The Perfect Marriage(55)
“So are we going to do this thing or what?” Allison asked.
Haley felt stuck in quicksand. She had always been a doer. Proactive. Looking to solve the problem at hand. It had been that impulse that led her to Jessica at the funeral. But now, with that plan in motion, there was nothing left for her to do.
Nothing except wait.
But for what, exactly? She didn’t expect to hear from Jessica again. She would either believe Haley or not.
Besides, whether Jessica actually believed her was of secondary importance. Not even secondary—irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was whether Jessica decided to keep her powder dry with the police because of what Haley told her. Since the detectives hadn’t yet come back to Haley’s apartment, she assumed that was the case.
Not being a person of interest in a murder case should have made Haley happy, but she felt little joy at the moment. After wanting James dead for almost as long as she’d been married to him, she was struggling with what to do next with her life. It was a question she had been considering since her sacking at Maeve Grant, but she’d always been able to distract herself from forward progress in her life with her revenge fantasies.
Her fantasy now fulfilled, she kept returning to the same question over and over again. What now?
At around seven, a nurse came out into the waiting room. “We just gave Owen a sedative to help him sleep tonight,” she said. “The doctor said that there will be no more visits today. He’ll let you have a longer visit tomorrow, but he wants Owen to sleep through the night. You two should take the opportunity to get some rest yourselves. It’s important for you to keep your strength up too. And not just physically. Emotionally too.”
Wayne suggested that they get a bite at the diner across the street from the hospital. He would have been more than willing to go someplace more upscale, but he doubted Jessica wanted to do anything beyond utilitarian this evening.
The hostess seated them in a booth toward the back. It could have comfortably sat six.
“Can I interest you in sharing a black-and-white malt?” he asked.
She laughed. “Yes. I think that would be . . . appropriate.”
When Owen was born, there had been a diner across the street from that hospital too. Twice a day during Jessica’s three-day stay, Wayne had gone downstairs and gotten them both black-and-white malts.
“How’s Stephanie?” Jessica asked after they’d ordered.
Wayne had not yet found a way to tell her that he’d ended things with Stephanie. “We’re taking a break,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Well, a breakup is more accurate.”
“I’m sorry, Wayne.”
“Thanks. It’s for the best.”
Wayne heard his next sentence in his head and decided it was worth saying aloud. “I think now . . . maybe more than ever, you and I just need each other.”
In the eleven days since James Sommers’s murder, Gabriel hadn’t narrowed the suspect list any more than he had in the first eleven minutes. Wife. Ex-wife. Ex-husband of wife. Business partner. Mysterious short-haired woman named Allison.
Allison hadn’t showed at the funeral, although Gabriel had known that would be a long shot. Asra suggested that Allison might be dead herself, the victim of a Reid Warwick double cross. For that reason, she had been monitoring the missing persons and Jane Does at the morgue, but no short-haired, thin women in the proper age group had turned up.
Gabriel had a different take. If Allison had been involved, he assumed she was on a beach somewhere, living off the proceeds of the deal she had decided not to split with James Sommers and Reid Warwick. That’s why he figured she had killed the former and stiffed the latter.
Then there was Ella’s theory: that Allison didn’t even exist.
Not that they needed another suspect at the moment anyway. None of the current candidates had an alibi worth a damn. Jessica Sommers claimed to be alone in her apartment all night. No one saw Wayne Fiske between the time he left school at 3:45 p.m. until his son showed up at his house at seven. Reid Warwick’s refusal to cooperate suggested that he too lacked an airtight alibi. The crazy ex-wife, who had originally been at the top of the suspect list, had the best alibi of the bunch. Her boy toy confirmed that she’d been with him (or at least on her way to him) during the time frame that James Sommers had been killed. Then again, Gabriel had the sense that her boyfriend would say anything to keep Haley coming back for more.
Unfortunately, closed-circuit TV from the Met Breuer museum didn’t capture the entryway to Sommers’s building across the street. The building’s own security system had been broken for more than a year, the landlord figuring that a visible camera made for a sufficient deterrent by itself.
Jessica Sommers’s building did have a working camera. It showed her enter at three and not leave until the following morning. On the other hand, tenants tended to know how to avoid being filmed by their own buildings’ security cameras. Which meant that Gabriel couldn’t rule out that James Sommers told his wife something on the phone that caused her to go to his office, setting in motion the confrontation that ended with him dead.
Reid Warwick’s Fifth Avenue residence had both security cameras and doormen. They all told the same story: Reid came home at a little after one in the morning with zero blood on his clothing. That was hardly airtight, of course. He could have gone to James’s office, killed his partner, and then switched clothes before coming home.