Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [143]
“Er, back to the part about letting me go in exchange for my silence,” I said.
“Pardon? Oh! No, that was just a flight of fancy,” she said dismissively. “I know several languages and dialects, and I have so many esoteric and secret skills, that sometimes I just wish I could use them more often. But you don’t need any sort of potion or poppet or charm, of course, because you’re going to be dead shortly. So what’s the point?”
“How shortly?” I asked with more than casual interest.
She looked up at the churning black sky, where low clouds were gathering directly overhead, flashing with ravenous heat and light. “Very shortly. It’s almost time for the ritual to begin.”
“Who inflicted the white darkness on Nelli?” I said, desperate to distract her from her purpose. “Was that you?”
“No, it was Celeste. The dog had attacked her snake, it deserved to be punished. She could also incapacitate you and Dr. Zadok at the same time. And so on and so forth.”
“Incapacitate?” I repeated. “If Max and I had been one split-second slower to escape, we’d be dead.”
“And that would certainly have been a bonus. I really wasn’t paying that much attention. Frankly, I rather agreed with you that the snake was dangerous and unattractive. But . . .” She sighed and shrugged. “Did I mention that good help is hard to find? I needed a disenchanted Vodou mambo to assist me, so I made compromises. One does so in all things, you know, not just with men.”
“Compromises like enchanting a gay man to sleep with you so you’d have a lover?”
“Have you seen his photo? He was very handsome. And athletic. And—oh!—the stamina.” Her tongue came out of her mouth for a moment, as if she were licking the memory.
I looked away. “What about your husband? Rumor has it that he had, er, stamina.”
“Stamina was not what he had,” she said irritably, gazing up at the clouds again. “I looked the other way through a lot of philandering.”
“Why?” When I saw the expression on her face, I said, “Oh, right. Because he was a billionaire.”
She shook her head. “Men like Martin—well, all men, really—fool themselves into believing a beautiful woman twenty years his junior wants him for himself alone. That was convenient for me, so I let him believe it.”
“So it was all about the money?”
“Money and power,” she said. “It’s always about money and power. Or are you still too young to know that, Esther?”
“Max always says that evil is voracious.”
“How quaint.”
“I still don’t understand why you killed Martin, though.” There was an obvious reason it had never even occurred to me that she had done so. “You were better off with him alive. Everyone knows you only got a modest amount of money when he died.”
“I’ll have to give up the penthouse if I don’t get more money!”
“Whoops, I guess I touched a sore spot,” I said. “So did you not know about the will?”
“I knew, but I didn’t think challenging it in court would be so fruitless! Especially not when I made sure he seemed out of his mind in the final days of his life. It should have been easy to convince a judge that he’d been losing his mind for a while. But that board of directors at the foundation . . .” She gave nasty snarl. “It’s the old boy system. Every one of them is pals with half a dozen judges. I hadn’t counted on that.”
“You should have just put up with the philandering.”
“I did! But then Martin decided to divorce me!”
“Really? Gosh! Who can fathom the ways of the heart?”
“And two expensive divorces had taught him the value of having his third wife sign an iron-clad pre-nup. So I’d have gotten nothing if he’d left me. Nothing!”
“Lopez knows,” I said suddenly. “He knows you killed Martin. And that you killed your first husband, too—to attract Martin as a grieving, available, younger widow I suppose? And Lopez knows you killed Darius!”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.” She was openly amused at my crestfallen expression. “But it doesn’t matter what he knows, Esther, since he can’t prove