Christian
Gavin is quiet, eyes closed, sitting on the bench in Wrightwood Park, his hands together as if in prayer.
We’ve gone over this for the last three hours, starting with lunch, then beers, now walking around the park near his condo in Lincoln Park. I had to violate our vow not to share names, that wall we put up to keep our scams from each other. He’s only known Vicky as “Number 7” and Simon as “Number 7’s husband,” but running through all my options now with this new development, it was just too hard to keep using titles, especially with a third person—“Number 7’s husband’s mistress”—entering the equation.
So now Gavin knows the names Vicky Lanier, Simon Dobias, and Lauren Betancourt.
Finally, Gavin opens his eyes, spreads his hands, and says, “I can’t think of another option.”
“Jesus, really?” But I can’t think of another one, either.
“You tell me, Nick,” says Gavin. “You’re the one in the middle of it. I hardly know a thing about any of these people.”
Truth is, I don’t, either. “I know Vicky,” I say. “Vicky, I get. No problem.”
“And what about this Lauren?”
I shrug. “I barely knew she existed until today. Vicky mentioned once or twice that Simon had a serious girlfriend who broke his heart or whatever when he was young. But reading that diary of Simon’s, I mean—Lauren’s me. She’s a female version of me. She has her eye on that pot of money and she’s not gonna let anybody get in the way. She’s doing to Simon what I’m doing to Vicky.”
“Okay. Fine. What about Simon?”
“Yeah, that’s trickier,” I say. “Most of what I know about Simon, I got from Vicky. But now I’ve read his diary, too, and it pretty much confirms what she says about him.”
“Which is?”
“Brainy in that useless, academic way,” I say. “Kinda guy who could recite the freakin’ quadratic equation or something from memory but wouldn’t know how to operate a can opener.”
Gavin likes that one, nods along.
“He lets himself get led around by women, that’s for sure,” I say. “Falls head over heels in love, that kind of thing. He recognizes he’s in a bad marriage, but never did anything about it until Lauren started batting her eyes at him.”
“But it sounds like he can go pretty dark,” says Gavin. “Like the St. Louis thing.”
“That’s the thing. That’s the X factor. The guy holds a grudge, that’s for sure. I mean, he’s all pissed off at his father for years and years and plans out this whole thing to kill him. He drives down to St. Louis during his college finals week, stabs him in the gut, pushes him into a swimming pool, then drives back here and takes his final exam the next morning.”
“That’s pretty cold,” Gavin agrees. “But you know something, that works both ways.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, on the one hand, you have to be very careful with him. You don’t want to get on his wrong side.”
“That’s an understatement.” I stretch my arms, releasing nervous tension.
“But on the other hand, you said the St. Louis cops still think he did it. They couldn’t prove it, but they think he was the guy?”
“That’s what Vicky said. And that’s what I’ve read about the case.”
Gavin cocks his head, a gleam in his eye. “So that could be helpful. That could be very helpful.”
—
“Let’s go over the ideas again,” I say. We are back at Gavin’s townhouse, a one-bedroom with a nice view west, a bachelor’s pad if you ever saw one.
“Option one,” Gavin says, ticking off a thumb. “You sideline Simon for a while. You can’t kill him, because then Vicky gets cut out and so do you, but you hurt him just enough that he’s hospitalized or unconscious or something past November third.”
“If we could somehow pull that off, it would be perfect,” I say. “But it’s way too hard.”
“Agreed. A firm ‘no’ on option one.”