Night Whispers (44 page)

"She was rude to everyone from time to time," Carter pointed out philosophically. "What has that to do with Gary?"

Paris drew a fortifying breath. "The police were here a while ago. They believe that whoever put Sloan's gun under the mattress also killed Great-grandmother, and they are convinced it wasn't Sloan or Paul."

"Don't get involved with all that, Paris. It will drive you crazy if you try to sort it out. Let them handle it."

"I don't think we can afford to do that."

He looked up, frowning. "Why not?"

"Because the police are already convinced I did it. I had the biggest motive and the best opportunity."

"That's ridiculous! It's insane."

"It's insane to go to jail for something I didn't do, but that happens to people all the time. There's only one person who could have moved that gun the morning after Great-grandmother was killed, and it's Gary Dishler. Outside of Paul and Sloan and you and me, he was the only other person the police allowed to stay on the premises after her body was found. You didn't do it and I didn't do it That leaves Gary."

An odd expression crossed his face as she finished, an expression almost like fear, but it vanished so quickly Paris couldn't be certain. "The police won't even bother asking him about it, and I think I'm going to be arrested. I think we ought to hire our own private detectives or something. And I think I ought to have a lawyer ready."

Anger, not fear, was tightening his face as she stood up and said, "Will you think about doing both those things?"

He nodded curtly, and Paris left him. She'd started down the stairs when she heard a door crash into its frame, and she turned and darted up the stairs. Her father's study door was still open, but Dishler's hallway door was closed now, and Paris almost moaned aloud at the thought Dishler would be the one he asked to get her a lawyer and hire the detectives. Then she realized her father had looked angry enough to confront Dishler himself and try to wring the truth out of him.

Fear for her father made Paris violate the precepts of a lifetime. She rushed into her father's office, closed the door, and leaned over his desk to the telephone. She pressed Gary Dishler's extension number, and the phone was immediately answered. "What is it?" he snapped.

"Gary? Oh, I'm sorry," Paris said as she carefully held down the number three on her father's telephone, which enabled the room-monitoring feature. "I meant to dial the kitchen."

"That's extension thirty-two," he said, and hung up. Gary had chosen the new phone system, and he'd shown her how to use the room-monitoring feature when her father was recovering from his heart attack. Now Paris was putting it to a new use. The conversation in Gary's office came over the speaker phone, and Paris listened to it with a mounting sense of disbelief and horror that turned to terror.

"I told you to calm down, Carter!" Dishler warned in a voice Paris had
never
heard him use before. "What are you saying?"

"You heard what I said. My daughter has just informed me that she is likely to be arrested for Edith's murder."

"Which daughter is that?" Dishler asked needlessly.

"I only have one daughter who counts," Carter snapped. "And she has just presented me with a rather convincing argument that
you
must have moved that gun. Which makes you a murderer."

Instead of hearing Dishler react with a violent denial, as Paris expected, she heard his chair make a noise as if he had leaned back in it, and when he spoke, his voice was grotesque in its calm lack of concern.

"You had a serious problem, Carter, and your business partners recognized it as soon as I reported it. They asked me to handle the problem before it blew up and the fallout destroyed all of us."

"What problem?" Carter demanded, but he sounded alarmed and defensive.

"Come now, you know what problem," Dishler said snidely. "The problem is that Edith changed her will before either of us realized it. She cut Sloan in for a piece of her estate, a large portion of which is the Hanover Trust. Sloan's part of the trust should have given her fifteen million dollars. But the Hanover Trust only has five million dollars total, because the trustee—that's you and your bank—has been milking it for a decade to keep the bank operating and to cover your losses everywhere else. Am I correct?"

After a silence, Paris heard her father say, "I could have persuaded Sloan to leave the money in the trust and to be satisfied with interest payments. I'd already persuaded Paris to do that—"

There was a crash, as if Dishler had slapped his hand on the desk. "Sloan Reynolds isn't Paris: She's a cop. If she decided she wanted to withdraw the principal and you couldn't hand it over, she'd have raised a stink. That stink would have covered you and spread to Reynolds Bank. Your partners in that bank couldn't allow that to happen."

"Stop calling them my partners, damn you! We had a business arrangement, not a partnership. They bailed me out when the bank was in trouble in the eighties, and in return I agreed to launder some money for them over the years. I've let them put their own people in a few key positions, and I've tolerated having you around, but nobody ever talked about murder."

"There was no choice. If I'd known ahead of time that Edith was going to change her will to include Sloan, the old woman would have died a natural-looking death before she could sign it, and there would have been no problem.

"Unfortunately, I didn't know anything about it until Wilson left here with the new will signed and witnessed by your servants. I consulted with your partners, who consulted with their attorneys. It turned out that the only sure way to prevent someone like Sloan from being able to claim her inheritance was if it appeared that she had murdered in order to get it. Your partners advised me to handle the matter."

Paris heard her father make a sound like a groaning curse, and Dishler said with a vocal shrug, "It's just business, Carter. Nothing personal. It was handy that she had her own gun."

Carter's voice dropped to a defeated whisper. "How did you know? When did you find out she was a cop?"

"The day before poor Edith's demise, I asked your daughter what her opinion was of the rare Persian carpets downstairs. She described the colors in the Aubusson—she didn't know the difference. That, combined with the fact that she showed no real interest in any of the decor, made me suspicious.

"It took me five minutes on the computer to discover she was a cop and one phone call to verify it. It took your business partners fifteen minutes to come up with a plan and give me instructions." Irritably, he added, "It took me thirty minutes to find where she'd hidden the damn gun. Now, can we end this unpleasant discussion?"

In the office next door, Paris heard the strain in her father's voice as he asked, "What about Paris? They'll arrest her for it."

"Now, you know I would never let that happen. Sloan will be taken care of tonight, and the matter will come to an end."

"How?"

"Are you sure you want to know?"

In the office next door, Paris held her breath, her hand hovering over the button that would turn the speaker phone off. But, she had to know what they were saying about Sloan.

Her father must have nodded, because he didn't speak, and Dishler's answer chilled her blood. Tonight, with a
little persuasion, Sloan is going to have an attack of guilt and shame that causes her to write a note, confessing to killing her great-grandmother. And then she is going to blow her brains out Women don't like to mess up their looks when they die, but she's a cop. She would be more likely to take a quick, certain route, don't you—"

Paris slapped the intercom button off and fled from her father's office, stumbling as she raced down the hall. Her father's bedroom suite was at the end of the north wing of the house, hers was at the end of the south wing. As she passed the central staircase that led down to the foyer and divided the two wings, she saw one of the maids walking down the hall with an armful of fresh linen, and she made herself slow to a walk.

She had no idea yet exactly what she was going to do; her crazed emotions blocked logic except for two trains of thought. She had to warn Sloan, and she had to leave the house without making anyone suspicious about why she'd left or where she was going.

"Hello, Mary," she said to the maid. "I just remembered I'm going to miss my—manicure appointment I'm in a terrible hurry."

In her room, she grabbed her purse and car keys and started for the door; then she remembered throwing Paul Richardson's card in a drawer with some vague thought of writing a stern letter of complaint to his superiors about the accusation he'd made.

She saw the card, but her hands were trembling as if she had palsy and she dropped it twice.

Nordstrom was in the downstairs hall. She needed to give him a message for her father so that he wouldn't suspect why she wasn't going to be home for dinner. She tried to think of where she could say she was going on the day after her great-grandmother's funeral that wouldn't strike him as odd. "My father is meeting with Mr. Dishler, and I don't want to disturb him. Will you tell him that… that Mrs. Meade called, and I'm going over to discuss some of my designs. I think it will help cheer me up."

Nordstrom nodded. "Certainly, miss."

«
^
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P
aris glanced at the clock on the dashboard as she lifted the Jaguar's car phone from its cradle in the center console and saw that it was a little after four o'clock. If she completely ignored the speed limit, the drive to Bell Harbor would take an hour or even less. It would take her longer than that to arrange for a plane, fly to Bell Harbor, and find transportation once she landed. She decided to drive. Either way she couldn't get there before dark.

Cradling the car phone on her shoulder, she kept one eye on traffic while she dialed the number Paul had scrawled on the back of his card. Her hands were still shaking, but she had urgent details to handle, and that kept her from thinking about the unthinkable.

The phone at the number Paul had written gave out a tone as if it were a pager, and Sloan put in her car phone number, hung up, and waited for a quick return call.

Sitting in his Palm Beach motel room, Paul listened with resignation to the verbal blasting coming across the phone line from the special agent in charge of the FBI's Miami division. The cellular phone he carried was lying on the nightstand, and a small light on it began to flash, indicating a call was coming in. Paul reached over and switched it to its pager mode to keep it from ringing… and further antagonizing the angry man on the other end of the phone.

"Do you understand what's happening here, Paul? Am I making this clear? It's going to cost the bureau a fortune in man-hours just to answer the first deluge of complaints that Maitland's attorneys filed in court today."

"What, specifically, is he accusing us of doing?"

"I'm so glad you asked," Brian McCade replied with biting sarcasm. There was a shuffling of papers as he picked up Maitland's attorneys' papers. "Let's see, this one accuses us of illegal search and seizure, then there's entrapment…" Paul listened silently to the long litany of legal accusations. "Wait, I missed this one," McCade said bitterly. "This one charges us with 'malicious incompetence.' "

"I never heard of that one. Since when is incompetence a violation of the law?"

"Since Maitland's attorneys decided to try to make it one!" McCade said furiously. "His attorneys are probably writing new law with some of these. I can see this going all the way to the Supreme Court for rulings."

"There's nothing I can say, Brian."

"Yes, there is. In one of these complaints, Maitland is demanding a formal, public statement of apology because you didn't find anything illegal on either of his boats. He wants you to say you're sorry."

"Tell him to go to hell."

"Our attorneys are drafting the legal equivalent of that reply; however, I don't think it's appropriate unless you honestly feel that he got the stuff you were looking for off his yachts without you knowing it."

Paul expelled his breath in a long sigh. "There's no way he could have. He flew back after he had the last meeting in South America aboard the
Apparition
. We kept that ship under surveillance on its way back here, and we've had it under surveillance every hour of every day that it's been in Palm Beach."

"So, what you're telling me is that no contraband was brought aboard in South America or you'd have found it."

Paul nodded; then he said it aloud. "Right."

"And there was nothing aboard the Star
Gazer
, either?"

"Nope."

"So, basically, Maitland is innocent."

Paul thought of the personal lives he'd destroyed over his wrong hunch, and he felt far worse than he could let McCade know. "That about sums it up. Although, legally you can hang your hat on the machine gun we found. That constitutes an automatic weapon, which constitutes 'illegal' "

"Thank you for that enlightening observation. Now, what do we say about the fact that the damned thing is practically an antique, and one that he confiscated to boot?"