Broker drew himself up. “Some men,” he said stiffly.
She peeled out of the T-shirt, rolled off the bed, and stooped for her dress. “I didn’t really want to do it with you anyway,” she said as the silk slithered over her tanned arms and fell to her knees. “Nothing personal. I just don’t like it anymore.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“No. Look, how do I get the damn key?”
She spoke matter of factly as she dressed, called for a cab, and brushed her hair. “After midnight no one should be up except Hiram. He’ll be down in the den watching TV. Cyrus always locks up before he goes to bed, but I’ll leave the French doors to the study open. You can climb a tree, can’t you?”
Broker nodded impatiently.
“Okay.” Lola put on her coat. “Cyrus sleeps with the key on a thong around his neck. He always keeps his right hand tight in a fist around it. But if he’s lying on his back and he snores, poke him firmly in the left side. He’ll turn over and let go of the key and stop snoring.”
She held out her hand. He took it and she said, “If you find Jimmy Tuna they’ll come after you hard. If you can detain Bevode it might help.”
“As in ‘permanently’?”
“No. Cyrus won’t go to Vietnam without him.” She slipped a business card from her pocket and handed it to him. The card was for the Century Riverside Hotel, 49 Le Loi Street, Hue, Vietnam. Imperial Room was written in flowing felt tip across the calligraphy-swirl red capital-C logo. “You’ll need all the help you can get once you’re over there. Till then.” She peered at him and was gone. He closed the door behind her.
Broker stared at the card and filled in the silent question that had been in Lola’s eyes: If you get over there.
35
Broker removed the bowling bag from the closet and changed into his dark outfit while he had a conversation with himself in the bathroom mirror. If she wasn’t for real, he was on his way to eat a twelve-gauge. But he had something to prove to himself and he was going to do it.
He’d put LaPorte on a pedestal once. Now that pedestal was a stack of stolen gold.
He sat down on the toilet and stared at his injured thumb. Could slow him up. Slowly he unbandaged it and gingerly removed the gauze that stuck to the infected sutures.
First he lightly dabbed some Vaseline on the finger and looped a single layer of gauze around it. The jelly held the gauze in place. He took a deep breath and eyed the roll of adhesive tape on the sink counter.
He started to whistle “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” When he wrenched the first turn of tape around the thumb all his saliva poured out at once. He spit it into the sink, took a second tight turn, and all his saliva dried up. When he’d finished, his whistling sounded like a shaky bone xylophone. There. Armored in adhesive. He tested it against the sink. Still painful as hell but less vulnerable.
Then he strapped his.45 on and pulled on the light raincoat and Nikes. He smiled at the black wool watch cap, dropped it in the bag, and padded down the back stairs from his hotel room.
He’d rented a gray V8 Buick, in case he had to drive fast. Now he spread a street map of New Orleans on the seat and studied it by the dome light. He decided on the residential neighborhoods west of LaPorte’s place to find what he needed.
Broker drove through the rain for three hours, back and forth, up and down quiet side streets under overarching canopies of old oaks and Spanish moss that shivered in the storm. On his third try he found what he was looking for. When he had it wrapped in his bowling bag he turned the car back toward the LaPorte mansion.
He parked a block away. He quartered toward the house in the cheap gray raincoat and light slip-on rubber boots. The bowling bag was in his right hand, the.45 snug in its harness across his chest. He walked past a flower bed and a damp humus of soil and orchids brought back tatters of Lola’s perfume, a scent of murder, chilly bright and sharp as a fishhook. But this was payback for Bevode, moonlight financing, and a personal challenge he meant to slap in Cyrus LaPorte’s face.
A trickle of lightning silently spiderwebbed the trees and the creepy turrets and gables jittered against the electric sky.
He slipped along the alley fence until he came to the overgrown portion he’d spied early in the afternoon. Then he placed the three trash cans, making sure their covers were secure. One, then two, in a stack. Steps. He climbed the cans and tossed his bag over the fence. Then he gripped the thick vines against the spear tips with his right hand and swung himself up, slid over on the bumpy massed vines, and dropped down on the other side.
As a peal of thunder smacked the blowing trees, Broker slid along the inky hedge. The yard lights were out and the interior to the house was dark except for lights in the kitchen and another room downstairs. Fainter hall and stairway lights upstairs.
He came to the base of the oak tree and squeezed past it and through the hedge and came out on the pool side. A dozen feet away, through the window, he saw Virgil Fret slouched in a chair at the kitchen table, nodding. An empty bucket of fried chicken sat next to a tall milkshake. Grease spots dribbled on his white T-shirt and the static on a TV screen three feet away on the counter monitored his brain waves. A bright, blocky 9mm pistol was stuffed into his waist band. Broker could almost hear him snoring through the steady rain.
Too perfect. Like Lola’s hair.
He crept to the back of the home until he could observe the other light. Hiram sat in a den at the other side of the first floor, watching television. He returned to the dark corner formed by the hedge and the tree.
He separated the looped handles of the bag and inserted his arms, effectively making the bag a backpack. The light cotton gloves had serrated rubber grips. He measured his distance and leaped up, seizing a low branch with his strong right hand, grunting as his knees clamped the slippery bark.
Sweat and rain blurred his vision as he struggled up the trunk, finally gaining the larger branches. With hand-and footholds he gained the branch he wanted. Balancing, he inched over the hedge.
Now the decision. Try to leap for the gallery or take the shorter jump to the drainpipe.
He figured the drainpipe wouldn’t hold. He gathered himself and sprung for the railing. He hit it mid-chest level. Locked his good hand over it. Pots of impatiens wobbled in their crockery saucers but the sound was drowned by the wind and rain. Nothing fell to the pool deck.
Out of the rain, under the balcony, he quickly stripped off the raincoat and the boots, furled them, and tucked them aside. He removed the wet gloves and put on a fresh pair. The French doors swung open. No need for the jimmy.
Dry as bone, he entered the sleeping home of Cyrus LaPorte like a bad dream.
He squatted just inside the study until his eyes adjusted. He listened, separating out the sounds of the house from the storm. Television downstairs. Roof timbers creaking. Checked his wristwatch: 2:13 in the morning.
Then he left his bag and crept down the varnished maple hallway to LaPorte’s bedroom. His eyes wandered up the stairwell to the third floor. Was she asleep? Or laying in her bed wide-eyed as a girl the night before the prom.
LaPorte curled in the fetal position on the king-sized bed. Aquarium shadows undulated over him, cast by branches dancing in a streetlight and the grid of window sashes. He wore pajama bottoms. No sheet. The grizzled hair on his chest was white as hoarfrost.
His right hand clenched against that silvery hair and slowly, in the weaving shadows, Broker picked out the irregular shape of the thong around LaPorte’s neck.
Broker squatted behind the gun cabinet, where a flash of lightning would not delineate him, and waited. After a few minutes he could smell the sleeping man, a halitosis of sour alcohol and digestive juices gusting through raw
