The walls were bare except for a yellowed newspaper clipping that had been matted and expensively framed under glass. Broker went closer and read the sentiment that was scrawled on the mat paper. “To Bevode. Happy birthday-Cyrus.”
The folio line announced the
Fragments of a story about a Cholera epidemic ran off the clipping. The headline read: HOW TO TELL WHETHER A PERSON IS DEAD OR ALIVE.
Apply the flame of a candle to the tip of one of the great toes of the supposed corpse, and a blister will immediately rise. If the vitality is gone, this will be full of air, and will burst with some noise if the flame be applied to it a few seconds longer; if life is not extinct, the blister will be full of matter and will not burst.
Broker sniffed. Bevode Fret’s room had the polecat funk of marsh grass where a big animal had lain and soaked up a belly full of meat. A keen ray of something Broker hadn’t smelled in a long time-fingernail polish-cut across the tiger-house scent. He turned. Lola, silent on barefeet, stood in the doorway wearing a simple, sleeveless white cotton dress. Her wet hair was pulled tight against her skull and she had painted her fingernails a livid funereal purple. “Our child’s room,” she said with icy contempt.
Lola’s fingernails rattled an anxious tattoo on LaPorte’s shiny, massive teak desk.
“Cyrus believes that manageable people have handles. The handle allows them to be controlled. You and Nina have handles until Tuna is found. I’m afraid I never grew any. No handles. You get dropped.”
Broker’s eyes roved the walls and he wondered how many years she’d spent collecting and decorating this house for Cyrus LaPorte’s pleasure. What plans she’d made here…
When she’d come up from the pool, even a little lathered from exercise, her makeup had still been precisely applied. Now, with her hair limp and wearing nothing on her face except her skin, she looked drawn and vulnerable to the harsh Louisiana light that hunted shadows around her cheeks, the edges of her lips, and the corners of her eyes.
The gruesome painted fingernails continued to chatter on the wood. “Please say something, Mr. Broker,” she demanded.
“How do you know he wants to get rid of you?” said Broker.
“Bevode told me.” She pushed the button for service. Hiram appeared almost instantly. “Could we have some coffee, Hiram, out on the gallery?” she said.
“Sure, Miss Lola,” said the decrepit old man affectionately. “I make it good and thick for you and the genman.”
When they were alone again she went out on the gallery and leaned on the railing. When he stood beside her she looked at him from the corner of her eye and chose her words carefully. “Nina is in danger. Cyrus believes the way to Tuna lies through her,” she said.
“She’s covered,” said Broker.
“I hope you’re right. But the price Cyrus pays for luring you down here is having Bevode off the field. Perhaps Tennessee Williams is apropos.”
“Go on.”
She held up her right hand and stared at her palm. “My grandmother read my palm when I was twenty-one. See this line? It’s the lifeline. Mine branches, one fork ends, the other continues on into this happy nest of wrinkles.” She cocked her head and placed her left index finger on the small juncture of creases in her skin. “I’m right here, right now. With you.”
An acoustic flip in the breeze brought a trill of happy laughter from the wedding party up over the hedges. Broker heard it as a crazy jungle sound.
They stayed that way for two minutes, exploring the twists and barbs of a silence as tangled as the iron lilacs that fenced General LaPorte’s home. Then a clatter of metal announced Hiram returning with a tray and silver service. After he set it on the table between the chairs, he bent and whispered in Lola’s ear. She smiled and turned to Broker. “Hiram is curious about what you wear on the gold chain around your neck.”
Broker pulled the tiger tooth out. Hiram executed a delicate hop, ancient and birdlike, and stared at the pendant. “It need cleanin’ up,” he said. “I got just the thing for it down in the pantry.”
Lola nodded indulgent assent, so Broker removed the chain and handed it to the septuagenarian butler, who cradled it in his crevassed palm and withdrew.
Lola held her coffee cup in both hands and blew on the thick liquid. The heat clotted around them and her voice sounded far away, underwater. “It says in your dossier that you work undercover…”
Clouds hid the sun and in the diffuse light her skin acquired the parchment softness of a Renaissance Madonna. She had long dark eyelashes. He wondered if they were real.
“But so far you’ve only played the sticks. How do you think you’d do in the big time?”
He cleared his throat. “Define big time.”
“The difference between Minnesota and the big time, Broker, is the difference between the frying pan and the fucking fire.”
She was grabbing at straws, too.
“I heard your husband’s wish list. What’s yours?” asked Broker.
“Sometimes I sit up here and I think how nice it would be if I were a widow before I was a corpse.”
“A very rich widow,” said Broker. The subject was murder.
“Exactly.” She inhaled and steepled her fingers. “I am chattel in this house, Mr. Broker-”
“Phillip.”
She inclined her head slightly. “I have no money of my own to speak of. But, with Bevode gone, we are quite insecure at the moment. Virgil is hardly reliable.” She took a deep breath. “If the gold in that safe disappeared, considering where it came from no one is going to report it missing.” She exhaled. “Be discreet and
“So far.”
She turned and drew an X with one cool finger at the base of his throat where the tiger tooth chain had hung. “Don’t forget, Cyrus has your little pendant,” she said.
“I have some questions…”
She patted her cheeks lightly with her palms as a flush of color rose from her throat. “In time. Right now there are some words I find difficult to get past my lips.”
They stood up together, without a signal. A mutual arising.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“The Doniat. On Chartiers,” he said for the second time.
“I’ll come see you. At nine,” she said, still staring into the distance.
Broker smelled the lingering mint of LaPorte’s after-shave evaporate like frost in the humid air and he heard the rattle of a streetcar and the hooves of a mule-drawn carriage clip-clop on St. Charles. Below them and through a screen of hedge, the bride and groom assembled in front of a white gazebo where a flutist played a wedding march. A hot gust of Gulf wind grabbed the stately notes and threw them in their faces.
Impulsively, she seized his arm and tugged him off the gallery, into the study, into hiding, in a furl of billowing curtain. She arched up on tiptoe and kissed him on the throat, on an electric spot just under his left ear. Her lips lingered in a wanton squirm of tongue that sent shivers down the inside of his chest and almost pried his stomach muscles inside out.
She stepped back and inspected his reaction, which was biologically predictable. She drew a cool tentative finger down his cheek. “You should really stop at a barber shop, Phillip. That long hair is all wrong for your face.”
Lola LaPorte spun away and ran down the hall, as light on her feet as a girl.
32
Broker paused in the hall in front of a gilded mirror and studied the trademark rosette of the hickey stamped
