There was no answer.
Ursula hurried down the stairs, one hand on the banister, the other holding the backpack over her shoulder, yielding to sobs.
Adrian slammed the office door shut and punched a phone number.
“Danny, where are you?”
“Xander’s penthouse.” He hadn’t been sleeping.
“Spread your troops a little. Send some men back to Villa Leona.”
“Why?”
“It just occurred to me—maybe the oldest brother is not in such danger after all.”
8
Early the next morning, Adrian Kimrean shot the 1969 Camaro back across the Gran South desert, aiming at the viscous pink lava blob of a rising sun ahead—foot grazing the gas pedal, fingers drumming on the steering wheel, train of thoughts traveling way faster than the muscle car. He had not slept, eaten, or drunk since the previous day, nor did he feel an urge to change any of that.
The Prospero Hotel on Palm Avenue was one of many steel-and-glass colossi erected in downtown San Carnal as towering mirrors for the self-contemplation of the city in its evil stepmother magnificence. Additionally, when the sun was low, the outer mirrors served to refract the orange sands into the city, thus imbuing it with the gold-colored light that Hollywood cinematographers believe to be a permanent feature of ancient Greece and present-day Florida. Boasting five stars and three different kinds of salmon in its breakfast buffet, the hotel was owned by one of many companies traceable to the Lyon family, and for that reason Xander Lyon had his usual residence in the penthouse suite—an arrangement that would constitute an exemplary punishment for most hotel owners in the world, but in a few cases it’s a treat. The AC never went above 68ºF, rooms never went below $500, concierges and bellhops bowed low enough to snog the carpets, and a myriad of employees worked 24/7 to spare the exclusive clientele any contact with people of such indecisive complexion, careless attire, and impetuous body odor as A. Z. Kimrean.
Which is why Adrian chose to sit at a window table in the café across the street, where he had a clear view of the front marquee. Sunlight blasted off the hotel’s façade, making the whole building glow like a mythical sword stabbed into a rock.
Danny Mojave joined him minutes later, wearing fresh black clothes and one-day-old circles around his eyes. He skipped the greetings.
“I don’t have much time; we’re planning security for Frankie’s funeral. Xander will have a personal escort of ten in three cars. He’ll be riding in the Jaguar with bulletproof glass.” He addressed an incoming waitress before she could step within earshot of them. “Coffee, please.”
Adrian was about to speak when he noticed that the waitress was not moving.
“I’m fine, thanks,” he shooed her away.
She left; Adrian was now noticing Danny’s incredulous stare.
“Zooey’s asleep,” he explained. “By the way—good thing she was, because last night the kid who knows too much sneaked out of Villa Leona and came knocking at my door, doing her Punky Brewster routine.”
“Ursula went to San Francisco?”
“Yes! So please congratulate the guards, the dogs, and everyone at home base; they’re doing a brilliant job looking after her.”
“Well, it was a smart move,” Danny reasoned, after some consideration. “There’s a fair chance she becomes a target too; maybe she was safer with you. Where is she now?”
“Hotel on Columbus Ave. I guess. Probably. I gave her a check; I don’t think they’d let her cash it in anywhere else.”
“Oh, cool! Kudos, Mrs. Doubtfire, thank God you are looking after her!”
“Well, I’m not the one in charge of security for the Lyon family!” Adrian comebacked. “And since we returned to the subject, why the escort and all the extra padding for Xander at the funeral? It was four days between Mikey and Frankie. Wouldn’t you expect at least the same lapse before Xander?”
“I thought so too, but you said the killer is not a planner,” Danny explained. “An improviser would have trouble sneaking into the thirty-seventh floor, but he knows of at least one occasion when the elder brother will leave the castle: the middle brother’s burial.”
Adrian nodded, shyly at first, like one of those slow claps in high school movies. “Nice. We may make a detective out of you yet.”
Danny correctly interpreted that as a compliment. He sighed, seemed to relax a notch.
“It’s a shame you’re completely wrong,” Adrian resumed. “Xander is in no danger.”
The waitress poured the coffee without Danny or Kimrean acknowledging her existence and left them alone again—two sketchy outlines burned against the glowing window.
“No danger?” Danny complained. “You said after the youngest and the middle brother, the next victim would be the eldest brother. ‘Brothers Grimm 101,’ you said.”
“I know, wrong reference. A hostile takeover is white-collar business; it calls for a highbrow model, not common folktales. Something classic—Aeschylus or Shakespeare. Characters with dark sentiments and methodical thinking.”
“So you know who the killer is?”
Adrian crossed his legs and stole a lump of sugar. “What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?”
Danny quickly reloaded his high school classical history curriculum.
“Man,” he answered. “Yeah, a man, I know; I never considered the killer would be a panda. No, wait. Not any man: the third leg is a blind man’s cane. The blind man is the guy who solved the riddle without noticing it was about him. Oedipus.” (Frowns.) “But…Oedipus? Who…? Wait, Xander?”
Kimrean popped the sugar lump in his mouth. “Good boy.”
“Wait, Xander is going to kill his father and marry his mother?”
“Stepmother. One of the drawbacks of marrying someone half your age—suddenly your son starts carrying a saucy pic of Mom in his wallet.”
Danny recalled the picture gaffe with Zooey and Xander the day before. “But he called her ‘my mother’; how did you know—”
“I know Miss Guatemala is not a blonde. So, hi, Elizabeth Omahira, the British merchant attorney in the Cayman Islands.”
“Wait, wait a minute,” Danny pleaded. “So Xander just killed his two brothers. In person.”
Adrian waived his chance to object, then calmly elaborated: “Focus on the m.o.: someone’s dismembering the cartel with surgical precision. He avoids the guards; if he can’t avoid them, he takes them out cleanly. Thus far, that could be a hit man. But when it comes to the real targets, the Lyon brothers, he shows cruelty. He engages in fistfights. There’s only one person who can inspire that much hatred: a sibling.”
Danny sat on that for a while, rubbing his week-old stubble.
“No way,” he determined. “Xander and Mikey never got along. They used to fight a lot, I’ll give you that. But breaking into your father’s house in the middle of the night to beat your brother to death? That’s psychotic.”
“Maybe. It’s also the mentality of a young Lyon on the rise. Think the ’74 Takeover. It’s the same cold, ultraviolent streak; it’s in his blood. All he needed was a trigger.”
“What’s the trigger?” Danny asked, and answered himself in the same paragraph: “The shoot-out with the Red Mums.”
“The shoot-out at the diner is the first cog, the unmoved mover; the real trigger comes later. Mikey’s blunder with the Red Mums causes a crisis. Xander, who was ‘abroad attending some meetings,’ has to rush back stateside. By the way, when you said he was ‘abroad attending some meetings,’ you could have just said ‘in the Caymans’; I heard Mikey mentioning it in the FBI tape. So ‘attending some meetings’ was a euphemism for ‘banging my mistress,’ see? Well, more like ‘banging my stepmilf.’ ” He reread that line, omitting Danny’s consternation, then appended: “In retrospect, I’d probably hide that under a
euphemism too. Anyway, Xander flies back overnight to deal with the aftermath, all the while thinking why is his brother such a douche, and why does he have to split the empire with him. Let that stew for a few hours, top it with an airline breakfast, and it’s a matter of time before he snaps.”
“Snaps, kills his brother, and blames it on the yakuza? Quite meticulous for a spur of the moment.”
“Not really, it’s the assassin’s trademark: effective attacks despite sloppy preparations. That’s why the chrysanthemum is not a chrysanthemum.”
He pointed at the window. A delivery van had stopped in front of the hotel; a boy in green overalls was unloading a wreath from the back while a valet in a double-breasted overcoat pointed him toward the reception.
“Chrysanthemums are the emperor’s flower in Japan; they stand for power,” Adrian recited casually. “Oddly enough, in Europe they are associated with death; they are mostly used in funeral arrangements. That’s the view that Hispanics brought to the Americas. For other people, they don’t carry that stigma, but still, there’s one place where you don’t usually find them.”
“Hospitals,” Danny guessed. “It would send the wrong message.” He paused, looked back over that sentence, then slapped his own leg. “The hospital! Hilfiger died in the ER the night of the shooting.”
“Everything points at the hospital,” Adrian confirmed. “The footprints in Villa Leona contained chlorophenol, a disinfectant agent used in surgery rooms.”
“Xander had to go to the hospital morgue to get Hilfiger’s items,” Danny recalled.
“And that’s the trigger, that’s when he comes up with the idea: he can try and prevent a war, or he can take out Mikey and chalk it up to the war.”
“He walks by the flower shop on his way out of the hospital, orders a red chrysanthemum,” Danny followed. “But they don’t have any, so he takes any red flower.”
“And that night he goes to Villa Leona.”
“He knows the north side is the weakest point.”
“And the dogs wouldn’t snitch on him.”
“But he doesn’t bring a gun.”
“Oh, he does,” Adrian countered. “But that handcannon he was toting around the other night? That’s a customized Taurus BA-44: made in Brazil, uses very specific ammunition. It’s a signature gun; he knows he can’t use it against his own brother. Maybe he plans to knife him; maybe he knows about the Beretta Mikey keeps in the pool house and plans to use that. In either case, Mikey catches him coming in through the window.”
“He’s the right height.”
“And the right shoe size: a little too long for his height. Plus Latino would have been my second option after Asian. And Native Alaskan my third, but that’s uncommon.”
“God, you’re obsessed with race.”
“Yes, and magical people who don’t see race somehow never win at Who Is Who? Anyway, he climbs inside; Mikey catches him, says, ‘You’; a fight ensues. And as in any fraternal fight, it all pours out: decades of grueling resentment, jealousy, ‘I wish you’d never been born.’ Mikey brings in the gun; he loses it; Xander takes him down…Mikey utters, ‘Why.’ Xander, shivering with rage, shows him why, then executes him.”
He helped himself to another sugar treat. Danny sorted out his thoughts, not fully convinced.
“And the why is…what?” he inquired. “The empire was virtually his already. The will splits it three ways, but Xander was to be the new boss, Frankie didn’t care, and Mikey was a lieutenant; nobody argued with that.”
“It’s not about who’s in the will. It’s about who isn’t.”
“Omahira,” Danny guessed. “So when Mikey asks why, he shows him the stepmother’s picture.”
“The mistress’s,” Adrian corrected. “Mikey was a textbook spoiled youngest; to him, Miss Guatemala was the Virgin Mary, and Omahira is the home-wrecker. After the Lyon dies, if she marries Xander, she’ll get a share of the empire, and Mikey will not stand for that. Xander knows it. So might as well get rid of him now.”
“Why kill Frankie then? If Xander and Mikey had gone to war over their father’s legacy, Frankie would’ve stayed out of it.”
“I know, he’s ambivalent. What tipped the balance was bringing me in. Since I’m here to investigate Mikey’s murder, Xander fears the flower message wasn’t clear enough. So he kills Frankie to underscore the message. Goes into the club, shoots every eyewitness, confronts Frankie, tells him how much he despises him just to gather the courage, then shoots him. Another third of the empire, another red flower, and a clear message: ‘Yes, we’re at war.’ ”
The waitress approached with a fresh coffeepot, offering a refill. Adrian shook his head no while Danny held his face in his hands, fingers buried in rapidly graying curls, seriously considering throwing up in his mug. He needed a shower and a joint. Nothing a police detective isn’t entitled to after eighteen months undercover as a drug cartel’s factotum, really.
He returned from his thoughts the way surviving soldiers used to return from Vietnam.
“What am I supposed to do now, Ade?”
“I take checks,” Kimrean said. He was manspread all over his seat, one leg under Danny’s chair, the other one threatening to make the waitress trip. “You guys hired me to take the blame off the yakuza. I just did.”
“I’m sure the Lyon will be happy to know it was actually his oldest, who incidentally is also banging his wife.”
“Do you want me to break it to him?”
Danny met Adrian’s trademark peaceful, focused, indifference-born stare.
“I think I’m very good at delivering news,” the P.I. said.
“You didn’t prove it happened as you say.”
“Do I have to?” he moaned like a five-year-old. “It’s not like we’re taking the case to court.”
“The killer took a bullet in the club; Frankie’s bodyguard managed to shoot him in the corridor,” Danny recalled. “Xander seemed okay when he joined us later.”
“A flesh wound. And it took me ninety minutes to drive there—enough for him to patch himself up.”
“He still must be patched up now.”
“Sure. Can you go and ask him to lift his shirt for a sneak peek? Do you boys have that kind of relationship?”
“No, but I just left him in the penthouse having breakfast and a shower.”
“Marc Anthony is in the shower?” Kimrean cried, slamming both hands on the table. “To the Oglemobile!”
Several customers in neighboring booths joined Danny in an admonishing scowl at that reaction.
“I think Zooey is waking up.”
“Yup,” Adrian confirmed, suddenly gloomy. “Come on, let’s wrap this up before she’s fully awake.”
* * *
—
They jaywalked to the hotel, its glass façade still incandescent under the sun that was rapidly cornering the last puddles of rusty rainwater into the waning shady spots. A temperature drop akin to that experienced at dusk on Mercury welcomed them as they emerged from the revolving doors, Danny in institutional mobster black, Kimrean braving the cold in their tank top and waistcoat, marching side by side through the main lobby.
“Suppose Xander has a fresh wound on his side,” Danny weather-talked. “What then?”
“You could tell Lyon Sr., if you trust he won’t bite the messenger’s head off.”
“I don’t, but it might help stop a war.”
“Xander will stop the war himself; he’ll talk to the yakuza, save the alliance, and make his dad proud. Or he may go full Oedipus and kill his dad.”
“You would make a terrifying villain.”
“I know. I couldn’t live with the voice of my conscience, though. There’s more than enough voices in here.”
At the reception desk, the wreath they had seen arriving had blended into a vast collect
ion of flower arrangements. Frankie being the face of the Lyons’ public businesses, it was only to be expected that he would get the most sympathies from the family’s influential connections. One of the garlands bore a ribbon with the name Villahermosa—a detail that almost made Adrian chuckle.
An overwhelmed receptionist explained to Danny, “They keep coming, but you ordered us not to send anyone upstairs.”
“We’ll take them with us to the church, thank you.” He turned to Adrian. “Maybe I should go upstairs by myself. I’ll call the front desk when I find out.”
“Right. Also, Zooey doesn’t need the excitement,” Kimrean said, green eye deviating from the flowers to the girls in reception. Danny left them and headed for the elevators.
Kimrean turned their back to the desk and scanned the lobby, crawling with businessmen hurrying to random convention events between infidelities and a few tourists who’d been stranded after missing a connecting flight. Xander’s men were easy enough to spot—one in the sitting area by the door, one in the chill-out bar, one by the express elevators. They probably weren’t even trying to go unnoticed. Out of the corner of their green eye, Kimrean glanced at the receptionist behind them, sorting some envelopes. She noticed, smiled again, almost successfully hiding her surprise at the mismatched eyes, then tried to scurry out of their view behind a bunch of lilies.
And then Adrian noticed the crack.
And watched as this crack slithered across the floor and between his legs, splitting branches, spreading over the lobby, shattering his field of vision, and bringing his whole theory down.
He twirled out of Zooey’s flirting posture, lurched to the bunch of lilies. There was no ribbon or card to it. But he’d spotted it, among the ghostly crowd of white lily heads, like a little hooded girl standing against a stream of snowed-on hats: a red rose.
Erithra lunis. The red moon.
“Oh shit.”
The receptionist meerkated at the cursing; Adrian interrogated her: “Who sent these flowers?”
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