Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  "It's just your iced tea's more fun-loving sister."

  "No alcohol."

  He nodded, and the waiter disappeared. "So what's your name"

  "Tina Guilford. And you"

  "Rick Chambers." He held his hand out, and when she shook it, he held on a half second too long.

  She freed her hand. "Pleased to meet you. Do you golf here"

  "Not often," he said. "And never in the summer. It's a hundred and six out there. By three it'll be a hundred and ten. I mostly just live here."

  "Do you like it"

  "Sure. It's a block from the Strip. It's got all the amenities, and the view in every direction is fantastic. It's safe from random people wandering in and out whenever they please. Not like the big hotels."

  "I never got the idea they were unsafe."

  "They're not, actually. But do you want all the people you see walk in their doors to walk into yours"

  "I suppose not." She looked at her watch.

  "Are you hungry"

  "Well, to be honest with you, he did ask me here for lunch."

  "It's getting to be mid-afternoon. Come on. Let's get a table." He leaned forward, his hands on the table as though he were about to push off.

  "No, I don't want to impose. I'll just finish my tea and order lunch for myself."

  "You're out of luck, Tina, honey. This is a private club. You can't pay for your iced tea, let alone lunch. We're too snobby to use money. It goes on a tab. Please. I'm hungry, too. I'll sit here and suffer with you if you want, just because you're beautiful. But it would be much nicer to watch you eat lunch."

  She looked at the hostess, visibly uncomfortable. Then she smiled at him. "I'll take you up on your kind offer. You're a true gentleman."

  "It's just my upbringing, and when I find a beautiful woman at my mercy I overcome that pretty quickly." He waved at the waiter and said, "We'd like a table in the dining room, please."

  They went into the dining room, which was still well populated, and ordered. They ate and had a pleasant, unhurried conversation. Jane kept steering the conversation away from the way she looked, and moved her arm twice because he had the habit of laying his hand on it for emphasis. When they'd been there for nearly an hour, she said, "Well, I guess he's not going to show up at all, and he lives here."

  "What's his name"

  "Today, it's Fool. But he'll still be calling himself David Cavendish."

  "If he comes in now, please don't make a scene. I'm too much of a coward for a fistfight."

  "Do you know him"

  "I don't think so. But he sounds Scottish. Probably throws the caber and drinks his single malt neat, and all that."

  "Pretty close. I'm picturing him in a kilt now. This would be a better climate for a kilt than Scotland."

  "Too much wind off the desert. It's the only show in town nobody would pay to see."

  A few minutes later, she determined it was time to force him to decide whether to commit himself. "This was a lot of fun, Rick. I really enjoyed our lunch. You turned what started as a horrible day into a nice one."

  "Oh, we can't just end it here. You were curious about the club. Let me show you around."

  "I don't want to waste your afternoon."

  "Afternoon is nothing. Half the people in town are asleep waiting for night. Come on." He came around behind her to pull out her chair, then led her out the far door that led to the residential part of the building. There was another door, and he used a key card to open it. Jane felt a blast of heat, but stepped into it after him.

  "Out here is the pool I like best. Over here, by the jungle." There was a thick barrier of sago palms, elephant ears, and flowering plants. The pool was a complicated shape with waterfalls and grottoes that opened onto some other part of the pool she didn't see. The impression was of a place apart, somewhere other than the desert. "Very pretty."

  "The golf course is up that way, and the tennis courts are over there. You can follow the ambulances picking up the sunstroke cases."

  He opened the door again with his key card, and stepped to the elevator. He pressed the "up" button.

  "Where to now"

  "You've got to see the view from the upper floors." When the doors slid aside he stepped in, pushed "18," and swiped his card on the reader beside the panel. The elevator rose. Jane followed him out on the eighteenth floor to a door marked 1829. "Here," he said. "Look the other way, and prepare for a sight."

  Jane covered her face with her hands and looked up and down the corridor to spot the security cameras. She didn't see any. He pushed the door open, then said, "Now look."

  She stepped across a symbolic expanse of marble into the large living room. In the floor-to-ceiling windows were the backs and sides of the hotels on the east side of the Strip-MGM and Venetian, Paris-and on the west side she saw the facades of Mandalay Bay Luxor, Caesar's Palace, Bellagio, Mirage. "This is absolutely breathtaking," she said.

  "I love it. I'm glad I got to show it to you."

  "I am, too."

  "Now take a look on this side." He opened a door and they walked into a room that was a sort of den, but had a desk with papers on it. The big window in this one was on the other side, and looked out onto the dry hardpan and distant mountains.

  "That's incredible, too," she said. "But it doesn't look any more real than the other side."

  "Let's have a drink," he said. "You have to keep hydrated around here, or you fall over and get stepped on."

  "What do you have"

  "Nonalcoholic"

  "Not necessarily."

  "How about a nice, icy vodka martini"

  "Well, okay."

  "Great. I'll make them."

  She followed him through the living room to a counter that was near the entrance to the kitchen. He took two martini glasses and walked off to put them in the freezer. He took the shaker and ice and poured in the touch of vermouth. She saw him shake and pour off the vermouth, pour in the vodka, then begin to shake it. As he shook it, he went back to the kitchen with the shaker, took out the two iced glasses, and walked across her line of vision to an angle she couldn't see. He returned with the two martinis, smiling. He handed her one, clinked his glass against hers, and said, "To serendipity."

  He tipped his glass back, and Jane raised hers. She saw that the stems of the two glasses had small metal rings around them. His was a silvery color, like platinum, and hers was gold with a little ruby on it. She touched the glass to her lips and turned her head to survey the windows again. The rings were obviously part of a set that people attached to guests' glasses at parties so they could identify their own drinks and not take someone else's. "That's a nice martini," she said.

  "I'm glad you like it," he said. "Anybody can make a good second martini. It's the first one that's hard, while people can still taste them."

  She looked at the far hallway. "I think I noticed your bathroom on the tour. Can you excuse me, please"

  "Sure. Right down there."

  She wanted to take her glass with her and pour it out, but that wasn't normal. He would suspect she knew. She set the martini down on the counter, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. The rings had not been on the glass stems when he'd taken them to the freezer. Why would he put those rings on the glasses this time There were only two of them. And did it really matter It wasn't as though the drinks were different but looked the same. They were the same, exactly. Only they weren't. They couldn't be.

  Jane looked around her for a solution. She spotted a dispenser on the wall of the bathroom that held paper cups. She flushed the toilet, and then ran the water while she pulled two cups out, put them into her purse, and left the bathroom.

  He wasn't visible. His drink was on the counter with hers, but he was gone. There must be a second bathroom. She poured her drink into the two little paper cups, poured his drink into her glass, and poured the paper cups into his glass. As she lifted her glass and took a sip from it, her eyes rose and saw him coming from the kitchen. Without thinki
ng about it, she realized he had used the moment to get rid of the concoction-the chloral hydrate, Rohypnol, GHB, whatever he used-just in case she went in there. Or maybe one of the times he'd done this before, he had forgotten to hide it before he carried the girl into the bedroom, and forever after he was worried about his own competence. He smiled, snatched up his drink, and took a large gulp. "You're right. That's good."

  He walked into the living room and sat on the couch. She came and sat near him. He looked closely at her as he said, "So, Tina. What do you do"

  "I'm a loan officer for a bank." She smiled. "That's why I've got time for an extra little unpaid vacation this summer. We're hardly making any loans, so they're happy to let anybody who wants to take time."

  "Sounds good. And bad, of course."

  "How about you"

  "I'm good, too, and bad."

  "I meant your job."

  "I'm semiretired. I was one of the people who put up money for this place, and we made quite a profit, so I don't really need to punch a clock."

  "That must be nice."

  "I thought it would be," he said. "I thought that I'd have a good life. I had a wife, and some kids. The kids were already out of college, and my wife and I had planned to travel and have a great time after I quit the contracting business. But I never seemed to be able to get there. Finally, this place got finished, and I came home one day and said, `I've retired.' She said, `That's odd.' I said, `What do you mean, odd' She said, `I've just filed for divorce.'"

  "Really I'm so sorry."

  "She was right, though. It was odd." He was getting tired, having a hard time keeping his eyes open. "We lived in California, which is a community property state. She took half the money and left. But I still have enough." He stared at her for a moment. "You did something to my drink, didn't you"

  "Did I"

  He lowered his head. "I'm sorry."

  "That's a really creepy thing to do," she said. "You could go to jail for the rest of your life." She took the Beretta pistol out of her purse, then pressed it against his temple. "Or you could run into somebody who woke up mad enough to kill you for it."

  His eyes widened, but then a moment later the chloral hydrate overcame even his alarm. His head tilted back on the top of the couch and his body seemed to melt into it. He began to snore.

  Jane listened to him for a few seconds, and decided his breathing was strong enough to keep him alive, and wasn't getting any weaker. She hadn't originally planned to do anything to Rick; she just intended to have him use his key card on the elevator. She would pretend to go toward the lobby, then stop the elevator on the fifteenth floor and get out. She rolled him slightly to the side and reached into his pocket, then pulled out his key card.

  She went into the kitchen and searched the cabinets and drawers until she found a small brown unlabeled plastic bottle with pills inside. She poured the pills out into the garbage disposal, ground them up, and ran the water for a minute to be sure they got out into the drain.

  Jane took a last look around. She wiped off the two glasses, the doorknob and faucets in the bathroom, and the plastic pill bottle, and took the two paper cups with her. She checked on Rick again. He was breathing steadily, if noisily.

  She remembered that he had told her he'd been one of the developers of the building. Would this man give up all that control Wouldn't he hold on to just a remnant of it, even if it was only a symbol She rolled him onto his side and took his wallet from his back pocket. She looked among the credit cards and found the second key card she'd been looking for. The first one bore a photograph of the building. This one was plain gold with the silver letters Silverstrike Construction. She looked out the peephole in the door, then opened it and left.

  She walked to the elevator, stepped in, used Rick's key card to activate it, and rode it down to the fifteenth floor. When she got out, she used the card again and sent the elevator back up to the eighteenth floor. She didn't want it to arrive on the ground floor, open, and reveal itself to be empty.

  She looked both ways and saw that the hallway was deserted. She kept her head down, because she assumed she was being taped. She stopped at Martel's door; tried Rick's key card in the lock; saw, as she'd expected, that it wouldn't work; and put it away. Then she took out the second key card, the one she had found in his wallet, and inserted it into the lock, then pulled it out. The little light shone green and she heard a click. She was right: Rick had retained a master key. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  After all of her effort, she was inside Daniel Martel's condominium. She stood still and looked in every direction. She didn't want to come all this way and get killed by another one of his booby traps. She studied the big living room. It was the same layout as Rick's, and she saw no alterations that would hide a booby trap. The door sign indicated that he had a maid service come in to clean, and he could hardly have warned the service about any booby trap. He must have been counting on the regular security system of the club to keep everyone out of this place.

  She could see he had the same built-in cabinetry Rick had, the same furniture facing the same tall windows. But the paintings on the walls were peculiar. They were stylized nearly naked showgirls that seemed to be taller than a man and menacing, with emaciated white-painted faces accented by collagen-puffed, bloodred lips and bared teeth. Their cheeks had round smears of rouge that were almost clownish. The eyes were luminous and cruel, like the eyes of the big cats in animal trainers' acts. They had the quality of unmasked falsehood, yet still grinned with triumph over the viewer like vampires caught with their fangs showing. She could feel the hatred of women that had inspired every feature.

  Jane put on her gloves and began to open drawers and cabinets, searching for all of the things that would give her more information about Martel. She moved into his bedroom. That was where burglars looked first, because it was the place most likely to contain valuables. The bedroom was painted dark gray, and it had two sets of curtains that could shut out all light from outside. The bed was a California king with a fake fur bedspread and silk sheets. Six pillows were piled on it at the head.

  She opened the drawers of the nightstands. The one farthest from the door held a box of .45 ammunition, but no gun. The other held two pairs of handcuffs and a blindfold. She closed it, and the sense of foreboding she'd felt since she'd arrived intensified. It might be nothing. There were plenty of people who played games with those things, and it meant nothing about their lives. But Daniel Martel was a murderer, someone she knew had already killed a woman. How could it not mean anything She found herself staring at the bed. It had a steel head piece and foot piece with vertical bars. Some of the bars looked as though the paint had been marred by something scraping on them.

  The closet door was on the other side of the bedroom. It was a walk-in the size of a second bedroom. There was a chest-high island in the middle, and the walls were covered with drawers, cabinets, and poles with hangers. Of course Daniel Martel would be unusually interested in his appearance; he made money seducing foolish women. She closed the closet door, but there was a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and she kept catching her own reflection in it, so she opened it again.

  The clothes on hangers had been pushed to one side so there was a section that was bare in the middle. She opened the drawers on the wall to her right, and saw that some of them had been emptied.

  The island in the center of the room kept drawing her eye. It was a chest-high rectangle about seven feet long and four feet wide, with drawers on all sides. She opened a few drawers. A couple near the top contained accessories-cuff links, watches, sunglasses, rings, an ID bracelet. Others had socks and underwear still in packages. But she soon lost interest in what was in the drawers. The most intriguing thing about them was their size. They were wide, but they weren't deep enough from front to back. Behind them, inside the center of the island, there had to be a long empty space. She tugged on one of the drawers to pull it free, but it wouldn't come out. She studie
d the island, ran her fingers under the overhanging top surface, and then knelt and looked up at it. There was a pair of hinges on one side. She walked to the opposite side, found the catch, and pushed it. The top opened like a chest.

  In the center of the island, between the drawers, was a rectangular box like a tray. Stored in it were four pistols with extra magazines, two boot knives, a couple of knives that could be opened with a flick of the thumb, two electronic stun guns, and a short Japanese sword designed for fighting in close quarters. She lifted the tray out and set it on the floor, then looked in the tray below it.

  There were bundles of letters and three photograph albums. She picked up the first stack of letters and leafed quickly through it, looking at the envelopes. Then she did the same with each of the others. The letters were in different handwriting, from several different people, sent to him at a succession of addresses. But all had been mailed in Indianapolis, Indiana.

  She took up the first of the photograph albums. There was a shot of a man about thirty-five to forty years old, with a handsome face. It was Martel. He had longer hair than seemed stylish at the moment, but the picture might be old. On the next page, there he was again in a tuxedo, with an attractive woman with long, shiny blond hair wearing a strapless gown and holding a matching clutch. She was a stereotype, a trophy girlfriend at some big event.

  Jane turned the page and saw them both again. The woman had her wrists and ankles tied to a bed, and she was bent over a pile of pillows. There was a gag in her mouth. She seemed to be in genuine distress, not posing or pretending. Sitting at the head of the bed near her was Daniel Martel again, as naked as she was, but smiling. He held a leather belt in one hand. Jane turned the next page, and then the next, and the next. Daniel Martel was a sadist. All the photos were of him and a succession of women, and all of them involved some kind of bondage. In a few of the photographs they were in the midst of intercourse, but even then, the woman would be restrained somehow, while Martel was merely naked, always smiling for the camera. The smiling pose reminded her of a snapshot of a fisherman on a dock standing beside the hoist where his prize tarpon hung.