I smiled knowingly. Why tell him I’d learned about this from my daughter’s cell phone, and from what she’d taken from Ann Slocum’s purse? Try explaining that, I thought. And the truth was, for all I knew, Ann had told Sheila about this, although I seriously doubted it.
“So you know,” he said. “I can’t believe Ann told her. That she would admit to what she was doing. Oh my God, if Ann told Sheila, she could have told…”
He had his face in his hands. He looked like he was going to have an instant nervous breakdown. “You don’t know how long I’ve been living with this, worried that someone… anyone might find out that…”
“Tell me,” I said, sitting there, looking as smug as a goddamn Buddha.
It came out in a torrent. “Ann needed money. They were always running short, her and Darren, even with selling purses on the side. I’d always found her… compelling. Attractive. Very… forceful. She could tell, she could tell I was interested. I wasn’t the one who suggested it. I never could have done that. But she asked to meet me for coffee one time, and she… made a proposal.”
“A business proposal,” I said.
“That’s right. We met, a couple of times at a motel here in Milford, but that seemed a little too risky, being right in town, so we started going to a Days Inn in New Haven.”
“So you paid her to handcuff you, and…?”
He looked away from me. “We kind of worked up to that. At first, it was just, you know, regular sex.”
“Things not good at home, George?”
He shook his head, unwilling to get into it. “I just… I just wanted something different.”
“What’d you pay her?”
“Three hundred, each time.”
“I guess none of this came up when you were at the lawyer’s office offering up judgments on my wife’s character,” I said. “Although I don’t know why it would. Totally different things, really.”
“Glen, look, I’m asking for your complete discretion here, you get that, right?”
“Oh, sure.” You stupid son of a bitch.
“The thing is, she wanted more.”
“She upped her rates?”
“Not exactly,” he said. I took a sip of my cold beer and gave him a minute. “Ann said it’d be a terrible thing if Belinda ever found out. First time she said it, I thought, Yeah, I totally agree. Second time she said it, I realized what she was getting at. She wanted more money to keep quiet. I thought she’d never tell. That’d be crazy. She and Belinda were friends, had been a long time, and if she told, it would all come out, Darren would find out-”
“Darren didn’t know?” That did make sense, given Ann’s orders to Kelly to keep quiet about what she’d heard.
“He didn’t know anything about it. I really didn’t think she’d ever tell, but I didn’t want to take the chance. The thing was,” and his voice got very quiet, “she took a picture, once, with her camera phone, when I was, you know, hooked up to the bed. Just me in the shot. She said, wouldn’t it be funny, if somehow that got emailed to Belinda. I’m not even sure she actually took the picture. She might have been faking, but I just didn’t know. So I started giving her an extra hundred each time, and that seemed to satisfy her, until, well…”
“Until she was dead.”
“Yeah.”
The boy who’d been chugging beer had stopped. “I can’t do any more,” he protested, laughing. “I can’t.”
“Wanna bet?” one of his friends said. One grabbed him from behind, a second held his head, and the third put the pitcher right to his lips. He started tipping and beer slipped down the boy’s chin and all over his shirt. But a lot of it seemed to be going down his throat, judging by the way his Adam’s apple was bobbing.
The boy was going to be very drunk, very soon. I just hoped these clowns weren’t planning to drive-
“When she had that accident,” George said, “I was stunned, you know? I felt sick, and I couldn’t believe it. But part of me, I hate to say this, a part of me was relieved.”
“Relieved.”
“She didn’t have any hold on me anymore.”
“Unless that picture’s really out there somewhere. On her phone.”
“I keep praying it’s at the bottom of the harbor. Every day that goes by, and the police don’t get in touch…”
I said, “You might get lucky on that score.”
“Yeah, I hope.”
I poked the inside of my cheek with my tongue. “I’ve got a favor to ask of you, George.”
“What?”
“I’d like you to get Belinda to rethink what she told those lawyers. That the whole pot thing, she got it wrong. It was just some Turkish cigarettes or something. She might also say that any time she ever saw Sheila drink, she was very responsible about it, which as far as I’m concerned, is the truth.”
I looked long and hard at George to see that he was getting the message.
“You’re going to blackmail me, too,” he said. “If I don’t do this, you’ll tell Belinda.”
I shook my head. “I would never do that. I was thinking I’d tell Darren.”
He swallowed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”
“But that money. That sixty-two grand. What the hell is that about?”
“Like I said, you’ll have to ask Belinda.”
