you took the elevator down and exited with another resident. Genius really.”
Vanessa Hogan just keeps smiling.
“You did make one small mistake though.”
That makes the smile falter. “What’s that?”
I point to the left shoe in one photograph, then the other.
“Same footwear.”
Vanessa Hogan squints at one image, then the next. “Looks like a white sneaker. Common enough.”
“True. Nothing that would hold up in a court.”
“And come now, Mr. Lockwood. Aren’t I too old to pull this off?”
“You’d think so,” I say, “but no. You had a gun. You kept it against his back. I could, of course, ask the FBI to pull all the nearby street camera footage from the day. I’m sure we would find the bald man holding a gun on him. We might even get a clearer shot of your face.”
Vanessa is loving this. “You don’t think I would have disguised my face too? Nothing much, just a little stage makeup?”
“More genius,” I say.
“I wonder though.”
“Wonder what?”
“I never realized the painting over his bed was so valuable.”
“And if you had?”
Vanessa Hogan shrugs. “I wonder if I
