The Black Tortoise

by Ronald Tierney

  “You haven’t been around much, have you?” she asked. “If you slept with more people, someone would have told you.”

  “You have some advice for me?”

  “You’re catching on. Okay, you’re young—you should get out more. Do things. Find out who you are and find a purpose.”

  “Wise advice,” I said. Lying was the least of my sins.

  She stood again, came toward me, perched her warm, slender body on my belly.

  “You’re put together pretty well,” she said. A sliver of light flashed on the blade of the knife. The weapon was from my kitchen. I supposed I should be grateful it wasn’t the meat cleaver.

  “So are you. You are the most beautiful naked woman I’ve ever seen.” It was true, but it also seemed like the right thing to say given the circumstances. “David probably couldn’t resist you. You had him come over, maybe sit on the top rail. He made it easy for you to just push him in, and your friend Jorge was there, waiting in the water below to finish the job.”

  “You do have a clue,” she said. “I thought you only knew about the program. You shouldn’t have been so nosy,” she said, putting the tip of the knife against the tip of my nose.

  “If you hadn’t killed David, I’d have been long gone, and your scheme would have worked forever. The auditors didn’t know there was a scheme, and I didn’t either. Apparently, the only one who could have known was David.”

  “Even he didn’t know he knew, but he knew enough to blow it. He helped Jorge even though he didn’t know what Jorge was doing. Pure genius, my Jorge, and a whole lot more. Anyway, it was kind of like a perpetual money machine, Jorge said, and this was merely the prototype, the test model.”

  “Killing me will only bring more attention,” I said.

  “What?” She smiled, her left hand behind her, fondling me, while her right hand, her knife hand, ran the blade along my neck and across my throat. “A little kinky sex that got out of hand.” She was drawing blood. “That’s all it was. Who knows who you were screwing around with.”

  She scooted back, the warmth of her body doing things to me despite the rush of fear. “I take a shower here to wash off any blood splatter. So I’m clean should the investigation even come close to me. My cell phone is at my place. So is Jorge’s. So they can do that tracking thing, and they’ll think we were there all night. We are each other’s alibi.”

  I needed a little more time to figure out how to get out of this mess before she killed me. A distraction. The night before, I’d thought about Emelio and Madeline, both of whom seemed most likely to be players. Emelio wanted respect. He wanted people to think he had achieved a level of success—a loving relationship, a home and a respectable job. Madeline, it seemed to me, wanted complete control of her environment, which also meant the people in it. Marguerite wanted to do good work, to believe that her life contributed something to the world. Craig just wanted to keep his head above water, to make it from day to day. What they all wanted was to survive, not only physically but psychologically They wanted to protect who they were or who they thought they were.

  I did too. Only the physical had the highest priority at this moment.

  “What do you want out of life?” I asked Vanessa. She remained astride me, the knife running along the contours of my body. The act was strangely sensuous.

  “My, my,” she said. “Are you aware you are only moments from your death? Are you sure this is what you want to talk about?” I could feel the warmth of my blood on my neck.

  “You brought it up, and I can’t think of a better time—for you, anyway.” What I was actually thinking about was how the bed was constructed. It had been a couple of years since I’d put it together. But essentially it was made of brass tubes that slid into each other. The horizontal bars running across the top of the headboard were solid brass.

  “Sure, let’s talk about you. What do you want out of life?” I asked again.

  “To live!” she said breathlessly. “To experience what it means to live before I shrivel up and die.”

  “Is this part of living?” I asked.

  “Only a very few have this kind of experience,” she said. “We’re sharing this moment, Peter.”

  It struck me that all I needed to do was grab the top rail, the one my handcuffs were attached to. If I yanked it hard enough, I could pull it completely free.

  “This is perfect,” she said. “Pushing poor David into the bay wasn’t all that exciting. I had no sense of participation. I could not feel his death. There was nothing real about it. This is real.” She was ecstatic, almost in another world.

  I understood what she said. Living had never felt more vivid to me either. Everything—breath, sweat, pain, touch—was incredibly sensuous. The blade just below my navel pressed hard. The blood was hot on my flesh.

  I moved my hands to the extent that I could, so the pressure on the brass bar would have equal force on the right and left. I did so slowly and grasped the bar with both hands.

  “How many people go through life without ever experiencing this?” she said.

  “I’m lucky too. How many people die at the hands of a beautiful, naked woman?”

  “You want to do it?” she asked.

  “You?” I knew what she meant.

  “Do I,” she said. “And at that very moment of ecstasy, you take your last breath. It would be fantastic for both of us.”

  As she slid farther back and focused on advancing the cause, I jerked the bar straight up. In a continuous movement I arced it over my body, crashing it with all the force I could muster against her blond head. Her body flew back against the brass rails of the footboard. Already there was no life in her eyes. I removed the knife from her hand and slid it under the mattress.

  I pushed her body to the floor and began to deconstruct the footboard so I could get out of the bed and find the phone.

  “Thank God I got here before the photographer,” Hadley said, glancing down at my naked body. I couldn’t get dressed with my arms and legs still attached to parts of the bed. Vanessa had used police cuffs. Hadley unlocked them. I slipped on a robe.

  “She’s dead, you know,” Hadley said.

  “Yes, I checked. I would have called 9-1-1.”

  “Ever kill anybody before?” she asked. Vanessa lay crumpled on the floor by the sliding doors.

  “No. It’s rarely called for in my line of work.”

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I had to do it,” I said.

  “It’s a human instinct to protect oneself.”

  “Or who we think we are,” I said.

  “The crime-scene people will be here soon. Tell me what happened.”

  “You might want to put a car out in front of the foundation offices and detain anyone leaving.”

  “Anyone being…?”

  “His name is Jorge Medina, and he’ll have some sort of microprocessor on him. Important evidence.”

  “That’s what you were going to give me later today?” she asked, pushing a button on her phone.

  “Yes, I didn’t anticipate…”

  “…the kinky sex?”

  “Any of this. I’ve never killed anything,” I said, not sure why I was still talking.

  TWELVE

  I told her everything and used the rest of the morning to write up a report for Mr. Lehr. I emailed him a copy and printed ones out for Emelio, Madeline and Hadley. I called my housekeeper and provided some instructions and packed for the weekend.

  Madeline was out on the pier, smoking and talking on her phone. I set her copy on her desk on my way to Emelio’s office. He was there. He didn’t look at me at first, and then he couldn’t take his eyes off me.

  I explained how Vanessa and Jorge had used a personally designed app to interrupt the box-office process. This allowed them to siphon off revenue from ticket sales. A percentage of the money was moved from the system at the time of purchase, before it was applied to the foundation’s account. And all reports with regard to the transa
ctions were altered to back up the manipulated amount of total receipts. This applied to theater events held in the larger venues, and to the larger ticket items for special events. The siphoned money went to the criminals’ accounts at separate banks. It was all automatic, and because it was programmed, it didn’t need to be changed for each new client. A perpetual money machine. As far as the auditors were concerned, the correct money went to the client and to the foundation. Reports showed that to be so, as there was no record of the diverted money. No one knew it was happening. Worse, this was merely a blueprint for what they could do as they expanded operations to other venues in San Francisco and around the country.

  Emelio was still staring. He stood, looking at me closely. “What happened?”

  “To my neck? Cut myself shaving.”

  His eyes were a soft gray. “No,” he said. “What happened to you?”

  “It’s all here in the report,” I said. Of course, not everything.

  “Some people are terrified of others discovering their secrets,” he said. “Some are terrified of unearthing their own.”

  He knew I knew what he meant. He looked sad. It wasn’t an act.

  I looked forward to a few days in wine country, maybe a visit to the spa, guaranteed fine food and wine. Beautiful country. A place where I could forget how it felt to be truly alive, to be me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My appreciation goes as always to brothers Richard and Ryan. A special thanks to my good friend David Anderson for his support. I also want to thank Orca editor Ruth Linka for making the words right and making the whole package come together in the exciting Rapid Reads program.

  RONALD TIERNEY’s The Stone Veil introduced semi-retired, Indianapolis-based private investigator “Deets” Shanahan. The book was a finalist in the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America’s Best First Private Eye Novel competition and nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for Best First Novel. Killing Frost is the eleventh in the Shanahan series. Ronald was founding editor of NUVO Newsweekly, an Indianapolis alternative weekly, and the editor of a San Francisco monthly. Until recently he lived in San Francisco, the setting for his Paladino and Lang series. He now lives in Palm Springs, California, where he continues to write. For more information, visit www.ronaldtierney.com.