“You kiddin’ me?”
Bonnar’s face crinkled into a skeptical grin from across his polished teak desk.
“I’m telling you what I suspect,” McGuire said flatly.
“That Glynnis Vargas had Crawford killed by her chauffeur? Then shot him herself, hung around town for a couple of days with you and took off for Brazil?”
“Check with Brazilian immigration or somebody.”
“Don’t have to.” Bonnar’s smile grew even wider. “She called the mayor yesterday. From Gstaad. That’s in Switzerland.”
“Why?”
“Why Switzerland?” Bonnar was teasing McGuire.
“Why call the mayor?”
Bonnar shrugged. “To say hello. To explain that she’s lookin’ forward to comin’ back and buildin’ a new home on Summit Ridge. Up there where Bob Hope and William Holden built their mansions. Best address in town. Said the Via Linda house was a tad too small for her.”
“Bullshit,” McGuire spat.
“Aw hell, McGuire.” Bonnar waved his hand and looked away. “I think you’ve kinda overstayed your welcome around here. You get my drift?”
“Do you still have buddies up at Twentynine Palms?” McGuire asked.
“Lots of ’em.”
It was McGuire’s turn to smile. “Call them,” he suggested. “Ask if they ever heard of a man named Lafaro. And watch what happens.”
“Hell, I’ll do it now,” Bonnar said, reaching for the telephone. “Just to prove how a good cop runs down a lead.” He spun his Rolodex, muttered a number under his breath and began punching the buttons on his telephone.
Bonnar’s office door swung open and the two men turned to see Art Lumsden’s round face looking back at them. “How ya doing, McGuire?” the black detective inquired.
Bonnar placed his hand over the receiver. “What’s up?” he asked, before removing his hand and asking to speak to Colonel Vander Hagen.
“Got us one out in the Indio Hills,” Lumsden said. He entered Bonnar’s office, holding the door slightly ajar behind him. “Another weird one. Cop on the site says it looks like he was hit from a helicopter or airplane. Maybe a skyhook, I don’t know. Shot from a height anyway, and there’s nothing around him taller than a cactus. Anyway, I’m going out to check. Thought I’d let you know.”
Bonnar nodded, waved Lumsden away and began speaking quickly into the telephone.
“What do you mean, from a helicopter?” McGuire blurted at Lumsden. He felt his pulse quicken, his body grow tense.
“Shot. Took a bunch of slugs from a high angle.”
“What did he look like?” McGuire demanded. Behind him, Bonnar looked up curiously, still speaking into the receiver. “The victim, did you get a description of the victim?”
Lumsden glanced at scribbled notes on a sheet of paper in his hand. “Caucasian, male, aged between forty and fifty, no identification, dressed in lightweight clothing, long white hair, white beard . . .”
McGuire slumped in his chair. “Anything about a cat?”
Lumsden glanced back at him. “Yeah, something about one,” he said frowning. “It was shot too. Lying next to the body. What the hell you know about this, McGuire?”
Bonnar finished his telephone call and leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “What’d you say that name was, McGuire? Lafaro, something like that?”
McGuire forced himself to turn and look into Bonnar’s smug face. “Something like that,” he repeated. He felt tired, old, defeated.
“Well, they never heard of him at Twentynine Palms,” Bonnar smirked. “Didn’t ring a bell with them at all.”
McGuire rose and brushed past Lumsden to the door.
“You know anything about this one?” Lumsden repeated, waving his notes at McGuire.
“No,” McGuire said without looking back. “No, I don’t know anything. Nothing at all.”
He drove west to Palm Canyon Drive, his senses numb. He wanted to get drunk, blind, unfeelingly drunk.
At a bar near the museum he chose a table in the furthest corner of the room and drank three double Scotches before leaving, with only a hint of unsteadiness, to walk among crowds of shoppers and tourists strolling through the late afternoon sun.
He stood waiting for his head to clear, watching people pass, happy and carefree, at ease with their friends. Teenagers in shabby, well-scrubbed jeans. Mature couples in country-club slacks and cotton skirts. Young women glowing in their practised, cool glamour. Men half McGuire’s age carrying themselves with more assurance than he had felt in years.
You’re starting to feel sorry for yourself, McGuire thought bitterly. Get your plans straight. Get out of here. To some place where you won’t be haunted by memories. Memories of Janet Parsons and Glynnis Vargas.
He froze at the sound of a woman’s voice behind him. She was chatting easily with someone, the distinctive tone and inflection of her voice penetrating his ear like a dagger.
“. . . but I don’t believe it was the right thing to do . . .” she was saying.
McGuire whirled to see a man and woman turn and begin ascending the steps of a resort hotel behind him. Others were passing between McGuire and the woman with the voice, the voice McGuire knew he had heard before, and he bolted through the crowd. A man shouted angrily at him as he brushed him aside; someone else struck him from behind; but he reached the couple as they arrived at the hotel entrance, their backs to him. The woman’s hair was thick and coal-black; she was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress patterned in brightly coloured flowers. Her escort was barely as tall as she was, with a bony face, gold wire glasses and short hair. He was reaching for the door, speaking to her, when McGuire touched her shoulder and she turned to him, a smile on her deeply tanned face.
“I know you,” McGuire hissed.
“You do?” she asked pleasantly. Her eyes swept quickly up and down, assessing him. “Really?” She tilted her head.
When she spoke again, McGuire knew it was her.
“Friend of yours, Marci?” The man smiled. He was holding the door open, waiting for her to enter the hotel, one arm raised to guide her through.
“I know your voice,” McGuire said. He was shaking. Someone jostled him from behind.
“Great voice, isn’t it?” the man said pleasantly. McGuire glanced at him. He had the open, friendly face of an insurance agent making small talk, and his hand rested on the woman’s shoulder, ready to propel her away from this madman and into the hotel.
“First you were Amos’s widow,” McGuire insisted, moving closer to the woman. She was attractive in a less than stunning way, her face a little too full, her features a little too coarse. “Then it was you who answered the phone in Las Vegas.”
She recoiled from his breath and winced. “He’s drunk, Kenny,” she said to the man with her.
Kenny’s smile widened. “Hey, buddy,” he said to McGuire. “Go have another drink, okay? Sorry, but I saw her first.”
She was moving away from him, entering the hotel lobby. Somebody behind McGuire told him to kindly move along, he was holding up traffic. “I know her,” McGuire repeated weakly.
“Well, I’ve known her for twelve years,” Kenny said. “And I’ve been married to her for ten. And believe me, she’s nobody’s widow.” He held out a hand. “Nice talking to you, okay?”
McGuire stared through the door into the lobby where the woman waited for her husband, who reached for her and took her arm. They walked away, whispering and giggling, while McGuire watched.
“It was her voice,” he said aloud. “That’s her. I know that was her.”
He drove east out of the valley, past Desert Center and through Blythe into Arizona. At midnight he was in Phoenix, parking the car in the bright lights of a motel-chain office. He rented a room on the ground floor, then sat hidden in the darkness of a grove of pine trees, watching the door of his motel room and his car until dawn arrived.
When the sun rose he finally entered the room, collapsed on the bed and dreamt of women standing over him, pointing guns at his head as he slept.
At noon he awoke, famished, and drove through the suburbs until he found a fast-food restaurant in a large, nearly empty shopping mall. He circled the lot several times before he parked the Mercedes well away from buildings and other vehicles and walked briskly to the restaurant, feeling the heat rising from the asphalt and penetrating the soles of his shoes.
He stood in line at the restaurant counter, ordered coffee and a sandwich and carried his tray to an inside table, where he had a clear view of the car. Around him, groups of mothers with young children shared soft drinks and gossip. Truck drivers attacked impossibly tall sandwiches. Salesmen read newspapers and sipped coffee.
McGuire checked the car again. No one had approached it.
When he turned away to begin eating, it disappeared in a ball of fire and shredded metal.
Children and their mothers began screaming hysterically. “Holy shit!” shouted one of the truck drivers. Debris landed on the open patio of the restaurant. The counter staff stood frozen and open-mouthed at the sight.
McGuire set his sandwich aside, stood and walked casually to the washroom, then detoured through the kitchen area, abandoned by staff who had run to the front counter where they watched the remains of the Mercedes burning a hundred yards away, four flaming tires marking the corners of the blackened, twisted hulk.
He left through the employees’ entrance, keeping the restaurant between him and the wreckage, telling himself it had been a warning, damn it, a warning, and not just his good luck.
An airport. He needed an airport.
He needed somewhere to hide.
Even Paradise can become a bore, Koko admitted. Especially when you’ve grown up. And she had grown up so much over the summer.
Standing sullenly on the upper deck of the Abaco Cay ferry, she watched the yachts manoeuvre out of the harbour. It was late August; another three weeks before college resumed.
She had no regrets about working in the Bahamas all summer. At the beginning, the parties had been fun, the laughter plentiful, the boys interesting. But she wouldn’t be as sad to leave as she had expected back in June. Twice she had almost returned home. Once when her parents and young sister came for a visit and she stood at the airport sobbing openly as they boarded their plane for Miami and home. And once when that jerk Louis, the weightlifter, treated her like a piece of meat. The bastard. Stuck on his muscle-bound body. Which was a lesson, she assured herself. Good looks, a great tan, curly hair, they’re all silly reasons to choose a boy. Or a man. Louis had made her grow up. Louis had reminded her that she had choices. Hers to make. Hers to live with. Knowing that, accepting that, realizing that, it was all part of maturity.
She began her final trip of the day. One stop at Green Turtle Cay and then back to Abaco, where she would curl up with a book, one of the Faulkner novels her mother had brought. That’s how she planned to spend her evenings from now until school began. Doing something with her mind.
The ferry nosed into the dock at Green Turtle Cay. Nothing ever changes here, she mused, except the faces of the tourists. The same boats at anchor in the harbour. The same bar and restaurant perched at the end of the pier, where the same palm trees wave in the dusky light, shading the path to the tourist villas and swimming pool and beyond to the crest of the hill and the small cabin.
Koko blinked and raised her sunglasses to her forehead. Something had changed after all.
There was a light in the cabin window. A figure stood on the small deck facing the harbour. At this distance it was only a silhouette, resting its weight on its arms. But the stance looked familiar.
She left the ferry at Green Turtle, the Bahamian captain smiling and nodding, reminding her the last sailing was at one o’clock. She entered the bar, chose the last stool and ordered a beer and conch fritters. Two yacht sailors hit on her almost at once, but she smiled silently and shook her head, avoiding eye contact, and they left her alone with her Miller Lite and greasy dinner.
“Been here a week now,” the manager of the bar replied to her question. She was a large, grey-haired Bahamian woman who seemed to be always smiling and laughing. “Comes down every night,” she said, her face clouding over and acquiring a rare serious expression. “Sits over there in the corner and has one drink all alone.”
Koko asked for another beer, took it outside and sat on the rotting hull of an overturned dinghy that lay between the bar and the path up the hill to the cabin.
He came loping down the path soon after the sun disappeared behind the other side of the Cay, walking silently in moccasins, wearing a grey sweatshirt and lightweight slacks. He nodded at her as he passed on the far side of the stony walk.
“Welcome back,” she said, and he studied her from the corner of his eye and nodded again. “Remember me?”
He paused at the corner of the building, glancing quickly at the entrance to the bar, across the harbour, back up the path, and finally meeting her eyes again. “Twisted Sister,” he muttered.
“Hey,” she laughed. “Not any more. I’ve changed. Anyway, I wondered if you wanted to talk?”
His eyes narrowed. “About what?”
“Just talk.” Koko stood up. “I’ve been here nearly three months and nobody talked to me the way you did that first time we met. I mean, people talk but they don’t listen, you know?”
He studied her for a moment, then angled his head toward the entrance. He watched her enter ahead of him, looked over his shoulder at the boats bobbing in the harbour, and followed her into the darkened bar.
“Faulkner?” McGuire asked almost an hour later. “You’re reading Faulkner? That’s good.” He nodded and sipped his drink. “That’s good.”
“Things like that mean something to me now.” She scooped a handful of peanuts from a bowl, popped several in her mouth and talked around them. “The thing about growing up is, a lot of it happens when you don’t expect it, doesn’t it? I mean, sometimes it’s not a gradual process. Sometimes you just wake up one morning and a lot of things that were stuffy and boring the day before just look more interesting. And all the stuff that used to be important is shit. Sorry,” she added.
“Is that how it happened with you?”
She nodded. “A couple of times.”
“After some pain, right?”
She smiled and avoided his eyes.
“Experience is what you get,” McGuire said, “when you were expecting something else.”
“Yeah,” she mused. “Yeah!” she said again. She was feeling light-headed. “That’s right.” She tried to remember something her father had told her, something he once tried to pass on to her as wisdom. “There’s . . .” she began. She couldn’t remember it now, so she said, “There’s no substitute for experience, I guess.”
“Sure there is,” McGuire replied. He drained his glass.
“What? What’s better than experience?”
McGuire smiled, a rare event for him, and she felt a chill sweep over her. “Being sixteen,” he said.
She laughed so loud she embarrassed herself, and looked around the room, covering her mouth with her hand. But the room was empty; only the manager stood behind the bar, polishing glasses and humming to herself. “That’s right!” Koko said, reaching to touch his arm. “God, when I was sixteen . . . I mean, I knew it all. All of it. Sex and life and all the dumb things my parents didn’t know about. I figured they would never know about it.”
“That wasn’t so long ago,” McGuire said.
“What wasn’t?” She left her hand on his arm.
“When you were sixteen.”
“Five years,” she said.
“Not long.”
“Maybe. But it seems long. Maybe because I’ve changed so much, going to college, working here.” She watched her fingers as she drummed them absently on his arm. “Talking to you. Where have you been?” she asked suddenly.
“Away.” His eyes grew wary.
“Up north?”
“Some. Spent some time in Mexico.”
“Really? Did you like it?”
“No.” He turned his empty glass around and around in his hands. “I despised it.”
“So that’s why you came back here?”
He shifted his eyes at her, looking for something in her expression. Then he pulled his lips against his teeth and nodded. “Next best thing to home,” he said.
She watched him, sensing the change in mood, feeling the hurt that had risen briefly within him and flown away to hide somewhere again.
He looked at his watch and nodded toward the bar. “Martha’s getting ready to close,” he said. “And the last ferry back to Abaco should be leaving any minute.”
“It left ten minutes ago,” Koko said.
“What the hell are you going to do now?” McGuire asked.
She curled her hair between her fingers. “I don’t know. I could bunk here all night in one of the booths, I guess. Or maybe you could show me your cabin.”
“I love saxophones. What’s the name of that song?” She was standing at the window of the cabin, a small tumbler of Scotch in her hand.
“‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’” McGuire said, walking back from the stereo to sit in the overstuffed armchair.
The cabin was sparsely furnished. A carved mahogany bed was pushed against the far wall. A sink, microwave oven and refrigerator were grouped near the door to the bathroom. Large bookshelves stocked with paperbacks flanked a new stereo system. A tiny writing desk, the overstuffed chair occupied by McGuire, and a scarred side table completed the interior setting.
“Who’s playing?”
“Zoot Sims.”
“Is he good?”
“The best.” McGuire looked out through the window at the darkened harbour below, where white lights lay scattered along the shoreline. He told himself it had only been a warning. He told himself it had only been a signal he had been smart enough to heed. They knew that. They knew he had heeded it. Now they would leave him alone.
Koko sat on the arm of the upholstered chair, looking down at him. “Will you tell me how you got that scar?” she asked.
“No.”
She touched the top of his head lightly with her hand, feeling the curls beneath her open palm. “Are you afraid I’ll tell people?” she teased.
“No.”
“Are you afraid I’ll give you another one just like it? If I know how you got this one?”
He looked up at her and smiled, the expression crinkling the corners of his eyes. “You? Give me a scar like this?”
“You think that’s funny?”
The smile broadened. “I think it’s hilarious.”
“And I think I just made you smile. How about that?”
He leaned away from her and closed his eyes. “Koko,” he said, “you’re sweet and smart and very pretty. But you’re too young for me.”
“I know,” she replied, twisting to set her empty glass on the table beside the chair. She dropped her arm across his shoulder and slid her body closer to his. “You miss the point,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You’re not too old for me.” And she laughed and bit her lip, and laughed again at his expression: surprised, amused and perhaps, just perhaps, almost happy.