“The guy he owed money to,” I went on, “was a sometime sunbelt drug lord by the name of Ronnard Raay Higgins.”
“Jesus.” She finally looked up. “The circle is a wheel.”
“To quote the old gospel song,” I agreed. “But the point is, there’s no longer any doubt in my mind about who did what to whom.”
“Nice sentence structure.” And she smiled for the first-time in what seemed like ten years.
“Thanks,” I said, “I thought you’d like it. Now as to Huyne, why mess up a good gag? He’s willing to think Ronn killed himself, that’s okay by me too. Eventually he’ll figure out that this mysterious Curtis — who was also staying at the Clairmont — killed Jakes, and he’ll set somebody up to finding Curtis, who will not be found because, strictly speaking, he doesn’t exist …”
“… or he’s already dead.”
“Right, depending on how you look at it. And it looks like Jakes is the one who threatened my ersatz client …”
“… the sixteen-year-old septuagenarian …”
“… correct — Lucy. So that ‘case’ is solved too.”
“Flap.” She let a wild silence come between us again for a second. “What if my refusal to give Ronn a little bit of money put him in a position to end his own life? That would be my fault, wouldn’t it? It would mean that I really did kill him.”
“Why do you vex yourself with useless supposition,” the Taoist in me said to her. “Skip that. Let’s go to dinner. I’m in the money. Life returns to normal.”
“Really?” She looked back down at the knife, focused on it hard. “What about this.”
“I told you,” I began, “I know you didn’t do anything with this …”
“… that’s right,” she interrupted quickly. Then her eyes flashed up at me in an emerald explosion. “And anyway: So what if I did?”
Some thunder you can literally feel. It rattles your chest and pops your ears. I felt it for quite a while as it resonated and then began to fade away, still echoing in the farthest places of my thought canals.
“Really?” I finally managed to say. Then I caught a gleam in her eye that I hadn’t seen in years, and I thought I understood. “I see. You don’t want things to return to normal. You don’t want me to think I know all there is to know about you. You don’t want me to take a lot of this — I mean what’s between us — for granted.” I smiled. “You want to be a woman of some mystery.”
She blinked once. That’s all.
*
As I had predicted, Huyne discovered that the mysterious Curtis might have had something to do with the death of Jersey Jakes. Huyne hauled me in a few days later and grilled me halfheartedly for around ten minutes about whether or not Curtis was my client. I told him that my client was Lucy — which he already knew was true, he’d checked with her — and that was more or less that.
Ronnard Raay’s death was officially declared a suicide. I didn’t know if it had been hard for Huyne to let it go at that or not. The handwriting of the fatal note did match Ronn’s. Danny found out that all it said was: “Sick of it.” What do you know about that? Whether or not he actually killed himself, it seemed he was at least planning something along those lines. Leave well enough alone.
Several of the other notes were clearly written by Jersey Jakes when compared to samples of Jakes’s handwriting. This included the last note found on Ronnard’s body in Easy. Huyne convinced himself that it was obvious: Jakes was playing both ends against the middle. Case closed — deliberately. It seemed to me that Huyne was just as anxious as I was to look the other way — forget Dally’s connection with everything.
I gave Lucy one of the Madisons that Mug had given me. I just sauntered into the Lounge, ordered my orange juice, and left the bill as a tip.
She didn’t know why I’d done it, and I couldn’t explain. I didn’t know why I’d done it either, exactly. But it got her into a better apartment and gave her a cushion to look for a new job. She ended up getting the perfect one of each: She was Reece’s assistant at the morgue, and she rented the other half of Reece and Drexel’s classy duplex in the Morningside area. They all rode to work together every morning — my little cadre of Waif Street Irregulars was growing. All’s well that ends well.
A few days after Huyne had questioned me about Curtis, I got a call from Danny Frank. He called because he thought that I might find it amusing — in a sort of grand theatre way — that Chuckie and Rimshot had been found dead in Mysterio, Georgia, a few miles east of Invisible. They’d been shot from behind in the head, and they were both missing their left hands. Connections with the drug world were suspected.
All I suspected was that Mug Lewis’s work really was finally concluded. I never did find out for certain what happened to the hands, but when I called Sonny to fill her in on the juiciest gossip she’d gotten ahold of in years, she told me that Tommy Acree had undergone experimental surgery to attach a new left hand to his arm. She didn’t know whether or not it took.
After things had settled down a little, I went to town and bought a nice new gray suit with one of my remaining Madisons. So you can imagine how nice a suit it was. I showed up at Easy one Tuesday night around seven-thirty, dressed to the nines: the new suit, a crisp white shirt, a five-hundred-dollar silk tie, a haircut, and even a dab of Romeo Gigu at my neck. Hal had to look twice before he even recognized me.
“Flap?” His eyes bugged. “Jesus.”
“Well,” I told him, “make up your mind, which is it?”
“I’m not sure.” He gave me the once-over twice. “Marcia? Get out here.”
Her face appeared in the food window, and she also gave a classic double take. “For God’s sake.” She shook her head and looked at Hal. “Who died?”
I was pondering the answer to just that question when Dalliance Oglethorpe appeared in the doorway of her office. She was in a plum-colored gauzy thing that choked a guy’s first sentence. Pearls at her neck, hair perfectly disordered, I could feel her cheek from across the room.
Hal whistled once. Marcia offered a sailor’s curse. Several regulars applauded.
“Ready?” I asked her.
She locked eyes with me and nodded wordlessly.
“Dinner at eight,” I told Hal as I moved across the floor toward the angel eyes. “Reckless abandon by midnight.”
“In your dreams,” Hal said to the back of my head, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“Ms. Oglethorpe.” I offered her my arm.
“Mr. Tucker.” She took it.
“What the hell is going on here?” Marcia asked Hal. “They never acted like this before. Or dressed like this before, for that matter. It’s like they don’t even know each other.”
“That’s the point,” Dally said, her eyes locked on mine, as we drifted out the door.
*
We’re human, all of us. We can’t help the fact that we’re not perfect. One of the main things that makes us imperfect is our constant impatience with the status quo. We want change. We’re restless without it. Maybe it’s because we only truly understand the world by contrast. How do you know the splendor of a glorious sunrise without the terror of a moonless night? How do you come to love the quenching of a downpour without the drought beforehand? How can you truly appreciate the angel’s kiss without first being convinced that you’ll never touch her lips again? Contrast of opposites. That’s why God divided the day from the night, the land from the water, the man from the woman — so that they’d know each other when they came back together, and show a little appreciation. So the sunrise that knits the night and day together can be glorious, so that the ocean will always want the shore’s dry land — so that the man will never get used to seeing the woman without saying to himself, “My God, who is that amazing person?”
This is why we like mystery: the contrast of knowing and not knowing, questions and answers, doubt and discovery. In the marriage of these opposites, we know God’s best plan. And what is God’s best plan? I’ll tell y
ou. In my book it starts: “Dinner at eight, reckless abandon by midnight.”
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Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Page 22
