“Was she?” Matthew said.
“She was not,” Jamie said.
“Then why did she go see him?”
“She suspected she had herpes,” Jamie said.
“Uh-huh,” Matthew said. “And did she?”
“Yes.”
The boat was a huge monster with a flying bridge.
Larkin was behind the wheel, guiding her in toward the dock, careful not to bang her up. A deckhand wearing a Larkin Boats T-shirt ran forward to toss a line to someone on the dock wearing an identical T-shirt, The Way to the Water. Another hand dropped fenders over the side. More lines came over, you’d think this was the QE2 Larkin was docking. Big boat, though, had to cost a pretty penny.
Two people were standing on the bridge with Larkin. Tubby little man wearing a sports shirt as colorful as a Portuguese man-of-war, and a blonde lady wearing yellow shorts, a white shirt, and a pair of sunglasses. Larkin frowned the moment he saw Matthew standing on the dock. He clambered down off the bridge, jumped ashore, walked immediately to him, and said, “What are you doing here?”
“Few questions,” Matthew said.
“Get lost,” Larkin said. “I’m about to sell a half-million-dollar boat here.”
“I’ll wait.”
“No, just get the hell off my property.”
One of the dockhands was helping the couple ashore now. First the lady in the yellow shorts. She was perhaps fifty years old, too stout, too heavily made up, and a bit unsteady in ankle-strapped sandals with very high heels. She came onto the dock with a smile of relief and a murmured “Thank you,” and then turned to watch her companion jump ashore. The man was grinning from ear to ear. He was eager to buy this boat. Matthew wasn’t sure the lady was half as eager. The man stepped back a pace, hands on his hips, and studied the boat from dockside.
“This won’t take a minute,” Matthew said.
“My customer’s waiting,” Larkin said.
“No, he’s admiring the boat.”
Larkin looked toward where the man was walking up and down the dock, reaching over to touch the boat’s teak railing, running his hand over her gleaming white flanks.
“What is it?” Larkin said.
“Mr. Larkin, when I saw you yesterday, I told you that Otto—”
“I don’t want to hear another word about Otto. I’ve already got somebody else looking for—”
“Yes, I know. But I’ve learned something that—”
“I don’t care what you learned.”
“Mr. Larkin, Otto thought your Cinderella might have been pregnant...”
“You already told me that. And I told you—”
“But he was wrong. She went to see a doctor because she had herpes.”
Larkin glanced quickly down the dock to where the man in the rainbow sports shirt was pointing to something on the boat’s transom. He said a few words to the woman, and the woman nodded, an uncomprehending look on her face.
“So?” Larkin said.
“I asked you yesterday if you could’ve made her pregnant.”
“So?”
“I’m asking you today if you could’ve given her herpes.”
“I don’t have to answer that,” Larkin said.
“Yes, you do,” Matthew said. “Because Otto was killed. And there’s got to be a reason for it.”
“Let’s say I did give her herpes, okay? I’m the kind of guy who gives herpes to twenty-two-year-old girls. Twenty-three, whatever. When I don’t even realize she’s a hooker. I’m that kind of rat, okay? What’s that got to do with Otto’s murder?”
“Well, Mr. Larkin, suppose someone in her family — a father, a brother — learned she had herpes and decided to find out who’d given it to her. This is Florida, you know. There’re lots of rednecks down here who don’t like their kin messed with.”
“This girl isn’t a redneck.”
“But you don’t know what her family’s like, do you?”
“What’s your point?” Larkin said. “She stole my watch, that’s all I—”
“Yes, but Otto was killed. And to me that’s a bit more important than your watch. What I’m suggesting is that perhaps this father or this brother spotted Otto following her and jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
“What conclusion?”
“That Otto was the man who’d—”
“Oh, I get it. This father of hers...”
“Yes, if it was her father...”
“Or brother...”
“Yes.”
“Or whoever... didn’t realize Otto was a private eye, figured he was somebody who knew Cinderella...”
“Yes.”
“Somebody, in fact, who knew her well enough to give her herpes, right? And then what? Killed him for it? Come on, man.”
“This is Florida,” Matthew said again.
“No way at all is it even a possibility,” Larkin said. “Because to begin with, hookers don’t have fathers or brothers.”
“I’m sorry,” Matthew said, “but I don’t find any of this even remotely funny. And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Too fuckin’ bad,” Larkin said, and glanced quickly down the dock toward his customer. “In case you don’t know it, this isn’t a court of—”
“Could you have given her herpes?”
“Oh, now I really get it,” Larkin said. “If I’m the guy responsible, if I’m the one infected her, then the wrong man got killed, right? Poor Otto took the rap for me, right? So you’re here to tell me what an unprincipled son of a bitch I am. Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Hope, and then I want you to get the hell out of here before I have Kirk throw you out.”
He nodded down the dock to where one of the hands was hosing down the boat. Big muscular guy with pecs bulging in the white T-shirt, biceps bulging below the short sleeves, tattoo on the right forearm, a dagger dripping blood.
“The only person selling herpes — and I hope to God nothing else — was Cinderella herself. Jenny Santoro or whatever the fuck her name is!” He glanced down the dock again, and then lowered his voice. “She’s the one selling it, Mr. Hope, she’s the one I bought it from. Which is why, the minute I realized what I had, I hired Otto to find her, never mind the gold watch. I can buy another gold watch, I can buy a dozen gold watches, but I can’t buy a doctor in the world can get rid of what she gave me. Okay, Mr. Hope? You got it now? You think you got it now?”
Matthew sighed heavily.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Good-bye,” Larkin said.
The conversation was entirely in Spanish, and Ernesto was doing most of the talking.
Their private code name for cocaine was “hat.”
In Spanish, hat was sombrero.
On the phone, Ernesto kept talking about sombreros. Ten sombreros at sixty dollars each, very high quality. If anybody from the DEA had been listening, he’d have known right off that Ernesto was talking about a drug buy. Ten keys of coke at sixty thousand a key. Drug dealers never mentioned the word cocaine on the telephone. They hardly ever mentioned it anywhere. Cocaine was always something else. To Charlie Nubbs and his pals, cocaine was “heavy machinery.” With the Ordinez gang in Miami, if you talked to someone about a typewriter, you were talking cocaine.
“I tried to get the hats for less,” Ernesto said, “but that’s the lowest they would go. Very good hats, size nine.”
A DEA man would have figured in a minute that the coke was ninety-percent pure.