In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [82]
“I worried about him, because all he thought of was work. He saw no one socially, except for the occasional girl he met in a bar or out walking on the Battery. But women liked him, you know. Always did. He was a good-looking young man. And he liked women. But he never brought anyone home, and he never fell in love. He was too busy.
“When he was twenty-eight, he received an offer for his garbage company, which was now the largest in the southern states. The money was fair, though not generous, but Ed suspected that the consortium offering the deal was linked to the mob, and if he refused, they might just take it over anyway. By force, if necessary.
“So he accepted the offer. And with his first real money in his pocket, he moved me, and all my favorite bits and pieces, to the splendor of Fairlands. He closed up the beach house, leaving only the few old sticks of furniture, the picture of a log cabin, and such like. And then he headed north. To seek his fortune. And my, how he succeeded,” she added with a little smile.
“He told me that as soon as he saw Manhattan’s towers floating along the skyline as he crossed the Triborough Bridge, somehow he knew he had come home. That was where he was meant to be.”
44
Camelia checked them out of the Omni in Charleston, and they caught a late-afternoon flight back to New York, via Atlanta.
Mel lay back in her seat, looking drained and saying nothing, and after glancing at her, Camelia kept his own gaze straight ahead. She was lost in her thoughts, no doubt mulling over her lover’s life story. Was Ed a different man from the one she thought she knew? Perhaps, but Camelia knew it wouldn’t change her love for him.
The Atlanta airport seemed extra busy, and the New York flight was delayed. They took a seat at the bar and ordered a couple of beers.
“Of course Mitch did it,” Mel said, just as Camelia’s phone rang. He excused himself to answer it.
Mel glanced around the airport. She could remember coming here as a child, but then it was not this huge, grandiose edifice. Like everywhere else, the southern world of her childhood had expanded and turned into a monster.
She sighed and turned her attention to Camelia. He had finished his phone call. A wry smile lifted his stern mouth.
“We got the dossier on Mitch Rogan. Like good-old-boy Sheriff Duxbury said, he was quite a guy. He did steal from Michael Hains. Served time for it, too, when they finally caught him. But he was soon back in business. And with money in his pockets. Then Hains died . . . on a vacation trip to the Cayman Islands. And under suspicious circumstances. But again, nothing was ever proven. The rumor was that Mitch Rogan had had something to do with that, too. He had plenty more brushes with the law after that: fraud; property scams; drug deals; suspicion of murder. His rap sheet reads like a eulogy to the criminal mind. You name it, Mitch Rogan did it.”
“I told you so.” Mel shot him a triumphant look. “Mitch wanted to kill Ed because Ed knew he had killed his family.”
Camelia gave her a pitying look. “Mitch Rogan died ten years ago,” he said, “in a boating accident in the Bahamas. He was on a fishing trip. No one even cared enough about the bastard to bring him home. He’s buried out there.”
To Mel, the flight back to New York seemed interminable, and the ride from JFK to the hospital even longer. Depression dragged her down into the abyss. She had thought they had found the killer. And now—nothing. The trip to Hainsville and Charleston had proven fruitless. They were back to square one.
Not quite, though. At least now she knew Ed’s life story, and that was something she would treasure forever. And it may be all you’ll ever have, a little voice somewhere inside her said ominously. Nervous, she willed the driver to go faster, faster. . . .
Filled with a terrible urgency, she shot out of the car almost before it stopped, racing up the hospital steps and through the