Designer Knockoff (45 page)
“Just like my place,” Trujillo said, and Lacey elbowed him in the ribs.
Upstairs were five spacious bedrooms and three bathrooms. Jeffrey explained that the servants’ quarters were situated over the three-car garage. They were occupied by a housekeeper and her husband, the groundskeeper and maintenance man. Jeffrey had given them the weekend off. The other employees lived off the grounds.
The door to the attic was at the far right end of the third-story hallway. They ascended the narrow attic stairs quietly, moving into a large open room. It had never been finished, but it was insulated. There were many stacks of boxes and rollaway dress racks. One corner was reserved for holiday decorations: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. There was also red, white, and blue bunting for the Fourth of July, or perhaps it was all merely set dressing for Bentley advertisements. Jeffrey said the house was seldom occupied. He visited on the occasional weekend when he wasn’t working.
They stopped en masse when they reached the trunks piled at the far end of the attic. They lifted rolls of old carpeting that had been stacked on top of them. As Jeffrey said, there were five, some larger than the others. All had been top-of-the-line steamer trunks in their day, leather wrapped and brass fitted, but now they were dark and dusty from neglect. Lacey thought of her own vintage trunk, which had been restored to its place of honor in her living room. It could have been a smaller sibling of these five trunks.
They started opening them one by one. All the trunks were locked, and Jeffrey had been unable to locate the keys. But not surprisingly Jeffrey, the builder, and O‘Leary, the former policeman, had a knack—and the proper tools—for lock picking. The first two trunks were soon efficiently broken into. One was full of family photos, keepsakes, and letters to Jeffrey’s grandmother. The second contained a cache of exquisite handmade baby clothes, perhaps Belinda’s when she was a little girl, and some later things that must have belonged to Jeffrey. He lingered over a small red cowboy hat and a pair of boots that looked like they might fit a child of three or four. He handed the hat to O’Leary.
“Ah, you made a darling little cowboy, Jeff,” O’Leary said.
The younger man grinned. To O’Leary he said, “Let’s start on the large dusty one over there.” He pointed out an old trunk with rusted hinges that looked as if no one had opened it for a long time.
The sound of an engine in the driveway drew Lacey to a small dormer window. She saw an impeccable blonde emerge from the driver’s seat of a champagne-colored Mercedes.
“Jeffrey, I believe your mother is here.”
“That’s very odd. She didn’t tell me she was coming.” He looked puzzled.
Lacey heard the front door open, heels clicking on the hardwood floor. “Jeffrey! Jeffrey, where are you?”
“I’d better see what she wants.” He rolled his eyes and then headed down the attic stairs.
In Jeffrey’s absence, Tony helped O’Leary pull the trunk away from the wall. The locks and hinges on this trunk were not so easily picked. There were three locks and they seemed to be rusted solid.
The soft murmur of voices became louder. An agitated Belinda was clattering up the stairs. She was awfully agile for someone in her seventies, Lacey thought.
“No, Jeffrey, get them out of here! They don’t belong here. What on earth were you thinking?” Belinda’s angry voice carried up to the attic.
Trujillo, O’Leary, and Lacey all exchanged a look. O’Leary shrugged. He put a large flathead screwdriver to the lock as Belinda opened the attic door and started up the attic stairs. After three flights she was breathing heavily now, and she came to a stop and stared at the whole group.
“Mother, calm down. I invited them,” Jeffrey said as he followed her up.
“You had no business doing that! All you people, please leave my home!”
“It is my house now,” Jeffrey said. “You have no right to speak to my guests that way.”
“Make them go!” Belinda cried. She saw Lacey. “You, you’re nothing but a troublemaker. Do you know what happens to troublemakers? They must be dealt with. And my family knows how to—”
O’Leary stepped between them, his face ruddy with anger. But Tony’s gleeful look merely said,
This is what we came for.
He looked ready to whip out his camera. Lacey knew Belinda, in her mid-seventies, was all bark. But she had plenty of bark left.
This is what we came for.
He looked ready to whip out his camera. Lacey knew Belinda, in her mid-seventies, was all bark. But she had plenty of bark left.
“What are you doing with the trunks?” Belinda demanded.
“We are opening all of them, Mother. It would help if you know where the keys are.” Belinda merely stared at the rusted trunk O’Leary had been trying to open. “We want to know about Gloria Adams.”
She turned on her son. “What do you need to know about her? Nothing! Nothing at all! She was going to ruin everything. There’s nothing else you need to know. Make them go, Jeffrey—now!”
The others were waiting for his sign. Belinda seemed to have run out of steam for the moment, and Jeffrey helped her sit down on the trunk full of her mother’s letters. Jeffrey nodded to O’Leary, who leaned hard on the screwdriver under the rusty hasp, and the trunk gave a groan of wood and metal.
“Not that one,” Belinda screamed, “you can’t open that one! I’ll tell you about Gloria Adams. She was a tramp!” She looked at her son, her eyes wild. “Gloria Adams was going to stop the wedding, Marilyn and your uncle Hugh’s wedding. Something had to be done.”
“Mother, let me take you downstairs.”
O’Leary leaned harder and pried off the first hasp with a loud pop. He started on the second. Lacey held her breath.
“She was going to ruin Hugh. I heard all of it; I was there. She said she was going to have his baby and he would have to marry her.” The words tumbled out of Belinda as if they’d been bottled up for a long, long time. “Marry her, she said. Marry her. When he told her that was ridiculous, she said at least she could destroy him.”
Lacey glanced over at Mike O’Leary. He was listening intently and nodding.
“Your aunt Marilyn walked into the room. She had come in on the train from Connecticut and she was there for their engagement picture to be taken.”
Lacey tensed at the mention of Marilyn’s name. Somehow part of her believed Hugh when he said he had really cared about Gloria, and Lacey always thought that perhaps Miss Hutton, the beautiful debutante, had played a part in this drama.
Belinda took a breath. “The photographer was supposed to arrive shortly. It was a big mess. I was her junior bridesmaid, did you know that? I had a beautiful dress of pink organdy and a matching picture hat. I carried a small bouquet of pink roses and lilies of the valley. I even had pink organdy gloves. But there was Gloria Adams, such cheap goods. That little tramp said she knew about the fabrics and the payoffs and the names to go with the black-market business that Hugh ran. He tried to calm her down; he said he would take care of her baby. She would have money, but he would have to send her away. He said it would be adopted and she could come back to work. But then she said if he took her baby away she would tell everybody who it was that really designed his new line of clothing. It was awful. They were all just running around the studio, shouting at each other. Gloria started tearing up Marilyn’s beautiful wedding gown. Marilyn was in tears; Hugh was frantic.” Belinda stood up again. “Someone had to take care of it, Jeffrey.”
Jeffrey pulled up an old leather club chair and helped Belinda sit down again. He knelt and took her hands. “Mother, if Hugh took care of it, we have to find out. It’s time we found out all of Uncle Hugh’s secrets.”
“Hugh? He didn’t take care of Gloria. I did.” Belinda looked over at O’Leary, who had just popped the middle lock open. “Please don’t let him do that.”
“How did you ‘take care’ of her?” Lacey asked.
But Belinda’s eyes were glued on the trunk. O‘Leary popped off the third hasp. The hinges were stiff, but he pried it up carefully. A layer of yellowed material was visible in the trunk. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Lacey and Trujillo stared, mesmerized, and Jeffrey hugged his mother tightly. There was silence. Only the whir of the attic fan could be heard, and a slight breeze disturbed the dust floating in the air. The stiffened material looked like pattern pieces stuck together. It rustled as O’Leary lifted the layers and then carefully pulled them back from what lay beneath.
There were several gasps, but not from the ex-cop, and not from Belinda, who knew what was there. Lacey felt her breath turn ragged as she watched. Her throat was so tight it ached, but she couldn’t pull her eyes away. Lying quietly in the trunk were the remains of a woman’s body.
The corpse was mostly bone and skin—its fluids had long ago soaked into its fabric wrappings, her clothes, scraps of silk, but it still had the wild curly black hair that had been Gloria’s trademark in life. She was tucked up on her side in the fetal position, and a stained silk sash was still tied around her neck. Her hands were reaching up for the sash. She wore a discolored smock, once blue, that identified her as a Bentley’s factory girl. Gloria Adams had not run off with a soldier, she had not gone to Europe to paint, nor had she met her end in some dark alley. She had never really left the Bentleys at all. And it was true that Hugh had known exactly where to get ahold of Gloria.
“Holy Jesus and Mary, Mother of God, this is an unholy mess,” O’Leary finally muttered in a low voice.
“She was going to ruin everything,” Belinda said. “I had to do something. Hugh tried to stop me, but I don’t think anything could have stopped me that day. I took the silk, and I twisted it and twisted it. Until it all stopped.” Finally exhausted, she sat back down in the club chair and said she needed something to drink.
O’Leary gently took Jeffrey by the arm and said he had to make some phone calls. He suggested that Jeffrey call the family attorneys. Belinda said he should call Hugh, because Hugh always knew what to do. Lacey knew that this was much worse than Jeffrey had imagined, but like a festering sore, the secret of his family was finally lanced. They had uncovered the dark heart of the Bentleys.
“Jeffrey, I’m so sorry,” Lacey said. She felt shaky and weak, and she was grateful when he came and put his arms around her.
“It’s not your fault.” Jeffrey looked at her clearly. “I’m sure your aunt Mimi would be proud of you. And Gloria too. And so am I. We wouldn’t be here if not for you.”
Lacey couldn’t help herself; she burst into tears and sobbed into his shoulder.
chapter 33
Lacey said later to Trujillo on the long drive back to Washington that she couldn’t understand why the Bentleys didn’t just dump the body in a landfill somewhere years ago. He pointed out that most killers screw up in disposing of the body—like Chevalier’s subcontractor. And if you’re a killer who happens by dumb luck to have gotten that part right, he said, you’re safer leaving it where it is rather than moving it.
But nobody knows why people do what they do,
Lacey thought. Maybe the Bentleys just thought that no one would ever think to look for Gloria there, in the picture-perfect farmhouse in the picture-perfect countryside. After all, everyone had assumed that if Gloria hadn’t simply run off, she was taken away in the night by some monster.
And we’re not monsters, are we? No, no, we’re the beautiful Bentleys.
But nobody knows why people do what they do,
Lacey thought. Maybe the Bentleys just thought that no one would ever think to look for Gloria there, in the picture-perfect farmhouse in the picture-perfect countryside. After all, everyone had assumed that if Gloria hadn’t simply run off, she was taken away in the night by some monster.
And we’re not monsters, are we? No, no, we’re the beautiful Bentleys.
In the weeks following the discovery of Gloria Adams’s body in the trunk in the attic, teams of lawyers swarmed around the Bentley family like worker bees supporting their queen. So far nothing official had been done, no charges had been filed, and they were all still free, as Lacey had predicted they would be. It would be months, perhaps years before anything like justice was served to Belinda Bentley Holmes. Perhaps never.
Senator Van Drizzen and his wife patched things up very publicly, and the charming, gum-popping psycho Doug Cable joined an unwary presidential campaign.
Chevalier, who turned out to have a lot of names, not just one, was happily telling the police in two states and the District every interesting story he knew about criminal conspiracies on the part of Hugh and Aaron Bentley. Trujillo and Lacey milked the story for several front pages and photo spreads, although Tony predicted privately that Hugh and Belinda would never be indicted, considering their age and their money. Aaron was another story, but he had put together a legal team that could stop a tank. Jeffrey resigned from the company and was on a retreat in a Franciscan monastery in Northern Virginia. It was really only a few miles from Lacey’s apartment, but she hadn’t seen him since the day in the attic. He seemed sad and distant on the phone, and she decided to let him call her, if he ever wanted to again.
Gloria Adams’s remains were finally released to the care of her family. Jeffrey quietly arranged to pay their funeral costs, much against the advice of the family’s attorneys.
With all the media attention on Gloria, the funeral in Falls Church was larger than expected. The reporters outnumbered the friends and family, and Lacey attended with Vic, who finally, he said, was free and clear of Steamboat Springs and his ex-wife. A small group from
The Eye Street Observer
was also on hand, including Mac and Trujillo. Wilhelmina and Annette Tremain were front and center, next to the polished wooden coffin, which was draped in a blanket of blue silk morning glories.
The Eye Street Observer
was also on hand, including Mac and Trujillo. Wilhelmina and Annette Tremain were front and center, next to the polished wooden coffin, which was draped in a blanket of blue silk morning glories.
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