First Class Killing (42 page)

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Authors: Lynne Heitman

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #Women Sleuths

BOOK: First Class Killing
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Chapter29ICALLEDFELIX FROM THE CAR ON THE WAY TOMonica’s. With the reintroduction of Felix to my life, I’d had to rearrange the turbo-dialing buttons on my cell phone. Felix’s number replaced the Majestic Airlines reservations line. The last electronic vestige of my association with my old airline got bumped down to regular speed dial.“Hey, Miss Shanahan.”“Hi, Felix. I’m just checking in. How are things?”“I had an emergency at the airport. The bag belt broke down, and I had to go in and fix it.”“We agreed that your airport job takes priority.”“I know, but it shouldn’t be so much trouble, you know? The problem is, it’s such a lame program. It breaks down all the time. I’m working with the manufacturer to get some of the bugs out. It wasn’t designed to handle variable workload, which is really kind of useless when you think about the fact that it was built for an airline, an operation with variable scheduleand variable workload. It needs to be run against dynamic—”“Felix.”“Yes, ma’am?”“H

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Chapter30EVEN WITHOUT THE ROBIN’S-EGG-BLUE JACKET,he wouldn’t have been hard to spot. He was twice the width of any two people sitting on the benches around him, and he wore a smartly coordinated tam. Based on the data points I had collected so far, I imagined the Djuro Bulatovic closet to be a tidy repository of pastel, home to a disciplined row of ecru, dusty rose, mint green, and lavender sport jackets, all with muted silk linings, each as big as a sleeping bag.He read his newspaper and never looked up. He seemed content to wait for my approach. The only problem was, I was having a hard time putting myself within the radius of his lightning-fast reach.But there were plenty of people around on the street, many of them late-season tourists moving in the direction of the Prudential Center, embarkation point for the ubiquitous duck tours. It was the perfect low-humidity, light jacket day for such an outing.The first step out to the sidewalk was the hardest. Then I put my head down, jayw

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Chapter31ANGEL FLIPPED HER HAIR OFF HER SHOULDER.Her long blond mane looked particularly untamed today, as if she’d swept her fingers through it when she got up and let it fall where it wanted. It added to her relaxed appearance, which came, no doubt, from her stay in “the country,” as she called it.The two of us had settled in the den of her cabin, yet another of her many properties. It was lovely, exactly what you would expect in the woods of New England. It had a deep front porch with split log railing and a pitched roof with a stone chimney. The sound of a running stream came from the back of the property, but otherwise there was a blessed absence of sirens and car alarms and garbage trucks and grocery carts filled with aluminum cans rattling down alleys. It was peaceful. The air smelled clean. It was like being in a sacred place, which made our discussion feel all the more inappropriate.“I need a what, doll?”“A frequent fucker program,” I said. “That’s the answer.”“What was the qu

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Chapter32HARVEY LEFT ON THE THREE-FIFTEEN P.M. DEPARTUREto Orange County the next day. I stood in one of the windows and watched him take off. We had decided it was best for him to go on without me. He could do the briefing on his own. Felix had worked through the night trying to find Web Boy. He thought he was close, so I stayed behind to try one last-ditch effort to get what we knew was out there. Harvey had set midnight in California as the absolute deadline for adding new information to the presentation. If I couldn’t come up with anything new by then, he would go with the case we had.I watched the aircraft rumble down the long concrete launch pad and lift into the afternoon sky. I had to force myself not to try Felix again. I knew he was working as hard as he could. Every time I stopped at a light all the way home, I had to resist all over again. There was no way I could stay in my apartment and not call him, so I went for a run. The phone was ringing when I got back.“Hello?”“I’ve

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Chapter33THE LAST EXHIBIT SHOT OFF TOHARVEY VIAe-mail around three in the morning, East Coast time. He was so nervous I decided to stay up in case he called with more questions. I did, in fact, stay up, but not awake, and when I heard the neighbor’s door slam and opened my eyes, it was six-thirty. The last time I remembered checking the clock was at three twenty-five.I went into my room and fell onto my bed without bothering to change. The next time I was conscious was after eleven. When I sat up, my neck was stiff. I couldn’t turn it to the left without sending shooting pains down my back, and I wondered if I would have to make only right turns all day. I also wondered about the nagging feeling that kept tapping me on the shoulder, telling me I was supposed to be somewhere. It was as if I could feel it, but when I whipped around to see it, it was gone. I chalked it up to oversleeping.It was eight o’clock on the West Coast, which meant that Harvey’s presentation was in progress. I prob

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Chapter34JAMIE’S NEW HOUSE INWESTCHESTER WASimpressive. It was not exactly a castle, but with its stone façade, arched windows, multiple chimneys, and massive front door, it wasn’t far from it. It stood, as did all of the dwellings on the street, on a large lot clustered with big, sheltering trees that had been there for generations. There were pumpkins on porches and swing sets in yards and a fading afternoon light that bathed everything in early-autumn gold.I went down the walkway, climbed the steps, and stood on the porch. I had a bunch of flowers in one hand and champagne in the other. The flowers were for Gina, because I wasn’t exactly sure how else to approach the woman who was married to my brother to whom I had not spoken in almost a year. The champagne I had hoped to break out when I announced my new career, the successful completion of our first case, and the possibility of a long-term contract. But that whole idea of celebrating a prostitution case seemed grossly out of sync

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Chapter35IT WAS A SWEET AND POWERFUL BONDING EXPERIENCEto be standing at the sink, handing dripping plates to Jamie again. Many a night when we were growing up, we had stood side by side washing dishes in the kitchen of the old house on Rivalin Road. It was always after my father had shuffled off without comment to his well-worn spot in front of the TV.My place, since I was older, was always at the sink, washing, rinsing, and directing the operation. Jamie cleared, stacked, and dried, never fast enough to match my pace. He would stack each piece of silverware in the dishwasher one by one, asking me things I didn’t know. Who was faster, the Flash or the Green Hornet? What would happen if the earth started spinning the opposite way? What caused emphysema? Why was everyone smarter than he was? Sometimes I got frustrated with him and just did the job myself. Later we found out his disability made it hard for him to focus on specific tasks.“You can let that soak,” he said, standing next to

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Chapter36JAMIE’S OFFICE WAS YET ANOTHER SPACIOUSroom in the mansion, this one tucked toward the back of the house. It had warm cherry paneling, abundant overhead lighting, and wall outlets of all varieties. So far, there was only a desk in the middle of the hardwood floor. Temporary, he’d said, until he could find the one he really wanted. The framed picture of his family with Mickey Mouse down in Orlando was one I also had at home. The heavy clay paperweight that looked to be some kind of hedgehog was from Sean. It said so right on the bottom. “To Daddy from Sean.” Only then was really tiny because he’d run out of space.I had checked it all out while my laptop made its scratchy way to the Internet. I was in now and checking the unread messages in my box. It was mostly spam. One had a blank space where the address should have been, which usually meant spam, but it also had a subject heading that could be from only one person.all men are pigsWhen I saw that a video file was attached, my

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Chapter37JAMIE HAD GONE INTO THE DEN TO WATCHTV, only he’d never turned it on. He sat stiffly on the couch, staring at a blank screen. When he noticed me in the doorway, it must have been in my face, because he knew. His face looked the same as it had the day I’d showed up at his school unexpectedly.He had known that day, too.“She passed.” That’s what the counselors and teachers had whispered to each other about my mother that day, as if she’d been a car in the next lane or a horse coming up on the backstretch. Passed what? Passed go? Passed counterfeit bills? To this day, I hated that gutless euphemism. She died. She’d been dying for a long time, her breath rattling around in her chest, sounding as if she were trying to breathe underwater. Sometimes lucid, sometimes not, but always dying. Jamie was eight, but he knew that, and he knew there was only one reason I would show up at his school in the middle of the morning, and when he walked into the room and took in the scene, he immedia

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Chapter38TRISTAN WAS DRESSED COMFORTABLY ANDsmashingly in midnight-blue sweatpants and a celery-colored pullover. There was just no way to catch him looking sloppy and unkempt. He stood in the middle of the living room of the two-bedroom condo he shared with Barry. With its fresh-cut autumn flowers and large cathedral windows, the place was as serene as a church, a jarring juxtaposition to what was going on between us.I stood close to the front door, leaving it to him to determine the distance between us. As a union officer, he knew everything that was going on, including my part in it. He was not taking it well. “Tristan, please don’t look at me that way.”“How should I look at you? Tell me, Alexandra. Shall I look at you as a friend, because it’s hard for me to see you as a friend just now. Is Alexandra Shanahan your real name? Or do you have a code name? Something like Double-O Lying Bitch.”Some people sputtered when they were angry and searched for words. Tristan wasn’t one of them.

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Chapter39HARVEY EMERGED FROM THE POOL, CLIMBINGone shallow step at a time and gripping the silver bar with his thick, square fingers. His disease had not diminished his bulk above the hips—his torso was thick, and his spongy belly hung down over the waist of his bathing suit. Yet he seemed fragile. If the waist of his suit was too small, the leg openings were too big. As he climbed the steps, the wet fabric bunched around his shrunken thighs.He found his glasses by the side of the pool and put them on. When he caught sight of me watching him, he reached across his body to grab the rail with his other hand. The effect was to turn his belly away and show me his back.“You’re early,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to come back here.”“They told me out front it was all right.”He held himself perfectly still. All that moved were rivulets of water that dripped from the ends of his hair. He turned cautiously to look at me. His heavy glasses had slipped down to the end of his nose. I knew he wan

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Chapter40IT WAS STRANGE TO SEEMONICA SITTING ONTristan’s couch, looking, if not scared, at least less self-possessed than the last two times I had seen her. The first time, she had been the one with the razor-blade smile swiping my date in Chicago. The last time, she had been the one with her clothes off and her sense of self-confidence firmly in place.“Hello, Monica.”“I’m only here because Tristan asked me. I trust him.”Tristan stood behind the couch at her left shoulder. Over his left shoulder, resting on the mantel in the middle of his international trinkets, was the deadliest trinket of all, his .44 Special. I hadn’t expected Tristan to be Monica’s private bodyguard, although, as I thought about it, there was no way he would bring her out of hiding unless he intended to protect her as best he could. I thought that would be pretty well.I sat down next to Monica. She looked good for someone in hiding, better than I felt. Tristan had given me the story on Monica in our long, overnight

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Chapter41IWAS ON FOOT, HEADED THROUGH THE NEIGHBORHOODand back to my car, when my cell phone rang. I was expecting Felix, hoping for Tristan, and would have taken almost anyone except the person whose name showed up on caller ID.“Hello, Angel.”“Well, doll, what did you think of the show?”“I think you’re sick and in need of professional help. But mostly, I think you need to go to jail.”“Your little brother is so the stud. Girl, he wore me out. We did it standing up, sitting down, in the shower, on the carpet, on the tile. We even did it in the bathroom sink.”“I already know everything that happened. Don’t waste your time embellishing.” Still, having seen the one image of the two of them, it was hard not to conjure the others she described.“Really? Why don’t you tell me sweet Jamie’s version, because we know he would never tell a lie.”“You pursued him, you lied to him, you came into his hotel room, and the two of you fucked. One time.”“One time or ten times, it makes no never mind when y

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Chapter42STEWART’S DOOR WAS LOCKED WHENITRIEDthe knob, but I knew he was in there. I heard his stereo pounding. I thought about crashing through the window but decided to go with a knock. I didn’t need the element of surprise, not with Bo’s Glock in my waistband.Alarmingly, Stewart wasn’t surprised at all to see me. He stepped aside without comment and let me in, then headed for the back room. “What you want is back here.”I stood for a moment, trying to decide if the fact that he had expected me was a bad thing. Angel had obviously filled him in. Ultimately, I decided it didn’t matter. I wasn’t leaving.Back in the bedroom, Stewart was watching Jamie’s video. He’d turned his stereo off, so the sound track was clearly audible. He froze the picture when he saw me, hit a button on his keyboard, and brought up a list of ten or twelve e-mail addresses.“This is the distribution list Angel gave me for this little art house film.” His voice had a sharp edge of confidence, as if he had total con

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