“You pull him out?”
“I tried. But it was dark. I couldn’t find him out there. So after like five minutes, I got scared. I left.”
“Desiree knew he had an allergic reaction to coke, didn’t she?” I said.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Tony only did pot and booze, though as a Messenger and all, he wasn’t supposed to—”
“Lisardo belonged to the Church of Truth and Revelation?”
He looked up at me. “Yeah. Since he was, like, a kid.”
I sat on the arm of the couch for a moment, took a deep breath, got a mouthful of Donald Yeager’s pot fumes for my trouble.
“Everything,” Angie said.
I looked over at her. “What?”
“Everything this woman’s done since day one has been calculated. The ‘depression,’ Grief Release, everything.”
“How’d Lisardo become a Messenger?” I asked Donald.
“His mother, man, she’s kinda nutty ’cause her husband’s a loan shark and shit; she joined, forced Tony into it, about ten years ago. He was a kid.”
“How’d Tony feel about it?” Angie said.
He waved his hand dismissively. “Thought it was a pile of shit. But he respected it, too, kinda, ’cause he said they were like his dad—always scamming. He said they had lots of money—boatloads of the shit—they couldn’t report to no IRS.”
“Desiree knew all this, didn’t she?”
He shrugged. “Not so’s she told me or nothing.”
“Come on, Donald.”
He looked up at me. “I don’t know. Tony was a talker. Okay? So, yeah, he probably told Desiree everything about himself from the womb on. I mean, not long before he died, Tony told me he’d met this dude was going to take off the Church for some serious cash, and I’m like, ‘Tony, don’t be telling me these kinda things.’ You know? But Tony was a talker. He was a talker.”
Angie and I locked eyes. She’d been right a minute ago. Desiree had calculated every single move she’d made. She’d targeted Grief Release and the Church of Truth and Revelation. Not the other way around. She’d zeroed in on Price. And Jay. And everyone else, probably, who’d ever thought they were zeroing in on her.
I whistled softly under my breath. You almost had to hand it to the woman. She was a piece of work, unlike any other.
“So, Donald, you didn’t know the cigarettes were laced?” I said.
“No,” he said. “No way.”
I nodded. “You just thought she was being nice, giving her ex-boyfriend a free pack of smokes.”
“No, look, it’s like, I didn’t know know. I just, see, Desiree, she’s, well, she gets what she wants. Always.”
“And she wanted your best friend dead,” Angie said.
“And you made sure she got it,” I said.
“No, man, no. I loved Tony. I did. But Desiree—”
“Was a great fuck,” Angie said.
He closed his mouth, looked at his bare feet.
“I hope she was the greatest of all time,” I said. “Because you helped her kill your best friend. And you gotta live with that for the rest of your life. Take it easy.”
We walked to his door, opened it.
“She’ll kill you, too,” he said.
We looked back at him. He leaned forward, packed weed into the bong with trembling fingers. “You get in her way—anything gets in her way—she’ll wipe it out. She knows I won’t say anything to any real cops, because I’m…nothing. You know?” He looked up at us. “See, Desiree? I don’t think she cares about screwing. Good as she is at it, I get the feeling she could take it or leave it. But destroying people? Man, I bet that gets her off like a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July.”
35
“What’s she gain by coming back here?” Angie said, adjusting the focus on her binoculars and peering through them at the lighted windows of Jay’s condo in Whittier Place.
“Probably not her mother’s memoirs,” I said.
“I think we can safely rule that out.”
We were parked in a lot under an expressway off-ramp, on an island between the new Nashua Street Jail and Whittier Place. We’d sunk as low as possible in our seats so we could get a clear view of the bedroom and living room windows of Jay’s place, and in the time we’d been here, we’d seen two figures—one male, one female—pass the windows. We didn’t even know if the female was Desiree for sure because Jay’s thin curtains were drawn and all we could see were silhouettes. The identity of the male was anyone’s guess. Still, given Jay’s security system, we thought it was a safe bet that that was Desiree up there.
“So what could it be?” Angie said. “I mean, she’s got the two mil probably, she’s safely hidden in Florida with enough money to get as far away as she wants. Why come back?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to finish the job she started almost a year ago.”
“Kill Trevor?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
“To what end, though?”
“Huh?”
“To what end? This girl, Patrick, she always has an angle. She doesn’t do anything for just emotional reasons. When she killed her mother and tried to kill her father, what do you think her primary motivation was?”
“Emancipation?” I said.
She shook her head. “That’s not a good enough reason.”
“A good enough reason?” I put my binoculars down and looked at her. “I don’t think she needs much of a reason. Remember what she did to Illiana Rios. Hell, remember what she did to Lisardo.”
“Right, but there was logic there. There was reason, twisted as it may have been. She killed Lisardo because he was the only link between her and the three guys who killed her mother. She killed Illiana Rios because it helped cover her tracks when she stole the two million back from Price. In both cases she achieved a notable gain. What’s her gain now if she kills Trevor? And what was her original gain when she tried to kill him eight months ago?”
“Well, originally, we can assume it was money.”
“Why?”
“Because she was probably the primary beneficiary of his will. Her parents die, she inherits a few hundred million.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“Okay,” I said. “But now that makes no sense. No way Trevor’s still got her in the will anymore.”