The Cruel Ever After (6 page)

6

“How long?” asked Chess, his right leg bouncing nervously. He was sitting on a wicker rocker on Jane’s back porch, talking on his cell to a man in New Jersey who created and sold fake passports.

“A week to ten days,” came the raspy voice.

“You can’t do it any sooner?”

“I’m good and I’m cheap. You want fast, you go someplace else.”

This was the only connection Chess had. You couldn’t just call up a man like this out of the blue and expect him to talk to you. You had to do it through intermediaries. “What about the new driver’s license?”

“I might be able to get that to you sooner, but I can’t promise. I’m pretty backed up.”

Chess was in the wrong line of work. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

“Money first. Then I start.”

“I’ll wire transfer it to your bank today.” It was going to take virtually every dime he had left in his Swiss account, but it was money well spent. He needed a new passport, just in case things got too hot and he had to run.

“You’ve got all the info?” asked the man. “The routing number?”

“Yeah,” said Chess. “And you’ve got Irina Nelson’s address?”

“We’re all set.”

After hanging up, he sat for a few minutes looking at the backyard. Jane was still asleep upstairs. It was just after eight, too early to be awake after so little rest. With everything on his mind, he’d barely slept at all. He bitterly regretted his decision to return to the Twin Cities. When Irina called to tell him she’d found a buyer, he should have lied, told her the bull had already been sold. Instead, as usual, he let his curiosity, his need for money, and his lust for a woman lead him into a dangerous back alley.

It had taken weeks to get the bull into the country through Central America. He recalled one particularly horrible time, riding for three days through the Guatemalan jungle, the humidity beyond belief, spiderwebs sticking to his clothes, his hair, his face. He’d come up through Mexico, over the Texas border, and then, traveling back roads, finally reached Minnesota. If he couldn’t sell it, it would take that long—or longer—to get it back out. It would also take money, which he no longer had.

Lifting Ed the Blackmailer’s cell phone out of one of the pockets of his safari jacket, he willed it to ring. He wanted to talk to him, whoever he was, and see if he could renegotiate the price of his silence. Until the bull was out of his life, Irina was right. It was best to stay out of sight. Jane’s house seemed as good a place as any to hide, although he wasn’t sure how long she’d let him stay.

Thinking back on the first time they’d met, he remembered how bad he felt about lying to her—back when he still felt bad about lying. He wasn’t gay. Cordelia had merely assumed he was, referring to him constantly as a “beautiful boy.” He went along with it because he wanted the part in the play, and if thinking he was gay made her happy, and made it easier for them to be friends, that was fine with him. Only later had he seen it as a path to his inheritance. The irony and utter outrageousness of playing gay in order to fool his parents by marrying a lesbian at a wedding presided over by a Catholic priest appealed to him. Chess had always shaded the truth, when necessary, a tad more than he should. He often did it to make people happy, but he also lied to get what he wanted. The only real problem about making things up was that he would sometimes forget what he’d said. To be a successful liar you needed an ironclad memory.

Chess’s mom had refused to speak to him after she learned the marriage was bogus. He’d been hoping that she would forgive him, but it wasn’t in the cards. He’d left the country without saying good-bye because she refused to see him. He thought that, given enough time and distance, she would change her mind.

In fact, she had. Two years ago, when she was dying in a nursing home in Lake Forest, his older sister had e-mailed him and said that their mom had something she wanted to say to him—and that she wanted to do it face-to-face. Before he made the plane reservations, he received another e-mail saying she was dead.

Over the years, Chess had concluded that his original sin was failing to find a woman and live happily ever after. To Chess’s way of thinking, there was no such thing as “happily ever after.” It was a fairy tale, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Most people settled for something less than they wanted, or accommodated a partner’s desires in ways that diminished them. Or they divorced. Chess had escaped all that heartache by simply admitting what most refused to see.

His parents had been a prime example. They projected the fantasy image of a happily married couple, but behind the doors of their home in Lake Forest the truth was far different. The fact that his mother and father had the audacity to tie his inheritance to what they knew was a lie infuriated him then, and did so still. Justify our existence by climbing into the same unhappy bed as we did and we’ll reward you. It was absurd. Even so, his heart broke when he thought of his mother sitting alone in that nursing home, watching the last of her life fade to black. To come to the end of the road without a reconciliation with her youngest son must have seemed a cruel fate. During those final hours, she had reached out to him, but it was too late.

“Are you okay?”

Chess turned to find Jane standing in the doorway.

“You’re crying.”

“Am I?” He touched his cheek, felt the tears.

She opened the screen door wide and let her dog out into the yard.

“I was thinking about my mother. Do you remember her?”

“I actually liked her a lot.”

He gazed out at the flower garden along the back fence. The sun hit the tops of a thick patch of iris, not as grand as
Le Jardin de Monet, les iris,
but close. “I never got a chance to say good-bye. She died a few years ago. We became estranged after … you know. It still bothers me.”

She didn’t say anything, just looked at him with those intense blue-violet eyes.

Although Chess had spent a lot of time with her, he’d never really understood what made Jane tick. She didn’t talk about herself much, or pontificate on pet subjects. Instead, she asked questions and seemed genuinely interested in the answers. In Chess’s experience, that was rare. He assumed that made her the beneficiary of more than one unsought confidence over the years.

She was dressed casually this morning in jeans and a red cotton shirt. Her lush brown hair spread loosely across her shoulders. She’d aged, for sure, most notably in the wrinkles starting to form at the edges of her eyes. He figured she dyed her hair, although if she did, she’d never admit it. She was as vain as the next woman. It would no doubt surprise her to learn that a certain amount of womanly vanity made her more attractive, not less. She could be generous, sometimes even kind, but at heart Chess saw her as a Gordian knot. Convoluted. Moody. Private. That’s what had fascinated him years ago, and apparently still did. Someday, perhaps, someone with the skill of an Alexander would forgo trying to untie her and instead take a sword to the workings of her heart. He wished he could be around to see it.

“I suppose I should get out of here, let you have your house back. I want to thank you again for letting me stay last night.”

“Were you able to get your stolen credit cards canceled?”

For a moment, he was thrown. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He’d almost forgotten last night’s lie. He touched the abrasions on his cheek. On the way over to her house, he’d found a brick in an alley and scraped his face, then rubbed some gravel in his hair. It added a note of authenticity to his tale of woe. “Everything’s been handled.”

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I could fix you some breakfast.”

“Are you still a great cook?”

“That’s the prevailing opinion.”

He sniffed the air. “Coffee?”

“It’s set on a timer. Can’t start the day without a caffeine fix.”

“Sure,” he said, smiling broadly. “Breakfast would be great.”

“And if you need to stay another night, that’s fine with me.”

“Can I get back to you about it later in the day?” As he followed her into the kitchen, the phone in his hand—the blackmailer’s cell—began to vibrate. “You go on,” he said. “I’ve got to take this.”

He flipped it open and said hello, pushing out the screen door and walking a few yards out into the grass.

“Morning.” The words were spoken in a deep baritone, but it sounded fake, as if the guy were intentionally lowering his voice.

“Ed?”

“That’s me.”

“Who are you?”

“Just consider me a friend.”

“Funny.” He stepped over to a tree and stood with his back to the porch door. “I didn’t kill that guy.”

“Right.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Whatever you say. But I cleaned up your mess and I still want the money.”

“We need to meet, talk this over.”

“Nothing to talk about. You pay me or I send the photos to the police.”

“I don’t have fifty thousand dollars.”

“Come on. You’ve traveled all over the world. You’ve got to be a man of means.”

A conclusion he’d drawn, no doubt, from looking at the stamps on his passport. “No money unless we talk first,” said Chess.

Silence.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard.”

“So?”

“How much money do you have?”

Chess relaxed a little. This guy wasn’t a pro. “My financial situation is complicated. Look, whoever you are, I promise I’ll pay you something. It’s worth it to me. I didn’t kill Dial, but you made a potential mess go away, and for that you deserve something.”

“How much?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. Meet with me and we can firm up a price.”

“Is this a trap?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Because if you try anything, those photos go straight to the police. You can’t just walk away from a murder scene, you know.”

Chess pressed a fist to his mouth to stop himself from laughing. The guy was such a pathetic amateur. “What did you do with the body?”

“It’s safe.”

“I don’t care if it’s safe. I want to know that it’s gone. Buried in the woods where nobody will ever find it. Or weighted and dumped in a lake.”

“I took care of it. I’m not stupid.”

That remained to be seen.

“Listen, buddy, you don’t tell me what to do. I tell you.”

“I’m just trying to be helpful,” said Chess. “Where should we meet?”

He hesitated. “If I agree, it has to be someplace public.”

“The Witch’s Hat.” It popped out of his mouth before he’d even thought about it, probably because he knew the university better than any other part of town. The tower was in a park, high on a hill. Nobody could sneak up on him there. “You know where it is”

“You mean the water tower in Prospect Park? Over by the U?”

“That’s the one.”

More hesitation. “I suppose I could meet you.”

“At eleven. Today. Eleven on the dot.”

“Don’t push me. I’m the one in charge here, not you.”

“I’m aware of that,” said Chess, working a little meekness into his voice. “So? Do we have a deal?”

The guy didn’t respond right away. “Okay,” he said finally, sounding less than sure of himself. “Eleven. I’ll be there. But no funny business. Remember, I got those pictures.”

7

Irina was running late. She’d managed to pull herself together after the fight with Steve, although it had left her stomach churning. At least her sister had arrived on time to take care of Dusty—one worry off her plate.

The Morgana Beck Gallery of Antiquities was located on a tree-lined street in the heart of St. Paul. Grand Avenue was thirty blocks long and ran from the Mississippi River all the way downtown. Irina described the area to customers as a mixture of the trendy and the historic, with neighborhood ethnic and big-city urbane tossed in for good measure. In fact, Grand Avenue boasted some of the best shopping and the best restaurants in town. Unlike the malls, most of the businesses were independent, one of a kind. Irina hated the burbs. Apple Valley had been Steve’s idea. She much preferred the inner city, having grown up in a house not far from here—the place that Misty currently called home, thanks to the generosity of their mother.

The gallery was a restored redbrick Queen Anne duplex. Her mother’s office was on the second floor in an octagonal turret. A duplex, as it turned out, was the perfect arrangement for them. The first floor held the galleries. The second floor had a fully stocked kitchen so they could grab meals on the run. Two of the three upstairs bedrooms were used for storage, and the third had been made into a shipping office. Much of their business these days came from online sales.

Irina parked her Saab in the small lot behind the gallery. As she slid out, she noticed that a planter on the back deck had been knocked over, spilling dirt across the wood planks and dislodging a huge hibiscus. Because of the wrought-iron bars on all the windows, they’d never had a break-in. She approached the rear door cautiously, righting the planter and kicking the excess dirt onto a small patch of grass that grew between the house and the blacktop. The door was locked, which Irina took as a good sign. Grand Avenue ran through a mostly residential area, so it could have been kids running around after dark.

Before Dustin was born, Irina worked four days a week. Now, because her mother thought she needed the time to take care of her child, she was down to two. Tuesdays and Thursdays were her days to open the gallery. Majid Farrow, a man she disliked intensely, mainly because her mother thought the sun rose and set on his abilities as an appraiser and a salesman, opened the other days.

Majid was from Texas—specifically, River Oaks, a suburb of Houston. His mother was Iranian born, a professor of Egyptian archaeology and philology, his father an American heart surgeon with a practice in downtown Houston. Irina’s mother had hired Majid the day after he graduated from Macalester with an interdepartmental master’s in Middle Eastern studies, Islamic civilization, and art history. That was seven years ago. He was a good fit for a gallery that specialized in Middle Eastern art and antiquities, but Irina felt that he enjoyed displaying his knowledge at her expense. Her degree was in art history, but nowhere near as specialized. She’d worked as hard as he had, if not harder, to become an expert in the field. Still, her mother seemed to prefer his opinions. He’d come late to his studies, which meant that he was six years older than she was. She thought of him as a peer. His avuncular treatment of her suggested that he thought otherwise. The less she worked with him, the better she liked it.