“Yes.”
Herb pauses for a moment. “How long?”
“Writing a book, Herb?”
“No… I…” Herb begins, starting to color. “We just like to know a little about the people we let into our homes, that’s all. Surely you can understand that in this day and age.”
Paris actually does understand. He sure as hell wouldn’t want Herb at his house. “Five years.”
Herb nods, silently absorbing the notion of five years with a woman like Cleopatra. “You are a very lucky man, John. A very lucky man.”
Paris leans forward and smiles at Herb in a man-to-man, swingin’-cat-to-swingin’-cat kind of way. He says, softly: “Luck has nothing to do with it, Herbie. Nothing at all.”
Herb, thoroughly outcocked, laughs, but it is a dry, mirthless sound, a sound born of intense envy and plain macho rivalry.
“Either of you boys wanna escort a lady to a party?” Carla says, inches behind Herb.
Herb nearly knocks his chair over as he stands up. “I know this boy would.”
Paris rises, buttons his blazer. He looks at Carla’s purse. Although he knows it is there, he cannot see the tiny lens of the hidden camera.
Perfect.
“Allow me,” Herb says, once again ignoring Paris, offering his arm to Carla. She takes it, but not before glancing at Paris with a look all police officers recognize.
The look that precedes the door.
Except, this time, the door is deceptively benign. It is a door that Paris had originally thought might lead to a closet or a pantry. A door behind which one might ordinarily find an ironing board, or a broom closet, or any other of a thousand kitchen adjuncts in this waxed and pine-scented version of suburbia.
Instead, Herb opens the door and Paris can see that it leads to a rather undistinguished stairwell. A stairwell leading downward. Paneled walls, soft lighting, a narrow wooden handrail. Paris can hear polite conversation, subdued music.
“Shall we?” Herb says.
Carla looks at Herb and offers a slight angling of her head, a very seductive half-smile. It is another look Paris has seen before, perhaps on the Discovery Channel, or maybe in an old episode of Wild Kingdom: the mien of the young jaguar in that airless instant before its legs uncoil.
Herb takes his arm from Carla’s, clasps his hands together, smiles at his two new recruits, then gestures for them to enter his carnivale-a grinning, false-toothed doorman to another kind of suburbia altogether.
38
Forty-eight thousand three hundred and fifteen dollars is not an easy thing to hide. Not if it is in small bills. And the biggest bill she has is a twenty. Plus, she has at least twelve thousand dollars in singles. Every time you think you have found a perfect place to hide it in your house or apartment-a place you are certain no burglar in the world would think of-you realize that it is the absolute first place any burglar with five functioning brain cells would think of.
So you move it.
Again. And again. And again.
She takes the cash from the plastic trash bag, stuffs it into a WVIZ tote bag, and covers it with a bath towel. She has decided to break down and finally rent a safe-deposit box somewhere with one of her myriad sets of ID. Tonight she will sleep with the bag’s canvas handle wrapped around her wrist; a butcher knife on the nightstand.
She knows she has to end this. And that the best defense is a good offense. And that there are two things she must do if she has any chance of surviving.
One. She has to get the photographs and negatives of her running from the Dream-A-Dream Motel.
Two. She has to find a way to get Isabella back before the police kick her door in.
A pair of seemingly impossible tasks she knows she cannot accomplish alone. A pair of dangerous endeavors that will probably require the mind of a master thief, the hands of a magician. She knows of only one person with that reputation.
She stashes the tote bag back in the hatbox, puts the hatbox in her closet for the time being. She then picks up the phone and dials Jesse Ray Carpenter’s number.
It is time to meet in person.
39
Paris takes in the room. Twenty or so people, mostly white, a mix of men and women in their forties and fifties. They descend the steps into the recreation room. Herb elbows them to the center of the room, introducing them to the other guests. Peg and Chazz. Lisette and Wolfie. Barb and Tug a lesbian couple.
You are a very beautiful young man, Fayette Martin had said to her killer. No one here, as yet, seems to fit that bill. Nor does anyone resemble the sketch of the woman from Vernelle’s.
Except for Rebecca D’Angelo, Paris thinks, crazily. Then instantly boots the thought from his mind.
They reach the far end of the room, where there is a green leather pit couch. Sitting on the couch are three couples in their forties, chatting softly, drinks in hand. They glance up as Carla and Paris approach them.
“Everyone,” Herb says. “I’d like you to meet Cleopatra and John.”
Paris surveys the men. No one even promising.
“This is Maggie and Mort,” Herb says, gesturing to the couple on the left. They are a handsome couple-she is platinum blond, busty; he is tall, indoor tanned.
“This is Jake and Alicia.”
Jake is older than Paris thought initially. He looks closer to sixty at this range, wearing a very expensive rug and a tailored suit. Alicia, on the other hand, is a bombshell. Petite and Asian, toned, forties. She is wearing a tight fuchsia cocktail dress and the most painful-looking stiletto heels Paris has ever seen.
“And last but not least, Ed and Gilda.”
There clearly was a reason to leave Ed and Gilda to the end. Straight out of the late seventies, Ed wears a navy blue leisure suit; Gilda, a red-sequined tank top and hot pants. Paris isn’t sure if they are in costume, or simply unstuck in time.
“What can I get you to drink?” Herb asks Carla, rubbing his hands together like a Borgian alchemist.
“I’ll have a Pellegrino,” she says.
Herb appears crestfallen, as if just now realizing-and rightfully so-that the only way he would stand a snowball in a microwave’s chance of getting anywhere near Cleopatra is for her to be so shitface drunk she couldn’t see what he looked like. He asks: “Is Poland Spring okay? We, uh, ran out of Pellegrino.”
“That’s fine, Dante,” she says.
The saying of his nom de boudoir reenergizes Herb, who scoots off to the bar.
The next twenty minutes of conversation is a bizarre mix of politics, suburban woes, and thinly veiled sexual innuendo. Paris takes every opportunity to covertly examine rings and pendants and earrings and bracelets-anything that might bear a symbol remotely resembling the Ochosi sign. Or even anything looking vaguely Mexican in motif.
But he finds nothing.
The next hour and a half yields even less. Everyone seems to behave like people would behave at a regular cocktail party. No more sex talk than usual.
At ten o’clock, having gathered what Paris believes to have been zero evidence, they find themselves in the kitchen with Herb again.
