That would be the roof.
It was just another night in downtown Los Angeles. The only thing marring the quiet was the sound of helicopters making a drug bust somewhere nearby. When you’ve lived in L.A. long enough, you learn how to tune the whirring out.
We walked over to the edge. Burnett stood behind me as we gazed at the city lights.
“Look at that view,” he said with a sigh. “I love the city after dark. In the day, it’s so benign somehow. But at night! At night, I can feel the electricity shooting through my veins, can’t you?”
“Burnett, we have to talk.” I had to explain about Gambino.
“Not now, Cece. Everything’s the way it should be.”
“Burnett—”
“Sssh. Don’t say a word.” He wrapped his arms around my waist, and I felt something hard poke into my back.
“Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the guys.”
I tried to extricate myself, but he held on tight. I felt like I had led him on, but people change their minds.
“Burnett, I’m sorry, but this isn’t going to happen.”
“Yes, Cece, I’m afraid it is.”
Surprised, I wheeled around and saw something shiny and black pointing at my gut. Jesus. The one time I utter that stupid line, and it really is a gun. Why does that figure? I got ahold of myself. Now was not the time for irony.
“Everybody’s waiting for us downstairs, Burnett. It’s time to cut the cake. They’ll wonder where we are.”
“Relax, Cece. This isn’t going to take long.”
“What isn’t going to take long?” I asked, willing myself not to panic.
Burnett pushed me a little closer to the edge. I looked up and saw the neon numerals of the clock tower. It was a quarter past nine. All over the city, mothers were putting their children to bed. Truck drivers were crowding onto the I-10, heading for destinations unknown. Waitresses were serving that last cup of coffee. Friends were becoming lovers. Lovers were figuring out how to stay friends. I looked down and everything was sparkling, from the tips of my sandals, covered in tiny copper beads, to the sidewalk a hundred feet below, still slick from the brief afternoon rain. How beautiful it all seemed. The colors were vibrating, pulsing, spinning in circles. Fuschia, chartreuse, midnight blue. It was 9:16 P.M. now. Burnett Fowlkes was going to push me off of the roof of an art deco landmark before another minute passed, and I was going to fall through the night sky into nothingness.
Like hell I was.
“You’re too smart to do this, Burnett. Stop while you’re ahead. Or not too far behind. Dozens of people saw us leave the party together. And besides, I have evidence, and it’s in a safe place. The police know what to do in case anything happens to me.”
I could feel my sweat stains spreading from tiny half-moons into something the size of buffet plates.
“You have nothing, Cece. You have some wild ideas about a murder that’s half a century old and has nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even born yet.”
“You were born in plenty of time to kill Theresa Flynn,” I said, shaking my head at my own blindness. It had been him all along. Him stalking that poor woman; him breaking in to her house to look for her sister’s lockbox; him there, in the backyard, the night Lael and I had broken in; him in the black SUV. He was on to me from that very first day, when I showed up at his mother’s house on my cockamamie quest to save a condemned man. The minute his mother told him I’d been asking about the Albaccos, he’d known they were in for trouble. God, had he seen me go into the locksmith’s shop? Had he been following me for weeks? What a fool I must’ve seemed, kissing him that day in the car.
“Why would I kill a woman I don’t even know?” he asked calmly.
“To protect your fortune. To finish up what your family started fifty years ago.”
“You’re obsessed with history, Cece. You think too much in terms of the past. The past is dead. There’s no legacy to protect.”
“There’s a hell of a lot of money,” I said.
He pushed me still closer to the edge. It would be so easy for him to claim I’d lost my balance and fallen. I’d been drinking up a storm. Wine, champagne, you name it. But maybe, after I was dead, somebody would notice this unfortunate habit I’d developed of falling into thin air whenever Burnett Fowlkes was in the vicinity.
“You know, this birthday thing, Burnett, it would get anybody down. Who needs a big party? We could’ve just crawled under the covers and hidden from the world until it was over.”
“Cece. Stop. Your prattle is annoying me.”
Now, that was really insulting. And look at him. Not a hair out of place. I was just a minor prattling problem he was going to take care of before blowing out the candles on his birthday cake. There was only one thing I had ever seen rile him.
“Your grandfather killed Jean Albacco.”
He reddened. “Leave my grandfather out of this.”
“I can’t. It’s just like you said, Burnett. You said he was an octopus. His tentacles reached everywhere.”
“That was a stupid metaphor.”
“Your grandfather killed Jean, and you killed her sister. God, talk about family legacies.”
“Shut up.”
“Jean knew he had defrauded Joseph Sr. out of his share of a fortune. She got her hands on a copy of a letter from a state legislator advising him of impending legislation about the tidelands. And more damning yet, she had a copy of the original partnership agreement between him and Joseph Sr. One plus one makes jail time, doesn’t it?” I’d found that particular piece of evidence yesterday, when Gambino and I had paid a visit to my safe-deposit box on the way home from Lael’s. I’d missed it the first time I went through the papers in Jean’s lockbox. It was folded up into a tiny square and tucked between two yellowed photographs. Too bad—it would have saved me a lot of time.
“That’s not proof of anything. Certainly not murder.”
“Oh, I think it’s enough to reopen the case. Detective Gambino of the LAPD agrees with me. He knows where all the relevant documents are.”
“You bitch.”
“You bastard. You killed a woman.”
“I’m not done yet.”
He smiled that smile at me. I melted despite myself. It was lethal, that smile, the kind of smile that made you complicit in a great big secret, the kind you’d sell your very soul for. I blinked. Oh, Jesus. I knew I knew that smile. Only I didn’t know from where until this very second.
It was Joseph Albacco’s smile.
Burnett Fowlkes was Joseph Albacco’s son.
I started laughing. There was no escaping the irony this time.
“Is something funny?”
“You didn’t have to do this, Burnett,” I said. “You didn’t have to do any of it. It was all for nothing. Don’t you see? You would’ve gotten the money anyway. The oil fortune was yours, Burnett. Even after the truth came out, it still would’ve been yours.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why don’t you ask your mother?”
“Ask me what?”
Meredith Allan had appeared, as if by magic. But she was no gossamer vision, no Fairy Queen. She was as solid, as cold and hard, as steel.
“Everyone’s waiting downstairs, dear. Everyone’s been looking for you.” She appeared entirely unperturbed by the sight of her son about to murder his dinner date.
“Tell Burnett who his father is,” I said.
“Burnett knows who his father is.” She was walking toward us slowly.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Burnett knows how much I love him. That’s what matters. And that I would never lie to him.”
“Then tell him what he needs to know. Tell him he’s Joseph Albacco’s son. Tell him how you were already pregnant with him when you married Mason Fowlkes.”
“Ms. Caruso, give me those bracelets.”
Now she wanted the bracelets. And I knew exactly why. Thank goodness she had dismissed me so curtly when I’d tried to give them back earlier.
“Why does Cece have your bracelets?” Burnett asked, confused. Meredith Allan had spent a lifetime confusing her son, smothering him or ignoring him according to her mood. But that was good. I wanted him to be confused. All I needed was for him to forget about me for a second and to think about her. To think about her and get all mixed up. It had to be a reflex by now. Then, maybe, he’d loosen his grip a little and I could make a dash for the stairwell. It would lead me straight to the elevator. It was my only chance.
“She stole them, and I want them back. Will you get them for me, dear?” she asked.
“No.”
Had he ever defied her before? The look on her face said he hadn’t.
“I don’t want to talk about your bracelets, Mother. I don’t give a shit about them.”
“Burnett! Don’t you dare speak to me like that!”
“Tell me who my father is. Tell me what I need to know.” The hand holding the gun was shaking now, but the other was still squeezing me tight.
Meredith smiled encouragingly. “I’m not angry. Please don’t worry. Just give me the gun, Burnett. I’ll take care of it. Don’t let this woman ruin everything for you.”
“Don’t you mean for you?”
For her. He’d done it for her. It was always about her. I’d had it right the first time. Meredith wasn’t Joe’s alibi; Joe was her alibi. It wasn’t her father who had killed Jean. It was Meredith herself. Her father had been the one who didn’t want to get his hands dirty. They were dirty enough. There was oil under his fingernails, a bad, bad smell he couldn’t wash away. Morgan had done his share. He’d left the mop-up work to them, to his daughter and his daughter’s son and whoever else would follow. Meredith knew that the only one who could be hurt by Jean, or by Theresa, for that matter, was her. Her son would inherit everything anyway. Because he was Joseph Albacco’s son, too. Did Joe know? I had no idea. I knew only this: it always comes down to money, just like Gambino said.
All of a sudden, Burnett let me go. I didn’t matter to him anymore. The money didn’t matter, either. There was no one in the world except the two of them. I tripped as I ran toward the stairs, ripping my silk stockings.
Meredith walked toward her son, her arm outstretched.
“I did it for us, Burnett, don’t you see? I did it to protect us. Jean would’ve destroyed everything, destroyed our name, twisted everything around.”
“You didn’t do it for me.”
“Oh, Burnett. You’re just like Joe. Your brain’s in a muddle, thoughts moving in every direction at once. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. See the world clearly, for once.”
“I do,” he said, then shot her dead. And before I could say or do a thing, he flew off the side of the Oviatt Building, another fallen angel with painted wings.