"That's ridiculous! It's insane."
"It's insane to go to jail for something I didn't do, but that happens to people all the time. There's only one person who could have moved that gun the morning after Great-grandmother was killed, and it's Gary Dishler. Outside of Paul and Sloan and you and me, he was the only other person the police allowed to stay on the premises after her body was found. You didn't do it and I didn't do it That leaves Gary."
An odd expression crossed his face as she finished, an expression almost like fear, but it vanished so quickly Paris couldn't be certain. "The police won't even bother asking him about it, and I think I'm going to be arrested. I think we ought to hire our own private detectives or something. And I think I ought to have a lawyer ready."
Anger, not fear, was tightening his face as she stood up and said, "Will you think about doing both those things?"
He nodded curtly, and Paris left him. She'd started down the stairs when she heard a door crash into its frame, and she turned and darted up the stairs. Her father's study door was still open, but Dishler's hallway door was closed now, and Paris almost moaned aloud at the thought Dishler would be the one he asked to get her a lawyer and hire the detectives. Then she realized her father had looked angry enough to confront Dishler himself and try to wring the truth out of him.
Fear for her father made Paris violate the precepts of a lifetime. She rushed into her father's office, closed the door, and leaned over his desk to the telephone. She pressed Gary Dishler's extension number, and the phone was immediately answered. "What is it?" he snapped.
"Gary? Oh, I'm sorry," Paris said as she carefully held down the number three on her father's telephone, which enabled the room-monitoring feature. "I meant to dial the kitchen."
"That's extension thirty-two," he said, and hung up. Gary had chosen the new phone system, and he'd shown her how to use the room-monitoring feature when her father was recovering from his heart attack. Now Paris was putting it to a new use. The conversation in Gary's office came over the speaker phone, and Paris listened to it with a mounting sense of disbelief and horror that turned to terror.
"I told you to calm down, Carter!" Dishler warned in a voice Paris had never heard him use before. "What are you saying?"
"You heard what I said. My daughter has just informed me that she is likely to be arrested for Edith's murder."
"Which daughter is that?" Dishler asked needlessly.
"I only have one daughter who counts," Carter snapped. "And she has just presented me with a rather convincing argument that you must have moved that gun. Which makes you a murderer."
Instead of hearing Dishler react with a violent denial, as Paris expected, she heard his chair make a noise as if he had leaned back in it, and when he spoke, his voice was grotesque in its calm lack of concern.
"You had a serious problem, Carter, and your business partners recognized it as soon as I reported it. They asked me to handle the problem before it blew up and the fallout destroyed all of us."
"What problem?" Carter demanded, but he sounded alarmed and defensive.
"Come now, you know what problem," Dishler said snidely. "The problem is that Edith changed her will before either of us realized it. She cut Sloan in for a piece of her estate, a large portion of which is the Hanover Trust. Sloan's part of the trust should have given her fifteen million dollars. But the Hanover Trust only has five million dollars total, because the trustee—that's you and your bank—has been milking it for a decade to keep the bank operating and to cover your losses everywhere else. Am I correct?"
After a silence, Paris heard her father say, "I could have persuaded Sloan to leave the money in the trust and to be satisfied with interest payments. I'd already persuaded Paris to do that—"
There was a crash, as if Dishler had slapped his hand on the desk. "Sloan Reynolds isn't Paris: She's a cop. If she decided she wanted to withdraw the principal and you couldn't hand it over, she'd have raised a stink. That stink would have covered you and spread to Reynolds Bank. Your partners in that bank couldn't allow that to happen."
"Stop calling them my partners, damn you! We had a business arrangement, not a partnership. They bailed me out when the bank was in trouble in the eighties, and in return I agreed to launder some money for them over the years. I've let them put their own people in a few key positions, and I've tolerated having you around, but nobody ever talked about murder."
"There was no choice. If I'd known ahead of time that Edith was going to change her will to include Sloan, the old woman would have died a natural-looking death before she could sign it, and there would have been no problem.
"Unfortunately, I didn't know anything about it until Wilson left here with the new will signed and witnessed by your servants. I consulted with your partners, who consulted with their attorneys. It turned out that the only sure way to prevent someone like Sloan from being able to claim her inheritance was if it appeared that she had murdered in order to get it. Your partners advised me to handle the matter."
Paris heard her father make a sound like a groaning curse, and Dishler said with a vocal shrug, "It's just business, Carter. Nothing personal. It was handy that she had her own gun."
Carter's voice dropped to a defeated whisper. "How did you know? When did you find out she was a cop?"
"The day before poor Edith's demise, I asked your daughter what her opinion was of the rare Persian carpets downstairs. She described the colors in the Aubusson—she didn't know the difference. That, combined with the fact that she showed no real interest in any of the decor, made me suspicious.
"It took me five minutes on the computer to discover she was a cop and one phone call to verify it. It took your business partners fifteen minutes to come up with a plan and give me instructions." Irritably, he added, "It took me thirty minutes to find where she'd hidden the damn gun. Now, can we end this unpleasant discussion?"
In the office next door, Paris heard the strain in her father's voice as he asked, "What about Paris? They'll arrest her for it."
"Now, you know I would never let that happen. Sloan will be taken care of tonight, and the matter will come to an end."
"How?"
"Are you sure you want to know?"
In the office next door, Paris held her breath, her hand hovering over the button that would turn the speaker phone off. But, she had to know what they were saying about Sloan.