Whoever Dancing Boy was, he was energetic. He was still twirling Beatriz around, and she was still laughing, when Charlie come back in with Michael Honeycutt. They were heading straight for me.
I did that subtle straightening thing that makes people pay attention, and Beatriz saw me, and waved, and dragged over Dancing Boy.
“Ms. del Gato,” I said deferentially, “I believe Mr. Sweeting wants to introduce you to your host.” And then Charlie was there, booming genially over the music, and Beatriz was shaking hands with a clean-boned man of about forty whose tux hung beautifully and whose gray eyes looked as guileless as a child’s. He was wearing some kind of cologne I couldn’t identify, a pleasant scent—not too strong, the way many men wear it—and seemed the kind of man who would do well mediating disputes: very little of that overt male body language that delineates the hierarchy. It seemed he and Dancing Boy, whose name turned out to be Peter Herrera, already knew each other, and the latter’s painfully obvious drawn-in elbows and slightly lowered eyes made it plain who was the alpha male. Honeycutt’s smile was affable, and he said all the appropriate things, but he was on automatic pilot, mind elsewhere, and after a minute or two, he excused himself. He moved well through the crowd, quite at home. I imagined that if someone faced him with his crimes, he would frown and say he was sorry, anything to avoid bad feeling or confrontation, but underneath would wonder what all the fuss was about. A man like that will often do what he thinks will please others; the trick is in predicting what he thinks. From the back, I recognized him as the man who had been talking to the Kenworthys.
Beatriz led Dancing Boy back onto the floor. It was nearly eleven o’clock and I had everything I had come for, but Beatriz was as happy as a child at her first birthday party, so I let them dance.
She chattered about Dancing Boy all the way south on I-75. He was ten feet tall, very kind, and could speak Spanish with such a charming accent. I didn’t interrupt until we were on Ponce, three miles from the house.
“What does he do?”
“He is an intern”—she sounded a little unsure of the word—“at a firm of attorneys. Lawson and Walton.”
“What kind of things does he do?”
“He’s some sort of liaison,” she said vaguely. “With a bank, I think.”
“Massut Vere?”
“Yes. Is it, then, a very important bank in the city?”
“Important enough. How long has he worked there?”
“Not very long. He doesn’t like it very much.” A point for Mr. Herrera. “He says that after he finishes his law degree, he wants to work with poor people.”
How very nice. I turned right on Clifton. She yawned.
“Two more minutes. You can stay in the car while I get your purse. We’ll have you at your hotel in less than half an hour.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“I wasn’t dancing half the night.”
She smiled again.
“Here we are.” I turned into my street. There was a car parked in the driveway. Julia’s. Julia was in it. As I pulled into the curb, she got out. “Stay in the car,” I told Beatriz.
“There you are!” Julia said, heading towards my screen door, assuming I would let her in. “I called but there was no reply. And I remembered what happened with your machine last time. I’ve been…Never mind. I’ve got things to tell you. Earlier today I—”
Whatever she was going to say was lost in a thud as she walked into one of the flower troughs Beatriz had filled this morning. Julia grabbed at me just as I caught her under the arms and for a moment we were frozen in an awkward tableau somewhere between Gone With the Wind and a game of Twister.
I hauled and she scrabbled up my body. She froze as one hand touched the bulge at my thigh and the other the harness around my waist.
Beatriz chose that moment to get out of the car. “Aud? Are you all right?”
Tousled, flushed, shoes in hand, she looked about sixteen and well used. Julia picked my hand off her shoulder like a dead bug. “Taken to packing in public for your sweet young thing?”
One in the morning. Two strange women in my driveway with even stranger ideas. I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Julia turned and walked with great dignity to her car.
“Julia. Wait. What is it you have to tell—”
But she started the car, shot me a contemptuous look, and drove off with a roar.
six
I woke at seven but slid back into the warm depths of sleep before I could make myself move, and then I was drifting through a slow swell of dream images: bullets bursting through flesh, skin opening like heavy silk under a cold razor, a child begging for me to help as her sister went up in flames. I finally heaved myself out of it and woke to a bedroom shimmering with morning, light and luscious as meringue. Sunlight turned the red rug into a patch of raspberry and the old oak dresser to Viking gold.
I got up, automatically began to make the bed. I straightened the ivory linen top sheet, then pulled the quilt up, folded the sheet down, tugged it taut. The quilt had been hand-pieced in the Netherlands sixty years ago and the colours were still as rich and mysterious as a nineteenth century oil painting. I smoothed it, remembering finding it, putting it on the bed for the first time. No one but me had ever seen it. No lover, no friend, no family.
I had breakfast on the deck. Everything was very distinct. Sunshine turned the deck rail into a long, continuous stick of butter. Cardinals appeared in the oak tree, bright and round. My grapefruit juice smelled like another country.
With food before me and sunshine on my skin, the dreams and strange mood faded, as they always did.
I threw a piece of bread down onto the grass. Two shrews came across it at the same time and fought, squeaking and shrilling and single-minded, like two crackheads quarrelling over a dime bag. I threw another piece. The noise stopped.
I wondered what Honeycutt was doing this morning, what he was planning to do about his money problems. He was a deeply stupid man. If you wash money for the Tijuana drug cartel and one of your pipelines is buying and selling art, you don’t draw anyone’s attention by faking that art. He was risking everything by splitting the pipeline in two: real art smuggling, clean money proceeds to the cartel; fake art smuggling, proceeds to his own account. But as far as I knew he lived more or less within his means, did not take drugs, did not gamble, so where was it all going? Some would be funnelled off into a secondary account in the Seychelles, but no one played both ends against the middle unless they were desperate. So what would make a man like Honeycutt desperate?
But that information was not necessary. I knew who had ordered Lusk’s death, and that the Friedrich had indeed been faked after Sweeting had sold it to Honeycutt. I even knew who had provided the fake. That was all I needed because I was working for Julia, and that was all she wanted to know.
There was no proof, but Julia had not asked for the kind of evidence you could take to court. I would turn over what I had to Denneny and let him deal with it. It would be up to him to decide whether or not he tried to get admissible evidence, or just let Lusk’s death go as a drug-related homicide. But there was still the question of all that cocaine.
It was almost ten o’clock. I stood and stretched, imagining the look on Julia’s face when I told her she hadn’t made an error of judgement over the Friedrich. Instead, all I saw was her contempt last night.
The phone rang. I picked it up. “Julia?”