Run for Your Life (Michael Bennett 2)

“Detective Bennett,” I said, showing him my badge. “I need to see Mr. or Mrs. Blanchette.”

Erica Gladstone, the murdered wife in the Locust Valley mansion, had turned out to be one of the Blanchettes. Her father, Henry, ran Blanchette Holdings, the private equity and takeover firm that made companies, and even hedge funds, tremble.

I was there to notify them of Erica’s death, and maybe

pick up a lead on their berserk son-in-law.

The elevator up to their penthouse apartment had fine wood paneling and a crystal chandelier. An actual butler in a morning coat opened the front door. Behind a wall of French doors to his right, steam rose from a rooftop swimming pool—an Olympic-sized, infinite-horizon number that seemed to meld into the unspoiled, twenty-story vista of Central Park trees that lay beyond.

“Mr. and Mrs. Blanchette will be downstairs in a moment, Detective,” the sleek butler said with an English accent. “If you would follow me to the living room.”

I stepped into a silk-wallpapered chamber the size of an airplane hangar. A gallery’s worth of professionally lit paintings hung from the double-height walls above designer furniture and sculptures. I gaped at a Pollock the size of a putting green, then exchanged eye contact with a massive stone Chinese dragon that could not, no way, have fit into the elevator.

The duplex would have been the slickest, most opulent, luxury apartment I’d ever laid eyes on without the pool. And I read Architectural Digest. Well, at least every time I went to Barnes and Noble.

“Yes? Detective Bennett, is it? Henry Blanchette. How can I help you?” The speaker was a short, amiable man in running shorts and a sweat-soaked New York Road Runners T, coming through a door. I was happily surprised that he seemed more like a kindly accountant than the Gordon Gekko type I’d been prepared for.

“What’s this about?” an attractive, fiftyish platinum blond woman demanded sharply, stalking into the room behind him. She wore a makeup bib over a melon-colored silk dressing robe. Both Mrs. Blanchette’s appearance and her attitude were more like what I was expecting.

I inhaled deeply, bracing myself. There’s no easy way to tell someone that their child is dead.

“There was a shooting,” I said. “Your daughter, Erica, was killed. She died instantly. I’m terribly sorry.”

Henry’s mouth and eyes seemed to triple in size. He stared at me, confused, as he stumbled back against the edge of a mod-looking mohair club chair. His wife sank, dumbfounded, onto an antique chaise.

“What about the girls?” Henry said softly. “I haven’t seen them in years. They must be grown now. Do they know?”

“Jessica and Rebecca were murdered, too,” I had to tell him. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

His wife gasped, her eyes filling with tears. Henry brought his hand up as if to say something, then lowered it.

“I’m afraid it gets worse still,” I said, dropping the third and final bomb in my arsenal of grief—getting it over with as quickly as I could. “We believe they were shot by your son-in-law, Thomas Gladstone. And that he’s also responsible for the string of killings that have been going on around the city.”

Mrs. Blanchette’s tears stopped like a faucet, and now I could see nothing in her face except rage.

“I told you so!” she screamed at her husband. “I told you marrying that trash would be . . .” She collapsed again, unable to continue.

The billionaire hung his head, staring into the Oriental carpet between his sneakers as if trying to read something in the pattern.

“We had a falling-out,” he said.

He seemed to be talking to himself.

Chapter 64

“IT’S NOT FAIR, Henry,” Mrs. Blanchette wailed. “After all my. . . . What did we do to deserve this?”

I had a hard time believing what I heard. But people handle grief in strange ways.

“Is there someplace where your son-in-law could be hiding out?” I said. “Another apartment in the city? A vacation house, perhaps?”

“Another apartment! Do you have any idea how much we paid for the Locust Valley house we bought Erica?”

In her mind, clearly, somebody like me wouldn’t have an inkling about that sort of thing. I turned to her husband.

“What was the nature of the falling-out?” I asked.

Mrs. Blanchette rose from her chair like a boxer after the bell. “What possible business is that of yours?” she said, glaring at me.