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“Will you tell me what your suspicions are?”
“Yes, but not now.”
My head drooped.
“However, I do have some news about Victor Bell that may interest the two of you.”
My eyes widened with curiosity.
Paul glowered. “What is it?”
Keith grinned. “He was having an affair with Annabelle Murray.”
“What!” Paul and I screamed in unison.
“I don’t believe it,” Paul said. “Why would a rich and beautiful woman want to fool around with that creep? In fact, how did she even know he existed?”
“He met her at the Book Expo convention in Chicago a few years ago. They had drinks. They went to her hotel room and had sex. Things must have gone extremely well that night because they continued to see each other quite a bit over the past few years.”
Fireworks went off in my head and I sat bolt upright. “Do you think Victor killed her?”
Keith shook his head. “No. He was having breakfast with another member of your Black Pack when Annabelle was killed.”
“Joe Long,” I guessed.
“Right.”
Paul shrugged. “I don’t care about all that. I just want you to tell Jackie that she has to have the bodyguard.”
Keith looked at his watch. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to wrestle with the bodyguard issue. In the meantime, I’m going to try and get my hands on any security video cameras that may be in the area. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a moving image of this woman in action. Grabbing her won’t be difficult once we know what she looks like.”
We didn’t get lucky and I refused to accept a bodyguard or stay in the house. As a result, Paul spent more time at my place than he did at his own.
30
PAM’S FOLDER
So Victor liked white girls, which explained why I’d never had a chance. Annabelle was a tramp and had probably been one since
the day Craig married her, which was why Dora appeared to be of Mediterranean descent. Keith said none of this shed any light on who Dora’s father actually was or if he had anything to do with Annabelle’s murder.
I was surfing the Internet looking for information on Tiffany Nixon one morning and wondering if Pam Bernstein would ever contact me again, when her folder arrived by messenger. I forced all thoughts about Victor and his disgusting little life out of my mind to concentrate on the task before me.
On the surface, the thick dossier that Pam provided didn’t seem very interesting. Everything was meticulously typed and in chronological order—I would have to investigate each piece of paper line by line and hope to strike paydirt.
Elaine was fascinated by this turn of events. Even though I never used Pam Silberstein’s name, I’m sure she figured it out. Pam would become the book’s Deep Throat.
There are skeletons in everyone’s closet, I told myself, hoping that when the bones tumbled out of Tiffany Nixon’s cupboard there would be a Janet Cooke/ Jimmy’s World carcass somewhere in the debris.
Janet Cooke was once a respected journalist at the Washington Post. On September 29, 1980, she published “Jimmy’s World,” a heartrending tale of a grade school heroin addict. According to Ms. Cooke, Jimmy was “eight years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes, and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin, brown arms.” The public was outraged. They wrote and called the Washington Post, demanding the boy’s immediate rescue from his horrific home life. When Janet declined to give his address, saying that drug dealers would kill her if she did, the government stepped in to search for the tot. Their efforts were fruitless but the story was so well written that on April 13, 1981, Janet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The intense media interest in Janet and Jimmy caused her story to unravel faster than a ball of yarn in a cat’s paw. It turned out that there was no Jimmy. She had made the whole thing up. Forced to return the prize and resign in humiliation, Janet became unemployable and was last seen selling women’s garments at a department store in the Midwest.
What if I investigated every story that Tiffany Nixon had ever written and found something close to a Jimmy? And what if I used that information to gain her cooperation—I could feed her information that would make Annabelle’s killer panic and make a mistake.
Unbelievable? Maybe . . . but so was Jimmy, and yet the powers-that-be had swallowed that story whole without even seeing the boy.
While reflecting on my scheme, I became conscious of how much I had changed in such a short time. “Sister,” I now realized, is an empty label unless both women want to claim kinship.
Alas, Tiffany Nixon had taught me the art of character assassination and I had always been a conscientious student.
