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.
Two years ago, Chisolm had bought out Edelstein with a cash and stock package worth three million. Edelstein had taken the stock, sold it when the SEC rules allowed him to, and invested the after-tax proceeds in half a dozen Internet start-ups.
When I met Edelstein at an alumni reunion, he was a guy who had his heart’s desire-a teaching career, a research lab and a plush and comfortable cushion on the side. “That way I can tell them to fuck off whenever I feel like it,” he’d told me. I wondered if Edelstein had ever regretted leaving Insignia Biotech.
Chisolm cleared his throat. “I’m a married man, so our relationship had to be discreet. We’d meet once or twice a week, usually in the city.”
“Was she seeing anyone else?” I asked.
He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “Why? Was she in the habit of doing that?”
I didn’t answer. Let him ponder that possibility.
He smoothed his hair back as if he were looking into a mirror. “I don’t think so,” he said. “At least, I didn’t think so at the time.”
I could see he was thinking about it.
“What did she do in her spare time?”
“She didn’t have much spare time. She was a real work horse-put in long hours. And when she wasn’t working at the office, she was working at home. You probably remember that about her.”
I nodded. “Yeah.” At least that much about her hadn’t changed. She was always a hard worker and a hard player.
“You have any thoughts on who’d want to kill her?” I asked him.
He shook his head slowly and I had the sense he was trying to find the right words. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought the last few days. Trying to find the who or the what. The problem was that she never spoke much about herself and her inner feelings. In a way, that was one of the masculine traits about her. That and her competitiveness.”
He stopped and stared out the window at a bird that had landed on one of the hedges. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He went over to his large polished mahogany desk and took out a pack of Benson amp; Hedges. He lit one, held in the smoke for a long minute and blew it out slowly. “Most women can’t stop talking about themselves, you know. Their emotions, their hang-ups, their desires. Alicia was different. She very seldom would let you know what she was thinking. She kept it hidden-almost like a poker hand.”
He paused, then asked, “Did you find her to be that way?”
He wanted to compare notes, but I wasn’t playing that game. He was astute-I had to give him that much.
“Go on,” I said.
“There was one other thing. Her feminism. She was an ardent feminist. She’d talk at length about it-almost as if it were an obsession. She’d go on and on with this drivel, and I’d listen to her and nod, yes…yes, just because I wanted to hump her.”
“What did you think was the point of her feminism?”
“Well, she said she was never going to be dependent on a man again, and I had the impression she really meant it.”
“What about her friends?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I didn’t know any of them. She never mentioned any friends and we never went out with any of them.”
“How well did you know her sister, Laura?”
“Yes, we had a few conversations. Nothing more than that. But I liked her. She was quite warm-very different from Alicia.”
He studied a painting on the wall. There was no mistaking the artist. It was by Francis Bacon. Two indistinguishable bodies twisted in an embrace to the death. A gaping shrieking mouth. A bloody slab of beef. An odd painting to be in a business office. “Alicia was like a thoroughbred. She was frisky and high-spirited. A lot of fun to ride. But…” he paused, “in the last few months she turned skittish. She didn’t seem to be as much fun anymore. She seemed preoccupied about something. I had actually…”
He stopped and fell silent.
I didn’t say anything. He was doing the talking, not me.
Finally, he said, “I was going to terminate our relationship. I told her so. I wasn’t enjoying it any longer. It was becoming a chore. You know, a Frenchman once said the only value a woman has is in her novelty. I subscribe to that theory. We had sex exactly seventy-nine times. I always keep meticulous records. Sixty-five times straight intercourse, eleven times oral sex, three times anal sex. So you can imagine how tedious it was.”
That was a new one on me. I would’ve liked to see his baseball scorecards.
“How did Alicia take it when you told her you wanted to break up?”
“Quite composed, as a matter of fact. I thought she would have taken it harder, but she didn’t reveal any emotion at all. She sort of shrugged her shoulders and said, well, let’s carry on. I had the sense she was tiring of me also.”
I nodded. “What about her work as an securities analyst? Which industries did she cover?”
He took another drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray. “Well, as far as I know, she followed companies in the real estate industry. She used to cover defense and technology areas. That was unusual for a woman. I kept on trying to interest her in genetic engineering but she was reluctant to change. I told her that this was a hot industry-this was where man played God.”
He stared at me. “And that brings me to the reason why I wanted to talk with you.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Now that the human genome has been sequenced, we’re going to be a very successful company. We have several genetic engineering projects going on at the present time-one of which is particularly exciting.”
His hungry eyes grew positively rapacious as he spoke. This guy made the big bad wolf look bush league. “We’ve produced hemoglobin from genetically-altered bacteria. We use recombinant hemoglobin that’s been engineered to mimic natural hemoglobin. This means we can mass-produce cheap synthetic human blood that would be free of HIV and hepatitis viruses. You could give a transfusion to any recipient without worrying about blood-type matching and the product would have a much longer shelf life than human blood.”
His eyes flashed. “Do you see how this blood could be useful for accident victims or wounded soldiers on the battlefield?”
I nodded. “And why are you imparting all this valuable insider information to me, free of charge?”
“Because…” And his eyes gleamed brighter than the Eddystone lighthouse, “we are about to make an initial public offering of our stock. We’re a closely-held company. This is going to be an exceptional opportunity. I know you have top-drawer contacts. I’d suggest you purchase some stock at the offering and inform your associates about this opportunity to make a large profit very quickly and very easily.”
I looked at him. This clown was violating just about every SEC regulation in the book and some they hadn’t even thought of yet. “And you’re going to make me a rich man because you like the cut of my jib?”
He snorted. “I do like your style, Mr. Rogan. And I know you’re not stupid enough to turn down an opportunity like this. Aren’t you interested in making a killing?”
“Not this way,” I said.
“Don’t you understand what we’re doing? We’re creating new strains of human gene cells that will enable us to pass on better traits from one generation to the next-actually improving the human species. We’ll theoretically be able to create a race of superbeings-far superior to the diseased and disabled wrecks you see around you. Something Nietzsche would envy and be proud of. Something he could only hope for in his writings. And think of the fortunes we’ll be making in the process. These new people will be smarter, tougher, more disease-resistant. In short, they’ll be far above and beyond your pathetic human beings of today.”
This insufferable son of a bitch was starting to get on my nerves. I gave him a sour grin. “You better go back and reread your Cliff Notes on Nietzsche. His Superman was a man of integrity, considerate to his inferiors-not some money-grubbing stock jobber.”
His mouth opened but he didn’t make a sound.
I stood and said, “Don’t trouble yourself to show me out. I’ll find my way.”