Too Close to Home (30 page)

THIRTY-FIVE

O
NCE WE WERE OUT in the parking lot, I grabbed Ellen by the arm and forced her to look at me. “What the fuck just happened in there?”

Darkness had fallen in the time we’d been in the police station, but I could see, by the glow of the parking lot lights, the tears on Ellen’s cheeks. She was struggling to free herself from my grip. “Leave me alone!”

“The fuck I will! You let that guy walk! He and his buddy nearly took off my fucking fingers! They probably were going to kill us!”

“Stop it!”

“You have any idea who that was?” I couldn’t stop myself from shouting. “I do. My guess is that was Lester Tiffin. And you know who the fuck Lester Tiffin is? He’s related to Illeana. A brother, maybe. A hood from New York. She didn’t exactly come from the best of families before she landed in Hollywood and finally ended up with your Conrad.”

“Don’t call him that. He’s not
my
Conrad.”

“Who called tonight when I was taking a shower? Illeana? Conrad?”

“It was a mistake!” Ellen shouted. “The whole thing was a mistake!”

“What?” I said. “What was a mistake?”

“Them coming to the house. Coming for the disc. It was all a stupid mistake.”

“Is that what you call it? When someone tapes your hand to a hedge trimmer? A fucking boo-boo?”

“You okay over there?” It was a cop, approaching us across the tarmac. “Ma’am, are you all right?”

I released my grip, dropped my arm to my side.

“It’s okay,” Ellen said. “Everything’s okay, Officer.”

He stood there a moment, making sure, then turned and walked over to a patrol car.

“I want to know what the hell’s going on,” I said.

“It was him,” she said quietly.

“In there? In that lineup? That was the guy? You recognized him?”

“At least his arm. And it sure sounded like him.”

“You know he’s going to get away with this. What he did to us. You can sleep at night knowing he’s walking around free?”

“He won’t bother us again,” Ellen said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s good to know. I’ll sleep soundly tonight.” I shook my head in disgust. “Ellen, don’t you get it? Those two, the one Drew killed, and that guy you just let walk, there’s every reason to believe they killed the Langleys.”

“No,” she said. “I’m sure they didn’t.”

“You’re
sure
?”

“I mean, I’m pretty sure,” she said, sniffing. “I need a tissue,” she said.

I found an unused one in my pocket and handed it to her. We stood there a moment, not talking, while Ellen blew her nose, dabbed the tears from around her eyes.

“Conrad phoned,” she said. “It was Illeana’s idea. She didn’t know I’d given Conrad the disc. She called her brother, Lester—”

“Get in the car,” I said.

“What?”

“Get in the goddamn car.”

She did as she was told. I got behind the wheel of the Mazda and sped out of the lot, the tires squealing as I rounded the corner and headed in the direction of Thackeray College.

The president lived in a grand house that always put me in mind of Wayne Manor of
Batman
fame. Maybe not quite as big, but imposing. The kind of house that said,
I live here and you don’t.

I drove up the semicircular driveway so quickly I nearly swerved onto the well-manicured lawn. I hit the brakes at the front-door steps. Ellen threw her hands forward toward the dashboard. We hadn’t said a word on the drive over. Ellen knew where we had to be going, and she must have realized there was little she could say to get me to change my mind.

I was prepared to drag her out of the car, but she had her door open before I got around to her side and was mounting the steps alongside me. Before I could bang on the door or storm right in, Conrad-style, it opened.

The man stood there before us.

“Illeana and I have been expecting you,” he said. “Please, come in.”

All the way over, I’d been picturing myself bursting in, guns ablazin’, but his manner threw me off my game. So Ellen and I went through the door and were led into the expansive living room.

Illeana was standing there, and she looked shaken. Her eyes were bloodshot, her usually perfect hair unkempt, and there was a large glass of what appeared to be scotch in her hand.

“Ellen, Jim,” she said. But she didn’t approach. She was frightened. Of us, or Conrad, or both.

“Her brother’s lawyer just phoned,” Conrad said. “Lester’s being released.” Looking at Ellen, he said, “Thank you very much.”

Ellen said nothing.

Then Conrad turned to his wife and said, “Tell them.”

“Conrad, wouldn’t it be better if you told them what—”

Then, suddenly booming like thunder, Conrad shouted, “Tell them! Tell them what you did, you stupid cunt!”

If I hadn’t been paying attention before, I was now.

Illeana, the ice in her drink clinking from her trembling, said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just . . . I was just trying to protect my husband.”

Ellen and I waited. Ellen, I suspected, already knew the basic story.

“When I heard you arguing,” she said to me, “with Conrad, when we came out to your place, about this disc, I couldn’t stop worrying about it. I wondered what was on it, whether there was any truth to the fact that it was Conrad’s book. No matter how his book got on that disc, I thought it might damage him, especially with his new book coming out and—”

“Get to it,” Conrad said.

“And then I came out to see you, to ask you for it, this disc, and you refused to give it to me. So then I decided to find another way to get it back.” She looked away a moment, took a drink of her scotch. “I need to sit down,” she said, and deposited herself into one of half a dozen overstuffed, velvety chairs that dotted the room. “I called my brother. He . . . he knows, and has friends who know, how to handle things like this. He said he and his friend Mortie could come up from New York and get the disc from you.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“They weren’t supposed to hurt you,” she said. “They were just supposed to scare you. He said if anyone could get you to tell them where the disc was, it was Mortie.”

I said, holding up the fingers of my right hand, “If my wife hadn’t pulled the plug in time, I wouldn’t have any of these.”

Illeana said, “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry?” I said.

“She didn’t know,” Conrad said. “She didn’t know that Ellen had given me the disc earlier in the day. She’d gotten it back from your lawyer.”

“Conrad had no idea I was doing this,” Illeana said. “Not until that detective, Mr. Duckworth, not until he came out here and asked about my brother, that he was known to hang out with Mortie DeLuca, the one your friend killed in your garage.” Another tear ran down her cheek. “Oh my God, I never dreamed someone would end up dead because of this.”

I must have looked stupefied. I know that was pretty much how I felt. “So what, we’re supposed to forget all about this? Because why? Because we’re all such good friends? Because my wife works for you?” I looked at Conrad. “You put in a call to her, tell her not to identify the suspect, Illeana’s fucking brother goes free?”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Conrad said.

“Fuck this,” I said. “I’m telling Barry all about this. Everything.” I pointed a finger at Illeana. “You got that guy killed. Not that he’s any fucking loss. But it was you, when you decided to bring your brother into this, when you decided to stick your nose in, that’s when you got that guy killed.”

“Please, Jim,” Ellen said. “Let Conrad explain about—”

I waved Ellen off. I wasn’t done with Conrad and Illeana. “And I guess you’d have me believe that this has nothing to do with the Langleys.”

“It doesn’t,” Illeana said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with them, I swear.”

“Really? Then how do you explain the gun? The gun they found by your brother’s car, the one he dropped getting back in when he was being chased by Drew?”

Illeana, red-eyed, glanced at her husband and back at me. “I didn’t know anything about a gun.”

“It must have already been there,” Conrad said.

“No,” I said. “The property had been searched before.”

“That’s not possible,” Illeana said. “Lester, he couldn’t have had anything to do with that. Nothing. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe the person who killed the Langleys sold him that gun, or gave it to him.”

I stared at her. “And who might that have been, Illeana? Would that have been you? Did you know all about this other book, the one on Brett Stockwell’s computer, from earlier on? Was it you who wanted to get that computer out of the Langley house before it incriminated your husband?”

“No, that’s impossible,” Conrad said. “Albert had called me about it earlier that day. I picked it up. It wasn’t in their house that night, when they were killed.”

“This is all horseshit,” I said. “But I don’t need to sort it all out. Barry can do that.”

“Jim,” Conrad said, taking a step toward me, trying to sound reasonable, almost kindly, “I understand that you want to bring the police into this. If I were you, I’d want to call Barry, tell him everything, make sure that Illeana’s brother is brought to justice, punished for what he and his friend did to you and Ellen.”

I waited.

“Illeana,” he said, and glanced contemptuously at his wife, “has done a lot to try to distance herself from her past, from the kinds of people she grew up with, from her own family, many of whom are not what you might call upstanding cit—”

“Hey,” she started to object.

“Shut up!” he bellowed again, his face suddenly flushing. He took a moment and continued. “But sometimes she can’t stop herself, and she calls on those people when she gets in a jam, as she did this week.”

“I don’t know what this—”

Conrad cut me off. “Hear me out, Jim. I know you won’t believe this, but I’m telling this to you as a friend. Because I care about you and Ellen.”

I bit my tongue.

“The people behind Mortie and Lester, these are not good people. They’re not . . . rational people. They’re not very happy about what happened to Mortie. They’re not very happy with your new friend Drew. And they weren’t very happy to think that Ellen here might have identified Illeana’s brother in that lineup tonight. But their unhappiness has been mitigated by Ellen’s failure to do so.”

Ellen said, “I would have told you this if you’d given me a chance.”

Conrad looked down at the floor briefly, as though shamed by what he was having to tell me. “It was made very clear to me and Illeana that we should pass on to you the message that if you didn’t let this drop, right now, they couldn’t guarantee your safety.”

“What?” I said, feeling the hackles rise. “They’re threatening us? Trying to intimidate us, to keep our mouths shut?”

Conrad nodded. “Yes.”

“Well, for fuck’s sake, if that’s what they think—”

“Jim,” Conrad said, keeping his voice very even, “I don’t like this any better than you do, but you don’t understand these people like I do. I need to lay this out for you. If you go ahead with this, you have to know the risks you’re taking. On behalf of yourself, and others. Drew, certainly. He killed one of their family. And Ellen. And Derek. Pursue this, you’re turning them all into targets.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Let it go, and they’ll call it even.”

I looked at Illeana. “Who are you?”

She didn’t say anything, but there was something in her eyes. While I’d seen moments where Conrad’s anger had frightened her, there was also this look that said,
Don’t mess with me, don’t mess with my people.

Conrad said, “While Mortie did die, and they might normally want some retribution for that, they also appreciate the gravity of the situation you were in. They’re also mindful of the bad judgment Illeana exercised. They would be grateful to see this all end here.”

“Grateful,” I said.

Ellen reached out and touched my arm. “We’re dropping this. We’ve been through enough. I know how wrong it seems to you, to let Illeana’s brother get away with this, but we have to do it. For ourselves. For Drew. But most of all, for Derek. If something happened to him, I could never forgive myself.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked. “On the way to the lineup?”

“I was afraid you’d try to talk me out of it, or that you’d tell Barry. That your pride, your fucking sense of justice, would get in the way of common sense. I don’t like keeping quiet about this any more than you do, but I’ll do it if it makes us safe. Because it’s over. This thing with the disc and trying to get it back, it’s all over.”

Nobody said anything for a minute or so. I suddenly felt very tired. I walked across the room and rested my arm on the fireplace mantel, steadying myself. I stood there a moment, looking at the cold ashes in the fireplace, still there from last winter.

“Fine,” I said.

Ellen came over and put a hand on my back. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” Conrad said. “Thank you.” He took a step toward me and said, “Really, Jim, thank you.” He cleared his throat. “I wonder if I might have a moment to speak with you, privately.”

“Huh?”

“Come with me, to my study,” he said.

I followed him down a carpeted hallway and into his sanctuary, a room lined with bookshelves and dominated by a large oak desk in the center that was stacked with papers, a computer off to one side.

He grabbed one of the two leather chairs that faced the desk, indicated for me to take the other one. I sat down.

“Again, thank you,” he said. “The fact is, there could have been other repercussions had Ellen identified Lester. Not as serious as those I intimated, but damaging just the same.”

For a second, I don’t know why, the note he’d written to my wife, the one I’d found in her purse, came into my head, and I saw a flash of my wife’s thighs wrapped around his head.

“There are things you don’t understand,” Conrad Chase said. “Things that could have an impact on you, and Ellen, if everything comes out.”

“What do you mean, if everything comes out?”

He cleared his throat, looked down at his pants, picked off a piece of lint, and let it fall to the carpet.