Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (32 page)

“You went and got the documents when I told you about it, didn’t you? That’s the kind of thing he’d keep track of.”

He nodded.

“How many women are there?”

“Hundreds,” he whispered.

The thought of being part of a setup that took advantage of that many women...he was crumbling in front of my eyes. His shoulders were folding inward and he kept shuffling the programs he’d picked up like he was picking a card in a magic trick.
 

 
“Why’d you do it, Jonathan? Why did you kill her?”

It was like watching a carefully constructed stone facade turn out to be crêpe paper and burn up from a stray spark. Jonathan slid onto the nearest pew, dropping the pamphlets he’d picked up. The only thing holding him up was his hand, gripping on to the back of the pew in front of him. And everything he’d been holding inside came out.
 

“She was going to change the birth certificate. The birth certificate I signed for her. Two years ago the only thing she wanted was to destroy her baby. She was going to. She didn’t, because I said I wanted the baby and Greg was happy to pay her to go away. And then she came back and all she wanted was to destroy my family. She was going to take away the most wonderful thing Alison and I have together.”

If all Jonathan had had to deal with was Hitchcock’s predilection for sex with lots of young women, he could have handled it. If the only thing Jonathan had had to face was the connection with Sabo and the meth trade, he could have bargained a way out of it. If all he’d had to deal with was Courtney’s insane demand to take Hailey back with sole custody, he could have figured out some way of dissuading her. But the money and the drugs and Sabo and Courtney happened at once and he lost his mind.

“How did you find her?” I said.
 

Jonathan shook his head. “The kids at the construction site were out drinking after work, and I took one of the bikes that had been left. Easy to get the gun out of the trailer. Then I just followed Greg’s location on his phone. You must have just missed him.” He shook his head. “You weren’t supposed to be there.”
 

Lucky me.
 

Had he been hoping to find Courtney and Hitchcock there together? Two birds, a couple of bullets.
 

“You did the wrong thing, Jonathan.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he yelled. I wondered if they could hear us outside. He wiped the tears that had rolled down his cheek. “I know that,” he said quietly.

“I understand why you did it. People do crazy things for people they love. And I can tell this is eating you up inside, Jonathan. You want to talk to someone and confess what you’ve done. You can’t.”

“You have no idea how this feels inside, knowing you’ve done something like that,” he said.

This wasn’t the time to explain that yes, yes I did. “Do you want Alison to keep Hailey?” I said.
 

“Yes.”
 

“Then you will shut your mouth until you get yourself a lawyer. A good one. Because how this plays out might be the difference between your wife keeping Hailey and not.”

No matter what happened to Jonathan now, he was going away for a very long time.
 

“I don’t hang around with lawyers,” he said.

“I do.” I took out my phone. I hit the button for one of my top three most dialed numbers.
 

“Please tell me this is just to wish me a happy Sunday,” Nathaniel said.

“Do you know any publicity-hungry defense lawyers who’ll work pro bono?” I said.

“Specifically?”

“Christians, sex for money, drug deals, accounting fraud, undercover cops selling meth, beautiful young women, and a baby theft.”

“So this lawyer isn’t for
you
, then.”

“You’re off the hook this go-round. You can marry me with a clear conscience.”

He ignored me, as usual. “I’ll call you in ten. Tell the accused not to say a word.”

I put the phone away. “He’ll call me in a few minutes. Those detectives out there are going to tell you they’re your friends. They’re not. They’re doing their jobs. So I’m going to give you a friendly piece of advice. Don’t volunteer information. Ever. I know you want to. I know you need to. You can’t.”
 

Finally, Jonathan nodded. I wondered if he would follow through. He was desperate to talk to someone.

A few minutes later, my phone rang. Nathaniel gave me a name and number, which I passed on to Jonathan. When Jonathan was in the midst of dialing the number, I headed back out to the foyer, where the remaining guests were standing around gossiping like their salaries depended on it. Alison stood in the center, jostling a fussy toddler and ignoring Greg Hitchcock, who kept trying to talk to her. I walked straight to her.
 

“You should probably go wait with your husband,” I told her. “Tell him to follow my advice, no matter what the gorgeous detective says to either of you. No matter
what
. No matter what you think or believe is the right thing to do, tell him to do the smart thing. Especially if you want to keep this one.”

Alison looked at me, and only then did I realize her eyes were brown, like Hailey’s. No one was ever going to doubt that girl was theirs, except for Courtney. Yes, Hailey wasn’t biologically theirs, but biology isn’t the most important thing in a family. And a mother who was right there was better than an unknown arrangement with people she’d never met.

Alison hurried to join her husband in the church. Hailey, looking over her shoulder, waved at me.
 

Someone’s hand landed on my upper arm. I turned, expecting to find Gruen. Or even Greg Hitchcock. It was Micah Schlegel.

“Hey,” he said. He waved a form in the air. “You didn’t sign this.” It was the broadcast and likeness release form.
 

“And I’m not going to,” I said.
 

“The production company only pays a small fee for promotional—” he said.

“You don’t have my permission. You don’t have my sister’s permission. Sorry. This memorial service is not going to be part of your tacky little reality TV spectacular.”

He stepped in front of me. Micah was territorial when it came to protecting his little show. “You can’t do this.”

I smiled. “Watch me. I have better lawyers than you do, Micah, so don’t even think about leaking this video footage anywhere.”
 

The look of shock on the producer’s face at my refusal to parlay the discovery of Courtney’s killer into a newsworthy event was hilarious and sad, all at the same time.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Think of it this way, Micah. You can interview yourself for the show. Turn yourself into a TV star.”

JONATHAN RICCIARDI WAS arrested for murder and accounting fraud. The charges were somewhat mitigated by the fact that he’d been trying to blow the whistle on what Greg Hitchcock was up to. He had a really good lawyer, albeit one who wanted to be on the evening news every night. The murder charges were reduced, provided he testified against everyone, which he did.
 

Greg Hitchcock was arrested and charged with accounting fraud, embezzlement, solicitation, possession of narcotics with intent to distribute, actual distribution of narcotics, and several counts of inciting other people to break the law. The name of his lawyer meant nothing to me. Nathaniel rolled his eyes when I asked, but he refused to say his opinion of his colleague out loud.
 

Broderick Tennyson was a police officer who got sent to jail. I didn’t ask what happened to him.

Samuel Gruen never did call me back.

*
 
*
 
*

Anne opened the door to her new apartment, a sublet in Santa Monica. Over her shoulder I could see most of the apartment: tiny living room, tiny kitchen and dining area, tiny hallway leading back to what was probably a tiny bedroom. She didn’t even greet me. She just stared at me for fifteen seconds. “How did you —”

Ah. It was going to be that kind of conversation. Where, if one thing seems weird, everything seems suspect.

“You told me the apartment number. Someone had propped open the front door. Happy housewarming.” I handed her the bottle of Shiraz Stevie had picked out for her.

It slowly seemed to dawn on Anne she should let me in, since she’d asked me to come here. “Come on in. Belongs to my friend Don. He’s headed to Europe for a long contract and needed to sublet this place for at least six months. Lucky timing for me.”

Lucky wasn’t the word I’d use. After my interaction with Sabo, Anne needed to get some work done on the house and had decided to remodel while she was at it. She wouldn’t live there for a while. If ever again.

“It’s a totally illegal sublet, so don’t tell the landlord.”
 

The living room was no more than three meters by two meters, and the main wall of the living room was taken up by a three-cushion sofa. There were a few framed prints by Ansel Adams on the facing wall. None of the decorations or furniture were Anne’s type of thing. The place must have come furnished. I took a seat on the far end of the sofa. “Anne, are you okay?”
 

Anne didn’t sit. She stood somewhat awkwardly by the wall decoration that marked the division between the living room and dining room. She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “With all the excitement recently—”

Oh, to hell with this. “Come on. Cut to the car chase.”

“Now I know the worst thing you’ve done for money,” she said.

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t do something like that for all the money in the world.”

“There’s so much information about people out there.”

Two sentences in and I already did not like where this was going.
 

“Then you...at my house. You know. With Sabo. You said it didn’t bother you whether he lived or died.”

“I remember.”

“You were telling the truth.”

“Anne, listen, I was—”

“You were telling the truth,” she said, loudly, right over me. “You didn’t care one way or the other. And I thought, where did she learn to be like that?”

Oh, fabulous. Psychoanalysis 101. Although in my case, most of my problems can in fact be traced back to my parents. “And what did your Google search tell you about that?”

She shook her head. “People can hide stuff from Google if they know how. Someone who can do the things you can do can probably hide stuff on the Internet. Or your sister could. She’s good with computers. I asked a guy to see if he could find anything. About you, I mean.”

“A guy,” I prompted.

“That private investigator. From the magazine. He never did help me with Sabo.”

She must have used her own funds and hired him on her own. She’d wanted some answers. “And?”

“So Drusilla Thorne isn’t your real name.”

“I would have told you that if you’d asked. Doesn’t even sound like a real name, does it?”

She took another drink. “You’ve never filed taxes. The only job you’ve ever had was in Vegas with Colin. You’ve never—”

“Is this going somewhere?”
 

“Your social security number is real and it was issued over a decade ago, but it was never used until last year.”

Until shortly before Stevie and I arrived in Las Vegas and I met Colin Abbott. True, all true.
 

“Who are you?” Anne said.
 

“My own sister calls me Drusilla. Don’t sweat the name.”

She smiled nervously and gave a short, repetitive, hysterical chuckle. “He couldn’t find anything about Stevie. There’s no one named Stevie Thorne. It’s like she’s never existed. She told me once that she’s British, but he couldn’t find any record that she’s ever entered this country.”

What kind of search had this man done? I wondered. “You checked our fingerprints.” The idea that she had come into my house—Gary’s guest house, whatever, the place where I was showing her hospitality—and taken things with Stevie’s fingerprints on them made me very angry. I could take care of myself. But she had brought my sister into this. “You did, didn’t you? You checked our fingerprints.” I allowed myself a few seconds to worry about the implications of our fingerprints showing up somewhere, and then I pushed it away. This wasn’t the time.

She didn’t answer.

“Oh, sorry, let me be more exact. What did he find when he checked our fingerprints?”

“Are you in witness protection?”

Would it make my life easier or harder to say “Yes”?
 

“No, Anne, I’m not with the Mafia. I have met some people in the Russian
Mafiya
, but they probably just want to kill me, so I avoid the Hollywood Farmer’s Market for a reason.”

“What?”

“Haven’t you noticed how many Russians live around Hollywood? Look, you can either trust me when I say who I am doesn’t matter and accept that you’ll never know, or we can be done being friends and you can accept that you’ll never know.” I shrugged. “I’m good with either decision.”
 

She stared at me through her cat’s-eye glasses and her jaw started to tremble. Anne was about to lose it.
 

I don’t let myself get too caught up in friendships for a reason. Generally the reason is I need to move to a new country and get a new name, but there are others as well. Know thyself.
 

“Why did you go with me?”

“To interview Courtney?” I asked.

“All of those things we’ve done recently. Like…Baldwin Park.”
 

“They were fun. Outside the norm of my everyday life. Spending time with my mate, Anne. And of course, you were paying me. That’s always a nice add-on.”
 

“Friday. At my house. I was so scared. Were you?”

There was absolutely no way I could answer that truthfully and make her understand that what scares me is pretty basic stuff, like losing someone I care about. “Yes,” I said. “That wasn’t reason enough to stop.”
 

“Would you do it for other people?”