The Hours of the Virgin (18 page)

“I know you're there, Ben. I can feel the cold coming off you even with my eyes closed. Thank you. Please return to your post.”

Ben's feet made no more noise going away than dust settling. The sliding door whooshed twice and shut with a click.

“Thank you, too, Jillian. I'm sure you're needed at the office.”

She looked up. “Not as much as I'm needed here.”

“This isn't legal business. I'd prefer it to be private.”

“I hope you know by now you can count on my discretion.”

“As my attorney you're entitled to all my secrets. As a woman you present complications. Please respect my feelings in this.”

She closed the laptop with a snap, rose, said her goodbyes in a crisp cool voice, and left.

Strangeways sighed. “What makes lawyers so damned territorial?”

“DNA.” I unbuttoned my coat. “Nice room. Who waters the philodendrons?”

“Someone comes in twice a week with a can and a spraygun. Damned nuisance, but Laurel thinks the oxygen the plants put out is good for me. Actually I think it has something to do with her name. The heat feels good on my legs.”

“No Laurel yet?”

“No.”

“How are the plants on nicotine?” I fished out the pack.

“They breathe carbon dioxide. One more poison shouldn't harm them.”

I committed arson and spiked the match in a pot. “No North yet either, I guess.”

“I thought detectives never guessed.”

“That's Sherlock Holmes. Are you going to give North that letter of recommendation?”

“Certainly. A man who is not as good as his word isn't good for much. He did do an excellent job with the library.”

“That's awfully New Wave of you, considering you suspect him of stamping the Dewey decimal system all over your wife's body.”

He colored under the tan. “I don't see a reason to be crude about it.”

“Sorry. A day that starts with a visit to the morgue never does much for my social skills.”

“I said before I've made my peace regarding the urges of a healthy young woman chained to a crippled husband nearly thrice her age. Not to extend the same understanding to the other man would be hypocritical in the extreme.”

“No argument.” I dropped ash on the floor. “Funny thing about blankets. Unless they're pretty thick they just make a gun look more obvious than it already is.”

“Bloody uncomfortable as well.” He pulled it out from under and laid it in my palm.

It was a sleek semiautomatic that could have been mistaken for a water gun, but not when you were holding it. The checked rubber grip was new and the metal had been reblued recently, unless it had spent the last sixty years in a vacuum. It was a Walther P38, the nine-millimeter parabellum. I figured out the catch on the fat magazine slung beneath the frame, inspected it and the chamber, sniffed the muzzle, and tipped sunlight down inside. It was clean except for a frost of dust in the striations. Nobody had fired it in a while. I handed it back.

“Pretty. First one I've seen outside of photographs. Your grandfather's?”

“My father's. Prize of war. He acquired it from a Home Guard who took it off a dead German flyer and carried it from Dunkirk through El Alamein, where he was invalided out and chose not to return to England. Shot himself with it in 'fifty-two, never found out why. Always hoped it was an affair of the heart. Resented him for years, of course. Still do, I suppose.” He reached over and laid it on the seat of the scooter.

“Were you planning to shoot North right away or talk first?”

“I hadn't decided. Thought I'd play it by ear.”

“No good. You've got to have a plan. Do it quick before you change your mind, and bury him back there in the woods. Ben and Vernon can take care of that. You'd have to cut them in anyway. They'd know he was here. You can rig it to look like breaking and entering, but that's tough to stage when you haven't had experience, and you'd probably go down for it in any case. The trespassing defense isn't what it used to be. What am I, corroboration?”

“Possibly. My accuser, perhaps. In case I developed cold feet when the time came to turn myself in. No doubt you're convinced I'm a prize ass.”

“A romantic. Same thing.” I flicked my cigarette again. The white ash did a jerky little dance on the terra-cotta. “I never bought the civilized act. A man who would fight for his life would fight for his wife.”

He smiled his water smile. “Not bad. A tad long for a bumper sticker.”

“Too short for a country song,” I said. “You weren't going to shoot him right away. First you'd find out if he stashed Mrs. Strangeways and if so where.”

“True. That much of an ass I'm not. How would you suggest I go about finding out?”

“Ask him.”

“I tried that. Do you suppose a gun would get me a different answer?”

“I've seen him under cross-examination. If a grand jury couldn't shake some truth out of him, I doubt artillery would. That might work on a computer expert. Not a killer.”

“She's dead, isn't she?” he said. “He killed her to cover up the affair.”

“The motive's thin. Twenty years ago he had a marriage to protect, but not now. If he was afraid of you he wouldn't have called. If he killed her he was throwing a muzzle on something worse than plain old adultery. Grand fraud, for instance.”

“So you do think he was in league with Boyette.”

“It's just a hypothesis. I still don't know why Boyette wanted me in, or who suckered me into calling on him if not him. As the DIA's resident authority on fifteenth-century manuscripts, he okayed the forgeries for purchase. Probably he gave advice during the process so the fakes would look good enough to pass at first glance. North might have done the actual faking.”

“He didn't strike me as any kind of artist.”

“Artists are obsolete. An eleven-year-old with a Mac can run up a copy of the Mona Lisa that would fool a layman. You said yourself North's a wizard with a keyboard.”

“A computer can't inlay letters with gold and semiprecious stone,” he said. “It can't duplicate ancient parchment and vellum.”

“Glitter-dust and Elmer's glue-all and poster paint. New parchment baked in an oven. Most people don't even know what vellum is. All they had to do was fool the eye. Boyette was the expert. The scam's as old as the original art. Technology's taken out most of the gruntwork.”

Strangeways lifted his glasses and removed the cheaters. His eyes looked bruised. “Then you believe he killed Boyette to wipe out his trail.”

“It'll work for a loaner until I get something better.”

“But what has any of this to do with my wife?”

“I'll answer that one when I find out what she was doing in the Tomcat the night Boyette dropped out of sight. And why she can't seem to keep these in her ears.” I held up the earring I'd brought.

He took it, slid his glasses down his nose, and examined the triangle on both sides. “I had them made for her on the occasion of our first anniversary,” he said. “The shape symbolizes solidity and love ever-renewing. Where did you find it?”

“In Harold Boyette's house this morning.”

He poked his glasses back up. “Ah. The link.”

“You don't seem surprised.”

“Nothing has surprised me since Little Rock. Do the police know about it?”

“No. They don't know about the other one either.”

“
Now
I'm surprised,” he said after a moment.

“She lost the other one when I elbowed her in the Tomcat. I didn't show it to you the other night because I wasn't sure what side you weighed in on. The Walther sold me.” I dropped what was left of my cigarette in a pot full of Spanish bayonet. “I'd like the earbob back. I'm hoping to return both of them with their owner.”

He put it in my hand. “Laurel isn't usually so careless.”

“The first time was carelessness. The second time she meant for it to be found. She's leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. For who I don't know, but it makes her look like less of an accomplice than she looked last week.”

“Is there a reason you haven't told the police?”

“I don't know what kind of jam she's in. I've got nothing against cops except they're too public. There are some holes a plastic badge can fit through that a brass one can't. Then it's plugged for everybody. I need to get a look at the hole. Would you rather I called them?”

He shook his head. “They keep coming back to ask the same questions and they never listen to the answers.”

“They listen.”

He shook his head again.

I breathed some plant oxygen. “Did your wife and Boyette ever meet to your knowledge?”

“She accompanied me once to his office when I consulted him on a putative Richard the Third letter someone wanted to sell me. I saw no spark between them, if that's where you're heading. You know by now how sensitive I am to that sort of thing.”

“When's your birthday?”

“December. Why?”

“That's a long lead time if she was planning to buy a manuscript from him and give it to you as a present. Anyway it wouldn't explain the fact that the earring in his house was a plant. Also he didn't have any—” I stopped.

“Yes?”

“Forget it. Something I should have noticed.” I looked at the earring. “I thought sixty was platinum. What made you choose it for the first?”

“The first is paper. I have too much of that in my library to make it anything special. I'll be one hundred and twelve when we celebrate our sixtieth. I thought it unwise to wait.”

I pocketed the piece. “I'll find her in plenty of time for the party. She's the thread that ties Boyette to North. Who by my watch is ten minutes late for this meeting.”

“Eight, actually. I'd have thought you'd discovered quartz technology by now. But then you and your partner always were the wind-up kind.”

This was a new voice. The room was just long enough and empty enough for it to echo, but neither of us had heard the sliding door open. I turned to face Earl North. The leaves on the potted plants rose and turned in the stirred air that Dale Leopold wasn't breathing anymore.

Part Three

The Hours of Iscariot

20

A cloud, prescient as hell, sucked the sun from the room as he came our way down the long passage, the plants on both sides shrinking away from his slipstream. He'd lost some hair and gained some waistline since his day in court, but there was still a haze of carroty orange at his temples, and his eyes looked exactly the same, a faded gray-blue like two flat pieces of tin left out in the weather, no shine in them. He wore a tan topcoat open over what might have been the same Robert Hall suit, a brown worsted that pouched behind his neck, and a bow tie that could have been red if it had the energy. He looked as if he'd spent the past twenty years in a drawer somewhere, growing blurred and brittle like Dale's favorite cartoons. He would smell—if you wanted to get that close—like old ledgers.

I didn't let him get that close. When he got within arm's reach I hit him with everything I had.

I didn't have a lot. I was still recovering from the flu. But it was enough to take him off his feet and demolish two pots; one with his head on the way down and another when he struck the tiles. A third, top-heavy with some kind of miniature palm, went over on its side and rolled around in a half circle, coming to rest against one of his sprawled legs. The hanging pot he'd hit swung crazily from its chain, spilling black earth down on him where he landed, half-sitting with his back against the heavy glass wall.

I was shaking the sting out of my hand when Ben came barreling in behind his gleaming hogleg of a magnum. He had on his outdoor gear. He stopped and swung the gun from me down to North, then flushed from his cap to his collar and threaded the long barrel into its holster. He was chugging like a pressure cooker.

“Lost him in the hall,” he said. “You all right, Mr. Strangeways?”

“I'm fine. You forgot Mr. North knows all the shortcuts.”

North was shaking himself out of his stun. He ran a hand over the lower half of his face, looked at the hand, then spat blood into it. He'd bitten his tongue. He looked up at me with the beginnings of an animal glimmer in his dull eyes and smiled. One side of his face was still numb and it made the grin crooked, like a hyena's. The smears of black earth didn't help.

“You're Walker,” he said. “I wasn't sure at first. I only saw you that one time, and we didn't speak. I guess I'm sure now.”

“Get up and I'll convince you some more.”

“That will be enough,” Strangeways snapped. “Ben, help him up.”

The welterweight hesitated, then bent down and stuck out a paw. North grasped it and hauled himself to his feet. He brushed at the dirt on his suit.

“He's a tricky one,” Ben said.

Strangeways said, “Next time don't take your eyes off them. Leave us now.”

He left. He was always leaving.

“What did you hope to prove by that?” asked the billionaire.

“I think he's talking to you,” I said.

North smoothed back his thinning hair with both hands, then stuck them in the pockets of his coat. I wondered about those pockets, about that little side trip through the house after Ben had patted him down outside.

“Just grandstanding,” he said. “A long time ago I got into some trouble. It left me with a bad impression of people in uniform.”

“He might have shot you.”

“I didn't say it was smart.” He was still looking at me. “I've been following your career.”

“Hard to do, with a naked eye.” I wasn't looking at his face.
You read a lot of bullshit about killer's eyes, kid. Forget the eyes, eyes don't kill. Watch their hands
.