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“Over what?”
“You. He would say that Manuelo had saved his life when I attacked him in a jealous rage.”
“But Foster didn’t know Rodarte. He certainly didn’t know that he had discovered the Windsor Street house and had concluded we were having an affair. If you’d been killed instead, what motive would Foster have given the investigator—”
“Rodarte would have made damn sure he was put on the case.
He’d promised to witness my self-destruction.”
“Then what reason would Foster have given him for your attempt on his life?”
Griff thought about it. “Money. I went to the mansion and demanded more.”
“Foster wouldn’t have told anyone about our arrangement with you, especially not someone as slimy as Rodarte.”
“Maybe he’d have said he offered me a job in advertising, then changed his mind and withdrew the offer.”
“Plausible, I suppose.”
“Knowing Rodarte as I do, I’m sure he eventually would have played his ace, broken the news to the poor cuckold that I’d been sneaking afternoons with his wife. Of course, Foster would have let him go on thinking I had acted out of jealousy. Our secret affair would have made him look more like a victim, and me a likelier murderer.”
Laura silently conceded that it sounded logical, but she wasn’t yet ready to fully accept it. “Why would Foster have that phony document? And the box of cash? How would he have explained them?”
“If Manuelo had killed me,” he said, “they wouldn’t have been there. Foster didn’t expect anyone but me to see them.”
There was no disputing that. “All right, I see how he could have given Rodarte a credible explanation, and Rodarte would have accepted it, believing Foster to be in the dark about us. But what would Foster have told me?”
“Probably that the confirmed pregnancy had made me greedy. I got to the mansion and demanded more than the half million. When he refused to pay more, I attacked him. Thank God for Manuelo. And thank God I’d done the job I’d been hired to do. You were pregnant. My death was a tragedy, but wasn’t it lucky that I was no longer around, an ongoing threat to your secret and the well-being of your child.” He paused, then added, “It would have been just as he wanted it, Laura. Neat and tidy.”
They were quiet for a time. Movies ended. People trickled out of the theater and made their way to their cars. Others arrived. There was a line to purchase tickets. But the van and the pickup truck stayed, and no one paid attention to the couple sitting in the innocuous midsize car between them.
“Your fingerprints were on the hilt of the letter opener.”
“So were Manuelo’s.”
“But he could have handled it at any time.” She tried to make eye contact, but he avoided it. “Griff?”
“I didn’t want you to know how he died.”
“I have to know.”
He looked away from her, out the windshield, his eyes following a family of four, mom and dad, two children, who’d just come out of a movie. The young son was rolling his eyes, flapping his arms, doing a disjointed jig, obviously imitating an animated character. They were laughing as they piled into their SUV and drove away.
“Why were your fingerprints on the letter opener?”
“I was trying to save his life,” he replied in a quiet voice. “When I saw what had made Manuelo scream, I pushed him aside and shouted at him to call 911. But he was transfixed by the horror of what he’d done. So I placed the call. While I was doing that, Manuelo split.
“I bent over Speakman to see just how bad it was. My initial reaction was to try to pull the letter opener out of his neck. I took hold of it but almost immediately realized it would be better to leave the thing where it was. It was partially plugging the wound, and even at that it was gushing.” He stopped, cursed softly. “Laura, you don’t want to hear this.”
“I must.”
He hesitated, then continued. “There was nothing I could do but what I did, which was to apply pressure around the blade, try to slow down the bleeding.”
She swallowed. “Rodarte said that there was blood on Foster’s hands, tissue under his fingernails. That he had…”
Griff held out his hands to her, palms down, so that she could see the scratch marks on the backs of them. “He was trying to pull the letter opener out. I knew for certain he would die if he did, so, yeah, we fought over control of it.”
He waited to see if she would respond to that, but when she didn’t, he went on. “I talked to him, trying to calm him down and stop him from struggling. I told him that help was on the way. Told him to hold on, to hang in there. Stuff like that. But…” He shook his head. “I knew he wasn’t going to make it, and I think he did, too.”
