Death of a Pirate King

by Josh Lanyon

  Against my best effort I was getting mad, and my heart was starting to race. I said, “I’m betting he wants to see you elsewhere. And I sure as hell want to see you elsewhere. So leave a number where he can reach you, and go.”

  I wasn’t being magnanimous there. I thought it might be a good idea if I knew where Verlane could be found -- just in case.

  Bewildered, looking from me to Verlane, Natalie pushed a notepad at him and he scribbled something down.

  He raised his bespectacled gaze to my face. “Guy wants to see me,” he said again with certainty.

  “I don’t,” I said. “And if you show up here again, I’ll have a restraining order slapped on you.”

  He gave me a final assessing look, turned and walked unhurriedly up the aisle, pushing out through the glass doors. As they jingled shut behind him, Natalie let out a long breath.

  “What an arrogant little prick!” she said indignantly. “He seemed fine until you walked in.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.” I started for my office. My heart was starting that uncomfortable tripping beat, signaling trouble. Aggravatingly, she followed me, still talking.

  “I’ve never heard you talk to anyone like that. You were kind of an arrogant prick too.” She sounded like she found it entertaining. If only I did.

  I sat down at my desk, pulled open a drawer, and pulled out my pills.

  “Are you okay?”

  I looked at her. “I just need a minute or two.”

  She nodded but didn’t go away. Wouldn’t the normal thing be to give me a few moments? Controlling myself with an effort, I popped my pills, took a swallow from the bottle of tepid water on my desk. I drew a couple of experimental breaths. I seemed to be okay. My heart was already slowing back to its normal rhythm, so maybe I’d just mistaken reasonable agitation for something else.

  “I really am okay,” I told her. “Do I have any messages?”

  “Hmm? Oh. Paul Kane called again. A couple of authors want to set up signings. It was a pretty quiet day. Only three people came in searching for books with red covers and the word ‘murder’ in the title.”

  Guy would have called my cell phone or left a message on the upstairs phone. Assuming Guy had anything to say to me. He’d left without waking me that morning.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Natalie said.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and despite my efforts, it snapped out. I glanced at the clock over the desk. “Shit. And I’m late picking Em up.”

  “Adrien, Emma can do without her horse riding lessons! You need to --”

  “There’s no need for her to do without.” I rose, and she asked, “Aren’t you going to call Guy?”

  “No.” And that was much curter than I intended. I glanced at her. “Sorry. Listen, Nat, can you do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Please don’t…discuss what’s happening here with anyone.”

  She said honestly, “I don’t know what’s happening, Adrien. I know you and Guy are having a rough patch and that some parolee came to see Guy. Where would that guy even know him from? That writing program Guy runs at the prison? Do you think maybe this Verlane is stalking him?”

  “No,” I sighed. “I don’t.”

  As I went out the side door, she called, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  * * * * *

  A deer crashed through the manzanita and underbrush beside the wide trail, springing away to vanish into the dusky evening. As Emma’s horse shied, I leaned across, grabbed his bridle, and yanked him down hard on the packed earth. The gelding tossed his head, blew out nervously, but settled fast, falling back into stride with my own mount.

  Emma sat up very straight in the saddle. Her eyes were huge, but she said bravely, “I could do it!”

  “I know you can.”

  “I wasn’t afraid.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,” I told her. “It’s how you handle it.”

  Like, don’t ever kill anyone because they scared you.

  Emma’s chatter, the creak of saddle leather and jingle of bridles, the thud of the horses’ hooves on the trail faded out and my thoughts turned inward once more.

  The reasons people killed each other were as varied as the people themselves. Porter Jones, for instance, appeared to me to have been taken out mostly because he stood between someone and what they wanted. Well, that made sense. Most homicides seemed to be motivated by greed, and one thing I’d learned from Jake was that mostly murder wasn’t complicated. The most obvious suspect usually was guilty. Even in the unsolved cases that went cold, the police generally had a pretty good idea of who the culprit was; they just couldn’t successfully take them to trial. Or if they went to trial, they weren’t able to secure a conviction.

  I thought there was a pretty good chance that Ally Beaton-Porter had offed her old man. She had the best possible motive: several million dollars and an illicit affair with a handsome young stud.

  Although if Porter really hadn’t been in good health, it would have made good sense to wait -- except that Porter had hired a PI, presumably with some purpose in mind. Paul Kane had insisted that Porter planned on divorcing Ally, and that had seemed to be reinforced by Roscoe Markopoulos.

  And while Ally didn’t strike me as having the brains to pull off poisoning her husband without killing half the other people in the room, I’d be the first to admit my instincts -- crime solving and otherwise -- weren’t always infallible.

  It just bugged me that everyone -- barring Al January and myself -- seemed to take it for granted that Ally was guilty. She probably was guilty -- she didn’t exactly seem grief stricken at Porter’s demise, and there was good reason that wives were the first suspects in a husband’s suspicious death.

  So what about Marla Vicenza? Had Porter left her any million-dollar behests? Because some people committed murder over twenty bucks in change. I wondered what Marla’s finances were like. She was certainly past her prime as far as Hollywood box office went, but if she had invested -- or remarried -- wisely, maybe money wasn’t an issue for her. But maybe getting dumped for a blonde bimbo was.

  This is why I had a problem with the idea of this Nina Hawthorne as murderess du jour. Yes, she did own Truly Scrumptious Catering, but if she hadn’t been on the scene, I didn’t see how she could have orchestrated getting poison into the right glass by remote control. Besides, having the patience to wait nearly twenty years to destroy Porter didn’t seem to mesh with being motivated by that whole passionate woman-scorned thing.

  I glanced at Em as she prattled on, and I tried to picture her at eighteen. Tried to picture her having an affair with some married asshole a couple of decades her senior. Now, had Langley Hawthorne killed Porter, I could more easily understand it. But Langley Hawthorne had been dead for years.

  Still…if Nina’s company had done the catering, then there was a very good chance that Nina had been on the premises at some point -- maybe the day before or earlier in the day of the party? That would have given her access to…but there again was the problem. How could she anticipate what Porter would drink or what glass would be used?

  She would have to be very familiar with Porter and with Paul Kane’s bar setup.

  Maybe Paul Kane used her catering company a lot. Maybe she was familiar with his bar setup, and maybe she knew that he always made these Henley Skullfarquars, but again, how could she control administering the fatal dose? I doubted the mixture was made ahead of time, and she couldn’t poison one of the ingredient bottles because no one else had died or even gotten ill from the cocktails.

  I kept coming back to the problem of Porter’s glass. Of course the simplest explanation was that Porter had taken the stuff himself. This mysterious ill health of his that -- assuming I’d heard correctly and wasn’t jumping to conclusions -- his ex-wife had referred to at the funeral: what if it was heart trouble?

  But no. That would have been determined right away -- the rest of his pr
escription would have been found on his body, for one thing.

  Could he have taken the stuff thinking it was something else?

  Like what?

  Emma said thoughtfully, “You know what doesn’t make sense? Why does an X stand for a kiss? I think an O should be a kiss because it’s like your mouth.” She demonstrated with an O that made her look very young and very surprised.

  “Who are you sending love letters to?” I asked.

  She giggled. “No one.”

  I looked skeptical and she laughed again. “I’m not!”

  * * * * *

  I dropped Emma off at her home -- managing to avoid any meaningful discussion with Lisa, who tried to insist that I stay for dinner -- and headed back to the bookstore.

  By then Natalie had closed up for the night and gone home. It was very quiet as I locked the door behind me. The forest of bookshelves stood motionless and silent in the gloom. Outside the front windows the streetlamps were coming on, the traffic thinning in this mostly retail part of town.

  I stared through the paint- and plaster-spattered plastic wall separating the store from the gutted rooms next door. Remembering Peter Verlane’s earlier visit, I hoped the construction crew had locked up properly before leaving for the day.

  Not that I was unduly worried about Verlane. Not about him killing me, anyway. I believed that, like Angus, he had been caught up in something larger than himself, swept along by a more powerful and unscrupulous personality. That didn’t mean I had forgiven him -- or was likely to any time soon -- but I wasn’t afraid of him. Which didn’t make his showing up at the bookstore any less of a shock. Nor did it mitigate my anger at Guy -- although maybe that wasn’t fair.

  I went upstairs and checked the phone machine, but there were no messages. I recalled Natalie saying that Paul Kane had called earlier, but I really didn’t have the energy to talk to Paul Kane right then.

  And it’s not like I had anything to tell him. My efforts at sleuthing seemed pretty ineffectual so far, if I did say so myself.

  I poured myself a glass of orange-pineapple juice -- and I realized that Natalie must have put my groceries away for me. I was grateful, but it gave me a strange feeling to think of her -- to think of anyone -- wandering through these rooms. Guy and Lisa had double-teamed me on that one, insisting after I’d developed pneumonia that my family needed access to my home in case of emergency. Guy had a key, of course, but now so did Lisa -- and Natalie.

  I drank my juice and stared down at the empty street. It was a warm, dry June evening. The summer night smelled of smog and distant dinners cooked in restaurants on the other side of town. A kid with a guitar sat on the stoop of the closed boutique across the street singing -- practicing, apparently -- an old Beatles song. The bald and featureless mannequins in the brightly illuminated boutique windows modeled their finery and gestured elegantly into space.

  “…of lovers and friends I still can recall, some are dead and some are living…”

  I thought about the league of extraordinary gentlemen I’d dated through the years. There was a lot to be said for being single; you couldn’t go by Friday nights.

  I wondered what Paul Kane did on Friday nights.

  I wondered what the hell Guy was doing tonight. Had Peter managed to track him down?

  I wondered what Jake and his wife did on Friday nights.

  Anyway, I could always call Guy. Ask him directly what the fuck was up with him and Harry Potter. Put him on the defense for a change. Because in my humble opinion there was a significant difference between working with an ex-lover, and continuing a friendship with someone who had tried to TWEP your current lover.

  Yes, I could call Guy, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what he might have to say.

  * * * * *

  Nina Hawthorne was something of a celebrity. She had inherited a bundle from her father when he fell off his yacht and drowned off the coast of Catalina, but she was a successful businesswoman in her own right. Truly Scrumptious Catering boasted an impressive roster of A-list clients, but it didn’t take a lot of Googling to figure out that Nina was a woman with a past -- and it wasn’t all lemongrass chicken meatballs.

  Before discovering her future was in food services, Nina -- who, from her photos, looked small and dark and rather chic despite the crew cut -- had tried acting, painting, and bounty hunting. Reading various interviews and reviews, I reflected what an excruciating thing it must be to grow up in the public eye. Every mistake was captured for posterity -- and reviewed by the pundits. And Nina had made many mistakes -- Porter Jones was the least of it.

  There had been rock stars, movie stars -- and even an astronaut. There had been car accidents, drug busts, alcoholic outbursts, and a Playboy centerfold.

  And there had been Paul Kane.

  Yes, about six pages back in my Internet searching I found a passing reference to a court case between Nina and Paul Kane. And before long I had the whole sad and sordid tale -- and it was sad.

  Not long after her father’s death, Nina -- who was about nineteen at the time -- had had a fleeting -- very fleeting -- affair with Paul Kane, which resulted in an illegitimate child: a little girl by the name of Hazel Honeybelle. The name alone proved pretty conclusively that Nina was probably not a fit parent. In any case, because of Nina’s much-publicized history of drugs, drinking, and promiscuity, Kane was able to win custody of the child -- whose name he promptly changed to Charlotte Victoria.

  This was the first salvo in a series of mildly comical skirmishes -- legal and personal -- between Kane and Nina as they fought for custody and control of their child, and it probably would have gone on for years, endlessly entertaining the readers of Us magazine. But farce turned to tragedy when Hazel/Charlotte drowned at age three in Paul Kane’s swimming pool at his villa in Sardinia.

  I stared at the grim photos of a black-clad Nina and an equally somber-looking Paul Kane at the child’s funeral.

  Now there, in my opinion, was a motive that age could not wither nor custom stale.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Jake’s cell before I remembered that it was Friday night, and he was probably off duty -- or at least not taking my calls.

  The phone rang, I got ready to leave my message, and Jake said crisply, “Riordan.”

  It startled me into one of my coughing fits. When I got my breath back, I said huskily, “Believe it or not, I think I have something for you.”

  There was a peculiar pause. I heard the echo of my own words -- and my tone -- and considered how I might conceivably be misinterpreted. I said hastily, “I mean, I think we may be approaching this from the wrong angle.”

  “What are we talking about here?” he asked neutrally.

  “Porter Jones’s murder. I don’t think he was the intended victim. I think someone was trying to kill Paul Kane.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Where are you?” Jake asked.

  “At home.”

  He hesitated. Said, “You want to meet for a drink, and you can tell me what you’ve found?”

  I hesitated too. Glanced at the clock. Five after nine. But it’s not like I had anywhere to be -- nor was I apparently going to have any company that night. “Sure,” I said colorlessly. “Where?”

  “Do you know where Brits Restaurant and Pub is?”

  “East Colorado Boulevard?”

  “I’ll see you there in about thirty minutes.”

  I hung up and went to change my T-shirt and sweats for jeans and a long-sleeved shirt in a charcoal multistripe. I wasn’t about to shave for a drink with Jake, but I did drag a comb through my hair and brush my teeth.

  I didn’t have as far to go and I got to the pub before Jake, and -- remembering that I hadn’t had dinner -- ordered a roast beef sandwich while I waited.

  He arrived a few minutes after my food. The Veronica Mars theme song was playing as I watched him -- tall and sort of compelling in black jeans, black T-shirt, and black leather jacket -- threading his way through the tables t
o the beat of the music. I smiled sourly as the lyrics to “We Used to be Friends” registered.

  A long time ago. Yeah. Only it didn’t feel as long ago as it probably should have.

  He spotted me at the bar, pulled out a stool next to me, and sat down. “Something funny?” His eyes -- I’d forgotten how light they were: almost whiskey-colored -- met mine warily.

  “Not really. I’m surprised you could make it on such short notice.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Friday night.” I shrugged. “I figured you’d be home with the little woman doing whatever it is little women like to do on Friday nights.”

  “Kate’s working tonight.” The bartender approached us, drying a glass with a Scottish tea towel featuring Queen Elizabeth’s somewhat damp face. “What are you drinking?”

  I considered it. “A Henley Skullfarquar,” I requested.

  The bartender and Jake exchanged a look; the bartender nodded as though conceding a point to me. “But you usually don’t get it by the glass, mate.”

  “How does it usually come?”

  “Usually make ’em up by the jug. They serve it during the Henley Royal Regatta. Not to worry. I’ll do it for you. You want soda water?”

  “Do I? What’s in it?”

  “Smirnoff Ice, Strongbow Cider, Pimm’s Cup, gin, grenadine, a slice of orange or lemon. You can add lemonade or soda water if you like.”

  “Jesus,” Jake said. “Are you on antibiotics?”

  “I won’t need them after this. No germ could survive that amount of alcohol.”

  “At least it’s got vitamin C.” He asked the bartender what he had on tap and requested Bass ale.

  I realized something that had been subconsciously bothering me. He had changed his aftershave. Not that I didn’t like this one. It was nice: a sharp, oriental, woody fragrance. But it made him smell…different. Alien. A stranger.

  Of course, he was a stranger. That was the point.

  Jake got his ale, took a long pull on it, and turned on his stool to face me. “So what makes you think Paul was the target last Sunday?”