Last to Know (21 page)

With an arm around Rose’s waist, Wally walked back to the table where he poured her a glass of wine. He glanced at the label. It was a good French chateau and a prime year. “You always know best,” he said to Rose, who hurried, too late, to try to save the burning bacon.

“Dad?” Diz said, and his father glanced up at him. “Exactly where is Bea?”

The name dropped like a stone into a pool, with ever-widening circles until it entrapped them all.

“I asked you never to say that name again,” Rose said too quickly, because she was nervous and quite possibly afraid of the answer.

But Wally replied, “I believe she has her own place, back across the lake. I imagine that’s where she will live.”

“You mean—near us?” Diz was stunned.

“Either there or at the Ritz,” Rose said, making a joke of it and scraping the burned bacon into the garbage disposal.

Diz was kind of wishing she could have done the same with Bea, but he simply shrugged and took himself off upstairs, where he climbed out on his branch and focused his binoculars on the Havnel property.

There were no lights. Even Forensics must have called it quits for the night. A woman had been murdered there; a second woman killed right here in their woods. His father had been implicated. Bea had been implicated. Diz needed to know the truth and he meant to find out that truth by watching, waiting for the one wrong move that would give Bea’s game away. Because he was certain now, it must be her. Tomorrow, he could go over there, spy on her, he could follow her, find out what she was up to.

She was sure to make a mistake, criminals on TV always did, and Diz desperately needed to prove his father’s innocence.

40

Harry was sleeping off the booze. In his dream he was in some cold, dark, labyrinthine hole, a place filled with inky water where no sound could be heard except a muffled ringing. It rang and rang. Try as he might, Harry could not get away from it. And then he woke up and it was still there. God almighty, it was his doorbell. Somebody had their finger on it and was not letting go.

Filled with sudden anger, he hurled himself out of the red leather chair and went to open the door, ready to give whoever it was a choice piece of his mind.

“What the fuck…” he said, then stopped. Rose Osborne was standing on his doorstep, wrapped in a big orange shawl over gray sweatpants and a jacket that said
HARVARD
in crimson letters across the front. Her thick dark hair was dragged into a bun, she wore no makeup, and her eyes were huge angry brown daggers looking at him.

“It’s three in the morning,” Harry said, knowing it must be at least somewhere near that.

“So what?” She pushed past him and stood in his hallway, looking round. “Where’s the dog?”

“Gone. Er … my friend—er, Rossetti, took him while I’m gone.”

“You are not ‘gone,’” Rose pointed out. Coldly.

“Well, yes, that is no, but I will be gone, tomorrow. That is,” he glanced at his watch one more time. “That is, I mean—today.”

She turned on him then, eyes not “blazing” as he might have described them, but hard, inimical. She looked, Harry thought, ready to kill him.

“Rose,” he said, trying to recapture the picture he’d first had of her in the white gypsy blouse with her bare brown shoulders and flying free hair and that lovely aura of womanliness that so attracted him. Now, she was a virago. Now, he knew, she was here to protect her man.

“Bea came to tell me she was innocent,” Rose said. “Begged me to believe her. I think she even wanted me to take her back, look after her. Again.” She shook her head at such madness. “You arrested Wally,” she said, in a voice of ice. “You accused my husband of murdering that young woman, Jemima. I told you Wally would never have done that, he could not have done such a terrible thing.” She took a step closer, her face in Harry’s. “I know now what he was doing,” she said. “He won’t admit it because of his children, he believes his innocence will be proven and there will be nothing to besmirch his reputation, his family’s reputation, Wally’s children mean everything to him. Except…”

Harry took Rose’s arm and led her into the living room. He sat her down on his red leather chair He hunched on the footstool opposite her.

“Except?”

Rose took a deep breath. “It was drugs. Wally was doing drugs, Detective Jordan.”

It flashed through Harry’s mind that he was no longer “Harry,” chummy over cups of coffee at her long pine table in that peaceful kitchen with the good smell of soup on the stove and the freshness that was Rose. He thought how far they had come in just a few days.

“I’m willing to bet I know who was supplying them,” he said.

Rose shook her head. “Then you know more than I do. I only know what he told me. Perhaps he’s told his lawyers more, they were with him for hours, I don’t know what will happen next.”

“Your husband was being blackmailed. The ‘good family man,’ the ‘famous writer,’ ‘the upholder of clean living,’ ‘the charmed life.’ I’m afraid, Rose, Wally’s ego could not tolerate being exposed as a liar and an addict, it would mean ruin and he knew it.”

She was looking at him, her big dark eyes stunned into blankness. He got up, went to the bar, opened a bottle of wine, actually a decent California Syrah he thought substantial enough to calm shattered nerves, a little bit anyway. He poured her a glass, took it over and put it in her hand, closing her fingers around it so she would not drop it.

Rose glanced down at it, surprised, and, always well mannered, thanked him. She took a gulp, then another. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and said, “What do you mean, Harry Jordan, my husband is a drug addict?”

“That’s not the important issue right now. What’s important is that I believe—I know—your husband is not a murderer. He did not kill Jemima Forester. I’d bet my own life on that.”

Rose began to cry, huge tears running unheeded down her cheeks, over her chin, into her neck. Harry went and got the box of Kleenex from the bar.

“It’s okay,” he said gently. “It’ll be okay now, you’ll see. I’ll make sure Rossetti gets everything right, he’ll take care of it for you.”

“But what about you?” She stared, panicked, at him. “Why don’t you take care of everything? After all, it was you who started it.”

Harry sat for a moment, on the footstool, looking up at the lovely distraught woman who needed his help, whose husband needed his help, whose very lives had been touched by evil. Of course he was the man who should be taking care of her. Of them all.

“Trust me,” he said to Rose. “I want to. But I’m leaving tomorrow—today that is, for Paris. It’s something I can’t put off.”

He got to his feet, and so did she. He took the empty glass from her hand, wrapped her orange shawl around her, smoothed the fringes over the edges. It was soft under his touch, cashmere, he knew. Soft as the woman in front of him, whose arms now came and wrapped around him. He held her close, breathing in that fresh-air scent of her, loving her gently.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispered in her ear. “You’ll see, everything will be okay. I know it.”

She moved away, looked at him. “Promise?” she asked.

“I promise,” Harry said.

Then he called a taxi to take Rose home. Next he called the airline to confirm his flight to Paris the following—or rather that afternoon. Then he called Rossetti.

“I want you to speak to Wally’s attorneys,” he said. “He’s not our man, I’m sure of it.”

“I know, I already spoke to the captain,” Rossetti said. “Anyway, why the fuck aren’t you on the flight?”

“I am,” Harry said. “I just need to shower, pack a bag, and I’m off.”

“You sure you’re off to Paris?”

Harry smiled at the skepticism in his colleague’s voice.

“This time I’m sure,” he said. “You are gonna work it all out, Rossetti. All by yourself.”

41

When she met Harry at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Mal thought he looked just the same as always: same unruly dark hair; same keen gray eyes searching her out in the crowd; same loping stride, like “a panther on the loose,” as she had once told him, only half joking. Lean, lithe, and sexy, that was her Harry. And also, she could see as he came closer, a very tired Harry.

He felt her eyes on him, spotted her, smiled, and then they were in each other’s arms, his face in her hair, his hands firm against her back, pulling her closer.

“You don’t know how good it is to see you,” he murmured.

Smiling, she said, “I’ve always tried to get you to Paris.”

“And now you’ve succeeded. And I’m glad to be here.”

“You’ll be even gladder,” she said, inserting herself closer to him, not caring what the rest of the world hurrying by burdened with hand baggage and fatigue thought about them. They were lovers. So what? This was Paris.

She glanced searchingly over his shoulder. “I’m looking for the dog,” she explained, glad when she made Harry laugh.

All he carried was his old duffel in which Mal would bet would be one clean pair of Jockeys; maybe a pair of socks if he was wearing socks right now, most often he did not; one clean white shirt, an old cashmere jacket he sometimes wore when they were going somewhere “posh,” as he termed a good restaurant, which meant to him anything other than Ruby’s; definitely no tie, he never wore one. There would be the old leather bag with his toothbrush, etc, and a copy of
War and Peace.
Harry always took
War and Peace
on his travels. He never finished it; said he always had to start again, at the beginning, because he couldn’t remember who was who, the names had him so confused. “Good training for a detective,” he told Mal when she laughed. Harry was definitely not a Kindle man; he still wanted that old book, the feel of paper in his hand, pages he could turn, the end he could read first to catch up. Harry always needed to know the ending first, and now, with this Havnel case and the death of the young woman, Mal realized he did not know the ending and that it grieved him.

She had, naturally, parked her car on a red line. There was another parking ticket and an irate warden who, when she tried a few tears and in garbled French explained that her passenger was Homicide Detective Harry Jordan, famous in the USA, let her off with a warning.

“You haven’t changed one bit,” Harry said, folding himself into the Fiat. “You get away with murder.”

Under the circumstances, Mal thought it an unfortunate choice of words. “Wanna go to my place first? Or would you like to go all Parisian, and sip a glass of wine, in a particular sidewalk café I like?”

“Definitely the wine.” Harry put his hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze. “And the sidewalk café you like so much. I need to know where you’ve been spending your time, alone in Paris.”

Mal thought it was better not to mention the young man in the tweed jacket with whom she had shared champagne the previous night. After all, she had been crying over Harry, which was the reason they had met.

She drove rapidly and confidently through the rush-hour traffic, through the unending grim suburbs and into what Mal termed “the light,” when the famous skyline, marked by the Eiffel Tower, appeared.

“Cities are all mere cities until you find their heart,” she explained to Harry, jostling her way into Saint-Germain and parking, illegally one more time, on the narrow rue Jacob, a few paces from her tiny hotel room, where she had been so lonely, listening to nursery school children singing, and longing for Harry. And now here he was.

“Then cities are like women,” Harry said. “You have to wait to find their heart, just like I waited for yours.” He leaned toward her and slid his arms around her as their mouths met in a long kiss.

When she pulled away he said, “Sure about that wine, right now?”

Mal grinned. “I heard that anticipation was the best part of sex.”

“I’m not sure I ever found it that way.”

“I’m parked illegally,” she said. “This might turn out to be the most expensive glass of wine you ever had.” But Harry took a blue tag from his duffel and stuck it on the car window.

“Police,” Mal read, astonished.

“An international code,” Harry told her, more jaunty now than when he’d gotten off the plane. “Gets a guy anywhere, any time.”

“It sure does with me,” she said, linking his arm and striding round the corner into the Café Deux Magots, where a waiter, who had gotten to know her from her lonely evening sojourns, greeted her with a smile. He raised his eyebrows, though, when he saw her with a partner.

“La meme chose, madame?”
he asked, pulling back her chair, while Harry attempted to fit his legs under the tiny table, hemmed in by other tiny tables filled with people who seemed completely into their own conversations and their own worlds, except, that is, for the tourists like him who were there to take-in-everything-they-possibly-could-and-happy-for-it, and who threw welcoming smiles of the “we’re all in this together” variety at them.

“Oui, s’il vous plait, le champagne, mais, je crois, deux café aussi.”

“Avec du lait, madame? Du lait chaud, peut-être.”

The waiter obviously knew Mal’s usual order and she impressed Harry by her command of the language.

“Pas moment,”
Mal said, showing off and smirking at Harry to see if he had noticed.

“You’ve been here too long,” he said. “You speak the language.”

“What you heard was about it. I can order stuff, buy a baguette—actually a
ficelle
—that’s the long thin one with two points at the end instead of one. Don’t know why, but it just tastes better somehow.”

“Glad to know you haven’t been starving.”

The waiter came back with two glasses of champagne.

“Maybe we should have gotten a bottle,” Harry said, as they raised their glasses to each other.

“We might not be here long enough for that.” Mal gave him a meaningful smile that meant everything to Harry’s wounded soul.

“This—coming here to be with you—is the best thing I’ve ever done,” he said softly, leaning closer. “Except…”

He paused and Mal waited.

“Except for when I got Squeeze,” he added, making her groan.