William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“Sorry, Victor,” she said. “No.”

“But why not? It’s a standard agreement. Why not? Why not?”

She stood and slipped me that sly smile of hers. “Because you want it too much.”

Out of watering eyes I stared at her with horror as she picked the wad of hundred-dollar bills off my desk and shoved it into a pocket of her leather jacket. The lottery ticket swirled round the toilet bowl to the drain.

“All I wanted you to do,” she said, “was to prove that Jimmy Vigs killed my sister. Was that too hard?”

“But Jimmy didn’t do it.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked him.”

“Nice work, Victor,” she said as she turned to leave.

Panic. Say something, Victor, anything.

“But what if I’m right and it wasn’t the mob? What if it was something much closer? I’ve been asking around, Caroline. The Reddmans, I’ve been told, are a family dark with secrets.”

She stopped, her back still to me, and said, “My family had nothing to do with it.”

“So you’ve said. Every time I mention the possibility that your family is involved in your sister’s death you simply deny it and try to change the topic of conversation. Why is that, Caroline?”

She turned and looked at me. “I get enough of that question from my therapist. I don’t need it from my lawyer, too.”

Her lawyer. There was still hope. “But what if one of those dark family secrets is behind your sister’s death?”

As she stared at me something at once both ugly and wistful slipped onto her face, a mix of emotions far beyond her range as an actress. Then she walked right up to my desk and started unbuttoning her shirt.

I was taken aback until she reached inside her shirt and pulled out some sort of a medallion hanging on a chain from her neck. She slipped the chain over her head and threw the medallion on my blotter. It was a cross, ancient-looking, green and encrusted, disfigured by time and the elements. In the upper corners of the cross, sharp-pointed wings jutted out, as if a bird had been crucified there.

“That is the Distinguished Service Cross,” she said. “It was awarded to my grandfather, Christian Shaw, for gallantry in World War I. He led an attack over the trenches in the first American battle of the war and routed the Germans almost single-handedly. My grandmother dredged it from the pond on our family estate after his death. She gave this medal to me one afternoon as we sat together in her garden and said she wanted me to have it.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“My grandmother told me that this medal symbolized more than mere heroism. Whatever crimes in our family’s past, she said, whatever hurts inflicted or sins committed, whatever, this medal was evidence, she said, that the past was dead and the future full of promise. Conciliation, she said, expiation, redemption, they were all in that medal.”

Those were the same three words the old lady had used with Grimes. I couldn’t help but wonder: conciliation to whom, expiation for what, redemption how?

“So all those rumors and dark secrets and gossip, I don’t care,” she continued. “They have nothing to do with Jacqueline and nothing to do with me. The past is dead.”

“If you believe that, then why do you still wear this medal around your neck?”

“A memento?” she said, her voice suddenly filled with uncertainty.

I shook my head.

She sat down and took her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross back from me. She stared at it for a while, examining it as if for the first time. “My therapist says my ailurophobia comes from deep-seated fears about my family. She says my family is cold and manipulative and uncaring and until I am able to face the truth I will continue to sublimate my true feelings into irrational fears.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I just hate cats.”

“Your therapist might be on to something.”

“Why is it that everyone wants to dig up my family’s past in order to save me? My therapist, you.”

“The police also tried to look into any familial connection with your sister’s death but were cut off by Mr. Harrington at the bank.”

She looked up at me when I mentioned Harrington’s name.

“And, deep down, Caroline, you want to look into it too.”

“You’re being ludicrous.”

“Why else would you pay my retainer with a check drawn on the family bank? It was as clear as an advertisement.”

Her voice slowed and softened. “Do you really think Jacqueline was murdered?”

“It’s possible. I can’t be certain yet, but I am certain I’m the only one still willing to look into it.”

“And you think with the answer you can save me?”

“Do you need saving?”

She closed her eyes and then opened them again a few seconds later. “What do you want me to do, Victor?”

“Sign the contract.”

“I won’t. I can’t. Not until I know everything.”

“Why not?”

“Because then I’ll have given up all control and I can’t ever do that.”

She said it flatly, as if it were as obvious as the sun, and there was something so transparent in the way she said it that I knew it to be true and that pushing her any further would be useless.

“How about this, Caroline?” I said. “I’ll agree to continue investigating any connection between the mob and your sister’s death so long as you agree to start telling me the truth, all the truth, and help me look at any possible family involvement too. I’ll pursue the case without a contract and without a retainer, providing you promise me that if I find a murderer, and you decide to sue, then you’ll let me handle the case on my terms.”

She stared some more at the medal and thought about what I had proposed. I didn’t like this arrangement, I liked things signed, and sealed, but it was my only hope, I figured, to keep on the trail of my fortune, so I watched oh so carefully as her hand played with the medal and her face worked over the possibilities.

When I saw a doubt slip its way into her features I said, “Did you ever wonder, Caroline, how the medal got into the pond in the first place?”

She looked up at me and then back at the medal, hefting it in her hand before she grasped the chain and hung her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross back around her neck. “You find that out, Victor, and I’ll sign your damn contract.”

“Is that a promise?”

“There’s a dinner at the family estate, Veritas, on Thursday night,” she said. “The whole family will be there. You can be my date.”

“They shouldn’t know we’re looking into your sister’s death.”

“No,” she said. “You’re right, they shouldn’t.”

“Anything I should know before I meet them all?”

“Not really,” she said, with an uncomfortably knowing smile. “Just don’t come hungry.”

“ABOUT HOW MANY CONVERSATIONSdid you have with the defendant in the course of your dealings, Detective Scarpatti?”

“I don’t know, lots. I taped five and we had others. It took awhile for him to get it all straight. Your boy, he’s not the swiftest deal maker out there, no Monty Hall.”

“So you were forced to lead him through the deal, is that right?”

“Just in the details, but there was no entrapment here, Counselor, if that’s what you’re getting at. Cressi came to me looking to buy the weapons. He wanted to buy as many as I could sell. I told him one-seventy-nine was all I could come up with and he was disappointed with that number. But he brightened when I added the grenade launchers and the flamethrower. To be truthful, I was more surprised than anyone when he showed up. We were targeting a Jamaican drug outfit with the operation. But your guy could never make up his mind on the spot. He always said he had to think about it.”