Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  He looked at me without words. Blank, noncommittal. Marianna wouldn't be happy about our clandestine meeting.

  “Mike, as much as I hate to admit this—”

  “You need help,” he finished.

  I nodded. “You don't trust him.”

  “Boardman's like a guy with HIV. Just because he's nice doesn't mean you take chances.”

  “I need an emotional condom. Why am I being so stupid with this?”

  He shrugged. “Your friends think you're having a breakdown.”

  “I feel something strong drawing me in, drawing me to him.”

  As soon as I said it I wished I hadn't. I was making girl noises again. And I knew—especially with someone like Mike McCoy—I wasn't going to convince him of anything if I sounded like a flower child from the Age of Aquarius.

  I shook my head hard to erase my last statement from his mind. “Okay, so it's not metaphysical. I just believe him. I don't think he killed the wife. I think he was having an affair with Brooke Stanford. Shit, maybe he still is. She's hot and right up his social alley. But that's not important. I've always been able to share.” I took a deep breath as both our minds conjured Marjory Sewell, with whom I'd been sharing Chucky for years. “It's just that I believe him and—”

  “So what?” Mike said, sticking his chin out at me. “So you believe he didn't kill two women. So the fuck what? Doesn't mean you have to go down for the count trying to prove it. If he's innocent, let Vince and the cops deal with it. You want to sleep with him, be my guest. Just get your ass out of his bed in the morning and go to work.”

  “Jesus, Mike, I went on a boat with him for a day. Who the hell knew—”

  “That's my point. Slink in his back door at night and out the front in the morning, but don't go with him in public.”

  “In hindsight, the boat trip was silly.”

  “Silly? Two men were shot, and you were the one holding the gun. That's quite a minimization of twenty-five-to-life. You keep this up, your friends are going to do an intervention.”

  “Okay, that's not why I called. I need your help. Was Brooke Stanford with him the night his wife was murdered? Did he go on that boat alone when his wife was shot? And does Virginia Booth know more than she's saying? There's something going on with trust assets-money Can't you scare her into telling you what she knows?”

  “Those kind of people go to the gallows tight-lipped. But I'll see what I can do.”

  SUNDAY NIGHT, SCOTT CALLED ME AGAIN TO confirm he was out of the hospital and back in his hotel suite. Heeding McCoy's advice, I waited until after dark and drove to the Biltmore, snuck in the door and up the back stairway, and fully expected to slink back out before daybreak. Scott had not, however, heeded my warning about Brooke Stanford, because there she was, answering Scott's door like a well-seasoned mistress—or a soon-to-be second wife. I was tired of acting like an emotional female, so I took it like a man.

  “Hey there, Stanford. We doing a threesome tonight?”

  She emitted a short gust of air from her windpipe as Scott sailed in from the bedroom, freshly showered and toweled from the waist down. A white gauze bandage was wrapped around his shoulder and up under his arm.

  “Cut the Hugh Hefner routine, Boardman,” I said, “and go put some clothes on.”

  He feigned surprise. “I didn't think you'd really come.”

  “What about Brooke here? Did you think she'd come? Or has she already?”

  The sound that came from Brooke was a bit more vocal this time. Like a screeching cat in heat. “I won't put up with this, Scott,” she said, as she plopped herself on a couch.

  “Give me a minute,” Scott said to us both, and ambled back into the bedroom to cover his ass.

  I snickered as I moved in closer and sat across from Brooke on the matching couch.

  She crossed her long legs and sat back. Today she wore slacks, crisp white linen. A yellow-striped polo and navy blazer completed the look of the perfect sailing companion. I had to wonder whether she dressed that way to subtly point out to me that she, in fact, should have been Scott's sailing companion on the day of the shootings.

  But then again, maybe she was. “Shoot anyone lately?” I asked her.

  “I could call Mr. Piganno right now and you'll be fired by morning,” she said.

  “And I'll call Chucky Sewell right now and you'll be in jail by midnight.”

  “For what?” she snapped.

  “They'll lock you up till morning—or until they realize it's not against the law to be dull, bland, and wholly without character.”

  Little did Brooke Stanford know that if I placed a call to the Providence cops and told them I was with Scott Boardman in his hotel room, I'd be hauled in for questioning long before she would.

  “I won't bother asking you anything, Brooke, because from what I've seen you're a pathological liar for whom the truth is a disease of the lower class.”

  She did a little jump on the couch, her body poised for counterattack, but her mouth was so tightly barbed she couldn't even spit.

  So I kept going at her. “Like your compadre Virginia Booth. She thinks the truth is dirty too. But maybe that's just because the truth, as you and she know it, is a filthy lie.”

  Brooke's heart-shaped jaw undulated, her chest pumped in anger, and Scott walked in dressed in Yale-emblemed sweats with a smile blazing across his shiny clean face. “Anyone for a cocktail?”

  Brooke popped up and walked to him. “I have to leave.”

  She stood by his side and turned to me. I looked at them both and wondered how I'd managed to be cast in this political melodrama. Scott whispered something into Brooke's ear and she dutifully resumed her seat on the couch facing me. Resigned and chastened, she tilted her head to her shoulder at such a steep angle I was afraid her dunce cap would fall off.

  Scott, meanwhile, was at the minibar, pouring himself a gilded glass of amber liquid. He positioned himself before one of the faux colonial wood fireplaces of his fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-night instant drawing room, where he appeared ready to give a speech. Would it be his version of “I Have a Dream” that we all could tumble into the next room and have a threesome on his big comfy king bed, or a Nixonesque resignation due to murder, wherein the world wouldn't have Scott Boardman “to kick around anymore”?

  “Shannon, Brooke,” he began, “both of you in your own special ways have been trying to help me out of an unfortunate jam—”

  I stood up for air. “Cut to the chase, Scott. I don't have any special ways and you're in the thick of much more than a jam.” I forced a burp.

  “Shannon, forgive my clumsiness. I've been taught how to speak to many people at once. It's inevitable that someone's sensibilities will be compromised when you speak to the masses.”

  “The masses?”

  He placed his glass on the mantel. “I apologize again. But I think you both needed to hear it from each other's mouth and not just coming from me. So let me just get right to the heart of this.” He looked at Brooke. “You did not accompany me from Connecticut that Friday afternoon, Brooke. I was alone in my car. We had drinks in the afternoon, but I was alone when I boarded the boat and found my wife dead.” He looked at me now. “Brooke concocted the story to help me when she saw me with you at Al Forno and heard about the murders the next morning. She even tried to convince me that we were together, but I wasn't that drunk or drugged. She simply wasn't there and I have no alibi.”

  Brooke was staring straight ahead. Her dunce cap had disappeared and she was now sporting an aura of haughtiness, refusing to speak because she would only tacitly acquiesce to Scott's words. She had, after all, sworn out a statement in a police report that she would now be forced to recant. She obviously disagreed with Scott's decision to out her as a perjurer. Her career at the AG's office had been short and sweet, and with a perjured police statement, it was now as washed up as the Dead Sea.

  We both let Scott continue his one-man show that so far had only me as an audience. Brooke, I
think, had heard this all before in dress rehearsal.

  Scott took his drink and joined Brooke on the couch, but his attention was riveted to me. “But I don't need an alibi to swear that I'm innocent. The night I met you at the restaurant, I was still under the influence of pills and booze. I thought—I'd almost convinced myself—that I could have done it. But then I came to my senses. Where was the blood if I'd killed two women—especially considering the violent manner in which they were… in which they died. How could I have done that and not be bathed in blood myself?”

  Time to raise my hand. “Perhaps you washed it off in one of Mrs. Booth's several bathrooms. Which is why I saw only the faintest bit of blood under your fingernails at the bar at Al Forno. You scrubbed and scrubbed until only the blood trapped under your nails—”

  He slammed the scotch down on the coffee table so forcefully that it sloshed from the glass and onto the fresh crease in Brooke's linen slacks. She stood and moved away toward the window.

  “Who told you that?” He hammered out his words as if each one could stand alone outside the confines of its lowly sentence. “That is simply not true.”

  “What part? Virginia Booth's house after the murders?

  Her bathroom? The scrubbing? Or the blood under your nails?”

  “I checked both women to make sure there was no reason to call 911—to make sure there was no hope for either. So yes, I got blood on my hands. And then I went to Virginia Booth's house. I felt I should be the one to tell her about her daughter. I know what the press can do. She's an old woman—”

  “But as strong as the oak and nails she's built from.”

  “And I was scared. I wanted to know if she knew anything … about the two of them… why had I not known that my own wife was gay—”

  “You didn't know? You mean you were cheating on your wife with her”—I nodded toward Brooke—“and you didn't know? I thought maybe there was an arrangement. Your wife had her girlfriends and you had yours.”

  “Our conjugal life ended a long time ago. Our arrangement was that we would stay together for the sake of the children and my career. But I had no idea she was gay. I assumed she had just lost interest in sex, the way so many married women do.”

  “Women don't lose interest in sex after marriage. They just no longer need it for bartering purposes.”

  “Whatever her reasons… Pat knew about Brooke… and others before her.” He looked at Brooke, who was reaching the point where she would soon lose composure. Whether it was because Scott Boardman was just now telling her he had no more interest in her than his last orgasm, or that he was saying it in front of me, I don't know. But I think if Brooke had had a gun, she'd have shot Scott Boardman. And possibly me too. Which made me go one step further.

  “Did you do it, Brooke? Maybe you killed his wife to get her out of your way.”

  “Pat wasn't a threat to me,” she said with a flick of her head. “She was a lesbian.”

  “But she was still his wife—and you weren't. And couldn't be until she was out of the picture.”

  She looked at Scott. “Eliminating Pat wouldn't have made me her successor. Scott's all done with me. He was done with me before that night.” She looked at Scott with imaginary daggers she may have wished were real. “Am I done now, sir? Am I dismissed? Because you're obviously done with me.”

  He got up, walked to her, and took her small hands in his. “I'll help you with the false statement problem. It won't look good for me, but I feel responsible…”

  Brooke hesitated for the merest moment, perhaps weighing words better left unsaid. She walked slowly to the door, opened it, and slid out like an agile cat. I looked back at Scott.

  “For one guy you can do a lot of damage.”

  “I didn't invent the wind. I'm not responsible for storms.”

  “Or good metaphors.”

  He resumed his seat on the couch across from me. “I respect you, Shannon. You see something you want, you go after it. And if you screw up, you don't blame the whole damn world for it and then try to eke guilt from others.”

  Presumptuous but keen observation.

  He leaned over his glass as if it held the prophetic grounds of Greek coffee. “You're like a man that way. You move on. Men don't waste time allocating guilt.”

  “Are we talking about guilt over Brooke or guilt over killing your wife?”

  “I'm talking about Brooke. I'm talking about my wife. I'm talking about women and why they'll never rule the world. They get bogged down in emotion.”

  Scott Boardman was making Vince Piganno noises but without the chest-beating.

  “What do you want from me, Scott? I mean besides sex—which you don't really need from me, since you seem to be shooting women away like ducks at a carnival.”

  He squinted at me suspiciously. But with no answer from my empty stare, he flopped back against the cushions and closed his eyes. His hands brushed once through his hair and then he laid them by his sides. “I'm tired. I think I have to stop for a while. Stop being what everyone else expects of me.” He kept his eyes closed a second or two longer and then opened them to my silence. “And I'd like to start by being honest with you.”

  “Tell me about the money.”

  His jaw jutted forward. “You mean that silly trust. I don't need Virginia Booth's money.”

  “How much money are we talking about?”

  He shrugged.

  “I'm assuming it's billions, and ‘silly’ and ‘billions of dollars’ just don't belong in the same sentence as far as I'm concerned. What will Virginia Booth say under oath about the events that occurred on the night your wife was found murdered on the Booths' boat?”

  He didn't even raise a brow over my legally framed question. He was probably surprised I'd waited so long to treat him like the murder suspect he was.

  “Virginia Booth thinks that I'm a mediocre father and a worse husband. She thinks I've misled Brooke and countless women before her. She will try to make everyone believe I murdered my wife and her daughter. But she won't say any of this because private grief is preferable to public revenge.”

  “What specifically will she say about your visit to her house that evening?”

  “I went to her house after. I told her what I'd found on the boat. And then I collapsed in one of the bedrooms—don't know how long—and then I just up and left and drove to Providence.”

  “Why did she lie? She said you used a bathroom and left immediately.”

  He rubbed his eyes like they were some magic lamp from which the truth would materialize. “I used a bathroom and then collapsed in a bedroom. She wasn't around when I left.”

  “And why would she clean the bathrooms to protect you, if she wants the world to think you're guilty?”

  “Virginia Booth's house is cleaned daily top to bottom by an army of live-in maids. It wouldn't even occur to her that a room might hold evidence. She doesn't exist in that world.”

  “Don't be so sure of that. Her daughter and your wife—both murdered—and neither of you called the police. Neither of you thought to dial 911? What am I missing here?”

  “Haven't you ever done anything wrong that you avoided for a while and hoped it went away?”

  And then, of course, I remembered the year before, when the four of us girls had been drinking and cavorting in downtown Providence. We witnessed the aftermath of a bloody murder and then we'd taken off. We didn't dial 911 either.

  “I think Virginia and I were both stalling,” he said. “The entire episode would be aired in the press and our private lives telecast like some reality-TV show. And then my campaign… but of course that was over at the first gunshot.”

  “And what about Jake Weller? He insists you called him that night and spoke with him. You told me when you called him from my bathroom you couldn't reach him. Who's lying?”

  “I'm not going to say he's lying. I had spoken to him earlier. I called him from your place because we were supposed to meet, but I never got him. But leave him o
ut of this. Jake Weller couldn't step on an ant without having sleepless nights over it.”

  “Who did it then, and why? The physical evidence may be lacking against you, but motive-wise you should be strapped to the chair and lit up like Times Square. Just like Jake Weller says. You look guilty as sin.”

  He smiled. “He actually said that?” He nodded. “Jake's a smart guy but he's always been a scared little man. The press people love his self-effacing ways, but I'm not surprised he'd be quick to cut and run.” He looked away from me. “Has he given some kind of formal statement?”

  “Who did it, Scott? I got a feeling you know.”

  “My suspicions haunt me. I would be convinced it was Brooke, but I can't see how she did it and then drove to Al Forno for a wine spritzer.” He smiled. “Your hide may be steeled enough for such a cold act, but not Brooke's. She'd panic when she saw all the blood, the screaming… well… I assume there was screaming… and then the eerie silence. I never realized how strong the smell of blood is. That was my first reaction when I boarded the boat. The smell. Salty and chemical.”

  “Don't underestimate Brooke—or anyone else. Murder is a special act. A private act. And like most private acts, it's done behind closed doors, hopefully with no one watching. And no one knows what any of us does in the privacy of our secret rooms.”

  “What about Muffie? It did, after all, happen on her boat. Couldn't she have been the target and my wife collateral damage?”

  “Her ex-husband?”

  “He's in Ecuador at a polo match.”

  “No way.”

  His expression serious and quizzical, he said, “Well, I guess it could be Peru…I know he was in the Galapagos—”

  “Forget it, Scott. If you've got nothing new to say, I have to go.”

  “Now? You have to leave now?”

  “While I still have a job.”

  “What about Leo Safer? Is someone going to try to shoot me again? Why isn't anyone worried about my safety?”

  “Because the cops think you're dirty. When you come clean, they'll protect you. Otherwise they'll treat you like a mobster who has a contract out on his life. You made your bed with thieves, so they'll let you lie in it.”