Sidney Sheldon's the Tides of Memory

by Sidney Sheldon

  “Then why reopen such an awful can of worms?”

  “Because nobody else is going to, Luce. No one cares who killed Jenny Hamlin. The media moved on after a couple of weeks. The police have totally given up. Maybe, if I can uncover the truth, if I can find some justice for Billy’s daughter, I can make amends.”

  “Amends to whom?”

  “To Billy. To my own children. I don’t know, Luce, I can’t explain it. It just feels right to do something. To at least look into it.”

  Lucy shook her head. She knew Alexia well enough to realize that nothing she said was going to change her mind at this point.

  “What does that mean, ‘look into it’?” she asked. “If the police couldn’t find anything, what makes you think you’ll be able to, sitting at a computer on Martha’s Vineyard?”

  Alexia smiled. “I don’t. That’s why I’m going to New York.”

  “New York? When?”

  “Soon. Tomorrow, if I can get a flight.”

  Lucy cleared away the coffee. “Okay, it’s official. You’ve lost your mind. You’re supposed to be relaxing, switching off, regaining your strength, remember? Not running around the city on some ludicrous wild-goose chase, all for the sake of a girl you never even met. A girl whose father, by the way, was probably trying to ruin you.”

  “I don’t believe Billy meant me any harm,” Alexia said. “And I’ve regained my strength. I need to do something, Lucy. I need a purpose. You do understand, don’t you?”

  “I guess. Just be careful, Alexia. There are doors that, once opened, can’t easily be closed again. Start digging around in this girl’s life and who knows what you might find.”

  Tommy Lyon sat at the American Bar in London’s Savoy Hotel, checking out the businesswomen and sleek yummy mummies as they wandered in. Most wore wedding rings, although the curvaceous brunette at the corner table had a promisingly bare left ring finger, despite sporting a plethora of diamonds everywhere else.

  Late thirties? No, early forties with good, subtle Botox. Divorced. Rich. Probably a tigress in the sack.

  Tommy prided himself on being a good judge of women, the same way that a betting man might pride himself on a good knowledge of horseflesh. Michael had been the master, of course. Michael De Vere could smell a woman’s likes and dislikes, her desires and weaknesses, from a thousand paces. Tommy Lyon had never quite matched his friend as a ladies’ man. Despite being tall, blond, and athletic, with a strong jaw and soulful brown eyes, every bit as handsome as Michael, somehow Tommy had always ended up playing second fiddle. He lacked the De Vere dazzle, that ineffable charisma that used to draw women to Michael like dust into a vacuum cleaner.

  Tommy Lyon missed Michael De Vere dreadfully. But it was nice occasionally to be the guy that got the girl. The brunette caught Tommy’s eye and smiled. He smiled back, and was about to send a glass of champagne over to her table, when a showstopping girl walked into the bar. She was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a pale green T-shirt from the Gap, and had no makeup covering her lightly freckled face. In a bar full of overdone, stiletto-wearing cougars, she stood out like a fresh orchid amid a sea of cheap plastic flowers. Miraculously, the goddess seemed to be walking toward him.

  “Tommy?”

  “Summer?”

  Tommy had never met Michael’s girlfriend. She’d been away in America for most of their relationship, and when she was around, Michael had kept her under wraps. Now Tommy understood why. Michael always managed to land gorgeous girls, but this one was exceptionally attractive. Every man in the room was gazing at her, and glaring at Tommy. Suddenly he felt a rush of pride that it was he she’d come to meet.

  “Thanks for seeing me.” Summer kissed him on both cheeks, European-style. “I know you must be crazy busy.”

  “Not at all. It’s a pleasure.” Tommy patted the bar stool next to him. “What can I get you? Wine? Champagne?”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine. It’s a bit early for me.”

  “Nonsense. If Michael were here you’d be drinking. Come on. How about a nice glass of Cristal?”

  Summer wrinkled her nose. Cristal? Really. Michael would never have trotted out a cheesy line like that. Not wanting to be rude, she said, “I’ll take a beer. Budweiser, if they have it, in a bottle.”

  Tommy bought the beer, and they decamped to a quieter table, passing the disappointed brunette on their way. Watching Summer put the beer bottle to her lips, Tommy registered a familiar stirring of desire. He tried to remind himself that this was Michael’s girlfriend. On the other hand, Michael was never going to wake up, a fact that Tommy Lyon had long ago come to terms with, even if Summer Meyer had not.

  He made polite conversation. “So, you’re at Vanity Fair now?”

  “Not exactly. I’m freelance, but I’m working on a piece for them.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Wealthy young Russians in London. The excesses of their lifestyle, that sort of thing.”

  Tommy warned, “Mind where you tread. Russian oligarchs don’t tend to take kindly to exposés, of any sort. I’m sure you’ve read the stories of Western journalists in Moscow being found with a bullet to the back of the head.”

  “My piece is hardly Woodward and Bernstein stuff,” said Summer. “It’s more which shoes is Dasha Zhukova wearing this week? Boring and vacuous. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a job and it means I can stay in London, close to Michael.”

  Tommy tried not to be distracted by the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the fitted cotton T-shirt. “You still go to the hospice every day?”

  “Of course. And it’s not a hospice,” Summer said defensively. “It’s a long-term care facility. He hasn’t gone there to die.”

  Oh, yes he has, thought Tommy. But he didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you for months,” said Summer, “but what with Michael getting moved down to London, and me having to find a flat and a job and everything, it’s been crazy. You know I’ve been researching his accident.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Tommy rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Is there much to research? Wasn’t it . . . well, an accident?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Summer told him about her trip to the Ducati mechanic in East London, and her suspicions that Michael’s bike might have been deliberately sabotaged.

  Tommy asked the obvious question. “Why would anybody do that?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you might be able to tell me,” said Summer. “You know about Teddy, of course?”

  “The body in the garden, you mean? Sure,” said Tommy. “He’ll go down for life, I reckon. Still find it hard to believe, though. Teddy always seemed so . . . soft.”

  “I know,” Summer agreed. “Anyway, it looks likely that Michael found the body when he was excavating the pagoda and reburied it.”

  “Christ.” Tommy blew out air through his teeth. “Really?”

  “Yeah. And I’m wondering, if Michael knew about Andrew Beesley’s murder, perhaps there was some connection between that and what happened to him.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you might.”

  Tommy looked blank.

  “Was there anything unusual, anything at all that happened in the days leading up to the party that struck you as strange? Did Michael meet anyone new?”

  “No one sinister,” said Tommy. “Suppliers, caterers, bar staff. It was a crazy time . . . we were run off our feet.”

  Ignoring Summer’s protests, Tommy bought another round of drinks and ordered some bar snacks. Privately he thought her theories about foul play were nonsense, a fantasy she’d created to prevent her having to deal with the loss of Michael. But she was a stunning girl, so sexy and sensual with that silken mane of hair and those long, long legs. He didn’t want her to leave.

  She resumed her questioning while Tommy shelled pistachios.

  “Did Michael ever talk to you about being threatened?”

  “
No. Never.”

  “And he never confided in you about the body?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not likely to forget something like that.”

  “Did he have any enemies that you knew of?”

  “You know Michael. Everybody loved him.”

  “Not everybody, it appears. Someone wanted him dead. Or at the very least silenced. And they got what they wanted.”

  “Look,” said Tommy. “I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, I really do. But if it’s enemies you’re looking for, you should focus on Michael’s mother. Alexia had plenty of nutters out to get her. Like those Patel people. That was the nature of her job.”

  “Yes!” Summer brightened. “Michael kept a file on all of them in the flat. I want you to take a look at it, when you get a chance.” After her second drink the room was spinning slightly. Summer realized she must have forgotten to eat lunch. “But you’re right, Tommy,” she went on excitedly. “Alexia could well be the key to this. Cutting her brake cables would be almost impossible. As home secretary, she’d have had a security detail, a driver, people watching her vehicles twenty-four/seven. Michael’s bike would have been a far easier target. And what better way to hurt a parent than to injure her child, right?”

  She was so adorably earnest, Tommy could stand it no longer. Leaning over, he slipped a hand around the back of Summer’s neck and pressed his lips to hers.

  For a second she was too surprised to do anything. But then she pulled away angrily. “What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?”

  A combination of embarrassment and sexual frustration, fueled by one too many drinks, made Tommy react angrily. “What’s your problem? It was a kiss. Why shouldn’t I kiss you?”

  “Why shouldn’t you kiss me?” Summer repeated incredulously.

  “I didn’t realize you’d taken a vow of celibacy.”

  “I’m with Michael, you asshole. Your so-called friend.” Summer stood up shakily.

  “Hey . . .” Tommy put a hand on her arm. “Michael was my friend, okay? My best friend. There was no ‘so-called’ about it. But Michael is dead, Summer.”

  “He is not!”

  “Yes, he is. Clinically and in every way that matters.” Every customer in the bar turned to stare at the drama playing out at the corner table. Tommy’s volume levels were rising. “Michael’s in a coma and he is never going to wake up. Never.”

  “Fuck you!” Summer shouted.

  “Is this what you think he would want?” Tommy shot back, tightening his grip on her arm. “For you to sacrifice your whole life for him, like some Hindu bride throwing her body onto her husband’s funeral pyre? Because if you think that, you didn’t know him at all.”

  With a wrench, Summer pulled herself free from Tommy’s grip. Grabbing her purse, she ran out of the bar, tears of anger and humiliation clouding her vision as she stumbled toward the exit.

  “He wasn’t a saint, you know,” Tommy called after her. “He wasn’t even faithful to you.”

  Summer turned and glared at him. “Liar!”

  “It’s true. The week before you came to Oxford, Michael told me about an older woman he’d been seeing. He called her his ‘sugar mummy.’ She was the one who bought him that damn bike, if you really want to know.”

  Summer’s stomach lurched.

  She turned and ran.

  The London traffic was so bad, it took her an hour to reach the facility where Michael was being cared for, a redbrick Victorian building close to Battersea Park.

  “You look terrible,” one of the nurses observed, not unkindly, when Summer walked in. Her hair was disheveled from having run her hands through it so many times and her cheeks were puffy and swollen from crying. “Are you okay?”

  “Not really.” Summer took up her usual place in the chair next to Michael’s bed, but was too upset to take his hand. She knew that what Tommy Lyon had said was true. At first, when she left the Savoy, she tried to convince herself it was a lie, a cruel fabrication that Tommy had made up out of spite because she’d rejected his advances. But as her black cab crawled across the river, she accepted the truth. I knew it myself, all along. That was why I came to Oxford, to confront him. I knew there was someone else.

  “How dare you lie there so peacefully, you son of a bitch!” she sobbed into the silence. “How could you do this to me?”

  Scores of questions tormented her, like tiny needles pricking at her brain. Had this older woman been there that night, before Summer arrived? For all Summer knew, she could have shared Michael’s bed only hours earlier. She wanted to know, needed to know. But Michael had denied her even that small shred of comfort, the comfort of closure.

  “You owe me an answer. You owe me!” she shouted at Michael as he slept, willing him to hear her. And she cried because there was no answer.

  There would never be an answer.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Police chief Harry Dublowski of the NYPD smiled at the attractive woman sitting opposite him.

  Harry knew when the woman called that he’d heard her name somewhere before. It was an exotic name. Aristocratic. International politics wasn’t exactly a passion of Harry’s, but when he googled “Alexia De Vere,” it all came back to him. The new Iron Lady! England’s answer to Hillary Clinton, complete with an errant husband. Except that where Bill’s worst crime had been having some fat chick give him head in the Oval Office, Teddy De Vere was doing time for murder.

  What Harry Dublowski hadn’t expected was to discover that Mrs. De Vere was actually a great-looking broad. Most women Harry’s age looked like hags. Either that or they had weird surgery faces that made them look embalmed. But Alexia De Vere was a genuine looker. Her Google pictures did not do her justice. According to her bio, she was in her sixties, but she could have passed for a decade younger. In a simple, flesh-colored shift dress and heels, with a caramel cashmere scarf draped across her shoulders, she could have used a bit more meat on her bones. But she was still elegant and, to Harry’s rheumy, old eyes, damned sexy. He’d always been a sucker for classy women. God knew he came into contact with precious few of them in this job.

  Alexia sized up the overweight, middle-aged cop across the desk and reached a swift conclusion: The man wants to be flattered. In this case, she was going to catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

  “Firstly, Chief Dublowski, let me say again how very grateful I am to you for making time to see me.”

  “Not at all.” Harry Dublowski beamed. “Happy to help.”

  “As I mentioned on the phone, I’m here about the Jennifer Hamlin murder investigation. It’s purely a personal interest.”

  “You knew the victim?”

  Alexia said carefully, “She was a family friend.”

  Harry Dublowski stood up and waddled over to an old-fashioned filing cabinet in the corner of the office.

  “Everything’s computerized these days,” he wheezed, “but I’m a sucker for hard copies. There’s something about the physical feeling of paper in your hand that helps you to think, right? Or maybe that’s just me.”

  “No, no,” Alexia assured him. “I’m the same. I always insisted on paper briefing notes at the Home Office. I’m sure it drove the young staffers mad.”

  Dublowski handed her the file, allowing his stubby fingers to brush against hers as he passed it over. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Mrs. De Vere, but this is strictly off the record. We’re not usually in the habit of showing information from murder investigations to the victims’ friends and relatives. And nothing can leave this room.”

  “Of course not. As I said, I’m very grateful.” Alexia was already reading. She remembered Sir Edward Manning handing her the FBI file on Billy Hamlin, after Billy first reappeared in her life. Had that really been two years ago? It felt like yesterday. And yet so much had happened since then. So many terrible things.

  “You never arrested any suspects?” She looked up at Chief Dubl
owski, her eyes a piercing ice blue.

  “No.” His face darkened. “It was a frustrating case, to be perfectly honest with you.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, as you know, the young lady was abducted and held for some period of time before her death. That usually opens up more avenues for investigation. So we were hopeful at first.”

  “What sort of avenues?”

  “More time in which someone might have seen something—a car perhaps—or heard something. Maybe the girl screamed. Or maybe someone noticed something unusual about a certain residence or place of business. As a general rule of thumb, the more complicated a crime—if it occurs in more than one place, for example, or over a period of days—the more likely the perpetrator is to make a mistake. Clues are just mistakes by another name.”

  “But that didn’t happen in this case?”

  “No. This killer was careful. Careful and smart. And he didn’t fit the normal profile either.”

  “Profile?”

  “A homicide like this, where a young woman is targeted and killed so sadistically, we’d expect to see more crimes with the same MO. More girls washing up with similar injuries. More deaths by drowning. The start of a pattern. But it didn’t happen. Thank God, in one way, right? But it left us kind of nowhere with the Hamlin investigation. Forensics drew a blank on the corpse.”

  “What about circumstantial evidence?”

  Harry Dublowski shrugged. “The victim lived one hell of a quiet life.”

  Alexia nodded. She knew this was true from her own, limited research on Jennifer. The girl had led the most uneventful, inoffensive existence imaginable. She’d never even gotten a parking ticket.

  “What about her father?”

  Harry’s eyes narrowed slightly. “What about him? You knew the dad?”

  “A long time ago,” Alexia said hastily. “Like I said, I’m an old family friend. The last time I saw Jennifer’s father he expressed concern for her safety.”

  If it seemed odd to Chief Dublowski that a high-ranking British politician had been family friends with an ex-con from Queens and his murdered daughter, he didn’t mention it. Instead he said matter-of-factly: “The father was an ex-con, a paranoid schizophrenic. No offense, but Jennifer’s dog woulda made a more reliable witness than her old man. The guy heard voices, and yes, some of ’em were about his daughter. He wanted my men to come and check them out for him. It was sad, really.”