Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

“I wouldn’t read too much into that, Detective.”

“Define too much.”

He laughed. “Excellent! You should be a lawyer.”

“Let’s quit fencing, Chad. Your relationship with Celeste was a lot deeper—meant a lot more to you—than you have led us to believe. You can deny it as much as you like, but any jury in New York is going to see right through your denials. They’ve seen enough reality TV to recognize denial when they see it.”

He held my eye a moment, then said, “A jury?”

“You want to tell me why a guy who’s in love with a girl would lie about it?”

He made a face of derision and snorted. “Any number of reasons!”

“How about when that girl gets murdered one block from his house after he discovers she’s been having an affair?”

He sighed and dropped his face into his hands. “I didn’t kill her.”

“I’m supposed to take your word for this?”

He dragged his hands down until they were in a praying position in front of his mouth.

I kept talking. “You lied to me before about your relationship and your feelings for her. That was a stupid thing to do, because it makes you look guilty. Give me one good reason I should believe you now.”

He looked down at the book in front of him and closed it. “I can’t. I acted without thinking. I had feelings for her. She was a pain in the ass, she was difficult, she was wild and much too emotional, sometimes she was overwhelming. But when she wasn’t around…” He shrugged. “…I missed her. I guess I felt I needed her.” He frowned at me, as though I’d said something he disagreed with. “She didn’t get in the way of my studies. It actually helped me, having her around. And she was smart. We had conversations…” He smiled. “You can’t do that with a lot of chicks. But she was getting restless. She had nothing to do. She wasn’t academic. I was encouraging her to read. I’m not a fan of Camus. I never yet heard of an existentialist who invented a vaccine or a space probe. But she was into all that fancy foreign café society shit. So I bought her The Outsider.”

“And you read it.”

“I speed-read it so we could talk about it.”

“You really cared about her.”

“I’ve already admitted that, Detective.”

“So when you found out about Rod…”

“It was tough. I’m not the jealous type, whatever you may think. We had a row, she promised she’d been stringing him along. What I told you about that was true.”

“Except you said you hadn’t called her, and you had.”

He flopped back in his chair, eyes closed, then sagged forward and took a deep breath. “Yes, I had.”

“What made you lie about that?”

“After Celeste disappeared, I decided I had to reinvent myself as a hard-headed son of a bitch. I try to cultivate that image. If you do that enough, eventually the image becomes real.”

“What did you talk about when you called her?”

“I asked her where she was and if she was coming over. She said she was on her way.”

“Did she say whether she had spoken to Rod?”

“No.”

“Anybody else?”

He frowned, remembering. “Yeah… She said she’d had a big row with her brother and with her dad. That was why she hadn’t come earlier. She’d been in her room. She needed to be alone or something. Then she’d walked out and her brother had called her, telling her to come home. Her dad was freaking out, having an angina attack or something.”

“Did she say where she was?”

“On her way.”

“You didn’t go to meet her?”

“I was going to, but she said not to.”

“What did you do when she didn’t turn up?”

He shrugged. “I watched a movie, then went to bed. I assumed she’d gone to see Rod.”

I frowned. “That didn’t strike you as odd behavior?”

He laughed a nasty, harsh laugh. “No. That’s women. They can change their feelings in a couple of seconds: ‘Oh, I’m crazy in love with you, but oops! I don’t really like the way you bend your legs when you sit and, and oh wow! Your friend has such big, brown, vulnerable eyes, now I’m in love with him.’ That’s women. Nothing they feel ever has any real depth or substance. It is never constant or real in any meaningful sense. You just have to live with it. After a couple of days, I boxed up her stuff and moved on.”

I grunted. “OK, Chad. Don’t leave town.”

“I don’t plan to,” he said, opening his book again. “I plan to prepare for my exams, if you’ll let me.”

Outside, a steady rain had started to come down. Through the windshield, I could see Dehan sitting behind the wheel. Rivers of silver light lay across the blacktop. I raised my collar, crossed the sidewalk and climbed in the passenger seat. I closed the door and she smiled at me.

“So did you talk guys stuff?”

“Yeah. He supports the Dodgers.”

She turned the key and the engine roared. As she pulled away she said, “Anything else?”

“He confessed that his feelings for her were stronger and deeper than he’d led us to believe. That it was in fact she who was growing bored, not the other way around. ”

The windshield wipers squeaked and thudded.

“He admitted he spoke to her on the phone?”

“Yup. He called to see why she was taking so long. Quite a turn around from his earlier statement. She said she was on her way, and that Samuel had called her saying the old man was having an attack of angina.”

She turned left onto Gleason, past the post office. “He was using his illness as emotional blackmail: Daddy needs his family with him, especially his youngest daughter. She was always his