“What’s the big deal?” I said. “It looks like something a Chippendales dancer would wear.”
“Look at this.” Sierra held the cuff out, and we all gathered around. She pointed to the rhinestone cuff link. “That’s an ‘L,’” she said, “See it?”
She was right. The capital cursive L traced out in glittery stones was plainly visible now that I was seeing it in brighter light.
“A rhinestone ‘L’ means only one thing in this town,” Sierra said. “I think this belonged to Liberace.”
“Really?” my dad said, suddenly much more interested. “Is that possible?”
“You’d be amazed what I’ve seen in people’s houses around here,” Sierra said. “Lots of people collect memorabilia—they go to auctions any time a show shuts down or an old casino’s going to get imploded. Hans and Dustin—the two gay guys down the street who got burglarized—that’s how they built their collection. I’m going to call them in the morning. If this is theirs, maybe our kitty knows where to find more.”
Sierra set the cuff down on the little phone desk, and soon dinner was on the table. I’m not sure I talked much while we ate. All I remember is my mind jumping back and forth between my parents’ crazy relationships and whatever Sierra had in her manila file folder. And what was happening between Daniel and me? Was my whole world on the verge of disintegration? How could that be, when everything seemed so smooth on the surface?
After dinner and Greek coffee in the living room, my parents began getting ready to leave. They had an early flight the next morning, and a rental car to return.
“You never sent your email,” I said to my mother as she pulled on her sweater and picked up her purse. “Want me to send a message for you?”
“No, that’s okay, darling,” she said. “I’ll call from the hotel.” She hugged me. “I’m sorry things are tough, Copper, and I’m proud of you.”
Proud of me? What for?
“Just take care of yourself, Mom,” I said. I picked up the tray of demitasses and headed toward the kitchen.
My father was standing alone near the little phone desk. His right arm was stretched out in front of him, and on his wrist was the Liberace cuff. He was looking at his reflection in the window.
I froze as realization hit me like a truck. My father was gay. He’d been gay all his life. Oh, my God, I thought. What’s it like to be locked in a closet for more than half a century? I couldn’t imagine. I remembered what he had told me about his mother the day we went to the Liberace Museum. “For her, being homosexual was simply not an option.” Oh, Daddy. What you really meant was that it wasn’t an option for you.
The cuff was off, and Dad was facing me. Our eyes locked. He knew that I knew. I set the tray down, walked over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Think it’s real?” I said.
“I’d like to believe it,” my dad said. “I—” he paused, and our eyes met. He reached out and ruffled my hair. “I love you, kiddo.”
“I love you, too, Daddy-o,” I said, and I ruffled his hair back.
:: :: ::
Sierra was all business as soon as the door closed behind my parents. “Daniel, if you’ll excuse us, Michael, Copper, and I have got to have a little meeting. If you want to watch TV—”
Thank you, Sierra! I’d been dreading telling Daniel myself.
“You can go up to my place,” I said. “You can have my laptop.” I turned to Sierra. “Let me go set it up, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Daniel followed me up the stairs. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said after I’d made sure Daniel had Internet access.
“Whatever,” Daniel said, sitting down at my desk. I didn’t like his tone. It almost made me wish he’d said, “We’ve got to talk” again. I sighed.
“I won’t be long, I promise.”
Back in the vicarage, I found Michael and Sierra at the dining room table. Sierra had spread out a bunch of papers, and Michael had a tragic look on his face.
“So what’s the deal?” I said.
“After you called, I pulled all the background on the Alliance’s transactions,” Sierra said. “And it all looked perfectly fine. Landmark Properties owns the Bluebird Motel, and it still looks like a perfectly good property for the Alliance. But since you seemed so convinced Julia’s up to something, and I was so sure she wasn’t, I did a little more homework. I pulled the background on Landmark.”
Sierra moved some papers to the top of the pile.
“Again, everything looked good. Landmark is a limited liability corporation, and the partners are Jasper Cutler and John Kusick. The officers are people whose names I didn’t recognize except for one that seemed familiar: R. Taylor Higginbotham. Recognize that name, Michael?”
“Maybe … ”
“The ‘R’ stands for Rachel.”
“Julia’s assistant,” Michael said slowly.
“Yeah,” Sierra said. “And that wasn’t a good sign. So I got the whole file from the Office of the Secretary of State. Took a couple of hours, but it turned out to be worth it. Guess who another director of Landmark Properties is.”
“Julia Saxon.” Michael and I both said it, and Sierra nodded.
“It gets worse,” she said. “As long as I was checking, I figured I might as well see what was happening with the original property—Willow Lake.” She riffled through some more papers. “It’s nice to have friends at title companies. I found out that another limited liability corporation has made an offer on it.”
More paper shuffling.
“This one’s called Triple J Ranch Partners. I checked out who the officers are and didn’t recognize any names, but I got the full list of directors anyway. Sure enough, the three Js are there. Jasper, John, and Julia.”
“If it was that easy to find out what was going on,” Michael said, “how come nobody noticed before?”
“Nobody bothered,” Sierra said. “Julia obviously thought they didn’t have to work very hard to pull this off.”
“What’s the real crime, though?” I said. “What do they get out of it that they couldn’t have gotten above board?”
“I was wondering that myself,” Sierra said, “and I think it comes down to two things. One is, the Bluebird property probably has some major defects they’ve neglected to disclose. Hazmat, if I had to guess. Old leaky gas tanks are common up there, and it costs a fortune to clean them up. But that’s just a guess.”
“It’s a very good guess,” I said, remembering the articles Ed Bramlett had given me.
“Yes, but it could also just be a run-down property they’ve managed to get some inflated appraisals on. What I’m almost positive about is that they want to buy the Willow Lake property for the price the Alliance was going to pay. Now that it’s been rezoned for multi-family units, it’s worth a lot more, and if they move fast they can swoop in before any other offers come in.”
“There’s still something bothering me,” I said. “A reporter at the newspaper was convinced that somehow you were going to ‘get screwed’ by all of this, Michael. And—just a minute. I’ve got something you’ve got to hear. I’ll be right back.”
Julia’s tape recorder was in my car. I glanced up at my apartment as I retrieved it from the glove box. The lights were still on.
Please be patient, Daniel, I prayed. You were right. We really do need to talk.
Back in the dining room, Sierra and Michael were still poring over all the papers.
I set the recorder on the table and clicked it on. This time, as I listened to Julia chat with her accomplices, everything made perfect sense. They were angling to get the Willow Lake property, and Julia had set it up so—if nobody looked very closely—it would be “all clean.”
But there was still one troubling problem. What did Julia mean when she said Michael had been “taken care of?”
“Isn’t
it great to have God on our side?” Sierra repeated as I clicked the recorder off. “That bitch! How could she?”
“But what does it mean?” I said. “I know it’s underhanded of them to take the Alliance’s property deal, but how does Michael get hurt?”
“That bitch!” Sierra said. “That fucking bitch!”
“I think I know,” Michael said, and we both looked at him. His face was the color of a hospital sheet. “I’ve got something to show you.”
“That fucking, fucking bitch,” Sierra said.
Michael came back with an envelope in his hand and sat back down.
“Julia sent this to me by courier today. She said the courier would wait while I signed it.” He opened the envelope and slid something out. Sierra and I leaned across the table. It was a cashier’s check for $300,000.
“It’s made out to you!” I said.
“Yes,” Michael said. “Julia told me somebody at Landmark screwed up and had the check made out to me instead of to the Alliance. It’s supposed to be a donation—it was part of the deal. So she wanted me to endorse it. I asked her why Landmark couldn’t get a new check, and she said this would be a lot faster and accomplish the same thing.”
“That fucking bitch,” Sierra said.
“I asked her if I should endorse it over to the Alliance for the Homeless, and she said, ‘No, it’s going into an escrow account. Just sign it.’”
I waited for another “fucking bitch,” but Sierra seemed to have run out.
“Yeah,” she said. “‘Just sign it, and later if I need to, I can show the world you got a personal kickback of $300,000 for guiding the Alliance away from a valuable property and into a bad one with an artificially inflated price.’”
That fucking bitch!
“But I didn’t sign it,” Michael said. “I was about to, though.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“Well, I had only stopped by St. Andrew’s to meet the courier, but any time my car’s parked in front of the church, it guarantees activity. Mrs. Carrington showed up with the latest dire news about the altar guild. When I got her taken care of, my cell phone rang.”
“Me?” Sierra said.
“Yup.”
“I’m going to be a lot nicer to Mrs. C. from now on,” Sierra said. “The old bat can show me as many photos of her neurotic dachshunds as she wants.”
“I kept the check, sent the courier away, and called Julia. She was pretty upset, but I told her everything would just have to wait until tomorrow. I guess I dodged a pretty big bullet,” Michael said. “Thanks, sweetheart. Julia may think she’s got God on her side, but I’m happy to have you.”
Sierra didn’t say anything for a minute.
“Actually,” she said at last, “you should be glad you have Copper.”
Sierra looked at me, and I realized I had just heard the biggest apology ever to emerge from her mouth.
“It took us all,” I said, “and we’re not through. I think we’ve avoided the screw job, but there’s still the property deal. Wouldn’t it be better if the Alliance got Willow Lake?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “I was willing to make the best of the Bluebird property, but the location’s not nearly as good.”
“Willow Lake’s a far better investment,” Sierra said, “even if Bluebird isn’t an outright liability.”
“This tape,” I said, tapping the recorder, “gives us the leverage we need to make Julia set everything straight. Let’s pay her a visit tomorrow.”
“I already told her I’d show up at ten,” Michael said.
We spent some more time working out the details, and by the time I was on my way up to my apartment again, I had agreed to go with Michael to confront Julia the next morning. He wanted a witness, and Sierra thought it would be better if the witness weren’t his wife.
“I’m his sister, though,” I said.
“I know,” Sierra said, “but you’re also the press.”
Had I heard right? Sierra was calling me “the press?”
“She’s got a point,” Michael said. “I’m glad we have the press on our side.”
And my pompous big brother was, too!
Before I left, I almost asked them what they thought about Mom’s revelations. No, I told myself. There would be plenty of time to dissect my parents’ issues after we got Julia Saxon, Esquire, taken care of.
:: :: ::
The only light on in my apartment was the night-light in the bathroom. Daniel was sound asleep on the bed. As quietly as I could, I slipped off all my clothes and slid in next to him. He moaned softly and turned. His arms slipped around me, and his body curled around mine. I sighed. Oh, Daniel. This is so good. You and me together, sleeping like spoons. This is how it’s supposed to be.
My mind whirled with thoughts of Julia and the face-off Michael and I had planned for tomorrow, but Daniel’s rhythmic breathing soon slowed me down. And just before I fell asleep, I felt the soft thump of a cat’s paws landing on the end of the bed. The whole family’s here, I thought as I drifted off. My parents might be philanderers, and my brother a stooge. My cat might be peculiar, and I myself may have my priorities mixed up. But right that very minute, and for a few more hours, everything was perfect.
:: :: ::
Tuesday, December 27
It stayed perfect, too. Daniel and I woke up before dawn and we made love.
“I love you, Copper,” he said as we lay there in the dark. “I miss you.”
“I love you, Daniel,” I said. “And you can’t miss me because I’m right here.”
But the truth was, I missed him, too. What had happened to us?
“All I wanted was to spend a week with you,” he said. “But right now, I’d settle for a day.”
“Daniel—” There was no point in postponing the inevitable. “I wish I didn’t have to but—”
Daniel pulled away from me and sat up.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You’ve got an appointment with a pimp at Kmart.”
“Come on,” I said.
“Come on what?” he said, standing up. “Come on, let’s go get some breakfast? Somehow, I bet not.”
“This won’t take long,” I said.
“Oh, you mean like last night,” Daniel said.
“Do you want to hear what it’s about or not?” I asked.
“I’ve done a lot of listening lately, Copper,” Daniel said. “When does it get to be my turn to talk?”
“My brother’s in trouble,” I said. “I have to help him.”
“Well, that’s a step up from a dead hooker, at least.”
Right then, my phone rang. I looked at the number before I answered.
“It’s Heather,” I said.
“Oh, great. The live hooker.”
I sighed and took the call.
“Copper, a detective was here last night asking Richard a bunch more questions. He’s a mess this morning. Have you gotten anywhere with Julia?”
“No, but I’m seeing her this morning.” I didn’t see any point in telling Heather my meeting had nothing to do with Victoria.
“Good. I think I’ve found a ranch school in California that will take Jason, but I’m going to need at least ten grand to get him settled. Tell her that, okay?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Daniel pull his cell phone out of his jeans. He retreated across the room and made a call.
“I’ll do what I can. Any idea what the cops suspect?”
“Richard’s afraid they might think he killed Victoria.”
“Oh, no!”
“They asked questions about Marks, though. And American Beauty, so who knows?”
Daniel finished his call before Heather hung up.
“Want some coffee?” I said.
“You have time?”
&n
bsp; “Yeah,” I said. But unfortunately, my cupboard was bare. It had been a while since I’d done any grocery shopping. “I’ll have to go borrow some coffee from Sierra.” I was about to add, “I’ll be right back,” but I restrained myself. No reason to reignite the war just yet.
Sierra was in the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee from a full pot.
“Oh, hi, Copper, “she said. “I’ve been thinking things over, and I think we should—”
“May I borrow some coffee?” I said. “It’s kind of an emergency.”
“Beans or already made?” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, not even sure which question I was answering.
“Is everything okay with Daniel?”
“No.”
Without another word, Sierra pulled two mugs from the cupboard above her and filled them from the pot. “Sugar?” she asked. “Cream?”
“No, black’s fine,” I said. “Thanks.” I picked up the mugs. “I’ll be back soon,” I said. God, it was becoming my favorite lie.
I was halfway across the driveway when a taxi pulled up at the curb. Daniel appeared at the top of my stairs. We met at the bottom, and I kept up with him as he walked purposefully to the curb.
“You’re leaving?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Leaving Las Vegas?”
“I’m not sure yet. Thought I’d have breakfast and think things over.”
“Will you call me? We really should talk.”
Daniel made a gulping sound. A laugh? Or was it a sob?
“I love you,” I said.
Daniel looked at me, but he didn’t say anything. Then he opened the taxi door and disappeared inside.
The cab pulled away, leaving me standing there at the curb in my bathrobe holding two rapidly cooling mugs of black coffee.
Chapter 23
Sierra and Michael were at the kitchen table, heads together in heavy conversation when I joined them. I refilled my mug and pulled up a chair.
“I’ve been up all night thinking,” Michael said. “The way I see it, I’ve got to let Julia know what we know and give her a chance to make it right.”
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