Читать книгу The Night In Question - Harper Allen - Страница 11

She looked nothing like he remembered.

Max Ross studied the unnaturally still figure of the woman sitting across from him while their waitress carelessly slapped down a couple of cups of coffee on the stained tabletop.

“Anything else?” The waitress’s nametag said, Hi! I’m Cherie—Have a Great Day! There was a smear of ketchup on the collar of her uniform, and her mouth was bracketed with two dissatisfied lines. Max doubted if she could make anyone’s day great. Certainly she wasn’t having an uplifting effect on the silent woman across from him. Except for pulling the thick cup and saucer closer toward her with one finger, Julia hadn’t given the slightest indication that she was taking any notice of either him or the incongruously named Cherie. It was as if there was an invisible shell around her, a shell that nothing was allowed to penetrate.

So what? He didn’t give a damn if Julia Tennant never had a good day the rest of her life, he thought coldly. Just walking around Boston as a free woman was way more than she deserved.

“That’s all, thanks.” Without raising his eyes he held out a twenty. “Keep the table next to us empty for half an hour.”

The twenty was plucked out of his hand, but the waitress didn’t move. “No guarantees, mister. If one of my tables is free then I lose out on tips. Making a living is tough these days, right, girlfriend?”

This last was addressed to Julia in an attempt at female solidarity. When Max saw the chipped red nails rest lightly on Julia’s shoulder he started to say something.

He was too late.

“Get the hand off. Now!”

She was still staring down at her coffee cup and he could swear those pale lips hadn’t moved, but the words had hissed out in a shockingly threatening undertone and the spoon she’d been using to stir her coffee was clenched in her fist. Before he could intervene, Julia lifted her eyes to the frozen waitress.

“I’m not your girlfriend, honey. And I don’t like being touched.” A lank strand of hair fell into her eyes but she ignored it. “If you want to sweeten the deal you can probably get ten bucks more out of him, but don’t push your luck.”

No one else in the place seemed to have noticed the incident, and Max wanted to keep it that way. He handed the shaken Cherie another bill. “Half an hour. This is private, okay?”

“Okay.” The white-faced woman flicked a frightened glance at Julia, now hunched over her coffee again as if nothing at all had occurred. “Private. Sure, mister.”

She turned and made a beeline for the swinging doors to the kitchen, ignoring the disgruntled looks of other customers who were trying to get her attention.

“Lousy coffee.” Julia patted the breast pocket of the cheap windbreaker she was wearing and pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes. Sticking one in her mouth, she lit a match with the economical movements he was beginning to associate with her, squinting against the smoke. She didn’t leave the pack on the table, Max noticed, instead tucking it securely back into the pocket it had come from.

“You didn’t smoke before, did you?” he asked. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he felt stupid. She glanced up as if sensing his discomfiture.

“No, Mr. Ross, I didn’t smoke before,” she said flatly. “I’ve picked up a few bad habits in the last two years. And I’ve lost a few too—like pretending I give a damn about small talk.” The corners of her lips lifted humorlessly, but her eyes were opaque, giving no clue to her real feelings. “What do you want from me?”

The Boston papers had called her The Porcelain Doll, and the name had been apt, Max recalled. Her skin had had the pearlescent glow of delicate china, her fair hair had brushed like a swath of spun silk against the shoulders of the discreetly expensive black suits she’d worn and her eyes had been the bluest he’d ever seen, fringed with thick dark lashes. Much of the time they’d been spilling over with tears, and that had reminded him of a doll too.

God, she’d been able to turn on the waterworks at a second’s notice, he remembered with sudden anger—trembling, crystalline drops that hadn’t been real enough to smudge her mascara. At the time of her trial he’d been thirty-one, and no gullible FBI probationer but a ten-year veteran of the Agency. But even he had found himself wondering once or twice if there was any way he’d made a mistake about her. Julia Tennant had been on the stand for three gruelling days, and at the end of the third she’d looked as breathtakingly beautiful as if she’d just choked up watching a particularly emotional rendition of La Boheme, rather than being mercilessly cross-examined on multiple murder charges.

Actually, her nickname had been The Porcelain Doll Bomber. Those slim and still-delicate fingers had handed over a gift-wrapped package to her husband, Kenneth Tennant, just minutes before he’d boarded his executive jet. Those blue eyes had probably widened in well-rehearsed horror as, only seconds after takeoff, the resulting explosion had rained flaming debris through the night sky.

But in the end, despite her tears and the protestations of innocence that even days of grilling couldn’t shake, the twenty-three-year-old widow had been found guilty of the murders of her husband and the three other unfortunate souls who’d been on the aircraft with him that night. Justice had been done, Max thought with grim satisfaction. His only regret at her sentencing had been that she didn’t have four lifetimes to spend in prison—one for each victim she’d callously snuffed out.

A few days ago he’d been told she was about to be released. Considering the date, he’d thought it was a bad April fool’s joke at first.

“If we’re just going to sit here gazing into each other’s eyes I’ve got better things to do, Mr. Ross.” Julia ground the butt of her cigarette out in an ashtray and pushed her coffee cup away from her as she started to rise from her chair. “It’s my first night of freedom. You’re not how I planned to spend it.”

“Sit down.” His voice revealed nothing of the outrage simmering inside him, but for a moment he saw a flicker of apprehension behind that blank gaze. Tucking a stray strand of lusterless hair behind her ear in the first extraneous gesture he’d seen her make, she sank back into her seat.

From the tables around them came a buzz of noisy conversation. Cherie hadn’t reappeared, but the two other waitresses working the floor called out their orders to the short-order cook at the counter and exchanged sarcastic banter with the customers. Max hardly noticed. Under the harsh lighting Julia’s skin was unhealthily pale and the smudges beneath her eyes looked like bruises. Her fingers were laced tightly together on the table.

She still looked like a doll. The unwanted thought darted through his mind. Except now she looked like a doll that someone had discarded a long time ago—the expensive paint chipped away, the pretty dresses lost over the years, the glamor gone. The sapphire eyes that had once sparkled with diamond tears stared at him expressionlessly. Julia Tennant didn’t cry anymore, he realized with sudden certainty.

There was no reason why that should bother him. When he spoke his voice was harsher than he’d intended.

“You’re never going to see her again. You understand that?”

“Don’t worry.” She looked away. “They told me.”

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “If you think that anything’s changed just because you manipulated the system, forget it. If there was any real justice in this world, you’d still be upstate making mailbags with the rest of the twenty-five-to-life sewing circle instead of being handed a get-out-of-jail-free card. You got away with murder, Julia.” He kept his voice even with an effort. “But if I even suspect that you’re trying to find her—”

“Back off. I said I understood the situation.” She lifted her chin slightly, her shoulders tense under the thin nylon of the windbreaker, and for a moment the ghost of the former Julia flitted across her features. He’d seen a newspaper photo of her at an arts gala once; her hair swept up and held back with jewelled combs, those delicate eyebrows arched in polite detachment, that same slight tilt to her chin.

Kenneth Tennant, his thick dark hair a distinguished silver at his temples, had been in the photo too. A proprietary arm had been around his beautiful trophy wife, and he’d been smiling at another couple in the picture—his sister Barbara and her new husband, Robert Van Hale.

Tennant and Van Hale had been doomed even then, he thought. Both of them had been on the jet when Julia Tennant’s exquisitely wrapped package had been opened.

“You couldn’t stop staring at me throughout the trial. I see you haven’t been able to break the habit.” Her voice held a thread of anger. “You must be attracted to dangerous women, Mr. Ross—or is it that girls-behind-bars fantasy that some men have?”

“Get one thing very clear, Julia,” he said, leaning forward slightly. When she automatically moved away he reached over and grabbed both of her clasped hands in one of his, holding her there. “You’re not my fantasy. You’re a black widow spider, as far as I’m concerned—a cold-blooded murderer who killed the father of your child, the husband of your best friend and two other people you didn’t even know.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Julia said tightly. “I walked into prison that first day with quite a reputation to defend. You know how it is when you’re the new kid on the cell block.”

“I’m sure you held your own.” He didn’t loosen his grip on her. “You’re the type who always lands on her feet. Your overturned conviction proved that.”

“Too bad the court takes pesky little details like constitutional rights so seriously. Now let go of my hands. You’re hurting me.”

Despite the lack of expression on her face, her voice had risen enough to attract attention, and Max released her fingers in reluctant frustration. What the hell had he expected? he asked himself. Some show of remorse? Some acknowledgement, however belated, of guilt?

A part of him had never been able to believe that she was exactly what she appeared—devoid of any real emotion, unmoved by the lives she’d destroyed. He wasn’t naive enough to think that her all-too-brief incarceration would have worked any miracle of rehabilitation, but he’d held to the faint hope that her time in prison might have made her face up to what she’d done. He’d been a fool. Nothing touched Julia Tennant.

Not even the loss of her child.

He’d done what he’d come here to do, he thought heavily. He’d delivered the message, although from her reaction it hadn’t been necessary. Like a phoenix, Julia had risen from the funeral pyre of her old life and was ready to start a new one—unburdened by any inconvenient baggage from her past. He pushed his chair back, unwilling to spend even a moment longer with her, and then he stopped.

“What’s that?” His gaze was on the back of her hand, and when she followed his glance her own wavered. Then she gave him a cold smile.

“You don’t want to know, Ross. It might upset your preconceptions about me landing on my feet.” She held her hand up and studied the odd marks on the back of it, slowly turning it so that her palm faced outward at him.

The same four red scars showed, a mirror image of the other side, but Max wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were steady and there was a tiny mocking hitch at the corner of her mouth, and all of a sudden he saw her coolness for what it was.

Behind the mask was a woman just barely holding herself together. Julia Tennant had been through hell.

Wrong tense. She was still there.

He felt as if he’d just been kicked in the solar plexus. The stale air of the restaurant pressed in on him, making it hard to breathe, but he knew it wasn’t the haze of smoke drifting from a nearby table or the unpleasant odor of frying grease that was creating the suffocating miasma. The air around Julia was thick with despair. It was an almost palpable thing.

“What was it—some kind of homemade weapon?” he asked, his throat dry and his voice a harsh rasp.

“It was a fork, Max.” Her outspread fingers trembled, and she instantly stilled them. “They got the new girl in a corner one day, and they nailed my hand to a table with a fork. I guess it was an initiation rite or something.”

She held her hand out a moment longer, in much the same pose as she might once have held it to admire the green fire of an emerald on her finger. Then she wrapped it around the coffee cup so that the wound wasn’t visible to him, drained the last of her coffee and set the cup back down on the table with an audible click.

“I’m leaving now,” she said offhandedly. “I have to find a place to stay for tonight, and since I don’t have reservations at the Ritz I’d better start looking for a room. If you ever approach me again, Ross, I’m putting you in a world of pain that you’ll never crawl out of. Do you understand that?”

The woman was threatening him. Compassion fled, and Max narrowed his gaze. “What are you planning, Julia—another gift-wrapped bomb?”

“No. A gift-wrapped attempted rape charge,” she said, her tone as cold as his. “You come near me and I’ll have my blouse ripped so fast you won’t have time to pull your damn ID from your wallet before the cops come. The charge won’t stick, but that’s the kind of thing that stays on your personnel file. Think about it.”

“And you think about this.” He’d passed the point where he could hide his anger and he knew it. “I’m never going to stop watching you. I’m making it my personal mission in life to ensure you don’t ever find her, Tennant, so keep that in mind if you get the urge to play mommy someday in the future and decide to go looking for her. She’s doing fine without you. She’s starting to get back to normal, and I won’t let you rip her world apart a second time.”

“You—you’ve seen her?” Julia had already started to turn away. Now she froze. Slowly she turned back to face him, her shoulders rigidly set and what little color there’d been in her face ebbing away. “When did you see her? Is she all right? Has anything happened to her?”

The questions tumbled from her bloodless lips too rapidly for him to answer, and the previously dull eyes blazed with sudden urgency. She looked down at him, and for a moment she seemed to be holding her breath.

Then she let it out. One corner of her mouth lifted in a mocking grin, and she shrugged carelessly. Reaching into her windbreaker, she pulled out the pack of cigarettes, shook one free and tossed the pack on the table. From the front pocket of her worn jeans she extracted a box of wooden matches, and one-handedly she snapped a thumbnail against the head of a match and peered at him through the flaring flame.

“Isn’t that what you wanted from me, Max?” There was a jeering note in the husky voice. She put the cigarette between her lips, raked back a limp strand of blond hair and brought the flame closer. “Isn’t that why you mentioned her—because you wanted to see if I would crack, just a little?”

“You didn’t crack when you watched your husband’s plane go down. You didn’t crack on the stand.” Max ignored the tendril of smoke that curled down at him and kept his tone even. “I hear you didn’t crack in prison, Julia. No, I didn’t expect the mention of her would upset you. But tell me one thing—why can’t you bring yourself to say her name?”

The shadow he thought he saw pass behind her eyes was gone so quickly that he realized it had to have been a distortion from the cigarette’s smoke. She was still holding the burning match in her right hand. With a deliberate movement she brought the fingers of her left to the flame, her gaze locked on his. Slowly she let her thumb and her index finger get closer, until he knew it had to be burning her. Then she pinched the flame out, her eyes still not leaving his face.

“Willa,” she said flatly. “Her name’s Willa, and she used to be my daughter, before you people took her away from me. I can say it, Max. There’s just no reason to, since I’m never going to see her again.”

She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then her lashes dipped briefly to her cheekbones, as if she was suddenly weary of the conversation. He didn’t know what prompted him to utter his next words.

“I saw her the day before yesterday. She’s fine. Nothing’s happened to her.”

Julia’s eyes were still closed, and he saw her lips tighten. The burning end of the cigarette trembled slightly. When the dark lashes lifted, the fabulous sapphire gaze that had disturbed his dreams for the last two years rested on him.

“Thank you,” she said in an undertone so low that he barely caught it. A wisp of smoke drifted between them, and she looked down at the cigarette in her hand as if she’d forgotten it was there.

“Cherie’s on her break. Did you folks want anything else?”

An older waitress had approached their table, and, disconcerted, Max wrenched his gaze from Julia. “No.” He shook his head. “We’re just about to leave.”

As he turned back to the slender figure in the wind-breaker and jeans, Julia bent swiftly forward and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. Once again she was under control, he realized. Any vulnerability she might have inadvertently revealed a moment ago was gone, and her eyes were no longer sapphire-like, but a hard, opaque blue.

“Don’t ever try to push my buttons like that again, Ross,” she said quietly. “You of all people should know what a cheap shot that was.”

He stared at her, taken off-guard. Then he frowned. “Look, lady, I wasn’t trying to push—” he began, but she cut him off.

“I know more about you than you think I do. I made it my business to find out all I could about the man who ripped my life away from me.” Her gaze darkened. “You lost a child yourself, didn’t you?”

The door to the coffee shop opened and a blast of chilled air blew in. There was a chorus of half-joking shouts from the table of construction workers nearest the door, but Max heard nothing except for the crashing roar that was suddenly filling his ears.

How had she known? He felt violated. She’d dug into his background—how in hell she’d managed it, he didn’t know, but somehow she’d learned more about him during her two years in prison than his closest acquaintances at work knew. She’d had no right to—

“You don’t like having your personal life pored over by a stranger, do you?” Julia said thinly. “Mine was on the front pages, Max—courtesy of you and your associates. Like I said, I don’t ever want to see you around me again.”

This time when she turned away he let her take a few steps before he called out her name. She looked over her shoulder at him, a flicker of anger crossing her features.

“What the hell is it now, Ross?” she asked, not disguising the impatience in her tone.

He shoved the cardboard package to the edge of the table. “You forgot your cigarettes, Julia,” he said, his own voice barbed. “I don’t want them. I don’t smoke.”

She took a half step toward him. Then she checked herself. “Neither do I, Max. I just quit.” Her grin was tight. “I’m going to be a model citizen from now on.”

The next moment she was gone. Across from him her coffee cup and the battered pack of cigarettes were the only proof that she had been there at all.

She’d been taunting him, he thought with sudden anger. Even her last remark had held a hidden message she’d known he would understand. She’d been telling him that she had the strength and the willpower to do whatever she had to do.

She’d been taunting him and she’d been lying to him.

Julia Tennant fully intended to go looking for her child.