Let Me Call You Sweetheart

  It would be so easy. Where would he go? he wondered. He did believe that the spirit moves on. Reincarnation? Maybe. Maybe this time he would be born Suzanne’s peer. Maybe they would fall in love. A smile played on his lips.

  But then, as he was about to close the safe, he looked at Suzanne’s jewelry case.

  Suppose McGrath was right. Suppose it hadn’t been Skip but another person who had taken Suzanne’s life. McGrath had said that person was laughing now, mockingly grateful for the testimony that had condemned Skip.

  There was a way to rectify that. If Reardon was not the killer, then McGrath would have all that she needed to find the man who had murdered Suzanne.

  Smith reached for the jewelry case, laid the gun on top of it and carried both to his desk in the study. Then with precise movements he took out a sheet of stationery and unscrewed the top from his pen.

  When he was finished writing, he wrapped the jewelry case and the note together and managed to force them into one of the several Federal Express mailers that he kept at home for convenience. He addressed the package to Assistant Prosecutor Kerry McGrath at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, Hackensack, New Jersey. It was an address he remembered well.

  He put on his coat and muffler and walked eight blocks to the Federal Express drop that he had used on occasion.

  It was just eleven o’clock when he returned home. He took off his coat, picked up the gun, went back into the bedroom and stretched out on the bed, still fully dressed. He turned off all the lights except the one that illuminated Suzanne’s picture.

  He would end this day with her and begin the new life at the stroke of midnight. The decision made, he felt calm, even happy.

  At eleven-thirty the doorbell began to ring. Who? he wondered. Angrily he tried to ignore it, but a persistent finger was pressed against it. He was sure he knew what it was. Once there had been an accident on the corner, and a neighbor had run to him for help. After all, he was a doctor. If there had been an accident, just this one more time his skill might be put to use.

  Dr. Charles Smith unlocked and opened his door, then slumped against it as a bullet found its mark between his eyes.

  Tuesday, November 7th

  85

  On Tuesday morning, Deidre Reardon and Beth Taylor were already in the reception room of Geoff Dorso’s law office when he arrived at nine o’clock.

  Beth apologized for both of them. “Geoff, I’m so sorry to come without calling first,” she said, “but Deidre has to go into the hospital for the angioplasty tomorrow morning. I know it will rest her mind if she has a chance to talk to you for a few minutes and give you that picture of Suzanne we talked about the other day.”

  Deidre Reardon was looking at him anxiously. “Oh, come on, Deidre,” Geoff said heartily, “you know you don’t have to make excuses for seeing me. Aren’t you the mother of my star client?”

  “Sure. It’s all those billing hours you’re logging,” Deidre Reardon murmured with a relieved smile, as Geoff took her hands in his. “It’s just that I’m so embarrassed at the way I barged into that lovely Kerry McGrath’s office last week and treated her like dirt. And then to realize her own child has been threatened because Kerry’s trying to help my son.”

  “Kerry absolutely understood how you felt that day. Come back to my office. I’m sure the coffee-pot’s on.”

  * * *

  “We will only stay five minutes,” Beth promised as Geoff placed a coffee mug in front of her. “And we won’t waste your time saying it’s been a glimpse of heaven to think that finally there’s real, genuine hope for Skip. You know how we feel, and you know how grateful we are for everything you are doing.”

  “Kerry saw Dr. Smith late yesterday afternoon,” Geoff said. “She thinks she got to him. But there are other developments as well.” He told them about Barney Haskell’s records. “We may at last have a chance to track the source of the jewelry we think Weeks gave Suzanne.”

  “That’s one of the reasons we’re here,” Deidre Reardon told him. “Remember I said I had a picture that showed Suzanne wearing the missing set of antique diamond pins? As soon as I got home from the prison Saturday night I went to get it out of the file and couldn’t find it. I spent all Sunday and yesterday ransacking the apartment, looking for it. Of course it wasn’t there. Stupidly, I had forgotten that at some point I’d covered it with one of those plastic protectors and put it with my own personal papers. Anyway, I finally found it. With all the talk about the jewelry the other day, I felt it important for you to have it.”

  She handed him a legal-size manila envelope. From it, he extracted a folded page from Palisades Community Life, a tabloid-sized weekly paper. As he opened it Geoff noticed the date, April 24th, nearly eleven years ago and barely a month before Suzanne Reardon died.

  The group picture from the Palisades Country Club took up the space of four columns of print. Geoff recognized Suzanne Reardon immediately. Her outstanding beauty leaped from the page. She was standing at a slight angle, and the camera had clearly caught the sparkling diamonds on the lapel of her jacket.

  “This is the double pin that disappeared,” Deidre explained, pointing to it. “But Skip doesn’t know when he last saw it on Suzanne.”

  “I’m glad to have this,” Geoff said. “When we can get a copy of some of those records Haskell kept, we may be able to trace the pin.”

  It almost hurt to see the eager hope on both their faces. Don’t let me fail them, he prayed as he walked them back to the reception room. At the door he hugged Deidre. “Now remember, you get this angioplasty over and start feeling better. We can’t have you sick when they unlock the door for Skip.”

  “Geoff, I haven’t walked barefoot through hell this long to check out now.”

  After having taken care of a number of client calls and queries, Geoff decided to call Kerry. Maybe she would want to have a fax of the picture Deidre had brought in. Or maybe I just want to talk to her, he admitted to himself.

  When her secretary put her through, Kerry’s frightened voice sent chills through Geoff. “I just opened a Federal Express package that Dr. Smith sent me. Inside was a note and Suzanne’s jewelry case and the card that must have come with the sweetheart roses. Geoff, he admits he lied about Skip and the jewelry. He told me that by the time I read this he’ll have committed suicide.”

  “My God, Kerry, did—”

  “No, it’s not that. You see, he didn’t. Geoff, Mrs. Carpenter from his office just called me. When Dr. Smith didn’t come in for an early appointment, and didn’t answer the phone, she went to his house. His door was open a crack and she went in. She found his body lying in the foyer. He’d been shot, and the house ransacked. Geoff, was it because someone didn’t want Dr. Smith to change his testimony and was looking for the jewelry? Geoff, who is doing this? Will Robin be next?”

  86

  At nine-thirty that morning, Jason Arnott looked out the window, saw the cloudy, overcast sky and felt vaguely depressed. Other than some residual achiness in his legs and back, he was over the bug or virus that had laid him low over the weekend. But he could not overcome the uneasy sense that something was wrong.

  It was that damn FBI flyer, of course. But he had felt the same way after that night in Congressman Peale’s house. A few of the downstairs lamps that were on an automatic switch had been on when he got there, but the upstairs rooms were all dark. He had been coming down the hallway, carrying the painting and the lockbox that he had pried from the wall, when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He had barely had time to hold the painting in front of his face when light flooded the hallway.

  Then he had heard the quavering gasp, “Oh, dear God,” and knew it was the congressman’s mother. He hadn’t intended to hurt her. Instinctively he had rushed toward her, holding the painting as a shield, intending only to knock her down and grab her glasses so he could make his getaway. He had spent a long time talking with her at Peale’s inaugural party, and he knew she was blind as a bat without t
hem.

  But the heavy portrait frame had caught the side of her head harder than he intended, and she had toppled backwards down the stairs. He knew from that final gurgle that she made before she went still that she was dead. For months afterward he had looked over his shoulder, expecting to see someone coming toward him with handcuffs.

  Now, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, the FBI flyer was giving him that same case of the jitters.

  After the Peale case, his only solace had been to feast his eyes on the John White Alexander masterpiece At Rest, which he had taken that night. He kept it in the master bedroom of the Catskill house just as Peale had kept it in his master bedroom. It was so amusing to know that thousands of people trooped through the Metropolitan Museum of Art to gaze on its companion piece, Repose. Of the two, he preferred At Rest. The reclining figure of a beautiful woman had the same long sinuous lines as Repose, but the closed eyes, the look on the sensual face reminded him now of Suzanne.

  The miniature frame with her portrait was on his night table, and it amused him to have both in his room, even though the imitation Fabergé frame was unworthy of the glorious company it kept. The night table was gilt and marble, an exquisite example of Gothic Revival, and had been obtained in the grand haul when he had hired a van and practically emptied the Merriman house.

  He would call ahead. He enjoyed arriving there to find the heat on and the refrigerator stocked. Instead of using his home phone, however, he would call his housekeeper on a cellular phone that was registered to one of his aliases.

  * * *

  Inside what seemed to be a repair van of Public Service Gas and Electric the signal came that Arnott was making a call. As the agents listened, they smiled triumphantly at each other. “I think we are about to trace the foxy Mr. Arnott to his lair,” the senior agent on the job observed. They listened as Jason concluded the conversation by saying, “Thank you, Maddie. I’ll leave here in an hour and should be there by one.”

  Maddie’s heavy monotone reply was, “I’ll have everything ready for you. You can count on me.”

  87

  Frank Green was trying a case, and it was noon before Kerry was able to inform him of Smith’s murder and the Federal Express packet she had received from him late that morning. She was fully composed now and wondered why she had allowed herself to lose control when Geoff had phoned. But her emotions were something that she would explore later. For now, the knowledge that Joe Palumbo was parked outside Robin’s school, waiting to escort her home and then stand watch at the house until Kerry got home, was enough to help relieve her immediate fears.

  Green went carefully through the contents of the jewelry box, comparing each piece with those Smith had mentioned in the letter he had included in the package to Kerry. “Zodiac bracelet,” he read. “That’s right here. Watch with gold numerals, ivory face, diamond and gold band. Okay. Here it is. Emerald and diamond ring set in pink gold. That’s right here. Antique diamond bracelet. Three bands of diamonds attached by diamond clasps.” He held it up. “That’s a beauty.”

  “Yes. You may remember Suzanne was wearing that bracelet when she was murdered. There was one more piece, an antique diamond pin or double pin, that Skip Reardon had described. Dr. Smith doesn’t mention it, and apparently he didn’t have it, but Geoff just faxed me a picture from a local newspaper showing Suzanne wearing that pin only a few weeks before she died. It never showed up in the items found at the house. You can see that it’s very much like the bracelet and obviously an antique. The other pieces are beautiful, but very modern in design.”

  Kerry looked closely at the blurred reproduction and understood why Deidre Reardon had described it as evoking a mother-and-child image. As she’d explained, the pin appeared to be in two parts, the larger being a flower, the smaller a bud. They were attached by a chain. She studied it for a moment, perplexed because it looked oddly familiar.

  “We’ll watch out for this pin to see if it is mentioned in Haskell’s receipts,” Green promised. “Now let’s get this straight. As far as you know, everything the doctor mentioned, excluding this particular pin, is the total of the jewelry Suzanne asked the doctor to tell Skip he gave her?”

  “According to what Smith wrote in his letter, and it does coincide with what Skip Reardon told me Saturday.”

  Green put down Smith’s letter. “Kerry, do you think you might have been followed when you went to see Smith yesterday?”

  “I think now I probably was. That’s why I’m so concerned about Robin’s safety.”

  “We’ll keep a squad car outside your house tonight, but I wouldn’t be unhappy to have you and Robin out of there and in some more secure place with all this coming to a head. Jimmy Weeks is a cornered animal. Royce may be able to tie him to tax fraud, but with what you’ve uncovered, we may be able to tie him to a murder.”

  “You mean because of the card Jimmy sent with the sweetheart roses?” The card was already being analyzed by handwriting experts, and Kerry had reminded Green of the paper found in Haskell’s lawyer’s pocket after both men had been murdered.

  “Exactly. No clerk in a flower shop drew those musical notes. Imagine describing an inscription like that over the phone. From what I understand, Weeks is a pretty good amateur musician. The life of the party when he sits down at the piano. That kind. With that card—and if the jewelry ties in to those receipts—the Reardon case is a whole new ball game.

  “And if Skip is granted a new trial, he’ll be entitled to release on bail pending that trial—or dismissal of the charges,” Kerry said evenly.

  “If the scenario plays out, I’ll recommend that,” Green agreed.

  “Frank, there’s one other point I have to raise,” Kerry said. “We know that Jimmy Weeks is trying to scare us off this investigation. But it may be for some reason other than we think. I have learned that Weeks picked up Skip Reardon’s options on valuable Pennsylvania property when Skip had to liquidate. He apparently had inside information, so there’s a good chance the whole transaction was illegal. It’s certainly not as major a crime as murder—and we still don’t know, of course; he may have been Suzanne’s killer—but if the IRS had that information, along with the tax evasion charges and what-have-you, Weeks could be put away for a long time as it is.”

  “And you think he’s worried that your probing into the Reardon murder case might expose those earlier deals?” Green asked.

  “Yes, it’s very possible.”

  “But do you really think that is sufficient to make him threaten you through Robin? That seems a little extreme to me.” Green shook his head.

  “Frank, from what I have learned from my ex-husband, Weeks is ruthless enough and arrogant enough to go to almost any lengths to protect himself, and it would make no difference what the charge—it could be murder or it could be stealing a newspaper. But all this aside, there’s still another reason why the murder scenario may not play out, even if we can tie Jimmy Weeks to Suzanne,” Kerry said. Then she began to fill him in on Jason Arnott’s connection to Suzanne and Grace Hoover’s theory that he was a professional thief.

  “Even if he is, are you tying him to Suzanne Reardon’s murder?” Green asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Kerry said slowly. “It depends on whether or not he is involved in those thefts.”

  “Sit tight. We can get that flyer faxed in from the FBI right away,” Green decreed as he pressed the intercom. “We’ll find out who’s running the investigation.”

  Less than five minutes later his secretary brought in the flyer. Green pointed out the confidential number. “Tell them to put me through to the top guy on this.”

  Sixty seconds later, Green was on the phone with Si Morgan. He turned on the phone’s speaker so that Kerry could listen too.

  “It’s breaking now,” Morgan told him. “Arnott has another place, in the Catskills. We’ve decided to ring the doorbell and see if the housekeeper will talk to us. We’ll keep you posted.”

  Kerry gripped
the arms of her chair and turned her head toward the detached voice coming out of the speaker phone. “Mr. Morgan, this is terribly important. If you can still contact your agent, ask him to inquire about a miniature oval picture frame. It’s blue enamel with seed pearls surrounding the glass. It may or may not hold a picture of a beautiful dark-haired woman. If it’s there, we’ll be able to connect Jason Arnott to a murder case.”

  “I can still reach him. I’ll have him ask about it, and I’ll get back to you,” he promised.

  “What was that about?” Green asked as he snapped off the speaker.

  “Skip Reardon has always sworn that a miniature frame that was a Fabergé copy disappeared from the master bedroom the day Suzanne died. That and the antique pin are the two things we can’t account for as of now.”

  Kerry leaned over and picked up the diamond bracelet. “Look at this. It’s from a different world from the other jewelry.” She held up the picture of Suzanne wearing the antique pin. “Isn’t it funny? I feel as though I’ve seen a pin like that before, I mean the little one joined to the big one. It may just be because it came up repeatedly in statements from Skip and his mother at the time of the investigation. I’ve read that file until I’m dizzy.”

  She laid the bracelet back in the case. “Jason Arnott spent a great deal of time with Suzanne. Maybe he wasn’t the neuter he tried to make himself out to be. Think of it this way, Frank. Let’s say he fell for Suzanne too. He gave her the antique pin and the bracelet. It’s exactly the kind of jewelry he would select. Then he realized that she was fooling around with Jimmy Weeks. Maybe he came in that night and saw the sweetheart roses and the card we believe Jimmy sent.”

  “You mean he killed her and took back the pin?”

  “And her picture. From what Mrs. Reardon tells me, it’s a beautiful frame.”