Chapter 66
Eddie
I hadn’t been to Fort Washington Park in a long time.
I used to come here as a kid. To this exact spot.
The spot where I now saw Vanessa waiting for me.
The sun was going down over the Hudson River. All the impressive might of the George Washington Bridge hung above me, and just ahead, standing on a hook of land that anchored one of the great pillars of the bridge, was a little red lighthouse.
Vanessa leaned on the black railings that surrounded the lighthouse.
I first came here as a kid because I’d read a picture book called The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge that my mom had borrowed from the public library for me.
I couldn’t believe there was a real lighthouse, so small, and yet so brave, and I had to see it for myself.
I never got tired of looking at the thing.
It was made up of steel, painted bright red, with a conical top and a railing around the light.
I’d heard you could get a tour of the lighthouse, but I’d never had the time.
It was only forty feet high, and had been rendered redundant when the George Washington Bridge had been built, and its lights lit the river for all passing barges and boats.
Still, the lighthouse stayed.
It was a plucky underdog. If any building in this city exemplified New York and its people, it was that little red lighthouse.
‘Why did you want to meet me here?’ asked Vanessa.
The weather was mild, but she still wore a long coat, with black boots, black gloves.
And held a small red leather purse in her left hand.
It was a Valentino purse – I recognized the branding – and it was the same red as the lighthouse, almost as if she’d chosen it to match.
‘It’s quiet,’ I said. ‘And I like it here. I thought we could have that talk.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘What do you want to talk about?’
‘Your late father-in-law, for one. I thought you might tell me the truth. I think you owe me that.’
‘I paid you, and I can’t thank you enough for helping me, but what else can I say? You’re a lawyer. Don’t you have rules? How do I know whatever I say will be confidential?’
‘You answered your own question. I’m still your lawyer.
Client confidentiality. Anything you tell me, I will take to my grave.
Unless you tell me you’re going to harm someone, then I have an obligation to help prevent that.
But as far as anything that happened in your past goes – my lips are sealed. ’
‘Alright, I’ll play along for now. I do owe you that much.’
‘That was a serious fire at the Hamptons house. How did it start?’
‘Who knows? You’d met Julian, he never had a cigar out of his mouth. The fire department think it had something to do with that.’
We were about five feet from one another, and there was nobody else around at this time of the early evening. The river was calm, and the birds were circling over the bridge.
‘Is that what the arson investigator found?’ I asked.
‘Cause is unknown, but probably the cigar they said. Patrick was very grateful to the East Hampton Fire Department for all their efforts to save his father. I believe he made a large donation to their fund.’
I nodded, and then noticed there was something on the ground, behind Vanessa’s boots. The light was fading, but I had a good idea what it was.
‘And your divorce?’
‘Granted, last week. I took three billion in the settlement. I didn’t want it, not really. I never really wanted any of it, but I had to take it.’
‘I know,’ I said, and she angled her head at that statement, gave me a strange look.
‘I know a lot more than you think, Vanessa. Let me see if I got this right. Patrick found the journal in Molly’s apartment. He believed Molly was coming after him for revenge, because Patrick killed a young woman named Teresa Chase . . .’
‘He didn’t kill her,’ said Vanessa.
‘He talked to you about it?’
‘They had both been drinking and doing drugs. Teresa was dancing on the counter and she slipped and hit her head, and broke her neck. Patrick panicked and called his father. Julian made sure to cover it all up, because he had big ambitions for his son.’
‘And you believe Patrick?’
‘I know a liar, Eddie. I know what they sound like. I know how they think. I know how they lie. What Patrick told me about Teresa is the truth.’
‘Okay, so he leaves with the journal, calls his father. Then you go into the apartment. And you do almost exactly what you told me. You warned Molly about Patrick.’
She hung her head, said, ‘I did. She didn’t . . . She . . . I told her to run like I had before. This time she believed me. She said she would get out of town, but she was too late. They got to her before she left. Julian’s crew of house painters.’
I took another step toward Vanessa. We were close now. Eye to eye.
‘That’s not the whole truth, is it?’ I asked.
She gripped that little red purse tighter.
‘Patrick didn’t kill Molly. And you didn’t kill Molly. But, in a way, you’re both responsible.’
Her left eye shone with a tear forming.
‘I did my best. I told her . . .’
‘You told her the truth. About you . . . about who you really are . . .’
The wind blew across us. That tear was caught in the gust, and was carried right off her cheek.
‘We had DNA analysis carried out. To confirm that Molly and the Jane Doe were related. Turns out, they weren’t. So I asked Raymond to do another DNA comparison. This one was just right. Molly wasn’t Willow Chase. You are . . .’
She took a deep breath, let it sit in her chest for a few moments, then it staggered out as panic and fear took hold.
‘That wasn’t Molly’s diary. It was yours.
You clocked Molly. You knew she was playing a game, pretending to be someone she was not.
That’s the game you had been playing for two and a half years, so it was easy to spot.
The night before she was killed, you confronted her, told her back off.
Told her that Patrick and his father were dangerous.
Maybe she didn’t believe you. Maybe she thought you were just a jealous wife.
And then you let her read your journal. When Patrick found the journal in the apartment, he thought, naturally, it was Molly’s.
We all did. If you hadn’t tried to warn her, if you hadn’t let her read that journal, she might still be alive. ’
‘She was way out of her league. She had no idea of the lengths that Julian would go to in order to protect his son. A son he hated, by the way. Julian never wanted Patrick to succeed for any other reason than his own selfish ends. Julian wanted more power. He wanted to control the country, not just the media. But yes, as much as it hurts, I feel as if I killed Molly. I gave her that journal. I knew she should’ve been more careful and yet I gave it to her.
And ultimately that’s what got her killed.
Just as Patrick is responsible. He read the first two pages of the journal.
He said he couldn’t read any more, and he believed Molly was Willow Chase coming after him for revenge.
He called his father, and that got Molly killed. We both killed her, Eddie.’
‘And were you planning on killing Julian all this time? Seems a long time to wait to kill one old man.’
‘Until he told me the truth, on that last night in the Manhattan house, I thought Patrick had killed Teresa, and covered it up. Teresa and I were close when were kids, and we fell in with the wrong people after we lost our parents. I got hooked on heroin, and drifted away from her. When I came out of that nightmare, I discovered she was missing. That she had drowned. My sister could have swum across that river behind us. I knew straight away something awful had happened. I tracked down an old cop, called Paul Winchester, but I couldn’t tell him who I was, or why I was asking questions.
I didn’t know if I could trust him. But I got the impression he had fought to find out what had really happened, and someone had made sure that he suffered for it.
That’s when I decided I wasn’t going to let this stand.
I wasn’t there for Teresa when she needed me.
She was the only good thing I ever had in my life.
We had let ourselves get hurt by men way too often.
I was going to make sure that the man who killed my sister paid the price.
I wanted my revenge. I wanted Patrick dead. ’
‘Then why didn’t you do it before? Why marry him? Why not kill him the first chance you got?’
‘The one useful thing about being a junkie is you get to meet a lot of criminals. I got close to one guy, dated him for drugs. He had money and he knew how to hide, how to pay off the cops. That’s what he taught me.
How to build a facade that no one could penetrate.
How to become someone else. But he was only able to do that because he had money.
You know how this works. You’ve seen it.
The law doesn’t apply to those with power.
You only get power in America through money.
If I was going to get away with killing the man I thought had murdered my sister, it wasn’t enough to kill him.
I had to take everything he had. I had to take his power. ’
‘You mean you had to take his money.’
‘I didn’t want it for myself. I wanted the power that came with it. The power that came from that kind of money. The power to stand above the law. There was only one way I could do that.’
‘The sunset clause in your divorce,’ I said. ‘If you split up with him, or if something happened to him the first two years of your marriage, you would get virtually nothing. You had to be married for two years before you got any spousal entitlement.’