Blood in Babylon Read online

  Everybody, including and especially Dehan, looked at me as though I had just contradicted myself, argued myself into a corner and shot myself in the foot. They were all frowning.

  I smiled with a little more feeling. “Did you know he had his cell in his back pocket?”

  She didn’t react.

  “He had it in his back pocket and obviously after all those hours in the water, it was completely waterlogged. And…” I turned to Dehan and waved a finger at her. “This was one of the things that completely foxed me. You all, as doctors, know that it is almost impossible to set time of death simply by the condition of the body. But if he’d died at two PM, he had barely been in the water more than three hours, and yet already he was floating, puffed up with gases from decay. I guess it could happen, but it struck me as odd. So I gave Ned’s cell phone to the boys at the lab. They’ll dry it out and they’ll be able to establish at what time the phone got waterlogged. Then we’ll see if it coincides with the watch. What do you think, Annunziata? You think the two times will match?”

  She shrugged. “How should I know? If the water was warm, it might have accelerated the decay and the release of gases.”

  “But what if the phone says he died, say, last night, at two AM, instead of PM? What happens to your alibi?”

  She sat up suddenly, savagely stubbing out her cigarette. “Do I need an alibi? So far, all you seem to have against me is the fact that I may not have an alibi for the time of his death. I and eight million other New Yorkers. Maybe I have no alibi, but neither have I motive, means or opportunity. And what you have is not a shred of evidence against me! All this is is some kind of envy fuelled vendetta against me because your Third World partner has some kind of chip on her shoulder!” She narrowed her eyes savagely at Dehan and snarled, “Put ketchup on it and eat it up, sister!”

  The room went very silent. Annunziata fished her cigarettes from her purse and lit up a second, blowing smoke in Dehan’s general direction.

  “Motive.” I smiled.

  She looked at me. “Well?”

  “You certainly had motive. And more than one. As soon as you discovered that Ned was Aloysius’ illegitimate son, you had motive to kill him. You all did. For a start, the moment he discovered he was Al’s son, and who Al really was, you would each stand to lose eight point three percent of the company shares which you own, to make up his twenty-five percent share. And then there would be the claim for his rightful inheritance, going back to Al’s death in 2007, plus interest accrued. We are talking about many millions of dollars.”

  Max waved a wild finger at me. “Aloysius’ death! A death which he caused! I know enough law to know that a criminal may not prosper from his crimes!”

  Dehan laughed. “Yeah, that’s cute. Go explain it to your pissing cherub. The rider to that legal principle is, ‘if they get caught!’.”

  I added, “Ned was never convicted, and he is no more likely to have killed your brother than you are.” I turned back to Annunziata. “But your real motive, stronger by far than the possible loss of money, was that he would not only become a member of the board of directors at Chester Cardio-Valves, he would become part of the Chester family, and he was black. The humiliation for your family would be beyond what you could endure. He had to die.”

  Max erupted again. “This is calumny and slander! What evidence have you got to back this nonsense up?” He stared at Annunziata. “Anne? Tell him!”

  She sighed and looked at her brother. Not for the first time, I noticed an unfathomable arrogance in her eyes. “Of course it’s lies, Max. Where is his evidence? It’s surmise, not even guess work. It’s fantasy.”

  I ignored her and went on. “Getting Ned to meet you at the Mamaroneck Motel was not difficult. Any number of lures would have got him there, but—and this is a guess—I think you enjoyed telling him you were going to reveal secrets about his father, tell him the truth about his origins, his bloodline. Was that how it went? What I didn’t fully understand, for a while, was why you sent that rather childish anonymous note, threatening to kill him and his family.”

  Her eyes shifted to meet mine. The implied insult had stung her. I smiled. Then it dawned on me. “How was it phrased? We will kill you and your family, you black bastard. ‘We,’ not ‘I’ but ‘we’. You couldn’t have pointed the finger at yourself more firmly. With your dumb broad act, foolishly implicating yourself in a conspiracy that could never be proved, while pointing the finger at Maximilian, the patriarch who would ‘take care of business’ by making a phone call, you stood out like…” I shook my head, momentarily lost for words.

  Dehan growled out a few for me. “Like a neon dildo at a vestal virgin convention.”

  I nodded. “About as much as that. The purpose of the anonymous note was to point suspicion at your brother, without ever proving anything and subtly distancing yourself from the conspiracy. It was subtle, I will grant you that.”

  She sighed and sucked on her cigarette, squinting through the smoke as she released it. “I hear you talking, detective, but I don’t see you saying anything. It’s all yammer yammer, but no substance. No… facts!”

  I eyed Max’s face for a moment. He looked like an outraged pomegranate. “Annunziata…?”

  “Not now, Max! Pas devant les étrangers!”

  I laughed out loud. “Yes, Max, not in front of outsiders!” I scratched my brow. “You know, people make mistaken assumptions about all sorts of things. You assumed Detective Dehan was from the Third World, when she is an American and a New Yorker, just as much as you are. You assumed we didn’t speak French, when in fact I do, and, most important of all, for you, Annunziata, you assumed that paper doesn’t hold fingerprints, when in fact it is one of the best possible surfaces for printing.”

  She froze. I smiled because I knew there were questions she desperately needed to ask, but she couldn’t ask them without admitting she’d put together the note. She watched me a moment and I watched her back.

  “You’re thinking that you used latex gloves on the note and on the envelope, so where the hell did you leave your prints? You are also thinking that you are not in the IAFIS database, so what the hell would I match them with, even if I got some prints?”

  “I’m thinking no such thing.” But she said it without conviction.

  “You gave me a fine set of prints for comparison, Anne, when I asked you if you could identify those symbols.”

  Her jaw sagged a little.

  I waited a moment, then smiled and shook my head. “The newspaper, Annunziata. The New York Times. You handled it when you read it. No prints on the note or the envelope, but they were all over the newspaper cuttings.”

  Her pupils dilated wide, her face went ashen. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled under her and she fell to the floor, sprawled across a dead, skinned lion. Max and Justinian rushed forward and lifted her back onto the sofa. Justin went to get her a brandy and Dehan pulled her cuffs from her belt.

  “Annunziata Chester, it is this Third World Jewish-Mexican’s pleasure to inform you that you are under arrest for the murder of Ned Brown. You have the right to silence, you do not have to say anything, but anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney; if you cannot afford one, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand the rights I have just explained to you?”

  Annunziata screwed up her face and spat the words at her, “Screw you!” Then she turned to Max. “If you had just done something! If you had had the balls to do something! But all you ever did—you pussy!—was to talk and talk and talk, while that piece of shit brought our family down!”

  Max’s eyes were wide. “Annunziata! You killed a man? You’re a doctor! For God’s sake, woman! What have you done?”

  Her voice was shrill and wild. “Killed him! For us! And what did you do, you pansy? Daddy would be ashamed of you! Ashamed!”

  Dehan snapped the cuffs on her prisoner and smiled at me. “You heard me Mirandize her, right?�
��

  “I did.”

  “Sound like a confession to you, partner? Sounded like one to me.”

  “Sounded like one to me too, partner.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Later that night, at shortly before ten, Dehan and I sat at our desks, drinking coffee-like liquid from paper cups. The detectives room was almost empty, most of the lights were off, and Annunziata, having spoken at length with her attorney, was now in the cells, awaiting a bail hearing in the morning. Dehan’s boots were on the corner of her desk, crossed at the ankles.

  “So,” she said, “here are a couple of things I still don’t understand. And number one is, did Annunziata Chester kill her brother Aloysius? Because that, to me, is the million dollar question. Do we know yet who killed Aloysius Chester? Because I gotta tell you, Stone, this case... What was it Annunziata called me? Your assistant? Well…” She pointed her finger at me like a gun. “There have been times during this case when that is exactly what I felt like.”

  “Was there a question in there? Somewhere?”

  A voice echoed from the door. “Ah! You two are still here?”

  Dehan removed her ankles from the desk and the deputy inspector approached us with uncertain, faltering chicken steps. “Carmen, John, congratulations are in order. A most difficult case. I am still not entirely sure myself… um… what happened.” He grinned. “Golf with the mayor on Sunday! No doubt he’ll be asking me…”

  I smiled and pulled him over a chair with my foot. “Still an open investigation, sir.”

  “Naturally…” He nodded a few times. “It is?” He looked at Dehan and they both burst out laughing.

  I laughed too, and when they had settled a little, I said: “In 1990, or there abouts—I hope we will get those court orders now, sir?”

  “By the morning, John.”

  “Thank you, sir. So, in 1990, Aloysius Chester, now in his early forties, returned from South America to attend a drop outs reunion at Harvard. While he was there, he met a young black woman, a student at the university from which he had dropped out, twenty years earlier. They spent a few days together and she got pregnant. He returned to New York and forgot all about her. She had the baby, dropped out of university and, a few years later, moved to New York.

  “Whether it was intentional, fate or a mixture of the two, Aloysius, his son, Ned and his mother all wound up living in the same neighborhood. By this time, Al had descended into deep psychosis and didn’t recognize his ex four-night stand. I am guessing she only just recognized him, but recognize him she did, and eventually, she approached him and told him that she wanted to marry him.

  “He did not want to tell Dr. Epstein because he knew that he would disapprove, but he contacted Max, Justin and Anne, and told them what he planned to do. Now, here is where it gets complicated. Annunziata raised with her brothers, not for the first time, the idea of having Al permanently removed. They responded as they always had, telling her it was not an option. But this time, as so much was at stake, she decided to take matters into her own hands and employed a private detective to look into the woman Al was proposing to marry. Remember, at this stage, nobody knew that Ned was Al’s son.

  “But the detective began to unearth facts: that the girl in question had been at Harvard, that she had dropped out after she hooked up with Al, that nine months later she had a baby, piece by piece the full extent of the problem became evident…

  “So now, Annunziata is faced with far more than simple embarrassment for the family. If Ned finds out who his father is, they are looking at having him inherit his father’s share of the company, which at that time was under the control of the siblings, and becoming a legitimate Chester. As long as he never finds out, they have no problem. But if he does find out…”

  The deputy inspector leaned forward. “So she killed her brother! But what about the 9mm, and the shots in the kitchen?”

  Dehan nodded.

  I said: “Let me cycle back to that. When Al died, initially everything was fine. The case went cold, and Ned had no idea who his father was.”

  Now Dehan leaned forward. “But why didn’t his mother just tell him?”

  “I’ll be able to explain that in a while. What concerns us right now is that, once we decided to investigate, our interview with Max rippled through the Chesters like a seismic wave. Max was largely oblivious to everything that had happened. He was just relieved that Al was no longer a problem. Justin, on the other hand, had a hunch somebody had done something, and was keen to distance himself from the whole affair, in particular the discussions they had had about icing Aloysius.

  “But Annunziata, that was a different story. On the one hand, she was aware that Justin could get her and Max in trouble because of his loose tongue and his febrile imagination, but more than that—much more than that—she was terrified that our investigation would unearth what her private investigator had unearthed, that Ned was Al’s son.”

  “So she killed him.”

  “She arranged a meeting with him, telling him she had information about Aloysius and his private benefactor. They met in the motel and she gave him a drink.” I turned to Dehan. “Remember the rings on the bedside table? I wondered then where the glasses and the bottle were. She fed him a dose of anesthetic and, while he was docile and pliant, she led him to the bathroom and dumped him in the bath. Lab results should confirm that in the next day or two. The water on the floor, and the wet towel, that was where she knelt on him till he drowned.”

  “Holy cow…” It was Dehan.

  I nodded at her. “Annunziata was a hard, ruthless and subtle woman. She played the dappy, dumb broad who didn’t really know what she was doing or saying, but you don’t become a doctor of neurology at Harvard by being stupid. She played a very subtle game indeed, whereby she scattered suspicion, without ever giving enough to convict. And she almost got away with it. She just overplayed her hand with the note.”

  Dehan was shaking her head, and the deputy inspector was watching her and nodding. “But,” she said, “who killed Aloysius?”

  I sat biting my lip for a long moment. Finally, I shook my head. “I can’t say just yet. But I am pretty sure I’ll have the confirmation I need by tomorrow.”

  Dehan sagged back in her chair and the inspector, for just a moment, looked like a kid who’s been told he can’t have a bike for Christmas. “Well,” he said, “keep me informed. Good work so far.”

  “Thank you, sir, we’ll walk you out. We’re on our way home anyway.”

  In the parking lot, he made for his Focus, waving goodnight to us, and we crossed the blacktop under the streetlamps toward where the Jag was waiting. My phone pinged a couple of times and I thumbed the screen. It was an email from Bernie at the Bureau, with several attachments. I had a quick glance, then climbed in behind the wheel. Dehan was sitting, waiting in the passenger seat.

  I fired up the engine and drove slowly down Storey toward White Plaines. Dehan frowned. “We taking the scenic route?”

  I nodded. “I just need to think a bit.”

  At White Plaines, I turned north, over the Bruckner Expressway, and kept cruising slowly toward the Church of the Sacred Apocalypse. I glanced at Dehan. “We were going up here, remember? You were pointing out how close everybody was to each other. You paused right here, by the church, and you pointed right to Al’s house, the church behind, Epstein’s practice up the road…”

  She was staring at me. “I remember…”

  Instead of continuing on up toward Morris Park Avenue, the way we would go to get home, I turned left for a block along Gleason and then right into Leland Avenue. There I stopped outside a pleasant, two story red brick house with a gabled roof and a porch over a garage.

  Dehan sighed. “This couldn’t wait till tomorrow?”

  “Come on, we’re passing.”

  We climbed out, crossed the street and climbed the steps to the front porch. There I rang the bell. It was opened almost immediately by Joy, still in her coat. She started when she
saw us, and laughed.

  “Oh, my goodness! I only just walked in. Another late night at the church! What can I do for you, please come in! Mary’s in the kitchen. Can I offer you anything?”

  “We won’t keep you. We just came to give you some news.”

  “News?” She removed her coat and hung it up. “Please, come through to the living room and sit. What news?”

  We followed her through. It was comfortably and tastefully furnished. There were low bookcases well stocked with well-thumbed books. Persian style rugs partly covered oiled, wooden floors. There was no coffee table to bang your shins on, but there were attractive incidental tables scattered here and there. Lighting was from handsome lamps which were placed strategically around the room.

  A flat screen TV stood to one side, where it was unobtrusive. It was attached to a DVD player, and I saw on the shelves, besides the books, an extensive collection of movies.

  She sat in a white, calico chair, and we sat opposite her on the sofa. She waited attentively and I held her eye. “Has Chevronne Brown been in touch with you?”

  She sat up straight and her eyes widened. “Chevronne…?”

  I waited.

  “No…”

  I nodded. “I imagined she wouldn’t. She’s in a pretty bad way at the moment.”

  “I don’t understand. What…”

  “Joy, your son, Ned, he’s dead.”

  Her hands went slowly to her mouth. Her eyes welled with tears that spilled when she blinked, and soaked her cheeks. She tried to hold it back, but couldn’t and began to sob. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and handed it to her. She blew her nose, then dabbed at her eyes. I was aware of Dehan staring at me.

  A shadow moved across the room and I looked up to see Mary standing in the doorway. I turned to Joy.

  “Does your daughter know?”

  She shook her head.

  Mary said, “What’s happened?”

  I looked up at her. “Could you get your mom some tissues, please, Mary?”

  She nodded and went away.