Secret leaned close.
“I’m going to tell you something but you have to promise not to repeat it,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Whatever.”
“It’s sort of a completion of what I started to tell you the other day,” she said. “It’s about me and my agent, Sam Lenay.”
“Right, him.”
“River got his hooks into Lenay. To this day, I still don’t know how, but he did. Lenay brought me into it to get a job done. My job was to seduce a woman named Carmen Key.”
“Waverly’s sister?”
She nodded.
“She was going to be in a bar that night,” Secret said. “My job was to seduce her and get her to the roof of a certain building, supposedly to make out.”
Wilde raised an eyebrow.
“Are you a lesbian?”
“No.”
“Was she?”
“Yes,” Secret said. “I did what I was told, to help Lenay. I got the woman to the roof then slipped away.” She took a drink of wine. “The next day, I found out she got put in a red dress and dropped off the roof. I didn’t know that was going to happen. All I knew is that I was supposed to get her up onto the roof.”
“Did you know someone would be up there waiting for her?”
“Not specifically but I guess I assumed it. The dead woman’s sister, Waverly, ended up coming to town. I made it my mission to help her but I never told her my role in it. To this day she thinks that I was only a witness.”
Wilde considered it.
“That’s fair,” he said. “You didn’t know you were doing anything wrong when you did it. After it happened, you couldn’t undo it. About the best you could do at that point was help her. What about Lenay? Certainly he knew who was behind it-”
“He claims he didn’t,” Secret said. “He was being blackmailed but he didn’t know by who.”
“Blackmailed for what?”
“He’d never tell me,” Secret said.
“Waverly almost killed Bristol.”
Wilde cocked his head.
“She couldn’t kill anyone. She doesn’t have what it takes.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Secret said. “She got suckered into a trap. At the last minute, right before Bristol was going to shoot her, Jaden shot him. She did it with Waverly’s gun.”
“Are you serious?”
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“It happened in a rental car,” she said. “They cleaned it up as good as new and turned it back in.”
Wilde lit a smoke.
“So I guess that means they took Bristol’s body out first.”
“That’s true. They buried him up in the mountains.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” Secret said.
“That’s pretty intense.”
“Jaden knew a lot of stuff about Bristol,” Secret said. “His firm was bidding for a Hong Kong project. He was strong-armed. He was told to withdraw his bid or else a woman he was seeing would be killed.”
“Strong-armed by who?”
“My guess is River,” she said. “River working for one of the other bidders. Anyway, Bristol was a stubborn man. He didn’t do it. Then it went down. His girl-a woman named Kava Every-was killed. She was dropped off a roof in a red dress.”
“That’s River.”
“River or Gapp,” Secret said. “Anyway, it wasn’t until then that Bristol took it seriously. He withdrew the bid before anyone else got killed.”
“So Waverly almost killed an innocent man.”
“Not entirely,” Secret said. “Bristol killed a woman in Cleveland, a woman named Bobbi Litton. He did it for Jaden. He did it the red-dress way, to make it look like a copycat.”
“Damn.”
“Right, damn,” Secret said. “Anyway, Jaden was indebted to him. When Waverly started closing in on Bristol, Jaden was his spy. She drew Waverly into a trap. The only thing that went wrong is that Bristol turned on Jaden at the last second. If he hadn’t done that, he’d still be alive today.”
“Interesting.”
“Jaden told all this to Waverly after the fact. That’s how I know, she told me.”
Wilde downed his drink and set the empty glass on the table.
“I’m going to get a refill,” he said. “You want another wine?”
She nodded.
“That’d be nice.”
He got up, then leaned down and got his lips close to her ear.
“While I’m gone, I want you to think about whether you have any more secrets to tell me. I want everything on the table.”
She smiled.
“Sure.”
She watched him disappear into the crowd. Then a memory grabbed her, a memory exactly one week old, a memory so vivid and clear that it was as if she was really there.
The night was cool.
She was in Denver to visit with Waverly. They’d been to the El Ray Club and had more alcohol in their guts than was healthy.
The night was over.
They were walking down the street.
“I got to pee,” Waverly said. “Wait here.”
She ducked into an alley.
“Are you really going to do that?”
“Just hold on. I’ll only be a minute.”
“I can’t believe you sometimes.”
It was then that Secret needed a cigarette and needed it now. She checked her purse. It was empty. Waverly didn’t smoke.
Cars were parked on the street, one after another.
Traffic was thin to non-existent.
No one was around.
Secret started checking out the dashboards of the cars on the off chance someone had left a pack sitting around. The fourth car down, she spotted a pack. The door was locked but the window was rolled down a ways. It was tight, but she got her arm in. Then she brought her body all the way against the car to get an extension. The pack was at the end of her fingertips. She couldn’t get it. She pulled her arm out, frustrated, then spotted a rock. She broke the window, reached in and grabbed the pack.
Then she heard a voice.
