“I love you.”
Still smiling after they said good-bye, Michael hung up and swiveled his chair around. “Where were we?” he asked Buchanan abruptly.
Buchanan recovered his composure. “I was about to ask you if the police have made any attempt to question you yet about your whereabouts at the time of Manning’s murder.”
Michael shook his head. “They have no idea whether I can prove I couldn’t have done it.”
“Then the obvious answer is they don’t want any proof that you couldn’t have. They’ve probably persuaded a judge that you’re a viable murder suspect and gotten him to authorize wiretaps, and whatever else they want, in order to look around for any other kind of wrongdoing they can find.”
He was quiet for a moment, letting his client assimilate that; then he said, “Before I recommend a course of action, I need to know your priorities here.”
“I want the police to find out who killed that son of a bitch. Instead of that, they’re wasting time and resources on me.”
“I can force them to cease and desist.” Gordon drew a breath and braced himself for a spectacularly unpleasant reaction to what he was about to say next. “However, in order for me to do that, you would first have to voluntarily offer the police a schedule of your whereabouts at the time of the murder. Since they clearly don’t want any proof of innocence from you, they’ll resist a request from me for an informal meeting, but I can threaten them with a deluge of legal action if they decline. Once they have proof of your whereabouts in their hands, if they don’t back off you, we can make things very unpleasant for them in court.”
The negative reaction Gordon anticipated was not vocal—as he’d expected it would be—but Valente’s jaw clenched in taut fury at the suggestion of volunteering any information whatsoever to the police. To Valente, voluntarily offering information to the police or prosecutors was tantamount to trying to appease his enemy, and that he wouldn’t do under any circumstances. Time after time, he’d chosen to wage a costly battle in court, rather than attempt to avoid the battle by offering explanations and proof to the prosecutors in advance.
In every other respect, Michael Valente was the most coldly rational man Gordon had ever represented—but not when it came to appeasing the justice system. For that reason, Gordon was somewhat taken aback when Valente nodded and said in a low, savage voice, “Set up a meeting.” He tipped his head toward the door of his office and added, “Use the conference room to make the call, and have my secretary type up the schedule I gave you of my activities that Sunday.”
Gordon got up, and gave him another piece of news he was sure would further enrage him. “I’ll try to get the detectives to come over here, but they’ll make you go down to the precinct. It gives them a home-court advantage. And,” he added, “undoubtedly some petty satisfaction.”
“Undoubtedly,” Michael said icily, reaching for a document lying on his desk and picking up a fountain pen.
“There’s one more thing. . . .”
A pair of frigid amber eyes lifted from the documents to his.
“If we can’t persuade them in this meeting that it’s completely pointless and indefensible to keep after you, then I’ll have to go to court to force them to cease and desist. That will take time, and time is what you don’t want to waste. Then there’s one other issue you need to be mindful of—”
“Which is?” Michael snapped.
“Mrs. Manning is undoubtedly a primary suspect. Her husband was cheating on her, so she had a motive, she had means—the gun—and she had a window of opportunity. I have no doubt the police have some sort of theory that you and she were involved and plotted together to get rid of her husband. If they ask you any questions about your relationship with her, now or in the past, I recommend that you answer them. Don’t volunteer, but don’t refuse to answer. I have a gut feeling the police are unduly suspicious of your relationship with her, even though it’s been out in the open since you flew her to the accident site.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you said they’ve never officially questioned her about her relationship with you. When the police refrain from asking the obvious, it’s because they think they already know something and they don’t want to tip their hand.”
After Buchanan left, Michael waited a few minutes while he came to grips with what he’d agreed to do; then he reached for his phone and called Leigh’s phone number, but not her private line. When Brenna answered, Michael asked her for Jason Solomon’s phone numbers, and he asked her not to mention his call to Leigh.
It took Michael less than thirty seconds to persuade Solomon to meet him at five-thirty at the St. Regis that night for a private conversation before Leigh arrived. The first twenty-five seconds of that time were spent avoiding Solomon’s excited inquiries as to Michael’s relationship with Leigh.
Chapter 52
* * *
With her elbows on her desk and her neck between her palms, Sam idly massaged her nape with her fingers while she read the last report in Leigh Manning’s file—a boring printout listing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every single neighbor Leigh Manning had ever had, at every address she’d ever lived at in New York.
Sam had been through all the files once already, but in her spare moments, she was going through the files on Leigh Manning and Michael Valente again, looking for something to connect the two of them prior to Logan Manning’s murder. The handwritten note Valente had enclosed with the basket of fruit was some proof of that, but the district attorney wanted to build a case against Valente for either first-degree murder or conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. After five weeks’ investigation, however, they still didn’t have a scrap of evidence to indicate the alleged conspirators had so much as spoken on the telephone prior to the weekend of Manning’s death.
Shrader strolled past Sam’s desk carrying his daily morning snack—two doughnuts and a cup of coffee. “Hey, Littleton,” he gloated as he sat down next to her at his own desk, “did you happen to see your grieving widow on the news last night? She was all dressed up and going out to dinner with her boyfriend.”
“I saw her,” Sam said. She’d already been through this same routine with Womack this morning, and she was ready to concede that Leigh Manning’s behavior at Dr. Winters’s office may merely have been a fantastically convincing performance.
“She’s brazen as hell now, isn’t she?” Shrader barked cheerfully.
“They’re not keeping their relationship any secret,” Sam murmured, glancing at him.
Shrader took a bite of doughnut and a swallow of coffee; then he picked up a piece of paper propped on his telephone. “I got a note here from McCord that says he wants us in his office at nine-forty-five. You know what that’s about?”
Sam nodded and turned the last page at the back of the earliest file on Leigh Manning. “The Special Frauds guy is coming over to tell us what they found when they audited Manning’s books and records. Forensics sent up their final written report on everything collected at the cabin, but there’s evidently nothing we didn’t already know from the preliminaries. McCord wants a full review and update of the case with us after that.”
Finished with Leigh Manning’s “life history,” Sam dragged the thick summary file on Michael Valente across her desk and opened it. It was hard to imagine two more opposite people than Valente and Leigh Manning seemed to be. Leigh Manning had never had so much as a traffic ticket, and she was a member of the mayor’s commission on fighting crime. Michael Valente had been charged with a series of crimes and he was on the police commissioner’s personal “Hit List” of known criminals whose activities he wanted closely monitored.
Beside her, Shrader made a phone call to an assistant DA who wanted to prep him for trial on an upcoming homicide case that Shrader had handled. Sam picked up a pen and began making a list containing the date of each case brought against Valente, the principal charges filed, and the ultimate outcome each time—one case per line.
She worked backward, starting with the most recent case, occasionally referring to the additional data on the summary sheets to clarify the details of the crimes he’d allegedly committed against city, state, and federal laws. One of the things she noticed was that the prosecutors had frequently gone to the grand jury to get an indictment, which usually meant they didn’t have a strong enough case to get a judge to sign an arrest warrant.
When she was finished, she had an impressive list of arrests and grand jury indictments over the last ten years for nonviolent crimes including attempted bribery, fraud, intent to defraud, grand larceny, insider trading, and income tax evasion, along with many variations on those same themes.
The right-hand column, listing the outcome of each case filed, had only three results: “Case Dismissed,” “Charges Dropped,” “Not Guilty.”
In every one of those cases, Valente had been represented by arguably the best criminal defense law firm in New York, but it was difficult to believe that even Buchanan, Powell could have gotten a patently guilty man completely off on every single case.
There were also occasional charges brought against him for minor offenses, including possession of a controlled substance, careless and reckless driving, and disturbing the peace. Sam had already read the individual files on each case; and, in her opinion, the controlled substance case had been particularly ludicrous. According to what she’d read, that arrest had evidently been based on Valente’s having had a prescription for a painkiller on him when he was busted for speeding—at six miles over the limit.
Once again the right-hand column had only three results for these lesser cases: “Case Dismissed,” “Charges Dropped,” “Not Guilty.”
The single exception to all that was the item at the bottom of her list—a charge of manslaughter in the first degree, brought against Valente when he was seventeen, for the shooting death of William T. Holmes. Unlike the other crimes, that one had been violent and Valente had pleaded guilty to it—his first and only time to plead guilty, rather than fight the charges and beat them. He’d been sentenced to eight years in prison, with eligibility for parole after four.
Sam flipped through the folders on her desk, looking for the case file on the manslaughter conviction, interested in the reason he’d done the crime, wondering if perhaps—that time—a female had been in any way responsible for his single violent act.
Unable to find the file, she leaned toward Shrader’s desk, but none of his folders had red labels. Womack’s desk was directly behind Shrader’s, and she swiveled around in her chair.
“What are you after?” Womack asked, returning from McCord’s office with a pile of folders in his hands.
“The file on Valente’s manslaughter conviction,” Sam told him.
“Haven’t got it,” Womack told her.
Sam got up and headed for McCord’s office. He wasn’t in there, so she started toward the table where the rest of Valente’s files were all neatly stacked, but as she passed McCord’s desk, she noticed a red-labeled file folder on it that was glaringly out of geometric order. Instead of being neatly placed on a corner or in the center of McCord’s desktop, it looked as if it had been thrown down. In fact, it was not only off center, it had papers spilling out of it. On a hunch, Sam checked the label on the folder and saw that it was the file on Valente’s manslaughter conviction. She wrote a note on McCord’s yellow pad to tell him she’d borrowed the file and returned to her desk.
Inside the file, she found the arresting officer’s report, but all it said was that Valente had quarreled with Holmes and shot him with an unregistered forty-five semiautomatic belonging to Valente. There were no witnesses to the actual shooting, but the arresting officer had been driving by, heard the shot, and had reached the scene before Valente could flee. McCord had drawn a broad circle around the arresting officer’s name and then written an address inside it.
Based on the information in the file, William Holmes had been a good kid with a clean record. Valente, however, had previously committed some other juvenile offenses, prior bad acts that the judge had taken into account, along with Valente’s age, when handing down his sentence.
Sam closed the file, thinking. . . . At the age of seventeen, Valente had taken a life, which meant he was capable of the act, but based on the details in that file, he’d done it in the heat of anger. Premeditated murder was a different kind of crime.
Lost in thought, she doodled on the tablet, trying to get a fix on who Valente really was, what made him tick, what made him turn violent—and why Leigh Manning would prefer him to a cheating, but otherwise respectable, husband.
She was still pondering all that when Shrader stood up. “It’s nine-forty,” he said, and then half seriously added, “Let’s not be tardy and give the lieutenant a reason to start the day pissed-off again.”
“God forbid,” Sam said flippantly, but she lost no time grabbing the borrowed file on Valente, a pad and pencil, and then getting up. McCord’s grim mood yesterday had coincided with a trip he’d made to Captain Holland’s office. When he walked in, he’d reportedly closed the door behind him in a clerk’s face. When he walked out, he’d supposedly slammed it.
“Usually this place is an icebox. Today it’s hot,” Shrader complained, stripping off his jacket and tossing it next to a crumb-covered napkin. Sam, wearing a light-rust-colored shirt, suede belt, and matching wool pants, left her blazer on the back of her chair and headed for McCord’s office.
She thought McCord’s tense mood yesterday might have been the result of having caught hell from someone because the investigation wasn’t moving fast enough, but five weeks wasn’t a long time for a homicide investigation—particularly an investigation meeting McCord’s incredibly meticulous demands for documentation and research. To McCord, everyone they interviewed was either an important potential witness who could help them or a very damaging potential witness who could help the defense—and he wanted to know everything there was to know, either way.
A few weeks ago when Womack had shown Valente’s doorman a picture of Leigh Manning and asked him if he’d ever seen the woman at his building, the doorman had firmly denied it. When Womack reported that in a meeting several days later, McCord had reamed him out for not asking the doorman how much Valente tipped him.
Womack went back to the doorman, got that information, and reported the figure to McCord. McCord then ordered Womack to run a background and financial check of the doorman to ascertain his living style—just in case several thousand dollars, instead of several hundred dollars, had changed hands between Valente and the seventy-two-year-old man.
Chapter 53
* * *
When McCord strode into his office at precisely nine-forty-five, his mood did not appear to be much improved. He nodded curtly at the three detectives seated in front of his desk. “We’re going to have some uninvited guests,” he began; then he stopped as the Special Frauds Squad auditor—a balding, sweating man in his forties—walked into the office, juggling a tall stack of large manila envelopes.
“What did you find out?” McCord asked as the man looked around for a place to unload the items. He unwisely chose to dump them on McCord’s desk, but McCord was too intent on hearing what he had to say to notice.
“Several things,” the auditor replied. “First, your dead guy was spending more than he was making. Second, he either had an incompetent CPA, or else he was scared shitless of being audited because there’s a lot of deductions he really should have tried to claim and didn’t. Third, his spending habits changed a couple of years ago. Fourth,” the auditor finished, his eyebrows levitating with irrepressible glee, “he’s got a platinum credit card from an offshore bank!”
“Could you amplify the first item a little,” McCord snapped impatiently.
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” the startled man said. “I mean that, until a couple years ago, Manning was doing extremely well—several of his commercial projects paid off big time for him, and he was also making a shitload of mo
ney in the stock market. The market started to slide at about the same time his business turned stagnant, but he went ahead and moved his offices to a new location anyway. The rent on the space he moved his offices into is staggering, but Manning didn’t seem to care. He then plowed over a million bucks into gutting, redesigning, and redecorating the place.”
He paused to open a manila envelope on the top of the pile; then he extracted a written report and glanced at it as if to confirm what he was about to say. “At that point, Manning began running his architectural firm as if it were some sort of ‘hobby’ that didn’t need to make a profit. It was costing him a lot to keep the doors open, and he was definitely spending more than he was taking in. Now, here’s what makes all that so interesting. . . .”
He peered silently at his audience to emphasize the magnitude of his next announcement. “Until a couple years ago, Manning was a big earner and a conservative spender. Suddenly, the reverse was true. He started spending money like he had an unlimited supply of it. His spending habits changed, and that’s what I look for!”
Sam was about to ask why having a credit card from an offshore bank was significant, but Womack spared her the need and the auditor answered the question.
“Let’s say you’ve got a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash that you obtained illegally,” the auditor proposed. “If you go to any U.S. bank and deposit more than ten thousand dollars in cash, the bank is obligated to report your name and social security number to the IRS. But you can’t risk any inquiries from the IRS about how you came by the cash money, which leaves you very few choices: You can bury it in the backyard and spend it a hundred dollars at a time, or you can take it to a legitimate bank in any country with laws that don’t require their banks to report to our tax authorities. Banks in Nassau, the Caymans, and Belize have been very popular for that purpose.”
He looked around at his audience, realized he wasn’t yet telling them anything they didn’t already know, but he forged ahead, his enthusiasm mounting. “Now you’ve got the money in a nice safe offshore bank earning interest, but you can’t spend it here, because you can’t write a check on a foreign bank to buy much of anything in the U.S. But he said significantly, “if your offshore bank issues you a platinum credit card with a high limit, or no limit, you can use it to buy virtually anything you want here. Logan Manning,” he finished triumphantly, “bought two luxury cars in two years on his credit card, and then he sold them a couple weeks later, took the check he was given, and deposited that into a regular bank account.