by Laina Turner
Chapter 23
Dirt finally broke down and confessed to everything once he knew Garrison had been caught. At first he had been defiant. When he realized there was no way he was talking his way out of this one, and giving the cops the information they wanted might help with a reduced sentence and maybe some more bargaining power, he caved. Dirt knew Garrison wasn’t going to protect him, and his lawyer was sure to throw Dirt under the bus.
Once they got Dirt talking, he talked non–stop for three solid hours. He had a lot of information on Garrison’s hold on Senator Daniels and the subsequent murder plot. Dirt also had somehow become privy to a lot of Garrison’s inner workings in his Vegas crime ring and knew more than Garrison probably realized he did. Dirt was able to fill in some areas for the authorities, which was sure to buy him some goodwill at some point.
To make a long story short, Dirt, who we’d thought, was our friend, had hooked up with Garrison Palazzo and had killed Senator Daniels. This was in exchange for money and ended up getting way too involved in something that was a dead end for him. I still couldn’t believe he was so stupid.
The FBI had caught up to Garrison as he tried to get to his car outside the warehouse. They had been building a case against him for a long time and, with Dirt’s help, would hopefully, be able to put him away for a long time.
The part that I had a hard time believing was that Chris thought that Helen killed the senator and that he was so in love with her he wanted to cover for her. He had gone to talk to Senator Daniels the night of the murder about the decision to fire Tobey. Helen had left the front door open for him so he could catch Tom by surprise, so when he arrived, he went right into the house and walked to the study. He saw that the senator was already dead and assumed Helen had killed him. Why? Because when he went and found Helen, she was distraught and hysterical. She’d played him. She knew that Tom owed the Palazzo family a lot of money and assumed they were the ones who had killed him. She wasn’t about to make waves because of her loyalty to Simon.
Simon, the one everybody thought was the killer, had wrangled a job with his old friend Cooper so that he could be with Helen. Who would have thought? Simon and Helen had met one time when she was in Vegas with Tom. They had been having an ongoing affair. It was hard to understand why Helen and Tom had stayed together if they were both unhappy in the marriage. Garrison kept pressuring Simon to kill Tom, saying it was his duty, but Simon, who wasn’t involved with the family, said no. That wasn’t the kind of person he was or wanted to be. That was when Garrison went to Dirt and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Simon had been the one who’d chased me with the black Hummer, but I learned that he did it to try to scare me off. He was afraid that his father or Dirt might hurt me if I got too close to the truth.
Bobby was repaying his debt to Palazzo by leaving threats to the senator. He was supposed to throw the authorities off the scent. Bobby had walked into the senator’s study after Chris that night and had also found him dead. Bobby had seen Chris leave, and he assumed that Chris killed Tom Daniels to have Helen all to himself. Tobey had told him about Helen and Chris’s affair, and Bobby told Tobey that he saw Chris leaving the senator’s study. He had also thrown the brick through my parents’ window and been the strange caller, trying to scare me away on Garrison’s orders.
Dirt and Garrison were in jail, and Helen and Simon left for the Bahamas. Devastated, Chris crawled back to Katy, and she finally told me why she kept allowing him to come back, at least this time. She was pregnant. I didn’t feel Katy needed to put up with such crap, even in that circumstance, but I also understood. It seemed Katy’s heart would always belong to Chris. And maybe he had learned his lesson, finally.
Bobby and Tobey had finally come out to everyone, and while Ruth was still trying to deal with knowing her son was a homosexual, she was supportive of both of them. Both Tobey and Bobby just felt relief about not having to hide anymore.
Cooper had begun to consider Dirt a suspect after he had talked to Simon. He had told the FBI where he was going after I had called him, and they had put a wire on Cooper. They had been tracking his every move, which was how they knew to come when they did. They were a little late busting in the room, but at least they finally made it.
Now that all this was settled, I finally got up the nerve to ask Cooper about the murder charges in his past. He explained that he had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had pissed off the wrong people. He didn’t go into too much detail, but I wasn’t going to push. I knew he was innocent and that was all that mattered. At least for right now.