James Grippando - Last to die

Jack started to explain what he was after, but Javier stopped him. “Tatum already filled me in,” he said. “And I can only give you about ten minutes.”

“Let’s get to it,” said Jack. “Kelsey, why don’t you start.”

Kelsey gave a little smile, as if to thank Jack for keeping his promise to let her take an active role. She scooted to the edge of the couch, leaning forward slightly, trying to make eye contact. Javier seemed to be looking beyond her, just as he had with their handshake, as if something on the wall behind her had caught his attention.

“How long did you work for Sally?” she asked.

“Few months, on and off.”

Kelsey paused, as if she’d expected at least a little eye contact with his response. But he still seemed obsessed with something over her or behind her.

“What did you do for her exactly?” asked Kelsey.

“Bodyguard.”

“Did she really need a bodyguard?”

“She was a rich lady. And she scared pretty easy. She’d be alone a lot. Her old man-and I do mean old man-was from France or someplace. And you heard about what happened to her and her daughter a few years back.”

“Yes,” said Kelsey, “we know about that.”

“So, she’d be alone, sometimes afraid to even go anywhere. She hired me to drive her around. The mall, restaurants, wherever. I’m not saying she needed me. But I made her feel safe.”

Kelsey asked, “Didn’t she have any girlfriends?”

“I suppose. None that I saw, though. She struck me as a loner. Real pretty lady, but not a very happy person. Know what I mean?”

Javier was talking to Kelsey, but he wasn’t looking at her face. His focus had seemed to shift from the wall behind her to the top of her head. Kelsey tried to sit taller and make eye contact, but his gaze rose with her, as if he’d developed some bizarre fixation with the crown of her skull.

“For crying out loud,” said Kelsey. “What are you looking at?”

“Huh?”

“Did a bird shit on the top of my head or what?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what is it? You’ve been staring at the top of my head from the moment I opened my mouth.”

“I’m not looking at your mouth,” he said.

“I know. You’re staring at the top of my head.”

“I understand that this is what you think. But what I’m actually doing is not looking at your mouth.”

“You’re losing me.”

“I’m a recovering porn addict.”

“A what?”

“I was addicted to porn. I can’t look at a woman’s mouth without having impure thoughts, which is a very distracting thing when you’re trying to have an intelligent conversation. So I don’t look at her mouth.”

“I see.” Kelsey glanced at Jack and said, “Why don’t you take it from here, boss?”

“Good idea.” Jack handed him a list of the beneficiaries under

Sally’s will-her ex-husband, the lawyer, the reporter, the prosecutor, Tatum, and the unknown sixth beneficiary, Alan Sirap.

“Did you ever hear Sally mention any of these people?”

“Tatum, of course. After I linked them up together.”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. What about these other people?”

“I’m sure she said things about Miguel Rios. Mike, she called him. Her ex, right?”

“Right. What did she say about him?”

“I don’t remember anything specific.”

“How about the other people? She ever say anything about them?”

He read over the list and shook his head, then stopped himself. “This guy. Gerry Colletti. If I’m not mistaken, he was her ex-husband’s divorce lawyer.”

“That’s right.”

“Him I remember her talking about.”

“What was that about?”

“We was out driving somewhere one night, and we passed this restaurant on the highway. And she says that used to be Alfredo’s.”

“Alfredo’s?”

“Sally and her ex-husband used to own a little Italian restaurant that went broke. Poured everything they had into it.”

“Miguel told me about that,” said Jack. “In fact he says it was Colletti who sold it to them.”

“That’s right. I think him and Gerry were friends way back or something.”

“Actually, it sounded to me like Miguel isn’t too keen on him anymore. But I’m more interested in what Sally told you about Gerry.”

“As I recall, she’d had a couple of glasses of wine and was talking to me pretty freely. She just starts saying how she couldn’t stand this Gerry from the day she met him.”

“Why not?”

“From the way she described him, he was one of these real slippery guys who turn a girl’s stomach. She was telling me about how Gerry took her and her sister out to dinner one night to try to talk Sally into letting her husband buy the restaurant from him.”

“Sally has a sister?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t…Rene, I think. She lives in like Africa or some place. According to Sally, she’s even more gorgeous than she was. But I find that hard to believe.”

Jack glanced at Kelsey, as if to say “Remind me to follow up with this Rene.”

Javier said, “Anyway, Gerry takes Sally and her sister out to dinner, buys them three bottles of wine. Sally’s convinced that this loser is thinking threesome with two hot sisters. All the while, Sally and her sister are doing their best not to puke at the thought. But my point is that Sally has a real vivid memory of this night. She remembers all the details. It’s almost creepy.”

“How do you mean?”

“I give you an example. She gets to the part of the story where Gerry is telling her what a cash cow this Alfredo’s restaurant is. Gerry keeps going on and on, to the point that she figures he had to be keeping two sets of books, because the P and L didn’t show any profit at all. Then finally, she does this impersonation of Gerry. For me, it was one of those spooky moments, like when you know that a person has relived this moment over and over again in her mind. She did the mannerisms, the tone of voice, the whole thing. The way she tells it, Gerry leaned into the table, looked her in the eye, and curled his index finger to call her closer, like some child molester trying to lure a schoolgirl into his van. Then he got this drunken grin on his face and whispered into her ear, like it was some big secret he was sharing: ‘Alfredo’s. It’s a gold mine, baby.’”

Jack felt a chill. It was almost too convincing, the way Javier had acted out the pedophile analogy.

“What did Gerry mean by a gold mine?” asked Kelsey. “Was he laundering money there?”

“Nah,” Javier said, dismissing it. “Gerry was a total bullshitter. But his little song and dance worked. Sally gave her husband the go-ahead to buy the place. From day one it hemorrhaged money. Eventually it wiped them out.”

“Is that why she hates Gerry’s guts?” asked Jack.

“From what she told me, she saw this Gerry character as the start of all her problems. It was the end of her happy marriage and her life with her little girl. The beginning of nothing but worries about money. Then she started working at Hooters or some place like that, which was when that stalker started hassling her. You know about that, right?”

“Yeah, Miguel told me. He thinks it was the stalker who murdered his daughter.”

“Well, there you go. In Sally’s mind, all her problems, including that stalker, could be traced back to Gerry selling them that pig-in-a-poke restaurant.”

“That’s interesting. Like I said, I don’t think Gerry is on Miguel’s short list of drinking buddies anymore, but he doesn’t seem to have the hatred that Sally had.”

“If you could ask Sally, she’d say it’s because Miguel is stupid. He thinks their restaurant failed because of the flood that ruined all their improvements. He just didn’t want to admit that his own friend screwed him from the get-go.”