by PJ Parrish
Reggie’s house, released by the police days ago, was spotless. It had been a disaster the day Reggie was arrested, and Louis wondered who had cleaned it up. He didn’t like the idea of anyone being in there alone.
“This place smells like lemons,” Mel said as he set his suitcase down.
Louis moved deeper into the living room. Every surface gleamed; every pillow was in place. He was thinking Margery had sent her cleaning crew over when he saw a handwritten note on the coffee table: Mr. Reggie. I clean up after polise. You now owe me $300. You pay when you get out jail? Eppie.
“Reggie’s maid was here,” Louis said.
Louis made a mental note to ask Margery if she wanted to pay Eppie and picked up his duffel. He was reluctant to settle into Durand’s room before they had a chance to examine every item in it. Gifts were not always things displayed on shelves. There could be clothing, jewelry, credit cards, or even cash, things Barberry’s men didn’t deem important to proving that Reggie was a murderer.
To Louis’s surprise, there were three bedrooms wedged inside Reggie’s small home. He chose to settle in the middle one, a twelve-by-twelve square painted blue and decorated with a Haitian painting of cotton pickers under a bloodred palm tree. There was barely room for a twin bed and a small rattan desk. A single jalousie window opened into the branches of a bottlebrush tree, heavy with fuzzy red flowers.
He tossed his duffel onto the bed and left the room. He could hear the clink of plates from the kitchen and figured Mel was rummaging for something to eat since they’d skipped breakfast.
Louis stopped at the door to Durand’s bedroom. Warm from the morning sun, the room was in perfect condition. The bed was made, the splashy green and yellow spread squared at the corners and dotted with throw pillows. The terra-cotta floor shone like it had been shellacked. The painting had been hung back in its place above the bed. A cool breeze from the open window gave the room a pleasant, beachy smell.
“You want some eggs?” Mel shouted.
“No, thanks.”
Louis decided to start with a search for the Patek Philippe watch, since it was the one thing they could be sure was a gift to Durand. The police report had said there was no jewelry found on Durand’s body. But Reggie had said Durand had the watch on when he left Testa’s.
There was a green leather box on the dresser. Louis flipped it open and rummaged through the contents—cuff links, shirt studs, collar stays, a tarnished ring, two joints wrapped in foil, and a cheap Timex.
There was nothing of note in any of the drawers. Louis checked the nightstand drawer and gave the closet a once-over. Nothing. The Patek Philippe was not in this room. Where the hell was it?
He looked to the glass étagère. There was no sense in worrying about fingerprints, since he was sure Eppie had wiped away any evidence. But maybe he could figure out if something looked expensive enough to be a gift from an appreciative woman.
The gold beaded apple looked expensive, but there were no markings on it that offered any clues. The New York City snow globe was a cheap plastic thing, with a faded $4.99 sticker on the bottom. The green speckled bowl could be anything from a cheap carnival prize to a priceless piece of European dinnerware. The Eiffel Tower didn’t look expensive, but Louis had to admit he probably couldn’t tell Baccarat from glass.
The gold pen set was a Mont Blanc. No engraving and certainly something that would make a nice gift from a woman but not in the same league as the watch.
The last item was a wooden box. The wood was a light color, maybe rosewood, and looked old. The corners, hinges, and tiny lock were a matte-finish silver. Not so noticeable on the front was a small silver plate engraved with the initials RQL.
Louis opened the lid, releasing a pungent scent of a rich liqueur and aged tobacco. The silk-lined box had some odd dials on the inside of the top and was filled with a neat row of plump cigars.
“Do I smell cigars?” Mel asked from behind him.
“Yup.”
Mel peered into the box, then plucked one of the cigars from it. He held it close to his eyes and then drew it sensuously under his nose.
“I have been blessed with physical pleasure more times on this trip than I deserve,” Mel said. “But now… now I have truly gone to heaven.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Louis asked.
“These are Gurkha Grand Reserve cigars,” Mel said. “Clearly the choice of discriminating—and filthy-rich—smokers everywhere.”
“How much do they cost?”
“They make only about twenty boxes of these every year, and they run almost ten thousand dollars.”
“Per box?” Louis asked.
“Per box,” Mel said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his Zippo. “Each one is infused with legendary Louis the Thirteenth cognac by Rémy Martin. You like Rémy Martin, don’t you?”
“I love Rémy but not when it’s been filtered through tobacco leaves,” Louis said. “And give me that back. You’re not smoking up the evidence.”
“There’s more in there,” Mel said. “And besides, Mark Durand sure doesn’t need them anymore.”
Louis grabbed at the cigar, but Mel moved away from him and sparked his Zippo. Louis debated whether to fight with him over the damn thing and decided it didn’t matter. There may have been twenty cigars originally, and who knew how many had been smoked?
“At least go outside,” Louis said.
Mel obliged, and Louis turned back to the humidor, looking again at the engraved initials: rql. Given the personalization and the fact that the plate looked as old as the box, it was a logical conclusion that RQL had been the original owner. Was the thing as old as it looked, and if so, had the plate been added years after? Or had the box been made to look like an antique?
He closed the lid and turned it over. There was a second plate, also silver but shinier, newer:
To Dickie, from Tink.
Happy Anniversary,
6-14-1979.
Well, “Dickie” could certainly be a nickname for “Richard,” which matched the R. So, the owner could still be alive, and even better, he might be married to a young, adulterous wife who, for whatever reason, chose to give her boy toy an expensive present.
But why would Mark Durand want a cigar humidor? Reggie said Durand hated the smell of smoke so much that he made Reggie go out on the patio to smoke his Gauloises.
“Did you find the Patek Philippe?”
Mel was standing next to him, radiating an eye-burning stink, despite the fact that the cigar was stubbed out and in his pocket.
“No,” Louis said. “But I did find something interesting. There are names on the bottom of this thing. Let’s see if we can figure out who they are.”
“Who you going to call?”
“No one,” Louis said. “I have a Social Register Margery gave me. Anyone who can afford these cigars will be in there.”
Mel followed him back to the living room. Louis dug into his duffel for the register and the Saks bag of Shiny Sheets Margery had given him. “Here, look through these for anyone named Dickie or Tink.”
“Tink? Good Lord,” Mel said as he settled on the sofa with the newspapers. Between bites of scrambled eggs, Mel examined the newspapers with a magnifying glass.
Louis grabbed a glass of orange juice and sat down with the black book. The names were in alphabetical order, and Louis flipped to the L’s. There they were. Right under the Kennedys: Tricia and Richard Q. Lyons.
Under the names was an address on the south end of the island, along with addresses for homes in New York and Paris. Under that was the name of what had to be a yacht: SeaDuction.
“Look for people named Richard or Tricia Lyons,” Louis said.
“Hey, check this out,” Mel said, holding out one of the newspapers. “You ever seen anything so obscene?”
“What?”
“The ice sculpture at the Cancer Ball,” Mel said. “It looks like two people screwing.”
Louis took the
Shiny Sheet but never saw the picture Mel was talking about. His eyes were locked on a photograph in the lower right-hand corner.
A woman in a blue dress. Milk-white skin and carrot-red hair. On her arm was the same dark-haired ferret guy Louis had seen with her at Ta-boo and the ballet.
Louis read the caption: Mr. Nesbitt Saban and Mrs. Arthur Norris.
“How’d you like to see that thing next to the stone crabs?” Mel said.
Louis looked up quickly. “What?”
“That ice thing,” Mel said, pointing to the newspaper.
Louis nodded and looked back at the photo of Sam. Everything that had happened between them that night was suddenly in his head, bringing a flush of warmth through his chest. But he was also hearing Margery.
Look what happened to Bunny Norris. Her husband, Hap, took up with that Samantha woman and gave Binky the icy mitt. Trash. You can dress it up in Dior, but it’s still trash.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mel asked.
Louis looked at Mel. They had been friends now for almost three years. Shared a couple of homicide cases, a few close calls, and a lot of beers. They talked about the Dolphins, their time in uniform, politics, and Mel’s retinitis pigmentosa. But Louis couldn’t remember one time they had talked at length about women. Hell, they never even discussed the fact that they had both dated Joe Frye, Louis’s recent ex.
But for some reason, now Louis wanted to tell Mel about Sam. And about his phone call with Joe.
“I talked to Joe the other night,” Louis began.
“Yeah? How’s she doing up there?”
“She’s busy.”
“She’s the sheriff. Even in a place like that, she’s going to be busy.” When Louis didn’t say anything, Mel looked up. “You two have a fight or something?”
Louis wondered how Mel had picked up on it. “She told me she thinks we should see other people,” he said.
Mel was quiet for a moment. “What’d you say?”
“I didn’t say much.”
“You never do, Rocky. Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
Louis’s eyes shot up to Mel. But there had been no reproach in Mel’s voice, just a sort of quiet acknowledgment that he understood Louis’s nature. Louis realized in that moment that his friend had been sending small signals for a while now, trying to give him safe ways to open up and talk about what was eating him. But Louis had ignored them. Because, to be honest, he wasn’t sure what was wrong. Joe was only part of it.
“You remember the night we checked into the Inn,” Louis said. “And I didn’t get back to the room until four?”
“Yeah.”
Louis held out the newspaper and pointed to Sam’s photo. “I was with her. In her house.”
Mel stared at him for a moment, then picked up the magnifying glass and studied the newspaper. “Was this the same night you talked to Joe?”
Louis nodded, then realized Mel might miss it. “Yeah. Same night.”
“How’d you hook up?”
“I was sitting at the bar at Ta-boo. She came up, made some small talk, and asked me to meet her outside in ten minutes.” Louis paused, still feeling a rise of heat up the back of his neck. “I went. I left her in her bedroom without ever finding out her last name.”
“You seen her since?”
“I saw her at the ballet, but she…” He cleared his throat. “She turned her back on me.”
Mel tossed the Shiny Sheet to the table and leaned back against the cushions. For a few minutes, neither of them said anything. The only sound was the distant splash of waves on the beach. It made Louis a little homesick.
“So it was a revenge fuck,” Mel said.
“Nice, Mel. That makes me feel a lot better.”
“What? You’re pissed that she didn’t show you off to her friends?”
Louis shrugged. “No, but I figured I’d get a nod of the head or something.”
“You did get something,” Mel said. “You got a pretty piece of ass. You can’t expect her to be your best friend the next morning.”
Louis stared at the Shiny Sheet, hearing Margery Laroche’s voice. You can screw up and sideways but never down.
“They were careless people,” Mel said.
Louis glanced up at him.
“They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
“Gatsby?” Louis asked.
Mel nodded.
Louis leaned back against the sofa. “There’s something else,” he said.
“I thought there might be.”
“Something weird happened.”
“At the ballet? You already said—”
“No,” Louis said sharply. “In bed.”
“And you’re complaining?”
“God damn it, Mel, I’m serious here.”
Mel was quiet.
Louis sat up, elbows on knees. “She passed out, man.”
“You mean afterward, right?”
“Of course, afterward. Right after she came.”
“What did you do?”
“I slapped her, and she came to.”
Mel was smiling.
“I told you, this isn’t funny. It scared the living shit out of me.”
“I know, I know,” Mel said. “I’m not laughing, believe me. It happened to me once. It’s called la petite mort.”
Louis shook his head.
“The little death,” Mel said. “That’s what the French call an orgasm.”
“Mel, she passed out cold,” Louis said.
“Well, sometimes with intense orgasms, there’s a decrease of blood to the brain, to the orbitofrontal cortex, to be exact. That’s the part of the brain that is involved in behavioral control.”
“How do you know this?”
“I told you, it happened to me once. The woman went out like a light, and I thought I had screwed her to death. After I got over myself, I did some research and found out I wasn’t the big stud I thought I was.”
Louis was quiet. He remembered something she had said while he was making love to her. Die with me. At least now it didn’t seem so damn weird.
“Forget about it, Rocky,” Mel said. “Forget about her. And you should call Joe back. A woman like her doesn’t come around very often, and you’d be an ass to let her go. Believe me, I know.”
Louis looked over at him. He had wondered a million times why Mel and Joe had broken up all those years back. Mel had said only that it was because she was a rookie just getting her start, and he was so much older and going blind and didn’t want to be a burden on her. He was sure Joe felt nothing but friendship for Mel now. As for Mel’s feelings, he had heard Mel talk with regret about only one thing in his life: the time his pride over his growing blindness had kept him behind the wheel of the squad car that had hit a kid and left him paralyzed. Mel had never before mentioned any regret about Joe.
Louis stared at the photograph of Sam for another moment, then his eyes went to the phone on the nearby table. But no words were coming, nothing that was an answer to Joe’s words that had stung him most: I want you to want something for yourself.
Louis tossed the newspaper onto the table. He rose abruptly and went to the window, squinting as he stared out at the ocean.
“I called Vinny about bringing Labastide home to Immokalee,” Mel said.
Louis was grateful that Mel had said something. “What did he say?” he asked, without turning.
“Vinny got a pretty good price from a friend of his who owns a funeral home. Think Margery will be okay with four grand?”
Louis turned. “How much was the exhumation and autopsy?”
“Seventeen thousand.”
“Well, she said she liked the kid,” Louis said. “I’ll guess we’ll find out how much.”
Louis came back to the sofa and grabbed the social register. He started toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Mel asked.
“Do you want me to come along?” Mel asked. “We could stop for a drink on the way back.”
Louis hesitated. “I think I want to go alone.”
Mel shook his head. “Rocky, you’ve got to stop digging yourself deeper into this shithole funk.” When Louis didn’t say anything, Mel went on. “When you decide to put down the shovel, I’ll be here for you.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Richard and Tricia Lyons lived in an oceanfront mon-strosity of a house. It was not one of those pretty Mediterranean Mizners that actually had some character. This was a new pastiche palace with Greek columns, gaudy chandeliers, and a grand arched entryway hung with faux-Versailles mirrors.
Carrying the humidor in the Saks shopping bag and led by a butler who wrongly assumed he was a pool guy named Marine Mike, Louis took the long walk through the canyons of the house. He knew very little about interior decorating, but there seemed to be little continuity in decor from room to room.
A white baby-grand piano basked in a rainbow of light from the cathedral-sized stained-glass window. A twenty-foot aquarium took up one entire wall, stocked with tropical fish and lobsters. An indoor Jacuzzi sat smack in the middle of a room filled with garden furniture. There was a twelve-foot marble statue of a Greek-gowned woman in one corner. The statue’s toes were painted bright red.
Louis followed the butler outdoors to a jungle of palms and bushes with pink saucer-sized hibiscus blossoms. Beyond was a large kidney-shaped pool, its water the deep blue of the Electric Popsicle cocktail Louis had tried once down in Key West.
“Hello.”
The voice was airy and unsure. Louis looked around and, seeing no one, ventured out from under the greenery and into the sun. A woman stood on the flagstone patio, a tawny-colored Afghan dog at her side. With its long, combed layers of hair, sagging face, and red-rimmed eyes, the dog had the look of an aging rock star after a long night.
Sadly, the woman resembled her pet. Wearing only a white swimsuit, she was rail-thin, with loose, deeply tanned skin cut with so many tiny lines she looked shrink-wrapped. Her hair could have been a wig created from the dog’s hair, a long pageboy that wasn’t moving in the breeze.