What You Don't Know, page 23
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Jenny Valentine: Blair had a tremendous, tremendous amount of guilt where her sister was concerned. I think if you asked her straight out, she’d deny it. I think if you got a few glasses of wine in her, she’d admit that on some level, she felt like she’d stolen her sister’s life.
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Neely Smith: And Bridget milked Blair’s guilt for every dime she could.
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Skye Stafford: About a year prior, Blair gave her sister fifty thousand dollars, claiming she needed a brand new car along with some back rent she owed. Understandably, Malcolm was livid.
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Isabelle Ryan: To him, Bridget was a cancer that needed to be cut out. He said if Blair gave Bridget one more dime, the marriage was over. He was leaving.
* * *
Elena York: Malcolm actually called Bridget and told her she was cut off, that she wasn’t getting another cent from them. Blair was furious he’d called her sister. Incensed.
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Isabelle Ryan: However, Blair complied. For a time.
* * *
Elena York: And then, Blair did something that tipped all of the dominoes over.
Phone Conversation
4:30 p.m., Friday, March 31
Call between Blair and Malcolm Gilbert. Malcolm Gilbert is MG; Blair Gilbert is BG
* * *
MG: Blair … I just got a notification that you transferred twenty thousand dollars to Bridget this morning?
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BG: What do you want me to do Malcolm Gilbert? Huh? She’s my sister—
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MG: Blair, you have given—
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BG: Loaned—
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MG: A loan? Did you say a loan? What loan? Huh? What loan? Blair, you’ve probably given her millions of dollars over the years. Hell, more. And I don’t remember being paid back five dollars, five cents, not even a penny—
* * *
BG: Well, what about that money you gave Willie two years ago for his back taxes? Huh? What about that?
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MG: First of all, I talked to you about it before I did anything, and you said, yeah, you should absolutely help him out. Second of all, he didn’t come begging to me with his hand out. Third, he paid me back—with interest.
* * *
BG: Well … I was going to tell you. I just didn’t get a chance to. She needed it.
* * *
MG: Blair. Blair! Do I have to remind you of how much she has shit on you over the years?
* * *
BG: Look, she was in a bad place—
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MG: When is she not in a bad place? That’s every day! Every damn day of that girl’s life is a bad place.
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BG: What do you want me to do? Make her give it back?
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MG: Hell, yeah, I want you to make her give it back! And don’t give her anymore after that, either.
* * *
BG: Have you lost your mind, Malcolm Gilbert?
* * *
MG: Have you?
* * *
BG: (Sniffs). Well, it’s already done, so there isn’t anything I can do about it.
* * *
MG: Blair. Do you remember what I said last year when you gave her fifty thousand?
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BG: Mal—
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MG: Do you remember what I said last year after you gave her fifty thousand?
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BG: Leave me? (Scoffs). Please.
* * *
MG: Blair, when you do shit like this, I can’t trust you. And when a husband can’t trust his wife, that’s not a marriage.
* * *
BG: Mal—
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MG: All right, Blair. All right. I’m giving you one more chance. One more chance. Now listen, because I’m only going to say this once. If that money isn’t back in our account by nine a.m. on Monday, I will walk out and I won’t be coming back.
* * *
BG: Oh, boo hoo. Please. I’ll believe it when I see it.
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MG: I walked out on you before, Blair. I can do it again.
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BG: You came back.
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MG: For Farrah. I came back for Farrah that time. She’s grown now. What’s gonna make me come back this time?
* * *
BG: Fuck you.
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MG: And who’s going to defend your sister when I sue her?
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BG: (Gasps). What did you say?
* * *
MG: Don’t pretend like you didn’t hear me. If that money is not back in the bank by nine a.m. on Monday, two things are gonna happen. One, I will walk out that door, and I won’t be back. Two, I will be on the phone with Larry two minutes after nine, telling him to get ready to serve Bridget, because I will sue her for every goddamn penny that hasn’t been paid back. I will jack her up. She won’t be able to buy a toothpick when I’m done. Oh, and Blair? I know about all the little five hundred here, a thousand there. I know you sign over your royalty checks to her, thinking I wouldn’t know about it. I know about all of it.
* * *
BG: You can’t do that—
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MG: Can’t do what? Walk out? Divorce you? Sue Bridget? Blair, I will happily do all three.
* * *
BG: Are you threatening me? Huh? Is that—You better back that truck up—
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MG: No, Blair, you’d better back that truck up. No, Blair, this is it. This is it. I’m not doing this anymore. You better get your priorities together.
* * *
BG: You—
* * *
MG: Enough, Blair. Enough. Enough. Do yourself a favor and stop talking
(Line disconnects).
Boom
Lieutenant Dimitri Cora: Saturday morning, Blair Gilbert gets a phone call.
* * *
Detective Andrea Chang: Bridget and Blair’s calls—the sisters talked practically every day. These calls would last anywhere from fifteen minutes to over an hour. The calls almost never deviated from that pattern.
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Lieutenant Sharon Donahue: One week before, Bridget called Blair and asked her for twenty thousand dollars, claiming she needed it for a medical bill she forgot about. Some cosmetic procedure that she’d had and now owed money on.
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Detective Andrea Chang: Bridget’s pattern of calls to her sister in the week leading up to the home invasion became more frequent, even for her. The volume of calls doubled from on average, five times a day to up to ten, fifteen or more a day. She was hounding her for money.
* * *
Lieutenant Sharon Donahue: On Friday morning after her Pilates class, Blair wired twenty thousand dollars to her sister.
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Lieutenant Dimitri Cora: Bridget calls her sister at ten thirty Saturday morning. That call lasted forty-five seconds.
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Detective Andrea Chang: They never had calls that short. Ever.
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Lieutenant Sharon Donahue: When we ran a dump of the cell phone tower near the Gilberts’ house, there was a call to Terrell Winters’ burner phone from another burner phone. That call came into his phone just seconds after the call between Blair and Bridget. Terrell attempted to reach that number throughout the day on Saturday and a few times on Sunday.
* * *
Detective Andrea Chang: A day never went by without Bridget calling her sister. Suddenly, there’s not a peep out of Bridget. After that less-than-a-minute call on Saturday morning, Bridget goes silent. Dead silent.
* * *
Lieutenant Dimitri Cora: The area code for that burner phone originated from Long Island City, where Bridget Johnson lived. We called the phone number and discovered it had been purchased at a bodega near Bridget’s apartment. In a pure stroke of luck, they had CCTV from the day it was purchased and we saw a man by the name of Jamar Norris making the transaction.
* * *
Lieutenant Sharon Donahue: We ran down some more of our phone number profiles and learned that Jamar Norris’s cousin is Bridget Johnson’s neighbor.
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Detective Andrea Chang: Basically, Bridget called Blair Saturday morning to verify she was home, before immediately getting on her burner phone to essentially wave the red flag in Terrell’s direction, to execute this horrific plot against her sister.
* * *
Lieutenant Dimitri Cora: Blair never knew what was coming.
PART 3
* * *
Monday, April 3
Highland Park, Illinois
The Residence
of
Malcolm and Blair Gilbert
5:30 a.m.
Farrah woke up slowly, in stages.
First, she was aware of soft snoring.
The groans and strains of the house.
The lingering stink of her mother being sick. Her own BO from not having showered since Friday morning. Tree’s sweat and slobber still smeared across her skin. Amazement that any scent managed to find its way through the broken corridors of her nose.
Murmurs. Murmurs? Voices. Those voices didn’t sound anything like those voices.
The TV. The voices came from the TV. They’d fallen asleep, the TV spitting out yet another movie.
Then the stabbing jolts of a tortured body, stiff and twisted.
The persistent throb of her lips. Her face. Her nose.
The tip of her tongue pushed against her tooth, or what used to be her tooth, now a pulsing, salty black hole, kept company on one side by a jagged edge.
Farrah allowed her eyes to drift open. She blinked several times to adjust to the blinding light of the TV, to search for shapes, familiar and strange, to attempt to get it together, figure out how many hours of misery were left.
They were in the basement. Had been there all day Sunday. Tied up. Gagged sometimes. Gag-free other times. Undone three times to use the bathroom. Undone three times to serve the monster’s insatiable appetite. Just for food, thank goodness. He seemed to have quelled his other craving Saturday night—Saturday night?—losing interest almost as soon as he took it. Conquest, one and done. Or two and done was probably a better way to put it.
BO Boy was curled onto the floor. The monster was splayed out on the couch, his mouth wide, his eyes closed, his mouth ajar. His bitch was huddled into the recesses of the chaise.
Her mother was slumped next to her, her head lolling from side to side. Muffled wheezes escaped her nose.
Her father. Farrah scanned the space next to her mother, expecting to see his bulk propped up against the wall, thinking she would see the whites of his eyes, the insomnia that had plagued him her whole life, keeping him involuntarily on watch.
Her father.
Gone.
Her father was gone.
The mounds of duct tape that had bound his feet and hands lay in shards on the floor.
She swept her eyes across the room one more time, panic sluicing through the chambers of her heart. She made a mental imprint of every sight, every sound, every piece of furniture.
Nowhere.
Missing.
Gone.
Dead?
“Oh, God,” she whispered to herself as she swiveled around, her eyes still searching.
They’d killed him. Killed him while she and her mom were passed out asleep, not knowing, not able to protest, not able to try to stop it. Hadn’t heard him scream, hadn’t heard the—what?—Gun shot? Stabbing? Beating?
Farrah nudged her mother. “Mom.” She cringed at the foreign lisp, the congestion.
Nothing.
She tried again. “Mom,” her whisper louder now, more persistent. “Wake up. Please, wake up.”
Farrah prodded Blair repeatedly until her mother finally jolted awake, disoriented, her head whipping around like a flag in the wind, her eyes wild with terror.
“What’s happening?” Blair mumbled, still disoriented.
“Daddy’s gone,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Daddy. He’s not here. He’s gone.” Farrah paused, tears pooling in her eyes. “I think they killed him.”
“What? No, no, baby, we would have heard something.”
“Then where is he?”
Her mother’s eyes fell onto the piles of tape that had restrained her father. “He escaped. Somehow, he escaped, which means this is almost over. It’s like I told you, Daddy always has a plan.” She nodded, her head falling back against the wall. “All we have to do it wait. Daddy is fixing everything.”
Farrah nodded reluctantly, terror and uncertainty still racing through her. Her mother inched closer, her fingertips grazing her own. She grasped at them, grateful, for a few seconds anyway, to feel her mother’s touch. Farrah kept her ear cocked for any signs of life upstairs. The creak of a floorboard, the soft padding of a foot.
There was none.
Tree grunted from across the room as he rolled over. He flashed a look at Farrah and Blair, about to fall back asleep when he jolted upright and jumped up, stumbling over to them, seething, as he dropped to the floor, his hands running over the carpet, clutching at the tufts, as though he could conjure up Malcolm by touch.
“Where the fuck is he? Huh? Huh?”
Her mother shook her head. “I don’t know. We have no idea where he is.” Her voice was trembling, like it was on the verge of collapse.
He straddled Blair, his fists pummeling her face.
“Where is he?” Tree said as he continued to rain blows down on Blair’s head. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know!” Her mother was screaming, choking, gasping.
Farrah swung around as best she could with her restraints, delivering a kick to his leg with her bound feet. He punched her in her eye, knocking her back.
“You want to lose another tooth? Huh? Huh?” He looked over at his two minions once more. “D. Dio! Wake the hell up!”
Dio didn’t stir, prompting Tree to hobble over to him and kick him in the leg several times with his good foot, which caused Dio to jerk awake, his limbs flailing like a marionette tossed into the toy box.
“What’s wrong?”
“Ol’ Boy ain’t here,” Tree said as he hobbled over to his girlfriend and shook her by the shoulders. “Cookie. Yo, Cookie! Wake the fuck up.”
Cookie opened her eyes and stared, not moving from her perch, not struggling to wake from a deep slumber.
“What?” Her voice was calm. Cold.
“Get up. We got to find Mally Mal. He escaped.”
“No.” She shook her head, still looking up at Tree.
Tree stared at her, his eyes wide, almost as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What you mean, ‘no’?”
“Let him go, T,” she said, her voice shaking. “Let everybody go.”
Tree wrenched her up from the chaise, causing her to yelp. Farrah exchanged a worried glance with her mother.
“What you say?” Tree asked.
“I can’t do this.” She sobbed, shaking her head. “I can’t do this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You said we was supposed to come up here and get some money—”
“Bitch, if I tell you get up and help me look, you get up and help me look.” Tree pulled a kicking Cookie toward the staircase as Dio’s head swiveled between them and Farrah and Blair, seemingly unsure of what to do.
Cookie’s tiny fists beat helplessly against Tree’s chest as he attempted to clamp her hands down and drag her upstairs all at once.
“D, what the hell you doing?” He looked at his minion. “Help me!”
Dio sprang into action at the directive, leaping over to help Tree subdue a now hysterical Cookie.
“I’m through!” she shrieked, her arms and feet flailing against both men. “I’m not doing this no more. I want to go home. I just want to go home.” Wails wracked her body.
By now, the two men had wrestled a screaming Cookie to the ground. “You ain’t going nowhere,” Tree said, still struggling to pin her arms to the ground. Dio held her feet as she continued to kick and strain against them both. “You gonna do what I tell you to do, or I’m gonna beat your ass like you ain’t never been beat before.”
“I just wanna go home. Please, just let me go home,” she cried. “I don’t want to do this anymore, Tree, please, I just want to go home.”
“You ain’t going nowhere, you hear me? Not until I say you can leave. And we ain’t leaving. Not until I get my money.”
