A Killer's Kiss (16 page)

The offices of Swift & Son were on Pine Street, just west of Broad, occupying the ground floor of an old stone apartment building. The name of the firm was printed in ornate gold leaf on the wide plate-glass window. The gold leaf was in varying states of peel.

“This a beat little outpost,” said Derek, standing beside me. I had come right over from the bank, and Derek, still waiting for his money, had followed.

“I’ll just be a few minutes,” I said.

“What should I do in the meantime, bo?”

“Wait out here,” I said as I peered through the window. The outer office looked like it was straight out of a Hopper painting, bare and dusty, with a few old chairs scattered across the worn wooden floor. On a side table, a single magazine sat forlornly. Radiators were uncovered, the walls were a faded pale blue, a vintage ashtray stand was set beside one of the chairs.

When I stepped through the wooden door, a little bell rang.

“Can I help you?” said an older woman behind a counter so high that only the top half of the woman’s head appeared. From what I could gather, her hair had once been red.

“I’m looking for Clarence Swift,” I said.

“Which one, Clarence Swift the Elder or the Younger?”

I thought about it for a second. “Clarence Swift the lawyer.”

“That would be the Younger, which is good for you, sir, since Clarence Swift the Elder passed away five years ago.”

“Lucky me.”

Just then the little bell atop the door rang again. The woman and I turned our heads at the same moment. Derek.

“You mind if I sit?” he said. “My dogs are barking.”

“Just stay quiet, Derek,” I said. “I won’t be long.”

Derek looked around, took a disapproving sniff, and then dropped into one of the chairs. He picked up the magazine on the side table, looked at it quizzically, then showed it to me. “Who’s that?” he said, pointing to the man on the cover with a shock of dark hair gelled perfectly in place.

“Reagan,” I said.

“Who?”

I turned back to the woman, whose gaze remained on Derek. “Is Clarence Swift the Younger in?”

“Mr. Swift is quite busy at the moment. Maybe I can help you? Is this about an overdue rent?”

“No, ma’am.”

“A problem with a property?”

“Not that either.”

“You are looking for insurance, then.”

“No.”

“Hey, lady,” said Derek. “You got anything more recent than 1987?”

“No,” she said.

“No
Maxim
s or nothing?”

“Maalox?”

“What say?”

“There’s a drugstore on the corner.” She turned her attention to me. “Are you sure you gentlemen are in the right place?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Would you tell Mr. Swift that Victor Carl is here to see him?”

There was a moment when the eyes peering above the counter appeared to fill with terror, as if I were the ghost of Clarence Swift the Elder come back to enact some terrible revenge, before they calmed again.

“Just a moment, please, Mr. Carl,” she said, “and I’ll see if he is available.”

The woman stood, eyed me warily as she straightened her print dress, and then made her way from behind the counter to the door leading to the back office. She was taller than I expected, big-boned and sharp-faced, long past fifty but with a rigidity to her posture that made her an altogether formidable presence. And somehow she seemed vaguely familiar, as if somewhere before I had seen the form from which she had been cast. She opened the door, eyed me again, closed it behind her.

From inside the back office, I could make out a scene of riotous anxiety. The exact words were muffled by the heavy door, but there was a high-pitched shout, a loud reply in a lower pitch, the scraping of furniture, the banging shut of file drawers, more shouts in the two different keys.

Derek raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.

When the door finally opened, the secretary once again appeared, smoothing straight her dress, patting her hair.

“Mr. Carl,” she said. “Mr. Swift will see you now.”

She held the door open for me and stared me down as I passed on through. She kept the door open as she returned to her spot at the counter.

“Victor, yes,” said Clarence Swift, waiting for me inside his office, standing before his desk, hands clasped, leaning forward,
peering at me from beneath his brow. “Welcome to my humble workplace.”

I looked around. “Not so humble,” I said, but I was lying. It was humble as hell.

The walls were dark and scuffed, the blocky wooden furniture was ancient and rutted, the floor was distressed, not by a decorator but by time. There was a cluttered desk with a battered chair, there were dark wooden file cabinets, there was a tall slanted writing desk with a holder for a pot of ink and a worn stool before it. It was an office out of some 1940s movie, without even a hint of the modern or luxurious. No computer, no radio or television, an old manual typewriter and a phone that was bulky and black, with a rotary dial. I had the sense that except for a few silver picture frames on the windowsill, this was exactly the way the office had been set up by the elder Mr. Swift many decades before, and the son had seen no reason to change it.

“What can I do for you, Victor?” said Clarence Swift, maintaining the pose of a suspicious prelate.

“I just have some questions, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m quite busy.”

“Working on Julia’s case?”

“There is much to be done.”

“Oh, Clarence, I’m sure you have the situation well in hand.”

“Thank you for your confidence. But still, this is no time for letting up. I need to be sure that Julia’s interests are completely taken care of. There is a surfeit of work yet to do, and your rejecting my caution and continuing to impose your presence on her has just amplified my difficulties. So if you’ll excuse me—”

“Youngblood, LP.”

Clarence blinked.

“You set it up,” I said.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I’m sure you do, Clarence. Youngblood was a limited partnership created to launder ill-gotten gains through Wren Dennis
ton’s investment company. There were two partners. One was Gregor Trocek, a shady business associate of Wren’s. The other was an old friend of Wren’s from their school days. You knew all of Wren’s old friends, surely.”

“Not all,” said Clarence. “I didn’t go to school with Wren. He attended Germantown Academy, I went to public school.”

“That must have rankled,” I said.

“Public school was good enough for a modest boy of modest means like me.”

“It was Gregor’s money that financed the partnership—cash, actually—but the money was earned through questionable means and no taxes had been paid, so he needed a way to turn the cash into an investment. Which is where the old friend came in. I’m talking, of course, about Miles Cave, the man you told me you never heard of. And when it came time to finalize the agreement, a document was required, and Wren came to you to draft it up, and you did.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Victor.”

“I read the thing, every word. It’s full of useless Latin and tortured legal phrases. The agreement humbly wrings its own hands even as it carefully creates a vehicle for illegal money laundering. It’s got your fingerprints all over it.”

“You’re making this up. It’s not possible to tell.”

“Then let’s ask the FBI what they think.”

“Why would they care?”

“I could give you one point seven million reasons.”

“You’re guessing,” he said, backing up now as his voice rose higher. “It’s not true. You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I know your type,” he hissed. “Willing to make up anything to put the likes of me down. But I deserve more than the lies of a private-school brat. Where did you go, Victor? Penn Charter? The Haverford School? In which lofty tower did you learn to make up stories about the rest of us?”

“I went to public school myself.”

“In the suburbs, I’d bet.”

“Yes, actually.”

“That hardly counts.”

“Still, you wrote it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

He pulled his outsize handkerchief from his jacket pocket, wiped the shine off his forehead. As he flicked the handkerchief back into the pocket, he collapsed loudly onto the high stool before the slanted writing desk.

Just then a voice poured through the doorway. “Anything I can do for you, Mr. Swift?” called in the secretary.

“No, Edna, we are fine, thank you.”

Swift stared at me for a moment with weary resignation in his eyes. Then he propped an elbow on the writing desk and clasped his hands together.

“You are correct, Victor. Yes, I drafted the agreement. I am embarrassed to have lied, but Wren asked me to tell no one of my involvement, and so I was merely trying to accede to the request of the dear departed. But you found me out fair and square. I should have known that a poor liar like me would be found out by someone as clever as you. Is that what you came for, to humiliate me?”

“Nah, that’s just a bonus. What I’ve really come for is Miles Cave.”

“What about him?”

“I’m looking for him.”

“There seems to be an army looking for him.”

“But I’m going to have your help.”

“Why would I help you?”

“Because if I can find him, the police will have a sweet suspect to nail Wren’s murder on. Which would be a great benefit to Julia.”

“Yes, it would.”

“And we both are doing all we can for poor Julia.”

“Yes, we are.” He stared at me for a moment and then dropped his chin. “He is a frightening man, Victor.”

“Then the sooner I find him, the better for everyone.”

“I’ve never met him, of course. And so everything I know is secondhand, from Wren.”

“Go on.”

“Wren said he was tall, good-looking, a ne’er-do-well. He drove a convertible and wore sunglasses and dated actresses. He lived on the West Coast but was often in Philadelphia to visit family and friends.”

I think it was the sunglasses that got me to thinking. The actresses, too, maybe, but really the sunglasses. I mean, where did that come from, sunglasses?

“Wren told me Miles had shadowy contacts with mobsters and drug dealers,” continued Clarence. “Some of his deals had been quite questionable, and there were rumors of an incident in Fresno that left one man dead.”

“Fresno?” I said.

“Yes, that’s right. Fresno. Wren told me that he didn’t trust Miles, didn’t really want anything to do with him. But Mr. Trocek had done him a favor in the past, and Wren wanted to help him with his investment. Miles, with his contact at the bank, was perfect for that. So Wren asked me to draft the agreement quite carefully, to protect everybody in case Miles stepped out of line.”

“Did you ever talk to this Miles fellow?” I said.

“Once, on the phone,” said Clarence.

I watched him closely as he spoke.

“His voice was deep, booming,” said Clarence. “He called me ‘Clarence, old buddy,’ even though we’d never met. He tried to be helpful, but he wouldn’t tell me much. He said his accountant would get back to me to answer my questions, but the accountant never did.”

Clarence spoke now with none of the hesitancy or meandering language that had typified his speech before then, and I let him. He tossed off a few more details, he mentioned something about a toupee. I nodded and returned his smirk when he told it, but I wasn’t listening anymore. It was the “Clarence, old buddy” that did it finally, and the way Clarence Swift couldn’t avoid the slight sneer that appeared on his lips when he repeated it. As soon as I heard it, I realized what I should have realized long ago. That Miles Cave didn’t exist. That he had never existed. That he was a figment of Wren Denniston’s imagination, and Clarence knew it.

Clarence kept on talking, telling me what he could about Miles Cave, with his convertible and sunglasses and actress girlfriends, with his life that contained everything that Clarence’s did not, while I looked again around the office.

Piles of files, documents, small drawers for keeping three-by-five cards listing rentals paid. All the hallmarks of a crimped legal practice and a real estate management company barely getting by. And the photographs in their frames. Clarence with an older man, his father, maybe? Another portrait of that older man, staring fiercely at the camera. Clarence with Wren Denniston. Clarence with his secretary, Edna. And one of a woman, tall and broad. It looked like Edna in her younger years, but that’s not who it was. I had seen that photograph before, Clarence had shown a copy of it to me in my office. It was of his fiancée, Margaret.

But I recognized the woman from more than her picture.

Clarence Swift again pulled out the handkerchief and wiped his brow. He had worked up quite a sweat manufacturing his Miles Cave tale. I almost felt like clapping.

“I hope that helped, Victor,” said Clarence as he snapped his handkerchief back into his pocket.

“It did,” I said. “More than you know. Thank you.”

“Do you need something, Mr. Swift?” called the secretary again from the outer office.

“We’re fine, Edna. Fine.” He looked at me, pursed his lips as if at the trials he suffered at the hands of his secretary. “And I again apologize for misleading you initially.”

“No harm, no foul, Clarence. Have you heard from this Mr. Cave lately?”

“No, not at all.”

“You’ll let me know if you do.”

“Of course.”

“Do you think he might have killed Dr. Denniston?”

“It’s possible, maybe probable. From what Wren told me, I sensed he could be quite dangerous.”

“Fresno,” I said, nodding.

“Yes, Fresno. But one thing I know for sure is that Mrs. Denniston had nothing to do with the murder.”

“How are you so certain that she didn’t?” I said as I stood.

“Because I know her,” said Clarence. “She is a unique woman, so extraordinary in so many many ways. It would be impossible for her. Just impossible. The very thought…”

“Yes,” I said. “The very thought.”

“I hope you find him, Victor. Find him and drag him to justice.”

“That’s just what I intend to do,” I said.