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“What happened?” Peabody asked when he fell silent.
“I gave them money. A lot of money to make it stop. To make it go away. It was a long time ago, and I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong when I was doing it. But it would’ve ruined me. If I’d gotten charged with rape, I’d have been finished. It could still ruin me.”
“And K.T. found out.”
“That’s what she does,” he said, bitterly now. “She finds out. Then she puts the screws to you when it suits her. I never did anything to her, but she said she was going to leak what happened to the media. She even had the names of the guy and his daughter. She said I’d go to jail, and no studio would hire me again. It was almost ten years ago, and she said I’d go to jail.”
“Unless you played along with her and lied about Marlo?”
“Yeah. She said I had to tell Matthew we were screwing on the side, and give him details.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said no. I wasn’t going to do that to friends. And she said they weren’t my friends. Did I think either of them would go to jail for me? She scared me.”
He took another drink, a long one.
“What did you do?”
“I got ahold of my lawyer friend and told him what K.T. said. He said I should stall her, and he’d find out where the girl was now, what she was doing. He said I wouldn’t go to jail because there’s a statute of limitations thing, and I was okay there. But still, I didn’t want all this hashed around in the media. My friend said it was a good bet the girl and her father wouldn’t want all that coming out either, so it would be K.T.’s word against mine. But I should stall her, tell her I had to think about it until he looked into it a little.”
“Did you talk to her about it last night?” Eve asked him.
“I tried to stay out of her way. Then she pulled that bullshit at dinner. It was worse because I knew what she wanted me to say, to do. So I just kept drinking so I wouldn’t think about it. She cornered me, started on me again. I told her to just leave me the hell alone. I wasn’t going to talk to her about it with all those people around. I think I said something stupid about my lawyer looking into it.” He rubbed his head. “Or I thought it, and didn’t say it. I don’t know. It’s blurry. I drank too much.”
He dropped his head into his hands again. “Connie’s right.”
“About what?” Eve asked.
“Drinking doesn’t make problems go away. Just because you can’t remember them doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
•••
To keep it rolling, Eve shifted straight to Marlo, and wondered if she should tell her fictional counterpart she was currently showing too many nerves for a cop. Instead, she read the data into record, dropped down at the table.
“You got here fast.”
“I was... already downtown.”
“Waiting for Matthew to finish up. Let’s save more time. We’re aware you and Matthew are involved, and hoped to keep the relationship private. We’re aware K.T. clued in, found the loft you and Matthew are using, and of her attempt to blackmail you with a recording of the two of you in an intimate situation.”
“You’re aware of quite a bit. I hope you’re aware that Matthew didn’t hurt her. We weren’t going to take her blackmail, bullying, and bullshit anymore, but we didn’t kill her.”
“She told you she’d hired a PI to break into your place, to plant a camera, to subsequently break in again to retrieve same. But you didn’t bring this information to the police.”
“No. It was private. Do you know how precious private is when you have so little of it? Besides, we didn’t know who she’d hired. If we’d gone to the police with the story, she’d have just denied it. How could we prove it? We decided that was how to handle the whole ugly mess. Prove it.”
“How?”
“Matthew agreed to meet her on the roof, but we were both going—with a recorder I had in my bag. We’d get her to talk about the break-in, the blackmail. Then we’d tell her to shove it. We’d have something to bargain with, you see? If she went public with what she had, we’d not only go public with her admission, we’d file charges.”
She nodded briskly, righteously. “Criminal trespass, extortion, sexual harassment. But when we got up there, she was in the water. She was already dead. Matthew—listen to me—he didn’t even hesitate. He went in after her. Despite what she’d done, what she threatened to do, he tried to save her. He tried so hard.”
Tears shimmered now along with the urgency in her voice. “He’d have saved her life if he could have. But we were too late. And now, we didn’t tell you all of this because we didn’t want the suspicion, the media nightmare, the fallout. We didn’t deserve it. We haven’t done anything but fall in love.”
“That’s nice for you, but you’ve also obstructed justice by withholding relevant information.”
“Fine.” She sat back, shrugged in a jerk. “Arrest me. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
