The questions were still ringing in her ears as she left the apartment. Down the steps, out into the street, key at the ready to open her car so she could escape. She looked back once more but Eli was gone, his door shut against her, and for some reason that made Lauren afraid.
16
Lauren drove like a crazy woman. She drank the air instead of breathing it, but Eli had knocked the wind out of her, and her lungs wouldn’t expand. He had come so close, made her feel safe, perhaps loved, and then attacked the man she loved like a brother. Lauren shook her head to clear Eli out. Unfortunately, Eli wouldn’t be banished. Lauren pressed the gas pedal and decided to damn well leave him in her dust if that was the only way.
She wasn’t a coward. Allan was not involved in anything illegal and Eli was not a port in the storm. Wilson was loved. Allan loved him. She loved Allan and those were the permutations that had held her in good stead for her adult life so there was no choice. Lauren went to Allan’s home to talk to him, knowing full well she intended to warn him about Eli. She tried not to think about the fact that, with Wilson dead, there was nowhere else for her to go.
Dawn was just coming up over Los Angeles when Lauren knocked at Allan’s door. She knocked firmly enough so that he would hear even if he were dead asleep. It was five-thirty in the morning. Lauren rang the bell, but no one came to let her in. Her heart threw itself against the walls of her chest and she put a hand over it to keep it from leaping into her throat. Knowing she needed to see him, Lauren made a decision. She used her key and stepped into Allan Lassiter’s home the way she had the night Wilson Caulfield died. This was not exactly the same as that night: this time she wasn’t invited.
Lauren eased the key out of the lock and went through the motions knowing she might find something she didn’t want to find: a woman sleeping in Allan’s bed, Edie Williams coming out of the shower, perhaps Allan, only Allan, angered that she should be so bold, so rude. She didn’t consider the possibility of finding something more sinister. Pocketing the key, she reminded herself again that she had no right to be there and then Lauren stepped over the threshold.
The first thing Lauren saw was the sky through the huge window. It was the palest peach, the shade that is tinged with gold. Night gray hovered at the very edges of the light as if coveting the morning. Another time Lauren would have admired the world as she stood in Allan’s stratosphere, but Allan’s universe had changed, or, perhaps, she was seeing it all for the first time.
She was trespassing.
She should leave.
She closed the door and saw Allan Lassiter’s home through new eyes.
This was an ominous, empty, forlorn, and deserted place. The furniture, the ceramics, crystal, and artwork had lost their sense of purpose. This place had once defined Allan by his taste, his eye for beauty, his flamboyance, his power, money, and prestige. Now it seemed to underscore his lack of creativity, warmth, and personal connection. There was nothing here: not a picture of Wilson or of her. There wasn’t even a picture of himself with a woman, Edie or otherwise.
There was mail on the side table. She pushed it around with one finger. Bills, professional notices, catalogues. Where were the letters from real people? Friends? His own protégés? People who knew Allan? What about people who liked Allan? Lauren stopped herself. Her thought process was absurd. She was creating problems where yesterday there had been none.
“Allan?” she called softly, listening carefully as she made her way into the living room. Now it was full on day, nature as a quick-change artist, and there wasn’t a sound in Allan’s home.
Lauren took a step toward the bedroom and cocked an ear. The shower wasn’t running. How she would have laughed if she’d heard him singing in there. That thought didn’t even bring a small smile to her lips.
“Allan?” she called again.
Through the door she could see the shadow of a lacquered chest of drawers she had often admired. From that angle the doorway looked like a portal to another world. The suede-beige walls undulated with shadows cast long and then dispelled as the earth tilted and the sun rearranged itself and then fought to come through the shutters on the windows. The bed was made neatly. It was too early for the daily maid. Allan hadn’t slept in that bed the night before. She looked away. That meant nothing. She hadn’t slept in hers either. With that thought, Lauren had a vision. Eli and her, naked in the early hours when it was more night than morning.
“Allan? It’s Lauren.”
By the time the last note had sounded, she was there, in the bedroom. He wasn’t; she shouldn’t be. Lauren was headed out, urged on by her own sense of propriety, when she stopped. Beside the neatly made bed was the exquisite rosewood chest and atop that was the phone. Sleek, black, silent. Lauren didn’t take long to decide that there was something to do before she left. She would do it for Wilson. She would do it for herself. Most of all, she would do it for Allan because no one was there to protect him any more except her.
Licking her lips, Lauren walked slowly toward the bed. She couldn’t do it standing up. The mattress gave beneath her. Twice she breathed hard. Twice she reached for the receiver, touched it and drew her hand back. On the third try, Lauren picked it up. Knowing Allan wasn’t at the office. Lauren calmed herself and dialed that number, punching the buttons fast before she lost her nerve.
She listened with one arm cocked to hold the phone to her ear, the other draped across her middle. Three rings, and on the fourth the voicemail menu announced itself. Lauren knew the routine. She punched in Allan’s extension and waited again. Three rings and on the fourth she would get the answering machine.
“Hello there.” This was no answering machine. Allan was at the office.
Air flooded into her lungs. Surprise! Surprise! She had given Eli’s speculation credence and now she had proved him wrong, wrong, wrong. Her smile was just breaking, she was just sitting up straighter, ready to talk when she heard something that wasn’t right. No. Something that was very, very wrong.
“I always knew you wanted me.”
“Allan? It’s me, Lauren,” she said.
“I know,” he whispered and then he laughed aloud. She heard that laugh in stereo and her blood ran cold.
Slowly Lauren turned her head. There he was. Allan, backlit by a white gold aura from the huge window in the living room, leaned against the door to his bedroom. He was grinning at her and there was a phone at his ear. It was a small and exquisitely manufactured cellular phone and he spoke into it. He purred into it. He grinned at her as he purred into it.
“I’ve always wanted to get you into bed.”
She heard his voice coming through the phone at her ear and coming at her from across the room. They were connected and they were together. Lauren’s heart stopped. That’s when he snapped the phone shut and came toward her.
There were three men and a woman in the van with no windows. They were dressed in black, armed, and ready to go. The house had been surveyed. The hour was good – not too early but not late enough for the few neighbors to be up and about. Not that they’d ever really seen neighbors, but one had to assume someone was inside the houses where lights went on at night. The man inside the house in question was still asleep and the people inside the van knew what to do: each one did a last-minute check of his weapon, confirmed communication with the intercept cars positioned at strategic locations, and readjusted his body armor. They checked with their commander up front. The word was go, so they went.
The back of the van opened. Four people piled out of the car with exceeding grace considering how they were outfitted. The commander stayed at the wheel, radio at the ready, ever watchful for a screw up by his men or unexpected movement from inside. Outside, one of the people went ahead and three watched. The leader called them ahead a second later. They fanned out around the little, ill-kept house on a close-to-abandoned side-street just inside the boundaries of Riverside County. Just outside the boundary line there was nothing but nothing.
Two age
nts rounded the house in the back. Two stayed in front, lying back against the wall by the front door as they waited to hear that their compadres were positioned. They didn’t worry about the sides of the house; the few windows were permanently barred so no one would be heading out that way. The agents in front heard the command to go come through their earphones.
All hell broke loose.
Front and back, the doors were kicked open simultaneously. Shouts and hollers, barked orders and weapons snapping around each corner followed closely by the man who held the weapon. More barks and roars and heavy boots on the floor as the intruders stormed from room to room. There were only five including the kitchen, so it didn’t take much time. They found Henry Stewart in the fifth, a small bedroom with a real bed unlike his previous accommodations. They found him much as they expected, paralyzed with fear now that he’d been found out. Poor little Henry was in shock, his expression never changing despite the commotion around him and the sound of assault weapons ratcheting as they were pointed at his head. But Henry wasn’t quite what he seemed. He was smarter than they thought. Henry knew they wouldn’t shoot because good guys didn’t unless they had to. They fought clean, face to face. It was the other stuff you had to watch out for. The people they sent in to make you think there was another choice. That’s who you had to be afraid of. People like Nick Cheshire.
So Henry lay with the covers up around his chin watching carefully to see when they would figure it out. They didn’t. They were all in the macho mode, even the lady.
“Henry Stewart. FBI. Up. Up. Up now,” the first person hollered and the others followed suit. Up. Up. Out of bed, you sleepy head. One of them ripped back the covers, all of them ready to rip him right out of the bed.
Instead, they fell silent.
Then they fell back.
Henry was wired.
A bomb was strapped to his middle.
Henry grinned.
That’s when they saw the switch in his hand.
“Boy, if this isn’t a surprise. Leave one woman’s bed, come home and find another in my own.”
Lauren jumped and the phone fell from her hands. She fumbled with it, stood, and put it back in the cradle. “I wasn’t exactly in your bed. I was just sitting on it.” Feeling like a schoolgirl caught snooping in the headmaster’s office, Lauren stepped away, her hands behind her back.
“Hey, it’s a start, right? I mean if you want to get technical, I wasn’t really in bed last night either.” Allan was jolly. Allan was full of energy. Allan was drunk. Lauren could smell it five feet away. She crinkled her nose and gave him room.
“You’ve been drinking this early?” Now there was a crack of a smile on her face, a little one of disbelief so he wouldn’t think she was making a judgment even though she was. Allan didn’t drink. Not that way.
“No, Laurie,” he said happily, “what do you take me for, a lush?” She forgave him the dreaded nickname because the overly hearty laugh worried her. “I just didn’t stop last night, so I don’t think that counts as taking a tipple early in the morning. God, I’m tired. Spent the night closing up at Michael’s in Santa Monica. Nice place. Nobody rushes you. Then I went to Edie’s.” He thought about that while he loosened his tie. She wondered if he was enjoying the memory or trying to figure out why that’s where he ended up. Then he was happy again, teasing her again. “You want to just lie down and take a little nap? I could use one, and you don’t exactly look like you got a lot last night.” He looked a little closer and laughed without humor. “Or maybe you actually got some. Fooling around on me, are you, Laurie?”
He tossed the little phone on the chair, pulled off his tie, then stripped off his shirt. Both landed atop the phone. Lauren saw his smile disappear as he turned his face away. His good humor disintegrated on the way to the bathroom. Lauren started to follow but stopped when he glanced over his shoulder. He should have looked rakish, instead he looked sleazy.
“Are you sure you want to come in here? I’m going to get naked and take a shower.” He unzipped his pants, forgetting this was Lauren in his bedroom. Or had he? Perhaps this was another prank, a little morning shock to amuse himself.
“No, I don’t want to go in there with you, but I will if that’s what it takes to get you to talk to me.”
“Fine. Your choice. Maybe once you see what you’ve been missing, you won’t want to talk.”
He disappeared and the water started running. Lauren stood her ground, but it was no show of strength. Doubt was enough to render her stationary, no wonder it had never been a favored companion. Lauren had always dismissed doubt as a rabbit hole for a timid mind. She looked toward the bedroom door but walked through the one leading to the bathroom. Doubt was left behind.
Allan could have hosted a party in his shower and more than likely he had but now he was there alone. Lauren could see him through the steam that fogged the clear glass, smudging the outline so that he looked like an impressionist painting. There was no doubt Allan was picture perfect. He could have been a model; he could have been a movie star. Form was of no interest to Lauren now; substance was what she needed to determine. She called to him over the noise of the five shower heads that pummeled him from top to bottom.
“Eli Warner thinks you had something to do with Wilson’s death.”
The water stopped instantly. The door of the shower flew open and Allan stood in front of her, naked. Water beaded and dropped from his hair and body. A rivulet ran into his lips, but they were shut so tight it rerouted itself down his jaw. Lauren stepped back. She said again, more quietly, more forcefully:
“Eli Warner thinks you had something to do with Wilson’s problems. Maybe even something to do with his death.”
Allan looked at her, he looked through her. His eyes were blood shot and bleary. Beautiful though he may be, there were flaws in his exterior that let Lauren see a molten interior. What he burned for, what burned through him, she didn’t know. She hadn’t even known the passion existed until this moment.
With a snap he grabbed the bath sheet off the electric warmer. Wrapping it around his waist, Allan pushed past her and stopped at the marble sink. There he looked at himself in the huge mirror, picked up a cup and brush and soaped his face. She stayed quiet while he shaved and rinsed and dried his face. A comb was put through his hair and he was almost perfect once more. He picked up his blow dryer.
“Do you have a gun, Allan?” Lauren asked before he turned it on.
“Do you have any brains, Lauren?” He was cruel and he didn’t care what he said to her or how he said it. He put down the blow dryer. Lauren moved in front of him.
“Allan, I’ve got to know.”
“I’m not going to answer you.” He turned around. They were two real people now. No mirrors. No tricks. “Eli Warner is a peon who obviously is just a bit tired of the grunt work he’s been doing.”
Allan swept past her. Lauren followed, standing clear while he threw open the doors of his closet and rifled the dusky rainbow of suits: gray, black, blues in all hues. They were all so expensive. Hand tailored. Great packaging. She used to think they were the whole picture, now Lauren knew they were only a piece of the puzzle that made up Allan Lassiter.
He slipped the wood hangers back: one, two, three. By the fifth suit he was slapping at them. Finally, he threw a charcoal single breasted suit on the bed. Followed by a shirt in the palest pink. It was folded, heavily starched, and it shot like a Frisbee out of his hand. He snapped a tie off the rack, whipping it onto the pile and he thought nothing of dropping his towel and dressing in front of her. He talked as if he’d forgotten she was there. Or, perhaps, she didn’t exist for him anymore.
“I hated that guy when I saw him. He’s an idiot. Moved in on Wilson like a torpedo. He was poking his nose into everything. Well beyond the scope of a normal background.” Allan pushed his shirttails into his trousers and zipped them. “Naw, there was something wrong from the beginning. I’ve talked to people about him, Lauren. I’ve talked to a lot
of people. I was going to have him removed. I had the connections. I could have done it. I told Wilson I would have him removed but Wilson said no.” He turned up his collar and put in gold stays, stabbing them like little sabers into the holes. He pulled his tie around his neck and faced yet another mirror. “So what’s he saying Lauren? What evidence does he have that I’ve done something so terrible? Lauren, think about this. He actually said I killed Wilson?”
“No, he didn’t exactly say that,” Lauren backtracked. He hadn’t said that but that’s what he meant. “He thinks there was something wrong between you and Wilson. He thinks it was something so bad that it could have hurt you and him. He only has a vague idea, sort of a feeling because of the way you’ve been acting since Wilson died and because of something he found out about Wilson’s firm. He’s going to keep looking into it.”
“Oh, that’s dandy. He’s going to run around this city calling me a murderer? Jesus, Lauren, what’s with you?”
“Nothing. I didn’t say I believed him. I just...”
“What? What did you just?” Whip. Snap. Tug. His tie was knotted.
“I’m just confused. I saw Henry Stewart last night. I talked to him.” Lauren moved around, trying to look Allan in the eye but he kept turning until he was looking at her through the mirror again. “Allan, listen. I saw him and talked to him and he said he didn’t kill Wilson.”
“Oh, now you’re making so much more sense. You believe a kid who blew up a building and killed two people. He said he didn’t kill Wilson—even though he could have come up with a zillion reasons to do it—you believe him. Then you run off to see a guy who hates my guts because he thinks he’s found the scandal of the season and you come here and accuse me...”
“I am warning you. I didn’t accuse you of anything,” Lauren interrupted, going to him, and putting her hand on his shoulder.
The Mentor Page 24
