Death Was in the Picture (31 page)

None of this was reflected in their faces. Both men remained unchanged. Laird in that place of calm, Steward looking like a violin string: taut almost to the point of breaking.

“And you knew, too, that Laird
would
have sex with her. He always did, didn’t he? You couldn’t stand the thought of it. He claimed he loved you, but he could resist no temptation. Not the smallest one. And you were angry. Suddenly you were so angry, you couldn’t contain it. You wanted to kill someone. You wanted to kill Laird. But you loved Laird. You could never kill him.”

“So he killed Fleur instead.” I spoke without knowing I was going to, shocked not only by what Dex was saying, but at how right—correct—it felt.

Had Dex expected he would make these accusations and that one of the men—perhaps both—would break down and confirm all he said as true? I think maybe he
did
expect that. Dex can play at being jaded all he likes. I know him better, though. At heart, he believes that, once you have the answer, justice will be done.

If Dex did hope that, he was left disappointed. There was no weeping confession. No confirmation to aid in bringing matters to their rightful conclusion.

Wyndham never blinked, never moved. In fact, I never heard his voice again. I did hear Steward’s though. “I don’t want to hear another word of this,” he said tightly. “I think you’d better leave before I call the guards and have you removed by force.”

Dex didn’t say anything more but, for me, he didn’t need to. No matter the outcome we knew—the five of us—we knew just what had transpired that night. It was possible that Xander Dean might swing for Fleur’s murder and Steward Sterling might remain free to defend a hundred guilty men and Laird
Wyndham might have sex with a thousand willing starlets and still we knew what had really happened on that night.

Is that justice? That’s not justice. It’s just knowing. Sometimes that’s all we have. It just has to be enough.

I THOUGHT THAT was the end of it. I really did. Dex and I went back to the office. Mustard went off to fix things. We got back to our lives. Mostly insurance claims and cheating wives.

Months later, we heard that Xander Dean had been convicted for the murder of Fleur MacKenzie. I brought the newspaper into Dex’s office, plunked myself down and read the item to him. It was short: Dean had been found guilty. There wasn’t a lot to say.

I felt a twinge, but Dex saw that twinge and he laid it to rest.

“You and me figure he didn’t kill that girl. Fact, we’re pretty sure he did not. They got him on the wrong murder, Kitty, but I’d lay money he’s killed someone sometime. Probably not just once, either. Life has a way of catching us up when we’re not looking. Life has a way of laying us flat when our heads are turned.”

“Are you talking about divine justice?” I asked.

Dex shrugged. Took a slug of bourbon, a hit of his smoke. Then he shrugged again. He seemed to be thinking about how he’d answer me, but I could sense the shape of the words before he sent them into the air.

“That’d be a fancy way of putting it, I guess. ‘Divine justice.’ Sounds almost pretty when you say it like that. And the thing I’m talking about? I’m not so sure it’s pretty. But I like to think that, in the end, a man gets what he deserves.”

“Do you really believe that, Dex?”

He looked me square in the face and nodded his head. “I do.”

It was that look in Dex’s eyes I thought about when, a few weeks later, I was flicking through a movie magazine and a tiny
item caught my eye. There had been an incident aboard the
Woebegone Dream.
While the boat was anchored off Ensenada, the actor’s trusted friend and lawyer had unfortunately slipped into the sea.

“It was a freak accident, so unfortunate,” Wyndham was quoted as saying. There’d been a group of people staying on the yacht, including a starlet named Belle Soul who, judging from the photos, had the longest legs that had ever been. The photographer had posed Wyndham and the girl in front of the yacht. Wyndham’s face was composed in sad lines and Belle was taking a run at it too, but it also looked like the face of a woman who thought her life was about to begin.

Wyndham had told the journalist that, sometime in the night, after everyone had gone to bed, Sterling had apparently gone out on deck and fallen into the drink. No one had been around to see him and pull him back.

In the morning, when it was discovered Steward wasn’t on board, the coast guard had been called and the tender dispatched with crew to look for the missing man. They’d found him a few hours later some ways distant. He was floating. And he was quite dead.

“He was a wonderful man,” Wyndham had told the magazine, and there it was in black and white. “A dear friend. He will be missed.”

I thought about divine justice again then. I couldn’t help it. However it had been dealt out. Had what Wyndham told the magazine been true? Maybe. Maybe Sterling had just wandered out on deck and tripped, fallen overboard. End of story, end of tale. Maybe Wyndham had killed him, to get him out of the way. Or maybe Sterling and his broken heart had taken a chance with the sea.

From my perspective, though, it all amounted to the same thing. As Dex had said: Divine justice.

There were no signs of foul play.