Ricochet

Chapter 12

THEY WENT TO BREAKFAST IN A DOWNTOWN COFFEE SHOP NEAR the Barracks. DeeDee ordered an egg white omelet with fat-free cheese, fresh tomatoes, and whole wheat toast. Duncan had two eggs over easy, fluffy grits with melting butter, sausage links, and biscuits with gravy.

“That’s so unfair,” DeeDee remarked as she watched him dunk a piece of sausage into the gravy. “I’m having a voodoo doll made of you. Every time I have to eat low-cal, I’m going to poke a needle into it.”

“It’ll catch up with me one of these days.”

“I doubt it,” she muttered. “It’s genetic. One of God’s meanest jokes on the human race is that you get to see what you’re going to become. Have you seen my mother’s butt? Broad as a barn.”

“But she’s not wrinkled.”

“Because her face is as round as a pie plate. I’m seeing them today.” Visits with her parents always put her in a bad and self-critical mood.

“You’ll eat well there.”

“But not until we’ve gone to the cemetery and paid homage to precious Steven.” Then she placed her palm against her forehead and rubbed it hard. “Listen to me. My brother is dead, I’m alive, and I’m resenting him? What kind of person does that make me? A terrible person, that’s what.”

“Look, if you’d rather have this conversation with yourself alone, I can leave and come back later.”

She shot Duncan a wry smile. “Sorry. But you know how I hate those pilgrimages to Steven’s grave. Mom sobs. Dad turns as silent as the headstone. As we leave, he looks at me and I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking why, if he had to lose one of his children, it had to be Steven.”

“That’s not what he’s thinking.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why does he make me feel like I’m a colossal disappointment?”

“He just doesn’t know how to show you how proud he is. He loves you.” This is what Duncan always told her, but he knew she didn’t believe it. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

DeeDee’s brother had been killed in a car accident a week before his high school graduation. DeeDee, several years younger, had taken it upon herself to fill her brother’s shoes, or try. Two decades after the tragedy, her parents were still mourning him and she was still trying to make up for their loss and win the love they had lavished on her dead sibling, their fair-haired child.

Her father had been a career military man. So straight out of college DeeDee had joined the Marines. She’d had a perfect service record, but it had failed to impress her father. She declined to reenlist when her stint was up and signed on with the SPD instead. Working her way up through the ranks, she’d made detective in record time, asked for VCU, and got it.

She had a natural aptitude for police work, and seemed to thrive on it. But Duncan often wondered if her career choice was yet another attempt to prove to her parents that she could do a difficult job as well as, or better than, any man. As well as, or better than, Steven could have.

Her goal-setting and overachieving were admirable. But the quest for excellence that made her a good cop also made her a discontented individual. Never satisfied with her performance, she was constantly striving to do better. She worked to the exclusion of everything else. She had few friends and took even fewer occasions to socialize. She scorned the very idea of a romantic relationship, saying that it wouldn’t be worth the effort required to make it work, and if by some miracle it did work, it wouldn’t coalesce with her career.

Many times Duncan had pointed out how lopsided her life was and urged her to give it some balance. But obsession was a tough adversary to argue against. Once a person became that grafted to something, it ruled her life, governed her decisions, and ultimately could lead to calamity.

His mind stumbled and fell over that last thought.

Whose obsession had he been thinking about? DeeDee’s or his own? He’d been dangerously close to obsessing over Savich. Now, Elise Laird.

“ Duncan?”

DeeDee jarred him out of the disturbing introspection. “Huh?”

“I said let’s talk about Elise Laird’s affair with Coleman Greer.”

Swell.

“That hunka hunka burning love,” she said, in tune to the Elvis song.

“I didn’t know you were such a fan.”

“Duh.”

“Good ballplayer.”

“Good? All-Star, Duncan. For the three seasons he was with the Braves.”

“I know the statistics. Better than you, I bet,” he added, wondering why he was suddenly feeling so cross with the world, and with DeeDee in particular. Could it be because she thought Coleman Greer was a hunka hunka burning love, and, apparently, so had Elise?

“What are your thoughts on their affair?” DeeDee asked.

Stalling, he signaled the waitress to refill his coffee cup. The question went unanswered until their plates had been cleared away and he was sipping the fresh brew.

“It hasn’t been confirmed that they had an affair.” Even as he said that, he knew DeeDee’s reaction would probably be volatile. It was.

“Oh, please! Give me a break. A woman has secret meetings with Coleman Greer, and you don’t think they were doing the nasty thing? What else would they have been doing?”

He couldn’t think of a plausible alternative to the nasty thing.

She said, “Let me tell you what I think.”

“I never doubted that you would.”

“I think the chances are very good that Mrs. Laird lied when she said she’d never heard of Meyer Napoli. No, let me finish,” she said when she saw that he was about to interrupt. “She copped that innocent act for our sake as well as for her husband’s. I think she somehow discovered that Napoli was following her. She figured it had to have been her husband who hired him to do so. And she confronted Napoli.”

“You’re outdoing yourself, DeeDee. Jumping to conclusions without having anything to back them up. Zilch. Zero.”

“Hear me out.”

He shrugged and indicated for her to continue.

“She confronts Napoli, who, we know, has the morals of a maggot. She pays him more than her husband does. He returns to Cato empty-handed… What?” she asked when Duncan began shaking his head.

“Laird told me that Napoli brought him evidence of the affair, but he refused to hear it or see it, remember?”

She gnawed on that for a moment, then said, “Okay, then maybe Napoli went to her. Later. After the judge had dismissed him. He shows her pictures, video, some kind of proof of her cheating. Tells her that maybe her husband is no longer interested in the material, but others would be. Media, perhaps. Coleman Greer is news, et cetera. He blackmails her. It’s not beyond Napoli to double-dip like that.”

“No, but where does Gary Ray Trotter factor in?”

“Messenger boy.”

“She shot the messenger?”

“Something like that.”

Duncan was reluctant to admit that all day yesterday, after his conversation with the judge, his thoughts had clicked along the same track. Cato Laird had lied about knowing Meyer Napoli outside the courtroom. Elise could have lied just as easily, and perhaps more convincingly.

“Your scenario isn’t without merit,” he said. “But as long as we’re being creative and playing make-believe-”

DeeDee made a face at him.

“-let’s look at it from another perspective. Let’s say that Napoli had been blackmailing the judge. He’s got the goods on the judge’s wife and her famous baseball-player lover. The judge may not want to know the lurid details, but you can bet the public does.”

“To avoid exposure, the judge pays Napoli to keep his wife’s affair a family secret,” DeeDee said.

“Exactly. His Honor is playing both ends against the middle. He doesn’t want the dirt on his wife to become public, and he doesn’t want his wife to know he’s got the dirt.” He closed his eyes to better concentrate.

“What?” DeeDee said after a time.

The scenario he’d constructed moved him only a hair’s breadth away from believing Elise’s allegation. But he had to be very careful how he presented it to DeeDee. “What if…”

“What?” she pressed.

“What if Judge Laird isn’t quite as forgiving and forgetful of the affair as he wanted me to believe? What if it’s been eating at him? A cancer on the marriage, on his love for his wife, on his ego and manhood?”

DeeDee frowned. “He’d have to be one damn fine actor. He seems to worship the ground on which she treads.”

“I’m only playing ‘what if?’ ” he said irritably.

“Okay. Go on.”

“The night of the shooting, he kept her in bed, didn’t let her set the alarm.”

“We don’t know that he kept her in bed.”

He did. At least that’s what Elise had told him. “Let’s assume.”

“Wait,” DeeDee said, holding up her hand like a traffic cop. “Are you saying…? What are you saying? Where are you going with this? That Trotter wasn’t simply Napoli ’s go-between? That he was there for a more nefarious purpose?”

Duncan shrugged as though to say it was possible, wasn’t it? “He had a pistol, which he fired.”

“Gary Ray Trotter? An enforcer? Some kind of hired gunman sent to put pressure on Judge Laird?”

“Or Mrs. Laird.”

“I hate to speak disrespectfully of the dead, but, Duncan, come on. Gary Ray Trotter, hired assassin?”

“You don’t think that idea has legs?”

“Not even stumps.”

Actually, neither did he. The more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed that a man of Cato Laird’s intelligence and resources would hire a chronic screwup like Trotter to do his killing for him. Elise Laird was playing him for a chump. He just didn’t know why. And he was furious with himself for giving her any credence at all.

But why would she make up a story like that? To protect herself from prosecution, stupid.

Why would she come to him with it? Even stupider. He had lust in his heart and she knew it.

But, dammit, she’d seemed genuinely scared when he said he might simply ask Cato what motive he could have for wanting his wife dead. Was that motive her affair with Coleman Greer?

“Shit!”

“What?” DeeDee asked in response to his expletive.

“I don’t know what. I’ve gone round and round on this thing and still all we’ve really got is a fatal shooting that doesn’t add up. It’s…”

“Hinky.”

“For lack of a better word. But the deeper we go, the less-”

“It looks like self-defense.”

“But nothing we have contradicts self-defense.”

“Then why are we spending so much time on it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you do.”

Yeah, he did, but he wasn’t yet willing to tell DeeDee about Elise Laird’s note, her visit to his town house, and her allegation that her husband had hired Gary Ray Trotter to kill her.

“We’re not closing the book on it because of our intuition. We both feel we’re missing something,” she said. “And that something could mean the difference between A: a woman protecting herself from a home intruder.”

“Or B: a homicide.”

“A significant difference.” She watched the waitress serve another diner a slice of coconut cream pie. “If Elise Laird eats like that, I’ll kill myself.”

“You don’t like her, do you?”

“I hate her,” she said bluntly. “Isn’t it enough that she looks like Helen of Troy and lives a life of luxury in a frigging mansion? It’s just too much to take that she also got to see Coleman Greer naked.”

“That’s not hate, that’s jealousy.”

“Before, it was jealousy,” she said. “It’s graduated to hate now that I know about her and Coleman Greer.”

“We need to confront her about that.” Duncan swore to himself that his interest in Elise’s affair with the baseball player was strictly business. It could be integral to their investigation. He needed to see her reaction when Greer’s name was mentioned. But only because her reaction could be telling and therefore important to the case. Honest.

“I couldn’t agree more,” DeeDee said. “We need to ask her about it, let her know that we know.” Her eyes narrowed the way they did when she was at the shooting range, taking aim at a target. “I particularly want to know if she was responsible for his suicide.”