Sandra Brown - Ricochet

Duncan looked directly into her eyes, then turned away.

The judge came into the locker room a few minutes later. “She’s still not herself,” he said without preamble. “On edge. Jittery. I think it will take a while for her to recover from this.”

“It was frightening.”

“And then some. My locker’s over here.” He led Duncan down a row of lockers and when he reached his, he began working the combination lock.

Duncan sat down on a padded bench nearby. “Before I forget, I charged my lunch to your account. Club sandwich and iced tea. You know they charge for refills? I also added a twenty-five percent gratuity.”

“Twenty-five percent? Very generous of you.”

“I figured you would have a soft spot for the waitstaff here.”

The judge gave him a wry look. “You’ve done some background investigation.”

“That’s my job.”

“So you know Elise’s employment history. I suppose you also know what she did before she came to work here at the club.” He stated it, he didn’t ask. “Do you think less of her for it?”

“No. Do you?”

Duncan ’s brusque comeback got the judge’s ire up. The heavy lock thumped against the blond wood locker when he let go of it. Angrily, he turned toward Duncan. Then, rather than take issue, the fight went out of him. He sat down on the far end of the bench.

He shook his head with self-deprecation. “I’m a cliché, I suppose. Actually, I know I am. I knew I would be when I began seeing Elise, not just here at the club, but actually taking her out.”

“Sleeping with her.”

The judge raised one shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Gossip spread like wildfire among my friends and associates. Our affair became the talk of this club. Then of all Savannah. Or so it seemed.”

“That didn’t bother you?”

“No, because I was in love. Still am. As much as possible I ignored the gossip. Then a ‘well-meaning friend,’ ” he said, forming quotation marks with his fingers, “invited me to lunch one day for the express purpose of informing me that the cocktail waitress I was seeing wasn’t a suitable companion for a man of my position and social standing. He told me where she’d worked before the Silver Tide. He expected me to be shocked, horrified. But I already knew about Elise’s former employment.”

“You’d done your own investigating.”

“No, Elise had told me herself. She was honest about it from the start, which made me love her all the more. Acquaintances of mine who overtly snubbed her, I consider former friends. Who needs friends like that? But it bothers Elise. She thinks I’ve suffered because of our marriage.”

“Have you?”

“Hardly.”

“You haven’t run for reelection since you married her. Voters may side with those former friends of yours.”

“I’m sure anyone running against me will dredge up her past. We’re prepared for that. We’ll own up to it and dismiss it as irrelevant, and it is.”

“Except that it may cost you the election. Will you be okay with that?”

“Which would you choose, Detective? A judgeship, or Elise in your bed every night?”

Duncan realized he was being tested. He held the judge’s stare for several beats, then deadpanned, “What’s the choice?”

The judge laughed. “My feeling exactly.” He raised his hands, palms up. “In the eyes of many, I’m a man to be pitied, a fool for love. I fell in love the moment I saw her, and I’m still in love.”

Duncan stretched his feet far out in front of him and studied the toes of his shoes. “I believe that.” He waited several seconds, then said, “What I don’t believe is that you had no dealings with Meyer Napoli except inside your courtroom.” He gave up the study of his footwear and turned his head. “You lied about that, Judge.”

Duncan won the staring contest. The initial challenge in the judge’s glare slowly evaporated. Finally he sighed with resignation. “You’re good, Detective.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need your compliments. I need an explanation for why you lied.”

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “So Elise would never know that I had hired Meyer Napoli to follow her.”

Duncan had thought it might be something like that. “Why did you?”

“I’m not proud of it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I can’t believe I resorted to hiring that-”

“Unscrupulous sleazoid,” Duncan said, impatient because he wasn’t getting a straight answer. “ Napoli didn’t come with character references, but you hired him anyway. You hired him to follow your wife. Why?”

“Again, it’s a cliché. The oldest reason in the world.” He looked sadly at Duncan.

“She was having an affair.”

The judge’s vulnerable smile was out of character for the man Duncan knew, but he supposed a cuckold was about as humble a creature as there was. “I had my suspicions,” he replied. “But before I tell you anything more, I want you to understand that it happened months ago. Last year.”

“Okay.”

“It’s over and has been for some time,” he insisted.

“Okay.”

Satisfied that he’d made that crucial point, the judge said, “For months I tried to ignore the signs.”

“She had a headache every night?”

He chuckled. “No. Even at the height of my suspicion, Elise was as passionate in bed as she’d always been. Our sexual appetite for each other never waned.”

Duncan tried to keep his expression impassive, but even if he couldn’t, the judge wouldn’t have noticed. He was submerged in his recollections.

“It was other things,” he said. “Classic signs. Telephone calls she pretended were wrong numbers. Rushing in late for meals without having a good excuse for her lateness. Time unaccounted for.”

“Sounds like an affair to me.” Duncan was perversely glad to cast doubt on Cato Laird’s confidence in his wife’s sexual appetite for him.

“I thought so, too. It got so that the thought of her in bed with another man dominated my mind. It’s all I could think about. If it was true, I had to know it, and I had to know who he was.”

“So you retained the services of Meyer Napoli.”

“Which indicates the degree of my desperation. I refused to go to his office. We met late one evening at a driving range. I practiced my swing while he asked pertinent questions. Did I know who her lover was? How long had the affair been going on?”

He shook his head with disgust. “I couldn’t believe I was discussing my wife with a man of his caliber. His phraseology, the vulgar terms he used, I couldn’t even apply to Elise. It all seemed so wrong, I started to call the whole thing off right then.

“But,” he continued with a sigh, “I’d gone that far, and not knowing was making me miserable. So I gave him the required advance on his fee, and left. That’s the last time I ever saw him.”

Duncan had been following the story, practically anticipating every word the judge was going to say before he said it. It was a familiar story that he’d heard many times over the course of his career. Passion led to possessiveness and jealousy, which spawned all sorts of mayhem, and frequently murder.

But the judge’s last statement didn’t gibe with the rest of it. “The last time you ever saw him? Napoli didn’t come through?”

“No, he came through,” the judge said tightly.

“She was having an affair?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sorry, Judge. You’ve lost me.”

“ Napoli got back to me,” he explained. “He had followed Elise to several clandestine meetings. He identified the man. He had times and places. But…but I stopped him there. I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want it confirmed to me that she was having an affair.”