gave him three inches in height over me. The guy had evidently studied the literature on Power Placement.
He reached over and pressed a button on the side of the coffee table. Inside of ten seconds Justine appeared. She looked at him and asked, “Coffee?”
The corners of his mouth turned up imperceptibly.
She nodded and turned on her heels.
Inside of fifteen seconds he had his coffee. That’s what it’s like when two people have been together for a long time. Non-verbal communication.
When we were alone, he said, “Frankly, Mr. Rogan, I’m interested in you. I was curious to see what kind of a man Alicia was married to. Obviously, a woman of that nature would have married an exceptional man.”
Where was he going with this line of horse hockey?
“I was surprised to learn you were a private investigator. You don’t look like one. You look more like a corporate executive, as if you just stepped off the cover of Fortune.”
He gave me the once-over, only he did it twice. “I know your background. Your credentials are impeccable…”
I grinned at him. “Your concern about me touches me deeply in my private parts,” I said. “But I came here to talk about Alicia.”
He nodded and put his fingertips together in a little steeple. “Please proceed.”
Chisolm looked every day of his fifty-five years. His skin was taut but you could still see where the wrinkles were before the face lift. His features were angular, but his lips were full-too full for a man’s lips. It was his eyes that gave him away. They were pale gray and sharp. Hungry eyes.
“Tell me about your relationship with Alicia,” I said.
“There isn’t much I can tell you that I haven’t told the police. They were here yesterday and questioned me up one side and down the other.”
“That’s fine. Just tell me what you told them.”
He leaned forward, separated his fingertips and put them on the edge of the coffee table, wiping away an imaginary speck of dust.
“We met for the first time about a year and a half ago. It was at a presentation for securities analysts. As you know, she makes a striking first appearance.”
He didn’t correct himself when he used the present tense.
“The presentation was given by a real estate investment trust of which I’m a director. She was working for Morgan Stanley at the time. Our initial contact was simply some brief chit-chat at the meeting and then a couple of drinks at the Plaza afterwards.”
He paused and took a sip of coffee. He was the kind of guy who stuck out his pinky when he drank from the cup.
“The next time I saw her was about a year ago. I went to a party given by my ex-partner, Joel Edelstein. It was to celebrate his endowment of a chair at Princeton. Alicia and I recalled our first meeting and thought it would be fun to see each other again.”
I knew Edelstein. We’d been undergraduate drinking and whoring buddies at Princeton. And I knew about Edelstein’s relationship with Chisolm. According to the information I had, Chisolm was worth some seven million. The seed money had come from his wife. He’d made the rest of it from paired REITs when the market for them was hot. He started the genetic engineering company four years ago. Chisolm was the money, the contacts, the business acumen. Edelstein was the scientist, the man with the ideas and the patents.
Two years ago, Chisolm had bought out Edelstein with a cash and stock package worth three million. Edelstein had taken the stock, sold it when the SEC rules allowed him to, and invested the after-tax proceeds in half a dozen Internet start-ups.
When I met Edelstein at an alumni reunion, he was a guy who had his heart’s desire-a teaching career, a research lab and a plush and comfortable cushion on the side. “That way I can tell them to fuck off whenever I feel like it,” he’d told me. I wondered if Edelstein had ever regretted leaving Insignia Biotech.
Chisolm cleared his throat. “I’m a married man, so our relationship had to be discreet. We’d meet once or twice a week, usually in the city.”
“Was she seeing anyone else?” I asked.
He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “Why? Was she in the habit of doing that?”
I didn’t answer. Let him ponder that possibility.
He smoothed his hair back as if he were looking into a mirror. “I don’t think so,” he said. “At least, I didn’t think so at the time.”
I could see he was thinking about it.
“What did she do in her spare time?”
“She didn’t have much spare time. She was a real work horse-put in long hours. And when she wasn’t working at the office, she was working at home. You probably remember that about her.”
I nodded. “Yeah.” At least that much about her hadn’t changed. She was always a hard worker and a hard player.
“You have any thoughts on who’d want to kill her?” I asked him.
He shook his head slowly and I had the sense he was trying to find the right words. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought the last few days. Trying to find the who or the what. The problem was that she never spoke much about herself and her inner feelings. In a way, that was one of the masculine traits about her. That and her competitiveness.”
He stopped and stared out the window at a bird that had landed on one of the hedges. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He went over to his large polished mahogany desk and took out a pack of Benson amp; Hedges. He lit one, held in the smoke for a long minute and blew it out slowly. “Most women can’t stop talking about themselves, you know. Their emotions, their hang-ups, their desires. Alicia was different. She very seldom would let you know what she was thinking. She kept it hidden-almost like a poker hand.”
He paused, then asked, “Did you find her to be that way?”
He wanted to compare notes, but I wasn’t playing that game. He was astute-I had to give him that much.
“Go on,” I said.
“There was one other thing. Her feminism. She was an ardent feminist. She’d talk at length about it-almost as if it were an obsession. She’d go on and on with this drivel, and I’d listen to her and nod, yes…yes, just because I wanted to hump her.”
“What did you think was the point of her feminism?”
“Well, she said she was never going to be dependent on a man again, and I had the impression she really meant it.”
“What about her friends?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I didn’t know any of them. She never mentioned any friends and we never went out with any of them.”
“How well did you know her sister, Laura?”
“Yes, we had a few conversations. Nothing more than that. But I liked her. She was quite warm-very different from Alicia.”
He studied a painting on the wall. There was no mistaking the artist. It was by Francis Bacon. Two indistinguishable bodies twisted in an embrace to the death. A gaping shrieking mouth. A bloody slab of beef. An odd painting to be in a business office. “Alicia was like a thoroughbred. She was frisky and high-spirited. A lot of fun to ride. But…” he paused, “in the last few months she turned skittish. She didn’t seem to be as much fun anymore. She seemed preoccupied about something. I had actually…”
He stopped and fell silent.
I didn’t say anything. He was doing the talking, not me.
Finally, he said, “I was going to terminate our relationship. I told her so. I wasn’t enjoying it any longer. It was becoming a chore. You know, a Frenchman once said the only value a woman has is in her novelty. I subscribe to that theory. We had sex exactly seventy-nine times. I always keep meticulous records. Sixty-five times straight
