Moment of Truth (40 page)

Davis grabbed the phone and his thoughts didn’t break stride. Newlin was out on bail at the time the shooting occurred. Perfect! Motive plus opportunity! It had to be
Newlin
in the ski mask!

The phone rang on the other end and as soon as a voice picked up, Davis said, “Gimme the Chief.”

“Oh Deo! Oh Deo!
” Vita DiNunzio sobbed. She reached for her daughter the moment she got in the door, and Mary regretted instantly that she’d brought everybody here. The DiNunzio kitchen couldn’t fit Mary, Paige, Jack, and Brinkley, in addition to her parents, shamelessly hysterical that their daughter had been shot at. Having a weeping mother wrapped around her waist wasn’t a good look for Mary.

“Let’s all calm down,” Mary said, giving her mother a final hug and gentling her into a chair. Fresh coffee percolated on the stove and its aroma filled the kitchen. The table had been set with two mismatched cups and saucers. Her parents were just about to down their thirty-fifth cup of coffee before her mother went to bed. In the morning they would discuss why they couldn’t sleep. “Everything’s fine now. We’re safe.”

“Completely safe,” Jack added, but her mother’s lips trembled at the sight of Jack’s swollen cheekbone.

“Oh
Deo
,” her mother moaned. She took off her thick glasses, set them on the table, and dropped her small face into a knobby hand. Even her silver hair, teased into curls, swoops, and swishes, drooped sideways, listing like the top of a soufflé. Mary wondered if they had smelling salts. For hair.

“Mom, it’s fine,” she said, patting her mother’s hand. “We’re all fine. Me and Paige, we’re fine. Fine, fine, fine. We even have a detective here to protect us.” Mary handed her mother her thick glasses and made her slip them on, then gestured to Brinkley. “Look. See. Exhibit A. A real detective.”

“A
detective
?” her mother said. She wiped her eyes with a napkin, leaving a reddish streak on her parchment-thin skin. Her eyes were as round as milky brown marbles behind the lenses, emphasizing their utter lack of guile, and Mary had to smile. If her mother was surprised at having a black man in her kitchen, it didn’t show. They used to have her father’s black crew home for lunch all the time, to the neighbors’ disapproval. “You a detective, with the
police
?”

“Yes,” Brinkley answered succinctly, from against the wall, and Mary’s eyes flared at him with significance.

“Maybe you could elaborate,
Detective
,” she prodded.

Jack laughed. “Reg, tell Mrs. DiNunzio how safe we all are because you’re here.”

“Yes, well.” Brinkley’s head bent to fit under the low ceiling and his arm cracked the Easter palm behind the switch plates. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Mrs. DiNunzio. I have a gun.”

“A gun?
Oh Deo
!” her mother wailed, and her father hovered. He kneaded her shoulders through her house-dress until she got used to the notion of a Glock in a house with twenty-five crucifixes, two statues of the Virgin Mary, and a candle for emergency novenas. “A
gun
!”

“Coffee anyone?” Mary asked airily, and bustled over to the stove and grabbed the pot. She was just about to go for the cups when Jack opened the cabinet, grabbed a bunch, and began setting them on the table with a happy clatter. How could she have ever thought him a murderer? He reminded her so much of her father, who was still consoling her mother as she segued into Act III of
La Traviata
. Soon the wheezing would start. “Dad, I’m sorry about this, but would you mind going up and taking Mom with you?” Before her hair explodes. “We need to talk some business, and it might upset her.” Call me crazy.

“Yes, good, no problem, Maria,” her father said, his own tears subsiding.

“Thanks, really, Dad. Here, Mom.” Mary set the coffee down and helped her father ease her mother up from the chair. Everyone said their good-byes as Mary and her father walked her mother out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and to the stairwell in the living room, with only slightly less effort than Christ bearing the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem. And after Vita DiNunzio was safely tucked in bed, with her husband at her side, Mary gave them both a kiss good night and fetched them their bedtime cup of coffee.

When Mary came back downstairs, Jack was enveloping Paige in a huge hug in the warm kitchen, his face buried in her glossy hair. “Thank God,” he said, and Paige broke the embrace, standing away from him.

“Thank Mary, too, Dad. She really did save my life.”

Jack looked over Paige’s shoulder. He grinned with relief, his blue eyes frankly grateful. “Thank you, Mary,” he said, advancing a step.

Mary stiffened, though there was a table between them. She didn’t want him to hug her, did she? Yes. No. Of course not. In the kitchen, where her husband used to? She picked up the coffee and poured a cup for Brinkley, then went around the table until there were four steaming cups and nobody could ever sleep again. “No problem. I saved myself, too. So it wasn’t so unselfish. Why don’t you sit down?”

Paige looked between them. “That’s not true, Dad.”

“Everybody sit down,” Mary said, waving her off, and pulled out a chair. Installed behind her aromatic cup of coffee, she felt safe and happy again and decided to attribute it to land memory and not Jack Newlin, who she was happy/sad to want to hug/not hug. It confused her. “We have a lot of catching up to do. Jack, let’s begin at the beginning. You did not kill your wife.”

“No, I didn’t.” Jack looked relieved to say it aloud, and Mary warmed to finally hear her suspicion confirmed. “I confessed because I thought Paige had killed her.”

Paige looked grave behind her untouched cup. “I’m sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t have lied to you about Trevor.”

“Let’s not talk about that now,” Jack said quickly. “Let’s hold the tears and I’m sorrys and get to the facts. Trevor killed your mother, didn’t he?”

“Yes, we were high, at least I was. He told me I did it, so I thought I did it. I do remember picking up the knife, but I don’t think I did anything with it. What I remember next was that it was in my hand, all bloody, and she was dead. But I don’t think I killed her. I was angry at her, but I don’t think I could ever do that.” Paige told the story about her confession to Captain Walsh and the discovery that she had no bruising.

“And Trevor was arrested on drug charges,” Mary said, but Brinkley was nodding as if he knew it. “Captain Walsh told us he was free on bail, so we think that it was him in the ski mask.” Mary looked at Brinkley. “Thank you for the hint about the earring back and DNA test, by the way. It helped us figure out that Trevor was the one.”

“Knew you’d put them to use.”

“Trevor’s trying to kill Paige because she knows what happened that night and he’s still at large. Is that it?”

“I think so,” Brinkley answered, but Jack, at his elbow, stirred and touched Paige’s hand gently.

“Paige, why would Trevor kill your mother?” he asked, and Mary noticed he was sitting in Mike’s chair to her right. She tried not to feel guilty, which was like not breathing.

“The money, Dad. He’s wanted to get married a long time, like since we met. He’s been pushing it. When I got pregnant, it got definite. I wasn’t in love with it, but when I told Mom she freaked out.”

“You should know why.” Jack fingered his coffee cup. “Your mother got upset because that’s what happened to her and me. She married me only because she got pregnant with you. I wanted to marry her. She was a prize to me, but she felt like she threw her life away when she married me. ‘Married down,’ as her family said.”

Paige was silent, listening, her pretty features soft and sad.

“Now, here’s the truth. You’re not sixteen, you’re seventeen. Your birthday is March 18, a year before. We took a trip, like rich people did in those days, and we didn’t introduce you around until you were about five. It was easy to pass you off as younger then. It was tricky, but doable since we didn’t socialize much anyway. You know how your mom was. That’s why you were born in Switzerland and why you were always more mature than your peers. They’re not your peers.”

Paige was stunned. “You’re kidding.”

“No, not at all.”

“Dad, why didn’t you just tell me that? It explains so much. About you, and her.”

“Your mother didn’t want to, and I went along with it. We’re both to blame. Me, more so, because she was sick, at some level. I wasn’t.”

Paige shook her head. “I don’t get it. Mom could have had an abortion, couldn’t she? I mean, with her money, it would have been easy.”

“She wanted the baby, and I did, too.”

Paige laughed abruptly. “She didn’t want the baby, Dad. I should know, I was the baby. What she wanted was to be miserable, and blame you for ruining her life. I heard her all the time, growing up. She always said she would have had a great career, if it wasn’t for you. And me.” Paige looked bitter. “Career as what? A professional victim?”

Jack winced. “Paige, that’s not right—”

“But it is, Dad. She always blamed everybody else, for everything. She never took responsibility for anything. You should have seen her at shoots. It was the photographer’s fault, or the clothes were wrong, or my lighting. Or at home. It was the maid, the accountant, my tutor. It was never her fault. Nothing was ever her fault.” Paige fell quiet, and Mary let it lie, remembering what the photographer had said about dealing with Honor and about kids being the ones who see the truth. The two of them, father and daughter, would have to sort it out someday.

“The question is what do we do now,” Mary said, after a minute. “Trevor is out there looking for Paige and maybe me. He knows he doesn’t have much time. He’s not going to give up, and the police don’t believe that he’s the killer.”

Brinkley cleared his throat, clearly uneasy. “I’ll cover you and Paige. Tonight we can all get some rest. Here, if that’s okay. We can sleep downstairs on the floor.”

“Sure.”

“Then first thing in the morning I take all of you to the Roundhouse.”

Mary shook her head. “It won’t do any good. I screwed that up so bad, the police won’t believe anything I say now.”

“Anything
we
say,” Paige corrected. “I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s on my own tummy.”

Brinkley shook his head. “They’ll believe us this time because we’ll be bringing in Jack. And Trevor.”

“Trevor? How are you gonna do that?” Mary asked, and Brinkley hunched over the table.

“Listen up,” he said, and they huddled around. “We got the earring back but not the earring. Now, we know from Paige that Trevor lost the earring and he doesn’t know where. I didn’t know that before. So we use that fact. We tell him we got the earring, that I found it at the crime scene. And does he want it, come and get it.”

Jack looked doubtful. “Why would you do that? You need a credible reason.”

“How about revenge?” Mary edged forward, certain that this was the first time a sting had been plotted at the DiNunzios’ kitchen table. “And money. You offer to sell the earring back to him. You want to get back at the police department for suspending you. But how do we catch him?”

Brinkley shrugged easily. “I wear a wire. I get him to say what I need, then we take him in. No muss, no fuss.”

“A wire,” Mary repeated, because it sounded so cool, and Paige clapped in delight.

Only Jack looked worried. “It sounds simple, but things can go wrong. This kid’s not that stable. He’s a killer.”

“I can’t handle a preppie, I got no business in the business,” Brinkley said with a smile, and Mary thought he should smile more often.

“Why don’t we do it tonight?” she asked. “End this thing already?”

Brinkley shook his head. “Can’t. Take me some time to get the wire. I have to figure a way to get court approval or any admission the kid makes won’t come into evidence. I should have the wire by late morning, then we’ll try to get hold of our boy.”

“How do we do that?” Mary asked, and Brinkley smiled again.

“We start calling around. The boy’s got to be pretty panicky right now. He reads the papers and he knows I’m on to him. If he hears my name, he’ll come in.” The detective reached for the coffeepot. “But first, we have some more of this fine coffee.”

After they made the requisite telephone calls, Mary scrounged up four blankets and pillows for everybody and arranged them carefully on the living room rug, making sure Jack was farthest from her, then Brinkley and Paige. They all lay down, exhausted, and when Mary turned out the living room lamp she thought it looked like four sausages in a frying pan. In the morning they would hatch their scheme, catch the bad guy, and be home in time for breakfast.