“You know, it doesn’t seem strange to me that she charged Eric with murder on that evidence,” Wendy said.
“Not weird at all. I didn’t like her, but it never occurred to me that there was anything strange about her until the last few days. It was pretty clear to everyone that you were alive, but she still wouldn’t drop the charges. When it seemed clear today that Jay Chernoff had enough evidence to get the judge to dismiss the charges without her, she changed her approach. She wanted to hold us for insurance fraud. She wanted to keep us in town, and to know exactly where we were.”
“Maybe it was spite. My taking off years ago was what made her waste a lot of time and money charging Eric.”
“Anything is possible. But if you’re really going to prosecute somebody, you do it. DAs don’t tell people who haven’t been charged with anything that they’re under some kind of house arrest. And she and Jay both seemed to know that she couldn’t do it. So why was she trying to?”
“I don’t know.” She began to open drawers.
Till knelt beside the bed and ran his hand between the mattress and the springs. He touched something, lifted the mattresss and pulled it out, then turned on his flashlight. “Interesting,” he said. “She must have just had time to hide this before we got here.”
“What?”
“Look at this,” he said. He held his flashlight on a photograph in a frame. It showed a man standing in a driveway beside a blue classic Maserati.
“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed.
“Who is he? Is that Scott?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“The one who beat me up. The one with the bat.”
44
SCOTT SCHELLING SLOUCHED in the back seat of the taxicab, watching the buildings, the cars, the streets sliding past his window. He was in a state deeper than weariness. When he had come off the plane, he had turned on his phone, heard the message indicator chirping, and turned it off again, something he rarely did. He liked to know the latest, liked to be alert, liked to be taking in information, gobbling it and then sending it back changed, a solution to each problem, an answer to each question.
But tonight was different.
Wendy Harper was dead. He had endured the long period of fear and used it in intense, concentrated work, the quiet building of his power and knowledge. He had let other people share in the credit to make them into allies. He had always chosen carefully and consciously who these people would be: whom he would push into positions of prominence, and which adversaries he wanted them to weaken and defeat. He had studied and planned, and now he had found his way to Jill Klein. She was going to be—already was—important to him. This morning—Saturday morning—when Ray Klein had flown to New York to get back to running the conglomerate, Jill had returned to Scott’s hotel room in Santa Fe, already full of ideas and plans for raising Scott’s status.
Early in the morning she had actually begun taking thank-you calls for the dinner party from her friends, members of the board of directors and their wives, major shareholders. She had used this chance to mention how impressed this person or that person had been with Scott Schelling. She was far too clever to say she’d even spoken with Scott alone: She was only repeating the impressions other people had conveyed to her as hostess. By now she had built the impression of a consensus. Anyone who had not made it his business to get to know Scott Schelling, well, you simply had to wonder about anybody like that. It was a small step, but it was the right step, and it could only have been taken on this particular day, when many of the guests had seen Scott for the first time, and he could still be a topic. Jill’s years as a corporate wife had given her a feel for what to do and when to do it, and Scott was her new beneficiary.
The houses were getting bigger and the cars newer and more expensive. The cab was entering his neighborhood now. The streets and sidewalks were clean, the trees tall and old, the lawns broad and green.
He would get a few hours’ sleep and then go to the office and begin making things happen. He would set up a Sunday meeting with the heads of publicity and fan relations and get them going on the new project. They had done it a hundred times before, and now they would do it for him. He envisioned the whole campaign. There would be an article in a magazine: an exclusive interview with the modest genius of pop music, Scott Schelling of Crosswinds. It would be a campaign that built slowly and subtly. The publicity people could feed the reporter statements from all of the current Crosswinds talent about how brilliant he was. It would work because it always worked.
After that, he would be offered television appearances. His PR people would let the cable networks know that he was available to serve as a talking head about music, popular trends, and celebrities. There was no reason to worry about high visibility anymore: Wendy Harper was dead. He would throw parties and invite the cream of the industry, then feed the fan magazines. Once photographs of stars taken “at Scott Schelling’s party” began to appear regularly, he would become familiar to the hard-core fan demographic.
Scott stopped himself from thinking too far ahead. This wasn’t the time, and it was not his job, anyway. Crosswinds had the best publicity people in the business, and they had actually improved since Aggregate had taken over. Scott had been able to get them more money to work with. Music was a business that was almost entirely a matter of creating stampedes, but his first bosses—the ones he had replaced—had been incredibly shortsighted and stingy about publicity. Ray Klein had a larger perspective, and he had not flinched at Scott’s budget requests.
For about the tenth time in the past two days, Scott realized that he actually respected Ray Klein. He was a good businessman, and he wasn’t really such a bad man to work for. Scott just didn’t like a boss—any boss. Ray Klein held power over him and made him afraid of losing what he had. Ray Klein stood in the way of his getting more.
There was the house. The gate was open, and in the space near the side of the house he could see Carl’s car. The cabdriver stopped outside the open gate, but Scott said, “Go on in. Let me off at the door.”
The driver backed up a few feet and then drove up the long cobbled driveway to the broad, flat space at the front. Scott got out and handed the driver a fifty-dollar bill, which was at least a twenty-dollar tip he didn’t deserve. “Keep it,” he said. When he was in the public eye in the next few months, he didn’t want cabdrivers giving interviews about how cheap he was. The driver lifted the suitcase out of his trunk, set it on the ground carefully, extended the handle for him, got into his car, and drove away.
Scott took a moment to look at his house. Carl had left the gate open for him, which meant that he must have called the hotel and found he’d checked out. Carl’s presence here meant that everything must have gone well. He took out his keys and unlocked the door, pushed it open and pulled his suitcase into the dimly lighted foyer.
The first thing Scott saw was the silhouette of a woman. Could Jill have flown here instead of New York to surprise him? The woman stepped toward him and he saw the gun. The woman’s voice was different from Jill’s. It was harsh, unfriendly. “You must be Scott.”
“That’s right. Who are you?”
“I’m Sylvie Turner. And right behind you is Paul.”
Paul was almost at Scott Schelling’s ear when he spoke. “Pleased to meet you, Scott. Welcome home. On Friday night your secretary said you were in a meeting. She didn’t say it was in another state.”
“Yes. I had some business in Santa Fe.”
“I guess you know what we’re here for.” Sylvie stepped closer. She was taller than Scott, and she looked down at him in an eager, predatory way that made Scott uncomfortable, but he didn’t dare to step back.