It took me a moment to process what I’d walked into. It wasn’t just the sound of him saying my name that was unsettling. It was the sight of him. He was standing there, stooped, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. His hair was lank. He was unshaven. Deflated. Defeated, even. When I’d imagined this moment, I’d pictured Pardew as a cornered tiger, ready to rip out my throat. A worthy adversary putting up a valiant fight as I avenged my father. Instead he looked more like a half-starved prisoner or a brainwashed hostage who’d lost all hope of rescue and was now wondering whether he had the will to survive the journey home.
“You know who I am?” I was struggling to continue looking at him.
“Of course.” His voice was quiet and wheezy. “Your father showed me pictures of you, hundreds of times. He was very proud of you.”
“I guess you knew my father well?”
Pardew nodded.
“He trusted you.”
He nodded again.
“Did that make it easier to plunder his life’s work? Or harder?”
Pardew held his hands up in surrender. “If you’re here to hurt me, or kill me, fine. Go ahead. I can’t stop you. But before you do anything, you should know…what the cops say? What the ADA says? It’s wrong. If you kill me, you’ll be killing an innocent man.”
“So you didn’t steal from my father?”
“Oh, yes. I did that. Attempted to. Kind of. Technically.” He took a moment. “What I did was make it look like some of his assets were worth less, so I’d owe him less when I bought the company. It was more fraud than theft, honestly. But that was in the past. I stopped doing it ages ago. Your father knew all about it. I confessed what I’d done. Tried to do. And he forgave me.”
“Cut the weasel talk. You mean you got caught, you fought, and my father dropped dead.”
“No. Well, I guess he did die, but that had nothing to do with me. When I last saw him he was smiling, healthy, sitting at his desk, drinking tea. I only heard he’d died when I got arrested. I was shocked.”
“When did you last see him?”
“The night he died. At his house.”
“The night you fought.”
“There was no fight.”
“I saw the crime scene photos. His study was trashed.”
“I saw those photos, too. All I can tell you is that it was fine when I left. There wasn’t even a coaster out of place.”
“So what happened? My father wrecked the place himself?”
“I have no idea what happened. If I had to guess, I’d say the police did it. So they could hang his death on me, in case they couldn’t sell the jury on the fraud thing.”
“Why did you go to the house that night?”
“Your father asked me to. He’d found out what I was up to. I figured he would, sooner or later. He asked me, and I told him everything. It was a weight off my chest, in the end. And it was the strangest conversation I ever had. I was confessing to defrauding him out of millions of dollars and yet we were sitting there, quiet, calm, polite, like friends chewing over childhood memories. I told him I had a record of everything I’d done, and a plan to put it all back the way it was. He accepted that, and forgave me. He said he took an element of the blame on himself for making the valuation formula too harsh, and giving me such an incentive to cheat.”
“How did he catch on to you?”
“He said he’d been tying up loose ends, getting ready to retire. He owned a house in Hell’s Kitchen. A brownstone. Worth a fortune. It was one of the first things I devalued. I thought it was a sweetener in an old deal, long forgotten. It turned out he’d bought it deliberately. Something to do with your mother. He said he’d left it alone for years because the interior was important to her, for some reason. Now it was time to finally get everything cleared out, and put the past behind him. I guess he meant he wanted to renovate, then sell it? Anyway, he saw its value in the books had fallen when it should have risen—a lot—and he got suspicious. It was easy to join the dots after that. But it was my own fault. I put myself in the frame.”
“Go back a second. My father said he wanted to get everything cleared out of the brownstone?”
“Right.”
“Those were his exact words?”
“As far as I can remember.”
“What did he mean?”
“Well, I assumed the house was full of junk.”
“Did you see it?”
“No. I can’t even remember the address. It was just a number on a balance sheet to me.”
“OK. So you promised to put everything right. What then?”
“We drew a line under the business and just chatted for a while. His housekeeper brought his tea, like she did every night. I passed, like I did every night I was there, because I only drink coffee. It got late, and I left.”
“The tea. Did Mrs. Vincent serve it in a mug? Or a cup with a saucer?”
Pardew thought for a moment. “A cup and saucer.”
“What pattern were they?”
“White, with red roses. The cup was a kind of a fluted shape, with a bouquet on all four sides.”
“Good. Now, one last question. You said you stopped devaluing my father’s assets a while ago. Why?”
“The plan wasn’t working. There were too many assets, and it was obvious I didn’t have enough time because he kept talking about retirement. I needed an alternative.”
“Which was?”
“I’m still looking.”
“Don’t lie to me. Lie about this, and I won’t believe anything else you’ve said. That would lead to a bad outcome. For you. Like my friend here, who has poor impulse control, throwing you out of a window of his choice.”
“I had the idea to challenge the valuation formula in court.”
“That sounds totally reasonable. Why try to hide it?”
“Because I asked a lawyer. He said there was no hope of winning a case like that. And now you’re really going to hate me. I floated the idea of offering the judge an…incentive.”
“So your lawyer set you up with a bent judge?”
“No.” Pardew shook his head. “He dismissed the idea out of hand. Said he’d never be party to anything like that. And that I’d be wasting my time anyway, because the judges in New York are too straight. I found out he was wrong about that, though. On my own.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“Around the same time I got a DUI. I was in a high-stress situation. You can understand that, right? Anyway, I’m at the gym and a guy approaches me. He says he’s an ex-cop, and that he has contacts who could make my problem disappear.”
“You were using the same lawyer for the DUI as you asked for advice about challenging the formula? Steven Bruce?”
“That’s right. But he wasn’t involved with getting the DUI case dropped.”
“Moron.” Robson’s whisper was audible clear across the room.
“It didn’t occur to you that Bruce knew you were open to bribes, because you raised the idea yourself? So he denounces the concept publicly, and sends the ex-cop to see you on the quiet?”
“No.” Pardew shook his head. “That never crossed my mind.”
“Moron.” Robson’s voice was no quieter. “Do you believe in fairies, too?”
“Ignore him,” I said. “So you paid?”
“I did. My case got thrown out. And I asked the cop if he’d be up for helping me in the future, if I was ever in need. He said yes, if the price was right and they could get the right judge. I was thinking that could be the perfect solution for my formula issue.”
“Only you wound up on trial for fraud and murder two. Why didn’t you try to use him to beat the charges?”
“The murder charge was bogus. It was only the fraud I was worried about. I wanted to use the guy. Obviously. But I couldn’t contact him. I was in jail. I couldn’t get bail because the ADA said I was a flight risk. My case was tanking, and I got desperate. I told Steven Bruce what had happened with the DUI thing and asked him to try and cut a deal. Oh my goodness. What an idiot I am. I told a guy I was willing to testify against a conspiracy he was part of. I thought word of the possible deal had just leaked. No wonder my file was taken and the case went south.”
“That’s what led to the mistrial. But how did you end up here?”
“The minute I got released the ex-cop—his name’s Brian Rooney—got in touch. He said he knew something that could help me. So I met him, and he brought me here. He said I had to stay until all the evidence about the DUI thing had been destroyed. And that I was lucky he didn’t kill me for trying to roll on him. He wanted to, but JD wouldn’t allow it.”
“JD?”
“Judge Dredd. It’s what they call the bent judge they work for. Because of his temper. The plan was to expunge the evidence so I’d have nothing to deal. Return the file. Then let me go, and I’d either have to run or get arrested. Only the process took ages because JD insisted on fixing the file himself, and he got sick before he could finish it. In the meantime they kept moving me from one hovel to another.”
“Why did you come back to this place?”
“What else could I do? Run, Rooney said. But how? Where to? I’m just a regular guy. I don’t have money stashed away, or contacts who could smuggle me out of the country. I don’t even have a passport. I had to surrender it. I couldn’t risk going to my house after the police had the file back, because they’d be watching for me. I figured this was the safest place until I came up with a plan. No one would look, because it had already been abandoned.”
“We should go.” Robson had crossed to the window. “We’ve been here too long, and that business with the car and the door was hardly discreet.”
“You’re right.” I scanned the room, then turned to Pardew. “Grab the sleeping bag and the mattress. Leave the rest.”
“Where are we going? What are you going to do with me?”
“Don’t worry. We’re not going to hurt you. But I’m not going to lie. After all you’ve done, with my father and the DUI thing, your account is seriously in the red. I have an idea that might bring it back into the black. I need to iron out some details. And get some information from you. I can’t guarantee the police won’t become involved. But for there to be any chance of this ending up OK, you need to come with us and do exactly what we say.”
Robson was in the kitchen when I came down. The newspaper was in the trash, the dishes were in the sink, and he was making tea.
“Did you put him on the third floor?”
I nodded.
“Do you think he’ll stay there?”
“Probably. I took his clothes and pointed out that if he wanders the city naked, he’ll get arrested and the police have the file.”
“But the police don’t have the file.”
“I know that. He doesn’t. And just in case, I wired his door handle to the electricity.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Depends on how much of what he said is true. I’m not bothered about the fraud. What he did’s a weird crime. Nothing was actually taken. It would have been, if he’d bought my father’s company on the cheap. But he didn’t. The assets are all still there, and they’re in the process of being revalued. So it’s no harm, no foul, as far as I’m concerned.”
“What do you make of the rest of it?”
“I have mixed feelings. Some of it rang true. My father was more likely to forgive someone than to fight them. And he did like his tea, last thing before bed. Earl Grey. The cup Pardew described, that was from his favorite set. My mother picked it out on their honeymoon, in Paris. As for the other things, the jury’s out. Like with this place. Why would my father say he needed to clear it out? Clear what out? Remember when we first set foot in here, we both said it felt like a safe house, it was so clean and sterile.”
“Maybe your father made the decision to call a cleaning service, then found the discrepancy with the value, but after the ball was already rolling. There’d be no need to cancel the appointment because of some accounting questions, if he really wanted the place taken care of. That would explain why it was so spotless when we arrived.”
“That’s possible, I guess. I’ll ask Ferguson, his lawyer, to dig through the bills. See if there’s any record.”
“What about his office getting trashed?” Robson added some milk to his tea. “That’s the biggest discrepancy, if you ask me. If Pardew didn’t wreck the place, who did? And when? Do you believe the police would really do that, just to pad a case they didn’t even know they were making yet? Could someone totally unrelated have sneaked in after Pardew left, but before your father collapsed?”
“You can rule out anyone else sneaking in. That’s too coincidental.” I helped myself to tea from Robson’s kettle. “I could believe the police would tamper with evidence—some of them, in some circumstances. But I don’t see the motivation here. And I trust Atkinson. No. I think Pardew’s lying. And I think there’s an easy way to find out.”
“Time for the window?”
“Something less dramatic. More scientific. Mrs. Vincent told me she heard arguing coming from my father’s study and things getting smashed while Pardew was still there. That’s in her statement, too. She also said my father wouldn’t let her back in the study after Pardew left. If Pardew’s telling the truth, there’d be a cup and saucer—or at least broken pieces of china—in the crime scene photos and the officer’s log. I don’t remember seeing any. But to be sure I’ll get copies from Atkinson and double-check.”
“What if Pardew is telling the truth, and your father took his cup to the kitchen himself when he’d finished his tea. That would explain why it’s not in the photos.”
“My father would never do that. You don’t buy a dog and bark yourself, he used to say. But just in case, I’ll talk to Mrs. Vincent and confirm whether she brought my father’s tea, assuming she can remember that kind of detail after all these months. I’ll also ask if she remembers finding his cup in the kitchen, later. Then, if we figure my father’s death was an accident, I’ll be satisfied to make Pardew help with my idea. If he’s lying, and he riled my father up, trashed his stuff, and caused his collapse, the story will have a different ending. I’ll still make him help. Then I’ll make sure he winds up in a place that makes those storefronts seem like Caribbean resorts.”