The Day Trader (34 page)

I can’t stop trying to figure out who tore up my house too. Maybe Taylor was looking for the cash he must have known Melanie made at the club. Maybe Reggie sent his people to look for some piece of evidence they’ll never find. Or maybe it was Mary who went through my possessions, just like I think she did at Bedford. I don’t know. There just aren’t any answers.

Around six I get dressed and leave the motel room to get dinner. I haven’t had food since yesterday morning, so I drive to a diner near the motel and sit in a booth by myself, reading a
People
magazine while a kind, older lady serves me a breakfast dinner of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage gravy, hash browns, and pancakes. It’s delicious—like my mother used to fix on Sunday nights—and I take my time with the meal, savoring each bite. With a full stomach, I’m asleep five minutes after returning to my room.

The next thing I know it’s seven o’clock Monday morning. The television is still on and the remote is poking me in the cheek. I sit up and rub my eyes. It’s time to get on with what I need to do.

At ten o’clock I walk straight into the reception area of Frank Taylor’s law firm. It’s a small firm and I remember the office layout from the Christmas parties he threw. There are about ten offices beyond this reception area off of two corridors, and a few cubicles for the assistants in an open area in between the corridors. Where Melanie used to sit.

“Good morning, sir.” The receptionist is a prim woman with a high, starched white collar reaching almost to her chin. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Frank Taylor.”

“Do you have an appointment?” she sniffs, reaching for a leather-bound book on one side of her desk. “I don’t remember Mr. Taylor having any appointments this morning.”

“His office is all the way down the left corridor, isn’t it?” I ask as I move past her desk. “All the way in the back, yes?”

“Wait a minute,” she pipes up. “You can’t go in there like that. Stop!” she orders shrilly as I stride into the corridor.

Out of the corner of my eye I see her reach for the phone, but I keep going, intent on what I’m about to do.

“Hello, Frank.”

Taylor’s eyes flash up from a thick casebook as I move into his doorway. His feet are up on his desk, and he drops them heavily to the floor as soon as he recognizes me, then tosses the book on his cluttered desk and stands up. “What are you doing here?” he snaps, wincing and touching his ribs as he rises. He must still be hurting from that knee I dropped onto his chest a few nights ago. And his face doesn’t look so good either. I beat the crap out of him, that’s for sure. Felt good too.

“We need to talk, Frank.” The receptionist appears behind me, and I turn toward her for a moment, giving her a fierce look. “Get out of here,” I order. She stumbles away, petrified, and I close and lock the office door behind her.

“My receptionist will call the police,” Taylor tells me, sitting back down in his desk chair with a muffled groan. “She has orders to do that if anyone barges past her desk. When you’re in the divorce business, you have to anticipate that passions may run high. You have no more than three minutes before the cops get here, so you better tell me quickly what’s on your mind.”

I stare at him for a moment before I speak, thinking about the knife slicing through Melanie’s soft skin. “You killed her, didn’t you, Frank?”

Taylor laughs loudly, then grimaces as pain ripples through his chest. “Do you
really
think that, Augustus? Are you that stupid?”

“You told me yourself that your law practice is in a shambles.” I motion at the door behind me. “There were a lot of vacant offices along the corridor. It’s a ghost town in here.”

His eyes narrow. “So?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

I could always sense when we talked at his Christmas parties that Taylor didn’t believe I was a very intelligent man. He always had a vaguely condescending manner, like he considered himself well above me on the IQ ladder. But suddenly I can see in his expression that he’s worried I’ve figured a few things out and that maybe I’m not as average as he thought. “I never understood why Melanie wanted us to take out those life insurance policies, but now I know.”

Taylor pulls his arms tighter across his chest but says nothing.

“Remember at the Grand that night you ‘happened’ to show up?” I continue. “You accused me in front of a woman I was talking to of killing Melanie. You accused me of killing Melanie before she could sign her will, and that as a result her parents wouldn’t get the money as she would have wanted. But that was all crap, Frank. Just legal mumbo jumbo you thought a guy like me wouldn’t understand.”

“You let me worry about the legal issues.”

“You’re the secondary beneficiary on Melanie’s policy. Who gets the life insurance proceeds has nothing to do with a will, even if she had signed one. Somehow you got her to name you as the second before she died, which is all the insurance company really cares about.”

“Someone has been feeding you bad information—”

“Don’t lie to me, Taylor,” I warn, raising my voice and taking a step toward him. He straightens up in the chair quickly and makes a subtle move for one of his desk drawers, but stops when I stop. “I know you’re the second on the policy. A guy named Scott Snyder dropped that bomb on me. Seems he’s been taking quite an interest in my life lately. He’s a private investigator here in Washington, and though he didn’t come right out and say it, he thinks I killed my wife.”

“Well, it’s good to know people like him are on the ball. Good to know it won’t be long before you’re where you belong. Behind bars.”

I want to throw Taylor out of the fifth-story window behind his desk so he can feel the same pain Slammer did, but I keep my anger under control—for now. “Snyder told me all about slayer statutes too, Frank.” I’m seething and my voice is starting to shake. “About laws that bar a person who causes bodily harm to another in the course of a crime from benefiting. So if I’m implicated in Melanie’s death, you’ll get the money because you’re the second. You’ll get the million dollars.”

“That’s news to me, Augustus,” Taylor says, trying his best to seem surprised. But it’s a terrible performance.

“Your original plan was to kill me.”

Taylor points at the door. “Get out of here, Augustus. I’ve had enough of this.”

“Then you were going to marry Melanie so you could get your hands on the insurance money to save your law practice.”

Surprisingly, he nods. “I won’t deny that I wanted to marry her. I loved her very much.”

“Sure you did,” I reply sarcastically. “A million dollars’ worth.” His hands squeeze tightly into fists, but he won’t challenge me. He knows better than to try something after that night on my lawn. “But Melanie wouldn’t agree to all that, would she?” I continue. “She was willing to divorce me for you, but ultimately she wasn’t willing to help you kill me. She went as far as to convince me to take out the policies, but when you pressed, she wouldn’t go through with it. Down deep, Melanie wasn’t the monster you are.”

Taylor laughs as if to say that he finds my accusations ludicrous. “You have quite an imagination, Augustus.”

“Is that what you and Melanie fought about outside the Two O’Clock Club the night of her murder? Killing me?”

Taylor’s eyes flash to mine, and I see that I’ve gotten his attention. “We never fought,” he says, his voice cold.

“I have a witness who saw you two arguing that night. She’s a woman Melanie danced with. Erin would pick you out of a lineup with no trouble. You watched that routine so many times. Participated once too, didn’t you?”

Taylor licks his lips nervously but remains silent.

I take another step forward, and now I’m right in front of his desk. This time he makes no move for the drawer. “You were worried Melanie might go to the police, and you were desperate for cash, so you hatched a different plan right there on the street while you argued. One that would end up getting you the same amount of money as long as you could hang the murder on me. A million dollars tax free. You knew she had demanded a divorce from me the night before. You knew the cops would latch on to that as the motive for the murder. That and the insurance money, because I was the primary beneficiary. It was perfect, wasn’t it? You couldn’t have scripted it better.”

“You’re so far off. You’re desperate because you know the police are closing in on you.”

He’s saying all the right things, but I can tell he’s rattled. I’ve figured everything out, and suddenly he understands that his perfect plan wasn’t so perfect after all. “You almost screwed up,” I continue. “You almost let your temper get the best of you. After I popped you at the Grand, you got your silver Mercedes and tried to run me down in the parking garage. You were drunk and pissed off and you wanted the money right away.”

“I told you before, I don’t have a Mercedes!”

I reach into my pocket and pull out the photograph of Melanie and him alongside the car. “You may not now, but you did.” The picture trembles with my fingers.

Suddenly there’s a commotion in the hallway. The police have arrived quickly, as Taylor predicted they would. “I know everything, Frank,” I say quietly, aware that I have only a few moments of freedom remaining. But this is the way I want it. I’m not going to run from Reggie. I’m going to face him like a man. “I know what Melanie did for you, at the club and in private. I know how she performed. She used to do the same thing for me.” I hesitate, then point at him. “I’ll convince the Washington police that you are guilty of Melanie’s murder if it’s the last thing I do. I promise you that.”

“It’ll be the last thing you
try
to do before they send a couple of thousand volts screaming through your body,” he says. “But you won’t convince them, because I didn’t do it. You did!”

“Mr. Taylor!‘ comes a loud voice from the corridor.

The police are right outside, probably with their guns drawn. I’m almost out of time.

“Mr. Taylor, are you in there?”

“Yes, help me!” he shouts suddenly. “He’s going to kill me!” He struggles to stand, holding one hand out in front of his face, clutching his ribs with the other. I watch in amazement as he tumbles backward over his chair just before uniformed policemen break down the door and spill into the room. His timing is impeccable. What a showman. Moments later my hands are cuffed tightly behind my back, and I’m being hustled down the corridor toward reception by five officers.

CHAPTER 21

Reggie is subdued as he sits on the opposite side of a scratched wooden table in this sweltering, sparsely furnished interrogation room. He’s slouched down, chin on his chest, hands thrust deeply into his pockets, and he seems to be contemplating the toes of his cordovan loafers while he thinks about how he wants to proceed. A few beads of sweat glisten on his forehead.

“You must have known I’d find out about you going after Frank Taylor in his office this morning,” he says quietly.

Standing behind Reggie is another man. It’s the same guy who accompanied Reggie to my house the night he stood on my stoop and informed me of Melanie’s murder. The guy stands in front of the door to the hall like a sentry, arms crossed defiantly, his sports coat off so I can see the handle of a 9-mm pistol protruding menacingly from his leather shoulder holster. As if I’d even think about trying to escape. This dimly lit room is buried in the bowels of the precinct, and I wouldn’t stand a chance of making it out of here, even if I could get past Reggie and the other guy.

“Did you hear me, Augustus?”

“I heard you.”

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

As near as I can tell, it’s been about three hours since the cops brought me to the precinct. Most of that time I’ve been confined to a cell down the hall with a couple of guys who looked like hardened criminals. Two uniformed officers brought me in here a few minutes ago to meet with Reggie. “I wanted to look Taylor in the eye.”

“Why?”

I shoot another quick glance in the direction of the man standing in front of the door. “You know why.”

“Is Lewis bothering you?” Reggie asks.

“He isn’t making me real comfortable with that gun sticking out of his holster,” I admit.

“Take a cigarette break,” Reggie orders.

“You sure?” Lewis asks. “This guy’s pretty big.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. I’ll be right outside if you need me,” Lewis says before closing the door. I see him peering at me through the door’s small window for a moment, then he disappears.

“Now tell me why it was so all-fired important for you to be able to look Taylor in the eye,” Reggie says.

“I wanted to make certain he was the one who murdered Melanie.”

Reggie pulls a pack of cigarettes out and offers one to me, but I decline. “And?”

“And now I’m certain he did it.”

“Tell me why you’re so certain.” Reggie removes a cigarette from the pack and taps the filter end on the table several times, then places it in his mouth. But he doesn’t light it. He’s trying so hard to be good.

I take a deep breath. “He had a clear motive.”

“Which was?”

“His law practice was failing, and he was broke. He needed the money from Melanie’s insurance policy to save himself financially.”

“But Melanie’s mother was second on the policy. You told me that yourself.”

“Somehow Taylor must have convinced Melanie to make him second. Maybe he asked her to marry him and that’s when she agreed to make the change.” I run my hands through my hair and realize that it’s gotten long over the last few weeks. “But I’m sure you already knew that.” He strokes his thin mustache and looks away. “Don’t play games with me, Reggie,” I say. “You’re much too thorough not to have already uncovered that piece of information.”

“So you think Taylor was banking on the fact that we’d arrest you,” Reggie continues, “and that he would get the money from the insurance policy on account of the slayer statute.”

“Yes.”

Reggie puts the cigarette under his nose and takes a long whiff, then pulls out a pack of matches and drops them on the table. “Let’s not forget that you had a very compelling motive too. Melanie was demanding a divorce and she was having an affair with Taylor. You needed the money as well.” Reggie’s fingers crawl across the table toward the matches.