Beyond Suspicion, page 33
Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak.
“That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it? I bluffed you into thinking that the police were looking for a match between our knives and the slashes in the wedding album. It got you to thinking: Maybe they’ll come looking in your house, too.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“When Cindy and I moved in with you, we took just a few personal things with us. The wedding album was one of them. Funny, but it wasn’t until after we’d spent some time with you that Cindy noticed it had been mutilated. Someone had taken a knife to it.”
“Probably that tramp, Jessie.”
“Not her. You did it when I decided it was time to move out of your house. Cindy decided to come with me, rather than stay with you.”
“You are so wrong.”
“Am I? Then I don’t suppose you’ll mind if I take these knives downtown to have them analyzed. I noticed that one of them has a nice serrated edge. There might even be a few microscopic traces of photo paper on the blade. You’d be amazed by these lab guys and the things they can find.”
Her bravado slowly faded. Her eyes filled with contempt. “This is all your fault.”
“That’s what Cindy said.”
“If you’d truly loved her, you would have stepped aside and made it possible for her to move on and start a new life without you, without the nightmares about that deranged client of yours.”
“The nightmares aren’t about me or Esteban. They’re about your husband. I know. I talked to Celeste.”
“Celeste,” she said, practically spitting out the name. “You two are just alike. But I see through your phony concern. You don’t love Cindy. You love rescuing her all over again every two months, six months, a year-however long it takes for her nightmares to start up again. That’s your kind of love.”
“What do you know about love?”
“I’ve known this much for a very long time: Cindy will never be happy so long as you’re in her life.”
It was like hearing Cindy’s speech all over again, only this time it was coming from the speechwriter. “You fed this to her, didn’t you? You convinced her that I’m the source of all her fears.”
She flashed an evil smile. “It didn’t take much convincing. Especially after Jessie ‘fessed up about you and her.”
“Jessie was a liar. This was how she got even with me when I refused to help her wiggle out of her scam. Ruin my marriage.”
“She did a very convincing job.”
“Are you saying you heard her story?”
“I was sitting next to Cindy in the car when she got the call. I heard everything. Cindy didn’t want to believe it. But Jessie said she had proof. She wanted to meet at your house to deliver it personally to Cindy.”
“The tape?”
“Yes. The tape.”
“So you and Cindy went to our house together.”
“No. I went. Alone.”
Jack paused, stunned by the admission. “You were there waiting when Jessie came by?”
“What decent mother wouldn’t do that much for her only daughter?”
The reference to her only daughter wasn’t lost on Jack. “What did you do?”
She walked as she talked, not a nervous pacing, but more like a professor who was enjoying her speech. “I was extremely polite. I just asked her to remove all of her clothes, get in the bathtub, and drink from a quart of vodka until she passed out.”
“How did you get her to do that?”
“How do you think?”
“The knife?”
“Hardly.” She walked a few more steps, then stopped at the end of the counter. She opened a drawer, then whirled around and pointed a gun at Jack. “With this.”
Jack took a step back. “Evelyn, don’t.”
“What choice have you left me?”
“You won’t get away with it.”
“Of course I will. I came home, you startled me, I thought you were an intruder. What a tragedy. I shot my own son-in-law.”
“This won’t solve anything.”
“Sure it will. Right now, it’s my word against yours.”
“Not quite.”
She tightened her glare, then blinked nervously, as if sensing that Jack had something to spring.
“I’m afraid your timing is really bad,” he said. “You caught me right in the middle of a conference call.”
“What?”
He pointed with a nod toward the wall phone beside the refrigerator. The little orange light indicated that the line was open. “You still there, Jerry?”
“I’m here,” came a voice over the speaker. It was Jerry Chafetz from the U.S. attorney’s office. Jack had dialed him up the moment he’d heard Evelyn put the key in the front door.
“Mike, you there?”
He gave Mike Campbell a moment to reply, then Jack said, “Turn off the mute button, buddy.”
There was a beep on the line, and Mike said, “Still here.”
“You guys didn’t hear any of that, did you?”
“Sorry,” said Mike. “Couldn’t help but listen. Hate to admit it, but I heard everything she said.”
“Ditto,” said Chafetz.
Jack tried not to smile, but he knew he had to be looking pretty smug. “Tough break, Evelyn. I’m really sorry. Your bad luck.”
The gun was still aimed at Jack, but she seemed to have lost her will. Her stare had gone blank, and her hands were unsteady. It was as if she were shrinking right before his eyes.
Jack went to her and snatched away the gun. “You’re right, Evelyn. I do love this rescue stuff.” He took her by the arm and started for the door. “Even when Cindy isn’t around.”
69
•
The message on his answering machine was short and matter-of-fact. Cindy wanted to meet for lunch.
It was their first direct communication in six months, since the shoot-out in their house. Cindy had refused to let him visit in the hospital, and after her discharge they’d separated on the advice of her therapist. From that point forward, Jack’s only way to contact his wife was through professionals, either her psychiatrist or her lawyer.
The blame game was deadly, but Jack found it easy to count up any number of reasons she might hate him for life. Her mother was a biggie. She’d pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, a plea bargain on a slam-bang case of murder in the first degree that at least allowed her to avoid the death penalty. And of course there was the irresolvable Jessie problem. Cindy was never going to believe that nothing had been going on between them. In truth, it didn’t matter anymore.
Jack was through blaming himself.
He waited at a wrought-iron table beneath a broad Cinzano umbrella. It was a humid, sticky afternoon on South Beach, typical of late summer in the tropics. This particular café was one they’d never visited together, and he suspected that was precisely the reason Cindy had chosen it. No memories, no history, no ghosts.
“Hello, Jack,” she said as she approached the table.
“Hi.” Jack rose and instinctively helped with her chair. She got it herself and sat across from him, no kiss, no handshake.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“No problem. How have you been?”
“Fine. You?”
“As good as can be expected.”
The waiter came. Cindy ordered a sparkling water. Jack ordered another bourbon.
“Pretty early in the day for you, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Not necessarily. I haven’t slept since I got your message last night, so I’m not really sure what time of day it is.”
“Sorry.”
“Me, too. About a lot of things.”
She looked away, seeming to focus on nothing in particular. A pack of sweaty joggers plodded by on the sidewalk. A loud Latin beat boomed from the back of a passing SUV on Ocean Drive.
“Have you found your son yet?”
Jack coughed into his drink. He’d suspected that might come up, but not right out of the starting blocks. “Uh, no.”
“Are you looking?”
“No. No reason to look.”
“What about the money? Jessie left the entire million and a half dollars to her son, if you can find him.”
“To be honest, I’m not much interested in trying to funnel stolen money to a child who’s probably perfectly happy not knowing me or his biological mother.”
“But what’s the alternative? Give it back to the Russian mob?”
“If I have any say, it’ll go to the relatives of people like Jody Falder, and anyone else Yuri and his pack of viatical investors eliminated in order to cash in on their investments.”
“That’s probably as it should be.”
“In due time. But at the moment, Dr. Marsh’s widow is trying to prove that half of that loot is hers. She’s suing Clara Pierce for fraud and mismanagement of Jessie’s estate. I’m content to let those two tear each other to shreds before I take a stand.”
“Good for you.”
“Yeah. I guess it is.”
Cindy squeezed the lemon wedge into her water. A breeze blew in from the Atlantic and sent their napkins sailing. They reached across the table to grab the same one. Their hands touched, their eyes met and held.
“Jack, there’s something I want to say.”
He released the napkin, broke the contact. “Tell me.”
“That day in the house, when I had the gun. I said some things to you.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Yes, I do. I said some very harsh things. And I want you to know that part of me will always love you. But those things I said. Some of them…”
“Cindy, please.”
“It really is the way I feel.”
He felt as though he should have been devastated, but he wasn’t. “I know that.”
“You know?”
“Yes. For years, your mother held such obvious hatred for me. I always wondered, why can’t Evelyn put this all behind her, especially since her own daughter has forgiven me for what happened with Esteban? But now I know: You never really did forgive me, either.”
“I tried. I wanted to. I’ve thought about this so much.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too. And as much as I loved you at one time…”
“You stopped loving me.”
“No. It’s not that. It’s just that it wasn’t love that was keeping us together. When you get right down to it, I think you stayed in this marriage because you were too afraid to be alone. Or worse, afraid of spending the rest of your life living with your mother.”
“And why did you stay?”
Jack struggled, wondering if some things were better left unsaid.
She answered for him. “You stayed because you felt guilty about what happened with Esteban.”
Jack lowered his eyes, but he didn’t argue. “Somehow I thought that if we worked long and hard enough, things would get back to where they were. Before Esteban.”
“That’s fairy tales, Jack. It doesn’t usually work that way in real life.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“You know, I used to think that people who bailed out on a marriage were just quitters. But that’s not true. Sometimes, the so-called quitters are really idealists. They know there’s something better out there for them, and they have the courage to go out and look for it.”
“You’re ready for that?”
“After all these years together, I think the one thing we owe each other is honesty. Since we’ve been apart, I haven’t had a single nightmare.”
“What does that tell you?”
“The nightmares will never go away. Not unless…”
“Unless I go away,” he said.
“I’m not trying to say it’s anyone’s fault. It’s just the way it is. Can you understand that?”
“I more than understand. I agree.”
She gave a weak smile, as if relieved to see that he wasn’t going to put up a fight. “That’s all I wanted to say,” she said.
“So, this is it?”
She nodded. “I should go.”
She rose, but he didn’t.
“Cindy?”
She stopped and looked at him. “Yes?”
“There’s one thing I need to know.”
“What is it?”
“Did you think something was going on between me and Jessie even before she called and told you there was?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“For months now, I’ve been trying to put a timeline together in my head. As best I can figure, Jessie came to me and said that the viatical investors found out that she’d scammed them and were out to kill her. Then, after I didn’t help her, she called you and said we were having an affair.”
“That’s right.”
“So, I just wonder: How did the viatical investors find out Jessie had scammed them?”
“Someone obviously told them.”
“Yeah, but who?”
“Could have been anyone.”
“Not really. There aren’t that many possibilities. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Jessie. It wasn’t Dr. Marsh. Just makes me stop and think: Maybe it was someone I confided in.”
She showed almost no reaction, just a subtle rise of the left eyebrow. “That’s something you may never know,” she said, then turned and started away.
He downed his drink and took solace in the knowledge that he had a little something to counterbalance it all. In a way, it was Cindy who’d started the whole Jessie mess.
“Cindy,” he called again.
She stopped, this time seeming a little annoyed. “What now?”
“There’s something else that’s bothering me.”
“If you’ve got something to say, just say it.”
“All right, I will. This is going to sound weird, because your mother has confessed and is sitting in jail. But the idea that she killed Jessie doesn’t ring completely true to me.”
She made a face, incredulous. “What?”
“Maybe it’s because I’m a criminal lawyer, but motives are a bit of an obsession for me. Your mother’s don’t quite add up in my mind. What she wanted more than anything was for you to find the courage to leave me. Killing Jessie wouldn’t necessarily have accomplished that. But your finding her passed out naked in our bathtub might.”
Cindy didn’t answer.
“Is that how you found her, Cindy? After your mother went to our house and forced her to drink so much that she passed out, was Jessie still alive?”
She flinched a little, virtually unnoticeable to anyone who didn’t know her as well as Jack did. But he definitely caught it.
She said, “What about the angle of the cut on her wrist? That was your whole theory, that someone who was left-handed cut her wrist to make it look like suicide.”
“That sounded like a neat idea at the time. But the angle wasn’t that pronounced. I was having second thoughts about it even before I accused your mother, when Rosa and I talked that morning before Katrina showed up at our house. The medical examiner didn’t put any stock in it at all. Your mother wouldn’t have spent a day in jail without a confession.”
“But there was still an angle, and my mother is left-handed.”
“It isn’t foolproof. The killer could have been in a hurry. Maybe she was even enraged, filled with jealousy. There’s no telling what angle the slash might take in those circumstances.”
“Exactly what is it you’re trying to say, Jack?”
“It’s an idea that’s been floating around in my head the last six months. I’m just trying to go back in time, trying to understand the mind-set. For your own good, your mother is desperate for you to find the courage to leave me and start a new life with no nightmares, no reminders of Esteban. She’s so desperate that she finally does something that she hopes will utterly shock you. Instead of shocking you into leaving me, she pushes you into a crime of passion. At the end of the day, she takes the rap for Jessie’s murder. After all, it was her plan that went awry.”
“So who do you think slashed up our wedding photos? Me?”
“No. That was definitely your mother’s work. But she was hoping you’d think it was Jessie who’d done it. Mom’s way of making you feel a little less guilty about having killed my old girlfriend.”
“Do you really believe my mother would do this for me?”
“You were the ‘good’ daughter, weren’t you? The one who protected her husband’s fine reputation long after your sister revealed the truth about him.”
Her glare was ice-cold.
He looked into her eyes, searching. There was a time when he could have looked straight into her soul, but this time he saw nothing.
Finally, she answered. “Like I said before, Jack. Sometimes in life you just never know.”
He stared at her, waiting for some sign of remorse.
“I deserve to know,” he said.
“And I at least deserved a husband who played by the rules.”
“Funny. Those were the exact words Jessie used to describe our marriage. Playing by the rules.”
“How ’bout that.”
“Yeah. How ’bout that.”
“Good-bye, Jack.”
He watched her turn and walk away. He kept a beat on the back of her head as she flowed with the crowd along the sidewalk. She was a half-block away when she disappeared amid the sea of bobbing and weaving pedestrians. He spotted her once more, then lost sight of her. For good.
•
It was Saturday night, and Jack escaped to Tobacco Road. When it came to broken spirits, there was no better salve than a dark club with live music and bartender who’d never been stumped by a customer’s request for a cocktail. The really beautiful thing about the Road was the lack of beauty-no glitz, no palm trees at the door, no neon lights of South Beach. It was just a great bar by the river that catered to everyone from Brickell Avenue bankers to the likes of Theo Knight.
“Hey, Jacko, you came.” Theo threw his arms around him, practically wrestled him off his bar stool.
“Of course I came. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Possibly because the only thing worse than having no date on a Saturday night is watching your old pal Theo blow on his saxophone and fight off hordes of groupies.”
