Smoke and Sin (The Perfect Gentlemen 4)

“But according to everything the family heard about the accident, Constance was alone in the car, rented in her name. How is that possible?” It didn’t make sense to Roman. How would a woman on lockdown have managed that? There was no evidence that Frank had been in the country. His passport records showed he hadn’t left the US until a full twenty-four hours after Constance’s death. That trip had been only long enough to retrieve his wife’s body for burial.

So who had signed her out that night?

Doctor Billings shook his head and set his glasses aside. “I’m afraid I can’t shed any light on that. Much of those records were sealed away because of the lawsuit. You need to talk to Franklin Hayes. I understand he’s in no state to explain, but if you ask the right questions, you might learn a thing or two. With dementia patients, it’s all about setting a proper stage and finding the lucid moments. But I can’t give you those records. They’re sealed.”

All of this was news to him. “There was a lawsuit?”

“We paid the Hayes family an undisclosed amount of money and they signed a nondisclosure agreement. Your client should have mentioned that.”

“Frank Hayes signed that NDA,” Gus tried. “Zack didn’t.”

“You’ll have to talk to our legal department. I’m not authorized to help you. Now, I have a hospital to run. I’ve given you everything I can.” The doctor stood, his decision obviously made. “I think your best bet is to deal with our technology department and talk to the president’s father.”

Gus stood, too, holding out a hand to the doctor. “If there’s anything else we can think to ask, we’ll call you. Thank you so much. We’ll be sure to tell the president how cooperative you and your staff have been.”

The doctor seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank you. And yes, please feel free to call me with further developments. If I can help you, I will.”

Roman took Gus’s hand and headed for the door. The minute they were out of the doctor’s earshot, he turned to her. “I still had questions to ask.”

“He was done,” she said with a shake of her head. “He got spooked when we asked about her death. He wasn’t going to touch that lawsuit. We need to find another way.”

“I never heard a word about that lawsuit. I’m not convinced it’s real. If that’s the case, we can force him to talk,” Roman insisted.

At the time of Constance’s death, he’d already assumed responsibility for most of the family’s legal issues. They would have told him about such a lawsuit, right? Yes, and let him handle it. Even though the suit would have been filed in England, he would have been the one to vet the British solicitor and advise Franklin.

But if it was real…why had he been left utterly out of the loop?

“Not without some legal pressure. The minute we apply that, we run the risk of our investigation becoming public. The press will ask questions.”

She was right, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t keep quietly digging. He might know someone else they could interview.

He stopped at the desk where Yolanda was once again doing her nails. “Hey, can you tell me if any of the nurses still working here were around ten years ago?”

Yolanda looked between him and Gus. “Did the good doctor pause treating the ‘stars’ long enough to play matchmaker?”

Gus grinned. “No, my boyfriend and I had a mix-up in our schedules. I was trying to surprise him by getting some of his errands done. You know men can’t multitask.”

Yolanda waved a hand. “Don’t I ever! There’s a reason there aren’t many male nurses. Men couldn’t handle being a nurse, if you ask me. Trying to remember all those tasks while handling the emergencies. Well, this place would fall apart if it was all run by the docs.”

“Yes, the nurses are important.” Roman didn’t want Yolanda to get off topic. He got the feeling she could talk forever if he let her. “I’ll be honest, the doctor wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. He doesn’t recall much about our patient. I thought talking to one of the nurses who was here at the time might be beneficial.”

“We have a small staff and a lot of turnover. I think it’s because they’re tight fisted with the cash, if you know what I mean. We get these bright-eyed young nurses who come here thinking they’ll make a fortune and meet a man, then realize that village life ain’t as charming as those romance novels make it out to be. The doctors are all old and married, and most of our young men leave here for London. So they find out that their real choices are between slow Jimmy and Alfie, who’s a bit too close to his mum, if you ask me. Now Jimmy ain’t slow in the traditional sense, so don’t throw your political correctness my way. He’s just lazy as pie and I’m fairly certain he talks to his sheep.”

Gus snorted, a sound she somehow made adorable. “So you have a lot of turnover?”

“Oh, yeah. If those doe-eyed girls last a year, we count it as a win. They run right back to London, they do. Marjorie House was the director of nursing for the longest time. Now she was a local. Went to university and come right back home. ’Course she came home pregnant, which was a scandal at the time, but she was here for some twenty-five years.”

“Did she retire?” Roman asked.

“Yes, but she died two years ago.” Yolanda’s words killed Roman’s hopes. “Such a shame. Only murder we’ve had in this town in fifty years. Police think some punk was looking for drugs and shot her when she couldn’t give him any money and ran off. We were all scared for a long time after that.”

Naturally his only witness was dead under suspicious circumstances. Roman knew he’d have to hunt down her police report, too. Frustration welled inside him. Every turn seemed to lead to another dead end.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” There was nothing left to say here, and they were losing daylight. No, he didn’t have to hurry back to London now, but his gut told him every minute that ticked by only made this tangle more dangerous. He glanced down at Gus. “You ready to go?”

She nodded, slipping her phone back into her purse. “Yes. Thank you so much.”

Yolanda gave them a little wave and picked up the e-reader near her elbow.

As he led Gus to the parking lot, the stiff set of her shoulders made Roman suspicious. “How did you get here? Do you have a car?”

He intended to return hers to the nearest facility because there was no way he was allowing her to drive all over the countryside, not when Constance had probably been conveniently murdered here. Marjorie House, too. Yolanda was most likely wrong about the cause. The nurse had died for no other reason than she’d tended to Constance Hayes.

“I took the train,” she murmured as the gray afternoon enveloped him. It had rained earlier and the clouds above suggested storms yet to come. “Then I caught a cab here. Apparently the only one in the area, according to the cabbie.”

“Then you can ride with me. I rented a car.” He gently took her elbow, steering her toward the Benz he’d driven up in. “Are you going to tell me how you knew to look here? I told you what you wanted to know.”

“Well, I knew Mrs. Hayes had died in this area. But when I was searching Kemp’s room, I spotted a notepad. He’d pulled off the top sheet, but I found this address left behind as an impression. When I looked it up, it led here.”

“And you didn’t bother to mention that to me?”

“I was going to, but then you told me you’d turned everything I’d already given you over to Connor. Sure, you promised me updates, but I wanted in. This is my fight, too. And I knew if I gave you the address, you’d only cut me out of this excursion.”

He stopped in the middle of the parking lot. “I wasn’t cutting you out. I was protecting you.”

“It’s the same thing. And have you considered that leaving me completely in the dark puts me at risk? I realize now that I could have screwed up everything by talking to the doctor today. I had no idea you were coming here, much less had a meeting scheduled with him. If he had been the suspicious sort, he could have easily had me arrested for tre

spassing.”

“Yet another reason for you to trust me to handle this. I’m taking care of it.”

“You’re still not listening.” She huffed and shook her head as she approached the car. “You want me to just give it all up and sit back at the house like a good girl and forget how many people I’ve lost. That’s the sort of woman you want, isn’t it, Roman?”

“Don’t make me sound like some kind of caveman. I’m worried. Everyone who has touched this case is dead. Doesn’t that strike you as suspicious?”

“It certainly does now. How are these events connected to Mad’s death? I don’t get it. Had he figured something out? He must have, but I don’t understand what he would have seen or learned that would have led him to uncover a conspiracy like this. Mad didn’t care about politics.”

“Mad didn’t care about much except getting laid and his next party,” Roman muttered.

Gus stopped, fists clenching. “That’s not true. He cared about many things, but politics wasn’t one of them. He wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in Zack’s campaign any further than to write him a check and show up at his victory party. Although he had an alternate plan. He called it a consolation bash and asked me if it would be poor form to offer Zack his choice of hookers if he lost.”

Roman couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of Mad trying to figure out how to buoy his friend’s spirits after losing a presidential election. It probably would have involved a shit ton of liquor and likely made The Hangover look like a kiddie film. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“Naturally he stopped talking about it after Joy’s death. He said that attending a closed casket funeral for the wife of one of his dearest friends took the party right out of him.”