Betrayals

by Carla Neggers

  “Don’t you always,” Thomas said. “What went through that keen mind of yours when the police didn’t catch him?”

  “What do you think? I was afraid—”

  “Afraid he’d come back for the Jupiter Stones? Afraid he’d come back for revenge?” Thomas seemed amused. He took just one sip of his coffee before setting it down. “No, Annette, you didn’t consider the possible consequences of your actions—you were simply relieved. With Jean-Paul a fugitive, you wouldn’t have to testify against him and risk having your affair made public. It’s even possible,” he went on, calm and arrogant, “that you helped him elude the police and get out of the country.”

  Annette laughed derisively, stretching one arm across the back of the sofa. “You think you’re the only one, Thomas, honorable enough to risk the exposure of unpleasant personal facts. When I discovered Jean-Paul was Le Chat, I did the right thing. Why can’t you give me any credit for that?”

  “When one does something because it’s right,” he said, “one doesn’t expect ‘credit.’”

  “You goddamned bastard—”

  He smiled. “I thought you didn’t care what I thought?”

  Letting her stew, he turned to the beautiful marble fireplace and restored his own composure. Dealing with Annette Reed had never offered him much tranquility; she’d set him on edge since she was a little girl. He’d always prayed she would overcome her selfishness and insecurity—her exaggerated fear of making a mistake—and allow her carefree, daring and fun nature to emerge.

  A photograph of Benjamin and Quentin on the mantel caught his eye. They’d been such a pair, that particular father and son. Both sensitive, both daring in their dreams, both tentative in life—not like Annette. She thrived on adventure and risk as a mask to her basic insecurity. In her youth, she’d had her affairs. In middle age, her company and her solitary life. What would she have become if Benjamin had lived?

  And Quentin. Would his father have recognized his son’s sensitivity and helped him come to terms with the positive aspects of his dreamy nature?

  Thomas abruptly turned away from the photograph. What-ifs were among the worst forms of torture an old man suffered, he’d decided. Benjamin Reed had died when his son was ten and had left his young, self-absorbed widow to raise him alone.

  It was done. So be it.

  “I believe you,” he told Annette, “when you say you don’t have the Jupiter Stones, if for no other reason than if you did, you’d have stuffed them down Jean-Paul’s throat and let him choke on them.”

  Annette leaned forward and spread a scone with jam. “You don’t like me because I’m a powerful woman now and no longer give a damn what you think. You don’t like strong women, do you?”

  “My dear, if you’d been a man you’d be a powerful, selfish man instead of a powerful, selfish woman. Don’t flatter yourself. There’s no double standard at work here.”

  “Isn’t there? How often are men accused of being selfish? Almost never. They’re single-minded, devoted to their work, determined. It’s women who are considered selfish.”

  “I don’t deny what you say, Annette, but I’ve seen selfish men—and none of this excuses your behavior.”

  “What behavior? That I wasn’t a gung-ho wife and mother?”

  Thomas sighed. “You’re making excuses, Annette, where there are none to make. No, you haven’t been a good mother to Quentin—but you were a rotten parent long before you became chairman of Winston & Reed. Working or not working has nothing to do with your basic selfishness. You’re a good businesswoman, but that doesn’t make you immune from being responsible for your other failings. It wouldn’t if you were a man.”

  “Get out of my house, Thomas.” She threw down the scone, but was pleased to see her hands weren’t shaking. “I don’t have to listen to your insults and senile drivel.”

  “I don’t want your feud with Jean-Paul harming anyone else. Do you understand that, Annette?” Thomas’s heart was beating erratically again. God help me from giving her the satisfaction of seeing how upset she still can make me. He went on carefully, “As powerful and strong as you think you are, my dear, you don’t respond well to personal pressure.”

  “And you do?” She sat back, hating him, but unable to pull her eyes from his aging figure. “Damn you to hell, Thomas, for thinking I want anyone hurt over this business with Jean-Paul. Yes, I’m sure he wants the Jupiter Stones. He must believe that silly woman Gisela’s claim they were real, in which case they must be enormously valuable—a pity I misplaced them. But he knows I’d pay him to stay away from me. So it has to be more than a simple profit motive at work here, don’t you think?”

  “It makes no difference—”

  “Not to you, I’m sure. I’m the one who turned him in and, as you say, ruined his life. Has it ever occurred to you that his conviction that I have those stones has kept him from coming after me? He doesn’t just want the stones.” She swallowed hard, looking for some way to make herself seem more composed, then gave up. “He wants revenge, Thomas. Don’t you see that? As soon as he get the stones, he’ll come after me.”

  I hope he does, Thomas thought, and he walked over to her, moving slowly and stiffly after his long day. Yet he could see from Annette’s expression that she wasn’t looking upon him as a man approaching eighty whose body was beginning to fail him. She was remembering their days together in Saigon, when Annette had wanted nothing more than for him to love her.

  He leaned in close, so that she could see the yellow in his eyes, the wrinkles and the liver spots on his hands and face, the sagging skin, so that she could know that time, too, would catch up with her. He didn’t give a damn about being old. He had seen too much death, was too close to it himself, to let it worry him. But aging, dying—they wouldn’t sit well with Annette.

  “Understand me, Mrs. Reed,” he said coldly. “I don’t care if Jean-Paul Gerard exposes you for what you are or even if he kills you. I only care that his obsession with the Jupiter Stones and your belief that you’re worth saving at any cost don’t spill over and ruin the lives of any more people I care about.” He straightened up and simply refused to breathe hard. “I’ll do what I can to keep him away from you—but not for your sake.”

  She suddenly looked like a petulant adolescent who wanted to stick her tongue out at him. “You’re wrong about me, Thomas. I’ve suffered, as well—”

  “You don’t know what suffering is.”

  “I lost a husband because of your arrogance!”

  “You see, Annette, you phrase everything in terms of yourself—you’ve suffered, you’ve lost. Suffering isn’t just when you yourself are hurt. It’s when someone you love is hurt. What’s unfortunate, but obvious and probably unchangeable, is that you only love yourself.”

  She stuck her chin up at him. “Go to hell.”

  “Simply do as I ask.” He gave her a nasty smile. “Think, my dear. What if after all these years I decided to talk?”

  “Kim!”

  The Vietnamese appeared immediately, but Thomas waved him off and walked himself out.

  Annette splashed more coffee into her cup and gulped it down, her hands shaking violently. She should have shot Thomas. She had guns in the house. She’d learned how to use them—would use them. She should have filled him with lead and watched him bleed. Who was he to judge her?

  No one would have blamed her for shooting him.

  Poor Mrs. Reed, they would say, having to endure being accosted by that vile old loser who’d killed her husband.

  Anyone else in her position would have shot him.

  She’d loved Benjamin! And she loved her son. Quentin was her baby—

  Ignoring Kim, she ran to her study and removed the Browning automatic from her desk drawer.

  Thomas had left the front door open. She rushed out to the steps with her gun.

  He was already gone.

  “I hate you, Thomas Blackburn…I hate you!”

  If only she believed it.

&n
bsp; Twenty

  A little before noon, Jared entered the unprepossessing building on Congress Street where Rebecca’s studio was located. There was no building directory. He asked a scrawny, ink-covered man in a printing office for directions. “Fourth floor” was all he said, and that ungraciously. Not bothering to thank him, Jared took the creaking elevator and entertained himself by considering ways the building could be renovated, if the owner had the funds and the imagination for such a task. Even a few gallons of paint would do wonders.

  The studio’s entrance looked like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie with its windowed door, black Gothic lettering and never-used brass mail slot. Jared peered through the milky, patterned glass, but he couldn’t see much. There didn’t seem to be any lights on inside. He knocked.

  No answer. He wasn’t surprised. Walking alone through the Public Garden and the streets of Back Bay had started him rehashing his conversations with Thomas and Rebecca Blackburn, trying to put pieces together. He had already known Thomas hadn’t told him everything, but he hadn’t expected the same from Rebecca. Not because she was any more forthcoming than her grandfather: being a Blackburn, she was naturally tight-lipped and outspoken, each when it suited her. The problem was, Jared hadn’t anticipated her knowing anything he didn’t already know. A stupid mistake on his part.

  He fished out the set of keys he’d swiped from Rebecca’s spartan room on West Cedar Street. He had guessed that she might be off on a mission of her own, but he was determined to check out her studio for anything that could lead him to the honest, complete answers neither she nor her grandfather would give him. Maybe he’d find something, maybe not. At least he was taking some kind of action and not just sitting around twiddling his thumbs or drinking Athena’s overpowering coffee.

  The third key he tried worked.

  The studio was pure Rebecca Blackburn. Everything about the large, airy rooms suggested the woman who worked here was intense, exacting, high-energy and, more often than she should be, irreverent.

  Nothing suggested she was anywhere near as rich as she was.

  Jared flipped on the overhead lights. On a less gloomy day, there would be adequate sunlight from the huge paned industrial windows that looked out onto the street. It wasn’t much of a view. Rebecca could have afforded the best views of the Boston skyline, the Rockies, the Alps, Central Park…San Francisco Bay. Whatever she wanted. But therein lay the contradictions that made Rebecca Blackburn not only a captivating, exciting woman, but also so hard to figure. Part of her wanted to have money and surround herself with the good things money could buy, to take pride in what her creative talents, business acumen and entrepreneurial drive had earned her. Jared could see that side of her in her choice of original prints for her walls, in her state-of-the-art equipment, in her quality pens and pencils and markers and all the other tools of her trade. In one corner, she had on display her many design awards and mementos of the game that had made her rich: the game board she’d made at eighteen for Sunday nights with Sofi and her grandfather, the original handcrafted game pieces, framed copies of the first Junk Mind poster.

  He started with a cursory search of her flat files and reference library, not sure what he expected to find. He was momentarily distracted when he came across photographs of her five brothers, some with wives and children, and it bothered him that he couldn’t tell who was who. He remembered the Blackburn boys as toddlers and little kids, but he didn’t know them as men. Next to their pictures was a photo of Jenny and Stephen Blackburn on their wedding day. Jared, just four, had been the ring-bearer.

  The elevator creaked down the hall. Jared wasn’t worried about getting caught; he’d shut the door on his way in. But then he heard footsteps, saw R.J.’s silhouette in the translucent glass and knew there wasn’t much way around it—he was going to scare the shit out of her.

  Of course, he should have remembered with whom he was dealing.

  Rebecca kicked open the door and said, “I should have you arrested, Sloan.”

  So much for scaring her. He eased down onto the stool at her light table and took note of the color in her cheeks, the load of papers in her arms, the way his heart started thumping when he saw her.

  “How’d you know it was me?” he asked.

  “Art.”

  “The printer?”

  “He said some good-looking guy was asking for R. J. Blackburn. The good-looking I wouldn’t know about, but you and Sofi’re the only ones who still call me R.J. You pick my lock?”

  He waved her keys at her. She snatched them out of his fingers. He said, “Your bedroom looks like an eight-year-old lives there—except for the Victoria’s Secret underwear.”

  Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. “Nice of you to notice.”

  “How could I not?”

  “You could have stayed out of my things,” she snapped back, dropping her load of stuff onto her drawing table. “What were you looking for?”

  He shrugged. R.J. had never been one for hypocrisy, and for that reason alone he’d never considered that she’d deliberately omit critical details—skirt the truth, in other words, if not out-and-out lie. Her last words to him at the hospital in Manila—and he’d always believed them—had been “Go on your way, Jared. I have nothing else to say to you.”

  Like hell, sweetheart.

  He said, “I was looking for what you know about our guy from Saigon that you haven’t told me.”

  She turned cool, a sure sign he had her. “Like what?”

  “There, you see? That’s not a direct lie, but it’s not the truth, either. You know what. You talked to him.”

  “I told you that already. He was here yesterday—”

  “And you said—and I quote—‘I recognized him straight off as the Frenchman who shot you in Saigon.’”

  She clamped her mouth shut.

  Jared was losing patience. “You want to tell me how you knew he was French?”

  “From his accent,” she said, neatening up her stack of photocopied papers. “He said something that night after he shot you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “There you go again. You don’t remember exactly. But I’ll bet you remember generally what he said. Rebecca, I have a right to know!”

  She inhaled deeply, controlling herself. “You’re a fine one,” she said, “to be talking about someone’s rights.”

  He sprang to his feet and raked both hands through his hair in frustration and guilt, but couldn’t think of a thing to say. Rebecca was on firm ground there, and she knew it.

  “You’ve stayed out of Boston for fourteen years,” she said, “but as soon as you spotted the Frenchman outside your house, you flew here and went straight to my grandfather. Why?”

  “You’ll have to talk to him about that, not me.” Jared studied her a moment, and he had to admit that she was as maddeningly captivating as she’d been at nineteen. His curse to notice, he supposed. “Believe it or not, R.J., I didn’t punch that guy on the motorcycle just so I could mess up your life. Thank your grandfather for me.” He sighed; obviously he wasn’t going to get anywhere with either Blackburn. And what right did he have to involve them in his problems? “I won’t be staying on West Cedar Street tonight.”

  He felt her eyes on him as he headed for the door, and he wondered what words he’d put in her mouth if he could. Stay…I’ll tell you everything, Jared…I’ve thought about you a lot over the years….

  Definitely time to back out of her life.

  “Have you seen Grandfather yet today?” she asked.

  Jared pulled open the door. “He came down a few minutes after you left and said we ought to head to San Francisco.”

  Rebecca’s smile surprised him. “He didn’t recommend Budapest to you?”

  In spite of himself, Jared grinned. “No—I think he must have decided San Francisco’s more romantic.”

  And he left before he started saying things he had no business sa
ying and forgetting how mad he was at Thomas Blackburn and his rich, beautiful and totally unfathomable granddaughter.

  Rebecca resisted the temptation to follow Jared only because she had work to do. Not design work; she’d already given up any illusions of drumming up clients today. A couple of hours at the Boston Public Library had netted her a biography of Empress Elisabeth that mentioned the Jupiter Stones, a couple of articles on the Côte d’ Azur robberies in 1959 that Rebecca photocopied and stuck in a file folder and stacks of information on her grandfather and his downfall. She checked out what she could and copied what she couldn’t and carted it all back to her studio to go through in privacy.

  A 1963 article from Time was on top of her pile. There were pictures of Thomas Blackburn as a Harvard professor in 1938; in Saigon in 1961 with his Vietnamese friend, the popular mandarin scholar Quang Tai; in Boston in 1963 at the funeral of his only child. This last picture also showed Stephen Blackburn’s penniless young widow surrounded by their six children at his graveside. They all looked exhausted and still in the grip of grief and shock. It was a photograph Rebecca had never seen until that morning. As far as she knew, her mother had never bothered with any of the news pieces probing the tragedy. She’d certainly never mentioned them.

  Steeling herself, Rebecca began to read.

  The Winston & Reed Building on the Boston waterfront was one of the best of Wesley Sloan’s timeless designs. Jared was impressed. He had never seen the finished building, but found that models and photographs didn’t do it justice. His father was a hell of an architect, but that didn’t make Jared itch to join his firm and design skyscrapers himself. He was content working out of his one-man studio behind his house on Russian Hill.

  Still smarting from his encounter with Rebecca, he entered the luxurious lobby and took the elevator to the thirty-ninth floor. He had no idea what he’d say to his cousin Quentin. The child that could have been yours is a great kid and I’m not going to let anything happen to her.

  At least it was a start.