"Whose will?" the blackmailer asked again. "Your wife's?"
"Never mind."
So, it -was real, Chaz thought, the document that Rolvaag had shown him. Thirteen million dollars with my name on it, and all I've got to do is avoid Death Row.
"Let's say I scrape up the money," he said.
"Yes, let's say." The blackmailer laughed. "Bring it in a suitcase. Now for the questions."
"Oh, come on," Chaz said.
"I've only got two. First, why did you marry her?"
Swell, thought Chaz. I'm being shaken down by Montel Williams.
"Because I really liked her," he said impatiently. "She was fun and good-looking and sharp. I thought I was ready to settle down."
Without warning, the blackmailer clobbered him with the paddle, the flat side landing squarely on the crown of Chaz's head. He saw it coming even in the dimness, an arcing downward blur. On impact he let out a moan and pitched forward. The canoe rocked but did not flip.
"All you wanted," the man said, "was a hot girl on your arm, Chazzie. A girl your buddies would notice and talk about-the female equivalent of a new Rolex. You weren't getting married, you were accessorizing."
Chaz slowly pushed himself up from the bottom of the canoe and repositioned on his knees. He touched his scalp and felt a rising knot. Meanwhile the blackmailer had resumed paddling, as if nothing had happened. He looked tan and solidly built, but he was so much older that Chaz had been completely surprised by the sudden blow. It was the sort of thing a young hothead might do.
"And the fact she was rich didn't hurt, did it?" the man said.
"I never asked for a dime," Chaz protested.
"Which leads to my second question: Why'd you throw her into the ocean?"
Chaz swallowed in a way that sounded like a dying bullfrog. He had no intention of admitting the crime.
"I guess you want to spend the night out here," the blackmailer said, "alone."
"Anything happens to me, you don't get paid."
The man's laughter made Chaz shudder. "Try to understand, junior, it's not just the money. I'm pissed."
"But you didn't even know her!"
"Funny, though, I feel like I do." Calmly the man swung the paddle out of the water and batted Chaz in the face; not hard enough to knock him over, but hard enough to crimp his nose.
"Goddamn!" Chaz cried, a warm trickle running down his fingers.
The blackmailer said, "As you can tell, I'm taking this whole thing very personally. Tell me why you did it and I'll row you back to the docks."
"I just can't."
"Chazzie, you know that I know exactly what happened. All I'm asking you is why."
The guy had a point. He already knew everything, and Chaz wasn't keen on getting smacked again.
"What if you're wearing a wire?" Chaz was pinching his nostrils, trying to stanch the bleeding. Now he sounded like a cartoon duck.
Again the blackmailer's grin gleamed in the starlight. "You're priceless," he said, peeling off his T-shirt. Then he held the flashlight at arm's length and aimed it back toward his bare chest, which was quickly darkening with mosquitoes.
"See? No hidden microphones," he said to Chaz. "Feel better now?'
"I guess."
"Then answer the question, please."
"I thought Joey had busted me," Chaz heard himself say. "I thought she'd figured out the water scam."
"And for that you heaved her overboard? In the middle of the fucking Gulf Stream?"
"You don't understand," Chaz said. "If she ever blew the whistle on me and Mr. Hammernut… you can't possibly understand the implications. The thing is, I was out of options. If only she…"
"What, Chaz?"
If only she'd given me a reason not to do it, Chaz thought. Like showing me the new will.
"Never mind," he said.
The blackmailer began paddling with more purpose, and Chaz marveled at how briskly they were gliding across the water. Being averse to exercise, he'd never been a fan of canoes; a ski boat powered by a two-hundred-horse Mercury was Chaz's idea of a dream ride.
"How's the shnoz?" the blackmailer asked him.
"It hurts." Chaz's nose had swollen to the size of a bell pepper.
Soon they came to the long canal through which they'd entered the bay, and Chaz was immensely relieved. The blackmailer was taking him back to Flamingo.
Suddenly the man stopped rowing and leaned back. Chaz could see the shine of his sweat and hear the ravenous buzz of insects on his face and chest. "Want some bug spray?" Chaz asked.
The man chuckled. "No thanks." He extended the paddle to Chaz and said, "Your turn, killer."
"What?"
"Yeah, I'm whipped."
Chaz took the paddle and examined it as if it were an intricately engineered device.
"Please don't tell me you've never rowed a canoe," the blackmailer said.
"Of course I have."
Chaz tried to remember the last time-way back in grad school, on some scummy lake in North Carolina. He and another student were helping a professor trace the dissolution of muskrat feces in bottom sediment. Chaz had ended the day with oozing blisters on the palms of both hands. He couldn't swing a golf club for a month.
"Hurry up, Chazzie, we're drifting back to Whitewater."
"Sorry, but I'm not up for this. My head's killing me."
"You'll be fine."
"But I'm still bleeding, for God's sake."
"Did you ever see Deliverance?" the blackmailer said. "Remember what happened to the chubby guy?"
Chaz Perrone started paddling.
Twenty
Being labeled a crook was a new experience for Karl Rolvaag, and it kept him awake much of the night. He was more intrigued than indignant, for it was impossible to feel insulted by someone like Charles Perrone. The blackmail accusation was so boggling that the detective viewed it as a critical twist in the case, a clue no less important than the fingernails in that soggy bale of weed.
Rolvaag stood in his ritual cold shower for nearly twenty minutes, replaying in his head the odd conversation with Joey Perrone's husband. He didn't doubt that the man was being extorted, but by whom? And with what sort of information?
Perrone had snidely referred to a "bogus eyewitness," which raised in Rolvaag's mind the tantalizing possibility of a real one. Yet such a scenario would require that the witness be nearly as venal and ice-blooded as Perrone himself; someone capable of watching a woman murdered and not trying to stop it; someone who, instead of rushing to the police, would go directly to the killer with a demand for hush money.
Given the pestilential abundance of lowlifes in South Florida, it was surely possible that Perrone's crime had been randomly observed by someone equally degenerate. Still, Rolvaag thought it more likely that the blackmailer wasn't a fellow cruise passenger but, rather, some enterprising scammer who'd read about Joey Perrone's disappearance in the newspapers. In any event, the detective was not displeased that the threat had driven Perrone into such paranoid agitation that he'd accuse a police detective of masterminding the plot. Criminals in such a ragged state of mind often made reckless mistakes, and it was Rol-
vaag's hope that the remorseless widower would continue on a path of self-sabotage.
Most tantalizing was the link between Perrone and Samuel Johnson Hammernut. Rolvaag had found nothing to substantiate Perrone's flimsy story that the sixty-thousand-dollar Humvee had been a gift from his wife, with Hammernut acting innocently as a middleman. Rolvaag believed that the farm tycoon had intended the Hummer- and one could only imagine what else-as payola for Chaz. It had been Rolvaag's observation that men like Red Hammernut were not spontaneously generous, and usually demanded something valuable in return.
What would a lazy, unscholarly biologist such as Perrone have to offer? The detective had a hunch.