Seventy-One

MY FIRST CALL WHEN I got back to the suite was from Bobby Erlich.

“You never showed.”

“Just ran into a potential client,” he said.

“Anybody interesting?”

“When they’re willing to pay, they’re all interesting.”

Then he told me that the response to my sit-down with Oprah was positive across the board and on all platforms, even better than he had expected. He said he hoped as many of the other owners as possible had watched.

I told him I doubted it, because the general vibe I’d gotten was that if it was good for me, it was bad for them.

“Trust me,” Bobby Erlich said. “By the time they go to bed, they’re going to feel as if they saw it whether they did or not.”

Then he said we should meet downstairs for breakfast before I addressed the owners, and he promised not to stand me up this time.

“Who loves you?” he said before telling me he had another call coming in.

I had taken a long bath and was about to go to bed when Ben Cantor called and told me about his visit with Jack.

“So he lied to you,” I said.

“By omission. But still a lie.”

“One he managed to leave out of his tearful eulogy, when he was so regretful about all the fighting he and Thomas had done.”

I paused then, looking at the flowers next to where my feet were perched on the coffee table.

“Did the two of them have one more fight that night?” I said to Cantor.

“He says no. He says that Thomas only went there to ask Jack and Danny to back off. And that he even took one more shot at the family maybe working together.”

“That wasn’t the feeling I got from Thomas. Did you believe Jack?”

“I did not. Because if the whole thing was so innocent, why did he hide it from me in the first place?”

“Did you ask him that?”

“I did, being a trained detective. He said he just thought it would look bad even though Thomas’s visit was completely innocent and so was he.”

I pulled a rose out of the bouquet, drank in the smell of it.

“Thanks for telling me. And now I am going to try, most likely in vain, to get some sleep.”

Cantor said, “Not before I finish telling you about my night.”

“There’s more?”

“There is.”

I waited.

“It turns out Thomas made one other stop that night.”