“You had burner phones? Just so you could screw around on me? Fuck David, buy him cigars, and use burner phones so I wouldn’t find out?” I pause to take a breath, and my chest hurts. “Lying to me through your teeth then, and since David’s arrest. Forcing me to look at your lying face, hold down my anger, and make sure we all aren’t brought down by this goddamned disaster.”
My pulse feels white-hot, deafening in my ears. The rage I’ve held back for so long finally overtakes me. I don’t know how long my rant lasts, but when I finally stop and gather myself, I see the wine bottle missing from the coffee table and the TV screen in shards. And a deep red stain dripping down the wall beneath it. Dripping like blood. Like the blood running out of the back of . . .
Oh, Jesus.
I drop to the couch, close my eyes. I am spent, and I am lost. It’s all lost.
The grandfather clock begins to chime.
When finally I open my eyes, I see Piper staring at me, studying me. “You knew.”
I stare back.
“How long?” she asks.
I desperately want to escape this moment. But there will be no flying away this time. I lock eyes with Piper, take a deep breath, and say the words that I know will seal my fate. Turn Piper against me forever.
“I’ve known since she threw it in my face. Jennifer Yamura. The day I pushed her down the stairs.”
Piper’s eyes widen. Her lips part. I see confusion, then terror. She blinks once, twice.
“It was the second call,” I begin. “The one Jennifer made to me when Angie was at lunch. She wanted to move up our meeting. But not for earlier the next day. She said she had to see me right away. She asked me to come to her house.”
I see the terrifying image of myself at Jennifer’s back door on Anna Groszek’s videotape, forty-three minutes before David Hanson’s own appearance on camera. The image that forced my decision to make David pay the blackmail, no matter what . . . to protect my own sorry ass.
Piper is gaping at me now, and I realize that I have stopped talking. I inhale and continue recounting, step by step, the horror of that day.
“She let me in the back door, led me to the living room, and told me that she didn’t trust the TV station’s lawyers to protect her. She said she wanted someone whose loyalty wasn’t divided. I told her that if she retained me, I would work only for her. We talked some more, and she said there was someone involved in the investigation we could blackmail. Someone important. But before she could tell me who it was, I stopped her. I said I wasn’t blackmailing anyone. We argued the point, and she became extremely angry. Started shouting at me. Berating me, calling me a coward. I shouted back, and that’s when she told me about you and David. She said you’d been having an affair for months, and the whole world would find out about it if I didn’t back her blackmail plan. She said I most certainly would blackmail whoever she told me to, that I’d get her out of testifying in front of the grand jury and beat back any contempt charges. These weren’t requests,” I emphasize. “These were orders.”
“I don’t—” Piper begins, but I raise a hand to stop her.
“I told her I was done listening to her. I said I couldn’t have a professional relationship with a client who said terrible things about my wife, who spoke to me like that. I headed for the back door, but she cornered me in the hallway, where the doorway to the basement is, and she threatened me again.”
Piper questions me with her eyes, pleading silently for a reason that will justify what she knows is coming. And she finds one. “Tommy.”
I nod. “Jennifer said if I didn’t get her out of her jam, she’d tell the grand jury all about Tommy. That he was part of the drug ring. That it was he who first tipped her to the grand-jury investigation.”
“But—” Piper begins.
“She and Tommy had been lovers.”
Piper puts a hand to her mouth.
“I told her to leave Tommy out of it. But she kept screaming that she’d have him sent back to prison. I lost it. I pushed her. She fell through the curtain of glass beads.”
This isn’t exactly how it happened. I’ve changed the order of things, for Piper’s sake. Yamura did corner me in the hallway, but it was after she’d made her threats against Tommy, not before. She sneered at me, bared her teeth, and told me about Piper and David. She told me how David loved to brag about his other conquests. She told me some of the things David had shared with her about his encounters with Piper. Personal and private things. My stomach turns even now at the memory.
“David and I laughed about her, actually,” Jennifer had said. “For all her good looks and that bitching little body, your wife’s a bit of a prude. Or she was at first. But she came around.” Then Jennifer stepped into me, said, “One of the things David taught her was to cradle his balls,” and with that she cupped her own hand around my testicles, “like this, when she sucked—”
That’s when I snapped. I shouted something and, as I told Piper, shoved Yamura backward, shoved her hard, and watched her disappear through the curtain of glass beads.
“I heard her hit the steps,” I tell Piper. “I pushed the beads aside and saw her lying there, on her back, halfway down the stairs.” This is why I was surprised when I first saw the crime-scene photos showing her all the way at the bottom, with her head on the concrete block.
“Her eyes were closed. She wasn’t moving. Blood was spilling out of her head onto the steps. I took a couple steps down, called her name. She didn’t respond. I waited, but she didn’t move. I was certain she was dead.”
“So, when I saw you on the street . . . ,” says Piper.
“I was coming from her house.”
Piper winces. “You had your leather satchel. It looked full, but I didn’t think anything of it.”
“I had her computer and jewelry. The money from her wallet.”
“To make it look like a robbery.”
What I’m expecting from Piper is revulsion and a stream of questions. How could I push a young woman down the stairs? What kind of man am I that I could callously strategize even as I stood over what I believed was her dead body? How could I calmly traipse around her house, stealing things to cover my tracks by making it look like a robbery? And how could I contain the knowledge of Piper’s affair with David—and with it, the rage—all this time? These rhetorical questions will be the mallet Piper uses to shatter the already-cracked crystal that is our marriage. And then she’ll call Devlin Walker.
But the questions do not come.