Smoke Screen (14 page)

“My loving you isn’t flattery enough?”

“Yes. Of course. But—”

“But your buddy did your job for you. He saved lives and became a hero. That’s what’s been eating at you, isn’t it?”

“A bit, yeah.”

The confession saddened her. “You don’t have anything to prove to me, Raley. Or to yourself. No one questions your work ethic, your knowledge and skill, certainly not your valor.”

“I know,” he said a bit testily, which he instantly regretted. “But, ever since the fire, I can’t help being just a little ticked off that Jay had done what I was supposed to do. So when this chick picked me out of the crowd, yeah, I admit it, it did my ego good. Anyway, I didn’t walk away. I ask your forgiveness for that. But for the rest of it…” He moved closer to her. “Hallie, I know—I can’t prove it, but I
know
—the margarita she gave me must’ve been spiked.”

“Jay told me that.”

“You know my tolerance level. Several sips of a margarita, no matter how strong, wouldn’t have made me stupid to the point that I’d jeopardize my relationship with you. I wouldn’t risk losing you for a night with another woman, any woman. It wouldn’t happen. The only explanation is that I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t in control.”

As best he could, he tried to explain how his body had responded as any man’s would to the sexual stimulation, but that
he,
his heart and soul and mind, hadn’t even been present. “Do you believe that? If you don’t, I might as well stop here.”

Her eyes searched his. “I believe you, Raley. I do. I just can’t get past how you could let yourself get into a situation like that at all.”

“You wanted me to go to the party, Hallie.” He said that in a tone that wasn’t contentious. He wasn’t trying to shift blame, and he certainly didn’t want to start an argument.

“I know, I know.” She closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them, he could tell she had fortified herself to hear more. He talked her through the harrowing experience of waking up and finding Suzi Monroe dead beside him. He told her about his series of conversations with the detectives.

“Do they believe you?” she asked.

“They seem to. Jay did, and you know how persuasive he can be. He didn’t mention drugs again, but he blamed the alcohol. Combined with my fatigue, it hit me hard. He impressed upon Wickham and McGowan that I wasn’t entirely responsible for my sexual escapade. I for damn sure wasn’t responsible for the way Suzi died.”

He told her about Candy coming to his rescue even though she was technically representing the other side. “She called me names and said if she was you, she’d never speak to me again.”

Hallie gave a weak smile. “Sounds like her.” Then she sighed and asked him if he’d like a Coke. They went into the kitchen and sat on barstools, knees touching as he explained what Jay had told him to expect in the days to come.

“I gave them a urine specimen, which will be tested. The semen in the condoms is on its way to the lab.” He pretended not to see her wince. “There will be an autopsy. Jay says a lot will hinge on that. They’re going to keep the incident under wraps, treat it like an accidental overdose, which I’m positive it was.”

Hallie remained silent for a while, studying the top of her Coke can. “Why would she drug you, Raley?” Lifting her gaze to his, she repeated, “Why?”

“I guess to make sure she got laid.”

“You’ve described her as hot looking. There are always men on the prowl at Jay’s parties, looking for wild and willing girls just like you’ve described Suzi Monroe. Why would she single you out and drug you if all she wanted was to get laid?”

“I don’t have an answer to that.”

She stared at him for several seconds more, then looked away. “Do your parents know?”

“I called them from the police station and laid out the whole story. They were at a loss for words. A girl died while in my company, in bed with me. Naturally they were stunned. At first. Then they wanted to rush right down, lend support, find me an attorney. I told them not to come, that for the time being I was doing okay.”

“But they believed you.”

“Unequivocally.”

He was hoping she would say she believed him unequivocally, too, but what she said was, “My folks will have to be told.”

“Let me tell them. It was my mistake.”

“They’ll be…God, I can’t even imagine.” She covered her face with both hands. “Shocked.”

“I think shock is a fair reaction to news this bad.”

“When all their friends hear, they’ll be so embarrassed.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that. Jay is keeping it out of the news.”

Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. She looked at him mournfully. “Why did this happen to us?”

“Because I was stupid. Goddamn stupid.” He cupped her face with his hands. “But you can’t for one instant doubt that I love you, and that I would give anything, anything, to erase the last twenty-four hours.”

Unable to speak, she nodded.

He drew her to him then and kissed her lips, softly, keeping the contact tender. “We’ll get through this, Hallie.”

“Yes.”

“It’s painful right now, I know, but I’ll make it right.”

They hugged each other tightly. Burying her face in his neck, she whispered, “I just hate it so much.”

“I hate it more.”

“I’m sorry, so sorry.”

He thought she meant sorry for the situation, sorry that it had happened to him. Maybe at the time, she had meant that. But later, he wondered if she’d been telling him what she knew then: She was sorry, but there was no possibility of the relationship surviving.

One day melded into the next. Hallie shared his disappointment when he was drawn off Brunner’s investigation and put on temporary suspension. He couldn’t prove that he had been a victim, too, but he felt that Hallie believed him and was ready to defend him wholeheartedly.

Initially.

But then the heat was turned up. Unhappily, Candy informed him that Fordyce was considering an indictment, and the possibility of that got leaked to the media. Jay and the others had kept the investigation quiet up to that point, but once the story was leaked, it spread through the community like an oil slick.

Some blond reporter, new to Channel 7, seemed to have made his situation her pet project. Her reports portrayed Suzi Monroe like a novice in a convent. The autopsy confirmed that she’d died of drug-induced heart failure, but the question of who had encouraged her to snort that much cocaine was raised. He was the likely suspect.

Tests confirmed that the semen in the condoms was his.

He called Hallie immediately upon receiving this news and told her he’d be at the bank when she got off work. He wanted to intercept her before she could get home, turn on her television, and hear a discourse about her fiancé’s semen from the smiling blondie who seemed to take particular delight in his misfortune.

He picked up Hallie at the bank, drove to White Point, parked, and climbed the steps onto The Battery. Looking out over the choppy water of Charleston harbor, he told her about the result of the lab tests. “I don’t know what she and I did. But we had some form of sex.”

Hallie didn’t say anything for the longest time, just stared into the shifting patterns of sunlight and cloud moving across the water. When she did speak, she said, “I’d like you to take me back to my car, Raley.”

“Hallie—”

“Please, Raley. I can’t talk about it any more right now.”

Maybe she’d been clinging to the hope that the semen wouldn’t be his, that it was all a hoax, or a terrible mix-up. But that afternoon seemed to change her. After that, even when they were together, he felt her distancing herself in small but noticeable increments. Her kisses became dry and chaste, her hugs listless. Conversations were strained. They talked around the subject, but it was always there.

The scandal overshadowed their lives and sucked all the happiness from them. Even when they tried to ignore it, it was slowly consuming them.

Finally, when they were only going through the motions of being a couple, he asked her point-blank if she wanted to call off the wedding.

“Do you?” she said.

“You know I don’t. But I don’t want to keep you attached to me if you don’t want to be.”

“I do. But…”

She didn’t share with him whatever that major qualifier was, the reason why she was rethinking their engagement. He supposed he could take his pick. Was it that he was still under suspicion for criminal wrongdoing? Or that she was being publicly humiliated because her fiancé’s name was being bandied about on TV every night? Everyone in Charleston knew that he’d had some kind of sexual congress with Suzi Monroe, which was reason enough to break an engagement even if he was innocent of the other allegations.

Taking her hand, he said, “Hallie, I love you. I want to marry you. My feelings for you haven’t changed. But I don’t want you to remain tethered to me out of a sense of obligation.”

“It’s not like that, Raley. I swear it’s not.” She paused, then said, “We’re both under a lot of stress. In this kind of emotional climate, neither of us can or should make a life-affecting decision. It’s hard to think of marriage when we’re dealing with this. We must get past this before we can take a giant step forward. I think we should give ourselves some time and space to sort things out.” Her expression was one of appeal and earnestness. “Don’t you?”

He leaned forward and cranked up the air conditioner. Resettling in the driver’s seat, he glanced at his passenger, who asked, “Did she return your ring?”

“Not then. And I didn’t ask for it. What I did was agree to her terms.” He gave a bitter laugh. “I guess I was a little generous on the time and space I gave her.”

“What happened?”

“I rented the cabin and started spending days at a time there. Jay seized the opportunity.” He cut another glance at Britt, whose lips parted with surprise. “It wasn’t enough that he had any woman he wanted eating out of his hand, eating
him,”
he added crudely. “He had to have Hallie, too.

“He had bemoaned the fact that she was the only woman in Charleston he wanted but couldn’t have. She thought he was teasing. Like a sap, so did I. He wasn’t. He took advantage of my distance and her vulnerability, and she…”

Raley had been humiliated by the speed and ease with which Jay had replaced him, in Hallie’s bed, in her heart. Even after all this time, it hurt and infuriated him. “Maybe she’d wanted him all along, too. Anyway, she mailed the engagement ring to my folks. I told them to throw it away, sell it, give it to the next homeless person they saw. I didn’t care.”

For a time, the only sounds in the cab were the swish of the tires against the pavement and the ticking of the analog clock in the dash. He didn’t know if Britt was afraid of saying the wrong thing, of speaking a trigger word that would send him over the edge, or if she was pondering what he’d told her.

Maybe she was working out the time line, wondering if Jay had been romancing her at the same time he’d been sleeping with Hallie. In any case, she didn’t say anything for the next several miles.

Finally he said, “We’re about five minutes from the airstrip. You’d better be thinking of what you’re going to tell the police, but before you say anything to them, you should notify your lawyer.”

She nodded, absently. “Was that why Jay set you up to take a fall? If he did, that is. Was Hallie the reason he made certain you got into bed with Suzi at his party? Did it then go terribly wrong?”

Ruminating out loud, she continued. “Jay didn’t count on Suzi overdosing and dying in his guest room. All he planned was to catch you with your pants down while Hallie was out of town, and then make certain she found out about it so he could make his move on her.”

“Jay wouldn’t go to all that trouble just to get a woman. Even Hallie.”

“But you believe he arranged for you to wake up in bed with Suzi.”

“With
dead
Suzi.” She looked at him with patent incredulity. He turned his head and nodded. “Yes, Britt. Jay planned it all. He coached Suzi on what to say to me, things like red suspenders being a turn-on, and my occupation being manly. Jay put words in her mouth that he knew would stroke my bruised ego. He knew it was going to take more than big tits and good legs to get me into bed with her.”

“She came on to you with a drugged drink in hand.”

“Provided by Jay. I’m sure of it. Once I was compromised and he had the condoms to prove it, he saw to it that she snorted enough cocaine to kill her.”

“Raley…” She shook her head with disbelief. “You’re accusing your oldest friend of murder.”

“Yes.”

“Why would Jay do that?
Why?
”

“Because my getting drunk and fucking Suzi Monroe wasn’t catastrophic enough. That would have caused me personal problems, probably cost me my relationship with Hallie, but it wouldn’t have affected other areas of my life.

“But Suzi dying of a cocaine overdose while in bed with me, now
that
took on the scope of total ruination. An incident like that, indefensible because of a temporary memory loss, could destroy a man’s life. It would shut him down completely. Along with anything he was doing.”

He stopped at the intersection of two country roads and looked at her. After several seconds, he saw understanding crystallize in her eyes. In a low, barely audible voice, she said, “Your arson investigation.”

He said nothing, merely took his foot off the brake and accelerated through the intersection. Just beyond it, he turned onto an unmarked, unpaved road. The next mile and a half was riddled with potholes. The ride was rough.

“I remember this,” Britt said. “Last night I was hanging on for dear life.”

“You were playing possum.” She had feigned sleep while his hand was under her, groping for the seat belt. She probably thought he had copped a free feel or two while fumbling around, but he really couldn’t find the damn latch. It had been stuck between the seats. He considered explaining that now, then thought it was best not to mention it at all. He didn’t want her to know how well he remembered it.

Her car was parked against the rusted, corrugated tin wall of the dilapidated hangar where he’d left it. He pulled up beside it, but neither made a move to get out of the truck. He left the motor running long enough to lower their windows, then turned off the ignition.