The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [174]
Della pulled on his tie. “They want what’s in your safe, Reg.”
He became like stone. He leveled a long stare, which she accepted with hardly a blink.
She knows. Della Dickey knew about the requiem. And perhaps she guessed that he had killed Solomon Gold.
He understood now that when he got to the coach house he would discover what the Thousand really was.
He also knew that Della Dickey was going with him.
74
IT WAS THE DAMNEDEST negotiation he’d ever been part of, so full of conflicts and ethical breeches and outright illegality that it would mean disbarment and jail if anyone outside this room knew. But this was the damnedest bit of trouble a client had ever been in, and Reggie was up to his neck in it, too.
Della Dickey sat at his side in a hot second-floor coach house guest room. Across the estate, maybe forty yards away, the great main house, ignored by cops and firefighters under orders and busier elsewhere, had burned to the bricks. Gary Jameson, wrapped in a blanket, sat in a chair opposite. Canada Gold sat three seats and a world away from her mother. Bobby Kloska had been ordered back onto the street by a gold star who rarely showed up at crime scenes. There wasn’t anyone in this small circle who didn’t have secrets, awful secrets, and they were there to trade them, with Reggie trying to get as many of their secrets in exchange for so few of his.
When he had arrived, up the old and dark painted wooden steps, Elizabeth said Canada wanted a word with him in private. Elizabeth looked worried. Reggie said what he always said—“Everything’s going to be all right.” He had never been less sure of it.
In a small square room, once the barren bedroom of an old nun, Wayne Jennings lay semiconscious on a musty cot. Canada Gold nodded at a revolver lying on a blue blanket. The gun was at once familiar, and a weight formed in his stomach, a cancer round as a pearl. “Peter Trembley brought it to kill me with,” she said. “I killed him with it instead.” Reggie didn’t reply. “I figure it’s the gun that killed Dr. Falcone, which means it’s the gun that killed Dad.”
Reggie nodded and waited for her to continue. It took a long time.
She showed him the letters on the grip of the gun. EKG. “My mother’s gun. Dad gave it to her as a present. He loved guns. He thought it made them rebels, what with the gun ban in the city and all. Why are you covering for her?” she asked.
It took him longer than it usually did to process. She thinks Elizabeth killed Solomon. Reggie wasn’t expecting her to be so right about everything else and so wrong about that.
Canada said, “Are you sleeping with my mother? Have you been having an affair with her all this time?”
“Your mother is my client.” He hoped that would serve as a denial of the accusation and also an explanation for why he wouldn’t comment further. An old lawyer’s crutch, but a sturdy one.
“A friend told me the truth, that my mother is a killer. I figure Marlena must have told this friend of mine,” she said. “Steve Rhodes had the gun. I figure Mom gave it to him. It would fit right in with his creepy collections. Rhodes tricked Wayne into touching it. Guess they figured at least one of his fingerprints might still be on it after Peter shot me and left it behind at the scene.”
Reggie almost corrected her. He almost told her that he knew how Steve Rhodes had purchased that gun and from whom. But her misconstruction of the facts wasn’t so bad for him, and as an attorney secretly representing himself, he saw no reason to correct the record.
“I’m going to keep her secret,” she said. “But first you’re going to get me everything I want.” What she wanted was for the Thousand to leave her alone. Forever. She wanted Wayne Jennings off the hook. For everything. She wanted Reggie to tell her mother that she would have