“Why would you care?”
“It’s really very simple, Dr. Campion. I decided about three days ago that your next fifty years are mine. I saw that they found his wife’s body?”
“That’s right. Fifty years might not be enough.”
“He told everyone that she ran away from him? Three years ago? We’ll begin with fifty years, then renegotiate, all right?”
“Yes, he told everyone she ran away. His senior aide was gone as well, a guy named Tod Gambol, and everyone believed she ran away with him. Yes, all right, we’ll start with fifty years, then go from there.”
“Was Tod Gambol found with the dead wife?”
“Evidently not.”
Dane said slowly, “What happened? Did you find out that she didn’t leave him?”
“Oh no, Cleo left him, all right. I believed that, no doubt in my mind at all. She’d been gone three years, and he’d divorced her, although she’d never responded, couldn’t be found. Of course I accepted it. I loved him. I was going to marry him.”
“But she didn’t leave him. He killed her.”
“Nope. Fact is, she did leave him.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“I also know that she was alive up to four weeks ago.”
Dane crossed his arms over his chest. “How do you know that for a fact? Did Senator Rothman assure you that she was alive and well and screwing around with his aide?”
“No. The bottom line is that Cleo Rothman wrote me a letter. She hasn’t been dead for three years-just for a month, at the most, and the tests they’ll run will prove it. No, John Rothman didn’t kill her three years ago.”
“Why did she write to you?”
“To warn me. She told me about the first girl John’d planned to marry, way back just before both of them graduated from Boston College. He killed her because Elliott Benson, a rival, had seduced her. He got away with it, she said, because he was smart, and who would ever begin to suspect a young man who was engaged to be married of suddenly killing his fiancee? The final police verdict was that it was a tragic automobile accident. She said that John cried his eyes out at her funeral, that her parents held him to comfort him.”
“How could she have found out about that? Did he talk in his sleep? Don’t tell me he confessed it to her?”
“No, she found a journal in the safe in his library. She wrote that one day she noticed that the safe wasn’t locked. She was curious and opened it.
“So when she opened it and found the journal, she read it. He wrote all about how he’d killed a girl-Melissa Gransby was her name-how he’d planned it all very carefully and gotten away with it. A simple auto accident on I- 95, near Bremerton. She must have written at least a half dozen times in that letter how smart John was, how I had to be careful because I was going to be the next woman he killed. She wrote that John had come to believe that I was sleeping with Elliott Benson, too, just like Melissa did, that I was betraying him, even before we were married.”
“Who is this Elliott Benson?”
“He’s a powerhouse in Chicago, a very rich and successful businessman, an investment banker with Kleiner, Smith and Benson. He and John have been rivals for years and years.
“Cleo wrote that she didn’t know if he’d killed other women, but she knew he would have killed her if she hadn’t left and she knew he was going to kill me and I should run as far away as I could, and quickly.”
Dane, frowning, said, “Why would a man who’s supposedly so smart keep a damned journal where he actually confesses to a murder? And leave that journal in a safe in his own home, for God’s sake, and then, to top it all off, he leaves the safe open? That’s really a long way from being smart, Nick. This whole thing’s a stretch. It just doesn’t feel right.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Nick said, “I thought the same thing at first. But listen, Dane. I knew Cleo Rothman, I knew her handwriting. The letter was from her, I’m positive about that. She told me she had the journal, that she took it with her, to keep John at bay in case he wanted to come after her. It was her only leverage.”
“Why didn’t she just go to the police with the thing? It was a confession, after all.”
“She wrote that John had many important, powerful friends, and that many of those powerful people owed him favors. She said she could just see him saying that as his wife-she knew his handwriting, of course-she had written it herself, that it was all an attempt on her part to ruin him. I could practically taste her fear in that letter, Dane, her sense that she was a coward, but that everything was against her, that she had no choice but to run. Do you think the cops would have believed her, launched an investigation?”
“They would have looked into it, of course, but it wouldn’t have helped if they believed she was vindictive, that she wanted to ruin a good man, and there was no other proof but the journal. Anyway, John Rothman wrote that he killed this Melissa Gransby because she cheated on him with this Benson character?”
“Evidently so. John couldn’t forgive her. The pages were full of rage, over-the-top, unreasoned rage, and Cleo wrote that she could see that Melissa’s unfaithfulness had changed him, twisted him, made him incapable of trusting a woman.
“She wrote that it did make a bit of sense since his mother had cheated on his father, and it hurt him deeply. Evidently he told her this when they were first married.”
“Did he tell you this? About his mother?”
She shook her head. “No, he’s never told me anything.”
“So Cleo Rothman found his journal, read his murder confession, and she just up and left him? With this aide? Jesus, Nick. Ain’t a whole lot of credibility here.”
“No, no, she wrote that she didn’t leave with anyone. She said she didn’t even know where Tod Gambol was. She was never his lover, had never been unfaithful to John. She loved John, always loved him, but she was terrified, and so she just ran. She became convinced that he was going to kill her, too, because she’d heard rumors that she was sleeping with Elliott Benson. Knowing this, knowing that he’d already killed a girl because she’d supposedly cheated on him, she knew he would believe the rumors and try to kill her just like he did Melissa.
“When she heard that I was going to marry him, then she heard the rumors that
“Okay, Nick, something else must have happened to make you go to San Francisco and become homeless.”
“Just before I got her letter, someone tried to run me down. A man with a ski mask over his head, driving a black car. It was dark and I was walking just one block from the neighborhood store back to my building.”
Dane stiffened. “What,” he said, “were you doing out in the dark walking to the store? In Chicago? That’s really dumb, Nick.”
She poked her finger in his chest. “All right, you want to know every little thing? Okay, it was my period, if it’s any of your business.”
“Well, I can see that you wouldn’t want to wait. But, you should have had the store deliver.”
It was so funny, really so unexpected, all this outrage over something so very insignificant, that she laughed. And laughed again. Here she was telling him about one of the most frightening experiences of her life-until a week ago-and he was all upset because she’d walked to her local store, by herself, in the dark.
On the other hand, given what happened, maybe he had a point.
She cleared her throat and said, “As I was saying, I was walking back when this car came out of a side street and very nearly got me. There was no way it was someone drunk or a stupid accident. No, I knew it was on purpose. Then there was his sister Albia’s birthday dinner. Supposedly it was food poisoning. It was really close. If I’d eaten more I would have died. The second I got that letter, I took off to his apartment to confront him about it.”
