“Where’s he at? The banquet? The door’s right over there. I can show you the way.”
“Oh, no. I can’t. I’ll get in trouble. He, he doesn’t want the other businessmen to know. That… there’s a problem.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew the tightly folded note. “Could you?”
The waiter smiled at her indulgently. “Sure, kiddo. Do you know where he’s sitting?”
She had thought about that, driving in. “I think he’s with the people from the big paper company.”
“GWP? Okay, I’ll see that he gets it.” He held out his hand for the paper, but she unfolded it quickly and pulled her ballpoint from her pocket. Meet me in the hallway outside the kitchen, she scribbled at the bottom. She refolded the paper and passed it to the nice waiter.
“You better leave now, before Egoberto tries to fillet you.”
She glanced over to where the ferocious cook was ramming rounds of helpless bread into the fiery inferno. “Right,” she said.
So here she stood, chafing her hand over her arms in a futile attempt to rub away the cold seeping from her gut. It already felt as if she had been waiting for an hour. What if the waiter couldn’t find Reid? What if he laughed and tore up the paper? What if he called the cops and they were already on their way to arrest her for blackmail? What if-
The kitchen door swung open again. Shaun Reid strode into the hall, brushing at his tuxedo jacket as if it had been soiled by his time in the kitchen. He saw her. His head went up. His black eyes and bruises startled her. He looked like a boxer. “Who are you?” he asked.
His age, his clothing, the authority in his voice-she almost blurted out the truth by sheer force of habit. The thing that caught her was that he didn’t know already. She had been cleaning his house for a year now, and he didn’t recognize her. Then she noticed the sheen of sweat across his forehead, the dampness on his upper lip.
It was quite cool in the kitchen passageway.
“I’m the person who has Millie van der Hoeven safe.”
He glanced quickly over his shoulder, then back at her. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll go call my friend, and he’ll take her to the cops. She’s been dying to talk to them all day.” She feinted, as if she were going to go around him.
He threw out his arm to stop her. “Open your jacket,” he said.
She did.
“Pick up your sweater.”
“Screw you. You want to see tits, go somewhere else, you perv.”
“I want proof you’re not wearing a wire before I talk with you, you little twit.”
“Oh.” She lifted her sweater and jacket as far as the underside of her breasts and turned around slowly, so he could see there wasn’t anything snaking down her back. It was by far the weirdest thing she had done in a day full of weird things. It didn’t feel real-more like she was acting in a TV show. The unreality emboldened her. “Here’s the deal,” she said, lowering her sweater. “You confess to having beaten up Becky Castle, and we’ll make sure Millie van der Hoeven never has the chance to testify that you killed her brother.”
Reid’s eyes narrowed. He stepped toward her, and for a moment she was afraid. Then a crash from the kitchen reminded her that they were in a relatively public place. If he tried anything, she could bring the house down with her screams.
“It was you who put that dress and the makeup in my office, wasn’t it? You little bitch.” He hissed the last phrase so quietly she wasn’t sure he had said it at all.
She forced her voice to remain strong and confident. “I’m sure you’d rather be arrested for assault than for murder.”
“It was an accident,” he snapped.
“So you want us to take Millie to the cops?”
“No!” He crossed one arm over his chest and propped the other against it. He covered his mouth and chin with one hand. Finally he said, “How do I know you won’t let her testify to the police after I’ve pled guilty to the assault?”
“It’s a balance. Like a seesaw. If you deny you beat up Becky Castle, we’ll be in trouble. If we let Millie tell the cops, you’ll be in trouble.”
“Getting arrested for assault and battery is trouble, you idiot.”
“You’re a rich guy. You can afford a good lawyer. Tell him it was a lovers’ fight, he’ll probably get you off with a few years suspended and some domestic violence classes.”
He looked at her closely. “Your friend is the person who really assaulted the Castle girl, isn’t he?” He stared at her hand. She looked down and saw her wedding ring. “He’s your husband,” Reid said.
She folded her hand and pressed it against her leg. “Do we have a deal?”
“I have to finish the dinner,” he said, tilting his head toward the kitchen. “I’m conducting some important business there. And I need a chance to call my attorney, to arrange to turn myself in.”
“You have until midnight tonight.”
“Just like Cinderella,” he said. “All right.”
She stood for a moment, not knowing what to do now. He had just… given in. She hadn’t been expecting that. Finally she shook herself and walked off. He said nothing, so neither did she.
It wasn’t until she had rounded the corner and was facing the stairs up to the lobby that she let herself smile, a wide, glorious, split-seamed smile. She did it. She was going to save her husband.
Shaun waited until the young woman was out of sight before shouldering his way through the swinging kitchen door. He barged straight through the middle of the freewheeling choreography of chefs and line cooks and waiters, his face pricking even foul-tempered kitchen workers to jump out of his way.
The hushed roar of the banquet hall neither slowed him nor soothed his expression. He pistoned along the edge of the room until he spotted the sommelier, pulling bottles from the bottom of a well-loaded cart. He moved into her space, crowding her until she clinked against the cart. “Jeremy Reid,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Um,” she said.
“Where?”
She pointed toward the ballroom exit. “He’s… he’s…”
“Where?”
“The lobby bar,” she squeaked.
Shaun sped toward the exit, moving as fast as he could without drawing undue attention to himself. He pushed through the doors into the lobby.
The lobby of the Algonquin Waters resort, for all its gleaming wood and arching spaces, was essentially a triangle whose point was truncated by a wide rectangle. The ballroom and smaller meeting rooms ranged along the bottom of the rectangle. One corner of the triangle hosted massive leather furniture in front of a riverstone fireplace that could have accommodated a whole deer on a spit. The other corner was the lounge bar. At the intersection of the triangle and the rectangle, the Oriental-carpet-covered floor opened to allow visitors to descend to the lower spa level via a polished cherry stairway. The same stairway where, if his guess was correct, his little friend was going to come out and cross the lobby to the parking lot.
He knew, from listening to Jeremy, that the hourly employees’ entrance in the back was locked, day and night, accessible only to those who could punch in the pass code. To get in to see him, his blackmailer must have come in through the public entrance, a bank of double doors opposite the top of the staircase.
Shaun speedwalked across the lobby to the bar. Jeremy was behind the faux-distressed bar counter, going over a list with one of the bartenders while the other one watched a football game on the television.
“Jeremy, I need to speak with you right away,” Shaun said in a low voice.
His son looked at him, clearly startled. “Dad? What’s up?”
“Please,” Shaun said, beckoning Jeremy with fingers flapping “urgent.” Jeremy excused himself and stepped away from the counter. Shaun grabbed him by the shoulders and moved them into a position where he was partially concealed by an overgrown ficus. “Can you see the lobby?”