J. Black - The Shop

“Why?”

“It’s just not like him. He lets things slide.”

“What else does he let slide? You?”

“Oh, I get away with stuff.”

“Are you sure you’re getting away with anything?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Children need guidance. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that? For your emotional well-being, you need someone to set the parameters every once in a while.”

“That’s fine for a child, but I’m seventeen.”

He said nothing.

“Can a child give you a blowjob that will set your hair on fire?”

All this acting out—he found it disturbing. “You’re a regular little potty-mouth. If my daughter said that to a stranger—”

“You’d what? Give her a spanking?”

“Take away her iPod, her iPhone, her television, her bed, her furniture, and make her stay in her room for a month.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad. What if she did it again?’”

“I’d flush her hamster down the toilet.”

“You wouldn’t do that!”

“You have a hamster?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not in a position to know, are you?”

Frank stopped on the oyster-shell path by the maintenance shed and looked back at them. “Do you want to go with me in the golf cart?” he asked Landry.

“I’d rather walk.”

“Okay.” He sounded perturbed, but by the time he took off in the golf cart, his lips were moving and he was once again practicing his speech for Cardamone.

“Is your mother here?” Landry asked Riley. “Grace?”

“She’s either shopping or she went to Tallahassee.”

“Tallahassee?”

“To her church. She spends half her time there.”

“You know when she’ll be back?”

“If she’s shopping, maybe late this afternoon. There’s not a whole hell of a lot to shop for around here. Now it’s Kohl’s instead of Bergdorf’s. She used to fly to Atlanta to do her shopping, when we had the jet. That’s all over now. This place is so lame . I was born here, and I can’t wait to get voted off this island, you know what I mean? What a back water. There is nothing to do! And now you got rid of Mr. Clean.”

“Mr. Clean?”

“The guy you pushed into the water. I used to think he was hot.”

“He didn’t look so hot to me.”

She giggled. “That was funny, the way he sputtered like a wet cat! He was, like, so surprised! He told me he has a really big dick, but we didn’t get that far.”

Again with the provocative statements. He knew she did it just for its shock value.

“So your family’s cutting back?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe. Mommy didn’t even want the veep to come here the last time, thought it was too ostentatious . That’s her favorite word now. She’s afraid the peasants’ll storm the castle or something.” She told him about the “ratty old oriental carpets” and the fact that her mother kept her saddles and bridles in her bedroom, which was a huge mess and smelled of dirt and horse hide. The way they used things over and over, all the equipment breaking down. The heater for the pool. The air-conditioning in the octagon house. “Which is, by the way, falling apart! It looks good from the outside, but it smells. Those old walls, I bet there’s mold. That’s where we keep the senator .”

“The senator?”

“My grandfather. Dad calls him the senator. As if he’s still the senator. He’s got round-the-clock nursing care. Dementia.”

Landry nodded. His mother-in-law suffered from dementia. It was a terrible disease.

“But he gets around. He’s always in the hothouse playing with his roses—thinks he’s gardening, but he’s actually making them worse, touching them so much. He used to raise champion roses.”

Landry ticked the family off on his fingers. “Your mom, your dad, the senator, and you. Have I got that right?”

“My cousin Zoe lived here until last night.”

“Oh?”

“We got in a fight and she moved out. She’s a pain in the ass, but in another way, she’s really amusing. God, was she upset when I threw her out.”

“You threw her out?”

“Uh-huh. She said bad things about my boyfriend.”

“You have a boyfriend?”

Riley told him about her boyfriend, Luke. He’d worked for the tree and lawn service that kept the grounds neat. She told Landry that she and Luke had been in love and were planning to run away together, like Romeo and Juliet. But then he died.

“How’d he die?”

“In a shoot-out with the police.” She told him the story, portraying Luke as an outlaw. “He wasn’t going to let anyone take him—he wasn’t going to go without a fight.”

Landry thought that kind of logic was the ultimate in stupidity. “Why did he take that woman hostage?”

Riley didn’t have an answer to that—it didn’t fit with Luke’s heroic image. She had no idea why Luke Perdue would take a woman hostage in a motel. None at all. So she glossed over it with proof that he loved her, then went back to blaming Zoe for saying bad things about him.

“What did she say?”

“She said he was sneaking around spying on the vice president. She was lying.”

Landry thought this was an interesting side trip. He didn’t know if it had any bearing on his own investigation. He’d have to ask Franklin about it. It was an interesting coincidence that Luke Perdue got himself killed in a motel holding a woman hostage.

Was this the hostage Special Agent Eric Salter shot? Eric Salter, the FBI agent he was currently impersonating.

Eric Salter had been consumed with guilt because his shot had taken out both the bad guy and the female hostage. Someone—Cardamone, probably—blackmailed Salter into doing jobs for him. He had been one of the two men keeping track of Franklin Haddox.

Small world.

The dogs accompanied them to the octagon house. They’d run ahead, then circle back. Always watching Landry and Riley to gauge their reactions. Outside the octagon house, Riley turned into a tour director. She gave Landry a canned speech she must have repeated a hundred times. There were two stories, a basement, and a cupola, she said. The low hill it sat on was man-made, she said. You could see the whole island from the cupola, she said.

Close up, the octagon house looked smaller than he’d expected. Riley told him the island had been built almost from scratch in the twenties—the reason it could accommodate a basement and the tunnels in an area where you normally wouldn’t find basements or tunnels. The tunnel, she said, was considered a “structural marvel”—those were the words she used—and had been designed in such a way that it would not flood during storms. She also told him her grandfather was sensitive to sunlight, so he had a room in the basement. Stairs from the outside led down to the basement. Landry noted that the steps had once been wide but were now narrow, to make room for the wheelchair ramp running alongside.

They went up the steps into the house, the dogs’ toenails clicking on the hardwood floor. The ankle-biters had given up trying to penetrate Landry’s desert boots.

The floor was empty of furniture. The room partitions had been taken out, except for what appeared to be a kitchen and a bathroom by the stairwell along the far wall. The windows let in plenty of sunlight. You would be able to see someone coming from all eight windows.

“What do you use this place for?” Landry asked.

“Mostly press conferences, when the veep is here. We rent this floor out for parties and weddings. We don’t really need the money, but Mommy thinks the place should be used. Once a month, some wildlife group meets here. Upstairs is storage.”