I pull through the gates at seven-thirty. The estate is lit from inside, the study window amber, the rest of the house darker. The housekeeper opens the door before I reach it and tells me Dad’s in the study.
Dad’s behind the desk.That’s the first tell. He tends to sit behind the desk when he's receiving or delivering difficult news. He has a glass of whiskey in front of him that he hasn't touched. The desk lamp throws its circle across the files he's pushed to one side.
I sit down across from him. He looks at me for a moment and says, "The grand jury has convened."
I go still.
"Not on Richard," he says. "On me."
The lamp hums. Outside the window the garden is dark, just the shapes of the cypress trees visible against the lighter sky. I stare at my father. He looks tired, broken even. There are deep lines on his face that I don’t remember seeing before and more white in his hair.
"The Metz evidence Richard planted has been building momentum. Evidence doesn't need a credible source once it's been examined and logged. The grand jury is moving forward." He picks up the whiskey glass and sets it back down without drinking. "I'm going to be indicted for the murder of Carl Metz."
I go still. How could this be? Is this really happening? But what does this mean exactly?
"What do the lawyers say?"
“They say that this is survivable, potentially. Self-defense argument, extenuating circumstances, with the right case built over the next eighteen months." He looks at me. “But there are no guarantees of course.”
I stare at the floor and nod.
"Tell me everything," I clear my throat. "From the beginning. The truth. What happened, how you did it, what the kitchen actually looked like that night. All of it."
He looks at me for a long moment.
"It'll take a while.”
"I'm not going anywhere.”
Dad talks for an hour.
I knew the general outline of the story: the Harry Winston necklace, the network, Metz running the operation, my father keeping the proceeds and building his empire from money that was supposed to flow upward. I knew Metz came to Hawaii two years later. I knew my father was waiting for him and that there were two men with Metz and that my father killed him and the two men left the island the following morning.
What I didn't know were the details.
My father spent two years preparing for a night he wasn't certain would come. He knew the kitchen. He knew the layout of the house, where he'd be standing, where Metz would be when he came through the door. He'd run through it in his head so many times it had stopped feeling like planning and started feeling like memory. He told no one. He just waited, and prepared, and every morning he got up and built his legitimate empire and every night he went to sleep knowing what he was going to do when the time came.
There was no version of it that ended without blood. He'd accepted that before Metz ever booked a flight to Hawaii.
"He came through the door at eleven," my father says. "Two men behind him. One by the door, one to the left. Metz came straight to the kitchen table and sat down like he owned it."
Dad pauses and then continues, “He was very polite. He laid out his terms. He wanted the money and he wanted me back in the network and he said if I cooperated there wouldn't be any trouble. He had a glass of water while he talked.”
Dad stops and picks up a glass of whiskey but then sets it down again without taking a sip.
"I'd prepared two years for that conversation," he continues. "He talked for about four minutes. When he finished, I told him no. He nodded like he'd expected that. Then I did what I'd prepared to do." Dad looks at me across the desk. "The two men were persuadable once Metz was on the floor. They understood the situation had changed. They left the island the next morning and I've never heard from either of them since.”
The room stays quiet. I listen to the sound of ice clinking in my glass as I raise it to my lips.
"You would do it again," I say. I don’t mean it as a question.
"Yes," he says without hesitation.
I believe him but I’m not sure what that means yet.
"There's something else," I say.
He looks at me.
