Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three Page 8

  “What all—who all are we talkin’ about?”

  Without skipping a beat, Nate exhales a list of names and agencies in a long plume of cigar smoke. The names are all familiar, all have been contractually obligated to Verge or Colin Elliot, Ltd at one time or another, and all can be contractually obligated again. Including Nate.

  “Do whatever’s necessary to reinstate yourself, find me a new solicitor, and sign everybody else up.” Colin drains off the remainder of the beer and belches mightily.

  Nate drowns a wasteful amount of good cigar in what’s left of his lager. “I’m sorry, that’s not possible,” he says.

  “What’s not possible? Didn’t you just advise me to make it official with this lot of volunteers that includes you?”

  “It’s not possible if it includes me. I meant what I said when we parted ways. I won’t work for you again. Not in any official capacity. I’ll help you any way I can as a friend, but not as a manager.”

  “Fine, then as friend point me in the direction of a new manager.”

  “Do I really have to point?”

  Colin is slow to catch his drift. And when he does, it all seems a bit obvious, a bit prearranged. “Did Amanda send you down here to see to the negotiations? Are you working as her agent now?” he says with the beginning of an edge to his voice.

  “Amanda has no idea I’m alone with you—she was taking a nap last I looked—and if she thought I was down here boosting her chances she’d have my ass.”

  “But you are.” Colin yanks on a pair of wrinkled linen trousers, thrusts his arms into a vintage Hawaiian shirt.

  “Only if you persist in seeing it that way, and there’s no guarantee she’d accept the position if you did offer it. She is contemplating an offer from me, you know.”

  “I don’t know. Have you already forgot that whilst she was fronting for David, great pains were taken to keep me in the dark about your relationship with her?”

  “I haven’t forgotten a damn thing about that period and the only thing relevant for either of us to remember is that Amanda never ever functioned as my puppet,” Nate says, his voice now taking on some edge. “With the exception of our mutual concern about this Jakeway monster, Amanda and I have never collaborated on a project that relates to you. We’ve never conspired to—”

  “Yeh, yeh, yeh, I guess I should believe that by now. Enough people have tried to convince me.”

  “You should also believe that my current advice in no way reflects on your ability to handle your own affairs. I’m in no way suggesting you’re incapable of getting through the current crisis without a committed professional staff, but given the nature of the crisis and who was most affected, it follows that you might want to—”

  “You can leave off tiptoeing and you needn’t spell out that at a time like this my entire focus should be on my wife—my pregnant wife—who may never completely recover from this honeymoon from hell . . . from this agony I’ve heaped on her. I’d only just concluded that’s where all my energy should go when you popped in on me.”

  “Then . . . So?”

  “Yeh, I’ll do it. You can tell Amanda she’s got the nod.”

  “Oh no you don’t. I’m not telling her, you are. And if you tell her I nudged you a little I’ll flat out deny it, not to mention—”

  “Fucking relax, will you? What would it matter, actually, if she did find out you were beating the drum for her? You appear mad for each other, so doesn’t it rather figure that you’d be on the lookout for job opportunities that could favorably affect her?”

  He gets no argument, so that appears to put an end to the encounter. With Nate in the lead they head for the stairs, where Nate stops short on the second step, turns and spits out the question everyone wants answered.

  Colin backs off a pace or two and pretends to give serious thought to a response. “No, that little tidbit you dropped this morning did not cause me to remember anything firsthand. No, it is, and no, it will always be, because I don’t want to remember. That okay with you?”

  It must be because Nate resumes climbing the stairs without comment.

  — TEN —

  Morning, August 17, 1987

  Nate is again the logical one to carry out a retrieval—this time from the Chandler house, this time with a combination chauffeur-bodyguard to see him through.

  Without Monday morning traffic and the mechanics of driving to distract him, his mind is free to wander a vast array of subjects. In the interest of sustaining the fragile calm that got him this far, he skirts any subject related to the last time he offered to act as errand boy, confines his thoughts to Amanda and the decision she still hadn’t arrived at after sleeping on Colin’s offer.

  That’s enough to occupy him on the way out of the city and through the lower-lying reaches of New Jersey. But as they gain altitude and penetrate the more desirable suburbs, the events of the past forty-eight hours won’t leave him alone.

  Bemus, who’s behind the wheel of a rental BMW, is sweating apprehension as he glides the big sedan into Old Quarry Court and around the cul-de-sac to the Chandler house. Although crime scene investigators have cleared the dwelling for entry by authorized civilians, crime scene tape still rings the property and a pair of uniformed cops is in evidence to keep the ghoul population at bay.

  As anticipated, his car and the one Laurel used as a battering ram have been removed. The driveway is clear of debris from the shattered overhead door and the yawning door opening is sealed with plywood he himself ordered from a local service specializing in emergency enclosures.

  One can only hope the large bloodspill on the garage floor was removed soon after forensic specialists finished measuring its spread. Its amplitude—he recalls Grillo’s pretentious word for it with such distaste he has to clear his throat before he can tell Bemus where to park.

  Oddly enough, the first order of business is not retrieval of the burial clothing Laurel came for on Saturday. Contents of the hiding place beneath the floorboards of her girlhood closet got first mention when he offered to make the trip today. Not one to scoff at sentimentality from someone so recently bereaved and traumatized, he made no comment other than ask her to list the items he should find there.

  That list wasn’t long enough to require written notation, but when he accesses the closet and lopsidedly crouches down to lift the loose floorboards, he questions both his memory and Laurel’s because the small diary she said he would find there is missing. Everything else is accounted for: A dilapidated cardboard angel figure with feathered wings; a homemade pet collar with bells attached; a collection of dog-eared greeting cards tied with a blue ribbon; a battered jeweler’s box containing baby teeth, bound locks of hair, and a silver-plated locket. All are where she said they’d be atop a hoard of marbles, but there’s no sign of a red leather-bound diary with a locking strap.

  He lifts out everything but the marbles. Those she said to leave in place. Then he stirs through the marbles thinking the diary could be buried within their considerable depth. He hits bottom without finding anything other than a couple of fifty-dollar bills the persnickety appraiser must have missed when he examined this hole in the floor.

  Nate’s sore ribs and immobilized arm make searching the far corners of the hiding place into a semi-ordeal. He’s winded when he struggles to his feet, pissed that he can’t be completely sure the diary isn’t in there someplace, just out of his impaired reach.

  He yanks a large plastic kitchen bag from the back pocket of his jeans, fills it with the items he was able to find and sets out for the cedar closet that’s better remembered as gateway to the attic.

  Bemus, who’s keeping watch in the hallway where he was bound to hear the noisy stirring of the marbles, wonders what all the clatter was. Nate’s explanation raises the good possibility the young Laurel lined her hiding place with marbles for the precise reason that anyone disturbing her treasures would be overheard.

  “Makeshift burglar alarm,” Nate says, smiling for a moment at
the unaffected simplicity of the scheme.

  In the cedar closet, he has no trouble discovering which of several garment storage bags contains the clothing set aside for when old Mr. Chandler’s time came. All the bags have see-through tops and all but one are empty. When he unzips it there are no choices to be made there, either. The three hangers holding a dark suit, a white dress shirt, and a necktie and belt are fastened together with a twist tie, segregating them from the few other items in the bag. But the bundled-together hangers resist his one-armed effort to hold the bag open and remove them all at once. And when he attempts to loosen the twist tie and remove one hanger at a time, his sling catches on the bag’s open zipper and the suit jacket slides off its hanger and into the depths below.

  “Shit!” Everything falls into the bag as he struggles to free the sling. “God-dammit.” He works loose, angles his uninjured side into the garment bag and flails around with his good arm for the dropped items. He’s panting by the time he’s fished out the suit jacket and trousers and tossed the now wrinkled shirt onto the pile. He grunts with the effort of extending his reach to the very bottom of the bag to snag the necktie and belt and could not be more surprised to come up with more than expected. He gapes at the wad of glassine envelopes clutched in his hand along with a crumpled necktie.

  “What the fuck?” He recognizes the envelopes for what they are, but he can’t think of a sane reason why anyone would stash a supply of Polks Headache Powder in the bottom of a garment bag. Unless . . .

  The sharp sour taste of aspirin stings his tongue when he samples from one of the envelopes. No question about it, it’s the headache remedy made infamous in some circles by Colin Elliot’s habitual use. When he reaches into the bag for the dropped belt, he scoops up a couple more envelopes. He tastes from one of these, and again there’s no question about it. But it’s cocaine numbing his tongue this time—cocaine of a grade consistent with the nursing home find.

  The two envelopes he sampled from he shoves into a side pocket of his jeans and returns the remainder to the depths of the garment bag, where there appear to be a dozen individual doses in all. The belt and necktie he stuffs into the plastic bag holding Laurel’s girlhood treasures. The other clothing items resist his efforts to restore to hangers, so they get stuffed into the plastic bag as well. Everything he’s handled is marked with a white powdery substance that will require explanation. But only to Laurel. Then somebody has to explain how the shit got in the garment bag to begin with.

  Grumbling about always finding more than expected when he visits this neighborhood, Nate closes the plastic bag on the items he did expect to find and encounters Bemus hovering in the doorway to the hall.

  “Everything okay in there? I thought I heard you talkin’ to somebody.”

  “You heard me cursing this damned sling.” Nate pushes past him into the hallway, where he further admits disability by asking Bemus to do a thorough search of the hidey-hole. “And while you’re at it, check the closet shelves and anyplace else in that bedroom where a small book could be concealed,” Nate says and starts for the front stairs with the bag of clothing and mementos in tow.

  A few minutes later, Bemus joins him on the ground floor, empty-handed and apologetic.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nate says. “Fact is, I’m relieved you didn’t find it. Otherwise I’d think I missed it because of the fucked-up state I’m in. Don’t know what I’ll tell Laurel, though.”

  “Maybe she just thought it was there.” Bemus moves to the front door, holds it open.

  “Yeah, that has to be it. Maybe she hid the diary someplace else. Maybe she already has it and just forgot.” Nate steps onto the front porch, making up excuses as he goes. But nothing occurs to him that will excuse the presence of coke and powdered aspirin in the bottom of a garment storage bag.

  The two uniformed cops alert when he and Bemus return to the rental car. Nate notices something that didn’t register earlier—that one of the cops is Officer Decatur, who drove him and Laurel back to the city on Black Saturday. He nods in recognition; he needn’t have, however, because the cop is approaching without encouragement.

  “Detective Grillo just called in and said to tell you they’ve got some test results from the Wolcott end of the investigation.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “The dregs in the water pitcher at the nursing home tested positive for cocaine. So did the drinking straw and cup. Very high quality uncut coke, he said.”

  “Then we are looking at a homicide,” Nate says as though this is big news—as though the evidence in his pocket wouldn’t support that claim and probably more.

  “Yes sir. The detective also instructed me to tell you this information was dispatched to Amanda Hobbs at your New York number before it was relayed to you at her request.”

  “Thank you, that’s good to know,” Nate says even though it isn’t. Amanda shouldn’t have to be the one to confirm the means of the old man’s death to Colin, Laurel, and the Chandlers; she’s already performed enough in that area. But he’s forgetting that when she does decide to become Colin’s next general manager, imparting bad news could well become a regular chore.

  On the ride back to Manhattan, Nate again limits his thoughts to Amanda and the big question. Nothing distracts him until Bemus—right out of nowhere, without warning or lead-in—wants to know when he made the decision to sign back on.

  “Sign on? Sign on with whom? Sign on with what?”

  “You don’t hafta play dumb. Anyone can see you’re back on the case.”

  “What case? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You took your old job back. And about time, I wanna say.”

  “Where the fuck are you getting your information?”

  “Like I said, from my eyeballs. It’s plain as day you’re at it again, minding the shit, big and small, supervising every little thing just like you did in the old days with the difference you’ve now got the two of ’em to look after and you’re goin’ about it more respectful than you used to.”

  “You need to get your eyes checked,” Nate mutters.

  “No I don’t. I was on to you the minute I got word to move the principals to your place from The Plaza and look at you now, chasin’ all over Jersey to fetch trinkets ’n’ trash the family coulda come for themselves and—”

  “I wasn’t chasing all over Jersey. One stop, that was, and I wouldn’t call old Mr. Chandler’s burial clothes trash, and what you call trinkets are someone else’s treasures.”

  “There, see what I mean? There you go on the defense as though I’d insulted your family or somethin’.”

  “I wasn’t going to call you insulting, just ignorant. The Chandler family couldn’t come for these things themselves. Those all-knowing eyes of yours failed to see that they not only lost their father, they were deprived of a second significant influence in the loss of David Sebastian who, at one time or another, functioned as mentor, tutor, and surrogate parent to all of them. And for David to have been killed on their property is too cruel an irony—so cruel that none of them ever want to lay eyes on the place again.”

  That shuts Bemus up, but it doesn’t keep the brash bodyguard’s observations from dominating Nate’s thoughts the rest of the way into the city.

  On the central floor of the triplex, as they’re leaving the elevator, Bemus mumbles something about having to see a man about a dog and makes his chastened self scarce. Nate is guessing where Amanda’s most apt to be when she calls to him from the doorway of the study, the first place he would have looked.

  Going by the number of legal pads fanned out on the broad surface of his desk, she’s handling at least five projects at once and there’s no telling which one has her looking like she’s ready to explode.

  “Okay, let’s have it.” He sets down the bag brought from New Jersey, eases onto the chesterfield and attempts to get comfortable. “I don’t think you’re all worked up like that over Grillo’s latest news or how to keep the media hounds
at bay, so you must have made up your mind about Colin’s offer.”

  “You’re right!” She darts behind the room-facing desk, plants herself in his high-backed swivel chair and gives it a half whirl. “I have made up my mind. I turned him down.”

  “You what? Are you out of your mind? You can’t have turned him down because of my offer. Why, for Christ’s sake? Why?”

  “Be still a minute and I’ll tell you why.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Why? Because I’m not an administrator, I’m a team player and that’s how I function best, that’s how I prefer to function, that’s the way I performed when I was enlisted as buffer for David, when I was perfectly capable of coming up with ideas and getting things done without wielding ultimate authority, without having to be in charge in order to do what I do best. Just ask Laurel.” She takes a quick breath. “Ask yourself.”

  “Believe me, I will. Ask myself, that is”

  “Good. And while you’re at it, ask yourself why you turned down his offer yesterday. Yes, he told me about the talk you had. Ask yourself that, why don’t you?”

  “That’s water under the bridge. You know as well as I do—as well as he does—why I won’t work for him again.”

  “Do I? Do you? Have you stopped to realize that the main obstacle has been removed? Once your fears were realized, however horribly, and once you revealed the basis for those fears, that issue ceased to exist and in case you weren’t paying attention during what I like to think of as your hiatus, Colin demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that his physical and intellectual stamina, his creative ability, and whatever all else, survived the ordeal you couldn’t quite let him recover from. You read the reviews, you listened to my firsthand reports from all those sold-out venues across Europe. Oh, and I almost forgot—you did witness his mind-blowing kick-ass performance at the Concert for Rayce. You can’t discount that.”

  “Okay, okay give it a rest. I won’t deny that much of what you say is valid, but it doesn’t change my mind.”