Murder Keeps A Secret Page 23

  Frost did not see his old friend until a Thursday evening early in May when he and Cynthia went to dinner at Le Bernardin with Rowan and Emily Sherwood. “After all you’ve done, the least I can do is treat you to a four-star meal,” Rowan had said. “I understand Le Bernardin is the best fish joint in America, so let’s go there.”

  On their way to the restaurant, Cynthia remarked to her husband that they would have a lot to talk about. Not only the arrest of Richard Taylor (which Rowan might or might not want to discuss), but an outbreak of scandals since Primary Day. The first, which had been the talk of the city’s intellectual and literary circles, had been a bankruptcy filing by the Hammersmith Press. This was no great surprise to those who closely followed the publishing industry, and had tracked Hammersmith’s decline. But a civil complaint, filed in short order by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Hammersmith, was. It alleged that Hammersmith indeed had a silent partner, as the Frosts had half-suspected. He was, or so the complaint asserted, one Sal Manetti, a marginal gangster to whom Stanley Knowles had sold fifteen percent of Hammersmith’s stock—presumably in under-the-table satisfaction of a shylocking loan—without any public disclosure that Manetti had become a major Hammersmith stockholder.

  The second scandal was also on the gangster front. Tom Giardi and Manetti were indicted on money-laundering charges—federal “RICO” charges under the wonderfully titled Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That, too, was no real surprise. What was a shock was the afternoon New York Press three days later, which printed four photographs, all taken on different dates, of Giardi and Grace Mann, hand-in-hand at New York restaurants other than Giardi’s own. Ms. Mann’s network, which had pressed her to maintain an image as an emancipated single woman, suddenly and cravenly found that there could be too much emancipation. Her contract as the network’s star morning anchorwoman was not renewed.

  And Cynthia, through her Foundation sources, had learned that Peter Jewett’s young protégé had recovered from her hysteria when the police raided their Berkshires love nest and had eloped with the professor.

  All these events were rehashed, with a serving of relish, leading Emily Sherwood to conclude that Harrison “had a gift for assembling an interesting table” at the Reuff Dinner. “Practically everybody that sat there is in jail, or on their way there or fired in disgrace,” she exaggerated.

  Inevitably the subject of the murders came up, though not until dessert and after a large consumption of a very good Montrachet.

  “Reuben, we haven’t talked about it,” Harrison Rowan said, “but how the hell did you fit all the pieces together that put the finger on young Taylor?”

  “You know the story,” Frost replied. “I told you most of it. But maybe I can fill in a few gaps, if you really want to hear about them.”

  “Yes, yes,” Harrison said. “It’s distasteful, but my curiosity is boundless.”

  “Well, I thought right from the start that the person who killed David had made an appointment to see him. Grace Mann told me that he had regular habits and almost never worked late, but the night he was killed he had left a message on the answering machine that he would be late. Assuming he were going to be delayed in the office, that meant someone had arranged to see him. Who would do that? Not, I thought, a person intent on murder. Why would you risk having David tell Grace or someone else that he would be late because he had a meeting with so-and-so?

  “That meant the murderer must have come with some other intention, of talking something over with David. Who could that have been? Stanley Knowles? Not likely. In publishing the mountain nearly always comes to Mahomet—Knowles would have called David to his office if there was some publishing matter to discuss. If Knowles was the murderer, his only interest was seeing David dead and collecting on his insurance. No matter how desperate, it’s very doubtful that he would have made an advance appointment to kill David on his own ground.

  “Peter Jewett? A possibility, but there was no evidence that his long-standing enmity for David had surfaced in any new dispute requiring a meeting or a confrontation. Their eternal dispute was conducted in print, not in person. I almost had to reconsider that one—Jewett kept popping up in odd ways—but then his little chickadee gave him an alibi.

  “Ralston Fortes? Maybe. It was just possible he might have come and made a physical threat on behalf of his paramour. And thrown David out the window when the confrontation got heated.

  “Tom Giardi? The least likely. From what I know of such things, Giardi and his kind do not make advance appointments to commit homicide.

  “That left Alan Rowan, full of petty grievances about his father. Words leading to murder were very possible. And with a mother and step-mother being less than candid about his drug problem. But then Alan—no thanks to him, I might add—was eliminated.

  “Then there were all the little clues, which proved to be wild-goose chases. We kept looking for an ‘Elizabeth’—the name of Marietta Ainslee’s cat and Peter Jewett’s estranged wife. Red herrings both. As was the fact, significant for a while in my restless imagination, that Fortes was wearing an ascot when I saw him in Washington—an ascot covering what I thought might have been scratches.

  “Then Cynthia and Francisca Ribiero, through their highly unorthodox methods—of questionable legality, I might add—eliminated Knowles and Fortes as suspects.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, dear,” Cynthia said. “But we did manage to concentrate your thinking.”

  “I won’t deny it,” Frost said. “Your discoveries, and what I learned about the Ainslee papers, did redirect my thinking. Except that the object of that thinking, Wheeler Edmunds, was a totally improbable and impossible suspect. But then, over a second glass of wine at the Metropolitan Museum, revelation came. The wine and word association did it—Elizabeth, Elizabeth who? Elizabeth Taylor, of course. Richard Taylor, of course. Or maybe it was Richard Burton and Richard Taylor, I don’t know.”

  “Come, come, Reuben,” Harrison said. “Are you really telling us that Elizabeth Taylor was the clue to it all? That’s pretty farfetched.”

  “Far-fetched it may be, but that’s what started me down the right road. I have no doubt in my mind that we—Cynthia, Bautista, Francisca, all of us—would have zeroed in on Richard Taylor eventually. Cynthia and I had speculated all along that two people might have been involved in David’s murder—an instigator and an executioner. Marietta Ainslee and Ralston Fortes, for example. Or Grace and Tom. Or Nancy Rowan and her son.

  “But let me tell you this much. Without the ‘Elizabeth’ lead, we might not have thought about Taylor until after the New York primary. And thus missed the opportunity to bring extraordinary pressure on Edmunds and, through him, on the hapless Taylor. If we’d made our deduction later, after Edmunds’s star started falling, we wouldn’t have had the advantage we did and we—or the police—might still be searching for ‘probable cause’.”

  “It’s some tale, Reuben,” Harrison said. “But in your omniscience, let me ask you one thing. Did Edmunds know what Taylor was doing?”

  “That’s complicated. Did he tell him to kill David, and then Jenkins? Of course not. Did he tell Richard to dangle the speech-writing bait before your son? I don’t think so. But what he did do was tell his most trusted aide about a potentially explosive problem, perhaps even saying that Taylor would be rewarded on this earth or in heaven if he solved it. His only mistake, and a very human and I think innocent mistake, was to misjudge Richard’s capacity for zealotry.

  “If he knew more, if he was guilty of more, he’ll be punished. Not in a court of law, but by having to sit in the vapid recesses of the United States Senate contemplating not only his political failure but his guilt.”

  “Or, almost as bad, contemplating his bad judgment,” Harrison added.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Reuben replied. “And let me add one other thing. I’ve no doubt in my mind that Edmunds, an experienced former prosecutor, coached Taylor at the end to
lace his confession with references to insane behavior.”

  “There’s only one question I have,” Cynthia said. “Why did Donna Knowles eat so little at the Reuff Dinner and so much at Giardi’s restaurant?”

  “A mystery, Cynthia. I don’t know. If I were writing a crime novel about the murders, I’m sure some pesky reviewer would call that a hole in my plot. Maybe she genuinely likes eggplant which, as you recall, Giardi’s served with everything. Maybe she knew bankruptcy was coming and, like a clever squirrel, was stoking up for leaner days. Or maybe she was terrified out of her mind of Giardi, Sal Manetti’s friend. But I really don’t know.”

  “It’s the only thing about this whole sordid business you don’t seem to know, Reuben,” Harrison said. “But enough.” He motioned to a waiter as he spoke. Frost thought he wanted the check, but instead he commanded a bottle of champagne.

  “My friends,” he said, glass in hand. “I thought I had nothing to live for last month, after the death of my son. That scar will never heal, nor will my compassion increase for the demented Mr. Taylor. But—in addition to Mr. Taylor’s arrest—there’s been another upturn in my fortunes. Emily and I are going to be married in Fairfax next Saturday.”

  Frost’s eyes filled with tears, old memories and more recent, sordid recollections swirling together through his mind. He grasped Cynthia’s hand; she, too, was both smiling and crying. Then Reuben raised his glass to Harrison. And touched Emily Bryant Sherwood’s with his own, whispering to her, at his side, “And may the angels sing, dear Emily.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Reuben Frost Mysteries

  1

  Recollections

  Reuben Frost sat down at his personal computer and got it up and working. A mechanical illiterate all his life, he had been astonished at his ability to cope with his hard-disk, 40-megabyte machine, complete with a 16-MHz microprocessor (whatever that might be). The pleasant young saleswoman at the computer store had assured him that the model he bought was state of the art, though she could scarcely conceal her surprise at the prospect of a dignified seventy-seven-year-old buying his first PC.

  “What are you going to do with it?” she had asked.

  “Prepare my will,” Frost had been tempted to answer, but instead had mumbled something about “writing letters.” “That is, if I can make it do anything.”

  “You won’t have any problem, Mr. Frost. It’s very user friendly.”

  The truth was that Reuben had bought his PC on a dare. For months his ancient friend Douglas Gilmore, retired chairman of Hastings Industries, had talked of little else but home computers whenever they met at the Gotham Club.

  “Douglas, you’re an old fool,” Frost had impatiently told Gilmore on at least one occasion. “Those damnable things are for young people, not the likes of us. I’ve always used a live secretary and I expect to continue to do so for the few years I’ve got left.”

  “Easier said than done, Reuben,” Gilmore had replied. “I don’t know how it is at your old law firm, but at Hastings it’s damned hard for someone who’s been retired as long as I have to get a decent secretary.”

  Frost had been forced to concede Gilmore’s point. His old colleagues at Chase & Ward were unfailingly polite when he visited the office, but he had the nagging impression that his occasional requests for stenographic help were thought a nuisance.

  One day Gilmore had finally said that Frost was undoubtedly right, that he probably couldn’t cope with a PC, that he was indeed a very old dog to whom new tricks would not come easily. Thus challenged, and also encouraged by his wife, Cynthia, who was eager for her husband to fill up his days, Reuben had taken the plunge.

  To his amazement, he and the computer got on well. He shared his triumphs with Gilmore and his younger club-mates, many of them writers who used PCs in their work. At the Gotham bar, the conversation often concerned laptops, printers, modems and other electronic esoterica that intrigued the aging hackers gathered for their pre-luncheon drinks. Frost imagined that this talk must resemble an earlier day’s conversations, right at the same bar, about the wonders of the newfangled automobile.

  Right now, on a sunny afternoon in mid-June, Frost wanted to be anywhere but before his computer in the library of his townhouse on the East Side of New York. The City had looked temptingly fresh and green when he had returned from lunch. But he had promised his wife that he would reply to an urgent request from their mutual friend, the writer Eleanor Daggett, to provide her with background on the Vandermeer family.

  The City’s news media had been fascinated with the tale of the Vandermeers and their fortune ever since the poisoning of the family scion, Tobias, the previous March, at a meeting of his wife’s reading club at which the Frosts had been present. Daggett, a well-known free-lance journalist, had become a specialist in so-called “true crime” sagas. The denouement of l’affaire Vandermeer had been astonishing and, now that the drama was over, or at least ready to be transferred to the courts, she wanted to find out all she could about Tobias, his wife, Robyn, and the whole unsavory cast of players.

  Frost stayed at his computer all afternoon, composing a long letter to the reporter:

  DEAR ELEANOR,

  As you requested, I will try to set forth what I know about the background of the Vandermeers. I will also include a certain amount of hearsay, but, knowing what a good reporter you are, I am certain you will not use anything in your book that you do not check for accuracy.

  My own exposure to the family goes back to my early days as an associate lawyer at Chase & Ward in the late 1930s. The firm, then as now, handled the Vandermeers’ trust and estates work and occasional corporate problems. One way or another, I became the corporate “expert” on their affairs, and then, in 1964, I did a special piece of research for Tobias that I will describe later.

  I should say at the outset that both Cynthia and I always had mixed feelings about Tobias. I don’t like drunks, particularly loutish ones, which Tobias became in the years before his death, though I can’t deny there were many times when he was utterly charming. Despite his often terrible behavior, he had a rather romantic streak that could be appealing.

  It was fascinating, and singular in my experience, to observe a man not only so rich that he didn’t have to do anything—there are plenty of those—but one who actually didn’t do anything, except of course play jazz piano, stitch needlepoint and, late in life, build a collection of Dutch genre paintings. It is certainly unique when one’s only workaday concern is to keep off the Forbes 400 list of the country’s wealthiest individuals—an obsession with Tobias.

  As for Robyn, her social climbing and cultural pretensions never appealed to us. But you couldn’t help feeling sorry for her as Tobias grew more sodden and meaner toward the end. And one also had to admire her deep commitment to the cause of literacy.

  The Vandermeers were one of the old Dutch families in New York, arriving at the end of the seventeenth century. They didn’t come over with Henry Hudson or Peter Minuit, but they were here not much after them. (A competitor of theirs in the real estate business once remarked to me that it was too bad they didn’t come with Minuit; with the help of a Vandermeer, he probably would have gotten the Manhattoe Indians to cut their price for Manhattan below $24.)

  By the early 1800s the Vandermeers had money to invest, and they put it into land and shipping. Manhattan had begun to burst out from its boundaries at the lower end of the island, and the Vandermeers shrewdly invested in well-located properties, many along Bloomingdale Road (no relation to the store; it is now Broadway). The ships they commissioned and chartered out sailed the world, not necessarily in the most respectable commerce. There is pretty good evidence, for example, that they were willing to engage in the slave and rum trades in the Caribbean and Africa and the opium trade in the Far East.

  The family liquidated its shipping interests in the 1840s, producing massive new funds for investment, virtually all of which went into New York City real estate.


  After the Civil War the first Tobias Vandermeer looked after the family fortune. He stuck to real estate, buying, selling and exchanging properties all over the city.

  I never knew Tobias I, who died in his nineties about 1930. But I remember tough old partners at the firm, unfazed by almost anybody, who still shuddered at the mention of Tobias I’s name a decade later. And he was supposed to be as close as the next second. From all I’ve ever been able to gather, he died unloved and unmourned—and very rich.

  The modern era of the family begins with Hendrik, who took Great Kill over when his father died. (The name of the family company has always been Great Kill Holdings Corporation—an ironic title given all that’s recently happened. But it is old Dutch, referring to a stream that ran through several Vandermeer parcels and emptied into the Hudson River around Forty-second Street.)

  Consolidation and expansion of Great Kill’s assets became Hendrik’s whole life. His wife had died in 1925, in the course of giving birth to Hendrik’s sole heir, the second Tobias.

  Hendrik’s technique for making money was simplicity itself. He leased the land that Great Kill owned to eager developers, providing a steady and reliable stream of ground rents to Great Kill.

  Hendrik’s skill in preserving the Vandermeer patrimony was the pride of his life. He never remarried after the death of his wife, and he had a very small circle of friends. One of them was Dr. Cates, the rector of the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, which used to be at Forty-eighth and Fifth. He accomplished a feat that no one else had theretofore been able to manage—to arouse a Vandermeer’s social conscience. Under intense pressure from the good doctor, Hendrik established the now notorious Bloemendael Foundation in the early 1960s, with an original gift of, as I recall, two million.

  Hendrik’s only source of discontent was his son, Tobias. I’ve always understood—he even said so himself, in unguarded moments—that the boy had had a wretched childhood. He was raised by a series of governesses until shipped off to Hotchkiss at an indecently young age. One gathers that Hendrik tried to befriend his son, but I don’t think he ever could break through his Dutch reserve to show him anything approaching real affection.