'The plastic surgeon is waiting outside the door to tell us what he did to your face so that it would resemble Lynn's. Would you like for him to come in?'
With the embarrassing helplessness of words a person knows to be meaningless, Rene said, 'I would like my lawyer, please.'
Glossman looked at the FBI agents. 'Gentlemen, she is all yours.'
'Joe, I…' she said, pleading, as one would say to a dead friend the words one regrets having not said in life. 'Please, I…'
He held up his hand, cutting her off. He did not want to listen. Turning to the agents, he said, 'Take her out of here.'
She was read her rights, handcuffed, and led out of the office. Glossman sat down heavily in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Bill Moran looked at the floor. We were silent for a long time.
Glossman ran a hand across his face. 'She was good, she fooled me, and I knew them better than anyone. Her own sister. For what? Money? God help the human race.'
Driving back to Picaroon and Kathy, the only thing I could think of to tell myself was to remember, remember it well. It is not often one can see pure evil, look at it, remember it, and some day maybe we'll find the words to name its essence.
EPILOGUE
We lay to a single anchor on the backside of Chandeleur Island twenty miles off the coast of Biloxi, Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. The sun was low in the west. It would be a good sunset if the haze over New Orleans didn't obscure the final descent. The wind was calm, now, down from the fifteen knots that had beam- reached us all the way from the Broadwater Marina.
The sail over was delightful under clear skies and mild temperatures. We left the marina at dawn. Guy and Mildred Robins came down to see us off and brought a big thermos of coffee and fresh homemade biscuits.
Promising to take good care of his beloved Picaroon, we quietly slipped the lines and motored out into the Mississippi Sound to a glorious day. Rounding the head of Ship Island by noon, we set a course to the west of Chandeleur so that we could come up on the lee side. Raising the north end of the half-moon shaped island by midafternoon, we sailed down its thirty mile length to North Cut, then anchored up close to the white sand beach in eight feet of crystal clear water.
The island is narrow, a quarter mile at its widest. We could hear the soft murmur of the surf, see the seabirds feeding on the tide line. There were brown pelicans, long billed marsh wrens, terns, and gulls. A heron, tiny in the distance, stood like a figurine at the edge of the water on the backside of the island. The birds have a harder life than we do. Why did God make birds so delicate and fine? Bad weather can be cruel to the small birds. Most of the time the weather is kind and beautiful on the out islands, but she can change so suddenly with the violent thunderstorms and seasonal hurricanes and the birds are made too delicate for the harsh weather.
We brought a bottle of champagne up into the cockpit. Man-O-War birds soared effortlessly high among the fleecy mare's-tails that foretold of coming weather. A jet contrail appeared, then dissipated as if my magic on a course toward Miami. The straw gold color of the wine glistened in the afternoon light, tiny bubbles racing to the top of the flute-shaped glasses.
Kathy sat close, snuggled into my arms, her back to me. She was quiet, watching the sun sink lower into the haze. 'Did she really kill her own sister to get control of the company?'
'Yes.'
'Do think she had anything to do with the death of her parents in the airplane crash?'
'We'll never know for sure, but I'll always believe Rene Renoir and Ignacio Sanchez had something to do with it.'
'Did she do something really terrible as a child that caused her father to cut her out of his Will?'
'What the Will said, was that she had a deviant personality that was borderline psychotic. It was complicated and involved her being an unwanted child with her sister the favorite of both parents and them letting Rene know about all of it. Whether it had anything to do with the mental state of the young girl, I have no idea. By the time she was thirteen she was uncontrollable and known as a 'Partygirl' and a 'Playgirl.' Read whore. She wanted to be a movie star. She bounced from men to men, motel to motel. Hung around strip clubs, cheap dives, and frequented bars where she hustled drinks and dinner off strange men for the thrills. She told incredible lies. Her life was indecipherable.' Kathy turned and looked at me with a frown. 'Oh, I instinctively understand that life. I've seen it too many times. It was a chaotic collision with male desire. Rene Renoir wanted powerful things from men, but could not identify her needs. She reinvented herself with youthful panache and convinced herself she was something original. She miscalculated. She wasn't smart and she wasn't self-aware. She recast herself in a cookie-cutter mold that pandered to long-prescribed male fantasies. Rene Renoir was bushwhacked by the Sanchez brothers. She turned herself into a cliche that most men wanted to bed and a few wanted to kill. She wanted to get deep down cozy with men. She sent out magnetic signals. The Sanchez brothers were men with notions of deep down cozy cloaked in rage and viciousness. Her only act of complicity was a common fait accompli. She made herself over for men. Max Renoir knew all of this and was powerless to stop it.'
'Little girls are sometimes like fragile flowers, Jay. They can be hurt very easy.'
'Well, Max tried everything, the best medical help money could buy, but it didn't do any good.'
Kathy got up, walked to the stern of Picaroon, and sat with her feet hanging over the boarding ladder. 'Are you defending his actions with the child?'
'I'm telling you what happened.' Maybe I was defending Max Renoir. The ruined young woman lying on the slab in the Miami morgue, the dead people aboard the Sun Dog lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, all the senseless violence, came flooding back. I had to defend somebody.
Walking over, I stood behind Kathy and put my arms around her. She leaned back against me. The sun sank into the haze, turning the sky a fiery orange, and the water around the boat faded to the color of molten lead. A redfish rolled behind the stern, showing the black spot on its tail. Further out, two dolphins worked a shoal of mullet.
Kathy turned around and looked at me. 'How did Rene get Lynn to come to Miami?'
'She convinced her to come down and see her off on the voyage. Rene had healed from the plastic surgery by then, and she returned on the airplane back to Jackson as Lynn. Sanchez and his people took control of Lynn in Miami, even before the Stede Bonnet sailed.'
'How did you find out about the plastic surgery?'
'When the fingerprints came back identifying the body as Lynn's, I remembered the photo that she showed me in my office, and the shape of Rene's nose. The FBI found the surgeon who did it.'
'So the whole scheme was foiled by love. That Barrel-chest person fell for the girl and couldn't kill her.'
'Calling it love may be a stretch, however it is what blew Rene and Sanchez's plan.'
'What was Sanchez getting out of it?'
'The FBI thinks it was his entry to legitimate business, some place to launder the millions he was making from the Snowpowder business. Who knows, these type people are hard to figure, their personalities are so diffusive, enigmas to their own selves. I'm not sure Rene would have kept the relationship after she gained control of the company. She would have had him killed to get him out of the picture.'
The sun set, darkness came fast to Chandeleur Island. Venus glistened bright as the evening star. Soft ripples lapped against the hull of the boat. Light breezes brought the smells of low tide.
'What happens to the Renoir estate now that all the family are either dead or in jail?'
'The courts will decide, but I imagine Glossman and Moran will continue to handle it.'
'It's a shame, isn't it. So much evil, so much ugliness among all this beauty.'
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.
'I enjoyed getting to know Guy and Mildred. They are wonderful to be around.'
'It's people like them, and Joe Glossman, and Bill Moran, and Dave and Sally Billingsly, who keep me from giving up on the human race. There are more good than bad.'
'What about me? Am I one of the good people?'
