He knew more than one builder who conducted business on the golf course. Crack one down the middle, strike a deal—he could pardon the expression—then turn his attention to something important: the upcoming chip and putt. His old man had had a handicap hovering near scratch until the booze had finally gotten him, in fact, so he surely had the genes. Golf, booze, cards, and dice, a little business on the side. If there had been other women involved in his old man’s life, Deal had never known about it. Maybe there was an answer to this feeling of uncertainty that now gripped him, if he just searched hard enough.
He found the right staircase and made his way slowly up to the second floor, the memory of the last time he’d visited a golf course burning brightly in his mind.
Things had been crazy then, too. Janice had gone missing and was presumed dead, and Deal himself was surely at fault. He’d found his way somehow to the club where his old man’s founding membership still stood. He’d charged a set of clubs and a lunatic golfer’s outfit to a tab that hadn’t seen action in a decade, then dressed and hauled himself out to a practice tee, where he’d smashed every ball in the enormous bucket the pro had provided until his tears were too thick to continue.
He’d tossed the clubs aside, peeled off the ridiculous clothes, right there on the tee, right down to his skivvies…which is when a solicitous attendant who’d been fond of his high-rolling father had come to escort him inside.
No, he told himself ruefully as he ticked off the numbers toward his room, golf might not be the answer. He couldn’t find the key card at first and found himself struck with despair at the thought of a walk all the way back to the office for a duplicate. There would have to be conversation, perhaps some providing of identification, not to mention the actual walking all the way there and back. There were lawn chairs and chaises down at poolside, he thought. He’d sleep in one of those first.
He remembered that he’d slipped the card into his wallet then, right behind the license that Ainsley Spencer had eyeballed a bit earlier. Blessed relief, he thought, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out his wallet and opened it and stopped, staring at the glassine window where his license—lousy head shot and all—was normally kept.
No license there now, he noted with a stupid stare. Someone had slipped a card in there instead. Come back alone. The words were scrawled in pencil, below his own room number.
Deal flipped the card over and saw that it was indeed the same card he’d given to Ainsley Spencer, along with the request for the old man to call if Dequarius should return. How on earth? he wondered, turning first the card and then his wallet over in his hands.
The old man would have to be a sleight-of-hand artist, he thought, or some kind of pickpocket…And then he stopped, a rueful smile coming over his features. Of course. What better way to explain certain of Dequarius’ talents? The old coot, Deal thought, fishing his key card out from behind his sorry-assed license.
He shoved the thing into the slot, then stared at the blinking red lights that danced around the face of the lock. Like the lights on Dequarius’ dumbass tennis shoes, he thought. He withdrew the card, turned it around, and tried the other way. This time the lights flashed green and he reached confidently for the lock.
He needn’t have bothered with all the folderol of the key, he realized, as the door swung inward at the brush of his hand. The latch had been open all the time.
Maybe he hadn’t closed the door carefully on his way out, he thought. Or maybe the mechanism was faulty. Hadn’t Russell Straight told him his door had been ajar earlier that morning?
If he hadn’t been so tired, the warning signals would have been flashing inside his mind, of course. But he was exhausted, dazed with the twists and turns of the night’s experiences, and still not certain he’d done the right thing where Dequarius was concerned.
He’d get some rest, though, then go see the old man first thing. He was inside the room now and had flipped the light switch in the foyer, kicking the door shut behind him.
Odd smell, he was thinking, must be his night for them. But this was the unmistakable aroma of trouble and danger, something in his weary brain urged.
The smell of blood, and something else darker and more sinister, and a clumsy smear like finger-painting on the bright wall before him…Someone in here, an inner voice was screaming now, his mind scrambling at last toward full alert.
He spun around, every nerve ending snapping fire, his hands raised to ward off the hounds of hell themselves.
It was then that he saw that Dequarius Noyes had turned up, after all. Sitting in the easy chair beside Deal’s ocean-view windows, his comb cocked jauntily in his thick Afro, his hand extended and clutching what looked like a card or a note or a ticket unavailable from any other source. His eyes were sightless, his shirtfront a mass of blood, and the other smells told Deal everything. He staggered quickly into the bathroom and vomited, then splashed water on his face.
Deal willed the apparition to be gone when he came back out, but there was no such luck. None for him this night, and decidedly none for Dequarius Noyes.
He walked toward Dequarius then, and reached out his hand to close his sightless stare, then take the offering that Dequarius had brought for him, slipping it out of the corpse’s cool, stiff grasp.
It was a brittle slip of paper, about the size of a note card, its edges nicked and crumbling. He turned it over and blinked, bringing it closer to the desk lamp to be sure of what he was looking at. A wine label, he realized, soaked or scraped from its bottle, or so it appeared. Faded with age, the French script dulled, the outlines of an imposing château a dimly visible outline beneath the print.
He glanced briefly at this item that Dequarius had thought so important, then slipped it into his pocket, along with the note from Ainsley Spencer and the sheet of paper he’d taken from the pad in Dequarius’ room. Finally, he sagged down on his bed and made the inevitable call.
Chapter Seventeen
“This is just the way you found him?” A plainclothes officer stood beside Deal, who was watching numbly as the medical examiner finished his work with the body that had once been Dequarius.
“I closed his eyes,” Deal said.
The detective made a note on the screen of a handheld organizer, then glanced up. “You didn’t touch anything else?”
Deal shrugged. Before the sheriff’s men arrived, he’d taken the faded label and the notes from his pocket and slipped them under the cover of the ironing board stowed in his closet. He was long past the point of trusting anyone from the sheriff’s office.
“The phone,” he said to the detective. “The toilet where I threw up. The sink handles.”
The detective touched the tip of the stylus to his tongue and made more notes. When he noticed Deal watching him, he gave a smile that was more like a grimace. “They handed these things out first of the year,” he said, meaning the handheld. “I tried to lose mine a couple of times, but the hammer came down from up top.” The detective gave Deal his screw-the-brass look. “Now I learned how to use it, you’d be surprised how much time it saves.”
Deal nodded. He supposed it did save time. Reduce a life to a few strokes on a liquid crystal screen, from there on, everything’s done by machine.
“The ME says he bled out right there,” the detective said, nodding at the chair. There was a photographer at work now, using a digital camera to record various angles of the scene. Those images could go straight to the computer as well, Deal thought, untouched by human hands.
“But since it was a shotgun took him out and your windows are still intact, I’d say it was a safe bet he was shot elsewhere.”
Deal nodded again, trying to imagine a shotgun blast taking out those big windows, scattering glass over the putting-green grass below. Hardly the sort of thing the Pier House would be happy about. What had taken place so far was surely troubling enough for the public relations team.
The detective replaced his organizer in h
is coat pocket and reached for something on the nearby dresser. He turned back, holding up a plastic bag. Inside was an oblong card that might have seemed a duplicate of Deal’s room key, except for an inch-thick wedge of plastic affixed to one end. “This belong to you?” the detective asked.
Deal looked again, then shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” the detective said, gesturing over Deal’s shoulder. “It’s a universal master for locks like these, something only a thief would have. I found it lying on your hallway floor.”
Deal turned to glance at the door, then back at the detective. There could have been a dozen of the things lying there, he would never have noticed.
The detective replaced the bag on the dresser. “Our boy over there could have gotten into any room in the Pier House. The big question is, Mr. Deal, why did he pick yours to come die in?” The expression on the detective’s face was not unsympathetic. “Must have been a hell of a thing to come home to,” he added.
The big question for Deal was somewhat different, however. His major consideration was with just where to begin. “He called me earlier,” Deal said finally.
“Called you?” Deal waited for the detective to go for his handheld, but it didn’t happen. “This is a friend of yours?”
“No,” Deal said. “I met him in the bar downstairs, on Thursday evening, right about the end of happy hour.”
The cop’s expression was neutral. Deal suspected it would remain that way no matter what he said next. We were lovers and I shot him in a jealous rage. He sold me phony gold coins and I killed him for it. If I’d given him the time of day he might still be alive.
“He wanted to sell me some jewelry he said had come up from a sunken treasure ship,” Deal continued. “I told him I wasn’t interested. The bartender noticed him then and chased him out.” Deal stopped, hating something about the way he was talking. “His name is Dequarius Noyes, by the way.”
He was also wondering how Ainsley Spencer would receive this news. Deal had consoled himself with the knowledge that the phone was inoperable at the old man’s house, but that was really just a cop-out. Now, the thought that someone like Deputy Conrad might deliver the news to the old man seemed a double blow.
The detective nodded. “We got that,” he said. “Kid’s got a history a yard long, dealing dope off that houseboat of his—”
“Houseboat?” Deal heard himself blurt.
“Yeah,” the detective said. “He’s got a place out on houseboat row, the worst of a pretty bad lot.”
He gave Deal a speculative look, then recovered his train of thought. “So if I got this right, the next thing you know, Dequarius is back on the phone with you earlier this evening, wanting to see if you’re still interested in this treasure.”
“I was never interested,” Deal said, his mind racing along. So Dequarius kept a place apart from his great-grandfather’s home in the quarter, then. It would make sense, he supposed, given the young man’s proclivities—a place to hide a stash in a pinch, that was the cynical take on it. But there was an upside as well. For all Deal knew, the police would make no connection between Dequarius and his great-grandfather. So long as Deal didn’t tell them of it, that is.
Deal forced his attention back to the moment then, wondering if the detective knew what had happened yesterday morning or was simply testing him. “And the fact is, I saw him again the next morning, while we were out jogging.”
“Who’s this ‘we’?” the detective asked.
“I was with Russell Straight, a man who works for me.”
“He staying here at the hotel?”
Deal nodded, deciding to leave out the “more or less” part.
“He approached you again about this jewelry while you were out jogging?”
“He was persistent,” Deal said.
“He must have been,” the detective said. “What time of the morning was this?”
Deal calculated. “Probably about six-fifteen.”
“That seems a little early for Dequarius to be on the hustle,” the detective observed. “Wouldn’t you say?”
Deal shrugged. “It could have been a little later. I’m sure you could look it up in the police report.”
The detective’s eyes narrowed. “I think you’re a step ahead of me, Mr. Deal. What report would that be, exactly?”
“The one you’re free to consult anytime, Dickerson,” someone behind them said, and Deal turned to see Rusty Malloy coming through the doorway, clad in a T-shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, and sandals. As far as Deal could tell, he hadn’t bothered to comb his hair since taking his phone call.
“My client intervened in an assault by one of your deputies upon Mr. Noyes yesterday morning,” Malloy continued, wincing as his gaze fell upon the bloody corpse. “The matter was disposed of, no charges filed.”
The detective took all this in with remarkable calm, Deal thought. “This was after Dequarius had approached you for the second time?” he asked.
“It was.” Deal nodded.
“So when Dequarius called you earlier this evening, that was the third time you’d spoken to him about this jewelry,” Dickerson said.
“We never really talked in any detail,” Deal said. Three times thou hast forsaken me, came the line swimming up out of his past. But surely that hardly applied in this case, he thought, stealing a glance at Dequarius’ body.
“Is there something funny, Mr. Deal?”
Deal turned back to Dickerson, feeling a tide of unreasoning fury swelling up inside him. He’d seen Driscoll pull the same stunt with suspects, lulling them along with innocuous questions before turning suddenly hostile. But he was no suspect and he wasn’t about to put up with an iota of bullshit from Dickerson, or anyone else.
“Was I laughing?” he said, careful to control his tone.
The two stared evenly at each other until Malloy cut in. “My client’s a bit tired, Detective. If it’s all the same to you, why don’t we continue this in the morning?”
Dickerson lifted his eyebrows and glanced toward the windows, where a couple of uniformed deputies were wrestling Dequarius’ body into a zippered bag. His expression didn’t indicate there was any great haste in the matter.
“Sure,” Dickerson said. “We can finish up in the morning.” He gave Deal what passed for a smile, then dug into his wallet for a card.
“Just give me a call in the morning, Mr. Deal, whenever you’re feeling up to it.” He glanced blandly at Malloy. “Couple more questions, that’s all,” he added.
Deal had heard that one before as well. He might as well have said, “We’ll get down to business the next time around.”
Malloy nodded. “I gotta go to the can. You guys doing anything in there?” He pointed at the bathroom, and Dickerson shook his head.
“Help yourself,” the detective said, and Malloy went off, closing the door behind him. “Careful,” he added to Deal, pointing as a couple of technicians came through the door of Deal’s room with a folded gurney.
Deal stepped aside as the men passed. In seconds they had the thing unclipped and raised and had secured the bag with Dequarius’ body atop it. The ME said something to the pair and in the next moment they were wrestling their burden away.
The toilet flushed and Malloy reappeared just as the gurney was disappearing out the door. He was mopping his pale face with a towel, and Deal realized then what had sent him to the bathroom in the first place.
“You all right?”
Malloy nodded, looking decidedly un-all right. There was a soft tapping at the door then, and the three of them turned to find a young man in a tropical shirt smiling brightly at them. “I’m here for the bags,” the kid said.
Deal turned to Malloy, who raised his finger in acknowledgment. “I stopped by the desk on the way in,” he said. “The hotel’s full, but they managed to find something.”
Deal nodded and turned back to the kid, who’d spotted the gore-drenched chair an
d pool of blood near the window. “Jesus,” he said. “What happened?”
Malloy gave him a scowl, then turned to Dickerson. “We can have his things moved out of here, can’t we?”
Dickerson glanced around the room. “Why not?”
“You want to pack up, John?”
Deal realized he’d been staring at the closet where he’d stashed the papers. He’d barely bothered to unpack his suitcase, which still sat atop the dresser at his side. He had nothing hanging in the closet, no reason to go there, even if he was willing to try to extricate the papers with Dickerson staring over his shoulder.
He turned to Malloy with what he hoped was a grateful nod. What was he going to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t leave without my ironing board”?
“Just take a second,” he managed. He thought Dickerson was looking at him strangely, but it was probably just his imagination.
He’d already stuffed most of his dirty clothes in an outer pocket of his soft-sided bag, so it wasn’t much of a process. He went into the bathroom, which smelled like the head of a tourist boat in a typhoon, swept his toiletries into his travel kit, then came back out and dropped it into the main compartment of his suitcase. The kid, who’d turned as pale as Malloy by now, snatched up the bag quickly and hurried out the door.
“I think we’re ready then,” Malloy said, pointing after the kid.
“I guess we are,” Deal said, careful to keep his gaze away from the closet.
Dickerson gave him a two-fingered salute. “Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Deal gave a last glance at the chair where Dequarius Noyes had spent his final minutes waiting for him, then followed Malloy out.
Chapter Eighteen
“Not bad, eh?” Malloy said, gazing around the living area of the suite the bellhop kid had led them to.
Bone Key Page 13
