The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (21 page)

Goldfinger said, ‘This is the problem at which we have arrived. Saturday is a bit of a difficulty for us.’

‘Not just a bit.’ Galore supplied, ‘We promised an early peek of the club to the
LA Times
. They’re scheduled for first thing Friday morning. They want to do a before-and-after kind of thing with Marcus, take some photos of him behind the bar, maybe standing on the balcony, then the later photos will show the same shots after the club is finished.’

‘Can’t you postpone that?’ Amanda asked.

Galore wrinkled her nose. ‘The word
postpone
is catnip to reporters. We’d be looking at a lot of bad press.’

Amanda told them, ‘I was inside that club this morning. It looked more like a crack den than the anchor to a two-point-eight-billion-dollar project.’

None of them seemed to notice that she had the price tag at her fingertips.

Galore supplied, ‘We had cleaners scheduled to go in this morning to start making the club more presentable. Obviously
that was well after your crime scene people arrived.’ She added, ‘But still, we’d need at least two days, balls to the walls, to get that place spiffed up.’

‘You realize the press has already gotten wind of the murder?’ Amanda said. ‘They know that a body was found inside the club.’

‘Yes, they know that a body was found,’ Galore said. ‘They don’t know that the man was anything other than a vagrant.’

‘Both the GBI and the Atlanta police were on scene. The media is going to assume that we wouldn’t put that much effort into solving the murder of a vagrant.’ She smiled at them. ‘Not that any death isn’t a tragedy, but the local police normally don’t ask the state for help in such circumstances.’

‘So it’s a drug deal gone bad, or two homeless men fighting over a forty,’ Galore suggested. ‘That would only serve to highlight another positive aspect of the All-Star development, taking an area that is prone to crime and turning it into a safe, clean, family-friendly neighborhood.’

‘But he wasn’t a vagrant. He was a retired Atlanta police detective.’

No one had an answer for that.

Amanda said, ‘I’m sorry, folks, I understand the dilemma, but I can’t rush a murder investigation for your grand opening. I have to think of the victim’s family. The detective had a wife. She’s only twenty-two years old.’

Will worked to keep the surprise off his face. Because of the age, he had to assume that the wife was Delilah Palmer. He had no idea why Amanda hadn’t shared this detail with him. There was a big difference between Harding being Delilah’s guardian angel and being her husband. Wives knew things. They had
access to information. If Harding was targeted for knowing too much, then Delilah would be the next person on the list.

Amanda continued, ‘Harding and the girl were married for only a few months. I already had to tell her that she’s a widow. Am I supposed to go back now and tell her that her husband’s death takes a back seat to a press event?’ Amanda shook her head as if the very thought made her sad. ‘And speaking of the press, Mrs Harding is incredibly photogenic. Blonde hair, blue eyes, very pretty. The press will be all over her.’

‘No, no,’ Dr No said. ‘We wouldn’t want any of that, Deputy Director. We’re not trying to impede your investigation.’ He shot Goldfinger a look, because of course they were trying to impede the investigation.

And Amanda would’ve known this already, so again Will had to wonder what she was angling for.

‘Deputy Director,’ Goldfinger began. ‘We would just ask that you do all you can to speed things along.’ He held up his finger. ‘Not speed, of course, because that would imply rushing. I would just say that you could please handle this expeditiously.’

She nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll do what I can. But I can’t have my people cleared out by Saturday. There are simply not enough hours in the day.’

Dr No asked, ‘Is there anything we can do to help expedite the process?’

Will felt an invisible zap come off Amanda. Dr No’s question was exactly what she had been waiting for.

‘I wonder if—’ She stopped herself. ‘No, never mind. We’ll do all we can.’ She started to stand. ‘Thank you for your time.’

‘Please.’ Goldfinger motioned for her to sit. ‘What can we do?’

She sat back down. She gave a heavy sigh. ‘I’m afraid it all comes back to Marcus Rippy.’

‘Fuck no!’ Kilpatrick had jumped to attention. ‘You’re not talking to Marcus. No fucking way, no fucking how.’

Amanda spoke to Goldfinger. ‘Look at this from my perspective. I have a highly decorated, much respected ex-police detective found murdered inside a building that is under construction. In the course of a normal investigation, the first thing I would do is talk to the building owner to eliminate him or her as a suspect and to generate a list of people who would have access to the building.’

‘I can give you a fucking list,’ Kilpatrick sputtered. ‘You don’t need to talk to Marcus.’

‘I’m afraid I do.’ She held out her hands in a helpless shrug. ‘I just need a few moments of his time, and a promise that he’ll have an open and honest conversation with us. It would go a long way toward repairing his reputation if he was shown to be helping a police investigation. On the record.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me? On the record?’ Kilpatrick had jumped to his feet. He told Goldfinger, ‘You can get five to ten years in this state for lying to a cop.’

Amanda asked, ‘What is your client planning to lie about?’

Kilpatrick ignored her, telling Goldfinger, ‘This fucking spider is trying to trap Marcus into saying something that—’

‘Kip,’ Dr No said, and Kilpatrick’s mouth shut like a trout.

Goldfinger told Amanda, ‘Deputy Director, perhaps you and I could speak in private?’

The three other lawyers stood in unison.

Amanda touched Will’s arm, releasing him. He headed toward the door.

Kilpatrick threw his hands into the air. ‘This is bullshit, man. Bullshit!’ The trio of lawyers had already dispersed. Will watched Kilpatrick from the hallway. He said ‘bullshit’ two more times before leaving the room. He tried to slam the glass door behind him, but it was on a pneumatic closer.

Like magic, Laslo appeared at Will’s elbow. Kilpatrick jabbed his finger at both of them, red-faced, furious. ‘Walk this peckerhead to the lobby, then come back to my office. Pronto.’ Kilpatrick punched the wall. The Sheetrock flexed but didn’t puncture. He kicked it to the same effect before stalking away.

‘Hey, peckerhead.’ Laslo indicated the long walk back to the lobby. ‘This way.’

‘Laslo.’ Will looked over the guy’s head, taking advantage of the half-foot difference. He wasn’t going to leave without Amanda, and something about the thug had rubbed him the wrong way. ‘You gotta last name?’

‘Yeah, it’s Go Fuck Yourself. Now start moving.’

‘Laslo Go Fuck Yourself.’ Will didn’t move. ‘You gotta card?’

‘I got my size ten up your ass if you don’t get movin’, buddy.’

Will forced a chuckle. He put his hands in his pockets like he had all day.

‘What the fuck are you laughin’ at?’

Will couldn’t tame the thing inside of him that wanted to piss this guy off. He thought about the old lady from the lobby, the way her bottom lip had trembled. Was that because of Laslo? Kip Kilpatrick? Will felt instinctively that something was there.

He told Laslo, ‘Mrs Lindsay warned me you’re a pistol.’

Laslo’s expression darkened, which meant Will had hit a nerve. Will wondered what the guy’s rap sheet looked like back in Boston. He imagined there was some weight to it. He had prison ink on the side of his neck and the look of a man who could take a beating and still win the fight.

Laslo warned, ‘You stay away from the old lady or I will fuck you up.’

‘You’d better bring a ladder.’

‘Don’t think ’cause you’re a cop I won’t take you down.’ Laslo put his hands on his hips, which Will thought was only appropriate for a man if he was standing on the sidelines at a game. Laslo’s tight shirt gaped open. The material was stretched so thin that he could’ve saved his dry-cleaning bill and painted it on. He glared at Will, asking, ‘What’re you lookin’ at, faggot?’

‘That’s a nice shirt. Does it come in adult sizes?’

The conference room door opened.

‘Thank you so much,’ Amanda called to Goldfinger. She smiled at Will, triumph putting a twinkle in her eyes. Marcus Rippy was important, but not as important as a two-point-eight-billion-dollar deal that everyone wanted a piece of.

Amanda asked Will, ‘Ready?’

Laslo jabbed his thumb down the hall. ‘This way.’

‘Thank you, Mr Zivcovik.’ Amanda took the lead toward the lobby. She asked Laslo, ‘Did you manage to find the phone number for Ms Polaski?’

He didn’t look away from Will as he passed her a piece of folded notepaper.

Amanda glanced at the number, then handed it to Will.

It was for the same disconnected line that was on everything.

Laslo yanked open the lobby door. ‘Anything else I can do for y’alls?’ He put on a hick accent that, layered on top of his Boston accent, made him sound like he was recovering from a stroke.

Amanda said, ‘Young man, surely you’ve lived down here long enough to know that y’all is a second-person-plural pronoun.’

The comment was meant to be the last, but Will had a question for Laslo. ‘Did you know Angie?’

‘Polaski?’ A toothy grin spread across his round face. ‘Sure, I knew her.’ He gave Will a knowing wink. ‘She had a cunt like a boa constrictor.’

‘Had?’ Amanda asked.

He slammed the door in their faces.

Faith sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair across from the nurses’ station inside the Grady Hospital ICU. There were armed guards at either end of the hall. The ward was full. Grady was Atlanta’s only public hospital, a level one trauma center that saw most of the bad cases the city had to offer. At any given time, at least a quarter of the patients were handcuffed to their beds.

She glanced up at the whiteboard behind the desk. Olivia, the head nurse, was updating the status of one of the patients. Grady admitted a lot of Jane Does, but Faith only cared about her potential witness, Jane Doe 2. She was still marked critical. The junkie’s surgery had taken four hours longer than planned. They’d had to rebuild her nose and throat. So much blood had been replaced that they’d basically put her into rapid detox from the coke. And now she was pumped full of morphine. She would be out of it for at least another hour, minimum.

At least Faith hadn’t let her time go to waste. She had tackled Dale Harding’s financial documents and phone records. Not that the task got her anywhere closer to a solution, let alone a clue to follow. Harding’s phone calls were all for pizza or Chinese delivery, so he must have used a burner phone for business. As for his bank records, it didn’t take a forensic accountant to understand the figures. Harding kept less than one hundred dollars in his checking account, a number that hadn’t fluctuated much over the last six months, because he had used a gold MasterCard to charge everything, from his gorditas at Taco Bell to the support hose that kept the circulation going in his legs. The cumulative balance on the card for the last six months was forty-six thousand and change. Harding had stopped making payments on the bill. Faith assumed this was by design. He’d stopped dialysis, basically signing his own death warrant. He’d obviously planned to screw as many people as he could on his way out.

The question was, had one of those people been Delilah Palmer? Faith couldn’t stop thinking about the porn photos, the dead look in the girl’s eyes. Even back to ten years old, Delilah seemed to show the resignation that it was her fate to be used by every man who crossed her path. Not just any man, but Dale Harding. A cop. A father. The one person she should have been able to trust, and he kept nasty photos of her in his attic and married her because—why?

Delilah had to be the key to both Harding’s and Angie’s murders. Faith didn’t buy Collier’s feminist theory that the girl was behind their deaths. Harding had always taken care of Delilah. She would have known that he didn’t have much time left. Why
kill the guy when she could just wait a few days and dance on his grave?

Faith could think of a lot of people who would want Angie Polaski dead, so she kept the focus on Dale Harding. He was a gambler. He took risks. He had likely taken a final risk before his death, something with a big payout, which meant that Delilah, his legal wife, would be the beneficiary. Unless there was something illegal about the payout. That made more sense. And it also explained why Delilah’s life would be in jeopardy.

And Faith had put that imbecile Collier in charge of finding her.

She scrolled through the sixteen different texts Collier had sent her since she’d left him at the Mesa Arms. If he was overtalkative in person, he was a freaking bible in the printed word. He peppered his texts with so much useless information about the weather, the songs on the radio and his dietary habits that Faith felt the need to distill the information into bullet points before her head exploded.

She reached into her cargo pants pocket and found her spiral notebook and pen. She flipped to a fresh page. At the top, she wrote four headers: P
ALMER
, H
ARDING
, P
OLASKI
, R
IPPY
.

She tapped her pen on the blank columns underneath the names. Connections. That’s what she needed to see. Delilah was married to Dale Harding, possibly his daughter. Harding worked for Rippy. According to the briefing Faith had gotten from Amanda, Angie worked for Kip Kilpatrick, which meant she really worked for Rippy.

Faith tapped the pen again. Angie probably knew Harding from way back. Bad cops stuck together. They told themselves
they were outsiders because they were the only ones who could get the job done, but the truth was that good cops wanted nothing to do with them.

Faith turned to the next page and wrote
QUESTIONS
at the top.

1. Why did Angie and Harding meet at Rippy’s club?
   
2. What does Delilah know?
   
3. Who would want to kill Harding?
   
4. Who would want to kill Angie?