I had been inside one killer’s mind, Castro’s, and now I put myself inside the minds of two killers. Saw the scene between them, Norman Roth and his wife. Susan Roth, once Susan Castro.
Norman Roth lay naked in the giant circular bed of the luxury condominium high above the city. Tall and muscular, lean in the hips, he looked up at himself in the mirrored ceiling of the bedroom. “He’s going to beat me, Susan. He’s a fucking devil in business. He’s taking losses, cutting corners, mining me.”
“I like a winner, Norman,” Susan Roth said.
“Susan!” Roth stared at her.
She was still slim, curved, her breasts reflected full in the ceiling mirror. She touched Roth in the bed. Her fingers played with his belly, stroked his chest.
“If he beats you, I’ll go back to him,” she said. “I can’t live without what success brings, Norman. Big success. I never lied about that I’m a practical woman, Norman.”
“I’ll never let him take you back!”
“Then stop him,” Susan said.
“I’ve tried. I’m almost to the wall. The only way I can stop him now is to kill him.”
“All right,” Susan said. “Kill him.”
Roth blinked at her. “Kill—?”
She kissed his neck, his throat. Her tongue flicked over his chest as she slid softly against his body.
“He’d kill you,” Susan said. “But we’ll kill him first.”
“How can we kill him? The police would guess at once it was me. Or you. The way he’s ruining me, ruining us.”
“But they would have to prove it, Norman,” Susan said, licked his belly. “We’ll make it simple. We’ll make Max come to you where there’ll be only the two of you alone, and no evidence afterward, and they can’t prove you were there when it happened.”
“What in God’s name would make Castro come to me like that?”
“To kill you,” Susan Roth said simply.
Roth looked at her and at her naked body touching him in the big bed. “Why would he kill me? He’s already got me ruined.”
Her tongue was in his ear now, her breath. “We make him think you’re not anywhere near ruined. We convince him you’re growing bigger and richer every day, and then we make him have to murder you fast or lose something very important to him.”
“Lose what?”
She kissed him, smiled down into his eyes. “The boys, Norman. We start proceedings to legally adopt the boys. His boys. We threaten to take his sons from him.”
Roth stared, then began to laugh. “Castro & Sons!”
“It’s the one thing that would make Max commit murder — the loss of Castro & Sons.” Susan Roth smiled. “His sons with your name. His business with your name.”
Roth laughed aloud. He grabbed her, rolled her over on the bed, kissed her breasts, kissed her mound, kissed... Stopped.
“The business! It won’t work if he thinks he’s ruining me, and he is ruining me.”
Susan Roth stretched and looked up at their naked bodies in the mirrored ceiling. “You’ve been invited to bid on the Haskins Project. Make your bid so low they must give it to you. They don’t reveal details of the bids.”
Roth shook his head. “A bid low enough to be sure would lose me a fortune. We’d really be ruined, and for keeps.”
“Not with Max dead,” Susan said. “A calculated risk, Norman. With Max gone we would get his insurance, his money, and his business. Or the boys would, and that means me. We’d have it all, and you could absorb the Haskins loss.”
“I’d need money up front to start the work, make it look good, and no one would give me a loan the way things are now.”
“I have my jewels, some securities. We’ll get a loan with them as collateral. Maxwell won’t know how we got the loan. He’ll find you have the contract and the money, are going ahead bigger and better. He’ll have to kill you. He’s wanted to from the start. You took his contract, his wife, and his male ego. I’ve known that all along. Now we can use it to save ourselves.”
“Will the courts let us adopt the boys without his consent?”
“They will if we can prove Max is an unfit father, a child molester, and we can. Or we’ll make Max think we can, and that’s all it will take. He wants to kill you, Norman. We’ll give him a good excuse, make him tell himself there’s no other way.”
Roth stared at her, perhaps suddenly a little bit afraid of her. Afraid and excited too. They stared at each other in the giant bed high above the city, Maxwell Castro’s ex-wife and his most hated enemy. They looked at each other with the excitement of victory and even of death, and that brought another kind of excitement. An excitement that isn’t all that different.
Afterward they began to plan.
They set the business wheels in motion, Susan had her lunch with Max Castro. Then they made Castro wait and wait until he was on the verge of exploding with his hate. When they were ready, they decided on a Thursday, the night of Susan Roth’s Junior League meeting.
“I’ve timed it, Norman,” Susan said. “If I drive from the apartment to the Junior League faster than usual, or slower than usual, there is only a difference of five minutes in total time.”
Roth nodded. “No jury would convict anyone on a matter of five minutes in city traffic. Not without a lot of evidence.”
“And there won’t be any. As long as no one sees you with Maxwell at the site, we’re safe, and Maxwell himself will make sure no one sees you, eh?”
They both laughed.
“Even if someone notices the car,” Susan went on, “it will be just an unidentified car on a dark street for a few moments. It will be far too dark to read the license plate. They’ll know we killed him, but they won’t be able to prove it.”
That Thursday, Roth volunteered to work at the Junior League himself. He told his men that he would not visit the site that night. He told them to knock off at the regular time.
Roth and Susan went to the empty site. She dropped him off. Castro waited. Roth killed him. Susan came back two minutes after Castro had arrived. A minute later Roth walked from the deserted building. Susan held the door open for him, he slipped into the car. Susan ran back around the car to the driver’s seat, drove off. Roth looked at his watch.
“Four minutes flat.”
They arrived at the Junior League exactly at Susan’s usual time. Traffic had been a little lighter than normal. From the numbers, they couldn’t have stopped anywhere.
As they worked at the Junior League, they smiled.
I sensed them still smiling when the police came the next morning. They were shocked, horrified, but admitted quite readily that they had hated Castro and were glad he was dead. They admitted they wanted him dead, but they certainly hadn’t killed him. They defied the police to come up with a shred of evidence. They knew they had made no mistakes, not one.
In his office above the city, Captain Pearce sighed. “Not one mistake, Fortune. They’re right. We’ve got no real evidence.”
“No one else could have done it,” I said.
“Or anyone else,” Schatz said.
Pearce nodded. “A tramp, a drunk, a psycho, a scared kid caught trespassing by Castro. Some enemy of Castro’s we don’t even know exists. Roth’s lawyer will make hash of a jury.”
“Except for Castro’s mistake,” I said, “and the flaw in the Roths’ plan.”
Pearce was doubtful. “It’s pretty thin, Dan.”