Duplicity

by Jane Haseldine

  “With that woman he was seeing from the D.A.’s office when you guys were separated?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was her. I found naked pictures on David’s phone.”

  “I’m sorry, Julia.”

  “For a lot of years, I never felt good enough for David, like I was damaged goods that could never measure up. But I finally realized David did a lot to perpetuate that myth before he walked out the first time. Blaming our first split entirely on my paranoia over the boys’ safety and the fact that I couldn’t let go of my brother’s disappearance, that wasn’t fair. He had his share of the blame too with being controlling and when he wasn’t telling me what to do, he was absent and always working. My only saving grace is that I wouldn’t let him move back in with us until I was sure.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “About David? Nothing right now. When he gets out of the hospital and back on his feet, the boys and I will move out and back to our lake house in Sparrow.”

  The airplane taxis down the runway at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. It lands easily, and the attendant opens the door and secures the stairs to the tarmac. Julia hurries off the plane and heads toward the terminal, anxious to get back to her sons.

  Julia grabs her cell phone and dials her home number. She listens as her house phone rings twelve times without anyone picking up, thrusting her into panic mode.

  “Hello,” Helen finally answers.

  “Thank God. You scared me. Is Logan home yet?” Julia asks.

  “Yes,” Helen says, and tries to catch her breath. “That’s why I just picked up. Logan just got off the school bus, and then we all rushed inside when I heard the phone ringing. Did you find that man who hurt your David?”

  “We’ll talk about that later. The officers are still there?”

  “Well, they were. The man who stayed with us in the house overnight left in the morning, and there was a single officer in his car out front until a few minutes ago. There was a major accident on I-75, a twenty-five-car pileup with the snow and lots of casualties. The officer promised that another police officer would be here soon, but the person hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “This is important, Helen. I want you to go to the window and be discreet. Look outside. Do you see anyone out there?”

  Helen puts the phone down and then returns a few seconds later.

  “There was a dark car I saw park across the street when I heard the phone ring. It’s still there and someone is sitting inside. The windows are tinted, so I can’t see a face, but I know someone is in there. Is this person going to cause trouble?”

  “Listen to me very carefully. Is the front door locked?” Julia asks.

  “Yes. You always tell me to lock it.”

  “Get out right now. Don’t go anywhere near the front of the house, and stay away from the windows.”

  “My purse is in the living room on the coffee table by the bay window,” Helen says.

  “Leave it. Go out the back door and go to the neighbors. The Wilsons should be home. Stay there until the police arrive.”

  “You scare me, Julia.”

  “Don’t let Logan and Will know you’re scared. Now go.”

  Navarro and Julia hurry through the terminal to his car in the parking garage. Navarro turns on his siren, and they cut through the late-afternoon rush hour traffic leaving the city.

  * * *

  Isabella Rossi watches the boy, Logan, walk toward his house with an old woman and the lawyer’s other child, the younger one a miniature version of the assistant district attorney, with their white-blond hair and fair skin. The older boy looks like the lawyer’s wife, she thinks.

  Isabella’s cell phone on the car’s inner console begins to ring, and Nick Rossi’s number comes across the screen.

  Isabella stares at her reflection in the rearview mirror and recalls the first time she laid eyes on Nick. It was at an L.A. club called the Black Sunset. Isabella was waiting with her sister behind the velvet rope with all the other wannabes, hoping to God they’d get in, when Nick pulled up in a black Ferrari, tipped the valet a cool hundred, and then disappeared inside. Isabella wasn’t going to let that kind of opportunity pass, so she used what always worked for her. Isabella pressed her body against the bouncer and whispered what she would do to him at the end of the night if he would just let her into the club.

  Ten seconds later, Isabella and her sister were in. Isabella slinked her way to the VIP section, where Nick was holding court in the center of the best table in the house.

  “You’re from Michigan? No shit. What’s you name?” Nick asked as he palmed Isabella’s ass.

  “Isabella Ferrari,” she lied, still thinking about the car.

  Isabella was a half truth. Sort of. She took the stage name Isabella Thorn after the guy who snapped her headshots suggested it sounded much better than the name she was born with: Kathleen Murphy.

  An hour after her new name debuted, Isabella left with Nick in the Ferrari, and one of Nick’s guys stayed behind to beat the crap out of the disappointed bouncer who didn’t get what he thought was coming to him at the end of the night.

  Her first beating came on their honeymoon, when Isabella asked her new husband why he never told her what happened to his mother, a revelation she heard from Uncle Sal’s wife during the wedding reception. If Isabella was supposed to know about it, Nick would have told her. That’s what he screamed while he continued to kick her even when she had curled up in a ball and tried to seek refuge under a table. The next morning, Nick acted like nothing happened. And no one noticed. Nick was a smart beater who knew not to hit his woman in the face. If no one can actually see the bruises, it’s like it never happened.

  Isabella taps her manicured fingernails against the steering wheel and rationalizes that she took the beatings because the money was just too good. And when their daughter, Christina, was born, things got better, as if Isabella had finally done something right in her husband’s eyes. But when her Christina was murdered by one of Nick’s rivals, Isabella felt an icy blackness in her chest, like any small part of her that had ever been good had died. She promised herself then that she would not only leave her husband, she would get even.

  Isabella removes a revolver from a briefcase lying on the passenger seat and begins to tuck it inside her coat when a police siren sounds in the near distance. Isabella hurriedly puts the gun back in the briefcase and catches the old woman peeking out from the kitchen curtains.

  An image quickly flashes across Isabella’s memory: Christina’s little hand sliding into her own whenever they took a drive. Isabella would stretch her arm into the backseat of the car until Christina reached out for her mother. Isabella would not let go of her daughter’s hand until the ride was over, even when her arm fell asleep. It was always so beautifully worth it.

  Isabella shudders and puts the car in gear, knowing the next part of her end game will have to wait.

  * * *

  “Okay, Julia. Calm down. I just ordered another officer to go back to your house,” Navarro says. “Logan and Will are at your neighbor’s with the housekeeper. Everyone is okay for now, but things are getting complicated. I got a message while we were on the plane. Jason Meter, the sniper, was killed in prison this morning. A fight broke out in the dining hall and Meter was stabbed to death. Meter ratted out Enzo Costas, but Meter didn’t say anything about Rossi’s involvement. Costas is dead. Meter is dead, and I got a call from the LAPD that Rossi took off and is nowhere to be found. So we don’t have anything to directly tie Rossi to the sniper.”

  “Rossi ordered the hit on Meter,” Julia says.

  “He’s obviously got someone else running the show in Detroit now that Bartello was killed and whoever that is must have made sure Meter was taken out before he pointed the finger at the boss.”

  “So we’re left with what? Nothing?”

  “Did Rossi tell you he planted the bomb? I’m not sure we can extradite him back here based on David’s confirmation alone, consider
ing the condition David was in when he indicated that Rossi ordered the courthouse attack.”

  Julia runs through the entirety of her conversation with Rossi in her head. She feels tempted for a moment to lie and implicate Rossi, but ultimately she can’t.

  “No. Rossi didn’t cop to anything.”

  Navarro pulls into Julia’s driveway, the ride seeming to take an eternity.

  “I’m going with you,” Julia says, and reaches for the door.

  “Not a chance. Sit tight.”

  Julia keeps her eyes trained on Navarro until he disappears inside her house. Julia looks at the dashboard clock and decides to give Navarro three minutes before she goes inside. She watches the minutes slowly creep past until the three-minute mark is reached. Julia grabs the passenger door handle when Navarro surfaces and hooks a finger for her to join him.

  “It’s all clear, like the other officer said. But come with me for a second,” Navarro says, and leads Julia inside and down the hall to David’s office. “Does David usually leave his office like this?”

  David’s meticulously kept files are strewn across his desk, and a filing cabinet is upturned.

  “No. I was in David’s office before I left. Someone came in here looking for something. I asked another lawyer in the D.A.’s office about the Rossi case file, but he thought it went missing in the blast.”

  “Then someone came into your house looking for something David had in the file. And whoever did it is an amateur. A professional would’ve left the place exactly how they found it. That rules out Rossi.”

  “Miss Julia, are you here?” Helen calls out from the front door as she and Julia’s boys are escorted inside by a uniformed police officer.

  Logan and Will rush to Julia’s side, and she gets down on her knees so she can wrap her arms around both of her sons.

  “What happened in this room?” Helen asks. “I dusted Mr. David’s office this morning. It was neat and tidy when I left it.”

  “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Logan asks.

  “No. Everything is fine. We’re just going to pack a bag and stay somewhere for a few days,” Julia answers. “Like a vacation.”

  “This has something to do with the bombing in the courthouse, doesn’t it?” Logan asks.

  “Stop worrying so much, honey,” Julia says, and gives Helen a subtle signal to get Logan and Will out of David’s office.

  “Come on, boys. We’ll go pack a bag now,” Helen says, and leads the boys to their rooms.

  Navarro sifts through the papers on David’s desk, old case files from his work at the district attorney’s office and even a few dating back to his work as a public defender.

  “Looks like David saved everything,” Navarro says, and turns quickly to Julia as something clicks.

  “Was David supposed to escort Sammy Biggs into the courthouse?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “If David was supposed to meet Biggs and bring him up to the courtroom, then David would have been at the exact location where the bomb went off. Like we thought, he must have been the target. Rossi wanted to be sure David was taken out.”

  * * *

  Isabella Rossi waits patiently in the stairwell on the twelfth floor of the hospital, having been there enough times to study and learn the patterns of the staff. She knows there is a narrow window when the nurses change shifts, the prime opportunity to enter David Tanner’s hospital room unnoticed.

  Isabella scans the floor for police officers and then slips into David’s room. He is sleeping, lying pale on the bed with his shaved light blond hair now starting to grow back into rough stubble, except around a deep red scar on the left side of his scalp from the surgery. David opens his eyes, and Isabella is almost amused at the attorney’s frantic recognition as he stares at her now sitting by his bedside.

  “Where’s the money? Give me the box number and the combination,” Isabella whispers. “You tell me or I’ll leak the Ruiz recording from the bar. I got a copy and a confessional of you paying off the bar owner for his silence.”

  “Go ahead. Leak it. I don’t care about it anymore.”

  “As you like,” Isabella says, and strokes her hand down the length of David’s thigh above the hospital bedsheet. “You don’t care about the recording now, but you care about your family. Tell me where the money is, or I’ll kill them.”

  David struggles to pull himself up from the bed, but Isabella pushes him back down.

  “Logan is such a handsome boy. He’s a very good basketball player. I watched him play a few days ago.”

  “You were at Logan’s school?”

  “I warned you before. No more chances.”

  “Don’t touch my family. If you do, I’ll tell your husband what you did. The money is at Infinity Holdings. Box number one hundred two. The combination is thirty-three, ninety-one, forty-seven.”

  Isabella turns her back to David and removes a long syringe from her purse. She works her hand down David’s left arm until she finds a meaty vein and injects the substance, enough, she was told, to make the lawyer’s heart explode, and pats David’s thigh until the syringe is emptied.

  David opens his mouth as if to beg her to stop. But it’s too late. Isabella drops the empty syringe back in her bag, slips out of his hospital room, and heads back down the staircase to the street.

  * * *

  Julia sifts through David’s files in his office with Navarro and feels the buzz of her cell phone in her pocket. The call is within the local area code but from an unfamiliar number.

  Julia is tempted to let the call go to voice mail but picks up at the last second.

  “This is Dr. Whitcomb,” the caller says. “David went into cardiac arrest. We were able to get his heart going again, but he’s in critical condition and back in intensive care.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” Julia cries.

  “His body was in a severely weakened state before this happened, so we’ll be monitoring him closely. He had a major heart attack.”

  “I don’t understand how this could happen. He was doing so much better. You were worried about a stroke, not a heart attack.”

  “No outcome can be predicted exactly. I’d suggest you come to the hospital as soon as you can,” Dr. Whitcomb answers.

  * * *

  Julia keeps her eyes steady on the machine that monitors David’s heart rate in his hospital room. She is afraid that if she looks away for even a single second, his heart will stop again, as if she could keep it beating at a normal rhythm by her pure will alone.

  Julia clasps David’s hand, careful not to squeeze too tight. Despite his recent infidelities, Julia can’t help but break down as memories of their life together take over her thoughts.

  She pictures David, the two of them dancing barefoot in the kitchen, his body pressed tightly against hers as Logan and Will gagged in fake horror over their father giving their mother a warm, wet kiss on the mouth.

  (I love you so much, Julia.)

  And she sees David poring over his case files late into the night as he prepared for trial the next morning to represent the family of a teenage boy who was killed by a drunken driver as he rode his bike home from the library.

  (Go back to bed. I’ll be up for a while. This kid deserves everything I can give him in court tomorrow.)

  “Julia.”

  She looks up suddenly, David’s voice no longer just in her head.

  “David! Let me get your doctor.”

  “I’m sorry,” David whispers. “I tried to stop Rossi. I made a mistake. He was blackmailing me. But I was going to make it right.”

  “Just relax, okay?”

  “I crossed the line on a case I was working. I knew it wasn’t right, but I was sure the guy was guilty. And then when things exploded between us, when you were still at the lake house and wouldn’t forgive me, I was lost. I was mad at you, and I made a mistake. Find the money before she does and give it to the police,” David begs, his green eyes intense and frightened.


  The machine monitoring David’s heart rate makes a loud warning, and a nurse hurries inside.

  A doctor and two other medical technicians rush inside the room, and Julia is forced out into the waiting area. She collapses on a chair and puts her head between her hands, nothing making sense anymore, knowing the life she worked so hard to create with David and the boys has completely unraveled.

  An instinctual fear goes off inside her, and Julia jumps up from the chair and hurries back to David’s room. Before she can reach the door, the doctor comes out, looking grave and red-faced.

  “I need to see my husband,” Julia pleads.

  “I’m sorry. We did everything we could. Your husband suffered another major heart attack, and we couldn’t get his heart working again.”

  “What are you telling me?” Julia screams.

  “Your husband, David. He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Julia stares at the light gray wall in her bedroom, her body facing away from David’s side of the bed. Logan is curled up in his father’s former space, and Will sleeps in a nest he made with his blankets at the bottom of the king-sized bed.

  The bedroom is cool, but Julia lies on top of the covers after enduring another night when sleep was elusive, and in the rare snatches when it was found, Julia would dream David was still alive. In the first few seconds between dreaming and waking, she would believe he truly was, and he was waiting to finally explain to her what had happened, what dark hole he climbed inside and the reason he slid down it. When Julia was a child, she always carried a tiny spark of hope that if she worked hard enough, she could change her fate. But this time, Julia realizes she is completely powerless and there is nothing she can do to bring David back, death being the one thing that can never be overcome. No matter what David did, in the end, they shared a history, a deep love once, and brought two little boys into the world together.

  The sun begins to rise outside Julia’s bedroom window. She knows the security detail is still parked out in front of her house, as he has been all night, which provides a hollow comfort.