I smiled in spite of myself. “Never heard it put quite that way before.”
We cruised up on the Tobin Bridge, and the span reminded me of Florida, the way the water seemed to physically drop from underneath us in a rush. But not just Florida, no. This was where Inez Stone had died, screaming as bullets entered her flesh and vital organs, as she looked into the face of madness and matricide, whether she was aware of the latter or not.
Inez. Had her death been part of the plan or hadn’t it?
“So,” Desiree said, “is my philosophy nihilistic?”
I shook my head. “Fatalistic. Marinated in skepticism.”
She smiled. “I like that.”
“Glad I could oblige.”
“I mean, we all die,” Desiree said and leaned forward in her seat. “Whether we want to or not. Just a simple fact of life.”
And she reached over and dropped something soft into my lap.
I had to wait until I passed under a streetlight until I saw what it was because the fabric was so dark.
It was a T-shirt. It bore the words FURY IN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE in white letters. It was ripped at the point where it would fall over the wearer’s right rib cage.
Desiree dug a pistol into my testicles and leaned in to me until her tongue flicked along the outer edge of my ear.
“She’s not in Florida,” she said. “She’s in a hole somewhere. She’s not dead yet, but she will be if you don’t do exactly what I say.”
“I’ll kill you,” I whispered as the bridge peaked and began its curve toward the other side of the river.
“That’s what all the boys say.”
As we looped around Marblehead Neck, the ocean boiling and belting against the rocks below, I cleared images of Angie from my head for a moment, quelled the black clouds of worry that threatened to suffocate me.
“Desiree.”
“That’s my name.” She smiled.
“You want your father dead,” I said. “Fine. Makes a certain amount of sense.”
“Thank you.”
“For a sociopath.”
“Such a sweet tongue.”
“But your mother,” I said. “Why’d she have to die?”
Her voice was thin and light. “You know how it is between mothers and daughters. All that pent-up jealousy. All the missed school plays and arguments over wire hangers.”
“But really,” I said.
She drummed her fingers on the barrel of the gun for a moment.
“My mother,” she said, “was a beautiful woman.”
“I know. I’ve seen pictures.”
She snorted. “Pictures are bullshit. Pictures are isolated moments. My mother wasn’t just physically beautiful, you dick. She was elegance incarnate. She was grace. She loved without reservation.” She sucked in a breath.
“So, why’d she have to die?”
“When I was little, my mother took me downtown. A day for just the girls, she called it. We had a picnic in the Common, went to museums, had tea at the Ritz, rode the swan boats in the Public Garden. It was a perfect day.” She looked out the window. “Around three o’clock, we came upon this child. He was my age—probably ten or eleven at the time. He was Chinese and crying because someone had thrown a rock from a passing school bus and hit him in the eye. And my mother, I’ll never forget this, held him to her chest and wept with him. Silently. The tears rolling off her cheekbones and the boy’s blood staining her blouse. That was my mother, Patrick.” She turned from the window. “She wept for strangers.”
“And you killed her because of that?”
“I didn’t kill her,” she hissed.
“No?”
“Her car broke down, you fuck! Get it? That wasn’t part of the plan. She wasn’t supposed to be with Trevor. She wasn’t supposed to die.”
She coughed loudly into her fist, sucked a harsh, liquid breath back into her body.
“It was a mistake,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You loved her.”
“Yes.”
“So her death hurt you,” I said.
“More than you could possibly imagine.”
“Good,” I said.
“Good that she died, or good that her dying hurt me?”
“Both,” I said.
The great cast-iron gates parted before us as we turned into Trevor Stone’s driveway. I drove through the opening, and the gates closed behind me and my lights arced up ahead of us through the carefully manicured bushes and shrubs, curled left as the white gravel driveway snaked around an oval lawn with an enormous birdbath in its center, then broke gracefully to the right onto the main drive. The house lay a hundred yards up, and we passed through a row of white oak on either side, the towering trees standing proud and unyielding like sentries spaced at five-yard intervals.
When we reached the cul-de-sac at the end of the road, Desiree said, “Keep going. There,” and pointed. I drove around the fountain and it lit up at the same time, yellow streams of light coursing through sudden eruptions of frothy water. A bronze nymph floated above it all, twisting in slow revolutions, dead eyes on a cherub’s face watching me as I passed.
The road doglegged at the corner of the house and I followed it back through a stretch of pine to a converted barn.
“Park it there,” Desiree said, and pointed at a clearing to the left of the barn.
I pulled over and shut off the engine.
She took the keys and got out of the car, pointing the gun at me through the windshield as I opened my door and stepped out into the night, the air twice as frigid as it had been in the city due to the wind screaming off the ocean.
I heard the unmistakable sound of a round ratcheting into a shotgun chamber, and turned my head, looked down the black barrel at Julian Archerson standing at the other end.
“Evening, Mr. Kenzie.”
“Lurch,” I said. “A pleasure as always.”
In the dim light I could see a chrome cylinder sticking out of the left pocket of his topcoat. I got a closer look as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and realized it was an oxygen tank of some kind.
Desiree came around beside Julian and lifted a tube that hung off the tank, straightened the kinks in the tube until she extended a translucent yellow mask through the darkness.
She handed the mask to me and twisted the knob on the tank, and it hissed.
“Suck on this,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Julian dug the shotgun muzzle into my jaw. “You don’t have a choice, Mr. Kenzie.”
“For Miss Gennaro,” Desiree said in a sweet voice. “The love of your life.”
“Slowly,” I said as I took the mask.
“What’s that?” Desiree said.
“That’s how you’re going to die, Desiree. Slowly.”
I put the mask to my face and took a breath, immediately felt numbness tingle through my cheeks and fingertips. I took another one, felt a cloudiness invade my chest. I took a third, and everything went green, then black.
39
My first thought, as I swam back to consciousness, was that I was paralyzed.
My arms wouldn’t move. My legs wouldn’t move. And not just the limbs themselves, but the muscles.
I opened my eyes, blinked several times at a dry crust that seemed to have formed over the corneas. Desiree’s face floated past, smiling. Then Julian’s chest. Then a lamp. Then Julian’s chest again. Then Desiree’s face, still smiling.
“Hi,” she said.
The room behind them began to take on shapes, as if everything suddenly flew out of the darkness toward me and stopped abruptly at their backs.
I was in Trevor’s study, in a chair by the front left corner of the desk. I could hear the roar of the sea behind me. And as the effects of my sleep wore off, I could hear a clock ticking on my right. I turned my head and looked at it. Nine o’clock. I’d been out for two hours.
I looked down at my chest and saw nothing but white. My arms were pinned
against the side of the chair, my legs against the inside of the chair legs. I’d been bound with an entire sheet strapped over my chest and thighs and another over my lower legs. I couldn’t feel any knots, and I realized both sheets were probably knotted at the back of the chair. And they were knotted tight. I was mummified, essentially, from the neck down, and no ligature marks or rope burns or handcuff abrasions would show on my body when it came time for the autopsy I was sure Desiree intended.
“No marks,” I said. “Very good.”
Julian tipped an imaginary hat to me. “Something I learned in Algeria,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“Well traveled,” I said. “I like that in a Lurch.”
Desiree came over and sat up on the desk, her hands under her thighs, legs swaying forward like a schoolgirl’s.
“Hi,” she said again, all sweetness and light.
“Hi.”
“We’re just waiting for my dad.”
“Ah.” I looked at Julian. “With Lurch here and the Weeble dead, who’s your father’s servant while he’s out on the town?”
“Poor Julian,” she said, “came down with the flu today.”
“Sorry to hear that, Lurch.”
Julian’s lips twitched.
“So, Daddy had to call a private limousine service to take him into the city.”
“Perish the thought,” I said. “What will the neighbors say? My gosh.”
She removed her hands from under her legs, pulled the pack of Dunhills from her pocket and lit one. “You figured it out yet, Patrick?”
I tilted my head and looked up at her. “You shoot Trevor, shoot me, make it look like we shot each other.”
“Something like that.” She brought her left foot up onto the desk, tucked the right under her, watched me through the smoke rings she blew in my direction.
“The cops in Florida will vouch that I had some sort of personal vendetta or weird obsession with your father, paint me as a paranoid or worse.”
“Probably.” She tapped her ash on the floor.
“Jeez, Desiree, it’s all working out for you.”
She gave me a small bow. “It usually does, Patrick. Sooner or later. Price was supposed to be sitting where you are, but then he screwed up and I had to improvise. Then it was supposed to be Jay in that chair, but another couple of screwups and I had to improvise again.” She sighed and ground her cigarette out on the desktop. “That’s okay, though. Improvisation’s one of my specialties.”
She leaned back on the desk and gave me a broad smile.
“I’d clap,” I said, “but I’m sort of incapacitated.”
“It’s the thought that counts,” she said.
“Since we’re sitting here without much to do before you murder your father and me, let me ask you something.”
“Shoot, babe.”
“Price took the money you two stole and hid it. Right?”
“Yes.”
“But why’d you let him do that, Desiree? Why didn’t you just torture the information out of him and kill him?”
“He was a pretty dangerous guy,” she said, her eyebrows arched.
“Yeah, but come on. In the danger department, I bet you made him look like a sissy.”
She leaned forward and looked at me with mild approval. She shifted again and crossed her legs up on the desk, held the ankles with her hands. “Yeah, in the end, I could have got the two million back within an hour if I felt like it. It would have been bloody, though. And Price’s drug deal wasn’t half bad, Patrick. If that ship hadn’t sunk, he would have had a ten-million-dollar payday coming.”
“And you would’ve killed him and taken the money the moment he collected.”
She nodded. “Not bad, eh?”
“But then heroin started floating up on the beaches in Florida…”
“So the whole scam was null and void, yes.” She lit another cigarette. “Then Daddy sent you and Clifton and Cushing down there, and Cushing and Clifton took Jay out of the equation, and I had to improvise once again.”
“But you’re so good at it, Desiree.”
She smiled, her mouth open, the tip of her tongue running lightly under her upper teeth. She lowered her legs to the floor and came off the desk, walked around my chair several times, smoking, and looking down at me with a radiant sheen in her eyes.
She stopped and leaned against the desk again, her jade eyes holding my own.
I’m not sure how long we remained that way, staring into each other’s eyes, waiting for the other to blink. I’d like to say that as I looked long and deep into Desiree’s shimmering green eyes, I understood her. I’d like to say I recognized the nature of her soul, found the common link between the two of us, and therefore, among all human beings. I’d like to say all that, but I can’t.
The longer I looked, the less I saw. Porcelain jade gave way to hints of nothing. And hints of nothing gave way to an essence of nothing. Except, maybe, naked greed, brazen wanting, the polished soul of a machine that knew only how to covet, and very little about anything else.
Desiree stabbed her cigarette out on the desk beside the other one, and dropped to her haunches in front of me. “Patrick, you know what sucks?”
“Besides your heart?” I said.
She smiled. “Besides that. What sucks is I kind of liked you. No man has ever rejected my advances before. Ever. And it turned me on actually. If we’d had the time, I would have gotten to you.”
I shook my head. “Not a chance.”
“Oh, no?” She came forward on her knees and laid her head on my lap. She turned her head onto her left cheek, looked up at me with her right eye. “I get to everyone. Just ask Jay.”
“You got to Jay?” I said.
She nuzzled her cheek against my thighs. “I’d say so.”
“So why were you stupid enough to say ‘Fail-Safe’ to me at the airport?”
She brought her head off my lap. “That’s what tipped you off?”
“I was sitting on the fence about you since we met, Desiree, but that’s what knocked me off it.”
She clucked her tongue. “Well, good for Jay. Good for him. He set me up from the grave, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She leaned back on her haunches again. “Oh, well. Lot of good it did him. Or you.” She stretched her torso and ran both hands through her hair. “I’m always prepared for contingencies, Patrick. Always. Something my father taught me. As much as I hate the prick, he taught me that. Always have a backup plan. Three, if necessary.”
“My father taught me the same thing. Much as I hated the prick, as well.”
She cocked her head to the right. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah, Desiree. Really.”
“Is he bluffing, Julian?” She looked back over her shoulder.
Julian’s impassive face twitched. “He’s bluffing, dear.”
“You’re bluffing,” she said to me.
“’Fraid not,” I said. “Dear. Heard from your father’s attorney today?”
Headlights arced through the house as tires crunched the gravel outside.
“That would be your father,” Julian said.
“I know who it would be, Julian.” She was staring at me, her jaw muscles moving almost imperceptibly.
I looked as deeply into her eyes as I’d look into the eyes of a lover. “You kill Trevor and me and make it look like we killed each other, it won’t do you any good without an altered will, Desiree.”
The front door opened.
“Julian!” Trevor Stone bellowed. “Julian! Where are you?”
Tires pulled away on the gravel outside and headed back down the drive toward the front gate.
“Where is he?” Desiree said.
“Who?” I said.
“Julian!” Trevor called
Julian moved toward the door.
“Stay,” Desiree said.
Julian froze.
“Does he roll over and fetch bones and shit?” I said.
?
??Julian! Jesus Christ, man!” Trevor’s decrepit footfalls drew closer on the marble floor outside.
“Where is Danny Griffin?” Desiree said.
“Not answering your calls, I take it.”
She pulled her gun from underneath her sweater.
“Julian! In the name of God!” The heavy doors burst open and Trevor Stone stood there leaning on his walking stick, dressed in a tuxedo with a white silk scarf, his body trembling against the cane.
Desiree pointed her gun at him, her arm rock-steady as she knelt on the floor.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Long time, no see.”
40
Trevor Stone carried himself with as much composure as I’ve ever seen in any man who had a gun pointed at him.
He glanced at his daughter as if he’d seen her just yesterday, glanced at the gun as if it were a gift he didn’t much care for but wouldn’t refuse, and walked into the room and headed for his desk.
“Hello, Desiree. The suntan becomes you.”
She flipped her hair and tilted her head toward him. “You think?”
Trevor’s green eyes flicked across Julian’s face, then glanced my way. “And Mr. Kenzie,” he said. “I see you returned from Florida no worse for wear.”
“These sheets binding me to a chair notwithstanding,” I said, “I’m peachy, Trevor.”
He rested his hand on the desk as he came around behind it, then reached for the wheelchair by the windows and sat in it. Desiree pivoted on her knees, following him with the gun.
“So, Julian,” Trevor said, his rich baritone filling the large room, “you’ve chosen to side with youth, I see.”
Julian crossed his hands in front of his waist, tilted his head toward the floor. “It was the most pragmatic option, sir. I’m sure you understand.”
Trevor opened the ebony humidor on his desk and Desiree cocked the pistol.
“Just a cigar, my dear.” He withdrew a Cuban the length of my calf, snipped the end off, and lit it. Small circles of smoke puffed from the fat coal as he sucked in his ruined cheeks repeatedly and got it going, and then a rich, almost oak-leaf smell permeated my nostrils.