1 Runaway Man (18 page)

“I used to perform,” Mom allowed. “But not in any grunge band.”

“You had a solo act?”

“I did. If it will help jog your memory my professional name was Abraxas.”

“Abraxas…” Suddenly, it hit him. “My God, you gave me a lap dance once.”

Mom arched an eyebrow at him. “Are you sure it wasn’t more like twenty lap dances?”

Bobby colored slightly. “So you remember me.”

“Of course I remember you, Mr. Kidd. You offered me a thousand dollars to go for a ride around the block with you in your limo.”

“And you turned me down cold. I could look but I couldn’t touch. You were very … professional.”

“I still am,” Mom assured him. “Rita danced, too, you know.”

He eyeballed Rita up and down. “I don’t remember you. And God knows I would. You went by?…”

“Natural Born,” she replied primly.

“Which meant?…”

“Let’s not go there, Mr. Kidd.”

“You’re right,” he said with a quick nod. “It was a long time ago. I haven’t been in one of those clubs in a million years.”

“We all move on,” Mom commented sagely.

Rita excused herself and went back out to her desk, closing Mom’s door.

Mom folded her hands before her on the desk. “How may we help you today, Mr. Kidd?”

He sat there stroking Gus for a moment before he turned to me and said, “By answering a direct question. Was my sister pushed off of her terrace?”

“Why? Do you have some reason to believe that she was?”

“I don’t know, Ben. I wish I did.”

“That’s what you said this morning when you gave Lieutenant Diamond and me that vague, cryptic warning about watching our backs. You must have
something
more to tell us or you wouldn’t be here. By the way, does anyone in your family know that you are?”

“No one knows I’m here.”

“Then let’s get to it, okay? We’re busy people, Mr. Kidd. Our time is valuable.”

Mom gaped at me in astonishment. She isn’t used to being around me when I’ve just gotten laid.

“Ben, I honestly … I don’t know what the devil is going on,” Bobby began, choosing his words carefully. “What I do know is that my mother didn’t exactly give you an accurate picture of why Katherine was sent away to the Barrow School. In fact, that story she fed you was a fairy tale.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she can’t deal with the reality of what actually happened. It makes her too uncomfortable. My mother … needs her illusions. She’s lost without them. That’s why I didn’t speak up this morning. Can you understand?”

“Sure I can,” I said. “What’s the real story?”

Bobby’s eyes returned to the carpet. “Kathleen wasn’t sent away to the Barrow School by Dr. Levin because she was becoming disruptive in class. She was sent there because she was abusing drugs and alcohol
and
sleeping with any and every boy who’d have her.” He paused to take a sip of his coffee. “I didn’t know a thing about it until I came home from Cambridge for Thanksgiving. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—high school boys coming in and out of her bedroom all day long while our mother was off playing bridge. Kathleen would take on three, four, five of them in a single afternoon. They were practically lined up out in the hallway. I-I was shocked. Especially because she’d been such a nice, sweet girl when I went away to school at the end of the summer.”

“Why don’t you tell us more about that summer, Mr. Kidd,” Mom suggested.

“Happy to,” Bobby said obligingly. “We spent it on Nantucket. Kathleen loved it there. She loved the water. And I have very happy memories of that summer. The Graysons had a place right up the beach from ours and that was the summer when I fell in love with Meg. She was sixteen. I was eighteen. We swam together every day. Sailed together, played tennis. She always had to beat me at everything. She was
so
competitive,” he remembered fondly. “So was her dad, Senator Grayson. He and my old man, the Ambassador, used to play high-stakes cribbage on our veranda every afternoon. They’d drink gin and tonics and curse up a storm. No one plays cribbage anymore. Have you noticed that?” On our silence he added, “When I left for Cambridge just before Labor Day, Kathleen was a healthy, blossoming twelve-year-old girl. She was well behaved, studious,
normal
. Somehow, in a few short months, she’d gotten totally out of control.”

“Did you try talking to her?” Mom asked him.

“You bet I did. She laughed at me. Hell, she even accused me of hassling her because
I
secretly wanted her, too. And couldn’t have her. It was just plain sick, the stuff that came out of Kathleen’s mouth. She was
twisted
inside. She was angry and mean. That’s why they sent her away to Barrow. But it hurts my mother too much to talk about it.”

“What happened when Kathleen got to Barrow?” I asked.

“Nothing changed. She was in constant trouble. And not because of any mythical bad boy whose big brother at New Paltz was supplying him with dope. It was Kathleen who was getting drugs sent to her—from her doper friends in the city. And she was screwing every boy in the school. The sad reality is, my parents had no way of knowing who the father of her baby was. It could have been anyone. It wasn’t the school’s fault. The authorities at Barrow did everything humanly possible, short of insisting that my folks lock her away in an institution. And my parents felt no animosity toward them. Hell, my father gave the Barrow School two million bucks after Kathleen left, for a new performing arts building. Would he have done that if he’d thought they were responsible for what happened to her?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Mom murmured.

“The story that your mother told us about taking Kathleen down to Nevis to have her baby—was that fiction, too?”

“No, that part was true. Dr. Sykes and his nurse did fly down and Kathleen did give birth there, like Mother said.”

“In January of 1990?”

“That’s what I was told.” He frowned at me. “Why, do you have reason to believe otherwise?”

“Nope. Just wondered.”

“After that, Kathleen was sent away to Geneva, like my mother said. But when it came to men, Kathleen was a trouble magnet her whole life. That eurotrash bum who married her for her money—he wasn’t the only one who used her. A lot of men did. One of them took filthy photos of her having sex with two of his closest friends and threatened to sell them to the British tabloids if my father didn’t pay up. Which my father did. Another one stole her credit cards and cleaned out her bank accounts. On and on it went. My father always had to ride to the rescue. About five years ago, she started seeing a new therapist in Paris, who finally seemed to get somewhere with her. Or maybe it was just the new generation of meds she was on. But she seemed to be doing better. Started to paint again. Stayed out of trouble.”

“You know this how?” I asked him.

He blinked at me. “Excuse me?”

“Did you visit her over there?”

“No,” he answered shortly. “We weren’t close, as I told you this morning.”

“So how do you know this? Through your mother?”

Bobby let out a humorless laugh. “Hardly. Kathleen and my mother could barely stand to be in the same room together. We got periodic updates about her from Peter Seymour. Peter’s the one who she stayed in touch with. She had to. He held the purse strings.”

“So he’s maintained a relationship with Kathleen over the years?”

Bobby’s face tightened. “Of a sort.”

“What sort?”

“Where are you going with this, Ben?”

“Just trying to figure things out.”

“You won’t. Not where Kathleen’s concerned. She was impossible to figure out. When she decided to move back to New York we were … encouraged, I guess. But, as my mother said, Kathleen kept to herself. She wasn’t comfortable around other people. Not even us. Especially us.”

“What do you know about Bruce Weiner?”

“Not a thing. I’d never heard of him until you guys mentioned him this morning. I gather, from what you were saying, that Kathleen had become obsessed with trying to establish a relationship with him.”

“Do you have any idea how she was able to locate him?”

“No idea whatsoever.”

“Who was privy to the identity of the couple that adopted her baby?”

“Besides Peter Seymour, you mean? No one.”

“Your mother didn’t know?”

“My mother didn’t want to know. No one in the family did. I sure didn’t. Nor did Meg,” he added hesitantly. “Or at least I don’t think she did.”

“Okay, I’m a bit confused now,” I confessed. “Is there a reason why your wife might have known who Bruce was?”

Bobby cleared his throat. “Well, yeah. She’s a Grayson.”

“Which means?…”

“Look, can we talk real world here?”

“By all means,” Mom said to him encouragingly.

“Meg’s running my campaign and she is strictly old school. A Grayson, through and through. Don’t get me wrong—she’s loving and kind and a wonderful mother. But she’s also one of the most ruthless people I’ve ever met, with the possible exception of her dear, departed father, the Senator. The Graysons take no prisoners. And that name still carries a lot of clout with certain people around this state. Like union bosses who know how to get out the vote and will bust heads if they have to. Meg has devoted herself—body, mind and soul—to making sure that I’m sworn in as New York’s next governor. For all I know, having some goon fling Kathleen off of that balcony could simply fall under the category of ‘preventive damage control.’”

I looked at him in disbelief. “Are you suggesting that Meg may be involved in your sister’s death?”

“I’m saying I don’t know. I’m saying that when it comes to politics
nothing
is off limits as far as she’s concerned.”

I looked at him some more. “Why are you telling us this?”

“Because I want to know who killed my sister.”

“So you
don’t
think she committed suicide.”

He puffed out his cheeks before he said, “No, I don’t.”

“Real world, Mr. Kidd,” Mom said. “What’s going on here?”

“I wish I knew, Mrs. Golden. I really do.” He glanced at his watch, then nudged Gus out of his lap and stood up. “I have to be going. They’ll wonder where I am. I hope this was helpful.” And with that, Bobby the K grabbed his topcoat and hustled on out of there.

“There he goes, ladies and gentlemen,” I said quietly. “Our next governor.”

Mom shook her head at me. “How weird was that?”

“Plenty weird. He called his mother a liar, his sister a slut
and
he cozied right up to accusing his wife of murder.”

“I wonder if we should believe what he said.”

“You didn’t?”

“He
seemed
credible. And genuinely upset. But I just don’t know.” She said it again. “How weird was that?”

The two of us were sitting there mulling over just how weird when Rita let out a cry of shock from her computer.

Someone had just fired shots at Charles Willingham outside of the Stuyvesant Field House on the campus of Canterbury College. Charles was no longer in charge. He was dead.

CHAPTER SIX

HE’D BEEN SHOOTING HOOPS AT THE FIELD HOUSE
with Coach Seckla, according to the latest news accounts I could find on my computer. Apparently, Charles wanted to get in some extra practice despite the mandatory three-day study break he’d been given for the Gauntlet. He was leaving the Field House when he and Sergeant Fred Ayeroff, a twelve-year veteran of the NYPD, were both shot dead by an unknown assailant. Ayeroff was one of the two officers assigned by Legs Diamond to watch over Charles. Coach Seckla, who had departed the Field House moments earlier to fetch his car, was unharmed.

The shooting death of Charles Willingham set off an instant torrent of grief—on the Canterbury campus, in the projects where’d grown up, across all of New York City. Hell, across the whole damned country. He was a huge star. A role model. A hero. I happen to know he was also a nice guy. A makeshift shrine was already being erected outside of those tall, wrought-iron campus gates. People by the hundreds were leaving flowers, candles and cards. The same thing was happening outside of the front door to his mother’s apartment building.

As I sat there at my desk, blown away, I got two phone calls. The first was from Sara Weiner, who sounded even worse than I felt.

“Benji, why did they have kill
Charles?
Why is this happening?”

“I don’t know, Sara. But I promise you we’ll find out. Are you okay?”

“No, I’m
not
okay. Some man is parked outside of our house.”

“He’s with the Willoughby police. Just making sure no one tries to mess with you.”

“Well, then why doesn’t he start with my parents? Because they are
totally
messing with me. My mom was out boning her boyfriend all afternoon. She just came staggering in smelling of wine. I can hear her in her bathroom throwing up. And my dad went—”

“To the office, I know. You already—”

“How can he
work
at a time like this? I mean, doesn’t he have
any
feelings? I’m freaking out here, Benji. I really, really don’t know how I-I’m…” She broke off, snuffling into the phone. “I told Trevor.”

“Told Trevor what?”

“That I made you the bracelet.”

I glanced down at the purple and pink woven bracelet on my wrist. It still seemed foreign there. “Was that wise?”

“I don’t know, but I needed to be truthful. It’s how I am. He was actually jealous, which is just so childish and s-so
Trevor
. But he’s not here for me right now. No one is—except for you. You’re here, right?”

“Always. You can count on me, Sara,” I promised, thinking that what Sara Weiner really needed right now was a professional grief counselor. Not to mention a mother who wasn’t self-medicating between the sheets all afternoon and a father who hadn’t run off to the city to bang a teenaged hooker. It wasn’t fair. Sara was a victim of this hot mess same as her brother had been—except she was still around to feel the pain.

“Benji, will you come to Bruce’s funeral tomorrow?”