Before I Say Good-Bye Read online

  Urbane. Handsome. Polished. A real estate visionary. Those were the words used to describe Lang in the gossip and society columns.

  Blood is dripping around him. . . . Adam is trying to warn you. The psychic’s words suddenly flashed into Nell’s mind.

  He kissed her cheek. “I think about you a lot, Nell. How have you been?”

  “I guess I’ve been about as well as you would expect,” she responded, a distinct chill in her voice.

  “You certainly look very well,” he said, taking both her hands in his. He smiled disarmingly. “I feel odd saying that—but it is a fact.”

  “Nothing like keeping up appearances, is there, Peter?” Nell replied, freeing her hands and leading him into the living room.

  “Oh, I suspect you’re a very strong woman who takes pride in keeping up appearances.” He looked around. “This is a beautiful apartment, Nell. How long have you had it?”

  “Eleven years.” The answer was automatic—dates had been on her mind so much lately. I was twenty-one when I bought this place, Nell thought. I had income from Mom’s trust, and the insurance money from both Mom and Dad. I had been living with Mac all through college, but once I graduated, I wanted a bit of freedom. Mac had talked me into managing his New York office, and I was about to start Fordham Law at night. Mac tried to talk me out of buying the co-op, but even he agreed that I got a steal.

  “Eleven years ago, huh?” Lang said. “The real estate market in New York was in a real slump back then. I’m sure that now it’s worth at least three times what you paid for it.”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  Lang could hear the coldness in her voice and could sense that she did not intend to indulge in small talk.

  “Nell, Adam and I were in a business venture together,” he began.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  How much does she know? Lang wondered, pausing for a moment. He decided to take a chance. “As you no doubt know, Adam had created the design for the tower complex we planned to build.”

  “Yes, he was very excited about the project,” Nell said quietly.

  “We were delighted with the preliminary work Adam had done. He was a creative and exciting architect. We will miss him terribly. Unfortunately, now that he isn’t with us, I’m afraid we have to start all over. Another architect doubtless will have his own concept.”

  “I can understand that.”

  So Adam hadn’t told her, Lang thought triumphantly. He looked at her, sitting across from him, her head down. Maybe he had been wrong about sensing hostility from her. Maybe she was just strung out emotionally.

  “As I’m sure you know, last August Adam purchased a downtown building and lot from a Mrs. Kaplan, for which he paid a little under a million dollars. It adjoins a lot I have since purchased, and it was part of the equity he brought to the construction deal we had worked out. The assessed value of that property as of last week was eight hundred thousand dollars, but I’m prepared to offer you three million dollars for it. I think you’ll agree that represents a nice return on an investment of only ten months.”

  For a moment, Nell studied the face of the man sitting opposite her. “Why are you willing to pay so much money for it?” she asked.

  “Because with it, we will have room to give our building complex a more impressive presence. It will enable us to include a number of aesthetic additions, such as a curving driveway and more elaborate landscaping, which will in turn enhance the value of our venture. I might add that when our tower complex goes up, it will have such a dominant presence that your property, assuming you retain it, may actually lose some of its present value.”

  You’re lying, Nell thought. She remembered that Adam had said something about the Kaplan parcel being necessary to Lang if he was to actually erect the structure he planned. “I’ll think about it,” she said, giving him a slight smile.

  Lang smiled in return. “Of course. I understand. Obviously you’ll want to discuss this with your grandfather.” He paused, then added, “Nell, I may be out of line, but I’d like to think we’re friends and that you can be up front with me. As you must be aware, there have been a lot of rumors around town about you.”

  “Are there? What kind of rumors?”

  “The rumors I hear, and I hope they’re true, are that you’re planning to announce that you’re running for your grandfather’s congressional seat.”

  Nell stood, indicating that their meeting was finished. “I never discuss rumors, Peter,” she said, her face showing no expression.

  “Meaning that if you announce, you’ll choose your own time to do it.” Lang followed her lead and stood as well. Before Nell could stop him, he had reached out and taken her hand. “Nell, I just want you to know that you have my wholehearted support, in every way possible.”

  “Thank you,” she said, pulling her hand back. And you’re about as subtle as a sledgehammer, she thought.

  The door had barely closed behind Lang when the phone rang. It was Detective Jack Sclafani requesting that Nell agree to admit him and his partner, Detective Brennan, to Adam’s office, and to allow them to examine the contents of Winifred Johnson’s desk and files.

  “We can probably get a search warrant,” Sclafani explained, “but it would be much easier to do it this way.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll meet you there,” Nell told him. Carefully she added, “I should tell you that, at her mother’s request, I went to Winifred’s apartment and went through her desk. She had asked me to look for insurance policies or any other personal financial information that might indicate what steps Winifred had taken to secure her mother’s financial future. Since I found nothing helpful there, I was planning to see if she perhaps had left personal papers in the office.”

  THE DETECTIVES ARRIVED on Twenty-seventh Street a few minutes before Nell. Together they stood in front of the office building and studied the architectural model in the window.

  “Pretty fancy,” Sclafani observed. “You must get big bucks for dreaming up something as fancy as this.”

  “If Walters was right in what he said yesterday,” George Brennan replied, “it looks better to us than it does to people who know about architecture. According to him, the design was being turned down.”

  Nell had gotten out of a taxi and come up behind the two detectives just in time to hear Brennan’s remark.

  “What?” she demanded. “Did you say they were turning down Adam’s design?”

  Sclafani and Brennan spun around. Seeing Nell’s shocked expression, Sclafani realized that she didn’t have a clue that her husband had been taken off the project. How long did Cauliff know it himself? he wondered.

  “Mr. Walters was at the district attorney’s office yesterday, Ms. MacDermott,” he said. “That was what he told us.”

  Her expression hardened. “I wouldn’t trust anything Mr. Walters said.” With that, Nell turned abruptly, walked to the door of the building and rang the bell for the building superintendent. “I don’t have a key,” she explained crisply, “and Adam probably had his with him on the boat.”

  She waited with her back to the two men, trying to calm herself. If what they had said about Adam’s design was true, why did Peter Lang lie to me less than an hour ago? she wondered. And if it was true, why didn’t Adam tell me about it? Was that why he’d been so preoccupied, so on edge those last weeks? He should have told me. I might have been able to help him, she thought. I would have understood his disappointment.

  The superintendent, a burly man in his late fifties, appeared and opened the door for them. In the process he offered his sympathy to Nell and told her he had had inquiries about the space. Would she be giving it up? he wondered.

  Jack Sclafani could tell from his partner’s expression that George Brennan had the same reaction to Adam Cauliff’s business quarters as he did: well-enough furnished, but surprisingly small. Basically it consisted of a reception area and two private offices, one large, the other a hole in the wall. To him, the space ha
d a cold, impersonal feeling. Certainly it was not an inviting place and didn’t go far in giving one confidence in the creativity of the people who worked there. The only picture on the wall of the reception area was an artist’s rendering of the proposed edifice, and in this context even it had a shabby look about it.

  “How many people did your husband employ?” Sclafani asked.

  “He only had Winifred here with him. Today, so much of the work of an architect is done on computer that when you’re starting out on your own you don’t need to take on a big overhead. Adam could farm out segments of the work on his project to others, such as structural engineers, for example.”

  “So the office has been closed since the . . .” Brennan hesitated. “Since the accident?”

  “Yes.”

  Nell realized that she had spent much of the past ten days trying to sound calm and self-controlled. Well, now the winch has been turned up another notch—that was the thought that had run through her head all night, as once again she lay sleepless till dawn. Presenting an outward appearance of calm was becoming more and more difficult.

  What would these detectives think if they knew about Lisa Ryan’s challenge to her? she wondered. Because, for all practical purposes, that’s what it had been—a challenge: Find out where and why someone made my husband take fifty thousand dollars to keep his mouth shut, and help me find a way to make it right. How do I begin to even attempt to do that? she kept asking herself.

  What would these practical, no-nonsense detectives think of Bonnie Wilson? she wondered. An hour after I got back to the normality of my own home, I had begun to doubt everything she had told me, including that she actually had been talking to Adam. I really do believe that she can read my thoughts, Nell decided. On the other hand, I certainly wasn’t thinking about “I’m from Missouri” when Bonnie talked about it. And I told absolutely no one that Adam and I had quarreled.

  And what about the collapse of the building façade on Lexington Avenue? Can they blame that in some way on Adam? There were so many questions out there, so many different forces pulling at her. She needed time to think, time to put all the pieces together. At the moment, she didn’t know which way to turn.

  She realized suddenly that the two detectives were looking at her with an expression of speculative interest mixed with concern. “Sorry,” she said. “Wool-gathering, I guess. Being here is more difficult than I had thought.”

  She did not realize, of course, that the understanding and sympathy in their faces masked a sudden certainty in both Brennan and Sclafani that, like Lisa Ryan, Nell MacDermott knew something that she was afraid to discuss with them.

  Winifred’s desk was locked, but George Brennan produced a ring of keys, and one of them fit the master lock. “Her purse was recovered,” he told Nell, “and these were inside. Oddly enough, the purse was hardly scorched. That’s the amazing thing about these explosions.”

  “A lot of amazing things have happened in these last ten days,” Nell said. “Including the attempt of Walters and Arsdale to suggest that any irregularities you find in their company should be blamed on my husband. This morning I spoke to Adam’s accountant. He assures me that there is absolutely nothing in his affairs that won’t bear the closest scrutiny.”

  I hope so, George Brennan thought. Because somebody from Walters and Arsdale had to have been working hand-in-glove with Sam Krause Construction, considering the kind of inferior materials they used in constructing the building façade that collapsed yesterday. When things like this happen, they aren’t just mistakes—somebody had to be in the know and on the take.

  “I don’t want to keep you,” Brennan said to Nell. “Why don’t we take a quick look through Ms. Johnson’s desk, and then we can all leave.”

  It took only minutes to ascertain that there was nothing out of the ordinary to be found there. “It’s exactly the same as her desk at home,” Nell told them. “All routine bills and receipts and memos, except here we did at least find an envelope with some insurance policies and the deed to her father’s grave.”

  The top two drawers of the filing cabinet next to the desk held files. The bottom drawer contained boxes of paper for the copier and printer, sheets of heavy brown wrapping paper and rolls of twine.

  Jack Sclafani skimmed through the files. “Run-of-the-mill correspondence,” he said. He thumbed through Winifred’s address book. “Do you mind if we borrow this?” he asked Nell.

  “No, of course not. It probably should go to her mother anyway.”

  There is one difference from the desk in her home, Nell thought—there’s nothing here about Harry Reynolds. I wonder who he was? Perhaps he was helping Nell to keep her mother in that expensive home.

  “Ms. MacDermott, this safe-deposit key was found in Ms. Johnson’s wallet.” As he spoke, George Brennan took a key from a small manila envelope and laid it on Winifred’s desk. “It has a number on it, 332. Would you know if it came from this office, or was it a personal key belonging to Ms. Johnson?”

  Nell examined it. “I have no idea. If it came from this office, then I knew nothing about it. I’ve had my own safe-deposit box for years, and as far as I know, Adam didn’t have one, either personal or for business. Can’t you take it to the bank and find out there?”

  Brennan shook his head. “Unfortunately all safe-deposit keys look alike, and there is no bank identification on them. The newer ones don’t even carry numbers. We’ll only be able to try to trace this one by going into the bank that issued it, and figuring which one that might be could take a while.”

  “It sounds a little like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

  “Not unlike it, Ms. MacDermott. But chances are it will turn out to be issued by a bank within a ten-block radius of either Winifred Johnson’s apartment or this building.”

  “I see,” Nell said, then paused, hesitating as though unsure of what she was going to say next. “Look, I don’t know whether this is relevant or not, but Winifred apparently was involved with a man named Harry Reynolds.”

  “How do you know that?” Brennan asked quickly.

  “When I looked through the desk in her apartment, one drawer was stuffed with papers of every imaginable kind, from architectural plans to the backs of envelopes to Kleenex. On every one of them she’d written ‘Winifred loves Harry Reynolds.’ My impression when I saw it was that they’d been written by a fifteen-year-old girl with a terrible crush on someone.”

  “To me, that sounds more like an obsession than a crush,” Brennan observed. “From what I understand, Winifred Johnson was a quiet woman who lived with her mother all her life until the mother went into a nursing home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Invariably, that’s the kind of woman who falls like a ton of bricks for the wrong guy.” He raised an eyebrow. “We’ll follow up on Harry Reynolds.” With a decisive shove, Brennan closed the file drawer. “Ms. MacDermott, we’re about finished here and then we’re going for a cup of coffee. How about joining us?”

  Nell hesitated for a moment, then decided to accept. For some reason she did not want to be alone in this office. As she had traveled there in the cab, she had thought she might take the time to go through Adam’s desk, but looking about her, she knew instinctively that this was not the day. She still felt such a sense of unreality about Adam’s death. And for some reason that she still had not quite assessed, if anything, the visit to Bonnie Wilson had enhanced rather than detracted from that feeling.

  How long had Adam known that they were not going to accept his design for Vandermeer Tower? she wondered. She remembered how confident he had been when he first told her about it. He’d said Peter Lang had come to see him, that Lang had bought the Vandermeer property and wanted to buy the Kaplan parcel. Adam had told him he’d sell it, but only on the condition that he go along with it as the architect. “Lang’s investors have commissioned me to prepare plans and a model,” he’d said.

  I asked him at the time what would happen if they di
dn’t accept his design. I remember his exact words: The Kaplan property is indispensable to the kind of complex Lang wants to erect. They’ll accept it.

  “Thank you, yes. I would like to have coffee,” she said. “I had a meeting with Peter Lang this morning that I want to tell you about. When I’m finished, you may begin to understand—and perhaps even to share—my feeling that he is both a liar and a manipulator, and he was definitely someone who stood to benefit from my husband’s death.”

  fifty-two

  LIKE HIS GRANDDAUGHTER, Cornelius MacDermott had spent a sleepless night. On Tuesday he did not go to the office until nearly noon, and when he arrived there, Liz Hanley was startled to see that his normally ruddy complexion had faded to an unhealthy gray.

  He soon made clear to her why he was showing such signs of stress, and though he argued a convincing case as to why his granddaughter was in danger of irreparably damaging any chance she had of running for elected office, it was Liz’s concern for his health that convinced her she should go along with his plan to prove to Nell that celebrity psychic Bonnie Wilson was nothing but a charlatan.

  “Call for an appointment,” he told her. “Use your sister’s name, just in case Gert ever mentioned you to this Wilson woman. I don’t trust her, and I want your slant on what she’s all about.” His voice was tense, not at all like his usual tone.

  “If I phone from here and she has Caller ID, she’ll know perfectly well who I am,” Liz pointed out.

  “Good thinking. Your sister lives on Beekman Place, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pay her a visit now and call from there. This is very important.”

  Liz got back to the office at three o’clock.

  “I, in my new identity as Moira Callahan, am seeing Bonnie Wilson tomorrow at three o’clock,” she announced.

  “Good. Now if you happen to talk to Nell or Gert . . .”

  “Mac, you weren’t seriously going to warn me not to let on what I’m doing, were you?”

  “I guess not,” he said somewhat sheepishly. “Thanks, Liz. I knew I could count on you.”