“We just need a quiet place to talk,” Marilyn says. She looks around the Happy Hibiscus. “He hasn’t gotten in here, so it’s safe.”
“Who?”
“My husband,” Marilyn says. “Todd.”
“Todd Croft is your husband?” Irene doesn’t mean to sound incredulous but she’d thought Todd Croft, with all his money and power, would have a trophy wife. Someone like…Swan Seeley. Polished, put together, a woman who wears five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce perfume and carries a two-thousand-dollar bag, someone who owns a cigarette boat so she can zip over to Virgin Gorda for a facial at Little Dix. This woman looks like she drives in a carpool, then heads home to scrapbook. She’s neither fat nor thin, neither pretty nor ugly. How would Irene describe her to the police? Round face, clear skin, a nice straight part in her brown hair. She wears a gold wedding band next to a diamond engagement ring; her nails are filed into pretty ovals, though they’re unpolished. She has leather thong sandals on her feet and a gold anklet so thin it’s almost imperceptible. Irene can’t recall the last time she saw anyone wearing an anklet. Her sorority sister Sandra, maybe, back in 1985. She must be Irene’s age, maybe a few years younger. Fifty-two or fifty-three, Irene would guess.
“Yes,” Marilyn says. “We’ve been married for twenty-five years.”
“So before all this started.”
“Todd started Ascension the year after we got married,” Marilyn says. “My family owns marinas and boat-building concerns in Florida. My father got Todd set up in business.” She nods at the sofa. “Okay if we sit down?”
Yes, yes. Irene leads Marilyn into the living room but the midwesterner in her will not be quieted. “Are you sure I can’t get you any coffee, tea, or…will we be needing wine?”
Marilyn doesn’t smile at that, and Irene starts to worry. “I’ve been trying to talk to you alone for a while now. But you were always with the captain.”
“Huck,” Irene says. “Yes.”
“And then, suddenly, you weren’t. I thought I’d lost you. I thought you left the Virgin Islands.”
“No, I moved in here with my son. You found that out somehow?”
Marilyn nods. “I asked someone close to you.”
“That narrows it down,” Irene says. “I know only five people.”
“I have things to tell you, things I wanted you to hear directly from me. When I leave here, I’m meeting the FBI to turn state’s evidence against Todd.”
Irene lowers herself down to the sofa inch by inch, as though Marilyn has a gun trained on her. Where is Irene’s cell phone? She wants to record this conversation but she doesn’t want to frighten Marilyn away. “You are?”
“After I do that, I’ll go into protective custody—assuming he doesn’t find a way to kill me first. But it’s been eating at me since I spoke to you on the phone in January, the wrongs that have been done to you. And your sons. And the captain. And the girl.”
“Maia.”
“I feel like I’ve been carrying all of you around on my back,” Marilyn says. “But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”
“No, by all means,” Irene says, “start at the beginning.” Where is the beginning? she wonders.
Marilyn takes a deep breath like she’s about to jump into cold water. “Back when my father gave Todd the seed money, ten million, Todd’s investing business was legit. Todd is…good-looking and quite charismatic, so his main strategy in building a client base was to court new widows, especially the gold diggers who’d hit it big, and there are an endless supply of those women in Florida. Todd was a savvy investor, and it was the heady first days of the internet bubble. Cisco, Oracle—everyone was printing money. Todd brought me to the Virgin Islands on vacation, we stayed at Caneel, and while he was chatting with someone at the bar there, he heard about the EDC, the Economic Development Commission, which offered tax incentives to lure businesses down to the territories. Todd immediately applied. He could work from virtually anywhere, and he wanted the tax break because it freed up that much more capital for him to invest. And, too, he loved the Virgin Islands.”
She pauses, checks that Irene is still with her. Irene bobs her head: Yes, yes. She can’t believe Marilyn Monroe is sitting here. She can’t believe she is hearing all of this in what would look to an observer like a regular social visit.
“I was ambivalent about the EDC. I thought it sounded shady, though now I know it’s perfectly legal, but also, I wanted to start a family, and I wanted to do that at home, in Miami, where the schools were good and my parents were nearby. No problem; Todd had to spend only a hundred and eighty-three days per year in the islands, according to the EDC guidelines, so he bought a simple villa on Water Island, which is undeveloped, deserted, overlooked. That’s the way Todd wanted it, and he traveled to and from Florida by himself.
“Well, I didn’t get pregnant, probably because we rarely slept together. I quickly realized Todd was using his time down here for more than just business. I also became aware that Todd had one client who, among his legitimate business interests, owned marijuana farms. This gentleman had a high net worth, and Todd didn’t want to lose him as a client, so he found a way to shuffle the dirty money deep into the deck. That, as far as I know, was the first time he hid a client’s money.”
“Marijuana farms seem nearly quaint,” Irene says.
“They call marijuana the gateway drug, which was true in this case,” Marilyn says. “In 2005, Todd hired Stephen Thompson, an attorney from the Cayman Islands who had a lot of experience with offshore accounts. Stephen brought along clients who were big dirty-money guys—the human traffickers, the exotic-animal dealers, the gem smugglers—but both Todd and Stephen were looking for a third partner.” Marilyn clears her throat. “A fall guy.”
Russ, Irene thinks.
“Todd bumped into you and your husband at the
