by Nancy Martin
“He’d get into trouble with six different kinds of regulators for allowing MaxiMan to get out of the lab like that.”
“Hence the blackmail.”
Frowning, Lexie said, “Would Huckabee demand a supply of the drug, then turn around and blackmail his source for giving it to him?”
“I don’t know. I think we need to talk to your pharmaceutical gentleman.”
Reed glanced into the rearview mirror. “Don’t you even think about that.”
“You’re not supposed to eavesdrop, Reed,” Lexie chided.
“I’m not deaf,” he said. “You’re talking about that old man, Devine.”
I said, “We need to find a way to learn if Kell was really blackmailing Potty.”
“Without getting ourselves killed,” Lexie added.
Reed said, “You’re not getting killed, ’cause you’re not talking to nobody.”
Lexie pretended she didn’t hear him. To me, she said, “If Potty bumped off Huckabee, how did he do it?”
I reminded Lexie about the tigers and told her about the gunshot wound to the hand.
“He might have been shot. The police have no way of knowing for sure. But chances are, the rest of his body is—well—”
“Oh, God, Nora! You don’t mean he was eaten? By Vivian’s tigers?”
My cell phone suddenly buzzed in my handbag, and I sighed. “I think I liked life better before I was so available.”
“Take a look,” Lexie urged. “Maybe it’s Michael again. Maybe you should talk with him, Nora.”
I read the incoming number on the phone’s screen. “It’s Libby.”
“Go ahead,” Lexie said. “See what she wants.”
Libby was barely coherent.
“The police,” she babbled. “They came and took them both! I was never so humiliated in all my life, Nora! Why, they even wanted to search my diaper bag! And when the police found all those jars the twins left in your refrigerator, they went crazy! It was awful! Horrible!”
“Libby,” I said sharply. “Calm down. The twins were arrested?”
“No, of course not the twins!” she said. “They came for That Man!”
“The police arrested Michael?”
“Yes!” Libby shrieked. “And Crewe, too!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Aren’t you listening?” my sister demanded. “The police arrested Crewe Dearborne! For the murder of Kell Huckabee! Nora, the police say Crewe killed a man!”
Chapter Twenty-one
What’s ridiculous,” Lexie said, highly offended by the suggestion. “Of course Crewe didn’t kill anyone.”
“The police have been under pressure to make an arrest,” I said. “I didn’t think that meant they’d grab the first possible suspect.”
My cell phone buzzed again in my hand, and I answered without thinking.
In my ear, Emma’s voice said, “Have you heard the latest bulletin?”
“Which one? There are so many.”
“Mick’s in custody.”
“Old news.”
“You sound pretty heartless. Aren’t you worried?”
I sighed. “Of course I am. Is he—does he have his lawyers with him?”
“Yeah, Cannoli and Sons met him at the state-police barracks. The cops put him in the squad car with his hands cuffed behind his back. With that broken leg of his, it sure looked like police brutality to me.”
My heart lurched. “Oh, Em.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“In the city.”
“Me, too. Where can I find you?”
“We’re heading over to Lexie’s house.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Emma said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
We arrived at Lexie’s home within a few minutes. Reed was helping us out of the backseat when Emma’s pickup bumped into the driveway and rocked to a stop.
Instead of wearing her usual grubby riding clothes, my sister surprised us all by walking around the hood of the truck in a black, very short sheath dress made of some stretchy fabric that clung to her like dew on a ripe peach. Around her shoulders she had thrown a man’s dinner jacket. The silk lapels gleamed in the moonlight. Even Reed couldn’t stop himself from staring. She looked like a movie star.
“What?” Emma demanded when the three of us failed to greet her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, the first to regain myself. “You look very nice, Em. Where have you been?”
“I was supposed to have dinner with someone, but I changed my mind.”
“Dinner with whom?” Lexie asked. “Calvin Klein? Emma, you clean up beautifully.”
She snorted. “I ditched my date when I found somebody more interesting to spend the evening with.”
“What’s going on, Em?”
She jerked her head back at the truck. “Take a look at my passenger.”
Lexie and I followed Emma to the truck door, which my sister opened to reveal a slumped male figure sprawled on the seat. As the dome light came on, I gasped.
“Raphael! Em, what have you done?”
“He’s fine,” Emma said. “He was in the bar of the restaurant, and we got to talking. The slick son of a bitch tried to slip me a Mickey.”
I leaned into the truck and instinctively reached for his throat to check Raphael’s pulse. His head lolled away from me, but I could see he was breathing. Someone had painted a matador’s mustache on his upper lip with a ballpoint pen. Dressed in a white tuxedo shirt with the collar open, elegantly cut trousers and a pair of Italian shoes that had been polished to a high sheen, he could have been a male model on his way to an important fashion shoot. If he’d been conscious. His pulse felt steady under my fingertips.
His eyes—only slits of awareness—did not register any recognition as I leaned close. He slurred something in Portuguese.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lexie’s voice was tense behind me. “Shouldn’t we get him to a hospital?”
“He’ll be fine in the morning,” Emma said. “I swapped drinks on him. He drank his own magic potion.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You let him swallow a roofie?”
Emma laughed, sounding pleased. “Serves him right, don’t you think? When he wakes up, I hope he has a hangover as bad as yours.”
“What are we going to do with him?” Lexie asked.
“Oh, I’ve already had my wicked way with Mr. Braga. I’m thinking I’ll just toss him out on the street.”
“Em, what did you do to him?”
My little sister grinned without apology. “I took him up to a parking garage and we fooled around a little. Not long, because he lost his head pretty fast. So we talked. And he told me all kinds of secrets. It was better than truth serum.”
“Em, you shouldn’t have drugged him.”
With another laugh, Emma leaned against the filthy truck, smudging dirt on Raphael’s expensive dinner jacket. “Among other things, I got the lowdown about his relationship with Penny Devine.”
I forgot about the moral implications of drugging a man. “What did he tell you?”
“That he slept with Penny. Many times. Command performances. Turns out, the Braga family isn’t as wealthy as it used to be. Raphael’s been depending on Penny for income for a long time. He takes MaxiMan to help him get through the weekends with Penny.”
“Where did he get the MaxiMan?”
“From Kell Huckabee.”
“What a snake.” Lexie glared at Raphael’s inert body. “Why don’t you take off all his clothes and dump him at Independence Hall?”
“He also told me why he drugged you, Sis. And it kinda surprised me.”
I met my sister’s steady gaze.
She said, “He’s scared to death of you. After he saw you at the polo match, he got the impression you wanted to stake a claim. He thinks you’re going to steal his kid.”
Lexie covered her mouth. “Oh, dear.”
“He drugged you for information, N
ora. He borrowed the roofies from one of his slimeball teammates. And he tried the same trick on me tonight. He wanted to know what you planned to do about—what’s her name? Mariel?” Emma gave me a long, measuring stare. “You’ve been keeping secrets, Nora. Does Mick know you have a little girl in Brazil?”
“It’s not Nora’s little girl,” Lexie said.
“No? Is that how you see the situation, Sis?”
“You should take Raphael to a hospital,” I said, fastening the seat belt around his inert body.
Now that I understood Raphael’s point of view, I felt terrible. How had I miscalculated so badly? And did that mean I had made other errors in judgment?
Emma promised to take care of Raphael. I kissed Lexie good night and went home with Reed. On the way, I tried to sort out everything I knew. And I found myself thinking about Mariel. For the first time, I let my imagination conjure up her face. Would she look like Lucy? Did she have Lucy’s Blackbird temperament? Or did she look more like her father? My head spun with details.
When we reached Blackbird Farm, Michael’s crew was once again guarding my driveway. Reed slowed, and I rolled down my window to speak to Aldo.
“Is he home yet?” I asked.
“Not yet. But don’t you worry,” Aldo said. “He’s got his lawyer with him. He’ll be home in no time.”
“Tonight?”
Aldo made the waffling motion with his hand. “Maybe tomorrow. This one could take some time.”
I didn’t want to hear any more. I punched the button, and the window rolled up again.
Reed escorted me to the back door, stepping gingerly over the charred floorboards of the porch. He paused, shifting uncomfortably on his feet as I fished in my handbag for my keys. “You going to be okay?” he asked finally.
“I’ll be fine.” I was touched by his concern. Although I’d known him for nearly a year, it had taken this most recent crisis to force Reed to show his true, caring nature.
“Don’t worry so much,” he said, lingering on the porch. “I know a lot of bad dudes. But Mick—he’s been good to me and to my old lady. He’s just got a lot of—you know—pressures.”
This was more of a speech than I’d ever heard from Reed.
“Don’t tell him I said this,” Reed added, “but he’s the closest thing I have to a dad, you know? He made me go to school and go to London—stuff I wouldn’t have done if not for Mick. So the other stuff he does—it’s okay with me.”
“Thank you, Reed.”
He shrugged, already heading for the car. Over his shoulder, he said, “No problem.”
I watched him leave, wondering if Reed was a better judge of character than I.
Michael did not come home that night. As I filed my story via e-mail, I tried not to think about him or where he was. Or what he might have done.
In the morning, I showered and dressed and went downstairs around nine.
The living room was still a shambles, with Penny Devine’s dresses hanging from all the doorjambs and the empty wardrobe boxes yawning open untidily. A carton of evening bags had been upended on the coffee table, like the booty of a shopaholic after a spree on Rodeo Drive.
In the middle of the mess, Michael slept on the sofa. Usually a light sleeper, he’d normally have heard me before I reached the bottom of the stairs, but this morning he slept soundly, his nose buried in an embroidered throw pillow. Someone had wrapped a frilly evening cloak fetchingly around his tall frame. His leg and cast were propped on the coffee table. The dark smudges under his eyes gave my heart a jolt.
I should have felt sorry for Michael. He was in pain. He’d been through a terrible night.
But a part of me was furious with him.
I studied his crutches. They didn’t match. One was decidedly newer than the other. And the bruises on his right hand did not come from any small incident while he’d checked out of the hospital.
I slipped quietly into the kitchen. Someone had already made coffee and it was steaming on the counter. An empty cup sat in the sink. Aldo, I thought.
I made oatmeal for my breakfast and sliced a banana on top. I ate half the bowl standing at the scullery, but the sight of Michael’s crew hanging around my mailbox at the end of the driveway dulled my appetite. I put the unfinished bowl into the sink beside the coffee mug, and I thought about how my life had changed.
The phone rang, and I grabbed it on the first ring. I carried it out onto the back porch so Michael’s sleep wouldn’t be disturbed.
Libby cried, “I sold Tom Cruise on eBay!”
“What?”
“For nine hundred dollars! Can you believe it?”
I had forgotten about Libby’s latest crackpot scheme. “No, as a matter of fact, I can’t.”
“I think I could get at least as much for Julia Roberts, so I need to do more baking right away.” She barely paused for a breath before asking, “Have you seen the morning papers yet?”
“I watched the local news while I got dressed.”
“So you saw all the pictures of those poor tigers.”
All the TV stations had helicopters circling Vivian Devine’s ranch house, where Animal Control was busily shooting tigers full of tranquilizers in preparation for hauling them out of their enclosure and trucking them to other sanctuaries where they would presumably get better care.
“And you know,” Libby continued, “the police are absolutely convinced That Man of Yours killed a person yesterday morning between the time he left the hospital and when he arrived at your house. Nora, I know it’s hard to call off a wedding once plans are in motion, but I have to ask. Is your heart set on going ahead with this marriage?”
“I’m not making any plans at all, Libby. You are.”
“Listen,” said my sister. “I’ll be the first to admit I don’t trust him. Except when it comes to you. Nora, I don’t see him doing anything to hurt you. I think he’d protect you with his last dying breath.”
“I know,” I said. That’s what I was afraid of.
“So the wedding’s on?”
“I’ll get back to you.”
I phoned Emma next, and asked her to pick me up as soon as possible.
When I put the phone on the cradle in the kitchen, I heard a distinct groan from the sofa.
I poured a cup of coffee and carried it into the living room.
Michael had propped himself up on one elbow and was rubbing his forehead as if it throbbed. He needed a shave, and his hair was a tangle.
I brushed aside the heap of evening bags and sat on the coffee table in front of him, cradling the cup of coffee in my hands.
In a raspy growl, he said, “I dreamed I threw up.”
“Very nice,” I said. “Good morning to you, too.”
“It’s morning?” He winced at his watch. “Jesus.”
“When did you get back from the police station?”
“About five.”
“You couldn’t manage to get upstairs?”
“I didn’t try.” He heaved his leg onto the sofa, tried to get comfortable, and gave up.
I handed him the cup of coffee. “Is it time to take some pain pills?”
“I took some before I went to sleep. I’m good for another couple of hours.”
“Do the pills help?”
“Not much.” He sniffed the coffee warily, still without meeting my eye. “Are the twins in the basement? And what about Emma?”
“We’re alone in the house. The twins are conducting their experiments elsewhere. And Emma made other sleeping arrangements.”
He seemed to relax a bit. “She with that Ignacio guy?”
“Emma doesn’t keep a man around very long—especially one with so few faults as Ignacio. Last I saw, she was with Raphael Braga.”
Michael looked at me finally, interest sharpening. “Oh, yeah?”
“Listen,” I said. “You’re not feeling well, so I’m going to give you the short version of a very long story, a story I should have told you before.”
Hearing my tone, he waited.
“I told you already that while I was in college, a friend of mine married Raphael Braga and moved to his family’s home in Brazil. His parents were very wealthy, an old family, and it was important to everyone that they have children right away. But my friend, she couldn’t. There was a problem. She was desperate to have a baby, so she asked me to help. And I did. The two of us went to a hospital in New York, Michael, and I gave her some of my eggs.”
I took a deep breath and continued, keeping my voice as steady as I could manage. “I donated my eggs to my friend. They were fertilized in a lab and implanted in her, and she had the baby. A little girl, who was perfectly healthy—just what the family wanted. She’s in Brazil, living with Raphael’s parents now.”
Michael paid close attention, watching my face for every nuance he could glean.
I said, “My friend and Raphael have separated, but the child—her name is Mariel—she lives with her grandparents while Raphael pursues his career in polo. I don’t know how much she sees her mother, but Raphael tells me she is—that’s she’s happy.”
“Nora.”
I went on, speaking more rapidly. “I didn’t tell you before because I wasn’t sure how you’d feel. That maybe you’d be angry with me, especially now that we—that I lost our baby.”
“But you’re telling me now.”
“Yes.”
“So this is some kind of confession? You want me to absolve you of your sin?”
I looked at him at last. “You think what I did was a sin?”
He said, “You gave away—”
“I helped a friend.”
Automatically, he lifted the coffee to his mouth, but he didn’t drink from the cup and lowered it again. “Did you ever consider maybe your friend and Braga weren’t meant to have kids?”
“I didn’t stop to consider a lot of things. And anyway, that’s not the way I think. Someone needed my help, so I did what she wanted.”
“That’s you, all right,” he said quietly. “Jumping in to help anybody who asks.”
“She wasn’t anybody. She was my friend.”
“What’s next, Nora? If somebody wants a kidney, you’ll be first in line?”