“He surely was. He could hide his true nature well, for periods of time. But it was like clenching a muscle, do you know what I mean? Even when he was in full masquerade mode—that’s what I’d call it, when he was being pleasant and charming—the performance would sometimes slip. After a while, he’d have to quit pretending. Sometimes ‘a while’ was a few days or a few weeks. Sometimes it was even longer, but it was never perfect.” To herself, she murmured, “No, it was never perfect.”
Grady pressed on. “Was he blackmailing someone at the time of his death? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I guess so? I asked him what had put such a smile on his face, and he’d had enough to drink that he filled me in. He said he’d caught somebody at the company skimming. I was ready to raise hell about it,” she amended quickly. “But he waved away any concerns of mine. Now he had leverage. He could get this person to do whatever he wanted, all he had to do was snap his fingers. That man, I swear. He treated the real world like his own personal RPG. Role-playing game, I mean. We used to play together. I don’t have many fond memories of our time together, but that’s one of them.”
Grady leaned back, leaving his barely touched drink on the table. “That leaves us with a big question: Who was this skimmer?”
“Two questions,” Leda piped up. “What did Christopher blackmail the skimmer into doing?”
The detective pointed his pen at her. “Good point. Two big questions. Can you help us with them, Ms. Copeland?”
“Not as much as I’d like to,” she admitted. “I don’t know who the employee was; I’m not even sure if it was a man or a woman. But he referred to them as ‘kid’ once or twice, so at the time, I thought it might be one of the underlings. But then I thought it might be Kim. I’d assumed he was sleeping with her, and that’s why she was so fast to step and fetch at his command.”
“Kim… Cowen.” Grady found the name in his notebook. “His assistant.”
“Assistant, sidepiece, whatever. Now, she’s the one you really ought to talk to. She knew every little thing, about every little thing he did.”
Leda nodded enthusiastically. “She’s definitely on our list.”
“Good, good. She can probably be of more help to you than I can.”
Niki asked, “Really? You were the one who was married to him.”
“Trust me, she saw more of him than I did. And in the end, that was fine with me.” She finished more of her drink and eyed the empty pitcher. “God, my life would be so much easier right now if I’d just divorced him.”
“Easier than him dying, and leaving everything to you?”
She laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh, or a pretty one. “Honey, he didn’t leave anything to anyone. It turns out, the selfish dick didn’t have a will. Every time I think I’m just about done with probate court, there’s some new wrinkle, some new piece of paper they want… I don’t know.” She sounded tired of the whole thing. “It took a few months for me to close the company. It never really made any money, and I couldn’t even sell it off for parts. Christopher had some money, but he also owed some taxes—so until that’s sorted, I can’t touch a dime of it. Thank God I have my own.”
Leda opened her mouth to ask but hesitated.
Grady went ahead with the rude follow-up. It was less rude coming from a cop, that’s what Leda figured. Better to let him do it. “Your own?”
“I got my money the old-fashioned way: I married it. My first husband was loaded, he was a cheater, and he died of a heart attack brought on by years of heavy smoking and drinking, combined with his habit of eating like Henry the Eighth. I loved him dearly; I really did. He broke my heart, and I left him shortly before he died. Of course, I took half of everything.” She laughed again, that same grim note. “I met Christopher while I was in the middle of my divorce proceedings, and he charmed me senseless. At first. Within a year, I wondered if he’d only married me for my money. I couldn’t decide if that was ironic or just plain sad.”
“But you still have a job,” Niki noted.
Leda glanced at Grady, but it looked like he’d given up on trying to keep either one of them quiet.
“Yes, I like to work. It gets me out of the house. I help large businesses decide how to allocate their charity funds—and even though those charity funds are usually laughably small, and they exist mostly for show, the money does some good. One of these days, I might ditch the big financial group for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, if they’ll have me. I don’t know.”
Grady made some thinking noises as he stared down at his notebook. He looked up at Janette Copeland again. “All right, then you don’t know for certain who the blackmailed employee was, but you think it might’ve been Kim Cowen. Do you know what he might’ve had on her—or anyone else?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. I didn’t touch the day-to-day operations, and I had nothing to do with hiring or firing. I didn’t exactly pore over everybody’s personnel files. Even if I did, you’ve had access to the same information. You’re as likely to guess from her background as I am.”
Leda wanted to know, “And you definitely don’t know what the employee in question was blackmailed into doing?” The light was sizzling around her left eye again, like another ocular migraine might be brewing. She closed her lids tight for a second and rubbed at her temple.
“Honestly couldn’t tell you. It was probably something gross, though. Christopher liked to set people up to take the fall for his own shortcomings or shady business dealings. God only knows how many people he torpedoed professionally, just to keep his own nose clean.”
“Excuse me,” Leda said, and stood up with a wobble.
“Are you all right?” Grady asked.
“Yeah, I just need some air. Some water. I need the ladies’ room; there’s air and water in there. Excuse me,” she said again.
“I’ll come with you,” Niki offered.
The women left, and Leda staggered down the stairs with Niki hobbling along in her wake, trying to keep the both of them from falling. The bathroom was on the first floor, almost under the stairs. There were two unisex rooms. Leda flung herself into the one that wasn’t occupied and almost shut the door in Niki’s face.
“Sorry,” she said, then moved out of the way and sat on the edge of the sink before she could fall over, facedown into the toilet.
“Don’t worry about it, babe.” Niki shut the door behind her and turned on the cold water faucet. She took a small stack of brown paper towels, soaked it, and patted Leda’s forehead with it. “Tell me what happened up there. What’d you see?”
“At first I thought it was another stupid ocular migraine. But then I caught something else,” she said. She was somewhat out of breath and didn’t know why. The stairs weren’t very steep or demanding, but she felt like she’d just run a couple of blocks to catch a bus.
“Care to share?”
“I saw Christopher, looking absolutely…” She fished for a word that would adequately convey the cruel disdain and amusement she’d seen for a split second. Barely a moment, but it’d shown her so much about the man. “Triumphant.” She let out a long sigh and squeezed the wet paper towels—then threw them away. She hopped down off the sink and faced it, elbows leaning on the cold porcelain. With a twist of the faucet, she shifted the water from cold to hot and let the steam hit her face. “He found somebody he could manipulate into doing his dirty work. But he didn’t know who he was dealing with, and it got him killed. I flashed on the killer. It must have been the killer,” she repeated quietly. “I saw him pushing a car, rolling it into the water.”