Chapter 17
Langdon held one finger up to me, his attention still on the phone. “S’great news, mate… Right, I’ll get back at ‘cha.” Langdon pocketed the phone, and I didn’t need to ask for an explanation.
“The kid’s okay, your little office romance—”
“Langdon, c’mon.”
He chuckled. “My info was good. They were just sitting on him a while.”
“While they were trying to put something together on you?”
“Me, J.A. … both of us? S’hard to say, really.”
“So… what now? Are you in trouble?”
Langdon shook his head. “How should I be? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, I… I don’t doubt it, of course.”
“But you’re relieved just the same.” I had to roll my eyes, but I was unable to disguise my little smile. “S’alright, Sheryl, I don’t blame you. So much going on, all this big business bullshit, hey, mistakes get made, y’never know what they might have turned up on me without me having the slightest idea. There’s always a danger of that at our level. People like me and J.A.—”
“But not me. I’m still just a lower-rung type, just some personal assistant.”
“You are whatever you want to be, Sheryl. You give any more thought to something philanthropic? AussieGarb’s always looking to help out where we can.”
“Well, that’s… I appreciate it, Langdon, I really do. But shouldn’t we make sure your company’s going to be around a good long time before we start just giving your money away?”
“If y’like,” he said, turning to the bartender and pointing at the television over the bar. “Find a news channel, will ya, mate?” The bartender nodded and picked up a remote control, flicking from one channel to another until he found a cable news channel.
“Checking your stock prices?” Langdon chuckled, but didn’t respond. I tried again. “Have you been in touch with your board of directors back in Australia?”
“Nobody’s got much to say about being approached by anyone from Alister Fashions or RicTel or anybody like that.” Giving it a little thought, he added, “‘Course, if they were selling me out, they wouldn’t mention it.”
“But if even one of them turned the offer down, they’d tell you about it, wouldn’t they?”
Langdon scratched his chin. “S’likely, not certain. They might just take hush money to go along with it, stay quiet. He may not stop short of physical threats, either. S’a pretty dangerous gambit to try to threaten an Aussie, but I wouldn’t put it past him.”
The TV screen grabbed Langdon’s attention. “Oye, mate, turn it up, yeah?” The bartender turned up the volume on the TV. Flynn McGinnis ‘s bandaged face dominated the screen, his eyes still swollen, one shot with red blood.
“I really just want to be left alone,” he said as unseen reporters clamored for answers from behind their camera crews and the microphones sticking into his battered face.
“What’s your account of what happened that day with Langdon Cane in Central Park?”
“I was in the wrong,” Flynn said. “My behavior was due to a personal issue, and it had nothing to do with Mr. Cane, Mr. Jonathan Alister, or Miss Sheryl Francis.”
“What can you tell us about the relationships of those three people? You worked alongside Mr. Alister and Miss Francis for over a year, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know anything about any of their relationships.”
“But you were motivated by romantic jealousy, isn’t that right?”
“It is, but that’s entirely my responsibility. Any romantic connection between me and Miss Francis was… it was in my imagination, it was… hopeful but unrequited. She never gave me any false hope or any real reason to think she had those kinds of feelings for me.”
“So you’re not going to press charges or pursue any civil remedy here?”
“No,” Flynn was too quick to say, “nobody’s done anything that needs to be remedied. All I can really do is ask forgiveness. I shouldn’t have put Langdon Cane or Miss Francis or John Alister in the positions I did. Now I just want to try to undo whatever damage I’ve done.”
“Then what?” another reporter asked. “Where do you go from here?”
“Me? I’m leaving New York as soon as I can. I want to withdraw from corporate life, from a spotlight I never intended to be in and never wished to be in. You’ll all move on to some other story soon enough, and the world will forget that Flynn McGinnis ever existed… which is probably for the best.”
Flynn walked on, leaving the reporters behind him, their cloud of questions rising up behind him as he shuffled down the street and away from the police station.
I turned to Langdon. “That’s great news! You’re off the hook!”
But I could tell by the slow shake of his head that Langdon wasn’t convinced. Nobody else in the bar seemed at all interested. “I dunno,” Langdon said, thinking out loud, “s’strange that he’s not gonna sue. I thought everybody sued everybody here in America.”
“He’s probably ashamed. And since they couldn’t get anything on you, or John it seems, Flynn probably feels like he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”
“Maybe.” Langdon leaned back with a sigh. “Or maybe the kid’s still in play.”
“Langdon?”
One corner of Langdon’s mouth tucked into his cheek. “I think maybe that kid knows more than he’s saying.”
“You don’t think he’s… in cahoots with John Alister?”
“He did used to work for him. Alister would have had a lot of pull there.”
I couldn’t disagree with that. But it didn’t answer nearly as many questions as it raised. “But… to what end?”
“Maybe it’s time we got back to Manhattan, ask him for ourselves.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Cane, Miss Francis?” We looked up to see a pretty red-headed woman I didn’t recognize standing with a microphone, a chubby, bearded cameraman standing next to her. “Carla Rosen, TMZ. What’s your take on the good news about Flynn McGinnis?”
“I’m glad he’s alright, but I’m not that surprised to hear it. I didn’t hit him near hard enough to put him a coma. Look at the face I left him with, just a busted nose was all.”
“Why do you think he was in a coma for so long? You are a demonstration-level fighter, after all.”
“And what I demonstrated there was restraint.” I could tell Langdon didn’t want to commit to the record any of the details of what had really happened until we’d sorted them out ourselves. “Maybe the kid’s got other problems.”
“Physical ailments, you mean?”
Langdon just stared her down. “I know what I said.”
She asked me, “What about you, Miss Francis? You were a friend of Flynn McGinnis…?”
“We were coworkers, but we were never close.”
Carla returned her attention to Langdon. “Does this mean you’ll be heading back to Australia?”
“In due time,” Langdon said, his eyes turning to me even as he addressed the reporter. “I hope Miss Francis will consent to spend Christmas with me, wherever I happen to be. Y’know, in Australia we celebrate out on the beach.”
A lump rose in my throat. “I… um, I think that would be quite lovely, yes.”
Langdon turned the reporter. “You heard the lady.”
“And what about Alister Fashions? John Alister seemed to intimate that your companies wouldn’t be entering into a rumored joint venture, and that’s got both your company’s stocks plummeting.”
“Stock prices go up and down,” Langdon said. “I’m not worried about that. Whatever J.A.’s up to, I hope it works out for him.”
***
We took the Alister Fashions company helicopter back to Manhattan. Langdon stared out the window at the snow-covered mountains spread out beneath us. “I’m surprised John didn’t go out to Australia himself,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around the increasingly complex web of deceit. “It’s hard to believe he’d trust anybody else with such a sensitive mission, going out there and trying to buy out your board of directors.”
“S’part of the campaign to keep himself out of it. There are still regulatory issues to be skated around, luv, and ol’ J.A. skates like a genius. It only makes sense that he’d send somebody else, even make a show of being around here, having nothing to do with it till way, way after the fact.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” I had to admit. A cold knot tightened in my stomach. “So who do you think his operative is? It has to be somebody he trusts.”
“Could be almost anyone, I’m afraid. He probably went outside the company, some third party figure, private operator. A guy like J.A. can hire any number of specialists in the field. All the better when he just disappears. Fake name, no fixed address, shazam and he’s a ghost.”
“That only makes sense,” I said as the pieces slowly began to fall into place. “That must be where he kept dodging off to during the days. I knew he wasn’t banging some girl in Harlem.” Seeing Langdon’s confused expression, I explained, “Office gossip, nothing to worry about.”
“Unless his woman is the operative.” Langdon twitched, turning to gaze into his imagination before saying, “You don’t suppose his wife could be the operative?”
“Margaret Alister?” My mind raced to digest the notion. “But… she’s been here all this time, until just a few days ago. The operative would have been in Australia for a while now. Hey, I wonder if keeping Flynn in custody was a way to keep you in the States so whoever was running this scam could get the job done?”
Langdon gave that some thought. “J.A.’s got a lot of juice, there’s no getting around it. But does he have that kind of pull that the cops would do his bidding?”
“If it helped them he might. He’s got a lot of money, could buy a lot of tickets to the Secret Policeman’s Ball.”
Langdon had to give that some thought. He turned to stare out the window. “Let’s just hope we get to that kid before he disappears off the face of the Earth.”
“You really think he’ll just crawl into the woodwork like that?”
Langdon looked at me sharply, eyes cold, voice low and steady. “No, I don’t.” But I knew what the alternative was—and that it was the same thing that could be waiting for me and Langdon both.
Murder.
Something occurred to me. “What if the operative is somebody in your own company?” Langdon turned with new interest. “Can you think of anybody who would have been in this for a while, somebody who wants to take over, maybe with a personal grudge?”
Langdon chewed on that, scratching the back of his head. I didn’t like how long it was taking for him to come up with a list of possibilities. “More’n a few, I guess. But like I said, I don’t dip my oars in the company stream, so I’m not prone to that kind of hassle.”
“There are lots of other reasons to want to see your boss go down than just having a broken heart.”
“Then it could be just about anyone,” Langdon said. “When you’re on top, there’s always someone comin’ up behind ya.”
“Whoever it is,” I reasoned, “he’s gotta be working with J.A. But you don’t really think he’d have brought Flynn McGinnis into it? That feels too risky to me. J.A. isn’t a risk-taker.”
“Sometimes you gotta take some risks,” Langdon said, “else the competition takes them first. Anyway, why buy up all that stock under a shell company if he didn’t mean to use it?”
My smartphone rang, and I pulled it out of my purse. “It’s Ricardo,” I muttered, swiping the screen and raising the phone to my ear. “Ricardo, what’s up?”
“How are you, girl? I saw you on TMZ! What is going on in your life, Sher?”
“That’s just what we’re trying to figure out. How’s everything back home?”
“Nuts, honey, that’s how it is. We’ve got paparazzi crowding around in front of the apartment, neighbors are complaining, and I think somebody’s been following me, Sheryl.”
“Following you,” I repeated, flashes of my own frightening moments returning to my mind’s eye. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. He wasn’t a photographer, you can’t miss them. But he skulks around in a pea coat like some government goon or something.”
“A man, and you recognize him?”
“I’m not even sure if it’s one guy or three, Sheryl. But I keep seeing this pea coat popping up. S’freaking me out a little.”
“Okay, um, well, I don’t want you to do anything that’s gonna get you into any trouble, okay? Don’t approach any of these guys, no heroics.”
“Heroics? Sheryl, I feel more like the damsel in distress!”
Langdon looked over with new concern on his face. I said to Ricardo, “Just lay low, and don’t talk to the press either.”
“Oh, um, about that…”
“Ricardo—?”
“I just… I got annoyed, that’s all. But I won’t say another thing, I promise.”
I sighed. “Is it on YouTube?”
After a nervous little silence, Ricardo said, “Half a million hits.”
I ended the call and pulled up YouTube, easily finding a video clip of Ricardo walking out of the front door of our Brooklyn brownstone.
“Sheryl Francis is a dear friend and a wonderful person,” Ricardo said, “and I don’t see why you people are trying to make her look bad. She’s not a dragon lady like you all keep saying! And she is not a slut!”
An unseen reporter asked him, “How do you know?”
“Because we’ve been roommates for years, duh! Also… I am a slut, so I should know!”
The reporters chuckled. “What’s your connection to John Alister?”
“I’m one of the hottest fashion photographers in New York, sweetie. So John and I have crossed paths once or twice. I’ve shot three Powerplay magazine covers.” Ricardo looked right into the camera. “Check me out at ricardotellez.com. I’m available, and my travel rates are very reasonable.”
Langdon took a look for himself. “He’s got a lot of charisma. How’s his work?”
“Good, great eye. He thinks somebody might be following him. And it could be true, Langdon. I… I didn’t want to mention it before, I thought it was kind of silly, but… at one point, back in New York, I felt like I was being followed too. Even on the mountain, I felt like that guy in black was closing in on me.”
“And he was,” Langdon said. “S’not much doubt about that.”
“And now Ricardo? Is he in some danger… because of me? Langdon, we can’t let that happen! He’s my best friend.”
“You think J.A. would have you tailed? Why?”
I could only shake my head and hold my hands over my face. “I don’t know, Langdon, I… it must have something to do with this deal he’s cooking up.”
“Must have,” Langdon agreed. “The question is what, and what are we going to be able to do about it?”
I had to add, “If it isn’t already too late.”
Langdon turned to me. Our eyes locked together and his hands cupped mine. “It’s never too late, Sheryl. As long as you and me are together, it won’t ever be too late. Before I met you, it was as if I wasn’t really living. I only started living when you came into my life.”
“I feel the same way, Langdon. I always did and I always will.”
“Then it’s not too late, Sheryl.” The helicopter shook harder, metal screaming and twisting, the rotor spinning faster. “We’re only just beginning!”
I knew he was right. I felt that we were unstoppable together, that fate or destiny or whatever they call it had brought us together for a reason, and that it still lay ahead of us. We were off to accomplish great things, and nothing and nobody was going to be strong enough to stand in our way.
A loud clack shot through the cabin and a bolt of panic raced through me. The noise was followed by a second one, even louder, and a loud, regular grinding sound began growling out of the rotor above of.
I looked at Langdon, and I could tell by his expression how frightened my own was. He was trying to be calm, but even he was worried—and that had me absolutely terrified.