Veiled Threats (20 page)

“W
HAT THE HELL
?”

A man in an intensely plaid bathrobe was staring at me from the open doorway of apartment thirteen. Lucky thirteen. Aaron Gold. The man in the robe was Aaron Gold, and he was going to help me. But help me with what? I had forgotten, somewhere back there in the rain, stumbling past the silent homes and the empty cars. Mind and body were both numb, my bleeding hands and banged-up skull so distant that they might as well belong to someone else, someone who had to reach apartment thirteen. Now that I had arrived, my purpose in being there eluded me, sinking from sight like a stone in deep water. In cold, black, bottomless water—

“Don't cry! Carnegie, come in, don't cry. I didn't recognize you, that's all.”

He put an arm around my waist, and at the touch of his hand I crumpled like a puppet with cut strings. There was a clumsy tangle of limbs, a lifting and lurching, and then I was slumped across a sofa. I could hear water dripping onto the floor. Maybe there was a leak in the roof. Or was it me? Must be me. Gold was talking, his irritating East Coast voice growing nearer and then fading out, but the words didn't make any particular sense. Not that I cared. I was drifting in a heavy, pleasant torpor. Even the shuddering didn't bother me
anymore. If only that troublesome voice would go away. Then I could sleep, drift to sleep …

“Your lips are blue! Here, let's get a blanket around you, you're like ice. And you're soaked. Is it raining that hard? Carnegie, wake up! Was it a car accident? Is anybody else hurt? Answer me, dammit!”

“No!” My own voice was weak and whiny. I coughed and tried again. “Nobody else. Just me.”

“Where's your car?”

“There isn't any c-car,” I said petulantly. My teeth were going like castanets. “Why do you keep t-talking about cars?”

“OK, never mind that. Do you need a doctor?”

I shook my head, most of the motion lost in shuddering.

“You sure? All right, wait a sec.”

He disappeared, and I heard the rubbery squeak of a faucet and the gush of water drumming in a bathtub. Oh God, a hot bath. Clear, shallow, hot water. The thought roused me just enough to realize how cold I was, cold to the bone. It took a few minutes to marshal my strength, then I staggered to my feet. A fringed chenille bedspread fell from my shoulders and tangled around my knees, but I kicked it away with a sob and followed the gushing sound down a short hallway to a small, brightly lit bathroom. Aaron Gold reached out to me. I pushed past him and stepped into the half-filled tub.

“Most people take their shoes off first,” he said mildly.

I didn't reply. I was busy scootching down, as deep as I could manage, into the bath water. As the tub filled, the mud and scum from my clothes turned the water to greenish murk, but it was hot murk and that was all that mattered. Kneeling by the edge, Gold shoved back the sleeves of his robe and lifted my ankles, one at a time, to pull off my sneakers. They
came free with a sucking sound. My feet were wrinkled and fish-belly white.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You didn't get this wet just in the rain. Were you in a boat accident? Or do they go in for midnight swims around here?”

I was almost capable, now, of rational speech. “Give me some time, would you? There's … there's a lot to explain.”

“No kidding. I'll get you some dry clothes. You want help getting out of those jeans?”

“No!”

He raised his hands, all innocence. “Just checking. Your womanly virtue is safe tonight. No offense, but you smell like low tide.”

He left, pulling the door half shut behind him. I picked at the buttons of my shirt, but the sodden cloth resisted my numbed fingers, so I gave up and plunged my hands back into the filthy water. The heated current from the faucet swirled below the surface around my bare feet, and the steam drifted up, veiling the turquoise tiles around me. I ceased, for a time, to be conscious of anything except the painful pleasure of getting warm.

I was warming up to rational thought as well, and as the feeling stole back into my fingers and toes, I thought about Holt Walker. Smooth, suave, professional Holt must be working for Keith Guthridge, or for the men behind him. How convenient to kidnap Douglas Parry's daughter, if you had Douglas Parry's closest friend on the payroll! But why had Holt broken into my houseboat tonight?

Come to think of it, he hadn't broken in. He'd used a key. I could clearly recall the sound of it turning in the front door lock. But I hadn't given him my key, and no one else had an extra.
No one except Eddie.
I sat upright in the tub, the water
sluicing off me in smelly rivulets. Surely not Eddie. That was crazy; I was crazy even to imagine it. Embezzlement was one thing, but conspiring in a kidnapping? It was unthinkable. Just as unthinkable as my smoldering, green-eyed Prince Charming chopping off Nickie's hair. Or had Andreas done that part? And what else had they done by now?

“I don't have anything wedding-colored, Wedding Lady, so you have to make do with this stuff.” Gold poked his head around the door and dumped some clothes on the toilet lid. “Hey, your eyes are all the way open, that's good. You want some hot soup, hot coffee, hot something?”

“Coffee,” I said absently.

“Coming up.”

I pulled the plug and stood up. Unbuttoning the shirt was impossible, so I peeled it over my head and dropped it on the floor, then struggled wearily out of my jeans. Something chinked when they hit the floor. My keys were still in the pocket, where I'd shoved them after Lily dropped me off. I smiled grimly. If Holt and his sullen friend had locked the door behind them, I could still let myself in. But what would I find when I did?

I shook my head in angry confusion. A hot shower and a lot of soap; then maybe I'd be able to think straight. I didn't see any shampoo, so I used the soap on my hair, then rubbed myself briskly dry with a threadbare blue towel and got dressed. Of the heap Gold had left me, only the socks fit. The gray sweatpants stopped well short of my ankles, and the paint-spattered navy sweatshirt left my wrists bare. But it was all clean and dry, and so was I. I wrapped the towel tightly around my hair, binding every damp curl up and out of the way, and then I made the mistake of swiping away a clear spot in the steamed-over mirror.

The face in the mirror was frightful. Thin, deadly pale, with huge bleak eyes and bloodless lips, and an open cut above one temple, from which a thread of blood was tracing its way over my cheekbone like a brilliant red scar. I cleaned off the blood with a tissue and unwrapped the towel, shaking my hair loose over my shoulders.

“All style and surface,” I muttered to my reflection. But at least I looked less like a skull.

“You all right in there?” Gold called. “The coffee's ready.”

I could smell it as I came down the hallway, a dark, welcoming aroma mixed with the reek of tobacco. My host, now wearing jeans under his appalling bathrobe, was perched on a stool at a pastel-blue Formica counter, stubbing out one cigarette and lighting another. The counter separated the living room from a kitchen that was much like the rest of the apartment: clean enough, roomy enough, utterly impersonal. A small saucepan on the stove was crusted with soupy remains that matched, in color and state of decay, the remains on a bowl and spoon in the sink. Sitting in solitary splendor on the countertop were an expensive-looking coffeemaker, its glass pot filled with the darkest of brews, and an open bottle of Scotch.

I took the other stool and lifted my waiting cup greedily. There was almost as much liquor in it as coffee, and the mixture chased every lingering chill from my body, right down to the wrinkled soles of my feet. I drained the cup and held it out for more. And I don't even like Scotch. Gold, amused, blew out a mouthful of smoke and said, “You're welcome.”

“What? Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. Thanks for everything.”

He reached behind him for the coffeepot. “My name is Aaron.”

“Thank you, Aaron.”

He nodded, pouring. With his unshaven stubble and his dangling cigarette, he looked like a second-string tough guy in an amateur play. “You're welcome, Little Mermaid. Now, what's the deal here?”

I took a deep breath. Where to start? Now that I had an audience, the story seemed so unbelievable. And so humiliating. Stick to the facts, I decided, and leave the feelings out of it. Keep it impersonal. “It's about Holt Walker. He's Douglas Parry's attorney, and—”

“And your boyfriend, I know. What'd he do, push you off his yacht?”

“No,” I snapped. “No, as a matter of fact, he arranged to have Nickie Parry kidnapped at St. Anne's last Saturday.”

Aaron Gold's cigarette fell from his lips and drowned itself with a hiss in his coffee cup. “
Kidnapped?
Are you sure?”

“I found the ransom note myself.”

“She was kidnapped last week, and now this week she's blithely rescheduling her wedding date? Wait a minute. Wait just one minute.” He skittered into the bedroom, came back with a small tape recorder, tried to start it, cursed at its dead batteries, and then grabbed a pencil and a legal pad from a drawer under the wall telephone. It was the telephone that alarmed me the most.

“No, you wait a minute!” I protested. “I didn't come here because you're a reporter! You can't write about this, and you can't call anybody! You have to promise me that, or I won't tell you another word.”

Gold sat down again and looked at me, completely deadpan. No hospitality now, no quips. Just a narrowing of the dark eyes below the tousled black hair. “Listen, Wedding
Lady, I
am
a reporter. And you don't
have
to tell me another word. I can go out the door this minute and investigate the shit out of what you just said. Also I can boot you back out in the rain where you came from. This isn't the Salvation Army. It's my apartment, and I was asleep. Now if you didn't come here to give me this story, why the hell—”

“I came here to hide!”

“From who?”

“From Holt Walker and—and some thug he hired to do the kidnapping! He attacked me once already, and now they're searching my houseboat. And don't yell at me. I hate it when people yell at me!”

“Holt Walker attacked you?” Gold came around the end of the counter and took me gently by the shoulders, staring closely into my face. “There's blood on your forehead. That son of a bitch. That son of a
bitch.
”

I shook him off. “Would you listen, please? Holt didn't attack me, this other guy did, but it was back at the fund-raiser for Senator Bigelow. I was wearing Nickie's jacket, and it was dark. Theo told me I just fell against a tree, but … Oh, my God. Theo must be in on it, too, or he wouldn't have lied.”

“Who's Theo?”

I closed my eyes and swayed. The whiskey was doing its job too well. “I have to lie down. Now.”

“Sure, of course. In here.” He led me to the bedroom, where the chenille spread no longer covered the tangle of wilted white sheets on a double bed. There were no pictures on the wall, no personal mementos on the dresser, not even a bedside lamp. Just a pile of newspapers on the floor weighted down with an overflowing ashtray and a tiny portable television set. The carpet was apartment-building
green, the drapes apartment-building beige. I fell facedown onto the bed, waiting for my queasy stomach to settle. Gold sat on the edge and brought out the inevitable cigarette.

“Do you have to smoke?” I said thickly, into the sheets.

“No, I don't have to. I like to.”

But he returned the cigarette to the pack and took the ashtray out of the room. I used the moment to sit up against the pillows and sort out my thoughts, something I should have done before I spilled the beans about the kidnapping. And to a reporter, yet. But now that I had, what was best to do? I blinked at the glare from the overhead light. Could I use what I knew about Holt to help Nickie somehow, or would it be safer to remain silent? What Holt had done to me was mortifying, but unimportant. The important thing was Nickie's safety. So, enough whining. I had learned the truth about Holt by chance, and now chance had given me an ally, wrapped in a plaid bathrobe. When Gold returned, I was ready for him.

“Look,” I said, in the voice I used to tame ferocious mothers-of-the-bride. “Later on, when this is over, you can have my exclusive story, all right? Eyewitness to heinous crimes in high society, any kind of garbage you want to print. But if you tell anyone now, you could kill Niccola Parry. Do you understand?”

“Of course I don't understand,” said Gold. He sat cross-legged on the foot of the bed, his feet bare and his robe gaping open. “I thought the Parry girl was sick at home. Corinne Campbell said so.”

“I lied to Corinne. I've been lying to everybody. Nickie's being held for ransom, and the note said that if the police hear about it, the kidnappers will cut off her f-fingers.” I stumbled over the words, and felt tears rising. I blinked them
back and went on. “Her parents are frantic. Douglas is going to pay the ransom, but they haven't told him when or where. And his closest friend is in on it!”

“Holt Walker?”

I nodded.

“Pretty nasty for you, finding that out.”

I nodded again.