“No apology necessary,” she said. “And we haven’t met formally, but I feel like we have. We have a number of mutual acquaintances. Daffy Nesbitt, for one. And your father’s firm represents a number of my projects.”
“I think I knew that Daphne was,” Payne said, nodding. “Her husband, Chad, and I have been close since we were kids. I was not aware of the connection with my father’s firm.”
“Brewster always speaks so very highly of you,” she added. “I suppose that getting shot did not change your mind about continuing with the police department. But, then, I do understand how it is sometimes not to see eye to eye with one’s father.”
“I don’t think I follow you.”
“You graduated top of your class at the University of Pennsylvania. Isn’t it fair to say that everyone expected that you would be working at your father’s firm by now? Or at least practicing law somewhere?” She paused, then added, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why that came out. It’s not my place to say.”
“But you’re right. It’s what they expected,” Payne said, and changed the subject. He gestured at Tony Harris. “I understand you have met Detective Harris?”
“I have had the pleasure,” she said. “I asked him if he could contact you for me. No offense to Detective Harris, but I thought I would feel more comfortable discussing this with you.”
“Let me assure you that anything you want to tell me you can tell Detective Harris,” Payne said. “When will we be able to speak with Mr. Austin?”
“The doctors said they’re going to keep Johnny overnight for observation,” Camilla Rose said. “In addition to some cuts and heavy bruising, he has a hairline fracture in his right forearm and a possible concussion. They’ve given him some mild medication for the pain. Before he drifted off to sleep, he asked that he not be bothered. With what Johnny’s gone through, especially losing his friend, I’m sure you understand.”
Payne nodded.
He said, “Did he say if he had any idea who would do this? Would you have any idea?”
Camilla Rose met and held Payne’s eyes as she nodded thoughtfully.
“At first, I thought it might be a robbery. Johnny had an envelope containing fifty thousand dollars.”
“Fifty grand in cash?” Harris said.
“Yes, cash. In hundred-dollar bills.”
“Why?” Payne said.
“Certain vendors are due today an advance for the gala. They prefer cash, and offer a significant discount on their services for it.”
Payne and Harris exchanged glances.
“Who, for example?” Payne said.
“It’s not what I suspect you are thinking,” Camilla Rose said. “I run an aboveboard program. Besides, no one knew that he had the cash. I’d just given it to him. Johnny was in such a hurry, I had to stop them before they almost drove off without it.”
“Where is the money now?” Payne said.
“The vendors still need their advances. I had my assistant come get the envelope. Johnny had stuck it in his sweater right before . . . before what happened . . . And when the EMTs came, Johnny told them to give it to me.”
Payne thought, In his sweater? Maybe that’s why he was not wearing a seat belt.
“So, aside from the cash,” Payne said, “any other ideas? Because I really do not believe robbery was the motive. I saw the whole thing go down.”
“I asked Johnny the same thing: if he had any ideas. Maybe someone had made any threats against him. Or against Ken?”
“And?” Payne said.
Camilla Rose hesitated, then said, “And all he said was, ‘You know.’ He repeated it.”
“What did he mean by that?”
She glanced around the room.
“May I buy you a cup of coffee?” she said. “Or maybe something a bit stronger?” She absently wiped at a large patch of dried blood on her sleeve. “After I get changed?”
Harris held up the file folder.
“Matt, I need to drop this off in the case file,” he said. “I’ll get going on what we discussed, then head over to the scene and see how McCrory is doing.”
“Thanks, Tony.”
“Ms. Morgan,” Harris said, “thank you for your help.”
“You’re welcome, Detective. A pleasure to meet you, despite the circumstances.”
As Harris headed toward the glass doors of the ER entrance, Payne nodded in that direction.
“My car is right out there, too. Take you back to The Rittenhouse? How does going to the Library sound?”
She made a small smile. She knew the inside line about the small Library Bar. Simply saying one was “going to the Library” came across as completely innocuous.
“Excellent. The Library it is.”
[ FOUR ]
As Payne drove down Broad Street, with City Hall, the world’s tallest masonry building, looming in the distance, Camilla Rose said, “I don’t know if you did this by design—I suspect that you did—but this is the perfect place for what I have to say. I won’t repeat this in public.”
As Payne glanced at her, he saw an open parking space at the curb ahead. He quickly pulled into it.
He turned to her, and said, “Okay.”
“It’s about what Johnny said when I asked.”
“He said, ‘You know.’ So, do you?”
She met Payne’s eyes and nodded.
On her lap, she held tight to a small clutch purse. She reached into it and produced a miniature bottle of vodka.
“My nerves are a mess,” she said. “Do you mind?”
“By all means, help yourself.”
“Would you like one?”
“I can wait.”
“Then you’re not going to judge me, are you? It’s not like you haven’t needed a nip or two at some point.”
“With me, it’s more like three or four. So, no judging.”
She made a wistful smile.
“You’re too kind, Matthew.”
Payne watched as she twisted off the top and drained the bottle.
After a pause, Camilla Rose, carefully screwing the cap back on and putting the empty in her clutch, then said, “Johnny means that Mr. Morgan is behind the shooting.”
Payne thought, But Old Man Morgan is dead.
She’s not saying that he calls the shots from the grave?
“Mr. Morgan? Your father?”
“My father passed, Matthew,” she said, her tone now cold. She looked out the passenger window and sighed. “Which is a great deal of why this situation is so grave.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t follow.”
She looked ahead, out the windshield.
“My father and I were very close when I was young. I was a classic daddy’s girl.”
She pointed in the direction of the thirty-seven-foot-tall bronze statue of William Penn standing atop City Hall.
“He used to take me up to the observation deck there, then over to LOVE Park, before going shopping along Walnut Street. Lots and lots of time together. And despite the divorce and my mother moving the two of us out to L.A., my father and I stayed in close touch throughout the school years—he paid for my schooling in Beverly Hills, of course, and kept an active interest in how I was progressing—and I spent my summers here with him.
“As I grew older, he saw to it that I had jobs here that introduced me into the family businesses. After graduating prep school, I came back from California to go to Wharton, with plans to eventually get my master’s at the business school. My father was a Wharton grad. I wanted to follow in his footsteps. And I did . . . until Mr. Morgan.”
What the hell is she saying? Payne thought.
He said, “So . . . who is this Mr. Morgan?”
Camilla Rose sat silently, staring out the window. Then she inhaled deeply and let it slowly out.
&
nbsp; “I really don’t know how to say this,” she finally said, still looking out the window. “No one will believe it, I know. And even if they did, Mr. Morgan has proven to be untouchable.”
“I’ve heard pretty much everything.”
She turned to look at him.
“I’m sure you have. That is fine for most folks, I suppose. It’s just that we do not air such dirty laundry. Heaven knows, the paparazzi makes up enough of it without our adding more.”
Payne nodded. He had seen the wild headlines and photographs triggered by her family name.
“Mason Morgan,” she began, practically spitting out his name, “has long despised my mother for what he considered her having broken up the marriage of his mother.”
“Then Mason Morgan is your replace brother,” Payne said, his tone making it a question. “I didn’t know you had any siblings.”
“Half brother, if you please. And after what he’s done, after his brazen betrayal, I refuse to refer to him by his first name, especially to his face. Doing so would suggest we have at least, on some level, a cordial relationship. I can assure you that we do not. He was ten when my mother married our father, and I was born a year later. I can understand his displeasure with my mother—she is a five-star bitch, and she likely was a homewrecker—but I never did anything to harm him.”
She looked back out her window and laughed.
“Five-star might be shortchanging her,” she said. “I hated being a debutante. My mother made me. And she did so not for my sake—she really knew I hated it—but simply to spite my father, who tried to talk her out of it when I asked him. This was while he was fighting to cut off her alimony because everyone knew she was shacked up with that actor Tom Smyth—in essence, married to him. My mother knew that if she actually remarried—Poof!—there went the two hundred grand a month that she had fought so hard for, as she said in the divorce proceedings, ‘to maintain the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.’ My father had had to agree to pay it—he wanted out of the marriage because he would not tolerate her infidelity—and she knew it and she really stuck it to him.”
“Two hundred thousand a month in alimony? Wow. That’s—”
“A real five-star bitch,” she said, looking at him and nodding. “And that’s not all. That was on top of the lump sum she got, and certain assets, such as the houses in Coral Gables and Pacific Palisades.”
Payne whistled.
“So, how is it that Mason is behind today’s shooting?” he asked. “How would Johnny know?”
Payne had used their first names without thinking. He realized that using “Mr.” struck him as awkward.
“Because he hates Johnny. Has since I met him. And it’s all over pure greed. And power. Same as what happened right before my father became sick.”
“Which was?”
“Father was grooming me to eventually take over the pharmaceutical business while Mason would continue running, also under father’s direction, the commercial real estate companies. I was, as now, already running the Morgan philanthropic arm, which I had built at Father’s request. He told me he was impressed with how I had started Camilla’s Kids while I still was earning my master’s.” She paused, then briefly continued, “Unfortunately, I also was getting . . .”
Her voice trailed off as she looked back out her window.
After a moment, she cleared her throat and went on: “I felt absolutely invincible back then. And because of that, I made some mistakes.”
“A lot of college kids do. Hell, most do. I did.”
“Thanks, but not like I did. I had it all. And I could do it all. Juggling school and the fund-raisers and working with my father came to me fairly easily. I worked hard . . . and so I played hard. Really hard.”
“And wound up in rehab,” Payne said, softly.
Looking out the window, she shrugged.
“Everybody was doing it,” she said. “I didn’t see the problem, especially after I finished my MBA. I’d come out of rehab and picked up where I left off. Everything was wonderful. Except I didn’t see how my father was really viewing my behavior.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
She turned and looked at him.
“Oh, sure he did. He made subtle suggestions. But we got along so well, and I told him I was fine, and my work did not suffer—I just thought all along that I still had earned his trust.”
She inhaled deeply again, then let it out slowly as she looked back out her window.
“They first found the cancer while I was away for two months in West Palm,” she said.
“In rehab?”
She nodded.
“Same place where I first met Johnny,” she said. “Anyway, they decided—my father told me later—not to tell me because it would have interrupted my treatment.”
“They?”
“My father and half brother, who really was the catalyst.”
“Catalyst? For what?”
“For marginalizing me. He essentially convinced my father, as well as got some board members and other officers at the companies to agree, that I was too young and unstable to be in the positions I was. Especially without my father being there.”
“Wow.”
She looked at him.
“Yeah. ‘Wow.’ At first, my father was not convinced. But as that goddamn disease quickly progressed, as it ate away at him and his mental and physical capacities weakened, he began to agree to certain changes. Small ones at first, then the bigger ones. In the end, I was left overseeing only the philanthropy arm, with a set budget of five million a year. My father’s estate, which held the vast majority of Morgan International shares, was redrawn to provide me personally with a million every quarter.”
“I feel uncomfortable asking, but four million a year isn’t exactly hardship, is it?”
“And that makes me sound like an ungrateful five-star bitch, too, right?” She did not allow him to respond, and went on: “I would agree. Except for the fact that he convinced my father that for the company’s sake—specifically the preservation of the Morgan family fortune—that I would have no access to the principal, only the quarterly payments that would end when I died. Meaning, at that point my principal would be distributed to the surviving family.”
“Which would be Mason.”
“Precisely.”
“But we’re still talking about four million a year, no?”
“Matthew, the pharmaceutical company is valued alone at eleven billion. Everything else nearly doubles that. It is unjust and an outrage that Mr. Morgan manipulated my father in his weakened state so that he could take control while patting me on the head with quarterly payments. Greed, power, ego—that sums up the son of a bitch.”
She paused, and when she looked him in the eyes, he saw tears welling.
“Do I need more money, Matthew? Or course not. Not personally. But, goddamn it, neither does he! So I’m pressuring for the release of my share of the principal—not just the payments, the whole principal—for two reasons. One, because I will see that the money goes to good causes now, as my father wished.”
“And two?”
She smiled.
“Because it will drive Mr. Morgan absolutely crazy. He loves believing that no one can get to him.”
Payne looked out the windshield in thought, then turned back to Camilla Rose.
“And you are saying that that is why Mason Morgan arranged for someone to shoot John Austin?”
“I told you, he hates Johnny. Especially after Johnny told him he was going to help me. For the record, I do not need Johnny’s help. But I do like the fact that he thinks Johnny’s interference could cause him problems, particularly if we married. There is a clause that says that should I marry and have issue, the quarterly payments on my death would continue.”
“The payments would go to your spouse
and child? Or just the child?”
“Just the child . . . or children. It was designed that way to cut off gold diggers looking to marry, then make out like bandits in a divorce. As my mother did.”
“Interesting. And are you going to marry?”
She laughed.
“Certainly not Johnny. After all I’ve seen what marriage does? Would you? And I don’t think I’m cut out to be an everyday mother. I have plenty of interaction with children at my ranches. Children I can really help. I’ve found that’s my real calling. And I want the money to do more of it now.”
“And to zing Mason.”
She laughed again.
“There is that,” she said, digging back in her purse and producing another miniature bottle of vodka. “Anyway, that’s far too much about me. What about you? How long are you going to continue with this cop thing?”
She reached over and pulled back on his fleece jacket, revealing the bloodstain on his shirt.
“My God, Matthew, I saw the news reports, and then someone told me that you almost died. Is catching another miserable heroin pusher worth losing your life?”
She opened the bottle and drank half of it.
He said, “Another miserable killer, slash, heroin pusher, to be precise. But you’re not the first person to make that point.”
“Well then?”
“I don’t have an answer right now. Except maybe to quote the great Marine Corps general Chesty Puller: ‘If not me, who? If not now, when?’ And I find it interesting you press the point while I’m trying to track down who killed your friend today.”
“You’ve made a lot of headlines, Matthew. You don’t need any more.”
“I might say the same about you.”
Once more Camilla Rose laughed, this time loudly. She smiled broadly.
“Touché,” she said, holding up the miniature bottle of vodka in a mock toast. She swallowed the rest, then added, “Except my headlines have been fun ones. Mine never said I almost died in some godforsaken ghetto.”
—
As Payne turned the Porsche up the brick-paved drive of The Rittenhouse, he felt his cell phone vibrate once in his pocket, indicating a new text message. He ignored it as he scanned the line of cars parked across the drive and saw that the shot-up Bentley was gone.
Broken Trust Page 4