Infamy (7 page)

“Yeah, I understand what you're saying, but I won't last a day in jail,” Mueller retorted.

“I'll personally see to it that you're safe,” Karp replied. “And if you want to talk to me, and provide me with verifiable information about anyone else who may have been involved in this, I give you my word, you'll be safe and protected. The other way, well, eventually the SWAT guys are going to come in after you. You might survive, you might not. But if you hurt anybody else, I'll make damn sure you never step a foot out of prison. Now, are you going to surrender?”

In answer, Mueller shoved Franklin ahead and walked out behind her with his gun still pointed at Karp. Then Mueller leaned over and put the gun on the ground. “Don't shoot,” he called out as he put his hands up in the air and kicked the gun toward Karp.

“Miss Franklin, come to me, please,” Karp said, and held out
his hand as he walked forward and stood over the gun as the SWAT team came rushing around the corner.

As Mueller was hustled off, Fulton walked up to Karp. “You okay, boss?”

“Yeah, I'm fine,” Karp said, then frowned. “What was the name of the detective who got shot?”

“Ted Moore. Why?”

“I don't know,” Karp replied. “Mueller says he was part of a setup.”

“So Mueller's paranoid.”

Karp smiled. “You're sounding like a defense attorney now. But do me a favor and check Moore out. And Clay . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Make sure Mueller is put in administrative segregation at The Tombs. I don't want him around any of the other inmates.”

Fulton raised an eyebrow. “What's bugging you?”

Karp thought about it for a moment. “I don't know. Maybe it's nothing . . . or maybe it's a hunch. Let's just play it safe, okay?”

6

R
ICHIE
B
RYERS SWAM UP TO
the edge of the pool closest to where Clare lounged in the sun. He allowed himself a moment to admire the swimmer's body that had not diminished upon reaching her forties. “What are you reading?”

Clare put her book down on her stomach and looked out from under her big-brimmed black sunhat. “A mindless romance,” she said with a laugh. “Full of heaving bosoms and beautiful bare-chested Scots Highlanders in kilts waving their swords and other things around.”

Glancing behind him, Bryers noted Wellington and his man, Fitzsimmons, talking before Clare's husband went into the
house. Fitzsimmons looked over at them; he nodded at something his boss said before following him inside.

Bryers turned back to Clare. “Do you think he knows?”

The smile disappeared from her face. “I hope not.”

“I don't see why he should care,” he muttered. “He can always find another woman to hit and yell at.”

“He cares,” she replied. “He cares about anything he thinks he owns, which includes me.”

“Is that a new bruise on your arm?” His voice hardened with anger.

Clare's right hand went up to the purple-blue mark on her upper left arm. “It wasn't much. He grabbed me a little roughly.”

“Grabbed you a little roughly . . .” His voice trailed off. “Like the time he kicked you ‘a little roughly' so that you had a bruise the size of a football on your leg. Or when he left his fingerprints on your chest from squeezing ‘a little roughly' until you screamed.”

Clare was quiet. A tear rolled down her cheek. “Please, I don't want to cry right now,” she pleaded.

“Leave him, Clare,” Bryers insisted. “I love you. I'll take care of you. We don't need the money.”

“It's not the money I care about,” Clare replied, wiping at her eyes. “It's Tommy. He'll never just let me go with my son . . . his son.”

“He hardly gives Tommy the time of day,” Bryers shot back. “Even hiring me has more to do with his ego than his son's progress on the basketball court. And that's too bad because Tommy's a good kid.”

“Tommy is another one of his possessions,” Clare said, “and nobody gets away with taking something that's his, especially not his wife and son running off to another man. His pride couldn't handle that.”

“Pride goes before a fall, and someday that man is going to fall hard. What's he going to do? He's got to worry about his public image—the philanthropist who uses his money only for the good of others. He can't afford to be exposed for what he really is.”

Clare looked over his head to see if she could spot her husband or Fitzsimmons watching them. Just in case, she laughed lightly as if Bryers had said something funny. “You have no idea what he's capable of; maybe I don't really, either, but I've heard him say things when he thought I wasn't around or not paying attention . . .”

Bryers scowled. “What sort of things?”

Clare shrugged. “Nothing specific. Just bits of conversations that sounded like threats. I've heard him yelling in his library and seen that big brute, Fitzsimmons, come out of there looking like a whipped dog, and I'd bet there aren't a lot of people
who can do that to that Neanderthal. Speaking of which, Wellington doesn't keep a bunch of thugs like Fitzsimmons and his crew around to mow the lawn and run errands.” She hesitated and faux-laughed again while saying under her breath, “Do you remember that New York City Council member, Jim Hughes?”

“Yeah, wasn't he the guy running for Congress who jumped off of his apartment building in Midtown?”

“Maybe he jumped, maybe he didn't,” Clare said. “But two days earlier he was over here and pissed off because Wellington was backing somebody else in the primary. I heard them arguing in the library, and Hughes said he was going to go to the press—something about some oil deal in Syria—if Wellington didn't change his mind. Next thing you know, he's taking a twenty-story swan dive onto the sidewalk.”

“You really think your husband would have a congressional candidate killed?”

“I don't have any proof,” Clare said. “But I've lived with the man for eighteen years and I know his temper. When he gets angry, really angry, he's capable of anything.” She was quiet for a moment. “I don't think he'd do anything to me; there'd be too much publicity, though I suppose he could make it look like an accident. But you . . . I couldn't live with myself if something happened to you.”

Bryers frowned. This wasn't the first time they'd had this discussion since their affair had started several months earlier. He didn't think it would be their last.

When Wellington had
first asked him to the house to talk about hiring him to coach Tommy, he'd liked the man. Constantine could be extremely charming and treated him like an equal—not like one of the richest men in the world hiring a private school basketball coach. They'd even sat around the pool drinking beer, discussing what Bryers could do for Tommy.

Constantine had offered him an extraordinary amount of money to coach his son. Several times his normal asking price. At first Bryers requested that he'd just take his standard fee, but the rich man had insisted. “My son's worth it.”

Even rationalizing that he needed the money to supplement his teacher's salary to pay off student loans for his daughters from a previous marriage, Bryers still felt guilty. But that hadn't stopped him from accepting Constantine's money or his invitation to use the guesthouse and pool. He'd grown up poor and it didn't seem like such a big deal.

Besides, he'd worked a lot with Tommy. Far more than they'd agreed to for the money. And Bryers had enjoyed it;
Tommy was a good kid, and the mother, Clare, was easy to talk to and interesting when she discussed her causes. A few times when he saw her around the pool he'd noticed the bruises, but if he commented on them, she'd explained that she was clumsy and “always bumping into something.”
But there was something sad about the way she said it, or the way she talked about her husband, and he'd suspected there was more going on than being clumsy.

Still, Bryers had no intention of having an affair with his client's wife. Yes, he looked forward to seeing her and considered her a friend, but he was bought as a basketball coach and didn't let his mind go beyond that.

Then one night when he was staying for the weekend in the guesthouse, and after a couple glasses of wine, he decided to go for a midnight skinny-dip in the pool. The Constantines were out, so he thought he was safe, but they'd returned home early and the lights in the front of the house had gone on. He was about to get out of the pool and make a dash for the guesthouse when suddenly the quiet of the night was shattered by the sound of Wellington shouting in a drunken rage at his wife.

Hanging on to the edge of the pool, Bryers cringed as his client cursed Clare, slurring his words but not the viciousness. “You whore! Shoving your tits in every man's face!”

“Wellington, please, you bought me this dress. You asked me to wear it and said I looked good when we left the house,” Clare pleaded.

“I didn't say flirt with anybody with a dick the whole dinner!” There was the sound of a slap, and Clare cried out in pain.

“Wellington, please. I won't wear it again. I was just trying to be nice to people and make you happy.”

“Bitch! Whore! Slut!” Each word was accompanied by the sound of a slap, then of a struggle.

Bryers felt his own anger boil up inside of him. Whatever Clare had done to anger her husband, and he doubted it was anything much, no woman deserved to be hit and abused. He had decided to intervene, when suddenly all went quiet. Wondering if Constantine had knocked his wife unconscious, or worse, Bryers swam to the far end of the dark pool, intending to get dressed and investigate. Then the house's glass door opened. Clare walked out into the moonlight, wearing the low-cut, ­apparently offending dress. Before he could let her know he was there, she reached up and slid the straps off her shoulders and let the dress fall to the ground. She stood for a moment in the moonlight in her bra and panties, and then they, too, were off. She dove into the pool.

When she came up about ten yards from him, he could hear
her crying. “Um, sorry, but I should let you know I'm in here, too,” he said quietly.

Clare gasped but then relaxed when she recognized him and swam toward him. “You heard?”

“I couldn't help it. I, um, thought you'd be gone longer. Are you all right?” he asked, acutely aware that a beautiful, nude—and married—woman was standing in the water just a few feet away. Even though the water was up to her shoulders, he was aware of her curves in the lunar light.

“Yes,” she said, and made a poor attempt at a laugh. “Wellington had a little too much to drink. He gets jealous for no reason.” She stopped and then sobbed. “No. I'm not all right.”

The next thing he knew, Clare was in his arms, her head pressed against his chest as she cried softly. “I, um . . .” he began to say, but then aware of his body's response to the feel of her skin on his, he tried to press her away. But she clung to him even more, and then she was kissing him and he was kissing her back.

“Your husband,” he managed to blurt out.

“He's passed out,” she replied. “When he gets drunk like this, he hits me around, and that seems to work like a sleeping pill. He'll be out until noon.”

“He hits you often?”

“Yes, but I don't want to talk about it,” Clare said, then she looked like she might cry again. “Don't you like me?”

“I like you very much, it's just . . .”

“It's just nothing,” she responded, and kissed him again. “I need you to make love to me. Please, I need to feel that someone cares about me, even if it's just for tonight.”

“I care,” he said. “I have for a while, and it's more than just for tonight.”

The affair had grown from two lonely people finding solace in each other to a loving couple wanting to get married. They'd been careful to wait until her husband was out of town, or else they'd met at his place in Brooklyn. But as the weeks became months, Bryers's conscience troubled him more and more. He didn't want to take the man's money while cuckolding him and told Clare he was going to quit. But she'd reacted with both fear and desperation. “He'll suspect the reason,” she wept, “and I'll never get to see you.”

Even after he argued that he'd just tell Constantine that he was too busy, and they'd still find time to be together, she'd pleaded with him. That was the first time he asked her to divorce her husband and marry him. “We need to do this the right way,” he'd said. But she balked over her son.

“He's getting tired of me,” Clare had said of her husband. “I
know he is. He'll want a divorce and then we'll be free. I just need him to reach this decision on his own. He won't even want Tommy when he has the next trophy wife.”

So for a time, Bryers had been willing to wait. But lately he'd noticed more bruises, and she'd told him just the night before that her husband seemed more on edge than usual. “I think something went wrong with one of his business deals,” she'd said when they were lying in bed in his apartment. “I went to his library to ask him about something this morning. I just got to the door and I heard him talking to someone on the telephone about a meeting in Istanbul. I didn't think anything of it, but when he saw me standing in the doorway, he got really angry. He screamed at me to get out and close the door. He was nice to me afterward and said he'd just had some business deals fall through and didn't mean to take it out on me, but I could tell he was just saying that.”

Now today there was a fresh bruise on her arm. “I don't think he'd do anything to me,” Bryers said, though he really wasn't so sure, especially when he thought about Fitzsimmons. Still, he was done seeing her abused. “How many more times is he going to hit or kick you before he does real damage? It's time to leave him. If he tries to stop you or threaten you in any way, we have the photographs of your bruises and can go to the police.
I have an old school chum, Butch Karp, who's the district attorney over in Manhattan. He's not afraid of anybody; he'd know what to do.”

Clare put her book down and got up. “I don't want to talk about it right now,” she said. “I think Wellington's suspicious and watching us. I'm going to fix lunch. Come on in and I'll make you a tuna sandwich.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “I want to get a few more laps in first if that's okay?”

“Sure, it will take me fifteen anyway.”

Bryers finished his laps and climbed out of the pool and walked over to the area where Wellington Constantine had been sitting. There was a stand with fresh towels, and he grabbed one.

As he was drying off, he wandered over to where Constantine's notebook was still open on the table next to the lounge. Absently, he glanced down at the page.

“You shouldn't be looking at that!”

The panicked tone in Clare's voice behind him made him jump. “Caught me being snoopy, I guess,” he said with an embarrassed laugh. “Is Wellington writing a book?”

“Not that I know of,” Clare said. “Why do you say that?”

“Looks like he's working on a thriller.” He nodded at the notebook. “Pretty dramatic stuff.” He bent over and read from
the page. “Listen to this: ‘We were lucky our friend in the WH got wind of the raid or the MIRAGE files might have stayed in the wrong hands. Stupid for al Taizi to keep a record.' And then it goes on, ‘Col. S and the Russian bitch are threats and need to be eliminated starting today.' What do you make of that? Sounds like a spy novel.”

“All I know is that he considers his notebooks to be very personal,” she said. “He told me never to touch them or look in them. He's got hundreds of them on the shelf in his library. I think he'd be really upset if he knew you were looking at that.”