“How did Richard know?”
“I told him, of course. Richard was quick, but he didn’t have much of an eye for detail. He would never have figured it all out on his own. So I gave him a little help.”
“But—I don’t understand. Why would you tell Richard?” I let my eyelids flutter with exhaustion.
“Well, you knew Richard. He had an appetite for sordid activities that I just didn’t share. And somebody had to punish Jacob. I couldn’t have him making a fool of me, chasing after women half his age, for all the world to see. And now, to be taking up with the daughter of my best friend—it was just too much. It was much easier to let Richard take care of everything.”
I let the opportunity pass to point out just how sordid her activities had been of late. “I’m confused. You encouraged Richard to blackmail your husband?”
She nodded. “My one mistake was that I didn’t realize the direction in which Richard would take the information. I assumed he’d simply blackmail Jacob for money and make him miserable and scared. I didn’t expect that he’d blackmail us all for Emma’s hand in marriage, that he’d try to use us all in every possible way. And I surely didn’t realize how attached Emma was to her father and what she would agree to on his behalf. It is unfortunate that Emma takes after him in all the wrong ways. I never expected her to be so stubborn. At least she takes after me in the looks department.”
“So…then you had to kill Richard?” I asked. My voice sounded like it was coming from far away.
Lily laughed, a gay tinkling sound. I was reminded of the way Nick Carraway had described Daisy’s laugh in The Great Gatsby. “I wasn’t left with a choice, really. I couldn’t let Emma marry that appalling excuse for a man. And how better to get back at Jacob for all of the crap he pulled? Oh, it makes me so angry. He loves showing off his society wife to all of his low-class, trashy art world parvenus. Having it both ways. Being Mr. Artsy but having all of my connections and position.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Furlong, but I still don’t understand. How could murdering Richard get back at Jacob?”
“Why, he was supposed to take the blame. Obviously. I’d nicely set everything up so that all of the evidence would point to him. It was really quite clever, actually.” The pride in her voice was tangible. Not that clever, I wanted to point out, since the police arrested Emma instead.
“How? How did you set him up?”
“Well, I arranged to meet Richard out by the pool for a late night tête-à-tête. I sent him a note, pretending it was from Emma. Of course, he was a bit surprised to see me, but I handed him a drink with enough of Jacob’s tranquilizers diluted in it to kill a horse, and he drank it down like a good boy. Both that glass and the other glass, the one that I pretended to drink out of, had Jacob’s fingerprints all over them. Richard was a little confused that I was wearing gloves, but I explained to him all about what a wonderfully rejuvenating treatment it is to cream your hands and then put on cotton gloves to trap in the moisture. It really does do miracles to soften the skin. Have you ever tried it, darling?” She held up her hands to show me how young they looked.
With a flash of understanding, I realized what the remaining loose end that had been nagging at me was.
The two glasses that Luisa and Hilary had cleaned up. Leaving the glasses by Richard’s body, with the evidence they undoubtedly held, was a grave mistake for a murderer to make—and you didn’t have to be an avid watcher of Law & Order to know that. But Lily hadn’t made a mistake by leaving them there—it had been part of her plot to frame her husband instead.
She didn’t wait for me to respond or thank her for her grooming tips. “It was actually quite fun, the entire planning of it all. Much more fun than planning a silly old benefit or redoing the apartment. Although, the apartment is starting to look so dated and tired. All of that toile in the dining room is so 1997. Maybe I should just sell the apartment and start fresh. There are some lovely properties available on Fifth these days. And it’s so much nicer to look out on the park.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She seemed to have gone completely around the bend. I wondered if there were park views from any of the cells at Sing Sing. Or if Sing Sing was still in operation.
“The park is nice,” I agreed.
“Isn’t it? Anyhow, it would have all worked like a charm if someone hadn’t seen fit to mess with the crime scene. Now, I wonder who did that?” she mused.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, my words faint. “You handed Richard the materials with which to blackmail your husband to punish him for his affair with Nina.”
“Not just Nina, darling. And not just one affair, either.”
“Okay. His affairs. But when Richard used the materials to strong-arm Emma into marrying him, you killed him and tried to set it up so that Jacob would take the blame.”
“That’s right. Now, I just need to figure out how to get him back on the hook. And how I’m going to get him on the hook for doing this to you, as well. Do you have any ideas? Oh, probably not. You must be feeling quite tired at this point.”
“I am a bit sleepy,” I admitted.
“You were always such an intelligent girl, weren’t you? We’ll miss you here next summer. But you just know too much. It’s such a pity.”
I nodded and let my eyes slowly drift shut.
CHAPTER 34
I opened my eyes just in time to see Hilary step out from behind the drapes, brandishing her tape recorder in one hand. Her endless tales of political intrigue in far-off countries could be dull at times, but for once she and her journalist’s bag of tricks came in handy.
Lily’s calm reaction seemed to demonstrate just how far gone she was. There was no panic at being caught in the middle of confessing to one crime and trying to commit another. “Why, Hilary, dear. What were you doing back there?” she asked mildly.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Furlong. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. Well, that’s not true. But I only did it to help Emma.”
I glanced at the door, where Luisa and Jane were blocking the way out.
“Did you get it all?” Luisa asked.
“I think so,” Hilary answered.
“Well done,” said Jane.
I leapt up from the sofa, and Lily gave me a confused look. “Rachel, you shouldn’t get up, darling. Why, you should be—”
“Practically dead by now?” I finished her thought for her.
“Well, yes, darling.”
“Sorry. Matthew switched the pills in your bottle of sedatives with aspirin. You laced my ginger ale with Bayer. And I do feel much better, thank you.” I didn’t point out that the aspirin helped mitigate the pain from the lump on my head, the lump that she’d given me. I should have felt triumphant that we’d outwitted her, but I felt devious and slimy. This is for Emma, I reminded myself, but that reminder didn’t seem to help.
“Oh, that’s good, darling. I mean, that’s too bad.” The calm expression on her face was giving way to confusion. “I wonder what I should do now?” She began to hum to herself, softly. I didn’t recognize the melody.
The men were waiting in the foyer as we escorted Lily downstairs. Matthew had explained everything to Jacob, who gazed at his wife with such pain in his eyes that I had to look away. Matthew didn’t look much better. No doubt he was thinking of the promise that Emma had extracted from him the previous day, that he wouldn’t say or do anything that would jeopardize her mother and his godmother.
“You’ve got the tape?” Matthew asked Hilary. She tossed it to him. “Okay, let’s get going,” he said to Jacob.
The rest of us gathered on the front step and watched as Matthew and Jacob led Lily to the old Volvo. They were going to take her into town and try to clear things up with O’Donnell. She hadn’t said a word since we’d left the study. If all went well, the lawyer Luisa had found for Emma could be engaged to help Lily instead.
Peter stood behind me, and I leaned back against his chest, letting him wrap his arms around me, appreciating their war
m comfort.
“What do you think will happen?” asked Hilary. “Will she go to prison?”
“I don’t know,” said Luisa. “I mean, she’s clearly not well. Perhaps an insanity plea of some sort?”
“Poor woman,” said Jane.
“Poor Emma,” I said. “I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive us. I can’t believe we just entrapped her mother.”
“Emma will understand,” said Jane.
“Will she?” I asked. “Even worse, how will she be able to forgive Matthew…and her father? It’s like we all ganged up against Lily, and by ganging up against her, we were ganging up against Emma.”
“It wasn’t ganging up,” said Luisa. “It was helping her.”
“You said it yourself, in your toast at the rehearsal,” said Hilary. “Sometimes she’s selfless to the point where she actually does harm to herself. And if she doesn’t understand now, one day she will.”
“We did the right thing. Really we did,” said Jane in a firm tone.
She was right, I knew. We’d taken matters into our own hands, true to the spirit, if not the letter of our long-ago pact.
I just wished it didn’t feel so empty.
EPILOGUE
I wish I could say that we all lived happily ever after, but that wouldn’t be accurate. Lily had the best criminal defense attorney money could buy, but even he couldn’t get her completely off the hook. In a rare turn of legal proceedings, the local DA allowed her to plead guilty by reason of insanity, and she was packed off to a state mental institution that was likely far less cushy than the various euphemistically named spas she’d visited during previous breakdowns.
The plea prevented the ordeal of a jury trial, but there was still an immense amount of publicity surrounding the tangle of events. After a couple of weeks, the tabloids turned to a fresh scandal, but I heard a rumor recently that Alan Dershowitz was planning a book on the topic. I doubted that Lily would be pleased to hear that she was soon to take her seat in history next to O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, although she probably wouldn’t mind the von Bulow connection. Somehow, the Furlongs managed to keep the blackmail plot out of the papers, and Jacob’s reputation remained intact—or as intact as it could be when his wife was publicly identified as mentally ill and inspired by his philandering to commit murder and frame him for the crime.
Emma remained shell-shocked for a while. She’d loathed Richard, but she still felt tremendously guilty about his death. And accepting that one’s own mother, however unstable, had killed one’s fiancé required a level of maturity that I most definitely didn’t possess. She spent the rest of the summer in her loft in New York, hiding out from the paparazzi who camped out by her door when the murder was still making headlines. I called her daily, sometimes even more, concerned about how she was doing and ashamed by my own part in proving her mother’s guilt. She’d accepted all of our apologies with an understanding grace, and for that I was grateful, but I was more anxious about her welfare than anything else. Early on, she sounded sad and dazed. As the weeks passed, however, she started to sound distracted instead. Finally, she agreed to let me come by with a picnic dinner one evening just after Labor Day.
New York City in early September was still all but unbearable. To step outside was to be sunk into a slow-moving smog of humidity and pollution that bounced off the pavements, ricocheted off the buildings, and then slowly wound its way around any life on the streets. I climbed up the four flights of stairs to Emma’s top-floor loft to find her covered with paint and surrounded by the debris of an artistic binge—empty paint tubes, soiled brushes, discarded pizza boxes and the like. The trouble she’d been having with her work since Richard appeared on the scene seemed to have disappeared when he did. And the paintings she created in the aftermath of his death were nothing short of extraordinary. She had ventured into abstraction for the first time, and while the comparisons to the best of her father’s work were obvious, there was also something distinctively her own displayed on the canvases.
I was searching for a couple of clean glasses to use for the bottle of chilled pinot grigio I’d brought when I noticed that among the clutter on her kitchen table was not one but four different boarding passes for the New York-Boston air shuttle, all bearing different dates and times but all with her name on them. I breathed a sigh of relief. Much as I’d worried that she wouldn’t be able to forgive her friends for their actions that weekend, I’d been even more worried that she wouldn’t be able to forgive Matthew. I was glad to accept that I’d underestimated her talent for empathy. I handed her a glass of wine and settled comfortably onto the sofa in front of the industrial-strength fan. I was looking forward to hearing how things were progressing.
Luisa returned directly to South America after the fateful weekend ended. According to her e-mails, things with Isobel were good, although the pressure from her family to marry was mounting. Apparently she’d arrived at her parents’ house one evening for a family dinner to find three eligible bachelors at the table from whom, her father explained to her during private predinner drinks, she would be expected to choose a mate. Luisa was the youngest and had her father wrapped around her little finger, but I was interested to see how this situation would play itself out.
Hilary, with her usual talent for finding the most dangerous place on the globe, had removed herself to Cairo to work on her article about Islamic fundamentalism and oil. I could only wonder how the veiled women in long black robes would react to the six-foot blonde in spandex.
I spent a weekend with Jane and Sean on the Cape before school started, and I noticed a bottle of prenatal vitamins sitting by the kitchen sink. Jane blushed violently when I asked her about them and admitted that she and Sean had decided to start trying to have a baby. We spent the rest of the weekend carefully monitoring her folic acid intake.
As for me, there wasn’t much to tell. Stan took the news about Smitty Hamilton’s thwarted takeover surprisingly well. Perhaps because he was excited about my ideas for creating a new corporate finance practice based on emerging technology companies. When the NASDAQ had crashed, most major investment banks had decimated their technology divisions, including Winslow, Brown. Now was the time, I argued, to reengage, when a bunch of tomorrow’s Microsofts were still flying under the radar screen and none of the major players were stepping up to meet their needs in the capital markets.
So, now I, too, had begun logging some air miles, albeit New York to San Francisco, and it looked like Winslow, Brown would be taking Peter’s company public by year-end. Of course, Peter and I managed to squeeze in some personal time amid all this banking talk. And even if he did tease me every so often about turning him in to the cops, he also did a superb breakfast in bed, which was more than adequate compensation.
First edition December 2004
THE PACT
A Red Dress Ink novel
ISBN: 978-1-4592-4620-1
© 2004 by Jennifer Sturman.
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