"Why don't you relate to us what this Barrel-chest fellow said as he was dying."
"Yes, Mr. Glossman, but first I'd like to ask Lynn why she failed to tell us she flew to Miami on the day Rene sailed aboard the Stede Bonnet?"
It was the first challenging question, and I saw the look of a peculiar pain growing in her eyes. Things were taking a vastly different turn from what she was prepared to deal with this morning.
"I didn't think it important. I flew down to wish her Bon Voyage. When I got the card a couple of days later, I had no reason to think anything wrong." There was no sound of honesty in her voice, no tone of truth or falsehood, only indifference.
Reaching over, I lay the copy of her round-trip airline ticket to Miami on Glossman's desk. Bill Moran picked it up and sat back in his chair reading it. The ticket had been paid for with Lynn's American Express credit card.
"Barrel-chest, Jay," Glossman prodded.
"He was the one who botched the kill on Rene. His orders were to do away with her while Sanchez spent a couple of days with a lady friend on Abaco Island. For some reason known only to him, he felt sorry for Rene, didn't want to kill her."
The two FBI Agents shifted in their seats. Glossman leaned back in his chair. Bill Moran threw the copy of the airline ticket on the desk, turned and looked at Lynn.
"Go on."
"He couldn't kill her, so he pumped her full of drugs, hoping to keep her sedated, blank her memory, until she got back to the states. Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. Only he gave her too large a dose of drugs. It killed her. When Sanchez learned Barrel-chest didn't dispose of Rene as ordered, he went into a rage and shot him."
There was silence in the office. Every eye focused on Lynn Renoir. She drew on the rich blue-blood Southern heritage, both a gift and curse, that old rigorous restraint of emotions. I watched her grapple with her rage, then gain leverage, and subdue them, all in the space of seconds. I wanted to applaud her triumph.
"Finish it up, Jay."
"Barrel-chest told us Lynn ordered the kidnapping and killing of her sister, and it was she that Sanchez spent the two days with in Abaco."
She leaped from the chair and stood directly in front of me. The fury in her cold, icy eyes was evident. She trembled all over, the same way that she had done in the bar in Miami the day she identified her sister's body. "My sister has been murdered by some drug pusher and, because of your incompetence, you accuse me of having something to do with it?" She remained standing before me as if consciously letting me see that she had nothing to hide. Her fists were clinched, feet spread slightly apart. Under different circumstances, she would have been sexy and alluring in her arrogance.
"Sit down, Lynn," Glossman ordered. "Maybe you better get it all out, now, Jay."
She settled into the seat, her dress rising past her knees, ignored this time. There were whispers of silk on nylon, and a teasing glimpse of her thighs, a mystery that made most men light headed.
Standing, I looked at a sheet of paper in my hand. Pointing directly at Lynn, I said, "This woman is not Lynn Renoir, she is Rene."
All eyes turned to her. The FBI agents sat up straight. Bill Moran leaned forward and studied her face. In the second that she grasped what I'd said, her body sprang upright in the chair with a single curve of motion, immediate and violent like a cry of rebellion. I paused, watched her fight for control. It was not a simple struggle, or a brief one. She looked at me, wordless. She was afraid, too scared to hide it. She gripped the edge of the chair with the fingers of both hands. The blood squeezed from them, leaving them white, the nails blue. The spasm of fear was stronger than her grip. Despite trying, she kept trembling.
"The fingerprints we lifted from the body in the morgue were identified as Lynn Renoir. Once this was learned, the rest was easy." Lifting the note Glossman's secretary handed me; I read the name printed on it aloud. "The plastic surgeon is waiting outside the door to tell us what he did to your face so that it would resemble Lynn's. Would you like for him to come in?"
With the embarrassing helplessness of words a person knows to be meaningless, Rene said, "I would like my lawyer, please."
Glossman looked at the FBI agents. "Gentlemen, she is all yours."
"Joe, I…" she said, pleading, as one would say to a dead friend the words one regrets having not said in life. "Please, I…"
He held up his hand, cutting her off. He did not want to listen. Turning to the agents, he said, "Take her out of here."
She was read her rights, handcuffed, and led out of the office. Glossman sat down heavily in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Bill Moran looked at the floor. We were silent for a long time.
Glossman ran a hand across his face. "She was good, she fooled me, and I knew them better than anyone. Her own sister. For what? Money? God help the human race."
Driving back to Picaroon and Kathy, the only thing I could think of to tell myself was to remember, remember it well. It is not often one can see pure evil, look at it, remember it, and some day maybe we'll find the words to name its essence.
EPILOGUE
We lay to a single anchor on the backside of Chandeleur Island twenty miles off the coast of Biloxi, Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. The sun was low in the west. It would be a good sunset if the haze over New Orleans didn't obscure the final descent. The wind was calm, now, down from the fifteen knots that had beam-reached us all the way from the Broadwater Marina.
The sail over was delightful under clear skies and mild temperatures. We left the marina at dawn. Guy and Mildred Robins came down to see us off and brought a big thermos of coffee and fresh homemade biscuits.
Promising to take good care of his beloved Picaroon, we quietly slipped the lines and motored out into the Mississippi Sound to a glorious day. Rounding the head of Ship Island by noon, we set a course to the west of Chandeleur so that we could come up on the lee side. Raising the north end of the half-moon shaped island by midafternoon, we sailed down its thirty mile length to North Cut, then anchored up close to the white sand beach in eight feet of crystal clear water.
The island is narrow, a quarter mile at its widest. We could hear the soft murmur of the surf, see the seabirds feeding on the tide line. There were brown pelicans, long billed marsh wrens, terns, and gulls. A heron, tiny in the distance, stood like a figurine at the edge of the water on the backside of the island. The birds have a harder life than we do. Why did God make birds so delicate and fine? Bad weather can be cruel to the small birds. Most of the time the weather is kind and beautiful on the out islands, but she can change so suddenly with the violent thunderstorms and seasonal hurricanes and the birds are made too delicate for the harsh weather.
We brought a bottle of champagne up into the cockpit. Man-O-War birds soared effortlessly high among the fleecy mare's-tails that foretold of coming weather. A jet contrail appeared, then dissipated as if my magic on a course toward Miami. The straw gold color of the wine glistened in the afternoon light, tiny bubbles racing to the top of the flute-shaped glasses.
Kathy sat close, snuggled into my arms, her back to me. She was quiet, watching the sun sink lower into the haze. "Did she really kill her own sister to get control of the company?"
"Yes."
"Do think she had anything to do with the death of her parents in the airplane crash?"
"We'll never know for sure, but I'll always believe Rene Renoir and Ignacio Sanchez had something to do with it."
"Did she do something really terrible as a child that caused her father to cut her out of his Will?"
"What the Will said, was that she had a deviant personality that was borderline psychotic. It was complicated and involved her being an unwanted child with her sister the favorite of both parents and them letting Rene know about all of it. Whether it had anything to do with the mental state of the young girl, I have no idea. By the time she was thirteen she was uncontrollable and known as a "Partygirl" and a "Playgirl." Read whore. She wanted to be a movie star. She bounced from men to men, motel to motel. Hung around strip clubs, cheap dives, and frequented bars where she hustled drinks and dinner off strange men for the thrills. She told incredible lies. Her life was indecipherable." Kathy turned and looked at me with a frown. "Oh, I instinctively understand that life. I've seen it too many times. It was a chaotic collision with male desire. Rene Renoir wanted powerful things from men, but could not identify her needs. She reinvented herself with youthful panache and convinced herself she was something original. She miscalculated. She wasn't smart and she wasn't self-aware. She recast herself in a cookie-cutter mold that pandered to long-prescribed male fantasies. Rene Renoir was bushwhacked by the Sanchez brothers. She turned herself into a cliche that most men wanted to bed and a few wanted to kill. She wanted to get deep down cozy with men. She sent out magnetic signals. The Sanchez brothers were men with notions of deep down cozy cloaked in rage and viciousness. Her only act of complicity was a common fait accompli. She made herself over for men. Max Renoir knew all of this and was powerless to stop it."