LeMoyne rolled his eyes. “Even for you, Sherlock. Gretchen went for a type—cool but remotely friendly, the ready rap, the body, the clothes. The clothes were always the tip-off. A girl who shouldn’t have been able to afford five grand worth of couture but wore it well.”
LeMoyne smiled and closed the script. “Not that it helped. If you knew the difference between real class and bullshit. Every one of those girls had a certain . . . commonness. Trailer-park trying to morph into Grace Kelly.”
He crossed his legs. “Beleeeve me, Detective, that takes more than aerobics and a crash course on what fork to use. Still, you can fool most of the people …” To Salander: “She was a hooker, Andy.”
Salander gazed up at Milo.
Milo said, “She did have that in her past, Andy.”
“Oh . . .” Another labored sigh. “I’m tres naive, aren’t I? I guess it was right there in front of me, but I just didn’t want to know— Not that it would’ve mattered. I don’t judge, why should I judge? And I swear the whole time we lived together she never did anything illegal or brought anyone home—I guess when she took those long weekends she was . . . She told me … I can’t be blamed for believing her. Okay, fine, I’m naive and stupid.” Staring at LeMoyne.
LeMoyne shook his head and reopened the script.
Milo said, “What did she tell you about the long weekends, Andy?”Salander squirmed. “I didn’t say anything when you first came around because I wasn’t sure— And it looks like now maybe it didn’t have anything to do with it. Now that you’re telling me she was . . . The thing is, I didn’t want to make things complicated—”
LeMoyne’s laughter cut him off. “You’re babbling, Andrew. They have no clue what the hell you’re talking about.”
Milo edged closer to Salander.
“What, Andy?”
“Her family,” said Salander. “Her real family. She said she was going out to Malibu to reconnect with them. Since she’d learned who her real father was. Tony Duke. I guess she was . . . fantasizing, right? It’s the world’s greatest fantasy, right? Live your life one way and then find out all of a sudden that you’re on a whole different level.”
Milo sat down on the bed.
So did I.
Milo’s notepad was out. His tie was loose. “When and how did she learn about this, Andrew?”
“When was last year,” said Salander. “Maybe a year ago—just before we started rooming together. How is her mother told her. The two of them had started relating again. They hadn’t talked for a long time, and then Jane started making overtures and they began trying to patch things up. Slowly—having lunch once in a while. It was at one of those lunches that Jane told her. They’d finished off a bottle of wine, gotten all girlie-chatty, and Jane just spilled it out. She said she’d met Duke while working as a flight attendant on a jet Duke had chartered—taking some models and a bunch of other people to the big island of Hawaii for a big photo spread and partying. Jane ended up serving Duke personally, and he invited her to spend the layover at some mansion he was renting. And … it happened. Jane and Lo’s dad—the one she thought was her dad, the asshole—were going together but hadn’t decided to get married. When Jane found out she was pregnant, she convinced him to marry her.”
“Talk about your false pretenses,” said Justin LeMoyne. “It really does have story elements.”
“The funny thing,” said Salander, “finding out about Duke caused things to make sense for Lauren. Like why she couldn’t stand her father— the one who raised her. She said she’d never related to her father, she’d always felt like a stranger to him—like there’d been this wall between them. Now she understood it.”
“Jane never told him about Lauren’s true paternity,” I said.
“Lauren said no way, his temper was too bad for that. The marriage broke up anyway, but Jane told Lauren the whole time she was pregnant, she was paranoid he would find out, do something violent. Luckily, Lauren resembled Jane.”