Page 76 of Nobody's Fool

Archie Belmond pushes through my hesitation. “Let’s talk specifics and compensation,” he says. “I want to hire you for the next three months to work exclusively on what happened to Victoria. Your pay will be half a million dollars plus all expenses.”

I try not to look wide-eyed and slack-jawed, but I don’t think I’m fooling anyone.

Half a million dollars, ladies and gentlemen.

Plus the one hundred thousand I already made just by coming here.

“Half of the money will be wired to you today,” he continues. “Half when you finish in three months.”

I’m a man of morals and scruples and all that, but seriously? Five hundred grand? That’s not just money—that’slife-changingmoney. That’s a better (or at least easier) life for my family. I’m adding up the pros and cons of accepting this job, and the pros are winning big-time. My mind is swirling. I don’t know if I’m being objective or seeing dollar signs, but if I say no, I probably get no more access to the family and learn nothing more. I don’t want that. Yes, I realize that Archie Belmond is, in some sense, buying me off. If I agree to this, I can’t ever tell my tale about Spain to… well, again, who would I tell it to anyway? Who’d believe me or care? What would I say happened? Still, that’s clearly what Belmond is doing here, right? He is paying money to keep whatever happened in Spain a secret. Or is he? Does he already know? Does Victoria remember? Has she always remembered?

If I turn down this offer, I’ll never know.

Odds are this investigation will go nowhere anyway. I’m good, damn good, but I’m not that good. If I refuse his offer, however, I’m out of the game. It’s over. But if I accept, if I stay in the game, if I can keep swinging the bat, at least there’s a chance.

Oh, and half a million dollars, ladies and gentlemen. Half a million!

I clear my throat. “I’ll need access to everything—family members, old friends, police files, investigator reports.”

“Of course,” Belmond replies. “In turn, we will ask you to be discreet as possible.”

“You don’t want me to kick up attention. I get that.”

“So are you in?”

I nod. “Yeah, I’m in.”

“Fantastic. Let’s start now, if you don’t mind. What happened with you two in Spain?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I’m hesitant to talk about Spain without Victoria present, but Archie Belmond explains: “Vic didn’t ask you because she’s not sure she wants to hear yet.”

So I start to tell him. I do the meeting at the Discoteca Palmeras, the Lax Bros, all of that. I obviously don’t go into lurid details about the nights spent in her apartment. I realize that may sound tame in comparison to the rest of what had happened, but this man is her father and so why go there? I keep emphasizing, perhaps to ease his way, that Victoria/Anna never seemed in distress. We had fun, I tell him. I fell hard for her and I thought she fell for me, but we were just kids on the European equivalent of spring break.

“So how did it end?” Archie Belmond asks.

And here is where I make a decision that surprises me. I had figured that I would come clean. The man is paying me good money. He has as much to lose here as I do. We are working together with the same aim—to find out what really happened to his daughter and jointly what happened to me that morning in Spain. But something inside my brain—something old and instinctive and primitive—tells me that confessing to waking up with a bloody knife in my hand next to what I’d thought was the murdered corpse of his then-missing daughter would be unwise.

And what would be the point?

I had learned as a cop that you don’t just toss out information willy-nilly. You hold as much back as you can. My father puts it better: You can always say something later, but you can’t “unsay” something. I instead tell Archie Belmond what could generously be described as a partial truth. I tell him that I was conned—robbed—by his daughter and her partner, Buzz, that I woke up and my money was gone, and that we never saw one another again.

“Until she came to your class,” Archie says to me as I finish.

“Yes.”

“You’re saying she robbed you.”

“Or Buzz did. Or both.”

Archie Belmond rubs his chin. “One thing I don’t get.”

I wait.

“When Vic came to your class, you knew who she was right away.”

No reply from me.