30
He retreated from the balcony and the hot sensation stoked in his cheeks and in his hands. LaPorte had made a fool of him. The fury banked like coals when he recalled Bevode Fret’s assured smile. Broker prayed that Danny Larkins and company knew their stuff better than he did.
The second wave of anger was packed harder and took a direction.
His eyes tracked the office as his hands burned to seize on something. Something that would make LaPorte feel as foolish as he felt right now. He yanked in frustration on a locked desk drawer. He kicked the desk.
Lola’s cool voice reined him in. “Forget it, Broker. Cyrus is crazy as a March hare but he wouldn’t leave anything valuable just laying around.”
The breeze carried the tangerine scent of sweat from her damp clothing. She’d tied a filmy purple silk scarf around her throat and put on a pearl silk kimono with billowing sleeves. She was around five seven. Hard to estimate the weight she packed in all that velvet muscle. He’d been close on the eyes, brown but lighter, sand- colored. A streak of premature gray twisted above the left side of her widow’s peak.
And Broker was suddenly very eager to discover the exact dimensions of the marital tension between Lola and Cyrus LaPorte.
She padded toward him, her bare feet sinking into the Persian carpet, and at twenty feet she engaged the eyes like a translated idea. Like art. At ten feet he could see the tiny suggestion of lines around the corners of her mouth and her eyes. Uh-huh. Surgeons had airbrushed some of that artwork. She had her fingernails dug in to the quick, hanging on to forty. But like LaPorte said, very well preserved. Maybe he saw a wisp of curiosity rise from the bored ashes in her eyes. Her lower lip bunched in a bittersweet smile and that’s where some of the lines got their exercise.
She misread his steaming bold stare and mocked him with an adult smile. “Wrong room, Cowboy. I keep the sex drive in the kitchen now, on the Cuisinart, right between chop and puree.”
Broker patiently tried to melt his agitation. Not fast enough.
She sighed. “Yes, Mr. Broker, I was a cheerleader and I can still do the splits and I was homecoming queen and I was Miss Baton Rouge and I even was the Sweetheart of Delta Chi. Eye-fucking. That’s one of your Vietnam words, isn’t it?”
He said, “I was in on the end. I missed the fun cultural nuances.”
“Well don’t get hot at me. I haven’t got it. It’s in there.” She pointed to the safe. “Seven ingots.” She dropped her eyes. “What happened to your hand?”
“Some geek tried to bite my thumb off resisting arrest.”
“Sounds like you got too close. Close could be dangerous,” she said, and watched his reaction.
Broker was thinking clearer now. Hiram the butler had kept him from leaving. Lola had been waiting for a chance to talk.
About what? He wondered if Lola liked her money cooked in blood like Cyrus and Bevode.
Cooler, he retreated to the safe and squatted and ran his hands over the door. “This is old.” He fingered the keyhole in the handle. “Takes a key.”
“It was forged in eighteen sixteen. Fourteen-hundred pounds of solid steel. According to the legend, cannon from Royale LaPorte’s ship were melted down to make it.”
Broker stood up and pointed to the portrait. “The pirate.”
Lola sat in the leather chair and crossed her knees in a silken swish.
“I boned up,” said Broker. “Royale LaPorte lost an arm fighting under Andy Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. President Madison pardoned him. The books say he danced with Marie Laveau the voodoo queen and kept his severed left hand pickled in rum in a glass jar. The hand is said to continue with the LaPorte family to this day.”
Lola clapped her hands in slow applause. Very deliberately, Broker pointed at the ancient safe and raised his eyebrows.
She nodded. “Probably climbed out of its gory pot and is in there caressing those bars at this very minute.”
Broker glanced at the imposing painting on the wall. “Maybe the Hue gold’s the general’s way of sailing back into history to commune with his ancestors?”
“What a kind way to put it, Mr. Broker,” she said tartly. “The fact is that with the travel time on the boat, paying off the Greenpeace kids, bringing in the diving crew and the new undersea excavation equipment-you can tell Nina Pryce that Cyrus is barely breaking even with his seven bars of gold.”
“You know Nina Pryce?”
“I met her at the party the other night when she robbed the place. I remember the tattoo. It was out of place on her.”
“Do the Vietnamese have any idea?”
“You and I having a conversation about Cyrus’s business is dangerous.” It was a frank statement.
“Do they?” Broker repeated.
She folded her hands and raised them just under her chin. “No. This is a case where knowledge really is power. Do you feel powerful? With your treasure map?”
“The map’s a phony. I’m down here chasing wild geese.”
“Then you should be wondering why Cyrus would purchase your silence when he can
Broker, unfazed, crossed the room and pointed to the whip on the wall. “What’s this?”
“Family heirloom. Cyrus’s great granddaddy used it to motivate the help.” She got up and walked to a closet in the wall of antlers. She opened the door and dug in a drawer and removed a frayed, discolored red silk hooded robe. “That whip was there, along with this, right next to old Bedford Forest when the order was founded.” The bittersweet smile crinkled the corners of her mouth. “I’m a little over the hill to be a princess, but I sure as hell married a dragon.” She cocked her head and he wondered how she got her hair to move in place all the time. Maybe it was a secret only taught to millionaires’ wives. “You always talk like this to strangers?” he asked.
“You know the Tennessee Williams line about us southern girls relying on the kindness of strangers.”
“She was a drunk and I ain’t Marlon Brando.”
“True. Brando has gone to fat. You don’t look like you ever will. Does it bother you that so many police officers have Michelin tires around their waists these days?”
Lola got up and mounted the dais and sat behind her husband’s desk. She opened the manila folder that LaPorte had referred to earlier and held up a sheet of paper. “On the other hand, Cyrus can’t resist a clean cop.” She folded her arms on the desk. “Another cop who was too good to be true stood in this office once. Cyrus knew Bevode Fret was so good that he was only one cold-blooded murder away from being very, very bad. You see, my husband has turned into a collector. Before I met him he used to collect medals and honors. But after that incident in seventy-five they were holding him back in the army. He decided he needed a trophy wife to talk up the generals’ wives at the club. And there I was, a Tulane graduate with two years of law school up against the financial wall so I was clerking in a firm downtown and he sized me up like a doll on a shelf and said, ‘I’ll take that one.’ He always said when he retired we’d raise a family. I think he started to come apart when the Berlin Wall came down.” She smiled bitterly. “That fucking wall was apparently holding up his character…”
She placed her palms together. “Well, we didn’t have a family. Instead he went through his antler phase. Cyrus has come a long way since he won those medals. Now he has a little bottle where he collects people’s souls.”
“Sounds like true love.”
She frowned. “I’ve lived with that man so long I’m not sure I’d recognize a good guy when he’s standing right in front of me.”
Broker shrugged.
“You are one of the good guys, aren’t you?” she asked. Broker started to laugh, but, seeing her serious expression, he stopped. She went on. “I mean, you wouldn’t really sell Nina out for money, would you?”
Broker shivered a little in the filmy heat. She was utterly unreadable as, he supposed, he was. It gave them an odd intimacy.
