Nobody came down the alley.
The air was sultry. Larochelle was standing close to O’Doull, and he could feel her warmth. Be dispassionate about this, he told himself. But he wanted to believe her.
Chapter Thirty-One
Larochelle smiled at the night clerk as they entered the lobby. “Buenas, Mr. Peabody,” she said.
The clerk looked at her, than at O’Doull, then grinned crookedly.
“You know her,” O’Doull said.
“Sure, he knows me,” Larochelle said. “He wanted to make out with me.”
Peabody showed many teeth in a large, strained smile. “This is the girl you were asking about, Officer,” he said. “Now I remember her. She walked out with a little suitcase. I remember thinking she might be skipping her bill.”
Larochelle took O’Doull’s hand in a gesture of closeness. “He thought I was a working girl. Didn’t you, Peabody? The girls have to pay him off to work around here. He thought he was entitled to something free from me.”
“Look,” O’Doull said, “I asked you some questions last night and you were so concerned about protecting a call-girl operation that you couldn’t seem to remember a goddamn thing.”
“Some things come back. Soon as I saw her, I remembered. She was here that night.”
“If he saw me,” Larochelle said, “he saw you-know-who.”
“A man,” O’Doull said. “Walking through the lobby. To the elevator, or from the elevator. Or both.”
“People come and go, like I say. Let’s see, there was a guy. Walked through here like an arrow, out the front door.”
“Give me a description.”
“Only saw the back of his head. Can’t remember what he was wearing.” Peabody studied the ceiling. O’Doull felt there was something unnatural in the way the man seemed to draw on his memory. As if he were deciding how much to tell.
“Hair?”
“Short.”
“Short?” said Larochelle. “It was a —”
“Don’t,” O’Doull said.
But a woman’s voice from behind him completed Larochelle’s sentence.
“It was a crewcut. Military moustache. Average height. Chunky. Round face. He’s a vicious fucker. A killer in bed.”
It was Cherrie, the blonde prostitute who had been with the judge in the penthouse. O’Doull guessed she had been standing behind him for some time.
“And this is the girl I saw,” Cherrie said. To Larochelle: “I don’t mean to get you in trouble, dear.” She sounded insincere.
But there was a triumphant expression on Larochelle’s face. “She saw him!”
“A killer in bed?” O’Doull repeated.
“I hope I don’t mean it literal. But he was savage. He took me upstairs once. I thought he was a cop. Packed a piece, anyway. Didn’t take his jacket off, and I’ll tell you, I got a five-inch bruise from the gun. He rents rooms here a lot, for clients, I guess, I don’t know what for. Peabody here knows him, don’t you, sweetie?”
Peabody had a blank look. Then his face seemed to fill with light.
“Oh, Rudy, sure, sure.”
“What about Monday night?” O’Doull asked.
Peabody’s eyes looked like those of a small, hunted animal. They were flickering around the lobby. O’Doull’s patience left him.
“For Christ’s sake, just do me a favor and be up front with me for a few minutes. You’ll do yourself a favor, too, especially if you want to avoid being an accessory after the fact to a murder.”
“Oh, yeah, Rudy was here. He comes by a lot. He went up to one of the rooms for maybe five minutes.”
“What room?”
Peabody spoke in a hushed voice. O’Doull began to realize that the man was afraid of Meyers. “I’m not here to get anyone in trouble. I think he went up to the penthouse; I’m not sure. He goes up there once in a while. Friend of the guy there. The guy that got killed.”
“Was he up there after midnight?”
Peabody’s eyes switched from Larochelle, to O’Doull, to Cherrie, back to O’Doull. “Around the time I seen this lady, I guess. Maybe two a.m?”
“Two o’clock,” Cherrie said flatly. “If I had known you were asking about a guy, not a lady, I’d’ve told you.”
“Did you see him before you saw me, or after?” Larochelle asked.
“Uh, after, I think,” the clerk said.
“Before,” Cherrie said. “He came out. In a hurry. You came down and walked out. In a hurry.”
“Okay, folks,” O’Doull said. “I’m going to write out a couple of statements now, and you’re going to sign them.”
***
“Like I say, Mr. O’Doull, you’ve got a tiger by the tail. What are you going to do about it?” Larochelle and O’Doull were sitting in a dark but friendly restaurant in Little Havana. Three guitarists were singing sad songs on a stage.
What, in fact, was he going to do about it? Should he talk to Braithwaite? Or get on the blower to Mitchell? Those were uncomfortable alternatives. He didn’t feel ready yet to put Mitchell in the picture. He thought about going to Jess Flaherty, who might be more receptive. It was obvious she hated Meyers. There were other things to check out, too. The fingerprints on the phone. The tape. He would try to spend some time on it tomorrow.
“Okay, don’t answer,” Larochelle said. “The bigger question is, what are you going to do with me?”
“Maybe we can find a little hotel for you out in Miami Beach.”
“Don’t tell me I’m not your prisoner anymore? I think I’d rather not be free.”
“What does that mean?” he asked. He felt hypnotized by her eyes. A languid, erotic energy seemed to flow out of them. Maybe it’s the wine, he thought. They were on their second bottle.
“It means I’m scared shitless. It means that maybe I’d rather shack up with you for the night.”
O’Doull could feel his cheeks reddening. He cleared his throat.
“If you’re afraid of me, I’ll sleep on the floor,” she said.
“We’ll work something out,” he said. He felt weak.
O’Doull had always been fascinated by the women of Montreal. On weekends, he had often fled to Montreal to escape the ennui of Ottawa and the boredom of those countless husband-seeking secretaries, so yearning, so lonely. The women of Montreal, by contrast, were elegant, soignées, possessed of a cosmopolitan confidence, a chic. But never had any of those alluring Canadiennes given O’Doull even an eyelash flicker of hope.
Much more than a flicker of hope was offered by the eyes of Marianne Larochelle — here, in this hot and humid little restaurant; here, in candlelight that seemed to flicker to the beat of guitar and marimba, to the musical poetry of José Martí.
O’Doull’s eyes were swimming in hers.
The ship whore, Meyers had called her. O’Doull’s gut twisted in silent fury. At the same time, her amorality made him wary of her, caused him to withdraw. She was liberated, he supposed — although several years ago, before the dawn of the New Woman, he might have thought of it as looseness. He decided to keep a warning light burning somewhere within him.
Tonight, a serenity had replaced the terror that had been in her eyes when they first met. There was a calmness, a sense of self-assurance.
And there was something else in her eyes that he could not read. They were as green as a forest in summer, and as inviting, but they spoke mysteries. Behind the eyes, he felt there was something dark, hidden, trapped.
Nervously, O’Doull began talking about himself, although he suspected there was little enough in his past to excite the imagination of this jet-set cocaine smuggler. But he wanted her to know him better, and so he talked about his boyhood in the little outports of Newfoundland from which the route to anywhere was by sea. He talked of his loneliness, of the long, empty spaces in his life when as a
boy he surrounded himself with his crazy machines, his inventions, his books, his experiments. He talked a little of his father, and of the pain he felt for him.
Through all this, her lips were parted with a gentle, perfect smile. After a while, she placed a hand on one of his and leaned towards him.
“You’re nice,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The air conditioning had been left on in his motel room. It was cold, and he switched it off.
It was one-thirty. O’Doull was feeling tipsy. “I guess you left your pyjamas in your overnight case,” he said.
“Pyjamas?” She laughed.
There was one king-sized bed in the room. O’Doull was sitting on the corner of it, watching her.
Larochelle began rolling a joint.
“Just think,” she said, “there’s another fifty tons of this on the ship. Do you think they’ll find it? Do you know where it’s coming in?”
O’Doull warned himself to be careful. He hadn’t told her about the satellite tracking. Mitchell would explode if he even suspected he was sharing a motel room with her.
“Not talking, huh?” Larochelle said. “You don’t trust me; I don’t blame you. What will the police do with the pot if they seize it? They’ll steal some of it, I guess.”
O’Doull was offended. “They’ll burn it. At a municipal dump.”
She sighed. “What a shame. What a waste. What a world we live in. A fifty-ton bonfire of one-toke dope.”
“What’s one-toke dope?”
“This stuff.” She wiggled the joint at him. “One toke is all you need. One toke, and in five minutes you’re Mary Poppins, floating on top of the world. Sinsemilla. Female flower.” She smiled. “The female is deadlier than the male, Theo.” She held the joint up to him, with a question in her eyes.
“No, thanks. It doesn’t do anything for me.”
“And it’s against the law, isn’t it, Theo? Well, I wouldn’t want you to break any laws. I might have to turn you in.”
She lit it and drew on it. O’Doull could smell the heaviness of it in the air. He had tried low-grade Mexican when he was a kid, and had often caught a floating whiff of marijuana here and there at parties in Ottawa, but this seemed different. Larochelle was standing near him.
Then she kneeled in front of him, putting her hands behind his neck, drawing him to her. She placed her lips on his, bringing his mouth open with her tongue, and exhaled. His lungs filled with the smoke from her mouth. He did not withdraw from her, was unable to. Her tongue danced in his mouth. Their lips seemed to hold together forever, fixed with sweet glue.
When she released him, he had to blink the stars away. Tiny swirls of smoke came from his mouth and nostrils. He hoped it was the marijuana. Otherwise, he was on fire.
Larochelle half-closed her eyes and peered at him. She smiled. Her right hand gently stroked his cheek; then she touched her fingers to his lips so lightly he felt only a tingle. With her hand she guided his face to hers, again with a touch so light it seemed to O’Doull that he was being drawn forward by a force that was outside her but that she controlled. She touched his lips with hers, withdrew, touched again, withdrew, and touched again. Each time, O’Doull felt a flow of energy, an electric pouring-out.
Her eyes had been closed as she kissed him. As she withdrew a little from him, they opened, and O’Doull felt a great pulsing. He was spellstruck, possessed. Her eyes mesmerized him. There was something of a proud, wild animal in them. A cat, a leopard.
She sprang lightly to her feet and swirled around the room like a ballerina, flicking light switches off. Then in the glow from outside — the Miami moon — she emerged from her dress, a butterfly. The dress twirled around her fingers and floated over her head like a sail.
It came suddenly to O’Doull that he was blasted.
Larochelle’s panties fluttered like a leaf to her feet.
O’Doull’s mouth was dry and his palms were wet.
She came to him, touching her lips to his ear. “I’m going to take you to places you’ve never been before,” she said.
***
It was half-past four in the morning.
O’Doull emerged from his motel onto the street, dizzy, awed. The street was deserted. The lights glowed like saints with halos. O’Doull was trying to digest the sensation of being this stoned, and was having difficulty relating it to anything in his experience.
An hour before, Larochelle had rolled another joint, and O’Doull, totally abandoned by then, smoked it with her. As they began to make love again, she started to cry, and held him tightly with her arms and legs, the muscles of her vagina holding him like a vise. After that, she turned cruel, making love to him viciously, causing him pain. She told him she wanted him to hurt her, too. He could not do anything like that. She called him obscene names, in English, in French, in Spanish.
His complaint of dizziness had been an honest one, and he excused himself to walk in the fresh air.
He did not wobble. He was steady on his feet. In fact, he felt light, as if he were weightless in space, or as if his feet were springs. He drifted down the empty streets of the city, along Biscayne Boulevard, up Flagler.
He stared in shop windows and saw small, strange faces staring back. Colored lights bobbed and blinked in the back of the stores. The air seemed to buzz. An old bum, shoulders slouched, passed him on the street, his shoes making a soft pat-pat as he went by. O’Doull fished a ten-dollar bill from his wallet, called him back, gave it to him, then walked on.
A patrol car cruised towards him and slowed as it went past. O’Doull waved to the men inside with a smile. They don’t know I’m stoned, he thought.
After a while, he stopped walking. He stood on the sidewalk, struck by something that was in his mind, something that he couldn’t make out but that was sending him a signal. He stood for a few minutes, touching his fingers to his forehead, his eyes closed.
Then he began to retrace his steps. He went back half a block and studied the sign on the door.
“Joe Mitsui,” it said. “Martial Arts Studio.” A smaller sign described Mitsui as a master of Shotokan karate, a sixth dan “shihan.” Tae Kwon-Do, third dan. He looked at the photographs for a while, then returned to the motel.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Joe Mitsui looked about thirty-five. He told O’Doull his age was fifty-four.
“I was born in California,” he said. “I’m American in my bones, but I like to think my spirit is in the East. After the war, I studied in Japan and in Korea. I spent twenty years learning. After all these years, I know a little, but it is very little. Let me close this class, and then we can talk.
There were six men and two women in the class. They wore white, yellow, and green belts.
“Open your eyes,” he said. “Now touch one another. Touch your fingers upon each other. Touch the face. Smile at each other. Thank you. Practice the breathing methods for next week, my friends. Thank you. Thank you.” He bowed, and they bowed and left for the dressing rooms.
O’Doull was feeling flabby, untoned. And exhausted. After he had returned to the motel, Larochelle had given him a final burst of strength, and they had stayed awake for another hour before releasing themselves to sleep.
“Some come here seeking an experience, a new religion,” Mitsui said. “They are looking for titillation. The martial arts are spreading like junk food through America.”
Mitsui smiled gently, somewhat wistfully. “It is so easy to sell out to the values of this country. I have done so. When I came back from Japan, karate and kung fu were catching on. Heck, I just climbed on top of the wave and surfed right into a comfortable business. My capitalist heritage took over. I have a boat, an acre on the water, kids at college, too many comforts.”
He offered O’Doull a hard chair and took one himself. “You want to know about commando karate. That kind of bu
siness, we don’t teach. We are not interested in death; we are interested in life.” He shrugged. “But I know the movements, the killing touches, the thirty-seven kyusho points. You learn them in order to avoid them.”
O’Doull described the condition of the bodies of Kelly and Escarlata. Mitsui nodded from time to time, without change of expression.
“Let me instruct you,” Mitsui said. “Westerners often express disbelief. They are not ready to accept the possibilities. Let me explain first that we are all surrounded by energy fields. Force fields. There is skill to organizing these fields, amassing their energy, directing them. There is a life force, ch’i, which, when concentrated, focused like an electric beam, can split a ten-foot block of ice, can drive spikes into concrete. I’m not talking about any strange psychic power, Sergeant. It’s in all of us, but few of us learn how to use it, and it is in knowledge, not strength, that the power lies. I am a humble beginning student when I think of the knowledge of others.” There was a hint of Oriental lilt to his voice, as well as a warmth.
“There are practitioners of such subtle ability they can touch a man at a certain time and certain place, and two weeks later that man will die. This is called the delayed death touch. There are those who can fog your vision. There are those who can create a wall with their mind through which no blade can penetrate. These are the masters, the artists. Those versed in the so-called art of commando karate are merely butchers. Cave men.”
As he took this in, O’Doull was trying to amass his own personal force field to beat back his fatigue.
“The West often seizes upon something that is good, as I say, and corrupts it. War then corrupts it even further, twists it, and makes it evil. This is how commando karate was born — through war. It is karate without the centering of the spirit, without love of your fellows, without a soul. There is only the idea of the kill. The kill is everything. And, of course, it is quite easy. I could come up to you, Sergeant O’Doull, and touch you in nine different places and cause you instant death. It would be play.”
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