Naked Came the Phoenix

by Marcia Talley

  Douglas tightened the grip on his wife’s hand, but Caroline was beyond sorrow. The daughter of a smiling psychopath, she said to herself. That is what I am. Maybe she would feel sorrow later, when the numbness had passed, sorrow and guilt and revulsion against the blood that moved through her veins.

  Emilio—hard to think of him as that other name—was going on, but Caroline heard only a part of it. Peddling influence, setting up a distribution network for their cocaine operation, and blackmail, that pool ever widening: business as usual for Claudia, only more so. Then he was saying something about a key.

  ″—on Ondine’s body. Hilda obviously didn’t know that Ondine had the thing, or she’d have retrieved it, but the key seems to have passed through several hands before the girl got it. Howard Fondulac’s fingerprints were on it, so Ondine may have been given it by him, or maybe she found it when she was trying to get him untangled from the Pilates machine.

  “I doubt we’ll ever be certain. I do know that Ondine told David she would see him in his cabin tonight. I assume she would have given him the key then, to give to Lauren, whom Ondine did not wish to be seen with too often. Ondine knew that Lauren was looking for the key to a safe and thought this might be it; she had no way of knowing that David had an interest in the contents of that safe as well.”

  “But did she know?” Caroline interrupted. “Did Ondine know that her mother was … ?”

  “Lauren told her the first night. They pretended to be strangers whenever there was a chance someone might overhear, but, yes, she knew where she came from.”

  That was who she’d seen with the model, Caroline realized, on the other side of the moonlit lake. Laughing or sobbing—or, more likely, both. Which also meant that if Lauren Sullivan was Hilda Finch’s other, illegitimate daughter, Caroline had spent the first evening here in friendly conversation with her own niece. Those unexpected sparks of sympathy she’d felt for the achingly pretty younger woman were facilitated by blood ties. A spasm of grief took her, and she missed Emilio’s next words, until:

  “—Finch looks to me a fairly pure example of a sociopathic personality. Without a conscience, her concern for others a learned facade, her only interests self-serving. I haven’t had a chance to interview her fully, of course, but I did ask her if she knew she’d killed her granddaughter in Ondine. She did not. There seems to have been a lot that Claudia kept from her silent partner—it was, as I said, more a triumvirate than a partnership. Claudia and Raoul, with the newcomer Hilda Finch anonymous behind the lawyer; all three jostling for power, attempting blackmail to keep the others under control, making temporary alliances against the third, aiming for domination. It is the reason a number of you were brought here, so that Claudia could assemble her victims in a bid for power against the others. Once Hilda Finch revealed herself, warfare was open—with knowledge as the weapon. One of them would feed another information to undermine the third. Hilda, for example, told Raoul about a secret compartment in Mrs. Blessing’s cello case; Claudia told Hilda about Raoul’s felony record. Raoul may have told Hilda that Claudia had a safe, or Hilda may have figured it out on her own. In either case, Hilda did not know where it was at first, nor did she have the key. In the case of Ondine, it is possible that Claudia herself didn’t know the identity of Ondine’s mother, since she had not been involved in that adoption procedure. At any rate, Hilda’s reaction, when I told her, was chiefly exasperation: She’d been overjoyed to discover that Lauren was hers, not from any maternal urge but because it would be a coup for the spa.”

  (Vince elbowed his assistant. “I toldja, didn’t I? Anyone that didn’t care about her own daughter had to be dangerous?” Mike LeMat nodded.)

  “Her chief regret for Ondine’s death was, I quote, ‘Just imagine what I could have done with this place if I’d had both of them.’”

  Caroline couldn’t even wince. She’d known it was coming, had known since hearing of Hilda’s hidden partnership with Claudia that her mother was not just impossible, she was downright evil. Looking back, Hilda must have known that Douglas was being blackmailed, and by what means, yet she had made no move to tell him the truth, to free him from the appalling images in his mind, to free Caroline to be happy in her marriage once again. Caroline studied her hands, feeling every eye in the room on her, the daughter, born to and raised by a creature like that. Only from Douglas did she feel empathy—Douglas and, oddly enough, King David. She straightened her spine and lifted her eyes to meet the tattooed gaze squarely: She did not want this disturbing man’s pity.

  “The key Ondine found opened one of Claudia’s two safes. The one it fit was cleverly hidden inside a storage cupboard in the corner of the conference room Detective Toscana has been using. The other, the reason Claudia de Vries was in the bathhouse at that hour of the night, was in a very clever compartment beneath one of the mud baths. That safe had a combination lock. When we emptied the mud bath, we found the keys to the bathhouse door—you may have seen how heavily locked she kept that building—but not the safe key. That is because Claudia’s killer knew there was a safe and recognized the key for what it was. However, either the killer knew as well that the safe was in the conference room and therefore inaccessible until the police cleared out, or else made the mistake of murdering Claudia before finding out where the safe was. Hanging onto the key would have been dangerous—if the police did a complete search of the grounds and found it, they’d know it had something to do with Claudia’s death—so the killer gave it to Howard Fondulac. He was a drunk, but he wasn’t stupid; he knew that he was being set up to take the fall and in fact told Detective Toscana as much, but he couldn’t very well reveal the details without giving away his own illegal activities.

  “The only person who fits into this combination of inside knowledge and incomplete details is Hilda Finch. She gave Howard the key, knowing that eventually she could get the location of the safe out of Raoul, but in the end, Raoul did not know his wife had a second safe. The one in the conference room did contain a great deal of moderately secret material, but it was primarily a decoy. The bathhouse safe was where Claudia kept her real treasures—blackmail evidence and correspondence going back more than twenty years: letters, bank statements, blood tests, records of drunk-driving and prostitution arrests for dozens of people. And by the way, the material in both has been seized, but it will remain confidential. You have my word on that, any of you who might be concerned.”

  Phyllis Talmadge made a small noise and slumped into her chair, causing those around her to speculate what sort of document bearing her name might be inside one of those safes.

  “Anybody got a cigarette?” Phyllis asked the room at large. When no one reached for a pack, she sighed gustily. “You know, until three days ago, I hadn’t smoked in nearly twenty years. How’s that for a health spa?”

  (So much for the psychic’s testimony that she’d smelled cigarettes before she was conked and thrown in the lake, Vince thought grumpily, leaving his packet firmly in his pocket. She’d been sucking mints to hide not booze but smokes.)

  “So,” Emilio was finishing up, “you understand why I have told you rather more than I would normally have done, by means of asking you to keep the gossip to a minimum. The press outside does not know of the familial links between several of the famous individuals here, and although the right to privacy is generally regarded in this country as a mild jest, I appeal to you to grant it to those who have already suffered enough. I leave it to your sense of honor. Of course,” he added, his voice and eyes going hard as diamonds, “I need hardly add that if I am aware of a leak originating in this room, the DEA will be most attentive to the individual involved, for a long, long time. Thank you for your time, and now I think Detective Toscana will need to take yet another set of statements from a number of you.”

  Close on to midnight, there was no one else in the swimming pool. When Caroline had first stood with that once again pristine stretch of blue water at her feet she had nearly drawn back: It would be a l
ong time before she was entirely comfortable with solitude, and the locked door to the ominous mud room still bore the police seal. But Douglas offered to stay with her, to float around quietly at the other side of the pool. That compromise reassured her, and the strong, steady laps she had swum in the silky water soothed her further. Soon, very soon, she would have to approach Doug with the offer to free him from marriage to a psychopath’s daughter—ironic, really, considering his own efforts in practically the same cause. But not now, not here; it was more than time for a small fraction of the relaxation and ease she had come here to find.

  When the three figures at the far end of the echoing, chlorinescented room caught her eye, she was startled, but not badly so, and although she glanced to the side to make certain that Douglas was there (and he was, standing protectively upright in the hipdeep water), she put her head down and continued her measured strokes to the end, where she surfaced to prop her arms on the rim of the pool.

  “We need to talk with you, Caroline.” It was, strangely, King David who spoke, not the beautiful DEA agent whom she had decided had to be the rock star’s lover. She looked from Emilio to Lauren Sullivan, then dropped back underwater to swim to the side and pull herself out. Retrieving her terry cloth robe from the bench, she belted it on and swept her wet hair back from her face.

  “About what?” About how devastating it was to have a mother who murdered and blackmailed and God knew what else without a qualm? About the link she had to this stunning red-haired woman before her, a link neither of them could mention without drawing forth the deep shame of being birthed by Hilda Finch? About how miserable and lost she felt, with only Douglas left to her? And how being faced with the larger-than-life trio of a seven-figure actress, a drop-dead-gorgeous bodybuilder, and a six-foot-four rock singer with black and green hair, tattooed eyes, and more sheer animal magnetism than Mick Jagger (all three of them, moreover, fully dressed, and in clothing so expensive it showed no sign of the long day behind them) made her feel like a low-rent cockroach? The three of them presented a united front, linked together in a bond that Caroline did not fully understand and felt that she personally would never again know. She faced them with her chin up. “You want to talk to me about what?”

  The tattooed eyes gave a quick sideways glance to where Douglas stood. Doug Blessing, whose own looks and charisma faded in their presence as a star in daylight. She held out one hand to her husband, her eyes defiantly on those of the rocker, who nodded and waited until Douglas had sloshed from the pool and joined them.

  “Let’s sit down,” the singer suggested. They sat, on two facing benches. His words, though spoken in a low voice, reverberated back from the mosaic tile scenes that lined the room, and as the blue water grew still again, the universe seemed to contract to where the five of them sat.

  Caroline could not bear it. She seized the initiative and spoke first. “If you’re here to tell me that Lauren Sullivan is my half sister, I already know it. And Lauren,” she went on, forcing herself to meet that world-famous gaze, “I promise never to tell a soul that my mother had anything to do with you. I’d probably deny her myself, if I could. Is that all you wanted?”

  “No,” said the actress, her sultry voice ripe with some intense but unidentifiable emotion. “Dad, do you want to … ?”

  She was, Caroline saw in disbelief, speaking to King David, who stirred and reached into a pocket.

  “‘Dad!’ Did you call him—but … you told me you’re, what? Forty-four?” Caroline objected, staring incredulously at the rock star. Even for someone as wild as King David, fathering a child at the age of, what? seven or eight? was a bit hard to believe.

  He laughed, checked the two photographs he had taken from his pocket, and handed one of them to Caroline. “Detective Toscana found these on Hilda Finch when he arrested her.”

  Caroline dried her fingers on her robe and took the faded snapshot by its white-bordered corner. It showed a red-haired young man, in profile. She turned it over and read, in a girl’s handwriting, “Tad Blake.” “Okay,” she said, waiting for the explanation.

  “Hold it up,” the singer ordered, and when she had done so he got to his feet and turned his head to give her the side of his face.

  “Christ!” exclaimed Douglas, who saw it at the same instant: The picture showed the baddest boy of heavy metal music as a clean-cut, all-American college kid, before tattoos, heroin, and decades of late nights in smoke-filled rooms.

  The singer looked down at Caroline, the lightning bolts crinkling in amusement. “Yeah, that’s me all right. I dropped out a couple months after that was taken, went to San Francisco to become, if you can dig it, a folk singer. Instead of that, I discovered drugs. I woke up five years later, cleaned up my act a little bit, and discovered hard rock. But can you imagine somebody called Tad Blake eating live bats on stage? The name would be fine for a folk singer, I guess, but it just didn’t have the right ring for where I wanted to go. So I changed it, got the tattoos to change my looks and my image, traded my gold-rimmed glasses for contact lenses, lied about my age—remember, these were still the days when we didn’t really trust anyone over thirty. I wrote ‘King’s Revenge’ in 1972, it went platinum, and I haven’t been off the charts since. And now everyone just assumes that I’m in such lousy shape for my age because of all the years of drugs and parties. I don’t have to let on about the vegetarianism and health spas.”

  “Tad Blake?” Caroline said, looking at the red-haired youth in wonder. Douglas nudged her elbow; she looked up to see a second photo being held out to her. She took it and nearly fell backward off the bench: Tad again, this time looking straight at the camera, his arms around a small, trim girl: Hilda Finch.

  Caroline gaped at the man across from her, then at Lauren. “Dad,” indeed; Lauren’s resemblance to the boy in the picture was unmistakable. She covered her mouth to stifle a laugh, a slightly hysterical sound that caused the other four to eye her with concern. “Sorry,” she gasped. “I was just thinking what Douglas’s constituency would do if they found out that their congressman’s wife was related, even secondhand, to King David.”

  “They wouldn’t know whether to impeach me or ask for your autograph,” Douglas replied, sounding rather uneasy at the prospect.

  “You’d sure as hell dominate the heavy metal vote,” the rock star reassured him, the sheepish grin on his middle-aged features eerily like that on the snapshot. “But hang on, it gets even weirder. You’re right saying you’re Lauren’s half sister, but it’s not through Hilda Finch that you’re related.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Caroline’s mind seemed to slip gears a fraction, then spin wildly. Her voice climbed higher. “Of course we’re related through Mother, who else is—″

  She broke off as King David and Lauren Sullivan, after a quick exchange of glances, rose as one and came to sit on the bench next to her. Without a word, Lauren lifted her right hand into the air and held it out, the palm toward Emilio. On the other side of her, the singer did the same, his thumb brushing her little finger.

  “Now you,” Lauren told Caroline. “No, the right hand.”

  Three hands held up to the air, the precise way she’d done that afternoon with Douglas. Only, where that comparison had denied the similarity, these three hands clearly differed only in size and muscular development: long nail bed, strong nails, thumbs without a hint of backward curve, prominent knuckles, an oddly long index finger, and a slightly outward turn to the smallest finger. King David’s hand was the biggest, of course, and Caroline’s fingers reflected long hours working the bow of her cello, but …

  “Ondine’s were just the same,” Lauren said sadly.

  “Would you look at that.” It was Douglas, speaking Caroline’s wonder.

  Now Emilio spoke up, for the first time. “When Hilda got to her thirtieth birthday and had never been pregnant again, she decided she needed a child. I gather by the notes in Claudia’s safe that your father was tested and judged not to be the pr
oblem. Eventually it was determined to be the result of some long-ago infection, perhaps just after Lauren was born, blocking her tubes. Surgery might have helped, but instead she went looking for Claudia de Vries, thinking that if her old college roommate had been able to get rid of one child, surely she could lay hands on another.

  “As it turned out, she was right. Claudia never forgot an old friend, never lost track of someone she’d once used. She was one of the few who knew what had become of Tad Blake. By this time she had a whole staff of snoopers, one of whom found out that King David, in those good old pre-AIDS days of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, wasn’t always punctilious in his use of birth control. Your mother was a sound technician on his road gang. You were three months old when she agreed to give you up, and Claudia handed you over to Hilda. Who, so far as I have been able to determine, had no idea where you came from. Claudia may have been saving that bit of information for the future.”

  King David now reached across Lauren to claim Caroline’s hand and to take possession of her attention with that magnetic gaze that she had mistaken for a man’s desire, when all along it had been a father’s yearning that gazed out at her, just as the mesmerizing touch of his hand had been blood calling to blood. The key that he told her he was searching for, she suddenly knew, was not just a slip of metal, but something more. The beloved lost possession that Claudia had dangled in front of his nose to get him to come here was in fact herself, Caroline. His daughter. “I knew as soon as I laid eyes on you,” he was saying. “That’s why I couldn’t take my eyes off you, couldn’t help touching you. You look just like your mother. She was a beautiful, talented, bighearted woman. Catherine was her name, although she called herself Cat. She died nine years ago, I’m sorry to say, but I have pictures of her for you. She didn’t want to give you up, but it would have meant losing what she had worked long and hard for—a rock band on the road isn’t exactly the place for a baby. She made the decision that it would be best for you to go to a loving, two-parent, relatively wealthy, and stable home. She couldn’t have known … . And I should have taken responsibility, but it was the seventies, and we were touring nearly three hundred days a year, and frankly in those days I was just a hyped-up bastard. I’m sorry, I was barely aware of you. I have to admit, you and Lauren aren’t the only ones.”