She stood up again. If looks could kill, yours truly would be ashes in an urn right now. But I glared right back at her. I had to give her credit. She stayed strong. She didn’t break down under my assault. She did sit herself back onto the sofa.

  “But I guess that’s not important now. Your husband had ruined Christopher. And you’d done nothing to stop it. You stood by while he abused your son and violated your daughter. And you used the roses, the instruments by which he further humiliated her, rubbed her nose in it, to somehow send a signal to the woman she loved before your hired hand shot her.”

  She sat there like a stone-cold statue, giving me nothing.

  “By sending twenty roses to Sarah, you reveal that you knew what each of the nineteen previous deliveries meant. You are complicit in your daughter’s sexual assault. You are guilty of so much more than attempted murder. You are beneath—”

  “Stop,” she shouted. Her hands gripped the couch, grasping for purchase. “My husband was a flawed individual. He had weaknesses. I won’t deny it. But Rachel was not the innocent that she claims to be. She was precocious. She used her charms with her father, always getting what she wanted. I don’t know what went on between them. Not really. And yes, he had a temper. He sometimes was too harsh with Christopher…” a hitch in her voice, but she caught it, steeled herself, continued, “with me. That’s why I sent him away. I did act.”

  “She was nine years old for crissakes. Nine!”

  She sighed and shook her head dismissively as if I didn’t understand the wily ways of nine-year-old girls.

  I thought I’d heard just about every kind of rationalization of the worst kinds of crimes. But this took self-justification to a whole new level.

  “But that doesn’t mean I stopped loving my husband. I visited him. Every few weeks, we met. Here and there. He loved me, in his own way. But I couldn’t let our family business, the business my father built, sacrificing so much, time with his family, his health. I wouldn’t let our name be besmirched with the tawdry, the vile secrets of a weak man and my children. I certainly wasn’t going to let any low-class shrew ruin our reputation, built over generations. Ms. Swan stuck her nose where it didn’t belong…” She stopped herself, studying me, perhaps wondering if I was wearing a wire.

  “You have to be kidding me,” I said.

  “Make light of it. Someone like you has no sense of pride in something greater than yourself. An institution, a business worth preserving. A respected family name. I wasn’t going to let it, us, be drawn through the mud. The jokes and disparagements of shallow people like you.”

  I was astonished. I don’t what I expected from her that day, but what I got was much worse than anything I’d imagined. I sat there trying to absorb all this new information, and suddenly, I had a flash of understanding.

  “Speed never met your husband. He never talked to him directly, did he?”

  She just looked at me.

  “You said you continued to meet with your husband. Talk with him. You never told Rachel and Christopher. Maybe you felt you were protecting them or maybe you were afraid they’d wouldn’t understand the depth of your betrayal as their mother.” I paused, still thinking, putting together my theory as I talked. “So Speed kept contacting you. Maybe you were smart enough not to give him your unlisted number. Maybe he showed up unexpectedly at your house. He wanted more money. He realized you’d gotten off cheap. You were angry because he’d failed to kill Sarah. Both of you were pissed off, but you realized that he was a risk. His drug use was getting worse, his state of mind deteriorating. You didn’t know what he’d say to whom. So you told your husband who sent Waldo to see Felicia. Is that about right?”

  She didn’t give me a thing.

  Stone. Cold. Statue.

  “Maybe you don’t even know, but you didn’t kill Speed. He overdosed all by himself. Although Waldo may have hastened the end with his lame attempt.”

  She looked like she wanted to ask a question but remained silent. I wasn’t going to tell her anymore anyway. I believed that what I had just recounted was as close to the truth as I was going to get. It made sense and explained William’s outburst in the Chairman’s suite.

  Suddenly, she blurted out, “I didn’t send roses to Sarah. It was Christopher. Trying to get back at his sister for abandoning him.”

  I didn’t know whether she was telling the truth, but guessed she was. Why would she bother to deny it? Why would this stick in her craw, among all the other despicable acts she’d committed? Christopher had been desperate, falling apart, he may have lashed out in desperation, trying to impress on Rachel what she’d done to him by hooking up with Sarah.

  In any event, I was tired of it. Tired of her. I wanted her gone. I never wanted to see her again. I was worried about Frankie and Alexandra and Fogerty’s threats. But even as we spoke here, I knew he was about to be neutralized.

  “I can’t listen to you anymore, Mrs. W. But I have just one more question. Why did you hire me in the first place?” I thought I knew the answer but wanted to hear it from the snake’s tongue.

  She looked at me. She shook her head. She sighed. She closed her eyes and mumbled, “The worst decision I ever made…” Her voice trailed off in what sounded to me like despair.

  Made my day.

  “It was your alibi, right? Why would you try and murder the person that you hired an investigator to investigate? Your try at a sleight of hand, a shell game. Look here, not there.”

  She remained silent.

  I shrugged.

  She changed topics. “What are you going to do with your silly notes there? Your ridiculous evidence? Are you going to tell your fantasy tale to the police? To Detective Marley. Go right ahead. There isn’t a shred of credible—”

  “What do you think led me to connect you and Speed?” I said.

  Her body went rigid, her face drained of color. She hadn’t forgotten that I was in her bedroom; she was still threatening to sue me for trespassing. “I have photos of your handwriting confirming meetings with S.W. on dates corresponding to his notes. I have a receipt for a purchase of the gun. I thought Christopher purchased it, but it was in your files. Your bank statement on the day after the shooting, shows a withdrawal from Bank of America of fifteen-thousand dollars in cash. That’s how much you paid Speed. Not a lot of money for you, but cash. I’d like to trace that money. Perhaps you could come up with credible purchases to account for all or most of it, perhaps not. What I have may not be enough to convict you in a court of law. I don’t even know if Sarah would want that. But I’ll bring this all to her. I’ll tell her and Rachel all about our conversation, starting with your belief that she seduced her own father.”

  She was as white as bedsheets pulled out of a hot dryer. “She won’t believe you,” she sputtered.

  “Your daughter isn’t stupid. And she lived with you for almost twenty years. She’ll believe me. Now get off my boat.”

  Her mouth opened, then snapped shut. She got to her feet, trembling with some combination of anger or indignation or worry. I doubted there was much guilt.

  As she passed through my front door and stepped onto the dock, I said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t want to miss the nightly news tonight.”

  Thirty-Eight

  We were all sitting in the lounge of the Sweet and Sour waiting on the ten p.m. news.

  Meiying and Frankie were hunched over a card table munching on microwave popcorn and playing Crazy Eights.

  I was at the bar in the middle of a cribbage thrashing from Dao, feeling happy to be losing. Things were back to normal.

  Fabrice had called the previous night and asked if I had time to speak with her boss, George Liu.

  When George got on the phone, he launched right into the fact that he’d had a long talk with his nephew, Takeshi. He said his nephew had disputed some of my facts, but basically admitted to “overzealous actions.”

  That was one way to put it. Overzealous to the max.

  He paused, and I heard some shuffling around on the other end of the line. He muttered something to Fabrice, then came back onto the line. “Takeshi gave his apologies. He spoke in the manner I expected. Telling me the words I wanted to hear.”

  “So where does that leave us? Can you promise that he won’t—”

  “Wait. Listen. Takeshi now lives in Chengdu. In China. With my family. Despite the fact that he said the words that needed to be said, there was no force behind them. No truth.”

  “I see. So, he agreed to go to China?”

  Liu chuckled. “He found that his choices were limited. He is going to school there. He has a guardian. He will not return to America for a long time.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Liu. That will be a relief to Dao and Meiying.”

  “Offer them my sincerest apologies, please. I will send them a letter soon along with a sincere gift.”

  Meiying hugged me tight when I told her the news, and Dao expressed his appreciation sincerely by showing no mercy at cribbage.

  On the sixty-inch big screen television attached to the upper wall opposite the bar, an excited female voice trumpeted the headlines to come. The second story was the one I’d been waiting for. The multimillionaire husband of the owner of Wambaugh Enterprises, Mr. William Fogerty, being led out of the Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas in handcuffs accused of sexually molesting his daughter.

  Take that, Mrs. Wambaugh. How’s that for dragging the family name through the mud?

  Marsh, sitting next to Dao, was studying architectural plans for the Kabuki theater. He looked up at the TV and whistled. “I wonder what great-great granddad, that snake oil salesman, would think about all this?”

  “Even that carnival barker might be ashamed. Far as I know, he didn’t molest little girls.”

  Meiying said, “Max! Shush!”

  I blushed. I wasn’t used to having to watch my words around little girls.

  “Don’t worry, Meiying. I know all about bad men and little girls,” Frankie insisted.

  “No. No. Too young, Frankie,” Meiying cried.

  I felt the same way.

  Later, after Dao and Meiying had gone to bed and Frankie was asleep on the couch in the lounge, Marsh and I stepped outside to the back deck where I sipped decaf espresso and he did the same to a glass of Cognac.

  I brought him up to date on the week of excitement he’d missed.

  “You need me, buddy,” he concluded.

  “Never said I didn’t. Doesn’t stop you from disappearing every now and then.”

  “Duty calls.”

  I didn’t bother asking him if the duty was to God, or mankind, or country. He never gave me any specifics. I had the feeling that he didn’t want me to know something that might somehow endanger me. In any case, I’d learned staring down that rabbit hole was a waste of time.

  “But I sure wish you and I could have paid William Fogerty a visit at the Palazzo.”

  “Yeah. Sounds like a good time.”

  “But I guess the way it turned out is even worse for him overall. He would have suffered physically if we’d surprised him, but this way, he’ll likely end up behind bars for the rest of his days. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.”

  “You sure Rachel’s willing to go all the way with it?”

  “I think so. Sarah’s behind her. And she feels absolutely no sympathy for the man. He’s related to her by blood, but she sees him clearly as the twisted predator he is.”

  “And neither of them wants to go after Mrs. Wambaugh?”

  “I hesitated telling Rachel the truth. I debated how much to say, how much of my talk with that pathetic woman she could bear. I started out skirting around the really nasty stuff. But I could soon see she had few illusions left about her mother. So I told her everything. She was most shocked, felt most betrayed, by the fact that she’d maintained a husband-wife relationship all these years while keeping them in the dark. That and the fact that her mother actually blamed her for some of the sexual stuff, essentially saying she preyed on his weaknesses. Imagine hearing that from your own mother.”

  “I can’t,” Marsh said, staring out at the subdued lights of the big boats surrounding us. “My mother thought I was the cat’s meow. The sun rose and set on my little brow.”

  “Another kind of delusion.”

  “Or clairvoyant. So, Rachel was able to handle it, after all?”

  “Better than I expected. Having Sarah helps.”

  “But they’re going to let the attempted murder slide?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. It would be hard to convict her. The stuff I took from her house would be thrown out. The rest is circumstantial. Speed’s notes are too sketchy. She has a harem of high-priced lawyers.”

  Speed Weed has pulled the trigger, attempting to kill Sarah. But he wasn’t the only, or even main culprit. Mrs. W. bore even greater guilt, as did William Fogerty. Guilty as sin. Scott Tripp was also culpable. All of them deserved to suffer for their deeds and omissions, and I trusted, the way things were turning out, that they would.

  I reflected a little more on my reflections and then continued, “And, with Rachel’s testimony against her father pending, they can’t imagine being involved in another criminal case. Neither one of them has the stomach for it. Mrs. Wambaugh is certainly no longer a threat.”

  It all made sense, and I agreed with the women’s decision. Mrs. Wambaugh was all alone now. Her husband, her secret affair, was going to jail for the rest of his life. Her son was dead. Her daughter would never speak to her again.

  She still had Manderley, but it seemed she was condemned to live there all alone now, in a prison of her own making.

  Thirty-Nine

  “Uncle Max, you’ve never been married, have you?”

  Jen, Bo Fiddler’s lovely, sweet, daughter, married now for almost one year, knew that I’d never taken the plunge, but maybe she was just making sure I hadn’t neglected to mention some ex-mail-order bride.

  We were in the kitchen of her small rental house in Haight-Ashbury. I looked out the greenhouse window, dotted with little cacti, and watched Frankie doing amazing tricks on her skateboard.

  “No, honey, never have.”

  “Well, it changes things. I know you have Alexandra. I don’t know exactly how much time you spend together, whether you’re in her bed a lot or a little, but even living together without being married isn’t the same. Before…”

  I let her speak. I didn’t want to go into how much time I spent in Alexandra’s bed, although lately it sure was feeling like not nearly enough.

  “Brad is the same Brad I fell in love with. But he’s changed too. He’s more serious. Not as much fun. He doesn’t like his job. Doesn’t know what he wants to do. Before, I was enough for him…”

  As she continued, trying to explain the unfathomable mysteries of a relationship, of a loved one’s mysteries, I almost regretted promising Bo I’d come and talk to her. But Bo, against his better judgment, had helped me out with the Wambaugh party, and I owed him. I tuned back into Jen’s philosophical musings.

  “…and so, we fight now. We didn’t used to ever do that.”

  I love Jen. I’ve known her all my life. I was Uncle Max. But she’d broken my cardinal rule of never ever marrying before the age of thirty, and even that was risky. Forty was better. Forgetting the whole thing best. I sighed internally and put my cynicism aside.

  “Sweetie, the two of you are still adjusting to your life together. The first year of marriage, from what I’ve heard, can be tough on some couples. Others don’t feel it until the second year or the sixth. But the problems always come. You’re lucky maybe that you have to deal with them right away. Maybe you can solve them early and it’ll be smooth sailing for the next fifty years.”

  It was my voice speaking, but I didn’t know who the hell was giving this Pollyanna advice.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  “It’s just that I can tell he’s unhappy. Maybe it’s me. Maybe he’s disappointed. I try not to nag him. I wish he knew what he wanted to do, but I don’t—”

  “He’s working for a contractor?”

  “A termite inspector. But he doesn’t like crawling under houses looking for bugs.”

  I couldn’t blame the boy. “How about college?”

  “It’s not his thing.”

  The choices had to be more varied than bugs or college.

  “What about you? I thought you were going to be a vet.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Right now, we need the money I make.”

  She worked as a waitress at a diner in the Haight.

  “Your dad will help.”

  “We want to stand on our own.”

  Admirable, but maybe not so smart.

  “You’ve been going to therapy?” Another area where I had no direct experience.

  “Yes. We started together, but it’s just me now. Brad didn’t like it. I do. It helps me.”

  “Good. Keep going then.”

  I hardly knew the man who was giving this sage advice. I’d sooner have my spleen removed than go to a therapist.

  “Well,” I said. “We have to get to the airport to pick up Alexandra. Will you promise to meet me for lunch sometime after the holidays? Check in with me. Let me know how things are going?”

  So I could let Bo know that his daughter was doing okay.

  “Sure, Uncle Max. I think you’re right, Everything will be all right. Brad will figure it out, and I’ll support him, and we’re going to have an amazing fifty years ahead of us.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. Life spans are lengthening. I think you’ve got at least seventy years.”

 

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