53
Three hours later, Laurie was alone with Daniel Longfellow in his Upper West Side apartment. After he explained that Leigh Ann was still at work and the dogs were at doggie daycare, she made quick work of thanking him for finding time to meet with her.
“To be honest, Laurie, you didn’t give me much of a choice. I think you know how much my wife and I would like to keep our names out of your production. I assumed by now you had confirmed our lack of involvement.”
Opting for a blunt introduction, she dropped a photograph of Joe Brenner on the living room coffee table. “I think you know this man,” she said.
His face immediately validated her instincts. A less decent man could have hidden his link to whatever was going on between Joe Brenner and Kendra Bell. But Daniel Longfellow wasn’t a talented liar. She would be able to extract the truth from him.
“Where did you get that picture?” he asked.
“He’s not exactly in hiding,” she said. “He’s basically the center of our investigation. And we know you have a connection to him.”
She allowed the silence to permeate the room. She could tell from the way he bit his lower lip that her instincts had been right. Longfellow knew Joe Brenner, and their relationship had something to do with Martin Bell’s death.
Laurie decided to take a stab in the dark. “All these years, Kendra thought she had the worst luck in the world. She vented about her unhappy marriage to a random stranger, and, lo and behold, the man recorded her and then blackmailed her when her husband just happened to be murdered. She never connected the dots. She never even entertained the possibility that this man might be the killer until I suggested it.”
Longfellow was struggling to maintain the aloofness of a man with a healthy distance from the subject at hand. “Ms. Moran, I’m a supporter of the work you do for your television program, but I’m afraid I need to call this a day.”
“Please,” she said, “hear me out, or else I’ll have this conversation with my television audience. What are the odds that Kendra Bell happened to pour her heart out to a man who would use that information to blackmail her for years? Or even worse, maybe he even killed her husband in cold blood as just the first step in a blackmail scheme.”
Laurie paused to search out Longfellow’s expression. Any stranger who had nothing to do with the man in the photograph would have been completely perplexed. Longfellow did not strike her as a man out of step with the conversation.
“This man,” she said. “He’s a private investigator. Joe Brenner. Brenner was never a random stranger at Kendra’s bar, was he?”
Daniel covered his mouth, as if he were suddenly imagining a series of horrible events he had never envisioned before.
“I’m fundamentally a good man,” he said, his gaze moving behind her in the distance.
“Then this is your chance to prove it,” Laurie said. “Whatever mistakes you made were years ago. I need you to tell me what you know about Joe Brenner.”
Senator Longfellow swallowed, and Laurie could tell that he was weighing the consequences of the decision he was about to make. “Brenner’s a well-known quantity in Albany,” he muttered. “I hired him—almost six years ago. Somewhere along the way, Leigh Ann and I became almost a long-distance relationship, even though we never planned it that way. I wanted to believe that we were both doing the work that was important to us, but, at some point, I could tell that something was broken. I suspected she was seeing another man.”
Laurie sensed that Longfellow was ready to open up to her. “So you hired a private investigator to confirm your suspicions,” she said.
It made perfect sense. Kendra had not been the only spouse to worry about the amount of time Martin and Leigh Ann were spending together. Brenner may have been disreputable among New York City lawyers, but he was also willing to use questionable tactics to unearth dirty secrets when necessary. That was the kind of person Longfellow had turned to in a moment of jealousy.
He swallowed before answering. “That’s not how I thought of it. At least, not at first. I told myself he would disprove my theory. He’d check on Leigh Ann in the city and tell me it was all in my imagination. It was a gamble, but it would have felt so great to have a shark of a private investigator come back and tell me I had nothing to worry about.”
“But that’s not what happened,” Laurie said.
“There’s that saying: Be careful what you wish for. I had heard such questionable things about Brenner’s tactics, but I became consumed with knowing the truth. And then”—he shook his head—“I got what I’d wished for.”
“He obtained proof that Leigh Ann was more than friends with Martin Bell,” Laurie said. She thought about George Naughten’s memory of Martin Bell kissing a woman in a taxi. It was Leigh Ann Longfellow, exactly as Kendra Bell had suspected all along.
Daniel wiped his face with his hands. “His work confirmed my worst suspicions. He even had photographs. I was paralyzed with indecision.”
“Why didn’t you just leave her?” Laurie asked.
“Because I didn’t want to!” He made the answer seem so obvious. It was true love, exactly as she had sensed when she first met them. “Why would I leave Leigh Ann? I’d known she was my perfect partner and my one true love since we first met at Columbia.”
Daniel’s gaze shifted to the floor as he ran nervous fingers through his full head of hair.
He pressed his eyes closed and shook his head. “At that moment, if I could have taken it all back, I would have. Because I knew that if I confronted her with the evidence I had collected, it would have broken us forever.”
“But what about that saying, the truth will set you free?” Laurie asked.
Longfellow scoffed. “Total nonsense. Think about it: If I had confronted my wife—my wife—with photos of her kissing another man, she would have known that I had spied on her. And, maybe even worse, she would know that I still wanted her, despite the affair. She never would have respected me again. I just wanted the affair to end.”
Laurie had come here knowing that the connection between Daniel Longfellow and Joe Brenner was important. Now her instinct was telling her that Longfellow was a flawed but honest man. She tried to put herself in his shoes and ask what he would have done next after learning from a private eye that his wife was seeing another man.
She saw the scene as if it were unfolding before her eyes. “You told Brenner to take the photographs of Leigh Ann and Martin to Kendra.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “In some of the photographs Brenner showed me, you couldn’t make out Leigh Ann’s face, but the man was definitely Martin Bell. I figured Kendra had more power than I did to make the affair stop.”
Laurie pictured Kendra five years earlier—suffering from postpartum depression and drug and alcohol abuse.
“Kendra had no power at all,” Laurie said.
“Of course she did. She and Martin had young children. I assumed she would demand that her husband end the affair or risk losing his entire family.”
Laurie shook her head. “What kind of way is that to salvage your marriage?”
He scoffed, seeing the irony. “Probably a really bad one. But I thought once the affair ended, I could work harder to be a better husband. I’d leave the assembly if necessary, come back to the city, and go into the private sector if I had to. But no matter what—I’d win back Leigh Ann’s heart, and everything would return to normal. At least, that’s what I assumed.”
“So what happened when Brenner told Kendra about the affair?”
The laugh that followed was bitter and completely unexpected. “At first, I thought the plan had worked. Brenner called me, saying he’d met Kendra at a dive bar and—quote, unquote—‘had it all taken care of.’ And, literally, a few minutes later, I got a phone call from the governor about the Senate appointment. It seemed as if fate had turned a corner. The next night, Leigh Ann surprised me with dinner—at the same table at the same restaurant where we had our first real date after we met. All of a sudden, she was back. I assumed Kendra had confronted Martin about his affair and that Martin had broken things off with Leigh Ann. We’d get to live happily ever after, as if the affair had never happened. But then Martin was killed. Don’t you see? Kendra must have been so angry about the affair that she hired a hit man.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police this?”
He took a deep breath, struggling not to cry. “Because I love my wife, and I don’t want to see her humiliated in public. I also don’t want to lose her. To this day, she has no idea that I found out about the affair.”
“You may think Kendra hired a hit man, but it’s just as likely that you did. After all, you’re the one who initially involved Joe Brenner, and you’re the one who was desperate to have your wife back.”
“Absolutely not. I would never do something like that. And I showed the police our financial records at the time. Everything was in order. I only paid Brenner a few hundred bucks in cash—certainly not enough to order a hit!”
At Laurie’s request, Leo had already confirmed this information with the NYPD, but she had wanted to hear it directly from Daniel. The lead detective told Leo that the senator had provided complete financial statements from both his and his wife’s accounts, and no large amounts of cash were unaccounted for.
“Well, I don’t think it was Kendra, either. Because, here’s the thing, Senator: Brenner never did as you instructed. He never gave Kendra proof of an affair.”
She waited to see if Daniel would draw the same conclusion she had. His face went pale. “Dear God. You think Brenner killed Martin?” She could tell that he had never entertained the idea.
She nodded. “At least, I think so. He entrapped Kendra into saying terrible things about Martin and recorded the conversations. I think he shot Martin, knowing that he could blackmail Kendra for the rest of their lives.”
“In which case, I’m the one who set it all in motion,” he said, his voice drifting off. “I should have known that lies never go away. They ripple through time. I have to do what’s right, even if it means telling Leigh Ann what I know. Even if it ends my career. I’ll go on your show. I’ll go to the police. I’m willing to drag my secrets into the light.”
“That’s good to know, Senator. Right now, I’d like to ask you to sit tight. I have an idea that could take Brenner down.”
As soon as she was in a cab, she pulled up Kendra’s cell phone number and dialed. After four rings, the call went to voice mail. “Kendra, it’s Laurie. Give me a call. I know who the Beehive man is. It’s time to turn the tables on him.”