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He handed me the rose and the card that came with it. I tipped him a twenty, feeling flush today.
I went back into the bedroom and laid the rose on the bed next to my suitcase. Then I sat down and opened the card.
This flower wasn’t from my brother Thomas.
The card said only:“You’re welcome.”
Seventy-Eight
DETECTIVE BEN CANTOR SATacross from Elise Wolf in a living room that brought the wordregalto mind, as if he’d somehow been granted an audience with a woman Jenny often referred to as the queen.
“I must say,” Elise Wolf said to him, “you were rather vague about the need to see me this evening.”
He let that one go for the moment.
“Have you heard from Jenny?” Cantor said. “You must be happy for her that she got to hold on to the team.”
“Isupposehappy is one way to look at it,” she said. “It was at her brother Daniel’s expense, of course. So there’s that.”
“But your late husband clearly wanted her to take over the running of the team,” Cantor said, “or he wouldn’t have left the team to her.”
“My late husband wanted many things, usuallywhenhe wanted them,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “And he often didn’t consider the consequences of what he wanted at any given time.”
She was dressed as if about to leave for some kind of formal reception. Black dress. A strand of pearls around her neck. A diamond ring on her left hand that looked big enough and even strong enough to light the rest of the house if there were some kind of power failure—even bigger than the rock Rachel Wolf had been wearing when he’d met her for drinks. Elise Wolf’s attitude, just in the few minutes Cantor had been here, was a combination of haughtiness and impatience, as if she were talking to the help.
She was exactly the way Jenny described her: a piece of work.
“Do you often conduct your interviews at this time of night?” she said to him. “And your business?”
She was sipping sherry. She’d offered him something to drink, but he said he was working.
“My business is rather transactional, Mrs. Wolf,” he said, “and often involves the exchange of information.”
“I’m quite sure I’m not following you. Are you being intentionally opaque?”
“I’m trying to quit.”
“You really are impertinent, aren’t you?”
He couldn’t help himself. He felt himself grinning. “You have no idea.”
“I might remind you that I don’t have all night.”
Jenny must have been raised by real wolves,Cantor thought, not for the first time.
Or maybe the real kill-or-be-killed Wolf was seated across from him in her high-backed antique chair.
“I’m really only here to ask you one question, which happens to be the same one I’ve already asked another member of your family.”
“I’m waiting.”
“How come when I spoke to you last week you didn’t think your son Thomas showing up here about an hour before he died was worth sharing with me?” Cantor said.
Seventy-Nine
JOHN GALLO HAD PLACEDno calls to either Jack or Danny Wolf, nor had he taken calls from them, since their sister had gotten the votes she needed in Los Angeles, having somehow defied gravity on a day when she was supposed to crash and burn.
The brothers had both been so sure. So had the commissioner, now fully in the pocket of Gallo and his associates. So, too, had her crisis manager, that grasping little twerp. But John Gallo had made the mistake of convincing himself it was a sure thing. That wasn’t his nature. He never trusted that a job was done until it was impossible for it to beundone.
