The Melody Lingers On Read online

  Lane did not answer. The traffic on the Merritt Parkway was getting heavier. She wanted Glady to think that she was concentrating on it.

  She knew that Glady had been too busy saying good-bye to Anne Bennett to notice that Eric Bennett had asked her to have dinner with him.

  3

  The day after their visit to the Bennett mansion, Glady unveiled her decisions in her usual modus operandi. After making her regal pronouncements about the selection of the furniture to take from the Bennett mansion, Glady left the everyday details for Lane to follow up on.

  “We’ve seen the virtual inside of the town house in New Jersey,” she said crisply, “but I want you to go over there and get the feel of the place. As I’ve told you, when I finished the decorating ten years ago, Anne Bennett said that her staff den was the most inviting room in the whole house. So placing that furniture into the den there will be comforting to her. I’ve picked paint chips for all the rooms, but let me know if you think the colors work. We may have to do some mixing to get the shade I want.”

  Amused, Lane thought that while Glady had been willing to make one trip to the Bennett mansion, she was not about to spend any more of her pricey time on this project, especially when she was doing it on the house.

  She also realized that working on the details of this project was going to be intensely interesting for her. Like everyone else, she had read every word in the media about Parker Bennett, starting with the headline that announced that five billion dollars had vanished from the assets of the revered Bennett Investment Fund. In addition to his wealthy clients, he had targeted investors who were mainly middle-class, hardworking small business people. That made the crime even more despicable. Elderly clients had been forced to sell their homes or retirement condos. Others whose income from the fund had been their only asset had no choice but to move back in with their children, where resentment of each other had fostered breaks in formerly tightly knit families. Four suicides had been linked to the financial disaster.

  “What are you waiting for?” Glady demanded. “I need you to be back here by twelve o’clock. Countess Sylvie de la Marco called me last night. She used to be Sallie Chico from Staten Island before she befuddled that poor old count into marrying her. He died about three years ago. I guess the mourning period is over if there ever was one. Now she wants to completely redecorate her apartment. We’re due over there at twelve-thirty. It will be a long session. I’ll try to steer her away from what is her version of good taste. She reminded me that she will have had an early lunch, meaning she doesn’t have any intention of feeding us. So on your way back, pick up a hamburger at the drive-through at a McDonald’s and eat in the car.”

  Glady looked down at the paperwork on her desk. Lane knew that was the sign that she was supposed to be on her way to New Jersey. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars, she thought as she left Glady’s private office, remembering the instructions from her favorite childhood game, Monopoly. With rapid steps she walked through the still-darkened reception area and out into the hallway. She was the only one on the elevator to the lobby but when she got off it, the ground floor was filled with people on their way to work.

  The receptionist at their office, Vivian Hall, was the first person on line for the elevator. Sixty-two years old, she had worked for Glady for ten years, a record for any of the employees. Perpetually planning to lose weight, she was a well-proportioned size fourteen with a cap of light brown hair.

  She stepped aside to talk to Lane. “How’s the dragon lady?” she asked.

  “In typical form.” Lane smiled. “I’m heading to New Jersey to look at Mrs. Bennett’s new digs. I have to be back in time to go with her to Countess de la Marco’s duplex.”

  “Good old Glady.” Vivian shook her head. “In eight hours getting a ten-hour day out of you. But you look as though you’re handling it just fine. Love that outfit. You look great in that shade of blue.”

  Ken had always liked to see her wear this color. A wave of sadness washed over Lane. His birthday would have been tomorrow. Thirty-six. It had been five years since a drunk driver had slammed their car on the Henry Hudson Parkway. The car tumbled off the road, rolling over and over until it finally stopped. Ken died instantly, his neck broken. They had been married only a year and she had been two months pregnant. Of course, the driver had no insurance.

  Over and over again, when that sadness enveloped her, she thought of her four-year-old daughter, Katie, whom she might so easily have lost that terrible day.

  These were her thoughts as she walked briskly to the parking garage.

  Ten minutes later Lane was entering the Lincoln Tunnel on her way to New Jersey. Thirty minutes later she was driving into the town house complex in Montclair that was the future home of Anne Bennett. Pretty area, she thought as she drove through the winding streets until she turned onto Cedar Drive. Following the street numbers, she parked in front of number twenty-one. It was part of a cluster of similar facades. The exterior was gray stone and she noticed with approval the large front window. Glady had taken one of the keys to the unit yesterday and Lane fished it out of her pocket.

  Before she could open the door, a man suddenly stepped out of the next-door unit. “Hello,” he called as he walked rapidly past the shared driveway to where she was standing. “Are you the new owner?” he asked. “Because if so, we’re going to be neighbors. I just bought here as well.” He extended his hand. “Anthony Russo, but better known as Tony.”

  “Lane Harmon.” As she acknowledged the greeting, Lane took in the appearance of this next-door neighbor. About six foot two, blue-green eyes, sandy hair and a warm smile. Even though it was November he had the deep tan of an outdoorsman. She judged him to be in his midthirties.

  “I’m not the new owner,” she told him. “I work for the interior designer who is decorating the house.”

  He smiled. “I could probably use her.”

  Not at her prices, unless you have big bucks, Lane thought.

  “I won’t keep you,” he said. “Who is moving in here?”

  “Our client’s name is Bennett,” Lane said. She had already turned the key in the lock. “I’d better get busy,” she said. “Nice to have met you.” Without waiting for his reply, she pushed open the door and closed it firmly behind her. Without knowing why, she locked it.

  She had seen the virtual inside of the unit but now, being physically there, she was pleased to see that it was flooded with sunlight. Further down the entrance hall, there was a staircase to the second floor. The entrance to the kitchen and a breakfast room was on her right. Walking into the kitchen, she noticed that she could look directly across the driveway into the breakfast room of Tony Russo’s apartment. He was standing there unpacking boxes that were stacked on the table.

  Afraid that he might glance in her direction, she quickly looked away. The first thing we buy for this place is a shade for that window, she thought.

  4

  Ranger Cole sat at the bedside of his wife, Judy, holding her hand as she lay motionless, her eyes closed, oxygen tubes in her nostrils. He knew that the second stroke would take her soon. Much too soon. Judy was sixty-six years old. They were only six months apart in age. She was older and he always joked that he had married an older woman for her money.

  They’d been married forty-six years. Kids of twenty so in love that when they went to Florida on a bus for their weeklong honeymoon it had felt like a limousine. They’d held hands all the way down. Neither one of them had gone to college. She worked as a sales clerk in Macy’s and he had a job in construction.

  Her mother didn’t want her to marry me, he thought. In school I’d always been in trouble for having fights with other kids. Too quick to turn my hands into fists. A nasty temper. Her mother was right but Judy calmed me down. I never was mad at her, not for one single minute. If I started yelling, like about a driver who cut me off, she would order me to stop it. Tell me I was acting like a child.

  To both of their r
egret they never had been blessed with kids.

  Ranger reached over and with a gentle stroke ran his calloused fingertips across his wife’s forehead. You were always smarter than me, he thought. You were the one who told me I’d be better off getting a job with the city, that jobs in construction came and went. You were the reason I got to be a repairman on the Long Island Rail Road. I worked from one end of the island to the other. You said it fitted my nickname. My father started calling me Ranger when I was a kid because I was always out of range of where I was supposed to be.

  Judy always told him how handsome he was. That’s a joke, he thought. He was a short, bulky guy with big ears and bushy eyebrows, even though he tried to keep them trimmed.

  Judy. Judy. Judy.

  Anger welled up in the depths of Ranger’s being as he thought about why Judy had had the first stroke two years ago after they learned that the money they had invested in the Bennett Fund had disappeared. Two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars that they were going to use to buy a condo in Florida. Money they had saved so carefully over the years. The condo they had seen was a real buy. An old lady who owned it had died and her family wanted to get rid of it furnished.

  Judy had loved the way it was decorated. “Much nicer than I would have figured out how to do it,” she said. “We’ll give away everything here in the apartment. It’s not worth the expense of getting a U-Haul. Oh, Ranger, I’m so ready to give up my job and get down to Florida and be in the sun. What’s nice is with no mortgage to pay and having both our pensions and social security, if we’re careful we won’t have to worry about money.”

  And at just that time the money in the Bennett Fund had disappeared, and that was the end of buying the condo. A few weeks later Judy had the first stroke and he had watched her exhausting herself trying to keep up with the exercises to try to strengthen her left arm and leg. She tried to keep him from hearing her crying at night but of course he heard her.

  It was Parker Bennett’s fault that their lives had been destroyed. A lot of people didn’t believe that he’d committed suicide by taking a dive off that fancy sailboat of his. Ranger didn’t believe that that jerk had jumped in the water. In one of the newspapers after Bennett disappeared, Ranger had seen his picture; he was sitting behind an antique, rich-guy desk in his office. Bennett’s way of offing himself would be to sit behind that desk all dressed up like he is in that picture and get drunk on some single-malt scotch, then shoot himself, Ranger thought.

  Our money helped pay for that fancy office.

  And Judy had been so depressed and so sick that she had given up. He knew that was why she’d had the second stroke yesterday.

  He knew she was dying.

  Don’t die, Judy. Please don’t die.

  The heart monitor beside the bed began to go off. It was a loud shrieking sound. In just a few seconds doctors and nurses were rushing into the room. One of them began pounding on Judy’s chest.

  Ranger could see that the blip on the screen that had been showing the heartbeats was no longer there. Now it was moving in a straight line.

  He stared straight ahead. I can’t live without her, he thought numbly.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Cole,” the doctor was saying. “There was nothing we could do to save her.”

  Ranger shook off the doctor’s hand and shoved it aside. He fell to his knees beside the bed. Ignoring the tubes that were still in her arms and nostrils, he put his arms around Judy and held her close to him. Overwhelming grief vied with murderous anger. Anger won. Bennett was alive. He was sure of it. He didn’t know how he was going to make him suffer but he would find a way.

  “I will find a way, Judy,” he said aloud. “I promise you, I will find a way.”

  5

  In his office at the Federal Building in lower Manhattan FBI supervisor Rudy Schell listened as a victim of Parker Bennett talked to him about Bennett’s supposed suicide. Unlike other victims, it was not rage that Sean Cunningham was exhibiting. It was with almost clinical detachment that he was making his case that if Bennett had committed suicide in that area of the Caribbean, his body would almost certainly have washed up on the beach of Tortola.

  Cunningham had made an exhaustive chart showing the currents around the spot where Bennett’s sailboat had crashed in Sharks Bay on the north end of Tortola.

  “If he had committed suicide, his body should have surfaced around Rough Point,” Cunningham was saying.

  Schell looked sympathetically across his desk at the man who was head of the Association for the Victims of Parker Bennett. A retired psychiatrist, Cunningham had recognized the devastating effect the loss was having on the investors. He had made it a personal crusade to reach out and try to help them to adjust their changed circumstances. He had a website and urged victims to share with each other their feelings of frustration, anger, and depression.

  The response had been overwhelming. People who had been total strangers had become friends and had gotten together for meetings in their local areas.

  Cunningham was thin, with white hair and rimless glasses. He looked every day of his seventy years, Schell thought, ten years older than when they had met two years ago.

  In the course of the investigation they had become good friends. As some of the other victims reacted with numb disbelief, anger, and despair, Cunningham had remained calm. He had lost the million-dollar trust fund he had set up for his two grandchildren. In response to Schell’s questions he had said, “My son has done very well. He can afford to educate his children. I am deprived only of my joy in leaving a gift that would have bought them their first houses.”

  In the past two years Cunningham had spent a major amount of his time counseling many of the victims who were having difficulty putting their lives back together. At this point in the investigation Schell could not tell the doctor that the FBI’s nautical experts had already come to the same conclusion. Ninety-nine to one Parker Bennett was still alive.

  They were on a first-name basis. “Rudy, are you humoring me or do you think his so-called suicide was staged?” Cunningham asked now.

  Schell replied carefully. “Sean, there is always that possibility. And given the way Bennett managed to hide what he was doing from the accountants and the SEC, it’s entirely possible that he was able to get away with staging his death.” He paused. “At least he’s gotten away with it so far.”

  “Did you hear that Judy Cole died this morning?” Cunningham asked.

  “No, I didn’t. How did Ranger react?”

  “It’s hard to tell. I called him. He was very quiet. He said that the second stroke left Judy so disabled that he knew she wouldn’t want to live if she’d learned how bad it would be.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Ranger Cole. When we interviewed him two years ago, he was like a man possessed. I think if he had bumped into Bennett at that point, he would have killed him with his bare hands.”

  “I’ll keep in close touch with him.” Cunningham stood up. “Shall I leave you the nautical charts I made? I have another copy.”

  Schell did not hint that the FBI charts were virtually identical to the ones Cunningham had prepared. “I definitely want them for the file. Thanks.”

  When Cunningham was gone, Rudy leaned back in his chair and, in a characteristic gesture, ran the palm of his hand along his cheek. He could feel the stubble that was already beginning to grow on his face. He smiled at the memory of his grandfather telling him that they used to call that stubble “five o’clock shadow.”

  I sure have it, he thought. It used to bother me but now I don’t care. In fact it was a real plus when I needed to go undercover. He got up and stretched. It had been another disappointing day trying to follow the trail of the money Bennett had stolen.

  But we will find him, he vowed, we will find him.

  But even as he made that promise he wondered if he would be able to keep it. With the Bureau’s focus on terrorism and the number of individuals who had to be watche
d, resources were stretched very thin. The previous week an agent who had worked with him on the Bennett case had been reassigned. He did not have the heart to tell Cunningham and the investors that if a break in the case did not happen soon, more agents who were working with him would be assigned elsewhere.

  6

  Lane made it back from the Bennett town house barely in time to leave with Glady to meet the Countess de la Marco. Her apartment was on the corner of Fifth Avenue opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The few blocks immediately surrounding the Met were known as Miracle Mile. “Isn’t this considered one of the best addresses in New York?” Lane asked Glady as they got out of the cab.

  “Yes, it is,” Glady agreed. “But the fact is that the most important address in New York is Seven Forty East Seventy-Second Street. I’ve been in the triplex that was built for John D. Rockefeller there. It would take your breath away. But even more important, it’s furnished tastefully. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. Now, what are you standing here for? It’s cold. Let’s get inside.”

  Countess de la Marco turned out to be a stunning blonde with the figure of a Victoria’s Secret model. “It’s obvious she had a lot of work done,” Glady murmured to Lane when, after they were invited to sit in the library, the countess excused herself to take a phone call. “She looks thirtyish. I know she’s in her late forties and her hair is loaded with extensions. When she’s in her sixties, her face will fall apart.”

  When the countess returned, she invited them on a tour of the apartment. For the next few minutes she treated them as visiting vendors but then became thoroughly intimidated by Glady. She ended up meekly agreeing to all of Glady’s pronouncements about how the apartment should be refinished and refurnished.