DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS (16 page)

* * *

A
S
SOON
AS
the officer who dropped her off at her house drove away, Laney examined her street and saw no cars parked at the curb. The ones that were in the driveways were either ones she recognized or didn’t appear to have anyone inside them. Breathing a sigh of relief, she quickly walked across the street to her neighbors’ and used their phone to call the car dealership.

“I would like a loaner car,” she told the woman she’d talked to before. “I can take a cab if you don’t have anyone to bring the car to me.”

“As it happens, the van is picking up a customer who lives out your way, so I can send a driver with your car and the van can pick him up and bring him back.”

Laney thanked her neighbor, then ran back to her house and changed into jeans and a hoodie, figuring it was more appropriate attire to go visiting on questionable streets in Meraux than her business pantsuit. She hoped she’d understood the snatches of Ethan’s telephone conversation correctly, and that 8830 Bourgin Street in Meraux was where Cristal, the prostitute, lived. She had no idea what the woman had to do with Senator Sills’s murder, but she was pretty sure what she’d done with Sills himself. For the entire time she’d worked for Senator Sills, she’d heard rumors that he liked to pay for sex. According to gossip, his penchant for prostitutes was what had finally broken up his marriage.

She glanced at the couch and the pillows, which had matching indentations. The memories of the night before and she and Ethan making love came back to her in a rush. Closing her eyes, she shook her head, but that did nothing to stop the thrill inside her as her brain fed her explicit images of why she’d had trouble sleeping the night before. If things were different, she’d lie down on the couch and lose herself in a daydream of the exquisite sensations he’d coaxed from her with his mouth and his body. Thinking of him, her body trembled in a tiny aftershock of her climax. She opened her eyes and saw the sheet and pillow piled on the coffee table, and the beautiful daydream dissolved.

Once she’d closed the front door on the girl and her mother selling candy, she’d turned to Ethan, thinking that he’d take her into his arms again. But that didn’t happen. He’d bombarded her with questions about Carolyn and the cat, then he’d called in crime scene people and lab techs and had them go over her house with a fine-tooth comb.

When the forensic team finally left, he’d asked for a pillow so he could sleep on the couch. So much for beautiful, sexy daydreams. There was no time for them anyhow. If she was going to get out of here before her babysitter showed up and make it to Bourgin Street to talk to Cristal before the police got there, she needed to get a move on.

Just as she finished tying her running shoes, her doorbell rang. An arrow of fear struck the center of her chest. Who was it? Stepping over to the window, she peered through the blinds. It was a sedan with dealership tags. Thank goodness.

She opened the door to a man in a light blue shirt with his name on the pocket. He had a piece of paper in his hands. “Ma’am,” he said. “Are you Elaine Montgomery? I’ll need to see your driver’s license please.”

She showed him her license.

“Here’s your key, and here’s the insurance approval for you to get a loaner car. Keep that in the car, if you would. That serves as our insurance information in case of an accident.”

She thanked him and grabbed her purse. As she headed toward the car, the driver walked down to the corner to wait for the courtesy van. She started the car and pulled to the intersection, feeling as though a monster were breathing down her neck—Ethan’s babysitter. At the corner, she spotted a large, dark-colored car several blocks down. Was that him? In the other direction, the courtesy van was braking as it pulled up to the corner.

Hurry,
she silently told the van. She didn’t want the driver around to tell the babysitter which way she’d gone.

It took her about twenty minutes to get to Meraux and follow the GPS in the loaner car to Bourgin Street. She drove down the street, but the loaner car’s GPS didn’t find 8830. So she parked on a side street and started walking. Getting away from her house without getting caught by the D&D agent was pretty much the extent of her plan, but she figured she could ask about Cristal Mackey at any little shops nearby or give her name to neighbors who might be sitting outside. Somebody was bound to know her, if she had understood the woman’s real name correctly.

There weren’t many people on the street, and those who were out looked rough. There were young men, boys really, who probably should have been in school but who were dressed to impress in ultrabaggy or ultraskinny jeans, appropriately sized T-shirts to match the jeans and either hoodies or colors. They loitered at corners or lounged on steps, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.

An older woman was sweeping the stoop of her house, muttering to herself in what Laney thought was Spanish but couldn’t be sure. When Laney walked past, the woman looked up and glared at her, bitter hatred in her black eyes.

She tried not to hurry, tried to look cool and nonchalant as she headed on down the street. Most of the buildings were old and peeling. Residences were mixed with shops and abandoned buildings. She passed a sign that advertised apartments to rent. She started to go inside, but on the door was a handwritten sheet of paper that read “Closed.”

Sighing, she kept on down the street. Then she saw a narrow house that was painted green and had a few pansies in the front yard. She didn’t see a sign with a street number, but it was on the 8800 block and for some reason it just felt like the right house.

She walked up the sidewalk to the three steps that led up to the door of the house. She rang an old, ornate brass doorbell and heard its deep ring inside the house. For a long time she heard nothing except the echo of the bell. There was no other sound, not even any change in the air that might hint that there was someone on the other side of the door.

After at least a minute a pleasant female voice called, “Who’s there?”

“Ms. Mackey? My name is Elaine Montgomery,” Laney said. “I’d like to talk to you about my father.”

“What? Sorry. I don’t know him.”

“Please. He was Elliott Montgomery. I just have some questions about him.”

“Nope. Don’t know him.”

Laney stepped closer to the door. “Ms. Mackey,” she said as softly as she could and still have any expectation of being heard. “I’m alone. I don’t want anything from you except to know more about my dad. Please.”

There was a long pause, then, “You’re alone?”

“Yes,” Laney answered. “I promise you.”

Another pause, this time so long that Laney almost gave up. But finally, she heard locks being undone. Then the door opened with the chain still on. The face that peered through the crack in the door was very attractive. Her eyes were a startling chartreuse color. She looked at Laney, then glanced around the hall behind her.

When she closed the door, for a split second Laney was afraid once again that she’d decided not to answer, but then the chain clanked and the door opened.

The woman was probably in her early to mid-forties, dressed in a pink pajama set with a flowered robe thrown on over it. Her blond hair was twisted up on the back of her head and fastened loosely with a barrette. She studied Laney for a few seconds, then nodded.

“Come in. I’m Cristy.” She stepped back to let Laney in and for the first time, Laney saw the handgun she held.

“Oh, I—” Laney said, stopping and holding up her hands.

“Sorry,” Cristy said, pointing the weapon at the floor and clicking on the safety. “Protection,” she said wryly as she walked around the island that separated the living area from the kitchen and put the gun in a drawer.

The inside of the house was bright and airy. Tall casement windows sparkled behind billowy white sheer curtains. Next to the door was a table that held a telephone and a tall hammered copper vase with a narrow neck. As Laney looked around, she realized, as small as the house was, that everything she saw could have been in a special
tiny house
issue of
Architectural Digest.
“Your house is beautiful,” she said.

“Thanks,” Cristy said, her face brightening into a smile. “I can certainly see that you’re El’s daughter. “He talked about you all the time.”

* * *

T
WENTY
-
FIVE
MINUTES
later, Laney knew a lot more about her dad than she’d ever known before, maybe more than she’d ever wanted to know. But where she’d only pieced together a blurry snapshot of the man who had done something that he’d thought was worth over half a million dollars to hide, Cristy painted her a life-size portrait. Laney heard about a man who had suffered along with the wife he’d loved as she sank deeper and deeper into alcohol addiction and depression, until she’d finally destroyed her looks, her body and finally her life. A man who had taken on the task of raising a daughter alone, and who had fallen in love with a prostitute.

Christine Mackey, who had taken back her given name after twenty-plus years as Cristal Waters, looked at her watch and said that she had to get ready for work.

“I apologize,” Laney said quickly. “I didn’t intend to stay this long. But I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you talking to me.”

“I actually enjoyed it. Ever since I saw that Darby Sills was murdered I’ve been sitting on pins and needles, wondering when the police were going to show up at my doorstep. I knew that eventually getting that domestic disturbance call covered up would come back to bite him. I figured it would get me in trouble, too. But truthfully, I never saw them after that night.”

“Them? You mean Senator Sills and my dad?”

“No. I mean Darby or Buddy Davis.”

“Buddy Davis?” Laney was surprised, although she shouldn’t have been. From the very beginning, there had been plenty of indication that Davis was right in the middle of all this.

“You know—” Cristy said, snapping her fingers. “I’ve got a picture.”

Laney’s heart skipped a beat. “A picture?”

Cristy smiled like the cat with canary feathers spilling from her mouth as she reached under her bed and pulled out a box full of photos. “I have no idea why Darby decided to bring Davis and Elliot with him that night. That was the first time I’d ever met your dad or Davis. But they were celebrating something and Darby had two bottles of Dewar’s scotch. So after about an hour we were all getting drunk, except your dad. When Darby tried to make him drink more, El joked that he was the designated driver. So I pulled out my camera, which I always did when I had a new client. It was my own personal form of insurance.”

“You got a picture of all three of them?” Laney heard the apprehension in her voice. Was there a picture of her father and the other two men
with
Cristal? She wasn’t sure she could bear that.

“Honey, no. I didn’t mean to worry you. It’s not that kind of picture. I took one of the three of them laughing at some joke while Darby poured more scotch. Then El took one of myself and Darby and Buddy Davis. When it got to be ten o’clock, El said he had to get home because you were going to call.

“That made Darby angry. So he drank some more, and Buddy kept up with him. Buddy started asking me to do things for him and that just added fuel to Darby’s fire. Then apparently, it dawned on him that I’d taken the pictures. He demanded the camera and when I wouldn’t give it to him, he hit me. He got really violent. As soon as Darby started swinging, Buddy ran like a yellow dog with its tail between its legs and I called the police. By the time they got there, Darby had broken my jaw and was claiming I’d stolen money from him. I was terrified that they’d arrest me, so I threw out all the names I could think of, including your father’s.” She shook her head slightly. “That, by the way, is when I got the gun. And soon after that, thanks to your father, I quit the business and started working on getting a college degree.”

While she’d talked, Cristy had been sorting through the pictures. “You won’t believe some of the people whose photos are in this box. Here are the ones I was looking for,” she said, holding up two small snapshots, then handing them to Laney.

Laney studied the first photo. It was odd to see her dad laughing and holding a glass up in a salute to a younger Sills and Davis. She looked at the second picture. In it, a truly beautiful Cristy, dressed in a glamorous negligee, stood between Sills and Davis. They were looking at her and she was smiling at the camera. The look on her face made Laney uneasy. She held the picture to the light and studied Cristy’s face more closely. “You liked my dad,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

Cristy smiled wistfully. “Your dad was a special man. I know that Darby was blackmailing him.”

“You do?”

“El told me. I begged him to go to the police and expose Darby for what he really was, but he wouldn’t. He wasn’t paying blackmail to Darby for his own sake.”

Laney knew what Cristy was about to say. Tears stung her eyes.

“He did it to protect me. He paid Darby and he sent money to me. I never wanted to take it but your father was pretty persuasive when he wanted to be.”

“Thank you,” Laney said, her heart aching with love and grief. “Thank you so much for telling me that. I couldn’t understand why he would let anyone blackmail him. I couldn’t believe he’d done something so awful he’d pay blackmail rather than admit it. But he was paying the senator to protect you. Oh, Cristy, you’ve given my dad back to me.” She paused. “Did my dad love you, too?”

Cristy played with the sash of her robe. “He did. But I was Cristal Waters and your dad was Elliott Montgomery,” she said with flat finality. “Now I really have to get dressed. I don’t want to be late for work. I do counseling at a women’s shelter on the evening shift.”

Laney started to leave, then turned back at the door. “I don’t have my phone with me. Do you have a smartphone? I’d like to photograph those two pictures and send them to my phone, just in case.”