Carter had become a household name. And, soon, I was going to be as well.
I had to prepare myself for that.
Chapter 12
After the brief bond review hearing that I had with Carter, and his arraignment, I knew that I was going to have to get on the stick as far as finding a new place to work, but I first was going to have to meet my new charges. After I was fired, my assistant Sarah called me, asking me if she could go ahead and work for me if I decided to go ahead and hang out a shingle. I was thinking, more and more, that that was exactly what I was going to do – hang out a shingle. I said that I would think about it, and she reminded me about Theresa Vinova and her two daughters, Arabella and Luna.
“They’re with their foster parents at the moment, but they’re waiting for you to go ahead and take custody of them. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve already set up a meeting between you and the girls, at the DCFS.”
I knew what the procedure was in this case. Since I was named to be the guardian of the kids, and I already had a home study completed, I was going to take custody of them immediately. It would be pending a court actually approving of the permanent guardianship, and possible adoption in the future, but I knew that the court order would be just a formality. The court was going to go ahead and approve me as the kids’ guardian, because I had nothing to my background that would prevent the it from doing so.
So, that evening, I went ahead and met the kids. They were staying at a temporary foster home, and those parents went ahead and brought them to the DCFS to meet me, along with the lawyer assigned to the kids’ case.
I was struck, immediately, by the way that Arabella looked. She was 14 years old, but she obviously was trying to look much, much older. Her fingernails were painted black, and her hair was dyed jet black, with one solid blue streak in the front. She was wearing heavy black eyeliner and black lipstick. She was dressed in a jean jacket, black T-shirt, jeans, and heavy black boots.
She took one look at me coming in the door to see her, and she rolled her eyes.
As for Luna, she was only eight years old. She looked like she was supposed to. Her hair was dark, but not jet black, like her sister. She was lightly tanned, and super skinny. She was wearing T-shirts and jeans as well, but her T-shirt was a long-sleeved and yellow.
Luna looked fearful, but Arabella looked like she was just over everything. Like this was just all a pain in her ass.
“Oh, you’re our new mom now?” Arabella said. “Whoopee.” Her voice was dripping with sarcasm when she said the word “whoopee.”
Luna came over to me, and she shyly gave me her hand. “Our foster family told us that you were going to come in to get us today. We’re really happy to see you.”
“Speak for yourself, shit for brains,” Arabella said to her sister. She looked at me to see my reaction to her cussing, but I didn’t bat an eyelash. I knew a little something about child psychology, and I knew that, for a little girl like Arabella, she was going to try to shock me. If I didn’t even react to her cussing, I was going to show her that I would not be shocked by anything she said or did. That should shut her up.
The foster family looked at me sympathetically. “These are the girls, and they don’t have any clothing that they brought from home. I bought them a few things at Walmart, and they’re in here.” She hastily handed me two bags that I could tell were full of clothes.
“I don’t know why she bothered,” Arabella said with another roll of her eyes. “This is all I wear. This is all I’m gonna wear. You can go ahead and try to make me wear some baby shirt and lame pair of slacks, but I’ll just take them right off and put this on. In other words, don’t even try to buy me clothes. I’ll just burn them.” She smiled, but it was not a happy expression. Rather, it seemed to be wicked. “I mean that literally. I’ll set fire to any clothes that you try to bring me.”
I looked over at Luna, and she nodded her head. “She will. She’s been in juvenile detention for it. Really, you probably shouldn’t try to make her do anything.”
The foster mom looked at me sympathetically again. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I wish you luck.” Then, she whispered, “and you’re going to need it.”
I wondered if Arabella was going to give me any kind of problems when I decided to go ahead and take her home. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she refused to get in the car and ran away from me. She seemed like the kind of girl who would much rather be living on the streets, as opposed to living with adult supervision, which was what was going to happen.
At the same time, I saw that she was protective of Luna. When she thought that I wasn’t looking, she put her arm around her sister, who had started to cry. When she saw me looking at the two of them, she glared at me. “What you looking at?” she demanded.
I knew when I saw the way that she protectively put her arm around Luna that I wasn’t going to have a problem with getting her to come home with me after all. She obviously knew that Luna was going to need a protective place to stay, and I could tell that she didn’t want to be separated from her. I knew that the two of them had probably formed a tight bond, considering all that they had gone through in their young lives. Their father dying in prison, their mother dying in a car accident, both of their parents being drug addicts. These girls had had a terrible life.
The only thing was, I had no experience in dealing with kids at all. I really had no clue on what I was going to do with these two.
Little did I know, however, that Arabella was going to prove to me much more valuable than I ever thought possible.
Chapter 13
Violet - August 18. Three days before Addison goes missing
“Michael,” Violet Nash said to her husband. “I know all about you and Addison Wentworth.”
Violet smiled as she saw her husband visibly blanche when she confronted him with her knowledge of his and Addison’s affair. She couldn’t believe that, after all this time, he really thought that he was getting away with it. He wasn’t going to get away with it. Not at all. There was no way that she was going let him get away with it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Violet thought that Michael was more nervous than she thought he would be. To her, he looked downright agitated. He was sweating profusely, and he was shaking. His eyes were darting to and fro, and he kept running his hands through his hair and pacing back and forth.
She had caught him before with his hands in the cookie jar. Throughout their marriage, Michael had never been faithful to her. Not once. She knew it. She tried to pretend like she didn’t know it, but she knew it.
At first, when she first started dating him, she didn’t think much of it. After all, Michael was a handsome guy. And at that time, he was just very wealthy. He wasn’t powerful when they first met. Now, he was a US senator, and she knew that everybody was talking about him being the next president. He was in the running, and he was considered to be a rising star in the Democratic Party. At the moment, he was actually the front runner for winning the nomination.
In the early days, when he was first running for senator, she believed in him. She believed in his vision. He was somebody who was the smartest person she’d ever known and was the most passionate as well. Not just in bed, although he certainly was passionate there, but in everything he did. He threw himself into all of his projects head first. For him, when he believed in something, it was damn the torpedoes. He was going to get it. His pet project when he was younger was combatting climate change, which was the reason why he focused his hedge fund on alternative energy companies. He was also a social justice warrior. The rights of immigrants, the rights of minorities, the rights of LGBT, the rights of any marginalized community - these were all rights that he forcefully advocated for.
That was why it was always difficult for Violet to accept the fact that while Michael was passionate about all the “right” things in his public life, in his private life, he was a total loser. Jerk. A womanizer in the first-o
rder.
She had hoped that, since he was running for president of the United States, he would actually keep it in his pants for once in his life. She had to admit, with his Addison affair, he was discreet, which was a plus. He was discreet with all of his women, because somebody was always coming along and making sure that his womanizing tendencies never made it into the press.
That somebody’s name was Sonny Mancino, the publisher of a prominent tabloid by the name of the Global Examiner. Sonny specialized in “catch and kill,” which meant that he would take any damaging story, pay a shit-ton of money for the exclusive rights to run it, then not print a word about it.
Sonny wasn’t just the publisher of that rag. He was also Michael’s personal fixer. This was necessary, as not everybody was willing to deal with Sonny’s magazine. Sonny paid off mistresses, and made sure that more than a few of them got a good job with any industry that they wanted to get into. When that didn’t work, he broke more than few collarbones and knee-caps. He was also very good at getting incriminating evidence on people that he could use against them. If somebody wanted to run a story on Michael having sex with a porn star, then it was up to Sonny to kill that story by finding out that the person who wanted to expose Michael happened to have a kiddie porn habit, or a bad cocaine habit. That was in his job description – he had to find incriminating information, and make sure that any story about Michael never saw the light of day.
Then, when Michael was running for senator, Sonny stepped up his efforts. It was one thing when Michael was simply a Silicone billionaire. His name was always famous, which was the reason why he had the fixer keep his affairs under wraps for all these years. But, when Michael decided to go ahead and run for senator, it was more important than ever that nobody talked about his affairs. Sonny threatened more than a few lives along the way.
The upshot was, nobody ever knew that Michael was anything less than a doting, dutiful family man. Nobody would ever be able to look at the smiles of Violet, Michael, and their two beautiful children, and know the dark secret that was hidden underneath. Nobody would ever know about the ruined lives of people who threatened to expose just who Michael was.
But Violet knew exactly who Michael was. What he was. He made her sick. Yet, she knew that she had to stick with him, because she was as ambitious as he. She had her own plans for her future. When she was the senator’s wife, she was nothing but a smiling accessory on his arm. But, all along, she was plotting and planning what she was going to do with her own life. She was a prominent lawyer before she married Michael, and she knew that she would be a very good federal judge one day. She made connections through Michael and she knew that there was a good possibility she would soon be nominated and that she would pass with flying colors through the current Senate.
Then, when Michael announced that he was going to run for president, she knew that the time had come that she was going to be even more famous. Gone were the ambitions to become a federal judge, and in were ambitions to actually run for office herself. Run for senator, and then maybe get on a ticket for national office in the future. She could use the office of First Lady to advance her own agenda, which was prison reform, but, more importantly, she could use the office of First Lady to get her name into the national conversation so that she could one day become president herself.
She and Michael had even, together, concocted a story that would make her seem even more sympathetic. They had a doctor friend who went along with backing up Violet’s story that she had metastatic breast cancer and that she was dying. That wasn’t true, of course. Violet was in the peak of health. But she knew that the story about her battling deadly breast cancer, and somehow overcoming it, would not only make her sympathetic, but Michael as well.
There was nothing that the press liked more than a story about a dying woman. Of course, the newspapers and news outlets got nosy about her treatment. They weren’t allowed to have her records, of course, but she knew that they would access them anyways. They would find some way to hack into the database and find her information. She made sure that there were plenty of records that were falsified and put into her file to show that she was, in fact, battling breast cancer.
And now, Michael was having an affair with one of the most famous women in the world. Of all the people he chose, of all the people he could’ve chosen, she could not understand why it would be that he would choose Addison Wentworth. Didn’t he know that if, God forbid, something came out about their affair, he would be ruined?
Michael finally stopped pacing and putting his hand through his hair. He looked Violet in the eye. “We have a problem. A big problem.” He shook his head. “I’ve been debating whether or not to say anything to you, but I know that I have to. I’m hoping that you’re going to be able to help me solve this.”
“Go ahead.” Violet fancied herself to be a modern-day Lady Macbeth, the woman behind the throne. She was very protective of her husband, even though personally, he didn’t earn her loyalty. She was still very protective of his career, because she knew that without his career, she wasn’t going to accomplish the things that she wanted to do. If there was anything that was going to put a wrench into her plans, she was going to take care of it.
Michael looked down at his hands, which were shaking. “She’s pregnant. Addison. She’s pregnant.”
Violet nodded her head, but said nothing. She was thinking in her head that this was the stupidest man to ever have lived. He had everything on the line, and he couldn’t even take precautions when he was having sex with his whores? She felt like braining him.
“And you know that it’s yours?” she asked him calmly.
He shrugged his shoulders. “No. I don’t know if it’s mine. But if it is, what are we going to do? It’s going to be easy enough for her to prove that I’m the father of the baby. All that she has to do is have that kid take a DNA test, and my goose is cooked. That’ll be it for my political career. I’ll be lucky to be elected dog catcher, let alone president of the United States.”
Violet realized that the ruse that they had come up with for her, that she was a woman dying of cancer, made this entire situation that much worse. Everybody was very sympathetic to her, because nobody had ever questioned her story. I mean, who would pretend to have cancer, except for a psycho? She had gone on one news program after another, her head shaved and wrapped in a scarf, and told Katie Couric, Megyn Kelly, the ladies from The View, Kelly Ripa, really any A-list woman who wanted her story, all about her cancer treatment and how she planned to fight like hell and beat it. She had become a really good actress.
Addison Wentworth might’ve twice won the Academy Award, but Violet deserved one herself.
While it seemed like an excellent idea at the time, her pretending to be gallantly dying, only to be miraculously cured through the power of prayer, clean food, meditation, and lots of painful chemotherapy, was going to be both of their undoing. If she weren’t “dying,” then the whole affair thing could be weathered. Bill Clinton had sex with every floozy in town, this was known before the election, and he still won. Donald Trump…well, he was in another league entirely, as far as sleeping with floozies went. Porn stars, Playboy models, all while his beautiful wife was pregnant with his kid. That didn’t seem to hurt him.
But having an affair while your wife is at home, sick and dying…that was a bridge too far for most people. That very scenario ruined Senator John Edwards. Ruined him. He went from having an excellent shot at being the next President of the United States to a virtual nobody, overnight. If his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, wasn’t actually dying, then he, too, probably would’ve been able to overcome his affair.
So, here she was, dying, or at least that’s what the world believed about her, and her husband was impregnating a legendary actress. It was going to be a huge scandal for Michael the “family man,” and he wasn’t going to be able to come back from it. Worse, the only way that the two of them were going to be able to overcome this mess would be if Violet came clean
and admitted that she wasn’t sick at all, and she never was. That would possibly mean that her husband would be forgiven by the public for his affair with Addison, if the two of them could convince the gullible public that Michael had no idea that Violet was pretending to be sick. Michael would then be more sympathetic, and the public would understand why he would stray.
It also would mean that her own dreams and ambitions would be completely obliterated.
She took a deep breath and just stared at this moron who was her husband. Her mind started turning, over and over and over. What was the solution here?
“You told her that she had to get rid of it?” Violet asked Michael.
“Of course I did. I told her exactly that.” He shook his head. “I even threatened her if she kept it. But you don’t threaten Addison Wentworth. You have to back up your threats with action.”
Violet nodded her head. She was going to have to be the clear-eyed one in this situation. Her husband obviously was treating this whole sorry mess emotionally, and when you deal with problems with emotion and not reason, you can never see your way clear.
“Do you remember Jackson Anderson? He’s the studio head over at Janus Pictures?”
Michael nodded his head. “Yeah. Why? What does he have to do with any of this?”
Violet stared at Michael. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Listen, I have my ear to the ground.” She shook her head. “Sometimes, I wish that I could say the same about you. Honest to Christ, Michael, if you didn’t have me around, I don’t think that you could tell your ass from a hole in the ground. Anyhow, I know all the gossip around town. That man raped Addison, years ago. Slipped her a Mickey, dressed her up like a goddamned cheerleader and had sex with her while she was three sheets to the wind.”
Dark Justice Page 10