Mary Clark - The Shadow of Your Smile

He stood up. “Good morning, Doctor. It’s really nice of you to see me on such short notice and I do appreciate it. You know how sometimes my head gets all messed up.”

“Come in, Sammy,” Langdon said abruptly.

With a cheerful wave at Beatrice Tillman, whose face was a study in curiosity, Sammy followed the doctor down the hall into what he guessed was his private office. It was carpeted in deep crimson. The walls were lined with mahogany bookshelves. A handsome leather-topped desk dominated the room. A wide leather swivel chair was behind it. Two matching chairs finished in a red and cream fabric faced the desk.

“No couch?” Sammy asked, his tone bewildered.

Langdon was closing the door. “You don’t need a couch, Sammy,” he snapped. “What are you doing here?”

Without being invited, Sammy walked around the desk to the swivel chair and sat down on it. “Doug, I made you an offer and you didn’t get back to me. I don’t like to be disrespected.”

“You agreed to a twenty-five-thousand-dollar price and raised it to one hundred thousand,” a shaken Langdon reminded him.

“Twenty-five thousand for murdering Dr. Monica Farrell isn’t very much, I figure,” Sammy commented. “She’s not like some intern nobody ever heard of. She’s what would you say… distinguished?”

“You agreed to that price,” Langdon said, and now Sammy could hear the panic he’d expected in Langdon’s tone.

“But you didn’t get back to me,” Sammy reminded him. “So that’s why the price has gone up again. It’s now one million, payable in advance.”

“You’ve got to be crazy,” Langdon whispered.

“I’m not,” Sammy assured him. “I taped you the other night in the diner and I’m taping you now.” He opened his jacket and exposed the wire he had attached to his cell phone. With a slow, deliberate movement he buttoned his jacket and got up. “What you or someone you know has on me wouldn’t mean much if it came to a trial. The cops would drop that charge in a minute in exchange for this tape and the other one. Now listen real carefully. I want one million dollars, then I do the job. I’ve figured out how to make it look like a burglary gone sour. So get the money, and you can sleep at night. You have to be smart enough to know that when the job is done, I won’t be sending any tapes to the cops.”

He got up, brushed past Langdon, and put his hand on the doorknob. “Have it by Friday,” he said, “or I go to the police myself.” He opened the door. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said, in a voice loud enough that he hoped the secretary could hear. “You’ve been a big help. Like you say, I can’t blame all my problems on my old lady. She did her best for me.”

Esther Chambers had had a dismal weekend. Her visit from Thomas Desmond of the Securities and Exchange Commission and his partner had thoroughly unsettled her. When she had found them waiting for her in her lobby on Wednesday evening, she had allowed them to come up to her apartment as Desmond had requested.

There, in the privacy of her home, he had told her that her boss had been watched for some time by the SEC and that criminal charges against him for insider trading might be forthcoming.

He had also told her that she had been thoroughly checked and that her finances had shown that in no way was she living beyond her income, so they felt confident that she was not engaged in any illegal activities. They told her that they wanted her to work with them and provide them with information about Greg’s business dealings. They stressed that confidentiality was of the utmost importance and that she would almost certainly be called to testify before a Grand Jury.

“I simply cannot believe that Greg Gannon would be guilty of insider trading,” she had told Desmond. “Why should he? The investment firm has always been very successful, and for years he’s received a big salary as chairman of the board of the Gannon Foundation.”

“It’s not a case of how much he has, but how much he wants, ” Desmond told her. “We’ve had multimillionaires who couldn’t spend all their legitimate money in a lifetime, and still they cheat. Some of them do it because it gives them a sense of power. But in the end, before they get caught, most of them are running scared.”

Running scared. Those words convinced Esther that it wasn’t all some kind of mistake. Greg Gannon is running scared, she thought.

Desmond had not been happy to learn that she had just submitted her resignation. He’d asked her if she could rescind it, then corrected himself. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. My bet is that right now he’s afraid to trust anybody. He might see a sudden change of heart as a tip that we’ve approached you. You say you offered to stay for one month?”

“Yes.”

“Then my guess is that he’ll take you up on it. He’s in deep trouble now. One of his big tips about a merger didn’t go through at the last minute. He lost a quarter of a billion for one of his hedge funds. He won’t want to worry about breaking in someone new right now.”

And that’s the way it’s turning out, Esther thought on Monday morning. When Greg had seen her note on Thursday morning, he had come out to her desk. “Esther, I’m not surprised that you’re ready to retire. Thirty-five years is a heck of a long time to keep working in one place. But I do want you to stay for at least one month and do the interviewing for your replacement, then when you find someone, break her in.” He paused. “Or him,” he added.

“I know we’re not gender-conscious. I’ll find someone good to replace me, I promise,” Esther said.

For a moment, watching the troubled face of Greg Gannon, Esther’s heart had softened, seeing in it the ambitious young man who had joined his father’s business a week after his graduation from college. But then any pity she felt evaporated. With all that he had, if he really was cheating, he was doing it for himself, and gambling with other people’s hard-earned money, she thought scornfully.

Thomas Desmond had asked her to copy him on Greg’s appointments. “We need to know who he’s wining and dining,” Desmond had said. “I doubt they’re all in his official appointment book. We know some of his calls go through your office phones, but not all of them. We’ve wiretapped the people we suspect of tipping him off to mergers and acquisitions but all those calls that Gannon made to our other targets were on prepaid phones. Fortunately some of the guys who are passing on tips aren’t smart enough to use the phones we can’t trace.”

“Many of Greg’s calls don’t come through me,” Esther had agreed. “Obviously he has a cell phone, but I pay the bills for it and it’s all routine stuff. But there are plenty of times when I try to pass on a business call to him in his private office and he doesn’t pick up. I’m supposed to assume that he’s on with the family or personal friends, but it happens so often he couldn’t just be on his regular cell phone.”

Acutely aware that she had promised Thomas Desmond that she would provide evidence regarding Greg Gannon’s business activities, including his lunches with clients, Esther said, “Mr. Gannon, I’ve got you down for lunch with Arthur Saling. Shall I make a reservation for you?”

“No, Saling wanted me to meet him at his club. He’s a potential new client and a big one. Keep your fingers crossed.” Gannon turned to go back into his own office. “Hold all calls until I let you know, Esther.”

“Of course, Mr. Gannon.”

For the rest of the morning it was business as usual. Then Esther received a call from Greenwich Village Hospital. It was from the executive director of development. This time she heard and understood the lack of cordiality that had previously been present in his voice. “Esther, this is Justin Banks from Greenwich Village Hospital. As you certainly must understand we are planning to break ground for the new Gannon Pediatric Wing. The pledge the foundation made has been overdue for six months and quite frankly it is absolutely necessary that it be fulfilled now.”