“Lovely.” I admired the softness of her face, the graceful flow of her scarf and the dog’s whiskery grin.
Danny Sinclair walked me out to my car, smiling and clear-eyed. “Good luck with your story,” he said, and waved as I drove away.
“Good luck to you too,” I told him.
I played the radio, turned up the volume, and sang along loudly to keep awake during the long drive back. It’s true, I thought, babies do change people. They change lives forever. I went directly to Kagan’s office.
“Is he in?”
“Do you have an appointment, Miss…?” Frances asked, eyes wary.
“No,” I said, “but I hope he can spare a moment.”
“I see,” she said crisply. “Your name again?”
Too tired for her paranoia, even when no one was watching, I stared her straight in the eye. She gazed back like a total stranger.
“Montero,” I said wearily, wondering what frightened her so. “Britt Montero from the Miami News. He’ll remember.”
She rapped on his office door, stepped inside, then emerged after a brief exchange.
“He’s with a client,” she said. “He can see you in a few minutes.”
She averted her eyes, tapping her computer keys primly, as I leafed through a dog-eared office copy of The American Trial Lawyer magazine.
As I skimmed a piece on libel law, an older black woman stepped out of Kagan’s office, a sullen teenager in tow. I assumed she was grandma and he was trouble. He slouched out the door after her, at that awkward age, somewhere between juvenile hall and state prison.
“What did he do?” I asked Kagan, when Frances showed me inside. “Steal cars or snatch purses?”
“My clients are innocent until proven guilty,” he said. In shirtsleeves, documents strewn across his desk, he looked almost like a real lawyer.
“Or until he pleads.”
“What now?” His look said, Cut the small talk.
“You forgot to mention Kaithlin’s son.”
He rapped his expensive fountain pen on his desk blotter, his small smile ironic. “Rothman spilled his guts, right? That son-of-a-bitch.”
“It wasn’t R. J. she wanted to save,” I said, “it was their son. Right?”
Kagan pushed a button, told Frances to hold his calls, then clasped his hands before him in a failed attempt to appear sincere. “She was a teenager when she had the kid. All these years later, she’d pulled it off, she’s sitting pretty in Seattle. But, like most broads”—he leveled a meaningful gaze at me—“she can’t let well enough alone. The Internet, God bless it. That started it. Playing around on her computer, she can’t resist surfing the sites for adopted kids looking to find their natural parents.” He spread his hands apart in a gesture of wonderment. “Lo and behold, her kid is registered.”
“So?” I prodded.
He hesitated, then fished his keys out of his pocket and unlocked a desk drawer. Shuffling through a thick file, he withdrew a single sheet of paper and handed me a printout of Danny’s message, his phony plea for help.
I merely glanced at it. “I’ve seen it,” I said. “She thought R. J.’s execution would kill their son as well. The mother-child bond was the only tie strong enough to bring her back to Miami. I should have known. How did she plan to reunite father and son without exposing herself?”
“Who knows?” Kagan shrugged. “It never got that far.” He licked his lips. “When she showed up here to blow her top, I whipped out my file on her. In fact, I gave her a copy. The photos, Rothman’s reports, old news clippings he dug up on her and R. J. It was a real blow, a shock to her that we knew her story and who she was.
“Evidently she goes off next to meet the kid, check out his condition, see how much time she’s got to work things out for him. Next day she calls and wants to meet with me and Rothman. Seems the reunion was another shock.”
“She learned the kid wasn’t sick, never was,” I said.
“Right. She comes in; you shoulda seen her. First time she’d ever mentioned the kid to us. Apparently he’s a dead ringer for his ol’ man. She says he lied and tried to manipulate her just like R. J. did. Actually, the kid was pretty smart,” Kagan said, admiring the boy’s ingenuity.
“So she risked her family and her new life to save her long-lost child, only to find out he didn’t need saving. But now you and Rothman know her identity, she’s been sold out, and somebody wants her dead.” I imagined Kaithlin as she watched the life she had so carefully constructed start to collapse around her. She had to know the end was only a matter of time.
“Why didn’t you mention the boy to me before?” I said.
“You never know,” he said, eyes shrewd, “when this kind of information might come in handy, have some value in the future.”
Still playing every angle, I thought, still hoping to make a buck off somebody else’s misery.
“She was mad as hell that he sucked her in,” Kagan was saying. “That she bought his story in the first place.”
“When did you see her last?”
“She got real paranoid after the second meeting with me and Rothman. Said somebody had seen her and she couldn’t leave her hotel room. So I went there that night, for dinner. I was trying to salvage the situation, so to speak. You know, talk her outa doing anything crazy.”
“She was okay when you left?”
“Fit as a fiddle,” he said.
“She was killed the next morning,” I said.
He shrugged and looked innocent.
“Did she say who saw her?”
“No, but it freaked her out, big time.”
“What craziness did you try to talk her out of? Going public? Exposing you?”
“Hey, a helluva lot more than that. She was furious, hysterical, first time I saw her. The second time, she was ice cold, which in her case was a helluva lot more scary. Tell you the truth, I liked her better hysterical.”
“Scary in what way?”
He lowered his voice and leaned forward. “She figured that since we made her, the kid could do it. She was afraid he was gonna be trouble, like his old man. Woman actually asked whether we knew somebody who could get rid of the kid, for good, if he gave her any problems. She was afraid he’d show up on her doorstep in Seattle and give her a little ’splaining to do. Me and Rothman, we couldn’t believe what we were hearing. We just looked at each other.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Hell, even I’ve got scruples.”
“Could have fooled me,” I said bitterly, wondering whether to believe him.
“Hey!” His lips curled defensively. “Everybody hates criminal defense lawyers until they need one. This ain’t the first time one of my own clients scared the shit outa me.” He pushed up from his chair so hard it bounced off the wall. “That broad,” he said, pointing his finger at me and pacing the room, “had a history, a track record of making bad things happen, and she had a helluva lot to lose.” He paused, arms folded. “If she could consider putting out a hit on her own kid, who’s to say what else she coulda done? Coulda decided to whack us too. She’d be home free.”
I almost laughed. The man’s cash cow had turned on him, baring its teeth. Was he claiming self-defense? “How was she,” I said pointedly, “when you left her that night?”
“Not bad.” He sat on the edge of his desk. “Good, in fact. She’d quit talking about the kid being a threat, seemed better than I’d seen her. Relaxed. Maybe it was Prozac, or she got her PMS under control, or something. Seemed like she’d adjusted. She was feeling better, even smiling. So was I. She was upbeat when I left.”
“You knew Rothman sold her out to R. J., told him where she was?”
“He did that?” Kagan’s eyes narrowed in what appeared to be genuine surprise. “How much did the son-of-a-bitch get?”
“Ask him,” I said, shrugging. His indignation was probably only because Rothman beat him to it.
“You try to be a nice guy,” he said bitterly, “thro
w a little business somebody’s way, and he gets greedy and blows things for you.”
“Yeah, life’s a bitch,” I said, “and then you die. Who killed her, Kagan?”
He contemplated his expensive Italian leather shoes. “I’d say R. J. had a helluva motive; maybe Rothman wanted to shut her face. Who knows?”
How much of what he said was true? I wondered, as I drove back to the paper. Faced with the prospect of endless blackmail, Kaithlin may have threatened to expose him. The statute of limitations had lapsed long ago on any crime she might have committed. All she wanted was to protect her marriage, her family.
Repairmen in the lobby were working on the stalled elevator. The other worked fine, though my stomach flipflopped as I stepped inside.
Fred waited in the newsroom. “Just what exactly happened in the elevator last night?” He studied me quizzically.
“You don’t want all the details, trust me,” I said.
“The fire department did thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the doors of the damn thing.”
“Put it on my expense account,” I said.
“Well, tell me one thing,” he demanded. “What were you and this pregnant woman doing in the newsroom after midnight?”
I explained.
“Are the mother and child in good health?”
“Fine.” I dug out my photos. “That damn elevator never should have been the only one in use overnight. Everybody’s complained about it.”
He nodded solemnly as I showed off my favorite: Rooney Jr., his face in a pout, tiny fists clenched.
“We should send flowers,” he said, studying the photo.
“That would be nice,” I said. “Diapers would be better.”
Angel got flowers. I got a call from Zachary Marsh.
“Guess who I saw out there today?” he greeted me.
“Me?” I said, resigned.
“You’ve got it,” he chortled. “Is that a new boyfriend, the dead woman’s husband, or both?”
“Not funny, Zack. You saw the poor guy.”
“I’m looking at him right now.”
“What?”
“I developed the pictures. The sequence with the roses is very touching. You look a bit tired, though.”
“I was, and I am. Had a rough night.”
“Tell me about it.” He sounded eager.
“I will,” I promised, and relaxed for a moment.
“You’d enjoy the story. It has a happy ending. But right now I have to work. I’ll tell you all about it later.”
I rang Eunice and lied to her housekeeper. She put me right through after I identified myself as the paper’s fashion editor.
“I thought this was Helen,” Eunice sputtered, annoyed that it was me.
“I’m sorry,” I lied again. “The person who answered must have misunderstood. I have a question about Kaithlin.”
“I—am—so—tired—of—her,” Eunice enunciated succinctly. “Even dead, she never goes away.”
“I can understand your feelings after all you’ve been through.”
“She’s still all R. J. talks about. Now this dreadful scandal, him wanting to claim that woman’s body.” Her voice became self-pitying. “It’s going to be in the newspaper, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “It’s a matter of public record. I can imagine how embarrassed you are. You did everything a mother could do. You even tried to find her, to save your son, after Mr. Rothman, that detective, gave you the information that Kaithlin was alive in Miami.”
“That awful little man,” she hissed. “I never had to deal with people like him in my entire life.”
“He is sleazy,” I agreed. “What did you do after he told you where she was?”
“Well.” She hesitated. “Before making a fuss and looking the fool, I had to see for myself whether it was really Kaithlin. I didn’t know if it was true or some scheme that horrible little man had cooked up with R. J. I thought she’d been dead all these years. So I went to the hotel where he claimed she was staying.”
“The day after you got the information?” I said.
“Correct. I sat in that lobby, all day long, just watching, to see if she was really there. I never even had lunch. Hardly went to the powder room. Just waited and watched.”
“Did you see her?”
She paused. “I caught a glimpse of someone I thought might be her, but only for a split second. Then she was gone. I couldn’t be sure.”
“Did that person see you?”
“She might have. I’m not sure.”
She was the reason Kaithlin holed up in her room, I thought. The reason she had met with Kagan there that night.
“I returned in a day or two,” Eunice said, “with an old photo of Kaithlin that I’d managed to find. A hotel employee said she looked familiar but must have checked out.”
She had. By then, Kaithlin lay unclaimed at the morgue.
Eunice’s halfhearted detective work suggested that she might have feared the information was accurate. Maybe she really didn’t relish the prospect of R. J. coming home. Maybe she wouldn’t mind sending him back.
“I know he’s your son, and you love him,” I said gently. “But do you think he might have hired someone to kill her? Did he ask you to do something like that?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. “The stupid fool is still obsessed by her. And he knows better than to ask me to become involved in anything so unsavory.”
A hearing into the legal tug-of-war over Kaithlin’s corpse had been set for later in the week. I had nearly finished the story when Fitzgerald called.
“I’ve got somebody here who wants to talk to you,” he said, over the sound of music. The background noises were too loud and happy to be anywhere but a bar.
“Who?”
“Hey, kid.”
“Emery, what’s up?”
“You ain’t gonna believe this, kid. We’re celebrating,” he said jubilantly. “The Jordan case. Finito. It’s all wrapped up. You can’t write nothing yet, you have to wait till we talk to the M.E. tomorrow. But the case? It’s solved.”
20
“What do you mean, suicide? That’s impossible.”
“Nope,” he said. “The FBI came through, God bless ’em. Their lab and ESDA, short for Electrostatic Detection Apparatus. Size of a fax machine. Amazing. They re-created what she wrote on that legal pad in the hotel room. Definitely a suicide note.”
“To whom?”
“The husband, Broussard. Who else?”
“But he never—”
“Evidently he ain’t picking up his mail these days. Here, listen to this, kid. Hey, Dennis, hand me the file. Okay,” he said. “Get this.”
I took notes as he read.
“Darling Pres,
“When you read this I will be dead. My morning swim, my love, is to where the horizon meets the sky. I won’t be back. I don’t know whether I’ll be found or not but, rest assured, I am gone and at peace. I love you and the girls too much to burden you with ancient history. I tried to protect our life together, yet follow my conscience to atone in some way for past mistakes. Instead I made a far bigger mistake, one that has trapped me between my ugly past and uglier people. My life has come apart with no way out.
“I could never look in your face again, once you knew my story. I know the value you place on truth, and I couldn’t bear to see you turn away. Here is one absolute truth: You were my final reprieve in a life gone wrong. Unfortunately, the past hounds us to our graves and beyond. Believe that I never intended to hurt anyone, especially you and the girls, the lights of my life. That’s why this is going to your office, so it won’t fall into the wrong little hands at home.
“We were so lucky! How many people ever share such a wondrous ten years? What a blessing that I found you when I did. You saved me. It was you and no other. Please don’t hate me.
“Love forever,
“Shannon.”
“Now,” Emery said. “Does that, or d
oes it not, sound like a suicide note?”
“But what about the medical examiner? The injuries he saw? He ruled it a homicide.”
“Some of them mighta been what I thought in the first place,” he said, “inflicted by sea life, from being dragged along the bottom by the tide; maybe some were even self-inflicted or she got banged up in a little scuffle she mighta had with somebody. They were all minor.”
“She did quarrel with Kagan and maybe even Rothman,” I said doubtfully. “You know, that private detective?”
“See?” he crowed. “The chief M.E. is good, but the guys in that office, they’ve been wrong before. Ain’t the first time, won’t be the last. That’s what I got to meet with him about. I’m gonna ask him, in light of this, to take another look at her and reclassify it as a suicide. This also explains why she cut the labels out of her clothes and stripped the tags off her luggage. Out-of-town suicides do that all the time to conceal their identities.”
“You’re sure she wrote it?” I said doubtfully.
“Gonna have a handwriting expert take a look,” he said, “but the signature looks identical on the copies of her checks and whatnot that we got from Preston Broussard. And there’s that line from her wedding ring. You know, that ‘you and no other’ crap. That’s her talking. She wrote it. I caught a break for a change. Maybe my luck is changing. God love the FBI. The only person happier than I am to get this monkey off my back is the chief. This brings down our murder rate and closes the case without a three-ring circus in court. Perfect.”
“It is pretty damn neat,” I agreed. It explained why Kaithlin didn’t run after seeing Eunice lurking in the lobby. She’d given up. She didn’t intend to run anymore. “You’re sure?”
“Think I’d close it if I wasn’t?”
“But Kagan was with her that last night,” I protested. “He’s the one who had dinner with her in her room. He just admitted it. Said she was in good spirits, better than she had been.”
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