The Invisible Heiress

by Kathleen O'Donnell

  “No. But she acts like she could.”

  “That’s a thought,” Smiley said. “But it’s not evidence.”

  “What about Marcella’s eeny, meeny, miny, moeing between my husband and father? That can’t be a coincidence either. What if my father found out about Brendan and Marcella then decided to off the younger competition?”

  “That’s the first thing I looked at,” Smiley said. “I do know how to work a case.”

  “And?”

  “Your father denies any liaison between him and Marcella. We’ve got no solid proof otherwise.”

  Right then I blabbed what I’d heard at Beverley.

  “I’ll talk to Harrison,” he said. “I’ll just say I’d heard a rumor about Marcella and Todd. I won’t mention anything else you heard. Sounds like she’s got all that covered anyway. That’ll keep you out of it for now. I can’t promise I can do that forever, depending on what I find out.”

  “Deal.”

  “It’s probably as simple as it looks,” I said. “Brendan drove by a club in the same neighborhood he dealt drugs, Shrinky’s a lowlife who hung out in the same neighborhood. Camera caught Brendan driving around. End of story.”

  “I’m not convinced of that,” Smiley said for both of us. “Possible? Yes. All we’ve got now are threads. But enough threads make a blanket. So, I’ll keep looking.”

  “Even though I act like an ungrateful brat, I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me. Working a closed case must involve all kinds of rule breaking.”

  I could still feel the kiss on my mouth from his greeting.

  He smiled, a small simple thing. But I saw a more complicated story in his eyes.

  “I’m breaking all sorts of rules with you, Preston.”

  “I know,” I said in a small voice.

  “But I stopped caring about the rules after Corey.”

  Smiley rearranged his features, smile gone, handed me the photos he’d carried in that I’d already forgotten about. He let me peruse in peace a few moments. I didn’t comment on his daughter. I’d done that once and still felt horrible about it.

  “What’s this?” I said looking through the pics.

  “What?” Smiley leaned in to see.

  My pulse hammered in my neck. Shrinky malingered at the curb, pink neon sign on the club exterior bright behind her. A closeup of a man stepping out of what looked like a car with one arm extended, as if she might grasp his outstretched hand to hoist him the rest of the way out. Before I could form a thought, Smiley held out a second photo of the two locked in an embrace still at the curb.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Isabel

  “How’s the unpacking going?” Sherman’s voice blared through my car speakers. Fancy ride came with Bluetooth.

  “It’s not. I’m not at the house yet. The movers got the last of everything. What there was of it. Our stuff is in.”

  “Good, good,” Sherman said.

  “Just called to see how things are going on your end,” I said, suspicious as always that he was doing something I wouldn’t like. “Am I interrupting something? You sound weird. I don’t know—preoccupied? You’re cutting in and out.”

  Our marriage hadn’t improved Sherman’s phone etiquette. It still took umpteen messages to get a call back.

  “Actually, I’m in the middle of something,” he said. “Why don’t you go to the house, get settled. I’ll meet you there later.”

  “Pulling into the drive as we speak.”

  He’d hung up already.

  I’d been worried our new house wouldn’t be finished before the baby was born. But we made it with a few weeks to spare. I couldn’t gripe about the new place, all things considered, but it’s grandeur disappointed. A newish, planned community, filled with McMansions. Not the historical neighborhood I wanted. I’d hoped for a well-established community with Tudor or Neoclassical homes, a high-priced old money kind of place. Not this nouveau riche, cookie-cutter place. I planned to upgrade sooner rather than later. I’d already saved a few available estates, more to my liking, on realtor.com.

  I let myself in with my new shiny key. “Hello?”

  I knew no one was home but wanted to hear my voice echo through ten thousand square feet of emptiness. I padded room to room, puffy feet and cankles swelled over my new Chanel ballet flats. Much to my fiancé’s dismay, I got rid of all our old crap stuff to get new. Sherman had never really furnished his place so not much to chuck.

  I brought the couture clothing I’d recently purchased (in my prepregnancy size) plus the maternity wardrobe I’d ordered from one of those exclusive boutiques for celebrity A-list mommies to be. New, glossy hair extensions attached by the hot in-demand stylist, facial, discreet Botox, and Juvéderm injections, complete with mani/pedi, compliments of the aesthetician du jour.

  I aimed for the only room in the house with a chair. Even though I’d vetoed any existing furniture, Sherman brought in his fey, precious desk with its Tiffany lamp. I sank down into his plush, desk chair—the buttery leather hugged my now substantial ass. I hadn’t even put down my new YSL bag, since there wasn’t anything to set it down on until I sat behind the desk. File folders, newspapers, cartons halfway unpacked, contents spilled over, balled-up trash scattered around the high-shine hardwood floor.

  I looked over my elite surroundings, felt a twinge that my mother didn’t live to see me finally living the life I felt owed. I missed the old bag. One of these days, I’d try to track down her white-trash husband, Dwayne, who’d taken the money and run, just to fuck with him. Make him think I’d fight him for the winnings. Nostalgic, I swung my bloated legs up to prop my swollen feet up on the desk, knocked my purse to the ground.

  With a grunt, I plucked my wallet, makeup bag, and pen out of the rubble, kicked Sherman’s crap that already littered the floor, out of the way, before I dumped my purse contents on it. Underneath my travel-size pack of Kleenex I picked up a business card. I held the small rectangle aloft to better see it.

  Shaw, Smithson, and Price stared back at me from the center of the card in black, bold, masculine print. The name Ernest Shaw decorated the bottom left.

  Why did Ernest Shaw sound familiar? My unborn baby kicked me square in the ribs as if to jog my memory. I racked my hormone-soaked brain. Shaw . . . Shaw . . . Ernest Shaw. I’d heard that name recently. I knew I had. Wait. Was he the guy who called sniffing around for money? Yes, that’s what he’d said his name was. I felt confident.

  What else did he say? I couldn’t remember, but he’d said something else. I looked closer at the card—attorneys at law. I’d assumed Shaw called on behalf of a department store or bank—a creditor of some kind. Did attorneys make collection calls? Maybe. I’d expended a lot of energy avoiding creditors most of my adult life but knew little about them or their process.

  Where’d the business card come from? If I remembered right, he’d said something about leaving his card in the front door of my apartment. Had I put it in my purse? No, I didn’t think so. I must’ve. How else could it have fallen out of my bag?

  Unless Shaw’s calling card didn’t fall out of anything that belonged to me. If the card hadn’t been lying dormant on the bottom of my purse, where’d it been? Already here, that’s where, on the floor with the rest of Sherman’s stuff.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Preston

  “I’m going to take these photos to our photo analyst. He’ll clean them up, enlarge them,” Smiley said. “Maybe we can salvage a little something.”

  “Wish we could see from the front, at least more of the car. It’s almost blacked out completely. Hard to identify someone from their back, especially in the shadows.” I squinted to focus. It didn’t help. “How convenient that whoever this guy is, he almost disappears in the darkness.” I pointed to the murky man in Shrinky’s arms.

  Smiley sorted through more photos. “Here’s another one.”

  “Well, it’s closer but still from behind and dark.”

  “Never kn
ow what we’ll see after my guy does his mumbo jumbo.”

  Both of us jumped at the sound of Smiley’s ringing cell. He made listening sounds while I further examined the pictures. Soon he held his phone between his ear and shoulder to write on his pad.

  “That was interesting, unbelievable actually.” He jabbed the phone off.

  “What?”

  “When I talked to Isabel’s partner at his office, I noticed they had a reception desk but no receptionist. The partner, Jonathan, said he’d fired her. As far as he knew she left town but gave me her name and number.”

  “Why would you want to talk to her?”

  “Routine. Gotta talk to everybody. I couldn’t reach her. Thought she really had left town—which she had—but only for a few weeks.”

  “And?”

  “That was the missing receptionist, Rhonda Hopkins. Jonathan fired her for stealing from petty cash, only she says she didn’t do it.”

  “They always say they didn’t do it.”

  “She said she thought Isabel stole it.”

  “Why would Isabel need to steal petty cash?”

  “Rhonda says because Isabel is a . . .” he referred to his notes, “a certifiable psychotic.”

  “I could’ve told you that.”

  “She spent time in a psych hospital out of state.”

  “Of course, she did. My father can really pick a therapist.”

  “Your father picked her? She wasn’t assigned to you?”

  “Nope. The chick they assigned to me couldn’t handle me. So they brought in Shrinky. Takes one to know one, I guess.”

  “Well, Rhonda had quite a bit to say about her.”

  “The receptionist always knows everything.”

  “She says Isabel and Jonathan were lovers.” Smiley kept reading. “Last year he broke it off, so she put a bomb in an office trash can. Set the place on fire.”

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Isabel

  I spent the next half hour nosing through the sea of cartons that Sherman had left dispersed over his office floor. Found nothing of great interest—spreadsheets, graphs, calendars, files of junk, normal office paraphernalia. Who kept a paper calendar anymore? A copy of his divorce papers gave me pause but no surprises there. I’d even uncrumpled all the wads of paper he’d rained down everywhere, spread them out one by one for close scrutiny. I wasn’t sure exactly what I thought I’d find. So far, Sherman was the definition of tedious, as I’d expect.

  What about that business card from Ernest Shaw though?

  Maybe I did, indeed, cram that little thing in my purse during some kind of hallucinogenic seizure. Other than me barking orders, I didn’t remember Ernest Shaw’s conversation. I think, yes, I think he said I’d called him back once. Is that what he’d said?

  Nothing stopped me from calling Ernest Shaw now to find out. I searched for my cell on my knees, belly hanging, to find where it’d landed. A thought interrupted my rescue. What if my mom left a shit heap of debts? Maybe he called to see if he could squeeze me for payment. I knew I probably couldn’t be held responsible, but who needed the aggravation? How would I know until I called?

  Wait.

  Even my loopy mother couldn’t blow through more than three hundred million dollars. But knowing her she could’ve gotten into some pissing match with an old crone at bingo. Territorial about her troll dolls, bingo cards, and taped-to-the-table trash bag, maybe she assaulted some granny on Social Security who saw her as a meal ticket.

  Maybe they couldn’t find Dwayne.

  Only one way to find out what Shaw wanted. Call.

  I pulled my phone from under the desk, my jiggly arm barely long enough to reach, pitched myself back into the chair. Poked out the first couple of numbers I read on the card, then stopped. Why worry about mundane bullshit now anyway, especially someone else’s bullshit? I tore the business card into little pieces, sprinkled them like confetti into my purse.

  So immersed on the floor of meaningless treasures, I’d forgotten about the desk drawers. What a moron. I yanked them open on both sides—one empty, one with a small, leather-bound notepad. Like the ones the police carried who came to my house to tell me my mother had died. I set it aside, gave the last center drawer a healthy tug. Didn’t budge. Tried again, this time put all my weight behind the effort. Almost jerked the hardware off, the stubborn thing still didn’t open.

  Then I noticed the tiny keyhole. Shit. Locked.

  I opened the notepad instead.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Preston

  “Well, Isabel’s in the wind,” Smiley said.

  I held my cell between my chin and collarbone to feed Walter White from his two-ton bag of dog food. “Already?”

  “She vacated her apartment, no forwarding address, according to the landlord who’s primo pissed because she owes him back rent and left the place a mess.”

  “Did you ask what’s-his-name? The partner?”

  “Um, yes,” Smiley said, a teensy bit impatient with my assumption he’d need a reminder. “He says she left to get married, of all the crazy things. No idea where she’d gone or if she’d come back.”

  “Why didn’t he report her when she tried to blow him to smithereens?”

  “He denies any of that happened. No affair, no bomb. Just a freak accident.”

  “What? Really?” Walter’s chomping got on my nerves, so I left him to his dinner, sat at Aunt James’s desk.

  “Fire chief said the fire definitely started because of a homemade explosive device. Not a very-well-made one either. Amateur. Said Jonathan stayed tightlipped about the whole thing then too.”

  I had no idea where Smiley was calling from, but I imagined him at home in his sad, empty, living room. He didn’t seem like an office kind of guy. I couldn’t envision him traipsing through a precinct full of cops. He seemed above all that, above everyone, a man who worked alone.

  “My mumbo-jumbo guy wasn’t able to do as much with those blurred photos as I’d hoped either,” Smiley said. “But I’ll drop them by anyway. Maybe something will stand out to you.”

  “Crap. Okay.”

  “Showed Isabel and Brendan’s photos around at the casino. A couple of dealers and a waitress recognized Isabel but other than that nothing. They all said she came alone, gambled and drank alone. Brendan’s face didn’t ring a bell with anyone and he never showed up on any security camera inside.”

  “I don’t know why that makes me feel better. None of my business what Brendan did at that point. We can’t still be nowhere, can we?”

  “I’d say we’re somewhere,” Smiley said. “The Asphyxia manager got a lot more cooperative. He—”

  “Asphyxia?”

  “The fetish club.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “Anyway, the manager gave me the member list.”

  “Look at you, on the downlow. You’re super detective.”

  Smiley laughed. “There’re no fetish club client confidentiality laws. The owner handed it right over, didn’t want us to get a search warrant or subpoena, which would shut him down for days.”

  “Any names look familiar? Like Isabel’s?”

  “Most don’t use their real names. The club owner couldn’t care less who they are as long as they pay in advance. The list is pretty much a tally of run-of-the-mill, freaky, sex names.”

  That cracked me up. “Are there run-of-the-mill, freaky, sex names?”

  “Yes, actually,” he said. “Marquis de Sade, yeah that’s original. Here’s Heidi Fleiss, Monica Lewinsky. Of course, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer.”

  “Brother. I guess originality got spanked out of them.”

  “Here’s a standout.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think General William T. Sherman was known for his kinky side.”

  I laughed. Might as well.

  “No telling then if Brendan ever actually went inside the club,” I said.

  “I doubt if he did. But someone else interestin
g did, on the security camera in the casino, plain as day.”

  “Who?

  “Judge Seward. Right next to Isabel.”

  I almost toppled over onto the desk. “No way. My parents’ Judge Seward?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Preston’s Blog

  Musings from the Dented Throne

  I’ll Have the Bonkers with a Side of Get the Fuck Out

  As you can see, my followers, I titled this post with my usual joie de vivre but find I can’t continue in that vein. Fact is, I’m mighty low on joie and pretty much out of de vivre.

  My chief of police father-in-law killed himself.

  Yes. You read that right.

  How can it be that both my Irishman and his father are gone quick as a whisper in the dark? My late husband once said to me, in a pique of frustration, “My father would hate me if he could.”

  I think my Irishman got his dad so wrong. I believe the man couldn’t continue to live in a son-less and wife-less world. While he and I weren’t close (that’s an understatement), I feel a deep pang at the thought of his despair. I’m no stranger to anguish.

  What of my own father?

  I’ve gone back and forth between love and hate in light of Dad’s obvious grief over my predicament and failed relationship with Mother, his inability to keep the little Jester sheathed, his embezzlement, and their subsequent secret divorce (yes, it’s true. I know. I can scarcely believe it myself). Then there’s his fixation on my trust fund. But I know now that it’s possible to love someone and cut them from your life. Even if I could forgive my father his many sins, and I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface of what those sins are, I can’t forget.

  I should talk, right? I’ve committed plenty of unforgivable sins.

  You see my dilemma.

  I want to throw stones but can’t take the high ground.