Beyond Suspicion (32 page)

•

The message on his answering machine was short and matter-of-fact. Cindy wanted to meet for lunch.

It was their first direct communication in six months, since the shoot-out in their house. Cindy had refused to let him visit in the hospital, and after her discharge they’d separated on the advice of her therapist. From that point forward, Jack’s only way to contact his wife was through professionals, either her psychiatrist or her lawyer.

The blame game was deadly, but Jack found it easy to count up any number of reasons she might hate him for life. Her mother was a biggie. She’d pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, a plea bargain on a slam-bang case of murder in the first degree that at least allowed her to avoid the death penalty. And of course there was the irresolvable Jessie problem. Cindy was never going to believe that nothing had been going on between them. In truth, it didn’t matter anymore.

Jack was through blaming himself.

He waited at a wrought-iron table beneath a broad Cinzano umbrella. It was a humid, sticky afternoon on South Beach, typical of late summer in the tropics. This particular café was one they’d never visited together, and he suspected that was precisely the reason Cindy had chosen it. No memories, no history, no ghosts.

“Hello, Jack,” she said as she approached the table.

“Hi.” Jack rose and instinctively helped with her chair. She got it herself and sat across from him, no kiss, no handshake.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“No problem. How have you been?”

“Fine. You?”

“As good as can be expected.”

The waiter came. Cindy ordered a sparkling water. Jack ordered another bourbon.

“Pretty early in the day for you, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Not necessarily. I haven’t slept since I got your message last night, so I’m not really sure what time of day it is.”

“Sorry.”

“Me, too. About a lot of things.”

She looked away, seeming to focus on nothing in particular. A pack of sweaty joggers plodded by on the sidewalk. A loud Latin beat boomed from the back of a passing SUV on Ocean Drive.

“Have you found your son yet?”

Jack coughed into his drink. He’d suspected that might come up, but not right out of the starting blocks. “Uh, no.”

“Are you looking?”

“No. No reason to look.”

“What about the money? Jessie left the entire million and a half dollars to her son, if you can find him.”

“To be honest, I’m not much interested in trying to funnel stolen money to a child who’s probably perfectly happy not knowing me or his biological mother.”

“But what’s the alternative? Give it back to the Russian mob?”

“If I have any say, it’ll go to the relatives of people like Jody Falder, and anyone else Yuri and his pack of viatical investors eliminated in order to cash in on their investments.”

“That’s probably as it should be.”

“In due time. But at the moment, Dr. Marsh’s widow is trying to prove that half of that loot is hers. She’s suing Clara Pierce for fraud and mismanagement of Jessie’s estate. I’m content to let those two tear each other to shreds before I take a stand.”

“Good for you.”

“Yeah. I guess it is.”

Cindy squeezed the lemon wedge into her water. A breeze blew in from the Atlantic and sent their napkins sailing. They reached across the table to grab the same one. Their hands touched, their eyes met and held.

“Jack, there’s something I want to say.”

He released the napkin, broke the contact. “Tell me.”

“That day in the house, when I had the gun. I said some things to you.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“Yes, I do. I said some very harsh things. And I want you to know that part of me will always love you. But those things I said. Some of them…”

“Cindy, please.”

“It really is the way I feel.”

He felt as though he should have been devastated, but he wasn’t. “I know that.”

“You know?”

“Yes. For years, your mother held such obvious hatred for me. I always wondered, why can’t Evelyn put this all behind her, especially since her own daughter has forgiven me for what happened with Esteban? But now I know: You never really did forgive me, either.”

“I tried. I wanted to. I’ve thought about this so much.”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too. And as much as I loved you at one time…”

“You stopped loving me.”

“No. It’s not that. It’s just that it wasn’t love that was keeping us together. When you get right down to it, I think you stayed in this marriage because you were too afraid to be alone. Or worse, afraid of spending the rest of your life living with your mother.”

“And why did you stay?”

Jack struggled, wondering if some things were better left unsaid.

She answered for him. “You stayed because you felt guilty about what happened with Esteban.”

Jack lowered his eyes, but he didn’t argue. “Somehow I thought that if we worked long and hard enough, things would get back to where they were. Before Esteban.”

“That’s fairy tales, Jack. It doesn’t usually work that way in real life.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“You know, I used to think that people who bailed out on a marriage were just quitters. But that’s not true. Sometimes, the so-called quitters are really idealists. They know there’s something better out there for them, and they have the courage to go out and look for it.”

“You’re ready for that?”

“After all these years together, I think the one thing we owe each other is honesty. Since we’ve been apart, I haven’t had a single nightmare.”

“What does that tell you?”

“The nightmares will never go away. Not unless…”

“Unless I go away,” he said.

“I’m not trying to say it’s anyone’s fault. It’s just the way it is. Can you understand that?”

“I more than understand. I agree.”

She gave a weak smile, as if relieved to see that he wasn’t going to put up a fight. “That’s all I wanted to say,” she said.

“So, this is it?”

She nodded. “I should go.”

She rose, but he didn’t.

“Cindy?”

She stopped and looked at him. “Yes?”

“There’s one thing I need to know.”

“What is it?”

“Did you think something was going on between me and Jessie even before she called and told you there was?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“For months now, I’ve been trying to put a timeline together in my head. As best I can figure, Jessie came to me and said that the viatical investors found out that she’d scammed them and were out to kill her. Then, after I didn’t help her, she called you and said we were having an affair.”

“That’s right.”

“So, I just wonder: How did the viatical investors find out Jessie had scammed them?”

“Someone obviously told them.”

“Yeah, but who?”

“Could have been anyone.”

“Not really. There aren’t that many possibilities. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Jessie. It wasn’t Dr. Marsh. Just makes me stop and think: Maybe it was someone I confided in.”

She showed almost no reaction, just a subtle rise of the left eyebrow. “That’s something you may never know,” she said, then turned and started away.

He downed his drink and took solace in the knowledge that he had a little something to counterbalance it all. In a way, it was Cindy who’d started the whole Jessie mess.

“Cindy,” he called again.

She stopped, this time seeming a little annoyed. “What now?”

“There’s something else that’s bothering me.”

“If you’ve got something to say, just say it.”

“All right, I will. This is going to sound weird, because your mother has confessed and is sitting in jail. But the idea that she killed Jessie doesn’t ring completely true to me.”

She made a face, incredulous. “What?”

“Maybe it’s because I’m a criminal lawyer, but motives are a bit of an obsession for me. Your mother’s don’t quite add up in my mind. What she wanted more than anything was for you to find the courage to leave me. Killing Jessie wouldn’t necessarily have accomplished that. But your finding her passed out naked in our bathtub might.”

Cindy didn’t answer.

“Is that how you found her, Cindy? After your mother went to our house and forced her to drink so much that she passed out, was Jessie still alive?”

She flinched a little, virtually unnoticeable to anyone who didn’t know her as well as Jack did. But he definitely caught it.

She said, “What about the angle of the cut on her wrist? That was your whole theory, that someone who was left-handed cut her wrist to make it look like suicide.”

“That sounded like a neat idea at the time. But the angle wasn’t that pronounced. I was having second thoughts about it even before I accused your mother, when Rosa and I talked that morning before Katrina showed up at our house. The medical examiner didn’t put any stock in it at all. Your mother wouldn’t have spent a day in jail without a confession.”

“But there was still an angle, and my mother is left-handed.”

“It isn’t foolproof. The killer could have been in a hurry. Maybe she was even enraged, filled with jealousy. There’s no telling what angle the slash might take in those circumstances.”

“Exactly what is it you’re trying to say, Jack?”

“It’s an idea that’s been floating around in my head the last six months. I’m just trying to go back in time, trying to understand the mind-set. For your own good, your mother is desperate for you to find the courage to leave me and start a new life with no nightmares, no reminders of Esteban. She’s so desperate that she finally does something that she hopes will utterly shock you. Instead of shocking you into leaving me, she pushes you into a crime of passion. At the end of the day, she takes the rap for Jessie’s murder. After all, it was her plan that went awry.”

“So who do you think slashed up our wedding photos? Me?”

“No. That was definitely your mother’s work. But she was hoping you’d think it was Jessie who’d done it. Mom’s way of making you feel a little less guilty about having killed my old girlfriend.”

“Do you really believe my mother would do this for me?”

“You
were
the ‘good’ daughter, weren’t you? The one who protected her husband’s fine reputation long after your sister revealed the truth about him.”

Her glare was ice-cold.

He looked into her eyes, searching. There was a time when he could have looked straight into her soul, but this time he saw nothing.

Finally, she answered. “Like I said before, Jack. Sometimes in life you just never know.”

He stared at her, waiting for some sign of remorse.

“I deserve to know,” he said.

“And I at least deserved a husband who played by the rules.”

“Funny. Those were the exact words Jessie used to describe our marriage. Playing by the rules.”

“How ’bout that.”

“Yeah. How ’bout that.”

“Good-bye, Jack.”

He watched her turn and walk away. He kept a beat on the back of her head as she flowed with the crowd along the sidewalk. She was a half-block away when she disappeared amid the sea of bobbing and weaving pedestrians. He spotted her once more, then lost sight of her. For good.

•

It was Saturday night, and Jack escaped to Tobacco Road. When it came to broken spirits, there was no better salve than a dark club with live music and bartender who’d never been stumped by a customer’s request for a cocktail. The really beautiful thing about the Road was the lack of beauty-no glitz, no palm trees at the door, no neon lights of South Beach. It was just a great bar by the river that catered to everyone from Brickell Avenue bankers to the likes of Theo Knight.

“Hey, Jacko, you came.” Theo threw his arms around him, practically wrestled him off his bar stool.

“Of course I came. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Possibly because the only thing worse than having no date on a Saturday night is watching your old pal Theo blow on his saxophone and fight off hordes of groupies.”

Jack looked around, spotted a woman at a table who looked as though she’d been there since last weekend. “I can live with it.”

Theo laughed, then turned serious. “How you been, man?”

“Okay.”

“Hey, I hear Benno Jancowitz is leaving the state attorney’s office.”

“I heard the same thing,” said Jack. “Guess he got tired of prosecuting parking tickets.”

“That blowhard deserved a demotion. I mean, it’s one thing to go after the son of a beloved former governor. But if you’re gonna indict an upstanding character like Theo Knight, you better be damn sure you’re right.”

Jack chuckled, though evidently not hard enough to suit Theo.

“You sure you okay, Jacko?”

“Fine.”

He laid a huge hand on Jack’s shoulder, as if to console. “Sorry about you and Cindy, man.”

“Don’t be. It was over for a long time. Now it’s just official.”

Theo gave a nod, as if promising never to bring it up again, then ordered himself a club soda. “Hey, there’s someone I want you to see.”

“Please, don’t start setting me up already. I just want to have a couple drinks and listen to music. When’s your set starting?”

“Five minutes. But I’m serious. I got someone who’s dying to talk to you.”

He was about to protest, but Theo had already signaled to the other side of the bar. Two women started through the crowd, and at least from a distance it appeared that his friend Theo was doing him quite the favor. One was wearing black leather pants and a fitted red blouse, and Jack wasn’t the only man watching her cross the room. The other was equally striking. He was beginning to think that this single life wasn’t going to be such a bad thing, until he got a good look at the tall brunette. Not that she wasn’t attractive. He was simply taken aback.

“Katrina?”

“Hello, Jack.”

Last Jack had heard, Katrina had helped the feds piece together computer records from Viatical Solutions, Inc., and identify more than a dozen
Mafiya
-controlled viatical companies, thereby preventing any further suspicious deaths and expedited payoffs. With both Yuri and Vladimir dead, however, the focus of the overall money-laundering investigation had shifted elsewhere, taking Katrina off the hook. It was evident to Jack that she’d resolved to return to a normal life.