Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark

by Sidney Sheldon

  “It’s not very substantial,” the lawyer explained, to the great disappointment of the head of St. Mary’s. “It may have sentimental value, though, perhaps when the child is older. There’s a book, an old book. And a letter.”

  The book was the one that recounted the love story of Miriam and Jibril, which a few years later Sofia and Frankie would spend so many happy hours poring over together. The letter was from Sofia’s mother, explaining that the book was not some legend, but the true story of one of Sofia’s ancestors, a relic of a past that Sofia had never known, and detailing the circumstances of her birth.

  Frankie had seen the letter. Sofia had shown it to him in her teens. He was the only one she trusted and he understood that the book and the letter changed everything for the orphaned Sofia. Overnight, she had gone from being nobody, the unwanted spawn of a hooker and her pimp, to being somebody, somebody special, a royal Moroccan princess tragically separated from her beautiful twin. Of course, the other kids in the home made fun of her, told her that her book was a load of horseshit, that there was no twin, no exotic royal past. But Frankie helped Sofia see past their envy and their mockery. He was her rock, her salvation, her only friend, and the book was her most treasured possession.

  To this day, Sofia wasn’t sure what had drawn Frankie to her. Perhaps it was that he was an orphan too, a genuine orphan, like her. Most of the kids in the home had families, just not ones that could take care of them. Frankie and Sofia had no one. But in other ways they were wildly different. Where Sofia had always been lonely and friendless, envied by the girls in the home for her beauty and harassed by the boys for the same reason, Frankie was adored by everyone, staff and kids alike. Handsome—my God, he was so handsome!—smart, funny, charismatic, he could make you feel special merely by casting his ice-blue eyes in your direction.

  Frankie cast his eyes in Sofia’s direction a lot. But not in the same, frightening, predatory way that the other boys did. Frankie’s attentions were nobler, gentler somehow, and infinitely more precious than the others’ testosterone-fueled advances. Sofia was flattered but frustrated. She longed for him to touch her, but he never made a move.

  She had begun to despair that he ever would. And then one day a miracle happened. They were reading the book together in the rec room, as they so often did. Frankie loved the book almost as much as Sofia. He thought Miriam’s story was wonderfully romantic and questioned Sofia endlessly about her family history and her long-lost twin, Ella. But on this day, he asked a different question. The most wonderful, unexpected, unhoped-for question. And of course Sofia had said yes, and Frankie had promised her that as soon as they were married, he would be with her, physically, as a man and wife should be.

  From that point on, in her own mind at least, Sofia Basta’s life had been transformed into one long fairy tale. She and Frankie married on her eighteenth birthday and moved out of the orphanage to a minuscule studio apartment in Harlem, where, as promised, Frankie had made love to her for the first time. It was the happiest four minutes of Sofia’s life.

  For the next two years Sofia worked as a waitress while Frankie went to school. He was so smart he could have been anything he wanted to be, a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman. He was offered the job in L.A. before he’d even graduated, that’s how smart he was. They moved to California, packing one single suitcase of possessions and waving good-bye to New York as happily as two people ever had.

  Los Angeles was everything Sofia had dreamed it would be and more. In fact her life now was so perfect, she felt guilty when she complained about anything—like Frankie having to travel for work or stay late at the office. Or like the fact that, so far, they’d been unable to conceive a child. Although this probably had something to do with how rarely her husband wanted to make love to her.

  “I want it to be special,” Frankie explained. “It won’t be if we let it become routine.”

  Sofia tried to convince Frankie that it would be special for her no matter how many times they did it, but he wouldn’t be moved. Sofia told herself she shouldn’t let it bother her too much. He showed her his love in so many other ways—taking intimate photographs, burning up with jealousy when other men paid her attention, complimenting her constantly on her clothes, her perfume, her hair. The sexual side would come, in time.

  She’d finished baking a batch of cookies and was in the middle of changing the sheets on their bed when she heard Frankie’s key in the door. Squealing with delight, she flew into his arms.

  “Baby.” He kissed the top of her head. “Did you miss me?”

  “Of course I did. Every second! Why didn’t you tell me earlier that your flight was today? I’d have come to LAX to meet you.”

  “I know you would’ve. I wanted to surprise you.”

  Frankie looked at his adoring young wife and congratulated himself, once again. Sofia’s beauty never failed to surprise him. After only a few days away from her, she seemed to have grown more lovely, more perfect. She was an angel. The thought of another man touching her put murderous thoughts into Frankie’s head. Yet he knew with absolute certainty that he could never be the lover she wanted. It was a problem.

  That night in bed, feeling her frustration as she lay next to him, Frankie asked, “Do you ever think about sleeping with other men?”

  Sofia was horrified. “No! Of course not. I’d rather die. How can you ask me that?”

  “You’d really rather die?” He looked at her with an intensity she’d never seen before. Sofia thought before answering, then said yes, because it was the truth. She wouldn’t have been able to live with herself if she betrayed Frankie. He was her life now, the breath in her body.

  “Good,” said Frankie. “In that case there’s a man I want you to meet. An important man.” Slowly, he reached down between her legs. Sofia moaned helplessly. It had been so long since he’d touched her. Please…please don’t stop. But Frankie did stop, pulling his hand away and placing a finger over Sofia’s lips. She could have wept.

  “I want you to be nice to this man. Do everything that I tell you to do. Even if it’s hard.”

  “Of course, darling.” She reached for him. “You know I’ll do anything for you. But what did you have in mind?”

  “Don’t worry about it now. I’ll set it up. You just do as I ask.”

  Frankie rolled on top of her. To Sofia’s astonishment, he was hard. Sliding inside her, he gave five or six short thrusts and climaxed almost instantly.

  For a while neither of them spoke. Then Sofia asked quietly, “What’s his name?”

  “Hmm?”

  “This man you want me to meet. What’s his name?”

  In the darkness, Frankie smiled.

  “Jakes. His name is Andrew Jakes.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LYON, FRANCE

  2006

  MATT DALEY LOOKED AT HIS WATCH. He had spent the last half hour sitting on an uncomfortable couch in a drab waiting room, deep within Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon. The building, looming over the river on the Quai Charles de Gaulle, was a shrine to ugly functionality, a place built by bureaucrats, for bureaucrats. A data analyst’s wet dream, thought Matt, noting the total absence of artwork or even an occasional colored rug or vase of flowers anywhere in the maze of corridors he’d seen so far. No wonder the staff look so depressed.

  In fairness, he was basing this assessment on a sample of two people. The dour young Frenchman who had issued him his visitor’s pass and led him to the office of the man he’d flown halfway across the world to see, and that man’s secretary, a woman whose battle-ax features exuded about as much warmth as a Siberian nuclear winter.

  “D’you think he’ll be much longer?” Matt asked.

  The secretary shrugged contemptuously and returned to her computer screen.

  Matt thought of his father. Harry Daley had never been to France, but had always admired Frenchwomen from afar for their poise and charm and sexiness. Boy, would Rosa Klebb over there have shattered his illusions!
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br />   Thinking about his dad made Matt smile.

  If it hadn’t been for Harry Daley, he wouldn’t be sitting here.

  HARRY DALEY HAD BEEN A WONDERFUL father, and an even better husband. Harry and Marie, Matt’s mom, were married for forty years and had been everything to each other. At Harry Daley’s funeral last year, scores of friends had lingered at the graveside, sharing their memories of the man Matt and his sister, Claire, had loved for as long as either of them could remember.

  During the ceremony, Matt got terrible giggles when the Croatian priest’s “May he rest in peace” came out quite clearly as “May he rest in piss.” Given that Harry had died of cancer of the bladder, this struck both Matt and his sister as hilarious.

  Raquel, Matt’s glamorous South American wife, didn’t see the funny side.

  “My God,” she hissed in Matt’s ear, “what is wrong with you? Have you no respect? It’s your father’s funeral.”

  “Oh, c’mon, honey. ‘May he rest in piss’? It’s funny. Dad would have seen the humor. Imagine what Jerry Seinfeld would’ve done with a line like that.”

  Raquel said cuttingly, “You are hardly Jerry Seinfeld, honey.”

  It hurt because it was true. Matt Daley was a comedy writer, but in recent years not a very successful one. Handsome in a boyish, disheveled sort of way, with a thick thatch of blond hair and apple-green eyes, his most distinctive feature was his contagious smile, a facial event that seemed to fold his entire physiognomy into one giant laugh line. In the early days of their relationship, Raquel had been attracted to Matt’s sense of humor and was flattered when amusing incidents from their life together made their way onto the hit TV show Matt worked on briefly back then. But after eight years the novelty had worn off, along with the hope that Matt’s residuals were ever going to earn them the glitzy Hollywood lifestyle Raquel yearned for. Matt now worked for a cable network that paid their bills but left them with little for the finer things in life.

  “What’s she bitching about this time?” Matt’s sister, Claire, was not a fan of her sister-in-law.

  “She doesn’t like funerals,” said Matt loyally.

  “Probably scared somebody’s going to shine perpetual light upon her and we’ll all get to see the scars from her latest eye lift.”

  Matt grinned. He loved Claire. He loved his wife too, but even he was beginning to come to the painful realization that the feeling was probably no longer mutual.

  On the drive back to L.A. after the funeral, Matt tried to build bridges with Raquel.

  “I’m about to start working on a new idea,” he told her. “Something different. A documentary.”

  The faintest flicker of interest played in her eyes. “A documentary? Who for?”

  “Well, no one yet,” Matt admitted. “I’m writing it on spec.”

  The flicker died. Just what we need, thought Raquel. Another unsold spec script.

  “It’s about my father,” Matt pressed on. “My biological father.”

  Raquel yawned. To be honest, she’d forgotten that Harry Daley wasn’t Matt’s real dad. Harry had married Matt’s mom when Matt was a toddler and Claire a baby in arms.

  “I found out recently that he was murdered more than a decade ago.”

  If this piece of news was intended to shock Raquel, or even pique her interest, it failed. “People get murdered every day in this city, Matthew. Why would anyone want to sit through an hour of television about your unknown father’s demise?”

  “Ah, but that’s the thing,” said Matt, warming to his theme. “He wasn’t unknown. He was an art dealer in Beverly Hills. Famous, at least in L.A. And seriously rich.”

  Now he had Raquel’s attention. “You never mentioned this to me before. How rich?”

  “Filthy rich,” said Matt. “We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  “Hundreds of millions? My God, Matt,” Raquel gasped, swerving dangerously across lanes of traffic. “What happened to all the money?”

  “It went to his widow,” said Matt, matter-of-factly.

  “What, all of it? What about you and Claire?”

  “Me and Claire? Oh, come on, honey. We hadn’t had any contact with him for over thirty years.”

  “So?” Raquel’s pupils dilated excitedly. “You’re his children, his blood relatives. Maybe you could contest the will?”

  Matt laughed. “On what grounds? It was his money to leave as he chose. But anyway, you’re missing the point. The story gets juicier.”

  Raquel struggled to imagine anything juicier than a payout of hundreds of millions, but she forced herself to listen.

  “The widow, who was only in her early twenties at the time, and who was violently raped by whoever killed my old man, gave all the cash away to children’s charities. Every last penny. It was the biggest single charitable gift in L.A. history. But barely anybody knows about it because instead of sticking around to bask in the glory, this chick hops on a plane just weeks after the murder and disappears. Literally vanishes off the face of the earth and is never heard of again. It’s wild, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s a great story?”

  Raquel didn’t give a damn about Matt’s stupid story. What sort of man didn’t lift a finger to stake his claim to a multimillion-dollar fortune? She’d married a cretin.

  “How come you never brought this up before?”

  The anger in her voice was unmistakable. Matt’s spirits sank. Why do I always seem to make her angry?

  “To be honest, I sort of forgot about it. I heard about it a few months ago, but I thought it might upset Dad if I showed too much of an interest, so I let it go. But now that Harry’s gone, I figure it couldn’t hurt to explore it. Networks are really into ‘personal history’ right now. And murder and money always sell.”

  The rest of the car ride passed in silence. By the time the Daleys reached home, two obsessions had been born.

  Raquel’s was with a four-hundred-million-dollar fortune.

  And Matt Daley’s was with the unsolved murder of his biological father: Andrew Jakes.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, WHILE his wife spent fruitless hours consulting lawyer after lawyer, hunting for the loophole that would restore “their” fortune, as she now thought of the Jakes estate, what started as a research project for a documentary became the all-consuming focus of Matt Daley’s life. By day he would trawl the L.A. libraries and galleries, greedily digging up every scrap of information about Andrew Jakes he could find: his businesses, his modern art collection, his real estate portfolio, his friends, enemies, acquaintances, lovers, interests, pets, health problems and religious beliefs. At night, holed up in his study like a hermit, Matt did more research online. Soon he was barely sleeping. Like a cuckoo chick demanding attention, the file marked Andrew Jakes grew bigger and fatter each day, while what little was left of Matt and Raquel Daley’s marriage slowly starved to death.

  After a while even Claire Michaels became concerned that her brother was overdoing it. “What are you hoping to achieve with all this?” she finally asked one day.

  Standing in the kitchen of her bustling house in Westwood, with a baby on one hip and a pot of tomato sauce in her hand, surrounded by the noise and mess of a cheerful family life, Claire made Matt feel happy and sad at the same time. Happy for her, sad for himself. Would things have been different if Raquel and I had had children?

  “I told you,” he said. “It’s for a documentary.”

  Claire looked skeptical. “How’s the script coming along?”

  Matt grimaced. “I’m not at the scriptwriting stage yet.”

  “Well, what stage are you at?”

  “Research.”

  “Who have you pitched the idea to?”

  Matt laughed. “What are you, my agent?”

  He tried to make a joke of it, but inside he knew his sister was right. All his friends had said the same thing. The mystery surrounding his biological father’s murder was becoming an addiction, a dangerous, time-consuming habit that was dist
racting him from his marriage, his work, his “real” life. Yet how was Matt supposed to let it go when the LAPD investigation had left so many holes, so many glaring, unanswered questions?

  According to the official file, Andrew Jakes had been killed by an unknown intruder, a professional thief who’d turned violent. No one was ever arrested for the crime. No specific suspects were even named. Meanwhile, his widow, Angela, seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, as had the jewelry and miniature portraits taken from the couple’s house that night. Her attorney, Lyle Renalto, had driven her to the airport but claimed to have no idea where she was headed and had apparently not heard from her since. Police had questioned him repeatedly, but he never changed his story. There was some talk of Mrs. Jakes’s being sighted in Greece, but nothing had ever been proven. Danny McGuire, the detective in charge of the case, quit the force not long afterward and left L.A., taking whatever insights he may have had with him. Meanwhile, the semen from Angela Jakes’s postrape forensic examination had never been matched to any other crime, before or since. Neither were the few smudged fingerprints found at the crime scene at 420 Loma Vista.

  Matt said to Claire, “It’s like one day this couple was living their lives in their beautiful mansion, planning for the future. And the next day, poof, it’s all gone. The house, the money, the paintings. The couple themselves. And after the murder, his widow just hops on a plane one morning and is never heard of again.”

  “Yes, Matt, I know the story,” said Claire patiently.

  “But doesn’t it scare you? The idea that all this”—Matt waved around the kitchen at his nephews, their schoolbooks, all the detritus of Claire’s full, busy life—“could be gone tomorrow? Gone.” He clapped his hands for emphasis. “Like it never was.”