Lucky Bastard

by Deborah Coonts

  “I don’t believe you.” She eyed me, assessing.

  I shrugged. “I don’t care,” I lied. “But, let me ask you about the shoes.”

  “Shoes?”

  “The Loubous. The one’s you bought.” I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Frank. His eyes widened as I talked. “The ones Sylvie Dane was wearing when she died.”

  “I didn’t buy those shoes. Red isn’t my color.”

  “How’d you know they were red?” I asked, my voice going all quiet and deadly.

  “Sylvie told me…” Miss Becky-Sue looked around, wild eyed. “Before. She told me before.”

  “No, you’d just arrived in town and she hadn’t been here more than a few days.” I stepped in closer. “And those shoes weren’t at the scene, so you couldn’t have learned about them from someone who was there. Nothing was mentioned in the paper. They showed up on a young woman. She was there. She took them.” I stared Miss Becky-Sue down. “You set Slim’s death in motion, then left to deal with Sylvie. I think I know why. You wanted her proof of the backdoor in the algorithm.” I paused. Slim. The coldhearted calculation, the planning, of the conniving bitch. I wanted to circle her neck with my hands and squeeze the life out of her.

  “Slim was a heart attack waiting to happen,” Miss Becky-Sue countered. “You said so yourself more than once.”

  “Yes, but you accelerated the timetable. There was enough Viagra in his system to drop his blood pressure to the floor when he popped his usual nitro pill.”

  Miss Becky-Sue’s eyes were still black holes in her pale face, ringed with mascara, but I could see just a hint of wild-eyed white.

  “You got the pills from Frank when his packet of them spilled in the plane. You knew he’d have them, that’s why you called him to come meet with Slim. The police found residue in Slim’s beer bottle that he had been drinking from before he went to the can. Sort of an odd thing to find in a Lone Star longneck, don’t ya think?”

  “Why would I kill Slim?” She softened, blinking back invisible tears. “I loved him.”

  “Save it for the jury.” I turned my back to her for a moment. My anger boiled to the surface. If I didn’t get myself under control, the jury wouldn’t have the opportunity to decide her fate. Turning back around to face her, I took a deep breath and unclenched my hands, letting them hang loosely at my sides. “You loved his money. Which, he threw into Aces Over Eights.”

  That took a little bit of the starch out of her. “He was an old fool.”

  “An idealist, perhaps, but no fool. And, when you got wind of the improprieties, the cheating going on, you took matters into your own hands.” Reaching down, I plucked a knife off the table, but not before I saw Miss Becky-Sue flinch. “What I want to know is how did you find out that Kevin Slurry kept a backdoor?”

  Her eyes darted around the room.

  Casually, I turned the knife over in my hands, running a finger lightly down the blade. The thing couldn’t cut butter, but Miss Becky-Sue didn’t need to know that. “Here’s what I think. Sylvie Dane got the better of you. She dangled the bait and, just as she knew you would, you swallowed it whole.”

  Becky-Sue glared at me.

  “Hit a nerve, have I?” I stepped closer. She took a wide-eyed step backwards. “You were played the fool.”

  “That bitch.” Miss Becky-Sue unraveled before my eyes. Shaking with anger, seething and scared, she wanted to strike out. The only weapon she had was the truth. “She came sniffing around. Dropped that little stink bomb in our laps. Slim went all righteous on me.”

  “He was going to tell.”

  “Sing like a canary. He said this was the sort of thing that gave poker a bad name.”

  I resisted the urge to point out he was right.

  “We’d lose everything.”

  “So you started plugging the leaks. First Sylvie, or maybe first Marvin…”

  “Who?”

  “The bad comb-over.” She’d killed him and she didn’t even know who he was. “Wrong place, wrong time, he got the cyanide meant for Sylvie.” Miss Becky-Sue smiled—a benign smile, as if she were telling a cute little story at a garden party. “He was a dead man and he didn’t even know it.”

  She scared the heck out of me. “So, with the cyanide gone, you had to use the shoe on her. Pretty clever, actually.”

  “She never saw it coming.” Miss Becky-Sue gloated, then her eyes widened when she realized what she’d said.

  “The cyanide you stole from Frank’s wife’s jewelry store—another part of the setup to try to hang this on Frank. Then, you tried to take out Sylvie’s source, Cole Weston, today with it, but you got me instead.”

  “Shoulda used a stronger dose.” She sounded like she would rip out my throat with one bite if she could.

  ***

  The Ferrari dealership, I had come full circle.

  Thankfully it was only midnight and not 3 a.m. Jeremy, Cole, Brandy, Dane, Estella, and I were looking for the last piece to the puzzle. Romeo was running late—he had taken Miss Becky-Sue and Frank to the station. I felt that with a little digging, and another conversation with the clerk at the Christian Louboutin store, Romeo would cut Frank loose. As far as I knew, gross stupidity wasn’t a punishable offense, although it probably should be. Romeo would untangle it all. Hopefully, he could break away.

  The door opened and Romeo strode through. Brandy stepped to greet him with a hug. The young detective looked happy, tired, but happy as he folded her into his arms and shot a frown over her shoulder at Cole, who smiled easily in return.

  The frown disappeared from the detective’s face as he stepped out of Brandy’s embrace and took her hand in his. “You guys find anything yet?”

  I swept my arm around the room taking in the others. “We just got here. Glad you could make it.” With Romeo’s steadying presence the place didn’t creep me out quite as badly.

  Someone had cleaned up the showroom, the same car still turned under the spot, minus the decoration. I wondered if the law required disclosure that blood had been spilled and a life lost on the hood? Show me the Carfax. How would one feng shui a car to get rid of the lingering angry spirits? Why did I care? So many questions, so few functioning brain cells.

  Romeo clicked on the overhead lights which ruined the ambiance, but settled my nerves. If something evil lurked in the corners, at least we’d see it coming.

  The dealership empty, we drifted apart, separated by our memories, pulled by our fears. Jeremy drooled over the car. I couldn’t look at it without seeing Sylvie Dane’s lifeless body draped across it. Dane, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, his head wrapped in a glaring white bandage, his eyes half closed—probably due to a pounding headache—lurked in the doorway, like a vampire waiting to be invited in. Estella roamed the space like a mountain lion hunting dinner. Pulling Brandy with him, Romeo dogged her heels but gave her just enough leash to wander.

  “I was sorta freakin’ last time I was here,” she murmured. Biting her lip, she wandered the showroom. “There are so many places to hide something. I wish Sylvie had told me where.”

  “Why did Sylvie want to meet you here?” I asked as I watched the scene unfolding in front of me. Although I was part of it, I felt disconnected.

  “Privacy.” Estella kept her eyes moving around the room. “Mrs. Dane said it was the only place in the hotel to meet where the cameras couldn’t see.”

  “Did you hang the sign out front, then?”

  The girl paused and glanced at me, guilt on her face, fear in her eyes.

  “It’s okay. I’d say that would be the least of your transgressions.”

  Estella tilted her head in a show of defiance. “It’s not like your office is locked or anything. I slipped the form from the desk out front, then put it in the pile of papers you sign every day. You should be more careful about what you sign.”

  She had an aptitude for justification, I’d grant her that. And there weren’t enough hours in the day to read all the shit I had to
put my signature on—most of it was corporate CYA anyway. Guess I was pretty good at justification as well.

  I parked my brain and waited. Thinking took way more effort than the results warranted. A shiver chased down my spine—I was cold. If the demand for high-end Italian iron dried up, Frank could always use this space as a meat locker. I let my brain continue to run free. Loose associations, often hidden, sometimes lit the way to enlightenment. Then it hit me—like a ballpeen hammer between the eyes. “The car.”

  “What?” Multiple voices rose in unison as everyone in the room stopped where they stood and turned in my direction.

  The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. I strode over to the car, then walked around it. “Let me play out a scenario. Let’s assume Sylvie was cheating in the poker game to provide a laundered, seemingly innocent payoff to Slurry. But for what?”

  No one said anything, choosing instead to let me circle that car another time as my thoughts raced. “He had to have some information she wanted. Maybe something he got using his back door into the poker site algorithm.”

  “But, why the car?” Romeo asked.

  “Frank told me he thought he had the car sold to Slurry, who had test-driven it earlier on the day Sylvie died.”

  “And then Sylvie ditches me to sneak into the dealership,” Dane added, his voice tightened to an angry pitch.

  “Why here?” Romeo asked as everyone gathered around the car.

  “Privacy. No cameras. Who would see?” I guessed. A reasonable explanation, assuming I was right about the other.

  Opening the driver’s door, I eased into the seat. Both hands on the wheel, fingering the paddle shifters because I couldn’t resist, I tried to imagine Slurry on a test-drive. “If I wanted to hide something where someone else, who knew where to look for it, could find it easily, where would that be?” I imagined the nooks and crannies of the car, a car I knew well. A tightly engineered racing machine, there weren’t many.

  Pulling the hood latch, I then levered myself out of the car and walked around to the front. “Let’s see what it has under the hood.”

  “Not much,” Romeo scoffed. “The engine’s in the back in Ferraris.”

  I smiled as I slid my fingers into the gap between the hood and the body, shifted the secondary latch to the side, then raised the hood. “Not this one. This is the first model with a midfront V-eight.”

  And there it was, the top of a metal cylinder, stuffed down the side. To the untrained eye, it would look like an oil spigot or something. Romeo handed me a handkerchief. Reaching in with two fingers, I worked the metal until it came free.

  Without a word I handed it to Romeo. Using the cloth to protect prints and keep his off it, he unscrewed the top and shook out a sheaf of papers, tightly bound with a string. He quickly scanned the pages. When he looked up his face held an emotion I couldn’t read. Whatever it was, it was not good. “They’re for you,” he said as he handed the documents to Dane.

  Dane seemed to pale, if that was possible. He looked like death as it was. When he reached for the papers, his hand shook. Nobody moved. Nobody seemed to breathe as we watched him read, turn a page, read, until he had finished. Without a word, he handed the sheaf to Jeremy and wandered over to the car where he stood and stared.

  Jeremy glanced through the pages. When he looked up, his eyes were glistening, his mouth set in a thin, hard line.

  My patience long since exhausted, I could wait no more. “What?”

  “Bugger.”

  “That’s it? That’s the only thing you can say?” He handed me the pages. After a quick scan, I dropped my hand and raised my eyes to Jeremy’s. “Bugger.” I wandered over to Dane.

  When I snaked an arm around his waist, he didn’t look up. Instead, he stared at the spot where his wife had died. “She died trying to prove my innocence.”

  “She did it, too.”

  “She squeezed Slurry to use his backdoor not to get the bad guys, but to prove I was still one of the good guys.” He rubbed a hand roughly across his eyes. I could feel his body shudder. “Fuck.”

  “Her choices, Cowboy.”

  He tilted his head back for a moment, fighting for control. Then he stepped away and turned on me, his voice raised. “You don’t know shit.”

  “That’s probably the first absolutely honest thing you’ve said to me since this whole thing started.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “So, you think Marvin was killed because he was working with Sylvie?” Dane asked. The others had left, and Dane and I again had boosted our heinies up onto the parts counter. Once again we sat, hands under our thighs, our feet swinging. A different day, a different hour, different costumes, and thankfully no dead body on the car. The world had shifted slightly in the last forty-eight hours. And I’m sure something had shifted inside of Dane as well. A woman he had both loved and wrongfully vilified had lost her life while giving him back his.

  “Either that or he followed Sylvie and spooked Miss Becky-Sue. She couldn’t leave someone who might know something,” I speculated. “We know he followed you two, heading this way. Wrong place, wrong time, he was expendable. And he got the cyanide meant for Sylvie.”

  “That would explain the shoe.” Dane’s voice was hollow, dead.

  “Weapon of opportunity,” I added unnecessarily.

  He didn’t say anything. What was there to say? Explanations at this point didn’t really matter. Instead we both watched the car turn on its dais.

  Finally Dane broke the silence. “How do I…?” His voice cracked.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swipe at a tear. This time, I was the one speechless. What could I say? What would help? I had no idea how a man would recover from the knowledge that his wife had died for him…and he had so misjudged her. And he could never make it right—not in this lifetime anyway.

  Instead, I covered his hand with mine and gave it a squeeze.

  ***

  Despite the late hour, energy and enthusiasm still burbled from the crowd, filling every corner of the casino. After all the turmoil, sleep wouldn’t pay me a visit any time soon. So I wandered, seeking peace and perspective and hoping a bit of the joy refilled my empty stores. My eyes drifted over the crowd. A typical crowd for this time of night—a mix of the well heeled and the jeans-clad onlookers ringed the tables. Drinks in hand, pressing buttons with the other, a cigarette dangling from their lips, slot players focused intently on the spinning cylinders in front of them. A couple of high-end girls sat at the bar, eyeing the crowd for their next mark. Too tired to run them off, I wandered on. Closing in on the far side of the casino, movement caught my eye.

  A man. Rushing away from me. He darted through the crowd, frantic, as if looking for something.

  Maneuvering for a better look, my heart soared and sank at the same time—Jean-Charles! What was he doing here? Something was wrong.

  I chased after him. Dodging patrons as I ran through the crowd, I almost bowled over a woman waiting at one of the blackjack tables. “Sorry,” I said as I righted her, then continued on, trying to keep Jean-Charles in sight.

  Finally, I was close enough to call to him and be heard over the crowd and the music. “Jean-Charles!”

  Stopping at my shout, he turned, scanning the crowd.

  I didn’t like the look on his face.

  Finally he saw me, and worked his way in my direction. He reached out to me.

  I took his hands—they were cold as ice. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Christophe. He’s disappeared. I picked them up from the airport. We were on our way home when someone called me about a lady swimming in my fish tank?” He shot me a quizzical look.

  I shrugged as if I had no idea.

  “My son, he was right here one second, the next, poof, he was gone.”

  My heart skipped a beat. I’d never seen such anguish on anyone’s face. Pulling him off to the side, out of the crush of people, I said, “Calm down. We’ll find him. Tell me what happened.
”

  “He had slept on the plane. Too excited to calm down, he wanted to see the hotel and the restaurant. We left Chantal at home—she was worn out.” Jean-Charles ran a hand through his hair as his eyes scanned the crowd over my shoulder. “He loved the lobby, the river, the ski mountain. Just for a moment, I left him sipping a milkshake in a booth near the kitchen in the restaurant while I tried to deal with the fish tank problem. I told him not to move. When I returned, not five minutes later, he was gone. It’s so unlike him.”

  I grabbed my Nextel. “What is he wearing?”

  “Blue jeans. Tennis shoes. A green shirt—the one with the little alligator on it.”

  I keyed Security. “We have a missing person. Male. Five years old. Sandy brown hair. Blue eyes. Jeans, green Izod shirt, tennis shoes. Three and a half feet tall and forty-five pounds, give or take.” I raised my eyebrows at Jean-Charles. He nodded. “His name is Christophe.”

  Jerry’s voice came back. “Roger.”

  “Get your people on the exits first.”

  “Wilco.”

  I repocketed my Nextel, keeping one ear listening to the chatter as Jerry rallied the troops. “Go back to the restaurant,” I said to Jean-Charles. “He’ll probably find his way back there. As you head in that direction, take a peek at the toy store and the gelato stand and any other kid-friendly places you see.”

  Jean-Charles, his face white, his eyes haunted, nodded.

  I squeezed his hand. “Try not to worry. We’ll find him. I haven’t lost a child yet.”

  Watching him go, I willed my mind to think like a five-year-old. A five-year-old who had never seen anything like the Babylon. I thought back over the details Jean-Charles had told me about his son.