Naked Came the Phoenix

by Marcia Talley

  “At a higher salary,” the politician’s wife had suggested.

  And in amity at last, looking the very picture of the successful political couple, the Blessings had gone in search of food and information. Food they had found, and information they were about to receive, both of those commodities in greater abundance than they had dared imagine.

  The dinner that Mike LeMat’s various family members had provided was a smashing hit, a meal that went far to counteract the depredations of the last days—both on the waistlines and in the minds. After Mike’s restaurateur cousin, grocer brother, and baker mother had done their parts (the spa’s chef having taken to his bed in horror), everyone in the dining room was replete, stunned with the unaccustomed bounty, drunk on carbohydrates and fats (both saturated and un-), tipsy with refined sugars and the first caffeine most of them had had since setting foot on the premises.

  And Vince Toscana saw that it was good.

  However, Vince reminded himself sourly, Detective Vince Toscana was no longer the chief investigator here. He couldn’t think about it without a jolt, the sight of that authoritative ID wallet in the hands of the near-naked man. If he hadn’t made the calls to Washington and confirmed it, he’d have slapped the guy in cuffs, too, for impersonating an officer.

  Well, he’d have tried to.

  Vince had to hand it to the state of Virginia: Even Philly’d never thrown anything like this at him.

  Okay, he decided, these jokers had stuffed in about as much food as any Italian mother could hope for. If he waited any longer, they’d fall asleep into their tiramisu. He caught Mike’s eye, and they began to encourage the players to move next door. Into the library.

  Caroline wondered for an instant who the gorgeous guy in the pricey suit was and then blushed furiously when she realized that the first time she’d come in—no, not in contact exactly, the first time they’d had relations—no! The first time she’d seen the guy, he’d been wearing rather less fabric than the scrap of paisley silk that was currently sticking out of his breast pocket. Adonis, Thong Man, the hunk-of-all-trades with the Italian name and the Oxbridge accent who’d hauled Claudia out of the mud bath, a man (a whole lot of man) she’d never seen wearing more than brief shorts and a briefer tank top, was dressed in a suit that made the custom three-piece that Douglas had changed into look like it came from Penney’s. Constanza straightened from applying a match to the kindling in the stone fireplace, and the room could see that, along with several yards of wool and linen, he had donned an unmistakable air of authority. They all forgot instantly that Detective Toscana was there.

  “Emilio,” Phyllis Talmadge said sharply, “what is going on here?”

  “Why don’t you take a seat, Ms. Talmadge? We’ll explain when you’re settled.” His voice was reassuringly that of his previous incarnation, and gradually, with curiosity now overlying their exhausted apprehension, the sadly depleted band subsided into the chairs circling the fire. Caroline and Douglas sat near the fireplace; Phyllis Talmadge, a bandage still on the back of her head, sat next to Caroline; Lauren Sullivan, the only one who had picked without interest at her rich food, was joined by King David, his multicolored Medusa locks tamed into a ponytail, the lines on his face carved into gouges by the strain of the last days. Dante the masseur was there, and his colleague Marguerite, with Gustav the weight trainer, Ginger the receptionist, Jean-Claude the dietitian, and a handful of others, including Geoff the assistant pastry chef, surely the most underemployed talent on the premises. Near the door, Vince and Mike stood watch. Emilio waited for their attention to return to him, and then he began.

  “Normally, in such a case as this, the police would take your statements and let you go, and you would hear nothing more until you were called upon to testify.

  “Because of the glare of publicity already generated by recent events, and because some of the people involved wish to keep what has gone on here as quiet as possible, it has been decided that you should be told everything, in the hopes that you will keep your statements to the press to a minimum. And since Detective Toscana had already set up this rather literary device of the meeting in the library″—here Constanza shot a glance at the back of the room; Vince Toscana’s eyebrows went up in what might have been wry apology—″I decided that we may as well make use of it. I had to draw the line at the traditional denouement of the Golden Age mystery story, namely, the unmasking of the villains and their arrest in front of the other suspects. Modern police techniques render that irresponsible, as I’m sure you understand. As for the other, I trust you will forgive the melodramatic overtones.”

  Here he reached into the inner breast pocket of his suit to draw out the small leather booklike object that Caroline had seen Toscana throw to the ground. He flipped it open and handed it to Douglas on his left.

  “You know me as Emilio Constanza. I was hired under that name eight months ago by Claudia de Vries, who thought she was getting an herbalist from Bombay. My name is Jonathan Sassoon.” (“I knew he was no paesan,” Vince muttered.) “I actually was born in India, into the ancient Jewish community in Goa, although what I know about herbs I got from a book I memorized on the plane coming to take Claudia′s job. My expertise,” he said, “is drugs.”

  The leather wallet indeed identified the impressive figure before them as an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency.

  “The feds,” murmured Douglas as he passed the article of show-and-tell on to Phyllis Talmadge, on Caroline’s left. “No wonder Toscana looks pissed.”

  “You’re also going to have to forgive a certain amount of apparently disconnected narrative as I go along,” said Adonis the Fed in his plummy accent. “This case has roots that go back quite a way.”

  (“I knew this case stank of ancient history,” Vince said sotto voce to Mike. Mike did not respond; he was too awestruck by the man at the front of the room.)

  “You have been the unfortunate witnesses to a series of deaths, all of them related in the sense that the deaths during an earthquake are related: They share the same underlying cause, if by different actual instruments. We have here five deaths and one assault, committed by three different individuals. I do not believe any of the other murders would have occurred had it not been for the first.

  “The first to die, of course, was Claudia de Vries, and the means of death may be taken as highly symbolic—a patchwork shawl drawn tight, knotted around her neck, representing the tightening knot of her various crimes and deceptions that were pulled in around her.”

  He caught himself and looked mildly embarrassed. “Pardon the romance,” he said. “It must be the surroundings. At any rate, Claudia de Vries was killed because she was a thief, a blackmailer, and a source of illegal drugs, and because there was a struggle for power among her fellow criminals. We will return to that aspect of the case in a minute.

  “As I said, that and the other deaths have roots that go back a long time. My own involvement began approximately twelve years ago, when I arrested a very famous rock star for possession of heroin. That’s right: King David himself.”

  The wide smile he gave the wrinkly rocker was eclipsed only by the electric return grin. The singer had, Caroline noted, surprisingly good teeth for a heroin addict.

  “Fortunately for David, he had a clever lawyer, a clean record, and a malleable judge. Which would have been just another instance of justice for the rich, except for one thing: David actually wanted to rehabilitate. He’d been very close to someone, another member of the band, who’d recently died of an overdose. I see some of you remember this.”

  They did, even Caroline, who had been barely in her teens at the time and hadn’t much cared for King David’s kind of music anyway, but who had read the articles about the band’s troubles with avid attention, wondering at the mix of the famous and the kinky.

  “I went to see him in rehab and made him an offer: He’d pass on any information that came his way about dealers and suppliers, we’d work it into our cases, keep his
name out of it, all that. It’s the sort of thing we do sometimes, though generally we’ll offer to reduce time. In this case, I was pushing the revenge side. Not that I had much hope—his sentence was so light we had no leverage, but a person can only ask, and besides, I thought that during our interview we had connected. Turns out I was right, though not in quite the way I’d thought.” Again an exchange of knowing smiles, until the agent pulled himself together.

  “Anyway, to my amazement, no sooner had I mentioned the possibility of his turning informant than he started to roar with laughter, as if I’d made an enormous joke. Turns out the director of the rehab center he was staying in had offered him a line of coke while they were filling in the admit papers. I couldn’t believe it—we hadn’t even suspected the place.

  “The center was run by Claudia and Raoul de Vries, and although they got a lot more subtle over the years, their operation grew. And we grew with them. We knew something was coming together these last few months, and that’s when I came in undercover.”

  (The skimpy turquoise thong he’d been wearing when she first saw him flashed through Caroline’s mind. That was some disguise—nobody′d think to look for a cop underneath … She blushed again and told herself to behave.)

  “Chris Lund and Howard Fondulac were two of her major distributors, Fondulac in Southern California, Lund all over, wherever Ondine had regular jobs. She, I hasten to say, had nothing to do with it.” He shot another glance across the room, but this time, Caroline thought, it was aimed not at King David but at Lauren Sullivan beside him. “Howard was getting erratic and had been diagnosed with the early stages of liver cancer. He was pressing Claudia to give him more of the stuff to distribute, at the same time that he was holding back a heavy percentage of the profits—he badly wanted to underwrite one last blockbuster film and was desperate for the cash. In the end, according to her notes, he said he’d given her all he could and threatened to tell all: If he was going to die, he might as well bring the whole operation down with him. So he had to be removed, whether by Raoul de Vries or by Christopher Lund or by another remains to be seen. I imagine that one of them will take our offer of a deal and give evidence on the other. This investigation, I hardly need say, is going to keep a number of agencies busy for a long time.

  “I believe we’ll find it was Raoul de Vries, rather than Lund, who killed Fondulac. He’d already attacked Phyllis Talmadge, though not very efficiently. He knew that his wife had a safe filled with blackmailing material, but he couldn’t get at it because of the continuous presence of the police. When he heard Ms. Talmadge’s declaration that the room contained secrets, he thought her statement was based on clear knowledge rather than some vague psychic intuition, and he panicked. Howard Fondulac’s death was similarly opportunistic, making use of the exercise machine, but you can be sure that this time his killer was watching, waiting for just such a chance.

  “Christopher Lund’s problem was that he’d started using more cocaine than he was selling. His death, although the timing is suspicious, may finally prove to be the accident it appears. The crime scene technicians haven’t finished in there, so it’s far too soon to say anything about it.

  “But now we come to Ondine’s death, which is the real reason we’ve brought you here. The precise details of her death are proving hard to pin down.” (An unfortunate turn of phrase, Caroline thought, considering the way the poor girl had died. The inappropriateness seemed to occur to Emilio/Jonathan at the same moment. He went on hastily.) “From the position of the body, it is just possible that she came back in the salon, looked into the next room and saw Karen McElroy lying dead in the pedi-bath, and fainted. She was, after all, so severely malnourished that it wouldn’t have taken much of a shock.” Caroline thought he seemed determined not to look over at the rock star and the actress when he said this, and she wondered why.

  “So Ondine could, possibly, have fallen against the shelf unit and had it come down on top of her. It was massive, but most of the weight was in the top, and as a result the piece as a whole was far from stable. The only problem with that theory is that we found two very clear sets of prints on the side of that freshly polished wood. One set up along the back.” Here he gripped his right hand over an invisible object at shoulder height. “And another lower down.″ In illustration, he pulled with his right arm against the imaginary weight, pushing out with his left. The room winced at the silent crash of a shelving unit, laden with nail polish, onto the fragile bones of a prostrate but still breathing model-waif.

  “Now, before I tell you about those prints, we need to look at the other skein in this tangle. For that we need to go back even farther than twelve years.

  “I believe most of you were aware some time ago that Claudia de Vries was a blackmailer. It should be obvious by now that she was a lot of things; anything that brought in money, she was willing to try. Some criminals stick to a specific area; others are generalists. Claudia was one of the latter.

  “The first criminal act we know of was when she was in college and agreed to help a friend arrange an illegal adoption. For payment, naturally, to ensure that the friend’s illegitimate baby went to a good, caring, if none too wealthy family. In fact, she dumped the child with a relative and kept the money.”

  Caroline realized that she was squeezing Douglas’s hand until all their fingers were turning white. She eased off, made herself take a deep breath, and then jumped when another voice spoke up.

  “That was me.” The speaker, Caroline saw with incredulity, was Lauren Sullivan, beautiful and bruised.”My adult looks have taken me a long way, I know, but as a child I was difficult and funny-looking and incredibly shy. My acting career began young, when I constructed a storybook family, loving and stable and infinitely detailed, and imagined myself into their midst.” She wasn’t about to go into detail here, serving up her life history for these eager strangers to drink in every nuance. It was none of their business that a year ago, when her therapy reached the point that the imaginary parents really had to be dealt with, she simply killed them off in an equally imaginary car wreck, fiery and tragic. Adoring but dead parents were infinitely more comforting than the parents she’d had, and any crutch, even a twisted one, was better than no support at all. She continued with the abbreviated version.”It is a role I play still—to the extent that when he asked me, I gave Detective Toscana that fantasy version of my history automatically, without thinking about it. In actual fact, although I was taken in as an infant by Claudia’s older sister, it didn’t last long. I was passed from one family member to the next, then into a series of foster homes. Not until I was thirteen did I arrive in a family that actually wanted to adopt me. The week before the papers were finalized, the father came to my room. I had a baby at fifteen.”

  The library was so still the air reverberated, even the whispers of the fireplace seemed to pause. Into this hush dropped a name.

  “Ondine.”

  Caroline must have made some sound, some protest, because Lauren looked up and smiled, tears quivering unshed. King David was holding her hand.

  “It’s a cycle, isn’t it? My baby, too, was put up for adoption. Claudia’s sister agreed to take me back, more or less permanently, but she couldn’t handle a baby as well. Ondine was removed from me when she was two days old, and I never knew what happened to her. All I knew was that my baby was a girl and that she had a birthmark on her face, although the doctor said it would fade when she grew. On her eighteenth birthday we both registered to have our records released, but even then it took us years to find each other, the records were so confused. She was so beautiful.” And then she wept.

  The DEA agent cleared his throat, to take the room’s attention off the weeping woman. Caroline’s eyes, however, remained on the actress. Her sister.

  “About three years ago, we became aware of another figure on the scene, directing Claudia and Raoul. A silent partner, with authority but working through a lawyer in Atlanta. Christopher Lund came into it around then, too
, a clever young man with a growing appetite for money. There were several questionable deaths connected with the spa: two accidental deaths of the possessors of large estates; one due to a heart condition exacerbated by the extreme diet and exercise program assigned here; and the hit-and-run killing of a wealthy man about to divorce his wife (nothing was proved against her because she had an alibi). There were even a couple of late-term miscarriages that might or might not have been induced. Nothing we could pin down, except that the deaths all involved hefty inheritances or life insurance policies for their grateful families.” (Such as Leticia Finnerman, Vince thought, of Newton, Massachusetts, killed by a brake failure on her way home. The macabre humor of that collection of falsified records in the conference room closet under the label “Dead Files.” Typical of the criminal mind, so sure that no one would catch on.)

  “So you get the idea. A lot of greedy and hard-to-prove illegalities, most of which were arranged by a known blackmailer. We’re talking major income and influence. So when Ondine threatened to interfere with Chris Lund, that threatened the business’s smooth running. The cold, mathematical logic of the psychopath: Lund was necessary, Ondine was a danger to Lund, therefore Ondine had to be removed.

  “In truth, the deaths connected to the spa all seem to have been directed by a party other than Claudia and Raoul de Vries, a party concealed behind an Atlanta law firm, whose financial records are being subpoenaed and will, I have no doubt, reveal payments from a number of names close to the dead. And I’m very sorry to have to say this publicly, Mrs. Blessing, but we believe that person to be Hilda Finch. She was the one out to take over the operation as a whole. She was the one on hand to wrest power from the other surviving member of the triumvirate, Raoul de Vries. She seems to have had contact with family members of several of the spa clients who died under dubious circumstances. And certainly the only prints on the shelf unit that killed Ondine were hers, along with those of Karen McElroy, which belonged there.”