Confidence Girl: The Letty Dobesh Chronicles

9

Letty parked her 4Runner in the cul-de-sac and walked up the driveway toward the Rochefort residence. The rain had further dissolved into a cold, fine mist, and all she could see of the Victorian was the lamplight that pushed through a row of tall, arched windows on the second floor. At the front door, she peered through a panel of stained glass, saw a sliver of the lowlit hallway—empty.

She knocked on the door and waited, but no one came.

The third window on the covered porch slid open. She lifted the shade, saw the living room illuminated by a sole piano lamp on the baby grand. Climbed over the back of the upholstered sofa and closed the window behind her.

“Daphne?”

The hardwood groaned under her footsteps as she moved through the living room and up the stairs. The bed in the master suite looked slept in, covers thrown back, sheets wrinkled, clothes hanging off the sides.

Letty went downstairs into the kitchen, and as she stared into a sinkful of dirty dishes, noticed the music—some soothing adagios—drifting up from a remote corner of the house.

She walked around the island to a closed door near the breakfast nook.

Opened it. The music strengthening.

Steps descended into a subterranean level of the residence, and she followed them down until she reached a checkerboard floor made of limestone composite. To the left, a washing machine and dryer stood in the utility alcove surrounded by hampers of unwashed laundry that reeked of mildew.

Letty went right, the music getting louder.

Rounded a corner and stopped.

The brick room was twenty-by-twenty feet and lined with metal wineracks, the top rows of bottles glazed with dust.

Beside an easel lay a Bose CD player, a set of Wusthof kitchen knives, and boxes of gauze and bandages. Hanging from the ceiling of the wine cellar by a chain under her arms—Letty’s eyes welled up—Daphne.

Then the lifeless body shifted and released a pitiful wail.

Letty recognized the tattoo of the strangling hands as Arnold LeBreck painfully lifted his head and fixed his eyes upon Letty, and then something behind her.

Letty’s stomach fell.

She spun around.

Daphne stood five feet away wearing a black rubber apron streaked with paint or blood and a white surgical mask, her black hair pinned up except for a few loose strands that splayed across her shoulders.

She pointed a shotgun at Letty’s face, and something in that black hole suggested the flawed philosophical underpinnings that had landed Letty in this moment. No more hating herself, no avoiding the mirror, letting her father whisper her to sleep, no books on learning to love yourself or striving to become something her DNA could not support. She was facing down a shotgun, on the verge of an awful death, not because she was an evil person, but because she wasn’t evil enough.

Letty thought fast. “Oh, thank God. You’re not hurt.”

Daphne said through the mask, “What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you’re okay. I ran into Chase—”

“What’d he tell you? I warned him to let me have a week with Arnold, and then I’d be out of his life.”

“He didn’t tell me anything, Daphne. That’s why I came over. To check on you.”

Arnold moaned and twitched, managed to get himself swinging back and forth over the wide drain in the floor like a pendulum.

“That man was going to kill me,” Daphne said.

“I know, honey. I saved you. Remember?” The smell was staggering, Letty’s eyes beginning to water, her stomach to churn. “Well, I see you’re okay, so I’ll slip out, let you—”

“You shouldn’t have come back.”

“I didn’t see anything in the papers about your husband or Arnold. I thought something had happened to you after I left last Sunday.”

Daphne just stared at her. The facemask sucking in and out. At last she said, “You think what I’m doing is—”

“No, no, no. I’m not here to…that man was going to kill you. He deserves whatever happens to him. Think of all the other people he’s murdered for money.”

“You saw my painting?”

“Um, yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“What do I think?”

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes. It’s … thought-provoking and—”

“Some parts of Arnold’s portrait are actually painted with Arnold.”

Daphne’s arms sagged with the weight of the shotgun, the barrel now aligned with Letty’s throat.

“I saved your life,” Letty said.

“And I meant what I said. I won’t ever forget it. Now go on into the wine cellar. Just push Arnold back and stand over the drain.”

“Daphne—”

“You’d be a lovely subject.”

Letty’s right hand grazed the zipper of her all-time favorite score—a Chanel quilted leather handbag she’d stolen out of the Grand Hyatt in New York City. Thirty-five hundred in Saks Fifth Avenue.

“Get your hand away from there.”

“My BlackBerry’s vibrating.”

“Give it to me.”

Letty unzipped the bag, pulled out the BlackBerry with her left hand, let her right slip inside. Any number of ways to fumble in front of a gaping shotgun barrel.

She said, “Here,” tossed the BlackBerry to Daphne, and as the device arced through the air, Letty’s right hand grasped the Beretta and thumbed off the safety.

She squeezed the trigger as Daphne caught the phone.

The shotgun blasted into the ceiling, shards of blond brick raining down and Daphne stumbling back into the wall as blood ran in a thin black line out of a hole in her throat.

Letty pulled out the pistol—no sense in doing further damage to her handbag—and shot her three times in the chest.

The shotgun and the BlackBerry hit the limestone and Daphne slid down into a sitting position against the wall. Out from under her rubber apron, blood expanded through little impulse ripples whose wavelengths increased with the fading pump of her heart. Within ten seconds, she’d lost the strength or will to clutch her throat, her eyes already beginning to empty. Letty kicked the shotgun toward the washing machine and walked to the edge of the wine cellar, breathing through her mouth; she could taste the rotten air, now tinged with cordite.

She looked at Arnold. “I’m going to call an ambulance for you.”

He nodded frantically at the pistol in Letty’s hand.

“You want me to . . . ?”

He let out a long, low moan—sad and desperate and inhuman.

Arnie,” she said, raising the Beretta, “I’m not even sure you deserve this.”