“Possible, ain’t it?” said Theo.
“Yeah. It’s also possible that she knew exactly how dangerous he was, but she wasn’t afraid of dying. Just like she wasn’t afraid to die two years later when she tried to hire your brother to shoot her.”
Theo squinted. The sun had moved just enough to create an annoying glare across the top of the windshield. “Either way, I guess she hated this Mr. Sirap as much as the other heirs.”
“Of course,” said Jack. “It was the stalking that led to the prosecutor’s accusation that Sally was trying to cover up for the man who killed her daughter.”
“Okay. That means five of the six heirs are connected to Sally’s past life. Which leaves a big question about my brother: What’s Tatum’s connection?”
Jack looked away, then back. “Maybe he’s the guy who made her whole scheme possible. She rewarded him for killing her.”
“No, no, doesn’t fit. She didn’t leave this money to reward anybody. She was trying to punish people. The only reason for her to punish Tatum is not because he made her scheme possible by killing her, but because he almost made her plan impossible. He refused to kill her.”
“But think about it. Doesn’t it make it more of a punishment for the other five if she makes Tatum Knight the sixth beneficiary?”
“She don’t need Tatum for that. She’s already got Alan Sirap, or whatever his real name is. Why would she need two-”
Jack waited for his friend to finish, and then he realized why he’d stopped. “Two killers? Is that what you were going to say?”
Theo chugged his beer, then threw the bottle out the open window. It smashed against the brick wall. “Was you who said it, not me,” he said angrily.
“Theo, come on.”
“Come on nothin’. I didn’t come all the way over here to prove my brother was guilty. It’d be nice if you could just pretend for ten minutes that you think he’s innocent.”
“I’m not-”
Theo got out and walked toward the hotel. Jack followed him inside, but Theo continued straight through the lobby and into the restaurant, probably for a replacement bottle of chapalo. Rene was at the front desk, checking out.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“Bad case of pissed-off pimenté.” Jack grabbed her suitcase and said, “We can load up.”
He led her outside and put her suitcase in back. She took shotgun, and Jack sat behind the wheel. Even with the windows open, there was no breeze to cut the mid-afternoon sun. The simple act of carrying her bag to the car had caused Jack to break a sweat.
Rene was checking her reflection in the rearview mirror, putting up her hair for the long and hot ride ahead of them. Jack averted his eyes when she caught him staring, though she didn’t seem to mind the attention.
With a bobby pin in her mouth she asked, “When are you going to get around to asking me?”
“Asking you what?”
“The question that must be on your mind: Why didn’t Sally leave one red cent of her forty-six million dollars to her darling sister, Rene?”
Jack removed his dusty Australian-style hat and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a bandanna. “That’s definitely near the top of my list.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“Honestly, my plan was to give it a day or two, get to know you a little, so I could tell if you were lying or not. Then I was going to ask.”
She cut her eyes and said, “You think you’re going to get to know me that well, do you?”
“No, I wasn’t implying-I’m a pretty quick study, is what I’m trying to say.”
She seemed amused by his embarrassment. She took his hand and said, “Put your finger right here, would you, please?”
Jack pressed his finger to the center of a long, twisted braid at the back of her head. Rene tied it all together with a colorful piece of rope, the kind he’d seen African women selling on the streets of Korhogo. In seconds, she’d completely transformed her look, and somehow it came as no surprise to Jack that she was just as striking with all that hair tucked up under her hat.
She looked at Jack and asked, “Should I tell you now?”
“Tell me what?”
“About me and Sally. And her will.”
“Now’s good.”
“You sure? I can wait, if you think you’ll be a better judge of my truth telling after we’ve bounced all the way back to Korhogo together.”
She was clearly poking fun at his “plan.” He said, “I’ll assume the risk. Go ahead.”
She took a breath, adopting a more serious air. “Truth is, Sally and I had a little falling out.”
“How little?”
“Actually, not so little. We were barely speaking to each other after she left Africa.”
“What happened?”
“Things were great while she was here. Everybody at Children First loved her. Two sisters working side by side for a good cause, fighting against the use of children as slave labor in the cocoa fields. I was truly sad when she decided to leave, and I thought I understood. Till about two months later. That’s when I found out Sally was getting married.”
“To her millionaire husband.”
“Not just any millionaire. Sally’s mega-millionaire actually owns a cocoa plantation that hires child slaves.”
“I had no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “Wow. You must have felt totally betrayed.”
“I was furious.”
“Are you still?”
“In hindsight, I realize that Sally was so screwed up over the murder of her daughter. Like I said before, she tried everything from working for charity to marrying for money. Nothing made her happy.”
“Except for maybe one thing,” said Jack.
“What’s that?”
“Based on her will, I’d say revenge.”
Their eyes met and held. Finally she said, “You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this. I don’t even think Sally’s estate lawyer knows everything.”
“Thank you for telling me. I was hoping that if I came all this way I’d get to the truth.”
“Maybe it’s time I got to the truth, too. The whole truth.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was thinking about what you said yesterday, how you wondered if Sally might have reached such a low point in her life that she hired someone to shoot her. Other than myself, I can think of only one other person who would have known her well enough to answer that question.”
“I’m listening.”
A sparkle came to her eye, as if she were suddenly energized. “How’d you like to meet Sally’s rich ex-husband?”
“I thought he lived in France.”
“He’s French, but he lives here most of the year.”
“You can arrange a meeting?”
“No promises, but with your friend Theo tagging along, I think we can pull off just about anything. Brains, beauty, brawn. How can we miss?”
“I know which of us is the brawn. So that must make me-”
“The baggage,” she said with a wink, as if to confirm that she was two of the three. “Now go get your brawny friend. Time’s a-wasting.”
Thirty-four
The road south was paved all the way to Man, a city of about 150,000 people in a breathtaking geographical setting. It was called the “town of eighteen peaks,” perhaps an overly romantic appellation for a confusing and frankly unattractive collection of urban districts that were spread across a valley and surrounded by mountains. Jack had no preconceived notion of West African cities, but Man reminded him of something else entirely, a place he just couldn’t put his finger on, until Theo spoke up.
“Like a shitty Colorado town without all the white people.”
They spent the night in Man, then set out in the morning for the coffee and cocoa farming region in western Côte d’Ivoire. The air had been scrubbed clean by an early shower, one last tropical blast at the tail end of a seven-month rainy season. Driving at the higher altitudes was a pleasant change from the dusty trek across the baked northern grasslands, but it wasn’t as beautiful as Jack had imagined it. High, forest-strewn ridges offered some insight into how the entire region had looked years earlier, before logging and agriculture claimed the rain forests.