Private Entrance (The Butterfly Trilogy) (16 page)

     This was Jack's world now, he was in his element, where it was just he and the target and the wide, wide world stretching away to the far horizons.
All of existence, life, the universe were reduced to the bow, the string and the arrow, and Jack's keen eye, strong muscles, and determination to hit the bull's eye.

     
"It's a nasty one, Detective," the uniformed cop said. "Young and pretty."

     He took his stance, planting his feet firmly with his left toe pointed toward the target, right toe pointed away.
She was nude, lying face down in her own vomit.

     He selected an arrow and nocked it on the bowstring.
"Looks like semen on her thighs and buttocks," the man from the coroner's office said as he scraped samples into a plastic bag. "She had sex before she checked out."

     With his back straight and head upright, he raised the bow and addressed the target.

     
"Cause of death?"

     Extending his bow arm, he kept his shoulder locked down and his elbow relaxed.
"Hard to tell. Drugs most likely, judging by the paraphernalia."

     Drew the bowstring back, anchoring it at his jaw.
"Accidental overdose?" Jack asked as he watched the coroner reach for the girl's cold shoulder to turn her over.

     Taking aim. Feeling the tension in his back. Eye on the target. His mind and body focused.
The corpse was turned over onto her back and blond hair fell away from her face—his sister's face.

     He released the bowstring.
Jack Burns fainted on the spot.

     The arrow flew through the air and went straight into the bull's eye but because he was at The Grove for one reason, to catch a killer, in Jack's mind it wasn't a bull's eye but a human heart.

     The heart of Nina's killer.

     Vanessa arrived with her usual flourish of swirling caftan, clattering beads and musky scent. "It's all arranged. Dinner tonight with Coco McCarthy."

     Abby had planned to dine with all three at the same time, but Ophelia had declined, saying that she preferred to be alone. And Sissy said she was expecting some important phone calls, but would be happy to re-schedule. Abby's anxiousness was growing. She should just go to their rooms and knock on the door, look into the eyes of Coco and Sissy and Ophelia and see
if she
knew.
But Ophelia Kaplan seemed troubled. And Sissy was embroiled in a personal matter. Abby didn't want to intrude.

     As Vanessa helped herself to a cup of fresh Kona blend coffee, she said, "Abby, I still think you should just do DNA testing." It would simplify everything. A strand of hair taken from each of the three hair brushes, and a lab analysis to compare with Abby's own DNA.

     But Abby was adamant. She would never invade another person's privacy. Not even for something as important as this. She had vowed long ago that she would not to do others what had been done to her...

     Sixteen-year-old Emmy Lou, arrested in front of her friends and taken to jail, the police going through her personal things, reading her diary, the prosecutor displaying her private possessions during the trial, to prove to the world what a bad girl she was, innocent objects—travel brochures to gardens around the world, true confession magazines, romance novels. He had read aloud the lurid titles of the confession stories and romance novels and told the jury that Emmy Lou wanted Avis Yocum's money to run away because the United States wasn't good enough for her, this girl who had been seen in the frequent company of a draft-dodging hippy.

     And then after sentencing, being taken to White Hills Prison, ordered to strip for a physical exam and humiliating rectal search, sprayed with green soap and hosed down, ending with a physical exam by a doctor who didn't even look Emmy Lou in the eye as he asked, "How far along are you?" in such a distracted tone that Emmy Lou didn't know he was talking to her. Emmy Lou on her back, her feet in stirrups, the doctor's fingers probing, and his declaration: "Looks like two months." The snap of rubber gloves as they came off his hands. "She's healthy. She can work."

     The final insult: chopping off her long copper-gold braids, "For safety," and being issued used underwear and a loose cotton dress, and from then on forced to bathe in open shower stalls with male guards watching, and using toilets that had no doors.

     No, Abby would not invade Coco's and Sissy's and Ophelia's privacy by testing their DNA without their permission.

     Abby knew little about the three women other than the basic facts the private investigator had collected. They
were
adopted. That fact was beyond
doubt. But what if they had never been told? Things were different in 1972, when adoption records were sealed and it was nearly impossible for mothers and children to trace one another. Only in the last decade had old records started opening up. And the things people had found, shocked them. Many of the adoptive parents had believed they were dealing with legitimate attorneys and agencies, that the babies had been willingly given up for adoption. Many had no idea they had been given kidnapped babies, or infants sold by desperate mothers.

     The word "sold" had haunted Abby for years. Sold for
what?
As if her child were a piece of furniture. Or a dog. Nightmares had haunted her. And guilt. She should have known her baby was born alive. She should have fought to keep it. She should have demanded legal aid, demanded to know what her rights were. Through Abby's ignorance and naiveté, her child could be living the worst life. But now, at least, knowing what she knew of Ophelia's and Sissy's and Coco's lives and their families, Abby received some consolation that her worst nightmare never came true.

     But another terrible thought continued to haunt her: that her daughter
did
know she was adopted, and had been told that her mother was a convicted murderer. Abby wanted to set the record straight.

     Vanessa watched the struggle on her friend's face, knew the agonizing indecision that gripped Abby, and made an observation: that her friend had created this oasis of healing, yet could not herself be healed.

     "By the way," Vanessa said. "I checked with the LAPD, to see if Jack Burns really is one of their detectives."

     Abby snapped her head up. "And?"

     "He is."

     "Investigating his sister's murder?"

     "They wouldn't say. Do you believe him, Abby? What if it's just a cover for the
real
reason he's here?"

     Abby shivered with premonition. Was it here at last? The showdown that she had feared someday would come?

     Not now! she wanted to shout. Not yet. Just a little more time. Let me be reunited with my daughter as a free woman...

U
RI
E
DELSTEIN WAS INVISIBLE.

     Sitting in his boss's bullet-proof office on the second floor of the Las Vegas Atlantis Casino Hotel, the senior accountant and best friend of Michael Fallon watched the action below on a special closed-circuit TV.

     He saw Michael down there, handsome and charming in a black hand-tailored suit, gray shirt and pearl-white silk tie, thousand-dollar lizard skin shoes, dark hair slicked back, two pinkie rings flashing gold and diamond. Fallon greeted the hotel guests and casino customers as if they were personal friends, shaking their hands, effusively welcoming them to the Atlantis.

     Everyone loved Fallon. When he took over the Wagon Wheel back in 1976, after the death of Gregory Simonian who had built the first casino on the Strip, Michael had established an open-door policy with his employees, inviting anyone with a complaint to come straight into his office and speak directly to him. He would sometimes circulate through the casinos and hand out cash to gamblers who had gone bust. If a police officer was killed
in the line of duty in the Vegas area, Fallon would send a generous check to the family. He donated millions to charity and was seen in church every Sunday. He hobnobbed with the cream of Vegas society, hot shot politicians, movers and shakers. They clapped him on the back and said, "What can we do for you, Michael?"

     It was a different Las Vegas from the one Uri and Michael had grown up in. The sixties had seen the pinnacle of Vegas mob crime when Robert Kennedy had spearheaded the fight to rid Nevada of organized crime, and the old boys got out. But no amount of federal investigating could tie Mike Fallon to the syndicate he had once worked for. He had turned legitimate the night Francesca was born. He had done it for her. And the wedding this coming Saturday, costing in the hundred thousands, was all for her.

     But now it was threatened.

     Uri figured gangsters killing gangsters was one thing, and he looked the other way. But the baby trafficking had come as a shock. He hadn't known Mike was involved in that. He learned about it when Fallon came to him with an outlandish story about a man named Bakersfelt who had run a lucrative network of black market adoptions years back, and now a woman named Abby Tyler was poking around into all that old business. "She'll uncover my name, Uri. I can't allow it. If the Vandenbergs find out..."

     Vandenberg, Nevada royalty, the richest of the rich, and Fallon's ticket at last into the blue-blood echelons he had craved to belong to—the family Francesca was marrying into on Saturday.

     So Uri had made a few phone calls and was awaiting the response.

     Down below, among the busy roulette tables, he saw Michael stop and exchange pleasantries with a pit boss named Julio. Fallon was grinning and Julio laughing, sharing a private joke. Then Fallon pointed to the ceiling, gave Julio a friendly pat on the back and moved on.

     Uri knew what the gesture meant. Julio had been ordered up to the office.

     As Fallon stepped into the private elevator, he sent Julio a wink and a smile and pressed the button.

     The doors whispered closed and Fallon let the smile drop. Some days his face ached from all the smiling.

     But it was what got him where he was today, that smile.

     Marrying Simonian's daughter had not launched Michael Fallon in the echelons he aspired to. Nor had inheriting the Wagon Wheel. No matter what he did, no matter that he was good looking, or how hard he tried to charm, he was still Mike Fallon, petty thug. When Francesca entered his life and his goals became for her instead of for himself, Fallon had made a frank appraisal of the man in the mirror and saw the flaws. It wasn't enough to be smart and ruthless and handsome. You had to have charisma. He saw it in all successful men.

     So he went to Hollywood and hired a make-over artist, a personal trainer, a movie director and an acting coach. They assessed him and analyzed him, they made him walk and talk and eat and drink while they watched and conferred. Then they trained him and coached him, made him posture in front of mirrors, took movies of him and showed them on a big screen. And what he learned was that it took a lot of phoniness to look sincere.

     It was hard work. They had to search for and find the one feature that would be Fallon's trademark, that would make men drop their guard and women want to hop into his bed. They found it in his laugh. But he didn't laugh much and that had to change. The team coached him on timing, how to blush on command, how to close his eyes as if he had committed a gaff. They brought in actors who showed him how it was done and pretty soon Mike Fallon got good at laughing in a self-conscious, self-mocking way. It was funny, sexy and so opposite from his dark side that even he believed the aw-shucks guy in the mirror. His rivals would never know what he was thinking, and no woman would turn him down.

     Fallon returned to Vegas a changed man. The thug was gone, the charmer was in his place.

     "Good house tonight," he declared to Uri as walked into his office. Fallon said it every night, the Atlantis always hopping.

     Uri saw his friend glance in the gold-veined mirror over the bar. Fallon never failed to check out his reflection, ever since his vacation in Hollywood and he had come back with a new laugh and a bounce in his step. "I'm going places, my friend," Fallon had said when he returned from California three decades ago. There had been a new light in his eyes, as if he had done some
house cleaning in his head. A new energy filled him, as if he were plugged into a dynamo. "I don't believe in luck," the new Mike Fallon had said, "not like those schmucks in my casino. Luck is for losers. I am going to
make
my way in this world, carve me a big chunk of it and hand it to Francesca on a platinum platter." And Uri, who knew Mike better than anyone, had fallen under the magic spell and decided that this was a star he wanted to hitch himself to.

     "I invited Julio up," Fallon said as he poured himself a scotch. Uri wondered if it was to give the man a bonus. Mike did that when he was feeling generous, and it kept the employees on their toes.

     Judging by the grin on Julio's face when he was escorted in, he was thinking the same thing.

     "You're doing a good job, Julio," Fallon said, patting the middle-aged man on the shoulder. "I wanted you to know that."