One Dangerous Lady

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  I rolled my eyes. “I think they’re all the same, at this point.”

  “Yes, but we do have this blueprint,” Larry said. Folding it up, he inserted it into his breast pocket. “And I’m not letting it out of my sight,” he said, tapping his chest twice. “Come on. Let’s go have a bite to eat, Jo. I’m starving.”

  Chapter 33

  Larry led the way downstairs to the dining room, where Mrs. Barnes had set up a buffet lunch for us on the sideboard. I helped myself to some of the cold cuts and salad, but I had no appetite. We sat down catty-corner to each other at the ancient, wooden refectory table that Larry had salvaged from an abandoned monastery in Umbria.

  Unfurling a large linen napkin and placing it fastidiously on his lap, Larry dug into his food with gusto.

  “Here’s the thing, Jo. I’m beginning to see that that yacht has a personality, too—one that is just as circuitous and complicated as that of its former owners. Of course, I have no idea if we could ever actually prove anything, but given this set of conflicting plans, I’d certainly like to get a firsthand look at that boat.”

  I was distracted, I could hardly concentrate on what he was saying.

  He looked up at me with one of his leprechaun smiles. “We could, you know.”

  “How?”

  “Carla sold it to a dot-commer from Virginia who charters it out. I have the name of the charter company he uses. The only thing we need is money. It costs a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a week, not counting fuel, food, and tips, and it’s available in one month’s time. . . . I also found out that the Coles’ old captain is in charge of the yacht again. Mike Rankin, he’s called. It’ll be very interesting to talk to him about his successor. Putting Jasper Jenks in charge was like asking a buggy driver to ride a racehorse. And the thing is, the Coles always did extensive background checks on their staff. They were very careful about who they hired and they always hired the best people. Given their resources, they could have had their pick of great captains. So why did they hire this inexperienced young man . . . ? Unless Carla was counting on a level of incompetency . . . or an accomplice.” Larry raised his eyebrows and looked at me. “What’s wrong, Jo? You’re not eating.”

  I paused. “Larry . . . do you really have to write this article?”

  He guffawed, holding his knife and fork in the air midbite. “What do you mean?!”

  “I mean, do you really have to write this article?” I said more slowly. “Is it something that you absolutely have to do?”

  He furrowed his brow. “Well, I won’t got to jail if I don’t. But the thought just doesn’t occur to me. I’ve been working on it for months. This is an absolutely fascinating case, I mean, with this new evidence . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “But what if . . . what if I asked you not to?”

  He put his knife and fork on the plate and propped his elbows up on the table, folding his hands. He stared at me very hard. “Well, I’d certainly want to know why.”

  I didn’t answer him for a few seconds while I collected my thoughts.

  “You once told me that if I asked you not to write it, you wouldn’t.”

  “That’s not precisely what I said. What I said was that if in the course of my travels, I uncovered something that would be detrimental to our friendship, I wouldn’t write the article.”

  “I know. You said that good stories were a dime a dozen, but real friends were rare. So I’m asking you, as a real friend, not to write it.”

  Larry lowered his eyes and thought for moment. Then he looked back up at me. “I can’t do that now, Jo. I’m too far into it. And I haven’t discovered anything that could possibly hurt you. Whereas I really do think that Carla is a menace. And she must be stopped.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Larry, you don’t understand how dangerous she really is.”

  “Oh, but I do. I’m just beginning to get the full picture.”

  I shook my head. “No, you aren’t. You just have no idea . . . Please, I beg of you, don’t pursue this.”

  He reached across the table and took my hand with a look of great concern on his face. “Something’s happened, Jo. What is it? Tell me.”

  I stared at his hand for a long time. This was the moment of truth. If ever I were going to confess to another living soul about the sordid secret of my past, it was now.

  Larry looked at me quizzically. “What’s the matter, Jo? Please tell me.”

  “Larry,” I began softly, “how long have we been friends?”

  “Several lifetimes,” he said without hesitation.

  I swallowed hard. “What if I were to tell you something that would be difficult for you to know . . . ?”

  “Go on.”

  I took a deep breath, resolved now to confide in him. “Something that no one else in the world knows . . . ? Something that if it ever got out, I’d be chopped foie gras. . . .” I said with a weak smile.

  “If you mean, will I keep my mouth shut? I think you know the answer to that. As far as my friends are concerned, I’m a tomb.”

  “But the burden of knowing, Larry. The burden of knowing . . .”

  “I know a lot of things, honey. Believe me. Things I’ll take with me to my grave. But you mustn’t tell me anything you’ll regret my knowing. Our friendship is too important to me for that.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” he said, obviously disconcerted.

  “The dreaded Countess de Passy said almost those exact same words to me once. We were walking on the beach in Southampton and I was about to tell her the real story of how Lucius and I met—something I’d never told another living soul up until that point. I think the real reason I wound up telling her was because she said that she didn’t want to know anything that would damage our friendship in any way. I believed her. Of course, what I didn’t know at the time was that she knew the whole story already because my son-of-a-bitch husband had told her all about it. And then, of course, she betrayed me.”

  “Well, I always think that time is the real measure of a friendship and you’ve known me long enough and well enough to know that I won’t do that, Jo. I’m very fond of you, as you well know. I could never break any confidence of yours.”

  “Not even if it would mean getting one of the biggest stories of your career?”

  Larry laughed. “My career’s had enough big stories. No story is worth sacrificing our friendship, Jo.”

  With that, he got up and closed the door so Mrs. Barnes wouldn’t overhear us. He sat down again and leveled me with one of his intense gazes.

  “Before you say anything, though, let me ask you something. Would this thing you are about to tell me have anything to do with the countess and her will and the way she died?”

  No fool, Larry.

  “It might.”

  “I’m sure you’re aware then of the rumor that was going around at the time.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Which one?”

  “That you pushed her off that balcony when you found out she’d left you back the fortune she stole from you. It was just a rumor, mind you.”

  “Did you believe it?” I asked him.

  The air was electric with tension. Larry, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me, was silent for a long moment. Finally he said, “I believed that the Jo Slater I knew then would not have surrendered to her apparent fate without a damn good fight.”

  After a long silence I said, “But did you believe me capable of premeditated murder?”

  “You mean hands-on premeditated murder? Murder that you commit yourself, not that you hire someone to commit for you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Hands-on premeditated murder. . . . Larry, may we speak hypothetically?”

  “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?” he said with a wink in his voice.

  “Of course.” I
smiled. “Hypothetically, it was a little more complicated than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hypothetically, I didn’t find out that the countess had left everything to me in her will. Monique de Passy was not a generous soul. . . . When my husband died and left her everything that should have been mine after twenty years of marriage, I felt desolate and betrayed. But I tried to get on with my life, Larry. I really did. Monique thwarted me every step of the way. To make a long story short, I became obsessed with getting even with her. Then one day I walked into a bar and saw a woman who I could have sworn was the countess. She was her twin. And it was then that I got the idea of how to get my revenge. Monique de Passy didn’t write that will. I did. I wrote a phony will for the countess in which she left everything to me—the whole fortune that should have been mine in the first place. Then I hired this dead ringer I’d seen in the bar to impersonate her, go to a reputable lawyer’s office, and get that forged will signed.”

  Larry cocked his head to one side, looking puzzled. “But the signature,” he said immediately. “They can always detect a forgery.”

  “Well, it just so happens that in New York State, if a person is incapacitated because of a physical injury, they can direct a lawyer to sign their will for them in the presence of witnesses. I told Monique’s double to go in there with an injured hand and say that she couldn’t sign the will herself. One of the lawyers signed it for her so the signature could never be questioned. Of course, in order for a will to be meaningful, the testator eventually has to die.”

  Larry’s face contorted into an odd cross between admiration and incredulity. He continued to stare at me as the realization of what necessarily had to follow this deception deepened and settled in his mind.

  “And she did die,” he said. “As I recall, she committed suicide by jumping off her balcony. It was in the papers. I believe you were the last person to see her alive.”

  “That’s right.”

  There was a long silence while Larry just looked at me.

  “Did you push her, Jo?” Larry said at last.

  I hung my head. “It all happened so fast.”

  “What exactly did happen?”

  “You remember my beautiful Marie Antoinette necklace?”

  “Of course. Your trademark.”

  “Yes, well, I had to sell it to her because I needed the money. But I just couldn’t bear for her to have it. I picked it up and threw it over the balcony. She lunged for it and she fell. I didn’t push her. I swear. It was her own greed that propelled her over the side. But I confess I was happy to see her fall.”

  I don’t think Larry quite believed my account of the events. He had the vaguely horrified yet captivated gaze of someone whose path has just been crossed by a lustrous insect.

  “Do you think I’m evil?” I said at last.

  “Evil? No. Certainly not,” he said firmly. “Evil, like genius, is a much overused word, a word that must be reserved for the very, very few. If you say Mozart was a genius, for example, you can’t really say too many others are. And if you say that Hitler was evil, that, too, raises the bar. . . . The man who murdered my wife—now there was an evil person. He killed purely for his own pleasure and for no other reason. He thoroughly enjoyed inflicting excruciating pain on her and watching her die inch by inch over the course of days.” As he spoke, a little film of perspiration sprouted on his brow. “If I ever told you what he did to her and the length of time he took to do it, you’d understand what evil really is.”

  I reached out my hand to him. “Larry, I’m so sorry . . .”

  “No, no . . . I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his moist eyes with his napkin. “I don’t know why, but it’s still so fresh and painful.”

  I said nothing, waiting for him to recover. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Anyway, I reserve the evil category for those who relish and revel in the suffering of others. That’s not you, Jo.”

  “Maybe not. But you could say that Carla Cole and I aren’t really all that different. I mean, if she has, in fact, killed Russell for the money, how is that different from me? She even said that to me—that we were ‘sisters under the skin.’ That really upset me.”

  Larry leaned forward, focusing in on me again. “But did you want her dead just for the money, Jo?”

  “No!” I slammed my hand on the table. “Monique took so much more from me than money! My God, Larry, she took my husband, my identity, my life. She effectively murdered me, only I was still alive and around to watch her become me. This was identity theft on a grand scale. I tried to let it go, but I couldn’t. She became an obsession. I just couldn’t stand by and let her be me. It was as simple as that. I had to get rid of her. I had to. It seemed so . . . so, I don’t know, so . . . necessary at the time.”

  “And now? Does it still seem so necessary?” Larry asked.

  Another silence engulfed us as I let the anxiety of talking about Monique drain out of me.

  “Well, it’s done,” I said at last. “Here, look at this.” I pulled the newspaper clipping out of my purse and handed it to him.

  He gripped his tortoiseshell glasses and read the story carefully. He raised his eyebrows the minute he saw her picture.

  “This is the woman with Carla on the boat,” he said, looking at me.

  “She’s the woman I hired to impersonate the countess and sign the fake will. She was blackmailing me and Carla knew it.” I paused to take a sip of water. My throat was dry. “Carla told me that one day she’d give me a present I couldn’t refuse. Well, this is it. She had that woman killed.”

  “What? Just as a favor to you? Are you kidding?”

  “No, no. Listen to me. Last week, Carla called me up and invited me for tea.”

  “And you went? After what she did to you?” he interjected.

  “I was curious.”

  “You should have been a reporter, Jo,” he said with a wry smile.

  “Anyway, Carla told me she was worried about your article. She asked me to ask you if you’d quit writing it.”

  “Really? That’s fascinating. She must know I’m getting close to something.”

  “Maybe, but she claims the reason is that she doesn’t want her privacy invaded. She’s also worried about what Max Vermilion is going to think of her when it comes out. Naturally, I told her I couldn’t help her, that there was no way I was going to persuade you not to write it. Then she threatened me again, insinuating she knew I was being blackmailed. But this time I called her bluff. I told her that I doubted she knew the reason I was being blackmailed or she certainly would have used it by now. And then I turned the tables on her.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I said my blackmailer was a pretty unsavory character and maybe Max would be interested in how she happened to know such a creature. I think that worried her a bit. Anyway, I naïvely imagined that I’d gotten the upper hand for a change. Then that clipping arrived.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. But, Larry, she didn’t get rid of that woman for me or even for herself—although I bet they had some relationship! She got rid of her to show me what she’s capable of. She’ll have you killed, too, Larry. She really will. She won’t let you publish that article. I know that you’re pretty fearless, but I don’t want to lose you, if you don’t mind. So will you please reconsider, Larry? Please? For me?”

  He shook his head and was silent for a long time. Finally he spoke: “Jo, you realize that now, more than ever, I can’t back off.”

  “But you see what she’s capable of!” I said, exasperated.

  “That’s exactly why I have to get to the bottom of this—precisely because she is capable of such horror. I have to expose her if I can. This is what I do, Jo. This is my life. After Helena died, I thought of becoming a monk. I also thought of killing myself. But as you
can see, I chose the more infernal path, writing. I made a silent promise to Helena that I wasn’t going to let someone get away with murder just because they have a lot of money. And I’m not going to break that promise, not now. . . . I intend to rent that boat even if I have to go into hock to do it. I’m going to find that hidden room and see what’s in it. Carla knows I’m on to something and I want to find out what that something is.”

  I admired his courage.

  “Okay,” I said after thinking it over. “If I can’t dissuade you, then I guess I’ll just have to help you. I have money. You arrange the trip and I’ll pay for it.”

  Larry called the charter company and booked The Lady C for a two-week cruise in July, only three weeks away. Though summer isn’t exactly the peak season for the Caribbean, Larry felt it was important to go back as soon as possible to exactly the same spot where Russell Cole had disappeared. He told me he spoke to Captain Rankin and arranged for the yacht to meet us in Bridgetown in Barbados. I set about preparing for the trip.

  Carla phoned me two days later.

  “Did you get my little present, Jo, darling? Isn’t it nice that there is no need for you to buy any more diamonds, except for those you want to wear? Are you not happy about that? And I want you to know that there is no need for you to write me a thank-you note.”

  That low, purry voice of hers gave me the creeps. I had no idea how to respond.

  “What do you want, Carla?”

  “I understand that dear Larry is back from Florida, and I was wondering if you had a chance to speak with him about the article. And if so, what did he say?”

  I didn’t like it one bit that she knew where Larry had been. She was obviously having him followed. I wondered how much more she knew. Did she know about the specs, or about my having rented The Lady C?

  “Call him yourself, Carla,” I said and hung up.

  I immediately phoned Larry.

  “She knows you went to Florida,” I told him.