Greg Hitchcock went up and said a few words about how wonderful it had been to know Courtney, what a great help she’d been at the Financial Counseling Center. I could tell he meant to talk about her as though she were the cute high schooler who’d come in to tidy up the office once in a while, but some of the words he used—darling, sweet, loving, attentive—combined to give an overall impression that he liked her in a whole different kind of way.
People always give away their secrets in what they say.
Micah went up to the podium and spoke. He droned on at some length about what Courtney had been like while they were making Girls Becoming Stars. He told an embarrassing anecdote about how she’d fawned over some guy thinking he was a movie producer. Then he exhorted us all to watch the reunion show “for Courtney.”
It’s never too early to work the promotion for your TV show, I guess.
In a surprise twist, Randi went up to speak. She talked about how close she and Courtney had been, how they’d both been nice church-going girls blah blah blah. It was all completely sincere and yet totally Hollywood fake at the same time. Randi was a survivor, with Sir Gareth Macfadyen at her side or not. She had a long and storied career ahead of her in Hollywood.
Then she looked at me. “Drusilla, you were close to Courtney. Would you like to say a few words?”
I made a note to avoid getting someone who didn’t like me dumped right before a funeral service. Payback’s a bitch.
Lots of the people present turned around to look at me.
I looked at Stevie. “What do I do?”
She gave me a tiny smile. “Do you know anything about Courtney other people don’t?”
Thanks for the lack of help on that, sweetie, I thought. I patted her hand and then walked to the front of the room.
As I walked the thirty feet to the podium, I wondered if I should try to be funny. Or sentimental. If there’s one time you have free reign to be sentimental or even outright maudlin, a funeral service is it. Or I could try to go against the grain and talk about what a pain in the ass she’d been in the short time I’d known her.
Something other people don’t know about Courtney.
Normally I’m good at making stuff up on the fly, but I was out of words. My fingertips slid along the oak base of the podium. The papers there were probably what Pastor Janek had read from during his statement. I tapped them for a bit and wondered what my sister had meant by what she said.
The hundred or so people present were all staring at me, wondering who I was. Greg Hitchcock had his arms crossed and he was glaring at me. Like I was going to say anything about his proclivities here and now—despite the vast majority of the behavior my parents taught me, they did teach me better than that.
Randi’s mouth was screwed up in a wry smirk, like she was waiting for me to make a terrible mistake
She wasn’t at all worried about what I might say. Interesting.
Micah also had his arms folded, his hands practically at his shoulders, giving himself a tight embrace. Maybe he was worried I was going to have another chat with him.
Detective Gruen’s gaze was directly on me, arms folded across his chest. Detective Vilar, next to him, had his hands in his pockets, watching the parishioners.
“I didn’t know Courtney very well.” That wasn’t a great start. The second sentence didn’t simply flow out from the first one. “I only met her during the last week of her life. My biggest connection with her is quite strange, actually. I was with her when she was murdered—”
And that was all I needed to say. Stevie had been absolutely right. I did know something other people didn’t.
The shooter had seen me, clearly lighted inside the motel room. I had had trouble seeing the shooter. I couldn’t tell for certain whether it was a man or a woman. Men tend to have bigger upper bodies that narrow to the hips. Women tend to be fuller below the waist or curvier all over. But there are always the ones, both male and female, who have slighter bodies, with less variation between the upper and lower bodies.
The shooter had a slender body, straight up and down.
Everything that had happened in Courtney’s motel room had happened so fast. It was serendipity I had noticed anyone outside the window at all.
The shooter had most definitely noticed me. There was no way he couldn’t have.
He must have assumed I could see him as well. And then every time we talked after Courtney’s murder I hadn’t said anything.
Had Stevie figured that out? Or was this what she’d call divine intervention? I wondered.
Because the revelation that I was the only witness to Courtney’s murder was a huge surprise to everyone in the church. Except, of course, the only person in the church who knew I’d been there. Because I’d been clearly visible through the window.
Greg Hitchcock lurched forward.
Randi’s smirk faded away.
Micah’s eyes widened.
Alison put her hand over her mouth and hugged her daughter just a little tighter.
Even the detectives at the back of the room moved, startled that I would reveal that in public.
Jonathan Ricciardi, though, barely reacted.
* * *
I finished with some kind of summary -- I probably babbled incoherently, although a childhood spent giving impromptu displays of precocious cheek at your parents’ cocktail parties does provide some training—and immediately returned to Stevie, who put her hand over mine. My sister leaned in. “What did you see?” Stevie asked.
“Something I didn’t want to,” I told her. “People have facets. You were right. How did you know?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. But I thought maybe you might.”
Pastor Janek hurriedly finished up and asked us all to join him for refreshments in the parlor. Everyone left the assembly room politely, although with heads together and a rising murmur. Stevie and I tucked our ankles beneath our seats and let others in the pew pass by us. A couple of people stopped to console me—or ask for gossip, same thing—but I shook my head and refused to speak with them.
When it seemed as though everyone else had left, I finally exited the pew, Stevie behind me.
Detective Gruen blocked my path. “Tell me what you remembered from that night.”
“Don’t you have a job to do, Detective?”
He stalked past me, not giving me a second thought. We were never going to meet up for that second drink. Tant pis. Just as well, really. It wasn’t like I needed a boyfriend at this point in my life anyhow. I was having a hard enough time holding on to my fake boyfriend.
Was there alcohol at the reception? I wondered.
Stevie and I walked out into the foyer, which was now opened onto the side room, forming the reception area. Everyone noticed when we joined the party, either by staring at us and whispering or by pointedly not looking in our direction.
Jonathan and Alison were standing by the table with the platter of freshly cut fruit. Alison carried Hailey and the little girl had her arm slung around her mother’s shoulders. Jonathan kept glancing over at me, perhaps wondering what I was going to do. Or say. Alison definitely knew he’d done it. I wondered if they’d talked about it openly, or if it was one of those things married couples accept as given.
Greg Hitchcock walked over to Jonathan, who was getting more upset every step I took toward them. Hitchcock reached out to touch Hailey on the back of her head, even as Alison hugged the baby to her tighter.
Courtney told Micah she wanted to change her story: the young mother in Oklahoma. She was going to need to produce the baby to prove it, of course. And then Sabo expected they were going to leave and go play happy families somewhere.
The afternoon that I met Hitchcock, Courtney had stopped by the preschool, which she’d done all that week. She’d mentioned Hailey directly to Jonathan. Then Hitchcock left with Courtney to drive her back to her motel. Did Jonathan worry that Hitchcock was going to try to help Courtney take Hailey back? After all, Hitchcock had a
fairly large club to wield over Jonathan—the financial house of cards Jonathan had signed off on. Plus, Hitchcock thought he was the baby’s father. While he clearly didn’t want to acknowledge paternity, some men just get a kick out of thinking that the kid is theirs to do with as they please.
Was Jonathan hoping to find both of them in that motel room? Take both of them out, end all of his problems at once?
“What are you going to do?” Stevie said. “What will you say?”
I shook my head. “What is there to say? Where is the proof? I’m exactly as certain of who did it as I was ten minutes ago.”
A woman standing next to me said, “You know who killed Courtney?”
The conversation near us cut off abruptly. Jonathan and Hitchcock, standing as far away as they were, simply stopped talking and looked at us. This was, after all, exactly what everyone expected from me after my little performance in the church.
I shook my head. “No, absolutely not. I don’t know who killed her.”
Probably no one else heard Gruen’s snort of disagreement over the murmuring of the crowd.
I looked at Jonathan. He waited for me to say something. He’d been waiting for it since the day I showed up at his doorstep, thinking I was going to point the finger at him.
Instead, I pointed at the meeting room we’d all just left. “You need help cleaning up in there?”
After a second’s hesitation, he nodded. We walked together, quietly, back in.
Gruen was going to know what to do with that, even if he didn’t know how to prove it.
We started picking up the leaflets, which most people had left there. A couple of tissues.
“You want to talk about it?” I said.
“What Greg was doing...I knew where it was going to lead. I was trying to leave.”
“Where what was going to lead? The women at the financial center?”
Jonathan straightened a few of the chairs at the side of the room. “With the women. With the meth business. He got involved with the drugs to get the money to pay the women. I didn’t even realize what was going on at first.” He tried to laugh, but it didn’t work. “I thought we were doing really well in the middle of a recession. Took me a while to figure it out.”
“You’re the accountant. It’s your job to figure it out.”
“A lot of people kept working good jobs in the middle of a recession. We kept working. And we helped people at the counseling office, we did.”
“Except for the ones Hitchcock asked to be nice to him.”
“I didn’t know he was doing it. I knew he saw other women. But...not like that. And the center was my idea.”
“You went and got the documents when I told you about it, didn’t you? That’s the kind of thing he’d keep track of.”
He nodded.
“How many women are there?”
“Hundreds,” he whispered.
The thought of being part of a setup that took advantage of that many women...he was crumbling in front of my eyes. His shoulders were folding inward and he kept shuffling the programs he’d picked up like he was picking a card in a magic trick.
“Why’d you do it, Jonathan? Why did you kill her?”
It was like watching a carefully constructed stone facade turn out to be crêpe paper and burn up from a stray spark. Jonathan slid onto the nearest pew, dropping the pamphlets he’d picked up. The only thing holding him up was his hand, gripping on to the back of the pew in front of him. And everything he’d been holding inside came out.
“She was going to change the birth certificate. The birth certificate I signed for her. Two years ago the only thing she wanted was to destroy her baby. She was going to. She didn’t, because I said I wanted the baby and Greg was happy to pay her to go away. And then she came back and all she wanted was to destroy my family. She was going to take away the most wonderful thing Alison and I have together.”
If all Jonathan had had to deal with was Hitchcock’s predilection for sex with lots of young women, he could have handled it. If the only thing Jonathan had had to face was the connection with Sabo and the meth trade, he could have bargained a way out of it. If all he’d had to deal with was Courtney’s insane demand to take Hailey back with sole custody, he could have figured out some way of dissuading her. But the money and the drugs and Sabo and Courtney happened at once and he lost his mind.
“How did you find her?” I said.
Jonathan shook his head. “The kids at the construction site were out drinking after work, and I took one of the bikes that had been left. Easy to get the gun out of the trailer. Then I just followed Greg’s location on his phone. You must have just missed him.” He shook his head. “You weren’t supposed to be there.”
Lucky me.
Had he been hoping to find Courtney and Hitchcock there together? Two birds, a couple of bullets.
“You did the wrong thing, Jonathan.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” he yelled. I wondered if they could hear us outside. He wiped the tears that had rolled down his cheek. “I know that,” he said quietly.
“I understand why you did it. People do crazy things for people they love. And I can tell this is eating you up inside, Jonathan. You want to talk to someone and confess what you’ve done. You can’t.”
“You have no idea how this feels inside, knowing you’ve done something like that,” he said.
This wasn’t the time to explain that yes, yes I did. “Do you want Alison to keep Hailey?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Then you will shut your mouth until you get yourself a lawyer. A good one. Because how this plays out might be the difference between your wife keeping Hailey and not.”
No matter what happened to Jonathan now, he was going away for a very long time.
“I don’t hang around with lawyers,” he said.
“I do.” I took out my phone. I hit the button for one of my top three most dialed numbers.
“Please tell me this is just to wish me a happy Sunday,” Nathaniel said.
“Do you know any publicity-hungry defense lawyers who’ll work pro bono?” I said.
“Specifically?”
“Christians, sex for money, drug deals, accounting fraud, undercover cops selling meth, beautiful young women, and a baby theft.”
“So this lawyer isn’t for you, then.”
“You’re off the hook this go-round. You can marry me with a clear conscience.”
He ignored me, as usual. “I’ll call you in ten. Tell the accused not to say a word.”
I put the phone away. “He’ll call me in a few minutes. Those detectives out there are going to tell you they’re your friends. They’re not. They’re doing their jobs. So I’m going to give you a friendly piece of advice. Don’t volunteer information. Ever. I know you want to. I know you need to. You can’t.”
Finally, Jonathan nodded. I wondered if he would follow through. He was desperate to talk to someone.
A few minutes later, my phone rang. Nathaniel gave me a name and number, which I passed on to Jonathan. When Jonathan was in the midst of dialing the number, I headed back out to the foyer, where the remaining guests were standing around gossiping like their salaries depended on it. Alison stood in the center, jostling a fussy toddler and ignoring Greg Hitchcock, who kept trying to talk to her. I walked straight to her.
“You should probably go wait with your husband,” I told her. “Tell him to follow my advice, no matter what the gorgeous detective says to either of you. No matter what. No matter what you think or believe is the right thing to do, tell him to do the smart thing. Especially if you want to keep this one.”
Alison looked at me, and only then did I realize her eyes were brown, like Hailey’s. No one was ever going to doubt that girl was theirs, except for Courtney. Yes, Hailey wasn’t biologically theirs, but biology isn’t the most important thing in a family. And a mother who was right there was better than an unknown arrangement with people she’d never met.
&n
bsp; Alison hurried to join her husband in the church. Hailey, looking over her shoulder, waved at me.
Someone’s hand landed on my upper arm. I turned, expecting to find Gruen. Or even Greg Hitchcock. It was Micah Schlegel.
“Hey,” he said. He waved a form in the air. “You didn’t sign this.” It was the broadcast and likeness release form.
“And I’m not going to,” I said.
“The production company only pays a small fee for promotional—” he said.
“You don’t have my permission. You don’t have my sister’s permission. Sorry. This memorial service is not going to be part of your tacky little reality TV spectacular.”
He stepped in front of me. Micah was territorial when it came to protecting his little show. “You can’t do this.”
I smiled. “Watch me. I have better lawyers than you do, Micah, so don’t even think about leaking this video footage anywhere.”
The look of shock on the producer’s face at my refusal to parlay the discovery of Courtney’s killer into a newsworthy event was hilarious and sad, all at the same time.
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Think of it this way, Micah. You can interview yourself for the show. Turn yourself into a TV star.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
JONATHAN RICCIARDI WAS arrested for murder and accounting fraud. The charges were somewhat mitigated by the fact that he’d been trying to blow the whistle on what Greg Hitchcock was up to. He had a really good lawyer, albeit one who wanted to be on the evening news every night. The murder charges were reduced, provided he testified against everyone, which he did.
Greg Hitchcock was arrested and charged with accounting fraud, embezzlement, solicitation, possession of narcotics with intent to distribute, actual distribution of narcotics, and several counts of inciting other people to break the law. The name of his lawyer meant nothing to me. Nathaniel rolled his eyes when I asked, but he refused to say his opinion of his colleague out loud.
Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) Page 24