Gerald Davis - A Murder Too Personal

I knew I was going to miss her. And I didn’t have even the faintest beginning of an idea of who killed her.

The traffic was moving freely as I drove north up I-95. I was averaging seventy. It was ten AM. The skies were a leaden overcast and threatening rain.

I used to think people never changed. Now I had to allow for the possibility that maybe people could change. Only not so radically. Like Hanoi Jane turning into a Conservative. How did something like that happen? It was almost as if she’d become a different person. Would I have married her if I’d known her in this incarnation? That was a tough one to call.

It was when I hit Greenwich that the car started to overheat again. I slowed down until the gauge came back to the mid-point.

Chisolm’s company was located in Norwalk, about an hour from the city. I pulled off I-95 at exit 15 and drove north a mile and a half up route 7 past fast-food franchises and sleek industrial buildings until I got there.

The place sat on two acres surrounded by a chain link fence with rolled razor ribbon on top. The entrance had a guard post with a swinging barricade. Next to the guard house was a discreet sign that read INSIGNIA BIOTECHNOLOGY LTD. The guard had some kind of comic opera uniform with a gold braid that made him look like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan. He shouted my name through the intercom and got the OK to let me in. He pushed a button and the barricade swung open while another guard looked at me without much interest.

There were two small buildings in the compound. Modern, gray and impersonal, with not a superfluous line in sight. Cookie-cutter designs without an original architectural thought, interchangeable with a thousand other nondescript industrial structures.

I pulled into a visitor’s parking slot in front of the administrative building. An electric eye opened the front door for me and I stepped into the reception area. The dark brown carpeting was deep and the lighting was subdued. The place was decorated in earthy autumn colors. There was a young woman with an absent look on her face at the console. She gave me her visitor’s smile, asked me to sign the log and escorted me down a featureless corridor to Chisolm’s secretary’s office.

Chisolm’s secretary was one of those lookers who’d just passed her prime. She was a tad hefty around the middle and had on too much make-up. Her hair was an artificial shade of reddish-brown that came right out of a bottle. It was done up in a style that strove for fashion but didn’t quite make it. She reminded me of Melanie Griffith on a bad day. I wondered how long she’d been with him. Some secretaries stayed with their bosses longer than their wives did.

She led me into his office. Her gray knit dress clung to her backside as it swayed. She was wearing sheer stockings and high heels with straps.

“Have a seat, Mr. Rogan,” she purred. “Mr. Chisolm is in the laboratory, but he told me he would be back shortly.” She eyed me up and down. “Would you care for some coffee?”

“Few things would please me more. I’ll take it black.”

“Sugar?” she smiled.

I smiled back. “Yes, I’ll have some sugar, sugar.”

The eyes with too much mascara glinted. “I won’t be long.”

Was Chisolm her type? Or was I? Or was Antonio Banderas?

She brought me the coffee in a Rosenthal cup and saucer with little flowers. There was a little mahogany coffee table in front of a couch across from Chisolm’s desk. She bent down and placed the coffee gracefully on the table, together with a linen napkin and a small silver spoon.

As she straightened up, she looked into my eyes and said, “My name is Justine. If there’s anything…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

If she’d been ten years younger, maybe…

“Thanks, sugar.” I gave her the sincere look right back. “Your kindness warms my very soul.”

She left me alone in the room. I took a sip of the coffee and felt like I was at a garden party. It was lukewarm and watery. You could see the little flower at the bottom of the cup through the light brown liquid. Blumschencafe.

Chisolm was no tightwad. It was obvious he wanted to display every nickel he had. The furniture, the carpeting and the paneling must have all set him back a pretty bob. There was a picture window to my left that looked out onto the quadrangle with an expanse of blue-green grass, trimmed hedges and a row of fountains, each one higher than the one in front of it.

The door opened and Chisolm stepped in, letting it close behind him with a muted click.

“Mr. Rogan,” he said, with what could have passed for a genuine smile in a dark alley if you didn’t look too closely. I stood and we shook hands.

“Have a seat,” he said and motioned me over to the couch. He took a seat in an overstuffed leather chair that gave him three inches in height over me. The guy had evidently studied the literature on Power Placement.

He reached over and pressed a button on the side of the coffee table. Inside of ten seconds Justine appeared. She looked at him and asked, “Coffee?”

The corners of his mouth turned up imperceptibly.

She nodded and turned on her heels.

Inside of fifteen seconds he had his coffee. That’s what it’s like when two people have been together for a long time. Non-verbal communication.

When we were alone, he said, “Frankly, Mr. Rogan, I’m interested in you. I was curious to see what kind of a man Alicia was married to. Obviously, a woman of that nature would have married an exceptional man.”

Where was he going with this line of horse hockey?

“I was surprised to learn you were a private investigator. You don’t look like one. You look more like a corporate executive, as if you just stepped off the cover of Fortune.”

He gave me the once-over, only he did it twice. “I know your background. Your credentials are impeccable…”

I grinned at him. “Your concern about me touches me deeply in my private parts,” I said. “But I came here to talk about Alicia.”

He nodded and put his fingertips together in a little steeple. “Please proceed.”

Chisolm looked every day of his fifty-five years. His skin was taut but you could still see where the wrinkles were before the face lift. His features were angular, but his lips were full-too full for a man’s lips. It was his eyes that gave him away. They were pale gray and sharp. Hungry eyes.

“Tell me about your relationship with Alicia,” I said.

“There isn’t much I can tell you that I haven’t told the police. They were here yesterday and questioned me up one side and down the other.”

“That’s fine. Just tell me what you told them.”

He leaned forward, separated his fingertips and put them on the edge of the coffee table, wiping away an imaginary speck of dust.

“We met for the first time about a year and a half ago. It was at a presentation for securities analysts. As you know, she makes a striking first appearance.”

He didn’t correct himself when he used the present tense.

“The presentation was given by a real estate investment trust of which I’m a director. She was working for Morgan Stanley at the time. Our initial contact was simply some brief chit-chat at the meeting and then a couple of drinks at the Plaza afterwards.”

He paused and took a sip of coffee. He was the kind of guy who stuck out his pinky when he drank from the cup.

“The next time I saw her was about a year ago. I went to a party given by my ex-partner, Joel Edelstein. It was to celebrate his endowment of a chair at Princeton. Alicia and I recalled our first meeting and thought it would be fun to see each other again.”

I knew Edelstein. We’d been undergraduate drinking and whoring buddies at Princeton. And I knew about Edelstein’s relationship with Chisolm. According to the information I had, Chisolm was worth some seven million. The seed money had come from his wife. He’d made the rest of it from paired REITs when the market for them was hot. He started the genetic engineering company four years ago. Chisolm was the money, the contacts, the business acumen. Edelstein was the scientist, the man with the ideas and the patents.