by Nancy Warren
“Please. I want Tiffany back at school and seeing her friends again. Frankly, I want her far away from Dwayne, too.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Linda agreed. “Tiff’s in the shower. I’m just ordering some more product for the boys—”
“More product? Their dressing room won’t be big enough,” she said with utter admiration at her mother’s sales abilities.
Linda giggled. “I know. But they had no idea of proper skin care. I think they’re going to be a lot happier now. And, of course, the way they go through makeup, they are going to be great customers for life.”
Even the grimness of Buddy’s murder couldn’t stop her from feeling happy for her mom or from congratulating her.
“So, I’ll pack up, you come and get us, and we can go to Brent’s house and get Tiffany’s stuff, plus I can drop off the product for the boys.”
“Sounds good.”
“And how about you? Did Loretta Forstman like her product?”
Toni could still smell the mingled scents of Loretta and Dwayne. “I think she liked my ex-husband a whole lot better.”
“Oh, mercy, she was not.”
“Oh, mercy, she was so.”
Her mother’s voice changed and the volume went up. “Hi, Tiffany. I’m on the phone with your mom.” Toni heard mumbling coming from the phone and then Linda was back, her voice dropped back to almost a whisper. Guaranteed to grab Tiffany’s interest. “And don’t worry about that other thing. One of these days, DDD will get what’s coming to him.”
Before her mother could say another word, Toni said, “Okay, I’m on my way.”
She retrieved the car and drove back to the hotel. When she got there, Linda was still packing. Tiffany was staring at the TV, which she’d flipped to one of the music video stations. She scowled at her mother. “How come I have to go home?”
The fact that her daughter was complaining that she had to go home and not arguing that she shouldn’t be forced to told Toni that her daughter was really happy to be heading back home. But, naturally, she had to put on the front. It was expected.
So, Toni played her role as best she could. She put a hand on her hip, and said, “Because you’ve already missed too much school and I am putting my foot down. You’re dad agrees with me.” In fact, when she’d told him at the fast food place that she was taking Tiffany home he’d looked pretty relieved. He was clearly realizing that having a teenaged daughter in town was putting a crimp in his sex life.
“Fine.” She rose and slapped off the TV. “Is he going to be home?”
“I don’t think so. He was headed back to the Double Nugget last I heard. He wanted to rehearse a new song.”
“But I’ll get to say goodbye to him, right?”
“Yes. Sure. He’s going to come to the airport to say good-bye.” Even if she had to haul him out of Loretta’s bed and drag him there personally.
“I have to say good-bye to Brent, too. He’s at work still.”
“You can write him a note.”
“Really? Mother? A note?”
“Trust me, it’s more polite than email. Brent understands you have to get back to school. Everyone does.”
She dug out the notebook she carried everywhere. She flipped through, looking for a blank page to rip out and give to Tiff.
All her recent ideas were in there, a few lists of things she needed to accomplish as soon as she was back home, the notes she’d made about Grant Forstman’s murder, some jotted assignments for Tiffany.
The book fell open to the notes she’d jotted down when she’d last been able to have a conference call with her top team members. That had been the very day Dwayne Diamond had called her from out of a clear blue sky looking for money.
They’d both got more than they’d bargained for.
She wished all she had to worry about was making up some fun cards to improve morale. Instead she was trying to prove her ex-husband wasn’t a murderer while the real murderer had struck again.
She looked at the slogans.
“When I put on enough makeup I feel like I’m someone else.”
She felt as though pins were pricking every inch of her skin as she stared at those words.
“Mom? Mom!” Tiffany stood with her hand out. “Paper?”
Her brain was turning faster than one of those slot machines Linda was so fond of, patterns forming, reforming, so she couldn’t keep anything straight.
Finally, the whirring stopped and as though she had a readout in front of her, that might or might not pay out, she knew what she had to do.
“Honey, I just remembered, I’ve got to pick something up. Why don’t you help Grandma finish her packing? I’ll pick you up a nice note card that says thank you on it. A torn piece of notepaper isn’t the Diamond way.
Her daughter looked at her as though she was crazy, but that was how her daughter looked at her most of the time so Toni wasn’t worried. “Whatever.”
She went back and flipped the TV back on. She didn’t even notice that Toni palmed Brent’s house key, the one he’d lent her so she could come and go from his house.
What she needed to do now, she needed to do alone.
Please let me be wrong about this, Toni said to herself as she parked in front of Brent’s house. If anyone asked, she was here to pack up Tiffany’s belongings. She also had a little side business that she was keeping to herself.
She could be in and out in thirty minutes, before Brent or Dwayne returned home. Then she’d scoop up her mother and daughter and have them at the airport in plenty of time for their evening flight.
She might even be on that flight with them. Everything depended on whether her hunch was correct.
Toni rang the bell in case anyone was home, but the echo of the bell died away and no one came to the door. She used the key to let herself in and called out, “Anybody home?”
Nothing but silence greeted her.
She stepped in, closed the door behind her. She stood for a moment and listened. Nothing. She could smell the faintest hint of Lady Bianca face cream.
She walked through the empty rooms. At Dwayne’s bedroom she hesitated, then knocked on the closed door. No answer. She opened it and confirmed that he was out. His guitar was gone too, so presumably he was at the casino working on his act. Or crooning love songs to some woman, somewhere, who ought to know better.
She peeked next into the guest room where Tiff had been staying. Fortunately, most of Tiff’s stuff was at the hotel. What little was left would take her about ten minutes to pack.
She took a deep breath. The best way to get through a difficult task, she always told her new recruits, was to put a big smile on your face and power through it. That might work with cold calling and friendly fishing, but for what she was about to do, she thought she could forgo the big smile.
She pulled her cell phone out of her bag, clicked to camera mode. Headed to Brent’s bedroom. There was a part of her that felt truly bad invading Brent’s privacy this way, but she needed to know the truth.
Her footsteps were silent on the thick rug. She got to Brent’s door. Knocked.
Nothing.
She opened the door and called his name softly, but there was no answer. She could sense the emptiness in the room. With a quick pep talk to herself, she flipped on his bedroom light and stepped inside.
Her mother had told her that his bedroom made the living room appear tame, but she’d assumed Linda was exaggerating.
She hadn’t been.
Her first thought was of an ice palace. Everything was white and glittered. Huge mirrors, a white shag rug, a king sized bed with a white satin bedspread, a silver headboard and so many sequined pillows they made her eyes hurt.
The walls were pure white, the molding silver. Enormous black and white photographs dominated the white walls. A showgirl posing in the sixties she’d guess from the clothing worn by the patrons.
When she opened the double closet doors lights immediately illuminated the largest walk-in c
loset she had ever seen. A short rack on the left held the somewhat meager and entirely dull wardrobe of Brent Hodgkin, CPA.
Every other inch of space was devoted to Sunny. Gowns, headdresses, an entire mirrored dresser for wigs. Rack upon rack of shoes.
She smelled powder and the faint scent of perfume almost like an echo from an earlier time.
The gowns were luscious, glittering things, most of them carefully stored in individual garment bags.
Her heart was pounding and she felt a shiver of claustrophobia as she walked deeper into the closet.
Black. She only wanted to look at the black outfits.
His system wasn’t to put like colors together, but to assemble gowns that would be worn for similar purposes.
Over-the-top show gowns together. Evening gowns together. Street clothes, if any of it could be classified as street clothes, together.
She flipped rapidly through day wear, increasingly hopeful that she was wrong.
She began searching through evening wear, flipping rapidly through each outfit. The odd garment bag wasn’t transparent so, after she’d checked every outfit she could see, she started on the ones that needed to be unzipped to display their contents.
She found what she was looking for in the third bag. Carefully, she unzipped the fastening and was greeted by black silk. She drew the padded hanger off the rack and carried the bag out to the bedroom. She laid the bag on the bed and rapidly unzipped it all the way.
“No,” she cried softly when she’d revealed a silk jacket and pants that she recognized. “Oh, no.” Somewhere in that rack of wigs in the cupboard would be the one that so resembled Loretta and Suzie’s hairstyle. He’d been impersonating women for years. He’d done a superb job for the security camera.
Her hand was trembling as she raised her cell phone.
“I should have burned that, of course,” Brent’s voice said, just behind her.
With a tiny squeak of surprise mingled with panic, she turned to find Brent Hodgkin standing just inside the door to his bedroom, the one she’d so foolishly left wide open.
She fumbled with the phone.
He wore a brown suit with a tie the color of swamp mud paired with a cream shirt. His hair was neatly brushed, his brown loafers shone with recent polish. She could only imagine he kept the gun he was pointing at her in as tip-top condition.
“But the outfit was Mother’s. I could not bring myself to destroy it. She wore it for him, you know. That’s why I put it on that night. Sentiment, I suppose.”
“The night you killed him, you mean.”
Toni was fairly certain that the gun had killed not only Grant Forstman but also Buddy Olafson, the security guy who’d been in charge of video surveillance. Brent wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.
If she could drag this out, maybe she had a chance.
In spite of the fact that he was a cold-blooded murderer, she couldn’t help a stab of pity for Brent. “Grant Forstman was your father, wasn’t he?”
He nodded. “Don’t you think one bad thought about my mother. She wasn’t a loose woman. He was going to marry her. They were engaged. But he met somebody else and broke her heart.” His voice trembled ever so slightly. “She loved him.”
“Did he know about you?”
His lips compressed. “He gave her some money. Paid her off. But he refused to see her or me.” He shook his head. “My mother died of a broken heart, Toni. And I swore I’d avenge her death.”
“How did you find out about the secret elevator?”
He made a derisive sound. “Please. Suzie couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. She was so full of herself, becoming the next Mrs. Forstman, that she told me everything. It was so easy. All I had to do was get rid of the bodyguards and pretend to be her.”
“The food poisoning?”
“They eat like pigs. Easy enough to slip something in their food.”
“But only one of them got sick.”
“Didn’t matter. Forstman was so paranoid of getting sick that he stayed clear of Milo that whole day.”
She nodded, remembering what Dwayne had told her. “He sent him home early. But why did you set Dwayne up to take the rap?”
“Look, Toni, no offense to your ex-husband, but Dwayne set himself up. He stole from Forstman, was banging his wife, I figured I did him a favor. He was better off in jail than getting taken out by Forstman’s thugs. They’d have done it, too.”
“Taken out? You mean like –”
“Rubbed out, digging holes in the desert, erased, disappeared—”
“Okay, murdered. I get it.”
“Forstman wasn’t a good guy to tangle with and Dwayne was like a bug crawling under his raised boot. He was asking for trouble.”
It was twisted logic but she didn’t imagine most killers used straight logic or they would never kill in the first place. “So, you were doing Dwayne a favor?”
He shrugged. “We were doing each other a favor. Your ex was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and since Dwayne didn’t kill Forstman I figured there was a good chance he’d get off. Meanwhile, he was so convenient, on the scene, looking guiltier than sin. What was the incentive for the cops to search deeper?” He scowled. “Everything was going fine. Then you came along.”
“My daughter came along first.” And for that, if nothing else, she would never forgive Brent. He’d committed murder while her daughter was staying in his home. Worse, he’d set up his house guest’s father for the crime.
He seemed to feel mildly ashamed of himself. “Yeah. That timing was unfortunate. She’s a great kid.” He shrugged. “But she’s tough. She’ll be fine. And Linda will do a great job looking after her.”
Right, because he was planning to kill Toni, of course.
She needed to think, and she needed to think fast. This guy had killed not only once, he’d killed twice, the second time an innocent man who happened to be in the way. She knew he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.
Unless she could stop him.
Linda was a great mom and a great grandma, he was right. But Toni wasn’t ready to let her take over Tiff’s upbringing so some pathetic guy with an overdeveloped mommy complex could get away with murder.
“How did you get Grant Forstman to let you up?”
In a second, she watched Brent’s face soften and transform ever so slightly. He pushed out his lips, cocked a hip. “Honey? It’s me, and I’ve got a little itch I need my big boy to scratch.” The man was an incredible mimic. If she’d had her eyes closed she’d have believed Suzie was in the room.
“She does not really say things like that.”
“Oh, she does.” He seemed as nauseated as she was. “I’d been listening in on her calls to him.”
“And he said, ‘Come on up?’”
He pursed his lips, went back to being Brent. “I will not offend my mother’s memory by repeating his exact words, but yes. He pushed the button to let Suzie up to his office.”
“I bet he was surprised to see you.”
“I made very sure he understood exactly who I was and why I was there.”
“And then you killed him.”
“I did it for Mother.”
“And what about Buddy? He never hurt you. He didn’t deserve to die.”
He shook his head, looking peevish. “Buddy’s all on you. I didn’t have any problem with you trying to get Dwayne off the hook. Hey, he’s a friend of mine.”
She almost snorted her disbelief but held herself back. That gun had not wavered from pointing in the general direction of her chest. She didn’t want to irritate Brent enough that he’d pull the trigger.
“If you wanted to make Loretta look bad, I had no problem with that. She was a slut, anyway. I didn’t even think to get rid of the footage from the security cameras. That was sloppy of me. When Buddy spoke to you that night in the club, I realized how stupid I’d been. And I took care of it.”
He explained these things to her as though they were perfectly reas
onable. Like one of those math equations he’d helped Tiffany with. Step one leads inevitably to step two, and if this happens then that happens.
But Toni did not fit the pattern. “There is no way you can kill me and get away with it. You might as well give yourself up to the police. Honestly, Brent. Everybody will understand that you did what you thought was right for your mother.” And she glossed over about what everybody would think about him murdering an innocent man in cold blood whose only crime was possessing film that implicated Brent. “I already have the names of some good lawyers from when Dwayne was charged. But if you kill me, well, my boyfriend’s a cop. They won’t rest until you are put away for life.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Or worse.”
He smiled. As though she were one of his less bright clients and she was trying to tell him why her poodle sitter was a tax-deductible expense.
“Don’t worry. I’ll fix it all up nice and neat and tidy.”
Oh, this she really had to hear. “How?”
“Pick up your cell phone and call Dwayne.”
“Dwayne? Why would I call him?”
“Because he needs to come home. And when he does, you’re going to argue and tell him exactly why you know he murdered Grant Forstman. He’ll go psycho and kill you. Then, in remorse, he’ll kill himself.” He glanced at the firearm in his hand. “With this gun, of course.”
A shiver of pure dread slithered down her spine. Not that Brent would get away with his insane plan, but that by the time he was caught she and Dwayne would already be dead.
“Well, I’m not going to call Dwayne.”
He looked for a second as though he was going to shoot her now and figure out the rest later. A spark of pure crazy flashed in his eyes, and she took a step back until she bumped the bed with the back of her knees.
Come on, Toni. She had to think of something.
“Give me your phone.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll shoot you in the leg. I’m a very good shot. I’ve been practicing for a long time.”
Damn. She picked up the phone. Clicked a button. She tossed it, harder than necessary and in the direction of his face. All she needed was a moment of inattention, for him to jerk back or have to pick up the phone from the floor.
