“He bought you this house?”Dash asked.
“Does every rich man with a sidepiece do that?”
He leaned forward so his forearms rested on the island.“You never wondered how he spent that kind of money and his wife didn’t find out?”
“His personal finances weren’t really my business.”
“But they weren’t his personal finances, were they?”
“I know he and Henry started that foundation and that it brought in millions of dollars every year.I saw a statement once on James’s desk.It was their foundation.They could spend the money however they wanted.”
“Mmm,” Dash said.“That’s not really how nonprofits work if you want to stay out of jail.”
“Like I said, not my problem.I was just the benefactor.”
“Tell me about the blackmail.”
Her brow arched in surprise.“I guess James really was chatty.”
“A man who overdoses on pills doesn’t really have much to lose while he’s waiting to die.”
The lines on her face hardened, and for the first time I could see the age that Botox and fillers couldn’t hide.
“All I know is that the last few months before Henry died James was becoming more and more stressed and tense,” she said.“He was always a big spender, but I never thought much of it because he obviously had it to spend.We took weekend trips together when we could both get away, and I would do volunteer work with the foundation too so I could take trips with him.He’d always add extra days to the end of those trips so we could go somewhere fun and exotic.Then I started to worry about his health.His color wasn’t good and he had shortness of breath every once in a while.I thought he was going to have a stroke or a heart attack.That was the first time I really thought about the consequences of what we were doing.You’re a cop.No one wants to explain to a wife that her husband died in another woman’s bed.I was going to end things.”
The more I listened to Jackie talk, the less I liked her.I don’t care what kind of magical Mata Hari she was.She’d been having an affair with the man for almost three years, had taken extravagant gifts and vacations from him, and then was going to dump him once she’d wrung everything out of him, including his health.
Some people might call that judgmental, but this was the South.Judgment of others was a calling, to be worn like a badge of honor.
“I knew he was hiding something from me, so I confronted him.That’s when he showed me the note and the pictures.”
“There were pictures?”Dash asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said.“Some good ones too.I could have had any man on the planet at twenty-five.You don’t realize what you once had until you turn fifty.”
Every man except Henry, I thought to myself.
“What did the note say?”
“It was like the ones in the movies,” she said, shrugging.“It was mailed to the office and put on his desk like all of his mail.Inside was a note written on regular typing paper and pictures.And someone had written instructions along with an address, time and date.And then there was an amount at the bottom.Five thousand in cash or the pictures would be sent to his wife.”
“Do you remember the address?”
“It was in Charleston somewhere,” she said.“All of them were.”
“How many did he get like that?”
“By the time he told me about it there’d been five different demands for money.Each one increasing by five thousand dollars, and each one had a different address for delivery.”
“What kinds of places were the deliveries?”
“Taped to the underside of a bench.In a flower urn on a headstone at the cemetery.Under a manhole cover.Places like that.It was very I spy.”
“Do you know if all the drop spots were near each other?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.“It’s been twenty-five years.”
“How long was he blackmailed?”Dash asked.
