“Oh, I believe you, Mr. Quinlan. I believe you now.”
Dr. Beadermeyer just shrugged and looked down at his fingernails.
“Maybe,” Quinlan said, “it’s Scott here who wants his wife kept under wraps?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Scott Brainerd yelled. “I never did anything, just told her father how worried I was about her.”
Noelle said very calmly, “No, Scott, that isn’t true. You’re lying as well. All of you lied to me. If it had been just Amory, I wouldn’t have bought it for a minute, but no, all of you were just like this Greek chorus, telling me the same thing over and over until I believed you. Goddamn you, I believed you! I allowed you to put my little girl in that goddamn institution!”
Quinlan quickly stepped out of the way when he saw her coming. She dashed to Beadermeyer and slammed her fist into his jaw before he even had a chance to twitch. He reeled back against the mantelpiece. Noelle stepped back, panting. “You bastard.” She whirled around to face Scott. “You vicious little shit, why did you do this to my daughter? How much did my husband pay you?”
Sally rose from the sofa. She walked to her mother. She put her arms around her. “Thank you,” she said against her mother’s hair. “Thank you. I hope I can hit Beadermeyer myself before this is all over.”
Sally wiped her damp hands on her pants legs. She felt such a surge of relief that it made her mouth dry. She actually smiled as she said to Scott, “I’m divorcing you. It shouldn’t take long, since I don’t even want my poor ivy plant that’s probably already dead anyway. My lawyer will serve the papers on you as soon as I can arrange it.”
“You’re fucking crazy. No lawyer is going to do a thing you say.”
“If you take another step toward her, Brainerd, I’ll just have to kill you. That or I’ll let Noelle at you. Look at poor Norman, his lip is bleeding. You know, I like the thought of Sally as a widow.”
Quinlan walked calmly up to Scott Brainerd, pulled back his fist, and rammed it into his stomach. “That’s for Sally, Noelle, and me.”
Scott yelped, bent over, breathing like he’d been shot, his arms clutching his middle.
“Sally,” Quinlan said, rubbing his knuckles, wanting to hit Scott Brainerd again but knowing it wouldn’t be smart, “one of my sisters-in-law is a lawyer. She’ll handle the paperwork on the divorce. Severing ties with this slug shouldn’t be difficult. It takes six months. Maybe I should kill him. You want to try running away, Scott?”
“Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you guys, the FBI is also all over the private books in Amory St. John’s firm. They’ve been doing that for a while now. That’s the real reason the FBI is involved in the first place. It’s all delicate stuff, so that’s why we’ve kept it under wraps, but there’s no reason for you not to know.
“Selling arms to places like Algeria, Iraq, and Libya—well, we do tend to frown on stunts like that. And that’s got to be the other reason, Sally, that your father and your husband locked you away. They must have believed that you would say something incriminating, something to prove that they were traitors.”
“But I never saw a thing, never,” Sally said. “Is that it, Scott?”
“No, damn you. I didn’t have a thing to do with that.”
“And her father manipulated you into coming on to Sally, into marrying her?”
“No, that’s not true. All right, so I did agree to have her put away. That’s because I believed she was sick.”
“Why did you believe I was sick, Scott?”
He didn’t say anything, just waved his pipe at her. “You weren’t a good wife. Your dad swore to me that your career was just something for you to do until you got married. He said you were just like your mother, a woman who really wanted a husband to take care of and children to look after. I wanted a wife to stay home and take care of me, but you wouldn’t do it. I needed you there, to help me, to understand me, but no, you never stayed there for me.”
“That doesn’t make her sick, Scott,” Quinlan said.
“I refuse to say anything more about it,” Scott said.
“Why am I not surprised that he was a traitor?” said Noelle. “But I’m not. Then maybe one of his clients murdered him. Maybe it wasn’t Sally after all. Such a pity it wasn’t Scott who murdered him. That’s what you were, isn’t it, Scott, you pathetic jerk?”
Good, Quinlan thought, she was trying to explain her husband’s murder another way. He was pleased. He said, “That’s what he was, Mrs. St. John. Now, you said you walked in here with Scott and found Sally literally standing over him with the smoking gun.”