Death of a Pirate King

by Josh Lanyon

  She simply gazed at me with those wide blue eyes. “I’m your mother. There is no such thing as unethical behavior on a mother’s part.”

  The scary thing was, she believed that. No, the scary thing was that in the parallel universe that she inhabited, everyone else seemed to believe it too.

  “I didn’t mean you, I meant my cardiologist.” For once I didn’t bother to hide my anger with her. “Look, Lisa, when the time is right, I’ll have the surgery.”

  “That time is now.”

  “Really?” I glanced around the room where everyone was carefully paying no attention to us. “Well, I guess it will make a change from charades.”

  “Please be serious.” That was her no-nonsense face and her no-nonsense voice. “Chronic MR complicated by A-fib is very serious, much more serious than they realized when you were growing up. Thirty percent of people who have A-fib wind up with CVAs.”

  Jesus. Lisa was speaking in acronyms. She must be terrified. She must have actually read up on the subject. I was touched. And ready to strangle her.

  “And seventy percent don’t.”

  “You can’t take that chance. You don’t have the right.”

  “I don’t have the right?”

  She said fiercely, “No, you don’t. Does Guy know --?”

  “That’s it,” I said, and I stood up. “I’m not going to discuss this with you or anyone else. And what goes on between Guy and me is nobody’s damn business.” I turned to the kitchen. Natalie and Lauren were gaping at me.

  “I didn’t say a word!” Natalie protested at whatever she read in my expression.

  I didn’t know if that was true or not, but the idea that my private life was being openly discussed -- that Lisa was -- had the gall -- that she was daring to -- and that my lawyer, my doctor, my lover for all I knew --

  I could barely formulate the thoughts, let alone the sentences.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I said. “What I can’t thank you for is interfering in my private life. I don’t think I can even pretend to be polite right now, so I’m going.”

  “Adrien!” She looked wounded.

  “Good night,” I said, and the Dautens responded in various tones of discomfort as I walked out of the room.

  * * * * *

  I don’t remember the drive back to Pasadena, but when I pulled up behind the bookstore, Guy’s car was parked outside -- and for a moment I considered driving away.

  But in the end I turned off the engine, got out and unlocked the door to the bookstore, and went upstairs.

  Guy was seated at the table in the kitchen drinking a beer. His long silver hair spilled over his shoulders, glinting in the overhead light. He wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a pirate skull and crossbones. His eyes looked very green as they met mine.

  “Can we talk?”

  I nodded. Took the chair across from him. I felt very tired. Anger is exhausting, and I was out of practice.

  “I want to explain about Peter.”

  I didn’t bother telling him that I’d made a couple of phone calls and learned that he’d spoken favorably at Verlane’s parole hearing. I knew he had done what he believed was the right thing. Talking to me first, hearing my feelings on the subject, wouldn’t have changed his course of action.

  I said, “I think I pretty much get it. You still have feelings for him.”

  “I do, yes. But they don’t have anything to do with what I feel for you. I love you. I would like us to be together. Really together.”

  I nodded. “What about Peter?”

  “Peter is a friend. He needs my help right now. But if you ask me to choose between the two of you, then I choose you.”

  “I’m not asking you to choose.”

  “Then what?”

  I shook my head.

  His silver brows kitted. “I don’t understand what’s going on with you.”

  “I don’t either,” I admitted. “I don’t feel capable of making a commitment.”

  He thought it over. “Now or ever?”

  “I…don’t know.”

  “I see.” I could feel him watching me. I stared at the knobs on the oven and wondered why the front left always stuck a little. “I suppose we could continue as we have been.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. I suppose so.”

  “Your enthusiasm is overwhelming.”

  “I’m sorry, Guy. I just --”

  “Here’s the thing about you, Adrien,” he said. “You keep the walls up. I don’t know if it’s because of what’s-his-name -- your college boyfriend. Mel? Or if it’s because of that asshole Riordan.”

  “D’you mind?” I said crisply.

  He eyed me for a moment. Then he said evenly, “Or maybe you’ve always been like this. But there’s this little distance between you and everyone else. And there’s no bridging it. Because I’ve been trying for two years.”

  “Sure,” I said, starting -- against my best intentions -- to get angry all over again. “But for the first nine months you were still sleeping with other people, partly for religious reasons and partly because -- and I quote -- ‘monogamy is not a realistic expectation of a healthy adult male.’”

  “And I told you that if you would be willing to make a commitment, so would I. But you’re not willing, are you?”

  “Not on your timetable.” I swallowed hard. “Let me ask you something. Did you have sex with Peter?”

  His face went bleak.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “That has nothing to do with us.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It was comfort and affection, that’s all. Peter has lost everything and everyone.”

  I said, “I let Jake Riordan fuck me last night. Do you think that has anything to do with us?”

  He stared at me. He finally managed to say, “Does it?”

  “To me it feels like it does.”

  “Call me when you’re sure,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty

  “You know, they already arrested that caterer,” Ally informed me, raising her head from the lounge chair beside the pool. She was clearly in mourning: a one-piece black swimsuit and Jackie O. sunglasses. “It was all a mistake. She was trying to kill Paul. Too bad she got it wrong.”

  Well, that seemed like the understatement of the year, although I’d already deduced Ally hadn’t been much tempted to throw herself on Porter’s funeral pyre.

  “I heard that,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you one or two questions.”

  She settled her head back on the blue cushion. The clouds overhead were reflected in her giant black lenses. “That’s what you said the last time.”

  “Was Porter working on a book when he died?”

  “A book?” Her tone implied that this was some avant-garde art form I was accusing her dead husband of experimenting with.

  “Like his memoirs. Or an autobiography.”

  She pushed up on one elbow and pulled her sunglasses off. “Oh. Yeah,” she said slowly. “He was working on that again.”

  “Do you know what happened to the manuscript? Is it with his papers?”

  She drew her brows together. “No. I’ve been through all his stuff.”

  That I didn’t doubt.

  “Do you know if he’d finished it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know if he had a publisher or an editor or a cowriter? Maybe a literary agent?”

  “I don’t know,” Ally said and she sounded a little peevish now. “I think he showed it to someone. I mean, he was always trying to show it to people.”

  “But he had definitely resumed work on his memoirs?”

  She replaced her sunglasses and lay flat again. “I guess so. I think he had some idea of finishing it before…The End.” She said it casually, like people referred to the final credits of a movie. “I don’t know if he’d bother to finish it, though, because who would want to read that?”

  I asked, “Did Porter ever talk to you about the accident aboard the Sea Gypsy?”<
br />
  “The what?” she murmured.

  “The Sea Gypsy. It was a yacht belonging to a friend of Porter’s named Langley Hawthorne. Langley drowned one night. Did Porter ever talk about that?”

  She smothered a huge yawn. “I never listened to Porter when he started yakking about the old days. Just thinking about it makes me tired.”

  * * * * *

  I’d faithfully phoned Jake before my visits to Marla and Ally. Each time I’d ended up leaving a message, and I hadn’t heard back from him. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to him since Wednesday night when I’d told him good-bye and locked the bookstore door after him.

  Not that I was surprised at his silence. LAPD had gone forward with the arrest of Nina Hawthorne, and I figured Lieutenant Riordan had his hands full with the media -- and with Hawthorne’s lawyers who were claiming everything from harassment of a celebrity to police brutality.

  It would have been nice to bounce some of my airier ideas off that hard head of his, but I realized that was unrealistic on my part. Jake’s ego was smarting at my unwillingness to resume our old friendship, and that was pretty much what I had expected. If we could have really been platonic friends, then maybe I’d have made an effort but I knew Jake wasn’t going to respect the boundaries of --

  Who was I kidding? I had no idea whether Jake was capable of maintaining a platonic friendship or not. And I didn’t care. Because the bottom line -- and no pun intended -- was that I couldn’t handle a platonic friendship with him. It was just too damn painful.

  Maybe I could have handled it when I believed he was doing everything possible to have a real marriage with Kate Keegan, but the fact that he had fallen back into his old patterns, that he was seeing Paul Kane on what appeared to be a fairly active basis, that he wanted to have his cake and eat it too, made it impossible for me.

  Not to mention the fact that once Jake figured out the direction my sleuthing was taking me, my popularity with him was once again going to nose-dive. Apparently he’d forgotten just how truly annoying he’d found me in the past.

  All the same, I called him to tell him I was going to visit Al January again, and as luck would have it, this time he picked up.

  “Hey,” he said neutrally.

  “Hey,” I returned -- because sparkling repartee is my middle name.

  He said, “I meant to call you earlier.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You’ve made your arrest. I’m just following up on a couple of things.”

  “That’s not why I wanted to call you. About the other night --”

  “There’s nothing to say, Jake.”

  A little shortly he said, “You don’t mind if I say it anyway, do you?”

  Equally short, I said, “Go ahead.”

  But he said, after a pause, “Another time. What did you need?”

  “Nothing. I’m just…following orders. I’m going to see Al January this afternoon.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you. I’m following up on a couple of things.”

  “What things?”

  “Apparently Porter Jones was writing his memoirs.”

  I could hear the crackle and static of empty air. He said slowly, “You’re the one who thought Paul was the real target. That was your theory.”

  “I’ve been wrong before.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s for damn sure.” He was angry, but controlled. “Someone knocked Porter off because he was going to write a kiss and tell biography? That’s the current theory?”

  Kill and tell in this case. “Don’t you think it’s worth checking out?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Have you figured out how Nina got the poison into Porter’s glass?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I said, “Well, maybe Al can shed some light on that. He was standing right at the bar with me.”

  Still no answer.

  It occurred to me -- and it was not a happy thought -- that perhaps his feelings ran deeper than I had allowed myself to believe. I was astonished to hear myself say, “Look, if you…ask…me not to go over there…I won’t go.”

  “I…” He didn’t finish it. Or I couldn’t hear what he said over the heavy pounding of my heart. I felt like we were standing on the edge of some precipice -- and I remembered two years ago and a vacation from hell.

  Keeping hold of the branch of the scrub oak growing over the drop at a gravity-defying angle, I lean further out over the cliff side, pebbles shifting under my boots and bouncing down the mountainside, clacking off boulders.

  “Watch it, for chrissake!” Jake’s fist fastening in my collar and hair, dragging me back.

  I free myself, yanking my shirt collar back into place. “I know what I’m doing.”

  But I hadn’t really. I had relied on Jake to be my safety net then, and I was relying on him now. And I was willing to return the favor -- if he needed it.

  “Call me after you talk to him,” he said abruptly and rang off.

  * * * * *

  “I was a little surprised to get your phone call,” Al said, handing me a bottle of noni juice.

  I set the bottle on the table. It was very hot today, the air still and heavy. Even the bees sounded hot and lazy. The wild grass rustled dryly on the burnished gold hillside.

  “You were pretty definite the last time we talked that no way was Nina capable of murder.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Al said slowly, apparently thinking back to our last conversation. “I said, no way did she push her father over the side of that boat.”

  “But you think she’s capable of trying to kill Paul Kane?”

  One of the shar-pei dogs stood at alert, staring out across the gorge at the hillside. Al spoke quietly and the dog came back and sat down, panting, beside his chair. Al said, “I think Nina…at one time might have been capable of that. I find it hard to believe that she would wait this long to go after Paul. They’ve been…maybe not friendly, but…cordial for years now.”

  “Did Paul use her company a lot of cater his parties?”

  “I don’t really know.” He frowned, thinking. “I think he might have used her once or twice. She’s very good and very popular. I’ve used her a couple of times -- back when I used to give parties.” There was that little flash of bitterness again.

  “So Nina’s arrest took you by surprise?”

  He sighed. “Yes. And no. It’s the kind of thing I can imagine Nina doing -- maybe not at this point in her life, but at another point, yes. She hated Paul very much at one time. Maybe she still does.”

  So much for that angle. I said, “Those cocktails Paul Kane makes. The Henley Skullfarquars. Was that an unusual thing?”

  “The skull fuckers? No. Paul makes them at most of his parties -- especially on the Pirate’s Gambit. Liquid headache, that’s what those are. Gin, grenadine, cider, Pimm’s, Smirnoff…and we’re usually drinking them in the sun on the boat.” He shuddered.

  I already knew the answer, but I wanted confirmation. “They’re made by the glass or what?”

  “By the jug. He mixes them up in an antique silver punch bowl.”

  I couldn’t recall seeing a punch bowl anywhere, but I was pretty sure only Paul had been behind the bar that afternoon.

  “That’s interesting,” I said, “because only Porter’s drink was poisoned.”

  “Right. The punch bowl wasn’t poisoned, just Porter’s glass,” agreed Al.

  “Do a lot of people drink that punch?”

  “Not more than once,” Al said. “Like I said, it’s a headache in a glass. Porter drank it. Porter would drink anything. Paul swears by the stuff. Paul can put the booze away.”

  I said, “I was standing right there at the bar -- I handed Porter his glass -- and for the life of me, I can’t think how Nina would have got poison into it. She wasn’t even there.”

  Al’s eyes met mine. “That’s for the police to work out, right? They must be pretty sure or they wouldn’t have arrested her.”

  I used to think that
way too a few murder investigations ago.

  “You don’t remember seeing anything?”

  He was absently stroking the dog, which rested its big head on his thigh. “I’d have told the police if I’d seen anything.” He glanced at the untouched bottle of juice. “Did you want some ice with that?”

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said. “Oh, did you know Porter had started working on his memoirs again?”

  I was watching him, so I saw his hand freeze on the dog’s broad head. He looked at me. He said slowly, “Yes.”

  I didn’t say anything and neither did he. Then, finally, he said, “Why?”

  “I wondered what happened to the manuscript.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ally says it’s not with Porter’s papers. It’s not anywhere.”

  “Marla --”

  “Marla says no. She confirmed that he was working on the book again, but she didn’t know what might have happened to it after his death.”

  “Maybe he lost interest,” Al said. “Maybe he decided to let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Maybe he did at that,” I agreed.

  * * * * *

  I was not surprised that Jake didn’t pick up when I called after leaving Al January’s hillside home.

  He rang me back while I was watching Emma riding around the paddock at the club that afternoon, but I didn’t pick up. He knew what he needed to know: I was still alive and annoying people.

  All I really had was a string of suppositions and my instinct. And I wasn’t about to use the I word in Jake’s presence. I needed more in the way of tangible proof, but I had no idea of how to make that happen. And if I tried to go to Jake with anything less than tangible proof, I knew he’d dismiss it -- and I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  I was walking back to the parking lot with Emma when her riding lesson was finished, my thoughts a million miles away, when she said suddenly, very quietly, “Adrien, are you going to have that operation?”

  Was it, like, a topic of dinner conversation around the Dauten household?