Angel of the Dark
The maid looked at Danny and thought, Poor man. How early does he have to be at work?
“I’m looking for Mrs. Jakes.”
“Mrs. Jakes not here.”
“Okay, look, I know Mr. Renalto’s your boss. And I know he’s not exactly thrilled about my questioning Mrs. Jakes, especially at this time in the morning. But this is a murder investigation. So I need you to please wake Mrs. Jakes, and Mr. Renalto if you have to.”
“No, you don’t understand. She not here. She leave last night. You’re welcome to come in and search the house if you no believe me.”
Unfortunately Danny did believe her. His heart began to race unpleasantly.
“Left? Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. She have a suitcase. Mr. Renalto drive her to the airport.”
Danny’s career flashed before his eyes. I should have come straight back here yesterday. I would have caught them. Now my key witness has flown the coop to God only knows where.
“What about Renalto? Did he leave with her?”
The maid looked surprised by the question. “Of course not. Mr. Renalto, he is here. He is asleeping upstairs.”
Danny pushed past her, bounding up the ornately carved staircase two steps at a time. Double doors at the end of the corridor clearly led to the master bedroom. He kicked them open. The sleeping figure under the covers didn’t stir.
“Okay, asshole. Where is she?” Danny marched toward the bed. “And you’d better have a good fucking answer or I am going to book you for obstruction of a murder investigation and personally see to it that you never practice law in this town again.”
Grabbing the heavy silk counterpane, Danny yanked it off the bed.
And really, really wished he hadn’t.
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO YEARS EARLIER…
SOFIA BASTA HUNG UP THE PHONE and hugged herself with happiness.
Her husband was coming home. He’d be here in an hour.
Husband. How she loved saying the word, turning it over in her mind and on her tongue like a piece of succulent candy. They were married now. Actually married. Frankie, her only friend through the long, dark, desperate years in New York. Frankie, the most beautiful, brilliant, perfect man on earth. Frankie, who could have had anyone, had chosen her, Sofia, to be his bride. Most mornings she still woke up and felt nervously for her wedding band, unable quite to believe her good fortune. But then she reminded herself.
I am Sofia Basta, great-granddaughter of Miriam, a Moroccan princess. I’m special. Why shouldn’t he have chosen me?
Their apartment was modest, a two-bedroom condo in the Beverly Hills postal district, but Sofia had made it warm and welcoming, delighting in creating the perfect nest for F
rankie to come home to. Brightly colored cushions and throws adorned the couch in the living room, which was flooded all day long with blazing California sunshine. How Sofia loved that sunshine, after eighteen grim, overcast years in New York! The grimy city, the loneliness of the children’s home. Sofia’s life had been a nightmare back then. But it all seemed like a dream now, a story that had happened to someone else.
And what a story it was.
Sofia’s mother, Christina, had been a drug addict and sometime hooker, as ill equipped to take care of her children as she was to take care of herself. But it had not always been like that. Christina Basta grew up in great wealth, first in Morocco and later in Paris, where her parents sent her to an exclusive girls’ boarding school. Tall and slender as a gazelle with creamy skin and mellow, searching brown eyes, the spitting image of her grandmother Miriam, Christina quickly caught the eye of the Parisian modeling scouts who hung around the Rue Du Faubourg looking for fresh talent. By sixteen years of age Christina was working almost full-time. By eighteen she was living in New York, sharing a model apartment with three other girls from her agency and indulging in all the myriad pleasures the city had to offer.
Christina Basta’s burnout was rapid and catastrophic. First came cocaine. Later it was heroin. At twenty, after one missed job too many, Christina was dropped by her agency. By now estranged from her family, and too proud to ask for help, she turned instead to “boyfriends” to fund her ever-growing habit—in reality dealers and pimps, who dragged her deeper and deeper into hell.
Sofia and her twin sister, Ella, were the result of Christina’s third pregnancy. Christina had tried to abort them, as she had the other babies, but the procedure was botched and both babies survived. Born in the Berwind Maternity Clinic in Harlem, and abandoned there by their mother that same night, the Basta twins spent a few short weeks together before Ella, the prettier baby of the two, was adopted by a local doctor and his wife. From then on, Sofia began her life as she was destined to continue it: alone.
But not completely.
When Sofia was six years old and living at the St. Mary’s Home for Girls in Brooklyn, the staff at the home received word, via a top-flight Madison Avenue law firm no less, that Sofia’s mother had died. Christina had left a “small bequest” to her daughters. As the doctor and his family had moved away, taking Ella with them, it was decided that the bequest should go to Sofia.
“It’s not very substantial,” the lawyer explained, to the great disappointment of the head of St. Mary’s. “It may have sentimental value, though, perhaps when the child is older. There’s a book, an old book. And a letter.”