Moment of Truth

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Yes, good, no problem, Maria,” her father said, his own tears subsiding.

  “Thanks, really, Dad. Here, Mom.” Mary set the coffee down and helped her father ease her mother up from the chair. Everyone said their good-byes as Mary and her father walked her mother out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and to the stairwell in the living room, with only slightly less effort than Christ bearing the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem. And after Vita DiNunzio was safely tucked in bed, with her husband at her side, Mary gave them both a kiss good night and fetched them their bedtime cup of coffee.

  When Mary came back downstairs, Jack was enveloping Paige in a huge hug in the warm kitchen, his face buried in her glossy hair. “Thank God,” he said, and Paige broke the embrace, standing away from him.

  “Thank Mary, too, Dad. She really did save my life.”

  Jack looked over Paige’s shoulder. He grinned with relief, his blue eyes frankly grateful. “Thank you, Mary,” he said, advancing a step.

  Mary stiffened, though there was a table between them. She didn’t want him to hug her, did she? Yes. No. Of course not. In the kitchen, where her husband used to? She picked up the coffee and poured a cup for Brinkley, then went around the table until there were four steaming cups and nobody could ever sleep again. “No problem. I saved myself, too. So it wasn’t so unselfish. Why don’t you sit down?”

  Paige looked between them. “That’s not true, Dad.”

  “Everybody sit down,” Mary said, waving her off, and pulled out a chair. Installed behind her aromatic cup of coffee, she felt safe and happy again and decided to attribute it to land memory and not Jack Newlin, who she was happy/sad to want to hug/not hug. It confused her. “We have a lot of catching up to do. Jack, let’s begin at the beginning. You did not kill your wife.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Jack looked relieved to say it aloud, and Mary warmed to finally hear her suspicion confirmed. “I confessed because I thought Paige had killed her.”

  Paige looked grave behind her untouched cup. “I’m sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t have lied to you about Trevor.”

  “Let’s not talk about that now,” Jack said quickly. “Let’s hold the tears and I’m sorrys and get to the facts. Trevor killed your mother, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, we were high, at least I was. He told me I did it, so I thought I did it. I do remember picking up the knife, but I don’t think I did anything with it. What I remember next was that it was in my hand, all bloody, and she was dead. But I don’t think I killed her. I was angry at her, but I don’t think I could ever do that.” Paige told the story about her confession to Captain Walsh and the discovery that she had no bruising.

  “And Trevor was arrested on drug charges,” Mary said, but Brinkley was nodding as if he knew it. “Captain Walsh told us he was free on bail, so we think that it was him in the ski mask.” Mary looked at Brinkley. “Thank you for the hint about the earring back and DNA test, by the way. It helped us figure out that Trevor was the one.”

  “Knew you’d put them to use.”

  “Trevor’s trying to kill Paige because she knows what happened that night and he’s still at large. Is that it?”

  “I think so,” Brinkley answered, but Jack, at his elbow, stirred and touched Paige’s hand gently.

  “Paige, why would Trevor kill your mother?” he asked, and Mary noticed he was sitting in Mike’s chair to her right. She tried not to feel guilty, which was like not breathing.

  “The money, Dad. He’s wanted to get married a long time, like since we met. He’s been pushing it. When I got pregnant, it got definite. I wasn’t in love with it, but when I told Mom she freaked out.”

  “You should know why.” Jack fingered his coffee cup. “Your mother got upset because that’s what happened to her and me. She married me only because she got pregnant with you. I wanted to marry her. She was a prize to me, but she felt like she threw her life away when she married me. ‘Married down,’ as her family said.”

  Paige was silent, listening, her pretty features soft and sad.

  “Now, here’s the truth. You’re not sixteen, you’re seventeen. Your birthday is March 18, a year before. We took a trip, like rich people did in those days, and we didn’t introduce you around until you were about five. It was easy to pass you off as younger then. It was tricky, but doable since we didn’t socialize much anyway. You know how your mom was. That’s why you were born in Switzerland and why you were always more mature than your peers. They’re not your peers.”

  Paige was stunned. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Dad, why didn’t you just tell me that? It explains so much. About you, and her.”

  “Your mother didn’t want to, and I went along with it. We’re both to blame. Me, more so, because she was sick, at some level. I wasn’t.”

  Paige shook her head. “I don’t get it. Mom could have had an abortion, couldn’t she? I mean, with her money, it would have been easy.”

  “She wanted the baby, and I did, too.”

  Paige laughed abruptly. “She didn’t want the baby, Dad. I should know, I was the baby. What she wanted was to be miserable, and blame you for ruining her life. I heard her all the time, growing up. She always said she would have had a great career, if it wasn’t for you. And me.” Paige looked bitter. “Career as what? A professional victim?”

  Jack winced. “Paige, that’s not right—”

  “But it is, Dad. She always blamed everybody else, for everything. She never took responsibility for anything. You should have seen her at shoots. It was the photographer’s fault, or the clothes were wrong, or my lighting. Or at home. It was the maid, the accountant, my tutor. It was never her fault. Nothing was ever her fault.” Paige fell quiet, and Mary let it lie, remembering what the photographer had said about dealing with Honor and about kids being the ones who see the truth. The two of them, father and daughter, would have to sort it out someday.

  “The question is what do we do now,” Mary said, after a minute. “Trevor is out there looking for Paige and maybe me. He knows he doesn’t have much time. He’s not going to give up, and the police don’t believe that he’s the killer.”

  Brinkley cleared his throat, clearly uneasy. “I’ll cover you and Paige. Tonight we can all get some rest. Here, if that’s okay. We can sleep downstairs on the floor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then first thing in the morning I take all of you to the Roundhouse.”

  Mary shook her head. “It won’t do any good. I screwed that up so bad, the police won’t believe anything I say now.”

  “Anything we say,” Paige corrected. “I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s on my own tummy.”

  Brinkley shook his head. “They’ll believe us this time because we’ll be bringing in Jack. And Trevor.”

  “Trevor? How are you gonna do that?” Mary asked, and Brinkley hunched over the table.

  “Listen up,” he said, and they huddled around. “We got the earring back but not the earring. Now, we know from Paige that Trevor lost the earring and he doesn’t know where. I didn’t know that before. So we use that fact. We tell him we got the earring, that I found it at the crime scene. And does he want it, come and get it.”

  Jack looked doubtful. “Why would you do that? You need a credible reason.”

  “How about revenge?” Mary edged forward, certain that this was the first time a sting had been plotted at the DiNunzios’ kitchen table. “And money. You offer to sell the earring back to him. You want to get back at the police department for suspending you. But how do we catch him?”

  Brinkley shrugged easily. “I wear a wire. I get him to say what I need, then we take him in. No muss, no fuss.”

  “A wire,” Mary repeated, because it sounded so cool, and Paige clapped in delight.

  Only Jack looked worried. “It sounds simple, but things can go wrong. This kid’s not that stable. He’s a killer.”

  “I can’t handle a preppie, I got no business
in the business,” Brinkley said with a smile, and Mary thought he should smile more often.

  “Why don’t we do it tonight?” she asked. “End this thing already?”

  Brinkley shook his head. “Can’t. Take me some time to get the wire. I have to figure a way to get court approval or any admission the kid makes won’t come into evidence. I should have the wire by late morning, then we’ll try to get hold of our boy.”

  “How do we do that?” Mary asked, and Brinkley smiled again.

  “We start calling around. The boy’s got to be pretty panicky right now. He reads the papers and he knows I’m on to him. If he hears my name, he’ll come in.” The detective reached for the coffeepot. “But first, we have some more of this fine coffee.”

  After they made the requisite telephone calls, Mary scrounged up four blankets and pillows for everybody and arranged them carefully on the living room rug, making sure Jack was farthest from her, then Brinkley and Paige. They all lay down, exhausted, and when Mary turned out the living room lamp she thought it looked like four sausages in a frying pan. In the morning they would hatch their scheme, catch the bad guy, and be home in time for breakfast.

  Paige conked out first, then Brinkley, but Mary felt safe enough even with the detective asleep. Trevor wouldn’t think to look for her at her parents’ house and neither would the press. She was way too old to run home, and everybody but her knew it. What Mary knew was that she loved her parents more as she got older, not less, and appreciated them in a way she hadn’t when she was young and time stretched ahead of her like a shiny sliding board. There was a limit now, an end point; Mike’s death had taught Mary that. She didn’t need her mother’s thin skin or her father’s ruptured spine to remind her. There would come a time when she couldn’t go home again, not because the C bus had been rerouted, but because her parents would be gone. And when they were gone, home would be gone, too.

  Mary shifted uncomfortably under her old blanket. It was a child’s fear, she knew, the fear of her parents’ death, and lying there she understood that every lesson her parents had taught her would be tested in surviving their passing. She didn’t know how she would live after they were gone, but she knew she would, and only because they had taught her to. It would be their final, and their greatest, gift, and she thanked them for it in her dreams.

  Jack heard Mary fall asleep, as he tossed and turned under the blanket. It wasn’t the hardness of the floor that was keeping him awake. It was how everything had gone so wrong, not only from the night he took the blame for Honor’s murder, but from the very beginning. From the moment he married Honor and started lying about their daughter, and to her.

  Honor always thought it was a detail, what age the child was, but Jack was never convinced. He knew all along, even as he prevented himself from knowing, that it was profoundly wrong to lie to Paige about the circumstances of her own birth. He had taught her to lie from the cradle; she was swaddled in lies. How could he expect anything but a lie when she grew up?

  Was Trevor with you, Paige?

  Of course not, Daddy.

  But all along, at some level, Jack had known that she was lying about Trevor. He had sensed that Trevor had been there and was responsible for Honor’s murder, at least in part. In fact, if he were being completely honest with himself, it hadn’t mattered to him whether Trevor was there or not. The truth was that he’d known it that night, when he asked Paige to lie to him and she did, and when he made the deal that he would protect her fiction, even serve it. As he had with her pregnancy.

  Jack faced the darkness and found the truth. He hadn’t been completely surprised when Paige told him she was pregnant, over the telephone at the office. He knew she was on a collision course with her mother, acting out against her from the day she’d declared she wanted to be emancipated. He knew that somehow, someday, Paige would figure out how to hurt her mother the most. Get pregnant, like her mother, replaying a past she didn’t know existed, but perhaps suspected. So it wasn’t Trevor’s plan that got her pregnant at all. Paige was lying to herself about that, and to all of them.

  Jack shifted on the hard floor. The more he thought about Trevor, the less likely it seemed that the boy could kill Honor as part of a long-range plan to get Paige’s money. Trevor was a rash, spoiled, rich boy. A fuckup; the kind of kid who sold drugs and picked up blondes who turned out to be narcs. Something didn’t fit; something just smelled.

  In his mind Jack went over the day Honor was killed. He had gotten the call from Paige at work, then had been on pins and needles the remainder of the afternoon. He had packed his briefcase, by habit, and left in plenty of time to get home for his usual seven o’clock, but the rain and the traffic had stymied him.

  Well, wait a minute.

  He had been stopped in the hall. Whittier, wanting to talk about the Florrman bill. Jack had tried to get away, but it had made him late. And in that time period Trevor had killed Honor. Whittier’s delay had given Trevor the time to murder Honor.

  Jack sat bolt upright. Could it be? Had Whittier stalled him so Trevor could kill Honor? Not possible. There was no connection between Trevor and Whittier, was there? Jack thought about it, every sense alert and awake. It was at least plausible, and he had to find out. The responsibility for catching Trevor was his; it was his wife the boy murdered and his daughter he tried to kill. Jack’s heartbeat quickened. He had a responsibility, not to a lie, as before. But to the truth. It might have been rash, but he had no choice.

  He rose silently, slipped into his I LOVE PHILADELPHIA jacket and his shoes, and left the house, closing the door softly behind him.

  52

  Jack approached the glistening skyscraper that housed Tribe & Wright with anticipation. It felt so good to be taking action himself, free from prison. If Whittier was behind this, he would find out. He eyed the building. If there had been press around the building, there wasn’t anymore; the eleven o’clock news was over and the reporters had crawled back under their rocks. It was dark, the street was empty. He hurried down the sidewalk and entered the marble lobby.

  The security guard at the desk came to a nervous wakefulness when he recognized Jack. It had to be from the news; Jack didn’t know the security guards on this late a shift. “Sign in, please, sir,” asked the guard, righting his cap, his eyes glued to Jack’s wounded cheek.

  “Ran into a truck,” Jack said, and walked to the elevator. His shoes echoed in the cavernous lobby and he stepped into an open elevator and hit the button for thirty. The elevator doors closed behind him with an expensive swoosh.

  As soon as Jack was out of sight, the security guard reached for the telephone and punched in a number, as he had been instructed.

  Jack had walked through the halls of Tribe & Wright a hundred times, even after hours, and the firm used to be as familiar to him as his home. But tonight it felt as foreign and unforgiving as the moon’s surface and almost as lifeless. The lights were on but the reception area was empty, the front desk bare and unstaffed, and the offices vacant. Though his floor looked the way it always did, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t know where he was. Either the firm had changed or he had changed. Or both.

  He walked by the foxhunting prints on the wall and scrutinized them as he never had before. He passed a side table made of tiger maple and wondered what it was doing in the hallway. It was just in the way. He passed the two large offices off the hall, but no one was in, of course. He could do what he needed to do.

  Jack’s office was just down the hall and as he walked toward it, he sensed it would be his last time. He wouldn’t be coming back to Tribe and he wouldn’t miss the place. All he wanted from it now was answers. He was going to sit in his chair and use his correspondence, notes, and time records to reconstruct everything that happened the day of Honor’s murder.

  Jack’s pace quickened. The police would have confiscated some files, but he hoped not all of them. Then he remembered. His laptop, with the single ticket to London. The prosecution would
use it against him, but he had arranged the trip to give himself some time alone, to consider what was happening in his marriage since Paige’s emancipation. It had all come apart before he had the chance. Jack arrived at his office, opened the door, and froze on the spot.

  It was completely empty. Even the furniture wasn’t there anymore. How could that be? The police would have seized files and computers, but not every file, cabinet, book, and law review. Where was his stuff? Photos of Paige and Honor? His personal papers? Diplomas, a citation from Girard? Then he thought about it. Only the firm could take these things and only with the approval of the managing partner. Whittier.

  Jack felt his jaw clench in anger. What was going on? Was Whittier really involved in this? A man he had known and worked with all his professional life? And why would Whittier want Honor dead? It was unthinkable. She had chosen him to be her executor, she had trusted him so much.

  Whittier’s office was around the corner and down the hall. If Jack wanted answers, that’s where he’d find them. He turned and strode down the corridor, more determined with every step. He’d tear the place apart. Ransack every drawer. Jack was halfway there when he heard voices. Strange. It was too late for the cleaning people. The voices grew louder as he got closer to Whittier’s office. It sounded like shouting. The door was open. Jack broke into a run, and when he reached the office door, he got the surprise of his life.

  Whittier and Trevor stood staring at him. Trevor looked disheveled, his eyes sunken and glassy. He was high, but Whittier surely wasn’t. The managing partner, still in shirt and suit pants, stood open-mouthed. He looked merely startled, but completely in command.