No Such Thing as a Secret: A Brandy Alexander Mystery (No Such Thing As...A Brandy Alexander Mystery) (32 page)

“Right again. You know if this were a real game show you could make a lot of money.”

No more than five minutes had passed since he’d entered the room, but it felt like a lifetime. Blood was beginning to cake at the corner of my mouth and I licked at it gingerly. My thoughts wandered to my family, my friends, to Nick and I almost burst into a fresh set of tears, but that wouldn’t get me out of this mess. I had to keep the conversation going, so I proffered another guess.

“You and the mayor took care of everyone who could have potentially ‘turned’ on you. But then someone got a hold of the pictures of Maitlin and the mayor and sent them in to Secrets magazine, which effectively ruined the mayor, so he killed himself.”

“Who do you think ratted him out?” he asked almost gleefully.

“His political opponent?”

A hard crack across my other cheek sent my head flying backwards and immediately I could feel it start to puff up. At least now I’d be symmetrical.

Gruber hopped off the couch and began pacing around the Persian rug. His eyes landed on the empty bottle of pills, and he picked it up and absently began playing with it. “If I were going to kill myself, I’d do something really spectacular like take a flying leap off of one of my buildings.”

I watched him toss the pill bottle idly from hand to hand, and as I did, something in the back of my mind slowly wended its way to the forefront. In an instant I had the last piece of the puzzle. Oh my God. “The mayor didn’t kill himself, did he, Mr. Gruber?”

His face creased into a broad grin and he patted me on the back. I flinched at his touch but he didn’t seem to notice. “You are one sharp cookie, Ms. Alexander. What gave me away?”

“The pill bottle.” He tilted his head, questioningly. “I remembered an article I’d read about your partner. It was an obituary, actually. It said that he had been depressed and he died of an accidental overdose from mixing alcohol and anti-depression medication. You killed your partner and made it look like suicide, and you did the same with the mayor. But why?”

Gruber grimaced as if caught up in a painful memory. “I’ve got no patience for weak people, Brandy. May I call you Brandy?” He had the gun. He could call me anything he wanted. “My partner was a gutless wonder. We hooked up because he had access to start up money for the company. I was the proverbial ‘brains behind the operation.’ The risk taker, the mover and shaker. Hoffman was content to remain a low budget company, doing penny ante jobs. But I was going to take this company to the top.”

“So you started a slush fund for the mayor in exchange for a guaranteed pay off when he got elected. But Hoffman disapproved, I take it.”

“Exactly. You know, you seem to have a real head for business. Under different circumstances I’d be recruiting you for my company.” He sighed. “C’est la vie.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “Hoffman made some noises, yada, yada, yada,” he rolled his hand over and over to fast forward the passage of time, “and I realized he’d become a liablility. So I did what any good businessman would do. I dissolved the partnership.”

I looked at him as if for the first time. He seemed to have absolutely no concept of right and wrong, only what was to his advantage or disadvantage. Gruber was a man without a conscience, which made him as dangerous as a man could possibly be.

He began speaking again but I was only half listening. I was desperate to find a way out of the God forsaken library. “It’s a wonder Richardson got elected in the first place,” he was saying. “The man had the personality of a sponge. And what a whiner, boy, I’ll tell you. First he begs me for my help with Maitlin and then he complains when I do something about it. He was just so damn squeamish about all the killing. I would have knocked him out of the loop a long time ago, but I had to wait until that last big city contract was signed, sealed and delivered. After that, Bradley was expendable. But I had to make it look like suicide.”

“
You
were the one who sent those photos to “Secrets”. You made it look like the mayor killed himself over the public exposure, and then you shredded up the magazine and left it under the chair, as if he’d torn it up in a fit of rage.” The man was brilliant. Crazy as a loon, but brilliant.

“You know I like you, Brandy. I really do. You’ve been a good sport and I wish there were a better pay off for you, but you’re going to have to die.” Without warning he yanked me off the couch by my hair. Pain shot up my neck and I screamed in surprise.

“Oh, you’re going to have to be a lot more quiet than that if we’re going to get out of here unnoticed.”

“Where are you taking me?” I asked thickly.

“If I told you, it would spoil the surprise.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a roll of duct tape. Deftly he bound my hands behind my back and placed a strip over my mouth. Then he wrapped his hand tightly around the back of my neck and led me out the door.

A black Audi was parked around the other side of the house. Gruber opened the back door and threw me unceremoniously inside. I landed on the floor and he quickly tossed a blanket over my prone body. As I struggled to right myself, he issued a gruff warning to lie there and behave myself or else he’d cut my fucking head off and mount it on his wall. Remembering the goat’s head, I opted to behave myself.

As the car started to roll away from the curb I stretched my legs out, my body vibrating with pent up adrenalin. I wanted to bang my feet hard against the side of the door, kick out a window, anything to get out of there. I hated being tied up. Hated it more than anything. It made me crazy.

I lay there gulping hot air, tears and sweat co-mingling on my face.
Oh jeez, my parents will be so bummed when they find out I’m dead. And Paulie, and Johnny and the twins. And Bobby. We finally put our past and all the bitterness behind us and then I have to go and get myself killed. Fucking typical.

Then my thoughts turned to Nick, and I cried silent tears for someone I barely knew but who had come to mean so much to me. Maybe it was the injustice of it all, or maybe it was the point beyond hysteria where you suddenly feel invincible, but I knew I would not go gentle into this damn goodnight. I was going to figure a way out of this stinking mess or die trying.

After about twenty-five minutes I heard the crunch of gravel under the tires as the car slowed and stopped. Gruber cut the engine and pulled the blanket off of me. “We’re here,” he announced in that bizarre childlike singsong.

I wanted to belt him one, and I would have if my hands hadn’t been strapped behind my back. I was so beyond reasonable thought it wasn’t even funny. I struggled to sit up and peered out the window.

We were parked next to a plywood and chain link fence which ran the length of a city block. On the fence was a large rectangular sign. I could barely make out the words in the darkness. Gruber flicked on the high beams momentarily so that I could read the printing. FUTURE HOME OF MEMORIAL SPORTS COMPLEX, and under that in only slightly smaller letters, HOFFMAN AND GRUBER CONSTRUCTION.

“It never fails to give me a thrill,” he commented, dousing the lights.

I cast a furtive glance around, searching for signs of human life. We were parked in the middle of a major metropolitan city, for Christ’s sake. Where was everyone?

I didn’t have time to ponder the question, because at that moment Gruber yanked open the back door and hauled me out by my elbow. I lost my balance, stumbling and landing hard on the gravel surface. My chin hit the ground and started to bleed. Bits of stone and glass ground into my knees and I whimpered in pain. He pulled me up, a look of annoyance crossing his face. “You haven’t said one thing about my building. You are very self absorbed, you know that? Now pay attention, you might learn something.”

It was hard to keep up with his mood swings. He changed from southern gentleman to east coast Mafioso in a heartbeat, and I couldn’t decide which one was creepier. As he guided me towards the construction site, he slung a companionable arm around my shoulder and I flinched at his touch. His gentleman mode was definitely creepier.

Cement mixers and other heavy equipment littered the unpaved parking lot. The building, a gigantic state of the art oval shaped structure looked very near completion. It was all steel and glass, about ten stories high. It must’ve cost over three hundred million to build, with a good-sized portion going to my host for the evening.

“Just think, Brandy, when this place is completed it will be able to seat twenty thousand sports fans. Imagine your friends, comfy-cozy in their luxury boxes, knocking back a couple of brewskis while rooting for the home team. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

I nodded, my mouth still covered in duct tape.

“Now, I don’t want you feeling all left out because your friends will be having fun without you,” he continued, a maniacal note lacing his voice. “I’ve thought long and hard about how I can include you in the festivities, and I think I’ve come up with a darn good solution.” What the hell was he talking about? If the man had
his
way, the only festivities I’d be participating in was pushing up daisies at Forest Lawn.

“Brandy, our time together has been fun, but I really am going to have to bid you adieu fairly soon. The trouble is what to do with your body? And then I got to thinking.” He rubbed his gun softly along my cheekbone, edging me towards the cement mixer. “I shoot you, then I hack you up in convenient disposable pieces. After that I toss you in the hopper, where, with the flick of a switch I grind you into pulp. Tomorrow morning when the dry cement is mixed with water in the cylinder for the paving of our new parking lot, you will be added to the mix. So you see you’ll live on in the very pavement beneath our feet.”

A great swooshing sound filled my ears as my legs buckled beneath me. He hauled me back up, laying a hand on the back of my head and pushing it forward until he was sure I wasn’t going to pass out. Wiggling out of his grasp I began to make incoherent noises through the duct tape.

“Come again?” He ripped the tape off my mouth, leaving my lips swollen and sore.

“I want my fifteen minutes,” I shouted.

“Your what?”

“My fifteen minutes. I earned it back at the house when we were playing that game. You may be a lot of things, Gruber, but I never thought of you as a whelcher.” I was grasping at straws here, taking a gamble that his ego would supersede his need to kill me on the spot.

“Christ, you’re a feisty one.” There was definitely an admiring tone in his voice. He cast his eyes toward his watch as if trying to decide if he had anything more pressing to do, and then he glanced back up at the site. “Oh, what the hey.” He grabbed my arm and steered me towards the building. “The view from the top is fantastic!”

It was absolutely imperative that I stay calm. I settled for not throwing up on my shoes. My chin throbbed, my shoulders ached and I couldn’t feel my wrists anymore.

“Could you please take off the duct tape?” I asked. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere. You’ve got the gun.”

“Point well taken, but no.”

Gruber punched in the security code and we entered the building through a back door. It was humongous inside, with a concourse that ran the length of the building and video walls and monitors so that fans wouldn’t miss a minute of the action. There were twenty concession stands, tons of restrooms, and a special “members only” area for those willing to shell out the big bucks for exclusive dining rights. Gruber explained all this to me as he urged me onwards and upwards. “The escalators aren’t running right now,” he apologized, “so we have to walk up four flights, but after that we get to take the elevator.”

I climbed the stairs with difficulty. My knees were bruised and starting to swell and I added them to my mental list of injuries. Two swollen cheeks, a fat lip, a bloody chin and I suspected that my hands would be falling off any moment now, due to lack of blood flow to the wrists.

Tears of frustration began to make their way down my face and I tried to rub them off on my shoulder. Gruber smiled benignly at me. “I know how you feel. I get all choked up just looking at the magnificence of it all too.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand to encompass the room. “Well, your fifteen minutes are almost up and we haven’t reached the top yet. Let’s see a little hustle in your step.”

We stood in one of the offices on the top floor of the complex, overlooking the street below. The only thing standing between us and an eight-story plunge over the edge was a waist high iron safety railing that stretched across what would eventually become windows. Ten-foot panels of tempered glass lay stacked nearby, awaiting installation. A cold breeze blew in through the opening, scattering the dirt and debris that littered the concrete floor.

Gruber maneuvered me over to the railing and leaned forward, exhaling deeply.

“Take a look at this,” he said. “Hoffman and Gruber construction as far as the eye can see.” He pulled me closer to the edge and I shut my eyes tightly, guarding against the nausea that was sure to betray my fear of heights. “You know,” he continued, oblivious to my lack of enthusiasm, “one day they may consider changing the name of our fair city to Gruberdelphia. It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think? I’m kidding, of course,” he added, chuckling at his own joke. I wasn’t so sure he was joking.

While Gruber ruminated over his constructural achievements, I took this time to try and figure out how to save my own life, but I was fresh out of ideas. Any minute now he would snap out of his ego driven reverie and implement his plan to chop me up like stew meat. And then I heard something. A faint mewing followed by a tiny scratching sound. He must have heard it too, because he leaned back from the rail and gazed off in the direction of the noise.

We heard it again, more distinctly this time. I followed Gruber’s gaze, and there under a pile of two by fours lay a gray and white kitten the size of a man’s hand. My heart lurched and automatically I began walking toward it.

Gruber put a restraining hand on my arm. “Do kittens make you feel all warm and tingly, Brandy?”