She was unintimidated. “I was young and stupid and I needed money,” she said. “None of my patrons left dissatisfied.”
“Except for one,” Jesse said. “The complaint says you stole his wallet, his Rolex, and his ring.”
She laughed. “It was his wedding band. Can you believe it? The guy paid to have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl — he thought I was sixteen — and had the nerve to bitch about his wedding ring being lifted. Look, Jesse, people change. I changed. I’ve made a new life for myself, a better life.”
“That’s true. You’ve moved up a few rungs. Your website is beautifully done. I imagine your high-end clientele pay you well enough so that you don’t need to pocket their jewelry anymore. But not quite enough to get you out of the trade completely.”
She turned hard. “Okay, Jesse, what’s this about?” She looked at her watch, made an impatient face. “Tick tock. Things to do.”
“Like spend six million dollars?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jesse left the room. When he came back in, he thumped a green duffel bag down on the table in front of her and laid a plastic-covered rifle and scope beside it. He opened the duffel and exposed the banded packs of bills.
“We’ve got two more duffels just like it in the evidence locker. Game over, Bella. You lose.”
She tried denial. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jesse. I really don’t. Stan told me the exchange was made and the tape was destroyed. What has any of this to do with me?”
He put his face very close to hers. “Don’t screw around with me, Bella. Just don’t. Like I told that idiot ex-friend of mine, Roscoe Niles, there’s hard time and there’s really hard time. As hot as you are now, what do you think a ten- or twenty-year stretch in prison will do to your looks? At least you’ll be popular inside, really popular. That much I can guarantee you.”
“I want a—”
Jesse cut her off, walking up to the mirrored glass. “Don’t say those words. You say the word lawyer and this stops being a negotiation.” He finger-combed his hair.
“Negotiation?” She perked up. “Why didn’t you say so? What do you want?”
“I have some pretty nasty suspicions about you, but I don’t want you, Bella.”
“Too bad,” she said, standing and coming close to him. “I certainly want you. Even if it wasn’t part of the deal, I would have wanted you, Jesse. You intrigue me. Men or women, they don’t usually turn me down.”
“What would Roscoe have said to that?”
She laughed a particularly cruel laugh. “That fat, limp old drunk? Talk about living in the past. He’s lucky there are drugs for his condition. I thought I’d gotten past having to force myself to be with the likes of him. The Teacher! I taught him some things, all right.”
“But you had the prospect of six million reasons to force yourself to be with him.”
“I’m not saying another word until you put something on the table other than props I may or may not know anything about.”
“By the way, Bella,” Jesse said, “that fat, limp old drunk was ready to roll over on you for a cup of coffee, so don’t give yourself too much credit.” Jesse lied to get under her skin. It worked.
“What are you offering me?”
He explained that given her involvement in extortion, fraud, conspiracy, and other assorted crimes, there was no way she could avoid at least a little time in prison, but that depending on what she gave him, he could probably get her time limited to a few years in minimum security.
“You’d be out in eighteen months and we’d make sure you didn’t get passed around. You say no to me, Bella, and I walk right out of here to Roscoe’s cell and make him an offer. Going once. Going twice.”
“Sold, damn it. Sold. What do you need from me?”
“The whole thing, from start to finish: details, names, dates.” He pulled a legal pad out of the table drawer, pulled a pen out of his pocket, and placed them in front of her. “Everything, Bella. You leave anything out and it’s no deal. I’ve already got Roscoe cold. Bascom’s dead, but I want Stan White and Evan Updike.”
She laughed that cruel laugh again.
Jesse asked, “I say something funny?”
“I can give you Stan, but Updike’s going to be an issue.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s dead. Stan killed him twenty years ago.”
90
Bella’s statement was like a detailed roadmap of the entire conspiracy. She literally knew where the body was buried. In this case, Evan Updike’s. Jesse put in a call to the New York State Police and gave them a location near Saratoga Springs where they might find the buried remains of a white male, approximately thirty-five years of age, and five feet eight inches tall. Three hours later Jesse got a call back. The trooper on the other end said, “He’s there, Chief Stone, right where you said he’d be.”
Bella only fudged one part of her statement, but Jesse expected that she would. People have a hard time implicating themselves in murder. According to her, it had been Roscoe’s idea to kill Bascom and to keep the money. “I attempted several times to talk him out of it and thought I had convinced him not to do it. Only after he went through with it and took the money did he call me to tell me what he had done. I told him I wanted nothing to do with him after that.” Jesse had read that section of her statement aloud to make certain Roscoe Niles got an earful.
Stan White was sitting alone by the pool, a bottle of vodka at his side and a .38 Smith & Wesson in his lap. When he heard Jesse’s footsteps, he raised the .38 and pressed the muzzle into the bag of flesh that hung beneath his jaw.
“I’ve been expecting you, Jesse,” White said.
“I can see that. Can we talk?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t come any closer to me than right there, we can talk until the cows come home or until The Hangman’s Sonnet comes out on iTunes.” White laughed, but tears rolled down his cheeks. “They say you can’t laugh and cry at the same time. Shows you what ‘they’ know, huh?”
“I’ve never been a big fan of ‘they’ myself.”
“I knew it was going to shit when I couldn’t get hold of anybody today. It’s horrible to be alone in the world. That’s why I did all this, to stop Terry from being alone. I could have just abandoned him to the state a long time ago, but I owed everything I ever had to Terry. I couldn’t abandon him.”
“Tell me about it.”
Stan laughed a joyless laugh. “We really meant to make the album. We really did, but Terry had a complete breakdown before we got started. Meanwhile, the label had already paid us an enormous advance. So I tried stringing it out until Terry got better, but he never got better.” White grabbed the bottle with his free hand and took a slug. As he did, Jesse inched closer. “Where was I? Oh, so I thought up a scheme to keep the money.”
“You created the myth of the album, leaked the names of the musicians who played on the recording, and then faked the theft of the master tape.”
“Just like that, Jesse. Exactly. But I created two monsters: the myth itself and—”
“Evan Updike.”
“That blackmailing little bastard. I needed someone who could give credibility to the myth other than me. He came cheap at first. Ten grand. That was nothing to me and Terry back then. But as the myth grew, Updike kept coming back for more and more, threatening to expose the truth. I couldn’t afford that because the myth had taken on a life of its own. The myth became the engine behind Terry’s sales. Every few years I would get the rumors going again and Terry’s sales would spike.”