Fidelity (39 page)

“Then what do you think happened?” Sam asked.

“I think he tried as hard as he could, and thought he’d failed.”

“So do I. I think he collected it all, and put it in that box, and when he ran out of things to collect, he looked it all over. And I think that when he did, he realized that it wasn’t enough.”

“Was he right?”

“I think he probably was. It’s hard to go into a strange town and get a local jury to convict one of their most prominent citizens of anything, and this is a capital offense. It’s eight years old, and the evidence is all circumstantial. But Phil was damaged. He could never look at himself in the mirror again without seeing a man who had hunted down a young girl running from danger and dragged her back to be murdered. It’s such a painful, debilitating piece of information that at first I don’t think he even considered telling me. He didn’t want me to have the same feelings he was having, unless and until it was unavoidable. I didn’t hear from him during any of this. That’s a sign of how much knowing this hurt him.”

“But he left the box with someone, and he asked that it be mailed to you if he didn’t come back for it.”

Sam shrugged. “I’m the only one who was with him to see the first part of this story. I guess he figured that if he didn’t come back for it he would be dead, and I’d be the only witness to swear it was true. He couldn’t let Forrest off.”

“When he was killed, he was out alone at one thirty at night, and it looked as though he was on his way back from meeting someone. He was getting into his car. And the man who kidnapped me said Phil had been trying to blackmail Forrest.”

“I’m sure Phil set it up to look that way, but I don’t think there’s any chance Phil was really after money. There wouldn’t have been enough money in the world to make Phil keep quiet about that girl. That’s what it is, you know. When you blackmail somebody, you become their best friend. You’re making sure that they’ll never be punished. “

“Then what do you think he was doing? I want to know if you think what I think.”

“And what’s that?” Sam asked.

“I think that Phil realized he didn’t have the perfect piece of evidence, the bit that makes a conviction a sure thing. I think knowing he didn’t was eating away at him. He kept searching, but ran out of things to find. And then I think he called Theodore Forrest, and told him he wanted to meet with him. I think what he wanted to do was to manufacture the perfect piece of evidence.”

“You think he was going to make a tape of Forrest paying him off?”

“Yes, and maybe admitting what he had done. But not that night. I think Phil went to meet Forrest and show him some of this file. Maybe he showed him copies of all of it. I think he probably showed him enough to make him pay blackmail. But this was a huge crime, and the payoff would have to be large, too, or Forrest would never believe it was blackmail-too much money for Forrest to have brought with him without even seeing the evidence. I think Phil was planning to meet Forrest again for the payoff-maybe with a microphone or a video camera, and maybe with a few police officers waiting to make the arrest.”

Sam nodded and took another sip of his drink. “That’s what I think, too. Phil knew Theodore Forrest was guilty-that he had used Phil and me to help him kill that poor girl-but that the only punishment he would ever get was what Phil Kramer brought to him. So he decided to trap him.”

Emily found herself in tears. “Oh, Sam. You don’t know how much I wish I were sure that was it. I feel as though it is, but I need to be sure.”

Sam said, “I don’t know everything. I do know that when I was a cop, the way we could figure out whether somebody was guilty of something was that he had come into some money he couldn’t explain. I mean, Forrest wasn’t the first person Phil knew bad things about. He could have blackmailed hundreds of people. Did Phil leave you a whole lot of money, Em?”

Emily laughed through her tears. “No. I’d declare bankruptcy if I could afford a lawyer.”

“Good. Then we know he was an honest man.”

“He was hardly that. He wasn’t honest with me.”

“He loved you, so you were the hardest, because the truth would chase you away. But if he didn’t have any money, he wasn’t blackmailing any millionaires.”

“It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

“There’s one thing that makes it certain he didn’t. You read Phil’s statement. He found out about Allison on June 14. He had enough to blackmail Forrest on the first day, but he didn’t do it. He worked on the case for months, collecting all kinds of bits and pieces that didn’t add anything to the prospects for blackmail, but would be helpful to the police. He kept at it until all he needed was that one last piece of evidence that made the case undeniable. He needed to have Forrest convict himself. He needed to have him on tape admitting he killed the girl. There’s no doubt at all that Phil was trying to do the right thing. The only thing I’m disappointed in him for is trying to do it alone.”

Emily could picture Phil going to meet Theodore Forrest. He had made sure nobody who would worry about him knew where he was going. He couldn’t have anyone following him and making Forrest suspicious. Maybe he carried one of the tiny tape recorders from the office in his pocket, but probably he didn’t, because he was afraid that Forrest would frisk him before speaking. He had already put together the copy of the evidence for Forrest, before he had brought the originals to Lee Anne’s house for safekeeping.

She imagined that Phil made sure everything he brought to Forrest had been copied on a photocopier, even the photographs. It was all black and white and grainy. She knew that he had done that because he didn’t want Theodore Forrest to think, even for a second, that he held the originals. Theodore Forrest was, after all, a murderer.

Ted Forrest sat in the kitchen of his house and tried to work out his next moves. The house seemed enormous tonight. Even the kitchen, which had always seemed crowded to him, now seemed cavernous and cold, with its long, empty granite counters with rows of identical cabinets and gleaming stainless-steel sinks and hoods. He sat at the butcher-block table at the end of the room because it was the only thing that seemed built to a human scale.

He felt he had to be where he could hear Caroline if she somehow managed to get out of the cellar, even though he had no definite notion of how she might accomplish that. Maybe she could break a wine bottle and use a razor-sharp shard as a blade to carve away some of the wood of the door and reach through, or use some part of a wine rack to jimmy the lock. The hardware was all heavy polished brass, but he supposed it hadn’t been designed to withstand a serious attack.

He went to Caroline’s desk in the sitting room off the library to look at her appointment book. He was relieved to see that she had written in nothing he would have to cancel. The day’s page was just a list of things she had planned to initiate: making calls and sending notes.

Forrest couldn’t recall a time when the house had seemed so empty. He would look out the front window occasionally, just to be sure none of the gardeners or groundskeepers had missed the word and come to work. But he saw no one. Caroline had made sure the servants wouldn’t be around to hear what she had planned to say.

They were Caroline’s servants, really. She had always been the one who cared about the house in the daily way. She inhabited it and used it as the setting of the social identity she had half-inherited and half-invented for herself. She had chosen the servants for their suitability, then trained and bribed them to exercise her will. Maria was the head housekeeper, Caroline’s principal informant. People would assume she spied on the other servants, but the guests here didn’t know that she also eavesdropped on them, and reported what she heard to Caroline.

It occurred to Forrest that he couldn’t have them around anymore. After whatever happened next, he would have to get rid of them for good. It was possible he would have to commission a remodeling and leave the country while it was going on. That would give him an excuse to let all of them go the same day.

He could plan what he should do in a month, but his next stepthe next thing he needed to accomplish-was still a mystery to him. One possibility was to turn her over to Jerry Hobart and leave immediately. Or-frantic with worry-he could report her disappearance to the local authorities and try to be sure his story conformed to the condition of the body. He could throw her body into the ocean. Bodies were found, but there must be thousands of others that never were. He could even dump her in the mountains and say she fell into the ocean.

But one other idea had occurred to him that had a certain appeal. It was to wait here for Jerry Hobart, get him to kill Caroline, and then kill Jerry Hobart. He had been thinking of Hobart as a way of sparing his nerves and his feelings because if he didn’t have Hobart, he would have to get rid of the body and clean up any sign that it had happened. But if he killed Hobart, then all he would have to do was call 911 on the nearest telephone, and public servants would be dispatched to handle both bodies and clean everything up for him. Doing it that way would clear him of any possible suspicion in Caroline’s death.

Hobart was the perfect sort of person to use. He would be armed. He had a criminal record of some sort. Hobart had told him it was for armed robbery. That was good enough, but Forrest had heard or read somewhere that people who had violent-felony convictions often had records with plenty of other serious matters on them that had not gone to trial, often sexual assaults. That would be ideal.

Ted Forrest could be the husband who came home and found his beloved wife killed by a sexual predator, and who, in turn, killed the intruder. Forrest would be simultaneously an innocent man, a bereaved widower, a hero, and-come to think of it-the beneficiary of a significant insurance policy. He had forgotten about that. It was as old as the marriage, purchased with the thought that there might be children. When Caroline was in her early twenties, the cost of insuring her was almost nothing. He had paid a single premium for a policy for each of them, and over the years he had almost forgotten.

Killing Caroline and then Hobart was such an appealing idea that his mind kept returning to it and refining it. One thing it would accomplish was to free him of the need to pay Hobart for Emily Kramer, or for Caroline. Forrest didn’t think there was much risk of an unfriendly interpretation by the police. Hobart was a career crim inal. Ted Forrest was now over fifty, and he had never done anything to arouse suspicion of any kind. And Caroline would make such a good victim. She had achieved the kind of reputation for goodness that only very rich women with a penchant for highly visible acts of philanthropy could hope for.

Forrest was highly attracted to the notion of having Hobart be the vicious intruder, the violent criminal who had burst in and attacked and killed the virtuous Caroline. It would enshrine her forever in exactly the role she had invented for herself: a secular saint. But could Forrest carry off the deception? Once Hobart had shot Caroline, it wouldn’t much matter how crudely and inefficiently Ted Forrest managed to kill him. In any state-certainly the state of California-if a man came into your house and shot your wife to death, you wouldn’t have a hard time getting the police to declare the shooting selfdefense, no matter what the angles of the bullet holes were. All Ted Forrest would have to remember was to tell the truth about the positions of the three people at the time, and be consistent about the order of events. All he had to do was keep from contradicting what the cops would see.

Forrest got up from the kitchen table, opened the door to the basement stairs, and listened. He thought he should be hearing something-pounding or shouting-but he wasn’t sure whether he did. He descended the stairs cautiously and walked quietly through the tasting room. He put his ear to the wine-cellar door and listened.

“I hear you, Ted,” she called. “I know you think this is funny and you’re really being clever, but you’re not. Eventually you’re going to have to face up to the way you’ve treated that girl. It’s illegal.”

He said nothing.

“I know you’re there.”

“Of course I’m here, Caroline.”

“Don’t you have anything to say?”

“I’m not arguing with you. I know it’s illegal. Well, sit tight.”

“Very funny!” she shouted. “You’re just pissing me off and making it harder on yourself. If you’ll let me out now, I may not show the cops the bruises you put on me last night.”

He made a lot of noise walking up the steps, but stopped near the top, sat on a step and closed the door, and then listened. There were no scraping sounds, and there was no hammering. Maybe she had already given up on getting out by herself. He stood, opened the door, and went up into the hallway by the pantry.

Hobart had said he would be here this evening, so there was plenty of time for preparations. Forrest went about them thoughtfully. Since Hobart had to drive here, he would drive through the open gate, up the driveway, and park on the circle in front of the house. He would come to the front door.

Forrest went to the front door and studied it, and then went to the other door at the rear of the house that opened by the pantry. That door was the one where deliveries were made, the one a stranger would see first. He began to work on the door. He got a large jackknife he had kept in the back of a desk drawer for years, went outside, and worked on the pantry door. He scraped away some paint and then dug more deeply into the woodwork beside the doorknob. He kept at it until he could slide the blade into the wood behind the metal plate and push the latch aside to open the door.

Forrest stepped back. He wasn’t sure whether he had done a good job or a bad one, but it looked the way the latch on the door of Kramer Investigations looked the night he had burned the place, so he was sure it would do. He had no reason to believe that Hobart was a locksmith or a safecracker, so he was confident it would look to the police as though this was the way he had come in. Hobart would never see this door.

Forrest stopped and looked around the kitchen for a moment, and tried to evaluate his plan. Did he really need to do this to Caroline? Yes, he did. She knew about Kylie, and she intended to use the girl to force him into giving her control over his fortune and his freedom. When he had gone into a rage and grabbed her, he’d had no intention of killing her. He had simply been the victim of an immediate need to make her shut up. He had needed to be by himself and think. But having thought, he could not see any way of getting through this with Caroline alive. She really was ready to call the police. Right now she would probably be down there doing things to herself so she would have enough marks on her body to impress the authorities and make him look like an abuser.