Need You Now

27

L illy walked briskly down the hallway, not quite as if the building were on fire, but almost. There was no wait for an elevator, and it was just two of us inside when the doors closed.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

She kept her eyes fixed on the lighted numbers above the doors. I couldn’t tell if she simply didn’t want to talk while we were still inside the bank or if she hated my guts and never wanted to speak to me again. The range of possibilities seemed that broad.

It was an express ride from the executive suite to the lobby. Lilly got out first, and I nearly had to break into a trot to follow her out of the building. It was the tail end of rush hour, but even a crowded sidewalk didn’t slow her down. I found myself dodging to and fro to avoid head-on collisions with oncoming pedestrians as I pleaded with her.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“You lied to me,” she said, never breaking stride.

“A legal name change for reasons of personal safety is not a lie,” I said. “I’ve been Patrick Lloyd my entire adult life.”

She stopped cold. “I came halfway across the world out of concern for your safety. I told you that the real name of the man who killed Gerry Collins is Tony Mandretti. You acted as if you’d never heard of him. Then you told me you had a business trip, got on a plane, and went to visit him-your father-in prison. That’s a lie.”

I would have liked a killer comeback, but I supposed she was right. “It wasn’t as if I was never going to tell you the truth.”

“That is so lame.” She turned angrily and started down the sidewalk. I took her by the arm, stopping her.

“Let go of me,” she said.

“Lilly, be reasonable.”

“Reasonable? You want me to be reasonable? I had no idea Gerry Collins and Abe Cushman were a fraud. Now, even the Treasury Department thinks I’m hiding billions in dirty money. The bank fired me, thugs are chasing me, and my stomach feels like I swallowed a box of roofing tacks. Mind you, all of this came to pass after you arrived in Singapore.”

“Are you suggesting I had something to do with all that?”

“Are you suggesting you had nothing to do with it?”

If this conversation was going to continue, there was only one way to answer such a broad question: “No, I’m not suggesting any such thing.”

My veracity caught her off guard. Slowly, the anger in her expression transformed into curiosity. We drifted out of the flow of pedestrians, crossed the sidewalk, and took a seat on the lip of a huge granite planter outside the office building. Overhead, a decorative strand of leftover Christmas lights twinkled in the bare branches of a potted maple tree. Our breath steamed in the chilly night air, the blinking lights coloring our little puffs of conversation.

“I’ve made mistakes,” I said, “and I’m sorry you’re the one getting hurt.”

She didn’t answer.

“But,” I said, “there are two sides to the story here.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s true that I didn’t tell you my real name was Peter Mandretti. But somehow you knew that, and a whole lot more, when you called Connie this morning and told her I had to get out of the ER and run for my life. You want to tell me how you got that information?”

“Why does it matter how I found out?”

“It matters because you’re getting bad information.”

“Don’t even try to convince me that you’re not Peter Mandretti.”

“That part is accurate. But you’re being led down the wrong path if someone told you that the Santucci family has figured out that Patrick Lloyd is Peter Mandretti and is after me.”

“How do you know it’s wrong?”

“Because I’d be dead by now if they were after me. My mom is proof enough of that.”

“Your mom?”

Lilly obviously didn’t know that part of the story. I digressed to fill her in. I wasn’t fishing for sympathy by bringing my mother’s murder into it, but the effect was there nonetheless.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said. “I really am. But hearing about her doesn’t make it any safer for me to tell you how I got your real name.”

Our eyes met, and I saw genuine fear in hers. “Talk to me,” I said.

“The man is scary, Patrick. Really scary. He knows everything. He knows about your family. He knows about Gerry Collins. He knows about Manu Robledo.”

“What did he tell you about Robledo?”

“That he opened the numbered account at BOS.”

“And you’re saying that’s the truth?”

“Yes. I knew it as soon as I went to the church and spoke to him. It was the same voice.”

“I knew that accent of his was phony,” I said.

“What accent?”

“He put on a weird voice when I went to see him at the church. At first it made me think he was some kind of cult leader. But it also made me think that maybe he was trying to keep me from recognizing him.”

“He must have realized how weak it was,” said Lilly. “He didn’t even bother trying to fool me.”

“So it is definitely Robledo who is threatening us, demanding the money.”

“And warning us that we’re dead if we go to the police. So don’t .”

“I just told you what happened to my mother when my dad went to the police. I’m not going to run and tell the police anything without a quid pro quo-protection, information, something. You know I wouldn’t negotiate without telling you.”

“Really? Right now, all I know is that you went to see Robledo and didn’t tell me a thing about it.”

“How did you know that ?”

“How do you think? There’s only one person who tells me anything, and your reaction just confirmed that he told me the truth. What do you have going on with Robledo?”

“Nothing. I only found out about him because you left a map to his so-called church in the search history of my Internet browser. I pulled it up after you climbed out the window of my apartment-which is another thing you haven’t explained to me.”

The anxious expression returned to her face. “The apartment,” she said, almost stammering. “I had to leave. Right away. It was him. The guy I’ve been telling you about. He showed up, pretending to deliver roses.”

“I found them.”

“I’m not kidding when I say that he’s scary, that he knows everything. He even knows stuff about us .”

“What kind of stuff about us?”

“He was watching us in Singapore.”

So was Evan Hunt , I thought-but I kept that to myself.

“He knows the littlest details, like how we broke up on the beach,” she said. “He witnessed the whole incident with the seagull pooping on your head.”

“Wonderful. I suppose that will end up on YouTube.”

It was a stab at levity, but she remained deadly serious. “He said it was all a stunt. He saw you splatter yourself with a handful of sunscreen.”

“What?”

“He said you were just trying to make me feel worse about dumping you.”

Apparently, my joke about YouTube wasn’t far from the mark. “Lilly, I Facebooked about the seagull after we broke up. I got about a hundred comments. I’m sure that’s how he found out about it. He wasn’t on the beach watching us. This sunscreen story is ridiculous. It just proves that he’s a liar who wants to turn you against me. Who is this idiot?”

She ignored my question, her eyes narrowing. “He said your transfer from New York to Singapore wasn’t just a career move. He said it was part of a plan.”

“Really? He actually said that?”

“Getting to know me, getting me to trust you, was part of your plan.”

I was starting to squirm. Lilly had been right-this guy’s breadth of knowledge was scary-and I wasn’t sure how deep a hole I was in. Honesty had been paying dividends so far tonight, though I wasn’t sure how much was too much. I gave it a shot.

“Let’s clear some of this up,” I said.

“Aren’t you going to deny it?” she asked.

“It wasn’t just a career move, but let me explain.”

“Are you saying there was a plan?”

I struggled with this one, measuring my words. “My trip to Singapore was part of an official investigation.”

Her mouth fell open, and finally she spoke. “You went there to spy on me?”

“Spying is a strong word.”

“So it’s true?”

“I can’t say it’s true, because I don’t know what he told you, but-”

“Oh, my God. You are such a liar.”

“I’m not lying. I’m being completely honest.”

“Now you are. But you played me for months.”

“That’s not true.”

“All your talk about love at first sight-that was just a line to make me trust you. All part of an official investigation .”

“Lilly, just calm down.”

“An official investigation for whom ? Some warring faction of the Santucci family run by your father from a prison cell?”

I couldn’t mention the FBI. “Lilly, please. That’s not it at all.”

“Go to hell, Patrick.”

“You’ve got it all wrong.”

She clutched the envelope Barber had given her, her glare shooting back at me like lasers. “We’ll see what the data says.”

She turned and joined the late rush-hour flow, disappearing into the night.