Casey sipped her martini. “I’m listening.”
“I know you killed Grace, I just don’t know how.”
Casey raised her eyebrows. “But you said the coroner ruled she killed herself.”
“So it appears.”
“Take off your sheet,” Casey said.
“You know I’m not wired, Casey.”
“You want your pores to open, to get the full benefit.”
“My pores are fine semiclosed,” Alexa said.
“Humor me, Alexa. Don’t tell me you’re shy. I’ve already seen your body. It’s a very nice one. You take very good care of yourself.”
Why not? Alexa stood, undid the tuck above her breasts, and let the sheet slip to the floor.
“You have a very nice body,” Casey repeated. “You hide it in those silly, off-the-rack business suits. The right tailoring would do wonders for you. I’ll take you shopping soon. Just the two of us.”
“Thanks. I have to stay in shape,” Alexa said, sitting and raising her feet to mirror Casey’s pose. “I like the suits I wear.” The heat was making her drowsy because she hadn’t slept in a very long time. “I guess I am guilty of liking you too much, of feeling we were close based on common experience. I wanted too much to believe you were what you seemed. It blinded me.”
“We’re a lot alike,” Casey said. “Possibly more than either of us imagines.”
Because you imagine that what I did to my sister was comparable to what you did to your father? That was different, very different.
“Do you have any illusions that this talk will lead to my arrest?”
Alexa shrugged. “Bringing charges would be very difficult, if not impossible. You were very smart. The witnesses are either dead or uninformed as to your involvement. There’s no one left to testify against you. William won’t because of the remote possibility you’ll forgive him in the future.”
“So he can destroy me,” Casey said. “That will never happen.”
“I doubt he has anything he can blackmail you with. Not yet anyway. He has a lot of possible directions. He thinks he’s playing a chess game.”
“You have old Willie Boy pegged. Can you make a case against him for what he did to my mother and father? What he did to Sibby?”
“I’m going to try. And if I do, he’ll try to take you down with him. Anyway, you said it yourself-there is no justice.”
“I really do like talking to you,” Casey said, taking a sip and putting down the glass. “You have this way of making me want to be honest with you.”
Alexa said, “Honesty is probably all but impossible for you, Casey. I do understand why, and my heart goes out to you. I think what you did is cold and horrible, and I hate what you did, but…”
“You empathize.” Casey put her open hands to her chest. “Dahlin’, that all means a lot more to little ole me than you can imagine. I’ve been alone all my life and you know better than anybody what my uncle did to my parents. You are the one who found the missing pages at Andy’s.”
“I didn’t say I found the pages at Andy’s apartment,” Alexa said, leaning back casually.
“Of course you did. How else would I have known?”
“Beats me, since we haven’t discussed Andy Tinsdale, or should I say Andy Fugate. You looked at his picture and said you only knew him as an orderly, which ensured I would find his apartment and the pages. It was a needless lie, Casey. You could have told me who he was and slammed that door closed, the way you did so many others. I would have found out you knew him anyway, which would have been worse.”
“You can’t plan everything perfectly.” Casey took another sip of her martini. “Obviously I’m too tired to talk candidly. Or without an attorney present. I had a thought today. Decell’s gone. It occurs to me that the LePointe trusts could use a security director with FBI experience. At a salary commensurate with the responsibility.”
“You offering me a bribe?”
“Goodness, no. A job. You’d be perfect.”
“That’s tempting. But wouldn’t I be under your thumb? Like Grace was?”
“That’s not nice,” Casey said. “The money would simply be commensurate with your law enforcement experience.”
“I make all I need.”
“Eighty-nine thousand, six hundred, and forty-one dollars last year before taxes. And you have almost a hundred thousand in your retirement accounts, another fifty in stocks and bonds. You live in a rented apartment all by your lonesome in Washington. You have no family to speak of, and workaholics make few friends. It must be awful. I could pay you five hundred thousand a year on a twenty-year contract. And you could have whatever perks and private entanglements you liked.”
“That’s tempting,” Alexa said. “But there’s Grace.”
“Grace, Grace, Grace.”
“You murdered her. You are the only one with the access to the money I found at her home. Who else could afford to walk away from it after it had served its purpose as a very clever prop?”
“Fifty thousand is a lot for anybody to walk away from.”
“Not for you. You paid thirty grand for a boat for a lunatic psychopathic swamp dweller.”
“I’ve never bought a boat in my life.”
“Okay, you bought it through Andy.”
“I barely knew the man.”
“Unko told me about the garden-shed incident.”
“He didn’t tell you that!” Casey squealed. “That old bastard. Well, I did tell you about Dr. Fuckerman. Andy Fugate was a very accommodating man, with extremely limited prospects.”
“Other than blackmail.”
“No big deal. I suppose I paid him to look the other way-help me make a few portraits of people I didn’t have releases from until he got them for me. He was not kind to the inmates, in ways you wouldn’t believe. He was a truly despicable individual.”
“Nurse Fugate didn’t recognize Leland in your exhibition?”
“Dorothy never saw any of my work as far as I know. She certainly didn’t attend the exhibition in Zurich where I showed that portrait, and she wouldn’t have had access to the catalog. Unko wasn’t there either. He’d have shit a brick. He treated Leland. So before we go any further, is this an interrogation or a job interview?”
Alexa said, “Just humor me. I just want to know how competent I am. We both know I can’t make this case.”
“This is between the two of us and the walls?” Casey said. “Andy was sometimes in town in the summers. More when we were younger. I think Dorothy wasn’t fond of having him around, because he was a reminder of something she didn’t like thinking about. He was a bastard in more ways than one. I couldn’t stand the sight of him.” Casey giggled. “He always wanted to play doctor, and guess who was the patient? He resented his mother since she treated him like a leper. Face it, they both imagined she would marry Unko after Sarah died and they’d win the blue-blood lottery.
“I suppose I tolerated Andy’s company because he was virtually unlikable and I was fascinated by that. He was a repulsive know-it-all loser with delusions of importance. It seems sometimes that the world is filled to bursting with unlikable people.”
“And Grace’s cash-that was yours. Andy didn’t have access to that kind of money.”
“I told you, the fifty thousand could have come from someone else that was in on it.”
“There it is again. I never said it was fifty thousand. Just like I never said I was in Andy’s apartment.”
“Next time I talk about it, I’ll try to remember all these little traps.”
“How did you get Grace to commit suicide?”
“This is growing tedious, Alexa. I never forced Grace Smythe to do anything, ever. You give me far too much credit-or too little. I’m not responsible for anything that woman did. Including her dalliance with Andy.”
“Did Andy tell you Sibby Danielson was your mother?”
“I think it’s more likely that Andy told Grace.”
“Grace was in love with you. She’d have done whatever you wanted. That I had figured out already, from the shrine and how she looked at you. I just didn’t know how you used that longing until tonight. We’ll say, for the sake of argument, that Andy snooped and found the notebook. Maybe he saw Dorothy making entries and found her hiding place. He approached you, thinking…you’d want to know?”