24. Just Like Lisa
CHAPTER 24
Just Like Lisa
Henry
A thirty-second recording brought my entire world crumbling down. It was one thing to suspect my uncle had killed Dad, but it was a whole different reality to finally have proof, to finally know who hated Dad so much. I swallowed, tasting something bitter in the back of my throat. I played the recording again, over and over until I’d memorized every word and sound.
Mom sounded so angry and surprised. What the fuck. Jonathan had killed Dad, and Mom found him out? How was this possible? Mom had been sick by then and rarely left her room. How had Jonathan convinced her to cover for him all these years and to give me up? I glared at the computer, brows furrowed.
I picked up the desk chair and threw it against the window. The glass cracked. I hit it again, and it exploded, sending shards all over the place. I paced the room as glass crunched under my shoes. This was what they’d done to me. Jonathan and Francesca had broken my life into tiny pieces. I wanted to kill him, smash his head in like he’d done to Dad.
The murder board Nikki had in her room flashed in my mind—so much blood, so much hate. And it all had come from his brother. I hated him. I hated them. My jaw clenched so tight a bone cracked painfully behind my ear.
I stuffed the chip in the back pocket of my jeans. My hands trembled as I left the room and descended the stairs. This hotel had become a haven for me. Nikki’s energy, her smell, still lingered in the lobby. Drinking hot chocolate on the sofa, the first time we had sex at the bar, and the time she fell asleep in my arms after she’d found out Lisa hadn’t made parole—all that was over. Or rather, all that had never been.
I trod to the bar, grabbed a beer, and downed it. The carbonation burned on the way down, and I welcomed the feeling. I had to stop thinking about her. She was gone. She didn’t care about me or this hotel. My chest hurt, every breath I took hurt, but I had to learn to live without her. I grabbed my keys off the counter and trudged to my truck. I needed a stiffer drink.
I headed out of town toward the 101 with the windows down. Rain pelted on the car door, wetting the seat along with my shirt and face. I sped down I-10 with no clue where I was going. My mind raced, flooded with a thousand incoherent thoughts. The main one being Mom. I took the next exit, made a U-turn at the light, and backtracked to A Different Point of View bar. I needed something to numb the pain. Or maybe I just needed to feel close to Mom.
When I reached the entrance, the valet gave me a ticket, and I stuffed it in my back pocket, mumbling a thank you, ignoring the looks he gave my beat-up truck. At the bar, I ordered a whiskey. The bartender was the same one who had helped us find Scott. I’d never asked Dom what he did with the asshole.
“Is Scott around tonight?” I asked the bartender, gesturing for another round. If he recognized me, he didn’t show it.
“He quit days ago.” He poured my drink and quickly moved to the other side of the bar.
I supposed when Dom said he’d take care of the trash, he really meant it. Nikki chose her friends well. No doubt Dom was in on it too. I shut my eyes, and all I could see was Nikki holding his hand, walking him upstairs. Dom kissing her by the window. I chugged my drink and slammed it on the counter.
“Wow, man. You look like shit.” Dom Moretti braced his arm on the counter.
I had to give it to him; he had great timing. My feet hit the floor just as I gripped his collar and punched him across the face. Every heartbeat thrummed in my ears, pumping hot blood through my veins. After the initial gasps, the room went eerily quiet. The bartender rushed to the phone behind the bar and started dialing. If he was calling security, I didn’t give a fuck.
“What the fuck?” Dom scrambled back, rubbing his chin, eyes trained on me.
When he didn’t move, I squeezed my hands tighter. A sharp pain spread up my fingers. The raw ache on my bleeding knuckles was an improvement on the anger twisting in my stomach. I stepped forward and came at him with a liver shot. He let out a grunt. Pressing his lips together, he shoved me away and stood his ground, hands out in front of him, palms facing me.
“Fight back.” I gritted my teeth.
“With pleasure. But first tell me what the fuck we’re fighting over?” Red rose to his cheeks. His chest expanded wide as he forced even breaths.
“You tell me.” I threw another punch. This time he locked his arm around my elbow and clocked me. I countered with a left hook and then another and another, pouring every bit into him. I wanted him to feel the way I’d felt when I read Nikki’s note, when I heard Mom’s voice in the recording. I wanted him to make up for all the years I’d spent alone, for all the ones I’d have to spend without a family.
Two sets of hands gripped my arms and pulled me off him. Their voices were a jumble of sounds over the blood drumming in my ears. I blinked several times, forcing air into my aching lungs. My feet squeaked across the shiny floors as guards walked me out of the bar and shoved me into an elevator instead of taking me through the lobby and back to the valet podium. I scooted back until I touched the mirror lining the elevator wall.
Dom sat on his haunches, his face inches from mine, eyes black and menacing. “Today I was feeling like I deserved a beating. Next time you come at me, I will pummel you to the ground. Drink this.”
“What is it?” I glared at the blurry glass he shoved in my hands.
“Just drink it.” He stood next to me.
My mouth twitched when I took a swig of it, but I let the whiskey wash down the last of the fighting adrenaline in my body. We stopped moving. The abrupt change made my stomach roll. Maybe it was time I stopped chugging whiskey.
When the doors slid open, Dom stepped out of the elevator, calling out for me over his shoulder. “Come on.”
With the amount of alcohol I’d had in such a short amount of time, I should be drunk, but instead I felt hungover, complete with a pounding headache and cottonmouth. I rose and followed Dom down a carpeted hallway. At the far end of the floor, he touched his wallet to the door lock magnetic strip. When the light turned green, he gestured for me to go in, and I obliged. If Dom wanted to get rid of me, he would’ve had the security guards throw me into the trunk of his SUV. Why had he brought me to his grand suite instead?
“There’s water on the dining table.” He closed the door behind him. “Now. Care to tell me what the fuck that was all about?”
“Nice place.” I took a bottle of water and drank until it was all gone. “You live here?”
He gave me a half smirk. “Perk of the job.”
“More of Derek’s money, I’m sure. Tell me. Is this what you and Nikki do? You go around finding pathetic fools with their heads so far up their asses they can’t tell a beautiful woman from a con artist?”
“Ouch. That sounds painful.” He let out a laugh. “I should’ve known Nikki had something to do with this. What did she do now?” He rubbed his side where I’d punched him.
I pressed my forefinger and thumb to my eyelids and winced. “Don’t pretend, asshole. You know exactly what you two did. Conning me out of my father’s will and the little money my mom had.” That slow burn in my stomach was back. I sounded like a complete moron. How had I not seen it?
He chuckled. “I really thought she’d retired. Maybe she figured she wasn’t ready yet. Or maybe she had a damn good reason for walking away with your mom’s money.” He sauntered to the head of the table where he had a laptop and piles of manila folders laid out. He shuffled through a couple, picked up the one with Cavalier on the label, and slid it across the table to me. “Is that the will Nikki stole?”
I took another bottle of water and downed it, glaring at the papers in front of me. “You didn’t give it to her.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What the fuck is going on, man?”
“She left me.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. Pathetic didn’t begin to cover it .
“And you automatically thought she left with that will?”
I nodded. “She left a note. Took some of Mom’s jewelry and money. I assumed she had this too.”
His eyes turned a deep blue, and a half smile pulled on his lips. After the beating I’d given him downstairs, he wasn’t mad. Instead, he was intrigued. Was he trying to help me?
“I’m sorry I punched you. Obviously, you had nothing to do with this. It all came down on me so fast I haven’t been able to digest any of it.” I sat back and let out a breath.
“Well, the good news is the will is valid. If you sue your uncle, it should be an easy win. Question is are you ready to move forward with it? The way I understood it, if you pull the trigger on this, Nikki’s sister will be the one having to bite the bullet, so to speak.” He sat at the end of the table.
Nothing about him said crook to me. Yeah, I’d seen Dom dance the gray area with ease and little regard, but he wasn’t a petty thief. Even if Nikki had no problem playing me, I could tell he had no part in it.
“I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.” I fished the chip out of the back pocket of my jeans, my hand tight around it. I needed to trust him. Not everyone was like Jonathan. Dom was a friend. “There’s a recording that suggests my uncle was involved in my dad’s murder.”
Both his eyebrows shot up as he shuffled through more folders until he found the one with Lisa Morrow on the label. “Fuck, man. That’s hard core.” He flipped through the pages and all the bloody pictures. “He had an alibi, though. The maid swore he was in his study when it happened. She also swore she saw Lisa punching the victim’s chest…” He mumbled as he ran a thumb over his jaw. He met my gaze, his eyes darting between my hand and my face. “Is that it?”
I nodded and tossed it to him. He inserted the chip in the SD slot of his laptop and sat back on his chair. My stomach rolled, as the voices began to play in my head. I trudged to the window, leaned on the frame, and focused on the dark sky and the city lights below us.
“Henry, this changes everything. We’ll need an expert to confirm this recording hasn’t been tampered with. But I’m willing to bet this is enough to get Lisa out. With this and your mom’s confession, we can put Jonathan away for a long time.”
I snorted and turned to face him. “Don’t count on it. Did you not hear her in the recording? She helped them that day.” I raised my voice.
“We can’t say that for sure. Listen to it. Something happened at the end there. A struggle maybe?”
“It’s just static.” I shook my head. “Maybe she had her phone in her purse when she recorded that.”
“Are you sure?”
My chest hitched. I’d been so mad at Nikki for leaving me I immediately transferred all that anger to Mom. Dom played the recording again. I sat in the chair next to him and listened. Really listened this time. There was shuffling again, like a wallet or something soft rubbing against the phone microphone.
At the very end, I heard the softest gasp, a wheeze. It sounded like there was a struggle. Did Jonathan figure out Mom was recording the conversation? But if he did, how had it ended up in Mom’s security box?
The realization hit me like a runaway train. I jerked to my feet, mouth open. Fuck. Mom had nothing to do with Dad’s murder. Just like Lisa, Mom had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. I thought of Mom and the day I’d seen her at Cavalier Manor with Francesca seemingly tending to her. I’d been right about the fear I saw in her eyes.
Jonathan and Francesca had kept her alive because of the recording she had. They made up all that bullshit about Mom not wanting to see me because they knew I would figure out something wasn’t right. They knew I would try to take her away, which I had. I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, the walls were covered in red spots. I braced my arms on my thighs, burying my face in my hands.
Why hadn’t Nikki sold the recording to Jonathan? He would’ve given half the Cavalier fortune in exchange for it. Had she done it to make it up to me, as she said in her letter? No. She’d done it because she knew I would use it to get Lisa out of jail. But what about Mom? What would Jonathan do if he found out I took the chip to the police? He’d have no reason to keep her alive.
This was out of the police’s hands. They had their shot, and they blew it when they put an innocent girl in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, sentencing Mom to a similar fate and upending the lives of two kids who couldn’t understand half of what was happening to them.
I had to end this with my uncle once and for all. It’d been a long time coming. Jonathan had to answer for his crimes.