Death of a Pirate King

by Josh Lanyon

  Paul put a hand on my arm. “Stay for a bit, Adrien. I’d like a word in private.”

  January said good-bye to me, patted Paul’s shoulder. Valarie kissed his cheek, murmuring, “Are you sure you can’t cancel your plans for tonight?”

  “I’m sure, my flower.”

  “Well, watch out for the crazies.” She caught my glance, and said, “Oh, that wasn’t directed at you -- although I do think you’re nuts to go along with this last brainstorm of Paul’s. You know, what you two are doing could be dangerous. Someone tried to run Paul off the road on his way down here this morning.”

  I turned to Kane, who laughed at my expression. “No one is trying to kill me,” he said.

  Valarie gaped. “You mean someone has threatened to --? Paul!”

  He was shaking his head, gently steering her toward the gangplank. “Bad driving isn’t a crime. The perils of amateur sleuthing: Adrien sees murderers behind road signs.”

  He waved them off, then turned smiling lazily to me. “Alone at last! Let’s go down to the salon.”

  I followed him below deck to a beautifully appointed lounge paneled in teakwood with panoramic picture windows of the harbor and the sky flushed with sunset. The plush carpeting and rich furnishings were in burnished earth tones. I’d been in nice hotels that weren’t as lavishly decorated.

  “What’s your poison?” Paul asked, going to the bar.

  Funny guy.

  “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  His mobile mouth quirked. He poured himself brandy and joined me over on one of the long L-shaped sofas.

  “Jake tells me you have a thing for pirates.”

  As “things” go, my affection for swashbuckling films is pretty tame, but his tone -- and the understanding that he and Jake had discussed and laughed at me -- turned it into something else.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” I drawled.

  He chuckled, studying me with his bright, inquisitive gaze. He took a swallow of brandy, savoring it.

  “Is Jake behaving himself?” he asked.

  “As far as I know.”

  He smirked at the implications. “He’s not scaring you off the case?”

  What was going on here? There was something very odd in this casual, almost -- but not quite -- friendly inquisition.

  “No.”

  “And you haven’t changed your mind about pursuing this…investigation?”

  “No. Should I?”

  He shrugged. “The police are very close to making an arrest, you know. The evidence is stacking up against Ally.”

  His main concern had not been justice for Porter -- it had been that Alonzo viewed him as a suspect. Not that I could fault him for that, since my concern had been that I was a suspect. I said, “Did you know Porter had cancer?”

  “Yes.” He looked momentarily grave. “I was one of the few people he confided in.”

  “I assume Ally knew?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, but turned his head at the sound of footsteps coming down the winding stairs that led into this lounge.

  Boots. Jeans encasing long legs and lean hips. Wide shoulders in a black leather jacket. Jake.

  “There you are,” Paul said lazily.

  Jake stared at me. In some alternate universe that dumbstruck expression would have been funny. Not so much in this one.

  “Oh, don’t run off,” Paul said as I rose. “We could make a threesome of it.” He chuckled. “Dinner, that is.”

  “Another time,” I said. “Dinner, that is.”

  I had to step past Jake to get to the doorway. He had recovered from his shock and watched me without expression.

  “Adrien,” he said quietly.

  I nodded at him. “Good night,” I told Paul. “Thanks for the boat ride.”

  I heard Paul laughing as I climbed topside.

  The air was chill and smelled of brine and something dank. Overhead, the palm trees rustled eerily, black against the blaze of sunset. The hollow thud of my footsteps followed me down the pier as I walked toward the parking lot.

  It wasn’t a shock…exactly. It was more the realization that Paul Kane had deliberately kept me onboard so that I would see Jake arrive.

  Or so that Jake would see me?

  Either way it was puzzling. Maybe I wasn’t exactly clear for whose benefit that little performance had been staged, but I was dead sure it hadn’t been an accident. That little meeting had been directed as any scene in a play.

  Why?

  Chapter Fifteen

  I knew the minute I was ushered into Dr. Cardigan’s office on Monday morning that the news was not good.

  Dr. Cardigan was seated at his desk frowning over a file that I had a suspicion was mine. He rose, shook hands, invited me to sit. I sat and glanced at the many smiling photos of his children and grandchildren on the bookshelves lined with medical tomes.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, sitting down again.

  His black cherry gaze rested seriously on my face, and I figured this was not a rhetorical question. “Good,” I said determinedly.

  He nodded like everybody said that and we all knew it wasn’t true. “Fatigue? Some difficulty catching your breath?”

  “Fatigue -- but nothing unusual.”

  “Are you finding your arrhythmia a little worse?”

  I think he could see by my expression that struck home. “Well, we’ve got your test results back and there are some things we need to talk about.”

  I nodded automatically.

  “I don’t think this is going to come as a surprise.” He was studying my charts again. “You’ve been largely asymptomatic for the past fifteen years, but your last ECG indicates changes in ejection fraction and enlargement of the left ventricle.” He looked up inquiringly. Apparently I was supposed to ask an intelligent question around about then.

  I said, “Okay. In layman’s terms?”

  “The pneumonia has aggravated your heart disease. Your heart is working harder with fewer results.”

  I nodded, trying to process.

  He looked up, scanned my face. “We’ve discussed surgery in the past. It’s now a matter of when, not if. I’m going to refer you to a cardiac surgeon --”

  I missed a bit of the next part. Open heart surgery. Not my favorite thing.

  I asked, “How soon would he have to operate?”

  “Your surgeon will make the determination once he’s examined you. Once symptoms present, it’s best not to delay.”

  I sighed. Rubbed my jaw. I felt broadsided. I guess I should have seen it coming, but I really didn’t feel that ill. Tired from the pneumonia, naturally. Stressed.

  Dr. Cardigan said, “We want to perform surgery before the left ventricle is irreversibly weakened. Repairing the valve is preferable to replacing it, but that’s often not possible when the damage has been caused by rheumatic fever.”

  I nodded. I’d done a fair bit of reading on valve replacement the first time the subject came up. Repairing the valve not only increased my odds of both short- and long-term survival but lessened the risk of stroke and worsening my heart failure.

  Studying my face, Dr. Cardigan said, “I know this isn’t the news you wanted, but it is not, by any means, a grim prognosis. It’s not a routine procedure, I’ll grant you, but there are over a hundred thousand heart valve surgeries performed annually in the United States alone. Most patients experience marked improvement in health and spirits.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “The recuperation process is a slow one, but there’s every likelihood that you’ll make a complete recovery. Your overall health is good. In fact, with surgery you may discover you no longer suffer from the arrhythmia at all.”

  So, really, everything was fucking terrific! Why did I have the ridiculous desire to cry?

  * * * * *

  “See! He likes you,” Natalie said triumphantly.

  I stared down at the scrawny scrap of fur cautiously sniffing my hand.

  “He doesn’t like me. He
thinks I’m going to feed him.”

  “Now who’s being a cynic? Anyway, every bookstore should have a cat.”

  The cat -- assuming it was a cat and not some beige bug-eyed refugee from outer space -- slunk uneasily down the counter, and flinched at the flutter of Mystery Scene pages as a gust of warm air blew in from the street.

  It was Monday afternoon, and I was not in a great mood after my trip to Huntington Hospital. After leaving the med center, I’d stopped off for some lunch I wasn’t able to eat, then spent an hour or two wandering around the Paseo. I’d stopped in at Apostrophe Books and bought a copy of Paul Kane’s unauthorized biography, and then finally steeled myself to go home.

  The sight of a flea-bitten alley cat -- okay, alley kitten -- on the antique mahogany desk that served as my sales counter did not improve my precarious mood.

  “Nat,” I said, “I don’t want a cat.”

  “But he’d be good for you, Adrien. There are all kinds of studies about how pets help people live longer -- just petting a cat can lower your blood pressure. And he would be company for you.”

  “My blood pressure is okay,” I snapped. “At least it was five minutes ago. And I don’t want a cat for company.”

  The cat cringed at my raised voice, and slither-ran down the counter, sending papers flying before he leaped to the back of a nearby chair and balanced there, sinking his little claws into the leather.

  “Now you’ve scared him!” she exclaimed, scurrying to retrieve the scattered flyers and receipts. “He’s just a baby!”

  “A baby what? He looks like a cross between a lemur and Gollum.”

  “He’s starving.”

  “Then feed him and put him back in the alley where you found him.”

  “I didn’t find him,” she said indignantly. “He came in on his own.” She gave me an expectant look. Like, what? This was supposed to be the universal sign that I and this feral cat were Meant To Be?

  “He’s filthy,” I said, and to prove my point, the little beast balanced on three legs and proceeded to scratch itself briskly behind its torn ear with the fourth. “He’s got fleas. He’s probably disease-ridden.”

  “You sound like Lisa,” Natalie said, quite unforgivably.

  I gave her a long look. “I do not want this cat,” I said. “No, Nat. Not in a hat. Not in my flat. Not in the store, not any more, just out the door -- if you please.”

  I thought that was pretty good for off-the-cuff, but she was unimpressed. “He’ll die out there!”

  “Or you’ll die in here. Take your pick.” At her expression, I sighed. “Honest to God, Natalie. I don’t -- I can’t take on the responsibility for a pet right now. And if I was in the market for a pet, it would be a dog.”

  A big dog. That ate cats for lunch.

  Apparently Natalie’s case of selective deafness had grown worse while I’d been out. As though I hadn’t said a word, she said, “And I’ll watch him during the day while you’re working this case.”

  “I’m not --” I amended, “I don’t know that I’m going to do any more sleuthing. It’s taking up a lot of time I don’t have.” I hoped that wasn’t as portentous as it sounded.

  Even before Dr. Cardigan had advised me to take things easy for the next week or so before my surgery, I’d decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to keep poking around in Porter Jones’s death. Not because it was dangerous -- it hadn’t been so far -- and certainly not because of Jake. No, it was after leaving Paul Kane’s boat the evening before. It bothered me the way Kane had manipulated me -- and Jake -- for his own amusement. At least, I couldn’t see any other reason for his behavior the evening before. And it made me uneasy. I already didn’t like him, and now I didn’t trust him.

  True, that left me still squarely in Detective Alonzo’s sights as a murder suspect, but it sounded to me like Jake was guiding the investigation toward Ally Beaton-Jones.

  Natalie was eyeing me curiously. I said lamely, “Besides, Guy is allergic to cats.”

  She didn’t say it, but I could see what she was thinking: that Guy -- at least as far as she knew -- hadn’t been around since last Thursday. Hadn’t even called.

  I missed Guy. I missed him a lot right now.

  “Feed him a can of tuna and put him outside,” I said. “He’s an alley cat. He’ll survive.”

  “He might not! He’s just a few months old!” She was getting angry now, and -- oddly enough -- I was getting angry too.

  “Then you take him home.”

  “You know Lisa won’t allow animals in the house.”

  What the hell was a healthy, twenty-something-year-old woman still doing living with her parents anyway?

  “Then call the pound. I don’t care. It’s not my cat, and this is not my problem.”

  She stared at me like I’d morphed into something that belonged in a Playstation. Even the cat seemed to be staring at me with those E.T. eyes.

  I tried to bring it down a notch. “Natalie,” I said placatingly, “Have a heart. I can’t deal with this right now. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  She was still not speaking to me when I left to take Emma to her riding lessons.

  * * * * *

  While I was watching Emma go through her paces, Jake called and left a message on my cell phone. I didn’t discover it until I was back at the bookstore.

  His recorded voice sounded terse and self-conscious.

  “It’s possible you’re onto something with Nina Hawthorne. It turns out she was at Paul’s the morning of the party. There’s still no indication of how she might have introduced poison into the cocktail mixture, but it might be worth talking to her.”

  Why tell me? He was the police. It was his job to check this stuff out. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was using this development with Nina as an excuse for contacting me. Was he -- like Paul -- worried I might pull out of the investigation? He didn’t agree with any of my theories so far, so why the hell would he care? Wouldn’t it be easier, really?

  Or was I the only one struggling with old feelings?

  I listened to the message again, started to dial Jake, and then stopped myself. There was nothing to discuss. Not really. If I called him it would be because I wanted to talk to him, and that way lay madness.

  I opened a can of Wolfgang Puck’s tortilla soup and made myself eat it, browsing through a stack of books that had arrived that morning from publishers. I’d been looking forward to Richard Stevenson’s new one for months. There were enticing offerings from favorites P.A. Brown, Neil Plakcy, and Anthony Bidulka -- and a promising first book by new author Scott Sherman (although if I had to read one more mystery about a hustler turning detective, I was going to shoot myself). I flipped pages and listened absently to the sounds of the street settling down for the evening outside my window.

  Rising, I went to turn on the stereo and listened to the opening notes of Snow Patrol’s “You’re All I Have” from Eyes Open.

  I tried not to think. I especially tried not to think about Guy.

  I could call him, of course. If I called him and said I was ill and needed him, he’d be here in a minute.

  But that would be the wrong reason to call. And the wrong reason for him to come back.

  I remembered that I had bought Paul Kane’s biography, and I went downstairs to retrieve it. For a moment I stood in the silent gloom of the store, staring through the plastic dividing wall.

  Nothing to see but ladders and scaffolding. A couple of drop cloths. A generator sat to one side beside a pile of broken plaster. There were coils of wire, cans of paint. Nothing sinister lurked there. I was just getting jumpy in my old age.

  I retrieved my book and returned upstairs.

  The book was called Glorious Thing, a nod to Paul Kane’s role as the pirate king in the fantasy flick The Corsair. This was the film that had made Paul Kane a star -- maybe a minor star as Hollywood galaxies went, but a star nonetheless. I’d seen the film a couple of times, and I had very much appreciat
ed Kane’s acting -- along with other things. Well, what was there to object to in watching a beautiful male animal run around half-naked for two and a half hours? Even if the dialog did consist of creaking lines like, “I swear by all that is holy, I will have my revenge!” and “What kind of demon are you?” (That last was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but had anyone asked me, I’d have been happy to explain that there was, in fact, a fairly complex demon hierarchy.)

  I wasn’t far into the book before I sussed that the author, Bonnie Kirkland, was not a member of Paul Kane’s fan club. It was hard to put my finger on what it was. For the most part she seemed to be sticking to facts -- everything seemed properly attributed and footnoted. And, if anything, Kane’s background was one that should have generated sympathy. Born Humphrey Horfield in Bristol, England, he was orphaned at an early age and placed in institutional care. He ran away when he was fifteen to become an actor. He changed his name and supported himself as a rent boy on the streets of London. Talent, his extraordinary good looks, and luck won him a number of small roles in theater productions, but his big break came in 1980 when he won something called the SWET Award for Best Newcomer for his role as Phineas in A Separate Peace.

  He played the role again in a film version, and then moved to the States where he landed a number of increasingly large parts in movies -- some bad, some good, but all seeming to move his career forward. But the most significant thing during that period was the friendship he formed with wealthy entrepreneur Langley Hawthorne, who had recently put together his own film production company, Associated Talent.

  Hawthorne thought Kane was going to be this generation’s Cary Grant, and he had invested considerably in him. But it was more than a business investment. Hawthorne had befriended Kane -- practically made him one of the family. Without actually saying so, Bonnie Kirkland managed to convey that she thought this was a mistake on Hawthorne’s part, and that Kane was a charming and manipulative user.

  As far as I could tell that opinion was based on two things: Kane’s affair with Nina Hawthorne -- Kirkland’s sympathies clearly lay with Nina -- and the fact that Hawthorne’s death had left Paul Kane rich and in control of Associated Talent.