The Daughter-in-Law (28 page)

Nicole squeezed his hand once more as if it were a secret code that no one else would be able to decipher. “Yes, call me. You and I will be able to make sense out of all of this. We’ll get it right.”

He saw her again at the banquet. She came in just as all the guests were taking their places, and went to the table where Pam was sitting. She wore a summer pastel that showed her neck and shoulders, and a simple chain of silver. Her hair was loose, turning in above her shoulders in the latest fashion. She had done nothing extraordinary, but still she took Jack’s breath away.

“Now don’t hit me again,” Joe Tisdale said to Jack for the benefit of the table, “but Nicole is one fine-looking young woman.”

“Very lovely,” Jack answered, stealing a glance at Alexandra to see if she were paying attention elsewhere. She seemed to be involved with another guest, so he ventured, “Very lovely, indeed.”

The dinner was served; beef filets or swordfish steaks, with the appropriate sauces and vegetables. The wines were collector items, uncorked and poured to individual tastes. Billy Joel appeared and visited the key tables before he took his place at the piano. The Donners’ summer affair began winding down to a perfect conclusion.

Pam pressed Nicole for a commitment. As they ate together she kept bringing up the art gallery, explaining the concept to her friends and enlisting their support. “You see, everyone thinks it’s a great idea. We’ll find people who know the art market. What will make us different is our willingness to take a chance on new talent.” Nicole promised to continue the discussion in the city and told Pam to give her a call. She took her leave from the others at the table and then worked her way across the lawn to where Alexandra was holding court.

“Thank you for having me,” she said to Alexandra. Alexandra accepted the compliment and expressed the hope that they would get everything taken care of in short order. There were no hugs or handshakes.

The men were standing and Tisdale repeated his offer of an evening at the opera. She promised to take him up on it. The Swiss banker clicked his heels. Jack took both her hands in his. “We’ll talk,” he said, hoping his tone would convey special meaning that
only she could understand. “We will,” she answered and then added, “I can’t thank you enough.”

“Delightful girl,” one of the wives said to Alexandra. “Will we be seeing more of her?”

“I don’t think so,” Alexandra answered. “I’m sure she has her own agenda.”

Nicole walked back to the main house where one of the servants had already loaded her suitcase into the trunk of her car. She passed by the security people as she drove out through the gate and crawled through weekend traffic in Newport. She had crossed the bridges over Narragansett Bay and was headed west along the meandering roads that crossed behind the Rhode Island beaches when she realized she was being followed.

FORTY-SEVEN

S
HE COULDN’T
remember where the car had fallen in behind her. In the twilight, with the roof down, she had been enjoying the color in the sky ahead. It was only in the darkness that she became aware of the steady glare of headlights in her mirror. Nicole eased to the right lane and slowed a bit, but the car showed no intention of passing. Then she picked up speed, driving well over the limit. The car faded at first, but soon reappeared, taking a new position a little farther back.

She pressed on until she reached the interstate where the heavy flow of traffic gave her a sense of security. But the car stayed behind her. She watched it pull out around cars that she had just passed. Her lane slowed behind a climbing truck, and she kept her focus on her pursuer as cars flashed past. The car came abreast of her, a plain sedan with two men in the front seat. It passed by, and disappeared around the truck ahead. Nicole breathed easier, and found a music station on the radio.

She stopped for gas, and pulled to the side of the parking area to raise the top. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her. But as she started out on the ramp, a pair of headlights flashed on in the truck area. The same car pulled out behind her and took up its position.

She could no longer deny her fear. Somehow, the car had slipped back behind her and followed her into the rest stop. The two men had sat in the darkness, watching her while she refueled. She realized how vulnerable she had been when she had gotten out of her car to raise the top, and how vulnerable she would be again when she left the highway. She had to get away from them.

She pulled into the left lane, pressed down on the gas, and accelerated past a line of slower cars. In the mirror, she watched a pair of headlights pull out behind. Nicole kept moving past the traffic until she came abreast of another truck. Then she slowed down, holding
her position, so that the car behind was caught in the outside lane, blocked in front by her, and on the right by the line of cars following the truck. She waited until she saw the signs for an exit, timed her approach, and at the last second accelerated around the truck. An air horn blared as she turned sharply into the exit ramp. The truck blocked the sedan from following her.

She had escaped, but she sensed that she was still in danger. The car could slow down or find an on-ramp where it could sit and wait for her. She could go north to the state parkway but that would entail traveling on dark and deserted back roads, exactly the kind of situation where she couldn’t let herself be caught.

She picked a secondary road that paralleled the interstate, and stayed on it for half an hour. For the most part, it was lighted and busy, and it allowed her to check the interstate’s on-ramps as she passed them in sequence. There was no sign of the car waiting for her. After passing three entrances, Nicole pulled back onto the highway and moved at the traffic speed, careful not to do anything that might attract attention. She kept checking for any signs of a car maneuvering in behind her, and looked carefully at any sedan that she was overtaking. There was no sign of them, and as the minutes passed, her anxiety began to calm.

She had lost them and in the flow of Sunday night traffic it would be hard for them to find her. If they really had been following her. Maybe it was her imagination. Maybe the car that had pulled out of the service area wasn’t the same one that she had seen earlier. She tried to convince herself that her fears had been ridiculous.

The Manhattan skyline finally came into view, a dazzling light array behind the dark silhouettes of the bridges. Her spirits lifted as she exited into midtown, and she nearly laughed in relief when she pulled into the garage under her building and parked in Jonathan’s space.

There was another anxious moment while she was waiting for the elevator. Another car entered and moved slowly through the parked cars, turning at the end of the aisle and then heading back toward her. To her relief, she noticed a woman passenger inside and breathed easily when the car turned into its assigned space. The elevator door opened, and Nicole waited for the woman and her husband to join her. She had their company all the way up to her floor.

In her apartment, she double-locked the door behind her, and
then walked from room to room, turning on lights. She felt ridiculous, almost like a child who’s afraid of the dark. Of course there was no one here. Probably no one had been following her, and if someone was it was most likely that he had given up hours ago. The two men who had passed her in the sedan were probably coming home from a day of sailing or from some sort of sporting event.

She unpacked, showered, and slipped into a comfortable T-shirt. Just before climbing into bed she went to the window, opened it a crack, and tipped open the blinds. In the street below, a sedan was parked with two men sitting idly. It was directly across from the entrance to her building.

FORTY-EIGHT

A
LEXANDRA HAD
new reports from Greg Lambert. In Belize, the police had arrested a small-time crook on a mugging charge and encouraged him to talk about his past activities. One of his botched crimes had been a break-in at a private guest cottage out on an island. The dates matched the time when Jonathan and Nicole were attacked during the night.

Someone had hired the thug, but he didn’t know who it was. “Just a man in a suit. He gave me five hundred, and promised me five hundred more. There was a young couple staying in an island cottage. ‘Very rich,’ he said. I was supposed to rough the lady up a little bit. Not break anything. Just throw a scare into her. And if there was anything valuable lying around, I could help myself.” He had rowed an inflatable dinghy over to the island from Ambergris Cay, circled behind the house and entered from the outside shower. But just as he had gotten inside, he saw the woman returning from the beach. He thought that he could knock her out before she could make a sound, take whatever jewelry he found on her fingers, and then make his escape.

“She fought back,” the thug had told the police. “The lady was tough, and she raised a racket. When I tried to get away, she held on to me.”

“Who do you think hired him?” Alexandra asked.

“Hard to say,” he answered. “Who knew that they were down there?”

The next bit of news came from New York. Lambert’s agents had found another past acquaintance of Jimmy Farr, the club owner Nicole had worked for. Farr had held her personally responsible for the drug money he had lost when she had failed on her last assignment. Nicole had spent two years paying off the debt.

“So she has been dealing with this . . . gangster,” Alexandra said.

“She was, but that seems to have been quite a while ago. And it’s
not all that damning. She wouldn’t be the first theater-wannabe to get involved with the wrong kind of people.”

“No,” Alexandra agreed, “but she’s certainly the first one to try and move into my family.”

The information only furthered her opinion that her daughter-in-law was a scheming con artist, and made her even more determined to be rid of her. But she still hadn’t found the smoking gun. Nicole could admit all the questionable things she had done, and all the sleazy people she had been involved with. It all could be seen as proof of her courage. She had repented her crimes and set herself on a more honorable path.

More troubling was the low-life’s claim that someone had paid him to “rough up the lady.” Who? Jack certainly had the connections to have it done without getting his own hands dirty, but Jack seemed to be on Nicole’s side. Wasn’t he advocating that she be paid off even if the price was outrageous? Or maybe it was one of Lambert’s security people, some overzealous commando trying to move things along to curry favor with Alexandra. She suggested to Lambert that he take a good look at his own people.

Or was it possible that Nicole had arranged the affair herself to prove to Jonathan that his family wanted her out of the way? But it was a man who put the money on the table. How could Nicole have any contacts in Belize?

As she grilled herself, Alexandra’s thoughts kept coming back to Nicole’s drug-runner friend. She had to look at her notes to remember his name, Jimmy Farr. Lambert thought that Nicole had paid off all her debts. But what if she hadn’t? What if Farr had raised his interest rates to take into account her newfound wealth? If that were the case then a solution might be simple. Just ask Nicole, “How much do you need?” But, of course, if she were being pressed by the underworld, she would have taken her payment as quickly as possible. She wouldn’t be holding out for “acceptance.”

There were so many possibilities, but there was really only one answer: get rid of the girl as quickly as possible by any and every means.

“Damn it, now she’s having me followed,” Nicole snapped at Ben Tobin. She was in his office for an update on the negotiations. Ben
was explaining that the other side was in disarray with Jack trying to be generous while Alexandra was offering nothing more than a token payment. “She’s trying to frighten me into giving up.”

He was keenly interested in her detailed account about the car that had followed her all the way from Rhode Island and then spent the night outside her door. “That’s stalking, and we can get the court to put a stop to it,” he told her. But as he pressed for more information he began to suspect that she had no idea who was following her. Certainly there was nothing to prove it was Alexandra. The car outside her house might not have been the same one she thought was following her. And the car could have been nothing more than two men interested in an attractive woman, driving alone, in an expensive convertible.

After he had calmed her down a bit, he raised a question of his own. He had spent Sunday upstate at a skydiving center, and had once again run into Harry Gillman, the man who remembered jumping with Nicole. “I’m only asking because this is something that might well come up if we have to go to court. Gillman says you were a very accomplished diver, not a novice who could forget to check her equipment. I told him he had the wrong lady, but he described you very accurately.”

“Well, I couldn’t begin to describe him,” she said. “I don’t remember anyone by that name.” She conceded that she had taken some lessons upstate and that Gillman might well have been one of the other students. “But I didn’t get certified up there, and I was a long way from being accomplished.”

He probed as to how she happened to find the jump center in western New Jersey. It wasn’t well publicized, and there were other schools with better facilities. “Oh, I don’t know. Someone may have mentioned it. I know I got lost the first time I went looking for it. Why? Is it important?”

Ben explained Alexandra’s assertion that Nicole had insinuated herself into the family. “Almost as if you had stalked Jonathan to win him over.”

“That’s ridiculous! You were there. He spoke to me. I didn’t come on to him. And even if I had, so what? Is it illegal for a woman to introduce herself?”

He laughed, but explained his concern. In cases like this, courts had great discretion in deciding fair and reasonable amounts. A dis-
traught wife could expect to do much better than a calculating gold digger.

“Is that what you think I am?”

He waved away the suggestion.