by Sandra Brown
“I don’t know if they met or not,” she snapped. That much was true. All she had done was give Hammond Lute’s note. She hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t said, whether or not the appointment had been kept.
“What would be the nature of such a meeting?”
“How should I know?”
“Had Lute caught you and Hammond together?”
“What?” she exclaimed on a short laugh. “Heavenly days, Rory, your imagination is truly running amok tonight. Where did you get that idea?” He gave her a hard look, the meaning of which couldn’t be misinterpreted. It pierced the tiny, fragile bubble of happiness spawned by seeing him again.
“Oh,” she said, her smile turning sad. “Well, you’re right, of course. I’m certainly not above committing adultery. But do you honestly think that Hammond Cross would sleep with another man’s wife?”
After a brief, tense silence, he asked, “What other reason could they have for meeting?”
“We don’t know that they did.”
“Has Hammond mentioned seeing anyone else in the hotel?”
“If he was there, I’m sure he saw the sweating hordes of people who are in and out of there every day.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“No, Rory!” she said with exasperation. “I’ve told you, he didn’t say anything.”
“Something is wrong with him.”
“With Hammond? Like what?”
“I don’t know, but it bothers me. He’s not his fire-breathing self these days.”
“He’s in love.”
His chin went back like it had sustained a quick, unexpected jab. “In love? With Steffi?”
“God forbid,” she replied, shuddering slightly. “I was almost afraid to ask about the depth of that relationship, but when I did, he said it was over, which I believe. His lady love is not the charmless Ms. Mundell.”
“Then who?”
“He wouldn’t say. He didn’t look too happy about it, either. Said it wasn’t just complicated, but impossible. And no, the lady isn’t married. I asked him that, too.”
Rory bowed his head slightly. He seemed to grow fixated on her bare toes while he ruminated on what she had told him. She had a coveted few moments to look at him—the smooth forehead, stern brow, rigid jaw, the uncompromising mouth which she knew could be compromised. She had felt it on her lips, on her body, hungry and tender.
“It’s a powerful motivator,” she said softly.
He raised his head. “What?”
“Love.” For ponderous, timeless moments they stared deeply into each other’s eyes. “It makes you do things you wouldn’t consider doing otherwise. Like marrying a man you hate.”
“Or killing him.”
A quick breath caused her breasts to tremble beneath the filmy fabric clinging to them. “I wish you had loved me enough to kill him.” She placed her hands on his cheeks and ran her thumbs alternately across his lips. “Do you, Rory?” she whispered urgently. “Do you love me that much? Please tell me you do.”
As though stretching across the years spent in heartache and yearning, she leaned over the console and kissed him. The first touch of her lips was as cataclysmic as a match striking flint. His reaction was explosive. His mouth devoured hers in a hard and greedy kiss that was almost savage in intensity.
But it ended just as abruptly. Reaching up, he forcibly removed her hands from his face and pushed her away.
“Rory?” she cried, reaching for him as he pushed open the car door.
“Goodbye, Davee.”
“Rory?”
But he slipped through the hedge of bushes and disappeared into the darkness. McDonald’s had closed. Everyone had left. The lights had been turned out. It was dark, and Davee was alone. No one heard her bitter sobs.
Chapter 34
“I know who killed Lute.”
Hammond’s statement shocked Alex and Frank Perkins into silence, but it lasted no more than a few seconds before each began firing questions at him. Primarily, Frank wanted to know why Hammond was here in his home study instead of at the police station.
“Later,” Hammond said. “Before we go any further, I must hear Alex’s account of what happened.” Turning toward her, he leaned forward. “The truth, Alex. All of it. Everything. Tonight. Now.”
“I—”
Before she could speak, Frank held up his hand. “Hammond, you must think I’m an idiot. I will not allow my client to tell you a damn thing. I want no part of this clandestine meeting you have forced me into. You have behaved in the most reprehensible, irresponsible, unprofessional—”
“Okay, Frank, you’re not a priest, remember?” Hammond said. “You’re not my Sunday school teacher, or my daddy, either. Both Alex and I have acknowledged how inappropriately we’ve handled this.”
“A peach of an understatement,” Frank remarked drolly. “The consequences of your intimacy are potentially disastrous. For all of us.”
“How are they disastrous for you?” Alex asked.
“Alex, less than five minutes ago, you admitted to doing everything within your power to get Hammond into bed with you. If you have any defense at all, your being with Hammond that night is it. But how effective will that testimony be in light of your background according to Bobby Trimble?”
“How can that be held against me? It’s behind me. I’m not that girl anymore. I’m me.” She looked from him to Hammond. “Yes, every ugly detail of Bobby’s statement is true. With one exception. I never went beyond letting them look at me.”
She shook her head emphatically. “Never. I safeguarded a small, private part of myself, in case my hope for a better way of life was ever realized. There was a line I would not cross. Thank God I had that kernel of self-preservation.
“Bobby exploited me in the most despicable way. But it took years for me to stop blaming myself for my participation. I believed that I was intrinsically bad. Through counseling and my own studies, I realized that I was a classic case, an abused child who felt that I was responsible for the mistreatment.”
She smiled at the irony. “I was one of my first cases. I had to heal myself. I had to learn to love myself and consider myself worthy of others’ love. The Ladds were instrumental. They had left me a legacy of unconditional love. I came to understand that if they could love me, being as basically good and decent as they were, I could bury the past and at least accept myself.
“But it’s an ongoing therapy. Sometimes I have lapses. To this day, I ask myself if there was something I could have done. Was there ever a time when I could have stood up to Bobby and resisted? I was so afraid that he would abandon me as my mother had, and I would be entirely alone. He was my provider. I depended on him for everything.”
“You were a child,” Frank reminded her gently.
She nodded. “Then, yes, Frank. But not the night I placed myself in Hammond’s path and hoped that he would respond to me.” Turning to him, she said with entreaty, “Please forgive me for the damage I’ve done. I was afraid of just this, of what has happened. I did not kill Lute Pettijohn, but I was afraid of being accused of it. Afraid of being considered guilty because of my juvenile record. I went to Pettijohn’s hotel suite—”
“Alex, again I must caution you not to say anything more.”
“No, Frank. Hammond is right. You need to hear my account. He needs to hear it.” The lawyer was still frowning his concern, but she didn’t heed the silent warning.
“Let me go back a few weeks.” She told them about Bobby’s sudden and unwelcome reappearance in her life, how he had shared with her his scheme to blackmail Lute Pettijohn. “I cautioned Bobby that he was way out of his league, that he would do well to leave Charleston and forget this ridiculous plan.
“But he was determined to see it through, and equally determined that I help him. He threatened to expose my past if I didn’t. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I was afraid of him. If he had been the same loudmouthed, arrogant, unsophisticated Bobby that he’d been twenty-f
ive years ago, I would have laughed at his threats and called the police immediately.
“But he had acquired some etiquette, or at least he affected good manners and social decorum. This new Bobby could more easily insinuate himself into my life and decay it from the inside. He did in fact appear at a lecture, passing himself off as a visiting psychologist, and my colleague never questioned his authenticity.
“Nevertheless, I called his bluff and told him to leave me alone. I suppose he got desperate. In any event, he contacted Pettijohn. Whatever Bobby said to him must have made an impression, because he agreed to pay one hundred thousand dollars in exchange for Bobby’s silence.”
“No one who knew Lute Pettijohn will believe that, Alex,” Hammond said quietly.
“On that I agree,” Frank added.
“I didn’t believe it myself,” Alex said. “And apparently Bobby wasn’t entirely convinced, either, because he approached me again, this time insisting that I be the one to meet Pettijohn and collect the cash. I agreed to.”
“In God’s name, why?” Frank asked.
“Because I saw it as an opportunity to rid myself of Bobby. My idea was to meet Pettijohn, but instead of collecting the cash, I was going to explain the situation and urge him to report Bobby’s extortion to the police.”
“Why not go to the police yourself?”
“In hindsight, I see that would have been the better choice.” She sighed. “But I feared the association with Bobby. He had boasted about his escape from a loan shark in Florida. There were numerous reasons I wanted to stay one step removed from him.”
“So you went to the Charles Towne Plaza at the appointed time.”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t call Pettijohn on the telephone?”
“I wish I had, Frank. But I thought that meeting him in person would make a stronger impression.”
“What happened when you got there?”
“He was courteous. He politely listened as I explained the situation.” She sat down on the edge of the love seat and stroked her forehead.
“And?”
“And then he laughed at me,” she said shakily. “I should have known the instant he opened the door that something was out of kilter. He wasn’t surprised to see me, although he should have been expecting Bobby. But I didn’t realize that until later.”
“He knew you were coming, not Bobby, and he laughed at your story.”
“Yes,” she said forlornly. “Bobby had called ahead and told Pettijohn I was coming, told him that I was his double-crossing partner, warned him that I would probably concoct a sob story, one guaranteed to make him feel sorry for me, before luring him into bed and creating my own chance to blackmail him for more of a prize than Bobby was asking.”
“I didn’t give that son of a bitch enough credit,” Hammond muttered angrily. “Trimble doesn’t look that smart.”
“He’s not smart,” Alex said. “Just crafty. Bobby’s got more gall than sense, and that makes him dangerous. When he sees an opportunity, he takes risks that no intelligent person would consider taking. He also knows the advantage of striking first.
“Nothing I said convinced Pettijohn that I wasn’t part of some devious grand scheme involving sex and blackmail. He suggested that I not squander the opportunity. As long as we were there, and I had my heart set on taking him to bed… You get my drift.”
“He came on to you?” Frank guessed.
“I resisted, of course. Knocked his arm aside. I’m sure that’s when the clove got on his sleeve. I’d spiked the oranges with them that morning. A speck must have still been on my hand. Anyway, I spurned him, and he got angry and began issuing his own threats, specifically that he had an appointment with a prosecutor from the County Solicitor’s Office. Hammond Cross.” She glanced at him. “He said no doubt you would be interested in Bobby’s and my scam.”
After a moment, she continued, “I panicked. I saw my carefully reconstructed life falling apart. The Ladds, who had placed such confidence in me, would be disgraced. Doubt would be cast on my credibility, rendering my studies worthless. Patients whose trust I had won would feel betrayed.
“So I ran. In the elevator I started shaking uncontrollably. When I reached the lobby level, I went into the bar looking for a place to sit down, because my knees felt ready to buckle.
“But when my panic subsided, I realized what an irrational reaction it was. In seconds, I had regressed to where I’d been when Bobby had controlled my life. There in the bar, I came to my senses. My juvenile record was decades behind me. I am a respected member of my community. I’m acclaimed in my field. What was I afraid of? I had done nothing wrong. If I could convince the right person that once again my half-brother was trying to exploit me, I possibly could get rid of him forever. Who better to make a believer than—”
“Hammond Cross, assistant county solicitor.”
“Correct.” She nodded up at Frank. “So I returned to the room on the fifth floor. When I got there, the door to the suite was ajar. I put my ear to it, but couldn’t hear any conversation. I pushed it open and looked in. Pettijohn was lying face down near the coffee table.”
“Did you realize he was dead?”
“He wasn’t,” she said, drawing a shocked reaction from both men. “I didn’t want to touch him, but I did. He had a pulse, but he was unconscious. I didn’t want to be caught with him in that condition when my former partner in crime was blackmailing him. So once again I virtually ran from the suite. This time I took the stairs down. We must have just missed each other,” she said to Hammond. “When I reached the lobby, I spotted you leaving the hotel by the main doors.”
“How did you know me?”
“I recognized you from your media exposure. You looked very upset. I thought—”
“That I had attacked Pettijohn.”
“Not attacked. I thought you had punched out his lights, and that, if your meeting had gone anything like mine, he probably deserved it. That’s why I followed you. Later, if Pettijohn filed a complaint against Bobby and me, if I was implicated in a crime, who better to have as my alibi than the D.A., who himself had had an altercation with Pettijohn?” She looked down at her hands. “Several times Saturday evening, I began to feel guilty about what I was doing, and tried to leave you.”
She glanced at Hammond, who guiltily looked up at Frank, who was scowling at him like the gatekeeper of hell.
“By Sunday morning I was very ashamed and left before Hammond woke up,” she told her lawyer. “That evening Bobby came for his money—there was none, of course. But to my astonishment he congratulated me for killing our only ‘witness.’ ”
“You didn’t know until then that Pettijohn was dead?”
“No. I had listened to CDs on the drive home, not to the car radio. I didn’t turn on the TV. I was… was preoccupied.” After a brief, tense silence, she said, “Anyway, when I heard that Pettijohn had been murdered, I believed the worst.”
“You thought I had killed him,” Hammond said. “That he eventually had died from my assault.”
“Right. And I continued believing that until—”
“Until you heard that he had died of gunshot,” he said. “That’s why you were so shocked to learn the cause of death.”
She nodded. “The two of you didn’t struggle?”
“No, I just stormed out.”
“Then his stroke must have caused him to fall.”
“That would be my guess,” Hammond said. “The cerebral thrombosis caused him to black out. He fell against the table, causing the wound on his forehead.”
“Which I couldn’t see. I didn’t realize how bad his condition was. For the rest of my life, I’ll regret that I didn’t do something,” she said with genuine remorse. “If I had called for help, it probably would have saved his life.”
“Instead someone came in after you, saw him lying there, and shot him.”
“Unfortunately, Frank, that’s right,” she said. “Which is partially why I have
n’t used my alibi.”
“And why I came here tonight,” Hammond said.
The attorney divided a puzzled glance between them. “What have I missed?”
Alex was the one to explain. “Thanks to Smilow’s thoroughness, and now the media, everyone knows that I was in Pettijohn’s suite last Saturday afternoon. But the one person who knows with absolute certainty that I did not shoot him is the person who actually did.”
“And that person made an attempt on Alex’s life last night.”
Frank’s jaw went slack with disbelief as he listened to Hammond’s account of their encounter in the alley.
“Alex was his target. He was no ordinary mugger.”
“But how do you know it was Pettijohn’s killer?”
Hammond shook his head. “He was only a hireling, and not a very accomplished one. But Lute’s murderer is accomplished.”
“You actually think you’ve solved the mystery?” Frank asked.
Hammond said, “Brace yourselves.”
He talked uninterrupted for another quarter hour. Frank registered shock, but Alex didn’t seem all that surprised.
When he finished, Frank expelled a long breath. “You’ve already spoken to hotel personnel?”
“Before coming here. Their statements bear out my hypothesis.”
“It sounds plausible, Hammond. But, my God. It couldn’t be more difficult, could it?”
“No, it couldn’t,” Hammond admitted.
“You’re going out on a limb with a chain saw in your hand.”
“I know.”
“Where do you go from here?”
“Well, first of all, I want to make damn sure I’m right.” Hammond turned to Alex. “Other than me, did Pettijohn mention any other appointments? I know that he had another scheduled for six o’clock. I just don’t know with whom.”
“No. He only told me about his meeting with you.”
“On your way to the suite, did you see anyone in the elevator or in the hallway?”
“No one except the Macon man who later identified me.”
“And when you took the stairs, you didn’t see anyone in the stairwell?”