Night Whispers by Judith McNaught
Sloan had to fight to control her expression. “I . . . well . . . yes.”
“How many?”
“Not many. One.”
“Only one? Palm Beach is the gathering place for an awful lot of Mr. Perfects. You must not have been looking around.”
Sloan closed her eyes and saw a tanned male face with a square jaw, beautiful gray eyes, and an insistent mouth leaning toward her. She swallowed. “He was as perfect as it gets.”
“Did you meet him?”
“Oh, yes,” Sloan said weakly. “I met him.”
“And did you go out with him?”
“Yes.”
“And?” Sara prodded.
Sloan’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she had to clear her throat. “We liked each other.”
“How much did you like each other?” Sara’s smile wavered as she watched Sloan’s face and listened to her voice.
Sloan laid her cheek against the pillow she was holding and swallowed. “A lot.”
“Do we have a name?” Sara asked.
“Noah Maitland.”
“Noah Maitland?” Sara uttered. “Noah Maitland?” Like many residents of Bell Harbor, Sara subscribed to the Palm Beach Daily News and kept up on the social whirl there. “Listen to me. Even if he weren’t an arms smuggler, you wouldn’t want him. He has a different rich, glamorous woman with him in every picture I’ve seen of him, but he never sticks with any of them.”
Before Sloan could reply, her mother returned from the kitchen with the tea and spoke up, her voice gentle but firm. “I don’t think Sloan should give up hope that all this will work out. Edith’s murderer will be found, and then Paris and Carter will realize she was innocent, and they’ll forgive her. And so far, no one has said that anything illegal has been found on Noah Maitland’s boats. I’m sure he’s innocent or Sloan would never have—” She glanced tenderly at her unhappy daughter and said with certainty, “Or else Sloan would never have fallen in love with him. The truth will come out about his innocence, and Sloan can apologize to him. I’m sure he’s a kind, gentle man who will understand and forgive her.” She looked at Sloan. “Isn’t that true, darling?”
Sloan thought of her last phone call with Noah and lifted teary eyes to her mother. “No.”
A few minutes later, Sloan realized she had to take immediate steps to help her get over all this. She reached for the phone and called the police department. “Matt, this is Sloan,” she told Lieutenant Caruso. “I’d like to come back to work tomorrow instead of Monday, if you can use me.”
“Are you back in town?” he asked, and when she said she was, he told her to report for duty in the morning. Caruso hung up the phone and strolled over to Jess Jessup’s desk. “Sloan is home. I told her she could come to work tomorrow. I hope that’s okay with Captain Ingersoll. I mean, she’s been charged with murder . . .”
Jess stood up. “Caruso, you’re an ass.”
“Where are you going?” Caruso called after him.
“You can reach me on the radio if you need me,” he replied, but before he left, Jess stopped at the dispatcher’s desk. “Sloan is back,” he told the dispatcher. “She’s at home.”
Before Jess reached his car, the dispatcher had put the word out to the officers on duty around Bell Harbor.
Within ten minutes, a parade of police cruisers began to arrive in front of her house.
Jess arrived first, and Sara answered the door. They had not seen each other since he’d appeared at her house after the barbecue on the beach, and Sara faltered when she saw him standing there. “Come out here a minute,” Jess ordered, drawing Sara forward onto Sloan’s porch. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s fine,” Sara said firmly. “She’s terrific.”
Jess wasn’t deceived. “How is she really doing?”
“Fair.”
He nodded as if he expected that; then he did the last thing Sara expected him to do or wanted him to do. He reached out and tipped her chin up, and his smile was without mockery or flirtation. “Do you think we could bury the hatchet for her sake for a while?”
Sara nodded warily, taken aback by the gentleness in his face as he looked at her. “I’d like that, Jess.”
For the rest of the afternoon and evening, a steady procession of police cruisers arrived at Sloan’s house and disappeared after a little while. Boxes of pizzas and sandwiches from fast-food restaurants accumulated on the living room table as Sloan’s friends on the force invented excuses to come by and say hello.
Sloan knew better.
They had come to show their support and to cheer her up. It worked until Sloan went to bed that night. Alone in her bed, there was nothing to distract her from remembering Noah. She fell asleep thinking about the times she’d lain against his side after they’d made love, her head on his shoulder, his hand idly caressing her, until they both slept. Or made love again.
48
Paris wasn’t fooled one bit by Detectives Cagle and Flynn’s courteous tone. They were sitting in her living room the day after her great-grandmother’s funeral, and they were trying to make her incriminate herself in her great-grandmother’s murder.
“I’m sure you can understand why we’re baffled,” Flynn was saying. “I mean, if Sloan killed Mrs. Reynolds, why would she wipe her prints off her own gun and then ‘hide’ the gun where we couldn’t miss it? Her prints on her own gun wouldn’t have incriminated her. The gun incriminated her because it fired the shot that killed Mrs. Reynolds.”
“I told you before,” Paris stated, “I don’t know the answer to that.”
“Sloan said the gun was still in its original hiding place, not under the mattress, on the morning after Mrs. Reynolds’s death. She checked. Do you think someone else could have put the gun under the mattress?”
“Who?” Paris countered angrily. “The servants had been sent home by you. The only people in the house morning who didn’t work for you were Paul Richardson and Sloan, my father and me, and Gary Dishler.”
“That’s the confusing part,” Cagle put in.
“Yes, isn’t it?” she countered. “You obviously don’t think Paul Richardson or Sloan could be guilty.”
“Richardson is FBI and he has no motive. Your sister has an unblemished record as a police officer and she was working for him. Believe me, if all that weren’t true, your sister would be staring at a lifetime in prison. Now, let’s see, who does that leave us with—who had a motive for wanting to see your great-grandmother dead and Sloan in prison, and who was here to move the gun under the mattress?”
Paris stood up, ending the interview, and motioned to Nordstrom, who was hovering in the hallway. She was through with being nice to people who treated her badly. “Nordstrom,” she said coldly, “please show these men to the door, and lock it behind them. They are never again to be allowed past the gates.”
Flynn dropped his friendly pretext. “We can get a warrant.”
Paris nodded toward the door. “Do it, then,” she said. “But until you have one, kindly get out and stay out!”
When the front door closed behind them, Cagle looked at Flynn with a wry smile. “That was a genteel way of saying ‘fuck off,’ wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. I’ll bet she was just as genteel when she pointed that Glock at her great-grandmother’s chest and pulled the trigger.”
Paris wasn’t feeling genteel. She was panicked. She paced slowly back and forth across the living room floor, trying to think of who the murderer could be. She wasn’t as willing as the police were to discount Paul Richardson or Sloan. Paul was obviously a liar and a phony, and he was fully capable of using people ruthlessly. He knew how to use a gun, and he would know how to fix things so it looked like someone else was guilty. He had no heart. He had broken hers. The problem was . . . he actually seemed to believe that Paris had killed her great-grandmother.
Sloan was as dishonest and heartless as he was. She’d pretended she wanted Paris to think of her as a real sister; then she tricked her into l
Absently rubbing her throbbing temples, Paris went over what the detectives had said and what they’d implied. They seemed to be absolutely convinced that Sloan was telling the truth, and that whoever put her gun under her mattress was the killer. The police were convinced it wasn’t Sloan or Paul, and Paris knew it wasn’t her father or herself.
That only left Gary Dishler.
At first the idea seemed absurd, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized how little she actually liked the man. When he’d come to work for her father a few years ago, his position as assistant had been well-defined, but now he seemed to be in charge of everything. Generally, he treated her father with deferential respect, but there had been a few times when she’d heard him use a clipped, impatient tone that was completely inappropriate. She’d seen him lose his temper with a housemaid and fire her on the spot because she’d touched some papers on his desk.
The more Paris considered it, the more unpleasant and unsavory Dishler seemed to her. She couldn’t imagine why he would want to hurt her great-grandmother, but she wasn’t entirely sure he was incapable of it.
Her father was going through condolence cards in a spacious second-floor study with connecting doors to his bedroom on one side and to Gary Dishler’s office on the other. The hallway door into Dishler’s office was open, but the connecting door was closed. Paris carefully closed the hallway door into her father’s study so they’d have complete privacy. “We have a problem,” she said as calmly as she could.
“What is it?” he asked, slitting open another envelope.
Paris sat down on a chair in front of his desk. “Do you know how Gary really felt about Great-grandmother? I know she was rude to him from time to time.”
“She was rude to everyone from time to time,” Carter pointed out philosophically. “What has that to do with Gary?”
Paris drew a fortifying breath. “The police were here a while ago. They believe that whoever put Sloan’s gun under the mattress also killed Great-grandmother, and they are convinced it wasn’t Sloan or Paul.”
“Don’t get involved with all that, Paris. It will drive you crazy if you try to sort it out. Let them handle it.”
“I don’t think we can afford to do that.”
He looked up, frowning. “Why not?”
“Because the police are already convinced I did it. I had the biggest motive and the best opportunity.”
“That’s ridiculous! It’s insane.”
“It’s insane to go to jail for something I didn’t do, but that happens to people all the time. There’s only one person who could have moved that gun the morning after Great-grandmother was killed, and it’s Gary Dishler. Outside of Paul and Sloan and you and me, he was the only other person the police allowed to stay on the premises after her body was found. You didn’t do it and I didn’t do it. That leaves Gary.”
An odd expression crossed his face as she finished, an expression almost like fear, but it vanished so quickly Paris couldn’t be certain. “The police won’t even bother asking him about it, and I think I’m going to be arrested. I think we ought to hire our own private detectives or something. And I think I ought to have a lawyer ready.”
Anger, not fear, was tightening his face as she stood up and said, “Will you think about doing both those things?”
He nodded curtly, and Paris left him. She’d started down the stairs when she heard a door crash into its frame, and she turned and darted up the stairs. Her father’s study door was still open, but Dishler’s hallway door was closed now, and Paris almost moaned aloud at the thought Dishler would be the one he asked to get her a lawyer and hire the detectives. Then she realized her father had looked angry enough to confront Dishler himself and try to wring the truth out of him.
Fear for her father made Paris violate the precepts of a lifetime. She rushed into her father’s office, closed the door, and leaned over his desk to the telephone. She pressed Gary Dishler’s extension number, and the phone was immediately answered. “What is it?” he snapped.
“Gary? Oh, I’m sorry,” Paris said as she carefully held down the number three on her father’s telephone, which enabled the room-monitoring feature. “I meant to dial the kitchen.”
“That’s extension thirty-two,” he said, and hung up. Gary had chosen the new phone system, and he’d shown her how to use the room-monitoring feature when her father was recovering from his heart attack. Now Paris was putting it to a new use. The conversation in Gary’s office came over the speaker phone, and Paris listened to it with a mounting sense of disbelief and horror that turned to terror.
“I told you to calm down, Carter!” Dishler warned in a voice Paris had never heard him use before. “What are you saying?”
“You heard what I said. My daughter has just informed me that she is likely to be arrested for Edith’s murder.”
“Which daughter is that?” Dishler asked needlessly.
“I only have one daughter who counts,” Carter snapped. “And she has just presented me with a rather convincing argument that you must have moved that gun. Which makes you a murderer.”
Instead of hearing Dishler react with a violent denial, as Paris expected, she heard his chair make a noise as if he had leaned back in it, and when he spoke, his voice was grotesque in its calm lack of concern.
“You had a serious problem, Carter, and your business partners recognized it as soon as I reported it. They asked me to handle the problem before it blew up and the fallout destroyed all of us.”
“What problem?” Carter demanded, but he sounded alarmed and defensive.
“Come now, you know what problem,” Dishler said snidely. “The problem is that Edith changed her will before either of us realized it. She cut Sloan in for a piece of her estate, a large portion of which is the Hanover Trust. Sloan’s part of the trust should have given her fifteen million dollars. But the Hanover Trust only has five million dollars total, because the trustee—that’s you and your bank—has been milking it for a decade to keep the bank operating and to cover your losses everywhere else. Am I correct?”
After a silence, Paris heard her father say, “I could have persuaded Sloan to leave the money in the trust and to be satisfied with interest payments. I’d already persuaded Paris to do that—”
There was a crash, as if Dishler had slapped his hand on the desk. “Sloan Reynolds isn’t Paris: She’s a cop. If she decided she wanted to withdraw the principal and you couldn’t hand it over, she’d have raised a stink. That stink would have covered you and spread to Reynolds Bank. Your partners in that bank couldn’t allow that to happen.”
“Stop calling them my partners, damn you! We had a business arrangement, not a partnership. They bailed me out when the bank was in trouble in the eighties, and in return I agreed to launder some money for them over the years. I’ve let them put their own people in a few key positions, and I’ve tolerated having you around, but nobody ever talked about murder.”
“There was no choice. If I’d known ahead of time that Edith was going to change her will to include Sloan, the old woman would have died a natural-looking death before she could sign it, and there would have been no problem.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t know anything about it until Wilson left here with the new will signed and witnessed by your servants. I consulted with your partners, who consulted with their attorneys. It turned out that the only sure way to prevent someone like Sloan from being able to claim her inheritance was if it appeared that she had murdered in order to get it. Your partners advised me to handle the matter.”
Paris heard her father make a sound like a groaning curse, and Dishler said with a vocal shrug, “It’
Carter’s voice dropped to a defeated whisper. “How did you know? When did you find out she was a cop?”
“The day before poor Edith’s demise, I asked your daughter what her opinion was of the rare Persian carpets downstairs. She described the colors in the Aubusson— she didn’t know the difference. That, combined with the fact that she showed no real interest in any of the decor, made me suspicious.
“It took me five minutes on the computer to discover she was a cop and one phone call to verify it. It took your business partners fifteen minutes to come up with a plan and give me instructions.” Irritably, he added, “It took me thirty minutes to find where she’d hidden the damn gun. Now, can we end this unpleasant discussion?”
In the office next door, Paris heard the strain in her father’s voice as he asked, “What about Paris? They’ll arrest her for it.”
“Now, you know I would never let that happen. Sloan will be taken care of tonight, and the matter will come to an end.”
“How?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
In the office next door, Paris held her breath, her hand hovering over the button that would turn the speaker phone off. But, she had to know what they were saying about Sloan.
Her father must have nodded, because he didn’t speak, and Dishler’s answer chilled her blood. “Tonight, with a little persuasion, Sloan is going to have an attack of guilt and shame that causes her to write a note, confessing to killing her great-grandmother. And then she is going to blow her brains out. Women don’t like to mess up their looks when they die, but she’s a cop. She would be more likely to take a quick, certain route, don’t you—”
Paris slapped the intercom button off and fled from her father’s office, stumbling as she raced down the hall. Her father’s bedroom suite was at the end of the north wing of the house, hers was at the end of the south wing. As she passed the central staircase that led down to the foyer and divided the two wings, she saw one of the maids walking down the hall with an armful of fresh linen, and she made herself slow to a walk.