Tango key, p.14
Tango Key, page 14
"Which was also when you and your father stopped talking, right?"
"Yes."
"And when he essentially wrote you out of the will?"
"Yes. Although I guess you know that's changed."
"So when did you and your father make amends?" He looked at her sharply, and she suspected he was assessing how much she knew. "Who said we made amends?"
"Didn't you?"
"Of a sort." He glanced back down into his mug. "About six, seven months ago he called me out of the blue one day if we could meet for lunch or dinner. I really wasn't too keen on the idea, but he was my father, so I said sure. We had lunch a couple of days later." He paused, and everything about him seemed thick and heavy with emotion. "Things just continued from there."
"Was this before or after Eve had filed for divorce and then withdrawn it?"
This elicited another sharp glance. "Look, Detective Scott, I don't know what—"
"Hey, it's a simple question. Give me a simple answer. Yes or no. Before or after."
The seams of his jaw tightened. "After."
"So her filing for divorce had something to do with your father's urge to reconcile things with you."
"It would seem that way."
"Did you accompany him on any of his archaeological digs?"
"No."
You need lessons in lying, Cooper. "You know a Colombian named Juan Plano?"
"He and Dad were friends."
"What's Plano do?"
"Do?"
"His line of work, Mr. Cooper."
"I'm not sure. I think he has something to do with these Colombian digs Dad was working on."
"So you don't know him real well."
"No."
"Not well at all."
"Yes, that's right."
"Is Mr. Plano still in Colombia?"
"How should I know?"
Aline burst out laughing. "Since he's in your suite, you'd better know."
Cooper had no snappy comeback; he looked like he'd just been caught jerking off in the men's room. Now she would let him chew things over for a while. Aline stood. "Let me know before you leave the island, Mr. Cooper. And oh, thanks for the coffee."
From the lobby, Aline called Waite's office. She recognized Freckle Face's voice and identified herself and then asked what kind of car Waite owned.
"A Plymouth Fury."
"That's his only car?"
"Yes."
"What're the tires like?"
Freckle Face sighed. "What do you mean, Detective? They're just regular tires, you know."
She asked if the foundation owned a vehicle. No, Freckle Face said, exasperated. Aline thanked her and hung up, thought a moment, and dialed Ferret at Lester's Bar. She told him about the break-in and asked him to let her know if he heard anything. He laughed. "Sweet Pea, if any self-respecting home invader got blasted by a skunk, believe me, he won't be bragging about it. But I'll keep my ears open and let y'know if I hear something."
"Okay, thanks."
The Honda putted through the soaked and glistening hills, rain exploding against the windshield and smearing like spit. The roads were so slick that every so often the Honda's practically bald tires lost purchase and the car fishtailed. Once, it seemed to be slipping on the hill just as things did in dreams, as she had in the dream where she'd been trying to climb to her loft and couldn't. The dream where Eve had a chainsaw. Eve with Murphy in her bed. Eve.
In all fairness, Aline thought, the chief should've removed her from this case and assigned it to Bernie. She'd been prejudiced against Eve since Murphy had laid eyes on her, and the deeper she probed, the more likely it seemed that the woman had indeed killed Cooper. The scenario that seemed most probable now was that Eve and Alan had planned Cooper's death together. She'd wanted the money and she had also wanted Alan, and the only way to get both without waiting for Cooper to die was to kill him. But still, there would've been better ways to do it, less obvious ways.
Perhaps Alan's reconciliation with his father had been part of the plan. Sure, that made sense. They had reconciled, and Cooper had changed his will so that Alan would inherit almost everything. Alan then realized that if he killed his father he would get the money and Eve. In either scenario, then, the motives had been merely common—lust and greed.
But how did the missing gold frog fit? Maybe it didn't. Maybe the frog had nothing to do with why Cooper was killed.
No, that didn't feel right either. It was all connected. She knew it was. She just didn't know how.
She slowed as the road twisted and looped out over the Cove Marina. The light was the color of egg yolks, but thin, like a kind of gauze. Through it she could see the slate gray storm over the Gulf and, closer in, boats bobbing in the choppy marina waters. Then she was past it and rising up Ivy Hill toward the Cooper mansion.
The Porsche and the Mercedes were gone, probably stowed in the garage. But Eve's yellow VW bug stood in the driveway, water beaded on its shiny hood and roof. Aline pulled up behind it, grabbed her poncho, and held it over her head as she dashed toward the front porch.
Eve answered the door wearing tight shorts and a halter top. Her black hair was straighter, longer, more like Monica's, and for a split second it was Monica who Aline saw, Monica with her creamy skin and her riant blue eyes. Then she was inside the hallway, out of the rain.
Eve took her Poncho, hung it on a hook behind the door, and said, "Can I get you something?" Her hand rested lightly against Aline's arm. The numerous rings on her fingers winked and danced with light from the lamp. Her nails were painted a deep red, except at the bottom, in the half moon, where they'd been decorated with tiny, precise white stars. "You look kind of funny. You okay?"
"Yes, thanks." She ran a hand over the back of her neck, her eyes fixing for a moment on Eve's bare feet. Her toenails were painted just like her nails. "You remind me of someone, that's all."
Eve lifted her right foot and scratched at her left calf. It was the same thing she'd done the night of the murder, Aline remembered. A nervous gesture. "Monica, you mean. I remind you of Monica."
Aline stared at her, suddenly understanding where Murphy had gone last night when he'd left Dobbs' party. A cold hand squeezed at her heart, squeezed until she thought she was going to scream. "Yeah. Monica. Right," she managed to say.
Something flickered in Eve's eyes. Fear, yes, it was fear. Fear that she'd said too much. And now she bumbled through an explanation. "Murphy showed me a picture of her. When I asked him why he always looked at me so funny."
Murphy. Not Detective Murphy: Aline's ears rang.
"I gotta tell you, that picture spooked me bad. It was like walking into a grocery store and seeing your twin when you never even knew you had a twin. Let's go into the kitchen. I'll get you something cold to drink."
But Aline didn't want to go into the kitchen; she wanted to know if Murphy had been in Eve's bed when he'd shown her the picture. Or if they'd been having a cozy moonlit swim off the dock out back. She shouldn't have been here. She wasn't the right person for this case. But the chief would want to know why she wanted off the case, and she couldn't tell him why. She couldn't snitch on Murphy. She couldn't say, Well, Gene, I think Murphy's screwing Eve, and every time I'm around the woman I feel like puking. She couldn't say any of that because he would ask how she knew.
My heartburn. That's how I know.
Hunches don't count, Al, he would reply. Evidence counts.
Evidence. Jesus. The heart knew things the mind could not: that was the only evidence she had. She knew, that was all. She knew. She sensed it in the air in Eve's kitchen. She saw it in the way Eve moved. She heard it in Eve's nervous chatter as she fixed them glasses of iced tea. Eve was acting like Aline was here on a social call.
". . . so I told him to take a hike and not call me again," she said.
She had missed something. "Who?"
"The reporter from that raggy tabloid." She folded a stick of gum into her mouth and straddled the stool across from Aline. "They want my goddamn story, right? Like I'm . . . well, whatever." She cracked her gum and flicked her fingers up the back of her hair, then gazed at Aline. "I suppose you want to know why I didn't tell you about Alan, huh."
Murphy had cued her. Murphy had told her how the omission of her affair with Alan looked from a cop's viewpoint. "Is there something to tell?"
She lit a cigarette. No, that wasn't quite right, Aline thought. Eve Cooper did not just light her cigarette. This was obviously something her dead husband had coached her on. Her long, lovely fingers withdrew the cigarette from the pack as though it were a delicate object. The fluid grace of her movements made this ordinary event, this mundane event, seem to be a ritual of impossible beauty, of mystery.
"Well . . . no, not really. I mean, we had a thing going for a while, when I was living in Marathon. But then I met Doug."
"You mean Alan brought you home to meet Dad and then had to go out for a while and you went to bed with Dad here in the house and Alan found you."
Tears stood in her blue eyes. She blew smoke into the air between them. "I knew no one would understand." She spoke softly. "That's why I never said anything."
"All things considered, Eve, there's only one way it can look."
Tears spilled from one eye, then the other, then she swiped at them, angrily, and stabbed out her cigarette. "Doug had a mistress. Did you know that? I didn't know it until six months after we were married. Nice, huh. Yeah, real nice. He wouldn't come home sometimes for a couple of days, and when he did, he smelled of her. You know what that's like, Aline?"
"You didn't tell me about Lucy Meadows, either. And besides, you could've divorced Doug."
She laughed. She slapped her open palm against the counter, and her rings clicked against the slick, inlaid tile. "Oh, sure. I could've divorced him. Except for this little ole contract he had me sign before we got married saying I wouldn't get anything from the marriage if I divorced him within seven years. Nothing." Color bled from her pretty face, her gorgeous face, as she realized how that sounded. "I mean, well, I didn't just marry Doug for money. I didn't. I loved him, but. . ."
"But the money helped."
Her eyes hardened. "You bet your ass it helped. Money always helps. People who say different are the ones who got it and who've always had it. They don't got. . ." She paused, frowning a little, seeking the correct verb, the correct tense. "They don't have any idea what it's like to not know if your old man is gonna come home Friday night loaded on the week's paycheck. They don't know what it's like to live in some shithole of a dust town where your only ticket out is a man who does something other than work at the goddamn prison or bartend. So don't go judging me, Aline. You come from money, so right from the start things was easier for you than for someone like me."
Her syntax, her grammar, worsened in direct proportion to her passion. Her face changed—not just the expression, but the structure, the color, as though Aline were seeing Eve as she might've looked if she'd never escaped her beginnings. "I hate to disappoint you, Eve, but I don't come from money. My parents started Whitman's in Key West in the late forties, and for the next twenty-five years they worked twelve- and fourteen-hour days. The difference between you and me is that you bought the bullshit about a man being your ticket out."
"You weren't there," she snapped. "You don't know what it was like. My people weren't the kinda folks who wake you up for school in the morning. They didn't give a shit whether I went to school or not. My old man died of cirrhosis when I was sixteen, and my ma went six months later of a heart attack. So I didn't have no one footing my bill through a fancy college."
Aline laughed. "Hey, I worked my way through college."
"You're missin' the point," she said, lighting another cigarette. "You're missin' the whole goddamn point. Your folks loved you. Me, shit, I was jus' a Friday-night mistake."
There wasn't much to say to that. Aline finished her ice tea in a gulp and flinched when the wind, which had changed directions, hurled rain against the sliding glass doors to her left. They overlooked a porch where there was an old cooler, potted plants, a bike, several blouses and pairs of shorts draped over the railing, and two lightweight_ beach chairs the wind threatened to snatch away.
"You'd better get that stuff in off the porch."
Eve glanced toward the door and got up. "Shit, just what I don't need. One of those chairs smashed through the window."
She slid open the doors. Rain and wind gusted into the house, snapping the curtains, whistling under the awning. Aline hurried out behind Eve to help her bring in the stuff, and just then the wind whipped off the lid of the old cooler. It pinwheeled into the air, tumbling like a drunken acrobat as Aline and Eve both lunged for it. It sailed out of their reach, over the railing, and Aline turned back to the business of removing the beach chairs, her clothes so drenched now that a little more rain couldn't possibly make much difference.
"I'll get the chairs," Aline called.
But when she glanced around, she saw Eve standing perfectly still in front of the cooler, head bowed as if she were praying, hair plastered to the sides of her face, rain pouring down around her. Suddenly she began to shriek, a high keening sound that slapped against the din of the wind as if competing with it. She leaped away from the cooler so fast her foot struck the edge of it, knocking it on its side. Water with chunks of ice washed out of it, and so did Doug Cooper's head. It bounced across the wooden slats of the deck, the ragged flaps of skin at the throat like white, grotesque fingers, then rolled, a misshapen beach ball, as Eve continued to shriek and Aline just stood there, gaping. It stopped centimeters from the tips of her sandals, the wide, vacuous eyes gazing past her, into the rain.
And then she fainted.
DECOYS
"Passions are vices or virtues in their highest powers."
-JOHANN VON GOETHE
July 5, 7:25 P.M.
He has cuffed her left wrist to the armrest of the chair at the table. It's too tight and bites into the bone. But it's better than being tied to the chair in the other room. Almost anything is better than that. And he hasn't blindfolded or gagged her.
He stands at the gas stove, stirring a sauce that smells so good it makes her mouth water. The pot on the other burner has pasta in it. Music thumps from the transistor radio over the sink—a Cyndi Lauper tune. He hums along to the music, a toneless hum like a horde of flies. The lanterns make the room bright enough to see him clearly—and she suddenly wishes for the dark again, the blindfold, sleep, or better yet, some coke. She would like to be buzzed out on coke right now, zipping along the razor edge of some white cloud high.
She sips from the Styrofoam cup of Pepsi he has set in front of her. She hates Pepsi. It's what she drank for years in Arcadia—Pepsi for breakfast with her cereal, Pepsi for lunch, Pepsi in the evening with dinner, Pepsi that rotted her teeth so badly that before she and Doug were married, he insisted that she have most of her teeth capped. Now she has beautiful teeth. Perfect teeth. She chews on the ice in the glass because it tastes better than the Pepsi, and he glances over at her.
"Don't do that, babe. You'll chip your pretty teeth."
"They aren't my teeth."
He laughs. He thinks she's joking. "Right."
"They aren't. My teeth had a bunch off fillings that showed when I smiled, when I talked. Doug hated my teeth because they weren't perfect. Doug didn't like anything that wasn't perfect."
"Doug was an asshole. "He stirs the pasta vigorously. "I don't like assholes."
"May I have some water?"
"Sure." He opens the cooler and lifts out a gallon container of distilled water. He sets it on the table in front of her and watches as she unscrews the lid. "You have nice hands," he says. "But the rings clutter them."
Like he's some sort of expert on goddamn hands, she thinks. "I like the rings. " Instead of pouring water into her glass, she tips the jug to her mouth and drinks from it. Her eyes meet his for just a moment, vacuous eyes, then she looks away and sets the jug back on the table. She flattens her palm against the checkered tablecloth. "This ring," she says, pointing at the lapis lazuli in a silver setting on her index finger, "is for luck. This one "—she wiggles her fourth finger, crowned by an emerald in a nest of gold— "is for health." She lifts her third finger, where a ruby glistens. "And this one is just pretty."
He smiles, evidently fascinated by her litany. "And the other hand?"
She moves it, making the handcuff clatter against the chair, then extends her fingers until they bend back. There are five rings on this hand. All of them were gifts from men, including the flawless two-carat diamond that is her wedding ring. "These rings are about lies."
He touches her hand, examining the diamond, then works the ring off her finger. "How much is it worth?"
She shrugs.
"C'mon. I know you know."
"Sixty-five hundred."
He touches her other hand now, points at the ruby. "And this one?"
"Forty-two hundred."
She thinks a moment. "Thirty-one hundred."
He laughs. "So you did marry him for money."
She doesn't deny it because, really, what would be the point? It is partially true. "And you killed him because you thought he was an asshole."
"Don't talk like that."
"I've always talked like that."
"Not around me. I don't like it."
She erupts with laughter. It bubbles up from someplace deep inside her, a laughter that is crazy and wild, and racing toward hysteria. He can saw off a man's head, but he doesn't like to hear a woman cuss? She says it out loud and bursts with laughter again, and he stands there until she is finished, until her ribs are aching too fiercely to laugh anymore, and he says, "It isn't the same thing. Not at all," and he slams his hand across her face.
Pain flashes across her cheeks and mouth, a white heat of pain, like her skin has been set on fire. Her ears ring, her vision goes fuzzy, blood thickens across her tongue where she has bitten it. She spits it out, at him, and a wad of pink spittle splats against his cheek and oozes down toward his mouth before he swipes it away with the back of his hand. He moves to strike her again, and she smiles. The smile disarms him.
