He: “So are you staying here tonight?”
She: “No. Are you?”
He: “I have a suite.”
She: “I see. And why are you telling me that?”
He: “Uh-oh. Am I being inappropriate?”
She: “You tell me. Tell me what you’re thinking right now.”
He: “I’m not sure that’s wise.”
She: “Why not?”
He: “I might get my face slapped.”
A pause.
She: “You think I’d slap you in the face.”
He: “Or maybe my wife would, if she heard me.”
Well done. A test. He’s cautious. He dips his toe in and gives her openings but allows himself an easy retreat.
She: “Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing your wife’s not here tonight.”
Seventy-five minutes later. Quicker than I expected. The sound is better inside the hotel room than in the ballroom, far less noise and interference. His moaning is annoying but helpful.
He: “You are just . . . full of surprises.”
She: “Do you like that?”
He: “I like that . . . I like that a lot.”
She: “Does your wife do this for you, Paul?”
He: “My wife? Give me a break. She just lies there like a sack of potatoes. I have to check her for a pulse.”
They laugh.
Melanie comes down the stairs over an hour later, past midnight, wearing her dress from the night, a small jacket over her shoulders. I know Mel from our days in the “entertainment” business, which she has yet to leave, though she’s going to school for a degree in sociology. I hope she completes it and gets out of this business. You can tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to get through the nights, but you can’t survive this work for very long.
I hand her an envelope. She opens it and counts the money. “This is more than we discussed,” she says. “This is too much.”
“Consider it a bonus. You got some good stuff in there.”
“Yeah, well, he doesn’t like his wife, does he?”
She unpins the crystal brooch from her dress and hands it to me. “Pretty sure we captured the whole thing on here,” she says. “If you use it, you’ll black out my face?”
“Of course, Mel. And I don’t think it will ever come to that, anyway.”
I give her a hug and we say our goodbyes. “Get that degree,” I say to her. “Promise.”
“I promise. I’m about two semesters away.” She looks around and leans in to whisper in my ear. “So what did this guy do, anyway, to piss you off?”
44
Christian
Vicky lies on me, twisting her finger in and out of my chest hair, thinking about something, though I don’t know what. She keeps her thoughts to herself, and I’m too cautious to push too hard lest I push her away.
I guess I don’t need to know if I’m anything more to Vicky than a financial whiz who also happens to be easy on the eyes and terrific in bed. Gavin is right. All that matters is that money. I need to keep my eye on the prize, a prize that is less than a month away now.
But the closer November 3 gets, the more I worry, like a pitcher throwing a no-hitter who’s just rolling along doing his thing, but now it’s the ninth inning, and the prize is in sight, and you feel yourself tightening up.
“What was it with you and Simon’s father?” I ask, because the whole thing with Theodore Dobias is something I should understand better. If Simon Dobias can be pushed as far as murder, I should probably know that before I help Vicky steal all his money, yes?
“Well, he obviously thought I wanted Simon for his money. Maybe it was personal to me, or maybe that’s just how he felt, generally, about women.”
“Maybe he didn’t trust Simon.”
“Oh, that’s definitely part of it. Simon . . .” She puts her chin on my chest and looks at me. “You look at Simon, he’s a nice-looking man, he can be charming and funny, but he never really had many good relationships with women before he met me. As far as I know, he only had one real girlfriend, back when he was like eighteen, this woman named Lauren who broke his heart. That was right around the time his mother died, and his world kind of crashed after that.”
“Oh, when did his mother die?” I ask, playing dumb.
“Well, it’s a whole story,” says Vicky. “Simon’s mother—Glory was her name—Glory was a law professor like Simon ended up. Anyway, she had a stroke that put her in a wheelchair and took away a lot of her mental capabilities and basically ended her career. Simon’s dad, Teddy—Teddy was making good money then and he started living this sort of swinger-bachelor lifestyle. He cheated on his wife. Simon caught him.”
“He caught him?”
“Yeah. Walked in on him. Teddy was having sex with this woman in his office, and Simon walked right in and saw it.”
“Harsh.”
“Yeah, harsh. And doubly harsh because Simon idolized his mother. He couldn’t bear to tell her what Teddy was doing. So he kept it quiet. And pretty soon, Teddy ended up blowing all his money and didn’t have the finances to take care of Glory, to pay for in-home care. Long story short, he wanted to put Glory in a nursing home, Simon freaked out, and right around then, Glory swallowed a bottleful of pain meds.” She looks at me. “Glad you asked?”
“So after blowing all his money on women, Teddy didn’t want Simon doing the same thing? And that’s why he put that language in the trust?”
“I guess so.”
“So what happened to Teddy?”
She looks at me for a long time.
I didn’t phrase that question well. What happened to Teddy? I should have been more generic, like What happened after Glory died? Did Simon ever make peace with his father? Something that doesn’t hint that I know that someone stuck a knife in Teddy.
Do better, Nicky. Stay on your game.
But then I realize that Vicky isn’t wondering why I would ask that question, or if I already knew something. She’s deciding how much to tell me. She’s deciding how much to let me into her life.
“Teddy, believe it or not, was murdered,” Vicky says. “He was living in St. Louis by then, and someone stabbed him and pushed him into his pool.”
“Whoa,” I say. “Who stabbed him?”
Her eyes trail off. “They never found out. They looked at Simon as a suspect, but Simon was up in Chicago taking final exams at U of C. It would have been very hard for him to have pulled that off.”
Very hard but not impossible. In fact, that would kinda be the beauty of it.
“What are you thinking?” she asks me.
I snap out of my trance. “Nothing.”
“You’re wondering whether Simon killed Teddy.”
“No, I mean—”
“You’re wondering whether I did.”
“God, no,” I say. “Of course not.”
But of course, I am.
“I’m just worried about you,” I say. “If you and Simon get into a fight over this trust money, and he’s capable of something like violence—”