“You know, Zack, sizing up people is no different than sizing up a crime scene. You collect everything and put it all under a microscope. FBI agents are uptight jerks in love with their own press-kit image. But they’re human, right? In Dirkson’s case, he served in Vietnam. When we worked together on a Vietnamese version of Murder, Inc., he called the suspects ‘gooks’ when he had a couple drinks in him. Booze, loose lips, racial slurs—when I called the two Wall Street operatives they both confirmed Dirkson was a closet racist.”
Moody tapped on the surveillance evidence against Ricketts. “I want a bonus for this work.”
“You’ll get it.”
“A million.”
“Excuse me?”
“I saved your whole project.”
“Moody, you saved nothing. I would have gotten Ricketts one way or another, with or without you.” I slapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, look, pal, you did a great job, you’ll get a fat bonus, but I’m not making you one of the family.”
After Moody left, I gave some thought to him. I liked Moody; he was good. But he jacked me up for money every time he sneezed. He had a greedy streak in him. I wondered if I would have trouble with him someday.
71
Morgan examined her nude body in front of the mirror at her Martha’s Vineyard home. Not bad, she thought, for a thirty-something-old woman with two young children. Her breasts were not the store-bought variety. They had miraculously sprouted toward the end of her adolescence when she also added an inch to her height and mellowed out the girlish curves down her side and rear profiles. She didn’t have the exotic sensuality of A-Ma, but “My body is better than yours, you little slut,” she told the mirror in the absence of the movie star. Still damp from her bath, she toweled off and began the process of creams and powders that are such an aphrodisiac to the male of the species.
She was preparing herself for making love.
Propping a leg up on a low stool, she rubbed it with cream, working it in firmly, moving up from her ankles to her knee and inner and outer thighs, squeezing the softness of the thigh flesh in a manner her masseur said would help fight cellulite, the bane of women over thirty.
She had taken special care with her bathing because she wanted to make the night a special one for Todd. They lived together on the island, in a Cape Cod—style beach house she had purchased. He had a cottage that gave him privacy and she refused his help with family expenses, telling him to keep the small income he was making from his books that got good reviews but sold poorly. He had everything going for him but her love. She had been faking her orgasms since the day they met and she wasn’t a good actress. He worked long and hard at their lovemaking, giving of himself, holding his own reward back to give her pleasure.
“You bastard,” she told the mirror, talking this time to Zack. Todd was better looking, better mannered, a better husband and father. In fact, lined up against Zack Riordan, he looked like Mother Teresa compared to Jack the Ripper.
But she was still faking her orgasms.
“Bastard,” she snarled. It was his fault. She had loved Zack since the first time she saw him, a cocky, rude, pushy street kid who walked around Halliday’s like he owned the place and was ready to use his fists on anyone who gave him lip. “No sane woman would love you,” she told the mirror. But she did. Loved him when he humiliated her after she threw herself at him when she was a teenager, when he impregnated her on her wedding day to another man, when he was lying helpless, breathing through a tube, after he’d been shot.
She had twice chosen men who were kinder, gentler, more sophisticated, and educated. And had to fake her orgasms because the only man who ever made her cream her pants was the bastard who used her as a doormat, cheated on her, married her for her money, and abandoned his children.
“What a fool.” This time she spoke to her own reflection in the mirror.
How do you learn to hate someone who richly deserved it? Unconditional love was just psychobabble. Anyone who gives unconditional love without getting the same in return needs his or her head examined, which is exactly what she did—have her head examined. By her third session she was giving advice to her psychoanalyst, who was going through a messy divorce and child-custody battle and didn’t know if she should go back and try again with her husband. “People don’t change unless they want to,” she told the analyst, mouthing a buzz phrase of the day. “You either have to accept him or find someone else with the qualities you want,” she advised the woman. When the woman sent her a bill for the session, she scribbled Physician heal thyself across it and returned it without a check enclosed.
The hardest thing for her to accept was that she could feel so much for a man who didn’t return her feelings. Love was a strange phenomenon. She had no idea why she loved Zack from the moment she saw him. But she had made one discovery about love: You didn’t choose who you loved. Choosing implied rational behavior, and there was nothing rational about love. Logic and reason had nothing to do with love. Ask any one of the thousands of women whose husbands used them as punching bags, or the men whose wives took the gold mine and they got the shaft.
The only conclusion to reach from her behavior toward a man who used and abused her was that there was something wrong with her. How else could it be explained? There was nothing wrong with Zack: He had everything he ever wanted, slept with whom he wanted, made babies he didn’t plan to raise, and used her family’s money to climb the dung heap. “He’s one smart hombre,” she said, “and you’re one dumb bitch.”
Todd fit his name, she decided. The only other Todd she ever heard of was a blond actor from the 1950s she saw in a beach movie video, and he fit the mode of the actor—tall and willowy, deceptively broad-shouldered, thin but muscular, hair like the tarnished gilt on the frames of old oil paintings, eyes cornflower blue. She relaxed him with three glasses of Chardonnay, thick juicy salmon steaks, grilled asparagus, scalloped potatoes, and a spinach—goat cheese salad.
She sent the kids off with their nanny on an overnight trip to a special showing of the circus in Boston so they would have the house entirely to themselves.
He sat back on the couch while she sat on the floor and slipped off his shoes. She put his feet in her lap and massaged them.
“God, that feels wonderful. Where did you learn how to do it?”
“My masseur does my feet better than the rest of my body. He claims that even though our feet occupy only a small part of our frames, they’re packed with more bones and nerves than the rest of our body.”
He leaned back and shut his eyes. “Hmmm, your masseur is right, I can feel it all the way up my body.”
Morgan slowly worked her fingers up from the soles of his feet to his groin.
He was already getting aroused. “All you have to do is touch me and I get hard.”
She unzipped his pants and pulled out his warm phallus. She bent over and licked it all over, then shoved it in her mouth and began sucking. He stopped her after a few minutes. “I want to be inside you,” he said.
Todd picked her up and carried her into the bedroom and lay her on the bed. He undressed her, savoring the removal of each item of clothing, kissing each part of her body until she was completely naked. He buried his head in the bushy mound between her legs, teasing the folds of her vulva and her clit with his tongue and moving deep into her pink area. She drew his head from between her legs. “Put your cock in me,” she said, and spread her legs until he was deep within her. Gripping his buttocks with her hands, she forced him harder and harder into her, moaning with pretended pleasure every time he made contact.
As he was making love to her, she thought about Zack. She fantasized that it was Zack who was inside her, remembering the first time they made love, almost giggling aloud that she let him take her like a bitch in heat on her wedding day. Thinking about Zack’s hot tongue violating her mouth, caressing her breasts, his hard penis inside her, suddenly got her into rhythm with the man on top of her and she began to flow with his lovemakin
g. Electrified pleasure gripped her and her body grew excited without any pretense. Her mouth devoured his hungrily, her tongue frantically violating his mouth. Arching back her legs, she pulled him in deeper, her hard nipples rubbing against his chest. She screamed out his name when the orgasm came and raked his back with her nails as he pumped her body with a frenzy.
When it was over she lay quietly, soaking in the pleasure, in the relief and sheer delight. She had never experienced sex like that before. She reached over to touch him, to whisper words of endearment, but he rolled onto his side and turned his back to her. His skin was cold and tense to her touch.
“What’s the matter?”
His was the cold voice from the grave, sending goose bumps crawling over her.
“My name is not Zack.”
72
I came out of a dead sleep to the jarring ring of the phone next to my bed.
“Zack … it’s Moody.”
“Yeah.”
“Bic’s dead.”
I heard the words but they didn’t penetrate right away. A-Ma turned over in bed and asked me who it was, and I waved away the question. Finally I said, “How?”
“Overdose. I got a call from my former LVPD partner. He knew I was working for you. Nine-one-one got a call about two hours ago from his wife saying that he had taken a hit of heroin and was overdosing. He was DOA in the med center.”
“What did you say?”
“DOA at—”
“No, no, you said ‘his wife.’ Bic’s not married.”
Moody was quiet for a moment. “I’m sure Nick said ‘wife.’ But he could be using the word generically, you know, that significant-other thing.”
“Find out. Fast.”
“Could be trouble?”
“With a capital ‘T’. He had a drug slut named Janelle Troy hanging out with him. If she’s Bic’s wife, I can see trouble down the line.”
“I thought I heard you say once that Morgan controls Bic’s money.”
“Morgan controls the trust, but if Bic dies leaving an heir, the money goes to the heir. It still has to remain in the trust, but when Bic threatened to break the trust, my lawyer told me he wouldn’t be able to do it because of his history of being a spendthrift drug addict. But that wouldn’t apply to his heir.”
“Well, if he got hitched and ditched, you’ll just have to live with it.”
“Moody, listen to me carefully. I’m not living with it. Get your ass out to that crime scene and find something to hang the wife on.”
“Hang her? You think she killed Bic?”
“The woman’s got the temperament of a black widow spider. I guarantee you she aced Bic. Get her. I don’t care how, just take her down.”
“You’re the boss. And, Zack …”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry about your brother-in-law.”
“Yeah.”
I hung up and cursed.
“Bic’s dead?”
“Dead. Janelle’s alive. If I had to choose between the two, I’d rather have him. I must have really pissed off someone big time in a past life. Everything I ever did comes back to haunt me.”
“Can she really cause that much trouble?”
“Do chickens have lips? Janelle’s like a thousand other Vegas losers, people who spend their whole lives going for the money but coming up with a handful of dirt. This time she’s gone all the way.”
“Has anyone told his sister?”
“Morgan? No, I don’t think so. I guess it’s up to me.”
73
Jack Moody pulled up a chair at a table in Black’s Beer & Pizza, where two plainclothes detectives were seated.
“Nick, Paul, how’ya guys doing?”
“Oh, good,” Nick told his partner, “the rich retired cop’s here to pick up the tab. One pepperoni pizza split two ways, four beers, we know how you rich dicks on expense accounts like to spend money.”
“Here, take the wife on a special night to Caesar’s, on my boss. Dinner, ‘gamboling,’ the whole nine yards.” Moody passed comp certificates across the tables.
“Is this a bribe?” Nick asked.
“Do chickens have lips?”
“What?”
“Never mind, a dumb reply I picked up. Of course it’s a bribe. Why the hell would I give you two dumb dicks anything if I didn’t want something in return? I want the dope on Bic Halliday.”
“Good,” Nick said, “I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t compromising my professional duties for nothing. In answer to your question, Bic Halliday’s death is accidental, plain and simple. You might call it an accidental suicide. Guys who have been shooting up half their lives are not only bound to make a mistake and suck in more than they can handle sometime, they’re just as likely to get their hands on pure shit and blow their lid. That’s what happened to Bic boy. One day he goes from a five- or ten-percent solution to a hundred-percent solution and bingo, he’s dead. Case open and shut.”
“What if someone slipped him the pure stuff?”
“You think maybe the butler did it?” Nick nudged his partner. “Did you get that, Paul, the butler did it.”
“You’re a funny sonofabitch.”
“I was thinking more like the wife,” Moody said.
“Good candidate. Janelle Troy was probably ready, willing, and able. Now how do you prove it? Bic’s fingerprints are on the syringe.”
“You checked fingerprints? I’m impressed. You used to just do everything by the seat of your pants—large-sized pants, at that.”
“Yeah, you’d be surprised at how high-tech we’ve gotten since you left for the big bucks with Riordan. We even take pictures of bodies before we turn them over to a mortician.”
Moody ate a piece of pizza as he talked. “I called an old friend of mine with the LAPD and he ran Janelle Troy’s California rap sheet and did some checking. She’s an up-and-coming small-business woman with her own franchise selling cocaine and heroin. Kinda funny that a pro like her would let her husband OD on pure stuff. Unless she had a reason. Does Bic have a will?”
“We found it in his desk. His wife okayed a search of his papers to see if he left a suicide note.”
“And?”
“What’d you expect? They got married, he made a will, his wife’s the natural beneficiary.”
“That marriage is real interesting,” Moody said. “The scion of the most prominent family in Vegas gets hitched and no one knows it. They get an out-of-town license and use an out-of-town preacher no one ever heard of. And no one’s seen the preacher since the marriage. My L.A. contact tells me the preacher’s sister filed a missing persons report because she hasn’t seen him since about the time of the wedding.”
“You’ve been busy,” Nick said.
“That’s why I get the big bucks.”
“So you think the wife iced him.”
“If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck …”
“Okay, big shot, you tell us. How do we take her down? In case you haven’t met Janelle Troy, this is not a woman who spills her guts when tough guys like us sneer at her. She’d hold her guts in and scream for her lawyer.”
Moody ordered another round. “We put her and the situation under a microscope. We do things you never see in an OD case. You haven’t done Super Glue fuming on the body, have you?”
“No use,” Paul said. “If her prints showed up on his skin in the injection area, she’d just claim she examined his arm. Paramedics would have handled the body, too.”
“Do it anyway, the angle of her prints compared to the angle of the body when she found him could make her a liar. Get in a handwriting expert to examine the will and marriage certificate. Do a background check on everyone even remotely connected to Janelle Troy. Question the neighbors, find out who’s been visiting the ranch. Maybe someone saw the missing preacher man. Get a search warrant and let’s take that entire place apart, piece by piece. Sweep it with a vacuum and look for traces of anyone who’s been out at the ranch. Get a chemist to do
further analysis of the heroin residue in the syringe. We know it’s pure stuff, but I want to be able to identify the batch it came from. His wife’s obviously his supplier; if we can bust her on a trafficking charge she may roll over on an accomplice. And we need to find the other man.”
Nick nudged Paul. “Didn’t I tell you he was smart? Already figured out that there had to be another man. I bet he learned that watching movies.”
Paul said, “I have just one question of Mr. Deep Pockets Moody. Who’s gonna get this gig approved by the chief? There’s going to be a big bill for the kind of case work-up he wants.”
“Don’t worry about it. Zack Riordan’s calling the chief, and so is Morgan Halliday. The chief knows what side his bread is buttered on.”
74
I met Morgan and the children at McCarran Airport. I sent Forbidden City’s private jet for them and was waiting with a limo on the tarmac when the plane taxied to a stop. Bic’s funeral was tomorrow. Bic’s friends could be counted on one hand, and they were all scumbags who were either in jail or rehab, so I had to do something about giving him a funeral because he was Morgan’s brother. As far as I was concerned, Bic’s remains could have been ground in a meat grinder and poured down a sewer, but I had to think about Morgan. We were closing Halliday’s for two hours so the employees could attend the funeral. That would be the first time the club had had its doors locked since it came into existence. I put the word out that any employee who didn’t attend the funeral wouldn’t have to bother reporting back to work—ever. The same thing went for anyone who wanted to work at Forbidden City. With that kind of arm-twisting, I expected to get the sort of turnout Con got on his sendoff.
I greeted Morgan and gave her a peck on the cheek. Her features were impassive. She was really aging well. Women complain that they lose a little of their looks for every day past thirty. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but Morgan sure made the statement a lie. She looked like the proverbial million dollars. I had seen her three times in my life after long absences and for the third time I found myself amazed at what a good-looking woman she was. Not only good looking, but Morgan had something else—class, that Vassar look I used to kid her about.
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