Death of a Pirate King - lanyon Josh - Страница 24

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“Are you okay?”

I looked at her. “I just need a minute or two.”

She nodded but didn’t go away. Wouldn’t the normal thing be to give me a few moments? Controlling myself with an effort, I popped my pills, took a swallow from the bottle of tepid water on my desk. I drew a couple of experimental breaths. I seemed to be okay. My heart was already slowing back to its normal rhythm, so maybe I’d just mistaken reasonable agitation for something else.

“I really am okay,” I told her. “Do I have any messages?”

“Hmm? Oh. Paul Kane called again. A couple of authors want to set up signings. It was a pretty quiet day. Only three people came in searching for books with red covers and the word ‘murder’ in the title.”

Guy would have called my cell phone or left a message on the upstairs phone. Assuming Guy had anything to say to me. He’d left without waking me that morning.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Natalie said.

“I’m fine,” I said, and despite my efforts, it snapped out. I glanced at the clock over the desk. “Shit. And I’m late picking Em up.”

“Adrien, Emma can do without her horse riding lessons! You need to --”

“There’s no need for her to do without.” I rose, and she asked, “Aren’t you going to call Guy?”

“No.” And that was much curter than I intended. I glanced at her. “Sorry. Listen, Nat, can you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Please don’t…discuss what’s happening here with anyone.”

She said honestly, “I don’t know what’s happening, Adrien. I know you and Guy are having a rough patch and that some parolee came to see Guy. Where would that guy even know him from? That writing program Guy runs at the prison? Do you think maybe this Verlane is stalking him?”

“No,” I sighed. “I don’t.”

As I went out the side door, she called, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

* * * * *

A deer crashed through the manzanita and underbrush beside the wide trail, springing away to vanish into the dusky evening. As Emma’s horse shied, I leaned across, grabbed his bridle, and yanked him down hard on the packed earth. The gelding tossed his head, blew out nervously, but settled fast, falling back into stride with my own mount.

Emma sat up very straight in the saddle. Her eyes were huge, but she said bravely, “I could do it!”

“I know you can.”

“I wasn’t afraid.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid,” I told her. “It’s how you handle it.”

Like, don’t ever kill anyone because they scared you.

Emma’s chatter, the creak of saddle leather and jingle of bridles, the thud of the horses’ hooves on the trail faded out and my thoughts turned inward once more.

The reasons people killed each other were as varied as the people themselves. Porter Jones, for instance, appeared to me to have been taken out mostly because he stood between someone and what they wanted. Well, that made sense. Most homicides seemed to be motivated by greed, and one thing I’d learned from Jake was that mostly murder wasn’t complicated. The most obvious suspect usually was guilty. Even in the unsolved cases that went cold, the police generally had a pretty good idea of who the culprit was; they just couldn’t successfully take them to trial. Or if they went to trial, they weren’t able to secure a conviction.

I thought there was a pretty good chance that Ally Beaton-Porter had offed her old man. She had the best possible motive: several million dollars and an illicit affair with a handsome young stud.

Although if Porter really hadn’t been in good health, it would have made good sense to wait -- except that Porter had hired a PI, presumably with some purpose in mind. Paul Kane had insisted that Porter planned on divorcing Ally, and that had seemed to be reinforced by Roscoe Markopoulos.

And while Ally didn’t strike me as having the brains to pull off poisoning her husband without killing half the other people in the room, I’d be the first to admit my instincts -- crime solving and otherwise -- weren’t always infallible.

It just bugged me that everyone -- barring Al January and myself -- seemed to take it for granted that Ally was guilty. She probably was guilty -- she didn’t exactly seem grief stricken at Porter’s demise, and there was good reason that wives were the first suspects in a husband’s suspicious death.

So what about Marla Vicenza? Had Porter left her any million-dollar behests? Because some people committed murder over twenty bucks in change. I wondered what Marla’s finances were like. She was certainly past her prime as far as Hollywood box office went, but if she had invested -- or remarried -- wisely, maybe money wasn’t an issue for her. But maybe getting dumped for a blonde bimbo was.

This is why I had a problem with the idea of this Nina Hawthorne as murderess du jour. Yes, she did own Truly Scrumptious Catering, but if she hadn’t been on the scene, I didn’t see how she could have orchestrated getting poison into the right glass by remote control. Besides, having the patience to wait nearly twenty years to destroy Porter didn’t seem to mesh with being motivated by that whole passionate woman-scorned thing.

I glanced at Em as she prattled on, and I tried to picture her at eighteen. Tried to picture her having an affair with some married asshole a couple of decades her senior. Now, had Langley Hawthorne killed Porter, I could more easily understand it. But Langley Hawthorne had been dead for years.

All the same…if Nina’s company had done the catering, then there was a very good chance that Nina had been on the premises at some point -- maybe the day before or earlier in the day of the party? That would have given her access to…but there again was the problem. How could she anticipate what Porter would drink or what glass would be used?

She would have to be very familiar with Porter and with Paul Kane’s bar setup.

Maybe Paul Kane used her catering company a lot. Maybe she was familiar with his bar setup, and maybe she knew that he always made these Henley Skullfarquars, but again, how could she control administering the fatal dose? I doubted the mixture was made ahead of time, and she couldn’t poison one of the ingredient bottles because no one else had died or even gotten ill from the cocktails.

I kept coming back to the problem of Porter’s glass. Of course the simplest explanation was that Porter had taken the stuff himself. This mysterious ill health of his that -- assuming I’d heard correctly and wasn’t jumping to conclusions -- his ex-wife had referred to at the funeral: what if it was heart trouble?

But no. That would have been determined right away -- the rest of his prescription would have been found on his body, for one thing.

Could he have taken the stuff thinking it was something else?

Like what?

Emma said thoughtfully, “You know what doesn’t make sense? Why does an X stand for a kiss? I think an O should be a kiss because it’s like your mouth.” She demonstrated with an O that made her look very young and very surprised.

“Who are you sending love letters to?” I asked.

She giggled. “No one.”

I looked skeptical and she laughed again. “I’m not!”

* * * * *

I dropped Emma off at her home -- managing to avoid any meaningful discussion with Lisa, who tried to insist that I stay for dinner -- and headed back to the bookstore.

By then Natalie had closed up for the night and gone home. It was very quiet as I locked the door behind me. The forest of bookshelves stood motionless and silent in the gloom. Outside the front windows the streetlamps were coming on, the traffic thinning in this mostly retail part of town.

I stared through the paint- and plaster-spattered plastic wall separating the store from the gutted rooms next door. Remembering Peter Verlane’s earlier visit, I hoped the construction crew had locked up properly before leaving for the day.

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