“？‘I know pure evil when I see it,’？” I said, quoting what Ransom had said in that interview all those years ago.
“That was a slip,” Ransom said. “The reporter was asking me about the Lady Killer. I was thinking about Lily when I said that. The reporter assumed I was talking about Beth. And of course, once it ran I couldn’t correct him, so that quote went down in history.”
“Was Beth angry about it?”
“No. ‘At least it’s dramatic,’ she said. ‘You always had a flair for drama, Ransom.’？” He glanced at me. “Beth has a great many flaws, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. She has her own coldness and selfishness, which come from the terrible conditions she grew up in. She can be egotistical and secretive, argumentative, blunt. I understand all of those things, and I will still defend Beth Greer until I shuffle off this mortal coil. Which won’t be a long wait now.”
“What did Lily want?” I asked. “When she came to you in the law library?”
“She wanted money. She’d had both Beth and Julian sending her money for a while, but Julian had cut her off, and Lily wanted more. Now Julian was dead, so she knew the money should be Mariana’s. Lily wanted to know if she could get Mariana to sign something to access it. Not just guilt money—something permanent. ‘You know who I am,’ she said, and I had to admit that yes, I knew. She said she’d go to the press, tell them who she was. She wanted money for the promise to stay quiet. Just like she’d done with Julian.”
I tried to imagine myself at twenty-one cornering Ransom Wells, ordering him to set me up for life. Lily may have been a psychopath, but she was also pretty ballsy. “What did you tell her?” I asked.
“I told her to go to hell,” Ransom said. “Incidentally, I hope she’s there now. Because I meant it. I told her that some silly blond chit wasn’t going to scare me. She said, ‘That’s what Julian thought until I shot him in the face.’？”
Jesus. “Did you believe her?”
“Did I?” Ransom thought about it. “I had to do a quick recalculation when she said that. Because if she’d done it, then I was in danger. And, yes, I believed her. I had the same preconceptions and prejudices of any man my age in 1973, but I’ve always been more willing to face the truth than other people are. And the truth was, this girl had killed my client, my friend, for his money, and it was nothing to her. She let me see the truth of herself in that moment. I don’t think she did that very often.”
I was engrossed now. The sun was up, and I didn’t know if I would be late for work, but I didn’t care. “What did you do?”
“I told her I didn’t believe her. I told her that Julian had been murdered by a robber in a random home invasion. I told her that if she had killed Julian in hopes of getting his money, it would have been an awfully foolish move. Mariana had a nervous breakdown after Julian’s death and signed all of her affairs over to me. And I had no intention of submitting to blackmail, so Julian’s death would be for nothing—if, of course, she had actually killed him. Which, I said, I doubted.” He folded his hands over his cane. “It was a risky move, talking to her like that, but I’ve made risky moves all my life. I insulted her, but at the same time I gave her an out. She took it. She left, and I never saw her in person again.”
“But that wasn’t the last you heard of her.”
“No. But I don’t want to think about Lily anymore. She’s your problem now.” He pulled a sealed envelope from his leather satchel and handed it to me. “Here are some papers, the few that are left. Julian destroyed most of them. There are also some other things of my own that you need to read. Ask yourself why Beth has decided to tell everything now, after all of these years.”
“Why?” I asked, taking the envelope.
“There’s a reason behind everything Beth does,” Ransom said. “She hasn’t told me what the reason is, but I know there is one. I haven’t asked her about it. There are a lot of things I haven’t asked Beth about. I’ve survived this long and I’ve been as successful as I have, because I don’t ask about things I’d rather not know.”