An Inconvenient Woman

by An Inconvenient Woman (retail) (epub)

  My heart melts at her smile.

  “I wanted to make sure you were a good match for her,” Ray tells me, then adds in French, “Désolé de vous avoir induite en erreur.” He is sorry for misleading me.

  The weight of doubting Ray, along with all my dark suspicions about him, suddenly drops from me.

  He smiles. ‘’By the way, how’s my accent?’’

  “Your accent is perfect,’’ I assure him.

  “I hope you don’t mind my deceiving you a little, but I know how important it is to have the right match. I’m sure you and Jade will like each other.’’

  “I’m sure we will.’’

  “Then why don’t we start her first lesson now?’’

  “Okay.’’

  Ray waits at a distance while I have my class with Jade.

  “Thank you, Claire,” he says at the end of the lesson.

  He looks at me closely.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  I avoid the question. “Where did you learn French?” I ask.

  “I lived in Paris when I was a young man with artistic aspirations but no talent to justify them,” Ray answers in that tone of self-mockery I find appealing. “It was my year of living dangerously. I would like to live there again someday, but I promise not to paint.”

  He pauses, then adds quite seriously, “I don’t want to go there alone.”

  Is he asking me to envision the two of us in Paris? It’s a possibility I can’t entertain, because I know it’s not going to happen. I have accepted the only road open to me now, and it does not lead to Paris.

  Which is why, when I left my house this morning, I took Max’s gun.

  Sloan

  NICK DEVINE WASN’T hard to find. Since retiring from the LAPD he’d spent his days slouched in a shadowy corner of the Home Plate Bar, nursing a whiskey and regaling his drinking buddies with tales of life on the job.

  Cancer had thinned him slightly, and he looked more worn, but the sinister twinkle in his eyes remained the same. He’d lived his life as a rogue cop, and nothing in that slimy past in the least bothered him. He was as shameless as they come, a man who’d never once reproached himself for the dirty things he’d done. For Devine, corruption was the way of the world, and he hadn’t offered the slightest resistance to it.

  When he saw me, he waved halfheartedly, with no indication of inviting me to join him at his table.

  “Detective Wilson,” he said when I did it anyway. “I didn’t think you ever came here. Figured it was too blue for you.”

  “Blue?”

  “Too many cops.”

  “I was a cop.”

  “Was being the operative word.”

  He could tell I had something on my mind, but he looked surprised when I said, “You were with the old Vice Squad, right?”

  He laughed at the very word.

  “Vice? What’s that? Nothing but victimless crimes. Making a bet. Loaning money at a higher rate than some bank that wouldn’t loan you a dime in the first place. Where’s the vice in that?”

  This was boilerplate Nick Devine, and under less pressing circumstances I would simply have gotten up and walked away. But as Jake said, bad cops know bad cops, and if my father was the man Simon had described, Devine would know about it.

  He went on in this vein for a few minutes. The usual stories about finding stars caught with hookers, often of the same sex. He threw in a car chase here and a stakeout there. He scoffed at honor and made light of anyone who believed in it.

  It wasn’t long until I was fed up.

  “Tell me about Lolitaville,” I said.

  Devine’s dancing eyes grew still.

  “Why are you interested?” he asked.

  “I have a client who’s been . . . implicated,” I told him. “I’m trying to drag him clear of it.”

  He was quiet for a few seconds, thinking it over.

  “Hell, I’m dying,” he said finally. “The doc says I got about a month. Why should I care who knows what?”

  He cocked his head to the right.

  “What do you want to know, Detective?”

  “Anything you can tell me,” I said.

  “It was a whorehouse out in the sticks,” Devine answered. “Bigwigs used it. Movie-mogul types. Fancy-pants lawyers and politicians. Which always struck me as strange, because they could have afforded the best. Top-flight whores. Luxury hotels. But this bunch, they liked it down and dirty. It was part of the thrill, I guess, to be in a crummy house in the middle of nowhere.”

  He nodded to the NO SMOKING sign at the far end of the room, then pointedly took out a cigarette and lit it. “In cop bars, I can do whatever I want and nobody says squat.”

  He had the voice of a dead man walking, at last free of all restraint.

  “Who runs the place now?” I asked.

  “It’s closed for now, I hear, but it’ll probably start up again after a while. It’s run by a bottom-feeding whore named Vicki Page. As evil a bitch as God ever made.”

  He leaned back, fully relaxed. He might have been in a chaise longue by the pool, taking in the sun.

  “Why did it close?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “My guess is Vicki felt some heat, so she closed it to be safe. She’s done it before. When a girl escaped and couldn’t be found for a while, or somebody came snooping around. Anytime she thought it might be found out, she’d shut it down until things cooled. That’s the way Vicki operates. You get close, she folds the tent and disappears into the night. But it’ll be up and running again once the smoke clears.”

  He was obviously well acquainted with the operation.

  “Was it always called Lolitaville?” I asked.

  “No. It only got that name a few years ago.” Devine answered as freely as he might have responded to the questions of a census taker. “When the clientele’s taste changed from well-done to rare.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They wanted young stuff.”

  “I see.”

  “Vicki was more than happy to oblige, of course,” Devine said. “Her morals would gag a maggot.”

  So would Devine’s, I thought, but I kept it to myself and went on to the next question. “Where did—”

  “Wait a minute,” Devine interrupted. “I been telling you stuff. How about I get some answers from you?”

  “Okay.”

  “Where you’d hear about Lolitaville?”

  “From Simon Miller.”

  The name clearly caught Devine by surprise.

  “What do you have to do with Simon Miller?” he asked.

  “He’s a client.”

  We were both saying things we shouldn’t, which suggested that we were on an equal footing. By revealing my client’s name, I assured Devine that I trusted him to keep his mouth shut, so he could trust me to do the same.

  A malicious delight came into Devine’s eyes.

  “You’re doing Simon Miller’s dirty work?” he asked.

  “It’s a living,” I answered drily.

  Devine flung his arm over the back of his seat.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

  He blew a line of smoke directly toward me. His smile was all self-satisfaction.

  “You really are a chip off the old block, Sloan.”

  I pretended that remark had no effect upon me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Devine took a long pull on the cigarette and sent another blast of smoke in my direction.

  “Hell-bent to get ahead,” he answered. “A real hot dog. Convinced you got all the right stuff. Just like your father was.”

  He looked faintly puzzled.

  “You were moving up fast in the department just like him,” he told me. “Then you up and quit. Why’d you do that?”

  “I had trouble with the life,” I answered. “Trouble being a good cop.”

  “Your father had trouble with that, too,” Devine said.

  He threw back his
head and laughed.

  “The incorruptible Monroe Wilson.”

  The way he mouthed my father’s name seemed seeded with a foul implication.

  “My father didn’t have trouble being a good cop,” I said insistently. “Which is what made it unfair.”

  “Made what unfair?”

  “The stuff my mother said about him. That he was corrupt.”

  Devine drew a final puff on his cigarette. “A gutsy woman, your mom.”

  “Gutsy?” I said derisively. “Does it take guts to lie about a man? Destroy his career? It doesn’t take guts to defame a good man.”

  “Maybe your mother didn’t think he was good,” Devine said.

  “You think she actually believed what she said about him?”

  “I’m just saying that if you once believed a man was good, it would hit hard to find out that you were wrong. You’d been played for a fool. A man that you thought you knew and that you really admired wasn’t admirable at all. He was just another liar. Another hypocrite. Another dirty cop.”

  His gaze seemed almost as tinged with pain as my mother’s had been. “My wife was disappointed in me, too,” he told me.

  He was suddenly quite weary.

  “I guess there’s nothing lower than a fallen god,” he added.

  “But my father wasn’t a—”

  Devine silenced me with a wave of his hand.

  “Anyway, it’s water under the bridge. Forget it.”

  “Forget it? How? She destroyed him. I can’t forget that. Or forgive her for it.”

  Devine shrugged.

  “She was dangerous to have around, that’s for sure. Pointing her finger. Claiming she had evidence.”

  “She didn’t claim to have evidence,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, yes she did,” Devine said.

  His smile was almost playful, but the tone of his voice was dead serious. “She was going to hand it over to Harry Griggs.”

  “ Harry Griggs?”

  “Harry was the head of Internal Affairs in those days,” Devine explained. “Always wore white linen suits with a matching hat. That’s why they called him White Hat Harry.”

  He was utterly confident about his view of the world. That it was ugly and malicious and that no one really stood for anything.

  “Your mother was set to spill the beans to Harry.”

  He crushed what was left of his cigarette onto the tabletop.

  “Well, you know what happened after that,” he said.

  He thumped out another cigarette and lit it.

  “Which was very fortunate for your dad, of course.”

  His eyes narrowed knowingly.

  “Very, very fortunate.”

  He smiled, and I felt the full thrust of his implication.

  “Because your mother was . . . an inconvenient woman.”

  He winked.

  “The type you need to get rid of,” he continued, with no effort to conceal the shocking thing he was suggesting. “If you want to get ahead.”

  This was Nick Devine at his sleaziest, a creature of dark innuendo alluding to ghastly things.

  I didn’t buy it.

  “The LAPD did a full investigation,” I reminded him. “My mother committed suicide. Every report came to the same conclusion. From the coroner on up.”

  A smile slithered back onto Devine’s lips.

  “Well, that’s the thing about suicide,” he said. “Especially with a gun to the head. It’s easy to fake. You make sure the body is in the right position and the pistol is in the right place. You add a little carbon residue here and there.

  He shrugged.

  “Easy.”

  His eyes were knife points.

  “You’d know how to fake a suicide like that, wouldn’t you, Sloan?” he asked almost teasingly.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you learn that particular skill?”

  “On the job.”

  He released a long, slow breath.

  “Just like your old man.”

  He was doing it again, insinuating that my father had faked my mother’s suicide.

  “My father wasn’t in the house when it happened,” I told him firmly. “He was at headquarters. I found my mother.”

  “Yes, I know,” Devine said. “You were supposed to be home by three thirty, but you were late.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you think I know it?”

  “Anyone could have told you.”

  He seemed hardly to hear me.

  “It was supposed to be a murder-suicide thing,” he said evenly. “That way no one would question it. A mother kills her daughter, then herself. A case like that, it’s cut and dried. Everybody knows the crazy mother did it. There usually isn’t even much of an investigation. At least, not the sort of investigation there’d be if it was only your mother who’d died.”

  I laughed in his face.

  “So my father hired you to kill my mother and me?”

  Devine didn’t laugh. He stared at me silently.

  “You need a better story,” I said contemptuously. “I mean, come on, Nick, do you really expect me to believe any of this?”

  Something in him softened, as if he’d been taken up by a malign nostalgia. “You were wearing a cute little red dress when you came home that day,” he said.

  I stared at him coolly.

  “The back door was supposed to be open, remember?” Devine asked. “But it was locked, and so you went around to the front.”

  I felt my skin tighten around my bones.

  “You were a very sweet-looking little girl, Sloan,” he added almost gently. “Innocent.”

  He seemed to see me again as I’d been that day. Seven years old. A child.

  “I went out the back as you came in the front. End of story.”

  When I said nothing, he added in a tone that was almost intimate, “I’ll burn in hell for things I’ve done. But at least I couldn’t do that.” He shook his head. “Not even for the incorruptible Monroe Wilson.”

  I felt a hole in the earth.

  It opened beneath me.

  I fell and fell.

  Claire

  THE CALL COMES in just before noon.

  A doctor tells me that my father is dying.

  I drive to the hospital.

  He is lying on his back, eyes closed, breathing very lightly, releasing gentle puffs of air. Mine is a death watch, nothing more.

  It ends an hour later, when his breathing stops. I summon a nurse, then do the paperwork necessary for the removal and cremation of his body.

  I am numb.

  I feel nothing.

  I am focused only on the next three hours.

  By that time, if Simon follows his normal schedule, he will be home.

  “There’s a chaplain, if you want to see him,” a kindly hospital clerk tells me when I sign the last of the papers. “And we can provide a grief counselor.”

  I shake my head.

  “No, thank you.”

  Before leaving, I walk down the corridor to Margot’s room. An old woman is now in what had been her bed.

  I go to the nurses’ station.

  A young man is working at a computer.

  “Can you tell me what happened to Margot Garrett? She was in Room 414.”

  “Let me check.”

  He types a few strokes.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No. Her French teacher.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but Mrs. Garrett passed away early this morning.”

  It was a death I might have prevented. It eliminates any further doubts as to what I have to do.

  I turn and head toward my car.

  I promise myself that I will never act too late again.

  Nothing will stop me now.

  Sloan

  SIMON’S VOICE CAME through clear and crisp: But you’ll never know, will you? Unless you look. Which you won’t.

  But I had looked.

  Now I had t
o deal with what I’d found.

  I turned off the tape and sat in the stony silence of my office.

  During the next few minutes I searched for a way out of the windowless cell I was locked in, and wondered how I might ever be released from it.

  There seemed only one key: to take up and hold . . . the feather.

  I pocketed the tape and went to my car.

  Claire

  I ARRIVE TO offer my last hour of French.

  “Bonjour,” Chloé says cheerfully when she opens the door.

  “Bonjour.”

  She leads me to a table where she’s already arranged the book for the class.

  I point to a drawing of people standing in a snowy park, wrapped in heavy coats and scarves. “Il fait . . . ?”

  “Froid,” Chloé responds delightedly. Cold.

  I point to a scene of people on the beach, a bright sun above them. “Il fait . . . ?”

  “Chaud.” Hot.

  The third drawing is of a little girl standing in front of a large house. She wears a huge smile. “Elle est . . . ?”

  “Heureuse.” Happy.

  “Très bien,” I tell Chloé, because she has correctly used the feminine form of the adjective.

  The next picture shows the same little girl, her eyes moist, her smile now a frown. “Elle est . . . ?”

  “Triste.”

  “Super.”

  In the final drawing, a different little girl stands at the door of a house that somewhat resembles Simon’s. “Elle est . . ?”

  Chloé gives the right answer. “A la porte.” At the door.

  I peer at the drawing of the little girl and think of Emma. Elle est en danger, I say to myself in French. She is in danger.

  Then I tell myself in English, But not for long.

  Sloan

  CANDACE LOOKED AT me somberly as she turned off the tape.

  “Miller didn’t think you’d come after him,” she said. “Not at the risk of damaging your father’s reputation.”

  I’d already told her about the warning I’d gotten from Vicki Page and the much more disturbing talk I’d had with Nick Devine, save for the final moments I’d spent with him. The last of his awful accusations were still echoing through my mind, but I kept them to myself.

  “There’ll have to be an investigation, Sloan,” Candace said ominously. “A very thorough one.”

  She meant an official inquiry that could unearth a world of corruption in which my father might have been involved.

  “I know,” I told her.

  She saw the pain in my eyes.