His face reddened and he leaned forward.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Who told you that?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “You aren’t putting that in the paper.”

  “I’m trying to put a true story in the paper.”

  “Listen,” Dalton said. “You publish that and I’ll have you in court before the ink is dry. And I’ll make sure you never write for the New York Times or anybody else ever again. You understand that?”

  “So you’re saying that you weren’t involved with Angel in that way?”

  “No,” he spat. “No way. Which of those bitches told you that? That’s slander.”

  I kept writing and he pounded the desk once with his fist.

  “You can’t print that. It’s libelous.”

  “I just have to ask the question.”

  “It’s preposterous,” Dalton said.

  “I understand.”

  He wheeled around in his chair and took the photo of his family off the shelf and whirled back and slammed it down on the desk. He and Mrs. Dalton stared coldly from the frame.

  “This is my wife. Nineteen years of marriage and I’m very happily married. She knew Angel. In fact, she’s the one who told me to get Angel a suitable dress the first time. She said, ‘You can’t let that poor girl walk in there looking like she just stepped out of the mall. They’ll tear her apart.’ That’s how involved I was with Angel.”

  “Maybe I should talk to Mrs. Dalton,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I mean no. The New York Times comes to her and asks if her husband was having an affair with some young thing at the office? A woman who was murdered?”

  “I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’d have a coronary right there. Half the goddamn country reading this story, all of her friends? And my daughter? My God, man. You can’t do this to me.”

  “I don’t know that I will use it. I’m going over to talk to my editor tonight,” I said. “But Tim, I had to ask the question. What if you said yes, you were involved with Angel. You loved her and you were leaving your wife and you and Angel planned to get married. I don’t know what your situation is until I ask.”

  “I’ve told you my situation.”

  “I understand,” I said. “And what you told me helps re-create a portrait of Angel. This young woman who was eating up all these new opportunities. And people like you and the Connellys helped her navigate this new world.”

  “We did. I did. David and Maddie did. They liked her. We all liked her.”

  I hesitated, then said, “Why?”

  “Why did we like her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, she was a hard worker and cheerful and very pretty and—”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” I began, “but on the boat I thought she seemed sort of pushy. Presumptuous. She was pleasant, but there was an edge to her, like she was, I don’t know, in charge or something. Like when she wanted David to take the boat to Bar Harbor.”

  “Oh, that was just Angel. That was her way.”

  “She was like that all the time?”

  “No. I remember that particular thing, I thought she was maybe a bit out of line with David. But in general she was very nice. Maybe it was the wine.”

  I scribbled, then looked up at him.

  “And maybe I shouldn’t say this, either,” I said. “But I saw you on the boat with her. I can see how someone might get the impression that there was something between you other than just a platonic work relationship. You seemed—”

  I hesitated.

  “Familiar.”

  “Oh, come on, Jack. We were kidding around, for God’s sake. She was just being silly.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He leaned forward, put his hands on the desk like he was laying out his cards.

  “Listen, can I tell you something, off the record? Between us?”

  I didn’t answer and he took it for agreement.

  “Yeah, she was a bit of a flirt. And yeah, I’m a middle-aged man, almost. I’m in shape but the hair is getting thin, a little gut I can’t seem to get rid of. I can’t keep up with the young guys on the lacrosse field anymore, and doesn’t that piss me off.”

  He paused

  “You saw her, Jack. She was very attractive.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “So maybe I played along a little. Maybe I was a little flattered by it. The male ego, you know? But that’s all, man. I helped her out a little. Maybe I got a little kick out of being around her. I’m terribly sorry about what happened to her.”

  “And you don’t know where she would have gotten a windfall of money?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t give her large amounts of cash?”

  “You kidding? My wife’s not stupid. Even with the dresses, she was the one who said, ‘Just send her to someplace like Saks, Tim. No need to have her going hog wild.’ ”

  “Sensible of her.”

  “Exactly. It all makes perfect sense.”

  “Except the killing part.”

  “Right. That makes no sense at all.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  30

  When we finished, I’d filled a few pages of the notebook. Dalton asked me when the story would run and I said I had to stop at the bureau that night to check, but it looked like it would be published Tuesday. He got up from his desk and stared out the window, but it was dark outside and he seemed to be looking at his own reflection. Checking the waistline, perhaps. Wondering what his vanity had gotten him into.

  I let myself out, and when I got back to the reception room with the couches, Roxanne was gone.

  I opened the steel door and she wasn’t in the outside foyer. I went to a window and looked down and could just see her car in the street, flashers still blinking. I walked down the hallway toward Dalton’s office again and his door was closed and he was talking, apparently on the phone. I heard him say, “In an hour. Tell your mother.”

  But no Roxanne.

  There was another corridor on the opposite side of the waiting room. It was dark, but I walked down it. I stopped halfway and listened. Heard voices, then music. I kept going and turned a corner and saw a door half-open on the right, blue television light spilling out.

  I walked to the door, heard a woman saying, “I know this isn’t politically correct, and God knows I feel terribly sorry about what happened. But the girl was, if not sleeping her way to the top, then certainly something close to it.”

  “There’s no death penalty for being attractive,” Roxanne said.

  “Oh, but there is, don’t you think? If Miss Moretti had been some dumpy, plain girl, do you think she would have been invited to this office retreat in Maine? And if she hadn’t been in Maine, if she hadn’t been able to bat her big eyes and convince people to take her to Bar Harbor, to dinner, to wherever else her whims pointed her, then she would have been home. She would have been safe with her working-class parents, would have eventually met some hardworking schmo from Dorchester or some such place and settled down and had babies and lived to be eighty. Instead she ended up here and one thing led to another.”

  “But Kathleen,” Roxanne said. “Being pretty and flirtatious didn’t kill her. Somebody killed her.”

  “But it did, Roxanne. Let’s say she was waylaid in the boondocks of Maine. What would have attracted somebody? Her looks, the way she was dressed.”

  “How was she dressed when she left?” Roxanne said.

  “Jeans down over her hips, the way they wear them now. Her belly hanging out, not that it wasn’t flat as a board. A little sweater that left very little to the imagination. Picture her with a flat tire with that outfit on, some pickup truck full of rednecks comes rolling up. But look at this for a minute. These people make this point in a very accessible way for young girls.”

  A tape started, music and a voice-over saying, “what if none of us were pretty girls….”

  I stepped into the room. They turned and smiled.

  “Jack,” Roxanne said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I borrowed her,” Kathleen Kind said. “There’s this organization that we’ve funded. They produce educational materials for adolescent girls. I was showing Roxanne.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “But you have to get on with your work,” Kathleen said. “More interviews?”

  “I have to go talk to my editor,” I said.

  “Well, here,” she said. “I’ll let you take this with you, Roxanne. If you’re interested, give me a call.”

  Roxanne said she would. Kathleen Kind ejected a tape from a VCR and handed it over, then took a folder from a shelf and gave that to Roxanne, too. I asked Kathleen if she had a few minutes and she said sure, but only a few because a car was coming to pick her up. I said I’d be quick, and she invited me to sit. There were two chairs in front of the desk and I took one and she took the other. Roxanne sat away from us, by the door, and opened the folder and read. I glanced at Kind: khaki skirt, black short-sleeved sweater, low-heeled black shoes.

  And a cool smile that was as impenetrable as a mask.

  I took my notebook out of my back pocket and flipped it open. She didn’t flinch. I said I was sorry about Angel and she said it was horrible, that she used to feel safe in the country but she never would again. She started to go on about how the notion that rural areas were safer than cities was a fallacy. I interrupted and asked how much Angel had been paid.

  Kind looked mildly irritated but swallowed it and her smile returned, as if it were lipstick she could take off and put back on.

  “She started at twelve dollars an hour. After two months, she went to fifteen. After six months she went to seventeen-fifty.”

  “Seven hundred a week?” I said.

  “Very good,” Kind said. “A reporter who can do arithmetic.”

  “Sometimes you get lucky,” I said. “That’s not a lot of money in Boston, do you think?”

  “It is if you have an associate’s degree, average clerical skills, and no prior experience in foundation work.”

  “Did you hire her?”

  “Tim hired her,” she said, as though nothing more needed to be said.

  “And Monica came with her?”

  “A few weeks later. Once Angel had established herself.”

  “How was Angel as an employee?”

  “Fine,” Kind said. “She could be very personable.”

  “I understand she went to some of the social events with other people here.”

  “Yes.”

  “She liked that?”

  “Who wouldn’t? Free champagne and all the jumbo shrimp you can eat.”

  “I’m told she was socially, I’m not sure what the word would be …”

  “Facile?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Did you think so?”

  “Miss Moretti was a very confident young woman, after she’d been here for a while.”

  “And when she first arrived?”

  “Much less so. I think her confidence grew exponentially the longer she was with us.”

  “Why?”

  “You’d have to ask people who worked more closely with her.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Not really. She worked for Tim, who is more on the grant assessment end, does this project meet the foundation’s goals, what will it achieve. I work with the financials.”

  “Did you explain some of that to her?” I said.

  “Not really. There was no need. She wouldn’t have understood anyway. Most of the people here don’t understand what I do, and they’ve been here for years.”

  “Well, here’s a question for you. Monica said Angel talked about offshore accounts and ways to hide income. How would she know about that sort of thing?”

  “I have no idea. And I can assure you, Jack, she wouldn’t have learned about that sort of thing here. The money goes the other way here. My job is to make sure too much of it doesn’t go at once.”

  “But where would she get these ideas?”

  Kind’s smile almost turned to a smirk.

  “Television, perhaps,” she said. “Nefarious characters are always hiding money in numbered Swiss accounts or some such thing.”

  “I was also told she seemed to have a lot of money, all of a sudden. Kept at least some of it in a safe-deposit box. Called it her piggy bank.”

  “Cute.”

  “How would she get her hands on a lot of money?”

  “That depends on what you call a lot.”

  “Let’s say thousands.”

  “Thousands isn’t a lot, Jack.”

  “It is for someone like Angel.”

  “In the circles she was at least on the fringes of, it’s pocket change. The people she was seeing at benefits and functions—I mean, there are people in this city who make the Connellys look positively middle-class.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Roxanne look up.

  “But how would Angel end up with any money?” I said.

  Kind didn’t answer at first, and the long pause was full of innuendo.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said. “And I wouldn’t care to speculate. But some people at this level of income can be rather free with their money. If they take a shine to someone….”

  The cool smile again.

  “But short of someone just handing her a bag of cash—she didn’t work anywhere else,” I said. “As far as I can tell, she’d really immersed herself in this place. So where else could extra money come from?”

  “Not from here. That’s one thing I take very seriously. I have to because some of these people think there’s this unlimited amount of money. I mean, and this isn’t for print, they’ve grown up in a world where there were no limits. And the money was earned by somebody two generations back. They don’t think of the sweat that went into that. They think it grows on trees, if you’ll excuse the cliché.”

  “Somebody else said that. And you reminded them it didn’t grow on trees.”

  “I come from modest circumstances. My parents came here from Poland with five dollars between them. They worked every waking minute so I could go to Smith, I could get an MBA at Wharton. My dad worked in this company that made hoses. I mean, actually made them. He came home all dirty, smelling like rubber. My mother did tax returns for the immigrant community in Quincy. Nothing was handed to them, not like some people in this world. We do a lot of good, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t forget that money comes from sweat. On my watch every penny is accounted for and it goes where the foundation is committed to putting it. And there are strict regulations governing that.”

  She lifted herself in her chair.

  “Are we through?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “If I have questions, I’ll call.”

  She stood and smoothed her skirt. I stood, too, stuck the notebook in my back pocket. Roxanne started for the door.

  “So what do you think happened?” I said, more confidentially.

  “To Miss Moretti?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Off the record? I think she crossed paths with the wrong person in Maine in that wasteland you have to cross to get home from Blue Harbor and she was killed. Happens all the time in this world, unfortunately. Women are prey. Of course, that doesn’t minimize the tragedy.”

  I paused. She didn’t look choked up, but that wasn’t her style.

  “Did she get any bonuses or anything like that?”

  “No, not that came through our operating accounts.”

  I must have looked perplexed.

  “Jack,” Kind said, gathering up a briefcase and bag from her desk. “You should go to one of these functions, the big ones. And this is totally off the record. The museums, the BSO—it’s wall to wall with silver-haired men and a lot of younger women. The men make seven figures and have alpha-male egos to match. The women, a lot of them, are wife number two or three, former administrative assistants who saw their chance and went for it. And then some of them, like Angel, are new to the game, just there for show.”

  “To watch the show, you mean?”

  “No, Jack,” she said, pausing by the door. “They are the show, all decked out in slinky dresses. There’s a term for it. It’s a little crass. Oh, what is it?”

  “Arm candy?” Roxanne said.

  “That’s it,” Kind said. “Walk into the Oak Bar at five o’clock and see the guys in their sixties and their pretty young things.”

  “You’re saying Angel was one of those pretty young things?”

  “Off the record, Jack. And I know it’s a terrible thing to say, given the circumstances. But it’s the truth.”

  She opened the door and we stepped into the hallway, and she closed the door and locked it with a key from her bag.

  “But what does that have to do with money?” I said.

  “Oh, come on now, Jack,” Kind said as we started down the hall. “These young women may be trophies, but the smart ones, they make sure they get something in return.”

  “And Angel?” I said.

  “Miss Moretti,” she said, “wasn’t stupid.”

  31

  A livery cab, a black Town Car, picked Kathleen Kind up out front for the ride home to Cambridge. We got in the car as the cab pulled away and I said to Roxanne, “What do you think?”

  “Not exactly warm and fuzzy,” she said.

  “I guess they need somebody to keep the bleeding hearts in check.”

  “And remember, it’s not her money they’re giving away.”

  “No, and it’s a good gig,” I said.

  “If you’re good with numbers and tax law and a little snooty.”

  The Town Car swung around the corner and out of sight.

  “And Angel?” I said.

  “I think for a nice girl, Angel sure stirred the pot.”

  “Maybe that’s my lead,” I said.

  “That is the story, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll tell Myra it’s changing.”

  “Yeah,” Roxanne said. “It’s not Cinderella getting killed on the way home from the ball.”

 

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