Double Cross (25 page)
Mom turned an ear toward the music. “What’s that?”
“We’re about to find out.” I followed the music down the hall to a door that was cracked open. I recognized it from the day we had found Stanley’s Apple laptop. It was his study. Just as I pushed the door open, the music stopped. I hit the End button on the phone.
We walked in and stood in the middle of the room. I hit the speed dial again. The music came from behind the desk. I followed the sound to the top desk drawer, which was partially open. I pulled open the drawer. In it was the Apple laptop.
I pulled the laptop out and set it on the desk. The music stopped again, and I turned to Stanley. He was no longer crying. His eyes moved from the laptop to the phone that I held at my side. “Where did you get that phone?”
“I’ll tell you what, under the circumstances why don’t I ask the questions? You do the answering.”
He just stood there looking at the phone in my hand, as if it were a moon rock. I held it up higher to give him a good look. He turned his head away.
“Why the sudden affinity for Apple laptops? Mom said you were a Dell man.”
He wiped his forehead with the table napkin. “Many of the students use them. I thought I should be familiar with . . . with how they work . . .” He avoided looking at the phone in my hand, even when I pushed it closer to his face.
I glanced at Mom. “You’ll be interested to know that I just speed-dialed a number from Elise Hovden’s phone. She’s the woman who worked for Simon Mason and committed suicide, remember?”
Mom nodded. “I remember, but I don’t understand. How did you get her phone?”
“I picked it up from her house the day we found her body. It had some phone numbers on it. She called one of the numbers the afternoon before she died. I just dialed it. It rings to your husband’s laptop.”
Mom crossed her arms and frowned at Stanley. “Was she another one of your women?”
I held up a hand. “No, it wasn’t like that. Wait, though, there’s more. A couple of days before she died, Elise had asked a friend of hers to trace a phone number for her—a number that was supposed to be untraceable, because it was set up through a forwarding service. The phone number that just rang on Stanley’s computer was that untraceable number. There was only one problem for Stanley. The untraceable number got traced, right to his new Apple.”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot but didn’t respond. His brow was furrowed, as if he were working through a difficult math problem.
I decided to go all the way and see if he could be bluffed. “You may be wondering why Stanley would set up an untraceable number for Elise Hovden to use. You see, Mom, he was blackmailing Elise. Or to put a finer point on it, he was blackmailing Simon Mason through Elise. It was just too tempting for you, wasn’t it, Stanley? Knowing about Simon’s son and all. Katie Parst thought Simon was being blackmailed by the extortion ring she was investigating, because they blackmail people who get caught up in vices. She figured Simon must have gotten involved in gambling or prostitution. It wasn’t those people, though, it was you.”
Now I crossed my arms, and the three of us stood there—Mom and I looking at Stanley; Stanley, his eyebrows narrowed into a V, looking back at us.
He took a deep breath and let it out. He walked around the desk and lowered himself into the desk chair. “You’re right. I was trying to blackmail Simon, but it’s not what you think. I didn’t get a nickel out of it.”
He opened a drawer on the right-hand side of the desk and pulled out a Colt .38 short-barreled revolver. I stretched my arm in front of Mom and pushed her back a step. Rather than point the gun at us, though, he simply laid it on the desk in front of him.
Up to that moment, events had progressed far better than I could have hoped, but when I reached over to feel for the purse that was supposed to be slung over my shoulder, things took a turn for the worse. There was no purse, which meant there was no .357 Sig. In the drama of the moment at the dining room table, I had left my purse sitting on the floor next to my chair.
It’s not the sort of move I’ll be mentioning in my security company’s marketing brochures.
So, there we were: three of us in the room, and only one of us with a gun. Unfortunately it was the wrong one. I took a step to my right, positioning my body more squarely between Stanley and Mom.
Stanley looked me in the eye. He was no longer whimpering. “Before we go any further, here, why don’t you answer a question for me? What’s to keep me from just taking Elise’s phone back from you right now and calling you a liar?”
I held up my hands. In the unsplinted one, I was clutching the phone. “Look, there’s no need to do anything stupid. If you want the phone, you can have it.”
Behind me, Mom sucked in a breath. “Don’t give it to him. He’s bluffing. He’s not going to shoot anyone.” It was a position that was undoubtedly easier for her to take while I was standing between her and the gun.
Stanley moved his hand over to the revolver. His fingers trembled. He didn’t pick it up. He merely rested his hand on the grip. “Everyone calm down. Hil’s right, I have no intention of shooting anyone.”
I motioned toward his hand. “Then, why the gun? Where I come from, that’s what they’re for—to shoot.”
He drummed his fingers on the grip. “I was just making a point. If I were as bad a guy as you’re making me out to be, I would just shoot you and take the phone from you right now.”
Mom peeked out from behind me. “Stanley! She’s my daughter!”
I did a double take. Despite her well-protected position, it was kind of nice to hear her say it.
“It’s okay, Mom.” I lobbed the phone across the desk to him. He sat up straight and reached out girlishly with both hands. He barely got a finger on it. It fell to the floor beside his chair.
I rolled my eyes.
His neck reddened, and I wondered whether he had ever caught a ball in his life.
“Just one problem, Stan,” I said, as he bent toward the phone and kept one eye locked on me.
“What’s that?”
“That’s not Elise’s phone.”
He just looked at me.
I shrugged. “You don’t think I’d be stupid enough to bring it with me, do you? I just programmed the number into my phone. My service contract’s up anyway. You can keep it if you’d like. I can pick up a new one in the morning.”
“Good one, Taylor,” Mom whispered from behind me.
He left the phone on the floor and straightened up in his chair.
I nodded at the gun. “Would you really have shot us? Or were you going to load us up with Valium and stick us in the car in the garage with the engine running, like you did with Elise?”
The hand that was next to the gun clenched. I glanced around to determine whether there was anything close enough to pick up and throw. Other than Mom, I didn’t see a thing that I could get to. I moved my right foot back a half step and flexed my knees. I would lunge at him if I had to. There was nothing else to do. I opened and closed the fingers of my good hand.
Behind me, Mom’s breathing quickened. Stanley tapped his finger on the desk. Something, a bug probably, smacked several times against the window behind Stanley’s head. He leaned forward in his chair. I moved up on the balls of my feet.
Then, old .38-caliber Stanley did something that, in retrospect, should not have surprised me. He reverted to form. He lifted both hands away from the gun, buried his face in them, and began to bawl. “I . . . didn’t . . . kill . . . her.” The words came in bursts between snorts.
It says something bad about me, I’m sure, that I would have respected him more if he had just picked up the stupid gun and taken a shot at us. Instead, Mom and I waited for at least five minutes as he grunted and hacked and blew. If Mom hadn’t been ready to jettison the guy before, I sure hoped she was finished with him after this display.
By the time he got a grip, I was tapping my foot on the floor and looking at my watch. He raised his head from his hands. “I guess you think I’m not much of a man.”
It was incredibly hard to pass on that one, but I did. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” I motioned with my thumb over my shoulder toward Mom. “That’s your wife, remember?” I turned and looked at her.
I’m not the best at identifying defining moments in anything, let alone my strange new relationship with my mother. I didn’t have to be a family therapist, though, to spot something troublingly worthy of note in what she did next. With the gun on the desk now looking far less ominous than it had a few minutes earlier, she emerged from behind me, walked over to Stanley, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Don’t worry, darling. We’ll get through this together.” She stroked the stringy hairs that were flattened damply against his scalp.
My eyes must have gotten as big as dinner plates. “What are you doing?”
She pressed her cheek against his forehead. “Can’t you see he’s suffering?”
I shook my head. “Wait a minute. Prostitutes; Elise Hovden dead in her car; the gun on the desk. This is no time to lose your focus, Mom.”
She batted her eyes. “But we haven’t heard his side of the story.”
He smiled up at her and wiped his nose with his hand.
It’s not every day that a girl gets a chance to stand valiantly between her mother and a revolver, only to have her mother, as soon as the danger is gone, comfort the jerk who pulled the gun in the first place. She could not have given me a clearer snapshot of my place in her world.
In the meantime, Stanley was still sniffling. “The people running the prostitution ring . . . were blackmailing me . . . I was afraid they would kill me . . . I went to her house to talk . . . but I didn’t hurt her. I would never hurt that poor girl.” He buried his head in Mom’s chest, which caused her to accelerate her cooing and head stroking.
As he soaked the front of Mom’s Burberry cardigan, I had a silent talk with myself.
What did you expect? That she would punt him and move in with you? That you’d have girl talks with bowls of popcorn in front of the fireplace?
The sad thing is, as unrealistic as it seems, that is exactly what I had hoped for. And why not? Was it so wrong just to want a mother? Millions of people have them. Why did I have to be different? I ran a hand through my hair.
You didn’t have a mother before, and it looks like you don’t have one now. Only fools allow hopes to turn into expectations, Taylor. Now, get over it.
What did you expect? That she would punt him and move in with you? That you’d have girl talks with bowls of popcorn in front of the fireplace?
The sad thing is, as unrealistic as it seems, that is exactly what I had hoped for. And why not? Was it so wrong just to want a mother? Millions of people have them. Why did I have to be different? I ran a hand through my hair.
You didn’t have a mother before, and it looks like you don’t have one now. Only fools allow hopes to turn into expectations, Taylor. Now, get over it.
I walked over and picked my phone up off the floor. Then I sat on the edge of the desk. I watched as Mom stroked his head several more times. When I couldn’t take it for another second, I said, “So, Stanley, why don’t you tell us what happened at Elise’s house?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
BEFORE STANLEY TOLD US his story, I did some office rearranging. I told him I’d feel a lot more comfortable sitting behind the desk, with the revolver back in the drawer. By that time he was a real puppy dog, but I still took the precaution of flipping open the gun’s cylinder. It was fully loaded. I dropped the bullets into my hand and stuck them in the pocket of my khakis.
He stood alone, hands at his sides like a chastened schoolboy, while Mom and I wrestled two leather wing chairs over from the other side of the room and positioned them in front of the desk. Then I walked past Stanley and sat in the desk chair. Just as he and Mom were about to sit in the wing chairs, Mom remembered that the caterers were still downstairs. She headed for the kitchen to pay them.
As she reached the door, I opened my mouth to ask her to bring up the desserts, but thought better of it. That would have been a bit flippant, even for me, although I’m not sure why I cared. In any event, I was glad that I’d eaten a few mouthfuls of spaghetti before the fireworks started. At least I wouldn’t have to sit through the rest of this soap opera on an empty stomach.
While Mom was downstairs, Stanley and I sat facing each other across the desk. I couldn’t think of a single reason to try to ease his discomfort, so I just stared at him. Before long he was looking at the bookshelves, apparently deep in thought. I assumed that he’d rather look at anything but me. When Mom came back into the study, she was carrying a bottle of water for each of us. When she handed one to Stanley, he unscrewed the cap and took a long drink.
I leaned forward and rested my forearms on the desk. “Okay, Stanley, what were you doing at Elise’s house the night she died?”
He fiddled with the cap on his bottle of water. “It started when I got in with the wrong people—”
I sighed. “So you’re really the victim? I assumed as much.”
Mom frowned at me. “You asked him to tell the story. Are you going to interrupt him with smart remarks or listen to what he has to say?”
He gave her a pathetic look.
This was going to be torture. “Go ahead.”
“They told me that if I didn’t come up with fifty thousand dollars, they would let ‘some people’ at the university know that I had been using prostitutes. I had no idea some of the girls were as young as you say. They didn’t seem young.”
I practically gagged at the mental picture that statement conjured. I blinked and glanced at Mom. She just sat there with her eyes fixed on his face.
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