“You and your pathetic little miscarriage! Lucy told me all about it the summer we got engaged. Wanted me to dump you and marry her. She would have been ten times the wife you’ve been! But no, I wanted you.
Wanted the beautiful golden princess.
“My family warned me. Dad told me over and over again what a whore your mother was, but Nathan Fox! He wasn’t even a Democrat! A Commie! Your father was a Communist!” Spittle dribbled down Michael’s chin. He was literally foaming at the mouth.
“And then that Commie bitch of his tried to blackmail me! Me! Told me he left a book and it might hurt my wife’s feelings. You were young. All sorts of crap like that. Said she didn’t want any money. But they always want money, women like that.”
Michael was raving. Michael was insane. But he was the one with the gun and one of his victims was tied up.
“The whole world was going to know what color nipples my mother-in-law has, for God’s sakes! This Lorraine said she was offering to sell it to me instead of a publisher. Had a list of Commie charities she wanted the money to go to. Sure, sure, I said. Right before I put the pillow over her mouth.” Emma gasped. Faith remembered she hadn’t told her that Lorraine was even dead. Lorraine, the person who had spent the most time with Emma’s father, the person Emma most wanted to meet.
Poor Lorraine, Faith thought. She was trying to do the right thing. Trying to make something good come out of the venomous manuscript Fox had left behind.
Had she deleted the sections about herself? Faith hoped so.
“Okay, okay. You come across Emma trying to kill herself. There’s a struggle for the gun and it goes off.
Or Emma just kills herself and I take you for a ride.” Michael Stanstead was thinking out loud. He ran his free hand through his hair in agitation. “Emma comes home, thinks you’re a burglar, shoots you by mistake, and kills herself when she realizes what’s she’s done.” None of the possibilities appealed to Faith.
Although Michael had been addressing his wife, he had been keeping his eyes on Faith. Now she realized that while he had been talking, Emma had been quietly inching her chair closer to him across the highly polished wood floor coated with many layers of polyurethane. Faith immediately leaned back against the door, swinging it slightly open.
“Stand up! Don’t move or I’ll kill you,” Stanstead screamed.
Emma scuttled closer.
“It’s the same gun, isn’t it? The same one you used to kill Fox.” Faith wanted to keep his attention focused on her. “Your wife had been despondent over her inability to get pregnant. You’ve been playing the caring, concerned husband all over town, all the while hinting that there has to be another explanation. Drugs? You’ve floated that idea? An eating disorder? When the police investigate, they’re going to find erratic withdrawals of large sums of money. Her own personal dealer? Then voilà, the same gun, and all the ends are neatly tied up.
She killed Fox to prevent him from publishing his book. A book that would have wrecked your political career. She’s eaten up with guilt over the patricide and in despair takes her life on Christmas Eve, unable to stand the happiness of others at the holiday. You become the object of sympathy and in a few years, find a more suitable mate.”
Just as Faith thought he had reached the point where her words had driven him to pull the trigger, Emma pitched forward and caught him off balance. He fell heavily onto the floor.
But he still held the gun.
Faith leapt forward and groped on the counter for the implement she’d seen out of the corner of her eye.
She grabbed the wooden pestle with its sharp point and drove it directly into Michael Stanstead’s left eye with all her strength. He screamed in agony, bringing both hands to his face and dropped to his knees. She picked up the gun and raced to the phone, punching in 911.
Emma was on the floor, too—a few feet away from her husband.
“You certainly know your way around a kitchen,” she said to her friend, and then she passed out.
The room was dominated by Maxfield Parrish’s Old King Cole mural, which ran the full length of the wall behind the bar. The sky at the top of the painting was indeed the artist’s signature blue, but the king, his fid-dlers three, and other attendants were autumnal—browns, scarlets, and golds. Emma sat across from Faith, leaning back against the banquette, slowly sipping a martini.
“Well, I’m not in the Caribbean,” Emma said pensively, “but then, neither is Michael.”
“No,” Faith concurred, savoring her own drink.
Some occasions—and places—call for martinis. Both this venerable Big Apple bar at the St. Regis Hotel with its vague suggestion of not just one but many bygone eras in the city’s history and the chance to sort things out with Emma qualified.
No, Michael Stanstead was dressed in an orange jumpsuit or some other prison garb, far from any beaches. Even the Stanstead Associates team of lawyers hadn’t been able to arrange bail. At the apartment, screaming in pain, Michael had alternated between cursing Faith and insisting he had the right to kill his own wife if she deserved it and that it was nobody’s business but his. Hearing his Miranda rights seemed to incense him even further. Possibly a clever attorney might have been able to explain away the latex gloves, the rubber raincoat, his wife bound with bed sheeting so as not to leave marks, but even a neo-Clarence Darrow couldn’t have done much with a client who kept insisting on this wild droit du seigneur.
“Do you know who I am?” he kept repeating.
Bobby, the doorman, had come up before the police arrived, after Faith’s frantic call, and had responded automatically with his boss’s name the first couple of times, then given up, wide-eyed. His first act had been to untie Emma, who had come to almost immediately, while Faith kept the gun steadily aimed at Michael.
“Why don’t you go to the Caribbean anyway?” Faith asked. It was the day after Christmas, late in the afternoon. Both Emma and she had been spending long periods of time both at police headquarters and with lawyers. And when they weren’t there, neither of their families had let them out of their sights. This was the first time the two of them had been alone together.
Michael’s father and Jason Morris had had a long meeting Sunday night, which included Adrian Sutherland, and apparently all three men called in a lot of chits. The newspapers were busy covering the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania and trying to insert a bit of holiday coverage into the grim news of world affairs. Michael’s arrest got buried in the Metro section of the Times. Faith knew the story would break sometime, but maybe not. Certainly not the whole story.
Powerful people were involved. They’d decided there was no way Michael Stanstead would be running for anything except exercise under the eyes of guards in watchtowers.
“People kept asking me how I was in these very heavy, meaningful voices and I was getting all these flowers. I just thought maybe I looked a little tired and the flowers were because of the holidays. Now I know that Michael was spreading it all over the city that I was, you know, sick.”
It had been a clever plan, Faith reflected. Michael would rid himself of a wife he didn’t want and get his hands on her money, which he wanted very much.
Since Sunday, she’d learned it was true Michael had lost a great deal of money in the crash and that he hadn’t recovered yet. His parents had always believed what was theirs was theirs. Emma’s continued insistence on not touching hers was literally driving him crazy. So, spread a few subtle hints around about his wife’s state of mind, add some “Puff the Magic Dragon” stories in the right places as well, and then all he had to do was play the part of the noble, bereaved husband after her tragic suicide. He’d had no idea his wife was that seriously depressed. He’d make some tearful speeches about not ignoring warning signs and the need for more mental-health programs. Emma would at last become the perfect political partner—