Authors: J. A. Kerley
Because few things pleased my brother more than startling me, I hid my surprise behind a false yawn. “Hello, Dr Charpentier,” I said, patting my mouth, stepping inside the entryway, and handing him my hat. “I take it your name’s not on the deed.”
Without looking, he neatly Frisbee’d the Panama atop a rack a dozen feet distant. I yawned again.
“You really thought I was lying about moving here?” he said.
I jammed my hands in my pockets and glanced at the surroundings. “Seeing it, I still have doubts. Auguste Charpentier owns no land in Key West.”
Jeremy walked into a high-ceilinged and mostly bare living room: a long blue sofa of creamy leather, matching chair, a low teak table. A stack of unopened packing boxes ruled one corner. “Charpentier has dissolved into the wind, Carson. Those few who believe they knew him think he has moved to France. He never allowed them close enough to care to check.”
“You’ve changed your name, then?”
“
Oui, mon frère
.”
“To what?”
An enigmatic smile. “How about I give you the nickel tour, starting upstairs? You’ll have to pardon the disarray.”
We climbed stairs and he displayed several unfurnished rooms, bright and high-ceilinged. The polished wood floors shone under light streaming from the tall windows. “How long have you been here?” I asked.
“I purchased it three months ago but had to handle tasks elsewhere. I’ve lived mostly here the past month.”
He took me to a gorgeous oak staircase spiraling to the top room of the cupola, his office, a round space with a half-circle desk before a view of the ocean framed by palms, two computer monitors on the desk, two more on a flanking table. Additional boxes sat to the side.
“You’re still operating on the assumption that the market has just two states, scared child and boastful drunkard?” I said.
“It continues to make money. I’ve also reached the point where just money makes money.”
He showed me the main bathroom, containing a shower in which I might have parked half of the Rover, a dozen heads angling in from every direction but below. There was a Jacuzzi sized for two, a standard toilet and a bidet. The floor was white marble flecked with green, the walls gently olivine. A white silk bathrobe hung on a brass hook inside the door.
We returned to the first floor and he took me to the spacious kitchen – where he expected me to comment on the pleasant peach color of the walls, but I did not – then led me through a dining room to a two-story solarium overlooking a walled-in courtyard bright with flowers and shaded by palms.
“Here’s an interesting item,” Jeremy said, a strange note of pride in his voice as he pointed above my back. High on the room’s sole non-glass wall hung a painting at least six feet tall, five wide, a semi-abstract rendering of strident, multihued flowers against a jungle-ripe background of flowing greens. Color gave it presence, composition gave it force, and the piece seemed perfect for the venues, both Key West and the room.
I thought I figured out the pride in his voice. “A designer didn’t select that painting,” I said, impressed. “You picked it out on your own.”
“Actually, I painted it last week.”
“No way.”
He smiled. “My artistic side seems to be opening up, Carson, though it did take two tries to get right. Would you care for a drink? Or did the ones you’ve had suffice?”
I had chewed a pack of gum on my trip from the tavern to cover the scent of alcohol. My brother had entered the Institution with normal senses, but something inside had honed them to a preternatural state. I figured it was a self-preservation mechanism. He had once told me he could detect psychosis by its smell, and I’d never argued.
“An ice water for now.”
He strode away and I ambled through the downstairs to the front window, seeing a herd of camera-laden tourists walking the avenue. In one day in Key West my brother would encounter more humans than in a year in Kentucky. I wondered how he would deal with it.
He found me and handed me a tumbler of water. It hit me that he’d not made a single allusion to his vaporous lady companion.
“So where’s your girlfriend today?” I said. “Peaches?”
“Don’t be so dismally cute, Carson. I told you Peaches was paint. My friend has various chores in Miami, including shopping for furniture. She’ll return early next week. You probably passed her on the way, though she would have been several thousand feet above you.”
“Does not-Peaches have a real name?”
He walked to a mirror and straightened his tie. “I’m beginning to think you don’t believe in her existence.”
“Photos then, a shot of you and your paramour lazing on the beach and making dreamy eyes at one another.”
He turned from his image. “Our relationship doesn’t resemble your body-centric succession of temp workers, Carson. It’s more …” he frowned in search of a word.
“Fictional?” I supplied.
“Cerebral.”
I smiled and made the motion of advancing a pawn. “No sex then, just endless games of chess?”
He started to speak, stopped, changed course. “There was a reason for your visit, correct? Have you brought me something to consider?”
I pulled the materials from my briefcase and handed them over. When I started to add my comments he asked me if I’d been to Key West recently.
“Two weeks ago I drove out to kill a Saturday.”
“Go see if anything’s changed,” he said, nodding toward the door.
I stood in the diamond-bright sun and pondered my choices. I might tour the Hemingway house, but I’d done so twice before and exited discouraged. Though the home had been the residence of one of the most influential writers in American history, it seemed the bulk of the visitors were mostly interested in the six-toed cats.
The raucous Duval Street was a few blocks distant and I might grab a beer in one of the bars, but this time of day Duval would be dense with milling clots of tourists released from the cruise ships like camera-strung cattle. I turned to study the imposing home, noting its address on the brass mailbox: three numbers and a street name.
They were all I needed to discover what name Jeremy was using.
I drove to the police station, hoping Lieutenant King Barlow was working. It turned out that King was not only on duty, he was in the station house, all six-nine, one-hundred-eighty pounds of him.
He brought me to his office, a small room beside the squad room, and I stood while he sat and towered over his desk. After a couple minutes of small talk, I got to the point.
“Are the recent real-estate transactions easily accessible, King?”
He held his index finger above his keyboard. “Tap tap. You want me to check something for you?”
I made a deal of looking outside the door, then closing it. “It’s, uh, one of these things that’s still in the early phases, King, if you get my drift. Hush-hush.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Drugs? Or more human trafficking?”
“Can’t say yet. If anything comes of it, you guys will get a piece.”
He grinned. “Hey … we’re still wearing laurels from last year.”
Ten months back I’d handled a human-trafficking case that ended up in Key West. Though King and his people had a small walk-on near the finale, at press conferences Roy McDermott insinuated a supporting role. Many law enforcement entities seized any opportunity to grab headlines, often at the expense of other agencies, but Roy spread the accolades around, thinking it bread on the waters, returned multifold.
Like right now. King pecked at the keys, stood, offered me his chair. “I’ll grab a coffee. Take it away, my man, and happy hunting.”
I entered the address of Jeremy’s home. It would provide the name my brother had used to purchase the property, assuming it wasn’t one of his corporations, dummy and otherwise, like C&A Associates, the one holding the mortgage on my home.
A screen came up with the addresses in sequence. I ran my finger down the list until coming to Jeremy’s house number. He hadn’t used a corporation to buy the house; it was a private transaction.
He had used his new name.
I stared in disbelief. My mouth was probably drooping open.
This was the way it was meant to be …
Debro withdrew from the body beneath him, his breath ragged with exertion and climax, sweat dripping from his brow on to the suck bruises on Billy Prestwick’s neck.
Just me and him. One of them at a time … It was the way.
This way was more intimate. More care could be given to their punishment. He still held their words, looks, dirty smiles in his memory – in his very heart – after all these years. But here he’d been putting them back into their lives unscathed. He’d allowed the kindness of his nature to deprive himself of his true due. This, finally, was the real deal: Justice. It was a pity he’d not realized it when he had the simpering, nasty Brianna or pretty-boy Kemp. Brianna liked to banter with the audience, then turn it into mean barbs. He should have driven sharpened pencils into her ears.
Try to hear what we’re saying now, bitch.
And Kemp? The blond slut sold something to doctors. After finding him – not hard, he remembered his name and it was in the directory – he’d followed Kemp locally for several days, watching him park his shiny silver Camry outside physicians’ offices and medical clinics, pull a big rolling bag from the trunk, and scamper inside for an average of fifty-three minutes. What was a salesman but a talking machine?
It should have meant another tongue gone … just like that.
Debro toweled sweat from his face and chest and went into the anteroom. Locking the door, he studied Billy Prestwick through the window: naked, his small hard buttocks gleaming with lubricant and semen. His eyes were wide open and his mouth opened and closed slowly, a line of spittle running from his chin to the floor. Even in his sloppiness, he was beautiful.
Prestwick’s skin was like fine china, Debro thought, almost glowing. His silver hair was a glorious mop. His slender back was red and chafed from Debro’s half-hour ride, but otherwise unmarked. It would remain so … the Gemini Project officially abandoned. Gary was no longer allowed to share. But Donnie had done his part.
Which meant Debro was alone. Or soon to be.
The way it was meant to happen.
I walked the area around the cop house for twenty minutes, trying to make sense of my finding. To purchase the house, Jeremy would have had to create the kind of identity echoed in a multitude of government offices, meaning that cross-checking would create confirmation and not questions.
It was a monumental undertaking, much riskier now than two decades back, when I’d crossed from one life into another, though Jeremy’s money might make it less reliant on paperwork trickery and more on well-placed bribes.
Still … why
that
name?
When ninety minutes had elapsed I returned to Jeremy’s house, surprised to find a large orange van out front, the lettering saying
Island Electronics
. In front of the van were two green pickup trucks with covered beds, the logo stating
Fioptics Ltd.
Across the street was a panel van from Harrow & Son, General Contractors. A short man in a blue uniform closed the back door of the orange van and strode toward the house with a coil of wire over his shoulder and a toolbox in his hand.
I heard hammering from inside, took the front steps three at a time and entered without knocking. The sound of sawing was added to the hammering and I saw two men cutting a section of wall from Jeremy’s kitchen. He was standing behind them, talking to a third man.
I pointed upstairs. “Can we go up to your office and talk?”
“We can go to my office.”
Climbing the steps I saw a woman in the rear room assembling an electronic console. The home held the sudden industry of a beehive. We entered my brother’s office and I saw the man who had carried the wire from the van. He was drilling a hole in the floor near the wall as a young woman wearing protective glasses looked on. Both wore
Island Electronics
uniforms.
“We need to talk,” I whispered to my brother.
“By all means, Carson, talk.”
“Not here, dammit. The bedroom.”
He shrugged and we backed into the hall and stepped into the empty bedroom. Or almost empty, another of the electronics crew pulling away floorboard with a pry-bar.
“I’m updating the security system,” Jeremy said. “And adding high-speed fiber optics. Putting new arteries in an old body, so to speak. Plus upgrading the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. I want it all completed soon … my girlfriend has furniture deliveries scheduled.”
“Where can we go to speak?” I said, feeling my jaw clenching.
“About the cases?” He sighed. “With all this clamor I haven’t been able to get to it today, Carson. I’ll call in a day or two.”
I willed my hands from his neck. All of this work had been scheduled and from the git-go my brother had no intention of reviewing the cases today. I could have e-mailed the materials. But that wouldn’t have let him jerk me around in person.
“Screw the cases, Jeremy,” I hissed. “I need to talk about something else.”
“I’ve really got to stay here, Carson. I want to make sure everything’s done to a T.”
The bathroom was across the hall and when the workers looked away I yanked him across the hall and into the bathroom, closing the door behind us.
“You can’t use the facilities on your own, Carson?” he grinned. “Is it ageing? Your prostate?”
“I know you know I know your name,” I said. “You know I know that, right?”
My brother held the grin, not needing to unravel all the knows. “You’re so predictable, Carson. How are things at police headquart—”
“Tell me your name,” I interrupted. “I want to hear you say it aloud. Just so I know I’m not dreaming.”
He paused, eyes sparkling, savoring the moment.
“Jeremy Ryder.”
“Why
that
name?” I said. “WHY?”
“Shhhh,” he said, lowering the lid on the toilet. “Have a seat, Carson.”
My legs were wobbly with everything that had unfolded in the past two hours: his magnificent house, his artwork, his original given name combined with my concocted surname. I sat. Jeremy leaned against the wall beside the long vanity and crossed his arms, a picture of elegance.