The cold smile came back again. “He’d been helping him by digging deep in people’s private lives and then handing the information over. He shot videotapes of married men having sex with their mistresses, he dug up information on addictions and past psychological problems, on family secrets—anything and everything people were afraid of. And then he handed it over to his boss, and they went to work turning other people’s fears into money. My husband,” she said flatly, “was nothing more than a blackmailer. That was his profession. To ruin lives, or threaten to ruin lives, so another man could make more money on his business deals or have more pull with the city government.”
I sat in silence. I didn’t want to tell her that it was not an uncommon practice. I didn’t want to tell her that secrets are money in the business world, that fear is leverage, that knowledge is power.
“I never pried about his job,” she said. “I knew it was confidential, and the few times I asked questions, that was what he told me. But somehow I’d always imagined that he was nobler, that he was out there solving cases the police couldn’t solve, or helping attorneys prepare for legitimate lawsuits. I knew the cheating-spouse cases would come and go, and there would be some unpleasant jobs, but . . . all he did was look for ways to hurt people. That’s it. He went to work every day determined to find some dirty secret, some sensitive topic, so another greedy man could make a larger profit.”
She sighed and shook her head, then took her hands off the railing and went back to rubbing her arms, even though she couldn’t possibly have been cold in the sweatshirt.
“He’d been doing this for years. Working for this one man.”
“Jeremiah Hubbard,” I said, speaking for the first time since she’d begun her story. She looked at me and smiled.
“Very good,” she said. “You obviously do your job well, Mr. Perry. Do the police know, too?”
I shrugged. “We’ve told them, but I don’t know how seriously they took us.”
“I see. Well, yes, it was Mr. Hubbard. And then one day, the whole beautiful arrangement fell apart. Wayne told me he’d been shooting video surveillance—using cameras that had been illegally installed, of course—and he’d videotaped a murder.”
“A murder?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you know who was killed? Or who killed him?”
“I don’t know any names. Wayne didn’t want me to know them.”
“Okay,” I said, not wanting to distract her from the story. “Go on.”
She took a breath and paused, remembering where she had left off. “He’d videotaped a murder. He told me this, and I stared at him, and said, ‘So what’s the problem? Call the police.’ But he said he couldn’t. He said the people involved were too dangerous. He said they were professional criminals, part of a national Russian crime syndicate, and we’d have to go into witness protection if we turned the tape over. He said they’d come after all of us, him, me, even Betsy. I couldn’t believe it. Witness protection. We’d have to throw our whole lives away.” She shook her head vigorously, aggravated by just the memory of the night.
“I told him to call the FBI,” she said. “That’s what you do in a situation like that, right? If it’s too serious for the police, then you call the FBI. And he told me he couldn’t do that, because the cameras had been illegally installed. He said he’d committed a crime just to get the videotape. But that was absurd; obviously, the police wouldn’t care about something so minor if it solved a murder for them. I told Wayne that, and he said he didn’t trust the FBI or the police—the men involved in the murder were too smart, too powerful, too dangerous.
“And,” she said, her voice tinged with anger and disgust, “he told me that Mr. Hubbard wouldn’t like it.” She raised her eyes to me. “Mr. Hubbard wouldn’t like it. That’s what he said to me. Can you believe that? My husband came home and told me that my daughter and I were now in danger because of his stupidity, because of his greed, and why couldn’t we go to the police? Because the rich bastard who’d put him up to it wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t like it.” She spat the words out like they were something foul in her mouth.
“He told me that, and I just stood there and stared at him. I was still holding the damned meat tenderizer, just standing there at the counter, listening to my husband explain how our lives were falling apart. And, eventually, I asked him what we were going to do.”
Her eyes seemed to grow distant as she looked at me. “I bet you’re dying to hear that part, aren’t you? I bet you’d love to know the master plan.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“Great,” she said. “I’d love to tell it. It’s all worked out so perfectly, you know.” The sarcasm in her voice rivaled anything uttered by Jerry Seinfeld or George Carlin. “He told me he was afraid the Russians already knew about the tape.”
“How?”
“I have no idea. I asked him that, too, but he ignored me. He said we were in danger now, that we had to run. He said Hubbard was going to give him enough money to get away. And all of this is happening so fast. I mean, I’d just come home from the grocery store. I’d bought a week’s worth of groceries, and now I was being told to run for my life.”
“So you came here?”
She nodded. “It was supposed to be temporary, though. A stopover. Wayne said he wanted me to take Betsy and leave. He’d stay an extra day, work out the money arrangements with Hubbard, talk to his father, and fly down to join us. From here, we were supposed to go to South America. He had a job all worked out. He was going to be a scuba-diving instructor for some sort of resort. He told me it would be great, living in paradise, waking up each morning for walks on the beach.” She shook her head sadly. “Paradise. That’s where we were going to go.”
“So he told you this, and you left the same night?”
“No. This was the day before we left. He thought we had a little time. We had dinner and put Betsy to bed and then stayed up all night talking about it. As scared as I was, it sounded like the best option. If we stayed in the city, we were going to be killed. If we entered witness protection, we’d hand our lives over to the government. They’d tell us where to live; Wayne would be given a job at Wal-Mart or something like that. But if we did it Wayne’s way and didn’t go to the police, then Hubbard would pay for us to leave. He’d give us plenty of money to create a new life.”
“What about your family?” I asked, thinking about John Weston and the agony he was suffering.
“I’m an only child, and so was Wayne,” she said. “My parents are dead. I was going to be leaving some good friends behind, of course, but as far as family it was just Wayne’s father and a few cousins. Wayne was going to tell his dad. But someone murdered him first.” Her voice broke a little when she said that, and I could tell that despite all the shock and disappointment her husband had provided her, she still loved him.