Desperate Measures
- Автор: Вудс Стюарт
- Серия: Stone Barrington #47
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: G.P. Putnam's Sons
- ISBN: 978-0-7352-1922-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Desperate Measures». Краткое содержание книги:
They thanked the man and reluctantly left the hospital. By the time Stone got home, Joan was at her desk. He told her what had happened.
“That poor girl,” Joan said, brushing away a tear.
“Where are Jimbo and Sylvia?”
“At home. They’re both crushed, but there was nothing more they could do. I’ll call them.”
“Tell them to put a guard on her room at Bellevue,” Stone said. “When word gets out that she’s alive, somebody could come after her.”
“Will do,” Joan said, picking up her phone.
“Send a whole lot of flowers and a cell phone to her room, with a note from me saying that when she feels like talking to call me, but not to rush it.”
“All right.”
Stone went back upstairs to try to get a couple more hours of sleep. Dino called as he was getting into bed.
“I got a look at the room,” he said. “It’s in one of two buildings built into the hotel. Apparently, when it was built, the property owners wouldn’t sell, so the hotel was built around them. Down a hallway was a door leading to an attic, and through there you could get to the hotel.”
“There are those three night guys there,” Stone said, “night clerk, elevator operator, and janitor.”
“They’re at the precinct being separately sweated as we speak,” Dino said. “So far, nobody knows nothing.”
“Okay, I’m going to sleep. I told Strategic Services to put a guard on her room.”
“Already done,” Dino replied.
“And I sent her some flowers and a cell phone so she can call when she feels like it.”
“Good idea. Let me know if you hear from her.”
“Okay, now I’m going back to bed.”
“Lucky sonofabitch, I wish I could do that.”
“Don’t call me before noon, unless something breaks.”
“Sure.” Dino hung up.
Stone pulled the blinds and lay on the bed in the dark, wondering what he could have done different that would have avoided this. Finally, he decided that there was nothing he could have done, unless Faith cooperated, and she was clearly not the cooperative sort.
He fell asleep finally and dreamed of falling twelve stories into a dumpster.
He was awakened by the phone at the stroke of noon. “Yes?”
“We’re not getting a whole lot out of the three,” Dino said, “but everybody’s money is on the janitor.”
“It’s got to be all three of them,” Stone said. “He couldn’t have done it unless the other three were in on it — or, at the very least, covering for him.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Dino said. “Now, I’m going to lock myself in my office and take a nap on the sofa.” He hung up.
30
Stone was getting hungry for lunch when Joan buzzed. “You had a message,” she said.
“Why didn’t you put the call through?”
“It wasn’t a call, it was a message from Mikeford Whitehorn.”
Mikeford Whitehorn had served in three cabinet positions and, in between, had expanded his family’s legendary fortune in investment banking. Stone had met him once, three or four years before, at a dinner party. “What’s the message?”
“He would be grateful if you would call on him at his home at three o’clock this afternoon. He’s at 740 Park Avenue.”
“Any idea what he wants?”
“That was the entire message. He didn’t ask that you call and confirm, either.”
“That was pretty confident,” Stone said.
“I guess he’s not accustomed to people saying no.”
“I guess not.” As Stone hung up, his cell phone started vibrating. “Hello?”
The voice was a hoarse whisper. “It’s Faith. I’m so sorry.”
“Listen, you need rest. You don’t have to talk now, not even to the police.”
“I’m going to be all right. I’ll call tomorrow. I just wanted you to know I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.” She hung up.
—
740 Park Avenue was the grandest and, legend had it, the most expensive apartment building in New York. It was built at the dawn of the Great Depression by Jacqueline Kennedy’s grandfather and was made up almost entirely of large duplexes and triplexes, one of which was occupied by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., from the mid-1930s. Some of the apartments had been described as “country houses in the city.” Stone knew a couple of people who lived there, but he had never visited Mikeford Whitehorn’s apartment.
He was admitted by a uniformed butler, seated in a large, paneled library stocked with leather-bound volumes on two levels that were joined by a spiral staircase, and asked if he would like a drink.
“No, thank you,” Stone said and was left alone.
A moment later Mikeford Whitehorn entered the room as a bull might enter the ring in Madrid. He was six feet, six inches tall and weighed, probably, two-fifty pounds — his slim weight. He had been an all-American football player at Harvard, back when that school had still produced all-Americans, and was known to intimates — but no one else — as “Swifty.”
Whitehorn enveloped Stone’s hand in a brief handshake, then he took a chair and ordered a large Laphroaig, a single-malt scotch whisky, neat. Stone reconsidered and ordered a Knob Creek.
“I remember our conversation at that dinner party a while back,” Whitehorn said.
That surprised Stone because it had hardly been a conversation: he had just listened while Whitehorn rattled on about whatever crossed his mind. “I remember it, too, Mr. Secretary,” Stone replied, “but I don’t remember talking much.”
Whitehorn laughed. “Maybe not, but you asked the right questions.”
“I was surprised to hear from you, Mr. Secretary. Is there something I can do for you?”
“I need some advice from a person of your background,” Whitehorn said. “The police thing, you know.”
“I used to be a police detective,” Stone said.
“Exactly. I don’t want to ask my grandson’s lawyer about this.”
Stone had not known that Whitehorn had a grandson. “I see,” he said.
“My grandson is named Michael Adams,” he said. “My daughter’s boy. He has never amounted to much of anything. He has what I consider to be a menial job, and he is supported by a trust fund I set up for him at his birth.”
“Is he in some sort of trouble?”
“He has been arrested, and it looks as though he may be charged as an accomplice in an attempted murder.”
“What are the circumstances?”
“He is a night clerk at a fairly seedy hotel on Lexington Avenue in the Forties, and it appears that at least one of his colleagues, the janitor there, is a suspect in half a dozen murders.”
“Let me stop you there for a moment, Mr. Secretary, while I declare a conflict.”
“A confict?”
“A young woman I employ as an aircraft pilot is a victim in this case, although she did not die.”
“How is that a conflict?”
“I can’t represent your grandson and advise the young lady simultaneously.”
“I’m not asking you to represent my grandson. He already has a competent attorney. I’m asking you to advise me, not him.”
“Well, as long as it’s only informal advice, not actual representation, I suppose we can talk about it.”
“Good. Now, my grandson’s attorney is urging him to accept a plea deal, guilty, in exchange for a five-year sentence, but Mike maintains his innocence and doesn’t want to do it.”
“I know that there are three suspects,” Stone said, “and that the police feel the chief among them is the janitor. However, they don’t believe he could have pulled off these murders without help, and that leaves the elevator operator and your grandson in a bind, I’m afraid.”