“It’s your Type A blood and tissue that’s under his nails, isn’t it, Danielle? They found Type O. Your mother is Type O. They also found Type A. You’re Type A, just like your father was.”
Danielle let out a sob, her chest heaving. “He didn’t even know me. He said these dirty, awful things to me and grabbed me and—and kissed me and started to tear my swimsuit off me. I screamed at him to stop. I screamed at him and I fought with him and he just laughed and said, ‘So you like to play rough, huh?’”
“Danielle, did your father rape you?”
“No . . .” She gulped back her tears. “But he would have if he hadn’t been stopped.”
“Is that the truth?” I asked Monette.
She nodded her head. “He had her top off—that’s all, thank God.”
“But it wasn’t you who stopped him, was it, Monette?”
Her gaze turned steely. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure, you do. Someone in this house heard Danielle’s screams. Someone who did something about it—unlike Elliot, who just stood out there on the patio doing absolutely nothing.”
Elliot glowered at me. “You know what, Hoag? I’ve taken just about as much crap out of you as I’m—”
“I’m talking about Joey.” I looked at him as he stood there next to Monette. “It’s Joey who, in a weird way, is the hero of this twisted family tale. Joey who, just this once, wasn’t trying to block out every sound in the house by blasting Nirvana through his headphones. You weren’t reading Journey to the Center of the Earth, were you, Joey? And you weren’t poking away at a term paper on your word processor. You were standing at your window peeking through the shutters at your dad while he snorted coke with Lou and Kyle out on the patio. An aspiring writer needs to observe human activity, after all. And when Kat and Trish came back outside with your mom after their little house tour, you were sneaking peeks at Kat, which is perfectly understandable. She does happen to be the sexiest nineteen-year-old girl on the planet. I’m guessing you were looking at Trish, too, and maybe having some second thoughts about telling Kyle you weren’t interested in having sex with her.”
“I—I was not,” he protested, reddening.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Joey. I would have been having second thoughts myself if I were you. It’s not every day that a red-blooded seventeen-year-old virgin is offered the sexual favors of a hot-bodied blonde, no strings attached. So you were standing there having yourself another look. That’s when you heard your sister scream. And you came running. Ran right in here and found your very own father trying to rape your very own kid sister right there on your parents’ bed. Your dad was an All-American at Notre Dame. Stood six foot four and outweighed you by at least sixty pounds. I’m guessing you’d tussled with him before. He knocked you around some. Am I right?”
Joey didn’t say yes. Joey didn’t say no. He didn’t say anything.
“There was absolutely no way you were physically capable of pulling him off Danielle. You knew that. So you did the next best thing. You opened your mom’s nightstand drawer, grabbed her loaded Beretta and fired off two shots at him, didn’t you?”
“Don’t answer him, Joey,” Monette said.
Joey’s eyes met mine. He nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Your dad took one shot in the shoulder and the other in his side. There was blood spatter on the wall behind the bed, blood spatter on the bedspread and there was this . . .” I opened the suitcase now and unrolled the pale blue hand towel that I’d found in the black trash bag last night. Inside it was Danielle’s white bikini, spattered with blood. “Lieutenant, you’ll notice that there’s also a yellow bikini wrapped up in this towel that has blood smears on it here and here, see? This would be the bikini that Reggie was wearing when she and Danielle went swimming before lunch.”
The room fell utterly silent. No one said a word to contradict me. No one even seemed to be breathing.
“Now came that two- or maybe three-minute gap between shots,” I went on. “I’m starting to think it was closer to three minutes, Lieutenant, because an awful lot had to happen. Everyone had to spring into action. By everyone I mean Monette and Maritza, who came dashing up the stairs from the kitchen immediately after the shots were fired. And I mean Reggie, who was down the hall in her room changing for lunch. Maritza, you tried to comfort Danielle, who was all scratched up and spattered with blood. That’s how your uniform got blood smears on it.” I unrolled the big bath towel and showed everyone the pale pink uniform that Maritza had been wearing. “Reggie, you got Danielle the hell out of here. Dragged her down the hall to her room so she could shower and change into something with long sleeves. That’s how you got the blood smears on your bikini. You hid both of your bikinis in Danielle’s room for Maritza to dispose of later. Maritza had to run downstairs to her own room so she could change into a different uniform. Monette, that left you alone in here with Joey and your wounded husband, who was lying there on the floor slumped against the bed. You have a very clear head, Monette. What you did next was, well, allow me to say I consider it pretty damned impressive. You took the Beretta away from Joey and then you told him to do something that mothers don’t usually ask their sons to do—punch you in the nose. Hard. It was Joey who gave you the bloody nose, not Patrick. Then you told him to go to his room, change his clothes, wash his hands and face and put on his headphones. Which Joey did. Unfortunately for you, Joey, Lulu followed the gunshot residue trail right to your room. She smelled it on your shoes. Here are the clothes you were wearing . . .” I laid his jeans, flannel shirt and Nirvana T-shirt out on the bed. “Lieutenant, your lab people will find that they’re covered with gunshot residue. Monette wiped Joey’s fingerprints from the Beretta with this second T-shirt right here before she used the Beretta herself to pump two more shots directly into Patrick’s heart. Monette, you told me that you and Patrick had quite some conversation before you shot him. You telling him what a horrible bastard he was. Him telling you what a rotten lover you were. You made that part up. There was no time for any such conversation.”
“No time,” she admitted hoarsely. “But I didn’t make up the conversation. We’d had it several times before. Too many times.”
“Did he say anything to you at all before you shot him or was he unconscious?”
“Oh, he was plenty conscious. He laughed at me as I stood there pointing the gun at him. He said, ‘Don’t forget to curl your pinkie finger when you pull the trigger, Queenie.’ Those were the last words that the father of my children said to me before I shot him. Pretty sad epitaph, isn’t it?”
“I think this is all pretty sad, actually. I’m curious about one thing, Monette.”
She let out a weary sigh. “Yes, what is it, Hoagy?”
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Why did you kill him?”
“I had to. I couldn’t let him survive. Even if he’d kept his mouth shut, which I doubted he was capable of doing, the police would have figured out what had happened. Joey would have gotten in serious trouble. Danielle would have been subjected to the vilest sort of media scrutiny. I couldn’t allow that to happen. They’re my children.”
The master suite fell into total silence again.
“Monette’s your killer, Lieutenant, just as she’s maintained all along,” I said. “But it wasn’t self-defense. Patrick didn’t punch her. Nor did he gouge her with his fingernails. She gouged herself, didn’t you, Monette? You took off your long-sleeved shirt, grabbed him by his dead hand and raked your own bare arms with his fingernails. Pretty gutsy if you ask me. Only a mother would do that. You, Reggie and Maritza—the three of you were protecting Joey, who’d fired two shots at his own father, and Danielle, who’d been sexually assaulted by him. When I came running upstairs after I heard the shots, Reggie and Danielle were standing in the hallway looking stunned and frightened.” I glanced at them. “But you kept it together. Both of you. As did you, Maritza, when you came up the
main stairs to find out what had happened. By claiming that the door at the top of the service stairs was locked, you bought yourself enough time to change uniforms. By the way, where did you hide all of this bloody clothing? I couldn’t find it in the laundry room. Did you stuff it in the kitchen trash bin?”
“Under my bed,” she said in a faint voice.
I turned back to Monette and said, “That wasn’t an idle question you asked me before, was it?”
Monette frowned. “Which question do you . . . ?”
“You wanted to know whether the medical examiner’s men were planning to strip us naked when they came here to take our blood and hair samples. You were afraid they’d find those gouges on Danielle’s right arm, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “I told her to make sure that she offered them her left arm when they asked to take her blood. Her left arm looks fine. You saw that for yourself.”
“You’re right, I did. But I wasn’t being totally honest with you. The truth is that they were planning to subject each of us to a head-to-toe body search. Correct, Lieutenant?”
“Correct.”
“So they were going to find those fingernail gouges in Danielle’s right arm. And, well, you were never going to get away with it. Also correct, Lieutenant?”
“Also correct.”
Monette started to speak but no words came out of her mouth. She just stood there with her mouth open, glaring at me.
“Reggie, you visited me in the pool house last night to find out how much I knew. You needed to find out whether or not I was going to cause you trouble.”
She gazed at me, her huge eyes shimmering in the sunlight that streamed through the open windows. “I visited you because I wanted to be with you.”
“You’re a part of this. You helped cover up what really happened.”
“Danielle and Joey are family. Are you trying to tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“I begged you to leave it alone. Why couldn’t you leave it alone?”
“Because you can never bury the truth. It has to come out.”
“Why?” she demanded. “What good comes from this? Who’s better off?”
I didn’t answer her. Didn’t have an answer. Instead I turned to Elliot and said, “How much did you know?”
He shrugged his soft shoulders. “I heard the screaming, sure. But Monette asked me to keep quiet about it, so I did. I don’t ask questions. I’ve been managing talent for thirty-five years. They come, they go. Hardly any of them last. All that lasts is loyalty. I’m here for Monette, same as she’s here for her kids.” He looked at Lamp and said, “And I’m 100 percent with the kid sister, Lieutenant. What’s to be gained by pursuing this? Who’s better off?”
“My job is to enforce the law, Mr. Schein,” Lamp said to him quietly. “I can’t look the other way. New charges will have to be filed against Monette Aintree. And Joey will have to be taken into custody.”
“Why?” Elliot demanded. “He was saving his sister. That boy’s a hero.”
A loud buzzer went off downstairs in the kitchen. Someone was ringing the house from the front gate.
“That’ll be my men,” Lamp said. “I called for more backup.”
“I will go down and let them in,” Maritza said. “If that is okay.”
Lamp nodded to her and she went down the stairs to the kitchen.
“I’m with Elliot,” Boyd said. “There was only one crime committed in this room yesterday—that drunken creep trying to get over on his own fifteen-year-old daughter.”
“Personally, I don’t disagree,” Lamp said. “But professionally, I can’t. You committed a calculated act of murder, Mrs. Aintree. You concocted a lie about it and you involved your children, your sister and your housekeeper in that lie. By doing so you made all of them party to the willful obstruction of a police investigation. I understand why you did what you did. Believe me, I do. And I’ll do everything within my power to keep Danielle’s name out of this. My report will simply state that the victim was making improper advances toward an underage guest whose identity is being withheld to protect her privacy. That’ll be the official version. The press will never get hold of Danielle’s name. Not if I have anything to say about it. And I do.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Monette said, her voice barely a whisper.
Maritza came back upstairs now from the kitchen with an odd, puzzled look on her face. “I let him in, Senora. He is coming in.”
Monette frowned at her. “Who is, Maritza?”
“The postman. He says he has an express mail delivery for you and Senorita Reggie.”
Monette drew in her breath. “Oh, God . . . ,” she said to Reggie. “Please tell me this isn’t happening now. It can’t be happening.”
“Sorry, Olive.” Reggie reached over and gripped her sister’s hand tightly in her own. “It’s happening.”
Chapter Eleven
Dear Olive Oyl and Sir Reginald—
First of all, please allow me to apologize for the pain and heartache that these past twenty-four hours have brought you. I cannot help but feel that everything that has happened in regards to Patrick has been my fault. That if I hadn’t written to you, your lives would not have been torn asunder yet again. I seem to ruin everything I touch. I always have. By reaching out to you, I have managed only to bring you more pain. Please believe that this was never my intention. My heart aches for you right now. And I do have a heart, hard as that is to believe.
Obviously, it was a mistake to think that I could come back into your lives after so many years. Even the mere possibility that I might return has proven to be utterly disastrous. This is the price I pay for being the evil creature that I am. I will not burden you any further. This is the last letter you will receive from me. I will continue to stay far, far away from both of you. That is a promise.
But before I go I do wish to explain myself to you. Or at least try. This old man’s purpose in contacting you was that I was hoping for forgiveness as my own end draws near. Not that I deserve any. Forgiveness for what, you may ask. Your mother, God rest her soul, did not take her own life on that East Village rooftop back in 1970. Eleanor didn’t jump. I pushed her. She had caught me making love to another woman earlier that evening, which was nothing unusual, believe me, but for some reason it set her off and she said some very accurate, painful things to me. She reminded me that if she hadn’t rewritten Not Far from Here for me after Alberta Pryce initially declined to represent it, that Alberta would never have agreed to take me on, never have sent the manuscript out, never have sold it and I would never have become rich and famous.
No one has ever known the ugly truth that it was your mother who rewrote the novel, not me. I was too proud and stubborn to do it. I also didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about it. I was, and still am, a no-talent fraud. No one could ever figure out why I never wrote a second novel. Only your immensely gifted mother understood why. Your mother who loved me and never, ever revealed our secret to anyone. Not even to Alberta. But when she caught me cheating on her that night, Eleanor decided she’d had enough. She told me she was sick of my selfishness, sick of my inflated ego, sick of me. And that she intended to set the world straight, come morning, on who was really responsible for the success of Not Far from Here. I couldn’t allow that. I was Richard Aintree, after all. The Richard Aintree.
So I pushed her off the roof.
The authorities found drugs in her system and concluded it was suicide. I encouraged that conclusion. I told them she’d been despondent. But that was never the truth. The truth is that I murdered your mother because she was going to expose me. The truth is that every awful word she’d said about me was valid and warranted. I was not worthy of her love. Or yours. Or anyone else’s. And so, once the business of her death was completed, I fled.
I should have just killed myself. I did try to jump in front of an oncoming freight train on the trestle in Gaviota, California, one nigh
t a long, long time ago. But I lacked the courage to do it. I still lack the courage. So I’ll just keep on keeping on, waiting for time to take care of what needs to be done to me. My health is poor. It won’t be long now.
Please don’t bother to look for me. You’ll never find me.
I apologize to Eleanor for never being willing to acknowledge how much her help meant to the success of Not Far from Here. She was its co-author. Her name should have been on its cover right there next to mine. I apologize to Alberta for deceiving her about Eleanor’s contribution and for lacking the courage to tell her what really happened to her dear friend on that East Village rooftop. I apologize to Stewart Hoag for dragging him into this project, which I now realize was the desperately misguided gesture of a foolish old man.
But, mostly, I apologize to you, my darling daughters, because all I’ve managed to do is make a mess of things yet again. I would ask you to try to forgive me, but I know you never will. I do not deserve your forgiveness. The painful truth is that I am not a very nice man. Feel free to hate me if you wish. I won’t blame you one bit if you do. And now I will say goodbye.
With all my love,
Dad
They wept.
The two sisters stood there in the front hallway with the express mail letter that had been sent from a post office in Teaneck, New Jersey, and hugged each other and wept as Danielle and Joey watched them with curious looks on their faces. Kat and Trish had been escorted out by the tall, tanned cop and were being driven to their respective homes. The medical examiner’s lab rats had evaporated. Boyd and Elliot had stuck around, as had Lamp.
“I—I knew it,” Monette sobbed. “I just . . . I—I knew she’d never abandon us that way. A mother doesn’t do that to her children. They’re our babies. We always take care of them. Always. We never, ever stop.”
“Never, ever,” Reggie sniffled, tears streaming down her cheeks. They were talking about Danielle and Joey now, about what had happened upstairs in the master suite yesterday. “But I feel sorry for Dad, I have to admit.”
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