“You were having an affair with Hannah Starr.”
“I put a stop to it early on. I tried.”
Lucy was staring hard at him.
“You signed on with her investment firm a little over a year ago,” Berger said. “I can give you the exact date if you want. You realize, of course, we have an abundance of information because of what’s happened.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s all anybody hears on the news,” he said. “And now the other girl. The marathon runner. I can’t think of her name. And maybe some serial killer driving a yellow cab. Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“What makes you think Toni Darien was a marathon runner?”
“I must have heard it on TV, seen it on the Internet or something.”
Berger tried to think about any reference to Toni Darien as a marathon runner. She didn’t recall that being released to the media, only that she jogged.
“How did you first meet Hannah?” she asked.
“The Monkey Bar, where a lot of Hollywood people hang out,” he said. “She was in there one night and we started talking. She was really smart about money, told me all kinds of stuff I didn’t know shit about.”
“And you know what happened to her three weeks ago,” Berger said, and Lucy listened intensely.
“I have a pretty good idea. I think somebody did something. You know, she pissed people off.”
“Who did she piss off?” Berger asked.
“You got a phone book? Let me go through it.”
“A lot of people,” Berger said. “You’re saying she pissed off almost everybody she met?”
“Including me. I admit. She always wanted her way about everything. She had to have her own way about absolutely everything.”
“You’re talking about her as if she’s dead.”
“I’m not naïve. Most people think something bad happened to her.”
“You don’t seem upset about the possibility she might be dead,” Berger said.
“Sure it’s upsetting. I didn’t hate her. I just got tired of her pushing me and pushing me. Chasing me and chasing me, if you want me to be honest. She didn’t like to be told no.”
“Why did she give you your money back-actually, four times your original investment? Two million dollars. That’s quite a return on your investment in only a year.”
Another shrug. “The market was volatile. Lehman Brothers was going belly-up. She called me and said she was recommending I pull out, and I said whatever you think. Then I got the wire. And later on? Damn if she wasn’t right. I would have lost everything, and I’m not making millions and millions yet. I’m not A list yet. Whatever I have left over after expenses, I sure as hell don’t want to lose.”
“When was the last time you had sex with Hannah?” Berger was taking notes on the legal pad again, conscious of Lucy, of her stoni ness, of the way she was staring at Hap Judd.
He had to think. “Uh, okay. I remember. After that call. She told me she was pulling my money out, and could I drop by and she’d explain what was going on. It was just an excuse.”
“Drop by where?”
“Her house. I dropped by, and one thing led to another. That was the last time. July, I think. I was heading off to London, and anyway, she has a husband. Bobby. I wasn’t all that comfortable at her house when he was there.”
“He was there on that occasion? When she asked you to drop by before you headed to London?”
“Uh, I don’t remember if he was that time. It’s a huge house.”
“Their house on Park Avenue.”
“He was hardly ever home.” Judd didn’t answer the question. “Travels all the time in their private jets, back and forth to Europe, all over the place. I got the impression he spends a lot of time in South Florida, that he’s into the Miami scene, and they’ve got this place there on the ocean. He’s got an Enzo down there. One of those Ferraris that costs more than a million bucks. I don’t really know him. I’ve met him a few times.”
“Where did you meet him and when?”
“When I started investing with their company a little over a year ago. They invited me to their house. I’ve seen him at their house.”
Berger thought about the timing, and she thought about Dodie Hodge again.
“Is Hannah the person who referred you to the fortune-teller, to Dodie Hodge?”
“Okay, yeah. She’d do readings for Hannah and Bobby at the house. Hannah suggested I talk to Dodie, and it was a mistake. The lady’s crazy as shit. She got obsessed with me, said I was the reincarnation of a son she’d had in a former life in Egypt. That I was a pharaoh and she was my mother.”
“Let me make sure I understand which house you’re talking about. The same one you said you visited this past July, when you had sex with Hannah for the last time,” Berger said.
“The old man’s house, worth, like, eighty million, this huge car collection, unbelievable antiques, statues, Michelangelo paintings on the walls and ceilings, frescoes, whatever you call them.”
“I doubt they’re Michelangelos,” Berger said wryly.
“Like a hundred years old, un-freakin’-believable, practically takes up a city block. Bobby’s from money, too. So he and Hannah had a business partnership. She used to tell me they never had sex. Like, not even once.”
Berger made a note that Hap Judd continued to refer to Hannah in the past tense. He continued talking about her as if she was dead.
“But the old man got tired of her being this rich little playgirl and said she needed to settle down with someone so he’d know the business was going to be handled right,” Judd continued. “Rupe didn’t want to leave everything to her if she was still running around, you know, single and partying, and then ended up marrying some schmuck who got his hands on everything. So you can see why she’d screw around on Bobby-even though she used to tell me that sometimes she was afraid of him. It wasn’t really screwing around because they didn’t have that kind of deal.”
“When did you begin having a sexual relationship with Hannah?”
“That first time at the mansion? Let me put it to you this way. She was real friendly. They have an indoor pool, an entire spa like something in Europe. It was me and some other VIP clients, new clients, there for a swim, for drinks and dinner, all these servants everywhere, Dom Pérignon and Cristal flowing like Kool-Aid. So I’m in the pool and she was paying a lot of attention. She started it.”
“She started it on your first visit to her father’s house a year ago this past August?”
Lucy sat with her arms crossed, staring. She was silent and wouldn’t look at Berger.
“It was obvious,” Judd said.
“Where was Bobby while she was being obvious?”
“I don’t know. Maybe showing off his new Porsche. I do remember that. He’d gotten one of those Carrera GTs, a red one. That picture of him all over the news? That’s the car. He was giving people rides up and down Park Avenue. You ask me, you ought to be checking Bobby out. Like, where was he when Hannah disappeared, huh?”
Bobby Fuller was in their North Miami Beach apartment when Hannah disappeared, and Berger wasn’t going to offer that.
She said, “Where were you the night before Thanksgiving?”
“Me?” He almost laughed. “Now you’re thinking I did something to her? No way. I don’t hurt people. That’s not my thing.”
Berger made a note. Judd was assuming Hannah had been “hurt.”
“I asked a simple question,” Berger said. “Where were you the night before Thanksgiving, Wednesday, November twenty-sixth?”
“Let me think.” His leg was jumping up and down again. “I honestly don’t remember.”