The Palm Beach Murders by James Patterson (best novels in english .txt) 📗

“I would do anything you asked after the way Mr. Brennan treated you. Besides, now that you’re not around, he doesn’t even pretend to treat me with any respect. If I didn’t need the job so badly, I would walk away and never come back.”

I gave Alena another hug before she headed out on her next errand. Now Marty and I had some time to look around.

Chapter 21

I decided to give Marty a grand tour of my former castle. It was a lot like the tours I had given friends and neighbors after we’d had work done around the house. As I was showing him some of the guest bedrooms upstairs and recognizing all the improvements I had made in my years as the mistress of the house, I started to realize that maybe I had been covering up flaws in our marriage by throwing myself so completely into home renovations. It wasn’t an uncommon practice among the bored housewives of Palm Beach, but I’d had no idea I was doing it at the time.

I had purposely saved the master bedroom suite for last. It sat on the east side of the second story, and the main windows looked out over the ocean. The view was remarkable. There was a separate walk-in closet on each side of a hallway that led to a bathroom, which included a small steam room, a Roman tub with Jacuzzi jets, Italian marble counters and sinks, and even a massage table that pulled out from one of the marble counters. That saved Brennan’s personal masseuse the trouble of carrying a table with her when she stopped by to give him one of his three weekly massages.

I enjoyed the look on Marty’s face as he inspected every inch of the house. He said, “This is just unbelievable. Even a spread in Architectural Digest wouldn’t do this place justice. And most of these renovations were your idea?”

I nodded while trying to hide my superior smile. “That’s right, I made this place what it is today. When I got here, Brennan had literally thrown some rugs across the floors and hadn’t updated the house in any other way since the 1960s. When I found mold—and I’m talking some serious mold, like up the walls and everything—in two of the guest bedrooms, Brennan’s response was ‘No one stays there long enough to get sick, so why worry about it?’”

“Peach of a guy. I’m glad I’ve never had to meet him face-to-face.”

“You’re in another class. There’s no reason for you to ever have to deal with that jackass. He’ll be out of our life soon enough.”

Marty smiled and said, “Now, that’s an attitude I can get behind. As long as you don’t need all this again, I can’t see why I won’t make you happy.”

Instead of answering him, I turned and wrapped my arms around his neck, then planted a long, lingering kiss on his lips. It felt nice to have this kind of passion in this particular bedroom. The room certainly hadn’t seen this kind of action from me in a long time. I had no idea what Brennan was up to on the dating front, and I didn’t care. If I really had to admit it, this house had always meant a lot more to me than Brennan had. At least that was what I kept telling myself.

I pulled Marty by his hand and said, “I have one more thing I have to show off, and this one will blow your mind.” I ignored his questions and pulled him into the walk-in closet, which was really just another room, to the left of the hallway leading to the bathroom. This was Brennan’s formal closet, with one entire wall covered by over a hundred suits, organized by cut and color. I knew it would shock Marty.

He was silent for a moment, then whistled as he walked along a row of suits, dragging his finger across the sleeve of each one. He looked up at the dozens of shirts, in colors ranging from white all the way to black, arranged in perfect order. It looked like a paint chart from one end of the closet to the other.

Marty said, “And he wore a different suit every day?”

“Sometimes two; one to work and one to go out at night. The man loves his clothes.” I watched Marty poke around the closet; then I said, “Go ahead, take a couple of sports jackets. He’ll never notice. Take anything you want. Brennan might be a little taller than you, but you’re about the same size. I’m telling you, that asshole will never miss them.”

Then I noticed Marty pulling a box from a shelf at the end of the closet and holding it up to show me. It was the box that our matched set of Walther PPK pistols had come in. Brennan’s blue steel pistol was still in the box, surrounded by foam padding; an empty space in the shape of a pistol showed where mine used to reside. Now it was safe in the nightstand in my hotel room.

I didn’t say anything when Marty pulled the gun from the box and checked to make sure there were cartridges in the magazine. He looked at me for any sign of disapproval, and when I gave none, he slipped the gun into the pocket of his shorts. You couldn’t even notice it.

He put the box back right where he’d found it. I knew it would take Brennan months to find out it was empty. Even if he decided to go shooting, he had other guns and might assume he’d stuck the PPK somewhere else. Things like that didn’t bother Brennan.

As we slipped out of the house and locked the patio door behind us, I realized I was about to walk down the beach with a man who had just stolen a gun and was carrying it illegally in public in one of the wealthiest cities in America.

This was an exciting game.