The Second Time Around

  Clearly that’s what the bulk of evidence indicated.

  Or did it?

  THIRTY

  Before leaving the restaurant, we agreed on times for my interviews with Wallingford and Garner. I pushed my advantage and suggested I meet them at their homes. Wallingford, who lives in Rye, one of the toniest suburbs in Westchester County, readily said that I could call on him on either Saturday or Sunday afternoon at three o’clock.

  “Saturday would be better for me,” I responded, thinking of Casey and the cocktail party I was attending with him on Sunday. Then, crossing my fingers, I slipped him a curve. “I do want to go to your headquarters and speak to some of your employees, just to get them to express their feelings about the loss of their 401k’s and the bankruptcy and how all that is going to affect their lives.”

  I saw him trying to think quickly of a polite way to refuse me, so I added, “I took names of stockholders at the meeting last week, and I’ll be talking to them as well.” Of course, what I really wanted to talk to the employees about was whether it was common knowledge that Nick Spencer and Vivian Powers were emotionally involved.

  Wallingford clearly didn’t like the request at all, but yielded because he was trying to get good press out of me. “I don’t suppose that would be a problem,” he said after a moment, his tone icy.

  “Tomorrow afternoon, about three o’clock, then,” I said quickly. “I promise I won’t be long. I just want to get an overall reaction to put in the story.”

  Unlike Wallingford, Garner flatly refused to be interviewed in his home. “A man’s home is his castle, Carley,” he said. “I never conduct business there.”

  I would love to have reminded him that even Buckingham Palace was open to tourists, but I held my tongue. By the time we’d finished espresso, I was more than ready to put on my traveling shoes. A journalist is not supposed to let emotion get in the way of a story, but as I sat there, I could feel my anger rising. It seemed to me that Lynn was downright cheerful at the thought that her husband had been involved in a serious romance before he disappeared. It made her look better, even sympathetic, and that was all that mattered to her.

  Wallingford and Garner were also on that same page. Show the world that we are victims—that was the thrust of everything they told me. Of the four of us, I thought, I’m the only one who seems remotely interested in the possibility that if Nicholas Spencer could be tracked down, there might be a way to recoup at least some of that money. That would be great news for the stockholders. Maybe I’d get back part of my $25,000. Or perhaps Wallingford and Garner were assuming that even if Nick could be found and extradited, he’d probably have buried the money so deep that it would never be found.

  After denying me a home visit, Garner did agree that I could call on him in his office in the Chrysler Building. He said he could give me a quick interview at 9:30 on Friday morning.

  Realizing how very few journalists got this far with Adrian Garner—he was famous for not giving interviews—I thanked him with reasonable warmth.

  Just before we left, Lynn said, “Carley, I’ve been starting to sort through Nick’s personal things. I came across the plaque they gave him in February in his hometown. He’d shoved it in a drawer. You went up to Caspien to get background material on him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.” I wasn’t about to admit that I’d been up there less than twenty-four hours ago.

  “How do people there feel about him now?”

  “The way people feel about him everywhere. He was so persuasive that the Caspien Hospital board put a lot of money in Gen-stone after he was honored. As a result of their losses, they’ve had to cancel plans for the children’s wing addition.”

  Wallingford shook his head. Garner looked grim, but I could also see that he was growing impatient. The luncheon was over. He was ready to go.

  Lynn offered no response to the fact that the hospital had lost money intended to benefit sick children, and instead asked, “I mean, what did they say about Nick before the scandal broke?”

  “There were glowing eulogies in the town newspaper after the plane crash,” I said. “Apparently Nick was an excellent student, a nice kid, and excelled in sports. There was a great picture of him when he was about sixteen, holding a trophy. He was a champion swimmer.”

  “Which may have been the reason he was able to stage the crash, then swim to shore,” Wallingford suggested.

  Maybe, I thought. But if he was smart enough to pull that off, it sounds pretty strange to me that he wasn’t smart enough not to be spotted in Switzerland.

  * * *

  I went back to the office and checked my messages. A couple of them were pretty disconcerting. The first e-mail I read was “When my wife wrote to you last year, you never bothered to answer her question, and now she’s dead. You’re not that smart. Have you figured out who was in Lynn Spencer’s house before it was torched?”

  Who was this guy? I wondered. Obviously, unless the whole thing was a crank message, he was in pretty bad shape mentally. From the address I could tell that he was the same guy who’d sent me a weird message a couple of days earlier. I had kept that e-mail, but now I wished I’d kept the other one that had seemed weird, the one that said, “Prepare yourself for Judgment Day.” I’d deleted it because at the time I thought it was from a religious nut. Now I wondered if the same guy had sent all three.

  Had someone been in that house with Lynn? I knew from the Gomez couple that it was entirely possible she had late visitors. I wondered if I should show this e-mail to her and say, “Isn’t this ridiculous?” It would be interesting to get her reaction.

  The other communication that rattled me was a message on my answering machine from a supervisor in the X-ray office at Caspien Hospital. She said she felt it was important that I clear up something for her.

  I returned the call right away.

  “Miss DeCarlo, you were here yesterday speaking to my assistant?” she said.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “I understand that you asked for a copy of the Summers baby X rays, saying that Mrs. Summers was willing to fax you permission to take them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I gather my assistant told you we did not retain copies. But as I explained to Mrs. Summers’s husband when he picked them up on November 28 last year, he was taking our final set, and if he wished, we would make duplicates for him. He said that wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “I see.” I had to fish for words. I knew Caroline Summers’s husband had not picked up those X rays any more than he had picked up the MRI results in Ohio. Whoever had read and taken seriously the letter Caroline Summers wrote to Nicholas Spencer had certainly covered all the bases. Using Nick Spencer’s name, he had stolen Dr. Spencer’s early records from Dr. Broderick, then he’d stolen the X rays from Caspien Hospital which showed that the baby had multiple sclerosis, and finally he’d stolen the MRI results from the hospital in Ohio. He’d gone to a lot of trouble, and there had to be a good reason.

  Don was alone in his office. I went in. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  I told him about The Four Seasons lunch.

  “Good going,” he said. “Garner’s a hard guy to pin down.”

  Then I told him about the X rays that someone purporting to be Caroline Summers’s husband had taken from Caspien Hospital.

  “They sure covered all their bases, whoever they are,” Carter said slowly, “which certainly proves that Gen-stone has—or had—a serious mole in the office. Did you talk about any of this at lunch?”

  I looked at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Of course you didn’t.”

  I showed him the e-mail. “I can’t decide whether or not this guy is a crank,” I said.

  “I don’t know, either,” Don Carter told me, “but I think you should notify the authorities. The cops would love to track this guy down, because he may very well be an important witness to that fire. We got a tip that the cops in Bedford stopped
a kid for driving while under the influence of drugs. His family has a high-powered lawyer who wants to make a deal. Their bargaining chip would be the kid’s testimony against Marty Bikorsky. The kid says he was coming home from a different party a week ago, around three o’clock Tuesday morning, and passed the Spencer house. He swears he saw Bikorsky driving his van slowly in front of the house.”

  “How would he know it was Marty Bikorsky’s van, for heaven’s sake?” I protested.

  “Because the kid had a fender bender in Mount Kisco and ended up at the service station where Marty works. He saw Marty’s car and got a kick out of the license plate. Talked to him about it. It’s M.O.B. Bikorsky’s full name is Martin Otis Bikorsky.”

  “Why didn’t he come forward before now?”

  “Bikorsky had already been arrested. The kid had sneaked out to the party and is in enough trouble with his parents. He claims that if the wrong guy were arrested, he would have come forward then.”

  “Isn’t he the little model citizen?” I said, but actually I was dismayed at what Don had told me. I remembered asking Marty if he’d been sitting in the car when he went outside to smoke. I caught his wife giving him a warning glance. Was that what that was about? I wondered now as I had then. Had he driven around rather than sit in the car with the engine running? The houses in his neighborhood were very close to each other. An engine running in the middle of the night might have been noticed by a neighbor who had a window open. How natural it would have been if, angry, upset, and having had a couple of beers, Bikorsky had driven past the pristine and beautiful Bedford mansion and thought of losing his own home. And then he might have done something about it.

  The e-mails I was getting seemed to verify this version of events, something I found very troubling.

  I could see that Don was observing me. “Are you thinking that my judgment of people isn’t panning out?” I asked him.

  “No, I was thinking that I’m sorry it isn’t panning out for this guy. From what you tell me, Marty Bikorsky has an awful lot on his plate. If he did go nuts and torch that house, he’ll do a long stretch, I can guarantee you that. There are too many high rollers in Bedford to let anyone burn down one of their houses and get off lightly. Trust me, if he can cop a plea, he’ll be a lot better off in the long run.”

  “I hope he doesn’t,” I said. “I’m convinced he’s not guilty.”

  I went out to my desk. A copy of the Post was still there; I turned to page three, which contained the story about Spencer being seen in Switzerland and about the disappearance of Vivian Powers. Earlier I’d read only the first couple of paragraphs. The rest was mostly a rehash of the Gen-stone story, but I did find the information I was hoping might be there—the name of Vivian Powers’s family in Boston.

  Allan Desmond, her father, had issued a statement: “I absolutely do not believe that my daughter has joined Nicholas Spencer in Europe. In these past weeks she has spoken frequently on the phone to her mother, her sisters, and me. She was deeply grieved by his death and is planning to move back to Boston. If he is alive, she did not know it. I do know that she would not willingly have put her family through this anguish. Whatever has happened to her occurred without her cooperation or consent.”

  I believed that, too. Vivian Powers was grieving for Nicholas Spencer. It takes a special kind of cruelty to deliberately disappear and leave your family to agonize every moment of every day, wondering what happened to you.

  I sat at my desk and looked at the notes I had made about my visit to Vivian’s home. One thing jumped out at me. She said that the letter from the mother of the child who had been cured of multiple sclerosis had been answered with a form letter. I remembered that Caroline Summers had told me she never received an answer. So someone in the typist pool had not only passed the letter along to a third party but also had destroyed any record that it ever existed.

  I did decide I had an obligation to call the Bedford police and tell them about the e-mails. The detective I reached was cordial, but he didn’t sound particularly impressed. He asked me to fax him a copy of both. “We’ll pass the information along to the arson unit in the D.A.’s office,” he said. “And we’ll run our own trace on whoever sent them, but I get the feeling it’s a crank letter, Miss DeCarlo. We’re absolutely sure we have the right man.”

  There was no use telling him that I was still absolutely sure he was wrong. My next call was to Marty Bikorsky. Once again I got the answering machine. “Marty, I know how bad it looks for you, but I’m still in your corner. I’d really like a chance to sit down with you again.”

  I started to leave my cell phone number just in case Marty had mislaid it, but he picked up the receiver before I was finished. He agreed to see me when I left work. I was just walking out when I thought of something and turned on the computer again. I knew I’d read an article in House Beautiful in which Lynn was photographed at the house in Bedford. If I remembered correctly, the piece contained a number of exterior shots. What I was particularly interested in was a description of the grounds. I found the article, downloaded it, and congratulated myself that my memory had been accurate. Then I took off.

  This time I got stuck in the five o’clock traffic to Westchester and didn’t get to Bikorsky’s house until twenty of seven. If he and Rhoda had looked stricken when I saw them on Saturday, they looked positively ill today. We sat in the living room. I could hear the sound of the television coming from the little den off the kitchen and assumed Maggie was in there.

  I got right to the point. “Marty, I had the feeling there was something wrong about your either sitting in a cold car or letting an engine run that night, and I don’t believe that’s what happened. You went for a drive, didn’t you?”

  It wasn’t hard to see that Rhoda had strenuously objected to Marty’s telling me to come there at all. Her face flushed, her voice low, she said, “Carley, you seem like a nice person, but you’re a journalist and you want a story. That kid was wrong. He didn’t see Marty. Our lawyer will make holes in his story. The kid is trying to get out of trouble himself by taking advantage of the accusation against Marty. He’ll say anything to make a deal. I received some calls from people who don’t even know us who say that kid is always lying. Marty never left our driveway that night.”

  I looked at Marty. “I want to show you these e-mails,” I said. I watched as he read them and then handed them to Rhoda.

  “Who is this guy?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know, but right now the police are putting a trace on these messages. They’ll find him. He sounds like a wacko to me, but he may have been hanging around somewhere on the grounds. He may even be the one who set the fire. The point is that if you stick to the story that you didn’t drive past the Spencer house ten minutes before it was torched, and you’re lying, there may be a few more witnesses who will come forward. Then you really are finished.”

  Rhoda had begun to cry. He patted her knee and for a few moments said nothing. Finally he shrugged his shoulders. “I was there,” he said, his voice heavy, “just the way you figured it, Carley. I had had a couple of beers after work, as I told you, and I had a headache and was driving around. I was still mad, I’ll admit that—mad clear through. It wasn’t even just the house. It’s the fact that the cancer vaccine was no good. You don’t know how hard I’ve prayed that it would be available in time to help our Maggie.”

  Rhoda buried her face in her hands. Marty put his arm around her.

  “Did you stop at the house at all?” I asked him.

  “I stopped only long enough to open the window of the van and spit at the house and all that it stood for. Then I came home.”

  I believed him. I would have taken an oath that he was telling the truth. I leaned forward. “Marty, you were there within a few minutes of the fire starting. Did you see anyone leave the house or perhaps another car driving by? If that kid is telling the truth, and he did see you, did you see him as well?”

  “A car came from the other direction a
nd passed me. That may have been the kid. About half a mile away another car heading in the direction of the house went by.”

  “Did you notice anything about it?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. I may have thought from the shape of the headlights that it was pretty old, but I couldn’t swear on that.”

  “Did you see anyone in the driveway coming down from the house?”

  “No, but if that guy who sent this message was there, he could be right. I remember there was a car parked inside the gate.”

  “You saw a car there!”

  “Just a glimpse of one.” He shrugged. “I noticed it when I stopped and rolled my window down, but I was there only a few seconds.”

  “Marty, what did that car look like?”

  “It was a dark sedan, that’s as much as I could tell. It was parked off the driveway, behind the pillar, on the left side of the gate.”

  I pulled the article I’d downloaded from the Internet out of my shoulder bag and found a picture of the estate taken from the road. “Show me.”

  He leaned forward and studied the photograph. “See, this is where the car was parked,” he said, pointing to a spot just beyond the gate.

  The caption under the picture stated, “A charming cobblestone walkway leads to a pond.”

  “The car must have been on the cobblestones. The pillar just about hides it from the street,” Marty said.

  “If whoever sent the e-mail did see a man in the driveway, that may have been his car,” I told them.

  “Why wouldn’t he have driven up to the house?” Rhoda asked. “Why park there and walk up the driveway?”

  “Because whoever was there didn’t want the car to be seen,” I said. “Marty, I know you have to talk to your lawyer about this, but I’ve read the accounts of the fire pretty darn carefully. No one mentioned anything about a car parked at the gate, so whoever was there was gone before the fire engines came.”

  “Maybe he was the one who set the fire,” Rhoda said with something like hope creeping into her voice. “What was he doing there if he was hiding the car?”