Murder.com by Haughton Murphy

smell might even mean someone higher up is breathing down my neck. Unfortunately, the work we’ve been doing has led us to exclude some possibilities rather than to include any new ones.”
    Bautista went on to explain that he and his colleagues had found the young fortune hunter that Marina Courtland had rejected a couple of years before. He was now attending the Harvard Business School and appeared to have an airtight alibi for the night of her murder: participating in a reading group of fellow students discussing a new book on the Boston Strangler.
    â€œSlight irony there, I should say,” Reuben interrupted.
    â€œYeah. Can you believe it? But all eight guys participating swear he was there. The other thing we’re doing, Reuben, we’re going through her address book and her cell phone and calling every number. And we’re examining every piece of paper we took away from her office and her apartment. So far we’ve come up dry, but we’ve got a long ways to go. But stand by, Reuben, we’ll get there.”
    â€œI hope so. I’ve got to get Dan Courtland off my back. He can’t fire you but he can fire my law firm.”
    â€œKeep it cool, Reuben, I’ll write if I get work.”
    â€œI’ve found work, I think,” Luis told Reuben in an early afternoon phone conversation less than forty-eight hours later. “I think we’ve solved at least one mystery.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” Reuben asked eagerly.
    â€œCan I come over?”
    â€œSince you’re not going to tell me now, what choice do I have? Hurry up.”
    Bautista related the new developments when he arrived. It seems that first thing that morning, a young man named Ben Gilbert had shown up at the Nineteenth Precinct on East Sixty-Seventh Street. When he told the desk officer in charge that he had been a friend of Marina Courtland, he was hustled off to the headquarters of Detective Borough Manhattan on Twenty-First Street. Luis summarized his story:
    Gilbert was a medical resident in pediatrics at Cornell-New York Hospital. With his uncertain schedule and demanding hours at the hospital, he had found little time for dating, so a friend suggested he try an Internet service called Meet.com. The friend said he could warn potential dates about his haphazard schedule, and only those who were willing to put up with it would respond.
    He had gone out with several girls contacted through Meet.com, with varying results. He had become especially attracted to a young woman named Hallie Miller, whom he described as being a junior editor in a publishing house, though he didn’t know which one. She was terrific, and sympathetic to the professional demands on his time and uncomplaining about frequent changes in their dating schedule. This had often meant rendezvous at sometimes less than satisfactory late-night restaurants.
    At some point, he decided that he was really interested in Miller and told her as much. Her response was to suggest that the two have dinner—during normal hours. They did, and it was over this meal that she confided that she was not Hallie Miller but Marina Courtland.
    â€œAnd why did this fellow say she had done such a thing—using an assumed name?” Reuben interrupted.
    â€œShe explained to Gilbert that she’d had a bitter experience with a party who was after her money. You remember we were told about that. She thought she could find someone on Meet.com without money being a factor, and then come clean if the situation developed.”
    â€œExtraordinary, but that fits with what we’ve been thinking.”
    â€œI agree.”
    â€œSo what happened to this Gilbert fellow?”
    â€œAs he tells it, the money angle drove him away. He wasn’t ready to take on a billionaire’s daughter, at least not one whose father had views like those of old man Courtland. Gilbert’s been a poor scholarship student all along and didn’t think