by Sandra Brown
“No. At least not to my knowledge. But her brother is a convict.”
Cassidy had uncovered that in his preliminary investigation. “According to prison records, Ariel hasn’t had any contact with her brother for years, not even a postcard. I doubt he could have procured a weapon for her without somebody finding out.”
Josh shrugged. “That was just a guess. She could have gotten a gun on the sly and disposed of it where it wouldn’t be found.”
“Maybe,” Cassidy said noncommittally.
“Think of the wounds. A man gets a woman pregnant. She’s furious with him for saddling her with an unwanted child. She shoots his balls off. Doesn’t that make sense?”
Cassidy squinted one eye as though considering the viability of the hypothesis. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I have to tell you, Josh, it’s shallow.”
“I thought you’d be more excited,” he said morosely.
“When she left your suite that night, was Ariel wearing shoes?”
“Shoes? No. She was barefoot, I think. She had taken off her shoes when we made love. I don’t think she put them back on. Why?”
“We’re still checking on some carpet fibers found in your father’s bedroom.” He paused for a moment. “Did either you or Ariel rent a car while you were here?”
“I did. I like having my own transportation.”
“You drove around New Orleans?”
“Plenty. Every day. I rented a convertible and enjoyed driving with the top down.”
That information could easily be checked out. “Did Ariel ever accompany you on these drives?”
“Once, I think. Twice maybe. Why?”
“Are you still sleeping with her?”
“No. Not for weeks now.”
“What happened?”
Josh glanced up at him, then away. “I don’t know. She got so carried away with being the leader of the ministry, there never seemed to be time. Or she’d be tired and cranky. Or I’d fuss at her about throwing up and she’d get mad. Now that I know about the baby…”
“What?”
“Well, I wouldn’t feel right making love to her while she’s carrying my stepbrother.”
Cassidy leaned forward. “Do you see the irony in that, Josh? It was okay to screw your father’s wife while he was alive, but now that he’s dead and she’s pregnant with his baby, you’ve gone squeamish.”
Josh turned defensive. “That’s how I feel.”
“Okay.” Cassidy leaned back in his chair. “For the moment, let’s pretend it happened like this. Ready? Ariel left your company, returned to the suite she shared with your father, killed him with a gun no one knew she possessed and which hasn’t been recovered, then came back for round two in bed with you, correctly assuming that you’d be her alibi.”
“That’s how I see it.”
Cassidy smacked his lips with consternation. “What I’m having trouble with is your motivation for telling me this now.”
“The lie has been on my conscience.”
“Conscience?” Cassidy repeated skeptically.
Again, Josh took umbrage. “I might be an adulterer. I admit to cuckolding my own father. But I’m not going to share a murder rap with Ariel.”
Indecisively, he gnawed on his lower lip. “Okay, it’s more than conscience, Mr. Cassidy. You might not believe this, but I’m afraid of her.”
Cassidy snorted.
Josh exclaimed, “It’s true. Before all this, I knew she was ambitious and shrewd, but she’s gone way overboard. She’s ruthless. Mean. She stops at nothing to get her way. If somebody crosses her over the least little thing, she fires him. No mercy. No discussion. Zap,” he said, smacking his fist against his opposite palm. “He’s expunged.”
He stared down at his shaky hands. “It’s as though I’ve had blinders on. Maybe I was so focused on my father, I didn’t see Ariel as she really is until now. I think she’s capable of doing just about anything to protect her interests. I think she’s unbalanced. Dangerously unbalanced.”
Cassidy subjected him to a long, thoughtful stare, then stood, signaling an end to the interview. “Thanks, Josh.” He extended his right hand. The young man shook it, looking bewildered.
“That’s it? I thought you’d have a million questions to ask me.”
“There’ll be plenty later. I’m going to work on this immediately. In the meantime, act normally around your stepmother. Go about your business as usual. Don’t do or say anything that might tip her that you’ve been to see me. Let her continue thinking that I eliminated her as a suspect weeks ago.” Cassidy looked at Josh solemnly. “I know this wasn’t easy for you.”
“No, it wasn’t. For years Ariel and I took refuge from my father in each other. I guess you could say we were codependent. We shared a common misery and relied on each other to make it bearable. Since his death, we haven’t needed each other to exact petty revenge. Hating him was the only attraction that had drawn us together.
“I believe that Ariel has serious psychological problems that date back to her impoverished childhood. I get mad at her, but mostly I fear her. Still,” he added, shaking his head sadly, “I can’t let her get away with murder.”
“Josh, because of your longstanding affair with Ariel, I have to know—would you be able to testify against her in court?”
Without a moment’s hesitation Josh replied, “Yes.”
They said their goodbyes. Josh had no sooner left his office than Cassidy pulled on his suit jacket and straightened his tie. As soon as he’d given Josh enough time to leave the building, he took the elevator up to the next floor and headed for Anthony Crowder’s office. He didn’t heed the secretary’s warning that Crowder was terribly busy and had asked not to be disturbed. With a confidence he hadn’t felt in days, he barged in unannounced.
“Before you start shouting at me, listen. I think I know who killed Jackson Wilde.”
Crowder tossed down the ballpoint pen he’d been using. “Well?”
“His son.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Practically verbatim, Cassidy repeated his conversation with Joshua Wilde. When he finished, Crowder stopped drumming his fingers. “I’m confused. You said you thought the son was the culprit, but he’s claiming it’s the widow.”
“Out of pique. Tattling is a coward’s way of getting even, and Josh has a yellow streak a yard wide down his back.”
“Then where’d he get the courage to kill his father?”
“He caught Wilde at his most vulnerable. Naked. Lying on his back. Possibly even asleep. Josh knew his father’s habits. He knew when to attack. Which would also apply to Ariel, for that matter,” Cassidy mumbled as an afterthought. “Anyway, Josh shot Wilde in the balls to throw us off, to make it look like a woman had killed him. He even reminded me of that when we talked.”
Crowder folded his meaty hands beneath his chin and ruminated on it a moment. “Why would Josh want his father dead? Jealousy?”
“Possibly. If Ariel’s baby is his father’s, as she claims. But I believe he had a stronger motivation.”
“Stronger than jealousy? Money?”
“Not directly. No doubt Josh had a hankering to take over the ministry when his old man was no longer around. He figured he was heir apparent to the spotlight. For a young man who had been his father’s apprentice, who had always lived in his giant shadow, that would be a reasonable ambition.”
“Instead, Ariel seizes control.”
“With both hands. Just as before, Josh is in the background. He’s still second banana. But discounting the ministry as a factor, there’s the personal one.”
“Which is?”
“Josh admitted to me that Jackson Wilde was a tyrant who psychologically abused both of them. He had been Jackson’s whipping boy all his adult life. He finally had had it up to here. So he gathered his meager courage and disposed of his old man, only to have his stepmother and lover elbow in and overshadow him. Talk about frustrating.”
“He traded o
ne despot for another.”
“Right. To get rid of her, he makes her out the killer. Or maybe…” Now that he had opened a new channel of thought, other possibilities came to mind. “Maybe they plotted together to off Jackson. Then, for the reasons I cited before, Josh has turned into Judas.”
“Sounds feasible either way. Have you discussed it with Glenn?”
“Not yet, but he’ll do backsprings. He figured all along it was either Ariel or Josh. He’ll want to put them under a microscope and probe until we know them inside out. I’d like to put tails on them.”
“The P.C. will shit if you ask for more men.”
“You gave me until the end of the week, Tony. Play fair. Help us out. Run interference with the commissioner.”
Cassidy returned to his office feeling as though he’d had an internal battery recharged. For the first time in days, adrenaline was coursing through his veins. He had a purpose, a new plan of attack. He would stay with it until he’d exhausted all possibilities, as well as himself.
The first thing he did was make a series of telephone calls.
There was no need for Cassidy to identify himself on the first call. He simply asked, “Are you still feeding info to that TV reporter?”
The informant system was a two-way street. The D.A.’s office used the same sources as the media, sometimes transmitting information that, like a pistol firing blanks, was loaded with half-facts and innuendos that were intentionally misleading.
Cassidy said, “I had a lengthy and private conversation with Joshua Wilde this afternoon. He left my office looking angry and upset. That’s it for now.”
He dispatched a clerk to check all the car-leasing agencies in the city. “Find the one that leased a car to Joshua Wilde during the week of his father’s murder. I want to know the make and model he rented, the mileage he put on it, and the condition it was in when he dropped it off. If it was a Chrysler product with blue carpet, I want the car chased down and taken immediately to the police lab. Thanks.” Perhaps the lab boys would find a speck of dried blood that would turn out to be Jackson Wilde’s and—bingo!—he’d have a bona fide suspect.
“This’ll be the easiest stakeout ever,” Cassidy told the police lieutenant who had been placed in charge of the surveillance team Crowder had weaseled out of the commissioner. “Joshua and Ariel Wilde are more visible than drag queens on Bourbon Street. They can’t possibly give you the slip.”
Once those responsibilities had been delegated, Cassidy sat back in his chair and sighed with a heightened sense of optimism. Something was bound to turn up. A piece of previously undisclosed evidence would point the accusing finger at either Josh or Ariel and away from Claire.
He had tried not to think about her since their bitter quarrel at Rosesharon, but to no avail. She remained uppermost in his mind—her body, her sweet lovemaking, and her angry allegations.
It was as if she had opened the closet of his soul and found the skeleton there, and she couldn’t have rattled the bones of it any louder. She had accused him of deceit and manipulation. At one time that might have been true. As a defense attorney, he’d exercised whatever means were necessary to get an acquittal. He’d used theatrics, tears, laughter, scorn, whatever it took to have his clients walk from the courtroom cleared of all charges.
If his conscience ever pricked him, he justified his actions. Defending criminals was his duty, wasn’t it? Even felons deserved their day in court. Somebody had to plead their cases before the judge and jury, so why not him? He was only doing his job, he told himself.
He had known those were justifications. There were ethical and reasonable ways to defend an accused without resorting to courtroom tricks, which he’d often used for no reason other than to show off.
Look at me, clever Robert Cassidy, the boy wonder who didn’t go to an Ivy League prep school and didn’t earn his law degree at Harvard. Turned out pretty damn well for a boy from rural Kentucky, didn’t he?
Winning had been his ultimate goal, not seeking justice… until that one case he’d won, and the stakes had been far too high. When Claire had accused him of deceit and manipulation, she didn’t know how close she was to being right about him, as he’d once been. But not as he was now. He brought the bad guys to justice and put them away where they could no longer hurt innocent people.
This case was no exception. He would go the distance to see that justice was done for whomever was found guilty by a jury of his peers of the murder of Jackson Wilde.
God help him if that person turned out to be Claire Laurent.
But it wouldn’t, he told himself stubbornly. She was innocent. No woman who was that warm and giving in bed could have killed in cold blood. He’d touched not only her lips, and breasts, and thighs, and belly. He’d touched her soul. If it was poisoned, he would have known it.
But, contrary to what she believed, determining her guilt or innocence wasn’t the reason he’d slept with her. That had been as inevitable as the tide. From the day they’d met, that part of their fate had been sealed.
As soon as she was vindicated, he’d go to her and humbly apologize for having put her through this awful ordeal. After all, she couldn’t respect him if he didn’t take his job as a public prosecutor seriously. Once they had apologized for their misgivings about each other, they’d make love again.
The thought stirred him physically, bringing him back into the present. Claire would be home from Mississippi by now. He stared at his desk telephone, tempted to call her. But no. She would still be angry. Best to give her a few more days to cool off.
In the meantime, he would dig diligently, looking for the missing element that would confirm someone else’s guilt and exonerate Claire.
She was innocent.
Claire frowned at the unopened mail stacked in piles on her desk. There were bills to pay, memos to sort through, and a menacing envelope from the IRS to open. She lacked the energy to tackle the paperwork and attributed her ennui to the trip. She had worked very hard, on a rigid schedule, in oppressive, muggy heat. She needed and deserved a few days’ rest before resuming her work. Then she realized that a few days’ rest wasn’t going to remedy her problem.
She warded off the depressing thought and pulled her mind back to the mess on her desk. In addition to the unopened mail were recent editions of the newspaper. According to an unidentified but reliable source, Assistant District Attorney Cassidy was readjusting his investigation to focus on Ariel and Joshua Wilde.
His name, printed in bold face type, captured her attention, and she stared at it until she lost track of time. In all likelihood she would have continued staring and remembering if her mother hadn’t interrupted, appearing at her door carrying a tray.
“Would you like some tea, Claire Louise? You’ve looked so tired lately, I thought it might help perk you up.”
“Thank you, Mama. That sounds wonderful. But only if you’ll stay and share it.”
“I was hoping you’d ask.”
Claire smiled and, taking one of the newspapers with her, moved to the sitting area where she had first entertained Cassidy. It seemed that everything she said or did reminded her of him. She resented his intrusive power over her mind. He hadn’t called or made any attempt to see her since the morning he’d left Rosesharon without a goodbye. She didn’t know whether to be relieved, heartbroken, insulted, or a combination of the three.
Thoughts of him evoked every emotion she was acquainted with; some were blissful to experience, some miserable. She would catch herself grinning demurely, then in the next moment be on the verge of tears. Not since the social workers had dragged her from Aunt Laurel’s house had anyone wielded that much power over her.
Mary Catherine set the silver service tray on the low coffee table. She passed Claire a hand-embroidered linen napkin, then poured them each a cup of fragrant tea from a china pot.
They chatted about inconsequential matters while they sipped their tea and nibbled on tea cakes Mary Catherine and Harry had baked that m
orning. The trip to Mississippi had been good for Mary Catherine. Claire noticed a healthy rosiness in her mother’s cheeks that subtracted years from her appearance. Her eyes were clear and animated. They didn’t have the vacancy that had always alarmed her, even as a child, because she recognized it as a harbinger of a “spell.” Mary Catherine seemed more in tune with her surroundings. To Claire’s knowledge, she hadn’t had another lapse since taking Cassidy’s fountain pen.
As though reading Claire’s mind, she said, “I see you were reading the newspapers. It says Mr. Cassidy now believes that Jackson Wilde’s son or widow killed him. Isn’t that silly?”
“Silly?”
“They didn’t do it. And I don’t believe Mr. Cassidy thinks so either.”
“How do you know they didn’t do it, Mama?”
Ignoring the question, Mary Catherine asked one of her own. “And why are those people picketing in front of our building again?” Picket-toting Wilde disciples had kept vigil in front of French Silk since their return to the city.
“I wish they’d go away,” Mary Catherine said with vexation. “It’s difficult for Harry and me to go to the market in the mornings. I enjoy our outings, but having to get through that crowd ruins them.”
To Mary Catherine’s mind, the inability to get to the French Market without a hassle was more worrisome than having her daughter accused of murder. But that wasn’t as disturbing to Claire as her mother’s previous statements. “The pickets are a temporary inconvenience, Mama. Once they arrest somebody for killing Reverend Wilde, they will disband.”
“Will he ever come back?”
For one heart-stopping instant, Claire thought she referred to Jackson Wilde. “Who, Mama?” she asked hoarsely.
“Mr. Cassidy.”
Claire’s shoulders relaxed as she slowly exhaled. “I don’t know. Why?”
Tears suddenly welled up in Mary Catherine’s eyes. Her lower lip began to tremble. “I was so hoping that when you fell in love, your young man wouldn’t disappoint you like mine did me.”
She removed a monogrammed handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt. The linen was so sheer that it appeared to have been spun rather than woven. It smelled like the rose-scented sachets she kept in her bureau drawers.
