Fifth Ave 01 - Fifth Avenue (83 page)

“But you can now?”

Elizabeth was silent a moment, but then she nodded.
 
“Yes.
 
I’ve seen that look before.
 
I saw it quite a bit in Leana when she was growing up.”
 
She took a breath. “George looked incredibly sad, as if he had been cheated out of something he always wanted.
 
That’s what I saw in his face--beneath the fear.”

“What could it be?”

“I don’t know.
 
But I might have a better idea if you tell me who murdered my daughter

“It was Louis Ryan.”

She had little reaction to this and while Jack was surprised by that, he supposed that perhaps a part of her always had known it was Ryan, but that she never assumed he would go this far after so many years.

For a moment, she was still, then she rose and stepped again to the windows that looked uptown.
 
“And now he has Leana.”

Jack picked up the phone on the table beside him.
 

“Who are you calling?” Elizabeth said.

“The police.”

“That letter was from Louis Ryan,” she said.
 
“You do know that, don’t you?”

“I know it now.
 
I think your husband is with him.”

“He thinks George killed his wife, Anne.
 
He’s always thought that.
 
But I suppose you know that, too.”

A dispatcher came on the line.
 
While he spoke to the man, briefly telling him what he knew, Elizabeth started talking.
 
“But George didn’t kill her,” she said.
 
“How could he?
 
Anne Ryan was his first love.”

Jack looked sideways at her.
 
The mood in the room was changing.
 
“Forget it,” he said to the dispatcher.
 
“A lot of people are involved in this--including my parents. Tell Lieutenant Greenfield that I will meet him at the hotel.
 
And get a crew out at JFK.
 
Diana Crane’s plane will be landing there at midnight.
 
I want to make certain nothing happens to her or her mother.”

He hung up the phone.
 
“I have to go,” he said.
 

But Elizabeth was in another place, another time.
 
She looked at Jack and said, “What would you have done, Mr. Douglas, had you been in my shoes?
 
He didn’t think I knew, but I did.
 
I followed them one night to a hotel in Hartford.
 
While I sat in my car, no more than a hundred yards away, I watched them go inside.’’

He was about to say this was none of his business, that he needed to go, when he realized what was unfolding here.

“You can’t imagine how much that hurt,” she said.
 
“Seeing them like that, laughing, holding hands.
 
But I loved George.
 
We were engaged and I was willing to do anything to keep him.
 
As far as I was concerned, Anne Ryan was poison.
 
And so I killed her.
 
I took one of George’s shotguns, drove out to her home and saw that her car was gone.”

She looked up at the ceiling.
 
“It was late,” she said.
 
“I knew she would be coming back sooner or later, and so I parked my car a mile down the road and hid in the woods near her house.
 
The weather was awful that night.
 
We were having a blizzard.
 
I must have stayed in those woods for hours before I saw her car coming down the road and skidding in the snow as she approached the bridge.
 
When I pulled the trigger, I remember being perfectly calm, like I am now.
 
Even the sound of gunfire didn’t startle me.
 
And when her car toppled over the bridge, I felt nothing but relief.
 
She was out of our lives.
 
Problem solved.
 
I hurried back to my car and left before the police could arrive.”

Jack couldn’t believe she was confessing this to him.
 
“You killed Anne Ryan?” he said.

Elizabeth smiled.
 
“You’re a sharp man, Mr. Douglas.
 
Brighter than I imagined.
 
Yes, I killed her.
 
I was desperate and so I killed her.
 
It was the best and worst thing I’ve ever done in my life.
 
While I may have gotten Anne Ryan out of our lives, my daughter is now dead because of what I did, and now my husband and my other daughter are at risk.”

Jack stood there, dumbstruck.
 
“You could have stopped this.”

If she heard him, it wasn’t apparent.

“I’ve never told George,” Elizabeth said.
 
“But I think he’s always known.
 
He’s just never had the heart to ask.”
 
She looked at Jack.
 
“But you’ll change all that, won’t you, Mr. Douglas?
 
You’ll tell George.
 
And you’ll tell the police.”

“I have no choice.”

“Of course you don’t,” she said.
 
“You’re an honest man.”

It was getting late.
 
He had to meet Greenfield at the hotel before he and his men went inside.
 
He was walking past Elizabeth when she said, “I love my family, Mr. Douglas.
 
I’ve told you this for their benefit, not mine.
 
I understand the repercussions--I’ll go to prison.
 
But the trade-off is worth it if you get there in time and don’t let Louis Ryan hurt either of them.”
 

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

“Have I ever told you that you remind me of my wife?”

They were standing in one of the exterior glass elevators.
 
Beyond the tinted windows that overlooked Manhattan’s Upper East Side, glittering Fifth Avenue skyscrapers rushed past them.
 
Leana looked at Louis, who seemed to be leaning against the city, his hands resting along the chrome rail, a faintly nostalgic look on his face.
 
While the subject had never been discussed between them, Leana knew that he once accused her father of murdering Anne Ryan.

She didn’t know why he mentioned this and she certainly wasn’t about to ask--Leana had other things on her mind.
 
She looked up at the elevator’s lighted dial and said, “We’re almost there, Louis.”

But Louis ignored her dismissive tone.
 
“I think Anne would have enjoyed tonight,” he said.
 
“She always liked parties.
 
She was the perfect hostess--beautiful, smart, witty, sophisticated.
 
Anne could make friends as easily as I seem to make enemies.”
 
He smiled at the memory of her.
 
“If she were alive today, you can bet your ass that the Baron and Baroness would have invited us to one of their dinner parties.
 
They would have fallen in love with her just as I did.
 
Everyone liked her.”

Leana knew that she should respond to this, but she didn’t want to encourage him. The man who murdered her sister was in her office.
 
It was this she wanted to focus on, not Louis Ryan’s wife.
 
Willing the elevator to move faster, she said, “She sounds wonderful, Louis.
 
You must miss her very much.”

“Oh, I do,” Louis said.
 
“We were perfect together, Leana.
 
You can’t imagine how much I miss her.”

He looked away and she saw something in his expression change, as if a switch had been shut off, a curtain dropped.
 
“I suppose that’s why your father murdered her.”

He leaned forward and pressed the button that stopped the elevator.
 
Beyond the windows, the city froze.
 

Fear crept into Leana’s heart.
 

“She died thirty-one years ago,” Louis said, his finger still on the button.
 
“Victim of a freak car accident.”
 
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
 
“At least that’s what the police said.
 
But I know differently.
 
I’ve always known differently.
 
Your father murdered my wife.
  
Have I ever told you what happened, Leana?”

She didn’t answer him.
 
She checked the dial and saw that they were between the twentieth and twenty-first floors.

“I see that I haven’t.
 
But I do think you should know what your father did.
 
I think it’s time that you and the whole world knew exactly what happened.”

Leana’s heart was beating in her throat.
 
She remembered how strangely he acted on the dance floor, how preoccupied he had been with her father and she had a sudden premonition of danger.

“The weather was terrible that night,” Louis said.
 
“Anne and I had an argument and she left the house in the middle of a blizzard.
 
I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen to me.
 
Instead, she got into her car and left.
 
I couldn’t go after her.
 
We had only one car back then and I remember how worried I was for her.
 
Anne never drove in the snow. Hours passed and nothing, not a word.
 
So I started calling around to friends, family--but nobody had seen her.
 
Nobody knew where she was.”

He seemed to slip further into the past, sinking straight into a time and a place in which she sensed he wasn’t comfortable.
 
He closed his eyes.
 
“And then the police called,” he said.
 
“They told me that Anne’s car went off the road and over the bridge that was down the road from our house.”

He removed his finger from the glowing button and the elevator lurched into motion.
 
Leana watched him pull his hand away.
 
All of this was a set-up.
 
She’d played right into it.
 
She looked at the elevator doors and wondered what would be beyond them when they opened.

“It was awful,” Louis said.
 
“Leaving the house, running through the snow to the bridge, seeing her car like that in the river, knowing there was no way she could have survived that fall, knowing that my Anne was dead.”
 
Anger shot into his voice.
 
“Do you know what that did to me?
 
Do you know how long I’ve waited for this moment?”

What moment?

Leana pressed her back against the elevator doors. Somewhere, far in the dark corners of her mind, she knew where this was leading, knew what he was saying, but she refused to believe it, because it couldn’t be true.

Louis closed the distance between them, the rage suddenly there on his face, heated and alive.
 
It was as dark as her fear, as black as her dress and it filled the elevator to capacity.
 
In a low voice, he said, “Even before I learned her tires were flattened by a shotgun, I knew this was no accident.
 
Your father and I had been battling in court for years.
  
When I won that final appeal, he got his revenge two days later by killing one of the few people who ever mattered to me.”
 
His eyes became hard stones of hate.
 
“And now I’m taking everything away from him.”

She shrank away from him, her eyes growing wide with disbelief.
 
She felt her knees start to give as realization washed over her.
 
Her world began to blur as all of the pieces of the past several weeks clicked into place.
 
“You!” she gasped.