Cold Open, A Sam North Mystery Read Online Free Page B

straight posture, her legs angled slightly and touching at the knees.
    “I’m very sorry about Jack,” I said.
    She nodded, and I said a few kind words about her late husband. She thanked me and there was an uncomfortable moment where neither of us spoke.
    “So I’m wrong?” I asked.
    “You are,” she said.
    “And you’ll tell me why?”
    “In a moment.”
    I was tired and exhaled and she must have seen my shoulders rise and slump because now she glared at me.
    “I’m sure there are a hundred other reporters who would like to hear what I’m about to tell you. The only reason I called you was because I saw your report this morning.”
    “I want to hear what you have to say,” I said, in as neutral a tone as I could manage.
    “Jack did not kill himself,” she said.
    “Okay.”
    “You’re trying to sound like you believe me,” she said.
    “Should I not believe you?”
    “I know you don’t. I’m not stupid,” she said.
    “I can tell.”
    “And this isn’t some widow-in-denial thing,” she went on. “That’s what the detectives told me when I talked to them about this.”
    “And you’ll tell me what you told them?”
    “Only if you agree to help me,” she said.
    “I’m not sure what it is you want me to do.”
    “I need you, or someone else, to find out who killed Jack,” she said. Her tone was flat and unemotional, like she was telling me there was a bit of rain in the forecast. “The detectives won’t. They think it’s Jack’s handwriting on that damn note.”
    “And you don’t?”
    “I don’t know, okay? I said it was at first, but now I really don’t know. It’s being checked out. But … but I don’t know.”
    She tried to hold back a sob, and I looked for a way to buy time to try and decide if she was nuts.
    “Robbie …” I said, but she didn’t let me finish.
    “If you’re going to tell me I’m just upset and emotional, save it.”
    “What bothers you about the note?”
    She sat there with her posture perfect and an almost elegant bearing and shook her head at the whole idea of the note. “There’s something about it that … I … I don’t know …”
    “Maybe we come back to it,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell me what you think happened.”
    The word from Rinaldi was that Steele had left here just before one a.m., gotten into a cab, gone down to Thirty-fourth Street and First Avenue, walked over to the end of Thirty-fourth by the heliport, and jumped in the river.
    That wasn’t the way Mrs. Steele saw it.
    “I think he went to meet someone,” she said.
    “And this someone would be?”
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    “And that’s what you want me to find out?”
    “Yes. He had a lot of enemies, people were always sending him threatening e-mails,” she said. “Some of the things people said were so—” She shook her head and tried rein in her emotions.
    It crossed my mind that Robbie Steele, much like her late husband, might be something of a conspiracy theory nut. Jack Steele had built a multimillion-dollar cable-TV franchise using conspiracy theories as a key component. Maybe some of that flowed into his home life.
    Robbie looked at me like she was waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t.
    “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she asked.
    I had learned it was never good, and rarely smart, to agree with a woman’s self-assessment if it included the word crazy . And definitely not to agree with any assessment that included the word stupid .
    “Robbie …” I said. “The police say—”
    “I don’t give a damn what the police say.”
    Her face tightened, and she wiped away a tear then began to cry. I decided this was getting a little too nutty for me. Here I was, sitting in Jack Steele’s apartment almost in the dark, with his very attractive widow, less than twenty-four hours after he killed himself.
    She was becoming more unhinged by the second and asking me to chase some wacky conspiracy theory. If I did, I would then