Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder (35 page)

“When my father died, he left me everything he’d married into.  He hated those people, people with money, so much that he wanted nothing more than to spit in their faces.  He didn’t merely write out a will, he published it.  He had it sent to every newspaper in the country, naming me, his bastard son, as the heir to their fortunes.  There was a photograph and everything.  He’d hired lawyers.  He had them set up for a fucking commission, and whoever saw to it that I was paid would get a percentage.  The more I got, the more they did.  He wanted them to fight the family for it, and he knew every step of the way they would.  My name was everywhere.  My mother’s name.”

“That’s why you hate him,” I said.

“He put me in the middle of a battle that wasn’t mine.  He took away my anonymity.  I understand why he did it, and with everything, all the good that’s come from me being forced away from the media circus, forced here, I can almost forgive him.  But they’re still looking for me.  Even after all these years.  Lawyers.  And others, sent by the family.  I have an outstanding hit out on my life.”

“Do you know who it is?” I asked fretfully.  That was far more serious than hiding from a little money.  What if this person had killed Charlie’s sister, trying to lure him to the funeral the way I lured our victims to dark alleys?

Frank laughed.  “They would only hire the best, V.  They went through my boss.  He gave Bella the job.  She tries to kill me every time I see her.  But I always get away.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, and he kissed me.  “My boss, Silva, keeps watch.  He lets me know whenever someone starts poking around looking for information.  It doesn’t happen very often anymore, but I don’t like to take chances.  My fingerprints are still on file.  Maybe my DNA.  I don’t know.”

“That’s why you came here?  To hide?”

“After what my father did, Silva had no choice but to fire me or send me away.  He couldn’t have that kind of attention.  Even the
chance
of someone finding out who I was would be too much of a risk.

“Americans don’t care about what happens in the rest of the world.  It’s gotten better with the Internet, but they’re still very separate.  Silva knew that I could go unnoticed here.  And it was Charlie’s home.  That made for an easy transition.”

I’d never actually thought of Frank as being forced to live here.  Even when he spoke so fondly of France, I never considered that he wasn’t allowed to go home.  “Do you hate it here?”

“No.  I actually quite like it.  Parts of it.”

“But you’d rather be there.”

“Growing up, my mother always spoke to me of Paris.  I wanted to be a
bouquiniste
when I was little.  They’re booksellers on the Seine.  They have little stalls and they sit out there, watching the world.  She was good friends with a man who was a
bouquiniste
.  He taught her English.  I met him before he died.  I used to send him money every Christmas.  He asked me to come to work with him.”

“You can’t stand water.”

“I know.  That changed it for me.  But I still think about it.  Maybe owning a shop, something not too close to the riverbank.”

I smiled.  He’d never told me that.  I didn’t think he had aspirations to be anything, much less something so
normal
.  It was sweet.  “I bet Charlie had a fit when you walked away from all that money.”

“He’d turn me in for the reward if he could, but Silva would have him killed.  He knows that he’s only alive because of me.”

“That bastard,” I said.  I’d kill him before he turned Frank in.

“Say what you will about Charlie, but the fact remains that we never would’ve met if it hadn’t been for him.  I will love him until the day I die for bringing you into my life.”

“I guess that is pretty redeeming.”

Frank pulled me close to him, holding me against his chest while he admired his ring like a soon-to-be bride.  If either of us would wear a dress, it was him.  “Shall we invite him to the wedding?”

I laughed.  “Yeah, that’ll be the day.”

He sighed and kissed my hair, then set his chin on my head.  He always did that when he didn’t want me to look at him.  It meant story time.  “I was six when we ran away from my father.  For awhile we stayed in hotels, but the money dried up pretty quickly, and she was afraid that if she went back to work he’d find us.  We were sleeping on the street.  We were starving.  Then she met a man who lived on a fishing boat. He offered to make us dinner.

“She told me to steal whatever I could while she worked off our meal, but he had a partner.  He found me pocketing things, and he started yelling.  I didn’t even understand what he’d said.  They raped her.  They held me there and they both raped her in front of me and then they threw us overboard.

“It wasn’t that deep, we were still close to the shore, but I was small, and I couldn’t swim, and my head kept going under.  She helped me as much as she could, but she was hurt, and…I smelled like the fucking Thames for a week.”

I blinked back tears.  No wonder talking about sex had made him so uncomfortable.  “I’m sorry, Frank.”

“I know,” he sighed.

“I can’t teach you how to swim.  You have every reason to stay away from water.”  I turned toward him, still secure in his arms.  “Let me do the job.  I can handle it.”

“You’ve never done a double.  You’ve never really worked alone.”

“I don’t want you on that yacht, Frank Moreaux.  I’m your fiancé now, I’m allowed to tell you what to do.”

“You told me what to do before,” he said, though he couldn’t help but smile at the word fiancé.  Neither could I.  “I have a ring for you, too.  It was my grandmother’s.  Your hands are so thin it should fit.  The little finger at least.”

“Really?” I sniffled.  I hadn’t thought that far ahead.  I just wanted to get a ring on his finger to mark my territory.

“But it’s not here.  It’s in Paris, safe, with some other things.  We’ll get it.  Soon.  I promise.”

“Okay.”

“The thing with Charlie’s sister is probably nothing, V.  I don’t have a bad feeling about this job.  I think it’ll be fine.  It was just…the boat.”

“You sure?”

He nodded.  And I believed him, even as I saw the doubt in his eyes.

Diane and Lawrence Wright were in an arranged marriage, a
smart match
to everyone they knew though there was no love between them.  They had two children and drove cars that fit seven, suburban assault vehicles that would never see so much as a dirt road, with GPS and DVD players for every passenger.  Their kids were spoiled rotten replicas of the parents, a girl and boy named appropriately Diane and Lawrence.

My dad used to joke that the name Vincent had been handed down to each generation because our family was so poor we couldn’t afford a new one.  The Wright’s could afford not only names, but also people.  They had multiple maids for each of their three homes, nannies by the dozen, and a lawyer on retainer who’d soon be suing the entire family of Mr. Wright’s mistress for his wrongful death.

The mistress was a recent Harvard graduate, taking a year off to
find herself
before joining her father’s successful law firm in Boston.  Rachel Fields had grown up even more spoiled than the Wright children, coasting through college as she had through life, and doing whatever she pleased along the way.  She was a big fan of cocaine, and had spent as much time powdering her nose as she’d spent in rehab.

Watching these people was better than any soap opera; they all did such terrible things.  The children would scream at their nanny for an hour if she was a second late picking them up, Diane Wright wore coats made of endangered species even in summer and chomped down prescription horse tranquilizers like they were breath mints, and Mr. Wright entertained himself by lighting Cuban cigars with hundred dollar bills in front of homeless shelters.  They were trust-fund babies who’d never worked a day in their lives.  The mistress wasn’t much better but at least she gave to charity, if only for the tax credit.

Frank was right.  They wouldn’t know where Idaho was.

Charlie’s sister had next to nothing when she’d died, and had not surprisingly written her eldest brother out of her will.  Although he had still somehow managed to get the lion’s share, which included a very strange lamp shaped like an ear of corn and a couple of self-help books about being addicted to fattening desserts.  He gave the books to Frank, because he knew how much he liked reading.  Frank set them on fire with a butane torch designed for crème brulee, taking the deceased woman’s insecurity as an insult to his people.

His associate hadn’t found anything unusual either, apart from how wholesome and well adjusted the rest of Charlie’s family was, so we could concentrate on the job at hand without worry.

Charlie had somehow convinced Diane Wright not only to have her husband killed, but to pay him to be head of her security while the hit was carried out.  For the low, low price of fifty thousand dollars, the Wright’s security system was upgraded to be absolutely useless.

It wasn’t every day we got to visit our victim’s homes, but Frank liked to, whenever possible.  He really was a voyeur at heart, and having me at his side helped to make it educational as well as insightful.

“They have a really big television,” he said, standing before the massive black screen, mounted on the wall like an oversized picture frame.  The thing was taller than me, and I was seriously tempted to turn it on, just to gauge the color and clarity.  The TV at our hotel had a strange green streak down the left hand side, turning every image in the area a sickening olive color.  “Where’s the rest of it?”

“They make them flat now, Frank,” I said, smiling to myself.  It was cute how he managed to remain in the dark about technology.  He hadn’t even known what cruise control was.

“What for?”

I shrugged, leaving him to the living room and heading down the hall toward the first of four full sized bathrooms.  Seeing their bathtub was love at first sight; large enough for a block party, with flat gold faucets to trickle silently while filling the deep white marble basin and massaging jets that could turn it into a Jacuzzi with the servant’s press of a button.  It smelled like a rose garden in there and the monogrammed towels were so fluffy and white that they looked like snow hanging on their golden hooks.  The towels in our hotel had holes big enough to fit my head through.

“Do you think we could stay somewhere nice for my birthday?” I called out, knowing we were completely alone.  Their house was the size of my home town, and my voice echoed.  He didn’t answer, so I went looking for him.

Frank was standing in the living room, looking perfectly natural under a crystal chandelier even as the abundant light transformed him into a living shadow.  He may not have been raised around wealth, but it suited him.  His stance was one of sophistication, pure elegance throughout.

“You okay?” I asked, moving to his side and becoming increasingly aware of how I must’ve looked in my baggy clothes.  They may have been designer, but I’d never be more than white trash to the people who lived here.

I followed his gaze to the seashell colored wall, to an oil painting so realistic that at first I thought it was a blown-up photograph.  “Is that freaking you out?” I asked.

The painting was dark, midnight blue water filled with floating bodies and frozen faces staring helplessly at the sinking ship above them while more people fell to the sea below.  The crash of the Titanic.  It was eerie looking into those faces.  I could tell which ones were on the verge of death by their eyes, some of them with already dilated pupils and the blank gaze of faded life.  Then I noticed something; a bright yellow rubber duck wearing a sailor hat in the midst of all that darkness.

I burst out laughing, unable to contain myself with the shock.  It was so weird!  And utterly inappropriate.  I couldn’t believe anyone as upper crusty as the Wrights could own something that was actually amusing.

Frank glanced at me as if he hadn’t realized I was there.

I cleared my throat and looked down at my scuffed up shoes.  Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny.  I certainly didn’t know much about art.  “Sorry.”

He moved a little so he could stand behind me, setting his hands on my shoulders.  “He likes to twist historical scenes.”

So the painter was famous.  No wonder the Wrights owned a piece.  If I’d learned anything about the rich people we killed, it was that art didn’t have to be good if the artist was famous.  But this painting
was
good.  At least I thought so.  It was funny.  And the corpses were utterly realistic.  “You’ve heard of him?”

“I’d like to go now,” he said distantly.  When I looked over my shoulder he was already heading toward the door.

I followed him, feeling thoroughly out of place.  Ever since I’d learned that Frank was heir to a fortune, I’d become more and more aware of how low class I was.  Shit like that didn’t used to bother me this much, because I knew it didn’t bother him, but being in that house, making such a shameful blunder with the painting, I longed for Middle America.  Frank could be impressed by me in Middle America.  I knew what I was talking about there.

“It was really well done, Frank.  Even more realistic than the movie, not that I saw most of the movie because Mark rented it for me and I was sort of otherwise occupied, but I saw enough to know that the painting was better, and I just thought it was funny because I wasn’t really expecting to see that ducky there with all the bod—”

He stopped and held my mouth the way he always did when I started on a nervous rant.  Then he removed his hand and kissed me.  “What’s wrong with you?”

I bit my lower lip.  “Are you sure you want to marry someone who doesn’t know anything about art?”

“Vincent!” he scoffed.  “I love you.”

“Even though I laughed at the painting?”

“It’s supposed to be funny, V,” he said, and he hugged me, smoothing his hand over my hair.

“But you got so upset.”

He laughed.  “Baby, it wasn’t that.  I just wasn’t expecting to see the painting in their home.  I know the artist.”