Murder Keeps A Secret Read online

  “Thank heaven for that.”

  “I told her we’d get in touch.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Port Washington, I think.”

  “And what about the Knowleses? Stanley seemed absolutely manic. I’ve never seen him like that before. All that joking, and in such a loud voice, about you being connected up like a computer.”

  “You know him better than I do. Still, I agree with you. I didn’t mind his kidding, but he was pretty heavy. She, on the other hand, seemed a trifle down.”

  “Oh, Reuben, she always is. You can’t ever talk to her about publishing without her poor-mouthing and whining.”

  “Maybe she sees her money going down the drain.”

  “Very possibly.”

  “She eats like a bird, too, as she herself admits. She scarcely touched her food.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t like her much,” Cynthia said.

  “How do I know the name Peter Jewett, by the way?”

  “He’s a member of the Foundation’s advisory history panel. Professor of History at Amherst. I’ve probably mentioned him. As a matter of fact, I’ll probably be seeing him tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll be in town for the panel’s semiannual meeting. Why do you ask?”

  “Apparently he and David don’t get along. Donna Knowles said that when they awarded David the Bancroft Prize for history, Jewett was the winner of the companion Bancroft Prize for American diplomatic history. When David found out, he refused to go to the ceremony.”

  “Peter can be ornery, arrogant and rude, I’ll say that. But what exactly does David have against him? It must be more than a clash of personalities.”

  “Donna didn’t elaborate. It was just another item in her litany of problems with her authors.”

  Before they could discuss the matter further, the telephone rang. Reuben went into the library to answer it.

  “That was Nancy Rowan, for God’s sake,” he said on returning.

  “What on earth did she want?”

  “Wanted to know if we’d seen Alan.”

  “How strange. Why didn’t she call David, or Harrison?”

  “I suppose she guessed they’d still be out. Or she probably knows Grace Mann goes to bed early and she might have to talk to her if she called the apartment.”

  “But why you?”

  “I’m sure she knew we’d be at the dinner tonight. Alan left the house yesterday and she’s probably checking up to see if he went, too.”

  “That’s really vindictive.”

  “What other explanation is there?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s certainly not a good situation.”

  “Did she have anything else to say?”

  “No. She asked if I’d seen Alan and I said I hadn’t. End of conversation.”

  “No questions about the dinner, I suppose.”

  “No, nothing like that. She’s very clearly written David completely out of her life.”

  “For which I can’t blame her.”

  “True enough.”

  “Well, at least her call roused us. I’m falling asleep and must go to bed. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Not much. Going to the office to get some postage stamps, I guess.”

  “Sounds more interesting than Peter Jewett and his history panelists. Or lunch with a young man who wants to do a Pirandello festival in North Dakota.”

  “Give him a grant. Just so long as we don’t have to go out there,” Reuben said as he and his wife headed upstairs to bed.

  3

  Morning After

  Tuesday morning, Frost was up and reading the Times when the telephone rang. It was Harrison Rowan, who asked to talk to Cynthia. Frost tried to thank Rowan for inviting him the previous evening, but the caller was interested only in talking to his wife.

  Reuben got Cynthia out of the bathroom to take the call and hung up when she picked up on the bedroom extension.

  “What did Harrison want?” he called out when he heard his wife coming down the stairs.

  “Silly old Harrison. He was all upset that he’d told me about Garrett Ainslee’s sex code. Nervous as a tick about whether anyone else had overheard him at the table, which I doubt. He said I absolutely couldn’t tell anyone and that it was very wrong of him to talk about it.”

  “Did you tell him you’d spilled the beans to me?”

  “Yes, and of course he trusts you’ll keep it quiet, too. He said David really is worried that Marietta Ainslee will take the book away from him.”

  “Well, his secret’s safe with me—and I trust with you.”

  “Reuben! Are you saying I can’t keep a secret?”

  “No, no, no. You learned the cardinal rule for a lawyer’s wife—discretion at all times—many years ago. I was only kidding,” Reuben said hastily.

  “I hope so.”

  An hour later, Reuben took the subway downtown to the offices of his firm, Chase & Ward, at One Metropolitan Plaza. Even though retired, he still kept a small office at the firm. He did not go there often, though it was still a useful place to buy postage stamps and cash checks. And to have a stenographer’s help in answering correspondence.

  As he went down the hall, encountering a fair number of young associates (or were they paralegals, a substratum in the office new since his time as an active lawyer?), messengers and the occasional secretary. He was depressed at how few of them he recognized, not realizing that the growth of the firm had made it impossible for even the active partners to know more than a fraction of the staff.

  Once at his office, there was a message to call Keith Merritt, a tax partner with whom he had worked closely. Frost walked over to see Merritt immediately. He found the tax lawyer eager to test his recollection of a nearly forgotten corporate merger that had come under attack in an Internal Revenue Service audit. Frost tried to reconstruct the decade-old events, but was not sure how helpful he had been to his former colleague.

  Returning to his own office, he ran into one of Chase & Ward’s youngest partners, Frank Norton, now in his mid-thirties. During Frost’s last years before retirement, Norton had been of invaluable assistance to him. He was a feisty and ambitious lawyer, but had nonetheless worked for Frost without a trace of condescension or resentment, which could not be said for all those with whom Frost had come in contact toward the end. Frost was fond of him.

  The younger lawyer greeted his old mentor warmly and seemed genuinely glad to see him.

  “You’re not free for lunch, are you?” Frost asked.

  “I am, to tell the truth. Things are pretty slow at the moment.” Norton was being unusually candid; the work ethic at Chase & Ward demanded that one always purport to be busy, even if the financial markets were in the doldrums, as they now were, and project after project had been postponed or canceled outright. “Shall we go upstairs?”

  Frost grimaced slightly. “Frank, one of the glories of being retired is that one no longer has to face the menu at the Hexagon Club or the eat-and-run pace of the Training Table,” Frost said, referring to the lunch club atop One Metro Plaza, and the nickname for the common table at which the firm’s partners customarily ate.

  “I agree. And we all know what terrible things can happen to you there,” Norton said, recalling obliquely the scandalous death by poisoning of senior partner Graham Donovan at the Training Table two years earlier. “But what do you have in mind?”

  “How about Bouley?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Honestly, you young fellows have tunnel vision. You come to the office in the morning, dash up to the Hexagon Club, and then work until dark, when one of the finest French restaurants in New York is a stone’s throw away.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Up just north of City Hall. It’s magnificent, but it does take a little time.”

  “You’re on. Let me get my coat and I’ll meet you at reception.”

  “Let me make sure we can get a table first. That fellow in the Times wrote the place up a while
back and it’s gotten very crowded.”

  A reservation made, the two lawyers walked uptown in the near-perfect spring weather. Norton discussed his latest activities, expressing worry about the slackening in legal business.

  “I suppose the firm’s in the red,” Frost said.

  “I’ll say! We’ve been running a deficit for three weeks!” The firm, as a partnership, paid out its cash, once expenses had been taken care of and a small rainy-day reserve provided for, as soon as it came in. Norton, who had become a partner in extremely prosperous times, had never seen a downturn before, even for such a short period as three weeks.

  “Don’t worry, Frank. The firm’s business does reflect what’s going on in the markets. But it always comes back. Plenty of businesses have to raise money, even in bad times. And when the stock market’s down, companies that aren’t affected find it’s a good time to buy others.

  “And if worst comes to worst and everything goes haywire, there’ll be a whole new demand for lawyers to help pick up the pieces. Financial lawyers are like undertakers, you know. Businessmen need us in good times and bad, as much as they may deny it, or resent it.”

  “Maybe,” Norton said, more than a trace of doubt in his voice.

  “I went to work in nineteen thirty-five, Frank, so I’ve seen the firm ride out the cycle plenty of times.”

  As he reassured his unnecessarily nervous junior, he led him down Duane Street to the tiny square where Bouley was located. Bayard, the maitre d’, gave them a friendly reception and seated them at a table by a window, the afternoon sun streaming through the curtained glass.

  “Hey, this is a nice place!” Norton said.

  “Yes. I’m not that much of a boulevardier, but that light, and the square outside, remind me of Paris. Right here in the shadow of the Hexagon Club.”

  The two men ordered from the tempting, slightly nouvelle menu.

  “How about some wine?” Frost asked, fully realizing that temperance was the usual daytime rule among working lawyers. (A rule Frost strongly approved of. One would not want a surgeon taking a drink before an operation; a lawyer’s client was, Frost maintained, entitled to the same clearheadedness.)

  “As I said, I’m not all that busy, so why not?”

  After a quick consultation, Frost ordered a bottle of Chablis, one of the less expensive bottles on a not especially cheap list.

  “What’s the gossip?” Frost asked, drinking approvingly from his glass.

  “You mean at the firm?”

  “Yes.” Frost missed being in touch with the latest rumors and scuttlebutt, false as often as true, that inevitably whirled about the office. And there was always an item or two of petty office politics that interested Frost, as the former head of Chase & Ward.

  “The only news is that we may actually be moving. There’s a new skyscraper going up in midtown where we can get all the space we’ll need for the rest of the century.”

  “That’s what everybody said when we moved to Met Plaza twenty-five years ago. And now I think they want to put a new associate in my little office.”

  “By ‘they’ you mean Bannard?”

  “Right,” Frost said, referring to the current Executive Partner.

  “Has he said so?”

  “No, but all he talks about whenever I see him is how hard up you all are for space. He even brought it up when we ran into him at the theater the other night.”

  “I’d ignore him.”

  “I do. But where is this building?”

  “That’s the catch. It’s on Eighth Avenue, practically in the porn district.”

  “That may present whole new opportunities for legal practice, if the financial business doesn’t come back. From Wall Street lawyer to Eighth Avenue lawyer. Pornography, dope, mugging. The possibilities are endless.”

  Norton laughed. “You know, Marvin Yates was at a dinner celebrating the closing of one of his mergers the other night and the investment bankers presented him with a box of condoms. Said it might come in handy at Pierpont Plaza, as the new building’s called.”

  “Condoms! That’s all one hears about these days. Coming down on the subway this morning, there were two posters in the car about using them, right between the ads for an abortion clinic and a warning about AIDS. I don’t think there’s any fun to sex these days. AIDS, herpes, all of that. Why, I remember years ago when one of our young lawyers—not a partner, I might add—took up with a girl in the files. One night her regular boyfriend came to the office and chased the lawyer down the hall with a baseball bat! It was the talk of the office for weeks. There was real feeling there! Today it would probably all turn into a very boring ménage à trois.”

  The sautéed oysters both lawyers had ordered arrived, served on a glistening bed of arugula. As they ate enthusiastically, Frost changed the subject. “Do I recall correctly that you clerked after law school?” he asked.

  “That’s right. A year for Judge Marder on the D.C. Circuit, then a year for Justice Carroll on the Supreme Court. It was a time I’ll never forget.”

  “Why do you say that? I didn’t do it and I’ve never been quite sure that clerking was that valuable, unless you’re a litigator.”

  “You’re right, unless you’ve got a really good judge. Dine Carroll was, and he treated his clerks like his own sons. It was almost like having a second father.”

  “That I can understand,” Frost said. “By the way, was Garrett Ainslee on the Court when you were down there?”

  “Oh, yes. I was there in seventy-eight. Ainslee died two years later, as I recall. Quite a man.”

  “Tell me about him. I’m curious, because my godson’s writing his biography.”

  “He and Justice Carroll were very close, though miles apart politically. Remember Ainslee was an old-line liberal and Carroll was a conservative, though not as much so as the ones Reagan appointed—or wanted to. Ainslee had a fine intellect, which surprised some people, since you don’t necessarily expect that in a former Senator …”

  “I’m convinced that any more than two terms in the Senate rots your mind.”

  “I agree with you. But Ainslee was different. He wasn’t just a knee-jerk liberal, but a very thoughtful man. Carroll respected that, and they argued and debated cases all the time behind the scenes. Some of the arguments were pretty strenuous, but there was real affection between them.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I think my judge had only one reservation about him,” Norton said thoughtfully. “That was his lechery.”

  “Really? Even at the end?”

  “He was only in his late sixties when he died.”

  “That does slow some people up,” Frost observed. “Besides, I thought he had a wife.”

  “Two. His first wife died about nineteen sixty-five or -six and he married the vivacious Marietta Greer after he went on the Court. But neither marriage kept him from catting around.”

  “Was his nightlife public? I’ve heard that it wasn’t.”

  “Justice Carroll certainly knew a considerable amount about it. He brought it up to me many times, though he always swore me to secrecy. He was afraid it would reflect badly on the Court if Ainslee ever got caught.”

  “Well, well. Dirty linen in the Supreme Court.” Frost laughed, and was about to tell Norton about the late Justice’s date books, but remembered in time Harrison Rowan’s strictures earlier that morning. Instead, he called for the check, both men having declined the tempting Bouley desserts after their oysters and entrées of seared slices of fresh salmon.

  “I should pay this,” Norton said, “I’m still on percentage.”

  “Percentage of what?” Frost asked, teasing his young companion once again about his anxiety over the fortunes of Chase & Ward. “Besides, this is my restaurant, so I’ll treat.”

  As they reached the door, Frost again assured Norton that the economic fortunes of Chase & Ward were bound to improve.

  “I’m not worried, Reuben. And besides, having a little breathing time
is good once in a while. Especially when you can have a great lunch like that one. What are you up to these days, by the way?”

  “Oh, not much,” Frost answered. “I hang out at the Gotham Club and read a lot. I’m perfectly content. Besides, something always turns up to keep me busy.”

  4

  Fall

  The next morning, Cynthia Frost awoke before Reuben, shortly before eight. In accordance with her morning ritual, she went down to the kitchen to squeeze fresh orange juice for them both. She flipped on the portable television on the counter and was instantly shocked and horrified by the first item on the local news: David Rowan, prizewinning historian, had jumped or fallen to his death at a building on West Forty-fourth Street. More details were promised after a break for commercials.

  With her dancer’s agility, Cynthia bounded upstairs, put on the television in the master bedroom and woke up her husband, all before the opening commercials were over.

  The couple sat on the edge of the bed, Reuben fully awake once he understood what his wife was screaming at him. They watched in frozen horror as the videotape on the news showed the open window from which the fall occurred, and then the body, covered with a blanket, lying on the street amid an array of fire engines, police cars and an ambulance.

  They could scarcely comprehend the details: the incident had occurred at seven-fifteen the previous evening; death was instantaneous; the police were saying nothing; neither suicide nor murder had been ruled out.

  Cynthia threw her arms around her husband and began sobbing. He looked fixedly at the screen, and then fairly shouted to his wife. “My God, Cynthia, that’s Grace Mann!”

  Indeed it was, though the Frosts had been too stunned to notice at first. David Rowan’s mistress was coolly describing the death of her lover.

  “I don’t believe any of this!” Cynthia yelled at the screen.

  “It’s insane! What is this show-must-go-on nonsense?” Reuben said. “Christ!”

  Cynthia continued to weep and Reuben tried to comfort her, though by now there were tears in his eyes, too. Then Grace Mann went on to the next story, looking vaguely upset, but not enough so that a stranger would have suspected that she was the dead man’s lover.