Authors: Elizabeth Adler
“Remember, that dog saved your life,” he reminded her.
She nodded. She would never forget. But that was another story. “You know how much I love him.” She sipped her champagne, looking at him over the rim of her glass. “So, what went wrong, Harry? I know you are in pain, I know you’re at a crisis in your career. Perhaps even with me? I just want to help you work it out.”
Harry took a deep breath, thinking of the thousands of miles between him and Evening Lake and the dead girl with her throat cut and the pearls from her broken necklace littering the bloodstained ground like white spring flowers pushing their way through the dead earth.
“I didn’t really know the young woman,” he said. “Not well, that is. Only for a few days. But she was so alive, Mal. Her name was Jemima. Puddleduck, of course,” he added, remembering that night at Ruby’s. “I guess in a way, she reminded me of you, or at least of the way you must have been before you became the famous TV investigator. Young, curious, nosy in fact, getting into situations, places you shouldn’t.”
“That was me,” Mal agreed.
“She came to me because she knew the young drug runner, Divon, was involved with the woman at Evening Lake. He was working with her, getting and selling hard stuff. He was at high school with Jemima, she said she would swear in court that he would never kill. And I believe her.”
“So then he—Divon—did not kill Jemima?”
“He couldn’t have, he was already in jail. But he was at the Havnel woman’s house at the lake the night it burned. I didn’t tell you before, but she’d also been stabbed. A kitchen knife in her right eye. We assume she was running from whomever it was wanted to kill her, right before the house went up in flames. The odd thing is, though, the daughter, who told us the whole story of how the inferno happened and who was with her mother at the time, never mentioned a kitchen knife.”
“She didn’t see a knife in her mother’s eye?”
“All the daughter said was she saw her mother go up in flames after spraying her hair too lavishly with lacquer then lighting a cigarette.” Harry shrugged. “It’s been known to happen. The girl ran when the house caught fire, I saw her fling herself in the lake to stop her hair burning…”
“When you rescued her,” Mal said.
Harry looked at her. “The flaming hair was a wig.”
Their eyes linked across the tiny table, their knees touched beneath it. Mal clasped Harry’s hand in hers. “Now I have something to tell you,” she said. “The woman’s name was not Lacey Havnel. That woman died ten years ago.”
Harry said, “I believe Rossetti found that out.”
“What none of us has found out though, is who, exactly, is the young woman who calls herself Lacey Havnel’s daughter?”
“I left that to Rossetti,” Harry said, weary now it was all being brought back to him.
“Leave it to me, too,” Mal said. “I’m here to help you.”
“And I’m here because I love you,” Harry said.
She gave him a long look and waved a hand to the waiter for the bill.
“I’m taking you home to bed,” she said, sliding her knees out from under the table and getting to her feet. “I just want to love you, Harry Jordan.”
* * *
In the too-small bed, France’s famous “lit matrimonial,” never meant for sturdy U.S. citizens, Mal lay on top of Harry. Both were naked.
“We fit,” she whispered, “like a pair of old gloves.”
“Socks,” Harry corrected her.
Mal raised her head from his chest and met his gaze. “Gloves. On hands. Sort of like that.”
“Or, socks. On feet.”
“There’s two feet and two socks,” she insisted. “One glove, one hand, if you get my meaning.”
“Jeez,” Harry groaned. “Why are we talking in euphemisms? My cock is in you and it fits perfectly. At least it did a few moments ago before we got into semantics, and I lost…”
“Lost your ‘glow,’” Mal said, giving Harry’s bum a pinch that made him yelp in pain but did nothing for his erection.
“It’s my turn to say ‘Jeez,’” she told him indignantly. “I saved myself for you, here, in Paris.” She remembered the cute French guy at Deux Magots and added for good measure, “All alone.”
Harry raised his head from the pillow, looking over her shoulder at the naked length of her. “You are beautiful,” he murmured.
“I know,” she said. “I’m beautiful when I’m here, like this, with you. I’m beautiful when you have your arms around me. When you taste me and make me cry out in either agony or joy, I’m never quite sure which, and when you are inside me and I’m empowered by that great surge I feel as you come, and I find myself crying out again, and again, and I want more.”
She felt Harry’s chest moving and glanced indignantly at him. He was laughing. “What’s so friggin’ funny about that?” she snapped.
“You are insatiable,” Harry said, running his hand the length of her back, along the indent before the curve of her behind, which reminded him, he was forced to say out loud, of twin melons.
“Cavaillons? Or watermelons?” Mal asked.
“One of each,” he replied. So she hit him.
“What about the tits?” She pushed him away, clasping her hands under the twin rounds whose nipples now stood out like laser pointers.
Harry groaned. “Please, please—they are breasts,” he said. “And they are beautiful. And you are beautiful, even first thing in the morning with bed-hair and faded perfume and the scent of last night’s sex on you.”
“You’ve forgotten morning breath,” she reminded him.
“I think I’d rather forget that,” he admitted.
Mal sighed. “I always knew you were not a true romantic.”
Harry rolled over. He pulled her hair back with one hand and gazed at her un-madeup face, still rosy with recent lovemaking, eyes still brilliant with excitement. “Oh, yes, I am a romantic,” he said. “And regardless of what might happen, don’t you ever forget it.”
Mal stared at him, surprised. What could he mean—what might happen?
42
Rossetti obtained the details of the death of the real Lacey Havnel ten years ago in Miami, primarily through social security, which allowed access not only to her identity but to her bank account, both of which had been taken over by the woman they now believed was Carrie Murphy, aged fifty-two, originally from Gainesville, Florida. The real Lacey Havnel had never been married, had no children, and had died in a hit-and-run in the parking lot of the bar where she worked as a waitress. It was not known whether Carrie Murphy, the woman who had stolen her identity, the “new” Lacey Havnel, had any children, though it was clear that prior to becoming Lacey, she’d had three husbands, all of whom “died on me” as she was quoted as saying at an inquest of the third. The first husband’s saw had slipped when he was cutting wood in the garden; the second suffered a heart attack, though there had been no autopsy; and the third had simply disappeared at sea. “Out fishing,” Lacey had told the court.
Then Rossetti read the rest of the text:
Our Drug Enforcement Department had Murphy (Havnel) under surveillance in Miami for some months before she left the area. We had been given information to the effect that she was expediting the shipment of cocaine and possibly heroin out of Mexico, where she went frequently “on vacation.” Efforts were made to locate her, the thinking being that she had been “eliminated.” She was a risk to those higher up in the drug cartel. No further activity was registered with those with whom she had had previous contact, though there was some evidence that she might have been working with a partner.
Rossetti sat back in his chair, taking in what he had just read. The woman was a drug runner on a high level. She had gone to Evening Lake to hide from whomever was after her, a prominent Mexican cartel, he suspected, and they were probably after her in the first place because she had either cheated on them, stolen the money, or the drugs, or both. Money, drugs, and sex were the factors in most crimes. Lacey Havnel, aka Carrie Murphy, qualified on two of those counts.
So, where did that leave Bea Havnel? Of whose existence there was no mention? The lovely, gentle, so blondly innocent “daughter”? Or accomplice.
Troubled, Rossetti needed to think. He called the dog, clipped on the leash, and went out for a walk. His footsteps took him, as they always did when he was troubled, to Ruby’s Diner, where Squeeze was greeted as a long-lost comrade, though in fact he’d been there just the other night with Harry.
“Sorry about your young friend,” Rossetti said when Doris came over with a biscuit for the dog and a Diet Coke for him.
Doris took out her iPad, ready for his order. “She was my niece,” she said shortly, and Rossetti caught the glitter of unshed tears. “Innocence comes in many forms,” Doris added, “and my Jemima was a true innocent. Which is why she was killed. She never saw the danger, the truth, until it was too late.”
Remembering what Harry had said, Rossetti asked, “You think it was somebody she knew?”
“Nobody who really knew Jemima would have done that,” Doris replied. “Nobody that knew her well, knew what a lovely girl she was. Sometimes I think ‘trust’ is a bad thing, these days,” she added. “And Jemima was too trusting.”
Rossetti thought she was probably right.
He lifted his cuff and checked his Rolex Oyster Perpetual, for once getting no pleasure from the sight of it adorning his wrist. Then he thought fuck it, it didn’t matter what the time was in Paris, he needed to speak to Harry. He got up, went outside with the dog, got out his phone, and speed-dialed Harry’s. It was Mal who answered, though.
“Why are you calling him?” she asked in a stern whisper. “The poor man is sleeping. In fact that’s all he’s done since he got here. Except for a glass of champagne, that is. He fell into my bed with not even a bite to eat, nor … well … anything,” Mal added, making Rossetti smile. He didn’t believe her for a minute.
“Wake him up, Mal, this is urgent,” he said. Then realizing he was behaving like a rude cop added, “Please.”
There was a pause, then Mal said a reluctant okay.
Harry, though, sounded alert and not at all sleepy a second later when he got on the phone.
“So? How’s Paris?” Rossetti asked, because it was all he could think of for openers having just gotten a man out of his lover’s bed.
“Paris makes a better man out of me,” Harry replied, with what Rossetti thought, astonished, was his old carefree man-of-the-world aplomb. “At least it did until you called,” Harry added.
“I know you’re fearing the worst.” Rossetti wished he didn’t have to tell him, wished he had not called him, had left him there in his Paris dreamworld away from the reality of the woman stabbed in the eye then burned; away from Doris’s niece, Jemima, with her throat cut.
“I was in Ruby’s,” he said. “Squeeze got his usual bounty,” he added, to lighten things up a bit.
“Glad to hear it, and thanks, for Squeeze.” Harry glanced over his shoulder as, hearing the dog’s name, Mal groaned. “Best dog in the world,” he added, just to get at her. “Remember how he saved Mal’s life, that time.”
“How could I forget,” Rossetti replied, hearing Harry laugh. Mal had thrown a pillow at him.
“So? What’s up?” Harry sank back onto the bed, putting an arm round Mal’s shoulders. She flung a leg over and lay smoothly against him. It was almost too much to bear as well as talk sensibly on the telephone, but there was an urgency in Rossetti’s voice. Harry knew he was not calling simply to ask if he was having a good time in France.
Rossetti quickly brought him up to date.
“Interesting,” Harry said, alert now.
“I also spoke with the waitress, Doris,” Rossetti said. “Jemima was her niece. Remember?”
Harry remembered only too well. Jemima’s image floated suddenly in front of his closed eyes, her wild red hair, her pale eyes, her blood. “I know Doris,” he said.
“Well, Doris said something I thought interesting. She said, and I quote, ‘My Jemima was a true innocent. Which is why she was killed. She never saw the danger, the truth, until it was too late.’” Harry was silent. Rossetti cleared his throat. “And what that means to me, Harry, and I believe you will agree, is that Jemima knew whoever it was killed her.”
“Right,” Harry said. “I’ll be on the next flight out,” he added, consulting the watch which he had not taken off; even in bed he needed to know the time. “Expect me tomorrow. You are on the right track, Rossetti.”
He clicked off the phone and heard a groan from behind him. He turned and met Mal’s eyes.
“I knew it was too good to be true,” she said.
43
It was, Diz thought, a good idea to keep an eye on things. By which he meant through his binoculars. He’d seen some pretty strange stuff out at Evening Lake. Every now and again, for instance, he would spot old Len Doutzer rambling in his quick mountain-man stride, up the hillside opposite, shotgun slung over his shoulder and looking, Diz thought, very creepy. Sinister, in fact. He would make sure not to go to that side of the lake alone, not with a crazy guy like that around.
He saw his father quite a lot too, now he was back home, rowing around the lake looking lonely as hell, but hey, he’d brought it on himself. Currently, Diz was not a fan of his father. He did not know exactly what had happened, but Wally had hurt his mom and nobody should be able to do that. He wasn’t even sure his mom and dad were speaking. How could his father ever have gotten himself arrested in connection with the murder of nice Jemima Forester. And horrendous Lacey Havnel. How could those two women even be spoken of in the same breath? Young as he was, Diz recognized the Havnel woman was bad news, which made her daughter’s sweetness and simplicity even more astonishing.
With a mother like that you wouldn’t have thought Bea stood a chance, which was why it wasn’t a surprise when she was arrested along with his father. The police had soon dropped that, though, but now his mom was having nothing to do with her. Bea was forbidden from their house. Diz hoped Rose was doing the right thing. He thought maybe he should ask her about that.
He went down to the kitchen, where Rose stood over the ancient Aga stove that generated a load of heat in the winter as well as keeping its ovens and hot plates always on the go. It was Rose’s pride and joy and she claimed it had made a good cook of her. Perhaps it had.