The Perfect Marriage(45)

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

He laughed. “Yeah. I killed him. Had to. I was really upset about the shitload of money he was going to make me. The better question, Allison, is why you killed him.”

“Don’t be an idiot. Why would I kill him?”

“Let me see if I can think of a reason. Off the top of my head, I’ve got two-point-seven million of them. Where the fuck is the money, Allison?”

“James never met me at the Acela. So I never got the Pollocks, which means I never went to DC, so I never sold them to my client, and that means that I never got the money. So let me ask you, Reid: Where the fuck are the Pollocks?”





14

Jessica had no interest in going back into James’s office. The police had told her that she could, but that wasn’t the issue. She knew someday she’d have to return, if for no other reason than to empty it out when the lease expired, whenever that was. But she wanted to put that off for as long as possible.

Reid clearly had a different timetable. He hadn’t raised the issue the day they learned James was dead, but a one-day moratorium was apparently all he could abide.

“I know this is terrible for me to ask, Jessica,” he’d said over the phone earlier that morning, “but I figured you’d understand that it’s the nature of the work James and I do that we need to sell pieces when we have a willing buyer because they just don’t come along every day. So I need the keys to both his office and the credenza inside it so I can get access to the Pollocks. And don’t worry, I’m still going to honor my deal with James. You’ll get your fifty thousand dollars for each one I can sell through Allison because she’s James’s connection.”

James had earned $90,000 on the first sale, but Jessica decided not to raise the issue. Reid wouldn’t be Reid if he wasn’t trying to screw her over.

“If you come down here, I’ll give you the keys,” she’d told him.



Reid wasted no time in showing up at Jessica’s home.

“Thank you,” he told her. “I’m really sorry to ask you for this before the funeral, but like I said, I have this buyer and I’m afraid he’ll go on to something else.”

“I understand. The world moves on.”

She excused herself to go to the bedroom to retrieve James’s keys. As he waited for her, Reid decided to get out in front of things. So when she returned, he said, “I need to tell you something, Jessica.”

She looked at him with fear in her eyes. He wondered what she thought he was going to say that would make her that afraid.

“You probably heard that I didn’t talk to the police about the work James and I were doing. You need to do that too, Jessica. Not cooperate with them, I mean. I know that’s hard for you, and it’ll make the cops suspicious if you shut them down, but the sale of these Pollocks . . . they’re not, strictly speaking, legal. I need this deal badly, to get out of a very deep hole I’ve dug for myself, and I know that James needed the deal to pay for Owen’s treatment, or he wouldn’t have done it. The thing is, we can’t sell them if the police are in our business. That’s why I didn’t tell them anything about Allison, and I suggest you don’t either. I’m sorry to put it this way, but it’s the truth: Would you rather help the police contact Allison or get the money to pay for Owen’s treatment?”

She looked as if she didn’t understand. “What are you saying, Reid?”

“I’m saying that we both want whoever did this to James to be caught, but I also know that we both really need the money that’s going to come out of these sales. And I’m saying that those two things are in direct conflict right now.”

“I don’t need the money that badly,” she said.

That wasn’t what James had told him. But there was no reason for James to lie about his need to raise funds. More likely, Jessica was lying about being flush now. Or maybe she just didn’t know how precarious their financial position was.

“That’s not what James said to me,” Reid countered. “But, look, even if that’s true, I need the money that badly. And to make this deal happen, I need to keep the cops away from Allison. She has a buyer on the hook for all three pieces. Once she knows I’ve told the police where to find her, she’s gone.”

Jessica looked at Reid hard. He didn’t have the faintest idea what she was going to do next, but she handed him James’s keys.

“I don’t know anything about Allison,” she said. “But there’s no way I would ever put money above finding who killed James.”

“Understood,” Reid said.

He saw no need to posture any longer. He’d come for the key, and now he had it. He didn’t care what Jessica thought so long as he could sell the Pollocks.

Which was why immediately after leaving Jessica, Reid headed uptown and let himself into James’s office. To his surprise, the blood was still on the floor. He’d thought the police would have cleaned it, but of course they hadn’t.

He stepped around the red stain that had soaked into the rug and went over to the credenza. He fumbled a little before finding the key that fit the lock. When he opened the credenza, all three Pollocks were still there.

He pulled out his phone and dialed. Allison answered right away.