Blood Always Tells, Hilary Davidson [good book club books .txt] 📗

“What I wonder is how Dominique came to die, and if Max knew that was going to happen.”

“If Max knew, he would have tried to save her.” There was a vehemence in her voice that made the man widen his eyes.

“Did your brother give you that black eye, Polly?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “But it was my brother Val, not Max. Max wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Was it Val who set you up to run into me today?”

She looked up, realizing she’d given away far too much. Every word out of her mouth was a nail in her coffin. When Val found out—and with Val, it was always a question of when, not if—he would do terrible things her. If she were lucky, he’d snap her neck and be done with it quickly. The other possibilities were too awful to face.

“Please let me go,” she begged. “I can’t stay here. He’ll know, and he’ll be angry with me.”

“I’ll deal with Val,” Desmond answered.

She could feel her soul curl up in misery inside.

“What did he want?”

She glanced at him, trying to measure his motives. She tried to remember the last time she’d had a conversation with anyone outside of her family. Her mother had made her afraid of everyone since Max had gone. Yet, strangers were never the ones who’d hurt Polly; the pain she knew was inflicted by her brother and, to a lesser degree, by her mother. “Are you telling me the truth about your sister? Is she really dead?”

Now it was his turn to nod. His face was fierce like a stone angel’s. “I still can’t believe it. She’s the only family I had. Now that she’s gone, all I care about is getting justice for her. I don’t know what else to do. Nothing else matters to me.”

She understood him so well. Max was the only real family she had, and he was all she cared about. Her parents had always been blind to whatever happened to her. Val was a monster. She wasn’t family to him, but a tool for him to use, a body to send on errands. It didn’t matter to him that she was his sister. He’d shown her that enough times. But Max… he was different. She remembered how he used to pick her up from school every day and walk her home, even though he was in high school. Boys that age didn’t like to walk hand-in-hand with their baby sister. Of course, that had all stopped long ago, but thinking of Max always made her heart warm up. Most of the time, she felt like it was encased in ice.

“I want to find Max, more than anything in this world.” She gazed at Desmond. “If I help you get justice for your sister, will you help me find Max?”

“I will. I promise.” He took a deep breath. “You’re going to have to tell me the truth about a lot of things. Will you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s start with Val’s plan. What does he hope to get?”

“I don’t know what Val wants,” Polly admitted. “He tells me nothing unless he absolutely needs to, or else if he feels like bragging. He says it’s my job to do what he tells me.”

“When’s the last time you talked to Max?”

“Not in a very long time,” Polly whispered. “He sends me notes and cards sometimes, but he won’t come to the house.”

“Is Max afraid of Val?”

“Everyone is afraid of Val.”

“Was it Val who poisoned Trinity Lytton-Jones last night? Did he put something in the drugs you delivered to her?”

“Yes. I asked him and he admitted it.”

“She was a regular customer of his?”

Polly nodded. “For years. She was a terrible addict. Tons of pills, mountains of cocaine.”

“How did she come to be Val’s customer?”

“I don’t know. The arrangement goes back a long time.”

Desmond’s eyes narrowed to slits, and he was silent for a moment. “What I don’t get is this: Val deals drugs, and Trinity is a really great customer. I mean, she probably spent a lot every week, right?”

“Yes. I don’t know exactly how much. I didn’t collect the money.”

“You didn’t get paid by Trinity?” His black eyes were shiny with curiosity.

“Never. Everything was paid for before I made a delivery.”

“Who paid?”

“I don’t know. The money goes straight to Val. I don’t know how he gets it.”

Desmond looked pensive. “That’s interesting. But my point was this: why kill the Golden Goose? He just lost what had to be one of his best customers.”

“He said…” Her voice quavered. She shouldn’t be telling him anything, but she liked him, especially because she believed he loved his sister. He was like Max in her mind—a good man. She felt pity for him, too. “He said it was because of her family fortune.”

Desmond sat stock-still, his gaze sliding away from her face into some far-off place where Polly couldn’t follow him. “Does Max deal drugs, too?”

“No. He wouldn’t.”

The expression on his face told her he didn’t quite believe her. He didn’t understand that Max and Val were like day and night. Max was kind and gentle, while Val… she didn’t like to think about what Val was. There were Russian fairy tales about a creature called Tugarin Zmeyevich, which was cruelty personified. Sometimes it looked like a knight, or a dragon, but it was always an incarnation of evil. That was Val.

“I’m pretty sure the police told me Max was arrested for drug possession when he was sixteen or seventeen,” Desmond said.

“That was Val’s fault!” Polly’s reply came out of her mouth like a bursting dam. “Max doesn’t use drugs or sell drugs. Val does, and he got caught once. He claimed the drugs in his car were also Max’s. That was why Max was charged.” She stared at the table. “Max didn’t want Val to get in more trouble than he was already in, so he went along with it. It was a lesser charge for Val since the quantity was split between them.”

“What exactly does Max do?”