Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  The day suited Mari's mood. She sat at the table on the deck and had her breakfast, trying to clear her mind of the clutter of suspects and motives for a few minutes, trying halfheartedly to identify the birdsong that went on continually in the trees around her. A magpie landed on the railing and squawked at her indignantly, fanning out his metallic-green tail and bobbing down and up, looking like a tuxedoed dandy in his black-and-white plumage. She left him the last bites of the bear claw and headed out to feed the llamas.

  The barn was as dim as a cave inside. Mari flipped on the light and wished there were a dozen more. She felt as if all her nerve endings were reaching up out of her skin, humming with electric anticipation. Her imagination conjured Kendall Morton lurking in every corner.

  She pulled out the feed buckets and leaned down into the bin to scoop out Clyde's grain first. The llama pellets were nearly gone and she practically had to dive head-first into the bin to reach the last of them. She would have to make a trip to the Feed and Read. Order more pellets, maybe pick up a copy of People. She dug into the feed with the scoop and pried up the end of something heavy.

  “What the—?”

  A strange apprehension started in the pit of her stomach and traveled outward as she straightened. The buried treasure had been upended. One corner stuck up through the drift of feed pellets. A book sealed inside a plastic bag. She knew without unearthing it what the title would be and a part of her wanted nothing more than to turn and walk away, pretend it wasn't there. She knew she wouldn't like the answers it gave her, wouldn't like the truths it told about her friend.

  If she filled the bin with fresh llama feed, how long would it take before she would be confronted by the evidence again? A month? Two? Even as her brain pondered the question, though, she was bending over into the bin again. She was all through avoiding truths about herself or anyone else. She would confront this one head-on and deal with it and get on with her life.

  She pinched the end of the clear plastic bag and tugged. The brown pellets rolled aside. She came up out of the bin with Martindale-Hubbell volume 2, California attorneys A–O, and a videotape labeled simply “Townsend.”

  Samantha drifted up toward consciousness like a diver drifting up toward the surface from the depths of the ocean. Out of the blackness toward rippling, shimmering light. But as soon as she broke the surface, she wanted to go back down. The light stabbed into her eyes. Pain hit the back of her head and exploded in bolts down through her back and arms and legs, tumbling her stomach over en route.

  Moaning, she tried to curl into a ball and turn on her side, but she couldn't bring her knees up because her ankles were tied to the foot of the bed on which she lay. Her wrists were bound as well, each to a post in the iron headboard. It rattled as she tried to pull her arms down, the sound hitting her raw brain like a bundle of steel fence posts.

  Panic and nausea swirled inside her, rolling up the back of her throat, choking her as it hit the gag that was stuffed in her mouth. She swallowed convulsively, choking as tears blurred her vision. Memories of the night hovered in the back of her pounding head. The darkness. The stillness. The call of the owl.

  It came back in a rush. Fear. Fighting for her life. The hood suffocating her. A tall figure clad in black. A mask. The club hitting her blow after blow after blow.

  She had no idea what had happened in the time since she had lost consciousness. She had no idea where she was. She had no idea who had attacked her or why, or what their plans might be for her. Panic went through her like a thousand volts of electricity, jerking her body against its tethers, arching her back up off the bed. Pain went through her in spasms and she sobbed, but she couldn't seem to stop fighting. She kicked and thrashed until the adrenaline ran out, then she lay there aching, crying softly, feeling the blood drip off her wrists.

  Slowly, her surroundings began to penetrate the small sphere that had been her world since coming to. Rough cabin walls. A small window filled with gray light. She could hear the birds singing outside and the snort of a horse. In the cabin there was no sound at all. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

  “Where the hell is she?” Bryce demanded, slamming the cordless phone down on the glass-topped table. The juice glasses shuddered and sloshed. No one had answered the phone at Samantha's house. She wasn't at the hotel. Most important, she wasn't in the bed in his guest room. She was gone. That hadn't been a variable in his plan.

  Sharon calmly rescued her croissant from a dousing and dabbed the puddle on the table delicately with her napkin. “She probably caught a ride into town with one of the hands. You said she would have second thoughts.”

  “I didn't think she would leave!”

  He paced beside the table, his hands on his narrow hips. He had prepared himself meticulously for breakfast, dressing down in jeans and old boots and a hunter-green oxford shirt, an ancient tooled belt around his waist with six inches of excess leather hanging limply down alongside his fly. He had planned to take a breakfast tray up to Samantha's rooms, make love to her again, then invite her to go riding—just the two of them. Time alone for them to bond. Time for him to impress upon her what a fine life she could have with him.

  Sharon sent him a look as she tore her croissant in two and baptized one end in currant jam. “I knew she would leave,” she muttered. “I just didn't think it would be so soon. Apparently she has a low threshold for sin.”

  Bryce wheeled on her, his eyes bright with fury. “I'm tired of your little asides, Sharon,” he snapped. “I tolerate too much from you, but I have limits, and you've just about reached them.”

  She rose from her chair like a queen, an icy exterior draped in white silk and a core of hurt that glowed in her eyes. Her hair was slicked back into a knot, the look emphasizing the heavy bone structure of her face. She stared hard at Bryce—down at Bryce, because she had chosen to wear a pair of gold mules with heels, needing to feel superior to him in some way, any way.

  “Don't you threaten me,” she warned, her voice trembling with emotion. “Your little whores will come and go. I will always be here. I know you too well. I know too much. I can make your life hell—and don't think I won't.” She narrowed her eyes and smiled, cobralike. “Don't think for a minute I won't, you ungrateful son of a bitch.”

  Reisa came out onto the terrace with a coffee urn and a vacant look in her eyes. Sharon stalked past her and into the house, trailing a fluttering train of white silk and a cloud of perfume.

  “Coffee, Mr. Bryce?”

  “Get out of my way,” Bryce snapped. Stepping around the housekeeper, he headed for the side gate and his Mercedes.

  Mari expected the tape to be pornographic, the result of a little game of “Candid Camera” in Lucy's bedroom. A video chronicle of Townsend's escapades in Lucy's bed or some other bed or with donkeys or children. Since Lucy was involved, she expected sex to be involved. But as she sat amid the ruins of her friend's study, her eyes trained on the television that had somehow escaped destruction, sex was not what she got.

  The opening shot was taken from horseback. On the trail ahead of the cameraman were Townsend and a small, thin man with a face like a carp and dark hair that looked like thread that had been stitched into his scalp. The two were dressed in safari khaki and camouflage hunting gear. Ahead of them was a rough-looking character with a drooping crumb-duster mustache and a crunched old water-stained cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. There was talk of rifles and scopes and other hunts. Townsend sounded excited. There was a flush on his cheekbones. Someone off-camera said the name “Graf” and the little man swiveled around in his saddle.

  Graf. J. Grafton Sheffield. Mari had heard Ben Lucas call him Graf. He didn't look like the kind of man who could pick up a rifle and kill anything, let alone a human being.

  They rode up a trail, thick woods all around. A lot of thrashing sounds and horses snorting. Somewhere in the distance, hounds bayed relentlessly. Townsend talked about trophies, about shooting a grizzly from a helicopter in Alaska.
Then the party broke into a clearing and Sheffield's horse spooked.

  The hounds yapped without cease. The camera caught a glimpse of them and their scruffy-looking handlers as it panned the clearing en route to a battered four-by-four with a small flatbed trailer behind it. On the trailer was a stainless steel cage perhaps three feet high and seven or eight feet long. Inside the cage was a full-grown tiger. A magnificent, beautiful creature.

  The riding party dismounted and the horses were led away. The cowboy and Townsend busied themselves preparing rifles. The camera slowly circled the tiger's cage. The animal was breathing heavily through its mouth, saliva dripping off its chin. Its eyes looked glassy and unfocused. One of the dogs was set loose and sprinted for the cage, snapping at the tiger's long tail that protruded between the bars. The cat let out a startled roar and tried to jump to its feet, but the cage wasn't tall enough for him to do anything but crouch, his muscles quivering. The dog barked furiously, lunging at the cage, then wheeling away, inciting his cohorts to riot.

  Townsend and the cowboy walked off across the clearing, rifles on their shoulders. Yet another scruffy minion climbed atop the tiger cage and pulled the door open. He drove the cat from the cage with a cattle prod. It stumbled down off the trailer and stood swaying on its feet, looking confused. Then the dogs were set loose.

  They charged the tiger as a pack, howling madly, teeth bared. Terrified, the cat bolted and tried to run under the four-by-four, but was headed off by a pair of dogs. He shied away and a third dog hit him broadside and sank its teeth into the tiger's flank, drawing blood. Screaming, the tiger twisted around and knocked the dog ten feet with a single swipe of its paw, then it dashed across the open ground as best it could, heading toward the woods with the rest of the pack in hot pursuit. Once he stumbled drunkenly and went down, the dogs diving at him, tearing at him. But he managed to regain his feet and run on.

  Twenty yards from the edge of the woods Townsend took aim and fired twice. The tiger went down in a boneless heap. The dogs were on him instantly, then the flunkies ran out and knocked the dogs back with clubs.

  Mari sat on the small couch with tears streaming down her cheeks, her stomach turning over. She watched the cowboy and Sheffield congratulate Townsend. Townsend posed, holding the head of the dead cat up by the ears, a big grin on his face, as if he were genuinely proud of what he had just done. The memory of Townsend's office played through the back of her mind—the mounted heads, the skins on the wall, the bear rearing and snarling ferociously in the corner. The son of a bitch had shot it from a chopper. He hadn't confronted the beast face-to-face, as the pose suggested. He had never seen the poor animal do anything but run for its life. And the tiger skin was not the result of some death-defying battle in India. It was the result of slaughter, plain and simple. Not sport, not challenge, no test of manhood.

  The tape turned to static. She hit the stop button on the remote and immediately a rerun of “Murphy Brown” filled the screen, the laugh track sounding obscenely inappropriate. Killing the volume to a dull mumble, she tossed the remote aside and stood up on wobbly legs.

  Everything on that tape with the exception of the horseback riding was illegal, to say nothing of unethical and immoral. One whiff of this in the press and Townsend's career would have been over. Ample ammunition for a blackmailer. And ample motive for the murder of a blackmailer.

  Her first impulse was to take the tape to Quinn, but what did it really show? No one on the tape spoke of where they were. The face behind the camera was never identified. Townsend was dead; what did it matter now that he had shot an endangered animal in a canned hunt? Quinn might recognize the dirtballs who ran the hunt. He would recognize Sheffield, but there was nothing much to charge him with. Christ, the man had walked on what should have been at the very least a manslaughter charge. She would have to be the queen of naive to think they would haul his bony ass back to Montana for simply being present at Townsend's illegal hunt.

  She was still clutching the volume of Martindale-Hubbell in her arms. She had yet to open it because she knew without looking she wouldn't like what was inside. But the ball was rolling now and there was no stopping it. She would see this through to the end because that was what she had to do. Taking a deep breath, she turned back the front cover.

  The first hundred pages of the book had been cut out to make room for a stack of court reporter's notes. Lengths of familiar green paper with reporter's phonograms in rows of red ink. Mari leaned back against the desk and paged through them, frowning, her heart sinking lower and lower as she read Lucy's notes about the people she was blackmailing.

  Townsend, whom she disdained as an egotistical old fool. He doesn't have the guts to run with the big dogs, but here he is anyway. He'll be eaten alive. It serves him right. . . . Kyle Collins, an actor whose boy-next-door qualities were crucial to his image. If his fans only knew what he's capable of after a few lines of Bryce's cocaine . . . I've told him I'll let him use the pictures I took for his next publicity campaign. Won't his public be surprised to see him in those leather undies? A state senator from Texas who apparently had a blood lust hunting mentality and had taken a number of trophy animals illegally while visiting Bryce's chunk of paradise. Matthew's motto is: If it moves, shoot it. Christ, the NRA must be so proud. Expensive hobby, though, Senator. Let's see, that leopard cost you $8,000 outright. My cooperation should be worth that much. . . .

  She explained in detail how Bryce's little hunt club worked, how Bryce arranged for the purchase of exotic animals through a black market network. The cost to the hunter depended on the animal and on the circumstances. Sometimes Bryce offered the hunt at no charge if his “friend” was reluctant. Bryce's game was to videotape the event and then hold the tape as security to ensure future favors from businessmen, politicians, Hollywood players. He didn't blackmail them outright; he simply kept the tape. He didn't need their money. Lucy doubted he needed their loyalty. What he really wanted, what he really cherished, was the power.

  I enjoy the game with Bryce. He's a player. He knows the rules. He appreciates another player of equal talent and I really don't think he minds me making money off his friends. He believes in survival of the fittest. The careless have to pay for their mistakes. It truly is a game with us. The game of life. All this and great sex too—not as good as with the cowboy, but certainly more . . . adventuresome . . . Cousin Creepella doesn't like sharing him with me. I'd say fuck her, but she would probably take me up on it. . . .

  There were more details. Lucy told without a hint of conscience how she had managed to get a copy of Townsend's hunt tape and how she had tormented him with threats of mailing it to CNN. She told of her escapades at Bryce's parties, the things she had seen and heard and profited by, the weaknesses she had preyed upon, the money she had made.

  Mari closed the book with shaking hands and set it aside. Her friend, her drinking buddy, had been a blackmailer. A despicable, parasitic blackmailer. Thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe more. Extorted from the rich and the famous and the powerful. They had paid handsomely for the tenuous promise that their dirty secrets would be kept. According to the notes, there were half a dozen men—and several women—who would gladly have seen Lucy dead.

  “Oh, God, Lucy,” Mari muttered, rubbing her hands over her face. She felt dirty and sickened. Through a haze of tears she looked around the room of this pretty log house she had inherited and saw nothing but filth. It was tainted, all of it—the house, the land, the cars—bought with dirty money. She wanted to run away from it, burn it to the ground, take a long, hot shower.

  You need a life, pal. I'll give you mine. . . . The line from Lucy's final letter came back to her, and everything inside her rejected the implication that she could take up where Lucy had left off. How could Lucy have thought that? Had the decadence of her life here warped her so badly that she saw everyone as corrupt, or was corruption so commonplace in her world it had become the norm?

  Mari shook her head and
cried a little, mourned for the lost soul of her dead friend, a soul lost long before she had died. She tried to reconcile the Lucy who had been comrade and comforter with the Lucy who had been blackmailer and seductress. The images wouldn't mesh, and she knew she would forever think of them as two separate people, one she had known and liked and one she would rather never have met, even posthumously.

  On the TV in the background, Eldon the painter made a pithy remark and the audience laughed like hyenas while Candice Bergen looked disgusted. Then June Allyson came on to extol the virtues of disposable underwear for women with bladder control problems.

  Just another day in paradise. Sitcoms and stupid commercials. Blackmailers and libertines. Beauty and beasts. Incompatible worlds inhabiting the same time and space. Surrealism in motion.

  “And you're caught smack in the middle of it, Marilee,” she muttered.

  Her brain whirled with all the information, the possibilities, the questions. She now had proof of many things, but no proof of who had actually murdered Lucy. She thought she might have enough to get the case reopened, but she wasn't so sure Quinn would agree. Lucy was dead, Sheffield had been punished in the eyes of the court. If Townsend had killed her, what did it matter—he was dead too. But there were other suspects.

  Everything tied to Bryce. According to Lucy's notes, he arranged the hunts. He made the tapes. He held the strings of a dozen powerful people. The puppet master. He seduced his friends into the hunt, deftly turning the tables so they became the ones in the cross hairs. Not because he needed their money or the favors they could grant him, but because he loved the game.

  Bryce stood to lose the most by Lucy's enterprise. Maybe the stakes had outstripped the enjoyment he took from playing with her. Maybe she had overstepped a boundary line. Maybe Bryce was the man for whom Sheffield had taken the fall. Or maybe her death had nothing to do with Bryce. Maybe Kendall Morton had acted alone. Or maybe all the theories were bullshit and Sheffield had accidentally shot her.