W
HEN THE HIGH-PITCHED WARNING BEEP SIGNALED
THAT A main door of the house had been
opened, Elise swiftly left her bedroom. She’d reached the top
of the stairs when she heard the chirps indicating that the code was
being entered. Cato was home.
He appeared in the foyer below her. She
called his name. He looked up and saw her poised there at the top of
the staircase. “Hello, Elise. You’re still awake.
Why am I not surprised?” Rather than coming upstairs, he
proceeded down the foyer, disappearing from her sight.
Her meeting with Savich had left her
shaken. Meetings with Savich always did.
When she’d returned home, the
house was empty. Mrs. Berry was off on Saturday evenings, so Elise
hadn’t expected to find her there. But it surprised her that
Cato wasn’t. As evening turned to night, she called his cell
phone several times but got only his voice mail. He hadn’t
responded to her messages.
It was uncharacteristic of him not to keep
in touch. It was also a bad omen. She passed the entire evening and
into the wee hours in a state of high anxiety, wondering what Duncan
Hatcher had told her husband.
She quickly descended the staircase.
“Cato?”
“In here.”
She followed the direction of his voice
into the kitchen. As she entered, he turned to face her with a butcher
knife in his hand. She looked from the gleaming blade to him.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a sandwich.”
He moved aside, allowing her to see the ham on the countertop, along
with fixings for a sandwich. “Would you like one?”
“No, thank you.
Wouldn’t you rather have breakfast? I could
make—”
“This will do.” He
turned back to carving slices off the ham.
“I’ve been calling
your cell phone all night. Where have you been?”
“Didn’t you get the
message?”
“No.”
“I asked the receptionist at the
club to call and tell you that I’d been invited into a
high-stakes poker game and that it would be late before I got
home.”
He reached around her for the telephone,
depressing the button that put it on speaker. The static dial tone
indicated that no messages were waiting to be retrieved.
“Hmm. That’s odd. She’s usually
reliable.”
Elise doubted he’d ever made the
request to the receptionist. If he’d wanted to assuage her
concern, why hadn’t he just called her himself?
He built his sandwich and halved it with
the butcher knife. “What time did you get home,
Elise?”
“Around five, I think. After
leaving you at the club, I got a call from the dress shop, telling me
that my alterations were ready. I went to pick them up, did some
shopping.”
That much was the truth. But before going
to the boutique where she often shopped, she’d driven to the
edge of town to the White Tie and Tails Club to meet Robert Savich.
He put the sandwich on a plate and carried
it to the table in the breakfast nook. “Buy
anything?”
“A pants suit and a cocktail
dress.”
He licked a dollop of mayonnaise off his
finger. “You can model them for me later.”
“I think you’ll
approve.” She sat down across from him, studying his
expression, trying to make eye contact, which he was avoiding.
“You’ve never stayed out all night before. Not once
since we’ve been married.”
He chewed a bite, blotted his mouth.
“Not since we’ve been married have I had a day like
yesterday.”
He took another bite, chewed, blotted his
mouth again. And he still wouldn’t look at her. She was in an
agony of suspense.
“My conversation with Duncan
Hatcher was most upsetting.”
Her throat closed.
“Even Kurt the massage Nazi
couldn’t work out the tension in my shoulders and
back.” He took another bite.
“What did he say to upset you?
What did you talk about?”
“Our relationship. Yours and
mine, not mine and his,” he added, flashing a humorless smile.
“Our relationship is none of his
business.”
Then he did look at her directly.
“Maybe he thinks it is.”
“Why would he?”
“You tell me.”
“I’m sorry, Cato. I
don’t know what you mean.”
“Twice now I’ve come
upon you two with your heads together, lost in conversation. The night
of the awards dinner. And again today at the club. I didn’t
like it either time.”
“The night of the awards dinner,
he was a stranger asking me for change. Today, when I left the powder
room, he was in the hallway, looking for you.”
His dark eyes searched hers. “I
wasn’t that hard to find today. And he could have asked a
dozen other people for change that night. He’s deliberately
putting himself in your path. You must sense why, Elise. You
can’t be that naive.”
“You think Hatcher is interested
in me romantically?”
He scoffed. “No romance about
it. He’d love to sleep with you only to make a fool of
me.”
Cato had stayed away all night out of
pique and jealousy. She felt her lungs expanding with relief.
“That would be the ultimate
payback for my putting him in jail, wouldn’t it?”
he said. “To seduce my wife?”
Although Duncan Hatcher had said as much
to her the night of the awards dinner, she smiled and shook her head.
“You’re wrong, Cato. He has no interest in me
outside his investigation.”
“What man could be immune to
you?”
She smiled at the flattery.
“But what about you,
Elise?”
“What about me?”
“What do you think of the
detective?”
“You have to ask?” She
placed her hand on his forearm where it rested on the table and
squeezed it lightly. “Cato, since the night of the shooting,
Detective Hatcher has done nothing but bully me. I dread the sight of
him.”
His features relaxed.
“I’m glad to hear that.” Pushing aside
his plate, he reached across the table and stroked her cheek.
“Let’s get in the pool.”
“Now? You just ate, and
it’s nearly dawn. Aren’t you too tired to
swim?”
“I’m wide awake.
Apparently, so are you. And I didn’t say I wanted to
swim.”
He took her hand and they walked outside
together. She reached for the switch that turned on the pool light and
the fountain in its center. He said, “No, leave them
off.”
He stripped to the skin. It was evident
that he wasn’t at all tired. He came to her, untied the belt
of her robe, and pushed it off her, along with her slip-type nightgown.
He ran his hands over her, possessively and with more aggressiveness
than usual.
She responded as expected, but her mind
was elsewhere. She was thinking of Duncan Hatcher. He hadn’t
betrayed her to Cato. Did that mean he believed her? Even a little?
Cato took her hand and pulled her down the
steps into the pool. He clasped her around the waist and waded in until
she could no longer touch bottom. As her body floated against his, she
noticed that here in the center of the pool, the water was deep and
dark. Like secrets.
“Duncan?”
He grunted a semblance of a response.
“That’s
yours.”
“Hmm?” He lifted his
head from the pillow and opened one eye.
“Your cell phone is
ringing.”
“Oh. Thanks.” He
rubbed sleep from his eyes with one hand and reached for his phone with
the other. He flipped it open. “Yeah?”
“Guess who they hauled in last
night and is still in a holding cell?”
“What time is it?” he
grumbled, trying to pull the numbers of his alarm clock into focus.
“Gordon Ballew.”
“Who?” How was it that
DeeDee didn’t sound groggy even on a Sunday morning?
“Gordie,” she
exclaimed. “Gordie Ballew. One of Savich’s
boys.”
“Got it.” With a
groan, he rolled onto his back and sat up. The woman who’d
been sleeping beside him was already up and across the room, gathering
her clothing and pulling it on. “What did he do?”
“Who cares?” DeeDee
said. “So long as we can get him in a bargaining mood. Meet
you there.”
She hung up before he could say anything
more. He returned his cell phone to the nightstand and swung his feet
to the floor. “Sorry, but I’ve got to run.
Work.”
“It’s all
right,” she said as her head popped through the neck of her
top. “I’ve got to go anyway.”
He’d met her in one of the hot
spots in Market Square last night. She was petite, pretty, and
brunette. That was the sum total of what he knew about her.
She’d told him some stuff, but the music had been loud, the
drinks strong, and he hadn’t really been listening anyway
because he hadn’t been that interested in anything she had to
say.
He remembered none of their conversation,
not even her name. He didn’t specifically recall inviting her
back to his place, but he must have. As for the act itself, the only
thing he remembered was that he’d made sure to use a condom.
Immediately after rolling off her, he’d fallen into a deep
sleep.
It wasn’t like him to bring home
a stranger, but he’d thought that having sex, even mindless,
meaningless sex, would keep him from thinking about Elise Laird.
Silly him.
His distraction must have made itself
felt, and that was unfair to any woman. Feeling rotten about it, he
said, “Look, you don’t have to race out of here
just because I do. Stay. Sleep. Make yourself at home. If this
doesn’t take too long, we could go out for breakfast
later.”
“No, thanks.”
“Well, then, leave your
number.” He tried to inject his voice with a bit of
enthusiasm, but was pretty sure he didn’t achieve it.
“I’d like to see you again.”
“No, you wouldn’t, but
that’s cool.” She moved to the door, where she
turned back and smiled. “You were a good fuck. Savich said
you probably would be.”
Gordon Ballew was one of those
individuals who’d been doomed before he took his first
breath. His mother hadn’t been sure who his father was and
didn’t consider that it mattered much since she
didn’t keep the baby anyway.
Not even a barren couple desperate for an
adopted child wanted one with a cleft palate, so from the delivery room
Gordie had become a dependent of the state, shuttled from one foster
home to another until he was old enough to exit the system and try and
fare on his own.
His entire life had been an endless round
of ridicule and abuse because of his deformed mouth, defective speech,
and diminutive size. Today, at age thirty-three, he might weigh 120
pounds, sopping wet.
Duncan would have felt sorry for Gordie
Ballew, except for the fact that he had never tried to improve his lot,
had never attempted to reverse the downward spiral that his life had
been since he wormed his way out of the birth canal.
Once he bade his last set of foster
parents good-bye, he’d been in and out of penal institutions
so many times that Duncan figured Gordie considered a cell block home.
He watched him thoughtfully on the video
monitor in the room adjacent to the interrogation room, where a member
of the counter-narcotics team had been hammering away at him for
several hours, without success.
“Has the DEA been
notified?”
Another narcotics officer shook his head
and gave a sour harrumph. “They’ve been such
bastards, blaming us ’cause Freddy Morris got popped, I
figure we don’t owe them this.”
“Did
we cause Freddy Morris to get popped?” Duncan asked.
“Hell no,” the officer
answered with soft but angry emphasis.
“Savich got him past you. All of
you.”
The officer grunted agreement without
accepting blame. “I don’t see how he coulda done
that.”
“He
couldn’t,” Duncan said. “Not without
help.”
The narc looked at him sharply.
“From inside? Are you saying somebody on our team ratted us
out?”
It was a touchy subject, one that had been
broached before to a barrage of protests from both teams. It was
something constantly in the back of Duncan’s mind, but he
dropped it for now.
“Where’s
Ballew’s lawyer?”
“Waived one,” the narc
told him. “Said he was ready to sign a confession, go
straight to jail, do not pass Go.”
DeeDee had been practically dancing in
place with impatience. “Are we going to get a crack at him,
or what?”
“Be our guest,” the
narc said.
As they moved toward the interrogation
room, DeeDee asked Duncan, “Were you good cop or bad cop last
time we questioned Gordie?”
“Bad. Let’s stick with
that.”
“Okay.”
The narc opened the door to the small,
dreary room and told the interrogating officer that he had a phone
call. “Besides, homicide has a hard-on for our boy
here.”
“Homicide?” Gordie
squeaked.
The narcotics officer stepped aside to
make room for Duncan and DeeDee. “He’s all yours.
Y’all have fun.” He strolled out and let the door
swing closed behind him.
“Hi, Gordie.” DeeDee
took a seat across the small table from him. “How are
you?”
“How’s it
look?” he mumbled.
Ignoring the attitude behind his reply,
she introduced herself by name. “Remember us? My partner
there is Duncan Hatcher.”
“I know you.” Gordie
cast a wary glance toward Duncan where he was leaning up against the
wall, arms folded over his chest, ankles crossed.
“Didn’t the narcs get
you anything to drink? What would you like?” She moved as
though to get up.
“Sit down, DeeDee,”
Duncan said. “He doesn’t need anything to
drink.”
DeeDee frowned at him with feigned
asperity and dropped back into the chair. “You picked the
wrong time to get busted, Gordie. Duncan’s pissed. He had
plans for this morning, but now he’s here with you.”
“Don’t let me keep
you, Detective.”
The con’s cheeky courage was
short-lived. He shriveled under Duncan’s hard glare.
“Let’s stop screwing around,” he said to
DeeDee, “book him for murder two, and I can be on my
way.”
“The guy died?” Gordie
squealed. “He wasn’t bleeding that much. Swear to
God it was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad.
He said something about my lip. I was high. It happened before I
realized. Oh Jesus. Murder two? I’ll confess to assault,
but…Oh Jesus.”
“Relax, Gordie.”
Duncan’s somber tone and the sinister way in which he pushed
himself away from the wall and sauntered toward the table
didn’t inspire relaxation.
Gordie Ballew began to cry, his knobby
shoulders bobbing up and down.
“Duncan, he needs a
Kleenex,” DeeDee said kindly.
“No, he
doesn’t.” Duncan sat down on the corner of the
table.
Gordie wiped his running nose on his
sleeve and looked up at him with patent fear. “He died? I barely swiped him with
that broken bottle.”
“The guy you assaulted last
night was treated and released.”
Gordie sniffed loudly. He gaped up at
Duncan, then looked at DeeDee, who nodded encouragingly.
“Then how come y’all’re talking murder
two?”
“Another case, Gordie. Freddy
Morris.”
His face, flushed with anxiety moments
before, turned pale. He licked snot off his misshapen upper lip. His
eyes began to dart between them, wild with fear.
“You’re crazy, Hatcher. I didn’t have
nothing to do with Freddy Morris. Me? You kidding?”
“No. I’m not kidding.
You want to change your mind about that lawyer?”
Gordie was too upset for that to register.
“I…I never shot nobody. I’m scared of
guns. They make me nervous.”
“That’s why
we’re not charging you with first degree. We don’t
believe you made poor Freddy lie down in that marsh, cut out his
tongue, and then popped him in the back of the head with a
forty-five.” He pretended to fire a pistol and made a loud
noise with his mouth.
Gordie flinched. “I gotta go to
the bathroom.”
“You can hold it.”
“Duncan,” DeeDee said.
“I said,
he can hold it.”
She looked at Gordie with sympathy and
raised her shoulders in a helpless shrug.
“Look, Gordie,” Duncan
said, “we know, those narcs outside know, the Feds know, we
all know you gave Freddy Morris over to Savich.”
“Are you nuts? Savich? He scares me worse than
guns. If Freddy had been smarter, he would have been scared of him,
too, and kept his trap shut.”
Duncan looked over at DeeDee with a
complacent grin, as though expecting her to congratulate him for
scoring a point. Too late, Gordie realized that he’d given
himself away. Immediately he tried to rectify it. “At least
that was the word on the street. I heard that Freddy Morris, uh, you
know, was in conversation with y’all. I didn’t have
personal knowledge of it.”
“I think you did,
Gordie,” Duncan countered smoothly.
“No,” he said, shaking
his head adamantly. “Not me. Un-unh.”
He squirmed in his chair. He wiped his
damp palms on the thighs of his grimy blue jeans. He blinked hard as
though clearing his vision.
Duncan let him stew for a moment, then
said, “Tell me about Savich.”
“He’s a tough
customer. So I hear. I only know him by reputation.”
“You work for him. You cook and
sell meth for him.”
“I peddle some dope now and
then, yeah. I don’t know where it comes from.”
“It comes from Savich.”
“Naw, naw, he’s a
mechanic, ain’t he? Makes machines or something?”
“You think I’m queer,
Gordie?” Duncan asked angrily.
“Huh? No!”
“Is that what you
think?”
“No, I—”
“Then stop jerking me around.
You’re not clever enough to outsmart me. You’re one
of Savich’s most reliable mules. We’ve got
schoolkids who testified at your last trial, Gordie, remember? They
said under oath that they go to you for a sure score.”
“I admitted to dealing every now
and then. Didn’t I?” He turned to DeeDee,
frantically seeking her backing. “Didn’t you hear
me just admit that?”
“You’re far too
humble, Gordie,” Duncan said. “Savich depends on
you to make addicts, future customers, out of children.
You’ve introduced them to meth. You’ve got them
raiding their folks’ medicine cabinets for boxes of Sudafed.
You’re an asset to Savich’s operation.”
The little man swallowed hard.
“Far as I know, his operation is that machine shop.”
“Are you afraid that if you talk
about him to us, you’ll wind up like Freddy Morris
did?”
“What I heard? I
heard…I heard Freddy bought it over some woman. A guy, I
don’t know who, did Freddy on account of he was banging his
old lady. That’s the story I got.”
Duncan spoke softly, but with menace.
“You’re jerking me around again.”
“I ain’t gonna say
nothing about Savich,” the convict cried out, his voice
tearing. He tapped the tabletop with a dirty, chipped fingernail.
“You’ll never get me to say anything, neither. Not
now, not ever.”
He appealed to DeeDee, whining,
“Where’s the confession? Those first cops that
arrested me? They said it would take a while to draw up the paperwork.
Left me waiting here, and in come those narcs, harassing me. Now
y’all. Just let me sign a confession saying I went at that
guy last night with a broken beer bottle. Lock me up. I’m
ready to take my punishment.”
“We could make a
deal—” DeeDee began.
“No deal,” he said
with a stubborn shake of his head.
“We could make this assault with
a deadly weapon charge disappear like that.” Duncan snapped
his fingers an inch away from Gordie’s flat nose.
“Or we could lay several others on you. We might even ratchet
this charge up to attempted murder. You’d do more
time.”
“Fine. You do that,
Hatcher,” he said, calling Duncan’s bluff.
“I’d rather go to jail
than…Nothing,” he finished in a mumble.
“Than wind up like Freddy
Morris?” DeeDee asked.
But even her seeming gentleness
didn’t make a dent. She and Duncan continued with him for
another half hour. He would not incriminate Savich. “Not even
for spittin’ on the sidewalk,” he avowed.
They left him alone, not showing their
weariness until they were out of the room. DeeDee slumped against the
wall. “I’ve never had to try so hard to be nice. I
wanted to wring it out of the little jerk.”
“You were convincing. Even I
thought you were turning soft.” Duncan was teasing, and she
knew it, but neither was in the mood for levity.
“Y’all did the best
you could,” said one of the narcotics officers gazing
morosely at the video monitor, where Gordie could be seen gnawing at a
bleeding cuticle. “Can’t say as I blame him. Freddy
Morris had his tongue cut out. Savich got to Chet Rollins in prison.
Somebody crammed a bar of soap down his gullet. He died slow. And that
Andre…what was his last name?”
“Bonnet,” Duncan
supplied.
“No sooner had the DEA struck a
deal with him to testify against Savich than his house blows up, his
mother, his girlfriend, and her two kids in there with him.”
“Savich got a hung jury and that
screwup ADA ruined us for a retrial,” Duncan said.
“He got away with killing five people. The baby was three
months old.”
“We thought we had Morris locked
down tight,” the narc said, taking out his frustration on his
chewing gum. “That Savich is one smart sumbitch.”
“He’s not that
smart,” Duncan growled. “We’ll get
him.”
“Doesn’t look like
we’re going to get him with Gordie Ballew’s
help,” the second narc said.
“Even if he made a deal with us,
Gordie isn’t a good candidate.” They all looked to
Duncan to elaborate on his statement. “First off,
he’s scared shitless of Savich. He’d give himself
away before you could set up the sting. Secondly, he’s
resigned to spending most of his life behind bars.
“In fact, I think he wants to.
Why would he risk dying violently by ratting out Savich, when he can be
guaranteed three squares a day and a home where everybody else is just
as bad off as he is? For someone as pathetic as Gordie,
that’s about the best deal available.”
They all muttered agreement of sorts.
Duncan and DeeDee left the others to wrap up getting Gordon
Ballew’s confession to the assault charge.
“Who do we know I could
get to sweep my house for electronic bugs?”
By tacit agreement, Duncan and DeeDee had
regrouped in his office. She was opening a can of Diet Coke when he
asked his surprise question, nearly causing her to spill the drink.
“You think your house is bugged?”
He told her about his overnight guest.
She listened, her mouth slack with
disbelief. “Duncan, you stupid—”
“I know, I know.” He
raised his hands in surrender. “I was an idiot. I confess.
But it happened. Now I’ve got to do some damage
control.”
“She could have killed
you.”
“Savich is saving that
particular honor for himself. This was just another taunt, his way of
letting me know how vulnerable I am.”
“Was she worth it?”
“I don’t even
remember,” he admitted. “I didn’t know
anything until you called and woke me up. When she dropped that
bombshell, I bounded out of bed and chased her downstairs. She struck
off down the sidewalk at a run. I would’ve gone after her,
but realized I was bare-assed, unarmed, and that possibly that was the
plan. Savich could be waiting out there in the bushes, ready to pop me
the minute I appeared. So I went back in, got my weapon, and searched
the house, thinking he might be inside. He wasn’t, of course.
Far as I can tell, nothing was disturbed.”
“Except her side of the
bed.”
“You couldn’t resist,
could you?”
“Did she take
anything?”
“I don’t think so. I
didn’t notice anything missing. But while I was asleep she
might have planted some kind of surveillance equipment in my house. I
want it checked as soon as possible.”
Within half an hour, they’d run
down a surveillance expert who sometimes did contract work for the
department. He promised to do the sweep later that morning. Duncan gave
him the location of his hidden key as well as the code of his alarm
system, which he’d changed before leaving the house.
As he concluded the call, DeeDee stacked
her hands atop the mass of steel wool that passed for hair, and sighed
with resignation. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Send me to my room?”
“Did you at least use a
condom?”
“I did.”
“Well, that’s
something. And you’re being conscientious about setting your
house alarm. That’s good. But from now on, get references
before you take a woman to bed, okay? If Savich is—”
“Cato Laird lied to
us.”
She dropped her hands from her head.
“I thought we were discussing Savich.”
“Now we’re discussing
the Lairds.”
“You learned something yesterday
after sending me away from the country club, didn’t you? You
fibbed when you told me nothing came out of your locker room chat with
the judge. Waste of time, you said.”
He’d called her on his cell
phone from the taxi he’d taken from the club to his town
house. “Yeah, I fibbed.”
“How come?”
“Because I wanted to take an
evening off.”
“Look how that turned
out,” she said drolly.
“I knew if I even hinted that
I’d learned something potentially important, neither of us
would have had a night off, and in my estimation, both of us needed
one.”
“I could kill you,”
she snarled. “But not before you tell me what you found
out.”
“He lied to us about Meyer
Napoli.”
He recounted everything Judge Laird had
told him about hiring the private investigator to follow Elise.
“He’s so crazy in love, he doesn’t care
that their marriage has cost him the respect of friends and associates.
Possibly even his next reelection. They share a passionate sexual
appetite for each other. Even though she had an affair, he loved her
too much to confront her with it. It’s over. History. The
marriage remains intact. Everyone’s happy.”
“She doesn’t know that
he hired Napoli?”
“He says she
doesn’t.”
“So the lady was telling the
truth when she claimed she’d never heard of him.”
“I guess.”
“And the judge is convinced the
affair is over?”
“Oh, it’s over, all
right.”
DeeDee looked at him quizzically.
“Mrs. Laird’s lover
was Coleman Greer.”