The Key

“There’s one other thing.”

He selected a fresh pencil from the mug, and we waited as he repeated his ritual with the sharpener. This time I had to work so hard not to react I worried that I might choke. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jake’s shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.

Thoughtfully, Gallagher lifted the pencil to his lips, and thoughtfully, he inserted the newly sharpened tip into his mouth as we waited for his final instructions.

But when he withdrew the pencil and opened his mouth to speak, all that emerged was a tortured gasp.

His eyeballs bulged, and a gurgle escaped from his throat, flecking his lips with blood-stained foam. His body jerked with spasms that pitched him out of his chair and onto the floor. His limbs flailed on the carpet as a horrifying wheezing sound came from his mouth.

I rushed to the door, to get help or tell someone to call an ambulance, but then the room went silent behind me.

Slowly, I turned around.

Gallagher lay still on his back, his eyes wide and unseeing.

It was all over in a matter of seconds.

chapter nine

I f we’d been doctors instead of MBAs, I suppose one of us would have tried CPR or something like that, but it seemed very clear that there was no bringing Gallagher back. A smell of burnt almonds tinged the air. I’d read about that scent in Agatha Christie books and had thought it was more a mystery novel convention than the real smell of cyanide. It turned out that she hadn’t been making it up.

Jake crouched down by the dead man, checking awkwardly for a pulse. Mark stood frozen, motionless in the spot he’d been in when Gallagher took his fatal lick. We both watched as Jake rose slowly to his feet. He shook his head, a stunned expression on his handsome face.

Dahlia arrived on the scene just then. She took one look, dropped the coffee cup she’d been carrying, and then followed it to the floor in a faint. Rather than step over her to get to another phone, I reached over Gallagher’s desk to call 911. Then I called Winslow, Brown security to explain that there was a dead banker on the 39th floor.

Paramedics arrived within minutes, followed closely by uniformed policemen, who were followed in turn by plain-clothes detectives. A photographer captured images of Gallagher’s body sprawled on the carpet. Then a team from the medical examiner’s office zipped up the corpse in a black rubber bag and wheeled it out, but not before the presumptive murder weapon had been extracted from the dead man’s fingers and inserted into a labeled plastic envelope. My little joke about poisoning Gallagher by pencil no longer seemed so funny, although it had been surprisingly prescient.

Jake, Mark, Dahlia, and I were shepherded into separate conference rooms until we could each give the police a statement. By the time I reemerged, it was nearly noon, I’d spent way too much time on my own with nothing to do but think, and the authorities were clearing out. If it weren’t for the yellow crime scene tape barring the door to Gallagher’s office, you would hardly know that anything untoward had happened. Gallagher’s death and the police presence were enough to generate a few hours’ worth of buzz and gossip, but this was an investment bank, and there were deals to be done and money to be made—people were already busily at work, although there was an oddly hushed and sober feel to the floor.

I returned to my office in a daze. Jessica took one look at my face, followed me in, pulled a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator, and handed it to me without her usual lecture on how its various chemicals would rot those organs they weren’t mummifying. She even opened it for me.

Peter wasn’t at work when I called. “He had an appointment uptown,” his assistant told me. I left a message for him and then tried his cell, but it went right into voice mail.

I was staring unseeingly at my computer screen when Jake came in.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No. I mean, yes. A bit freaked out, I guess.” I’d seen dead people before, but I’d never actually watched anyone die. “How are you?”

He shrugged. “A bit freaked out, too. I rescheduled the call with Perry, by the way. He’s a real piece of work. He seemed more concerned that this might slow down his deal than anything else.”

I’d completely forgotten about the call, not to mention the laundry list of tasks Gallagher had assigned in his last minutes of life.

“Listen,” Jake continued,“Mark, believe it or not, is already working on the revisions to the Thunderbolt materials. I don’t think anyone would miss us if we skipped out of here for a bit. And I think we could both use a change of scenery.”

It had been a long time since I’d found myself drinking during the middle of the day, much less in the middle of the work week, but when Jake said,“To hell with it” and ordered a bourbon on the rocks, I changed my Diet Coke to a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé.

We were a few blocks from the office in the Bar Room of the 21 Club. The red-checked tablecloths and model airplanes and other trinkets hanging from the ceiling offered a cheery counterpoint to our less than cheery moods. We’d ordered food with our drinks, but neither of us could eat much. This was, for me at least, a clear indication that I really was freaked out. Our limited food intake, however, didn’t stop us from proceeding on to a second and then a third round of drinks. Jake was sticking to the Maker’s Mark, but I was alternating the wine with Diet Coke. Each beverage provided its own unique comfort.

“He wasn’t the nicest guy,” said Jake. “In fact, he was a total bastard. But nobody’s ever died in front of me like that. And it looked so…painful.”

I grimaced. I didn’t want to think about the convulsions, or the wheezing, or the strange cast to Gallagher’s skin as he lay dead on his office floor, but the images and associated sound effects kept playing in my head and had a lot to do with my lack of appetite. “At least you didn’t spend the last several days joking about how much you wanted him dead.”

“You were only joking. Somebody else must have been a lot more serious.”

“But who?” I asked. “I mean, it’s one thing to think the guy’s a schmuck or a bastard or whatever, it’s another thing to poison his pencil.” I couldn’t get over how surreal and somewhat ludicrous death by poisoned pencil truly was. If anyone ever chose to murder me, I hoped they’d do it in a more dignified way. “Speaking of which, it had to be someone who knew about the pencil thing.”

“And had recent access to his pencil supply,” Jake pointed out.

“Well, there’s us,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been too hard for one of us to sneak a doctored pencil into the mug on his desk. It was just a plain old Number Two, nothing fancy. Is cyanide readily available?”

“What makes you say cyanide?”

I explained about the smell of burnt almonds and Agatha Christie.

“Interesting,” he said. “I think cyanide’s a common ingredient in a lot of pesticides, but I don’t really know. Did you get a look at the pencil after the fact?”

“No. Why?”

“The entire tip was missing—I guess it came off in his mouth.”

“Ugh.” I pushed my plate of untouched food even farther away.

“Anyhow, we weren’t the only ones in Gallagher’s office lately. Dahlia’s in and out of there constantly. And she’s—she was probably in charge of his pencil supply.”

“Dahlia? You can’t be serious.”

“Everybody said there was something going on between the two of them.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” I told him about my conversation with her in the ladies’ room.

“So they weren’t having an affair. But his treatment of her was pretty abusive. Maybe she just flipped?”

“You think she’s seen Nine to Five one too many times?”

“Huh?”

“You know, Nine to Five? Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin? They’re all secretaries, and they have an evil boss, and they fantasize about how they’d kill him? And Lily Tomlin’s character fantasizes about poisoning his coffee, and then she accidentally does?”

He was looking at me strangely. “Forensic City, Agatha Christie, and Nine to Five?”

“I have eclectic tastes.” It seemed best not to mention the Dawson’s Creek reruns.

“I’m beginning to see that.”

“But I still can’t picture Dahlia poisoning anyone.”

“No, I have to admit, I can’t, either.”