by Sandra Brown
Ariel was only two years older than Josh, but as she came out of the bedroom dressed in an oversized T-shirt, her long hair held away from her face by barrettes, she looked several years younger than he. Her legs and feet were bare. “Did you order some dessert?”
Jackson always taunted her about her overactive sweet tooth and never let her indulge it without hassling her. “Chocolate layer cake,” Josh told her.
“Yummy.”
“Ariel?”
“Hmm?”
He waited until she turned to face him. “Only a few hours ago, you discovered your husband’s body.”
“Are you trying to spoil my appetite?”
“I guess I am. Aren’t you the least bit upset?”
Her expression turned sulky and self-defensive. “You know how much I cried earlier.”
Josh laughed without humor. “You’ve been crying on cue ever since that night you came to Daddy with a special prayer request for your little brother after he’d received a life sentence. You wrenched Daddy’s heart and sang on his podium at the very next service.
“I’ve seen you be very effective with your tears. Others might mistake them as genuine, but I know better. You use them when it’s convenient or when you want something. Never because you’re sad. You’re too selfish ever to feel sad. Angry and frustrated and jealous, maybe, but never sad.”
Ariel had lost a lot of weight since marrying Josh’s father three years earlier. Then she’d been rather plump. Her breasts were smaller now, but the areolas were still wide and the nipples large and protrudent. Josh hated himself for noticing them beneath her soft cotton T-shirt as she propped her hands on her hips.
“Jackson Wilde was a mean-spirited, spiteful, self-centered son of a bitch.” Her blue eyes didn’t blink once. “His death isn’t going to spoil my appetite because I’m not sorry he’s dead. Except for how it might effect the ministry.”
“And you took care of that during the press conference.”
“That’s right, Josh. I’ve already laid the groundwork for continuing the ministry. Somebody around here should be thinking about the future,” she added snidely.
As though suffering a splitting headache, Josh pressed the tips of his long, slender, musician’s fingers against his hairline and squeezed his eyes shut. “Christ, you’re cold. Always scheming. Always planning. Relentless.”
“Because I’ve always had to be. I didn’t grow up rich like you, Josh. You call your grandparents’ place outside of Nashville a farm,” She scoffed. “My family had a real farm. It was dirty and stank of manure. I didn’t help groom fancy horses like you did only when you felt like it. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to weed the vegetable garden and shell peas and slop a hog so he’d be fat in November when we butchered him.
“I only owned one pair of shoes at a time. The girls at school laughed at me for wearing hand-me-downs. And from the time I was twelve, I had to ward off the groping hands of drunken uncles on Saturday nights, then look into their smug faces from the choir loft on Sunday mornings. Oh, yes, we always went to church on Sundays and listened to sermons that glorified poverty. But I never believed a word of it.”
She shook her long, straight, platinum-blond hair. “I’ve been poor, Josh. And poor sucks. It makes you mean. It makes you desperate. You reach a point where you’ll do anything to escape it. That’s why my little brother is in prison for the rest of his life. After he got sent up, I knew I had to do something drastic or wind up worse off than he is. So, yes, I cried for your daddy. And if he’d asked me to wipe his butt or give him a blow job on the spot, I would have done that, too.
“I learned from him that money makes all the difference. Being rich and mean is a whole lot better than being poor and mean. When you’re poor, you go to jail for your meanness, but if you’re rich, you can do what you please and nobody can touch you. I’m a schemer, all right. I will be for the rest of my life because I’m never going to be poor again.”
She paused to take a breath. “Don’t try to tell me you’re sorry he’s gone, Josh. You hated him as much as I did, if not more.”
He couldn’t quite meet her direct gaze. “I guess my feelings could be classified as ambivalent. I don’t feel any remorse. But I don’t feel relieved, as I imagined I would.”
She moved toward him and slid her arms around his neck. “Don’t you see, Josh? If we play it smart, this can be a beginning for us. The public loves us. We can go on as before, except that life will be so much better without him harping on us all the time.”
“Do you really think our adoring public will accept us as a couple, Ariel?” He smiled wanly over her naïveté. Or was it her rapacity that amused him?
He couldn’t hold any of it against her, really. She had not had the advantages he’d grown up with and taken for granted. Even before Jackson Wilde had become a household word, he’d had a faithful and generous following. The offering plates were always full. In addition to Martha’s inheritance, it amounted to a sizable income. Josh had never lacked for anything material.
The first time he’d seen Ariel, she was wearing a cheap, loud dress and too much costume jewelry. Her speech and crude accent had been offensive to his ears. Even so, he’d admired the audacity it had taken for her to approach his father and solicit prayers for her convicted brother.
Today she was slim, articulate, and immaculately groomed. But Josh knew that when she looked into the mirror Ariel still saw a plump, disheveled, desperate young woman making a last-ditch effort to alter the course of her life. When she gazed at her manicured hands, she saw garden dirt beneath her fingernails.
“The public will accept our new relationship in time,” she was saying, “if we bring the Lord into it often enough. We can say we fought our romantic love for each other because it didn’t seem right. But then through prayer and Bible study, God convinced us that it had been His will all along. They’ll eat it up. Everybody loves a happy ending.” She kissed his lips softly, teasingly, releasing a slender thread of her breath into his mouth. “I need you now, Josh.”
He shut his eyes tightly, trying valiantly to ward off the lust that was gathering in his center. “Ariel, we shouldn’t be together for a while. They’ll think—”
She moved closer, bumping his pelvis with her own. “Who’ll think what?”
“The police… that Mr. Cassidy from the D.A.’s office. We’re bound to be suspects.”
“Don’t be silly, Josh. We have each other for our alibis, remember?”
Her nonchalance was exasperating, but his attraction to her was based on frustration and forbiddenness. Rather than shaking her, as he felt like doing, he slipped his hands beneath her T-shirt and clasped her around the waist, pulling her roughly against him. His lips ground over hers. He pressed his tongue into her eager, wet mouth while the heels of his hands caressed her pelvic bones.
His sex was swollen and hot. He was impatient with his clothing. But as he went for his zipper there was a knock at the door.
“That’ll be our lunch.” Ariel sighed. She kissed him one final time, brushed her hand across his distended fly, then drifted out of his arms. “Have the waiter bring the tray into the bedroom. We’ll eat first.”
“Cassidy?”
“Here.” He juggled the telephone receiver while trying to depress the volume button on the remote control and keep from dropping his bologna sandwich and his beer.
“It’s Glenn. I’ve been officially assigned to the Wilde case.”
Good, Cassidy thought, Crowder had come through. Detective Howard Glenn would be the point person, or the main liaison between him and the police department. Once Glenn selected his platoon of officers to investigate the case, he, Cassidy, would be constantly apprised of developments.
He knew that Glenn was difficult to work with. He was a slob, untidy in every respect—except his detective work. But Cassidy was willing to overlook Glenn’s character flaws in exchange for his competence.
“Got anything?” he asked, setting aside
the tasteless sandwich.
“The lab report’s back. We’re going through it now.”
“How’s it look?”
“No prints other than his, his old lady’s, and the housekeeper in charge of the suite. Course, we’ve got hundreds of partials that belong to the people who stayed in that suite before him.”
Although Cassidy had figured as much, it was still dismal news. “Any sign of a weapon?”
“Zilch. Whoever walked into Wilde’s suite and offed him walked out with the gun.”
The lack of a murder weapon was going to make solving this case and getting a conviction a real challenge. Luckily Cassidy liked challenges, the harder the better.
“How soon could you get a few phone taps in place?” he asked the detective.
“First thing tomorrow. Who else besides the wife and son?”
“We’ll discuss it in the morning. Stay in touch.”
He hung up, took another bite of his sandwich, another swig of tepid beer, and returned his attention to the television set. Earlier, he had called the cable station that aired Jackson Wilde’s Prayer and Praise Hour and asked for copies of all available tapes. The station management had promptly delivered the tapes to his office. He’d then brought them home, where he could watch them without interruption.
The programs were slickly produced. Wilde put on a dazzling show, complete with flying white doves, an orchestra, a five-hundred-voice choir, a gold leaf pulpit, and Joshua’s mirrored piano, which resembled the one once owned by the late Liberace.
The format never varied. The program opened with a trumpet blast loud enough to herald the Second Coming. The choir broke into song, the doves were released with a flurry of white wings, and Wilde descended a curved staircase as though he’d just wrapped up a visit with the Almighty, which is exactly what he intimated in his opening remarks.
Ariel, always dressed in pristine white, her only jewelry a simple gold wedding band and a pair of discreet pearl earrings—Wilde stressed that the only treasures they stockpiled were their spiritual rewards—was introduced with the trilling of trumpets in the background. Then the audience got a close-up of Joshua Wilde as he played the introduction to Ariel’s first song.
Her singing voice, marginal at best, was greatly enhanced by the orchestra, the choir, and a sound system whose staggering cost would have made a large dent in the national debt. Ariel threw beatific smiles toward her husband, toward Josh, toward the audience, and toward heaven. Invariably, by the end of the song, at least one eloquent, glistening tear had spilled from her celestial blue eyes.
Cassidy was a skeptic by nature and rarely took anything at face value. Generously allowing for that, he still couldn’t understand how anyone of reasonable intelligence could fall for Wilde’s glitzy sideshow. His sermons were gross distortions of the gospel. He preached much more vehemently about admonition than grace, more about condemnation than love, more about hellfire than forgiveness. More was said of Satan than of Christ. It was easy to see why he was held in such contempt by clergymen of most organized Christian sects.
It was also plain to Cassidy how Wilde was able to induce such fanaticism in his narrow-minded followers. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear: that they were right and anyone who disagreed with their opinion was wrong. Of course, God was always on their side.
After viewing the tapes several times, making notes as he watched, Cassidy switched off the set and headed for his bedroom. An inventory of clean shirts and shorts revealed that he could go another couple of days before a trip to the laundry.
When he was married, Kris had taken care of his wardrobe, just as she had kept the house, done the shopping, and cooked their meals. The divorce hadn’t come about because she was negligent. And by most standards, he would have been judged a fairly good husband. He always remembered anniversaries and birthdays. He had a sixth sense that told him when sex was out of the question and on those nights he refrained from asking.
The dissolution of their four-year marriage could be blamed more on apathy than on animosity. It had cracked under external pressure, and their love for one another hadn’t been strong enough to hold things together. Kris hadn’t even wanted to discuss relocating, and, after a pivotal incident that had unbalanced his perfectly balanced life, he’d been adamant on relocating.
When word reached him of an opening in the Orleans Parish, Louisiana, D.A.’s office, he applied for the job and a divorce on the same day. The last he’d heard of Kris, she was still living in Louisville, happily remarried and pregnant with a second child. He wished her every happiness. It certainly wasn’t her fault that his work had been more important to him than she had been and that when his career went awry, he’d had to reevaluate everything in his life, including their marriage.
In some respects, he was still shackled to his past mistakes. He’d been hacking away at those problems for five years and wasn’t yet completely free of them. He might never be. But his marriage wasn’t a link in those chains. It had been a clean, unemotional break. The only time he thought of his former wife was when he needed sex very badly and no one was available or when he was out of clean shirts. That wasn’t fair to Kris. She deserved better than that. But that’s the way it was.
He stripped and got into bed, but his mind was too preoccupied to settle into sleep. He realized, to his surprise, that he was also semierect. Lust for a woman hadn’t caused it. It was residual excitement looking for an outlet. He was supercharged, mentally and physically.
As he lay there, sleepless, he reviewed the facts of the Wilde case, acknowledging that there were damned few of them. All he knew for certain was that it was going to be a difficult, jealous bitch of a case that would consume his life for months, if not years.
Undaunted by the prospect of that, he was itching to get started. He’d overseen the writing and issuance of the press release that gave an account of the murder. It was now a matter of record that he would be heading the investigation and prosecuting the case when it came to trial. He’d asked for the opportunity and it had been granted. He couldn’t blow it. He had to prove to Crowder that his trust wasn’t misplaced.
Cassidy also had to prove it to himself.
Chapter Three
The building was located on North Peters Street, one block from where it merged with Decatur. It was last in a row of scarred brick warehouses that had thus far withstood the path of progress in this old industrial district of the French Quarter. Most of the buildings, including the nearby Jax Brewery, had been gutted and redeveloped into fashionable eateries and shopping malls.
The renovation had resulted in a discordant blending of authentic New Orleans with crass commercialism. The old-timers, who wished to preserve the mystic atmosphere of the Vieux Carré, considered such commercialization an abomination, a desecration of the district’s uniqueness. Those who clung to it did so with tenacity and defiance, as the facade of French Silk evinced.
The ancient bricks had been painted white, although the side of the building that was exposed to the intersecting street bore the cruel marks of age. In keeping with Creole architecture, there were glossy black shutters on all the windows. Black grillwork simulating balconies had been added to the second and third floors. Above the entrance, suspended from twin black chains, was a discreet sign bearing the name of the business written in cursive.
Cassidy soon discovered, however, that the front door was also a facade and that the real entrance to the warehouse was a heavy metal door on the Conti Street side of the building. He depressed the button and heard a loud school bell ringing inside. A few seconds later the door was opened.
“What do you want?” The woman who confronted him was built like a stevedore. RALPH, spelled out in blue letters and centered in a red heart, had been tattooed on her forearm. Her upper lip was beaded with perspiration that clung to the hairs of a faint mustache. She looked no more like she belonged in a lingerie factory than a linebacker did at a debutante ball. Cassidy’s heart went out to Ra
lph.
“My name is Cassidy. Are you Claire Laurent?”
She uttered a sound like a foghorn. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No. I’m looking for Claire Laurent. Is she here?”
She gave him a suspicious once-over. “Just a minute.” Propping the door open with her foot, she picked up a wall-mounted telephone and pressed two digits on the panel. “There’s a guy here to see Ms. Laurent. Kennedy somebody.”
“Cassidy,” he corrected with a polite smile. He was no Schwarzenegger, but he could hold his own in an ordinary brawl. Still, he’d hate to tangle with this Tugboat Annie.
She glared at Cassidy while waiting for further instructions. Cupping the mouthpiece of the telephone, she spat past his shoulder. Finally she listened, then said to him, “Ms. Laurent wants to know what about.”
“I’m from the district attorney’s office.” He removed the leather folder from his breast pocket and flipped it open to show her his ID.
That won him another glare and a slow, distrustful once-over. “He’s from the district attorney’s office.” After a moment she hung up the telephone. “This way.” She didn’t looked pleased about her boss’s decision to see him. Her rubber soles struck the concrete floor like each footfall might have a cockroach beneath it. She led him past row upon row of boxed goods that were being labeled and loaded for shipping.
Large fans mounted in the walls at ceiling level were blowing hard and noisily. But they succeeded only in circulating warm, humid air. Their blades interrupted the sunlight streaming in, creating an effect like a strobe and lending a surreal atmosphere to the warehouse.
Cassidy felt a trickle of sweat running down his side and forgave the woman her sweating upper lip. He shrugged off his suit jacket and held it over his shoulder. Then he loosened the knot of his necktie. As he moved across the warehouse, he noticed that it was spotlessly clean and highly organized. The busy workers, seemingly unaffected by the heat, chatted happily among themselves. A few glanced curiously at him, but none had glared at him like Tugboat. He supposed that suspicion was the nature of her job, which was obviously to keep out the scumbags and undesirables like himself.