Payoff

by Douglas Corleone

  I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and examined the door, which was made of a sturdy light oak with an oval of beveled glass centered in its upper half. No sign of forced entry. Hadn’t been dusted for prints, because Edgar insisted the intruders were all wearing gloves.

  “Who besides you, your wife, and your daughter has a key?”

  “Well, there’s Manny. He’s our majordomo.”

  “Your what?”

  “Our head servant. He’s in charge of the other male servants—the driver, the chef, the gardener.”

  “He’s the butler.”

  “Yes, he’s the butler.”

  “What’s Manny’s last name?”

  “Villanueva.”

  “He’s here in the States legally?”

  “Oh, yes. Emma’s fastidious about who she hires. Every employee has to either be a citizen or a permanent resident. All of their documents—copies of birth certificates, social security cards, passports, green cards—are on file in her office upstairs.”

  Quickly he added, “Don’t get me wrong, we’re not prejudiced. This is Southern California, after all. We believe all foreign-born people, documented or undocumented, should be able to seek better lives for themselves here in America. They should be permitted to obtain driver’s licenses, their children should be entitled to an education.”

  He paused, lowered his voice though there was no one else outside. “It’s just that in our last house, when we lived in Beverly Hills, we had this young woman, Sofía, who took care of Olivia, and she was detained in a federal facility after being stopped for a minor traffic infraction. Olivia absolutely loved her, and I spent tens of thousands of dollars on an immigration attorney, and in the end, nothing could be done. It was just a terrible experience, so since then—”

  I cut him off. “Where is Manny originally from?”

  Edgar turned, squinted as he gazed down at the Pacific. It was late in the day, yet the sun still hung high in the sky. “Panama, maybe? I’m not really sure, but it’d be on file.”

  “Any other servants have a key?”

  “No, Manny’s always the first to arrive. If he has the day off, we make arrangements to let in the maids and other staff.”

  “You pay Manny well?”

  Edgar nodded. “Of course. He’s the majordomo, he makes six figures. The other servants don’t earn quite so much, but their pay is competitive with other households in L.A. County.”

  “All right. You’ll give me access to all their files, then?”

  “Of course.”

  “I may need to interview them.”

  He hesitated. “That may not be wise. They’re good, hard workers, but I don’t know that I’d take them into my confidence.”

  “That’s just why I may need to interview them.” I added, “Don’t worry yourself about it. We won’t alert them to what this is all about until we absolutely have to.” I stepped away from the door to survey the ground, looking for shoe or boot prints or at least trampled grass. “I take it that no one but your driver is working today?”

  “We called everyone scheduled to work and told them they wouldn’t be needed until further notice.”

  A skipping-stone walkway led from the main door to this. It looked as though it had been recently cleaned. Not necessarily in the last twenty-four hours, but not a scuff mark or speck of dirt could be seen. Likewise, every blade of grass stood tall and green. At the bottom of the drive, there was a gate with what looked like a working camera. How did these men get from the road to the door without kicking up some dirt or knocking down some grass?

  As I walked down the hill, I thought of the day I returned from Romania to learn that Hailey had been taken from our property. I remembered all too vividly pacing the length of our enormous backyard, trancelike, looking for some clue, some hint of what might have happened to our daughter, of who might have been responsible. As terrified as I’d been that day, my belief that we’d eventually learn the answers to those questions never once wavered. Whatever happened, I’d thought, whoever took her, it was only a matter of time until we knew.

  Eleven years later, I was still no closer to learning my daughter’s fate. For me, there was no hope of closure, and that knowledge continued to eat at me night after night after night.

  Before I realized it, I’d wandered a good hundred feet from Edgar’s house. I turned and started back toward the door used by the intruders.

  I said, “Let’s have a look inside, then.”

  Chapter 7

  The interior of the Trentons’ home was every bit as vast as I’d anticipated, the sparse traditional furniture making it appear even more so. The great room was airy with few walls, but every wall possessed its own bookcase, each bookcase loaded with a variety of books, not just hardcovers but also trade and mass market paperbacks, fiction as well as nonfiction. For the first time I realized that Edgar’s finding Will Collins’s Unfathomable wasn’t necessarily dumb luck. The Trenton family either read a good number of books or made one hell of an effort to make it appear as though they did.

  A lithe redhead, as striking as she was tall, entered the room. She held out a slender hand and I took it lightly in my own as I looked into her fiercely intelligent green eyes. Her irises were surrounded on all sides by red cobwebs, no doubt from hours of constant crying and a deprivation of sleep. From what Edgar told me over the phone, she’d survived a night of pure terror, and I couldn’t help but admire the fact that she was standing here at all. I’d expected to be speaking with her from a bedside chair.

  “Mrs. Trenton,” I said, “I’m terribly sorry to be meeting you under these circumstances.”

  “Please, no need for formality. Emma is fine.”

  I bowed my head. “Simon.”

  “Where shall we start?” Edgar said.

  I replied, “With the ransom demand.”

  “Yes, right.” Edgar excused himself and moved toward the stairs.

  “Where did you find the demand?” I asked Emma.

  “It was in our mailbox.”

  I felt Edgar’s eyes on me as he walked up the stairs. Victims didn’t like to be questioned separately. Dividing couples made them feel as though the authorities thought they were at best forgetful or untrustworthy, and at worst, suspects.

  “How long after the intruders left did you find the ransom demand?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I had no sense of time after they left. They arrived sometime after midnight. Within a few minutes, they’d knocked me out, either with a choke hold or a punch to the temple, maybe chloroform. That was in my bedroom. When I came to, I was here in the great room, propped up against that wall.” She pointed to the wall directly across from the French doors. “It was pitch black in here. They had dark sheets tacked up to cover every window. I don’t know how long I was awake before they put me out again and fled.”

  I stepped forward and studied her bruises, the worst of which appeared on her left temple. Her eyes were black and blue, no doubt from a blow to the nose. Her voice was rather nasal and didn’t match her face, so it was safe to assume she’d broken a small bone or two in the nose. In my experience, the bones in the nose healed on their own. But the strike to the head warranted a visit to the hospital, and I told her so.

  “After all this is over,” she said, shaking off the idea.

  “I don’t want to frighten you, Emma, but a blow to the head requires diagnostic testing, even if you feel fine. You could be suffering a brain bleed and not know it until you collapsed. The damage by then could be irreversible, or you could die.”

  “I’m aware of the ‘talk and die’ syndrome, Simon. Edgar and I are dear friends with Liam Neeson, and I absolutely adored his wife, Natasha. They were in this house more times than I can count.”

  Emma was speaking, of course, of the lovely actress Natasha Richardson, who had died following what seemed like a minor fall on a ski slope in Quebec. For a solid hour after the spill, she had looked and felt perfectly fine; then cam
e a sudden and severe headache. Two days and two hospitals later, the forty-five-year-old British beauty had passed.

  Before I could say another word, Edgar was on his way down the stairs, holding the ransom demand in his ungloved hand. I sighed but there was nothing I could do. Over the phone, I’d warned him to preserve the crime scene for the police, not to touch anything at all without gloves, but he clearly hadn’t heeded my advice in this regard either. The sheets Emma had just told me were covering the windows when the masked assailants had been here were now neatly stacked on the floor. Even the evidence in Emma’s own body—the alleged blue poison—was probably long gone.

  “So, Emma,” I said, “roughly what time did you discover the ransom demand?”

  “A short time after dawn. Before I even called Edgar, I ran outside and looked around for Olivia.”

  “What caused you to check the mailbox?”

  She shrugged. “The little red flag was raised. I knew it hadn’t been up the previous evening, so I ran the rest of the way down the drive to the mailbox and opened it.” She motioned to Edgar. “This note was inside.”

  Edgar handed me the single sheet of paper, which appeared to contain text printed from a computer.

  E. Trenten:

  Sorry we missed you. O. will be returned to you for 8.5m US. Instructions to follow. If you involve law enforcment there will be no deal. We will than simply return O.’s head.

  Obrigado.

  I set the letter down on a small table. “I take it from our conversation that you intend to pay them.”

  Edgar motioned to the ransom note as though the answer were obvious. “Of course I intend to pay them.”

  “It’s not always as simple as it seems, you know.”

  “What other choice do I have?”

  Do I have, I noted. Not “we,” plural, but “I,” singular.

  I stared down at the ransom demand again. There were two misspellings for “Trenton” and “enforcement.” Also, the author used “than” when he should have used “then.” Yet the language was sophisticated, idiomatic. Sorry we missed you. It was the kind of language you’d find on a note from your cable guy or UPS driver. Instructions to follow. That too sounded like something out of an American movie rather than the words of a real kidnapper. But then, kidnappers watched American movies too, I supposed.

  Obrigado means “thank you” in Portuguese. Why give anything away? Unless it was intentional. Like the misspellings.

  I looked up at Edgar and answered his question. “Right now, unless you’ve changed your mind about bringing in the authorities, we have no other choice but to go over everything that happened last night.”

  “And then?”

  “Then comes the hard part,” I said. “We wait.”

  Chapter 8

  “Start from the beginning of the evening,” I said to Emma. “Be as detailed as possible.”

  Sitting on the sofa across from me, Emma uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, her eyes closed as she tried to conjure the seemingly meaningless details of the previous night. Edgar placed an arm around her and delivered an awkward kiss that clipped her upper right ear. He had to be at least fifteen years older than his wife, which in Hollywood, probably wasn’t any stranger than an age difference of a couple of months in the heartland. Certainly it wouldn’t have surprised anyone that a man of his means could land a woman of her caliber. And they’d been married sixteen years, which meant he’d been a reasonably young man of forty-five when they became engaged, and she’d been going on thirty. Back then, Emma had aspired to become a film actress, while Edgar was rapidly climbing the executive ladder at Carousel Pictures.

  “Nicholas, our driver, dropped Olivia off from school at about three,” she said. “She came upstairs to my office, gave me a quick kiss, then went to her room as usual. Neither of us had any plans for the evening.”

  “What were you doing while you were in your office?” I said to keep the conversation flowing.

  Emma seemed a tad embarrassed. “I was working on a short story.”

  “Emma’s a wonderful writer,” Edgar added. “She has a few stories out on submission right now, to publications like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Once a few of her stories are published, she intends to continue work on her novel.”

  She waved him off, said, “Please, Ed, let’s focus.” She drew a deep breath, then continued. “I finished what I was working on about an hour and a half later, then I went to Olivia’s room and knocked on her door. She didn’t answer, so I tried the handle, but it was locked, which is a fairly new thing.”

  Edgar shrugged. “She’s fifteen, Simon. What can you expect?”

  “Anyway,” Emma said, “when she finally responded, she sounded as though she’d been sleeping. I asked her to come to the door, but she said she was in bed. This is another new thing; she’s been taking naps in the afternoon.”

  “If only we could all afford a daily siesta,” Edgar said.

  “So, I told my daughter, I didn’t mean to disturb her, I just wanted to know what she’d like for dinner. She said she’d really been craving a Double-Double from In-N-Out Burger. I asked her, ‘What about the whole vegetarian kick you’ve been on?’ She said she’d been cheating anyway, and she needed a break from pizza and salads. So, I said, ‘Fine, In-N-Out it is.’”

  I said, “Aside from her increased desire for privacy, how has your relationship been with your daughter?”

  Emma was quick to say, “It’s been wonderful.” She thought about it. “You know, we argue over the usual things. Curfew, cleaning up after herself. Staying in touch while she’s out of the house, though that hasn’t been a problem recently—she’s finally enjoying spending more time at home. The one thing we have argued about over the past few weeks is how much time she spends on the Internet, the social networks and such.”

  “I have the same argument with my assistant Valerie.” Edgar’s words elicited a sharp look from his wife.

  “Olivia’s computer,” I said, “is it still upstairs?”

  “No,” Emma said, “it’s gone. They took it. It was a top-of-the-line MacBook. They took that, her iPad, her iPhone, her iPod—everything they could get their filthy hands on.”

  “At least a couple of those items have locator applications,” I said.

  Edgar said, “We thought of that. We contacted Apple first thing. They told us that her computer, phone, and iPad have all been wiped clean. There’s no way to locate them.”

  “Do you have Olivia’s passwords? E-mail? Facebook? Twitter? Whatever else?”

  Emma shook her head.

  “You mind if I have a colleague attempt to crack them?” I said.

  “Of course not,” Edgar said. “So long as he’s discreet.”

  “She,” I corrected him. “And yes, she is very discreet.” I removed my BlackBerry from my pocket. “Before I place this call, tell me what else was taken.”

  “My jewelry,” Emma said. “A couple of Edgar’s Rolexes. The money from our safe.”

  “How much?”

  Edgar said, “About thirty thousand.”

  Emma turned to him. “That’s all that was in there?”

  He said, “I haven’t counted every bill recently, but yeah, that’s about right.”

  “You gave them the combination?” I said to Emma.

  “I offered it.”

  “They knew the combination, then?”

  “Either that, or Olivia gave it to them. We trust her completely. She has the combination in case of an emergency.”

  I nodded. “Anything else taken?”

  Edgar said, “My gun.”

  “This is the .38 you told me about over the phone?”

  “Yes.”

  To Emma, I said, “Edgar tells me you went for the gun when you heard the intruders entering.”

  Her jaw shifted.

  Her nostrils flared.

  Her emotions were rising to the surface again.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I wen
t to the closet in our bedroom, took the gun vault from the high shelf, and placed it on the bed. I entered the combination and removed the gun. Then I opened the bedroom door. And I saw—” She swallowed hard. “—them. They were running up the stairs toward me.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “What I’ve been taught to do,” she said. “I aimed dead center at the first man’s chest. But just as I squeezed the trigger, another man rushed out of my office and tackled me.”

  “So you got a shot off?” I was surprised Edgar hadn’t mentioned that to me.

  “I did. But because the other man tackled me, the shot went wide.”

  I stood, motioned to the staircase. “Show me where the bullet struck.”

  “That’s just it,” Edgar said. “She can’t.”

  “I heard the weapon fire,” she insisted. “I felt the recoil.”

  “Yet we’ve searched the entire house up and down,” Edgar said, shrugging. “There’s not a single bullet hole to be found.”

  Chapter 9

  Following an exhaustive back-and-forth, Edgar stood and held out his hands, palms up, facing me. “She was knocked to the ground and then knocked out a few seconds later.”

  Emma scoffed.

  He turned to her and said, “I’m not saying you’re lying, sweetheart. I just think it’s possible you’re mistaken.”

  I had a couple follow-up questions for Emma about the shot she was sure she’d fired, but I preferred to ask them outside Edgar’s presence.

  “All right,” I said. “Emma, would you put together a list of your daughter’s online accounts? E-mail addresses, Facebook profile, Twitter handle, and anything else you may know about.”

  She pushed herself off the sofa. “Of course.”

  “Edgar,” I said as she shuffled away, “tell me about the alarm system.”

  He shrugged. “Well, for one, it doesn’t work unless it’s turned on.”

  “Who would have been responsible for turning it on?”

  “With me away, Emma would’ve been responsible. Manny always asks before he leaves for the day, but we usually tell him we’ll take care of it.”