by Nora Roberts
“He’s the same one who claimed one of New York’s most respected dealers is a thief. Now you add murder.”
“It’s not a claim, it’s a fact.”
With restless movements, he paced back to the doorway, looked toward the powder room door, paced back.
His brother, Tia noted, was more contained. At least, she amended, as far as she knew.
“She took what wasn’t hers,” Gideon continued. “And because she wants more, she’s upped the stakes beyond anything that can be justified. A man’s dead. A man I met only yesterday, one who gave me his bed because his friend asked him. A man who fixed me breakfast just this morning. A man who’s dead only because he was loyal to a friend.”
“How did you meet Cleo?”
“I tracked her down in Europe.”
“Who is she in this?”
“She’s connected to the second Fate.”
“How?” she demanded.
“Through ancestry. She comes down from the White-Smythes. One was a collector in London.”
All right, Tia mused. All right. Another piece of the puzzle in place.
“You recognize the name.” Gideon’s statement proved to Tia she’d have to work on her acting skills. “You’ve looked into it, then.”
“I think, under the circumstances, I should be the one asking the questions.”
“And I’ll answer them. If I could use your phone first off. I need to call my family.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“I’ll call collect.”
“You can’t use the phone. It’s tapped. Or maybe it’s tapped. Or maybe I’m just having a big, complicated hallucination after all.”
“I’m sorry? Bugged? Your phone’s bugged?”
“According to another surprise visitor.” She turned around. “I think, all in all, I’m really taking this very well, don’t you? I mean, here I am, with a couple of strangers in my apartment—one who is currently being sick in my powder room and the other telling me fantastic stories in the kitchen. And I’m making tea. I think even Dr. Lowenstein would agree that’s progress.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Why should you? Tell me why you believe Anita’s responsible for this man’s death.”
“I’m responsible.” Cleo stood, braced against the doorway. She was still very pale, but her eyes were clear again. “He’d be alive if it wasn’t for me. I got him involved.”
“I’m the one who got you involved,” Gideon reminded her. “So you might as well hang it on me.”
“I’d like to, but it won’t wash. I was double-crossing you. I’d justified it, and you were going to get your share, but I was doing a shuffle on you, and I pulled Mikey into it. She must’ve had them watching the street, so when we came down after I made the deal with her, Mikey goes his way, I go mine. They split up and tail us, only I make my shadow and, being so goddamn clever, lose him. Only Mikey’s clueless, so he just bops on home, and that bastard takes him down there. If he hadn’t been with me, they wouldn’t have known he existed.”
“None of us knew she’d resort to murder,” Gideon told her.
“Well, we know now.” She looked at Tia.
“If this is true, why haven’t you gone to the police?”
“And tell them what?” Gideon jammed his hands in his pockets. “That we believe a respected businesswoman is directly responsible for the murder of a young black dancer? A murder that very likely took place while she was at some public place or in some meeting? And we tell them we know this because she’s stolen a statue while in Dublin and agreed to buy another? I suppose we can tell the police they’ll just have to take our word on it when they ask for proof of any sort. No doubt they’ll clap the cuffs on her.”
“Regardless, you expect me to believe you.” Tia lifted the sputtering kettle off the burner.
“Do you?” Gideon asked.
She looked at him, then at Cleo. “Yes, I guess I do, but I intend to research if insanity runs in my family. There’s a pull-out sofa in my office here. You can use that tonight.”
“Thanks.”
“It isn’t free,” she told Gideon and lifted the tea tray. “From this point on, I stop being a tool and become an active participant in this little . . . quest.”
Cleo smiled as Tia carted the tray into the living room. “Translated, Slick, the doc just informed you she’s your fucking partner.”
“Yes, I did. Lemon or sugar?”
Twelve
“AN accident.”Anita studied the two men whohad come to the private entrance of her office. It served her right, she supposed, for selecting brawn over brains. But really, she’d given them such a simple task, with such specific, follow-the-dots instructions.
“The guy went nuts on me.” Carl Dubrowsky, the shorter, stockier of the two, had a belligerent expression on his pockmarked face. He’d been a bouncer at a club before Anita had enlisted him to handle a few pesky chores.
She’d had reason to know he’d needed a job and wouldn’t quibble about a few minor legalities, as he’d been arrested twice for assault and had barely beaten a charge of manslaughter.
Such activities didn’t look well on a résumé.
She studied him now as he stood in one of the dark, Savile Row suits she’d paid for. You can dress them up, she thought. But you can’t take them out.
“Your instructions, Mr. Dubrowsky, were to follow Ms. Toliver, and/or any companions she might have brought with her to our meeting. To detain her and/or those companions only if it should become necessary. And to, most important, retrieve my property, using persuasion of a physical nature if such action was warranted. I don’t believe there were any instructions in there to fracture anyone’s skull.”
“It was an accident,” he repeated stubbornly. “I tailed the black guy and Jasper took the girl. Black guy went to the apartment, like I said. I went in behind him, like I said. Had to soften him up a little so he’d pay attention while I was asking him about the statue. Went through the place looking for it, didn’t find it, so I softened him up some more.”
“And you let him answer the phone.”
“Figured maybe it was the girl, and I’m thinking I put the arm on him while she’s on the hook, maybe she’ll talk—or with Jasper on her, she could maybe take off for the piece you’re after. Guy starts screaming, warns her off, so I gave him a good jab. Fell wrong, is all. Guy fell wrong and fucked himself.”
“I’ve warned you about your language, Mr. Dubrowsky,” she said coolly. “I see the problem here is that you attempted something in an area where you have no skill. You attempted to think. Don’t do so again. And you, Mr. Jasper.” She paused for a long-suffering sigh. “I’m very disappointed. I had more faith in you. This is the second time you haven’t been able to keep up with a second-rate stripper.”
“She’s got fast feet. And she ain’t as dumb as you think.”
Marvin Jasper was flat-faced and kept his hair in the same needle-sharp buzz cut he’d worn as an MP during his stint in the army. He’d hoped to turn that into a stint with the police force but had washed out during the psych test. He was still bitter about it.
“Apparently she has brains enough to outmaneuver both of you. Now she could be anywhere, and so could the Fate.”
Moreover, she thought, the police were involved. She had no doubt Dubrowsky had been foolish enough to leave some sort of evidence behind. Fingerprints, a stray hair, something that would, eventually, tie him to the murder. Something that could, potentially, tie her.
That would never do.
“Mr. Jasper, I want you to go back, keep a surveillance on this apartment where Mr. Dubrowsky had his accident. Perhaps she’ll go back there. If you see her, I want her taken. Quickly and quietly. Then contact me. I have a place where we can discuss business in private. Mr. Dubrowsky, you’ll come with me. We’ll go prepare for that business.”
ONE OF THE advantages of marrying a wealthy, older man was that wealthy, older men so often had myri
ad holdings. And clever businessmen often kept those holdings buried under a morass of corporations and twisting red tape.
The warehouse in New Jersey was just one of the many. Anita had sold it only the day before to a developer who planned to open one of those cavernous discount stores.
One-stop shopping, she mused as she drove across the cracked concrete. She wasn’t planning on shopping, but she was going to take care of her task with one, final stop.
“Sure is out in bumfuck,” Dubrowsky muttered, and in the dimming light pulled back his lips in a sneer at her prissy order to watch his language.
“We can keep her here for several days, if necessary.” Anita crossed to the loading bay doors, careful not to catch the heels of her Pradas in the cracks. “I want you to go over the security, to make certain once we have her in, she won’t get out.”
“No problem.”
“These loading doors operate electrically and require a code. I’m more concerned with the side doors, the windows.”
He pursed his lips, studied the sooty block of the building. “She’d have to be a monkey to get to the windows, and you got riot bars on them.”
She studied them as if weighing his opinion. Paul might have left her a number of properties, but Anita had taken the time to tour them all. Inside and out. “What about around the sides?”
He trudged around, turning the corner. Weeds sprung up through the broken stone, and though he could hear the sound of traffic from the turnpike, it was a distant whoosh. Bumfuck, he thought again, shaking his head.
“Broken lock on this side door,” he called out.
“Is there?” She knew it. She’d had a complete and extensive report from the appraisal. “That’s a problem. I wonder if it’s locked from the inside.”
He gave it a hard shove, shrugged. “Might be. Or it’s jammed or something.”
“Well, we won’t . . . No,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Best to see if we can get in through it so we know what has to be done. Can you push or kick it in?”
He was built like a bull and proud of it. Proud enough that he didn’t think to ask why she didn’t just unlock the damn door.
Slamming his bulk against the thick wood soothed the ego she’d scraped raw in her office. He hated the bitch, but she paid well. That didn’t mean he was going to tolerate getting sniped at by a woman.
He imagined she was the door, gave it one good kick and snapped the thin bolt lock on the inside.
“Like paper,” he claimed. “Gonna want to put a steel door on here, a police lock if you want to keep out vandals and shit.”
“You’re quite right. It’s dark inside. I have a flashlight in my bag.”
“Light switch right here.”
“No! We don’t want to advertise we’re here, do we?” She aimed the thin beam inside, scanned the room. It was another concrete box, dark, dusty and smelling of rodents.
It was, she thought, perfect.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“Over there in the corner,” she said, gesturing with her light.
He walked over, kicked listlessly. “Just an old tarp. You want us to keep her out here for any time, you gotta think about how we’re going to get food out here.”
“You won’t have to worry about it.”
“Ain’t no Chinese carry-out on the corner,” he began as he turned. He saw the gun in her hand, held as steady as the pencil light. “What the fuck?”
“Language, Mr. Dubrowsky,” she said with a tsk. And shot him.
The gun kicked, the sound echoed, and both sent a thrill through her. He took a lurching step toward her, so she shot him again, then a third time. When he was down, she stepped very carefully around the blood spilling into a slow river on the concrete floor. Tilting her head like a woman considering a new bauble in a shop window, she sent one more bullet into the back of his head.
It was a first for her, a killing. Now that it was done, very well done, her hand shook lightly and her breath came fast and shallow. She shined the light in his pupils, just to be sure, to be absolutely sure. The beam bobbed a bit, but she bore down and saw that his eyes were open and staring. And empty.
Paul had been like that after she’d waited out his final heart attack with his medication tight in her fist. She didn’t consider that killing. That, she thought now as she steadied herself, had been patience.
She stepped back, took the old broom from the corner and meticulously brushed at the dust, smearing any footprints on her backward trip to the door. Taking out a lace-trimmed handkerchief, she wiped the broom handle before tossing it aside, then covered her hand with the silk and lace to pull the door closed.
It was a bad fit now, she mused, as Dubrowsky had conveniently jarred the jamb. An obvious break-in, an obvious murder.
Finally, she wiped off her dead husband’s unregistered Beretta and heaved it as far as she could into the scrubby brush bordering the lot. The police would find it, of course. She wanted them to find it.
There was nothing to tie her here but the fact that her husband had once owned the building. There was nothing to tie her to some nasty little man who’d made his living breaking arms. There were no records of employment, no tax forms, no witnesses to their dealings. Except for Jasper. She didn’t think he’d run to the police when he heard his associate had been shot.
No, she had a feeling Marvin Jasper would become a sterling employee. Nothing like a little incentive to inspire loyalty and hard work.
She walked back to her car, and inside smoothed her hair, freshened her lipstick.
She drove away thinking that it was absolutely true if you wanted something done right, you did it yourself.
JACK AWOKE TO church bells. The pretty peal of them brought him out of a sound sleep on top of the bedspread and made him aware of the steady flow of the breeze through the window he’d left wide open.
He liked the smell of it, the hint of sea it carried. He lay as he was a moment, letting it wash over him until the bells faded to echoes.
He’d arrived in Cobh too early to do anything more productive than admire the harbor and get the general lay of the land.
What had once been a port that had given so many of the country’s immigrants their last look at their homeland was now more of a resort town. And pretty as a postcard. He had a strong view of the low street, the square and the water from his windows. On another trip he would have taken his time absorbing the place, acquainting himself with the rhythms of it, with the locals. He enjoyed that aspect of traveling, and traveling alone.
But in this case there was only one local he had any interest in. Malachi Sullivan.
He intended to find out what he needed to know, make his second stop, and be back in New York within three days. Anita Gaye needed watching, and he’d do a better job of it in New York.
When he was finished here, he intended to contact Tia Marsh again as well. The woman might know more than she realized or more than she’d let on.
Business aside, he’d make time for a pilgrimage before he left Cobh. He checked his watch and decided to order up coffee and a light breakfast before he showered.
The room service waiter had a face full of freckles.
“And isn’t it a fine, fresh day?” he said as he set up the meal. “You can’t do better for sightseeing. If you’d be needing any arrangements made for touring, Mr. Burdett sir, the hotel’s happy to see to it for you. We might have rain tomorrow, so you’ll want to take advantage of the weather while you have it. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”
Jack took the little folder holding the bill. “Do you know a Malachi Sullivan?”
“Ah, it’s a boat tour you’re wanting, then.”
