Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [76]
“And your father agreed to this?” I asked.
“Yes, but the deal was just for Morphitrex,” Vivian said. “The rest, Father never intended to sell. He thought that some of the other drugs he’d worked on might still be made legally in this country. He didn’t want Matson to have them.”
“So what soured the deal?” I asked. “How did Matson and his buddy wind up dead?”
“It was her fault,” Nick said. “She was going to double-cross our father.”
“That’s right,” Vivian countered. “And you went along with it, too. Don’t pretend it was just me.”
“Your father told me you shot Matson,” I said.
“No,” Vivian said. “It wasn’t me. It was Williams. He shot Duncan, too. Father told you it was me just to get you to sink the yacht. He knew you’d never do it if you thought it was Williams who did it.” She looked away. “I didn’t know he was going to call you,” she said. There were tears in her eyes, but they didn’t mean anything to me.
“But you went along with it when he did,” I said. “Tell me this: Why did Williams think he had to kill me?”
“I didn’t know about that,” Vivian said. “Otherwise I would have told you. Probably he thought you knew too much. I’m not even sure Father knew what he was going to do.”
“You said you were going to double-cross your father,” I said. “How were you going to do that?”
“Williams had her apartment bugged,” Nick said. “He heard us talking.”
“About what?”
“Vivian and I were going to get squeezed out of the money. That much was for sure. We could see it coming, so we made a side deal with Matson. We’d get him all of Father’s papers, not just those about how to make Morphitrex. We wanted a flat fee: three million apiece. Duncan and Matson agreed to it. They put the money in an escrow account in the Cayman Islands. All we had to do was deliver. After you left to sink the yacht, Vivian called me on the phone. That’s when Williams heard us talking about how we’d pulled it off. He said he was going to kill both of us. He almost caught us, too—at a restaurant. We had to run out through the kitchen.”
“I lost my cell phone,” Vivian said. “That man can run.”
“For the first time, I agree with Williams,” I said. “I’m thinking of killing you both myself. A small loss to the world you’d be, I might add.”
“It was Harry who taught me how to hack into Father’s computer,” Nick said. “He knew a lot about computers.”
“So I guess the whole thing with that juicy little video was just your father’s way of softening me up,” I said. “I guess it worked.”
Nobody said anything.
“Are you sure it was Williams who killed Matson and Duncan?” I asked. “And one more lie, and somebody’s going to have a long walk back.”
There was an extended silence. As a cop I had come to know that breed of silence well, the silence of someone who has hit the wall of lies and who is too tired or too scared to think of any new ones. We were in Sunny Isles now, still heading north. I could smell Rascal’s Deli before I could see its sign. It was calling me like a cup of coffee on the midnight shift up in Harlem, far away in another life. The Thunderbird Hotel summoned me sweetly from the east side of Collins as we sailed by. The sign said they even had a swimming pool. It was about all a tired man could ask for in this life.
“Williams killed both of them,” Vivian said from a place I had wandered away from. “Then he dragged me back and made me confess the whole thing to Daddy, about selling the other drugs to Matson. He took my computer and all my files. He wanted to get rid of any of Daddy’s research I may have stolen. Then he got hold of Nick’s computer and did the same thing.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’d made backup files, probably on a disk or CD. Right? You were still in the game. What happened? Williams found out about it?”
“It was my fault,” Nick said glumly. “I thought I had hidden them well enough, but Williams found them. He caught me and held a cigarette lighter under my palm. He asked if Vivian had her own set