Silent Partner by Stephen Frey Read Free Book Online Page A

snapped his fingers. “I remember now. And you are the product of an Italian-Irish marriage, correct?”
    Angela bit her lip. “The product.” He made it sound so clinical, as if she’d been born on an assembly line. “That’s right.”
    “It seems like there are so many of those marriages,” Lawrence observed, as if he found the combination odd.
    “It’s the Catholic commonality.”
    “You’re probably right, but I—”
    “And the overpowering sex appeal of the Italian woman,” she continued. “The poor Irish guys don’t stand a chance when they see a woman as beautiful as my mother.”
    Lawrence chuckled. “Yes, I can see how that might happen.” He paused. “You were . . . poor growing up.”
    “We were.” Her gaze dropped into her lap. “We didn’t have many extras, but we had each other. And that was enough.”
    “Your father couldn’t hold a job for very long.”
    “My father was a decent man.”
    “He was an alcoholic.”
    “Mr. Lawrence, I don’t think you have the right to—”
    “You earned your undergraduate degree in political science,” he continued quickly, not giving her a chance to object. “Yes?”
    “Yes.”
    “And I think I remember from my information that you worked two jobs while you were in college. Night shift during the week at a convenience store near the dorms and as a counselor at a school for underprivileged kids on weekends. Very impressive. From what I understand, you’ve carried that solid work ethic with you into the business world. You are proof of what can be achieved with hard work and determination, even without a slew of high-level, blue-blooded connections.”
    Her annual salary at Sumter was forty-eight thousand dollars. Decent, but hardly worth jumping up and down about. So she wasn’t certain she was proof of any great achievement. However, there weren’t many employment options in Richmond, Virginia, and she had to be in Richmond. “The woman on your staff did her research very well, but my world must seem pretty unexciting to a man like you, Mr. Lawrence.”
    “Please, Angela. Call me Jake .”
    “Okay.”
    “Were you ever robbed while you were working at the convenience store?” he wanted to know.
    They were thorough, she thought to herself. They must have found the police report. “Yes. Once.”
    “What happened?”
    She hesitated, replaying the horrible events of that night in her mind. “It’s three in the morning and there’s no one in the store except me and a stock boy. I’m sitting behind the cash register reading a book and he’s in the back. I come to the end of a chapter, look up, and I’m staring down the barrel of a .357 Magnum. On the other side of the gun is a green ski mask. The guy inside the mask grabs the cash from the register, then he forces me into the back behind the cold drinks and ties me up.” She shut her eyes, remembering those awful seconds. “While I’m lying there on the floor with my wrists tied to my ankles, he makes the stock boy, who’s black, get down on his knees and beg for his life, yells at the kid that ‘every nigger ought to beg for his life at least once.’ When the kid refuses, the guy in the ski mask shoots him in the face. Kills him instantly. Then he kneels down next to me, puts the gun to my head, and tells me he’s gonna kill me ‘just for working with a nigger.’ ” She swallowed hard. “He pulls the trigger, but it only clicks. I guess the chamber was empty, or the gun misfired.”
    “Or he was just trying to scare you.”
    “Maybe. But I’ll remember that sound for the rest of my life. And I’ll remember what he said to the kid before he killed him.”
    “Did the police find the guy?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Did you show up for your next shift?”
    “I was there the next night,” she said. “I needed to buy textbooks. I needed to live.” It had been the longest night of her life. She hadn’t taken her eye off the door the entire time.
    Lawrence took another