Lanyon, Josh - Adrien English 04 - Death of a Pirate King (24 page)

She picked up the box of tissues and blew her nose. “I’m
supposed to ask you if you’ll be at the house for dinner tonight,” she said in
subdued tones.

I’d totally forgotten, of course, but I said, “Yeah, I’m just
going upstairs to change. I’ll see you over there?”

She nodded and blew her nose again.

I left her mopping up, went upstairs, showered, and changed
-- and left a message on the snooty-sounding answering machine at Hitchcock and
Gracen.

* * * * *

“Christmas in London!” Lisa announced.

“Whatever you’d like, my dear,” Bill Dauten replied
immediately, patting her hand. I had the impression he’d have said the exact
same thing if she’d cried,
Off with their
heads!

The rest of us were noticeably silent. Even Emma wore a
little frown. Maybe she feared Santa wouldn’t be able to locate her across the
sea.

“London is lovely for the holidays,” Lisa insisted into that
noncommittal silence. “Adrien and I spent the holidays there when he was ten. Do
you remember, Adrien?”

“Not really,” I said.

She looked a little hurt.

Someone -- possibly even Dauten -- distracted her with talk
of the opera season, and the rest of us exchanged looks of silent relief.

Despite my complaints, I didn’t really mind the occasional
family get-togethers at the Dautens. But I was distracted that evening with my
thoughts of murders old and new. I was reminded of a quote by Camus: …
habit starts at the second crime. At the
first one, something is ending
.

I was thinking about this, thinking about the likelihood of
truth in it as regarded the death of Porter Jones, while we sat around chatting
after dinner -- and listened to Emma demonstrate the value of her much-hated
piano lessons. She’d actually loved the piano before she started the lessons,
which was probably a lesson in itself.

Bill skimmed the paper while Lauren and Natalie were in a
huddle in the kitchen, apparently reviewing notes on their love lives, when
Lisa alighted on the sofa next to me.

“Darling, are you feeling quite all right? You’re
so
pale.”

Now how the hell could she say that when I’d been out in the
sun all day Sunday? My nose was pink. I made some answer.

“Don’t growl, Adrien.” She gave me a disapproving look. “I
think you should know I’ve had a long talk with Dr. Cardigan.”

“You’ve had
wha
t
?” I was too shocked to lower my
voice. This was the very reason I’d changed doctors a few years ago. Doctor
Reid had been too much the old family friend. He’d brought me into the world,
ushered my father out, and was Lisa’s sometime escort to a lot of society
functions.

She ignored my astonished outrage. “Adrien, you must have
that surgery. Why are you shilly-shallying? Do you realize -- do you
want
to die?”

What the hell was the deal? Was she blackmailing these
people?

“Of course I don’t want to --” I interrupted myself. “This
has got to stop, Lisa. You talked to my cardiologist?” I couldn’t seem to get
past that. Even the ‘shilly-shallying’ barely registered. “Do you know how
unethical that is?”

She simply gazed at me with those wide blue eyes. “I’m your
mother. There is no such thing as unethical behavior on a mother’s part.”

The scary thing was, she believed that. No, the scary thing
was that in the parallel universe that she inhabited, everyone else seemed to
believe it too.

“I didn’t mean you, I meant my cardiologist.” For once I
didn’t bother to hide my anger with her. “Look, Lisa, when the time is right,
I’ll have the surgery.”

“That time is
now
.”

“Really?” I glanced around the room where everyone was
carefully paying no attention to us. “Well, I guess it will make a change from
charades.”

“Please be serious.” That was her no-nonsense face and her
no-nonsense voice. “Chronic MR complicated by A-fib is very serious, much more
serious than they realized when you were growing up.
Thirty percent
of people who have A-fib wind up with CVAs.”

Jesus. Lisa was speaking in acronyms. She must be terrified.
She must have actually read up on the subject. I was touched. And ready to
strangle her.

“And seventy percent don’t.”

“You can’t take that chance. You don’t have the right.”

“
I
don’t have the
righ
t
?”

She said fiercely, “No, you don’t. Does Guy know --?”

“That’s it,” I said, and I stood up. “I’m not going to
discuss this with you or anyone else. And what goes on between Guy and me is
nobody’s damn business.” I turned to the kitchen. Natalie and Lauren were
gaping at me.

“I didn’t say a word!” Natalie protested at whatever she read
in my expression.

I didn’t know if that was true or not, but the idea that my
private life was being openly discussed -- that Lisa was -- had the gall --
that she was daring to -- and that my lawyer, my doctor, my
lover
for all I knew --

I could barely formulate the thoughts, let alone the
sentences.

“Thanks for dinner,” I said. “What I can’t thank you for is
interfering in my private life. I don’t think I can even pretend to be polite
right now, so I’m going.”

“Adrien!” She looked
wounded
.

“Good night,” I said, and the Dautens responded in various
tones of discomfort as I walked out of the room.

* * * * *

I don’t remember the drive back to Pasadena, but when I
pulled up behind the bookstore, Guy’s car was parked outside -- and for a
moment I considered driving away.

But in the end I turned off the engine, got out and unlocked
the door to the bookstore, and went upstairs.

Guy was seated at the table in the kitchen drinking a beer.
His long silver hair spilled over his shoulders, glinting in the overhead
light. He wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a pirate skull and crossbones.
His eyes looked very green as they met mine.

“Can we talk?”

I nodded. Took the chair across from him. I felt very tired.
Anger is exhausting, and I was out of practice.

“I want to explain about Peter.”

I didn’t bother telling him that I’d made a couple of phone
calls and learned that he’d spoken favorably at Verlane’s parole hearing. I
knew he had done what he believed was the right thing. Talking to me first,
hearing my feelings on the subject, wouldn’t have changed his course of action.

I said, “I think I pretty much get it. You still have
feelings for him.”

“I do, yes. But they don’t have anything to do with what I
feel for you. I love you. I would like us to be together. Really together.”

I nodded. “What about Peter?”

“Peter is a friend. He needs my help right now. But if you
ask me to choose between the two of you, then I choose you.”

“I’m not asking you to choose.”

“Then what?”

I shook my head.

His silver brows kitted. “I don’t understand what’s going on
with you.”

“I don’t either,” I admitted. “I don’t feel capable of making
a commitment.”

He thought it over. “Now or ever?”

“I…don’t know.”

“I see.” I could feel him watching me. I stared at the knobs
on the oven and wondered why the front left always stuck a little. “I suppose we
could continue as we have been.”

I sighed. “Yeah. I suppose so.”

“Your enthusiasm is overwhelming.”

“I’m sorry, Guy. I just --”

“Here’s the thing about you, Adrien,” he said. “You keep the
walls up. I don’t know if it’s because of what’s-his-name -- your college
boyfriend. Mel? Or if it’s because of that asshole Riordan.”

“D’you mind?” I said automatically.

He eyed me for a moment. Then he said evenly, “Or maybe
you’ve always been like this. But there’s this little distance between you and
everyone else. And there’s no bridging it. Because I’ve been trying for two
years.”

“Sure,” I said, starting -- against my best intentions -- to
get angry all over again. “But for the first nine months you were sleeping with
other people, partly for religious reasons and partly because -- and I quote --
‘monogamy is not a realistic expectation of a healthy adult male.’”

“And I told you that if you would be willing to make a
commitment, so would I. But you’re not willing, are you?”

“Not on your timetable.” I swallowed hard. “Let me ask you
something. Did you have sex with Peter?”

His face went bleak.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“That has nothing to do with us.”

“Really?”

“Really. It was comfort and affection, that’s all. Peter has
lost everything and everyone.”

I said, “I let Jake Riordan fuck me last night. Do you think
that has anything to do with us?”

He stared at me. He finally managed to say, “Does it?”

“To me it feels like it does.”

“Call me when you’re sure,” he said.

Chapter Twenty

“You know, they already arrested that caterer,” Ally informed
me, raising her head from the lounge chair beside the pool. She was clearly in
mourning: a one-piece black swimsuit and Jackie O. sunglasses. “It was all a
mistake. She was trying to kill Paul. Too bad she got it wrong.”

Well, that seemed like the understatement of the year,
although I’d already deduced Ally hadn’t been much tempted to throw herself on
Porter’s funeral pyre.

“I heard that,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you one or two
questions.”

She settled her head back on the blue cushion. The clouds
overhead were reflected in her giant black lenses. “That’s what you said the
last time.”

“Was Porter working on a book when he died?”

“A
boo
k
?” Her tone implied that this was some
avant-garde art form I was accusing her dead husband of experimenting with.

“Like his memoirs. Or an autobiography.”

She pushed up on one elbow and pulled her sunglasses off.
“Oh. Yeah,” she said slowly. “He was working on that again.”

“Do you know what happened to the manuscript? Is it with his
papers?”

She drew her brows together. “No. I’ve been through all his
stuff.”

That I didn’t doubt.

“Do you know if he’d finished it?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know if he had a publisher or an editor or a
cowriter? Maybe a literary agent?”

“I don’t
know
,”
Ally said and she sounded a little peevish now. “I think he showed it to
someone. I mean, he was always trying to show it to people.”

“But he had definitely resumed work on his memoirs?”

She replaced her sunglasses and lay flat again. “I guess so.
I think he had some idea of finishing it before…The End.” She said it casually,
like people referred to the final credits of a movie. “I don’t know if he’d
bother to finish it, though, because who would want to read
tha
t
?”

I asked, “Did Porter ever talk to you about the accident
aboard the
Sea Gyps
y
?”

“The what?” she murmured.

“The
Sea Gypsy
. It
was a yacht belonging to a friend of Porter’s named Langley Hawthorne. Langley
drowned one night. Did Porter ever talk about that?”

She smothered a huge yawn. “I never listened to Porter when
he started yakking about the old days. Just thinking about it makes me tired.”

* * * * *

I’d faithfully phoned Jake before my visits to Marla and
Ally. Each time I’d ended up leaving a message, and I hadn’t heard back from
him. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to him since Wednesday night when I’d told him
good-bye and locked the bookstore door after him.

Not that I was surprised at his silence. LAPD had gone
forward with the arrest of Nina Hawthorne, and I figured Lieutenant Riordan had
his hands full with the media -- and with Hawthorne’s lawyers who were claiming
everything from harassment of a celebrity to police brutality.

It would have been nice to bounce some of my airier ideas off
that hard head of his, but I realized that was unrealistic on my part. Jake’s
ego was smarting at my unwillingness to resume our old friendship, and that was
pretty much what I had expected. If we could have really been platonic friends,
then maybe I’d have made an effort but I knew Jake wasn’t going to respect the
boundaries of --

Who was I kidding? I had no idea whether Jake was capable of
maintaining a platonic friendship or not. And I didn’t care. Because the bottom
line -- and no pun intended -- was that
I
couldn’t handle a platonic friendship with him. It was just too damn painful.

Maybe I could have handled it when I believed he was doing
everything possible to have a real marriage with Kate Keegan, but the fact that
he had fallen back into his old patterns, that he was seeing Paul Kane on what
appeared to be a fairly active basis, that he wanted to have his cake and eat
it too, made it impossible for me.

Not to mention the fact that once Jake figured out the
direction my sleuthing was taking me, my popularity with him was once again
going to nose-dive. Apparently he’d forgotten just how truly annoying he’d
found me in the past.

All the same, I called him to tell him I was going to visit
Al January again, and as luck would have it, this time he picked up.

“Hey,” he said neutrally.

“Hey,” I returned -- because sparkling repartee is my middle
name.

He said, “I meant to call you earlier.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’ve made your arrest. I’m just
following up on a couple of things.”

“That’s not why I wanted to call you. About the other night
--”

“There’s nothing to say, Jake.”

A little shortly he said, “You don’t mind if I say it anyway,
do you?”

Equally short, I said, “Go ahead.”

But he said, after a pause, “Another time. What did you
need?”