Jennifer swept back her hair, looked at him, more than a hint of anxiousness in her eyes. She vacillated for a moment and then went to him, knelt beside him, touched his shoulder. The scent of her perfumed body cascaded over him. She spoke low, close to his face. Her breath tickled his ear.
“Jack, I told you before, you don’t have to put up with that sort of behavior. And now that this ridiculous murder case is out of the way we can go on with our lives. Our house is almost ready, it’s gorgeous, it really is. And we have wedding plans to finalize. Sweetheart, now everything can go back to normal.” She touched his face, turned it toward hers. She looked at him with her best pair of bedroom eyes and then she kissed him, long and deeply, letting her lips pull back slowly from his. Her eyes quickly searched his. She didn’t find what she was looking for.
“You’re right, Jenn. The ridiculous murder case is over. A man I respected and cared for got his brains blown apart. Case closed, time to move on. Got a fortune to build.”
“You know what I mean. You never should have involved yourself in that thing in the first place. It wasn’t your problem. If you would just open your eyes you’d realize that all of that was beneath you, Jack.”
“And hardly convenient for you, right?”
Jack abruptly stood up. He was more exhausted than anything else.
“Have a great life, Jenn. I’d say I’d see you around but I really can’t imagine that happening.” He started to leave.
She grabbed his sleeve. “Jack, will you please tell me what I did that was so awful?”
He hesitated and then confronted her.
“The fact that you even have to ask. Jesus Christ!” He shook his head wearily. “You took a man’s life, Jenn, a man you didn’t even know, and you destroyed it. And why did you do that? Because something he did to me ‘inconvenienced’ you. So you took ten years worth of a career and wiped it out. With one phone call. Never thinking about what it would do to him, his family. He could’ve blown his brains out, his wife could have divorced him for all you know. You didn’t care about that. You probably never even thought about that. And the bottom line is I could never love, I could never spend my life with someone who could do something like that. If you can’t understand that, if you really think what you did wasn’t wrong, then that’s all the more reason why we need to say good-bye right now. We might as well flesh out the irreconcilable differences before the wedding. Saves everybody a lot of time and trouble.”
He turned the handle on the door and smiled. “Everybody I know would probably tell me how crazy I am for doing this. That you’re the perfect woman, smart, rich, beautiful — and you are all of those things, Jenn. They’d say we’d have a perfect life together. That we’d have everything. How could we not be happy? But the thing is, I wouldn’t make you happy because I don’t care about the things you do. I don’t care about the millions in legal business, or houses the size of apartment buildings or cars that cost a year’s salary. I don’t like this house, I don’t like your lifestyle, I don’t like your friends. And I guess the bottom line is, I don’t like you. And right now I’m probably the only man on the planet who would say that. But I’m a pretty simple guy, Jenn, and the one thing I’d never do to you is lie. And let’s face it, in a couple of days, about a dozen guys a lot better suited to you than Jack Graham are going to be knocking on your door. You won’t be lonely.”
He looked at her and felt a grimace of pain as he observed the absolute astonishment on her face.
“For what it’s worth, anybody who asks, you dumped me. Not up to the Baldwin standard. Unworthy. Good-bye, Jenn.”
She still stood there several minutes after he left. A series of emotions competed for space across her face, none, in the end, winning out. Finally she fled the room. The sounds of her high heels against the marble floor disappeared as she hurried up the carpeted stairs.
For a few seconds more the library was quiet. Then the desk chair swung around and Ransome Baldwin eyed the doorway where his daughter had been standing.
Jack checked the peephole, half-expecting to see Jennifer Baldwin standing there with a gun. His eyebrows raised a notch when he saw who it was.
Seth Frank walked in, shrugged off his coat, and looked around appreciatively at Jack’s cluttered little apartment.
“Man, this brings back memories of another time in my life, I can tell you.”
“Let me guess. Delta House ’75. You were vice president in charge of bar operations.”
Frank grinned. “Closer to the truth than I’d care to admit. Enjoy it while you can, my friend. Without meaning to sound politically incorrect, a good woman will not allow you to continue such an existence.”
“Then I might be in luck.”
Jack disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a brace of Sam Adamses.
They settled into the furniture with their drinks.
“Trouble in wedded-bliss-to-be-land, counselor?”
“On a scale of one to ten, a one or a ten depending on your perspective.”
“Why am I thinking that it’s not the Baldwin gal that’s entirely gotten to you?”
“Don’t you ever stop being a detective?”
“Not if I can help it. You want to talk about it?”
Jack shook his head. “I might bend your ear another night, but not tonight.”
Frank shrugged. “Just let me know, I’ll bring the beer.”
Jack noticed the package on Frank’s lap. “Present?”
Frank took out the tape. “I’m assuming you’ve got a VCR under some of this junk?”
As the video came on Frank looked at Jack.
“Jack, this is definitely not G-rated. And I’m telling you up front, it shows everything including what happened to Luther. You up to it?”
Jack paused for a moment. “You think we might see something in here that’ll catch whoever did it?”
“That’s what I’m hoping. You knew him a lot better than I did. Maybe you’ll see something I don’t.”
“Then I’m up to it.”
Even forewarned, Jack was not prepared. Frank watched him closely as the moment grew closer. When the shot rang out he saw Jack involuntarily jerk back, his eyes wide in horror.
Frank cut off the video. “Hang in there, I warned you.”
Jack was slumped over in his chair. His breathing was irregular, his forehead clammy. His entire body shuddered for an instant and then he slowly came around. He wiped his forehead.
“Jesus Christ!”
Flanders’s passing remark to the Kennedy example had not been inappropriate. “We can stop right now, Jack.”
Jack’s lips set in a firm line. “The hell we can!”
Jack hit the rewind one more time. They had gone through the tape about a dozen times now. Watching his friend’s head virtually explode was not getting any easier to watch. The only mitigating factor was that Jack’s anger was increasing with each viewing.
Frank shook his head. “You know it’s too bad the guy wasn’t filming the other way. We might’ve gotten a flash from the shooter. I guess that would’ve been too easy. Hey you got any coffee? I have a hard time thinking without caffeine.”
“Got some pretty fresh stuff in the pot, you can bring me a cup. Dishes are over the sink.”
When Frank returned with the steaming cups, Jack had rewound the tape to a demonstrative Alan Richmond saying his piece on the impromptu stage outside the courthouse.
“That guy’s a dynamo.”
Frank looked at the screen. “I met him the other day.”
“Yeah? Me too. That was in my I’m-marrying-into-the-rich-and-famous-set days.”
“What’d you think of the guy?”
Jack gulped his coffee, reached for a bag of peanut butter crackers that lay on the couch, offered one to Frank, who took it and then put his feet up on the rickety coffee table. The detective was slipping easily back into the less-structured domain of bachelorhood.