Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

He glanced up and down the hall and slipped into the master bedroom. He slid open the drawer on the bedside table and saw the dull gleam of gun metal, a snub.38 Smith. Some change, some business cards. Didn’t figure he’d leave the key to the safe just laying around.

Probably kept it with him all the time.

There were three other bedrooms on the second level. In the first one the bed and furniture were stockaded with sheets. When he opened the second door he hesitated on the threshold, stayed by a potent sense of trespass.

The room contained an ornate, white wicker bassinet, a cradle, a changing table, and a baby bed bundled with a gaily colored bumper and matching quilt and pillow. The furniture items and the shelves on the wall were piled with a Noah’s Ark of stuffed animals and dolls. A glider rocking chair and ottoman were positioned in the corner by the window. Next to the chair he noticed a basket full of children’s books. He could read the title of the top book, Baby Bug . A little boy and a little girl played with a rabbit on the cover.

Someone used this room. It was spotlessly maintained and the smell of freshly ironed cotton hugged the sunlight filtering through the fluffy curtains. Broker backed into the hall and slowly closed the door. He wondered if he had just stumbled into the dungeon where Lola LaPorte visited her emotions.

Okay. He reminded himself. It’s all too easy. They were tricky folks. But so was he.

The third bedroom adjoined LaPorte’s and was unvisited by the cleaning staff.

A bench and a set of weights were strewn around the unmade king-size bed and a stipple of suspicious stains stiffened the sheets. Candystripe Calvin Klein briefs and a pile of socks lay in a corner. The dresser drawers were askew and a silk T-shirt draped from one of them. There were a dozen suits cloaked in cellophane from a dry cleaner in the closet, and a dozen pairs of shoes lined up below them. A rainbow of expensive silk ties littered the door. He went in.

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 Picayune , an incomplete date, August; it looked like 1880 something.

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 it could make your loan problem go away.” She continued to gaze at the slowly tossing foliage. “We could call it a good faith down payment. Do we understand each other?”