The Key

“Then who did poison him?”

“Here’s an idea,” he said, rattling the ice in his glass. “Gallagher’s daughter must be his primary heir—he wasn’t the type to leave much to charity, and he probably made his current wife sign a pretty rigorous prenup. Naomi was in his office. If she’d been married to the guy, she must have known about the pencil thing, and she had the opportunity to slide a poisoned one into his mug when he wasn’t looking. She’d probably be psyched for her daughter to come into her inheritance early.”

I thought about that. “Well, if she did, it wasn’t very smart of her to let half the department know that she would look so favorably on his dying. And when it comes to wives, his current wife was there, too. Annabel.”

“What motive would she have?”

“Gallagher’s money but no Gallagher. Sounds like a winwin to me.”

“I bet he was worth more to her alive than he is dead.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I became friendly with my divorce lawyer when my wife and I were splitting up, and in the process I learned a bit about pre-nuptial agreements.” He looked up with a rueful smile. “See—don’t let anyone tell you that divorce doesn’t have a silver lining—you get to meet new people and learn new things.” He was striving for a light tone, but he was only partially successful.

“Good to know,” I said, trying to match his tone, but I felt a pang of sympathy. Regular breakups were bad enough; I couldn’t imagine how people got through a divorce. It made you wonder how people ever had the courage to get married in the first place.

“Anyhow, what Naomi said was probably right. Annabel will likely only end up with a share of whatever Gallagher made during the course of their marriage. Anything he made beforehand was probably excluded. That’s how these things usually work. And they haven’t been married for very long—just a couple of years.”

“Gallagher must have made at least ten million just while they were married, though. That’s nothing to sneeze at.” Ten million was enough to buy a sufficiently large apartment that I’d never trip over Peter’s boxes again. In fact, it was enough to buy each of Peter’s boxes its own apartment.

“Not for most people. But a lot of it’s probably already spent, and as for the remainder—let’s just say, unless it was invested in something that really takes off, half isn’t going to be enough to maintain the sort of lifestyle the second Mrs. Gallagher has been maintaining for very long.”

“But were you listening to what Gallagher was saying this morning to his lawyer?”

“Hmm? No.” Jake shook his head as he sipped his drink.

“About the papers being delivered, and how he was sure he’d hear from ‘her’ when they were? Maybe he was going to divorce her.”

“In which case she’d end up with the same amount of money. Or maybe that’s not what he was referring to at all. He could have just been trying to screw Wife Number One in some new way. Or maybe another ‘she’ entirely.”

“Could be. He sure didn’t seem like the faithful type.”

“I still can’t get over the way he came onto you,” he said, shaking his head. “He really was a bastard.”

“It happens.”

“But in this day and age, and after all of the lawsuits you read about and diversity training and everything?”

“You’d be surprised.” Maybe it was the wine on an empty stomach or maybe it was the shock of that morning—either way, I found myself telling Jake about some of the other uncomfortable encounters I’d had with male colleagues and my “insurance policy.” It was nice to be able to talk to someone about it.

“It amazes me how sexist this profession still is,” Jake said in disbelief. “It makes me ashamed to be a guy, practically. But it’s a good idea, keeping a record like that.”

“I just hope I’ll never need it.”

“Does anybody else know?”

“About the notebook? Just my friend, Luisa. It was her idea in the first place.”

“Not even your fiancé?”

“Peter? No. He’s already upset enough about how hard I work. And he gets angry when I tell him about partners acting like assholes; he’d go ballistic if he knew they were acting like lecherous assholes.” I paused. “Why? Do you think I should tell him?”

Jake flashed his rueful smile again. “You’re asking the wrong guy. As my ex-wife would attest, not to mention everyone I dated before her, I’m not exactly an expert at relationships.” He took another sip of his bourbon.

“Me, neither.” My track record before Peter had been more than a little checkered on the good judgment front. Then with a jolt I remembered the other thing I’d wanted to talk to Jake about. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this,” I said.

“Tell me what?”

“Last night. There was an anonymous e-mail on my home account about Perry and the Thunderbolt deal.” I explained about the e-mail and what Peter and I had sent back.

“What a strange thing to happen.”

“Mostly it was just creepy.”

“I bet. I wonder why this Man of the People guy got in touch with you, specifically? How did he even know you were working on the deal? Do you think it’s somebody who knows you but didn’t want you to know who he is?”

“Could be. Although, I had another idea, too. Dahlia mentioned yesterday that two different people had called from Thunderbolt for a team list. Maybe one of them was actually this Man of the People guy and he was only pretending to be from Thunderbolt. She would have given out all of our names.”

“Names, yes, but how did he get your personal e-mail address? And why did he contact you, instead of me? Or Mark, for that matter?”

Peter and I had discussed this at length. “He may have tried different variations of all of our names at all of the likely e-mail services—AOL, Hotmail, Verizon. My home account is nothing clever—just my first name and my last name plus my broadband provider. He could have sent out dozens of other e-mails, most of them to addresses that don’t exist or belong to other people. And if they belonged to other people, they wouldn’t have responded—they wouldn’t have had any idea what the e-mail was about. And maybe he did try to e-mail you, and Mark, too, but he didn’t hit on the right addresses?”

“I definitely didn’t get anything on my Yahoo account. I checked it last night.”

“I just hope I did the right thing. It felt wrong not to follow up in any way. If the deal is dirty, then it seems like I have a professional obligation to do something about it. But I didn’t want to get anyone at the firm involved before I knew more, because I didn’t want to give Gallagher even more reasons to hate me.”

Jake nodded his head. “I think you did do the right thing. It was a bit of a catch-22, but you made the right decision. Even with Gallagher out of the picture, it’s probably better to find out what’s going on before making any accusations.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Will you let me know if you hear back from this guy?” he asked. “We should definitely get to the bottom of this, especially since Perry’s still so gung-ho on getting the deal done.”

“Sure,” I said.

It was good to know we were in this together.

chapter ten

W e left 21 a little after three. I’d only had a glass and a half of wine when all was said and done, but I could definitely feel it as we walked back to the office. The bourbon seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Jake.

His cell phone rang on the walk back, and while nothing he said into it was particularly revealing, there was something about the way he spoke that made me think he was talking to a woman. An uncomfortable feeling washed over me. It took a moment to identify what, precisely, it was, and when I did, I wished I hadn’t.

Jealousy.

This was inappropriate in every possible way, and I did my best to shunt it to the back of my mind, where it festered quietly for the rest of the day.

Four hours later I was sitting with another glass of white wine before me, but this time in the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel on East 55th Street. The rich colors of the Maxfield Parrish mural that gave the room its name glowed from the wall above the bar, tarnished somewhat from decades of cigar and cigarette smoke. Now the place was smoke-free, thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, and while the nicotine-deprived might complain, business was still going strong. Every table in the small lounge was full, and a throng of people occupied the remaining floor space, drinks in hand as they vied for the next empty table.