City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(15)

Bryce feigned a sip. He wondered what Ozmian had seen in her. She was, of course, drop-dead gorgeous, thin, athletic, stacked, her body now curled up on the chaise longue like a cat, but there were a lot of beautiful women in the world he could have picked. Why her? Of course, there might have been reasons that only became apparent in the bedroom. As she talked, his mind drifted over various possibilities in that arena.

“I was taken advantage of,” she was saying. “I had no idea what I was getting into. He took a sweet foreign girl and crushed her, like that.” She picked up a frilly pillow, twisted it in the most alarming way, then tossed it aside. “Just like that!”

“What was the marriage like, exactly?”

“I’m sure you read all about it in the papers.”

Indeed he had, and in fact had written quite a bit about it himself. As she well knew. The Post had taken her side—everybody hated Anton Ozmian. The man went out of his way to be detested.

“It’s always good to hear it directly from the source.”

“He had a temper. Oh my gawd, what a temper! A week into our marriage—a week—he trashed our living room, broke my Swarovski Kris Bear collection, every single one, crunch crunch crunch, just like that. It broke my heart. He was horribly abusive.”

Bryce remembered the story. That was when Ozmian had discovered she’d been sleeping with her CrossFit trainer as well as an old boyfriend from Ukraine all along, and there was even a suggestion she had done both of them the morning of the wedding. So far, nothing new. She’d tried to claim he beat her up, but that was disproved in court. In the end she sued for divorce and pried ninety million out of his pocket, which was no mean feat, even if he was a decabillionaire.

Bryce leaned forward, his voice full of sympathy. “How terrible that must have been for you.”

“Right from the start I should have guessed, when my little Poufie bit him the first time she met him. And then—”

“I wonder,” he continued gently, steering the conversation, “if you could tell me something about his relationship with his daughter, Grace.”

“Well, you know she was from the first wife. She wasn’t mine, that’s for sure. Grace—what a name!” She gave a poisonous laugh. “She and Ozmian had a close relationship. They were both cut from the same cloth.”

“How close?”

“He spoiled her rotten! She partied all the way through college, only graduating when her father gave a new library to the school. Then she did a two-year Grand Tour of the Continent, sleeping her way from one Eurotrash bedroom to the next. Spent a year clubbing in Ibiza. Then she was back in America, burning through Daddy’s money, supporting half of Colombia’s gross national product, I’m sure.”

This was new. During the divorce, the daughter had been more or less off limits to the press. Even the Post wouldn’t drag a kid into a divorce like that. But she was dead now, and Harriman could feel his reportorial radar starting to ping big time.

“Are you saying she had drug issues?”

“Issues? She was an addict!”

“Just a user, or a genuine addict?”

“Two times in rehab, that celebrity place in Rancho Santa Fe, what was it called? ‘The Road Less Traveled.’” She gave another derisive snort of laughter.

The martini was gone and the butler brought her another unasked, whisking away the empty glass.

“And what drug was at issue here? Cocaine?”

“Everything! And Ozmian just let her do it! Enabler of the worst kind. Terrible father.”

Now Harriman came to the crux of the matter. “Do you know, Ms. Ozmian, of anything in Grace’s past that might have led to her murder?”

“A girl like that always comes to a bad end. I worked my butt off in Ukraine, I got myself to New York, no drugs, no alcohol, ate healthy salads without dressing, worked out two hours a day, slept ten hours a night—”

“Was there anything she might have done, such as buying or selling drugs, getting involved with organized crime, or anything else that might have led to her murder?”

“Well, as far as drug dealing, I don’t know. But there was something in her past. Awful.” She hesitated. “I probably shouldn’t say—Ozmian made me sign a nondisclosure agreement as part of the divorce settlement…”

Her voice trailed off.

Harriman felt like a prospector whose pick had just glanced off a vein of pure gold. All he had to do was poke around and brush away some dirt. But he played it cool; he had learned that instead of following up with a probing question, the best way to let something like this come out was silence. People felt compelled to talk into a silence. He pretended to look over his notes, waiting for the second double martini to do its work.

“I might as well tell you. Might as well. Now that she’s gone, I’m sure the NDA is no longer valid, don’t you think?”

More silence. Bryce knew enough not to answer a question like that.

“Right at the end of our marriage…” She took a deep breath. “Drunk and high, Grace ran over an eight-year-old boy. Put him in a coma. He died two weeks later. Just awful. His parents had to remove him from life support.”

“Oh no,” said Harriman, genuinely horrified.

“Oh yes.”

“And what happened then?”