“I can understand why you exaggerated your mom’s modeling career,” I said. “The truth is so much more, shall we say, disreputable.”
Evie wore a worried little frown. Nevertheless, she said, “Dad would never have confided in you. Not about that. You’re bluffing.”
We’d reached the smooth, wet sand close to the water’s edge, and paused to watch a couple of seagulls bicker over the remains of an ice cream cone someone had dropped. Waves rolled ashore with soothing regularity.
“Forty-one grand in cash,” I said. “Every month, like clockwork.”
Evie gaped at me. “How do you know about that money?”
“Didn’t I just say? Your dad told me all about it. Also you forget, I’m a trained investigator.” And yeah, that’s two more Jane Delaney fibs if you’re keeping count. For the record, I’m not a real investigator, and I have no formal training in, well, anything.
I could almost see the gears turning in her head. “Well, even if Dad collected those payments every month and took them to the bank,” she said, “that doesn’t mean he knows... everything. He wasn’t directly involved in anything underhanded. Certainly he never said anything to me about it.”
“Because he was trying to protect you from the truth,” I said. “Trust me. He knows it all. And now so do I.”
Evie’s words were revealing. Even if Dad collected those payments every month. Which told me we were talking about multiple cash payments that added up to forty-one grand, and also that Carter acted as bagman, collecting and then depositing the money into Peaches’s bank account. But I still didn’t know how many people were paying her, or for what.
We started walking on the wet, pebble-studded sand, letting cute little baby waves roll over our feet while scurrying out of reach of their big brothers. A pair of barefoot runners, an older couple, offered friendly greetings as they jogged past.
Evie appeared lost in thought. At last she said, “Dad was always doing that. Trying to protect us. He was—is—a good father. I just wish he’d been more, I don’t know, assertive. He let Mom treat him like crap. And it didn’t stop when they broke up. You should’ve seen her at Thanksgiving, viciously insulting him, belittling him in front of everybody. It’s like she was determined to deny him the slightest shred of dignity.”
“I’m glad to see you still consider Carter your real father,” I said.
She looked at me sharply. “Of course he’s my real father. This whole thing with David doesn’t change that. I just needed... I needed to know. To meet him.”
David. So I had the first name, at least.
We’d reached a rocky jetty, which sheltered little tide pools studded with barnacles. Evie selected a rock to sit on, while I climbed up onto the jetty, awkwardly stepping from rock to rock. Funny, this had been a lot easier when I was a kid.
“Did you find David through the DNA site?” I asked.
“Yes, but not that first one,” she said. “There are several sites where you can run your DNA, so after I found out I’m not related to my dad, I registered on the others.”
“To maximize your chance of finding the man who fathered you,” I said.
She nodded. “And I finally did, just a couple of days ago. We exchanged a few emails and agreed to meet here.”
“What’s his last name?” I asked. When this was met with silence, I added, “You know I can find out, Evie.”
I must have done a good job of making her think so, because she sighed and said, “Waldmann. David Waldmann. He’s an orthopedic surgeon in the city.”
“Does David have a family?” I asked.
She nodded. “That’s why he was willing to pay Mom all those years. To keep his wife and kids from finding out.”
My heart banged so hard, I nearly took a header off the jetty.
Was the wind messing with my hearing? Had Evie just admitted her biological dad was one of the people Carter had been collecting cash from every month?
Gingerly I retraced my steps across the rocks to the safety of the sand. “So David knew about you all along?” I said. “He knew his, um, relationship with your mom had produced a daughter?”
She shook her head. “Oh no, he had no idea before we found each other on the DNA site. My existence came as a complete surprise.”
So then, what the heck was the hush money for? I couldn’t ask outright, since I’d led Evie to believe that Trained Investigator Jane Delaney was all-knowing.
I sat next to her. “I’m curious. How did you find out about the rest of it?” Whatever the rest of it was.
“Well,” she said, “after we realized Mom was missing, Dad and I went to check on her house.”
“Right,” I said. “You told me you collected her valuables and documents for safekeeping.”
She shot me a quick look. “Her laptop, too.”
Really? You don’t say. “And this was shortly after Thanksgiving?” I said.
“December ninth. It was a Monday. I left work early, picked Dad up at Grandma’s, and drove over to the house. The place was a little stuffy, but everything was in order. Not like now.” She grimaced.
“Does your dad know you have your mom’s computer?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t see me take it. I shoved it into this small suitcase along with her papers and mail.”
“Obviously you found something intriguing on it.” In addition to Peaches’s most recent bank statements, which Evie had printed out.
“The first thing I did,” she said, “was look for any hint about where she might have gone. You know, airline charges, hotel reservations.”
“And you didn’t consider it a major red flag when none of that turned up?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said. “If she was traveling with a friend, he might’ve taken care of the arrangements.”
He, huh? I had to remind myself she could be making all this up. I was no stranger to Evie’s on-again-off-again relationship with the truth.
“You didn’t stop there, though, did you?” I said. “By that time, you already knew Carter wasn’t your biological dad. It’s only natural you’d search your mom’s computer for clues to his identity.”
“Well, sure,” she said. “It’s why I took it, if I’m being honest.”
Now she was being honest? “By then you’d already spat in all those little tubes, hoping the guy who’d fathered you was doing the same thing.”
“It wasn’t all spitting,” she said, as if that mattered. “A couple of those DNA companies ask for cheek swabs. I’d already sent my samples to them by the time I got ahold of Mom’s laptop, but the results weren’t back yet.”
“What did you find on her computer?” I asked.
“Not the name of my biological father. That would have been too easy. But I wouldn’t say I came up empty in the potential-dad department. If anything, I got more than I bargained for. I found her spreadsheet.”
Spreadsheet? I don’t care how active your sex life is, who keeps track of it on a spreadsheet?
“Well, that must have been eye-opening,” I said.
“Understatement of the year. Once I realized what I was looking at... well, you can imagine my shock.” Evie frowned into middle distance, as if picturing the salacious spreadsheet. “It was all there, in neat rows and columns. The men’s names, dates, all of it. Plus a section for notes. Almost like a journal.”
“How many names?” I asked.
“A lot,” she said. “A little over a hundred.”
I struggled to school my expression. That sure was a lot of spreadsheet entries. My, ahem, entries would fit on a Post-it. One of those really tiny ones. “What else was on there besides names and dates?” I asked.
“Well, payment information, of course,” she said.
Ah. Now we were getting somewhere. I had to tread lightly. “How far back do the payments go?” I asked.
“Twenty-seven years,” she said. “You know.”
I nodded as if I did indeed know. “Sure. Of course
. Going back to when your mom was...” I did some quick arithmetic. “Eighteen?”
Evie nodded. “When I was eighteen I was packing for college and daydreaming about meeting a nice boy there.”
“While at the same age, your mom was...” I lifted one eyebrow and nodded, as if to say, We both know what your mom was up to.
“Having sex for money,” she said.
Her words socked me in the gut. I averted my gaze for a moment, as if contemplating the breaking waves. Could it be true? Had Peaches been a...
Prostitute?
When I felt in control of my features, I looked back at Evie, who was eyeing me closely. Too closely. She said, “You told me you knew about it.”
“Well, sure, I knew about the prostitution,” I said, as offhandedly as I could manage. “I didn’t realize she documented her, um, activities on a spreadsheet.”
“My mom was an organized person,” she said, as if that explained it. “She had separate columns for everything. Like ‘incalls’ and ‘outcalls.’ Do you know what those terms mean?” When I shook my head, she said, “Neither did I until I looked them up. ‘Incall’ means the client goes to the call girl. ‘Outcall’ means she goes to him. She had a lot of repeat customers. All the appointments were made through an escort agency.”
Well, at least Peaches had been a supposedly higher class of prostitute. She hadn’t walked the streets, if that counted for anything. Evie’s disgusted expression told me it made no difference to her. Streetwalker or escort, a whore was a whore.
“She even had two separate columns for the different kinds of payments,” she said.
“You mean like cash or credit?” I said.
She scowled. “That’s not funny.”
I hadn’t realized I’d made a joke. What else could she be referring to except different levels of payments for different varieties of services? Eww. I didn’t want to know.
Her tone was bitter. “I suppose I should be grateful that she stopped selling her body when she got pregnant with me.”
“You aren’t?” I said. “Grateful?”
“I might be if it meant she went straight,” she said, “but we both know that didn’t happen. I’d thought nothing could be more devastating than learning my mother had been a prostitute. But she didn’t stop there, did she?”
Sometimes I actually know when to keep my mouth shut. No, really. This happened to be one of those rare instances.
She squeezed her eyes shut, still struggling to come to grips with hard truths she’d learned four months earlier when she’d stumbled across the infamous spreadsheet. Apparently prostitution wasn’t the only criminal activity Peaches kept detailed notes about.
I’d let Evie believe I knew all about it, but that’s not why I reached over to stroke her back. It was an automatic response to a fellow human in pain. I handed her a tissue and watched her dab at her moist eyes.
“Sorry,” she said.
“No apologies necessary.”
“I, um...” She cleared her throat. “I guess I’m still waiting for the shock to wear off. In a way, I called it, back when I was a kid. Not that it’s uncommon to grow up with a love-hate attitude about your family. You know what I mean. ‘No one else’s family is as weird as mine.’”
“That’s true,” I admitted with a smile.
“I grew up ashamed that my folks weren’t married,” she said. “I thought it was the worst thing in the world. I begged Mom to ‘do the right thing,’ I guess you’d say. She was the stubborn one, not him.”
“A lot of people have unmarried parents nowadays,” I said. “It’s become a lot more accepted.”
“Then your circle of friends widens,” she said, “and you meet someone whose family is seriously messed up, and you start to think, gee, maybe mine isn’t so weird after all. You begin to gain, I don’t know, maturity. You stop demanding perfection.”
I hadn’t expected this level of wisdom from uptight Evie Moretti. “I think most of us go through that,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I’d give anything to turn back the clock,” she said, “when the worst thing about my family was no marriage certificate. Then my idiot brother gave us a new worst thing when he decided to break into our neighbors’ homes and spent a year in prison.”
“Your family isn’t the only one with a black sheep,” I said.
“Well, the next part’s all on me,” she said, with a self-deprecating sigh. “I just had to act on my suspicions that my dad wasn’t my dad. If I’d let it alone, if I hadn’t bought those DNA kits, Mom and Dad wouldn’t have split up. I wouldn’t have gone snooping in my mom’s computer to find out who my biological dad is. I wouldn’t have learned about the prostitution, or the blackmail that came after.”
Ah. So we were talking about hush money, only it had nothing to do with an out-of-wedlock child. David Waldmann hadn’t been paying Peaches all those years to keep quiet about Evie. Until two days ago, he hadn’t known Evie existed. Which meant he must have been paying Peaches to keep quiet about him hiring a prostitute. And apparently he wasn’t the only one.
Two spreadsheet columns, Evie had said, for two kinds of payments: one for prostitution and the other for blackmail. First you pay the call girl to do things with you, then afterward you pay her to keep quiet about the things she did with you.
Evie said, “Maybe Mom would still be alive if I hadn’t started the DNA thing.”
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“Sean was so angry at Mom after he found out Dad wasn’t, you know, his biological dad,” she said. “I mean, my brother hadn’t gotten along with Mom for a long time, but he was really out of control after that. Started picking fights all the time, throwing her infidelity in her face, calling her a... well, a slut.”
I thought of the argument Zak had overheard. You miserable old slut. “Did Sean try to find out the identity of his—”
“No.” Evie shook her head. “He wouldn’t even know how to go about it, and I don’t think he really cares who fathered him, only that Mom cheated on Dad. By that time it was regular, garden-variety cheating, because the prostitution stopped before I was born. Sean still doesn’t know about that, and I have no intention of telling him. If Dad decides to, that’s up to him, but I doubt he’ll do it, because my brother’s such a loose cannon.”
“So you think Sean was angry enough to kill your mother?” I asked.
“When you throw drugs into the mix?” she said. “I hate to say it, but yes.”
I stood. “Let’s walk, Evie. I don’t know about you, but my butt’s growing numb on this cold rock.” We resumed our trek up the beach. I said, “I know your mother was receiving forty-one K a month, but I’m fuzzy on how many former clients she was blackmailing. Your dad wasn’t specific.”
“There were six men,” she said, “all paying different amounts. David was paying her five thousand a month.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“Twenty-three years,” she said. “He was her last regular client. She never told him he got her pregnant. I guess you could call it a very underhanded way of extracting child support.”
“So when you and David connected on the DNA site,” I said, “did he realize you were Peaches’s daughter?”
“Not until I told him,” she said. “The name Moretti meant nothing to him. At first he assumed I was the result of some one-night stand in his youth. He didn’t know the name Peaches Gillespey either. Mom used a made-up name when she worked for the escort service—Layla Bissett.”
“And the other five guys?” I said. “How much were they paying her?”
“Between one thousand and eleven thousand a month,” she said, “depending on their ability to pay and degree of desperation. Mom was very good at reading people and exploiting their weaknesses. She thoroughly researched their private and professional lives, knew just which former clients to target.”
“What I don’t get is why they paid at all,” I said. “Wouldn’t it have just been her word against their
s?”
“Dad didn’t tell you about the videos she secretly recorded?”
I winced. “I guess that would do it. Where are those videos now?”
“On her computer,” she said. “And no, I didn’t watch them.” And risk viewing the moment of her conception? I’d say she’d made the right call.
“If I could go back in time and talk to my teenage self,” Evie said, “I’d assure her that in fact she had it right. No one else’s family was as weird as hers.”
“So help me get clear on the timeline,” I said. “Your mom did a little modeling starting at age sixteen, right? Then at eighteen she switched to, um, escort work—”
“Sex work.” Evie kicked a pile of dried seaweed. “Call it what it is. And you skipped an important part, Jane. The sugar daddy.”
“Oh. Right. How could I forget about the sugar daddy?”
“Modeling wasn’t the dream career Mom thought it would be,” she said, “and this rich old guy—she calls him ‘Number One’ in the spreadsheet—he’s taken with her looks and he sets her up in this swanky Manhattan apartment and supports her for about eight months. Then Number One has a stroke and his kids give her the boot.”
“So then, the sex work started...” I prompted.
“The sex work started soon after,” she said. “I’m guessing the sugar daddy was like a gateway drug. She was a call girl for about a year and a half before she met my dad.”
“Your grandma told me they were both twenty at the time?” I said.
“Yep. My dad was... well, he was inexperienced,” she said. “His buddies hired Mom for him as a birthday gift. I’m guessing he didn’t tell you that part.”
“Um, no. So then, he was actually one of her—”
“Clients,” Evie said. “That’s right. They fell in love, and she promised to be faithful. No more sex work.”
“While in reality...” I said.
“While in reality, she didn’t stop. She did reduce her, uh, workload, but she continued to see a few regular clients on the sly for two more years, until she got pregnant with me. Of course, Dad had no idea, not until we got the DNA results. I’m sure that to this day, he hasn’t seen that spreadsheet. He’s not the most computer-savvy person, plus she had everything locked down with passwords. I found where she kept those.”
Preserving Peaches Page 20