by M. M. Mayle
“And why wouldn’t you?” Amanda says. “I mean, that’s how anyone would have seen her without corroborating evidence, wouldn’t they?”
They ride on in silence for a while, with him chewing on the implication he should feel responsible in some way, with her presumably mulling over the entire constellation of events.
“I could use a drink and I’m getting hungry,” he says when they reach Holbrook Road. “I overlooked lunch and I don’t remember much about breakfast. You ready for something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know a spot around here or do you want to pick a place in the city?”
“I only know a couple places near here. There’s the Claremont Diner, where I once went with Laurel but she was driving so I don’t know if I can find it again, and Pals Cabin, where I once met Laurel and because I was driving I probably can find it again once I get to West Orange and Prospect Avenue.”
If her signature breathless run-on delivery is any indicator, Amanda’s back on her game. And, now that they’re nearing Valley Road, he can find the way to West Orange.
The sprawling restaurant affords an atmosphere as far removed from Old Quarry Court as can be managed on short notice. Seated in a side room heavy on dark paneling and leatherette-upholstered booths, Amanda orders a vodka and tonic with ice water on the side, and he goes for a vodka on the rocks. He has two more before he’s ready to think about food; she’s still on her heavily diluted first drink when she opens a menu.
The only criterion for his food choice is lack of resemblance to either latkes or flanken. Mushroom soup and a Cobb salad meet that requirement. Amanda chooses the house salad. As though by unspoken agreement, small talk prevails while they wait for the food to arrive. Nothing is said of the elephant crowded into the booth with them until the soup and salads are served, and Amanda—right out of nowhere—suddenly wants to know why he chose a certain simile earlier.
“Or maybe I shouldn’t call it a simile in the purest sense. You gave an extreme example of something you were loathe to do in expressing your reluctance to inform Laurel of Mrs. Floss’s death. Was that random or is there some reason to believe Laurel’s brothers dabbled—no, you said flirted—with cocaine use? Is there any truth to that?”
“You don’t miss much, do you?”
“I try not to. Is that a problem?”
“No.”
“You sound like it is.”
“Trust me, it’s not. This . . . this cognizance of yours is one of your greatest assets and if I sound irritable, it’s because I’m feeling overwhelmed.”
“I’m sure you are and with good reason, but—”
“But I still haven’t answered your question.” He slugs down the remains of his third drink. “If you really must know, that wasn’t a random remark, but feel free to call it a simile if you want to.”
He’d like another drink. If he has another, he’ll have to ask Amanda to drive when they leave, and that will give her even more power.
He signals the waitress and asks for coffee. After it arrives, he fills Amanda in about the substance that was first mistaken for rodenticide, then explained away as jock itch powder, and ultimately proven to be cocaine.
“I think you can see why I let that sleeping dog lie.”
“I see no such thing and I’m mind-blown that you don’t see.”
For a moment she appears ready to cry. He’s beyond bewildered until she blows her nose and glares at him.
“Only hours ago you had me compiling everything known about this Hoople Jakeway creature with one of those details being Mrs. Floss’s assertion that she saw him entering and leaving the Chandler house by the grade door to the garage. “Entering, Nate, going into Laurel’s house. The bastard’s been inside and he may have been in there while she still lived there . . . while she was home . . . while Colin was there, god forbid. He’s probably been all through the house, including the attic, where he got careless while doing a line.
“Along with everything else I think this guy’s got to be considered a cokehead with an unlimited supply, if you take into consideration the amount left at the scene of the Sid Kaplan murder and the amount that can be presumed taken from the safe of a known drug dealer—Gibby Lester, I mean, and now Brownell Yates’s stubborn notion of a connection with Rayce’s death doesn’t seem so much like wishful thinking, and now I think we should go to the police, but not before Laurel is informed. Okay?” She takes a deep breath and eyes him expectantly.
“If I have another drink will you drive me home?”
“I already planned to.”
“Will you stay with me when we get there?”
“I already planned to stay because I want to call Laurel from your house. I want her to know—and Colin if necessary—that I am with you on this in every sense of the word and every step of the way because I’m going to tell her everything. And I mean everything. Nothing will be left out, no one will be spared, and if they can’t deal with it, tough toenails.”
“That’s my girl.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Very early morning, May 28, 1987
At first, Laurel resists the sound without knowing if it’s coming from inside her head or out. For a while, she’s unsure if she’s asleep, awake, or suspended somewhere in between. The sound—a series of distant double warbles coming at regular intervals—persists once she determines she’s more awake than not.
She slips out of Colin’s loose embrace without waking him, eases out of bed and out of the room without turning on a light. Clad in an oversized T-shirt and bikini briefs, she closes the bedroom door behind her and hesitates in the hallway to verify that it’s the phone in her north wing office that she hears ringing. The sequence of four fixed rings followed by a measured pause repeats itself twice while she listens.
Wide awake now, she does a quick mental inventory of those with access to that number. Her brothers, her sister, her father’s caseworker at the nursing home, Amanda, Nate—none of whom would call at this hour without good reason. Which translates as bad news.
Putting off the inevitable, she looks in on both boys during a pause in the ringing. Along the way, the little ankle-rubbing cat shows up to hinder her progress until she picks him up and carries him along.
In the office, she flips the switch for the wall sconces left over from another era, drops the cat on a cushioned windowsill, and occupies her desk chair as though she had nothing better to do than plan another chapter of Colin’s stalled biography. Now sounding like a klaxon on a sinking ship, the phone starts up again. She answers just ahead of the fourth ring. “Yes?” she says in a small voice.
“Laurel? It’s Amanda. I am terribly sorry to—”
“Just get it over with! Is it my father? Has something happened to one of my brothers? My sister?”
“No, no, nothing like that, but it is serious. Things . . . have happened, there’s a great deal you need to know. Now.”
“Then tell me!”
Amanda takes an audible breath and introduces a premise Laurel would reject out of hand if she hadn’t witnessed several of the key incidents herself and didn’t know several of the contentions to be inarguable fact.
Unlike the ringing telephone, Amanda goes on without pause. For several minutes. When she does hesitate, it’s only to catch her breath. At one point Laurel takes notes, attempts to keep track of a chain of events too long and too complicated to grasp in one hearing. All she manages to write down are the names of the new players, with only one—Brownell Yates—sounding even vaguely familiar.
“I’m faxing a written statement of everything I’ve just said, along with a photo of Jakeway and charts and timelines to support these findings,” Amanda says, and picks up a new thread.
Upon absorbing news of Mrs. Floss’s hideous death, Laurel ceases to comprehend other than on a superficial level. She hears without actually processing that Nate discovered the body; she can’t quite grasp what business Nate had at the Floss house and what part the demented
old lady played in this unfolding drama. She’s numb after Amanda executes an especially longwinded explanation of why Nate kept mum about the cocaine discovered in the Chandler attic last Saturday. But not so numb she can’t resist Amanda and Nate’s plan to go to the police with what they now view as primary evidence.
“No,” Laurel says with as much emphasis as she can muster, “No, you must not go to the police with that.” Some of her gumption returns. “I forbid it. I absolutely forbid it! And if you don’t understand why, you should be in another line of work.”
This produces the longest pause of the entire lopsided exchange and subdues Amanda, but only slightly. She responds from another angle, speaks of Nate’s reaction to Mrs. Floss’s death as though courting cooperation through sympathy.
“He took it pretty hard,” Amanda says. “Especially when it appeared he may have been the last person to see her alive. Did I mention that he wants to take care of the funeral arrangements once it’s cleared with social services? Oh and we’re going to need a statement from you that there are no survivors and something else confirming . . . I forget what he said exactly, something about—”
“Where are you anyway? Is Nate there now? Can I talk to him?”
“I’m at his place where I’ll be for the rest of my stay in New York and he’s here but he’s out cold because, as I was telling you, he took this all pretty hard and he drank a lot at dinner and after I drove him home he had more to drink and wanted me to wait until morning your time to call but I didn’t want to put it off so he fell asleep while I was preparing my statement and—”
“Amanda, listen to me for a minute. You were wise to let me know about Mrs. Floss right away. I’ll call the Glen Abbey police yet tonight and determine what they need from me. Tell Nate he’s kind and generous to want to pick up the tab for the funeral, but that’s my responsibility—mine and my family’s. While you’re at it, tell Nate your investigation cannot go forward if it’s dependant on the cocaine allegedly found in my attic. And that’s final. Okay?”
“I guess it’ll have to be,” Amanda says, petulance creeping into her tone as the conversation winds down to an inconclusive finish.
Laurel gets up to shut the office door, ignores how chilled her bare feet and legs have become. She powers on the computer when she returns to the desk. The shifting shapes of the screensaver hold her attention until the ping of the fax machine breaks in.
Was it only this afternoon—yesterday afternoon—that Colin eased off thinking the worst about the Nate-Amanda relationship and even complimented Nate for his ability to separate business and pleasure? What would Colin think now, given Amanda’s brazen admission of collusion with the enemy? And what would he think of the demand for heightened security precautions now that it’s safe to say the demand originated with Nate?
What would he think if he were willing to believe cocaine was found in her attic? Would he shrug it off as Nate did at first—blame it on a couple of experimenting college kids? Or would he think she kept a stash? And how hard would he laugh at the outrageous concept of a Native American called Hoople Walking Crow Jakeway hell-bent on a mission to avenge Aurora’s ruination?
She could laugh at that notion herself if she didn’t recall those baseless fears that tried to possess her at the Concert for Rayce. But that doesn’t keep her from recalling the stand she took the night Mrs. Floss burst in—the beans-on-toast night when Colin tried to cast himself as her guardian and protector and she pompously proclaimed that she’d never give in to fear, never live her life from beneath the bed, never buy into the aberrations of a crazy old lady, or she’d soon be crazy herself. Her exact words or very close.
The computer monitor no longer holds any fascination and the fax machine has fallen idle. Just as well because neither are a priority at the moment. Before she does anything else, she’ll get in touch with her brothers and sister, extract from them promises to attend whatever services are arranged for their onetime benefactor. Then she’ll call the Glen Abbey police department and take care of whatever it is they require. After that, she’ll leave word for David that she needs to see him at his earliest convenience and will be traveling to London tomorrow—no, later on today—with Colin when he visits his Harley Street physicians.
Some six sleepless hours later, at nine a.m., Laurel prepares to enter David Sebastian’s Curzon Street offices in London. This comes only after assigning Anthony’s supervision to Sam Earle, leaving Simon with Susa Thorne for the day, and convincing Colin the disposition of Mrs. Floss’s dead body is her sole reason for consulting with David.
“I don’t like leaving you here alone,” Colin says when he drops her off.
“I don’t like you going to your doctor appointments without a Praetorian Guard, so I guess that makes us even,” she says and belies her astringent tone by kissing him as though they were going to be apart for a week.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” David says when she’s shown into his private quarters.
“Pleasure doesn’t enter into it,” Laurel says, inwardly recoiling from his ill-concealed interest in her appearance—regretting the hasty choice of a clingy Missoni dress and a loose and flowing hairstyle.
“I can always hope, can’t I?” David waves her to an elegant Regency chair positioned at right angles to the imposing desk he commands in his always correct dark pinstriped suit, white-collared blue shirt, and regimental tie.
He’s probably hoping she requested this emergency meeting to announce an end to her little walk on the wild side; he’s probably hoping she’s relented and will return to the practice of law—entertainment law, to be specific. She keeps these uncharitable thoughts to herself while taking the faxed version of Amanda’s revelations from her battered carryall.
“Here.” She hands it across the intimidating expanse of desktop. “This will go quicker if you read that first.”
He complies after lifting an eyebrow at the sender’s ID.
While he reads, she surveys the surroundings, estimates how much of the understated splendor was paid for by those rock stars he holds in such low esteem and courts with concealed condescension. These glum thoughts occupy her until David finishes with the fax and removes his reading glasses.
“Before I say anything else, allow me to express my condolences about Mrs. Floss. I’ve never forgotten how that good neighbor kept you going during the darkest days and propped you up after the shock of your grandmother’s death. Tragic, just tragic . . . especially the circumstances of her—”
“Save the eulogy for later,” she says. “The overriding concern now is what to do about the rest of this . . . this hypothesis from hell.”
“Start by considering the source,” David is quick to say.
“Amanda or Nate?”
“Nate. That’s a given, Amanda’s only an accessory. What I see here is a highly structured effort to make himself indispensable to Colin, inveigle his way back into a position of power. Devious for enlisting Amanda, despicable for engendering fear, his construct is nevertheless brilliant for distilling known fact and pure fiction into a near-believable premise.”
David pauses to review a page. “And he’s managed to alarm you, so the plan’s working.” He pauses to reread another section of the fax. “But what I don’t see anywhere is the catalyst that set this in motion.”
“Catalyst? I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.”
“The occurrence—real, or imagined by some old lady—that put wheels under the argument. What set him off and when.”
“Nate or Hoople Jakeway?”
“Nate—Am I going too fast for you? You seem to be having trouble keeping up.”
“I’ve had very little sleep.”
“I should have realized. All right then, here’s what we’ll do—a point-by-point takedown, starting with the introduction of Hoople Jakeway as a threat.”
David goes on to discredit everything that doesn’t have basis in hard fact. He pooh-poohs the notion of an unrequited suitor
with a bone to pick as the convenient invention of a hack with a sensationalized story to write. He dismisses Amanda’s charts as immaterial, representative of potential over actual, with a dash of wishful thinking.
He rejects everything attributed to Mrs. Floss for the obvious reason of her dementia and untimely demise. He devalues the links between the three homicides as insignificant in light of what the deceased all had in common. He scorns the suggestion of a possible link to Rayce’s death as wildly implausible, and finds absurd the idea any of this conjecture should seriously impact Colin.
He does exactly what she wants him to do—slays the monster under the bed—and says exactly what she wants him to say until he gets down to those points that cannot be rebutted.
He cannot deny the findings of the private investigator who matched names with numbers and provided a photograph bearing passable resemblance to the Floss sketch. He can’t explain that away, and he can’t automatically disregard the supposition Jakeway entered her home more than once, leaving behind cocaine residue and who knows what else. Then there’s the matter of Jakeway’s registered visit to St. Joseph’s hospital the day of the Sid Kaplan murder; that can’t be mere coincidence.
“But why?” David argues when she supports those claims. “And can you really be sure your brothers or perhaps your sister didn’t do a little sampling, as Nate originally surmised? For that matter, how do you know there is any coke to be found in your attic and if there is, that Nate didn’t plant it there to strengthen his case?”
“That’s ridiculous! That’s beyond outrageous! Nate wouldn’t resort to that even . . . even if he did want Colin back, which he emphatically does not!”
David ignores her mounting stridency, as has always been his practice. “And why is your house the target area?” he says. “If someone’s determined to eliminate Colin, why not on the streets of New York a la John Lennon. God knows Colin provided enough opportunity while he was in Manhattan, and—”