Spiral (23 page)

”Anytime you’re ready.”

I was hoping neither of them had been in the service, because drills with bayonets or even riot batons would have made two-on-one pretty untenable for me. But I was lucky: They’d watched more baseball games than training films.

Luke dropped his hands to the tapered part of the cue and took the first swing, a right-handed batter going level for a line drive. I got the towel stretched between my hands and up, the wet cloth absorbing most of the momentum at the sweet spot of the cue, but drawing Luke off balance with its give. Then I dropped my left elbow quickly, catching the thick end of the cue under my left armpit. I yanked before Luke did, and his hands slipped off the tapered end as he stumbled backward.

Hack came forward like a man intent on splitting a chunk of wood with a maul. While his arms were still rising on the upswing, I drove the tapered end of Luke’s cue into Hack’s belly until I thought it touched his spine.

He went down, first coughing, then vomiting. Luke flexed his arms and clenched his fists, dancing around like he wanted me to come after him in a ”fair” fight.

Holding the cue like a quarterstaff, I took two steps toward him, and he dropped back three. I advanced one more, he retreated three more.

I said, ”Appears we’ve reached an understanding.” I looked over to the bar. ”Ms. Moran, thanks for your help.”

As I moved to the door, the jukebox was signing off on the satin-sheets tune, making Hack a little more audible as be waited for his internal organs to realign themselves.

I leaned the cue upright against the wall and spoke into the relative quiet. ”Never cared much for country and western.”

”Me, neither,” said Donna Moran, though I didn’t see her smiling about it.

There was something else I didn’t see, at least not until I’d gotten back in the Cavalier and went to make a turn.

”You do know, Mr. Cuddy, that I am not here twenty-four hours a day to care for you?”

”Why I called ahead to be sure, Doctor.”

”We both know you did not.” The nice Haitian woman with the French/Creole accent smiled more wisely than tiredly. ”Now, hold still while I see how many sutures are... ugh. What strenuous thing did you do that tore open so many of these?”

”Pool.”

”Then the dressings would be wet, not the sutures torn.”

”It wasn’t a swimming pool, Doctor. I was playing pool.” She frowned. ”And you did this pushing a little ball with a stick?”

”My opponents didn’t like the way I kept score.”

The doctor began threading a needle. ”Perhaps if you watch what I am about to do, you will next time choose a different game.”

”I’ve already made that decision, thanks.”

The tired smile reappeared, joined by the concentration a professional brings to bear on what must be a tiresome task.

I drove back to my hotel to drop off the bloodied jacket. Carrying it folded over my arm as I crossed the lobby, my clerk friend Damon called out from the desk.

”Mr. Cuddy, I have something for you.”

When I walked over to him, he caught a better look at my jacket. ”Oh, God! You’re hurt again?”

”I’m fine, Damon. What’ve you got?”

He handed me a simple number-10 business envelope, sealed but with no markings other than ”Cuddy, J.” scribbled on the back.

”Who left this?”

”I don’t know,” said Damon, still eyeing my stained sleeve. ”I was registering a guest, and that just kind of plopped on the counter. A man said, ‘For John Cuddy,’ so I wrote your name on it.”

”You wrote?”

Damon nodded as his phone began to ring.

I said, ”What did the man look like?”

”Sorry, never looked up from helping the guest.”

Damon lifted his receiver, and I used a nearby letter opener to slit the envelope. A single sheet of copy paper came out, creased in threes.

When I unfolded it, there were differently sized letters cut from newspaper headlines or magazine advertisements, pasted on the page like an old-fashioned ransom note. Only the message was a little different:

AsK The bAnD

abOuT SuNDy MoRAn

Hanging up his phone, Damon said, ”Is everything all right, Mr. Cuddy?”

”I doubt it.”

Up in my room, the phone-message dome was blinking. When I dialed for voice mail, the electronic announcer said I had one new call, which turned out to be Duy Tranh, returning mine about the hospital bill and specifying curtly when he’d be available for me to reach him. I felt that tingling in the back of my head again, but what was causing it just wouldn’t come to mind. Then again, the doctor had told me that my memories might fade in and out, so I pressed the buttons for Tranh’s number.

”Hello?”

”Mr. Tranh, John Cuddy.”

”You have been remiss in—”

”That hospital bill. You got called by the credit card company about a charge on the one you’d given me, right?”

No reply.

I said, ”Thanks for your concern. I’d like to see the Colonel sometime soon.”

”One hour,” said Tranh, hanging up on me before I could disagree with him.

Nicolas Helides was sitting in the stern of the big sailboat moored behind his house. A gangplank went from its deck to the dock, probably to allow him to get on and off using the aluminum brace. He faced toward the Intracoastal and away from the glass wall to the internal portion of the pool. Where Duy Tranh had found his granddaughter.

As I reached the bottom of the gangplank, I could see the Skipper was alone, a blanket over his legs, the brace leaning against a seat cushion in the cockpit. A white motor yacht at least a hundred feet long cruised by slowly, with—and I had to look twice—a helicopter on its uppermost deck.

I
thought Helides was focused only on the passing yacht before he said, ”Lieutenant, that’s fifteen million of materiel going by, not counting the whirlybird.”

I stopped. ”You recognize my footsteps?”

The good hand rose from his lap, a portable phone in it. ”Umberto called me from the gate.” A change of tone as the hand came down again, the wake from the yacht rocking his sailboat like a child’s cradle. ”I understand from Duy that you had some sort of... medical problem.” I climbed the gangplank. ”You might want to hear about the cause of it.”

He looked at my bandaged arm as I sat in the cockpit across from him. ”Please.”

I summarized my barhopping with Mitch Eisen, being jumped by Ford Walton outside the hotel, and my visit to the Homicide Unit after the hospital stay.

The Skipper said, ”And what have you found out about this... prostitute?”

I described my trip to the trailer park and roadhouse. Helides actually smiled. The half of his mouth that the stroke didn’t prevent from smiling. ”A bar brawl. Like the old days, eh?”

I thought back to Saigon, the dozens of times I watched my MPs—our MPs—crawl on their hands and knees into bars. Inside, combat troops from the bush on two-day passes did their best to drink a month’s worth of booze and forget what they’d just been through and would be going through again. Forget by starting a free-for-all fistfight with whomever supposedly slighted them, any opponents having roughly the same attitudes.

The MPs would crawl into the bars because the safest way to break up a brawl was to sneak up below the revelers’ line of sight and whack them behind the knees with a nightstick, causing the muscles back there to spasm so badly that nobody could get to their feet for fifteen minutes, by which time the desire—the raw
need
—to swing on somebody would have—

”Lieutenant?”

The concussion, or just me since Nancy? ”Sorry, sir.” The Skipper searched my eyes. ”I really appreciate what you’re trying to do for me.”

”Glad to be here, Colonel.”

And I knew that I was. At least by comparison.

He looked back at the Intracoastal, a parade of small fishing boats going by now. ”You remember my penchant for sailing?”

”Yes, sir.”

”This is a forty-eight-foot sloop, custom-built for me but modeled after one of Phil Rhodes’s Carinas. Cassie and I used to take this fine craft out into the ocean and sail her two-handed to Bimini. We’d hire a guide there, fish the reefs and the flats, then sail back. Idyllic.”

I waited.

”Now, Cassie doesn’t care much for sailing anymore. And while Duy is perfectly competent as crew for the rigging and manning of sheets, it has to be a pretty calm day for me to be able to take the helm for more than an hour at a time. And a ‘pretty calm’ day rather defeats the purpose of going out under sail in the first place.”

I waited some more.

Nicolas Helides drew in a deep, deep breath, then let it out slowly, the ruined side of his face making his right upper lip flutter a bit. ”Lieutenant, what possible connection could exist between Veronica’s death and the murder of this prostitute?”

I didn’t mention the note I’d gotten at the hotel. ”I’m going to be spending the rest of today trying to find out, sir.” A nod. ”Could you also check in with Duy? I’m not sure we’ve covered everything he needed to speak with you about.”

Tranh was in his suite, sitting at the computer but turned toward the door as I opened it following his ”Come.”

Dressed in a burgundy, short-sleeved safari shirt and contrasting khaki pants, his solemn eyes and sharp features walked me into the living room area. As I sat in the single armchair, my own eyes went up to his wall of knives. Most were more ornate than the one Ford Walton had tried to use on me, and I didn’t see any empty spaces.

Tranh stayed seated, but swiveled more to face me squarely. ”Mr. Cuddy, you and I really must reach an understanding.”

I thought back to what I’d said to Luke as he backed off at the roadhouse that morning. Still a form of brawling with Tranh, just more civilized.

”Mr. Tranh, I think we understand each other just fine. You don’t like me, and I don’t like you.”

A pause, his features softening slightly. ”And yet, we are both devoted to the Colonel. Does that not strike you as... odd?”

”Odd because we’re so different?”

”From each other, or from his real sons?”

Tranh’s insight did strike a chord in me, but I said, ”Justo Vega is devoted to him, too. Just a matter of individual choice.”

”Or character, perhaps?”

”Perhaps.” I wanted off the topic. ”Colonel Helides asked me to check in with you.”

A slight smile. ”Which is the only reason you would have?”

”Probably.”

”Very well, Mr. Cuddy. If we cannot be friends, let us at least be forthcoming.” He glanced down at my bandaged arm. ”What caused you to be hospitalized this morning?”

”Last night, actually.”

”Last night,” very evenly.

”I’ve already told the Colonel outside.”

Tranh frowned. ”I could have been there, as I was in the library on your first visit here. You know he would have permitted it.”

”I know the Colonel had a phone in his lap just now. He could have called you to join us, but he didn’t.”

Tranh watched me, but something was moving behind his eyes. Finally he said, ”Your point?”

”Think about it, Mr. Tranh. It’ll come to you.”

Closing the door to his suite, I caught a flash of motion at the end of the corridor where it intersected with a crossing one. This time I knew to use a name. ”David, wait. Please.” Again, I didn’t hear footsteps going away or coming back, but his shaggy head peered around the corner timidly, like a deer ready to bound away at the slightest threatening movement.

I said, ”Can I talk with you, just for a minute?”

Helides moved his lips before speaking. ”It is time for me... to eat, John.”

I took the remembering of my name as an encouraging sign. ”I’m a little hungry, too, and I just need the answers to a few questions. Please, David?”

The hollowed eyes looked down and then around and behind him. ”In the kitchen.”

”This time of day here... is not so bad.”

”Why?”

”No one else eats now, so all is... quiet. Orderly.”

In the same navy-blue sweatshirt and pants I’d seen him wearing in bed, David Helides picked black shavings— olives, I thought—from his pizza. He’d nuked a slice for each of us, every step of the process from refrigerator to plate to microwave executed excruciatingly slowly. To help, I’d poured us both glasses of Coke over ice, and now we sat at the center island of a room laid out exactly like the kitchen in his brother’s house.

Helides had gotten most of the shavings off his slice of pizza. ”Duy Tranh knows I do not like olives, but he... gets them anyway.”

”They’re not my favorite, either.”

Helides looked from his meal to my bandage. ”Your... arm.”

A potential ”disruption” for him. ”Just a little cut.

Nothing to worry about.”

A nod, but wary.

”David, would it be easier for you to eat first, or to eat as I ask my questions?”

”I do not know.” He looked up now, almost smiled. ”I do not usually eat with anyone... who talks with me.”