The Perfect Impression by Blake Pierce

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Jessie phrased her response carefully.

“How do you know?” she asked simply, though she wanted to say much more.

“I was checking voicemail this morning and got one from Theo. He told me.”

It was a good thing Ariana Aldridge wasn’t able to see her face because Jessie couldn’t hide her disappointment, not so much at the answer as at her own inability to discern if the woman was being deceptive. Whether it was the fuzzy cell connection or just being too tired to pick up on vocal nuances, she didn’t know what to make of the response.

“I see,” she said after a moment to regroup. “So you only learned of her death this morning?”

“That’s right,” Aldridge said. “I was obviously devastated. I hadn’t known her that long but Gabby and I hit it off right away. It’s a real loss.”

“Of course,” Jessie replied. “It’s too bad you weren’t here. I think Steve and the others could have used another friendly face.”

“Speaking of,” Aldridge replied, “I’m not even sure why you’re calling me. I was long gone by the time this happened. I’m not sure what use I can be to you.”

Jessie noted that the woman had entirely evaded the topic of being a source of support for her supposed friends. She decided not to pursue that until she could look Aldridge in the face.

“You’d actually be surprised how useful seemingly irrelevant information can end up being. That’s why I want you to come in for a formal interview when I get back to the city. How does that sound?”

“I’m happy to do it,” Aldridge replied, “though I don’t think it’ll do you much good. I just have to square it away with my mother, who will need to watch my daughter.”

“Oh yes, little Ginny,” Jessie said. “How did she do the first time being away from you for an extended period?”

“Okay,” Aldridge said, sounding taken aback that a stranger knew details about her personal life. Jessie decided that this might be the perfect time to throw a few extra questions at her, when she was back on her heels.

“That’s great,” Jessie said. “We’ll get into everything more when I return but for now, I’d like to nail down a few basics. Why did you leave Catalina so suddenly?”

The pause on the other end of the line told her that she’d made an impact. Jessie let the moment linger. She could almost hear the woman’s brain working overtime.

“It’s not as dramatic as it seems,” she finally said. “The group just enjoyed some activities that I…I wasn’t into. I started to feel uncomfortable. Theo didn’t seem bothered by that stuff and wanted to stay. I didn’t. So I left.”

“What kind of stuff?” Jessie asked, keeping the pressure on.

The pause this time was even longer than before.

“You know, I thought you’d already have addressed all this with the others by now,” she said carefully. “I don’t really know all the details so I’m not the person to talk to.

“What details?” Jessie demanded. “What activities were you referring to?”

“I’ve got to go,” Aldridge said hurriedly. “If you need to follow up later, let me know.”

“Ariana—” Jessie started to say before realizing the line was dead.

She looked over at Peters, unable to hide her excitement. At last, she had something to work with, a way to burrow under the perfect impression that everyone was presenting.

“What?” Peters said, without any of her interest.

“What do you mean, ‘what?’ Didn’t that strike you as interesting? Whatever ‘activity’ the rest of the group was into was enough to make Ariana Aldridge bail on the whole weekend. All this time we’ve had to accept the notion that everyone was too drunk to remember what happened last night. Now we finally have a lead that suggests that maybe they weren’t just out of it, they were intentionally hiding something.”

“What do you think?” Peters asked dismissively. “That they’re a bunch of Satanists who planned to sacrifice her at midnight?”

“I don’t know,” Jessie replied, surprised at his indifference to the woman’s revelation. “It could be that. It could be some kind of sex club. I’ve come across that before. They could have been planning to go to some hidden warehouse to watch dog fights or intending to spend all night shooting heroin in someone’s suite. The point is that there is something they didn’t tell us that scared her off. I’m not sure why you’re suddenly so blasé about this.”

“I guess I’m just not convinced that it’s the smoking gun you think it is,” he said.

“Well, we’re about to see who’s right,” she told him. “We’ve got a little less than five hours before your boss starts wetting himself, so let’s get started.”

“Where?”

“With the one person most likely to react to this new information: Theo Aldridge.”

“You think he’s going to be more forthcoming than he was last night?” Peters asked.

“I think he was pretty cocky while he was drunk,” Jessie told him. “Now he’ll be hung over. And once I use the ammunition his wife just gave us, he’ll be feeling the heat. Besides, I’ve often found that the big, tough guys are the first to break. Let’s see if he’s one of them.”

*

Deputy Heck told them that Theo Aldridge had returned to his room. When Jessie banged on his door, it took almost two minutes for him to answer it. When he did, she saw why. He was wearing only boxers and a T-shirt and still had sleep in his eyes.

“I only just fell back asleep,” he said irritably. “Couldn’t you have given me a little time to rest?”

“Sorry, Theo,” Jessie said, sidestepping him as she entered the room. “Time is short and we need to talk.”

“Hey, I didn’t give you permission to come into my room!” he objected, regaining some of the belligerence from the previous night.

“Are you refusing to talk with me?” she asked in a tone that suggested it might be a crime for him to do so.

“I just—I’m not dressed,” he said, switching quickly to a pathetic, pleading voice.

“Then get dressed,” she instructed, flicking on his light and walking further into the room. “And please don’t make Detective Peters stand out in the hall. It’s rude.”

Aldridge stepped aside for Peters to enter. The detective seemed reluctant to do so. Once Aldridge pulled on some jeans, his demeanor became immediately less deferential.

“What was so important that you had to barge in here? I gave the hotel manager my timeline like you asked.”

“I know,” Jessie assured him, speaking with an intentional aggression intended to keep him on his heels. “And he passed it along to me. I looked at it on the way up here. It’s pretty useless. You could drive a truck through the gaps in time that you listed. But that’s not what I’m interested in right now. Have a seat.”

Aldridge sat down on the bed. Peters moved to the corner of the room. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. Jessie found his demeanor unnerving, but chose to keep her focus on the giant man sitting befuddled on the bed before her.

“What then?” he asked apprehensively.

“I spoke to your wife,” she said without preamble. “She explained why she left.”

She let the comment hang in the air, seeing how he’d respond.

“What did she say?” His voice was frustratingly impassive. In the space of a minute, he’d gone from annoyed to apologetic to cryptic. Since he wasn’t tipping his hand, Jessie had to be careful how she answered the question.

“She told us she wasn’t into the kind of activities you all had planned. I can understand why. But considering that she obviously has a bit of bias, I wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself. This is your one opportunity to come clean, in your own words. If you hold out on me and I have to pull teeth to get answers, it’s going to go much worse for you. So make your choice.”

She stood still, waiting for his reply. She’d learned that sometimes it was best to let an interview subject stew, their imagination conjuring up consequences far worse than she could administer. She saw that Aldridge was going through exactly that process. When he finally spoke, she could tell he was spooked.

“Look, I’ll tell you,” he said resignedly. “But I don’t know what this has to do with Gabby’s death. The other couples we came with—they’re swingers.”

Jessie let the admission settle in. It was hardly the most shocking revelation she’d heard in her career. In the last few years, she busted up an underage sex ring, caught a killer intent on executing cheating women, and nailed a couple who worked in tandem to murder a woman they’d both been sleeping with. Swingers was comparatively tame.

“Okay,” she replied. “What does that mean exactly?”

“They come to this place a few times a year and I guess all the rules go out the window. Apparently the Paragon caters to stuff like that. There are hotel staffers who work as waiters or porters or housekeepers but do double duty as sexual partners.”

Jessie looked over at Peters, who had a guilty expression on his face. It was now clear to her why he’d been so reticent to pursue this line of inquiry. He clearly knew all about the hotel’s reputation.

She bored into the detective with her eyes, furious at how much investigative time he’d cost her by keeping this secret. She wanted to rip into him then and there, but that confrontation would have to wait. With much effort, she swallowed her frustration, said nothing to him, and returned her attention to Aldridge.

“Why did Ariana get cold feet?” she asked.

“She didn’t,” he told her. “We didn’t know about any of this until we got here. Friday night was just like a normal vacation. They only sprang it on us yesterday. I guess they wanted to give us a chance to settle in. Ari wanted no part of it. I was more…curious.”

“And that’s what set her off?” Jessie pressed.

“She seemed like she might be open to the idea at first,” he said. “But the more she heard about it, the less she liked it. She said it seemed like cheating. I said it wasn’t cheating if everyone was cool with it. She told me she definitely wasn’t cool with it. It escalated from there. She accused me of wanting an excuse to sleep with the hot bartender. That’s around the time she started demanding to go home.”

“But you didn’t want to go,” Jessie prompted.

“I thought she was overreacting and made the mistake of saying so. That only made things worse. She started packing her bag right then. Nothing I said after that mattered. She wouldn’t let me come with her.”

He was saying all the right things but Jessie didn’t quite buy it and she let him know.

“It doesn’t seem like you tried that hard. You could have taken the next ferry and met her back home. But you didn’t do that.”

“No,” he said, a flush of arrogance in his tone. “I thought about it but then I said ‘what the hell—I’m not going to ruin my weekend just because she got all puritanical.’ I’d been looking forward to a break from a crying baby for weeks and then I had to cut it short, just because my wife got on her high horse? I don’t think so.”

“So you stayed to spite her,” Jessie poked.

His face got red and he sounded like he was trying hard to keep the agitation out of his tone.

“No, I just didn’t want to be bullied. Sure, I wanted to have a nice dinner, maybe get a little loaded, and relax. What do I care if these guys like to bed down with the staff? It’s none of my business. For the record, I didn’t do it. Ask anyone who works here if I was with them. They’ll all tell you the same as me: no.”

Jessie could tell that his anxiety was giving way to defensiveness. She was dangerously close to the point where he might start talking about invoking rights and talking to lawyers. She wanted to avoid that mess, especially when she wasn’t sure she could count on her partner, and decided to back off for now.

“Thanks for your time, Mr. Aldridge,” she said abruptly, turning to leave.

She caught Peters’s eye. He looked like he might prefer to stay in here than face her outside. But as irked as she was with him, she was more fixated on something else. After Ariana Aldridge’s inadvertent revelation, and her husband’s reluctant confirmation, she finally had a string to pull at. If she handled it right, hopefully the whole thing would unravel.