“You were right on,” Jerry agreed heartily. “He’ll be great.”
It was six o’clock. “Let’s hope so,” Laurie said as she pushed back her chair and got up. “We’ve labored in the vineyard long enough. Let’s call it a day.”
Two hours later as they sipped coffee, Laurie said to her father, “As I told Jerry and Grace today, the die is cast.”
“What does that mean?” Timmy asked. Tonight he had not asked to be excused after he finished dessert.
“It means that I’ve done everything possible, and we start filming the people on the program tomorrow morning.”
“Will it be a series?” Timmy asked.
“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Laurie said fervently, then smiled at her son. So like Greg, she thought, not just in looks, but in the expression he gets when he’s thinking something through.
He always asked about any project she was working on. This one she had described in the broadest terms as “a reunion of four friends who grew up together but haven’t seen each other in twenty years.”
Timmy’s answer to that was, “Why didn’t they see each other?”
“Because they lived in different states,” Laurie answered honestly.
The last few months have been hard, she thought. It wasn’t only the pressure of the enormous amount of preparation for the filming. Timmy had received his First Holy Communion on May 25, and she had not been able to keep the tears from slipping past her dark glasses. Greg should be here. Greg should be here, but he’ll never be here for all the important events in Timmy’s life. Not his confirmation or graduations or when he gets married. Not any of them. Those thoughts had sounded like a drumbeat in her head, repeating themselves over and over as she made a desperate effort to stop crying.
Laurie realized that Timmy was looking at her, a worried expression on his face.
“Mom, you look sad,” he said anxiously.
“I didn’t mean to.” Laurie swallowed over the lump that was forming in her throat and smiled. “Why should I? I have you and Grandpa. Isn’t that right, Dad?”
Leo Farley was familiar with the emotion he sensed his daughter was feeling. He often had moments of intense sadness when he thought of the years he and Eileen had been married. And then to lose Greg to some devil incarnate-
Leo stopped that thought. “And I have you two,” he said heartily. “Remember, don’t stay up too late, either one of you. We all have to get up early tomorrow.”
In the morning Timmy was going away to camp for two weeks with some of his friends.
Leo and Laurie had wrestled with their abiding worry that Blue Eyes might somehow find out where Timmy was going, then realized that if they isolated him from activities with his friends, he would grow up nervous and fearful. In the five years since Greg’s murder, they’d struggled to make Timmy feel normal-while keeping him safe.
Leo had gone upstate personally to look the camp over, and had spoken with the head counselor and been assured that the boys Timmy’s age were under constant supervision, and that they had security guards who would spot a stranger in a heartbeat.
Leo told the counselor the words Timmy had been screaming: “Blue Eyes shot my daddy.” Then he repeated the description the elderly witness had given the police. “He had a scarf over his face. He was wearing a cap. He was average height, broad but not fat. He was around the block in seconds, but I don’t think he was young. But he could run really fast.”
For some reason the image of the guy who had skated past them on the sidewalk in March ran through Leo’s mind as he spoke the words “really fast.” Maybe it’s because he almost knocked over that pregnant lady who was ahead of us, he thought.
“A little more coffee, Dad?”
“No thanks.” Leo had made himself stop telling Laurie that getting those people from the Graduation Gala under one roof again was too risky. It was going to happen, and there was no use wasting his breath.
He pushed his chair back from the table, collected the dessert dishes and coffee cups, and brought them into the kitchen. Laurie was already there, about to start loading the dishes into the dishwasher.
“I’ll do those,” he said. “You double-check Timmy’s bag. I think I have everything in it.”
“Then everything is in it. I never knew anyone so organized. Dad, what would I do without you?”
“You’d do very well, but I plan to be around for a while.” Leo Farley kissed his daughter. As he said that, the words of the elderly woman who had witnessed Greg’s death and heard the murderer shout to Timmy, “Tell your mother that she’s next, then it’s your turn,” rang in his head for the millionth time.
At that moment Leo Farley decided that he would quietly drive up to Salem Ridge for the days of the filming. I’m enough of a cop that I can do surveillance without being observed, he thought.
If anything goes wrong, I want to be there, he told himself.
16
Alex Buckley’s alarm went off at 6 A.M., only seconds after his interior alarm made him stir in his sleep and open his eyes.
He lay quietly for a few minutes to collect his thoughts.
Today he would be in Salem Ridge for the first day of filming the Graduation Gala.
He pushed off the sheet and got up. Years ago, a client who was out on bail had come to his office. When he stood up to greet her, she had exclaimed, “My God, I never realized there’s no end to you!”
Six foot four, Alex had understood the remark and laughed. The woman was only five feet tall, a fact that had not prevented her from fatally stabbing her husband during a domestic quarrel.
The woman’s remark ran through his mind as he headed for the shower, but it quickly disappeared as he thought about the day ahead.
He knew why he had decided to accept the offer from Laurie Moran. He had read about the Graduation Gala when he was a sophomore at Fordham University and had followed the case with avid interest, trying to imagine which graduate had committed the crime. He had been sure it was one of them.
His apartment was on Beekman Place, by the East River, that was home to high-ranking UN delegates, as well as quietly wealthy businesspeople.
Two years ago he had happened to visit the apartment, and at the dinner table learned that the hosts were putting it on the market. He instantly decided to buy it. To him, its only downfall was the large, incessantly blinking red PEPSI-COLA sign on a building in Long Island City that marred the view of the East River.
But the apartment had six large rooms, as well as servant quarters. He knew he didn’t need so much space, but on the other hand, he rationalized, the full dining room meant he could have dinner parties; he could turn the second bedroom into a den; and it would be handy to have a guestroom. His brother Andrew, a corporate lawyer, lived in Washington, D.C., and came up to Manhattan regularly on business.
“Now you won’t need to go to a hotel,” he had told Andrew.
“I’m willing to pay the going rate,” his brother had joked, then added, “As it happens, I’m sick of hotels, so this will be great.”
When he bought the apartment, Alex decided that instead of a biweekly housekeeper it would be better to have one full-time employee who could keep the apartment clean, run errands, and prepare breakfast and dinner when he was home. Through the recommendation of the interior decorator who had furnished his new home with quiet good taste he had hired Ramon, who had been with one of her other clients but had chosen not to move to California with them. Ramon’s former employers were an eccentric couple who kept erratic hours, and what they didn’t wear they dropped on the floor.
Ramon happily settled in the studio-sized room and bath off the kitchen, which had been designed for a live-in helper. Sixty years old, born in the Philippines, he was long divorced, with a daughter in Syracuse.