Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark

by Sidney Sheldon

  “I didn’t witness Andrew’s murder.”

  Both men turned to look at Angela, but her attention was focused wholly on Danny. Feeling a ridiculous sense of triumph, he moved toward her bedside, edging Renalto aside.

  “Would you like to tell me what you did witness?”

  “Angel, you don’t have to say anything,” the attorney butted in.

  Danny raised an eyebrow at the endearment.

  “Angel was my husband’s pet name for me,” Mrs. Jakes explained. “All his friends used to call me that. Not that I am an angel, by any means.” She smiled weakly. “I’m sure I could be quite a trial to poor Andrew at times.”

  “I highly doubt that,” said Danny. “You were telling me about last night. About what happened.”

  “Yes. Andrew was upstairs in bed. I was downstairs reading.”

  “What time was this?”

  She considered. “About eight, I suppose. I heard a noise from upstairs.”

  “What sort of noise?”

  “A bump. I thought Andrew might have fallen out of bed. He’d been having these spells recently. Anyway, Conchita came running in, she’d heard the noise too, but I said I’d go up. Andrew was a proud man, Detective. If he were…” She searched around for the appropriate word. “If he were incapacitated in any way, he wouldn’t have wanted Conchita to find him. He’d have wanted me.”

  “So you went up alone?”

  She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, bracing against the memory.

  Lyle Renalto stepped forward. “Angel, please. There’s no need to upset yourself.”

  “It’s all right, Lyle, really. The detective needs to know.” She turned back to Danny. “I went up alone. As I was walking into the bedroom someone hit me from behind. That’s the last thing I remember, the pain in my head. When I woke up, he was…he was raping me.”

  “Can you describe the man?” asked Danny. He knew from experience that the best way to calm emotional witnesses was to stick to the hard facts. Once you started with all the “I know this must be distressing for you” bullshit, the floodgates opened and you’d lost them.

  Angela Jakes shook her head. “I wish I could. But he wore a mask, a balaclava.”

  “What about his build?”

  “Most of the time he was behind me. I don’t know. Stocky, I guess. Not tall, but he was certainly strong. I fought, and he hit me. He said if I didn’t let him keep doing it, he would hurt Andrew. So I stopped fighting.” Tears streamed down her swollen cheeks.

  “Where was your husband at this time? Did he try to help you? To raise the alarm?”

  “He…” A look of confusion came over her face. She glanced at Lyle Renalto, but he looked away. “I don’t know where Andrew was. I didn’t see him. On the bed, maybe? I don’t know.”

  “It’s all right,” said Danny, sensing her anxiety levels rising. “Go on. You stopped fighting.”

  “Yes. He asked me for the combination of our safe and I gave it to him. Then he raped me again. When he’d finished, he knocked me out a second time. When I came to…the first thing I remember is you, Detective.”

  She looked Danny in the eye and he felt his stomach lurch, promptly forgetting his next question. Lyle Renalto smoothly took advantage of the silence.

  “Conchita, the Jakeses’ housekeeper, told me that all Angela’s jewelry was taken and a number of valuable miniatures. Is that correct?”

  Before Danny could respond that he wasn’t in the habit of leaking sensitive information about a murder inquiry to “family friends,” Angela blurted out angrily, “I don’t care about the damn jewelry! Andrew’s dead! I loved my husband, Detective.”

  “I’m sure you did, Mrs. Jakes.”

  “Please find the animal who did this.”

  Danny cast his mind back to last night’s crime scene: the blood-soaked floor, the old man’s all-but-severed head, the disgusting, obscene scratches on Angela Jakes’s thighs, buttocks and breasts.

  Animal was the right word.

  THERE WAS NO SIGN OF THE pretty nurse outside Angela Jakes’s room. As Danny stood waiting for the elevator, Lyle Renalto oiled up to him. “You don’t have a very high opinion of attorneys, do you, Detective?”

  The lawyer’s tone had switched from hostile to ingratiating. Danny preferred hostile. Nevertheless, it was an unusually perceptive comment.

  “What makes you think that, Mr. Renalto?”

  Lyle smiled. “Your face. Unless, of course, it’s just me, personally, whom you dislike.”

  Danny said nothing. Lyle went on.

  “You’re not alone, you know. My father hated lawyers with a passion. He was crushingly disappointed when I graduated law school. I come from a seafaring family, you see. As far as Pa was concerned, it was the United States Naval Academy or nothing.”

  Danny thought, Why’s he telling me this?

  The elevator arrived. Danny stepped inside and pressed G but Lyle stuck an arm out to hold the doors. His film-star features hardened and his cat’s eyes flashed in warning. “Angela Jakes is a close friend of mine. I won’t have you hounding her.”

  Danny lost his temper. “This is a murder inquiry, Mr. Renalto, not a game of twenty questions. Mrs. Jakes is my key witness. In fact right now, she and her maid are my only witnesses.”

  “Angela didn’t see the man. She told you that already.”

  Danny frowned. “I thought Mr. Jakes was a close friend of yours too. I’d have thought you’d want us to find his killer?”

  “Of course I do,” snapped Lyle.

  “Or perhaps you weren’t quite as close to Andrew Jakes as you were to his wife. Is that it?”

  This seemed to amuse Lyle Renalto. “For a detective, I must say you’re a pretty poor judge of people. You think Angel and I are lovers?”

  “Are you?”

  The attorney smirked. “No.”

  Danny desperately wanted to believe him.

  “This is a triple felony, Mr. Renalto,” he said, removing the attorney’s arm from the elevator door. “Rape, robbery and murder. I strongly suggest you do not attempt to obstruct my investigation by coming between me and the witness.”

  “Is that a threat, Detective?”

  “Call it what you like,” said Danny.

  Renalto opened his mouth to respond but the elevator doors closed, denying him the last word. Judging from his twitching jaw and the look of frustration etched on his handsome face, this wasn’t something that happened very often.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Renalto.”

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, BACK ON WILSHIRE Boulevard, Danny’s cell phone rang.

  “Henning. What have you got for me?”

  “Not much, sir, I’m afraid. Nothing in the pawnshops, nothing online.”

  Danny frowned. “It’s still early days.”

  “Yes, sir. I also checked out Jakes’s will.”

  Danny brightened. “And?”

  “The wife gets everything. No other family. No charitable causes.”

  “How much is everything?”

  “After taxes, around four hundred million dollars.”

  Danny whistled. Four hundred million dollars. That was quite a motive for murder. Not that Angela Jakes was a suspect. The poor woman could hardly have raped and beaten herself. Even so, Danny thought back to the words Angela had murmured repeatedly to herself last night: I have no life.

  With four hundred million in the bank, she certainly had a life now. Any life she wanted.

  “Anything else?” he asked his sergeant.

  “Just one thing. The jewelry. A little over a million bucks’ worth was taken from the safe and Mrs. Jakes’s jewelry box.”

  Danny waited for the punch line. “And…?”

  “None of it was insured. Seven figures’ worth of diamonds, and you don’t add it to your homeowner’s policy? Seems strange, don’t you think?”

  It did seem strange. But Danny’s mind wasn’t focused on Andrew Jakes’s insurance oversights. “Listen,” he said, “I want you
to run a check for me on a guy named Lyle Renalto. R-E-N-A-L-T-O. Says he was Old Man Jakes’s lawyer.”

  “Sure,” said Detective Henning. “What am I looking for, exactly?”

  Detective Danny McGuire said honestly, “That’s the problem. I have no idea.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARRAKECH, MOROCCO

  1892

  THE LITTLE GIRL GAZED OUT OF the carriage window at streets teeming with filth and life and noise and stench and poverty and laughter, and felt sure of one thing: she would die in this place.

  She had been sent here to die.

  She had grown up in luxury, in privilege and above all in peace, in a sprawling palace in the desert. The only daughter of a nobleman and his most favored wife, she had been named Miriam, after the mother of the great prophet, and Bahia, which meant “most fair,” and from her earliest infancy had known nothing but praise and love. She slept in a room with gold leaf on the walls, in a bed of intricately carved ivory. She wore silks woven in Ouarzazate and dyed in Essaouira with ocher and indigo and madder, shipped in at great expense from the Near East. She had servants to dress her, to bathe her, to feed her, and more servants to educate her in the Koran and in music and poetry, the ancient poetry of her desert ancestors. She was beautiful inside and out, as sweet-faced and sweet-tempered a child as any noble father could wish for, a jewel prized above all the rubies and amethysts and emeralds that adorned the necks and wrists of all four of her father’s wives.

  The palace, with its cool, shady courtyards, its fountains and birdsong, its plates of sugared almonds and silver pots of sugary mint tea, was Miriam’s whole world. It was a place of pleasure and peace, where she played with her siblings, sheltered from the punishing desert sun and all the other dangers of life beyond its thick stone walls. Had it not been for one terrible, unexpected event, Miriam would no doubt have lived out the rest of her days in this blissfully gilded prison. As it was, at the age of ten, her idyllic childhood ground to an abrupt and final halt. Miriam’s mother, Leila Bahia, left her father for another man, riding off into the desert one night never to return.

  Miriam’s father, Abdullah, was a good and honorable man, but Leila’s betrayal broke him. As Abdullah withdrew increasingly from life and the day-to-day business of running his household, the other wives stepped in. Always jealous of the younger, more beautiful Leila and the favoritism Abdullah showed to their child, the wives began a campaign to get rid of Miriam. Led by Rima, Abdullah’s ambitious first wife, they prevailed on their husband to send the child away.

  She will grow into a serpent, like her mother, and bring ruin on us all.

  She looks just like her.

  I’ve already seen her making eyes at the servant boys, and even at Kasim, her own brother!

  In the end, too weak to resist, and too heartbroken to look his favorite daughter in the face—it was true, Miriam did look exactly like Leila, right down to the soft curve of her eyelashes—Abdullah acquiesced to Rima’s demands. Miriam would be sent to live with one of his brothers, Sulaiman, a wealthy cloth merchant in Marrakech.

  The child wept as the carriage clattered through the palace gates and she left the only home she had ever known for the first, and last, time. Ahead, the desert sands stretched out before her, apparently endless, a bleak but beautiful canvas of oranges and yellows, modulating from deep rust to the palest buttermilk. It was a three-day ride to the city, and until the walls of the ancient battlements loomed into view, they passed nothing but a few nomads’ huts and the occasional merchant caravan weaving its weary way across the emptiness. Miriam had started to wonder if perhaps there was no city. If it was all a wicked plan by her stepmothers to throw her out into the wilderness, like they did to criminals in the poems Mama used to read her. But then, suddenly, she was here, inside this anthill of humanity, this wild mishmash of beauty and ugliness, of minarets and slums, of luxury and destitution, of lords and lepers.

  This is it, thought the terrified child, deafened by the noise of the clamoring hands banging on the carriage as they passed, trying to sell her dates or cumin or ugly little wooden dolls. The apocalypse. The mob. They’re going to kill me.

  BUT MIRIAM WASN’T KILLED. INSTEAD, NOT twenty minutes later, she found herself sitting in one of the many ornate waiting parlors in her uncle’s riad close to the souk, sipping the same sweet mint tea that she was used to at home and having her hands and feet bathed in rosewater.

  Presently a small, round man with the deepest, loudest voice Miriam had ever heard waddled into the room. Smiling, he swooped her up into his arms and began covering her with kisses. “Welcome, welcome, dearest child!” he boomed. “Abdullah’s daughter, well, well, well. Welcome, desert rose. Welcome, and may you prosper and flourish evermore in my humble home.”

  In reality, Uncle Sulaiman’s riad was anything but humble. Smaller in scale than her father’s palace, it was nevertheless an Aladdin’s cave of sumptuous wealth, beauty, and refinement, all paid for with the proceeds of the younger brother’s thriving textile business. And Miriam did flourish there. Unmarried and childless, her uncle Sulaiman came to love her as his own daughter. For the rest of his life Sulaiman remained grateful to his brother, Abdullah, for bestowing on him so great and priceless a gift. If it were possible, he loved Miriam more than her natural parents had done, but Sulaiman’s love took a different form. Where Abdullah and Leila had protected their daughter from the dangers of the outside world, Sulaiman encouraged Miriam to savor and explore its delights. Of course, she never left the riad unaccompanied. Guards went with her everywhere. But under their watchful eyes she was free to roam through the vibrant buzzing alleyways of the souk. Here were sights and sounds and smells that she had read about in storybooks brought phantasmagorically to life. Marrakech was a delicious assault on every sense, a living, breathing, pulsing city that filled Miriam’s tranquil soul with excitement and curiosity and hunger. As she grew into her teens, more beautiful with each passing day, her love affair with the city intensified to the point where even a proposed vacation to the coast caused her to feel irritated and impatient.

  “But why do we have to go, Uncle?”

  Sulaiman laughed his booming, indulgent laugh. “You make it sound like a punishment, dearest. Essaouira is quite beautiful, and besides, no one wants to stay in Marrakech in high summer.”

  “I do.”

  “Nonsense. The heat’s unbearable.”

  “I can bear it. Don’t make me leave, Uncle, I beg you. I’ll devote twice as much time to my studies if you let me stay.”

  Sulaiman laughed even louder. “Twice nothing is nothing, dearest!” But, as always when Miriam really wanted something, he gave in. He would go to the coast for two weeks alone. Miriam could stay home with her guards and her governess.

  LATER, JIBRIL WOULD REMEMBER IT AS the moment his life began.

  And the moment it ended.

  The sixteen-year-old son of Sulaiman’s chief factor, Jibril was a happy, outgoing child, seemingly without a problem in the world. Pleasant-looking, with curly brown hair and a ready smile, he was also bright academically, with a particular aptitude for mathematics. His father harbored secret hopes of Jibril one day founding a business empire of his own. And why not? Morocco was becoming more cosmopolitan, its inhabitants more socially mobile than they had ever been. Not like it had been in his day. The boy could have the world at his feet if he wished it, as bright and glittering a future as he chose.

  Unbeknownst to his father, Jibril had secret hopes of his own.

  None of them revolved around business.

  They revolved around the incandescent, radiant, utterly lovely form of Sulaiman’s niece, Mistress Miriam.

  Jibril first met Miriam the day she arrived at the riad as a frightened ten-year-old. Then thirteen and a kind boy, sensitive to others’ pain, Jibril had taken Miriam under his wing. The two of them quickly became friends and playmates, spending endless happy hours roaming the souk and squares of the city together while Jibril
’s father and Miriam’s uncle worked long hours in the company offices.

  Jibril couldn’t say exactly when it was that his feelings toward Miriam had changed. Possibly the early arrival of her breasts, shortly after her twelfth birthday, had something to do with it. Or possibly there was some other, nobler reason. In any event, at some point during his fifteenth year, Jibril fell deeply, hopelessly, obsessively in love with his childhood playmate. Which would have been as wonderful a thing as could have happened, had it not been for one small, but undeniable, problem: Miriam was not in love with Jibril.

  Tentative allusions to his feelings were met with peals of laughter on Miriam’s part. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she would tease him, pulling him by the hand in a way that made Jibril want to melt with longing. “You’re my brother. Besides, I’m never getting married.” Memories of her mother’s flight and her father’s despair still haunted her. Uncle Sulaiman’s happy independence seemed a far safer, more sensible option.

  Jibril wept with frustration and despair. Why had he ever behaved like a brother toward her? Why had he not seen before what a goddess she was? How would he ever be able to undo the damage?

  Then one day, it happened. It was during the weeks that Miriam’s uncle Sulaiman was away on vacation in Essaouira. Jibril returned to the riad after his morning’s studies to find smoke pouring out of the windows. You could feel the heat from a hundred yards away.

  “What’s going on?”

  Jibril’s father, his face and hands blackened with soot, coughed out an answer. “It started in the kitchens. I’ve never seen flames spread so fast. It’s a miracle we got everybody out of there.”

  Huddled around them was a throng of frightened household staff, some burned and weeping, others coughing violently. They’d been joined by numerous neighbors and passersby. Soon the crowd was so big that it was difficult for the men with water buckets to fight their way through.

  Jibril’s heart tightened in panic. “Where’s Miriam?”

  “Don’t worry,” said his father. “She left early this morning to go to the baths. There’s nobody in the house.” But just as he spoke, a figure appeared at an upper window, arms flailing wildly. It was hard to make out who it was through the thick, acrid clouds of smoke. But Jibril knew instantly.