Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

were visiting from Europe. She couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant either. She had never been there before and Alornerk’s friends had chosen it, somewhere in Queens.”

I listened to her, then unlocked the car door. “You think she’s lying?”

She drummed a bit more, then looked up at the young leaves in the green ash overhead. “It’s messy and unlikely enough to be true. It could also be a phony alibi.”

I climbed behind the wheel and she got in the other side. I asked, “What did Alornerk say when they interviewed him?”

She frowned at me and slammed the door. “Read the report sometimes, Stone. That’s what it’s there for.”

“I did, bits. I like to keep it fresh. Besides, I have you to read it for me. I like the way you tell it.” The big old engine growled and we pulled away. “What did he say?”

She sighed. “He confirmed her story. The friends had gone back to Europe that evening. It had all been a big shock. He couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant either. He would contact the friends and get them to tell him. He never did, and neither of them was ever a suspect, so it wasn’t followed up.”

I turned into Manhattan Avenue. “You want to go and see Seth Greenway?”

“Of course. Fifteenth floor, 667 Madison Avenue. It’s in the file.”

“Don’t judge me. My father used to judge me. That was what led me into a life of dissolute vice and profligacy, and ultimately self-recrimination and self-loathing. It took years of therapy and analysis to make me the man I am today. But the shadows are never far away. The shadows… and the nightmares.”

She watched me say all this from behind her aviators, with a small smile on her lips. When I’d finished, she said, “You know all about my family, my history, my childhood, but you never talk about your own past, or your parents.”

I shrugged. “Not much to tell. My father was an Austrian sadist with a small mustache and blond eyelashes. He used to pronounce Austria ‘orstria’. That always terrified me.”

She laughed. I smiled. After a bit I said, “Helena made the point that the killer could be a woman. You think that’s significant?”

She shrugged. “I noticed that. I don’t know. If she suspected a woman, why not say so? Also, ninety percent of murders are committed by men. So, statistically, it’s not likely.”

“Statistical probability is a misleading friend, Dehan. Statistically, he is very unlikely to have been murdered in the first place, and yet he was.”

“Still, I noticed the comment but personally would not attribute much significance to it.”

I made a left and a right onto Central Park West and was temporarily distracted by the beauty of the grass and the trees in the early spring light. At West 97th I turned into the park. “Would you say she was pedantic—in her speech, I mean.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I guess so. She’s very precise. You get the feeling she was taught extremely correct English, and sticks to the rules.”

“I noticed she uses shall in the first person.”

She frowned at me. “What?”

“Not many people know that shall is the first person of will: I shall, you will, he will, it will.” I glanced at her and went on. “We shall, you will, they will.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She knew that.”

“Huh…” She frowned again. “Is that important?”

“Well, it makes her question a little more significant, because presumably she knows that in English ‘he’ is a neutral pronoun as well as a masculine one. That may not be popular in our politically correct age, but she struck me as a woman more concerned with propriety than political correctness. I may be wrong, but I think she thinks it was a woman.”

She shook her head as we turned out of the park and onto the Museum Mile. “One of these days, Stone, you are going to come out with one of these gossamer thin deductions of yours, and it will be totally wrong.”

I snorted. “See? And then you want me to share my thoughts. So that you can erode my ego with cruel stabbing words, like my mother when she used to make me lie under the floorboards, with the rats.”

“You’re out of your mind, Stone.”

“I must have spring fever.”

Five minutes later, I made two lefts onto Madison Avenue and parked outside J Safra. Dehan opened the door to get out, but I sat drumming the walnut steering wheel and staring at the FedEx van in front of me.

“What?”

“The killer knew where she would be at that time, so he could organize the special delivery.”

“Yes.”

“He also knew Jack was going for lunch.”

“Yup…”

I eyed her face a moment. “So, where did Jack go for lunch?”

“Let’s find out.”

“Yeah…”

I climbed out and we made our way along the sunlit sidewalk toward 667 Madison Ave.

We crossed the echoing, toffee-colored marble lobby to the bank of elevators along the far wall, which still evoked Orwell’s art deco vision of the future. There, we took a car to the fifteenth floor, in uncomfortable intimacy with a dozen other people, all trying hard to pretend it was normal to be this closely confined with a dozen strangers in a steel box fifteen stories in the air.

The doors slid back and we exited with relief into the reception of Connors Communication. Here the walls were also marble, but of pale oxblood hue that was oddly unsettling. A girl who had the kind of charm you learn at customer services school gave us a pretty smile and asked how she might help us.

I showed her my badge.

“I am Detective Stone. This is Detective Dehan. We are investigating a homicide and we would like to see Mr. Seth Greenway.”

She made a call