Deadly Stakes

15

Ali left the interview room while Paula was gathering her papers. She was on her way back to the jail entrance when she changed her mind. Pausing at the check-in desk, she asked to speak to the jail commander. Tex Higgins was someone Ali knew, and once the desk clerk handed her the in-house phone, she had no trouble getting through to him.

“So you’re done with the interview room?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Ali said. “I’m wondering if Charles Ralston would agree to see me.”

“You’re working for the other side, aren’t you?” Tex asked. “The girlfriend’s side, I mean. I can’t imagine that his attorney would agree to let you talk to him alone.”

“I’m not asking his attorney,” Ali said. “I’m asking him.”

“Wait right there,” Tex said. “I’ll see what he says.”

Much to her surprise, a few minutes later, a guard came to collect Ali. After she deposited her Taser and Glock in a locker, she was led to a standard jail visitation room, a grimly appointed place where shackled prisoners were led in and seated in separate cubicles with battle-scarred gray Formica countertops and walls. Inmates were separated from their visitors by the same kind of Plexiglas barrier that separated the departmental clerks from the general public. Here, however, all communications were conducted over handheld phone sets.

The man led to the spot opposite Ali was a long drink of water, probably once a high school basketball star, with graying curly locks that, in a different era, might have been worn in an Anglo approximation of an Afro. He didn’t look like a Chip or a Charles. The long slim fingers that reached for the handset were delicate enough to belong to a piano player. The man looked to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, and what might have been a handsome face was puffy and gray with what was most likely a combination of worry and lack of sleep. The countenance he presented to Ali looked almost as defeated as Lynn Martinson’s.

“You’re the writer working for Lynn’s mother?” he asked.

Ali nodded. “That means I have no official standing, and you’re under no obligation to speak to me-” she began, but Chip Ralston cut her off.

“Have you seen Lynn?” he demanded with a distinct catch in his voice. “How is she? Is she all right? I’m so sorry to have dragged her into this mess.”

Words of what sounded like genuine concern for Lynn weren’t what Ali had expected to be the first thing out of the man’s mouth. His undisguised anguish brought Ali down on the side of not pulling any punches.

“She’s okay, considering the circumstances,” Ali answered, “but I’m here to ask one question on her behalf: Are you going to take the deal?”

“The deal to point the finger at Lynn?” Ralston replied. “Absolutely not. Whatever Gemma’s and my marital difficulties may have been, they weren’t Lynn’s fault. She’d have no earthly reason to kill Gemma. None. I just got off the phone with my attorney. I’ve instructed him to cut a different deal. I’ll agree to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter on the condition that he drops all charges against Lynn.”

“That’s not what the prosecutor proposed originally, and he probably won’t be too happy about that,” Ali said softly. “Your lawyer won’t be, either.”

“Of course my lawyer won’t be,” Chip Ralston agreed. “He’s my mother’s attorney, not mine, and he’s looking to make a fortune because he thinks his fee will be coming out of her checking account. But I’m not going to be responsible for depleting my mother’s economic resources. Truth be known, I’ll probably end up qualifying for a public defender, too, but I’m not going to bother. This is exactly what Gemma wanted. She said she’d ruin me, and she has.”

“Why?” Ali said.

“Why what?” Chip asked.

“Why did Gemma want to ruin you?”

“Because I was a disappointment to her,” he said. “Because I never measured up to her lofty expectations. She thought she was getting a carbon copy of my dad-a world-renowned surgeon-not a ‘do-gooder’ general practitioner. I made reasonable money but not great money. She wanted the kind of prestige my father had and the kind of lifestyle my mother had, and if she had been just a little more patient, she could have had it regardless of how much money I make. My father died last year. My mother is eighty-eight, and she’s not in the best of health. She’s not going to last forever. I think Gemma got tired of waiting around for my parents to croak so she could grab half of my inheritance. She wanted to get out while she was young enough and attractive enough to find herself another meal ticket-not that she needed one after she took me to the cleaners. Now look where it got her.”

“Who do you think killed her?” Ali asked.

“Probably her latest fling, whoever that guy is,” Chip answered. There was no disguising the bitterness in his voice.

“Did you kill her?” Ali asked suddenly. “Or did you hire someone else to kill her?”

The phone in Chip Ralston’s hand shook, but his voice was steady. He held Ali’s eyes without blinking. “No,” he said. “I did not.”

“But you just told me you’re going to plead guilty.”

“To manslaughter,” he agreed, “but only if I can get the prosecutor to drop all charges against Lynn. She’s the one good thing that has happened to me in a very long time. I’m not going to let Gemma destroy her, too.”

“Who is James Sanders?” Ali asked.

Chip blinked. “Who?”

“James Mason Sanders is a small-time crook whose body was found in the same general area as your former wife’s body. I’m trying to figure out if there was any connection between them.”

Chip Ralston shook his head. “It’s not a name I recognize, but Gemma wasn’t exactly forthcoming about her pals and her relationships. It’s come to my attention that she engaged in a good deal of risky behavior, including signing up for any number of dating websites both before and after she filed for a divorce.”

“You have reason to believe she was unfaithful?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t believe she ever was faithful,” he replied. “I just didn’t know it at the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, I always wanted to have kids,” he said. “I thought I’d make a great dad, and I wanted us to have kids. She claimed she did, too, at least at the beginning. Once I got through medical school, we tried for years to get pregnant, and it didn’t work. We both went for tests. My sperm count was fine. She told me that her doctor said she was the one with the fertility problem, but she wasn’t willing to do anything about it.

“I suggested in vitro. She said no dice. I said, ‘Fine, let’s adopt.’ She said no, that if we were supposed to have kids, it would happen, but it didn’t. Later, I found out that she was on the pill the whole time. I wasn’t meant to find that out, you see. After she moved out of the house, someone in her doctor’s office screwed up and mailed me a copy of her prescription renewal. After that, HIPAA be damned, I went looking for her prescription records. I found out she’d been taking the pill for years-for as long as we’d been married.”

Ali looked at him and said nothing. She had suffered through a series of betrayals at the hands of her second husband, Paul Grayson. In Paul’s case, his faithlessness had resulted in the out-of-wedlock birth of more than one child-something Ali had discovered only after the man’s death. In Chip Ralston’s case, he had no children at all to show for Gemma’s betrayal. Ali understood, however, that the hurt was much the same.

“You might think I would have been pissed about that, but you know what?” Chip Ralston asked. “I ended up being grateful. It turns out Gemma was right not to have kids. She would have made a terrible mother.”

“What about you?” Ali asked. “Did you have affairs?”

Chip shook his head. “Never. I didn’t meet Lynn until long after Gemma had already flown the coop.”

“Lynn said that even after the divorce, Gemma stayed friends with both your mother and your sister.”

“Look,” he said, “when it comes to families, I believe in live and let live. My mother always thought Gemma was terrific, and I never tried changing her mind. When Lynn showed up on the scene, I made it clear to my sister that I expected her to be civil. The one time she and Lynn met in public, Molly was polite, which is more than I can say for my mother.”

“Did you object to your mother remaining on friendly terms with Gemma?”

“That was her business, not mine.”

“Do you know of anyone who wished Gemma ill?” Ali asked.

“You mean other than yours truly?” Chip asked.

In spite of herself, Ali liked the guy. She was surprised to realize that, plea bargain or not, she more than half believed that he hadn’t had anything to do with killing his wife. “Yes,” she said. “Other than you.”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have no idea. If I did, I’d tell you.”

“All right, then,” she said, pushing back the molded plastic chair and standing up. “Thank you for agreeing to speak to me.”

She watched him put down his handset. The county attorney had assumed that the plea bargain offer would cause the two suspects to start pointing accusing fingers at each other. Instead, Chip Ralston had thrown himself under the bus.

Unsure what to do about this unexpected turn of events, Ali left the visitation room, collected her weapons from the lockbox, and waited until a guard let her back outside. Determining guilt or innocence wasn’t in Ali’s job description.

Once on the street, Ali dialed B.’s number. “I’m on my way to Phoenix,” she said. “I’ll probably end up spending the night.”

“Would you like me to join you?” B. asked.

Yes, that was what she wanted, but she hadn’t wanted to say it in so many words.

“What about your work?” she asked. “Can you afford the interruption? Besides, you already spend so much time in hotels. .”

“Not in hotels with you,” he countered. “Besides, through the magic of telecommuting, I can work anywhere. It would give us a chance to revisit the Ritz,” he added. “Return to the scene of the crime, as it were. With any kind of luck, maybe when you’re finished working, we could grab a late dinner at Morton’s.”

The Ritz-Carlton at Twenty-fourth and Camelback was where B. and Ali had spent their first full night together, and Morton’s, next door, was where they had shared a very romantic dinner.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered,” B. said. “Now, is there anything you need me to bring?”

It was close to four in the afternoon. The idea of driving directly to Phoenix without having to drive the eighty miles back to Sedona had some real appeal.

“Ask Leland to pack an overnight kit for me,” she said. “Actually, ask him to make it for two nights, in case I have to stay longer.”

Ali knew from experience that Leland would pack for her as well or better than she would herself. The thought that at some point she would have to learn to get along without the faithful service of her aide-de-camp was one she quickly put aside.

“All right,” she said. “You go straight to the hotel. I’ll meet you there.”

And I’ll go track down James Sanders’s grieving wife and son, she thought. Going to see them was the last thing she wanted to do, which was enough to move it to the top of the list. That was always one of Ali’s mother’s watchwords: Do the tough things first.