“I’d never really thought of it much.”
“No, you were staying pure…” He said, “But you’ve been thinking about it lately?”
“The first time,” Lucy said, “do you know when it was?”
“Tell me.”
“In the bedroom the other night, when I sat on the side of your bed. I thought about it after and wondered if that was why I came to you, because I wanted it to happen.”
“I thought you just wanted to talk.”
“I did. But while I was sitting there I was so aware that we were alone in a dark bedroom. I realized, this is what it’s like to become intimate. This is the beginning of it and I loved the feeling. I wanted you to touch me, but I was scared to death.”
“Well, listen…”
“I learned something about myself I never knew before.”
“Boy, you come out of the nuns you come flying.”
She was smiling at him again. She said, “I’ll never forget you, Jack. You remind me so much of him…”
He knew who she meant. Not the other day when she said it, but he did now-just looking at her face, her smile, and feeling the goosebumps up the back of his neck.
She said, “Before he took all his clothes off and they called him pazzo and threw rocks at him. That Francis of Assisi. I’ll bet he was just like you.”
Roy called at five to ten. Lucy spoke to him for a minute and then handed the phone to Jack, her eyes wary as she said, “He’s at the hotel,” and continued to watch him as he took the receiver.
“Roy?”
“Listen, I’m almost directly across the courtyard from the guy’s room. I sit in the dark with the door open a speck I’m looking at the elevator and can almost see 501. They put their new car in the garage across the street, carried five bank sacks into the room, and they been in there ever since. Little One’s been going in and out-he says they’ve drunk three bottles of champagne and now they’re working on cognac and talking about girls. If you could get what’s her name, Helene, to bring ’em out for two minutes we could have this done.”
“No, there’s no way-”
“Knock on their door bare-ass and when they open it she runs over here and we take ’em.”
“She’s not in this.”
He glanced at Lucy watching him as he heard Roy say, “Well, shit, everybody else is but her and she’s done a lot more than most.” They were in the sun parlor; Cullen across the room in his favorite chair, looking this way over the top of a magazine.
“Jack, is that Roy?”
Jack nodded and said into the phone, “What about the Indian?” As Cullen was saying, “I want to talk to him.”
“He was downstairs a while,” Roy said, “but he must’ve put the Chrysler away. Last time I checked, it was gone.”
“He followed us to Gulfport.”
“Yeah, what happened?”
“Nothing, I lost him.”
“Well, what’d you find out?”
“Alvin Cromwell’s got a banana boat lined up. He thinks he’s going with ’em, tomorrow.”
“Well, you did good, didn’t you?”
“So they’ll stay put tonight… Roy, you drinking?”
“I had a couple. How’d you tell?”
“You aren’t bitching about anything.”
“Hey, well, listen. You don’t like my first idea, I got another one. Little One goes in to bring ’em something or clear their mess, we go in with him. Shit, all four of us could hide behind Little One.”
“Roy, I went into the presidential suite of a hotel one time-I’d been trailing this couple around for five nights and they were loaded, the woman with a different set of jewelry every time I saw her. She was advertising herself. Look at me, you all, how rich I am. I went in their suite and you know what I found?”
“You’re making some point,” Roy said, “but I don’t see it yet.”
“I found nothing. She kept her jewelry in a hotel safe deposit box. The guy even put his cash in there. The moral is, when you see one that’s too good to be true, it ain’t.”
“Jack, you can’t get five bank sacks in a deposit box or even the hotel safe.”
“Did you look in the sacks, Roy?”
“All right, where would they hide it?”
“I don’t know, but when they advertise it, come parading in with the sacks, you know it isn’t in the room. We march in behind Little One and we don’t find anything, then what? It’s over with. We walk away, the cops pick up Little One, look at his printout, make him a deal, and we’re back at the farm. Be there in time to plant soybeans.”
Roy said, “I want to know where they could hide it.”
“We wait till the morning,” Jack said, “we’ll find out. Don’t use Little One for anything, okay? The man’s clean and wants to stay that way.”
Roy said, “You’re no fun. Shit. Listen, send Cully to spell me and then you and Lucy come sometime after midnight, with both your cars. So we’ll be ready at peep of day. Tell the guy at the desk we’re having a party up here, 509. Shit, we may as well.”
As soon as Jack hung up the phone Lucy said, “Who did you mean, ‘She’s not in this?’ Me?”
“He was talking about Helene, using her again as bait.”
“And you didn’t like the idea?”
Cullen said, from across the room, “I wanted to talk to him.”
Jack glanced over. “I’m gonna drive you down there, right now.”
Lucy said, “If you’ve told her everything and you did use her, isn’t she in it?”
“She did it as a favor, that’s all. I’m gonna take Cully and then stop off at Mullen’s and change my clothes. How ’bout I’ll meet you at the hotel in a couple hours? Park in the underground garage, right across the street.”
“Will she do anything you ask?”
He looked at her face raised to his, waiting, and said, “What do you want to know, Lucy? What she would do for me or what I might ask her to?”
The body Leo had prepared that morning occupied a moderately priced Batesville in one of the smaller visitation rooms. Jack studied the man’s face in lamplight, surprised at his ruddy complexion and the way the man’s sparse gray hair was combed down on his forehead like a Roman senator and fixed there. This was not Leo’s work.
But Leo should be here. Or someone from the security service. Jack looked in the other visitation rooms. Raejeanne had said Leo must’ve received another body; otherwise why was he going to be late for dinner? It seemed, though, the man in the visitation room was the only customer. Unless the second arrival was up in the prep room and Leo was in his office. Jack had come in the side entrance. He could check, see if Leo’s car was in back. Or he could run upstairs and look. He was going up anyway. Somebody was here. Jack knew that. There had to be. What he didn’t understand was why, after having lived in this funeral home the past three years, he felt an urge to look over his shoulder. To turn around, quick.
The security man would be right here in the hall or in the small reception office, his thermos of coffee on the desk. But since he wasn’t…
Jack went up the stairs, reached the dark hallway, and stopped when he heard the sound. Like a door closing quietly, with a faint click. The double doors to the prep room were closed. So were the doors to the casket selection room. He thought of the Beretta he’d lifted from Crispin Reyna, beneath the front seat of his car, and the colonel’s Beretta, Jesus, that he’d had in his hand and put back in the drawer with the Indian in the bathroom, vowing never to go into somebody else’s room again, ever. He was home now, but it was the same kind of feeling, that he shouldn’t be here. Or somebody shouldn’t. He turned on the hall light. It didn’t help much.
He’d check the prep room first because that casket selection room-shit, it was too easy to hide in there. He never liked that room. All those crepe-lined empty caskets waiting for people.
He opened the prep room door and jumped and made a sucking-in strangled kind of sound and then said, “Oh, shit,” looking at Helene standing there with a put-on surprised expression on her face. Helene in jeans and a UNO sweatshirt, Helene’s hair catching the fluorescent light as she stepped out of the dark.