“I knew it,” he mutters to himself. “I told her it wouldn’t work.”
“Shut up,” she says. “Just shut up.”
“What wouldn’t work?”
She winces, pressing her hands to the base of her bump. “It doesn’t matter. You do what Brody told you, and it works out for all of us.”
“What wouldn’t work, Catherine?”
Eddie walks over to her and kneels beside her, putting his hands on her bump. “We don’t have to do this,” he says.
She looks on the verge of tears. “Don’t,” she says, shaking her head. “We have to.”
“What do you have to do?”
She looks at me. “You wouldn’t understand, Bex. You should go. I’m sorry, all right. I didn’t mean for it to go this way. For what it’s worth, I always liked working with you.”
I take a step forward. “I’m not going anywhere until you explain. What’s going on? If you stole all that money, where is it?”
“I’m telling her,” Eddie says, getting to his feet. “It’s all my fault, anyway.”
“What is?”
“Don’t,” Catherine says. “You know what he’ll do.”
“What who will do?”
Eddie takes a deep breath and walks over to the peeling wallpaper, ripping a corner off and crunching it in his hand. “We’ve got nothing,” he says, tossing it behind him. “Look at the state of this place. The baby’s due in two weeks, and we’ve got no cot, no diapers, nothing. I don’t even know how we will pay the hospital bill.” He turns to face me, and tears are running down his cheeks. “Please,” he says. “You’ve got to help us.”
“Help you with what?”
“Lend us a couple of hundred bucks.”
“What about the money you stole?”
“We haven’t got it. My salary’s been going to that son of a bitch for months. We’ve got nothing. Maybe you could get me my job back. We’d be okay if I could get back to work and have some money coming in.”
“Eddie. Where is the money you two stole? Where have your two paychecks been going?”
“We don’t have it,” Catherine snaps. “All right.”
“Where is it?”
She looks at Eddie and then groans as she glances up at the ceiling. “Oh, fuck it. Listen, you’ve got to swear you’ll keep this secret. If he finds out we told you, we’re dead.”
“You’re scaring me, Catherine. What’s going on?”
She shifts in position in the chair. “We had no choice but to steal that money.”
“What?”
“Detective Brody has been blackmailing us. He said it would be over if we got him a hundred thousand dollars. He even showed us how to sneak it out. But then we got fired, and he took the fifty but said we still owed him. Said I had to sign the witness statement he wrote about you. I’m sorry, Bex, but I had no choice.”
“Why was he blackmailing you?”
“He pulled a traffic stop on us. Planted drugs in the car. Said Eddie would end up in jail, and I’d have the baby taken off me if the case went to court. I couldn’t risk losing the baby.”
“What did he do with the money you gave him?”