Smoke Screen (3 page)

“What did you talk about?” Javier asked.

“I’ve told you,” she said wearily. “This and that. ‘How’s your job? Fine. How’s yours? Do you have any vacation plans?’ That kind of thing.”

“Nothing personal?”

“He asked if I was seeing someone. I told him no one in particular. He said, ‘Good. I’d hate to depart this earth leaving you to some undeserving but lucky bastard.’ He was grinning, and it was the teasing kind of flirtation Jay was famous for. I laughed. And then I realized what he’d said and asked him what he meant about departing this earth. He said, ‘I’m dying, Britt.’”

Recalling that moment and Jay’s somber expression, her voice became husky with emotion. “Then he told me about the cancer.”

Pancreatic. Advanced. Not a chance in hell of beating it, so I’m not putting myself through chemo and all that shit. At least I’ll have my hair when they bury me.

After a quiet moment, Javier said, “According to Jay’s oncologist, he had only a few more weeks. Month or two at the outside. Shocked the hell out of everybody in the department when he announced it. Some people cried for days. Jay offered to surrender his badge, but Chief said he could work right up till…well, the end.”

Britt nodded, confirming that was what Jay had told her. “He was such a vital individual. He created his own energy field. When he told me, I couldn’t believe it.”

Clark cleared his throat. “Do you think maybe he was trying to get around to all the women he’d wanted to sleep with one last time before—”

“No,” she said adamantly. “When he invited me to join him, he said he needed to talk to me. I got the impression it was about something serious.”

Javier snorted. “More serious than terminal cancer?”

Her temper snapped. “A basic part of my job is to evaluate people, Detective. I can sense when someone is holding back the key element of a story because they don’t want to be in the news, or when someone exaggerates their role in an attempt to seem more important to the story than they are.

“Jay dismissed my condolences and said he had something much more important to talk about. He said he was about to give me an exclusive that would make my career. And it wasn’t a flirtation and it wasn’t a come-on. I would have known if it was. Jay was serious. Whatever he wanted to tell me was important to him.”

There she paused. Clark leaned forward expectantly. “Well? What was it?”

“I don’t know. That’s when Jay suggested we leave so we could talk in private.” She didn’t want to tell them it was at that point that Jay also had seemed to grow nervous. Already her veracity was being challenged. Who would believe that Jay Burgess would ever become nervous?

Apparently the detectives sensed she was withholding something. Clark leaned toward her again. “You had privacy at The Wheelhouse, Ms. Shelley. You and Jay had a cozy little corner in the bar. People saw you. Witnesses said you two had your heads together like nobody else in the world existed.”

Witnesses?
The word struck a criminal note that was unsettling. “That’s a gross distortion,” she said. “Jay and I had our heads together very close so we could hear each other above the noise.”

“Or to whisper sweet nothings.”

She glared at Javier. “I’m not going to honor that with a comment.”

“Okay, okay. Uncalled for.”

He left it to Clark to continue. “Jay asked you to go to his place.”

“To continue our conversation, yes.”

“And you went willingly?”

“Willingly? Of course. I thought he was about to give me a big story.”

“So you go to the apartment of any man who offers you an exclusive?”

“Mr. Javier!” Alexander exclaimed. “I will not let my client be subjected to insults like that.”

“It was a follow-up to what she said herself.”

“Let it drop,” she said to the lawyer. Actually she was glad to know he was still awake, since he’d said nothing for several minutes. Javier’s crack was low, but she had reached the crux of her story and was eager to move it along. “When we left The Wheelhouse, I felt dizzy.”

“Had you had a drink before you met Jay?”

“I’ve already told you that. No.”

“Did you take any…medication? Cold remedy, antihistamine?”

“No.”

“One glass of wine made you tipsy?”

“Apparently it did, Mr. Clark. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Not particularly. Not for a lady who doesn’t drink scotch. One glass of wine could make you drunk.”

“It’s never affected me that way before.”

“First time for everything.” Javier shifted to a more comfortable position in his molded-plastic chair.

Ignoring him, she said into the camera, “By the time we got outside The Wheelhouse, I wasn’t feeling well.”

“How so?”

“Well, drunk. Nauseous. Disconnected.”

“Anything unusual occur between the bar and Jay’s town house?”

“Again, my memory of the walk is hazy, but I don’t think so.”

“No exchanges with anyone else along the way?”

“No.”

“Did Jay ask you to spend the night with him?”

She looked directly at Javier. “Not that I recall.”

“Did Jay know you weren’t feeling well?”

It was a good question, and she wished she had an answer for it. “I’m not sure. I don’t believe I remarked on it. I might have. He might have asked me if I was sick. Honestly, I don’t remember talking about anything. We walked to his town house and went inside.”

“Then what? What’s the first thing you did when you got inside?”

“I remember being embarrassed over my condition.”

“Over being drunk?”

“Or drugged,” she said with emphasis. “I remember making my way to the sofa.”

“So you knew where his sofa was?”

“No. I’d never been to that town house before. I saw the sofa and knew I needed to sit down.”

“Did you take your shoes off first?”

“No.”

“Your dress?”

“No.”

“Did you undress before or after Jay started pouring the scotch?”

“I didn’t undress.”

“So Jay undressed you.”

“No!”

Clark jumped on that. “How do you know if you can’t remember?”

Before she could respond, Javier said, “If you didn’t undress yourself, and Jay didn’t undress you, how come you woke up nude and in bed with him, which, by your own admission, you did? Want me to read back that part of the statement you gave us yesterday morning while they were taking Jay’s body to the morgue?”

“No, no! I remember what I said in my statement because it’s the truth. What I don’t remember is how we got undressed and into bed.”

“You don’t remember getting blitzed on scotch?”

“No.”

“Or taking off your clothes?”

“No.”

“Or having sex.”

“I don’t know that we did.”

Javier reached into the pocket of his sport jacket and removed a small plastic sandwich bag. Inside was the foil packet for a condom. It was empty. “We found this among the cushions of the sofa.”

Britt stared at it, searching her memory, coming up blank.

“Do you customarily carry a condom in your handbag, Ms. Shelley?”

Meeting his insinuating gaze, she replied coolly, “It must have been Jay’s. He could have used it anytime.”

Clark shook his head, looking almost rueful. “His maid had come that morning. She said she gave the place a thorough cleaning, even took the cushions off the sofa to vacuum underneath. She’d swear to it this wasn’t there then.”

Britt asked, “Did you find the condom itself?”

“No. It’s assumed Jay flushed it.”

“He could have used it earlier in the day. After the maid cleaned, but before meeting me.”

Clark shook his head. “Jay was here at headquarters all day. Didn’t even go out for lunch. He left at six. Hardly time for him to return home and have sex on his sofa with another woman, then get to The Wheelhouse and down several drinks before you joined him at seven.” He smirked and Javier chuckled, anticipating what his colleague was about to say. “Even Jay wasn’t that fast.”

G
EORGE
M
C
G
OWAN OPENED HIS BEDROOM DOOR IN TIME
to see his wife of four years, Miranda, slipping a terry-cloth robe over her nakedness. The young man in the room with her was zipping the cover around his portable massage table.

Unruffled by the unexpected appearance of her husband, she said, “Oh, darling, hi. I didn’t know you were home. Would you like Drake to stay? He just finished with me.” Her eyelids lowered drowsily. “He was particularly magic today.”

George felt his face grow hot. His fingers tightened around his glass of Bloody Mary. “No thanks.”

Drake hefted his table, essentially doing a biceps curl with it. “Wednesday, Mrs. McGowan?”

“Let’s make it ninety minutes instead of the usual sixty.”

He smiled suggestively. “I can extend it as long as you like.”

Drake’s double entendre wasn’t lost on George. Neither was the hot, musky smell of sex that permeated the room, or the rumpled satin sheets on the king-size bed. Drake hadn’t done his work on the massage table, and the sly look he shot George as he sidled past him on his way out said as much.

He should follow the smarmy bastard, break him over his knee, shatter the bones of his hands, ruin his face, and put him out of business. The oily, Mediterranean-looking prick was beefed up, but George could whip his ass. Maybe he’d gone a little soft around the middle, but he could still make this guy wish his ancestors had stayed in Sicily or wherever the hell they were from.

Instead, he soundly closed the bedroom door and turned to glare at his wife. The silent rebuke was wasted, however, because she didn’t see it. She had moved to her dressing table and was pulling a brush through her mane of auburn hair as she admired her reflection in the mirror.

She would dearly love for him to take issue with her screwing her masseur in their bedroom. So damned if he would give her that satisfaction. Besides, something else took priority.

“You need to see this.” He opened the doors of the tall armoire and turned on the television set inside. “Britt Shelley is about to conduct a press conference about her and Jay.”

“This should be interesting.”

“It is. She claims she was given a date rape drug.”

Miranda McGowan’s upraised arm was arrested in motion. She lowered it slowly. “By Jay?”

George shrugged and turned up the volume just as the local newswoman addressed a question about her relationship with the recently deceased Jay Burgess. “He and I were friends.”

“I’ll bet,” Miranda remarked as she moved from her dressing table to the end of the unmade bed and sat down.

“Shh!”

“Don’t shush me.”

“Will you just shut up and listen?”

George remained standing, the remote control in his hand, his attention riveted on the plasma screen and the close-up of Britt Shelley as she averred that she had no memory of the events immediately preceding Jay’s death. “I have a vague recollection of entering his town house with him. Nothing beyond that.”

“Are you accusing Jay Burgess of giving you the date rape drug?” a reporter asked.

“No. But I believe that someone did. My experience matches that of other women who have been given them.” George turned and looked at his wife. She shifted her gaze away from the TV and locked eyes with him, but neither said anything.

George turned back to the set in time to hear Britt Shelley’s lawyer reply to a question. The man held his fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. As a former policeman, George knew the gesture was a dead giveaway of uneasiness. The man was about to either hedge on something he was unsure of or blatantly lie.

“Ms. Shelley has submitted a urine specimen to be tested for these various substances. However, they disappear from the system relatively quickly. Depending on which drug Ms. Shelley was given, it’s possible that too much time has elapsed for it to be detected.”

A reporter in the front row said, “So you can’t prove that she was given one of these date rape drugs.”

“I can’t comment until I know the result of the urinalysis.”

“Regrettably, I did everything wrong,” Britt Shelley interjected, much to the consternation of her lawyer, who frowned at her.

He jumped in before she could say more. “Ms. Shelley didn’t at first realize that she’d been victimized. Had she, she wouldn’t have showered, wouldn’t have used the bathroom until after she’d submitted a specimen for testing.”

“In other words,” Miranda said, “she’s making claims she can’t prove.”

Without turning, George waved at her to be quiet.

“No, I don’t have any idea what caused Jay Burgess’s death,” Britt Shelley was saying in reply to another reporter’s question. “He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which he’d been told was terminal. It’s assumed his death is cancer related, but an autopsy will be conducted—”

“Do you know when?”

“That’s a question for the medical examiner. I hope sooner rather than later. I want an explanation for Jay’s death, just as everyone else does.”

“Do the police suspect foul play?”

Before Britt Shelley could respond, her attorney whispered something in her ear, and she nodded at him. “That’s all I have to say at this time.”

“Are the police—”

“Did you and Burgess—”

“What did you drink at The Wheelhouse?”

The reporters continued to shout questions at her and her lawyer as they retreated from the podium.

“Turn it off.”

George did as Miranda asked. In the instant silence, ice cubes rattled in his glass as he took a drink of his Bloody Mary. “How many does that make so far today?” Miranda asked.

“You care?”

“You’re damn right I care!” she fired back. “I care because you’ve been drunk ever since we got the news.”

“Jay was my friend. Drinking is part of my grieving process.”

“It doesn’t look good.”

“To who?”

“To anybody who happens to be interested and is paying attention,” she said, angrily emphasizing each word.

“Everybody is interested and paying attention. Jay’s dying is news. He was a hero.”

“So were you.”

He stared down into his glass for several moments, then shot the last of the drink. “Yeah. A big hero. Which is why you married me.”

She laughed softly. “That’s right, sweetheart. I wanted a hero”—she spread her robe open from the waist down—“and you wanted this.”

There was a time when he would have dropped to his knees, crawled to her, and planted his face in her lap. He would have sent his tongue burrowing into her sex in search of the tiny gold charm that pierced her flesh, a tantalizing trinket that remained hidden until she was aroused. He used to make her crazy doing that.

But then he’d found out who had suggested she get the charm. That had ruined the pleasure for him.

She laughed and covered herself. “Poor George. So upset over Jay’s demise he can’t even make love to his wife.”

“Not when she still reeks of Drake.”

“Oh, please. Don’t take a self-righteous posture with me. You’re in the throes of a ridiculous affair with the teenybopper who hustles drinks at the country club.”

“She’s twenty-six. She only
looks
eighteen.”

If anything could hurt Miranda—and he had a powerful need to hurt her just now—it was a reminder that she wasn’t getting any younger. Thirty had come and gone. Forty loomed. It was still a long way off, but she was terrified of it.

In her youth, she’d been Miss Charleston County, Miss South Carolina, Miss This and Miss That. She had more tiaras and trophies than the housekeeper could keep polished. Other girls were winning those titles now. Girls with firmer thighs and perkier tits. Girls who didn’t get Botox injections as regularly as pedicures.

Idly, painfully, he wondered if the current Miss Charleston County would have an abortion just to keep her tummy tight.

Miranda’s rich laughter interrupted that dark thought. “Does your tacky little affair explain why you’re popping Viagra these days?” He gave her a sharp look. “Oh, yes. I found it in the medicine cabinet.”

“I’m amazed you could locate it among all the pills you keep in there.” He set his empty glass on the portable bar and considered pouring another shot of vodka but talked himself out of it. He’d kept a buzz going for the last thirty-six hours. Miranda was right; it didn’t look good.

“If you need a pill in order to keep it up for your new, young girlfriend, you’re more pathetic than I thought.”

She was trying her best to rile him, to start something or, rather, continue it. Usually he’d get right into it with her and keep it going until she won. Miranda always won.

But today, he didn’t want to play their game. He had other things on his mind, life-and-death issues that were weightier than their ongoing contest to see who could inflict the most painful wound.

“We’re both pathetic, Miranda.”

He went to the window and moved aside the drape, which had been pulled closed, no doubt to create a more romantic ambience for her and Drake. From this second-story vantage point, George could see down onto the back lawn of the estate, where a crew of men were mowing, weeding, clipping. Separated from the formal lawn by a stone-wall border, the irrigated acreage spread out like a green apron. A white wood fence enclosed a pasture where their racehorses grazed.

He could see the roof of the multicar garage that housed his father-in-law’s collection of classic cars as well as his own fleet of automobiles, kept buffed and polished and gassed up, ready to roll at his whim.

George McGowan had come from the working class. Money, actually the lack of it, had been a constant worry to his folks. In order to provide for his family of seven, his daddy had worked overtime at Conway Concrete and Construction Company. It was hot and dusty work that killed him well before his time. He’d dropped dead one August afternoon while working an extra shift. The doctor said he hadn’t felt a thing.

Who would ever have guessed that his oldest son, George, would wind up marrying Miranda Conway, only child of the owner of the enterprise, the most desired girl around, because she was not only the most beautiful but also the richest. She was a debutante, a beauty queen, and an heiress. She could have had any man she wanted. She had wanted George McGowan.

“I can’t go back and undo it,” he said quietly as he watched the Thoroughbreds graze, taking their life of privilege as their due. As Miranda did. “Even if I could, I wouldn’t. God help me, I couldn’t give all this up.” He let the drape fall back into place and turned toward her. “I couldn’t give you up.”

She tossed back her hair and looked at him with exasperation. “Stop being such a crybaby, George. For crissake. Jay Burgess died in bed with a naked lady beside him. Don’t you think he’d rather go that way than die of cancer?”

“Knowing Jay like I did, yeah, he probably would.”

She gave him her smile, the one that would make a man sell his soul to have her. “That’s my boy. That’s my hero. That’s my strong, handsome George.” She stood up and started walking toward him with a feline gait, slowly untying the belt of her robe and letting it slide off her.

When she reached him, she pressed her lush body against him and boldly began massaging him through his trousers. “Are you sad, baby? Worried? I know how to make you feel better. You’ve never needed Viagra with me, have you?”

She caressed him with a know-how that could only be achieved with practice. Lots of practice. He gritted his teeth and tried to reverse the rush of blood funneling toward her stroking fist, but resisting her was a lost cause. He cursed her to hell and back, but she only laughed and unzipped his trousers.

“Georgie Porgie, puddin’ and pie. Kissed the girls and made them…” Coming up on tiptoe, wrapping one long leg around him, she bit the lobe of his ear, then whispered, “Make me cry.”

His soul was lost already, too far gone to ever hope for redemption. So, what the hell did it matter?

Roughly, he thrust himself into her.

“Mr. Fordyce, they’re replaying it now.”

“Thank you.”

Attorney General Cobb Fordyce’s personal assistant withdrew, leaving him alone in his office. He’d asked her to alert him if Britt Shelley’s press conference was aired a second time.

He swiveled his chair around to face the walnut cabinetry behind his desk and used a remote to switch on the television set, to watch what had been broadcast live during the lunch hour, which he’d missed because of a meeting.

Cobb didn’t know Britt Shelley personally, only professionally. She’d been a fledgling reporter during the election that put him in this office, and she’d advanced just as he had. Often she covered the state capitol for the Charleston station, and he’d seen her on-air work there.

She was a tough but fair interviewer, far superior to the station’s other reporters, better than the station’s news operation altogether, and he’d often wondered why she hadn’t been snatched up by a larger TV market.

He’d also wondered if she purposefully downplayed her attractiveness so it wouldn’t be a distraction to the story or a drawback to her credibility. When a hurricane had been threatening Charleston last year, she’d covered it live, dressed in a jacket with the hood drawstring tied tightly beneath her chin, her face washed clean of makeup by the torrential rain. Hardly glamorous.

She was no prima donna and no pushover. She certainly didn’t look like one as she faced an audience of her colleagues and stated she didn’t remember anything beyond going into Jay Burgess’s town house. Then she alleged that she’d been given a date rape drug.

She was articulate, earnest, believable. But if her urinalysis came back negative, her attorney would have a hell of a hard time proving that she’d ingested a drug that would cause total memory loss.

The lawyer seemed to realize that. He looked uneasy and uncertain about his client’s claim. He looked constipated. He appeared to be the kind of timid defender who actually helped prosecutors get convictions.

She, on the other hand, was confidence personified. Of course, she was adroit at playing to a camera. Cobb had experience with that himself. She knew how to evoke a self-serving emotion from her audience. He could relate to that, too.