Reilly 04 - Breach of Promise (43 page)

“He’s right here.”

“Put him on.”

“Why?” asked Sandy.

“I have some work for him.”

The phone must have flown to Wish, because he answered only a second later. “How,” said Wish, “Chief Wish Whitefeather here,” and that greeting was followed by a thumping noise, then an “Ouch.” Sandy’s son had a sense of humor about being Native American his mother apparently didn’t appreciate.

“So you’re a chief now,” said Paul. “Too important for me to corner you for a couple of hours for a project I’m working on?”

“I’ll check my calendar.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” said Wish, hurt. “I’m taking classes at night, you know. Police administration.”

“Oh. Sorry,” said Paul.

“When do you need me?”

“Today, possibly into tomorrow.”

“What are we doing?”

“Interviews.”

“You running the show?”

“Nope. You’ve been promoted from assistant to detective-in-training.”

“Outstanding! But . . . how will I know what to ask? Are you going to fill me in on what’s going on?”

Paul did.

“Okay, let me see if I have this straight. You think someone put something into the Chinese food this juror ate right before he tossed in his chopsticks.”

“Yeah, someone out for a puff, or a stretch. Someone went out there and took care of our friend Clifford Wright.”

“How do you know that’s what happened?” asked Wish, sounding dubious. “I never heard anything about him being killed by someone.”

“I don’t know it. Yet. It’s just a hunch.”

“Oh,” said Wish.

“I spoke very briefly with one of the jurors this morning already, Grace Whipple. She said the bailiff brought lunch in a little late, at about twelve-fifteen. They jumped on that food like prisoners of war. Said it was a real high point in a nasty morning. They had all probably been thinking about it for at least an hour. Nobody could have fiddled with anything in full view of the rest of the jury under those circumstances.”

“So you think it happened when the food was out in the hall for about fifteen minutes after it arrived, before anyone ate, and all the jurors were coming and going.”

“Well, it was outside the anteroom in a private hall that leads to the clerk’s offices and the judge’s chambers. That hall is locked. You have to have business with the court, or work there, to get in.”

“So you think it was one of the jurors.”

“If anyone. Only they knew what was happening in that jury room. At this point, I don’t know anyone did anything. I’m just intrigued.”

“Do you really think someone planned to kill this guy by giving him an allergy attack?”

“Not really. It’s more likely, if this actually is the case, someone got angry, saw an opportunity, and grabbed it without knowing how serious the consequences might be. Maybe they just thought it would temporarily put him out of commission.”

“Where would they get the peanuts?”

“Apparently, most of them brought snacks.”

“I really don’t get this.”

“What?”

“Nina won the case. Why does she care about that juror?”

“She told me to go ahead and check it out, Wish.” Paul had known she would. Ultimately, the truth was too important to Nina, even when it might work against her. “She doesn’t expect us to find anything.”

“But if one of the other jurors offed him, Nina’s verdict will get put aside, won’t it?”

“We’re a long way from that happening, Wish. Right now, our role is to gather information, not to worry about what might happen.”

“Okay. Who do I go see?”

Paul decided to assign Wish the bulk of the jurors, those who had supported Mike in the beginning, and those who had been persuaded by Cliff to go with Mike later, according to exit interviews conducted by the media, which had pounced on the jury after the verdict. They would have less cause to want to harm him. Paul would take the ones that opposed Wright—Diane, Mrs. Lim, Courtney, and maybe Sonny. And then he might want to talk with Lindy. She had the most to gain, although how she could know what was happening in the jury room was a problem, unless she had a confederate.

“So I need your help on two fronts. Before anything else, the first thing I want is, I need you to . . . um“—some of this was tricky; he didn’t want Wish to break any ethical rules to get him what he needed, but it was the lazy way and the sensible way to keep this investigation short—”get me the jury’s addresses, phone numbers, everything. Nina will cooperate on that front.”

“Easy!” said Wish enthusiastically. “I’m sure we’ve got a list right here somewhere.”

“Good, good. And then“—now here came the important part, the part Nina might not embrace so eagerly—”if you come across anything relevant, of course . . .”

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” said Wish. “Of course, I can’t bring you anything really private.”

“Of course not,” said Paul, hoping nevertheless that Wish might, in his helpful innocence, stumble on something useful.

“I won’t let your faith in me down,” said Wish.

“Who taught you to talk like that?” Paul asked.

“That would be me,” said Sandy. “Just a little motherly advice. And there’s more. Find yourself another flunky.”

“You just eavesdropped on a private conversation between me and your son,” said Paul. “Nina won’t like hearing that.”

“He’s underage. And I’ll tell you what Nina won’t like. Nina won’t like you using my son to weasel your way into our private files.”

“That’s insulting,” said Paul. “Wish would never do that and neither would I. Besides, Nina wants this investigation to be over as much as I do. She won’t mind us getting what we need quickly and efficiently, and getting on with it.”

“Really?” said Sandy. “Hang on while I ask her about that.”

“Oh, don’t bother. We can get the jurors’ names from public records. Now, if I promise not to ask Wish to take advantage of his position at your offices to grub through trash cans or something, can I please borrow him for a few hours?”

“For how much?” asked Sandy.

“Lindy?”

A silhouette opened the door to Lindy’s trailer and stood there, irresolute.

Lindy came from the little kitchen, wiping her wet hands on a washcloth, calling, “Alice?”

“It’s me.” She saw Mike, the sun behind him, making a fuzzy halo of his hair.

“I, uh, hoped you’d let me come in. No phone, so I couldn’t call first.”

“What do you want, Mike?”

“Can I come in?”

She was so bewildered to see him that she found herself stepping aside to let him in, saying, “I can’t believe you remembered the place.” He followed her into the trailer and she motioned toward the table with its built-in benches. “I was just making some coffee.”

“No, please. Don’t bother,” Mike said. He sat down and leaned on the table on his elbow and scratched his head, familiar actions.

The room felt smaller with Mike in it. She hadn’t broken her solitude over the past months with any guests. A long time ago, they had lived here together for a short time. She could barely remember.

Lindy went to the window, looked out for traces of a lawyer or a sheriff or Rachel, but Mike’s black Cadillac sat all alone in the turnaround. The cloud of dust he’d raised still drifted in the breeze. Besides Comanche’s stall and the storage shed, the landscape, all rock and high scrub desert, was silent and shadeless at midday.

“I see you’re packing up,” Mike said. “You never should have come out here to this lonely old place anyway.”

“Where else would I go?” Lindy said. Something in Mike’s face stopped her from going on and saying what she had a right to say about that. “Dad loved it out here,” she said instead. “It hasn’t been so bad.”

“Reminds me of when we lived out here for a while, you remember? Tumbleweed Flats, we called it. No phone, no TV. Damn, it got hot. It’s sure hot out here today, isn’t it?”

“Why did you come? You could see me tomorrow in your lawyer’s office.”

Mike looked out the window at the rolling brown flank of the mountains silently, chewing his lip.

“Did he send you all the way out here to soften me up?” She went back into the little kitchen and came back with a couple of beers. She didn’t care if that was why he had come, that was how glad she was to see him, but she wasn’t going to let him know that, he didn’t deserve to know that, so she slapped down the beers and said, “Here. I’m having one anyway.”

“You got every right to say anything you want, Lin.”

Looking like a man with his head in a guillotine, his face was resigned and frightened. He’d screwed up his courage to come out here and try to tell her—what? “You look terrible,” Lindy said.

“You look great. No wonder. You beat the pants off me. You did.”

She had a long drink from the bottle. “I like beer out here. It cools me off better than wine.”

“Seems like a long time since we talked,” said Mike.

“We’ve had mouthpieces to do that for us.”

“Yeah.”

“How’ve you been?”

“Not good.”

He didn’t seem inclined to get to the point, and she didn’t care. He came into the bare room and filled it up for her, completed a sketchy picture. She just wanted to sit there and enjoy his huge presence for as long as it could last.

“I’ve been riding Comanche all over this desert,” she said after a minute. “Look.” She spilled out the contents of a dirty cotton drawstring sack onto the table. White rock pieces, jagged like shark teeth on the edges, tumbled out. “Collected these a few days ago. I had to get on a ledge about fifty feet up one of those rock faces, lie on my back, and chip away with my hammer. I doubt anybody else had ever been at that particular face. I’ve got more of it out back in a big pail of water.” Mike turned the rocks over, holding one up to the sunlight streaming onto the table.

“Beautiful. You always wanted to go out and prospect for opal.”

“There is some around here. Dad looked for silver, but that was all prospected out even before he came here, and I’m sure he never thought about opal. Unfortunately, I don’t think this spot is as rich as I thought it might be. I’m not finding much.”

Mike nodded, looking fatigued as he had most days in court. Lindy felt the urge to apologize to him for putting him through the court case, but resisted. He’d thrown her out and chosen Rachel. What did she have to apologize for? “It’s a long drive out here. Why don’t you rest? You look really tired.”

“Thanks. But I have to get going in a few minutes.”

Yes, you need to run on home to your pretty, young lover, Lindy said to herself, using the painful thought to touch the bruises on her heart and remind her that she needed to protect herself. He had no right to hurt her anymore.

“I came to talk to you.” Well, that was obvious. She saw how awkward he felt.

“One last time?” she said. “I thought we said our good-byes out by the lake that night.”

“I’ll be selling the business, moving on.”

Guarding herself at this introduction of the business between them she said, “That’s your decision, Mike, although I’m sorry to hear it. Do you want to work up some installment payment plan? If that’s what you came here to talk me into, that’s fine.”

Mike drank most of the bottle down in one long swallow. He set the bottle down on the table with a clatter. “You haven’t seen the receiver’s final report. My lawyer called me just before I left. All that expansion you were working on in Europe fell apart after you left. And the bottom dropped out of the domestic spa market. A Chinese company came in and undercut us. Somehow, it didn’t matter anymore to me—”

“How much did we lose?”

“We might get seventy million for it if we can sell it. Less if we liquidate and just go out of business.”

“But,” she could barely contain her shock, “how could that happen? I mean, at the beginning of all this, wasn’t it worth at least two hundred?”

“Months of neglect,” he said simply. “I let it go, along with you.”

“Seventy million. Mike, that’s my share. That’s the judgment my lawyer’s writing up right now.”

“So I’m told. I didn’t get it at first, but my lawyer says it’s the value of the business from the time we—”

“Yes. From the time we split up. Well, that’s awful news, Mike. I’m sorry.” She thought. “You’ll appeal the verdict then?”

“No. I’m done with courtrooms.”

“Mike, why’d you have to be so pigheaded—”

“Please, Lin. Not now.” Here was her chance to rub his nose in his failures, all of them, but how could she with him looking so collapsed and old in his defeat? She actually reached her hand out toward his hand, but thoughts sprang into her mind to arrest the gesture. On the witness stand he had barely admitted her role in the business. He had denigrated, insulted, cheated, and betrayed her . . . and all the while Rachel had whispered in his ear, touched his arm . . . she returned her hand to her side.

“Listen.” he went on obliviously, apparently too wrapped up in his own inner struggle to admit hers to his consciousness. “You want to know the worst thing? The worst thing is I don’t understand what happened to me. One day we were happy, and the next day I jumped into a bottomless pit.”

She bit her tongue, going back into the kitchen to get him another beer. When she returned, he had another stone between his fingers. He turned it back and forth in the light, his face intense and absorbed.

He set the stone back into the sack. “Rachel left me this morning,” he said, his eyes fixed on the sack, not her.

Lindy folded her arms. “The receiver’s report.”

“She read it. Then she set it down on the dining room table and she swung her purse onto her shoulder, and she said, ’Bye, Mike,’ and walked out the door. Went back to handsome Harry, is my guess.”

“And you came straight here to cry on my shoulder.”

“No, Lin, I . . .”

“You have some nerve,” Lindy said, unable to hide the anger vibrating in her voice.

“I came to tell you you were right. You’re smarter than me, Lindy. You’re smarter about living your life. I was too old for Rachel and she was in it for the money.”

“Now you figure that out?”

“I guess I knew, Lin, but I wanted her anyway. There’s no excuse, no explanation. I just lost my way.” He didn’t say anything more.