“I know,” I said. “It’s not often that the help gets a look inside.”
I opened the door and was suddenly flooded by an effulgence of solar light.
The Promethean Room had a thirty-foot ceiling with an outer wall of glass that went all the way up. The long room was dominated by an ebony wood table that could seat at least thirty participants. But that day there were only two people there: Cassandra, who sat to the center right of the table, and Roger, who stood at the far window looking down on the east.
“Hello,” I said with some volume. “Everybody waiting for me?”
Roger turned and began the thirty-pace stroll toward the center of the left side of the table. I met him at the chairs across from his daughter.
“Why is he here?” Cassandra asked the old man.
“Because I want him here.”
“This is not his business.”
“You wouldn’t think so,” I said jauntily. “But surprisingly enough I have something to say. You know, I’m a private dick and dicks do what they do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cassandra asked. And, before I could reply: “I’m done with you.”
“I know,” I said. “You wanted me to derail your father and clear the way for you and Alexander to take over MDLT. Derail or kill.”
“I never asked you to kill anybody.”
“Not in so many words. But that doesn’t matter anyway because I delivered your message and decided that murder for hire wasn’t my thing.” I took that moment to sit.
Roger followed suit.
Cassandra wanted me obliterated from her sight. But if looks could kill I would have been dead long before the Quiller Case.
“You see,” I said, “I was confused about what were the reasons I was hired to find out if Quiller was worthy of saving. I mean, who would care if a man like that lived or died, was free or caged?”
I glanced at my employer and he looked away.
“At first Quiller didn’t even want me in the cell with him,” I said to Cassandra. “He told me to leave but he finally, begrudgingly decided that I might be able to help him. At first I thought that he was somehow blackmailing your dad to get him out of Dutch. But your father said no and he was right... kinda. Quiller did have information that Roger didn’t want divulged, but he wasn’t protecting himself like you thought.”
“No?” the daughter said on a sneer. “Then why was I told by Minta Kraft that that man Quiller had evidence that my father is a murderer?”
“That’s where I got confused,” I admitted.
“No,” Roger said to me. “Don’t.”
“It’s the only way, Rog,” I told him. “You see,” I then said to his daughter, “your father cares more about you and your brother than you think. My grandmother told me a long time ago that you were the stronger sibling, the one that looked after Alex. He’s a weak man, given to dark moods and depression.”
“There’s a reason for that,” she said, showing more humanity in those few words than I would have thought possible.
“Yes,” I said. “He was broken over the murder of George Laurel.”
“Joseph,” Roger warned.
“Your brother met Valeria Ursini at the Olympics when your father was training the fencing team. Alexander fell in love with her, but she was infatuated with Roger.”
“You always said that you gave us everything,” daughter said to father, “but in reality you took it all.”
“It seems like that,” I said as Roger stood up and headed back for his post at the window.
“It is that,” Cassandra said to the old man’s back.
Roger stopped his escapist pilgrimage and settled onto a chair three seats down.
“Did you know that after Valeria started at Yale your father dropped her and Alex moved in?”
It gave me great pleasure to say something that Cassandra didn’t know and that Roger didn’t know that I had figured out.
“Yeah,” I said. “He hooked up with her. He figured that there would be wedding bells and babies. But Ms. Ursini heard a different drum. She wanted a good time but no more. And when she got together with George Laurel, your brother couldn’t take it. He offered Sola Prendergast enough money to pull his whole family out of poverty. That’s why Sola hacked poor George to death.”
“That’s a lie!” the sister proclaimed.
“No,” I said gently, and then I lied a little. “Quiller told me the story. When I asked him about your dad he told me that there was suspicion about George among the homicide cops of New Haven. They didn’t have enough to go after a Ferris, so they let it drop. And then, years later, Quiller sent a lawyer in to offer Sola his services if he would tell him what really happened.”
“Those are just words,” Cassandra ejaculated, spittle popping from her lips. “Some story you made up to save that bastard’s life.”
“Sola signed a confession,” I avowed solemnly.
Everything I said was true, only I hadn’t heard it from Quiller directly. I read it in the TTT.
“That can’t be,” she said, aging in front of my eyes.
“Minta Kraft told you that Quiller had something on your father. You used her to set up Quiller. And she used you to bring him down.”
“Please, Joseph,” Roger pled.
“Your father’s crime was to cover up your brother’s paid-for butchery.”
Cassandra turned her eyes to Roger. There was no mistaking the pain on both their faces. He wanted to deny everything and so did she.
“You should be happy,” I said to Cassandra. “Your convoluted plan to destroy Quiller and get his blackmail file out in the world would have destroyed the only person you truly love.”
There’s little use for truth when it is the unwanted answer to a lifetime of hatred.
With great concentration Roger’s only daughter was able to push against the tabletop and stand.
“Cassie,” Roger said.
“Shut up!”
“I didn’t know what to do,” he continued. “I felt like you say, that it was all my fault. I wanted to save him. Save him.”
Cassandra Ferris-Brathwaite turned away and stumbled the few steps to the wall. There she put out a hand to remain upright and walked to the door of the Promethean Room.
“You destroyed her,” Roger Ferris said to me.
“She shot my grandmother by proxy. I gave her what she deserved face-to-face.”
36
“So what did you do, Daddy?” Aja asked me months after the Quiller Case was closed.
“I gave the Ten Thousand Things file to someone I could trust and asked them to hide it... somewhere. Then I went on with my life.”
“I mean about Mr. Ferris’s son.”
She was seated behind her reception desk while I sat in the same chair as when I talked to Roger’s daughter.
“I retrieved the confession that Sola Prendergast wrote and the documentation that came with it,” I said. “Then I turned it all over to Henri Tourneau.”
“That’s that nice police detective, right?”
“Uh-huh. Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
“That he’d call New Haven PD and see.”
“And what’d they do?”
“Nothing.”
The smile my daughter affected was filled with a kind of sympathetic pain. Aja-Denise is a beautiful young woman. I know that, but when I look at her, all I see is my child.
“Did you tell Grandma B?”
“I wanted to, but hey, you know, she deserves a little happiness.”
Aja smiled at me.
“What?” I asked her.
“How come you’re tellin’ me ’bout it?”
That was the right question. Aja almost always asked the hardest ones.
“Maybe two months after,” I said, “after I thought it was through, I started waking up in the middle of the night.”