that he was a force to be reckoned with; this was the first time it had occurred to her that he might actually be dangerous.
In her view, there were two ways she could respond to what he’d said. She could act like a girlfriend, reaching out to touch his hand and try to tell him that everything would be okay. She thought he’d probably respond all right to that, but he would probably try and reassure her back. It might help; comforting her might let him feel more in control of what was happening, which might help him be calm and cool. But at the same time, it said that she didn’t think he could control himself, that he was someone who needed to be soothed.
So she went with the second option. She just answered his questions. “The trouble is,” she said, “That I have a lot of suspicions, but not much I can actually prove. Where do you want to start? Philip, Arturo, or AEGIS?”
“Olivia,” he said. There was a light strain to her voice. “Do you think she could have had something to do with all of this?”
She shook her head very slowly. “I don’t know, Alex. She wasn’t something I was looking into this afternoon. I don’t know her personally, so I don’t have a read on whether or not she’s capable of arranging a murder.”
He nodded, his face quiet, but the expression in his eyes was deeply wounded. Not by her, she thought. By the fact that he felt the need to ask. It was one of those questions where the asking said more than the answering ever could. “Philip, then.”
“I suspect you know a lot of this.” She reminded herself briefly that she was speaking about this man’s father, and then dove in. “The stories are everywhere. The gossip columns had him paired with a different woman every month, and sometimes, after he was gone, the women in question were pregnant. Sometimes, they seemed to have greater means than they’d had before he was there. None of the women were ever willing to publicly state the father of their children, and he never claimed any of them publicly.”
Alex nodded. “The old man fucked anything that moved. Especially if it was paler than my mother.”
Responding to that was harder than she’d anticipated. “That was a source of tension between them?”
Another nod. “If you ask Olivia, he misused her, and only married her in order to prevent her father from trying to ruin Philip.” Alex’s eyes were far away, seeing another time and another conversation. “He used to say that she was the cow he had to accept to get Grandpa’s fortune.” The corners of his mouth bent upwards, but the expression he wore wasn’t quite a smile. “I figure there had to be a middle ground. They had to have liked each other at some point. There must have been a moment, even if it was only one, where they got along.”
Zoey thought back over the articles she’d found in the archives of the different papers around the cities. The fights in public, the screaming. More than once, the police had been summoned. If that moment had happened, it was before the new Mrs. Blankenship had found herself in the public eye. “Absolutely,” she said.
He gave her a small smile, the sort that said that he didn’t believe her even a little bit, but he appreciated the consideration. “And Arturo. Was he ever connected to my father?”
“Did you know that AEGIS gives scholarships to a certain number of highly qualified New York City college kids every year?”
“Of course. It’s part of a recruitment program, to try and get a more diverse applicant pool into the STEM divisions of the company.”
“Did you know that Arturo was one of the scholarship students, just a few years ago?”
Alex’s eyes locked onto her with that same scrutinizing gaze that made her want to sink into the seat and disappear. “No, he wasn’t. That’s been one of the few fields I’ve never neglected. I’ve been part of the award ceremony every years since its inception. The old man was determined that his son would be seen “giving back,” especially since I did my best to take his place in the gossip rags as much as possible. I would know if I’d shaken his hand.”
Zoey pulled out her tablet and tapped to one of the pages she’d saved, then passed the tablet to Alex. She knew what he’d see, but she also knew he needed to see it. Arturo Soprano. 2010. Alex’s knuckles were pale as he clung to the tablet. “What’s interesting, though, is that as far as I can tell, Arturo Soprano never went to college. He’s listed as winning the scholarship, and then a few months later, he opens his construction company. And right away, the company’s doing great, it’s getting contracts from big companies, he’s doing renovations and interior design work instead of the crusty gross stuff most companies need to do in the early days to make ends meet. And he did an interview a few years back, where he credited his success to the confidence and support of a venture capital firm. When I went looking for the VC firm—it didn’t exist.”
“What do you mean it didn’t exist?”
She shrugged. “I mean that if there ever was such a thing as Wilfred Venture, it never had an Internet presence. No Facebook page, no website, no contact information. No Yelp reviews. Nothing. It didn’t exist. I didn’t get as far as digging down into incorporation records, I ran out of time, but that would have been my next step.”
Alex’s mouth had grown thin. Whether he was pressing his lips together with rage or pain, she couldn’t tell for sure. “You don’t need to,” he said. “Wilfred Venture—Wilfred was the old man’s middle name, his father’s name. He hated his father, probably more than I hated him, if such a thing can be imagined. He had a small fund of company money that he invested in projects which were of personal interest to him, but where he didn’t want to spend his time selling the board on using AEGIS funds. He called it Wilfred’s Ventures. Because they never panned out, the company never saw a return on those investments.”
“You think that’s the connection?”
“It makes sense,” Alex said. His scrubbed his hand over his mouth for a moment, then rubbed at his eyes as if he were trying to wake himself up.
The car stopped, and after a moment, there was a soft tap on the window. Zoey jumped, and Alex’s expression flipped like someone had turned a switch, moving from the cold and remote expression of a businessman to that of the man who owed her sexual favors in return for her research. “David’s just letting us know he’s there. He’ll give us a moment to put our clothes back on before he opens the door.”
Zoey glanced down. “My clothes are on.”
“He doesn’t know that. He’s been driving for me since I was 12. He doesn’t want to know what I get up to back here.”
“Is that—um—a thing you get back to up here?”
Alex went still for a moment. “Sometimes. But never on the way home. I’ve never brought women to my home before.” He smiled faintly. “That’s not a line. It’s—well, it’s never been necessary.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I always got invited to her bedroom long before now.”
Zoey felt her cheeks flare. “I have a Murphy bed. It squeaks, and it’s lumpy. Most of the time I sleep on my couch. It’s more comfortable.”
“It’s all right,” he said, and that faint smile, the one she was starting to realize that she trusted more than the big CEO grin, was brushing his lips again. “I’m not upset that you didn’t ask me back to the Bronx. I’ve had a lot of sex over the years, Zoey. More than a lot of men I know, less than the gossip sites would like to believe. Is that a problem?”
“No,” she said, and she meant it. “Just curious.”
Alex tapped back on the window with one knuckle, and the door opened, as if by magic. He stepped out of the car, then reached a hand back towards her. She scooted over to the door, then put her hand in hers, her bag over her shoulder, and followed Alex towards the high rise apartment building.