French Silk (5 page)

Seven years ago, Josh's mother, Martha, had died with as little fanfare as that with which she had lived. Josh received the news that she had died instantly of a stroke while he was in New York, studying music at Juilliard. He never got to say goodbye. Her life had been so inconsequential that her death had barely caused a pause in the well-oiled operation of his father's ministry. When she died, Jackson had been actively expanding his ministry to cable television. He was driven, inexhaustible. Immediately following his wife's funeral, he had returned to his office to get in a few hours' work so that the day wouldn't be entirely wasted.

Josh had never forgiven his father for that particular display of insensitivity. That's why he didn't feel guilty now for the appetite that was making his stomach growl, even though he'd viewed his father's bloody corpse only hours ago.

That's also why he didn't feel guilty about committing adultery with his father's second wife. He reasoned that some sins were justified, although he had no scriptural reference to support that belief.

Ariel was only two years older than Josh, but as she came out of the bedroom dressed in an oversized T-shirt, her long hair held away from her face by barrettes, she looked several years younger than he. Her legs and feet were bare. "Did you order some dessert?"

Jackson always taunted her about her overactive sweet tooth and never let her indulge it without hassling her. "Chocolate layer cake," Josh told her.

"Yummy."

"Ariel?"

"Hmm?"

He waited until she turned to face him. "Only a few hours ago, you discovered your husband's body."

"Are you trying to spoil my appetite?"

"I guess I am. Aren't you the least bit upset?"

Her expression turned sulky and self-defensive. "You know how much I cried earlier."

Josh laughed without humor. "You've been crying on cue ever since that night you came to Daddy with a special prayer request for your little brother after he'd received a life sentence. You wrenched Daddy's heart and sang on his podium at the very next service.

"I've seen you be very effective with your tears. Others might mistake them as genuine, but I know better. You use them when it's convenient or when you want something. Never because you're sad. You're too selfish ever to feel sad. Angry and frustrated and jealous, maybe, but never sad."

Ariel had lost a lot of weight since marrying Josh's father three years earlier. Then she'd been rather plump. Her breasts were smaller now, but the areolas were still wide and the nipples large and protrudent. Josh hated himself for noticing them beneath her soft cotton T-shirt as she propped her hands on her hips.

"Jackson Wilde was a mean-spirited, spiteful, self-centered son of a bitch." Her blue eyes didn't blink once. "His death isn't going to spoil my appetite because I'm not sorry he's dead. Except for how it might effect the ministry."

"And you took care of that during the press conference."

"That's right, Josh. I've already laid the groundwork for continuing the ministry.
Somebody
around here should be thinking about the future," she added snidely.

As though suffering a splitting headache, Josh pressed the tips of his long, slender, musician's fingers against his hairline and squeezed his eyes shut. "Christ, you're cold. Always scheming. Always planning. Relentless."

"Because I've always had to be. I didn't grow up rich like you, Josh. You call your grandparents' place outside of Nashville a farm," She scoffed. "My family had a real farm. It was dirty and stank of manure. I didn't help groom fancy horses like you did only when you felt like it. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to weed the vegetable garden and shell peas and slop a hog so he'd be fat in November when we butchered him.

"I only owned one pair of shoes at a time. The girls at school laughed at me for wearing hand-me-downs. And from the time I was twelve, I had to ward off the groping hands of drunken uncles on Saturday nights, then look into their smug faces from the choir loft on Sunday mornings. Oh, yes, we always went to church on Sundays and listened to sermons that glorified poverty. But I never believed a word of it."

She shook her long, straight, platinum-blond hair. "I've been poor, Josh. And poor sucks. It makes you mean. It makes you desperate. You reach a point where you'll do anything to escape it. That's why my little brother is in prison for the rest of his life. After he got sent up, I knew I had to do something drastic or wind up worse off than he is. So, yes, I cried for your daddy. And if he'd asked me to wipe his butt or give him a blow job on the spot, I would have done that, too.

"I learned from him that money makes all the difference. Being rich and mean is a whole lot better than being poor and mean. When you're poor, you go to jail for your meanness, but if you're rich, you can do what you please and nobody can touch you. I'm a schemer, all right. I will be for the rest of my life because I'm never going to be poor again."

She paused to take a breath. "Don't try to tell me you're sorry he's gone, Josh. You hated him as much as I did, if not more."

He couldn't quite meet her direct gaze. "I guess my feelings could be classified as ambivalent. I don't feel any remorse. But I don't feel relieved, as I imagined I would."

She moved toward him and slid her arms around his neck. "Don't you see, Josh? If we play it smart, this can be a beginning for us. The public loves us. We can go on as before, except that life will be so much better without him harping on us all the time."

"Do you really think our adoring public will accept us as a couple, Ariel?" He smiled wanly over her naïveté. Or was it her rapacity that amused him?

He couldn't hold any of it against her, really. She had not had the advantages he'd grown up with and taken for granted. Even before Jackson Wilde had become a household word, he'd had a faithful and generous following. The offering plates were always full. In addition to Martha's inheritance, it amounted to a sizable income. Josh had never lacked for anything material.

The first time he'd seen Ariel, she was wearing a cheap, loud dress and too much costume jewelry. Her speech and crude accent had been offensive to his ears. Even so, he'd admired the audacity it had taken for her to approach his father and solicit prayers for her convicted brother.

Today she was slim, articulate, and immaculately groomed. But Josh knew that when she looked into the mirror Ariel still saw a plump, disheveled, desperate young woman making a last-ditch effort to alter the course of her life. When she gazed at her manicured hands, she saw garden dirt beneath her fingernails.

"The public will accept our new relationship in time," she was saying, "if we bring the Lord into it often enough. We can say we fought our romantic love for each other because it didn't seem right. But then through prayer and Bible study, God convinced us that it had been His will all along. They'll eat it up. Everybody loves a happy ending." She kissed his lips softly, teasingly, releasing a slender thread of her breath into his mouth. "I need you now, Josh."

He shut his eyes tightly, trying valiantly to ward off the lust that was gathering in his center. "Ariel, we shouldn't be together for a while. They'll think—"

She moved closer, bumping his pelvis with her own. "Who'll think what?"

"The police … that Mr. Cassidy from the D.A.'s office. We're bound to be suspects."

"Don't be silly, Josh. We have each other for our alibis, remember?"

Her nonchalance was exasperating, but his attraction to her was based on frustration and forbiddenness. Rather than shaking her, as he felt like doing, he slipped his hands beneath her T-shirt and clasped her around the waist, pulling her roughly against him. His lips ground over hers. He pressed his tongue into her eager, wet mouth while the heels of his hands caressed her pelvic bones.

His sex was swollen and hot. He was impatient with his clothing. But as he went for his zipper there was a knock at the door.

"That'll be our lunch." Ariel sighed. She kissed him one final time, brushed her hand across his distended fly, then drifted out of his arms. "Have the waiter bring the tray into the bedroom. We'll eat first."

* * *

"Cassidy?"

"Here." He juggled the telephone receiver while trying to depress the volume button on the remote control and keep from dropping his bologna sandwich and his beer.

"It's Glenn. I've been officially assigned to the Wilde case."

Good
, Cassidy thought,
Crowder had come through
. Detective Howard Glenn would be the point person, or the main liaison between him and the police department. Once Glenn selected his platoon of officers to investigate the case, he, Cassidy, would be constantly apprised of developments.

He knew that Glenn was difficult to work with. He was a slob, untidy in every respect—except his detective work. But Cassidy was willing to overlook Glenn's character flaws in exchange for his competence.

"Got anything?" he asked, setting aside the tasteless sandwich.

"The lab report's back. We're going through it now."

"How's it look?"

"No prints other than his, his old lady's, and the housekeeper in charge of the suite. Course, we've got hundreds of partials that belong to the people who stayed in that suite before him."

Although Cassidy had figured as much, it was still dismal news. "Any sign of a weapon?"

"Zilch. Whoever walked into Wilde's suite and offed him walked out with the gun."

The lack of a murder weapon was going to make solving this case and getting a conviction a real challenge. Luckily Cassidy liked challenges, the harder the better.

"How soon could you get a few phone taps in place?" he asked the detective.

"First thing tomorrow. Who else besides the wife and son?"

"We'll discuss it in the morning. Stay in touch."

He hung up, took another bite of his sandwich, another swig of tepid beer, and returned his attention to the television set. Earlier, he had called the cable station that aired Jackson Wilde's
Prayer and Praise Hour
and asked for copies of all available tapes. The station management had promptly delivered the tapes to his office. He'd then brought them home, where he could watch them without interruption.

The programs were slickly produced. Wilde put on a dazzling show, complete with flying white doves, an orchestra, a five-hundred-voice choir, a gold leaf pulpit, and Joshua's mirrored piano, which resembled the one once owned by the late Liberace.

The format never varied. The program opened with a trumpet blast loud enough to herald the Second Coming. The choir broke into song, the doves were released with a flurry of white wings, and Wilde descended a curved staircase as though he'd just wrapped up a visit with the Almighty, which is exactly what he intimated in his opening remarks.

Ariel, always dressed in pristine white, her only jewelry a simple gold wedding band and a pair of discreet pearl earrings—Wilde stressed that the only treasures they stockpiled were their spiritual rewards—was introduced with the trilling of trumpets in the background. Then the audience got a close-up of Joshua Wilde as he played the introduction to Ariel's first song.

Her singing voice, marginal at best, was greatly enhanced by the orchestra, the choir, and a sound system whose staggering cost would have made a large dent in the national debt. Ariel threw beatific smiles toward her husband, toward Josh, toward the audience, and toward heaven. Invariably, by the end of the song, at least one eloquent, glistening tear had spilled from her celestial blue eyes.

Cassidy was a skeptic by nature and rarely took anything at face value. Generously allowing for that, he still couldn't understand how anyone of reasonable intelligence could fall for Wilde's glitzy sideshow. His sermons were gross distortions of the gospel. He preached much more vehemently about admonition than grace, more about condemnation than love, more about hellfire than forgiveness. More was said of Satan than of Christ. It was easy to see why he was held in such contempt by clergymen of most organized Christian sects.

It was also plain to Cassidy how Wilde was able to induce such fanaticism in his narrow-minded followers. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear: that they were right and anyone who disagreed with their opinion was wrong. Of course, God was always on their side.

After viewing the tapes several times, making notes as he watched, Cassidy switched off the set and headed for his bedroom. An inventory of clean shirts and shorts revealed that he could go another couple of days before a trip to the laundry.

When he was married, Kris had taken care of his wardrobe, just as she had kept the house, done the shopping, and cooked their meals. The divorce hadn't come about because she was negligent. And by most standards, he would have been judged a fairly good husband. He always remembered anniversaries and birthdays. He had a sixth sense that told him when sex was out of the question and on those nights he refrained from asking.

The dissolution of their four-year marriage could be blamed more on apathy than on animosity. It had cracked under external pressure, and their love for one another hadn't been strong enough to hold things together. Kris hadn't even wanted to discuss relocating, and, after a pivotal incident that had unbalanced his perfectly balanced life, he'd been adamant on relocating.