Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (22 page)

“If I’m correct and Ernest engineered this
whole thing, well then, he’s doing it for a reason, isn’t he?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was too big a
mess to even contemplate engineering it.

“Well,” she said, considering, “that’s what
I think. And then there’s another thing: what if I’m wrong? And
what if I told the police I suspected my husband of doing this? And
then they stop looking and something... something terrible
happened? Then it would all be
my
fault,” the well bred
control seemed to be slipping slightly. Arianna looked close to
tears for a second. Then the cloud was gone, or I’d been wrong
about it in the first place.

“But why are you telling me all of this? Why
bother talking to me at all?” I had to ask.

“I thought about it a lot after I saw you
earlier today. I had to stop at home to get these things and I
checked on you before our meeting. You’re in this business,” she
indicated the paper between us, “the business of stocks. Or you
were. So I guess part of me wanted to know — to
know
, you
understand — if you were involved on some level. That seemed
important to me.” I could understand that. All of it. It was Ernie
we were talking about.

“When I first saw you,” she went on, “I
thought you might represent a missing piece. You know: an old
girlfriend suddenly back on the scene. Quite a coincidence. Then,
when Ernest was... missing... I thought... I thought maybe you were
in on it. That maybe you knew things I didn’t. But you don’t, do
you Madeline? You don’t know anything.”

Since this summed things up even more neatly
than I would have done — after all, I’d been the one driving all
over West L.A. and dressing up and getting myself caught on
incriminating video cameras — I had to smile, if somewhat ruefully.
She was right: I didn’t know anything.

“No,” I agreed, “I don’t know anything. And
I haven’t had any kind of contact with Ernie since we broke
up.”

“And I thought you’d know Ernest pretty
well. You had a... a... connection with him, and so you wouldn’t
wish him harm.” Which made me wonder if we were talking about the
same Ernie. But whatever. “Also, you were at Langton yesterday and
you went out of your way to find me downtown today, so you have
some kind of vested interest. You might not know anything now, but,
for whatever reason, you want to. Is that correct?”

I nodded, if somewhat cautiously.

“Also, the fact that you’re somewhat
implicated makes you a good choice to tell. The police suspect,
well, not you, but someone who matches your description. I thought
it was unlikely you were on your way to the police. Am I right
about that, too?”

And, I could only nod because, of course,
she was. I knew nothing about anything except that I’d managed to
put myself in a potentially... embarrassing position. Going to the
police was not high on my current list.

There were a few things I was burning to
know: all around Ernie’s actual disappearance. “Why do you think
the note went to the office and not to you?”

Arianna looked stunned for a second, as
though she hadn’t thought about this before. “I... I don’t know.
But you’re right: things like this usually go to the home, not the
office, don’t they?”

“That’s what I was thinking. And the
kidnappers haven’t contacted you at all?”

She shook her head, no.

“Have the Langton people told you what the
demands are?”

“No. That is, there haven’t been any demands
thus far. Which only confirms what I’ve said. If this,” she
indicated the paper with the figures on it, “is truly his object
and it’s the reason he’s staged this whole thing, then he’d want
all of the correspondence going through the place where there’d
most likely be a press leak.”

“He might even have leaked it to the press
somehow himself,” I said thoughtfully.

Arianna nodded. “That’s precisely what I
thought. And, if any of what I’m guessing is correct, the demands
will appear around the time the interest of the press begins to die
down. Because that would build the pitch again.”

“And so,” it was my turn to consult the
paper on the table between us, “if what you and I are both thinking
is true, the stock bottoms next Friday and Ernie buys back in. So,
if it does all go that way, would that mean he’s suddenly rescued
or released on Wednesday?” It was a little scary: I was actually
starting to see how it all fit together.

“Except, maybe,” Arianna was studying her
shoes carefully now, “the ransom note finally shows up in the next
few days, the ransom gets paid and Ernest gets ‘released.’”

I looked at Arianna sharply.

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

There was the potential to make an actual
fortune by creating the LRG death spiral situation with the stocks,
then pocketing a handsome tip in the form of the ransom money.

“Now I have a question for
you
,”
Arianna said. “I really don’t understand why you suddenly
reappeared at this time.”

And that was the crux of the whole matter,
wasn’t it? It had all been getting so convoluted, I could barely
remember, myself. And then, of course, I did: something to do with
a new life and a good tip and then the vision of my mom’s stricken
face. “It was the stock,” I said clearing my throat. “At Club
Zanzibar, that night, Ernie told me to watch the stock. And I did.
And,” without my willing it, my voice dropped to a whisper. “And I
bought.”

“And then it dropped?”

I nodded.

Arianna watched me for a moment and I could
see disbelief warring with the desire to accept what I’d said. “You
really don’t know anything?” she said. And I could tell that part
of her wanted it to not be true.

I assured her that I didn’t.

“Then where do you go from here?” she
asked.

“Home, I guess. To be honest, I’m tired of
thinking about the whole thing,”

She agreed, “I just wish I could do the
same. Forget about it, I mean. But, Ernest...” she didn’t finish,
but I understood. If all that she’d said was true, her predicament
was worse than mine. By a longshot.

Chapter Twelve

I followed Sunset down to the Pacific Coast
Highway. Not the most direct route to Malibu, but it’s interesting
and peaceful in a perverse sort of way. A lot of people aren’t
crazy about driving in LA at the best of times. But I never seem to
mind it. All of those years of
not
driving in New York, I
guess. I mean, back there, I never even
had
a car. I
wouldn’t have known what to do with one.

Sunset Boulevard is all it’s ever been
cracked up to be... and more. From the most crass and plastic
aspects of Hollyweird, to practically pastoral (for LA) Brentwood,
to the peaceful Pacific Palisades. The whole snaking route can be
like a car show: the lines of Benzes and Ferraris and Lexuses
(Lexi?) — not to mention Porsches — is nothing short of
decadent.

And that’s when you understand it clearly,
the fullness of this place: This ain’t Great Falls, honey. This
ain’t Austin. And sure: they also have eighty thousand dollar
Toyotas in those places, but they’re generally the exception, not
the rule. Which is where the whole Hollyweird thing stems from, I
reckon. In Austin or Great Falls or Bremerton or just about
anyplace, if you have a lot of money and you want to stand out from
the crowd, things are simple. You don’t have to put a lot of
creativity into it. You grab the nearest Lexus, the newest BMW or
the flashiest Chrysler and you’re in business, turning heads. In
West LA you have to go further to be impressive. A lot further. A
purple Rolls Royce convertible might get a second look, but if it
also has antlers on the hood and a rollbar, heads will turn. The
fact that people might be laughing while their heads are turning
doesn’t seem to faze some people.

If you’re at all interested in the
ultramobile one-upmanship that Angelenos love to practice at every
opportunity, Sunset — the great, serpentine length of it — is
the
place to do it. Sometimes it’s awful, sometimes it’s
awesome, but it’s usually amusing.

Of course, this day my head was so full of
what had happened at the Hestman School and with what Arianna had
been telling me, I may as well have gone a different way. I’m
capable of multitasking, so my driving was fine, but I kept going
over the things Arianna had told me. And one of the things I kept
wondering was if she was telling me the truth. I couldn’t think why
she wouldn’t have been, but, at the same time, I had to wonder why
she had told me her whole tale to begin with. Why me? Thinking
about it made me uneasy. I wondered if I was being set up. Or
perhaps it was something as simple as her hoping I would do some of
the legwork for her. Or it might be something... less...
appealing.

I had to admit that I liked Arianna. Aside
from being stunning (which I could forgive her, if I put some
energy into it) she also seemed bright and open. Forthright. I’d
wager that, under the right circumstances, she could even be
vivacious.

But as sincerely as she’d imparted
everything, some of what she’d said rang hollow, or at least a
little off. She’d painted an attractive, believable picture: the
happy — albeit insanely well-to-do — couple moving out from the
East, looking forward to fixing up their little nest together and
spending “quality” time before duties called. She had said Ernie
called it an adventure. But I knew Ernie or, at least, I’d known
the Ernie he’d been more than a dozen years before.
That
Ernie would have been as likely to pick tapestries for the foyer
as... well... as he would have to strap on wax wings and fly to the
sun. No Icarus, that Ernie. Solid, practical and always cognizant
of the inside track.

Which led me to the other part of what she’d
told me: that she believed he’d engineered the whole kidnapping. A
fact that the neat columns of calculations — as precise as any
ledger — seemed to confirm. Which kind of brought me back to the
beginning again: why had she told me?

And then there was Paul Westbrook, someone I
hadn’t thought of in years. Ernie’s shadow when we were at Harvard.
His evil twin — it had been a joke between them, though: deciding
just which one was the evil twin would have been quite a chore.

When Ernie and I were together, wherever
Ernie went, there was Paul. Increasingly, in the time I’d known
them, they’d been two halves of the same whole. It hadn’t been
pretty, even from the sidelines.

The last few months had gotten more and more
unbearable, until suddenly things weren’t bearable at all anymore.
I’d known that part of this had to do with Paul. For a lot of
reasons, but mainly due to his presence in our lives and the way
that Ernie and Paul were together.

Paul wasn’t physically unattractive yet,
from the beginning, something about him repelled me. The wispy
goatee he was always trying to cultivate, his neatly trimmed yet
slightly greasy hair but, most of all, the way his ice blue gaze
would never actually seem to look right at you when he spoke to
you, fixing instead on a point just above your head or, in certain
moods, on your chest. Being around him was always unpleasant for
me.

I couldn’t have put a name to what Paul and
Ernie shared though, from the beginning, it didn’t seem healthy. On
one level, it was like the classic competitive boys one-upmanship
thing. But it was more, as well. And perhaps less. Small stuff at
first, but rising — inevitably, it seemed — to higher levels. Ernie
to Paul: Professor Wannamakker is an asshole. I’d love to see
someone take him out. And Paul flattens the tires of Wannamakker’s
car. Paul to Ernie: I completely feel like getting stoned. And
Ernie scores Paul some coke. Ernie to Paul: The neighbor’s cat is
driving me crazy at night. And Paul kills the cat. This last one I
didn’t know for sure, but I had strong reasons to suspect it. That
was very near the end.

Paul was at our place and Ernie was bitching
about the cat. I was the one that found the cat — dead and
stiffening — outside his owner’s apartment door the next day.

“Paul killed the Johnson’s cat,” I said to
Ernie that night.

A smirk. “How’d you know?”

“I just know.”

“Is the cat dead?”

“The cat is dead. I saw it myself
today.”

“That doesn’t mean Paul poisoned it.”

It took me a whole day to realize that Ernie
was the only one that had mentioned poison in that conversation.
And the cat had indeed been poisoned. I should have packed and left
then but I was young and stupid. Sometimes at the age I was you
need someone to draw you a picture. That was still to come.

Paul had wanted me then, I’d always known
that. And I hadn’t found it flattering, even from the vantage point
of my twenty-two years when almost everything is flattering.
Because I’d known that it wasn’t so much me — Madeline Carter —
that Paul wanted, it was me — Ernie Billing’s girlfriend — that
Paul desired. And, for a while near the end of our relationship,
Paul made it into a full-time campaign.

It finally happened at the end of finals
week in our graduate year. There had been a party at Paul’s frat
house. I’d enjoyed myself for a while. I wasn’t aware of drinking
much, I know I didn’t do any drugs, but in the morning I woke up in
Paul’s bed with Paul beside me, and both of us unclothed. We were
naked and I was damp where there was no cause for dampness to be.
My clothes, when I found them on Paul’s floor, were damaged, as
though they’d been ripped from me. I was aware of some bruises,
nothing serious but alarming, nonetheless, on my back and arms and
sides.

Unlike Steve, Paul didn’t have the good
sense to stay sleeping while I got out of his room. I wish he had.
But he woke up, saw my obvious discomfort. And he laughed.

“What is it like to have a real man, Maddy?”
he said, watching me from the bed as I collected my belongings as
hurriedly as I could. The shirt I had been wearing was shredded:
there was no way I could wear it in public, and I pawed through the
mess looking for something to cover it with, ignoring Paul, trying
to block him out. “I know you’ve been wanting me, baby. I’ve been
seeing it in your eyes.” He slithered up from the bed on his knees,
I could see that his cock was hard. “Come here and give me more of
what you gave me last night.”