“Sit down,” I said. I shoved him back onto the couch.
He did. His undertaker’s style had deserted him. He was no longer the old smoothie. You could see he wanted me six feet under.
“Why did you fire Alicia?” I said.
He looked at me like I’d said, “Why did you kill Alicia?”
The words came out of his mouth in a stammer. “I…I didn’t…”
“Don’t hand me that, Stallings.” I grabbed his shoulder from behind. “Did it have something to do with Jergens?”
His eyebrows went up about six inches. “How…?”
“I find things out. Things you don’t want other people to know. I know what color your skivvies are.”
He slumped even more in the sofa. “I have nothing to say to you,” he tried. “Talk to my lawyer.”
I squeezed his shoulder so hard he winced. “This isn’t due process, Stallings. You can’t take the Fifth with me. But I have a hunch the SEC would like to hear about it. I’m sure you’d welcome an investigation of Jergens’ stock offering. You know how these Boy Scouts are when they start to poke around.”
“Oh, God, no.” His frame slumped even more.
While he debated whether to betray a valued client and lose a stream of future income, I surveyed the view from the fortieth floor. He had the corner office with tinted windows on two walls. From where I stood, you could see all the way down the East coast to Key West. The Statue of Liberty looked insignificant way down in the harbor, like one of those souvenir shop models. You wanted to reach out and pick it up and shake it and let the snow settle on its base.
“What about Jergens? Was he the reason you fired Alicia?”
The answer was barely audible. “Yes.”
I had to prod him. “What happened?”
Stallings practically had tears in his eyes, like I’d just punched the last hole in his meal ticket. “Jergens was going to float a new stock issue in the third quarter and we were to be the lead underwriter. The real estate market has been strong, as you know, and Jergens was one of the strongest operators. It would have taken the slightest hint of scandal to derail the offering and our underwriting fees with it. I couldn’t afford to take a chance. The future of the firm literally depended on it.”
“Why?”
“We’ve lost some large underwriting clients recently and our reputation was starting to suffer. If we’d lost this deal, people on the street would have started questioning our ability to do deals.”
“What did Alicia do?”
Stallings permitted himself a small smile and then looked up at me to see how I’d take it. “She was a clever woman, your wife. I don’t know what caused her to suspect anything, but she actually went down and inspected a bunch of properties in person. She started at the top floor in each building and went through every one, knocking on doors to determine occupancy rates. She talked to maintenance workers and cleaning ladies. What she found out was that Jergens’ financials were not strictly cricket.”
I had to hand it to Alicia. That sounded like something she would have done in the old days, before her new age, Mother Earth self. “Nice detective work, for an amateur.”
Stallings nodded vigorously, as if he wanted to get on my good side. Little did he know I’d lost my good side a long time ago, somewhere in that perfect purgatory that was called the Au Shau valley.
“That’s when you canned her?”
“Well, no,” he said. “It was a little more complicated than that. She evidently went directly to Jergens and told him of her findings. I don’t know to what end. He threatened her and told her to bury the information. Then he set up a meeting with me at an out-of-the-way restaurant and told me to fire her.”
“So you did?”
Stallings nodded. “Yes. But then an odd thing happened.” He narrowed his eyes. “He called me back a couple of weeks later and told me to re-hire her.”
“Why did he do that?”
Stallings leaned toward me. “That’s the strange thing. I don’t know why. But she came back to work as if nothing had happened.”
“What about the report?”
“It was never published. It just disappeared off the face of the earth.”
I took this all in. “What did Jergens threaten her with?”
“He swore to destroy her career. I believe he even threatened her with physical violence. When she came back to the office after meeting him, she looked scared to death.” He stopped and caught himself. “I suppose that’s a poor choice of words.”
“Don’t trouble yourself about it,” I said. “No one’s going to flunk you for insensitivity.”
CHAPTER XXVII
Her starched white dress made an audible rustle as she rose to get me the file. In a single motion, she reached down and smoothed out the wrinkles on the front of the material where her legs had been.
“I really shouldn’t do this,” Pasternak’s nurse said in a tone that meant she really wanted to do it. “But since he’s dead and she’s dead, I don’t see how it can hurt anyone.”
A sob story always worked on a babe like this. Nurses were sweet, they were caring, that’s why they went into the healing professions. I’d told her how grief-stricken I was by Alicia’s death and how I thought Pasternak’s suicide might have tied into it and how I wanted to make sense out of the whole tragic business. She bought into it. But only up to a point.
“I can’t let you take the file out of the office, but I’ll let you read it here,” she told me with a tone of concern. She confirmed that the police had taken Alicia’s file. That was why I couldn’t locate it when I made the unsolicited house call to Pasternak’s office on that midnight dreary.
She led me into a cramped waiting room with a soundproof double door that was a shade more comfortable than Pasternak’s office had been. She turned and gave me a pleasant little nurse’s smile. Her accent was somewhere between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and her face was round and flat in a Balkan kind of way. “Take as much time as you need,” she said in a voice that came from years of practice in the art of comfort and solicitation. “I have a lot of paperwork to do before the office is closed down.”
She laid Alicia’s file down carefully on a coffee table covered with editions of Architectural Digest, Vogue, The New Yorker and other magazines that reflected the supposed browsing habits of the ideal clientele Pasternak wished for but didn’t have.
“Before you go, I’d like to ask you a few questions,” I said.
She looked surprised, but quickly said, “Sure, Mr. Rogan, whatever I can answer.”
“Thanks. Why don’t you sit down.”
She sat facing me in a prim and proper way with her knees pressed together and her feet in their sensible white shoes flat on the floor.
“I just want to understand why my wife is dead and why Dr. Pasternak is dead.” I tried to look earnest. “Will you help me.”
“I’d be glad to, if I can, but I don’t know very much about your wife. She came once a week, but she broke her appointments a lot. Doctor used to get very upset about that-more than with most of the other patients, you know.”
“Why do you think that was?”
She shrugged brightly. “I don’t have the faintest idea. Maybe Doctor liked the sessions with her more than the others.” She furrowed her brow. “Doctor did tell me once that her sessions were…what was the word he used… fascinating.”
She leaned forward and spoke softly, almost reluctantly. “You know, Mr. Rogan, it’s like this. Most of Doctor’s patients were older you know, elderly, and they were, you know, not very interesting. They were…he called them ‘run of the mill.’ They were, in other words, boring, you know. Doctor said they had body odor and they… they had
