off something like this. You need props and professional lighting with pink gel bulbs to soften the wrinkles.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Sebastian complained.
He wasn’t the only one. “How many women did Roy do this with?”
“Knowingly, only Erin. Unknowingly, ... .” Vera trailed off, mustering a demented smile.
“I think I’ve got you beat on feeling sick,” I said to Sebastian, grim.
“This whole thing is absolutely disgusting.”
“You’re saying that Roy had sex with anyone who would fall for his crap and filmed them without their knowledge,” I volunteered. “You guys made money off the backs of innocent young women.”
Vera’s eyes narrowed. “They were hardly innocent. Each woman who was with him knew that he was married. That didn’t stop a single one of them. They were all trying to trap him, get pregnant, and take his money. They earned what they got.”
“And Tina?” Even though I knew it was wrong to out her, I desperately needed to understand. “She didn’t seduce Roy. She was blackmailed into having sex with him or risk losing her job.”
“Tina ended up with all of my money,” Vera fired back. “She lives in a better house than I do. She has money in the bank, unlike me. That little brat of hers has a future. I couldn’t even have children. She should consider herself lucky.”
“Yes, I’m sure she feels grateful to have been used for your disgusting practice,” I muttered.
“Nobody got hurt,” Barry argued. “It was a quiet operation. None of the women filmed even knew until Erin opened her big mouth.” He glared at the younger woman. “She set all of this in motion. Unfortunately, you’re going to suffer the fallout. There isn’t much I can do about that.
“I knew when you came to the office asking questions that you were going to be a problem,” he continued. “I compared notes with Vera. She said you’d been poking your nose into her business when she was here making arrangements for Roy’s funeral. When Erin called and told us about the conversation the two of you had this afternoon it became apparent we had to silence you.”
“But I didn’t know anything,” I argued. “Until right now, I had no idea what you guys were doing.”
“So you say,” Vera said. “We can’t take the risk. We’re at the end of an odyssey now. We have to make sure that things play out as they were meant to.”
“What odyssey?” I snapped. “You killed Roy. Why? He was the reason you were making money.”
“He was also the reason we lost all the money,” Vera shot back. “Tina was hardly the first woman to come up pregnant by Roy. There were two payouts before her. By the time she got her cut, we had almost nothing left. The nest egg we’d managed to put together with the movies was gone.
“I only agreed to the movies for the money,” she continued. “I figured he owed me after the years of betrayal. He swore up and down that the movies were a great idea. They would keep him busy and allow us to survive. We were surviving, and building, and then this one turned up pregnant.” She extended a finger in Erin’s direction.
“Don’t blame this on me,” Erin hissed. “It would’ve been fine if he didn’t want to add yet another woman to the mix. He was supposed to stop with me.”
This kept getting more convoluted. “So ... you were in love with him?”
Erin snorted. “Oh, please. I already told you that I love Bobby, even though he’s a total loser.”
“He is,” Barry agreed, ruthlessly bad-talking his own son. “He’s as lazy as they come. Erin had a plan to get the money for them to live on. Bobby couldn’t know how she managed to come by it because he never would’ve forgiven her. We had a lie ready for that. He’s not very bright. He would’ve believed she inherited from a dead relative. Everything was going along smoothly and then ... baby.”
Erin pinned him with a dark glare. “It’s not my fault. Roy said he’d had a vasectomy.”
“He told every woman that,” Vera argued. “He just preferred riding bareback. You were supposed to be on birth control.”
“It makes me bloat before my period! I can’t be naked on camera if I’m bloated.”
“Well, now you’re going to be bloated for another six months,” Vera said with satisfaction. “Congratulations.”
I was starting to feel dizzy from the rapid-fire conversation. I needed to redirect the participants. “Why did you kill Roy?”
“Because he lied,”