Erica Orloff - The Golden Girl

“Of course I do. Katherine Gould.”

“No, no, no, Uncle Bing…” Madison was mocking him, inciting his fury further. “The name on her birth certificate. The name she was born with. The name she had when she went to the courthouse. To watch her father’s trial. Poor little immigrant girl with her kerchief on. Thick accent. Ugly black shoes. Hand-me-downs. Tell him, Katherine. Tell him all about it. Or should I say Katarina?”

Katherine Gould stared with pure hatred at Madison. “Shut up, you pathetic bitch. You spoiled, spoiled, worthless girl.”

“Guess it’ll be up to me to clue in poor stupid Bing. That’s why you’re not CEO—or won’t be for long. Too gullible. Don’t have the temperament needed to have a position of that power.”

“Shut up!” Katherine shrieked. “Just shut up, now!”

“Her real name, Uncle Bing, is Katarina Karaspov.”

Bing didn’t react—not at first. It took a second for the name to seep into his brain. Madison watched it, almost as if watching a movie in slow motion. Then she finally saw the recognition dawn on him.

He turned to Katherine. “What? You’re…the…the daughter of that beast who killed my baby brother?”

“My father didn’t kill anyone. He was railroaded by the system. By a system that couldn’t see past his thick tongue, his accent, his ugly black shoes, like she just said. A system set up to revere people like the Pruitts and despise people like the Karaspovs. Immigrants. Use us like workhorses, then turn on us in an instant.”

“But he killed my brother. He…burned him.”

“He didn’t. He wasn’t capable of it. He turned that child over to the men he worked for. It was supposed to be a clean job. They were supposed to give him to a nursemaid—to his own former nanny to care for him. Hell, she loved him more than his own stupid mother. She was too busy with her bridge club to even tuck her children in at night.”

Bing’s face was pale, and he had broken out in a sweat. “I can’t breathe,” he said, clutching at his throat.

“My father took the fall for his partners in crime, in return for enough money for me to go to college, for my mother to buy a house. But I knew he was innocent. And though I was the little immigrant girl, I made sure I got straight A’s, that I worked two jobs, that I had the ‘right clothes,’ the right look, the right hairstyle. And I spent years—long relentless years—researching the Pruitts. I know more about the lot of you than you know about yourselves.”

“So you went for the job with my father with malice aforethought.”

“Absolutely. And along the way, he fell in love with me. And I became enamored of him. I changed my plan from ruining the Pruitts to the ultimate irony—becoming their matriarch. Marrying into them in the ultimate realization of the American dream.”

Madison looked at Katherine’s face. She was flushed, heady with the dream she’d once embraced.

“Then he threw me out like I was worthless. Or worse, old. I saw him going for younger women. Women who weren’t even fit to converse with him, let alone share his bed. Then that Claire…for God’s sake, she was your age. That was too much to take.”

“But what about me?” Bing asked, horrified. “What about me, us. Our dream?”

“You’re so stupid. Really…do you think you hold a candle to me? You’ve never been bright enough to compete with your brother—or me, for that matter.”

“But we were going to run Pruitt & Pruitt together.”

“You’re a fool. A stupid old fool,” Katherine said. “Men really never outgrow thinking with their pants, Madison. They’re not like women. Not like us.”

Madison realized Katherine had said more than enough for the FBI, but she needed to know if Bing was a pathetic patsy or a full participant, especially where the murders were concerned.

“Bing…okay, I get that maybe you were jealous of my father—had a sense of brotherly competition, but…why go along with her plan? You have enough wealth for a lifetime and then some. Why? I don’t understand.”

“I was so tired of the attention he got, Madison. Him and his golden-girl offspring, while me, I had two ex-wives and no children.” His voice was laced with a nasty sarcasm. “Katherine’s too old now. I guess I…she came to me with a plan. To increase my wealth tenfold through working with money that we could hide offshore. No one would know. And at the same time, we were creating a set of books that would topple your father’s reign as CEO. I’d never heard a more perfect plan in my entire life. It was sheer brilliance.”

“Bing—” Madison shook her head sadly “—my father loves you. You’re his only brother. He feels protective toward you.”

“Please…don’t patronize me,” he snapped. “Once he came along, he was all my mother cared about. He got the attention, he got the love, and I was shunted aside, this ugly reminder of William’s death. Then my father chose him as the heir to the throne of Pruitt & Pruitt. He chose him to lead the family into the new century. Me? I was an afterthought.”

“Bing, you run a huge part of the company. You’ve been on the cover of Fortune and been profiled in the Wall Street Journal. You’re delusional.”

“Would a delusional person have so perfect a plan? And it would have worked…”

“Except for Claire.”

“Except for Claire. So we had to get rid of her.”

“Bing,” Madison shook her head. “But kill her? How?”

“Katherine and I figured out she was snooping around. So it was a preemptive strike. I told Claire that I knew Jack was crooked, and I had proof. If she met me at the warehouse, I would give her the evidence. Once she got there, friends of Katherine’s erased her. End of story.”

Madison was stunned. Claire had gone there knowing the evidence might point to Jack. But she was willing to hunt for the truth, just as Madison was. Her admiration for her friend’s courage grew.

“And me? Getting rid of me?”

“If your father had married Claire, as was his plan, they would have had babies, and you, my dear, would have found your fortune divided many more ways—maybe even eradicated entirely. But once Claire was gone, I realized that if Katherine could arrange for your demise, too, then Jack would be completely and utterly destroyed. Only putting him in prison for illegal accounting practices would be the cherry on top.”

Madison was chilled. The two of them were stark raving mad, and now she had enough evidence on both of them.

“Well, your plan failed, you two. I’m still alive.”

Madison started to back up to the Mercedes, but Katherine pulled a gun from her purse.

“Sorry, my little blond heiress. Now it’s your turn.”

Suddenly, SWAT teams made their presence known. A male voice shouted from the rooftop, “Freeze. Put the gun down…you’re surrounded.”

The Mercedes’s doors opened, and out stepped Troy and his team, their automatic weapons drawn and trained on Bing and Katherine. At the same moment, Bing grabbed Madison and thrust her in front of him as a shield.

“Hold on, everybody,” Troy said, holding his arms up and urging calm.

Katherine trained her gun on Maddie’s head—right at her temple.

“If anyone moves one step closer, she’s dead.”

“Now…you do that, and you’re in a heap more shit, Katherine. That’s a capital offense…needle-in-the-arm kind of crime…” Troy spoke calmly, in a measured voice. “We don’t want this turning into a bloodbath.”

Madison tried to weigh her options, and found they were rather slim at the moment. If the SWAT teams could take out Katherine, she felt she could handle Bing, but the gun butt pressed to her temple was limiting any choices she had.