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.”
Gavin is good with this kind of stuff, the plotting and planning. He organizes his thoughts well. I’m a pretty damn good player, but he’s a better coach.
“Option two, you do what you do best and try to get between Simon and Lauren,” he says. “You use that pretty face of yours and play that role of the multi-multimillionaire superstar investor, and you sweep Lauren off her feet and away from Simon. She dumps Simon, he crawls back to Vicky. And that might be doable,” he adds, “but there’s no time. This all has to happen in a week.”
“Very doable,” I say. “But yeah, no time.”
“Third option,” says Gavin. “You threaten Lauren. You scare her off. But that’s dicey. I’m not even sure how you’d do it. Put a gun to her head and tell her to break up with Simon? Then what? I’m not at all sure how that would play out.”
“Right, it doesn’t work.” I sit down next to him on the couch. “He’d assume Vicky sent me. Who else would’ve sent me? And then he’d file for divorce immediately.”
“So that only leaves one option, my friend.” Gavin pats my back. “And the question is: How bad do you want that twenty-one million dollars?”
57
Vicky
“So that leaves only one option,” says Christian, standing in the living room of his condo.
“What’s that?” I say, seated on the couch, having listened to him discount other options that were never really options at all.