Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (6 page)

Nathaniel dropped his pen onto his yellow legal pad. “Here’s the good news. Sabo has a history of involvement with disputes and physical altercations.”

“Somehow your phrasing doesn’t inspire relief. What’s the bad news?”

“Usually he doesn’t even get charged. When he has been charged, it’s always been dropped.”
 

That seemed to line up with Gruen’s visit to me that morning: Roger Sabo had to be some kind of confidential informant. “He has friends in the police department or the DA’s or maybe both.”

Nathaniel nodded.
 

I did not mention Gruen’s visit to my house. When I don’t know if sharing a piece of information will make my life better, I tend to shut up. Telling the lawyer about the detective could wait. “What about the restraining orders?”

“Do you have any plans to go near him?”

Good point. I shook my head.

“My advice about filing charges is not to do it. We want it to go away, not escalate. Which might be hard.” He picked up a piece of paper on his desk. “Courtney is planning on filing an affidavit supporting Sabo’s version of events.”

“She what?” The sight of Sabo throwing Courtney against the table flashed through my mind. “He beats her up and she supports him?”

“Not your problem, Drusilla. Your problem is Roger Sabo. Whatever this chick’s mental state is...stay the hell away.”

Roger Sabo and Courtney Cleary against Anne and me. He had some kind of magic touch with the cops, and she was looking for publicity. I didn’t want any publicity whatsoever. That put me on the defensive.

“Dammit. What did He-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed say about...this?”

“As of this morning, Sabo hasn’t officially filed any paperwork. Right now he’s making threats and that’s it. And speaking of threats....”

The lawyer was referring obliquely to the reason I came to his office every Monday morning: my stepfather, Roberto Montesinos, insisted I check in with him weekly. I ran away from home when I was sixteen and managed to stay hidden until just a few months prior—when I also got to meet Nathaniel Ross. Now that I had been found, it was like I was still sixteen and under house arrest. All the time. “You haven’t told him what happened.”

Nathaniel reached up and turned the giant screen of his computer toward me. The screen was blank except for one black window. “He knows you were in the hospital.”
 

“Does he know why?”

He said nothing as he stood up and buttoned his jacket.

“My version needs to match up with yours. Or we’re both in deep, Nathaniel.”
 

My lawyer cracked a smile. “I said you were in an accident.”

“What kind of accident?” When he didn’t say anything, panic set in. “What kind of accident did I have, Nathaniel?”

He picked up one of his perfect bound notebooks that had the numbers stamped on the corners of the pages, and opened it to the page where the green silk bookmark was nestled. He wanted to remember his story exactly. “You told me you wrecked a Vespa. I expressed doubts about whether that was true.”
 

Doubts I could deal with. I smiled at him. “Now we’re engaged in a conspiracy. That’s devious and underhanded. And so incredibly hot. I am immensely turned on right now. Do you want to do it here on your desk? You have a really sexy desk.”

He ignored me and settled on the corner of his desk (which was sleek and very attractive, much like the personality, if not the person, of its owner). “The second this Sabo guy files suit against you, I’m going to be shocked,
shocked
to find out you lied to me.”
 

I nodded. “Fair enough.”

The clock ticked over to one o’clock, and the computer rang. More of a buzz, perhaps. Nathaniel typed a few things on the keyboard. Then he said, as he did every week or two during these meetings, “This is Nathaniel Ross. I have someone here to talk to you.” Then he walked out of his own office and shut the door behind him.
 

“He’s gone,” I said.

The black window in the center of the computer screen turned into an image of a middle-aged man with dark olive skin and salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He was staring at the screen as though he might challenge it to a duel.

He’d probably win. Winning is his thing.

“Trudy, are you all right?” my stepfather asked in his melodic Spanish accent.

I’d only had my current name for a year at this point, and already it sounded much more normal than my birth name. Trudy just sounded all sorts of wrong at this point. “The name’s Drusilla.”

“Mr. Ross told me you were in the hospital. I can see you’re hurt. Tell me what happened.”

“I had a little accident on a scooter. One of those Vespa things. They’re unbalanced crap.”

There was a long pause. “I don’t believe you.”
 

My stomach muscles clenched and I felt the familiar wash of adrenaline down my spine. Exactly how much did Roberto know and, if he knew, why was he playing with me like this?

And then it dawned on me: of course I would have lied to the lawyer. Roberto would expect me to lie to Nathaniel. The lawyer would have expected me to lie and would have told the Vespa story as though it were a lie. I had the best lawyer on the planet.

“You can look up Vespa safety ratings online, Roberto.”

“What happened, Trudy?”

“My name’s Drusilla. If you can’t remember a simple name, Roberto, perhaps you ought to look into getting tested for Alzheimer’s. Which would be a terrible development for a CEO, right?”

My stepfather is an extraordinarily wealthy man and head of one of the largest investment banks in the world. He managed that feat on his own, well before he married my mother. His sigh was both dramatic and melodic. “Drusilla. Tell me what happened.”

“Oh, all right,” I said. “I was riding on the back of a motorcycle with a friend—”

“Who?”

“Uh...Raven. I think.”

“Raven. Is that her given name?”

“His stage name. Maybe. Wasn’t what I liked about him best, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, we weren’t going very fast and we took a little tumble. That’s it.”

“Were you drinking?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t driving.”

“And this other person?”
 

“Took off. No idea what happened to him.”
 

I waited to see if Roberto would take it. After all, going off drunk on a motorcycle was exactly the kind of thing he expected me to do. Hell, it was the kind of thing I had done all the time as a teenager in Manhattan and London. I hadn’t done it in years, though. Not for a very long time.

“Mr. Ross will take care of it,” Roberto said. I would have pumped my fist in the air but I was on camera. “However, this won’t happen again.”
 

“Oh, come on, Roberto. I didn’t ask for this trouble.”

“And yet miraculously you keep finding it. Perhaps you enjoy bad situations.”

Rolling my eyes seemed like a better video chat choice than flipping him off. Though I was sorely tempted.

“Enough about your issues,” he said. “How are things going with your project?”
 

Ah yes. The project. The project to get me out of Los Angeles and home to New York.
 

Eleven years ago I murdered someone. I’d had a very good reason to do it, but murder is still a huge and horrible thing. My mother, who’d washed her hands of dealing with me when I was fifteen, refused to so much as answer the phone when I called for help. When my father found out what I’d done, he sent someone to track me down and kill me. After all, I’d cost him a lot of money when I killed his business partner, and money is all that man cares about.

Not surprisingly, I got scared, and Stevie and I went into hiding for eleven years. I’d had very good training from my bodyguard, who was former Special Forces. I knew how to hide.

My mother, not knowing whether I was alive or dead after I vanished, had me declared dead privately and with no tabloid fanfare. Then she hired actresses to play me in public. It’s not hard to arrange that sort of farce when you have more money than Croesus. And when all of Croesus’s money was at stake. From what Stevie had been able to piece together, my being dead put the issue of the vast fortune I was supposed to inherit under a huge cloud. Having actresses pretend to be me pushed the day of reckoning for what would happen to all the money off until my thirtieth birthday.
 

It also complicated my simply being able to show up and get my money without my family’s approval. Not only would I have to prove I was who I said I was, but they could fight me every step along the way. If I revealed publicly the reason for my disappearance—the name of the person I had killed—the firestorm would be immense. No doubt my father would show up to join in the fun.

Keeping my money from possibly ending up in my father’s hands has been a family priority for decades.

When my mother married my father, her grandmother Ida didn’t like him one bit, because she was a wise, wise old woman who believed thirty-five-year-old men had no business marrying seventeen-year-old girls. Too bad no one listened to Great-Gramma Ida, despite her pocketbook. When I was born she announced she was leaving ninety-five percent of her fortune to me, which probably made my father ejaculate with excitement on the spot. Then she added that I wouldn’t inherit until I was thirty. Ida figured thirty years was long enough for me to become my own adult. And long enough for me to learn what kind of man my father really was.
 

When my brother was born, Ida split the pie between the two of us. That probably really irritated my father. Now there were two people he’d have to hide his true nature from for thirty years. And, to no one’s surprise, he couldn’t do it. When I was five years old, he introduced me to my little sister Stevie. Her mother was our former ski instructor. That was the end of his marriage and the start of a very complicated trans-Atlantic custody arrangement.
 

Ida died two years after I disappeared. I wished I’d been able to say goodbye to her.

Stevie was not only the reason for my parents’ divorce, but also the reason I had not yet returned to New York despite Roberto having found me. My mother hated Stevie from the moment she was born. My return to New York was going to make all hell break loose on its own. Stevie accompanying me was an absolute no-go.
 

The project
was to get Stevie standing on her own so that I could leave her.
 

Roberto hadn’t even told my mother he’d found me alive and well after eleven years of not knowing. The consequences of that omission on their relationship were going to be bad enough. Bringing Stevie along with? No.

“It’s not going well. I think I told you last week we were going to see another psychiatrist. Complete bozo. Ten minutes in, he starts discussing medication.”

“There are several medications which can assist—”

“Roberto, I don’t have any concerns about why someone might want to take drugs. The more the merrier. But he didn’t even know the reasons why yet. Have you ever been to a psychiatrist?”

He answered a tad too quickly. “I have not.”

Ooo. Liar, liar. “Then let me tell you how this works. The first session is a get-to-know-you kind of cocktail party thing. The two of you chat, but you stay vague on the particulars until you get to know one another. The three doctors we’ve seen have been bozos, giving diagnoses right off the bat. And they’re also expensive. Maybe I should become a therapist. There’s really good money there.”
 

“Yes, but therapists have to listen to people,” Roberto said. “Your skills lie elsewhere. Which brings me to the subject of this chat. You need to start developing the expertise you’re going to need in New York.”

“Doing coke at parties in Tribeca?”

Roberto did not laugh at that. On the up side, he didn’t get angry and end the call, either.

He finally responded with, “No. That is not what I meant. You will have family responsibilities.”

“Don’t we have fleets and fleets of top MBAs to handle things for us?”

“Yes. But at best they don’t care about whether your properties thrive or die. They move on to their next challenge no matter what. At worst, they’re amoral thieves who plan on robbing you blind.”

“You’re an investment banker, you ought to know.”

He waited a second. “Yes.”

In case I haven’t mentioned this, Roberto the investment banker is the least avaricious and most normal and reasonable person in my family. More than once I used to wish he’d been my real father. My life would have improved immensely on Day One, starting with me being a different person.

“What’s Chance doing?” I asked.

Chancellor was my brother, younger than me by fifteen months. Everyone talked about how close we ought to be, us being practically Irish twins and all. Everyone would have done better to discuss how we were different species created out of the same genetic material. Chance was the kid everyone hated in school: he was smart
and
he worked hard, with excellent grades and a focus on being the top at everything he did.

The last time I spoke to him was shortly before my entire life went to hell in London and my father had plans to ship me off to boarding school in Switzerland. Chance’s response: “Maybe you’ll learn something for once.”

“Chance is doing excellent work. He has a JD/MBA from Harvard. Did you know that?”

I’d never even heard of a JD/MBA degree, although I could parse what it was from the initials. That seemed about right for that stuck-up prick. “Good for him.”

“Currently he’s senior vice president of sales and marketing at van der Laan.”

My mother’s family giant cash cow. “Then the family’s taken care of.”
 

“You really want to leave your future to your brother’s care?”

Oh.

Excellent point.
 

Once Chance was in charge, my future would look very sketchy indeed. I would inherit my half fifteen months before he got his. Chance was both educated better than I was and had real-world business experience. I was doomed.

“You have some work to do to get ready. While you seek out help for your sister, you need to work on a few things for yourself. I have the name of someone I’d like you to work with.”