Fidelity (40 page)

He could hear the prosecutor now: “Surely she didn’t make marks like these on herself. So who did?”

Nobody knew Caroline the way he did. They would never imagine that she was so opportunistic and calculating. At worst they would think she was a vengeful wife who was being replaced by a much younger woman. And the law’s crude view of human life demanded that there be a victim and a criminal. Caroline was an expert at roles, and she would be all the victim that the law required. He was sure that if he opened the door right now, he would find her covered with bruises.

That was fine. His breakin story would account gracefully and smoothly for the bruises, too. They would all be fresh enough. He was sure doctors could tell how recent a bruise was, and she had never had any before. Those marks could have been caused only by the intruder. The more ways that Forrest found to think about his situation, the more certain he was that the intruder story was the best way to handle it.

There were several things he would have to prepare before Hobart got here. Forrest needed to put together the money to show Hobart. That would be what Hobart demanded to see first. But Forrest had been assembling and keeping large sums of money in the house for weeks, ever since Philip Kramer had contacted him. He hurried upstairs and opened the safe, got the banded stacks of hundreds, and laid them out on the bed to count them. He put two hundred thousand in a large bag he used to take to the gym. That was the payment for taking care of the Emily Kramer problem. Then he counted out enough stacks of money to make the same payment for Caroline. He could probably fit those into the same bag, but he decided it was better to have two. That way, at some point Hobart’s hands would both be encumbered.

Forrest found a bag of Caroline’s in the closet. It was a piece of luggage-an overnight bag, really-but it was about the right size, and seemed to him to be a nice touch. If it got bloody or something, he could even leave the money in it and place it with the bodies, as though Hobart had forced her to open the safe before he killed her. If Forrest’s fingerprints were on it, that didn’t matter. After all, the money was his.

Everything fit together perfectly. It left nothing dangerous, nothing ugly, nothing messy or inconvenient. Thinking about his plan gave Ted Forrest a sample of the happiness that he was going to feel.

He needed a gun, of course. There were two in the house. One he retrieved from his nightstand, an M9 9mm Beretta. There was also another gun somewhere in the master suite. He had bought it for Caroline years ago, when things were still cordial between them. It might fit the story he was concocting if that turned up somewhere, too, but he didn’t like the unnecessary complexity. He tested the story. Caroline hears noises downstairs, gets up to investigate, and brings her gun with her. She gets ambushed from behind, or shot-no, ambushed and beaten if there really are bruises on her-by the intruder. She’s killed. Ted hears the shots or something, goes downstairs and shoots the killer. No, too many guns. He decided to forget hers.

He looked around to be sure there was nothing out of place. The bed had not been slept in last night. It was still made, the covers tight and the decorative pillows arranged at the head of the duvet as the chambermaid had left them. He moved the pillows to the couch where Caroline usually put them, and then pulled back the covers and punched the goosedown pillows to indent them as though someone had slept here. He turned off the light and hurried downstairs. This had taken too long. He should have been where he could watch the front of the house and listen for sounds from the wine cellar.

He stood with his ear to the door of the basement, heard nothing, and then opened the door. He went down the stairs into the tasting room, but still didn’t hear her. He put his ear to the door of the wine cellar.

It occurred to him that he might have forgotten another problem. There was no real ventilation down here. The wine cellar wasn’t a place where anyone had ever spent much time before. The new cooling unit worked by pumping water through a closed system, not blowing air. She could be suffocating. He reached for the door, then stopped. What if she were suffocating? His story would accommodate that comfortably. But if he opened the door, air would rush in again and revive her. She would be active and difficult.

He turned and walked toward the steps, and climbed. As he reached the third step from the top, his cell phone rang. It startled him because he had forgotten he had it, and then realized he had been below ground. It might have been ringing for a minute or more. He answered it quickly. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

He heard simultaneously Kylie’s voice and a muffled shout from behind the door.

Kylie said, “Hi, baby,” as Caroline shouted, “Let me out, you bastard!”

He stepped into the hallway and shut the door as he said, “Hi, honey. What’s up?”

“What’s up over there?”

“Nothing. I got back really late last night and I’ve been asleep.”

“I heard somebody.”

“It’s just one of the maids yelling out the back door at the gardeners. This place can be really nuts sometimes. It’s a big place, and there are always people running machines or yelling. Sometimes I wonder.”

“Poor thing,” she said. “So when are you going to pick me up so I can make you feel better?”

“Oh, how I would love to go get you right now. But I just can’t. Caroline is home today and, well, you know.”

“I know. Maybe when I’m older, things will be better.”

“I promise. Now, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I can. I love you.

“I love you,” she said. “‘Bye.”

Forrest cut the connection, and then looked at his watch. He had been surprised to hear Kylie’s voice, but it was three forty already. She was already out of school. He tried to calculate. He had called Hobart at around four A.M. Hobart had said he was nearly done with Emily Kramer. He would have needed to get rid of her body and probably take care of a few incidentals. Give him two hours for that. Then he would have to spend an hour showering and packing and checking out of wherever he had been staying. That would make it seven A.M. If Hobart drove up here it would take him at least six hours, and with stops, much longer. Make it four in the afternoon at the earliest. If Hobart arrived at four or five, he would want to check into a hotel, change his clothes, probably rent a different car, have dinner somewhere. He would not arrive here at the house until early evening, just as he had said on the phone.

And Forrest was all ready for him.

Forrest walked through the house examining doors and windows, then revisited the pantry door where the police would decide Hobart had broken in. He placed the two bags of money in two downstairs closets. That way he could produce the one for the already-completed job on Emily Kramer when Hobart arrived, and save the other to induce him to kill Caroline. The sight of so much money would blind Hobart to any little signs that something was out of place.

Forrest spent an hour rehearsing in front of the full-length mirror in the downstairs cloakroom off the foyer. He spoke to an imaginary Hobart, searching his own face for a furtive expression, listening to his voice for a false tone. Finally he devised and memorized a sentence he could say at the very moment when he was pulling out his gun: “I don’t know how to thank you for taking care of this for me.”

Ted Forrest saw the car coming up the dark highway when it was still a half mile away, even before it passed the riverbed that was the western boundary of the Forrest estate. There had been no water in the river for years, but it was still easy to see from a distance because ancient trees still ran in a line along the banks.

He wondered at first how he knew it was Hobart, but in this flat country, headlights could be seen for miles, and he had noticed the purposeful quality of the car’s motion, then saw it slow slightly as the driver saw his house. The car nosed along the tall iron fence until it found the open gate, and then turned into the long driveway.

The car came up to the circle at the front door and stopped, and its lights went out. Hobart got out of the car and stepped to the front door quickly. He didn’t have to knock because Ted Forrest was already holding the door open, standing back from the entrance so Hobart could step inside. Forrest had kept the light in the foyer dim, and it was the only one turned on in the front of the house. Hobart’s arrival would be difficult to see from the road.

Things were going well. Hobart had brought a full-size black car of some American make, something that looked enough like one of Forrest’s from a distance to be unremarkable to passersby. Forrest closed the door.

Hobart wore a short-sleeved shirt and carried a sport jacket that he had picked up from where it lay on the passenger seat while he was driving. Hobart was bigger, taller, and more formidable than Forrest had remembered. Forrest was athletic and had always kept himself in good physical condition, but the sight of Hobart’s bare arms reminded him that there were people who weren’t in his circle of golfand-tennis friends. In prison men spent their time lifting weights and fighting. “Hi,” he said. “Have any trouble?” He held out his hand to shake Hobart’s.

Hobart chose that moment to put on his sport coat, and didn’t seem to see the hand. “Not much,” Hobart said. “Got my money?”

“She’s dead?”

“Sure.”

“The money is right here.” Forrest went to a door that Hobart had not seen before, cut into the decorated wood that rose seven feet from the marble floor of the big open room. He opened it and Hobart saw it was a closet. Forrest came back with a satchel like a gym bag and handed it to Hobart.

Hobart took it with his left hand, squatted to set it on the floor, and unzipped it.

For Forrest, Hobart’s movements were bad news. He was keeping Forrest in his line of sight, keeping his right hand free and unencumbered. Hobart was clearly aware that this was the perfect time for Forrest to alter the terms of their deal.

Of course, Forrest thought. Hobart did this routinely, for a living. He knew every aspect of his business, including the twinge of buyer’s remorse a client might have after the person who had been threatening his happiness was dead and buried. From the moment when Hobart completed a job until he took the money and got out of sight and out of reach, he was in danger, and he knew it.

Hobart finished assuring himself that the whole bag was filled with stacks of hundreds. He zipped the bag and stood up with it in his left hand. “Good enough,” he said.

Forrest held out his right hand again to shake Hobart’s, but Hobart ignored it. Forrest felt uneasy. Hobart had already realized that if he shook, both of his hands would be full, but only one of Forrest’s would. Even that, thought Forrest. Hobart was absolutely unblinking. There was no overconfidence, no forgetfulness.

Forrest said, “Was getting Emily Kramer hard?”

“You and I agreed on a price, and you just paid it. The time and trouble I had to put into it is my problem.” Hobart started to move toward the front door. Forrest noticed that as he stepped in that direction, he didn’t move his eyes from Forrest’s.

“Don’t go,” Forrest said. “When we were on the phone, I mentioned I had another job.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll put this in the car, and then we’ll talk about it.”

Forrest could tell there was no point in saying, “You can leave your money here in the foyer,” or trying to dissuade or distract him from his intention. He was the expert at this. Hobart’s money wasn’t safe until it was in his trunk, and he had the only key. Car trunks could be popped or their locks hammered in, but not without Hobart’s knowledge.

But Hobart was back already. He came in and shut the door. “All right. Tell me about it.”

“It’s my wife, Caroline.”

“You want me to kill your wife? Why?”

“It’s a long story. I offered to provide for her in a breakup, but she would rather destroy me.”

“She could do that?”

“It doesn’t matter, really. Leaving somebody around who wants to do that to me would be insane.”

Hobart looked around him and up toward the vaulted ceiling and then his eyes followed the curving staircase to the second floor. “Are you planning to burn this place, too?”

“What? Why?”

Hobart shrugged. “I assume she has some kind of evidence on you, right?”

“No, just suspicions and resentments and an inexhaustible supply of anger. If I let her go, she’ll spend all her time and my money paying people to dig up something or fake it. I can’t let her do that. You can’t let her do that. If people look hard enough at me, they’ll probably find something that relates to my business with you. Neither of us wants that.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s in the wine cellar. She was out of control-threatening to call the police, threatening me with everything she could think of, and refusing to listen to anything I said.”

“Is she tied or restrained?”

“No. I just put her in there and locked the door. She’s been in there for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Let’s see. I put her in there about four this morning, so I guess it would be about sixteen hours.”

“All right. I’ll take care of it. What you’ll want to do later is tell the cops an intruder did it, stole something, and left. Figure out something you want stolen.”

Forrest felt vindicated. It was so much like the idea he had thought of that nothing came to mind to say at first. Then he chuckled. “It won’t be hard to find something expensive that only she ever liked. Just don’t pawn it or something, okay?”

“I know better than that. Do I need a key?”

Forrest couldn’t let him do it that way. He had to be around when Hobart did it. He had to shoot Hobart over Caroline’s body. If he shot Hobart anywhere else, it wouldn’t look as though he had been trying to save Caroline or that he had surprised Hobart in the act. If he did it up here in the foyer or outside, it might just look as though he had shot the man in the back. Revenge wasn’t a legal reason to kill someone. “I’ll come down and show you,” he said.

“Okay.” Hobart followed Forrest into the hallway toward the kitchen. Hearing Hobart’s footsteps behind him made Forrest nervous and uneasy. He had to hide his feelings. Hobart would be good at detecting fear.