“You’re real police, right?” She had a heavy Long Island accent. “Not some fringy private investigators or something?”
“Why would a private eye be asking questions about George Langston?” Ellie asked.
“Half the partners who got pushed out last year have either sued the firm or are getting sued for poaching clients. It’s like Lord of the Flies since the downsizing. All the staff knows we’ll get fired in a New York minute for helping any of the old guard.”
Now Ellie had a smile to match Rogan’s. Ladies and gentlemen, they had found themselves a talker. They assured her they weren’t interested in the internal workings of the law firm, and then made their way to a Starbucks on Sixth Avenue.
Margene didn’t even wait for them to ask a question before launching in. “So the suspense is killing me. What in the world could two police detectives want to know about George?” She emphasized his name as if it alone captured the very essence of his uninterestingness.
Rogan followed their game plan of easing into the subject gently. “Something bad happened to one of his daughter’s friends. It would help us put some of the information in context if we had a better sense of the family dynamics.”
“Ramona’s okay, though, right? You don’t think she did anything wrong.”
“Oh no, nothing like that,” Rogan assured her.
“Oh, thank God. That girl is such a little sweetheart. Hard to believe she grew up with George. I mean, not that he’s a bad guy, but—well, have you met him?” They nodded. “Okay, so then you know. I mean, some of the girls upstairs thought he was adorable in this old-fashioned way, but I never quite got it. He’s just . . . he’s so . . . pent-up. Maybe the fact that Ramona’s so laid-back is proof of the whole nature-over-nurture thing. Or maybe it’s because of Adrienne. Now, boy, did George get lucky there.”
Ellie was beginning to wonder whether this woman was even breathing between sentences. “So it sounds like you know Ramona was adopted, and that Adrienne came into the picture later?”
“Oh, of course. Everyone knew. I mean, I wasn’t there when it all went down, but people talk. No one—not even the girls who were kind of into him—could believe George was marrying someone like Adrienne. I mean, she’s gorgeous. And such a doll. So, on the one hand, it’s like, how the hell did he land her? But on the other hand, you could kind of tell that George would be watching all the other partners when Adrienne was around, like she might embarrass him or something. Don’t get me wrong. He absolutely loves her. But George is so class-conscious, you know?”
They didn’t, but they were about to.
“Seersucker suits in the summertime. Bow ties. He wants to be taken so seriously. But”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“you know his father was a building superintendent? That’s right. He didn’t come from money. You’d think he’d be proud of it, but—whatever. At least he married a great woman and raised a great daughter. That’s gotta say something.”
“How about friends?” Rogan asked.
“Same kind of thing. Always chasing the social ladder. Honestly? I think it’s why he got pushed out. The partners here didn’t respect him enough. And he was having a hard time bringing in clients, too. People issues, you know? People can tell when you’re not comfortable in your own skin.”
“Isn’t he friends with some muckety-muck doctor?” Ellie said it like she wasn’t sure of the details.
“Oh, that’s David. David Bolt. Yeah, those two go all the way back to middle school. David told me once—I’m sure George didn’t like it—that George’s dad was the super in David’s family’s apartment building. That’s how they got to be friends. More like brothers—you know how guys can be? Better friends to each other than us girls, I hate to say. David was actually the one to get Ramona into that fancy school. I was the one who drafted the letter to the headmistress. In fact, George might’ve been pushed out earlier if it weren’t for David throwing him business here and there.”
“What kind of work?” Rogan asked.
“You know, a drug company matter, usually litigation. Sometimes it was work for the patent department. One matter was a construction project for NYU Medical Center. But it was always one little thing or another, not enough to make George a rainmaker or anything. Not even enough to save him from the ax, as it turned out.”
Margene had nearly drained her frothy whipped-cream coffee drink and was starting to look at her watch. They thanked her for the information and got her home number in case they needed to contact her again.
“I didn’t mean to make him sound like a bad guy,” she said. “Once I get on a roll, I’m hard to stop. And it’s always so much easier for some reason to go straight to the imperfections. George is a very nice man at heart.”
Her post-gossip pangs of guilt must have still been kicking, because as they walked out onto Sixth Avenue, she pulled her cell phone from her purse. “The week he asked me to draft Ramona’s recommendation letter from Dr. Bolt, I wound up having to work eighty hours because of a deal that exploded. To thank me, he gave me a weekend in the country. Got me a car service both ways and everything. They had these cute little llama things. Look, isn’t that sweet?”
Ellie took a look at the picture on the screen to be polite. A Long Island gal like Margene thought she had spent the weekend with llamas.
The two animals in the pictures were not llamas, but alpacas. And in the background behind them stood a distinctive red barn with a sloped green metal roof.
She could tell from Rogan’s expression that he’d made the connection as well. When he’d seen the animals on Julia Whitmire’s Facebook page in front of that same barn, he had thought they were goats.
“Oh, those are cute,” Ellie said. “That was very nice of him to thank you so generously. Is that the Langstons’ place?” If Ramona’s family owned alpacas at a country property, that would certainly explain how Julia could have spent time there as well.
Margene nodded. “Up in Pound Ridge. Nothing fancy—seemed almost like a cabin or something—but tons of land, and definitely relaxing.”
Ellie’s phone buzzed. She let Rogan handle the goodbyes and stepped to the curb to answer the call.
“Hatcher.”
“This is Detective Sean Doherty from the 19th Precinct. I was just handed a potential stalking report from a walk-in up here. I was about to write it off as a lost cause, but I found the victim’s name in an incident report you filed in a homicide case you caught last Monday. Your vic, Julia Whitmire, posted some kind of harassment on a blog belonging to Adrienne Langston?”
“That’s correct. Are you telling me Adrienne Langston finally filed a police report about those comments on her blog?”
“It’s more than comments. We’ve got a box full of maggots courtesy of Mrs. Langston’s own personal evidence collection.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You have what?”
“Her doorman handed her a surprise delivery: an Adidas shoe box nearly full of those nasty little fuckers. The fella in the property room had stomach enough to forage through the pile. Guess there was half a rancid chicken at the bottom. So is this for real or what?”
“If the maggots were real, then, yes, I’d say it’s for real.”
“No need to get feisty. I’m asking whether this should go to you as part of your homicide.”
Ellie hated that word. When Ellie heard feisty, she thought of tiny, yippy dogs who nipped at ankles. She didn’t nip at ankles. She bit. And when she bit, she went for the jugular.
But she had been a little bitchy. “Yeah, refer the report to us. We’ll handle it out of our squad. But can you send the box full of nastiness straight to the lab for analysis?”