The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (32 page)

Laslo explained, ‘Tiger was at the top of his game, then his family life fell apart, and now he’s hit rock bottom. Can’t even swing a club anymore.’

‘Why did his family life fall apart?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Kip said. ‘What matters is that Marcus is the same way. If things are bad at home, they’re bad on the court. His game is tied to LaDonna.’

Angie still couldn’t see it. LaDonna was as erratic as a Ping-Pong ball, but Marcus was having his best season yet. ‘How so?’

Kip said, ‘Anytime she mentions divorce, you can count on at least five points being shaved from the board. More if she calls a lawyer.’

Angie wanted to laugh, but they were obviously dead serious.

‘Five points.’ Harding was nodding his head, probably planning how he was going to exploit this information with his bookie. ‘Marcus can’t play without her.’

Angie asked, ‘Does LaDonna know she’s got this power?’

‘What the hell do you think?’ Kip flashed Laslo an incredulous look. ‘Does LaDonna know?’ He grabbed the basketball. ‘She uses it like a God damm guillotine over our heads.’

Harding put down the empty peanut bowl. He clapped his hands clean. ‘You want us to plant some Oxy on Fig’s wife, call the cops, stick her in the pokey for the night?’

Angie’s heart banged into her throat. ‘That sounds extreme.’

Harding didn’t seem to think so. ‘Why use a hammer when you can use an ax?’

She struggled to come up with reasons not to. ‘Because Reuben—Fig—is married to this woman. Because she’s got a kid—his kid. Because she might not be screwing Marcus.’

‘Everybody’s screwing Marcus.’ Kip said this like it was gospel.

‘Look.’ Angie leaned up on the couch. She talked to Kip, because this was his decision. ‘You told me to handle LaDonna, but handling LaDonna means handling all the wives.’ She opened the folder as if she needed to remind herself of something, but the truth was, she was grasping at straws. ‘The way you keep the wives happy is you don’t cause waves. Sending . . .’ she pretended to look for the girl’s name, ‘Josephine to rehab is a big wave. It’s a media thing. It’ll get her a lot of attention. There will be interviews and paparazzi. You know what happens when cameras are around. The wives go nuts trying to put themselves in the
picture. And then there’s the question of whether or not Jo is even using drugs.’ She looked at Harding for the answer. He shrugged. She said, ‘Walk it out. You plant the drugs, you call the cops, she gets in front of a judge, who puts her in rehab. What happens when they figure out she’s not using? Blood tests will show she’s clean. She won’t go through withdrawal. What if that’s the story she tells—that she was framed?’

‘Is there a race angle?’ Laslo asked. ‘I can’t tell what she is. Black? White? Latina?’

‘She’s beautiful,’ Kip said. ‘That’s all that matters. Nobody gives a shit when an ugly bitch complains.’

Harding suggested, ‘Jo’s mother.’

Kip asked, ‘What about her?’

‘She was moved up here after the father died. Got some kind of heart condition, so they wanted her to be near a good hospital. The mother’s on Fig’s dime.’

‘Easy,’ Laslo said. ‘We threaten Jo with the mother. Tell her Mommy is going to end up eating cat food if she doesn’t cut it out with Marcus.’

Angie spitballed, ‘If Jo’s got a line on Marcus, the mother could be looking at an even bigger jackpot. He’s got a hell of a lot more money than Reuben does. He could put the mother up in a penthouse on top of the Ritz. Buy her a new heart. Whatever she wants.’

Harding said, ‘She’s not wrong.’

Angie shot him a look. He hadn’t said she was right, either.

Kip said, ‘Okay. What’s the solution, assholes?’

Angie rushed to answer before anybody else could. ‘I’ll shadow Jo and see what comes up.’ She thought about something
else. ‘If she’s not screwing Marcus, then what’s going on between the two of them?’

Kip bounced the ball. ‘What else could she want from him if she’s not looking to move up the food chain?’

‘Could be she’s slipping him pills. Could be she’s blackmailing him about something from his past. Could be a lot of things.’ Angie had to stop to swallow. She couldn’t let this get away from her. ‘We can’t find a solution without knowing what the problem really is.’

Harding said, ‘I’m leaning back toward my idea. Jo’s the problem. Jo goes away, the problem goes away.’

Angie tried, ‘What if Jo isn’t the only one who’s the problem? What if she’s talking to somebody? What if she’s working with somebody?’

Harding shrugged, but she could see his mind was swinging back around.

‘Don’t be stupid about this.’ Angie stood up. She knew that Kip responded best to aggression. ‘I’ll find out what’s going on. All I need is time.’

‘Time is exactly what we don’t have,’ Kip countered. ‘Training is ramping up. We’ve got the All-Star ground-breaking in two weeks. I had to cut off my own right nut and hand it to Ditmar to keep Marcus in. This has to be taken care of fast.’

They all went silent again.

Angie stacked the pages in the folder. She had to get out of here before Harding swung back the other way. ‘Let me dig a little deeper before we bring down the ax.’

Kip said, ‘You’ve got two days.’

‘It’ll take that long just to catch myself up to speed.’ Angie listed the things she had already done. ‘I’ll need to follow her
around, check her digital footprint, scope out where she spends her time.’

‘Clone her phone, read her texts, pull the emails off her computer.’ Harding winked at Angie. He was finally on board. ‘She’s right, Kip. I can get my electronics guy on this pronto, but to drill down what’s the what will take at least two weeks.’

‘We don’t have that kind of time.’ Kip tossed the ball in the air. ‘You’ve got one week, Polaski. You know how this works. Either the problem goes away or the wife does.’

‘You’ll have to move along,’ an insistent woman in Lululemon warned Angie. She had a fluorescent baton in one hand and a plastic cup of green slush in the other. ‘This is the drop-off lane.’

Angie looked up at the elementary school. She had parked at the curb. There was no sign indicating that this was the drop-off lane.

The woman repeated, ‘Move along, please.’

A car horn beeped behind Angie. She checked the mirror. Black Mercedes SUV, the boxy, six-bills kind. Just the thing every mother needed to take her kid to school.

‘
¿Habla Inglés?
’

Angie swallowed the knives that wanted to shoot from her mouth. Just because she was in a shitty car with a leaking transmission didn’t mean she was the fucking maid.

‘
Habla
fuck off,’ she muttered, jerking the car away from the curb. The coffee cup between her legs sloshed onto her jeans.
‘Dammit.’ Angie jerked the wheel again, turning out of the school parking lot. She took an illegal left. More car horns blared. She was doing a fantastic job staying undercover.

Peachtree Battle Avenue split in two, a grassy divide separating the north and south lanes. Angie couldn’t figure out how to turn back around. She drove over the grass, then parked in the wide mouth of a brick-paved driveway that led to a mansion. Not exactly the best place to hide in plain sight, but better than her vantage point yesterday, which put her too far down from the school to watch Jo drop off her kid.

Kip was getting impatient. Two nights ago he had given Angie a week to figure out what Jo was up to. After a full day of surveillance with no revelations, he was making noises about Dale taking over.

There was no way in hell that Angie would let Dale take over.

She studied the line of traffic on the other side of the street. More black SUVs, some BMWs and the occasional Lexus. E. Rivers Elementary was the Taj Mahal compared to the public school shitholes Angie had attended. The kids were so shiny white that they practically glowed.

Angie had been to the school many times before, but never this early. Usually she parked in the strip mall across the main road and stood on the sidewalk watching the kids on the fenced-in playground. She had wanted to check out Jo’s kid. She knew who to look for because there were tons of photos on Reuben Figaroa’s Facebook page. Jo wasn’t in any of them, but that wasn’t why Angie was unhappy about the pictures. No matter how studiously Reuben avoided fame, he was still a public figure. He shouldn’t be showing everybody his kid’s face. There were
nuts out there. Any one of them could figure out where the boy went to school, what time he would be on the playground, just like Angie had.

This was her grandkid, she guessed. Technically, not for real. Angie sure as hell wasn’t old enough to be a grandmother. Especially to a kid like Anthony Figaroa.

The name was cumbersome for a six-year-old, but it seemed to fit. Anthony was like a little adult. His brow was permanently furrowed, shoulders rounded, head down as if he wanted to fold into himself. Instead of playing with the other kids at recess, he sat with his back to the wall of the school and stared mournfully out at the playground. He reminded Angie of Will. The lonely aura, the longing mixed with the thing that always held him back.

Will was great at sports, but there was no parent to drive him to games or pay for his equipment. There was also the matter of the roadmap of scars on his body. If Will changed out in the locker room, someone would notice the obvious signs of abuse, and then a teacher would become involved, and the principal and social workers, and suddenly he would be put under a magnifying glass, which was the thing Will hated the most.

Anthony Figaroa clearly shared this same aversion to attention. Then again, so did his mother. Angie saw Jo’s charcoal-gray Range Rover inch along the drop-off lane. The same scene played out that Angie had witnessed the day before. Jo didn’t wave to the other mothers in the car pool. She didn’t speak to the Nazi with the sign who’d shooed Angie away. She made like Anthony. She kept her head down. She stayed in her lane. She dropped off her kid. She drove away. Going by yesterday, or any other day that Angie had watched her daughter, Jo would go
home, and she wouldn’t go back out again until it was time to pick up Anthony.

Unless it was Thursday or Friday, the days she went to the grocery store and the dry cleaner, respectively. Angie had pictured a lot of things for her daughter, but never that she would turn into a hermit.

Angie’s car was pointed in the wrong direction to follow Jo. Another trip through the grassy divide landed her two cars behind the Range Rover, which was stopped at a red light. Jo’s blinker wasn’t on, which could mean that she was heading straight into the Peachtree Battle shopping center. Angie scanned the shops down the hill. This wasn’t Jo’s grocery day, and even if it was, she used the Kroger on Peachtree. Her dry cleaner was on Carriage Drive. The only business in the strip mall that was open this early was Starbucks.

The light changed. Jo drove across the intersection and turned into the Starbucks parking lot.

Angie followed at a distance, keeping another car between them. The lot was packed. Angie expected Jo to pull into the line at the drive-thru, but she circled a few times and found a spot.

‘Come on.’ Angie had to wait out a shuffling woman with her nose in her phone before she could exit the parking lot and find a space in front of the bank across the alley.

She got out of her car and darted toward the Starbucks. She didn’t realize what was about to happen until she saw Jo opening the glass door. She was going into a coffee shop. She would place her order at the counter. She would thank the woman behind the register. There would have to be some kind of conversation. Angie would finally hear Jo’s voice. This was why she
had wanted the job at Kip’s in the first place—this moment, this space in time. She would hear her daughter speak. She would divine through some long-snuffed maternal instinct whether or not Jo was okay, and then Angie could get back to her regular life and never think about her lost daughter ever again.

Angie opened the door.

She was too late.

Jo had already placed her order. She was standing with the herd of coffee-buyers, waiting for the woman behind the counter to call her name.

Angie mumbled a curse as she got in line for the register. The guy ahead of her had apparently never been to a Starbucks before. He was asking questions about sizes. Angie pulled a bottle of overpriced apple juice from the fridge. She glanced at Jo, then let herself stare openly.

She wasn’t the only person appraising her daughter. Every man in the room had noticed her. Jo was beautiful. She had a way of drawing your eye. What was troubling was that she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. At twenty-seven, Angie had used her looks like a battering ram. There wasn’t a door she couldn’t break open.

‘Josephine?’ the barista called. ‘Tall soy latte.’

Josephine, not Jo.

She picked up the cup. She didn’t speak. Her smile was stressed, obviously forced. She took the latte to the back of the store. She sat down at the long bar overlooking the parking lot. There was an empty stool one seat down. Angie checked to make sure the cashier wasn’t looking. She ducked out of line and took the empty seat before anyone else could.

The bar was narrow, maybe a foot wide. Outside the window, cars snaked toward the drive-thru window. The guy between Angie and her daughter was typing on his computer. She glanced down at the screen and assumed he was writing the great American novel. At a Starbucks. Just like Hemingway.

Angie opened her juice. She had done private eye work off and on for years. There was a go-bag in her trunk with the tools of the trade. Duct tape, a small tarp in case it rained, a good camera, a directional microphone, four tiny cameras that could be hidden inside potted plants and air vents. None of which could help her at this late date. She spotted a newspaper a few seats down. She bumped the woman on the other side of her, nodded at the paper, and it was silently passed her way.

Hemingway, meet Sam Spade.

Angie skimmed the headline on the front page. She chanced another look at her daughter. The cup caught her attention. J
OSEPHINE
was written in black marker. Angie knew there was a lot in a name. Her mother’s pimp had called her Angela. Even now, if anyone said the name, bile would shoot into her mouth.