Mystery Heiress

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“What are you doing even thinking about Jessica Holmes?” he asked himself.

Three

Sterling and his twenty-two-year-old companion, the son of a trusted neighbor, arrived at the Heart’s Desire Motel on Round Lake shortly after 3:00 p.m. While the young man waited in Sterling’s Lincoln, the attorney knocked at the door of Jake’s motel unit and collected the keys to his Porsche. One glance was all it took to measure the Fortune CEO’s physical and mental state. Crusty, experienced courtroom warrior that he was, it tugged at his heartstrings to see Kate’s aristocratic-looking son so thoroughly leveled by the sordid situation in which he found himself.

Sympathy won’t do him any good, he thought. What he needs is a good strong dose of tough-mindedness.

Reemerging, he instructed his assistant to drive the sports car back to Minneapolis and park it in a guest spot beneath their apartment building. Handing over the keys, he gave the young man a crisp hundred-dollar bill. “Put the keys in my mailbox,” he said. “If you’re stopped, you’re returning the Porsche to Minneapolis as a favor for a friend. That’s all you know. Call me on my mobile phone if the police give you any trouble.”

Chosen for his cool head and his lack of curiosity about other people’s business, the young man pocketed the money. “Will do, Mr. Foster,” he said with his typical nonchalance.

As he drove off, gunning the Porsche’s engine slightly, Sterling returned to Jake. “Okay,” he said, dusting off a somewhat grimy-looking chair and taking a seat, “let’s have it from the beginning. Tell me everything that happened last night. And I do mean everything.”

Still wretched and worse for wear, but with his wits more coherently gathered about him, Jake admitted going to Monica’s house and arguing with her over some stock he’d wanted to buy back from her.

“I was willing to pay a premium for it,” he said, bitterness permeating his voice. “She refused, using some of the foulest language I’ve ever heard. Suddenly, she came at me with a letter opener, and managed to stab me in the shoulder. When I struggled with her in self-defense, forcing her to drop it, she scratched at me with her fingernails. I didn’t actually push her until she picked it up and tried to stab me again.

“At that point…well, I did. I considered my life to be in danger. I guess I didn’t know my own strength, because she fell backward, hitting her head against that stupid marble fireplace of hers, the one with the naked dancing cupids. She was knocked out cold, but she came around pretty fast, and I helped her over to the sofa. Once she’d gotten her bearings, she started working up another head of steam. I was afraid she’d come at me again, and I’d had enough. I left and drove home…to Lake Travis.”

“Was anyone else in the house?”

Jake ran his fingers through his silver-brown hair. In that moment, the troubled edge he’d had for years showed very clearly. “Not that I know of,” he vowed.

“Was she expecting anyone?”

“If so, she didn’t tell me about it.”

A moment’s silence held as Sterling regarded him with a penetrating stare. If Monica had been blackmailing him, as Natalie’s account of their conversation seemed to suggest, he needed to know. He decided not to put the question directly. “Why’d you sell her the stock in the first place?” he asked.

Somehow, Jake had known the attorney would get around to posing that question. He wasn’t the first. Nate had grilled him about the stock, too, as had several of Fortune Industries’ directors. The fact that Monica had been amassing a sizable number of shares, with potentially serious ramifications for the company, hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone.

He couldn’t afford for the real reason to get out. “With my separation from Erica, and divorce looming as a possibility, I, uh, needed the money,” he prevaricated.

Sterling’s weathered-lion features contorted in disgust. “Cut the crap,” he ordered. “I want the truth.”

Usually so erect of posture, Jake seemed to sag against the mattress. “Whatever I tell you is confidential, right?” he asked after a moment. “Attorney-client privilege?”

The lawyer nodded.

“Okay, then. Several months ago, Monica informed me that I’m not Ben Fortune’s son. According to her, my real father was some poor stiff of a GI named Joe Stover, who got blown to pieces in World War II. She threatened to tell the world about my parentage if I didn’t cooperate.”

Sterling whistled. This was no clumsy attempt at dissembling on Jake’s part, but rather the unvarnished truth. His pain and sorrow were all too evident. The lawyer realized that, if Monica’s claim was true, the implications for Jake’s struggle with Nate over the company would be far-reaching. For one thing, they gave Jake an excellent motive for killing her.

“I take it you believed her,” he said.

Jake looked down at his hands. “Not completely,” he said. “At least, not at first. Dad’s name was on my birth certificate. Yet I’d always had my suspicions that I differed from my siblings in some way where he was concerned. I’m not saying he didn’t love me. Or even dote on me. But compared to the way he was with Nate, Lindsay and Rebecca, we were never really close.”

For years, Sterling had considered himself Kate’s closest confidant. Yet she’d never breathed a word of anything like this to him. “I assume the old tart offered you some sort of proof,” he said, a trifle angrily.

“She’d hired an investigator, rounded up a bunch of affidavits from people who knew Mom when she was just a teenage waitress. According to them, she was already pregnant by Stover when Dad appeared on the scene.”

“You saw the affidavits?”

Jake nodded. “They seemed genuine.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t know. Monica claimed that, after showing them to me, she’d put them in her safe-deposit box.”

The lawyer winced. In all likelihood, the affidavits—genuine or otherwise—would be found by the investigators probing Monica’s death. Her son, Brandon, a self-involved would-be actor and sometime errand boy for his mother, would become their proprietor. Even if he didn’t choose to bandy them about, they’d become part of the public record if Jake was tried as her murderer.

Somehow, Sterling had to keep that from happening. If it did, Kate would be wounded to the quick. And the family would be shaken to its foundations. Setting aside Jake’s bombshell for the moment, he concentrated on another aspect of the problem that was troubling him.

“From the way you describe events unfolding, your fingerprints must be all over Monica’s living room,” he said. “Your DNA, too, in the form of blood drops and fingernail scrapings. But…think carefully…did you touch the letter opener she stabbed you with? It’s likely to have been the murder weapon.”

His expression pained and his brown eyes focused on a point in midair, just past Sterling’s left shoulder, Jake tried to recall the details of the harrowing experience he’d had the night before. “I think so,” he said at last. “I must have, at some point, when I tried to wrest it from her grasp.”

Sterling stifled a groan. Jake was in hot water up to his eyebrows. True, there weren’t any eyewitnesses to testify that he’d done Monica in, because the simple fact was that he hadn’t. But there was more than enough damning physical evidence against him. If the police and the district attorney’s office settled on him, and suspended their efforts to find the real killer, he might end up being convicted of Monica’s murder.

He was going to need a crackerjack criminal attorney—preferably a team of them. As a lifelong practitioner of family and corporate law, Sterling wasn’t qualified to manage his defense. But he’d do his utmost to help. Frowning, he weighed the pros and cons of getting someone else involved at once, and decided against it. Jake would appear at police headquarters as a pillar of the community who had been victimized by Monica and had left her recovering from her excesses—an innocent man willing to tell the authorities all he knew, who had brought his family attorney with him for moral support.

It was time to call the police. Before picking up the phone, Sterling set some parameters for Jake. The Fortune executive was to repeat his story to the authorities exactly as he’d told it to him, without embellishment.

“The blackmail, too?” Jake asked reluctantly. “If it gets out that I’m not Ben’s son, Nate will sue to have me disinherited.”

Sterling was torn over that issue. There was always the hope that the whole ugly story would remain hidden until the real murderer was found. But that possibility was exceedingly slim. Besides, it must be clear from the physical evidence that Monica and Jake had struggled. For that, there had to be a reason. If Jake didn’t offer one, his story wouldn’t hold together.

The attorney wished mightily that he could consult with Jake’s yet-to-be-chosen defense attorney on that crucial issue. But it wasn’t to be. With characteristic firmness, he came to a decision. “You’ll have to tell them about it,” he said. “Your story won’t make sense if you don’t. And it’ll come out anyway. When it does, you’ll be seen as withholding evidence. As for Nate, there’s no way he can pull such a stunt. You’re Kate’s son, whoever your father was. And it was from Kate, not Ben, that you inherited.”

Instead of contacting Detective Rosczak, and working from the bottom up, Sterling went straight to the top. Nels Petersen, the Minneapolis police commissioner, happened to be a personal friend. “I understand your boys want to talk with a client of mine, Jake Fortune, the CEO of Fortune Industries, in connection with the death of Monica Malone,” he said forthrightly when Commissioner Petersen came on the line. “Mr. Fortune admits he visited Miss Malone yesterday evening. Though he had nothing whatever to do with her demise, he realizes the details of his exchange with her might prove helpful…”

Jake fretted visibly as Sterling listened to the police commissioner’s reply. The lawyer didn’t bother to enlighten him. “He’s out of town just now, but he’ll be back by dinnertime,” he said at last. “All right if we meet with you and the detectives who are handling the case at the Government Center around 7:30 p.m.? You’ll be there personally, I trust?”

It was a big favor to ask on a Saturday evening, when Commissioner Petersen doubtless had other plans. Yet the man agreed. Now, thought Sterling, all I have to do is drive Jake back to Minneapolis, see to it that he gets a shower, a shave and a hot meal, and help him firm up his story. At times, he reflected, lawyering was a lot like baby-sitting.

Jake’s encounter with the police that evening at the Hennepin County Government Center went as well as could be expected. With Sterling and Commissioner Petersen present, Detective Rosczak and his partner, Detective Harbing, didn’t try any tricky stuff. Yet they were hard-edged, skeptical, persistent. To Jake it felt as if they went over every point of his story a hundred times. Though both detectives seemed surprised, even taken aback, by his admission that Monica Malone had been blackmailing him, neither of them appeared to believe his version of what had taken place.