Free Partners In Crime by Katy Munger Page A

women," Auntie Lil made
clear.
    "Not me?"
    "Certainly you. I meant tell them both to
leave their husbands at home. We don't need a bunch of overgrown
boys masquerading as policemen butting in with suggestions and
acting superior."
    He quite agreed with her assessment of
Shaunessy and O'Reilly. "Fine," he said.
    "We also need to talk to Cheswick's widow,"
she decided. "I remember her well. I last saw her at that benefit
luncheon in 1986. Lilah is her name, correct? She has quite a
sensible mind."
    "Correct." He thought of Lilah again. A
tall, athletic woman with strong features and a frank demeanor who
had grown old with grace, refusing to dye her hair and standing out
as the only gray-haired wife at the infrequent partner social
functions. An island of honesty in a sea of silver and tinted
coiffed ladies.
    "You had a thing for her once, as I recall,"
she reminded him needlessly.
    T.S. sighed. Auntie Lil never forgot a
single fragment of his nearly nonexistent personal life. His
"thing" had consisted of a minor crush nearly thirty years ago,
shortly after he joined the firm, when he had met Lilah at a party
for the young turks at Sterling & Sterling. Not yet married to
Robert Cheswick, she had arrived on one of her first dates with the
partner-to-be. T.S. had spent the evening talking opera with her,
delighted at her intelligence and daring.
    Appalled she was going to many a horse's ass
like Cheswick, T.S. had made the mistake of mentioning their
encounter to Auntie Lil, who, even then, was a terrible busybody
when it came to his life. She'd championed the banner of Lilah
Cheswick until months after the wedding, only dropping it
reluctantly when he fabricated a pert young secretary in the
Foreign Investment area simply to gain some relief from being
constantly reminded of what he did not have.
    "It's never too late," she announced to
T.S., interrupting his thoughts.
    He stared at her. "What are you suggesting?
That I call her up and say, 'Sorry your husband was stabbed and by
the way, would you like to get married?'"
    "Of course not." She sniffed, offended at
such implied bad manners. "That would be inexcusably rude. I meant
that it's still not too late to get married to someone."
    "You never got married to anyone," he
pointed out.
    She shot him a steely glance and her eyes
snapped with brilliance. "That, my dear Theodore, does not mean I
was never asked."
    Having put him in his place, she switched
subjects again. "Finally, I want you to tell me in great detail
what happened at your retirement party, and we'll need to go over
the list of employees who left late last night."
    "That's going to take a while."
    "I know. That's why we're going to your
house for a nightcap." She snatched the bill from the waiter's
hands and rummaged through her purse for a credit card.
    "You think that the list is important?" T.S.
asked.
    "For our purpose, it has to be." She stacked
two embroidered handkerchiefs, a dog-eared address book, a large
Swiss army knife, several pens and a box of colored pencils, three
packs of mints and what looked to be a broken charm bracelet on the
tablecloth before she produced a credit card from the depths of her
bag. She flashed T.S. a triumphant smile. "Found it."
    "Anyway, we have to start somewhere," she
continued matter-of-factly. "Unlike the lieutenant, we haven't an
army of investigators to pore over security trading tracks. And we
certainly can't investigate everyone at Sterling & Sterling. I
think it's unlikely the killer would have tried to stay hidden in
the building all night. There was no guarantee the body would not
be discovered before morning. And I think there was a body well
before morning."
    "But if he was killed during the evening,
that would mean there could be a connection between my party and
his death,'' T.S. said.
    She batted at the air absently. "The papers
said he was killed between 10:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M. He doesn't get
in that early, does he?"
    "Not to my knowledge," T.S.