Sidney Sheldon's the Silent Widow

by Sidney Sheldon

  Anne was about to ring the bell – she felt foolish, rousing Nikki from sleep, but she’d driven all this way and her need to see her ‘friend’ had long since spilled over into a compulsion – but an unexpected noise made her hesitate. It was a cry. Not of fear but of sorrow. Anguish, even. Short at first but then followed by another, longer sound, keening and awful like an animal’s howl. It was coming from the backyard.

  A narrow passage led along the side of the house to the rear of the property. Anne followed it, being careful not to slip on the slick stone tiles. Rounding the corner at the end she saw Nikki, kneeling underneath a beautiful, spreading magnolia tree. The tree was in bloom, but the night’s heavy rains had dashed many of its oversized white blossoms to the ground, creating a carpet of silken petals on the wet grass. It was on this carpet that Nikki knelt, wetter even than Anne was, her blouse clinging to her shivering body like damp seaweed on a rock. Her head was tilted up towards the moon, but her eyes were closed, and she was crying out piteously, like a dying she-wolf. Her kicked off shoes lay on the ground beside her and she was holding something in her right hand. Only as Anne drew nearer did she see what it was: a tiny, elegant pistol, glinting silver in the shadows.

  ‘Nikki!’ Anne called out to her loudly, shouting to make herself heard above both the howling and the rain. Running over, she sank down on the grass beside her friend. ‘Nikki, it’s me. It’s Anne! Are you all right? What’s happened?’

  With a start, Nikki opened her eyes and turned to look at her. For what felt like a long time, both women stared at one another in shocked silence. Soaking wet, freezing cold, side by side beneath the magnolia tree Nikki had planted with Doug on their first wedding anniversary, there was so much to say. Too much. So instead they said nothing. Eventually Nikki stood up, as if in a trance. Still holding the Glock in her right hand, she offered Anne her left.

  ‘You’d better come inside and get dry.’

  Anne nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  Like two bedraggled ghosts, the two women went into the house.

  Half an hour later, wearing a pair of Nikki’s pajamas and swaddled in a faux fur blanket in front of the fire on Nikki’s couch, Anne allowed herself to be coaxed into a deep, satisfying sleep. Nikki stroked her hair with an absent, repeating rhythm, her voice hypnotic and heavy as she told Anne to rest, to close her eyes, to let the warmth surround her and take her.

  Nikki watched as the younger woman slipped effortlessly into sleep. Like a baby, she thought. That was the one part of the dream that she and Doug had missed out on: a child of their own. Long before she learned about Lenka, Nikki remembered how despairing her infertility had made her at the time. How not having children had felt like the biggest tragedy in the world. Before she knew what tragedy meant.

  Would she have gone through with it tonight, if Anne hadn’t shown up? Would she really have pulled the trigger and blown her own brains out? Her instinct told her that she would. But she would never know for sure now. All she did know was that the moment had passed. Anne had appeared, like an angel of mercy, and Nikki had taken the gun inside and put it back in the drawer and locked it, and she no longer wanted to die. Not today, anyway. There was too much left to do. Too much she still needed to understand.

  Had God sent Anne to save her?

  Or perhaps it was Doug who’d intervened, in some mysterious, spiritual way, from the afterlife? That was a nice thought.

  Standing at the window, Nikki gazed out into the night. The rain had stopped, and all was peace and calm and stillness. She thought about Derek Williams, how he’d given his life for the truth. Her truth. She owed it to Williams to see this through.

  From the safety of a warm, dry car, a figure watched in the darkness, their night vision goggles trained onto Nikki Roberts’ living room window.

  Sliding lower in their seat, they settled in for the night.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Goodman sat alone in the booth at Joe’s Diner, staring morosely at his phone. Johnson was in the men’s room, where he’d been locked away ever since his ill-advised third cup of coffee twenty minutes ago. They were due back at Derek Williams’ apartment for a meeting with forensics. But Nikki’s email, sent at five this morning, had already thrown Goodman for a loop.

  ‘Been thinking all last night,’ she wrote. ‘Not sure what to tell you, but I guess now Williams is dead I have to tell someone. Brandon Grolsch is alive. He called me yesterday, very distressed. I don’t know where he is, or how he’s connected to any of this, but I lied to you about not knowing him. I’m sorry.’

  As if that weren’t enough of a bombshell, she carried on.

  ‘If Williams was right about a corrupt cop helping the cartels, then it has to be Johnson. I know you don’t want to believe it. But it fits. He asked for this case, he’s senior, he’s ex-drug squad, and he’s deliberately mishandled the investigation into these murders, trying to make me the scapegoat. He’s deflecting and he’s succeeding.’

  There was a lot of paranoia in Nikki’s note, shot through with micro-threads of truth, but perhaps that was to be expected, given her frazzled state of mind, especially since Williams’ murder. But it was the last part of the email that troubled him much more.

  ‘Watch Johnson, Lou. I don’t think you’re safe around him, and I don’t want to see you hurt. I don’t think I’m safe either, so I’ll be gone for a while, off grid.

  Try not to worry.

  Take care. NR.’

  Goodman felt his pulse quicken.

  How long was ‘a while’? And what the hell was ‘off-grid’ supposed to mean?

  He’d already rung her twice since the note landed in his inbox, in addition to sending a brief email reply, but all her devices were switched off. Off grid.

  Not good.

  As for the rest of Nikki’s suspicions about Johnson, without evidence there was little Goodman could do to pursue them. And in the meantime the two men were supposed to be a team.

  ‘Jesus,’ Johnson grumbled, shuffling back to the table clutching his distended belly. ‘What the hell do they put in their coffee in this joint? I feel like I just gave birth.’

  Goodman put away his phone, wrinkling his nose in distaste. ‘Too much information, dude. Shall we go?’

  ‘Ready when you are,’ said Johnson. ‘I hope forensics have got something concrete. Because that son of a bitch had so many enemies, half of Los Angeles might have taken him out. Hell, I had half a mind to do it myself!’

  Goodman followed his partner to the car, trying to shake the feeling that Derek Williams’ ghost had just walked over his grave.

  Setting her bag down on the bed at the San Miguel Hacienda in Palm Springs, Nikki felt a surreal sense of déjà vu.

  The last time she’d stayed here had been with Doug, five years ago, for their wedding anniversary. The small, intimate guesthouse had been built as a family home in the Moorish style, with warm tiled floors and ornate stone fountains and rooms that opened onto secret, sun-drenched courtyards, overgrown with bougainvillea. There was no air conditioning, astonishingly for a hotel out in the desert, and yet somehow the whitewashed walls and ceiling fans and the shade from the desert palm trees that surrounded the property ensured that guests were always comfortably cool inside. And outside, an old-fashioned, kidney-shaped pool, sparkling sapphire blue, provided frequent cooling relief from the punishing afternoon sun.

  The Hacienda was intrinsically romantic. Even now, Nikki could still remember her delight walking in here, and Doug’s pride and satisfaction that his surprise discovery had worked out so well. That he’d pleased her.

  ‘One of Haddon’s rich patients came back raving about this place,’ Doug said, slipping his hands around Nikki’s waist and pulling her towards him greedily. ‘And I know how you hate those big corporate joints. So you like it?’

  ‘I love it,’ Nikki said, tossing her bag on to the white linen bed and floating into the simple bathroom, barefoot and
happy and carefree in a way that seemed so alien to her now, she could hardly believe she was the same person.

  Perhaps I’m not the same person, she thought, turning her phone back on and sitting soberly on the end of the bed beside her overnight case, the same one she’d brought to the SLS for her meeting with Derek Williams, the one that never happened.

  Williams had told her to disappear to somewhere neutral and anonymous, ‘somewhere nobody knows you’. The Hacienda was hardly that. But something had drawn her here. A half-remembered feeling of safety, perhaps, or of happiness? As if her soul were reaching subconsciously for the last vestiges of the life she’d lost.

  Or maybe it was Doug again, pulling her strings from beyond the grave? She’d felt that last night, when Anne showed up. When she’d been ready to end it all, to screw up her courage and turn off the noise and the pain forever.

  Was that really only last night? Less than twenty-four hours ago?

  Nikki’s phone began pinging with messages. Goodman. Goodman. Gretchen. Goodman. Ignoring them all, she pushed it to one side. With a faint knock, Señora Marchesa, the proprietress, stuck her smiling, heavily wrinkled face round the door of Nikki’s room.

  ‘How long you staying with us this time, Dr Roberts?’ she asked. ‘You know the room is free right through the end of June if you want it. Summer’s pretty quiet up here.’

  ‘I’m not sure yet, señora,’ Nikki told her, returning the smile. ‘Can we say a few days, and then I’ll let you know?’

  ‘Of course,’ the older woman said, touching Nikki gently on the shoulder. ‘You look tired. Try to rest.’

  Nikki waited till she’d gone to drop the smile, suddenly and totally, like a too heavy weight. The pretense of happiness was too hard now, even for a few seconds. Inside her chest was a burned-out shell where her heart should have been, a scorched wasteland still smoldering with anger, white-hot to the touch.

  Damn you, Doug, for the happy memories! Damn you for lying, and cheating on me! Damn you for being dead! I hope you burn in hell, with your Russian witch and her child beside you!

  Nikki had told Anne Bateman last night that she loved her but she could no longer be her therapist.

  ‘It’s not personal,’ she insisted. ‘I’m in no fit state to practice, and you need a therapist who is and who can help you move forward.’ She still hadn’t broached the subject of Luis Rodriguez and Derek Williams’ wild accusations about his secret life as a drug lord. And she knew now that she never would. Without evidence, Williams’ theories would have to die with him. If Luis really intended to hurt Anne, Nikki reasoned, he would have done it by now. Either way, there was nothing that Nikki could save her from. And if Williams was right about Luis Rodriguez, she needed to save herself.

  Numb with her own pain, Anne had agreed to part ways, and the two women had said warm goodbyes to one another when dawn broke this morning, both of them knowing that they wouldn’t see one another again.

  Anne had seen the gun in Nikki’s hand last night. She’d said nothing, but that shared moment of what should have been private anguish had changed everything. Nikki couldn’t be Anne’s rock. She couldn’t be anybody’s rock, not until she’d laid her own demons to rest.

  Once Anne had gone, Nikki composed an email to Goodman. She then sent four others. Two to her remaining patients, Carter Berkeley and Lana Grey, terminating her role as their therapist and asking their forgiveness. One to her new secretary and ill-fated office manager, Kim Choy, to whom she also transferred three months’ wages in lieu of notice. And a fourth and final note to Gretchen. That had been the hardest to write. Because Nikki wanted to believe so badly that this wasn’t goodbye. That one day, when all this was over, maybe she really could move to New York and start again. And Gretchen could come and stay with her, and they’d have Thanksgiving together and go to shows and exhibitions and restaurants and Nikki would build a new practice and life would have meaning again.

  She knew it was a pipe dream. But writing that note to her oldest friend, it was a pipe dream she didn’t have the strength to let go, not completely.

  Once the email was sent, she ate a quick breakfast and got on the road, putting fifty miles between herself and the city before LA’s morning rush hour began in earnest. In the past, Nikki had always found the drive out to the desert liberating. Palm Springs itself might be a bizarre throwback to the long-gone glamour days of its Rat Pack past, but the vast open spaces that surrounded it, the mile upon mile of nothing, of rock and sky, that led one there – that landscape had a magic to it, for anyone willing to appreciate it.

  This morning, however, Nikki felt no freedom, no elation on the long, empty roads. Next to her on the passenger seat was her cell phone, which she’d been forced to switch off after the third call from Goodman, and a letter, handwritten, from Derek Williams. She hadn’t opened the letter yet. She would do that at the Hacienda, where she felt safe, and alone. But its mere presence was enough to suck any joy out of the car and replace it with fear, the sort of brooding dread that came with knowing a sleeping rattlesnake was coiled up beside you.

  The letter had arrived at Nikki’s offices, roughly four hours before Williams’ murder. Kim had had the forethought to drive it up to the house and deliver it to Nikki personally, rather than wait for the police to seize it in their regular trawls of Nikki’s business mail.

  Now the letter sat propped up against the pillow on Nikki’s bed. She’d been about to open it when Señora Marchesa walked in. Once the señora was gone, she had to screw up her courage all over again.

  Tequila, Nikki thought. Tequila will help.

  Slipping on her bikini, she grabbed two miniatures of Jose Cuervo from the fridge in her room, along with Williams’ letter, and marched defiantly out to the pool, stretching out her slender limbs on a sun lounger. I’ll open it when I’m ready, she decided, letting the hot dry air warm her skin and the cold tequila warm her throat and calm her jangled nerves. Whatever Williams had chosen to put in his final letter to her had been his decision. But Nikki got to decide when she opened Pandora’s Box, and she clung to that tiny shred of control like a life raft in a stormy ocean.

  She fell asleep quickly and without even realizing it. When she woke her skin was burning, her mouth dry and her head throbbing with an awful, insistent ringing noise that went on and on and on …

  ‘Are you gonna get that?’ An angry woman in an ugly printed one-piece and a large straw hat loomed over Nikki’s lounger. ‘Because if you aren’t, maybe you could turn your cell phone off? Some of us are trying to relax here.’

  Groggily realizing what was happening, Nikki reached for her phone.

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice sounded hideously raspy, as if she’d been gargling with sand.

  ‘Nikki? Oh my God, thank God. Thank God! Where were you? I’ve been calling and calling …’ Anne was hysterical, speaking so fast and so loudly that Nikki had to hold her cell away from her ear.

  ‘Anne. I told you this morning. I can’t help you any more,’ she said patiently. ‘Whatever’s happened, you need—’

  ‘NO!’ Anne cut her off, screaming wildly. ‘Please! You don’t understand. I found out something terrible … about Luis.’

  A shiver ran down Nikki’s spine. She knows. So Williams was right all along?

  ‘I can’t talk on the phone,’ Anne babbled. ‘It’s not safe. You have to meet me!’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything,’ said Nikki bluntly.

  Anne burst into tears.

  ‘I am begging you, Nikki. Please!’ she sobbed. ‘If I ever meant anything to you. It’s for your sake as much as mine.’

  ‘How is it for my sake?’ asked Nikki.

  ‘It just is, OK? I have evidence, something I need to show you in person. I swear to God, after this I will never contact you again.’

  ‘Can’t you go to the police?’ Nikki asked wearily.

  ‘No!’ It was almost a shriek. ‘I need you.’

  Nikki put a hand to her burning cheek.
She felt torn. She’d never heard Anne this desperate before, and that was saying something. If she really had found proof that Luis was what Williams insisted he was, that would account for it. But what did she expect Nikki to do about it? On the other hand, this was Anne. Her Anne. Anne who had saved her life last night, whether she intended to or not.

  I could meet her, Nikki thought. One last time.

  But where, and how? The idea of turning around and driving all the way back to LA tomorrow filled her with dread. She’d only just escaped the city. Plus if Goodman found out she was back, or worse, Johnson, she’d be screwed.

  Perhaps she should ask Anne to come to her instead? To drive out to the desert. But that presented its own problems. She didn’t want anyone to know where she was. And if Luis was still having Anne followed … No. It was too dangerous.

  ‘Be at my office at six o’clock tomorrow night,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll have Kim let you in through the back door.’

  ‘Not your office,’ Anne replied. ‘Luis has people watching. Your home too. And mine, and the concert hall.’

  The fear in her voice made the hairs on Nikki’s arms stand on end.

  Anne blurted out an address downtown. ‘It’s a warehouse in the old clothing district but it’s been empty for months. I pass it on my way to rehearsal.’ She gave Nikki instructions on how to get in. ‘Six o’clock, yes?’

  ‘OK,’ Nikki said reluctantly. ‘Tomorrow at six.’

  With a click, the line went dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Strangely, Nikki woke the next morning feeling enormously better. Perhaps it was the temporary euphoria of an unbroken night’s sleep, her first in many days. The Hacienda’s cloud-soft bed had welcomed her like a lover, stinging sunburned skin and all. And though she awoke looking like a half-boiled lobster, with flakes of skin peeling painfully from her nose, cheekbones and the tops of her red-raw shoulders, her raging anxiety seemed to have gone and with it all the anger and sadness that had felt so overwhelming the night before.