“How can I promise if I haven’t heard the secret?”
“I’ll give you a hint-it’s about Dawson.”
The mystery woman. The lady of the lagoon. Who’d been in and out of his thoughts, in various stages of dress and undress, from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. “Okay, you’re on,” said Pender. “But it better be good.”
5
The moon was dim, but the starlight was so bright that the bay rums cast shadows across the path from the Great House to the overseer’s. Lewis gave the black hole of the Danish kitchen a wide berth when he passed the landing.
Emily answered the door. Her blouse was cut low, her bosom pushed up high. She closed the door quickly behind him. “A reporter? You killed a reporter?”
“Is there a problem with that?”
“Yes, there’s a problem.” She led him into the living room, handed him a copy of that morning’s
“That’s what we wanted, isn’t it?” said Lewis. He could hear someone typing furiously in one of the bedrooms.
“No, it’s not what we wanted. A reporter dies, every newspaper in the country gets interested. Once the wire services pick it up, the heat’s really going to be on. There’ll be Feds all over the place.”
“Feds! Pah! There’s already one nosing around. That big bald fellow in the church this afternoon-he moved into one of the A-frames at the Core yesterday. Dumb as a sack of coconuts-he doesn’t suspect a thing.”
“Well, they won’t all be. We have to give them a Machete Man, the sooner the better.”
We? Have to nip that one in the buuuuud. “How are you going to do that?”
She told him-they were back to
“No,” he said firmly. “No more.”
“No more what?” They were standing two feet apart-casual but friendly conversation, according to the proxemics chart. She moved closer, broke the casual plane. She pressed up against him. She was wearing an underwire poosh-em-up, he realized-her huge titis were slopping over like pillows served up on a tray.
“No more killings.”
“What’s the matter, didn’t you enjoy the experience?”
“Of course not.” But he was starting to get aroused, remembering how it had felt the other night to be lying in wait, holding the power of life and death, wielding it. And the plan did make sense, in a twisted way. Give the police a dead victim and a dead suspect at the same time-
Emily pressed closer, trapping his semi-erection against his thigh. “When a man and his dick disagree,” she told him, “I always believe the dick. And next time it will be even better-we’ve decided to give you the honors.”
“What honors?”
“That’s right, you don’t know yet, do you?” She stepped back. He found himself missing the contact. “Have a seat, Lew-there’s something I want to show you.”
6
“Knock knock.”
“Come in.”
“You’re no fun.” Pender ducked through the doorway of the Quonset. “You’re supposed to ask who’s there?”
Dawson was sitting up in bed-a narrow foam pallet-reading a Virginia Woolf novel by the light of a miniature oil lamp. Thigh-length white cotton nightgown embroidered with a yoke of tiny red flowers around the collar; she pulled the covers up to her waist. “I recognized your-oh, you mean for a knock-knock joke. Okay, who’s there?”
“Never mind-the moment’s passed.”
“Never mind the moment’s passed who?”
Pender’s mouth opened and closed. He cracked up. Dawson, a natural deadpan, cracked up too-Pender’s laugh was Stage Five contagious. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Just a neighborly visit.” Actually, he was there in response to what Marley had overheard that morning: one hell of a good night kiss, sixty/forty she wanted to sleep with him. Odds like that, a man would have to be married, gay, or crazy not to give it a shot.
“Pull up a chair.”
As in purple velveteen beanbag. As in, set the way-back machine to 1969, Sherman. Pender stooped, slid the beanbag next to the footlocker Dawson used as a bedside table. On it was a compressed-air horn with a fat red trigger, a burning mosquito coil, the oil lamp, a cup of tea, and an ashtray with a half-smoked marijuana cigarette in it. He saw the roach; she saw him see it; he saw her see him see it.
“You’re under arrest,” said Pender. Dawson blanched. “I’m kidding,” he added hastily. “I’m a kidder, I kid.”
He watched her try to recover-she laughed, adjusted the flame on the lamp. But she’d angled her body away from him as she did so, and kept her head turned away as well. He remembered what Marley had told him-the forty of the sixty/forty was that he was a cop. It started to come together for him.
“My hand to God, Dawson, I’m retired. And before I retired, I hadn’t worked a dope case since I was a Cortland County sheriff’s deputy in 1969. So if that’s what’s going on, some old dope bust or something, I give you my word, I don’t know, I don’t care, and I won’t turn you in.”
Dawson clutched her chest in exaggerated relief. “It was only a couple of joints, a long time ago.” She laughed again.
But the tone-mock relief-was wrong. And on a polygraph chart, the laughter blip often followed a deception spike. Drop it, Pender told himself. Leave it alone. But he couldn’t-without even being entirely aware of it, he had switched into affective interview mode. Establish common ground, give something up to get something. And watch for a tell-that was the poker term for the little tics and mannerisms that give a player away when he has a lock hand, or is bluffing one.
“I happen to be a juicer myself,” he went on, “but I have never shiven a git what a person puts into what hole of their own body for what purpose, as long as nobody dies. People start dying, that’s when I get inv-Oh, fuck.”
The tell had come on
7
It must have been dark in the Omo Sebua. The video was grainy, the colors muddy. Emily narrated, translated. Lewis had no trouble recognizing her in the video, but it took him a few seconds to place the younger Bennie. Phil appeared only briefly, as a shadow on the wall, holding a shadow camera.
After the stolen breath, the murder, and the dying man’s kiss, Emily stopped the tape and kept it frozen on the image of her younger self grinning triumphantly at the camera, her eyes glazed, her mouth smeared with blood. “Well?”
