James Patterson - French Kiss

Finally Paulo rolls off and rests at her side.

For a moment, Laura becomes a kind of waitress in a sexual diner. “Can I get you anything else, sir?”

But Paulo Montes merely keeps his heavy breathing pumping. “That was good, very good. Go into the next room. Take what you want. Within reason, of course.” He laughs again. What a comedian!

Like all the girls who work for the Russian gang, Laura knows Paulo Montes is one of the most significant importers of what are called travel packages: drugs that are smuggled along strange geographic routes-say, from Ankara to Kiev to Seoul to New York to São Paulo-in order to confuse and evade the narcs.

“No, thank you,” Laura says, slipping into her torn underwear, her jeans, and her shirt. She plucks a few of his many sweaty curly hairs from her stomach.

“Don’t be ungrateful, bitch,” Paulo says. This time he’s not sounding funny. He doesn’t laugh. “Scag, maybe. I got it in the plastic containers. Or some good China white.”

“I just need to use the bathroom,” Laura says.

Paulo snaps at her quickly. “Use the maid’s bathroom at the end of the hall. You can’t use this one. I have personal items in there.”

Laura simply says, “Okay.” She’s tired and frightened and disgusted.

“Now go in the next room and treat yourself. Even something simple. Take a little C. Have a party later with your friends.”

To appease him she says, “Do you have some weed? I’ll take some weed.”

He laughs again, the loudest of all his laughing jags.

“Weed? You’re joking. Like Paulo would ever deal low-class shit like that.”

She watches Paulo on the bed, naked, laughing.

As Laura leaves the room all she can think of is that line from the Christmas poem: “…a little round belly / That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.”

Laura Delarico has finished her story.

“So that’s it. The clients don’t pay us girls directly. It’s all online, I guess. I don’t really know. When it was over, I just left.”

Burke speaks. “Detective Moncrief and I want to thank you. We know this has been tough.”

“I wish I could have helped more,” Laura says. “I’m not afraid. I just…well, that’s what happened.”

“You’ve helped us more than you can imagine,” I say. Sincerely, softly. “What you gave us was big. I’m fairly certain Maria Martinez visited Paulo’s room as well.”

Burke agrees. “There’s a very real possibility she was the dark-haired girl he rejected before you.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Laura says.

“You’re right,” I say. “Not yet. But it is a logical deduction. He may have killed her and disposed of her. Or he may have put her body in the bathroom.”

“The one he wouldn’t let me use,” she says quietly. “I guess that makes sense.”

K. Burke holds up her hand. “Or we may be completely off base. Maybe it was not Maria Martinez. Maybe we’ve got it all wrong.”

I cannot resist. I say, “Ah, K. Burke, ever the jolly optimist.”

I reach over and gently touch Laura Delarico’s hand. She does not pull away. She is so much less frightened than she was a few hours ago.

“And that is why…” Suddenly, I must stop speaking. Oh, shit. Oh, no.

I feel my throat begin to burn. I’m having trouble breathing. Maria is on my mind, in my heart. Because of Laura’s information, we may actually have a shot at solving Maria’s murder.

K. Burke senses the emotional hole I’ve fallen into. She finishes my remarks.

“And that’s why…we need you to help us just a little bit more.”

Laura says nothing for a few long moments.

“Well?” I say.

Laura is suddenly businesslike. Sharp. Composed.

“I know what you’ll do if I don’t keep helping you,” she says.

“You know what we’ll do?” I ask. “I don’t even know what we’ll do except ask you to help us.”

“No,” Laura says. “You’ll play the Grandpa card.”

“The what?” I ask.

K. Burke is far quicker than I am in this matter.

“Laura thinks we’ll tell her grandfather how she’s been making money,” says Burke.

For the first time I see a toughness in Laura. I am beginning to think that Laura Delarico is not so naive and innocent as I first thought. She’ll make a good lawyer someday.

“Believe whatever you want, Laura,” I say, “but I promise you with my heart that we will never do such a thing.”

“I guess I’ll believe you because…well, because I want to believe you,” Laura says. “I want to help…at least, I think I want to help. Oh, this sucks. This whole thing sucks.”

Time for a bottom line. Laura agrees to continue to help. “But just one more time.”

Later, after Laura leaves, K. Burke and I walk the dirty gray hallway back to the detective room.

“Nice job,” Burke says. “Your performance won her over.”

“Did you think that was a performance, K. Burke?” I ask.

“To be honest, I don’t know.”

Back at our desks, we learn that Paulo Montes will not be in New York for three days. He is on a quick drug trip through San Juan, Havana, and Kingston.

I tell Burke that I’m going to take one of those three days off.

“Impossible!” she exclaims. “Your presence is critical. We have Vice files to examine. We have a reinspection of the murder scene as well as forensics at Montes’s suite. I need you to-”

I cut her off immediately. “Hold it,” I say sharply. “Here’s what I need from you. I need you to stop thinking that you’re my boss. You’re my partner. And I don’t mean to throw this in your face, K. Burke, but we would not be progressing if I had not pursued my very un professional way of doing things.”

K. Burke gives me her version of a sincere smile. Then she says, “Whatever you say, partner.”

A man knows he’s in love when he’s totally happy just watching his girlfriend do even the simplest things-peeling an apple, combing her hair, fluffing up a bed pillow, laughing.

That is precisely how I’m feeling when I walk into the ridiculously tricked-out media room of Dalia’s apartment: the Apologue speakers, the Supernova One screen, the leather Eames chairs. A room that is insanely lavish and almost never used.

As I walk in I see Dalia standing on a stepladder. Her back is to me. She is frantically sorting through the small closet high above the wet bar. She neither sees nor hears me enter. I stand and watch her for a moment. I smile. Dalia is wearing jeans and a turquoise T-shirt. As she stretches, one or two inches of her lower back are exposed.

I walk toward her and kiss her gently on that enticing lower back.

She gives a quick little yell.

“Don’t be scared,” I say. “It’s only me.”

She steps off the ladder and we embrace fully. I know a great kiss cannot wash away a bad day, but it surely can make the night seem a little bit brighter.

“When did this closet become the junk closet?” she asks as she climbs back up the ladder and begins tossing things down to me.

A plastic bag of poker chips. These are followed by three Scrabble tiles ( W, E, and the always important X  ). A plastic box containing ivory chess pieces, but no chessboard in sight. And a true relic from the Victorian era: a Game Boy.

“This is for you,” she says as she pretends to hit me on the head with a wooden croquet mallet. I add the mallet to the ever-expanding pile of items next to me.

“And you’ll like this, ” she says with a smile. Dalia leans down and hands me a small gold box. I open it. It contains two little bronze balls the size of small marbles. Never saw them before. I shrug.