Tango Key (10 page)

"Just keep talking."

"I don't have anything else to say."

"Oh, I think you do. You can tell me, for example, where Doug and Ed Waite went at the end of May, Ms. Meadows. That would be nice, if you would tell me that."

Her eyes fluttered. It was the equivalent of a nervous stutter. "On one of their digs. That's all I know."

"But you arranged their tickets, didn't you?"

She tapped her lighter against her desk, and didn't look at Aline. "To Colombia. To Barranquilla."

"Where's the Lost City?"

"The what?"

"You heard me."

"The ticket was to Barranquilla and back to Miami. Two tickets. For Ed Waite and Doug." She sat forward, the string of pearls at her neck swinging out. 'That's my business. Travel. It's—"

"I overheard your conversation with Mr. Waite," Aline said. "Now why don't you just tell me what the Lost City is . . ."

"How should I know? I've never been there. It's just someplace in Colombia. That's all I know, Detective. Really."

"Then why didn't you just say so."

"I did. I said it just now." She burst into tears, covering her pretty face with her pretty hands. "I don't know," she whispered. "I don't know anything anymore."

Aline dug into her purse until she found a travel pack of Kleenex, and passed it to her. Lucy yanked out a couple of pieces, blew her pert little nose. "Did Doug provide for you in his will?"

Her head bobbed.

"How much?"

"A . . . a . . . quarter of a million."

Enough to constitute a motive, but if her alibi checked out, then the motive didn't matter. Except that Lucy Meadows was the sort of woman who wouldn't want to dirty her own hands, who would contract a killer.

"Anything else?"

"I . . . I don't know."

"I'd like to ask you something just out of curiosity, Ms. Meadows."

She seemed to relax a little. "What?"

"You were involved with Doug when he was still married to his first wife, right?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't break it off when he married Eve. Why not?"

"Why should I? I'm not the kind of woman a man like Doug marries, Detective Scott. I'm not so sure I would have even wanted to marry him, to tell you the truth. Oh, I didn't always think that. There was a long period of time after he told me he was going to marry Eve that I refused to see him. But then . . ." She shrugged, puffed on her cigarette, put it out, sat back. "I don't know. You get used to things. And actually, I think Doug and I had a better thing going between us than he ever had with Eve or his first wife." She smiled. "Maybe that's one of the advantages of being a mistress rather than a wife. I don't know. His first marriage was to produce a son. Once Alan was born, he lost interest in his wife. His second marriage was to live out certain fantasies that—"

"What kind of fantasies?"

"Creating a cultured woman out of a soda jerk. And sexual fantasies, I think."

"What kind of sexual fantasies?"

The flush that spread through Lucy's cheeks seemed incongruous with her role as Cooper's mistress. She folded her hands together and stared at them. "There was something unnatural about his sexual relationship with Eve."

"That had to do with sexual fantasies?"

"Yes.''

"Could you be more specific?"

Lucy squirmed. The flush in her cheeks deepened. "Pain." It seemed to hurt her to say the word, and when she looked up, emotion flickered like light in her eyes. "His fantasies all dealt with pain. And so did his sexual relationship with Eve. Is that specific enough?"

"He abused her?"

"He abused everyone. It was just the form of the abuse that differed. What I'm, uh, saying, is that pain was part of the, uh, intimacy between them."

"And between the two of you?"

Indignant now: "Certainly not. Look, Detective Scott. I'd be glad to answer any questions you've got about Doug, but I've got an agency to run. Clients I've got to call back."

"Just one more thing. Tell me about Doug's artifact collection."

"I've never seen it."

"Oh c'mon. You knew the man twelve years, right?"

"Thirteen," she corrected.

"And you never saw the collection?"

"I saw some pieces, sure. Ceramic stuff that smelled like it'd been in someone's basement for a hundred years, some brass items."

"Nothing in gold?"

"No."

"How much- would you say Doug Cooper was worth?"

"A couple of million, I guess."

Try six, Lucy dear,

"Uh-huh. I see. Well. Thanks for your time, Ms. Meadows. And if you think of anything else, give me a call."

"Eve killed him," she said softly.

"It seems to me that a quarter of a million is reason enough to kill a man who strings you along for thirteen years, Ms. Meadows. Besides, as his mistress, your assumption about Eve's guilt is hardly unbiased."

Lucy shrugged. "Maybe not. But I know I'm right about Eve, and I don't think she did it just for the money, Detective. I think she did it because she's still in love with Alan Cooper, Doug's son. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if they'd planned it together. They had an affair before she met Doug, did you know that?"

Echoes of what Kincaid had told her. "I heard about it, yes. Is that why Doug and his son no longer spoke to each other?"

"Yes. Doug also wrote him out of his will."

So the gist of this theory, if it were true, was older than time, Aline thought. Wife and stepson kill husband and father for money and love. Not very original, but certainly plausible.

When she left the travel agency, Aline drove over to the Tango Key Hospital to see if Bill Prentiss had the results of the autopsy yet. The hospital wasn't large—just a hundred beds—but what it lacked in size was compensated for by the courtesy and professionalism of the staff. If she were ever sick or needed surgery, this was the place where she wanted to be. Here. Not in Miami, not in Gainesville, not in Jacksonville, not in any of the teaching hospitals with their rosy reputations. Those hospitals were too large. You could never be absolutely certain that the stuff oozing into your arm was uncontaminated or that the nurse was giving you the right dose of medication or that your doctor's recommendation for surgery wasn't just because his cash flow was low that month. Those places lost patients; Tango Hospital did not.

She found Prentiss at the computer terminal in his office. Without looking up, he said, "Hi, Al. I've been trying to call you. When Bernie said you weren't in, I sent you thought waves."

She laughed and ruffled his curly black hair as she sat down. "I must've heard you. Here I am. What've you got on Cooper?"

He smoothed a hand over his hair. "I wish you wouldn't do that, Al." There was no humor in his voice. "Really."

"My, aren't we in a good mood today."

"Yeah. I've been thinking of going home and starting the day all over again." He turned away from the terminal and she saw the circles under his dark blue eyes. "Lanie moved out last night."

So here it was again, another weird parallel between their lives. Lanie had probably moved out at the same moment Aline was contemplating the demise of her relationship with Murphy. There were certain disadvantages to knowing someone born thirty seconds before you were, same year, same latitude and longitude, she decided, and told him what had happened with Murphy.

He wasn't the least bit surprised. "I kind of figured something along those lines. You think we're going to die the same day, Al?"

"Don't be morbid."

"I can't help it."

She sat forward and covered his hand with her own. "We'll have dinner sometime soon, okay? We'll get drunk. We'll walk on the beach. Rent a movie. Pretend we're ten years old."

He smiled, but it wasn't very convincing. "Tell me Lanie's a jerk."

"Lanie's a jerk."

"Tell me about the ratio of women to men on Tango."

"Two to one, maybe three to one during a good snowbird year."

"Two women for every man," he repeated, nodding. "Okay. I feel better now."

"Good." She squeezed his hand and took her own away. "Now tell me what you found on Cooper."

 
I would've preferred having his head. But based on what I had to work with, he died between five yesterday afternoon and eight-thirty last night. He'd been in the water about an hour."

"What'd he die of?"

"He bled to death, Al. He died as he was being decapitated."

"Christ," she whispered.

"Something else, but I'm not sure what it means yet. Under his fingernails, I found granules of pink sand. The only place I know of around here with pink sand is that little coral island about four, five miles offshore where we used to party in high school."

The one, she thought, that disappeared during high tide. Great. "You think that's where he was killed?"

"Yeah, I do. These grains of sand were embedded under the nails, Al, like he was digging his hands into the sand."

So the killer either owned a boat or had rented one. It wasn't much of a lead, since both Eve Cooper and Ted Cavello owned boats and Ed Waite probably had access to one. Hell, everyone on Tango had access to a boat. "What was used to decapitate him?"

"Judging from the wound, I'd have to say it was a chain saw."

"Anything else?"

"Nope. Unless the head shows up."

"Don't hold your breath."

I
n the dream, Aline kept climbing the ladder to her sleeping loft but couldn't get to the top. The rungs would snap, her hands would slide, she would fall to the floor. Every time she fell, she heard Murphy and Eve laughing from inside the loft, and now, as she started up the ladder again, they leaned over the side of the loft, both of them naked, both of them waving, both of them calling,
Helloooo, Aline, Helloooo
. They slipped back into the dark, laughing, and Aline sobbed and shouted at them to get out of her house and her bed as she kept climbing.

This time she made it to the top of the ladder, and when her head popped up over the edge of the loft, something buzzed past her ear. She jerked around and there was Eve, the chain saw buzzing like a horde of mosquitos in her hand as she hissed
, You shoulda minded your own business, Aline. I don't want to hurt you, Aline. You're making me do this.
Aline screamed as the saw slammed into the back of her neck, and when she screamed again, her head was bouncing across the floor of the loft, through pools of blood, so much blood, her own blood. The smell of it spilled out of the dream with her and poured over her as she tumbled out of the hammock and landed on the floor on her knees.

She scrambled up and lunged for the lamp. Light puddled on the pillows and bled down the center of the mattress, which was, of course, empty. No Murphy. No Eve. No chainsaw. Nothing, not even a spot of blood. She started to turn off the lamp and changed her mind. The idea of stretching out in the hammock again, in the dark, didn't appeal to her in the least.

What'll it be this time, Al?
The Nightmare Chaser? Lobelia? A shot of bourbon? A joint? Did she have any joints in the house? Did she have any bourbon? Did she really want to spend twenty minutes steeping herbs for tea?

It would start to get light in an hour. She would walk down to the beach and watch the sun rise. Tango Key was probably the only place in Florida where a woman could walk on the beach in the dark alone and not get mugged, raped, robbed, or murdered. Or it used to be, at any rate. She took her service revolver with her, tucked into the pocket of a denim vest and hidden inside a windbreaker.

Outside, the warm breeze smelled sweet, of jasmine and brine. Her deck shoes sighed against the sidewalk for a block, past darkened beach houses, empty cars, beneath a sky strewn with stars that were fading like memories. Now and then the
hairs on the back of her neck stood up, the skin there tightened as if she were being watched. But when she glanced around she didn't see anyone or anything—not a paperboy, not even a moving car.

The sidewalk turned to dirt and finally emptied into sand. Aline removed her shoes and stuck each in a pocket of her windbreaker, then wended through the thin barrier of sea oats to the beach. The sand retained some of yesterday's warmth and molded itself to her feet. The breeze slid through her loose hair as gently as a lover's fingers. The lubricious air kissed her cheeks, her mouth, and tasted strongly of salt.

Everything about the sea here, at night, on this island, was haunted with eroticism. It seeped through the soles of her feet, through the pores in her skin, her eyes. It stirred a strange, almost primal heat that opened inside her like a fan.

If she could define the essence of Tango, distill it, this was what it would be, this burning, this eloquent thrill of the flesh, the bones, the blood, this sense of bursting with life. Most of the time, it was a subtle sensuousness, no more than a nuance in the air. But for people who detected it, Tango became an addiction, the only place worth settling into.