A Diamond Before You Die

by Chris Wiltz

  “Every detail,” she said, “after I give you a bath and get you comfortable.”

  I let her take over. It was tough getting the blood out of my hair without getting the bandages wet, but she managed.

  “It’s a good thing you came over,” I said.

  “It certainly is.”

  I opened the good eye and looked out of the side of it at her. My head was tilted back so she could rinse my hair. “It’s a good thing I didn’t shoot you.”

  She glanced down at me. “Not a chance.” She soaped up a washcloth.

  “Hm. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to hit someone who’s holding a gun on you?”

  “No.”

  “What are you—some kind of karate expert?”

  “I’m rusty.”

  I tried to lift my eyebrows. My eyes involuntarily rolled, and I ended up squinting. She started soaping my back.

  “Your shoulder’s all scraped up,” she said.

  “That happened when I fell.”

  She lifted my arm that was furthest from her and turned it over. “You’re all scraped up here, too,” she informed me. She looked at the other one.

  “That happened on the side of a brick building.” She shook her head at me. I smiled. “Do you think men with scars on their faces are sexy?”

  Her lip did its thing. “Some men are sexy with patches and bandages on their faces.”

  She put me in bed with the bourbon and the ice pack, and was changing into her blue-flowered kimono. I started to tell her I had to go back downtown, but then I decided that Mr. D. was safe for the night and that I was feeling too weak to move. It was too late, anyway. I should have let Uncle Roddy go get him.

  I settled down into the covers, took a long, slow slug from the bottle and concentrated on watching Lee change instead of on the fact that I had a face with a three-inch gash in it.

  “Did you feel at all like you were being followed today?” I asked her.

  “No. I didn’t worry about it too much on the way to the office this morning, but I drove around before I went to the Cottons’. Then I parked around the corner and walked.”

  “Did you go home first?”

  “No. I had everything I needed downtown.”

  I told her about the office being broken into, and that I was afraid when she went home she would find her place in a shambles.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, getting in bed beside me. “I’ve had the feeling that whoever followed me wasn’t threatening me. I’m not saying I’m exactly relaxed, though.” She sat up to face me and crossed her legs lotus fashion. “You know, Neal, the things we’re working on aren’t necessarily related.”

  I halted the bottle on its way to my mouth’. “I get the feeling that you’d prefer they not be.”

  She rocked her body forward slightly. “I’m just not making any assumptions.”

  “Well, I’m not ruling it out.”

  She rocked back. “No. Of course not.”

  I swilled the bourbon. “Don’t panic,” I told her, “I’m training myself not to worry about you. After tonight, there shouldn’t be a problem.”

  She hit me lightly on the leg. “Give me something to make some assumptions with.”

  We had managed to back off from an area of tension I didn’t think we were capable of talking out yet. I hated thinking there was any kind of competitive feeling between us. I hated even more that I might be thinking there was one because of the old man’s unwanted influence over me. I decided I was too fog-brained to deal with anything other than facts.

  I started telling her about everything, beginning with the showdown with Callahan in his office, then the phone call to Yastovich after the break-in at my office, the meeting with Mr. D., the attack on me, the strange way I’d been saved and the disappearance of Yastovich’s body. I ended by remarking that Richard Cotton was being elusive. I was drinking steadily the whole time I talked. The pain in my face had been reduced to a dull throb.

  Lee sat in her lotus position, meditative. My eye wanted to close. I was barely managing to hold it at half-mast. I scrunched down and moved the pillows so they were supporting the ice pack.

  “For a detective without a case,” Lee said, “you’ve been seeing a lot of action.”

  “Urn.” My eyelids met. They couldn’t help it—they wanted to be together.

  Lee shook my leg. “Neal.” The lids parted reluctantly. I squinted at her. “So you got into this battle with Callahan because of Richard Cotton?”

  “More or less.”

  “The favor he asked you to do—he asked you to find out what Solarno had on Callahan?”

  “Yeah.” It was getting difficult to talk.

  “But how did he know Solarno had anything?”

  I couldn’t keep squinting. I let the eyelid fall. “He hired Solarno to get something,” I said sleepily.

  She made a soft exclamation. “He wanted to win that badly? Why did you agree to help him?”

  It had all gone too far for me to be sure anymore, but behind my closed eyelids appeared a vision of Myra. Because of Myra, I wanted to say, but she wouldn’t understand that, and I couldn’t go into it now. And, anyway, I was asking myself, why had I gone on with it after I’d found out it was Solarno who’d killed Myra? Why hadn’t I told Richard I wanted out then? Wasn’t I satisfied with that answer? I was suddenly very confused, but too tired to make much of the confusion.

  Lee was saying something about the police, then, “I wouldn’t have touched it.”

  I think I told her I knew she wouldn’t have, but I’d had to, though I may have fallen asleep before I said that. Whether I said it or thought it, there seemed to be an end to the confusion just before I drifted off. It was simply that I’d had to do it.

  The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. I opened my eye expecting to see daylight, but it was dark. Lee was stirring beside me. I turned to reach the phone. The pillow was cold and wet. I shoved the dish towel and what was left of the ice on the floor, and picked up the receiver. It was Lee’s answering service. I handed her the phone.

  She listened, then I could hear the little beeps as she called a number. I moved the phone cord off my neck. I was going out again.

  Lee reached over me to hang up the phone.

  “It was Paula Cotton,” she said. “Her husband hasn’t come home.”

  “What time is it?” I muttered.

  “It’s two-thirty. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  I didn’t hear her go.

  25

  * * *

  Hurricane-ville

  The plasterer got me out of bed the next morning. I was slightly hung over, which slowed up the jackhammers.

  Before I left the apartment I made a few calls. There were no messages at my answering service. Lee’s service answered at her office; there was no answer at her apartment. Richard was not at his office. He wasn’t at home either; no one was. I didn’t know whether to be irritated or worried. Then I called the motel. Mr. D. wasn’t in his room. The not-quite headache became full blown. I took a couple of aspirin and headed downtown.

  Mr. D.’s room at the Decatur Street motel was completely cleaned out and cleaned up when I got there. The clerk downstairs smelled private cop all over me, and I had to part with twenty bucks to get into the room and find out that Mr. D. had not checked out. For another twenty, he got the night clerk on the phone, who told me sleepily that he didn’t know what Mr. D. looked like so he didn’t know if he’d seen him leave or not. I gave him a description. He said he didn’t remember anyone like that. My guess was that Mr. D. had skipped out on the motel bill. Trying not to lose the faith, though, I left a message marked urgent for him. The only thing else my money bought me was what Mr. D. had put down as his home address—the laundry.

  The next logical move was to run over to the laundry and peer into its dark, abandoned recess. I spent the rest of the afternoon going in and out of the establishments on Bourbon Street, trying to pry open countless pai
rs of tight lips and get a line on where Mr. D. lived. A woman in a joint called Daddy-O’s finally believed it was a matter of life or death. Or maybe it was my bandaged face.

  I spent time going in and out of the barrooms and strip joints instead of going to the city directory for Mr. D.’s address because I wanted the word out on the street that I was looking for him.

  His apartment was two back rooms in a dumpy old house in the Faubourg Marigny, across Esplanade from the French Quarter. If he’d gone home, it hadn’t been for long; his place was still a wreck—hurricane-ville, you know.

  I used a credit card on the door and stepped into a rubble of cut-up clothes and yards of twisted celluloid. The whole place stank. In the kitchen the contents of the refrigerator had been dumped on the floor. In the bedroom was another lingering smell: The mattress had been slashed, wads of stuffing pulled out of it and urinated on. My office had only been searched; Mr. D.’s apartment was a message of hate and destruction. On the bathroom wall it was spelled out in big red letters: YOU DIE SCUM.

  Hurricane-ville. Right.

  I put an index finger on one of the letters and rubbed the stuff with my thumb. It was greasy, lightly fragrant. Lipstick. In the medicine cabinet I found a round plastic container of pancake makeup and a box of rouge. No lipstick.

  When I’d told Mr. D. that I wasn’t the one checking into motels, I don’t know why he didn’t slug me. Nothing made any sense but fear.

  I needed to think; I needed to find a man I could only identify by voice. I needed to find someone else who was possibly the only person to see his face, my guardian angel. Mr. D. might know the identity of the raspy-voiced knife artist, but all I could do was wait for him to call me, probably from another motel. After seeing his apartment, I could understand that Mr. D. would consider my knowing where he was a risk. Besides Mr. D., there was Callahan. I might be able to get to the silver seal with a small army or a tank. I had neither. Uncle Roddy, of course, was a small tank, but I had no ammunition to give him.

  Two blocks before I got to the Père Marquette I was overcome by a compulsion to go across the lake. I took a left and went to the expressway entrance on Loyola Avenue.

  The afternoon was overcast, hazy, and the air was muggy. It was unseasonably warm for March. I tuned in the radio and found out the temperature was eighty-four degrees. If it reached eighty-five, it would break a record. There was rain in the forecast, too, the percentage growing higher through the night into the early morning. As I drove the sun would break through the cloud cover for a few seconds, intermittent with the rumbling of thunder off in the distance. There were small, unfoamy ruffles cluttering the surface of the gray-green lake water. As I got closer to the north shore, raindrops would dapple the windshield occasionally, but never enough for me to turn on the wipers.

  I drove into Covington and through the back streets to the entrance of the Cotton estate. I started to turn in to the shelled drive, but some sixth sense directed me to park beyond it and not announce my arrival.

  I walked onto the grounds, cut across the tennis court, went around the pool and behind the pool house. I had no idea why I was being so circumspect, but before I left the cover of the pool house and went out into the open, I took a long look at the larger house. It nestled like a jewel in the lush purple velvet of profusely blooming azaleas.

  Everything was still and quiet; the house looked closed up. I kept close to the camellia bushes at the edge of the property and went down the slope of land to the lagoon. I circled it and came up on the left side of the house. There was nothing to see, no lights and no movement through any of the downstairs windows.

  I stepped onto the veranda and went around to the back. The garage was below me, down another, smaller slope of land. I wanted to see if there were any cars in it, but not before I checked out the smaller structure on the right of the house.

  I crouched down and dashed across the twenty-five or thirty feet of grass that separated the two buildings to an oak tree that sheltered the little one. From there the two sets of French doors leading into the cottage from a narrow, empty patio were visible. One pair of doors was open.

  No one was in the room. I could see the corner of a bed with a white spread on it, and a chiffonier of dark wood with a small mirror on top. Off to one side of it was an old-fashioned floor-length mirror, an oval glass tilted back a bit in its elaborate curved stand. On the other side was a door leading to a front room.

  I waited and watched for several minutes. I was about to leave the oak tree and venture inside when I heard the amplified sound of a needle jumping off a record. Someone put it back on, and a rather slow reggae beat wafted through the door.

  There was a flash of white in the inside doorway, and Quiro floated into the bedroom. He stopped, executed a short, neat dance step, turned twice, then moved foward with the music until he was in front of the oval mirror. His timing was perfect, his every movement graceful, without exaggeration, his footwork flawless, dangerously complicated looking in the stiletto high heels he wore on his feet. He was also wearing Paula Cotton’s bared-shoulder, white-sequined gown.

  The white dress set off his café au lait skin spectacularly. As his dipping and swaying and dancing became more fervent, his skin took on a sheen, a richly oiled glow that was more sensational than a thousand flashing sequins. I couldn’t help thinking it: In that dress, the way he moved his straight, slim, flat-chested body, he exuded more sexuality than Paula Cotton in all of her expensive alabaster perfection ever could. I thought of her outrage if she knew he was prancing and sweating in her costly designer gown. White-hot outrage.

  Another song ended, and Quiro hurried back into the front room. He returned carrying a silver candlestick, stood in front of the mirror, held the candlestick up to his mouth, and lip-synched to a Billie Holiday record. He would raise his free arm over his head, then clutch it to his chest, causing his exposed back muscles to flex and ripple under his smooth, shiny skin. Every now and again I could glimpse his tortured or ecstatic face reflected in the mirror.

  I have never felt more like a voyeur, and that’s saying something given the business I’m in. I wanted to go down to the garage, but I didn’t think I could make it without his seeing me. Even if I waited until he changed the record, it would be risky. There was no indication, anyway, that there was anyone else around; what he was doing seemed to be for his own personal pleasure, and even if it wasn’t my idea of a good time I figured he had a right to his privacy.

  I waited until the record was finished and he left the bedroom, then I went back the way I had come, another loner in the haze.

  26

  * * *

  Whistling in the Dark

  For the second time that day, I stood in the shadow of a tree and listened.

  Lee hadn’t been at her office when I got back from across the lake, so I drove up Magazine Street to Audubon Park.

  A light wind had blown up, and the leaves on the giant oaks rustled softly. That soft sound was like whispers in the twilight. A chill came over me that riddled my bones with superstition.

  The door opened and Lee came out on the small front porch. Her body was tightly wrapped in a white terry cloth robe; her hair was wrapped in a towel. She went to the side of the porch and stared down into the bushes. I came out of the shadows.

  “Hi.”

  She turned around, but not fast like she would have if I’d frightened her. When she said, “Neal,” though, it was with relief.

  “Looking for something?”

  “I’m supposed to get a newspaper delivered, but I think it ends up in the bushes most of the time.”

  I crossed the lawn to the bushes and found the paper. There were a couple more rotting into the soil. I went to the end of the hedge and stepped up onto the low porch. She held out her hand for the paper, and looked up into my face rather dreamily. Her pupils were large in the gathering darkness. I put my arm across her shoulders, and led her inside.

  I closed the door behind us. Sh
e dropped the paper on a small table at her side, and stood fixed in front of me, smaller than usual in her bare feet. A fragrant, smoky smell, vaguely familiar, seemed to be coming from her. I bent and kissed her neck. A more perfumy scent lingered there. I lifted my head. The smell was in the apartment, odd, Eastern, the hint of a medicinal potion.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “I burned some incense earlier.”

  “Heady,” I murmured and bent down again.

  “I have to go,” she whispered, her lips brushing mine, her arms coming up around my back.

  I pushed her robe open and off her shoulders; she moved her arms and with a small, sensual shrug, let the robe fall to the floor.

  Sometime later she got up and turned on a lamp. I was sprawled on the futon, smoking a cigarette.

  She slipped on a pair of navy-blue trousers. “I was supposed to be at Paula’s ten minutes ago,” she said. “I left a message for you this afternoon. Didn’t you get it?”

  I shook my head languidly. “Where’s Richard Cotton, Lee?”

  “He told her he’d be back tomorrow. He won’t tell her where he is.” She went to the closet and pulled out a deep-rose silk blouse. “She’s quite furious.”

  “Doesn’t he give her any kind of explanation?”

  “None. I think he’s going to come back tomorrow and end the marriage.” She started brushing her hair with long, swift pulls.

  I got up and went into the bathroom. “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just what I think.”

  I threw some water on half my face, and picked up a towel. “What does she think?”

  On the side of the bathtub in a jade-green pot was a stick of incense burned halfway down. I put my nose to it. Jasmine?

  Lee came into the bathroom and handed me my clothes. She took out some makeup. “She’s thinking about what she should do.”

  “If it blows?”

  She nodded. “One part of her wants to fight it; another wants to be the first to say it’s over. Especially the way he’s acting now.” With a little foam-tipped wand she began applying plum-colored shadow to an eyelid.