French Silk (14 page)

"Are you prepared to arrest us on the basis of this hunch of yours?" Ariel asked loftily.

"Without any evidence? You know as well as I do, Mrs. Wilde, that I couldn't make any charges stick."

"Precisely." She turned and sailed through the door.

Josh remained, but he shared her agitation. "That accusation was uncalled for, Mr. Cassidy. Rather than upsetting my stepmother with nasty allegations, why aren't you out beating the bushes for the real killer?"

"Come off it, Josh." Cassidy deliberately lapsed into the familiar form of address. If he was going to wear either of them down, it would be Josh. "I know you're boinking her. I wouldn't give a damn … unless you iced your old man so you could keep on boinking her."

"Stop saying that!"

"Then talk to me, dammit." He slapped the surface of his desk with his palms.

After a moment of tense silence, Josh asked sullenly, "What do you want to know?"

Cassidy curbed his temper, knowing intuitively that Josh would retreat if he wasn't handled with finesse. "Look at it from my perspective, Josh, and see what conclusions you draw. Ariel's young, pretty, talented, and in love with her young, handsome, talented stepson, who returns her love. Only there's a hitch. She's married. The unwanted husband gives her a motive I can't discount. And she was the only person other than your father who had a key to that suite."

"What about the maids? The hotel staff? Professional burglars don't need keys. They break into locked hotel suites all the time."

"Jackson was killed by someone familiar, someone he didn't mind seeing him naked and sprawled on the bed."

"It wasn't Ariel."

"Was it you?"

The younger man blanched. "My father and I had our differences, but I didn't kill him."

"Did he know about your affair with his wife?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Cassidy's reclining chair sprang erect, practically catapulting him across the desk. "Don't bullshit me, Josh. Did he?"

The younger man squirmed beneath Cassidy's hard gray stare. Eventually his shoulders slumped slightly and he looked away. "No. I don't think so."

Ah-ha. He now had a confession that they were involved in an illicit relationship. He screened his happy reaction. "You think you were clever enough to conceal it from your father, when I guessed thirty seconds after meeting you?"

"It isn't that we were so clever," Josh said with a mirthless laugh. "It's that he was so egomaniacal. He would never suspect Ariel of choosing me over him."

Cassidy looked him in the eye and believed him. "He was a real son of a bitch, wasn't he?"

"Yes, he was."

"Did you hate him?"

"Sometimes."

"Enough to kill him?"

"Sometimes. But I didn't. I couldn't. I wouldn't have the nerve."

Cassidy believed that, too. Joshua Wilde was named after the Hebrew warrior of the Old Testament, but it was a misnomer. Undoubtedly Jackson Wilde, with his thunderous voice and avenging-angel temperament, had been sorely disappointed in his mild-mannered, soft-spoken son. A kid could stockpile a lot of resentment against an overbearing, supercritical parent. Better parents than Jackson Wilde had been blown away by their stressed-out children. But Cassidy didn't think Josh had it in him to put a bullet through a man's head.

"What about her?" Cassidy asked, pointing his chin toward the door through which Ariel had made her huffy exit. "Think before you answer, Josh. We might turn up incriminating evidence at any moment, something we missed before. If you protect Ariel, you're an accessory, and the punishment's the same. Did she kill him?"

"No."

"Could she have done it without your knowledge? Did you make love with her that night, Josh?"

He cast his eyes down but answered without hesitation. "Yes."

"Did she leave your suite at any time?"

"No. Not until she left for good, sometime in the wee hours."

Too late for the murder, which Elvie Dupuis had placed between 12:00 and 1:00 A.M. "You're sure?"

"Positive."

"Do you suspect her of killing him?"

"No." He shook his head so adamantly that several locks of hair fell over his brow.

"How can you be so sure?"

He raised his head and met Cassidy's stare head-on. "My father was Ariel's ticket to greatness. Without him, she's zero."

It was a dead-end street. They were guilty as hell. The rub was that Cassidy didn't know if they were guilty only of adultery or of a sin more grievous. But even if they had offed Wilde, he had no evidence to hold them. "Have a nice trip," he said in a clipped voice.

Joshua Wilde was taken aback. "You mean I can go?"

"Unless you want to sign a confession."

"I've got nothing to confess and neither does Ariel. I swear it, Mr. Cassidy."

"You may have to yet—in a court of law. For the time being, goodbye."

Cassidy watched him go, wondering if he was releasing a murderer onto an unsuspecting public. Although, he reasoned, the only danger Ariel and Josh posed to the general public was fleecing them of hard-earned cash in the name of the Lord.

Querulous and feeling at odds with the world, he snatched up his phone after its first shrill ring. "Cassidy." It was Crowder, who wasn't too pleased to hear the results of the interrogation. "The bottom line is they walked," Cassidy summarized.

Crowder had several choice comments about the widow and the ruckus she had left in her wake. "She's flying off to Nashville smelling like a rose, looking like a goddamn martyr, and leaving us with a stinking pile of shit to shovel. Cassidy, you there?"

"What? Oh, yeah, sorry. Shit. Right."

"What's the matter with you?"

Cassidy was gaping at the stuffed folder that Howard Glenn had just carried into his office and dropped onto his desk with a triumphant flourish.

"I'll call you back." Cassidy hung up, leaving Crowder in midsentence. He looked up at Glenn, who was standing at the edge of his desk, a smug grin on his unshaved face.

"Hey, Cassidy. This might be the break we've been looking for. Let's go."

Chapter 7

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"
I
t's yours, isn't it, Miz Laurent?"

"Where did you get it?" Claire asked the unpleasant man who confronted her with the stance and glower of a gladiator.

"One of my men found it in the garbage dumpster a few blocks from here. Didn't you figure on us checking the contents of the garbage bins located near anyone involved in the Wilde case?"

"I'm not involved," Claire said evenly.

"This indicates otherwise." He brandished the incriminating folder an inch from her nose. She batted it aside.

"Glenn, back off," Cassidy said abruptly. The odious man frowned at him, but took a couple of steps backward. Cassidy turned to Claire. "Frankly, I thought you were smarter than this. Why didn't you just throw the folder in the river along with the murder weapon?"

She had thought that the rooms in her apartment, which had been designed for maximum light and spaciousness, would make her feel less claustrophobic. But the moment she'd admitted Cassidy, the walls had seemed to start closing in, especially since he was accompanied by the detective, whom she regarded with unconcealed distaste. He was repugnant to her, not so much because of his unkempt appearance but for his mean, suspicious smirk.

When she spotted what they'd brought with them, her heart had lurched and her palms had grown damp. She felt trapped, afraid, but she was determined not to show it.

"Come clean, Miz Laurent. What about this?" Detective Glenn dropped the folder onto the bar in her kitchen. Dozens of clippings spilled out and scattered across the glossy surface.

Claire hated being backed into a corner by someone in authority. Her instinct was to fight back, as she had done as a five-year-old. But she was no longer a child. She couldn't kick and claw and bow her back. It would be futile to lie. They had her. They knew it. She knew it, too. The best she could do was brazen it out.

"It was mine," she admitted. "Considering that Reverend Wilde was murdered, I thought it would be imprudent for me to keep the file."

"Imprudent?" Glenn snorted. "Is that a fifty-cent word for fuckin' crazy?"

Claire's eyes snapped furiously. Her back went rigid.

Cassidy stepped between her and the detective. "Excuse us." He pushed the detective toward the door. After a whispered but heated discussion, Glenn shot her a dirty look before going out, soundly pulling the door closed behind him.

"Thank you," she said to Cassidy as he came back around. "I don't believe I could have stood him for another second. He was thoroughly obnoxious."

"I didn't do it for you. I did it for me. I've got a lot of questions to ask. It was obvious that Glenn was going to get nowhere with you, so I asked him to give me a shot."

"What questions?"

"What questions! We've got incriminating evidence on you, Ms. Laurent."

"A collection of clippings?" she asked scoffingly. "Hardly, Mr. Cassidy. I was about to make myself a sandwich for lunch. Would you like one?"

Never taking his eyes off her, Cassidy flipped back his suit jacket and propped his hands on his hips. He gazed at her as though trying to figure her out. "You're a cool customer, aren't you," he said tightly. "As well as a liar."

"You never asked me if I kept a file on Jackson Wilde."

"I'm surprised you didn't deny ever having seen these." He gestured at the pile of clippings on the bar.

Claire rounded the bar and moved toward the refrigerator. "Denying it would have really made me look guilty, wouldn't it? Is shrimp salad all right?"

"Fine."

"Wheat bread or white?"

"Christ," he muttered, raking his fingers through his hair. "Don't you ever stop with the southern hospitality?"

"Why should I?"

"Because Glenn is downstairs waiting to arrest you, and you're talking wheat or white."

"I won't be arrested, Mr. Cassidy, and we both know that." Having taken all the ingredients from the refrigerator, she kept her back to him while she made the sandwiches. She hoped he wouldn't notice that her hands were trembling.

In hindsight, disposing of the file seemed like a desperate measure taken by someone with bloodstained hands. She'd been foolish to toss it into the dumpster. Nothing should have been left to chance. Why hadn't she done as he quipped and thrown it in the river? Of course, on the day following the murder, things had happened so quickly that she hadn't been thinking clearly. She'd made an error in judgment, and it was proving to be a costly one.

She'd also underestimated Cassidy and the seriousness of his initial interrogation. His questions had made her uneasy and cautious, but they hadn't been cause to panic. Finding the folder had changed everything. Now he was more than mildly curious about her feelings toward Wilde. He actually suspected her of killing him. He would be watching her, looking for the slightest scrap of evidence. But Claire had had plenty of practice at thwarting authority figures. The first lesson she had learned was never to be intimidated.

She turned to face him. "You haven't got enough evidence to make an arrest stick, Mr. Cassidy. I had collected a few articles relating to Jackson Wilde. That's hardly a smoking gun."

"The gun's in the Gulf by now," he said as he picked an olive off the plate she handed him. "Carried away by the river's current."

"More than likely." Since the bar was covered with the clippings, she nodded him toward the glass-topped table in the dining room. "Tea or a soft drink?"

"Tea."

"Sugar?"

"Nothing."

After returning with two glasses of mint-sprigged iced tea, she sat across from him. He picked up half of his sandwich and took off a corner in a strong bite. "Some of those clippings are years old."

"My interest dates back several years."

"You have that much interest in religion?"

"No, Mr. Cassidy," she said with a retiring smile. "I'm Catholic by birth, but have never embraced any organized church. I certainly wasn't enamored of charismatic televangelists. Wilde attracted my attention because I believed him to be one of the most dangerous men in America."

"So you considered it your civic duty to ice him?"

"Do you want to hear my explanation or not?" she snapped.

He gestured for her to go ahead.

"You're very rude, Mr. Cassidy."

"Yes, I know."

Their stares locked and held for several seconds. Claire wasn't about to back down, so she began speaking. "Unlike some of the other TV preachers, Wilde threatened to rob people, not of their money but of something much more valuable—their rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. About the time French Silk's first catalog went out, he began his crusade against everything he considered pornographic. From the beginning, his message bothered me tremendously."

"Because his influence could hamper your business?"