Hopper pushed himself up with his good arm and got to his feet. I was on my knees, doubled over, barely able to breathe. He gave me a blow to the side of the head with the heel of his shoe. The blow spun me counterclockwise and I ended up facedown in spilled beer. I expected any moment for him to find his gun and finish me off, but instead I heard a commotion as he fumbled through the mess, headed for the door. He was making a run for it.
I was stunned and confused, and one eye was beginning to swell where he had kicked me. I wobbled to my feet and staggered to the open door. The hallway was a short L. Straight ahead led back inside the bar, where I could hear drunk men shouting at the ball games. To my immediate left the hallway went down a flight of stairs. Which way had he gone? I assumed he would cut through the bar the way we had come in, but then I heard a door open and daylight fell across the top of the stairs. I held a hand to my groin and staggered to the stairs.
The door opened onto an alley. I ran out and saw a flash of movement to my left. Hopper was running down the alley toward the street.
“Hopper!” I shouted.
He glanced briefly over his shoulder at me but didn’t slow. The way he was hobbling along I could tell he was in pain. He was losing a lot of blood.
I shouted after him again, “Hopper!”
This time he didn’t look, just kept moving.
I didn’t understand what the hell was going on. This was a guy I’d trusted. A guy I thought I’d known pretty well. I’d never had a reason to think otherwise. Now, out of the blue, he pulls a gun on me. Nothing made sense anymore. I ran after him but he had a big head start. As I reached the open end of the alley, I heard a car horn. Then I saw it happen.
Hopper had run out into traffic, directly into the path of a car. The driver hit the brakes, but too late. Couldn’t stop in time. Hopper had apparently, not seen it coming. He ran in front of it and it took his legs out from under him. I watched him roll onto the hood, then up over the cab. The car skidded to a stop in the middle of traffic. Hopper’s body dropped to the pavement, and remained there, motionless. I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed.
“Hopper!” I shouted as I ran to him.
Time seemed to slow down. Everything around me moved at the rate of a Hollywood dream sequence. Sounds and colors faded to the periphery of my consciousness. Traffic was still flowing because the accident had happened so quickly most motorists would not have been aware of it. The car that hit him was a white Honda sedan. I reached the car and raced around to the rear. Hopper was on the ground, on his back, eyes closed. His arms and legs were twisted around at unnatural angles. There was blood on the ground. He was groaning.
“I’m right here, Hop,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
He didn’t reply.
The driver of the Honda was standing with her door open. She was staring at Hopper, terror in her eyes, obviously petrified at the notion that she might have killed someone with her car. I turned to her.
“Call nine-one-one,” I said.
She remained frozen.
“Do it!” I said.
She blinked once, as if pulled from a trance, then her eyes found me. She nodded, then ducked inside the car for her cell phone.
There was blood coming from the corner of Hopper’s mouth, and another trickle visible in one of his nostrils.
“It’s Nick,” I said. “I’m right here, buddy. Can you hear me?”
He didn’t move a muscle. The groaning had stopped. I touched his throat, searching for a pulse. It was there but weak. I glanced up at the crowd gathering nearby. I saw lights ahead, a police car angling in our direction.
“Stay with me,” I urged him. “Help is on the way.”
His eyes fluttered, then stuck open, squinting against the afternoon light. He looked up at me, eyes searching my face.
“Terry,” he said. The blood from his nostril trickled past his ear and dripped to the pavement. His lips had parted only enough to let the word out.
I shook my head. “No, I’m Nick,” I said. “Can you see me?”
He parted his lips to speak again and there was blood smeared across his front teeth. “T…Terry,” he said again.
I frowned. He was clearly in tremendous pain and most likely severely concussed from the impact of the car and then hitting the ground. He probably had no idea what city he was in or even his own identity.
“What is your name?” I asked.
He strained to raise his head from the ground but didn’t have the strength. So he lifted an arm and gestured with a trembling hand. I leaned down to listen.
“Don’t trust anyone,” he whispered, his eyes gazing past me to the sky above.
“What do you mean? Tell me what is going on,” I said.
“Be…careful,” he croaked, then his eyes rolled back in his head and he was gone.
I stood and backed away.
Don’t trust anyone.
A police car parked nearby and two cops got out and rushed to the scene. I backed away, walking between parked cars that had come to a sudden stop seconds after the accident. I hadn’t yet taken my eyes off Hopper’s body.
Don’t trust anyone. What had he meant?
As the cops reached the body I ducked past a pocket of onlookers and kept my face down as I hurried away. I had little interest hanging around to answer questions. I jogged around the corner, then jumped in a taxi.
Be careful, Hopper had said. It had sounded ominous.
Why had he tried to kill me? And what had been his part in all of this? Too many questions, not enough answers, and another of my longtime friends was dead.
Don’t trust anyone.
CHAPTER 34
I chose not to return home. Too dangerous. Veronica Wagner’s body had turned up again and the cops would have me in handcuffs and a jail cell faster than I could say whiplash.
I knew that choice was risky. It made me look guilty. Now the cops would assume I was making a run for it and they would be on the lookout for me. There was no way to win, but I couldn’t afford to spend time in jail waiting for a lawyer to come to the rescue. My memory had cleared enough to recall parts of dinner that night with Veronica, Terry, and the clients from Kellogg’s, but the most important details — all the stuff that had happened between dinner and waking up to find her on my bedroom floor — were still fuzzy.
The clock was ticking. There was no longer any margin for error. If I didn’t want to go to jail for the murder of minor celebrity Veronica Wagner, I had to find a way to prove I hadn’t killed her. In order to do that, I had to find out who had.
* * *
“Tell me everything you know,” I said.
I was walking with Ellen. We held hands. The day was still overcast and there were puddles on the ground, but the rain had finally tapered off.
She didn’t speak for a long time.
“Terry is dead,” I told her.
Tears filled her eyes. She touched a hand to her face and turned away so I wouldn’t see the emotion. I knew she was hurting.
“Did Whitney tell you?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I know about your relationship with him, Ellen.”
She let go of my hand and stopped, staring at me in disbelief.
“How?” she asked.
“Whitney told me everything. She informed me that our relationship is a sham. You only used me to get to Terry. So let’s move past the lies.”
She closed her eyes and her head dropped. “I’m so, so, so sorry,” she whispered.
I took her hand again. “We can talk about all that later, maybe. Right now what matters is what happened to Terry.”
She looked at me curiously. “Whitney told me the police said it was an accident.”
I shrugged. “He was found in the tub in his apartment. Apparently, he fell and hit his head. Has all the makings of an accident, but I’m not buying it. I want you to tell me what’s really going on, damn it. You tried to blackmail a United States senator, somehow ended u
p abducted, and Terry wound up dead. Tell me what the hell I’m missing. Give me some answers!”
The afternoon was fading. It was still cloudy but the setting sun was visible as it lingered at the fringe of the city skyline, a shimmering ball of hazy orange. I’ve always loved the change in the way the city smells after a good rain. Changes in weather always alter the urban rhythms, if only temporarily. We crossed at a light and turned down a residential neighborhood. I watched our reflections pass in the window of a mini van. Physically we still looked like a couple, but on an emotional level those days were over. I felt a lump in my throat.
“This is so messed up,” she said, pushing a hand through her hair as she shook her head. “I’m totally embarrassed. It’s not like I never cared about you or anything.”
“I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, Ellen. Let me be very clear about that. I obviously didn’t know you the way I thought I knew you, and that’s on me. It means I’m an idiot and naive but I’ll get over it. The thing I care about right now is finding out the truth of what you and Terry were up to. You owe that much to me, and you certainly owe at least that much to Terry. So start talking.”
She jerked her hand away and folded her arms over her chest. I could see her mind working.
“I don’t know where to begin,” she said.
“I don’t need all the gory details. Whitney told me about your birth mother and her murder. She said you methodically tracked down the father, and that you thought Terry was the guy, but somehow he convinced you it wasn’t him. So you went after the Senator, and now here we are with an escalating body count. Am I leaving anything out?”
“It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” she said. “Our plan was clean and simple. No one was supposed to get hurt. I never would have believed it could get so complicated and scary.”
She turned and looked at me, her eyes as soft and watery as I’d ever seen them. “I almost died, Nick. They were going to kill me.”
“How did you get away?”
A single tear rolled down her cheek. “I jumped from the roof of a warehouse and grabbed hold of a piece of guttering. Then I just ran as fast as I could and hid. I was scared out of my mind.”
“Do you have any idea who the Mexican works for?” I asked.
She shot me a cutting look. “I can do the math.”
“Fair enough. I guess that’s what happens when you try to blackmail a member of the United States Senate,” I said.
“I don’t have to explain anything to you,” she replied bitingly.
I stopped and turned to her, sticking my finger in her face.
“People have died because of you, Ellen. So yes, you sure as hell do have to explain yourself to me! This isn’t a game, and it isn’t just about money. Both you and Whitney crossed the line. You thought you were so smart that you could just hold Shelby to the fire and he would cave and give you anything you wanted to keep his name out of the press. You have no idea who are dealing with. A man like Shelby eats small potatoes like you for breakfast. You are like a bug on the floor to him. All he is ever going to do is reach over and smash you. He is too rich and powerful to play your little games. Don’t you know anything?”
“I know enough!”
“Apparently, not.”
Ellen walked on ahead of me. I waited, looking away from her, allowing myself a moment to cool down and bring my emotions back in check. Again an image of her and Terry rolling around in the sack together flashed into my brain. I shook it away before my blood pressure spiked.
She crossed the street up ahead for no apparent reason and I followed, careful not to let her out of my sight. I jogged to the opposite side of the street. As I did, an NYPD black and white slowed to let me by. I hadn’t even noticed it rolling up. My heart froze. I stared through the glass at the two cops. They stared back. The moment seemed to linger for hours though in reality it was only two or three seconds. If they got out to ask questions I was screwed. I had jaywalked right in front of them — a minor offense but enough to justify pulling over and giving me a hard time. I offered an apologetic wave and darted between parked cars and continued on my way, hoping they wouldn’t have the desire to waste time running me down. My heart was in my throat. I headed north and spotted Ellen. I gave a quick glance over one shoulder and the cops were gone.
When I caught up she was standing at the top of a subway entrance.
“I’m not a bad person,” she said, eyes rimmed red.
“I know. You have to start making better decisions.”
“You don’t really know anything about me, Nick.”
“I’m very aware of that now. I probably only know what you wanted me to know.”
She nodded. “Everything I told you is a lie. And so is everything Whitney told you. Most of it anyway.”
I wasn’t sure how to interpret that.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“She told you I’m adopted, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I was,” she said, “but not by her. I grew up down the street from where she lives now. I’ve only know her a couple of years. I met her in a bar in Boston. Her husband works late and I was a waitress. We became friends and one night she told me about a story she read in the paper. It was a story she had heard about a female student who was murdered on the Harvard campus decades ago. Whitney was fascinated by it. We spent hours talking about it, and then one night we started putting together a plan. This was our chance to get rich and break free from our miserable lives. This was our big score. We planned to take the money and run away together.”
Ugh. “So she didn’t raise you?”
“No, Nick. Whitney and I are lovers.”
I leaned against a handrail and placed both hands on top of my head. I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep breath. Talk about WOW.
“Didn’t see that coming,” I admitted. “She’s old enough to be your mother.”
She shrugged. “Age is just a number.”
They were both smart, attractive women, so as a man, the notion wasn’t exactly gag inducing, but I was still stunned. I had already painted these two characters into stories in my mind, and now I was forced to rearrange a few narrative threads. So be it. Nothing should shock anyone anymore.
Something didn’t add up. I stared at my shoes, searching for answers in the scrambled clues collected over the past several days.
Then I looked at her. “So this was never a search for your father.”
“No.”
“Why involve Terry at all?”
She glanced away and sighed, then put her eyes back on me, visibly pissed at being asked to spell it out. “It was a gamble,” she said. “We thought if we offered to cut him in on our plan, offer him a slice of the cash, he could be an invaluable asset to what we were trying to accomplish. I mean, damn, he was the spitting image of Harrison Shelby, right?”
I reluctantly nodded yes. “How did you intend to use him?”
“As a decoy,” she said. “We knew it would be complicated and tricky — and dangerous — but Terry was eager to jump in. Turns out he was a greedy bastard.” She smiled.
I nodded agreement.
“Plus, he hated his brother,” she added.
“That’s certainly not beyond the scope of imagination.”
Ellen sat on the top step of the subway entrance. She crossed her legs at the ankles. I sat beside her. Foot traffic going in and out of the subway streamed past us. I glanced up into the passing faces and noticed plenty of dirty looks. It wasn’t exactly a convenient place to sit. Ellen didn’t seem to care.
“How could you really expect to get away with it?” I asked.
“I’m not stupid,” she said.
“Certainly not, but now Terry is dead and you almost were.”
“It was the perfect time. Shelby was beginning his run for the presidency and couldn’t afford to have a dark secret from his past resurface to haunt him. I wasn’t shocked when he refused to meet my demand, but I never exp
ected him to try to kill us.”
“You’ve obviously never met a politician.”
“Don’t be a smartass, Nick.”
“Terry was my best friend, but I never knew he had a brother.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I was using Terry every bit as much as I was using you to get close to him.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh yes, that makes me feel fabulous.”
She glared at me.
“Is life all about money to you? Do you use people for what you need and then cast them aside?” I said.
“You are in no position to judge me.”
I stood and walked back up the steps. It was difficult listening to her attitude. There was a pizzeria across the street. I smelled Italian sausage and green peppers. My stomach reminded me I was starving. She followed me in and sat opposite me at a table by the window. The window glass was smudged with greasy handprints. The old guy behind the counter warmed our slices in his big oven and we hunched over the paper plates with bottles of beer. The pizza was amazing.
“Tell me what happened Tuesday night,” I said.
She sipped her beer and stared at the melted cheese on her plate. Then her eyes lifted.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I went to dinner with Terry to entertain some clients. I woke up the next morning with no memory of dinner or of anything that happened that night. Then you turned up missing and Terry was found dead. I think I was drugged. I think Terry put something in my drink at dinner. That was part of your plan, wasn’t it? He put something in my drink so that I couldn’t interfere with whatever was going to happen. Then I awoke to find a dead woman in my bedroom. Tell me what happened, Ellen, because I’m seriously losing patience.” I could feel the color rising in my face.
“That had nothing to do with me, Nick. You have to believe that. The only plan was to blackmail Shelby, but that fell apart in dramatic fashion. Shelby turned me away like I was a joke. He didn’t seem the least bit daunted by my threats. I told him that his brother told me everything about the stripper, and the murder, and that I was his biological daughter. I intended to scare the crap out of him but he simply laughed in my face. That was not the reaction I had anticipated.”
Dead and Gone Page 20
