No Reservations Required (4 page)

7

Chris walked out of the bedroom, toweling her long, curly brown hair dry. As she stood on the balcony that enclosed a section of the second floor, she looked down into the living room. Phil was crouched low next to the front windows, gazing at the street in front of the house through a crack in the curtains. “What’s going on?” she asked, curious about what might be happening outside.

“It’s that damn car again.”

“What car?”

“The one that followed us home last night.”

“I didn’t see a car.”

“That’s because you weren’t looking. I’m being tailed. Have been for several days.”

This was the first Chris had heard of it. “By who?”

“The cops.”

“Why?”

“They’ve got to nail somebody for those two murders.”

Chris was aghast. “But you were nowhere near those locations that night. I should know.”

“You think that matters to
them
?” He jabbed his forefinger at the curtain. “They just need a warm body with a potential motive.”

“What motive? You liked your brother-in-law. And the idea that you’d ever hurt someone—it’s ridiculous.”

“Tell that to the plainclothes jerk out in the car.”

“Fine,” said Chris, marching down the stairs into the living room. “I will.”

Phil turned around and grabbed her by the waist just as she steamed past him toward the front door. “God, but you’re a sexy woman.” With one flick of his hand, he untied her robe. He slipped his arms around her naked body, running his palms up and down her back.

“And you’re my guy. I gotta protect you.”

“I’ll handle the cop.”

Chris had dated only casually before meeting Phil, and she’d never been in love before. Phil told her right off that he was used goods. He’d been divorced twice, and freely admitted that the problems in his marriages had been mostly his fault. That admission only made Chris love him all the more. Honesty was important to her, and Phil might not be perfect, but he was an honest man. He was her silver fox, a superconfident older guy who would never let her down. None of the younger men she’d dated could hold a candle to him. The difference in their ages didn’t matter a bit to her. He was in better shape than most twenty-year-olds.

Chris was the second child of a hardworking mom and a father who’d dumped her before she was even born. Her first memories were of an apartment over a dentist’s office. Tiny rooms. A TV set that didn’t work. Lots of canned spaghetti for dinner. When she was nine, she and her mom and her older brother had moved to another apartment, this one above the Lakeside Pavilion in South Minneapolis. It was a cheap dollar theater that, in the ’80s, before VCRs were in every home, had made money showing old movies. Chris had grown up watching Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart. Her favorite was Errol Flynn. When she was twelve, she got a job helping the manager at the theater clean up between showings. By the time she was fifteen, she was working the concessions. At sixteen, she manned the ticket booth. One of the perks of her job was a free pass to any movie she wanted to see—and she wanted to see them all. It was a glamorous world totally unlike her everyday life. She always suspected that when she met “the” man, it would be incredibly romantic, just like what she saw in the movies. It turned out that she was right.

Two summers ago, she’d been jogging around Lake Harriet early one morning when she’d turned into Super Klutz, tripped over a rock, and landed in a bush. A man who’d been sitting on one of the benches came over and helped her up. Branches had scraped her legs, but other than that, she was fine.

“If you hadn’t been checking me out so carefully, you would have seen the rock,” he said. When he grinned at her, she saw that he had a beautiful smile. He looked just like Errol Flynn.

She smiled back at him. And that was how it started. She sat down on the bench and they began talking. He told her he owned a construction company. She said she worked for Cafe Aldo as a line chef. He laughed, said it was a small world. As it turned out, he was part owner of that restaurant. And that’s when they realized they’d met before. He’d walked through the kitchen one day a few months before and asked her to grill him a steak. She remembered thinking he was handsome, but that was as far as it went.

They couldn’t seem to stop talking that first morning. He invited her to have breakfast with him. She had the day off, so she took him up on his offer. Later, they ended up in Hudson at another restaurant for lunch—one more cafe in which he had a part interest. They spent the afternoon antiquing along the St. Croix, the evening sitting on Phil’s deck, and then she stayed the night.

The next morning, Phil asked her to move in with him. He told her he’d never been so powerfully attracted to anybody before in his life, both physically and intellectually. He couldn’t let her get away now that he’d found her. He said he felt he’d finally found his soul mate, and even though she wasn’t an impulsive person, Chris felt the exact same way.

And still, she hesitated. The apartment she lived in wasn’t fabulous—nothing like his home in Woodbury—but it was hers. She’d worked hard to get where she was. When she tried to explain it to him, he said he understood—it wasn’t a problem. He’d pay the rent on the place as long as she liked. He just wanted her to give their relationship a try. She brought some of her clothes over the next day.

Phil didn’t like schedules. He preferred to make spur-of-the-moment decisions on what they would do each day. Sometimes he’d go to work; sometimes he wouldn’t. Six months ago, she’d quit her job. It was a major source of contention between them. Phil would want to do something fun, and she always had to go to work. It just didn’t make sense. He said he had enough money to last him a lifetime—and he wanted to share it with her.

A month after quitting, she gave notice at her apartment. The little furniture she owned wasn’t as nice as Phil’s, so she sold it. All she brought with her were the rest of her clothes and some personal stuff she’d collected over the years. Her mother and her uncle lived in the Twin Cities, but because Phil didn’t like her spending time away from him, her relationship with them had become somewhat strained. Chris felt bad about that, but she figured that once she convinced Phil she was completely committed to him, his possessiveness would mellow to more manageable levels. She could hardly deny him her time when he’d been so generous to her. She had a beautiful home, new jewelry, lots of romantic trips to the “Mexican Riviera,” as he laughingly called it. Puerto Vallarta. Acapulco. Mazatlán. Phil was everything Chris had ever wanted—and more.

“Why don’t you make us some lunch?” said Phil, returning his attention to the window and the cop outside.

“Sure,” said Chris. She watched him clench and unclench his fists. “What are you going to do?”

“I’d like to go out there and beat the crap out of that guy.”

“But you won’t.” She knew he had a terrible temper because she’d seen it, but she’d never seen him this wound up before.

“Hell I won’t.” He turned suddenly and stormed toward the door.

“Take it easy, Phil.” She followed him, then stood on the front steps and watched him stomp across the street. He banged on the driver’s-side door with his fist.

“Open the goddamn window,” he shouted.

The window eased down.

“Listen, jerkoff, you want to ask me something, you come into my house and ask it. But don’t follow me around. I don’t like it.”

The man in the car got out. He was tall and lanky, wearing a baseball jacket over a blue dress shirt and tie. He and Phil talked quietly for a few moments, and then both men headed for the house.

Chris, wearing only a robe, quickly dashed upstairs to put on a pair of jeans and a tank top.

When she returned to the living room, Phil introduced her as his fiancée, Chris Parillo. That shocked her a little because Phil had never talked about marriage. She sat down on the couch next to him and he draped his arm across her shoulders.

“Detective Lundquist here seems to think I had something to do with Ken Loy’s murder. I assume he’d like to peg me for Bob’s, too, but he’s being cagey. He likes to play games. I’ve already talked to his partner. But it seems that doesn’t count. He says
he
wants to talk to me now. Think I should do it?” He looked at Chris.

Phil could sound so arrogant at times. His personality put people off. He was smart and he didn’t mind letting others know it. Chris was drawn to his confidence, although she knew not everyone was. “Sure. Why not? You’ve got nothing to hide.”

The detective’s gaze swept over the living room, then rose to the second-floor balcony. “Nice house,” he said. He was sitting on a leather chair across from them. Chris could see the bulge under his jacket, the shoulder holster where he kept his gun.

“Glad you approve.” Phil turned to Chris. “Al wants to know where I was the night Loy died.”

“You were with me,” she said. It was the truth.

The detective’s quick blue eyes dropped to her.

“We’d gone out to eat at Pazzaluna, and then we drove over to the Grandview theater and saw
The
Hours.
Phil didn’t like it. He fell asleep.”

Detective Lundquist removed a small pad from his pocket and started to take notes. “What time was that?”

“Well, our dinner reservations were for five thirty. I know because I made them. The movie started at seven fifteen.”

“Do you have ticket stubs, anything that would prove you were actually there?”

“I put the dinner and the movie on my credit card,” said Phil. “That should be plenty of proof. Look, I already told all this to your partner.”

“And you never left the restaurant or the theater at any time?”

“No,” he said, tightening his grip around Chris’s shoulders.

“Is that correct?” asked the detective, looking directly at Chris.

She nodded. “He was with me the entire night.”

Returning his attention to Phil, the detective asked, “You’d filed a civil lawsuit against Ken Loy, isn’t that right?”

“I did,” said Phil. “I was suing him for the wrongful death of my sister, Valerie Fabian. Now I’ll just have to sue his estate. If you want to know what I thought of the guy, I’ll tell you. He was a worm. He didn’t deserve to live after what he did. It was criminally negligent homicide. The guy was on his freakin’ cell phone and he wasn’t watching the road. I’m not sorry he’s dead. As far as I’m concerned, he got what was coming to him.”

“Those are strong words.”

“Strong words aren’t against the law last I checked.”

“Do you own a gun, Mr. Banks?”

“Several. I have permits for all of them.”

“Can you describe them to me?”

“I have a Smith and Wesson J Frame .38 Special. A Steyr nine-millimeter semiautomatic and a Springfield Armory semiautomatic .45.”

“That cover it?”

“I also own a couple of hunting rifles.”

“Are you a hunter, Mr. Banks?”

“A lethal hunter,
Al.
”

Chris wondered why Phil was talking like that. He was almost baiting the cop, daring him to prove he was guilty.

“You get along with your brother-in-law?”

“Sure. Bob and I weren’t best buddies or anything, but he was family. He was good to my sister. We stayed in touch after her death. Had drinks or dinner together every now and then.”

“He supported your lawsuit against Loy?”

“Absolutely.”

The detective changed gears. “What can you tell me about Andy Gladstone, Robert Fabian’s half brother.”

Phil narrowed his eyes. “What’s he got to do with anything?”

“Are you a friend of his?”

“I know him.”

“What about his relationship with Fabian?”

Phil shrugged, looked at Chris. “They seemed friendly enough. Andy struck me as kind of a suck-up, but a lot of people acted like that around Bob. He was a powerful man.”

“Was Mr. Gladstone upset over Valerie’s death?”

“Sure. We all were.”

“What did he think of the lawsuit you were bringing against Loy?”

“He thought it was a good idea. Hell, we all wanted to see Loy rot for what he did. If I was the kind of guy who believed in ‘an eye for an eye,’ I would have driven over him with one of my cement trucks. But I’m not. I chose to take my revenge
within
the law.”

“And Andy Gladstone. Did he ever say anything about getting back at Ken Loy?”

“You ask me, you guys are really reaching. He’s about as milquetoast as they come.”

“Mind answering the question?”

“No. Not that I remember.”

The detective pulled a card out of his pocket and handed it to Phil. “If either of you should recall anything you think is important, my number’s at the bottom.”

Phil stood, ripped up the card, and flipped it in the air. “I’ve answered all your asshole questions. Anything else you want to know, talk to my lawyer. Now get the hell out of my house and don’t come back.”

8

In newspapers across the country, the name Jayson Blair could cause an editor’s blood pressure to sky-rocket and reporters to break into a cold sweat. Blair was the
New York Times
reporter who had been fired for plagiarizing and fabricating major news stories. The fact that this sort of journalism existed was a growing scandal, a damaging bullet the
Minneapolis Times Register
had always taken great pride in dodging.

And that was why, only a few days after Bob Fabian’s funeral, Sophie was so surprised to hear the Blair name repeated again and again—never directly to her, but as she passed people talking in small clumps in the hallways at the Times Register Tower, the name was definitely being invoked. Reporters looked scared and she wondered why.

Sophie had come to the office on Monday to finish writing a restaurant review of the recently renovated Heartland Grill in Mahtomedi. As she entered the office she shared with her son, Rudy, she saw that he was on the phone.

Sophie was the main restaurant reviewer at the paper, but because she was already running a major hotel in downtown St. Paul, she’d taken the job with the proviso that her son be hired as her assistant. In truth, Rudy did most of the work. In early September, he’d been offered the job of food column editor and he’d accepted.

Sophie loved working with her son—it was one of the main reasons she took the job at the paper in the first place. Rudy had graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Theater Arts, but like his mom, he had a great interest in all things culinary. At first Sophie wasn’t sure he would be content to work for the
Times Register
, but she’d been wrong. In the past year, he’d really grown, both in his writing ability and in his passion for food. Sophie was incredibly proud of him.

Their shared office was divided into two cubicles, with a small outer area that served as a waiting room. As he continued to talk on the phone, Sophie entered Rudy’s cubicle and gave him a kiss on his cheek. He was a handsome young man. At least, his mother thought so. They both had strawberry blond hair and great smiles. Rudy was also small, like his mother, but he worked out regularly. Sophie could tell he was talking to John Jacoby, his partner. John was a fine artist who supported himself by working for a local brewery. Rudy and John had been together for nearly three years.

Feeling that she might be interrupting a private conversation, Sophie sat down behind her desk, took out her notes, and began to work on the review. When Rudy was done with his conversation, he came into Sophie’s cubicle and sat down in the chair in front of her desk.

“Hello, Mother of mine,” he said, tapping the eraser end of a pencil against the side of his head. “John found a dog.”

She looked up from her computer keyboard. “What kind of dog?”

“A mutt. We’ve seen him roaming around the neighborhood for the past few days. Brown and black, maybe twenty pounds. He’s obviously lost. He’s got no tags on him, no collar. John thinks maybe he was dumped. But he’s a really cool little guy. We brought him in last night, gave him a bath, and he slept on a pillow next to our bed. He even seems to be house-trained.” Rudy folded his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. “He kind of looks like a cross between a hedgehog and a fox.”

“Have you talked to your rental agent? Can you have a dog in your duplex?”

“John left a message for him. We’re waiting to see what he says. You working on the Heartland Grill review?”

“It’s almost finished. Look, Rudy, I’m curious about something. Why are so many people around here talking about Jayson Blair? Has something happened that I don’t know about?”

Rudy wagged his finger at her. “If you spent more time here, you’d know.”

“Know what?”

“Irazarian. Our homegrown golden boy.”

Del Irazarian was a reporter who had bagged two of the hottest news stories of the last year—an in-depth report on airline safety at Twin Cities International, and another one on drug addiction among Minneapolis police officers. The drug addiction series won him an award.

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know all the details, but he’s about to be fired.”

“When?”

“Today. The scuttlebutt is that he fabricated sources, made up quotes, statistics, cited research papers that didn’t exist. The whole nine yards.”

Sophie put her head in her hands. That’s when a thought struck her. “Wasn’t his editor—”

“Yeah. Andy. I don’t understand how he let Irazarian get away with it. I mean, Andy’s good. Better than good. If anything, he’s a little too conservative when it comes to sources. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Who’ll fire Del?”

“Probably Fred Scott. But it came down from Andy. We’re printing a full page of retractions tomorrow morning.”

“I wonder . . .”

“Hmm?”

“Well, you know that Anika Gladstone works at the Maxfield. We’ve become pretty good friends. She mentioned to me a few weeks ago that Andy and Bob weren’t getting along.”

“You think it was about Irazarian?”

“It’s possible. Anika said it—whatever
it
was—was killing Andy. He idolized Bob, always tried to do everything he could to please him.”

“They were brothers, right?”

“Half brothers,” said Sophie. “They had different fathers. Bob was, oh, maybe a dozen years older than Andy. I think Andy’s had kind of a spotty job history. Bob was taking a chance by hiring him, but then, from what Anika said, Bob was extremely pleased with his work.”

“Until a few weeks ago.”

She nodded.

“Well,” said Rudy, tipping his chair back and clasping his hands behind his head, “whatever went down between them, Bob Fabian didn’t change his will. Andy still inherited the paper. You ask me, he’s in way over his head.”

Sophie had to agree.

“The fallout from what Irazarian did is going to hit this paper like a sledgehammer. If any heads were about to roll, I would imagine Andy’s would have been at the top of the list. Now he owns the paper. He sure got lucky, if you ask me. If Bob hadn’t died when he did, Andy would be working as a checkout guy at Home Depot.”

Sophie glanced up, caught the look in Rudy’s eyes, and knew what he was thinking. She knew because she was thinking the exact same thing.