“I’m not sure I’m ready,” I told Tav, brushing a wisp of hair off my face.
“I know. I promised myself I would wait six months before asking you, but my willpower is not up to the task of waiting.” The rueful awareness in his eyes, the crooked smile, the memory of that almost-kiss Monday night made my chest feel tight.
Maurice rolled down the window and said, “Are you coming, Anastasia?”
“Yes,” I answered both men.
Chapter 30
Friday afternoon I locked up Graysin Motion, shut off my cell phone, and took Corinne’s manuscript into my kitchen. Making a big pot of coffee, I sorted the pages back into order and sat down to read. The tale of Corinne’s life, her excitement as she fell in love and married, only to find herself restless and unsatisfied soon after; her love for baby Randolph, and her anguish as the son she loved turned into someone else under the influence of drugs; her dislike of the daughter-in-law Randolph brought her, a girl ten years his junior who was more interested in partying than in mothering the child who came along six months after they married; her ballroom dance successes and her drive to win more titles and recognition; and the stories about people she met along the way kept me glued to the manuscript as the level of coffee in the pot steadily declined.
Greta Monk’s story was here, along with Corinne’s confrontation with her about the embezzlement. Conrad Monk, Corinne said, had repaid the money his wife embezzled and spread hush money around liberally to keep her from being indicted. Corinne had gone along only to keep scandal from tainting the dance scholarship foundation and its good work. Marco Ingelido’s sordid story was here, a cautionary tale of lust run amok. She’d loved Marco, Corinne admitted, and had hoped to marry him before he got Phyllis, Sarah’s mom, pregnant. When he’d become engaged to Marian, Phyllis’s sister, Corinne had warned Marian, told her that Sarah was, in fact, Marco’s child. My eyes opened wide at that. So, Marco’s wife had known all along and never let on. I wondered whether the knowledge that her husband had slept with her sister, had fathered a child with her, had eaten at her over the years.
I made notes as I read, planning to pass my ideas along to Detective Lissy (whether he appreciated it or not) and Phineas Drake. Corinne gave Maurice’s story of cruise ship romance gone bad a humorous spin, and I wondered how he’d react to that. It didn’t seem to me, even forty-some years after the fact, that he found anything funny about the incident. I knew Detective Lissy would have latched onto the story already, so I didn’t include it in my notes. There were a couple of stories I hadn’t heard before, one featuring a ballroom dance judge who was a closet homosexual in the early 1970s who had been blackmailed by a former partner. Since he had died of AIDS in the late 1980s, I didn’t put him in my notes either. The other tale I was unfamiliar with involved Turner and cheating. He’d done more than cheat himself, according to his loving grandmother; he’d run a cheating racket that involved buying copies of tests, hacking professors’ computers, and selling the tests themselves and/or answers to a startling number of students. I wondered whether he could be prosecuted for the hacking; even if not, having the tale publicized was likely to ensure he never got admitted to another university. Not that failing to get a degree would matter much to his future, now that he had inherited Corinne’s millions.
Lavinia Fremont’s story came late in the manuscript, with great descriptions about their trip to England and the excitement of competing. Corinne described the attack outside the nightclub in horrific detail, and included a confession that rocked me back in my chair. I turned the last page over with relief and regret. I imagined the book would sell well. Draining the last bit of coffee from my mug, and feeling a caffeine-overdose headache coming on, I tapped my pen on the table and stared into space. My thoughts tumbled semiaimlessly. If I wrote a memoir in my seventies, would I have the same wealth of stories to tell that Corinne did? Would the people whose secrets Corinne laid bare in the book recover from the revelations? I thought about Mrs. Laughlin and her statement about greed and revenge being the only credible motives for murder. I’d thought all along that greed had twisted someone into a murderer. Maybe Turner or Randolph in order to inherit early, maybe Marco or Greta, who were greedy for acclaim and success and whose quests for those might be curtailed by Corinne’s brutal openness. Maybe even Mrs. Laughlin, greedy for autonomy and new adventures.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I became convinced that I was wrong. Greed hadn’t prompted Corinne’s murder.
Revenge had.
Chapter 31
I thought about calling Maurice and talking it over with him, or even Tav or Danielle, just to run my suspicions past them. In the end, I called Detective Lissy. He was the one who would have to make the arrest, after all.
I caught him as he was leaving the office for the weekend, and he seemed strangely unwilling to make time for me, even when I told him I knew who had killed Corinne Blakely.
“So do I,” he said wearily. “Maurice Goldberg. We arrested him, remember?”
“It wasn’t Maurice. Look, I read the manuscript-”
“So did one of my officers. We talked to a couple of the folks mentioned in the book, including the Monks and Mr. Ingelido, and we’re satisfied they didn’t have anything to do with the murder.”
“They didn’t,” I agreed. “If you’d just hear me out-”
“Ms. Graysin, my grandson is pitching the first game in the Little League championships in forty-five minutes. The only thing I’m listening to this evening is the crack of the ball against the bat and the insults of parents abusing the ump.”
“Where?”
A hint of disbelief in his voice, Lissy told me.
An hour later, I joined him on the metal bleachers set up around a baseball diamond out near Vienna, Virginia, a D.C. suburb off of I-66. The sun beat down hotly, and I was grateful for the Baltimore Orioles cap I wore with my ponytail threaded through the back. The metal bleachers had absorbed enough heat to be uncomfortably warm against the backs of my thighs as I settled in beside Lissy. He looked casual and much more grandpa-ish in multipocketed khaki shorts and a faded blue golf shirt. Despite that, the shoelaces on his athletic shoes looked like they’d been ironed, and not a smudge of dirt sullied their whiteness. He slid me an exasperated look when I sat down and didn’t introduce me to the woman on his other side, whom I assumed was his daughter.
“You know Virginia has stalking laws, right?” he greeted me.
“I’m not stalking you!”
“Hmph.” He turned away to applaud as a team of adolescent boys in red-striped shirts took the field. “My grandson,” he said proudly, pointing to a burly lad throwing balls from the pitcher’s mound. He sounded more human than I’d ever heard him.
“Looks like he’s got an arm,” I said, parroting something I’d heard my dad say once about an Orioles pitching prospect.
I’d hoped that praising his grandson would soften Lissy up, but he merely said, “Give it to me.” He kept his eyes on the field while I talked, turning his head to face me only when I’d finished.
“You want me to arrest Lavinia Fremont?” he said incredulously. “The woman who benefited most from Corinne Blakely’s generosity, whose business was financed by Blakely?” He sounded as if he’d have had the ump throw me out of the game if it were possible.