The Ugly Truth

by Jill Orr

  Although Dale insisted they were happy, that both Greer and Rosalee were content with things, I very much doubted his rose-colored assertion that his wife and mistress were perfectly happy about this barbaric, male-first sort of relationship, but whatever. He obviously had convinced himself the arrangement worked.

  “Everything was going fine in that regard,” Dale said, looking down at his fingers. “But Greer has—I mean, had—” he corrected himself, “very expensive tastes, and frankly, money was becoming an issue. I was making a good living, but between the private schools, camps, lessons, cars, donations, college prep, and just generally keeping up with the Joneses, money was getting tight.”

  “And you were paying all of Rosalee’s expenses too?” I added.

  “It was the least I could do for her,” he said, an emotion I couldn’t readily identify rolling across his face.

  “It was stupid, so stupid, looking back—but when I started consulting with a diplomat from Qatar, I just ‘forgot’ to disclose it on the year-end FARA forms. It was reckless, but you have to understand that back then everyone was doing that kind of thing. I could name ten lobbyists right now who work for foreign governments and haven’t disclosed it. That requirement was a joke, seen as more a suggestion than a law.”

  If he was trying to convince Will Holman that his law-breaking wasn’t that big of a deal, he was barking up the wrong tree. “It was a way around paying taxes, which is illegal,” Holman clarified.

  Mountbatten looked out the window, then back at Holman. “Well, yeah, I guess…there are a lot of loopholes in the system where this kind of thing is concerned, but yes, not disclosing my relationship with Qatar meant that I didn’t have to declare the money.”

  “But you needed to do something with it,” I said.

  He nodded. “You asked me yesterday about Colonel Mustard Enterprises. That was Rosalee’s idea.” Dale took a sip of his coffee before continuing. “I did it for her—for us. The deal was that I’d take the consultancy with Qatar in order to make enough so that when I left Greer, I could take care of her and the kids. And Rosalee and I could be comfortable too.” He stared out the window again for a good five full seconds, and when he turned back to us his eyes were moist with emotion. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

  We sat silently as the gravity of what he’d just said sank in.

  “What happened next, Dale?” Holman asked when the silent seconds stretched on.

  Dale wiped his nose, which had started running as his emotions spun closer to the surface. He was truly upset by this point, and whatever else he may have been lying about, I could tell his sadness was genuine.

  “Greer must have found out about the money somehow…I honestly don’t know how she did. I obviously didn’t tell her and kept no records of any transactions, but maybe she had my phone bugged or followed me or something. I still have no idea, but she came to me about a month ago and said she was going to go to the FBI. The hell of it was she didn’t even care about the corruption; she was mad because I was planning to leave. She said she’d keep quiet if I stayed.”

  Dale wiped away a tear that fell out of his right eye. “I told Rosalee later the same day Greer made the ultimatum. In fact, it was the only time in all these years that I ever came to Tuttle Corner and parked right in front of her house. I told her we had no choice. If Greer went to the authorities, we’d go to prison.”

  Holman interrupted him. “You’d go to prison. Rosalee didn’t technically do anything wrong.”

  Dale looked at Holman like he was speaking Swahili. “Rosalee laundered all the money. Colonel Mustard Enterprises? The butter company? That was all Rosalee. You can’t just deposit millions of dollars into the bank without saying where it came from, you know.”

  I saw Holman’s jaw clench. He didn’t believe Dale, or didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure. I thought back to my conversation with Rosalee the other night. She hadn’t explicitly said she’d been involved in the money laundering, but she also hadn’t said she wasn’t. Now that I looked back, all she’d said was that Dale laundered money through the Tavern and she knew about it. I forced myself to come back to the moment as Dale continued talking. The details of what happened to the money were the least of our concerns.

  “Rosalee went ballistic. She absolutely lost her mind.” He widened his eyes as if the shock of her reaction was still surprising to him. “She said we couldn’t let that happen and Greer had to be stopped.” He paused. “She told me she knew someone who could ‘take care of her.’ ”

  “What did she mean by that?” I asked. We would need Dale to say the words if we were going to be able to report it.

  He ignored my question, lost in telling his story. “I told her no—emphatically no. In fact, I was so shocked, so horrified that she would even suggest something like that…I couldn’t believe it. That was not the woman I’d known and loved all these years. I’m afraid I didn’t handle it well. I was just so outraged she’d even suggest something like that…I stormed out. That was the last time I saw her.”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  Dale dropped his head into his hands, and when he raised it his eyes were red-rimmed and glassy. “November fourth. The day before Greer went missing.”

  Dale said he’d left Tuttle Corner and had gone straight to Manhattan, where he had meetings and that scheduled interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. The next evening he talked to his son Charlie, who was worried because he hadn’t seen his mom all day. When he wasn’t able to get ahold of Greer, he called the police, who later found her car covered in blood.

  “I just couldn’t believe it—any of it. Greer gone, Rosalee responsible…it was like a living nightmare.”

  “What makes you think Rosalee was responsible?” Holman asked. “Did you talk to her afterward? Did she admit to killing your wife?” Holman sounded more like a defense attorney than a reporter in that moment. I put a hand on his arm in a warning gesture. We were reporters and should at least try to convey impartiality.

  Dale knitted his brow together. “My wife is killed right after Rosalee said she knew a guy who could make her disappear? What would you think, Mr. Holman? I didn’t want to believe it—I still don’t—but there’s no other conclusion to come to. Rosalee said she was tired of waiting around and wanted us to have a life together. When she found out Greer was a threat, she must have just snapped.”

  “So, you haven’t seen or spoken to Rosalee since that night you went to her house and she suggested she knew someone who could,” I check my notes, “‘take care of’ Greer?” I asked, trying to clarify what he’d told us.

  “That’s right. I knew the police were going to be all over me—they always look at the husband—so I knew if I tried to call or get in touch with Rosalee, it would just make me look like I was involved.”

  That seemed a pretty calculated move for someone shocked and grief-stricken. It seemed to me if your wife was murdered and you thought your lover did it, you’d tell the police. Or at the very least, call them up and accuse them of it.

  “Why not tell the sheriff everything right after you found out about Greer? If you really thought Rosalee had her killed, why not turn her in?” I asked.

  Dale looked down at his hands again and twisted the gold band still in place on his left ring finger. “I love her—loved—love, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t want any of this to be true. I didn’t want Greer to be gone, Rosalee to have—have—”

  “And you didn’t want to get caught,” Holman said.

  I kicked him under the table. He needed to keep himself in check. Acting like Rosalee’s lawyer right now wasn’t doing anybody any good.

  “Yes, you’re right. There was an element of self-preservation at play too, but honest-to-God that was mostly for my kids. With their mother gone, I’m all they have. If I got sent to prison, they’d have nothing left. I’ve failed them in a million different ways, but I didn’t want to take their future as well.”

  �
�So what changed?” I asked.

  “Honestly? It was you,” Dale said, looking at me directly. “I knew deep down that it was only a matter of time until someone figured out about the money laundering. When you showed up yesterday asking questions about Colonel Mustard Enterprises, I knew it wouldn’t be long till the whole sordid story came out. I was up all last night debating what to do.”

  “And?” I asked when he paused.

  He took a deep breath in and blew it out slowly. In a stronger, fuller voice he said, “After I leave here, I’m going to Sheriff Haight and am going to tell him everything—all about the affair and the Qataris and the money laundering. I wanted to do this interview first because I figure at least this way, I can get my side of the story out there. I may be guilty of a lot of things,” he said with a steely edge, “but I did not kill my wife.”

  CHAPTER 28

  The rest of the afternoon was a blur. Word had gotten out that Dale Mountbatten was in Tuttle Corner, and when we walked him out of the newsroom to accompany him to see Sheriff Haight, there was a small herd of reporters already waiting there.

  “What are you doing at the Tuttle Times?

  “Did you come to confess to killing your wife?”

  “Were you and Rosalee Belanger in it together?”

  “What was the motivation for killing Justin Balzichek?”

  “Did the reporters from the Times persuade you to turn yourself in?”

  “Why are you so dressed up, Miss Ellison?”

  The questions were coming almost as rapidly as the click-click-click of the cameras. Holman stood on one side of Dale, and I on the other. We moved slowly through Memorial Park, our path blocked by the growing crowd of reporters and bystanders. Kay Jackson called the sheriff’s office to warn them what was coming their way, so when we got about halfway across the park, Butter and Deputy Wilmore came out to help.

  “Step aside, step aside,” Butter said to the crowd of reporters. “Let the man walk. You’ll all get your chance to ask your questions eventually.” He put his arms out to keep a safe distance between the crowd and us.

  The press was not allowed inside the sheriff’s office, so once we got inside, we all took a deep breath. For the first time, I felt sympathy for people like Harry Styles and Reese Witherspoon, who were hounded by reporters everywhere they went. No one understood the impulse to get the story more than me, but that frenetic kind of question-shouting and crowding just wasn’t my style. I could see how a person might lose it and smash a camera here and there after a while.

  Carl was waiting just inside the station to take Dale back to an interrogation room. “Thanks, guys,” he said to Holman and me as he led Dale, flanked by Butter and Wilmore, toward the back. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Hey,” I said, before he turned to go, “can we have a quick second?”

  He told Butter to take Mountbatten back. “What’s up?” he said, looking between Holman and me.

  I felt like it was important for Holman to start this particular conversation, so I waited for him to speak up. Thankfully, he did.

  “Rosalee came to see me,” Holman said.

  “What? When?” Carl kept his voice low, but I could tell he was freaking out.

  “A few days ago—”

  “A few days ago?” His surprise turned to anger. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”

  “She was scared. Says she’s innocent and Dale is trying to frame her for the murders.”

  “And just so you know,” I said, lowering my voice and leaning in, “Dale says the same thing about her.”

  “Great,” Carl said. “Just great.” He blew out a gale-force sigh and put his hands on his hips. “I need to go talk to Dale, and then I really need to talk to Rosalee. Where is she?” He looked at Holman.

  “I don’t know.” Holman looked down.

  “Don’t toy with me, Holman. I’ll have the DA slap you with an obstruction charge if I have to…”

  “He doesn’t. Honestly,” I cut in. “He’d persuaded her to turn herself in yesterday, but then she took off. No one has heard from her since.”

  “Well, if this isn’t the biggest shitshow I’ve ever seen—” Carl stopped himself. He rarely cussed, and I could tell he was angry for letting his temper flare. He paused as he looked across the room toward where Dale Mountbatten was waiting in the conference room. “I’ve gotta go. But one of you two better call me the nanosecond she gets in touch, you hear?”

  We agreed and asked if we could be let out the back entrance to avoid the press, which Gail thought was just the height of (hilarious) irony.

  We went back to the office and got straight to work writing up the story on Dale Mountbatten. Holman was taking the lead, and Kay and I were helping by fact-checking certain details like dates that Rosalee worked for the couple, his previous FARA disclosures, and any records we could find pertaining to the establishment of Colonel Mustard Enterprises. We were trying to establish a paper trail between Colonel Mustard Enterprises and Dale Mountbatten personally. Being that it was nearly six o’clock on a Thursday evening, most of the offices that we needed to get in touch with were already closed for the day.

  “We’ll run what we have,” Kay said, looking over our notes from the interview. “By tomorrow morning, every paper who sent a reporter down here is going to have a similar story. Let’s get out ahead with something, even if we can’t run everything.”

  Holman and I agreed, and we sketched out a rough plan of what we thought we could print without crossing any ethical lines.

  I was on my way to the break room to make another pot of coffee when I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize. R u free?

  Who is this?

  Ash. Can u come to funeral home?

  How did Ash get my number, and why did he want me to come to the funeral home right now?

  I texted back. At office. Big story. All okay?

  Not really. Could use ur help.

  It can be hard to decipher tone over text, but I was picking up on a kind of frightened tenor unusual for Ash. Or at least what I knew of him. He didn’t strike me as a guy who scared—or asked for help—easily.

  I walked back into Holman’s office and told him I had to run out for a short while. Both he and Kay looked at me like I had ferrets coming out of my ears.

  “I wouldn’t leave if it wasn’t important.”

  “Is it Rosalee?” Holman’s voice was so childlike and hopeful in that exact moment, I thought my heart might break in two.

  “No,” I said. “I’d tell you if it was.”

  He blinked at me twice and then turned back to his laptop. Kay gave me a confused look, and I just shrugged in response. The last thing I would do was tell Kay about Holman’s complicated feelings for Rosalee. I would never sell out my partner like that. If Holman’s Rosalee-bias became a problem, it would be a problem I’d have to deal with on my own.

  CHAPTER 29

  Since the funeral home was technically closed, it was dark inside except for the light coming from Franklin’s office down the hall. Ash’s face was half in shadow, the light hitting just one of his eyes giving him an ethereal—if a little spooky—look. “Thanks for coming,” he said as I walked inside. “I didn’t know who else to call. Wow, you look nice.” He nodded to my dress.

  “Thanks,” I said, my face reddening. I really needed to go home and change. Or start dressing better on a regular basis.

  I followed him back to the office, and despite the fact that we were alone in the building, he closed the door behind me. I took one of the chairs across from Franklin’s desk, but instead of sitting in his grandfather’s chair, Ash sat on the corner of the desk, right in front of me. He wore jeans and an off-white Henley that was just fitted enough to reveal that he must spend time in the gym. Not that I was looking at his pecs or anything. I was there to help. As a professional. Or something.

  “You look stressed,” I said, leaving out that he also looked kind of hot. “What’s going on?”

&nb
sp; “I screwed up, Riley. Like, really screwed up.”

  “Okay…”

  He let out a mirthless laugh. “For the past week, all I’ve been thinking about is a way to get out of taking over the family business, and now ironically—there isn’t going to be any business left when this gets out.”

  “Ash, slow down,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

  He took a deep breath before speaking. “Remember how I told you I talked to that woman, Sofia Scheiner?”

  “Justin Balzichek’s next of kin, yes. I spoke to her on the phone too.”

  “Right. Well, she came by this afternoon.”

  “I thought she was coming Saturday?”

  “She said she decided to come up earlier ‘to get it over with.’ ”

  “Hmm, okay. So, what happened?”

  “Well, technically the fourteen-day waiting period isn’t up until tomorrow, so the body has yet to be cremated. Javier has it scheduled for the morning.”

  “Right.” I was having trouble seeing where this story was going, but Ash was clearly terribly so upset about something to do with Sofia Scheiner and her unscheduled visit that he was telling the story in halted clips.

  “She seemed so disappointed and said she’d taken off work just to drive in all the way from Arkansas and…well, I just felt so badly for her…”

  “For God’s sake, Ash, just spit it out!”

  “I gave her his stuff. I gave ‘Sofia Scheiner’ Justin Balzichek’s personal effects.”

  “Why did you put air quotes around Sofia Scheiner?” I asked, leaning in against my growing sense of dread.

  “It wasn’t her.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head like he still couldn’t believe it. “She seemed convincing—she knew a lot of details about Justin and how he died and even referenced our conversation on the phone…when she asked if she could have his things so she could ‘start the healing process’ I just…I just gave it all to her.”