The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  I found the breaker box in the closet of what looked like a guest bedroom. I put a chair in front of the door, so anyone coming in would knock it down and give me warning, and flipped open the box.

  He had made it too easy: everything was neatly labelled. I slid the screwdriver from its snug leather band on my thigh and hummed as I worked. He had what he thought was a good system: sensors on all windows and doors, battery backup in case someone cut the mains. I simply disconnected the battery from the mains so it could not recharge, and switched the alarm hookup over to the circuit labelled HALL: a few hours’ extra life for the fish in that fancy aquarium in case there was a power hit. No booby-trap lines to the phone. Good.

  I closed up, put the screwdriver away, and went back to wandering. The carpet in the hallway was the particular shade of deep red that men favour when there is no woman around to tell them any better. It was wonderfully thick. An elephant could probably jump up and down outside Honeycutt’s bedroom and he wouldn’t hear a thing. Just made to be burgled. There was a reasonable amount of art, but nothing like the quantity Eddie had shown me. I recognized a particularly ugly sculpture in one of the bathrooms, and the large Day-Glo painting on the wall. No icons, no precious statuettes, no display cases. Given the shoddy electronic security, I doubted he had anything that small and precious in the house at all. They were too easily hidden in a pocket or…smuggled. Of course. Part of the money would be washed that way. Use dirty money to buy art quietly. Ship art abroad where it’s sold for clean money that can come back quite legally.

  I opened the door to what seemed like a den, but the air was empty of the scents of use: no paper, no hot plastic from faxes and computers, no smoke or alcohol, no late-night sweat. The desk had a pile of papers on it, but they were tidy and curling at the edges. This was a front.

  At the end of the hallway was a second, smaller stairway leading to the third floor. I walked up two stairs and tilted my head back. From above my head came a creak and sigh, the sound of a bored man on a chair outside a room. A guard. Another time, then.

  The music from below was louder, a lot louder, and now it had a pronounced beat. People were dancing. I started downstairs.

  Charlie Sweeting met me in the hall. “There you are. I think your young charge might have had a bit too much to drink.”

  “Where?”

  He stepped back. “It wasn’t my—”

  “Where?”

  “Dancing.”

  He had to almost run to keep up. People peeled from my path like sod before the plough.

  One of those party songs from the early eighties was thumping from the speakers and the dance floor was half full. Beatriz was being whirled around by some young man. Her hair was loose, eyes brilliant, cheeks flushed. She was laughing. People were watching. But her feet were sure and her energy high.

  “She’s not drunk. Just having the time of her life.” I smiled at Charlie, as much to make everyone in the room relax as to reassure him. He muttered something I didn’t hear over the music, and headed for the quieter back parlour. I watched him walk past the Kenworthys, who were talking to someone with his back to me, then turned again to the dance floor. I watched for a long time, unseen.

  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?”

  “No. This is Beatriz.”

  Peter had invited her out for lunch and she didn’t want me along and was that all right? I listened to her chatter and watched a bee humming around the forsythia bush just below me. Much more interesting than any phone conversation. “Beatriz, just call Philippe. If it’s fine with him, it’s fine with me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” The bee was gone now.

  “I…Did I wake you up?”

  “No.”

  “And you will drive me to my appointment tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” I made an effort. “I’ll be there at eight-fifteen tomorrow to pick you up. Enjoy your lunch.”

  “And you don’t mind that I won’t be there to help with the flowers?”

  I told her I didn’t mind. Eventually she went away. When I dialed Julia’s number, it rang and rang and rang. She had even turned her machine off.

  To many Americans, dirt exists only to be eroded with four-wheel drive or mountain bike. The great outdoors with its fragile systems was created for the convenience of fools who tear into the heart of a wilderness area to gawk at the grizzlies, get indignant if one gets too close, and roar off in a cloud of noxious exhaust, trailing Rush Limbaugh at ninety decibels and leaving behind their sewage.

  If only they looked, they would see a world in their own back garden.

  Gardening, the English vice. Kneeling on the grass, I could see a microcosm in a yard of dirt. Ants, ranging from lone black soldier ants with mandibles the size of my little fingernail, to the pale streams of fire ants like tiny amber necklaces. A glistening pink roll and wriggle of earthworm; beetles like apple seeds. Ladybugs—which the English call ladybirds—sitting like spatters of wet enamel on the underside of leaves. Black wasps with their menacing dangle of legs. A daddy longlegs trundling like some strange Mars Rover over granular soil flecked with specks of mica, then waving front legs at a pecan shell turning soft as rotting cardboard.

  Sometimes I used my fingers, digging down into the rich dirt, feeling it push under my nails. No doubt I’d regret it later, but it was good to feel so much life under my hands. I dug, tapped an impatiens or marigold free of its PVC pot, dropped it in the hole, brushed dirt back around the pale green stem, pressed firmly until the young plant stood on its own. I wondered if there was a group anywhere in the state that planted trees in deforested areas. I could volunteer for that as soon as Beatriz was on her plane and I’d prepared a report for Julia.

  I straightened, took a look. Bright, welcoming colour filled about half the beds. The back garden now looked a place for people as well as wildlife. I wondered if Julia liked flowers.

  It took a while to clean up enough to eat lunch. I tried Julia again. Ring, ring, ring. I went back to the garden.

  Evening. I called Julia. Ring ring ring. What had she found out that she wanted to tell me on Saturday night?

  I tried to settle to a book by some philosopher called Roszak who declared ecology and psychology were the same thing. According to his bio he wrote fiction; god knows what it was like.

  I had no way of knowing if leaving the answering machine off was one of Julia’s normal habits. Maybe she had found something out and done something stupid.

  Her house was in Virginia Highlands, a brick tudor with roses outside. She liked some flowers, then. I parked down the street. There were lights on, one upstairs, one down. Her car was in the drive, and I could hear music. Light jazz. I watched for a while. Eventually the light upstairs went out and another came on in what might be the dining room. I saw the swing of shadow hair against the blinds.

  I drove away.

  I was running around the corner in Inman Park, only this time she didn’t take the corner wide, we didn’t bump into each other, she went on to the house and had her flesh blown off her bones when it went up, nothing left but a standing skeleton surrounded by chunks of what looked like raw pork.

  I got stuck in morning traffic a mile from the Nikko. I tried Julia’s home number. Ring ring ring. I called information, got her office number. Her voice told me to leave a message for Lyon Art.

  “Julia? Aud. This morning I’ll be with my client, whom you met Saturday night. I drop her at the airport at midday but will be free after that. I have the information you want. Call me at home or on my cell phone.” I gave her the number.

  Beatriz was full of beans when I picked her up. She chattered at me all the way back to the city, and walked into Perrin & Norrander full of confidence. Afterwards, she smiled all the way to the airport.

  I parked in a no parking zone and helped her carry her bags to the first-class check-in. “I think they’ll offer me the job,” she said suddenly as the clerk stamped various things and put tags on her luggage.

  “Congratulations.”

  She looked down at her shoes, suddenly shy. “It means I’ll be back in a month or so. Will you…I mean, you’re probably busy…but…”

  “Someone will have to advise me about what flowers to plant.” She gave me a tentative smile, and I found I was smiling back. “Call when you’ve booked your flight.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think you are a very kind woman.”

  I zipped east on I-20. Honeycutt may have given the order, but he was not the one who actually lit the match that was supposed to have burned Julia Lyons-Bennet to a carbon carcass. A
ll of a sudden I wanted that name; a little tidbit for Denneny. Perhaps it was time to have a little chat with Michael Honeycutt.

  I was following the hairpin bend of the Moreland exit by the time I got through to his secretary. “I’m Katy Willis, personal assistant to Charles Sweeting,” I told him in a brisk, impersonal voice. “Mr. Sweeting would like an appointment to see Mr. Honeycutt at his earliest convenience.”

  “Mr. Honeycutt left very early this morning for a six-day trip to the Seychelles. If it’s urgent, perhaps I could help?”

  “No, I believe it’s a personal matter. Perhaps we could go ahead and schedule an hour for, say, next Tuesday?”

  “I could manage to squeeze him in for forty minutes on Wednesday at ten.”

  “Thank you.” At five minutes past ten next Wednesday morning Michael Honeycutt would go grey under his Indian Ocean tan. By the time I was finished with him, he would want to cancel the rest of his appointments that week, but I would have that name.

  When I got home I spent half an hour watering the flowers. The cheerful pinks and yellows and violet in the two front troughs reminded me of something: the window boxes lining the smart Mayfair mews where my mother had lived the last two years. She had never seen my house.

  When making a rocking chair it is extremely important for the runners to curve in exact symmetry. I hummed as I checked one against the other; shaved; sanded. Perhaps when it was done, I would ship the chair to my mother. Perhaps I would go visit her for a week this summer.

  Birds sang their evening chorus. The harsh screeching of a blue jay drowned them out for a while, then I heard again the trill of a cardinal, liquid as the sunset spreading like cranberry juice along the cloud line between the trees.

  When I had the runners shaped to my satisfaction, I started on the armrests. I wanted them wide and comfortable, but not so wide that they overwhelmed the balance of the piece. I went over to the far wall, ran my fingers over a few pieces of pine, thinking. Eventually I selected one, brought it back to the table vise.