The Rich and the Dead (12 page)

“Hello, Scott Sloan's office,” a woman with a syrupy Southern accent answered.

“Scott, please,” Lila said.

“He's unavailable at the moment. But I could transfer you to his wife, Meredith's line?”

There was nothing inherently suspicious in that, Lila knew, but she couldn't help wondering where Scott had gone without Meredith. Didn't they share all their clients?

“No,” Lila snapped, acting on impulse. “This is Andrea Baxter,” she said, grabbing the first name that popped into her head. “We had an appointment and I've been waiting for forty-five goddamned minutes.” In Lila's experience, the old saying about catching more flies with honey than vinegar was 100 percent bullshit.

“Oh, my stars,” the secretary said. “That's impossible. He wouldn't have scheduled you now. He's unavailable between eight forty-five and ten thirty every morning.” Unavailable, Lila thought. That was the second time Scott's assistant had used that word. Where was he?

“Well, I'm standing here like an idiot at three Indian Creek,” Lila said, really laying it on thick. She could hear the woman on the other end of the phone begin to breathe audibly. “How fast can he get here? Because if I don't see him in ten minutes, he's losing a huge commission.”

“I'll try him, but he's at the Four Seasons now, so it would take over an hour to reach you,” the assistant babbled. “What did you say your name was? I'm sure we can reschedule if you'll give me a—”

But Lila had already hung up the phone, hopped into her Maserati, and was speeding south along Collins Avenue toward the Four Seasons. It might be nothing, but she knew from experience that it was best to pursue every lead. And right now, Scott Sloan was definitely a suspect.

By the time she walked into the lobby it was 9:20. His secretary had said he'd be here until 10:30, which meant there wasn't much time. Scott was somewhere in the hotel, but Lila had no idea where. The solicitous man at the front desk confirmed that he wasn't a guest, and Lila didn't find him during her brief survey of the pool and the hotel restaurants.

Lila stopped for a moment, giving her mind a chance to process everything. The assistant had said he was unavailable for almost two hours every morning and then let it slip that he was at this hotel. What could he be doing? Maybe the gym?

Sure enough, after signing a fake name at the registry for the hotel's subterranean fitness club and searching its many nooks and crannies, Lila spotted Scott in a small room off the long hallway. She peeked through the tiny window of the door to see him standing on a yoga mat, balancing on one leg with his arms stretched into the air, swaying side to side to keep his balance. Next to him was a young woman with blond hair down to her waist, wearing tiny white shorts and a tank top with the Om symbol on it.

“Yoga?” Lila wondered aloud. Boozy, country-club Scott didn't strike her as the yoga type.

Lila quickly ducked to make sure that neither of them saw her spying through the window. She turned to leave but glanced back one last time—just in time to see Scott quickly kiss the yoga instructor on the mouth. From the way the woman kissed him back, Lila knew it wasn't the first kiss they'd shared. Now things were beginning to make more sense.

Smiling, Lila turned and walked back to the club reception desk to book a private session with the “darling yoga girl with the long blond hair.” It turned out the girl, whose name was Willow Morris, had an opening in a couple hours. Lila happily booked it, then headed to the spa gift shop. Camilla Dayton would be needing some yoga pants.

“My name's Camilla,” Lila said as she stepped into the yoga studio at noon. Willow, instead of shaking Lila's outstretched hand, put her own palms together, closed her doe eyes, and gave her a small bow.

“Namaste,” Willow said.

Lila was struck by the girl's wide-eyed, cheerful face. It was the kind of face that missionaries wear as they walk up to strangers asking them if they know Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior—the face of a true believer. Lila smiled, already faltering. She'd handled a broad range of characters in her day—ex-cons, drug dealers, corrupt politicians—but sincerity and earnestness were her kryptonite, and she didn't know how to face them.

Amid burning incense, sitar music, and flickering candles, Lila grudgingly began her first-ever yoga class. She quickly found that she was about as limber as a cement block. And if Willow told her to “relax and breathe” one more time, she might just deck her. Lila wasn't a yoga expert, but she'd been breathing on her own for thirty years, and it had been working just fine so far.

While they were moving through a series of what Lila could only think of as sadistic contortions, Willow asked Lila about herself, which gave Lila the opportunity, between groans, to tell the now-familiar story of her escape from New York, the philandering ex-husband, the agony of loss. Willow stood nodding in sympathy, a slight frown on her face.

“Everything,” she said, “contains both meaning and the opposite of meaning, which is no meaning.” Lila felt her body quivering with the effort it took to keep her balance while also suppressing an eye roll. Instead, she simply nodded.

“Breathe your ex-husband
out
!” Willow shouted as Lila struggled to mimic her posture. “Breathe your freedom
in
!”

After the ninety-minute lesson was over, Lila casually asked Willow out for a drink—saying that, being new to the city and all, she'd love to pick her brain about Miami.

“There's a place right down the beach that does a killer guava smoothie. Guava is really good for detoxifying your organs,” Willow offered, bending in a way that made Lila wonder if she had any organs at all.

As they walked together, Lila returned to her tale of the philandering husband back in New York. In order to get Willow to spill about Scott, she figured she needed to do much more spilling herself.

“What breaks my heart the most is that he lied to me.” Lila breathed in sharply, hoping Willow would get the sense that tears were about to flow. “And what I hate most of all is that I should've known. Before I was his wife, I was his mistress. I mean, how dumb am I?” Lila looked at Willow to see if she was getting anywhere.

Willow's head was turned away from Lila, toward the ocean, her face sporting her usual serene smile.

“If a man cheated on another woman with me, why did I think he wouldn't cheat on me with another woman?”

Willow took Lila's hand in hers; her eyes looked like those of a baby seal about to be clubbed. “There are no patterns in the now. You trusted, and opened your heart. That's all that truly matters.”

“Tell that to my divorce lawyer,” Lila said with a sigh.

After a short walk, they arrived at a little palm-frond shack just feet from the ocean's edge. A young Japanese guy wearing only a crocheted Rastafarian hat and surf shorts was behind the bar. Bhangra music blasted from an old speaker atop a defunct vending machine. The bartender nodded to Willow, who nodded back.

“Hey, Kiyoshi,” Willow said. “Can you whip us up two of those guava smoothies when you get a chance?”

Lila knew it was early in the day to drink, but she also knew she wouldn't get any information out of this girl through the power of antioxidants alone. She needed to get Willow drunk, and she needed it now.

“Um . . . ,” she said, fumbling with the straps of her new Lululemon top. “I hate to admit it, but after dredging up all those memories, I could really use a drink.” Willow paused, looking at Lila, and Lila worried she'd gone too far. But then, to her relief, Willow loudly slammed her hand on the bar.

“You're right! A drink is what we both need. Kiyoshi always has a bottle of something behind that bar of his. Am I right, my man?” she asked.

Kiyoshi's face was as stoic and unreadable as an owl's. “Cuban moonshine,” he said, pulling an unlabeled bottle out from behind a pile of coconuts. He then poured a bit into the blender. Lila knew that wouldn't be good enough.

“Why don't you grab us a table?” she suggested to Willow. Once the young woman had walked away, Lila slipped Kiyoshi a hundred-dollar bill with the instructions to “make those drinks as stiff as a corpse.”

She watched with delight as he poured half the bottle into the blender.

That should do it,
Lila thought.

About halfway through the smoothie, the Cuban moonshine started to work its magic. Lila continued to talk so incessantly about her fake ex-husband and his fake mistress that she was beginning to believe she really had been wronged.

“And you should see the slut he's with now. She's barely out of high school. He's using our money to produce her album.”

“What if they're really in love?” Willow said slowly. She was drunk.
Lightweight,
Lila thought, with a feeling of smug superiority. “I mean . . .” Willow paused, lowering her face to the straw to take another sip. “People fall in love and people fall out of love.”

Lila waited, sensing that Willow was on the edge of confessing. In the ocean, a group of surfers battled loudly for a wave. The shack started to fill up with sunburned tourists and marijuana-soaked locals. Kiyoshi put Fela Kuti on the sound system.

“The man I love is married,” Willow said finally. “That doesn't make me a bad person, does it?”

“I guess that depends.” Lila had to strike a delicate balance. In order to get more out of Willow, she needed to make her feel bad about her actions, but not so bad that she would clam up.

“I mean, it started as nothing. He's a client of mine. And all I remember about our first few sessions is how much sadness he had in his body. You couldn't not feel it. I mean, his aura was literally black, you know?” She finished her drink and signaled Kiyoshi for another. Lila made eye contact with the bartender, nodding to make sure the second drink was as strong as the first.

“So we start talking,” Willow said, taking a deep sip of her second drink. “Turns out, his wife is having this big affair and their marriage is essentially over. Well, love is my religion.” She placed her two tiny hands over her heart and made a small sound that sounded like the cooing of a dove. “I don't know how it happened. I was trying to heal his broken heart and somehow we fell in love.”
And a few months from now,
Lila thought,
Meredith Sloan will be dead and Scott Sloan will be married to a Ukrainian lingerie model. Ain't love grand?

“If she's having an affair, why doesn't he just leave her?” Lila asked.

“They run a big business together. If he leaves his wife for me, he's worried that he'll lose everything in the divorce. But his wife's lover is really high-profile, so we know that it's bound to become common knowledge soon enough.” Willow let out a long, pitiful sigh. “The only way the marriage will end is if she leaves him first.”

“Will she?” Lila prodded gently.

“Who knows? All I know is that they're so unhappy.” Willow leaned in toward Lila's face. She smelled like coconut oil and baby powder. “I couldn't live the way they do, with so much anger and hate.”

“I've been there,” Lila said. “And it isn't pretty. That much misery can make people do crazy things. Once I found out about my husband's affairs, I had these long, intricate daydreams about him stepping off a curb and being plowed down by a truck.”

Willow's face lit up with the delight that comes from a shared understanding. “Yep,” she said, nodding, “Scott has those. Oh, does he ever!”

“He fantasizes about killing his wife?”

“When you put it that way, it sounds really bad. I know it's a karmic nightmare to wish another person ill, but it helps him release his anger. And he has so much anger.” Willow sighed. “I mean, it's not like he would ever actually do it. He's absolutely terrified of his wife. She's a real nightmare. At least, that's what he tells me.”

It seemed to Lila that bashing her boyfriend's wife was something Willow had been aching to do.

“She sounds awful,” Lila offered, desperate to keep Willow talking. “Actually, I don't think the world would miss her too much if she was hit by a truck.”

At this, Willow let out a big laugh. Then, as if shocked by her own reaction, she became stern-faced. “That's the last thing he wants, trust me.”

“Relax, I was just making a bad joke,” Lila said, putting her hand on top of Willow's. She knew that keeping the mood light was imperative to keeping the conversation going. “Obviously, I know you don't want her to die.”

“Oh, I know.” Willow snatched her hand from under Lila's and gave it a tiny flick, followed by a nervous giggle. “The whole thing is so ugly, I sometimes wonder how I became a part of any of it. All I meant was that, if she dies, he gets nothing. Her family made sure of that.”

“Her family?” Lila asked. If what Willow was saying was true, this news changed everything.

Willow nodded. “She comes from serious money. If she dies, he gets zero. It's all in their crazy prenup. Leave it to her to control him even from the grave,” she added, a little bitterly. Lila liked drunk Willow. She had a bit of a tough streak.

So,
Lila thought, as Willow rambled on.
If Meredith dies, Scott gets nothing. If that's true, it wouldn't be remotely in his interest to kill her.

“Anyway,” Willow was saying, “Scott and I have been trying to get news of his wife's affair out in the public, to force the divorce. Both of us have sent anonymous tips to the South Beach gossip columns several times.”

“And?”

“Nothing.” Willow pouted. “We think the papers don't want to risk a lawsuit. So it seems pretty hopeless at the moment,” she said with her face in a frown and her body in a slouch. Then, shaking off her temporary blues, Willow straightened her back and looked thoughtfully out toward the ocean. “But I know it will all work out in the end.”