by Robert Lane
“He’s still alive, right? How bad is he?” Her words came out in a rehearsed tone, as if the questions were neatly lined up and would be delivered in order. I went with the program.
“The worst. The longer he lives, the more innocent people die. Not just frontline intelligence operatives, but their parents and loved ones.”
“OK. And you didn’t tell me.” She gave a minuscule shrug of her shoulders and glanced at me. “Why? Why not tell me the truth? Is it that hard?”
I couldn’t do it, play the rapid-fire Q-and-A game with her. “Do you have any idea,” I said, starting in on a speech for the ages, intent to stir a poet’s grave, “what your voice, your smile—”
She placed her hand lightly on my mouth. “Answer the question.”
“I thought it would have spoiled a time that was never in my dreams, for I knew of no such things to even dream about.”
A little thick—I’ll give you that. But desperate times, right? Let’s see what she—
“Can the crap.” She gave a slight shake of her head and gazed out toward the blinking red channel marker, then at me. “You getting an assignment while we’re on vacation?”
“No choice.”
“Not to receive it, but you did in accepting it.”
“True.”
“Could have come to me, told me about it.”
“Could have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“And say what? ‘By the way, I gotta knock this guy off before toast and tea, hope you don’t mind’?”
She pinned my eyes with hers. “Listen, dingleberry, that is exactly what you should have done. If that is who you are and who we are, then don’t sugarcoat it.”
Dingleberry? Things were looking up for the world’s second-most-important person. Might even get a sleepover out of the evening.
“From now on I’ll—”
“None of that is the issue, Jake.” She spit my name out. “It’s what you said, not what you didn’t say. It’s your words, not your omission of words.”
“The books?” I threw it out, because I always knew.
“Do you know how that makes me feel?”
There’s not a guy on the planet who can field that question from a girl. Twice, when we’d hit rough patches in our relationship, I’d told her she could withdraw back into her books. Once was bad enough. But twice?
A dolphin blew behind me. Probably Nevis casting a vote for Kathleen. A waxing moon, two days from full, had broken the horizon, and its light whitened and sparkled the dark waters of the bay.
I waited for her to rescue me, but it wasn’t going to happen. “No, obviously, I don’t know,” I said in a voice I didn’t recognize. “If I did, I never would have said it.”
“That’s nice, but it doesn’t cut it.”
“You’re really steamed, aren’t you?”
She jerked her head back. “Steamed? No, Jake, I’m not steamed.”
I wished she’d stop using my name. I took the opportunity to pour more wine into my glass and sneak in a gulp. I was tempted to skip the glass and take the bottle straight to my mouth. The sunset sailboat Magic came in from the gulf. A couple took a selfie off the stern: a white flash, and then laughter. Assholes.
“When you say that,” she said, staring ahead at the wide swath of illuminated water, “that I can always go back to my books, it makes me feel…small. Like your life is larger than mine.”
Eleanor Roosevelt’s comment that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent flirted in my head. “You know—”
She raised her hand like the lead rider of the cavalry. “As if,” she turned and looked squarely at me, “I’m an object, and when things get a little dicey, it’s beyond my head. My intellect. My ability to cope. My image in your head of who I am.”
“Kath—”
“Don’t. You killed a cardinal. You show no remorse, but I know it’s there. There had to be a reason he was there. You were set up. I don’t hold you. You want to shield me. I don’t agree, but I get it.
“But underneath, I’m a minor character to you who can’t handle the big issues. That is your image of me that surfaces at the most unguarded moments. That I am a person better off reading about moral ambiguities, because I sure can’t handle them. A condescending attitude, buried so deep you don’t know it’s there, and you have no control when it flares.”
“That’s horseshit.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“I make some regrettable, off-the-cuff remarks, and you extrapolate those into—”
“You repeated the regrettable, off-the-cuff remark. I’m not extrapolating anything. I’m struggling to see things as they are.” She stood up. “I suggest you do the same.”
Don’t be afraid to see what you see.
I rose and put my hands on her shoulders. I wanted to shake her until everything was right; I don’t like it when my world doesn’t work that way. “Tell me what I need to do.” The left side of her face was in full moonlight, and the right was dark. I leaned over and hovered my mouth over the corner of her lips. “Tell me.”
I pulled back, and we locked eyes. “I need some time.” She turned and started walking. My hand slid down her arm and found her left hand. I didn’t let go. She swung her head back to me.
“I won’t let go.”
“I know.”
I let go.
She strolled down the dock. Brief, bold, and gone. That girl owned it.
A sailboat came in from the gulf. It passed under the moon, and for a brief time, I could make out the two people in the cockpit as if they were under a spotlight in a play. The boat slipped back into the dark, and they were gone.
I tried to get her out of my mind and focus. I was chasing two men, not one. I wasn’t gaining ground on either. I had misjudged my adversary, and Donald Lambert had paid the price. Tomorrow I’d check in with Bretta at Words Against People on the chance that Renée Lambert had taken the bait on the message board. I’d push PC and Boyd until something came up. I still hadn’t heard back from Morgan. I wanted to go back to Lambert’s and—
I’m struggling to see things as they are, and I suggest you do the same.
Was my distraction with Kathleen leading to a half-assed effort? Was Donald Lambert’s last act on earth reaching for his bucket of dirty shower water because of my prancing? Either I was in the game or I wasn’t. I picked up Kathleen’s wineglass. She had not touched it. I took a page out of Rondo’s playbook and threw the glass into the bay.
CHAPTER 20
The cardinal didn’t visit me that night. That was no great surprise, as neither did sleep, which was a prerequisite for his nocturnal visits.
I was in the hotel pool at half past five, did my swim and run, and was back at the house by seven. I sat down in the screened porch, picked up a notepad, and collapsed into a deep sleep.
Morgan startled me as he came through the side door, holding his morning can of beer. Except for the morning throwaway, he never drank out of aluminum.
“Wake you?”
“No.”
His bare feet slapped against the floor, and he claimed the chair next to me. I picked up the notepad I’d been studying before I did my version of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. A breeze off the water made the palm fronds rattle like unbalanced, warring ceiling fans.
Morgan said, “Coffee?”
“Didn’t get around to it.”
He hopped up and disappeared into the kitchen. I viewed my pad. April Woltmann. Tracy Leary. Bretta. PC/ Boyd. Lambert’s house. Cardinal Antinori. I scribbled notes by each entry. Morgan returned and placed two cups on the table between us. He lowered the blind a few feet to block the sun’s rays from searing our faces. The day had started at muggy and promised to never look back. I put my pad on the side table.
“Where’s Garrett?” I said.
He took a sip of his beer. “Kitesurfing. Out before dawn.” He put the beer down and gave it a definitive shove. “Was
Kathleen waiting for you last night?”
“She was.”
“You tell her your life is a meaningless pit without her?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Do you know your life’s a meaningless pit without her?”
“Tracy Leary. What did she give us?”
Morgan glanced up as a fifty-foot boat with a yellow hull and a soaring tuna tower created swells just off the end of the dock. Dolphins jumped its wake as if it was burning gas just for them. Impulse rested in her lift a good ten feet off the water. She looked small. Neglected.
He shook his head. “Tracy, Tracy,” he said. “Such a sweet thing. We’re getting together in a few days—”
“Wonderful—I sent you to a redhead?”
“You did.”
When in the vicinity of redheads, Morgan was like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl. His excuse, he had once enlightened me, was that on the bow of his parent’s sailboat (a Morgan, hence his name) was a figurehead of a woman, nude from the waist up, with flaming red hair. Her eyes, ancient mariners believed, scanned the horizon for enemies and angry weather. As his parents sailed into Caribbean sunsets, young Morgan, tethered so as not to tumble off, would straddle the lady while his hands, for stability, cupped her smooth, wooden breasts as the bow rose and fell with the gentle swells. Without realizing what was happening to him, Morgan’s first sexual climax, at a very young age, came from riding the back of a redhead. “Freud,” Morgan had said, “would get no arguments from me.”
“That, however,” he cut me a look, “did not in the least impede my mission. To the contrary.” He took a sip of coffee just as the yellow boat’s rolling wake crashed into the seawall and sent a great white egret aloft. “We had a meaningful discussion.”
“I’m sure you did. Didn’t bother with a cover, did you?”
“Never really planned to.”
“She have anything?”
“Her story was—”
“She know anything about Renée Lambert?”
Morgan eyed me and took another leisurely sip of his coffee. I jotted another note to look into the funeral arrangements of Donald Lambert, although I’d decided no way would Renée show herself after the murder of her father. I’d tossed the picture I took from Lambert’s house into my truck and hadn’t looked at it. I made another note on the pad. I drew a stick figure with a gun in its hand, but the gun looked like a banana.
“Renée,” he started in, and my phone rang. PC. I hit the button, said, “Call you right back,” and disconnected before he had a chance to reply. “You were saying?”
“She knows Renée. Said Renée joined the group after the suicide of her mother. Her mother got verbal abuse from the most unexpected source and in the most unexpected manner. She didn’t spend a lot of time with WAP but wanted to be on the panel at the Valencia so she could drop in on her dad.”
“Did she?”
“What?”
“Drop in on her dad.”
“Didn’t say one way or the other.”
“What was the unexpected source and manner?”
“I questioned her on that. She said Renée didn’t elaborate, nor did she press.”
“Anything about the man she was with that evening?”
Hadley III landed on his lap. “Tracy and Renée met in the ladies’ room toward the evening’s conclusion. A chance encounter. Tracy said Renée was upset and had been crying.”
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, as if the intensity of my body language coupled with the sincerity of the request would in some manner contribute to a satisfactory response. “Tell me she got something out of her.”
“Tracy asked if she was having boy problems. She—that is, Renée—blurted out, ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ Tracy had seen Renée with the man somewhere around the bar area.”
I thought of Rondo’s statement that he had seen them both at the bar. Same with Adam. Morgan hadn’t given me anything new.
He mimicked my position, which sent Hadley III sprawling to the floor and darting out of the room. “Renée told Tracy that she’d made a terrible mistake, a ‘judgment’ she called it, and that both her boyfriend and his friend were professional killers, and that if—”
“She told this to some woman she barely knew while they powdered noses?”
“Washing hands.”
“Pardon?”
“Side-by-side sinks, and I never said they barely knew each other. I said they met that evening by a chance encounter.”
“Correct.”
“They knew each other from a previous meeting and had shared several dinners together. In the ladies’ room, Renée just spilled. Tracy said she talked faster than the water came out of the spigot, like she broke and just couldn’t keep it in anymore.”
I stood up. “What else?”
“This.” He arched his back, reached into his pocket, and handed me a bar napkin. “Renée took a pen out of her purse, jotted this, and handed it to Tracy. When she gave it to her, she said, ‘He knew.’”
“Who—”
“Flip it over.”
Antinori’s name was written on top of Paretsky’s. The napkin was partially torn at the letter A.
“What else did she say?” I asked, without lifting my eyes from the napkin.
“According to Tracy, two other ladies came in, and Renée went mum. On the way out the door, Renée said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, these men are connected. Paretsky is doing Antinori a favor, and Antinori knows what’s coming.’ Something like that. She couldn’t recall the precise words. Tracy lost track of her after that.”
“Tracy up to speed? She realize that Antinori’s dead and in the news?”
“Tracy,” Morgan leaned back, “never heard of Antinori, nor did I tell her of his recent demise. She assumed that Renée’s note referred to boyfriend issues. She took it totally out of context.”
I glanced again at the napkin. “The hell I’m supposed to do with this?” I tried to hand it back to Morgan, who waved it off. I placed it on the table between us. “She question her? Talk to her later?”
“Not that evening—lost track of her. In the following days, Tracy tried to call Renée but said she couldn’t get hold of her.”
Although it was news, it wasn’t. I’d known since that morning in London that the cardinal wanted me to kill him. Assisted suicide. I’d been in denial, telling myself that I didn’t have the luxury of questioning the man. And now a napkin on which Renée had scribbled his name. I couldn’t understand the ménage à trois of Giovanni Antinori, Alexander Paretsky, and Renée Lambert.
What if I never could?
Morgan took Impulse to the marina around the corner for a pair of new batteries. He asked before he left if I needed him for anything. I wished I could have given him an affirmative answer, but I was piling up questions faster than I was closing ground on Paretsky.
I worked my list. Garrett said Woltmann was a bust. Tracy Leary gave me a napkin bearing the name of the cardinal I had killed. Rondo spun a sad tale and raised the distinct possibility that Renée had a flash drive that belonged to Paretsky. That got a couple of stars next to it on my pad. I called Bretta at WAP and left a voice mail. I wanted to know if Renée, like a spy coming in from the cold, had responded to my message.
I’d already dismissed funeral arrangements for Donald Lambert as a dead end. If Renée was on the lam and in danger, assuming she was still alive, no way would she pop up for her father’s funeral. A few phone calls confirmed my theory. No one had claimed the body of Donald Lambert, nor were they able to contact his daughter.
PC called again.
“I forgot,” I answered. “What do you have?”
“We’re at Riptides.”
I thought of just drilling him on the phone but decided to meet them and then hit Sea Breeze for breakfast. “Be there in five.” I climbed in my truck and thought of Lambert’s picture of himself and his wife that I’d tossed in the backseat. I’d give it a look after I
talked with PC.
PC and Boyd were at the same high table as last time. Their shoes were on the sand-dusted plank floor beneath them. The playlist was country, but as I joined them, it changed, midsong, from Willie to classic rock.
A waitress—they were starting to look annoying—inquired, while smacking gum, if I wanted anything. I told her I was fine. She pressed her belly on the table. “You sure?”
“Positive.”
She popped her gum and spun around.
PC, munching on a cheese bagel he had brought with him, explained that several people mentioned noticing a boat, but seeing a fishing boat on the canal was as common as seeing a bird in the air. No one reported a stolen boat.
“The guy across the canal who owns Knotty Girl, he see anything?”
“No. He was out of town for a few days. Just got back.” He picked up his bagel but didn’t bring it to his mouth. “But all’s not lost. We ran smack into Slammin’ Tammy.”
“Slammin’ Tammy?”
“Slammin’ Tammy Callahan. Longest drive on the WPGA tour in 1981. Know how we know that?” He took a bite.
I waited, but either he wasn’t going to let me off the hook or the information wasn’t worth delaying a bagel bite for. “Tell me.”
Boyd put down his beer and broke in. “She unloaded on us two seconds after we rang the doorbell, showed us the plaque, the picture of her—”
“Two doors down,” PC said, cutting him off. “Broadcast her fifteen minutes of fame before you could catch your breath, but after that not a bad lady. Knows all, hears all, even fed us. Told Boyd he needed a haircut.”
“It is about time.” I checked my watch. Garrett had texted me and was due back any moment, and I wanted to meet with him. I leaned on the table, and it rocked away from me. “You didn’t bring me down here to tell me about the longest women’s drive of 1981.”
“You said that she, Renée, hadn’t been around for two months, right?”
“Six months. Lambert heard from her around two weeks ago, but he insisted that he hadn’t seen his daughter for close to half a year. I think he lied. Tell me I’m right.” Not only had recent events led me to that conclusion, but, as I recalled from my initial conversation with Lambert, he had broken eye contact and looked down.