Ricochet

Chapter 27

“APPARENTLY YOUR TALENT EXTENDS TO RESURRECTING THE dead.”

The piano had kept them from hearing the approaching car and DeeDee coming up the steps. Not that it mattered. This would have been an ugly scene in any case, but at least if Duncan had been alerted to her arrival, he would have had a few seconds to brace himself for the inevitable storm. He would have had time to put on his pants. As it was, he’d been caught in nothing but his drawers, and was damned lucky at that.

Elise slipped into the bedroom and closed the door. DeeDee stared after her, then her irate gaze swung back to him. “How long have you known she was alive? From the night she disappeared?”

“Night before last.” Trying to defuse her, he calmly explained finding Elise in his bedroom after DeeDee had driven him home from Smitty’s. “I was holding her at gunpoint, DeeDee, thinking everything you’re thinking right now. Then Gerard called and told me that Judge Laird had positively identified her body at the morgue.”

Elise returned, dressed. She passed him his jeans. He thanked her and pulled them on. “To have done that, Laird has to be dirty.”

“He was overwrought, wrung out,” DeeDee countered. “In his distress, he made a mistake.”

“He didn’t make a mistake.”

“The dental records-”

“Matched the teeth of the corpse. The X-rays may have been labeled with Elise’s name, but they weren’t her X-rays.”

DeeDee ruminated on that while eyeing Elise up and down. “You look awfully rosy-cheeked for someone who’s supposed to be dead.”

“I believe you wish I were.”

DeeDee’s own cheeks turned pink. “I just don’t like being dicked around. And before Duncan went soft in the head-and hard in the crotch-over you, he didn’t like being dicked around, either.”

“That’s enough, DeeDee,” he said.

“Not by a long shot,” she fired back. “I want to know what the hell is going on, or I’m calling Gerard and telling him about your little scam, or whatever the hell this is.”

“I’ll explain everything if you’ll calm down, sit down, and listen.”

Looking mutinous, she clumped to the sofa and plopped down. He moved an armchair closer to her. Elise sat on the piano bench.

Duncan began by asking DeeDee how she’d found him. “If you found us, others might.”

“I called your mother.”

“My mother?”

“I told her you’d gone away for a few days of R-and-R after the Laird fiasco, which she’d read about. Not that she or anyone knows the full scope of the story,” she added, shooting Elise a hostile glance. “I told her something important had come up and I needed to see you, told her I couldn’t reach you by cell phone, and asked if she had any idea where you might have gone to relax.

“She gave me the phone number here, but I never could get an answer. I called her back-by now she’s worried about you. She gave me directions and I volunteered to drive up here and check on you.”

“You could have kept calling my cell.”

“You ignored the calls.”

“I would have called you back.”

She glanced toward the bedroom then looked at him sourly. “When you got around to it.”

He ignored that. “Did something important come up?”

She removed a folder from her oversized handbag and passed it to Duncan. “Your hunches of yesterday were correct.”

Elise reacted with surprise. “Yesterday? What hunches?”

“Duncan asked me to check out some things.”

Elise looked at him. “You did? You talked to her? You told me you’d left a voice mail message.”

“A white lie,” he admitted uneasily. Then to DeeDee, “Napoli’s secretary?”

“Paid off like a slot machine. She distinctly remembered sending Savich an envelope by certified mail. She even gave me the receipt, signed by Savich’s secretary. The guy with the perfect coif and false eyelashes? Anyway, Napoli gave his secretary the envelope sealed and ready to mail, but she believed it contained photographs.”

“Let me guess,” Duncan said, turning to Elise. “The photographs of you and Savich. The same ones he sent to Cato. Double-dipping as usual. Except it pissed off Savich enough to kill Napoli.”

DeeDee jumped as though she’d got an electric shock. “Excuse me?”

Duncan turned to Elise. “Tell her.”

Elise gave DeeDee a detailed but concise account of what had happened on the Talmadge Bridge, including seeing Savich shoot Napoli. When she was finished, DeeDee looked at Duncan. “You believe that?”

“I do now that I know Napoli was stupid enough to try and blackmail Savich.”

Looking both affronted and puzzled, Elise said, “You didn’t believe it until now? You didn’t take my word for it?”

He had no time to address that before DeeDee said, “There’s more. You suggested I run background checks on the men we know Savich has hit. Unnecessary busywork to keep me occupied, no doubt. But, as it turns out, not a waste of time.” She paused, looking smug. “Guess who’s related to Chet Rollins?”

“Elise is his half sister.”

His knowing that took some of the starch out of DeeDee’s posture, but it only increased the animosity with which she regarded Elise. “You heard him asking me to check out Rollins’s background, so you covered your ass and told him before I could.”

“Actually, Elise didn’t overhear me asking you to do that.”

“Why did you ask her to do that?” Elise asked, raising her voice. “Why, Duncan? Unless…” Her perplexity turned to anger. “You wanted to be sure I was telling you the truth,” she accused. “That’s it, isn’t it? After everything, you still don’t trust me.”

“Go figure,” DeeDee muttered sarcastically.

“Put yourself in my place, Elise,” he said. “I had to be certain.”

They shared a long look, which he was the first to break. He turned back to DeeDee. “What else did you find?”

She hitched her chin toward Elise. “She and Savich go way back. They were cozy friends long before she married the judge.”

“We weren’t cozy friends.”

“I’ve seen the pictures,” DeeDee said hotly. “The ones you killed Napoli over.”

“Savich killed Napoli.”

“How convenient to blame it on a reputed criminal,” DeeDee said, coming to her feet. “I don’t believe your bridge story any more than I believe you shot Gary Ray Trotter in self-defense.”

“It’s true, DeeDee.”

She spun around to Duncan. “How can you-”

“Sit down.”

“She-”

“Sit down!” He waited until she was once again seated and silent, although still fuming. “Trotter wasn’t there that night to burglarize their house. He was there to kill Elise. He’d been hired to kill her. By her husband.”

Her dismay apparent, DeeDee looked from Duncan to Elise, then back to Duncan.

Taking advantage of her momentary speechlessness, he said, “Remember the night in Smitty’s, I told you Elise had come to me early in our investigation with a story I didn’t believe?”

“That’s the story?” DeeDee asked with a chortle of disbelief. “The judge hired Trotter to kill his beloved, beautiful trophy wife? How many blow jobs did she give you before you started believing that?”

He heard Elise’s gasp of outrage, but he remained fixed on DeeDee. With more restraint than he knew he possessed, and than his partner deserved, he said, “Do you want to hear this or not? If so, apologize to Elise. If not, there’s the door, and I’ll find another partner.”

“Partner? If you ally yourself with her, you’ll be lucky to have a job.”

He stood up. “You can let yourself out.”

“Okay, okay,” DeeDee said. “I want to hear the story.” He looked at her hard, reminding her of the condition under which she would hear it. She sighed, looked at Elise, and grumbled an apology.

Duncan returned to his chair and began talking. It took a half hour for him and Elise to explain everything. DeeDee asked frequent questions, questions Duncan expected because he had asked them himself.

“Who was the dead woman in the morgue?”

“My guess would be Lucille Jones,” he replied. “She was of similar height and weight. On paper, her and Elise’s physical descriptions would be interchangeable. Savich needed to get rid of her. Laird needed a body so we would close the case. Savich told Laird about the distinguishing birthmark. All he had to do was pretend to recognize it, and nobody could dispute it.”

Except you. That’s what DeeDee’s look said, but she didn’t say it out loud.

“A few days after Elise’s disappearance, when her body failed to surface, Judge Laird and Savich must have got nervous. Savich thinks, how lucky is this? I’ve got a woman whose disposal would serve two purposes. So he drowned Lucille Jones in the river, probably weighted her down so she wouldn’t be found for several days, and when she was, she would be a mess and identifiable only by her birthmark and dental records.”

“DNA.”

“He could have kept strands of hair, which Cato Laird would provide to Dothan, saying they came from Elise’s hairbrush. Elise had left the house that night without any jewelry, which was a break for them. Fewer details to worry about.”

“What about her clothing?”

“Elise was wearing a tank top and skirt that the judge had brought home as a gift that night. They procured a matching set. Maybe even had Lucille Jones buy them herself.”

“What if Napoli had pushed Mrs. Laird into the river, or what if she had jumped? Weren’t they afraid two bodies would surface?”

“Laird would claim whichever was found first, so we would close the case on Elise. Then if the second body surfaced, it would in fact be that of prostitute and drug user Lucille Jones. Or Elise would have been an unidentified Jane Doe. In either case, nobody would be looking for Elise Laird, the judge’s wife. She would be dead, positively identified by her husband and dental records, and probably cremated.”

DeeDee gnawed the inside of her cheek, looking at them in turn as she tried to absorb the facts as well as the hypotheses. Homing in on Elise, she said, “You married him in the hope of gathering evidence you could take to the DA and blow the whistle on him and Savich. Is that the gist of it?”

“Yes.”

“So where’s this evidence?”

“If I had any, Cato would already be in prison. None of this would have happened.”

DeeDee looked at her with incredulity. “Are you saying that after almost three years of living with the man, you haven’t gathered one scrap of paper, recorded one conversation, nothing?”

“If I had something, I wouldn’t have stayed with him.”

“Yeah, it’s such a rotten palace he’s set you up in. I can see why you’d hate it there.”

Elise came off the piano bench and bore down on her. “I hate Cato Laird. He had my brother killed with no more thought than he would swat a housefly. And I had to sleep with him. Pretend to make love to him. For years,” she said, her voice quaking. “But I was willing to do it if, at the end of it, Cato would pay.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” DeeDee said. “But one more question. Why did your husband bother with Napoli? If he was too fastidious to kill you himself, why didn’t he just ask his pal Savich to do it?”

“I’ve given that some thought,” Duncan said. “Savich would have been expedient and thorough. But while Elise’s body was still warm, Meyer Napoli would have crawled out of the woodwork waving those photographs of Elise and Savich to every reporter on the East Coast.

“He would have spilled the beans about her relationship with Coleman Greer, about how Cato had hired him to follow her. Cato would have come under scrutiny and would have been made to answer for all that. And so would Savich. But by using Napoli, Cato set himself up to look like the injured party. He got rid of Elise as well as his blackmailer.”

DeeDee came to her feet, massaging her forehead. “All right, I have the big picture, but where does it leave us?”

Duncan nodded toward Elise. “We have an eyewitness to Napoli’s murder.”

“Get real, Duncan. She won’t make a credible witness.”

“We’ve got the certified mail receipt for the envelope Napoli mailed to Savich. That’s a direct connection.”

“Still doesn’t place Savich on the bridge that night. We’ve got even less on Judge Laird. In fact, we’ve got no evidence that he’s guilty of any wrongdoing except falsely identifying a body, which could be chalked up to confusion brought on by abject grief, and a mix-up at the dentist’s office.” Turning to Elise, she asked, “How long do you intend to play dead?”

“Until it’s advantageous for me to reappear.”

“In the meantime,” DeeDee said to Duncan, “are you going to stay here and play house with her?”

Her tone of voice grated on him, but for the sake of time and energy he decided to let it pass. “Elise and I have come up with a dozen plans and rejected them all.”

“You’ve been talking police strategy with her?”

Ignoring the slight, Elise said, “It’s occurred to me that maybe I never found any evidence on Cato because it simply isn’t there.”

“You think Savich keeps their books?” Duncan asked. She raised her shoulder in a shrug. He felt a familiar tingle in his gut that said she might be on to something. Tugging on his lip, he began to pace. “If we get Savich, Laird will topple as a matter of course.”

“How do you figure?” DeeDee asked.

“Yes, Duncan, how do you figure?” Elise said. “Cato isn’t going to ‘topple’ easily. He isn’t going to slip up and make a mistake. He hasn’t in all the time I’ve been married to him, and he’s not going to now.”

“Somehow we’ll get him.”

“Somehow, but how? You didn’t get him for having Chet killed. He got away with it. And if I had died, either in the home study or on the bridge, he would have got away with killing me, too.” She divided a vexed look between him and DeeDee. “Wouldn’t he?”

Neither of them denied that she was more than likely right. “He would have,” she said adamantly. “You know it, and so do I.”

“I’ll figure out something,” he said.

“But what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“When?”

“As soon as I can.”

“Meanwhile, I’ve got to stay dead?”

“I don’t know, Elise. I’m working it out.”

“He must be brought to justice, Duncan.”

“I agree.” He sliced the air with his hand as though to cut off her next argument. Lowering his volume, he said, “But of the two fish, Savich is bigger. If we can get the judge to help us nail Savich-”

“How are you going to do that?” Suddenly her expression radically changed. Backing away from him, she said, “Please don’t tell me you’re going to offer Cato clemency in exchange for giving up Savich.”

He averted his gaze from her. “I don’t think I’ll have to go that far.”

“He’ll never confess.”

“I’ll twist his arm.” He gave a weak grin, but Elise wasn’t amused. “Look,” he said with diminishing patience, “I’d like to beat a confession out of the son of a bitch. I’ve got more than one reason to lay into him, but-”

“I hope you don’t mean that literally,” DeeDee said.

Whipping around to her, he snapped, “You don’t have to come along.”

“What? This has become personal? It’s no longer about enforcing the law, it’s about her?”

That was the second time she had used the pronoun in reference to Elise, making it sound like a slur both times. “I’m a cop,” he said tightly. “Cato Laird conspired to have a man choked to death on a bar of soap. If he goes to jail, I’ve done my job, and I can sleep nights.”

“In her bed.”

The silence that ensued teemed with anger. No one spoke for several moments, then Elise said, “I don’t think you’ll have to get physical with Cato. When he sees me alive he’ll-”

“You’re staying here.”

She turned to Duncan. “Like hell I am.”

“You’re staying here, Elise. Out of sight, safe, until Cato Laird and Savich are both locked up.”

“But-”

“No buts,” he said stubbornly. “I can’t deal with this and protect you at the same time.”

“I must be there when Cato realizes he’s been caught,” she exclaimed. “I want to see his expression. I’ve waited years to get vengeance for my brother’s murder. I won’t be denied that.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “You’ll have your day in court. I promise. But you’ve got to stay in the background for now and let us take it from here.” She was on the verge of arguing further when he added, “If something happens to you, we’re up shit creek again, and we never get the bastards. You’re crucial to our case against Savich. Equally crucial to the case against Laird for Chet’s murder and everything else. You stay out of sight until the time is right to spring the trap on them. I’m sorry, Elise, but that’s just how it’s gotta be.”

DeeDee had been listening in silence and with evident satisfaction to his exchange with Elise. She finally spoke. “I hate being the one to remind you that so far you’ve got no trap to spring.”

He outlined his plan to DeeDee. She responded with a decided lack of enthusiasm. “I don’t know, Duncan. It doesn’t feel good to me.”

“The gloves have to come off, DeeDee. It occurred to me yesterday that we’re never going to nail these guys using strictly legal methods. We can’t play by the book and expect to convict them. They know all the loopholes in the legal system. They know how to beat it. The only way we’re going to get them is by bending a few rules.”

“Which rules?” she asked worriedly.

“I’m just saying…” He let the sentence trail off and got no more specific than that. “You’re gonna have to grant me some leeway. Are you in or out?”

“I’m in,” she said, but with uncertainty. Then, “Of course I’m in.”

He looked at Elise and gave her a tender smile. “You must agree that this is the best way.”

He didn’t put it in the form of a question, effectively giving her no choice other than to agree. After a long hesitation, she nodded.

Duncan decided to leave his car with Elise. “Use it only if you must,” he instructed as he handed her the keys. “Stay in the house as much as possible. When you have to go out, keep a low profile. You cannot be seen until this is over.” With affection, he ran his hand over her spiked hair. “Can’t have any Elise Laird sightings reported, okay?”

“Okay.”

He reinstalled the house phone and told her that if he called, he would let the phone ring twice, hang up, then call right back. “Otherwise, don’t answer. Use it only on an emergency basis. I can’t stress that enough.” He also gave her the extra pistol he’d hidden above the knickknack cabinet.

“It’s easy to use.” After acquainting her with the pistol, he put it and extra ammunition in an accessible place.

When the time finally came for him and DeeDee to leave, Elise’s distress was plain. “I’m afraid.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I’m not afraid for myself. I’m afraid for you.”

“I’ll be careful.” He rubbed her arms reassuringly. “DeeDee will be at my back.”

Close to tears, she whispered, “Please be careful.”

“I promise I will. You, too. Don’t take any chances. None. Understand, Elise?”

“I understand.”

They clung to each other as they shared a lengthy good-bye kiss. When he finally pulled back, he gave her a look rife with meaning. “Remember everything we said this morning.”

“Every word.”

He touched her lower lip. “I’ll see you soon.” Then he turned away quickly and ushered DeeDee out the door.

They discussed the plan on the drive back to Savannah. As they crossed the Talmadge Bridge and turned into the downtown area, DeeDee tried one last time to dissuade him against implementing his plan of attack before clearing it with Captain Gerard.

“It’s dangerous and crazy to try and go this alone, Duncan.”

“I’m not alone. I’ve got you.”

“We could bring in Worley, a couple of others who-”

“No. Me, Laird expects the worst from. Better if it looks like I’ve reached my limit, flipped out, become a loose cannon.”

She covered several city blocks before she said, “Are you absolutely, one hundred percent positive that Elise Laird didn’t cook up this elaborate story and screwed you until you believed it?”

He shot her a hard look. “To what end? You yourself said she’s got a cushy nest. Why would she want to destroy it, unless what she says is true?”

“I’m only saying it’s a little strange that in all the time she’s been married to Cato Laird, she hasn’t collected one shred of evidence that he’s anything other than a devoted husband, upstanding citizen, and honest judge.”

“We’ll get the evidence. Eventually.”

“If you say so.”

“Once we have Savich, it’ll be easy.”

“Mrs. Laird-”

“Don’t call her that.”

“She didn’t agree with your priorities.”

“In the end she did. Stop at my house.”

“What for?”

“I need to change clothes. I don’t want to meet the judge in T-shirt and jeans.”

“We’re not ‘meeting’ him, Duncan. We’re abducting him.”