Grady grinned. “You were cleared in the original investigation. You were in the hospital with kidney stones when the murders occurred. The hospital confirmed it.”
He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. The kidney stones. I knew there was some reason I couldn’t have done it, but it’s been so long that the details escaped me. I’m definitely not the murderer, so I have no reason to lie to you: Nobody liked the guy. His own wife went out of her way to avoid him. She’s probably someone you should talk to, if you’re revisiting the case.”
“Janette,” Grady said, checking his notes. “Yeah, she’s on our list.”
“She seemed like a cool lady, though it’s hard to say. I only saw her a handful of times, mostly with Kevin. Neither one of them was Christopher’s biggest fan, and I don’t know why she stayed married to him—except, one must assume, it was cheaper than a divorce.”
Leda nodded vigorously. “I would put up with a lot of garbage for a lot of money.” Then she saw the stink-eye Grady was giving her. “Probably.”
Richard smiled and gave her a wink that was intended in a grandfatherly manner, she was pretty sure. He reminded her of Joe Biden, without all the hair-sniffing.
Grady shook his head slowly. “At any rate. Mr. Beckmeyer, off the top of your head—and remember, this is just between us—do you have any thoughts as to who else we ought to speak to?”
Beckmeyer hemmed and hawed, leaning his head left, then right. “I suppose if you forced me to make some guesses, I’d start with Janette. Isn’t the spouse usually the guilty party, in this kind of situation?”
“More often than not, but you don’t think she murdered her son, too—do you?”
“Kevin was her stepson, but now that you mention it… no, I don’t. She and Kevin seemed to get along pretty well; they were more”—he hunted for a descriptor—“from the same planet, if you know what I mean. But no, I don’t think she would’ve hurt him. If anything, I might have suspected the pair of working together, if poor Kevin hadn’t bitten the dust along with his dad.”
“So do you have any second-tier suspicions?” Leda prodded.
“I’d take a look at… well, let’s see. You should probably talk to that fellow, Abbot somebody. He was a low-level consultant, newer to the company. Supposedly he and Christopher had some kind of in-office row, and nobody knew exactly what it was about—but Chris didn’t fire him, and I remember he laughed off any suggestions that he ought to. Then there was Brian Doherty, the old CFO, but wait… he’s dead now, isn’t he? I heard he died of a heart attack or a stroke, a few months back. I saw something about it on Facebook, maybe.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Grady mumbled down to his notebook as he scribbled away. “But I’ll double-check it when I get back to the precinct. Any other names you want to hit me with?”
“I can only think of one more: Kim Cowen. She was Christopher’s secretary, but that really undersells her position. She was his right-hand woman. Nothing happened in that office without her knowing about it. I heard through the grapevine that she was up all night after the funeral, shredding documents in his office.”
“Ooh,” Leda exclaimed softly. “Juicy!”
“Dear, if you want juicy… well. There was a rumor going around that Kim and Kevin had something going on, out of office, if you get my drift.”
Leda said “Ooh!” again with a little more oomph behind it.
Grady looked up like he’d been thinking about rolling his eyes yet again in response to this nonsense, but now he was just thinking. “Good to know, thanks. I’ll see if I can’t confirm or deny it. I don’t remember hearing anything about it at the time.”
“It was only office gossip—you know how that goes. I’m not even sure that it’s worth checking out. It might not mean anything at all. Sheila had access to everything Kim had, too… so you might want to swing back around and talk to my wife.”
“You know what, we’ll be sure to do that. Listen, I want to thank you for your time,” Grady said, folding his notebook away and stuffing it into his pocket. “We all know you didn’t have to sit down with us today, and I appreciate it.”
They exchanged parting pleasantries, and Grady and Richard shook hands before Grady and Leda left.
Back inside the car, still parked on the steep driveway in front of Richard Beckmeyer’s house, Grady asked Leda, “Did you get anything? I didn’t see you throwing up any time-outs; and if you had any psychic flashes, they must’ve been more low-key than the ones I’ve seen so far.”
“Not a thing,” she told him. “But Mr. Beckmeyer seems lovely.”
“Nice guy, yeah. And probably not the murderer, so that’s always a plus.”
“So what happens next?”
“Next?” He put the key in the ignition, started up the car, and left it in park for a few seconds. “Next, I drop you off at the destination of your choosing, and I go back to the precinct to poke around in the files a little more. That Abbot guy…” He brightened and threw the car into gear. “Keyes, that was his name.”
“Abbot Keyes? Sounds like a Victorian orphan.”
Grady chuckled. “I guess, but he was an exceedingly normal-looking guy, maybe five foot eight or nine. Dark hair that didn’t want to lie down right. I remember the whole time I talked to him, I wanted to offer him a comb and a tub of hair gel.”
“Did he have an alibi?”
“Almost everyone had an alibi. Abbot was at a funeral. His brother’s? Half brother’s? Something like that. Pictures put him there. He showed up in the background of the church shots, and he was present for the reception later that night.”
“So not our guy, either.”
Grady looked over his shoulder and checked for traffic, then pulled back into the street. “Yeah, but here’s the thing about alibis: anybody can get one—even someone like Beckmeyer, who seems so… how’d you put it? Lovely. His alibi wasn’t rock-solid, either. The only rock-solid alibi is being dead, in my experience. Not sick, not injured. Dead. All others vary. You can buy one, you can make one up, you can bribe friends into giving you one. You can even fabricate one, if you know what you’re doing. There’s almost no such thing as an airtight one.”
She frowned. “You mean we can’t even check that nice old man off the list?”
“He’s moved down the suspect list, but no. He hasn’t escaped it entirely. Nobody has, until we’ve got a confession or a smoking gun.”
“What if, while somebody was being murdered, the suspect was in the middle of a live TV broadcast? In front of a live crowd?”
“That would be pretty airtight, but there’s always the chance the suspect paid somebody else to do it. Those are always the trickiest cases, when people have enough money to outsource their murder needs.”
“Sounds like the wife would have had enough money to pay a professional.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Christopher Gilman was rich, but our investigation turned up evidence that he was also richly in debt. I don’t know how much of the estate was left when he was gone.”