Blood Royal (39 page)

“Exactly, it was a toy gun. But if the jury finds that you had a reasonable belief that Joe was going to plug you, they can find you not guilty based on an imperfect self-defense theory. In the princess’s case, a jury would have to find that she had a reasonable belief that she was in imminent danger from her husband.”

Dutton said, “What if there was hard evidence that the princess had a genuine belief that her husband planned to have her killed? How would that have affected her case?”

“She could raise an imperfect self-defense and get off—if the danger was imminent. From a practical point of view, if jurors thought the princess had a reasonable belief she was going to be harmed, they would care little about the fine points of law. Jurors are more influenced by common sense than legal technicalities. But it’s all moot now—she’s taking a plea.”

“She’s agreed to a plea, but the news reports are that the plea won’t be entered until next week.”

Marlowe shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, she’s still going to plead. She never brought up the subject of being afraid for her life, probably for exactly the reason you’ve mentioned before, that it would show real malice on his part and put the monarchy in jeopardy.”

Dutton put his hand on the top of her thigh and kissed her ear as he whispered, “Ah, but luv, what if you had the evidence and were able to put such a scare into the government that they offered the princess a heat-of-passion plea and probation? Or even dismissed the charges?”

Indeed, if she had the evidence and was able to pull it off, then what would they think of her in Modesto?

She gave him an appraising look. “How did you get so smart about people?”

“Osmosis working for a tabloid. Tabloid reporters, criminal defense lawyers, and morticians all have something in common—they see only the worst side of life. No news is good news, there’s a dead body in most bad news, and pretty soon there’s a lawyer. When you see enough of man’s inhumanity to man, you come to understand that there is a violent nature in humans, cruelty that goes beyond our animal instinct. Animals kill for food, we do it for sport. Sometimes we kill each other just for fun.”

“I’m impressed, quite a philosopher—”

“For a slimy tabloid hound.”

“For a prizewinning journalist. According to the last dead body you had sex with.”

He saluted her with his mug of beer. “Ah, you’ve uncovered my secret, that I had a veneer of respectability before The Fall. Like Satan and his Dark Angels, I was cast out of heaven and I’ve been floundering in a purgatory of sex, lies, and mediocrity ever since. But that’s beside the point. We have to work with the hand we’ve been dealt. We need to deal with the two matters at hand.”

He told her about tracking down Howler. “He’s being held by the Royal Protection Service, the bill’s being picked up by the palace gang. Now, what does that tell you?”

“A cover-up.”

“Bigger, a Royalgate. There was a message in that macabre presentation Howler created at Westminster.”

“A man in Tudor-era dress with a woman’s head on his lap.”

“But not just any man, but bloody old Henry VIII, the wife killer himself. Shortly before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Henry VII beat Richard III and became the first of the House of Tudor to reign. He was followed by his son Henry VIII, who sired the great Elizabeth I. He repaid Elizabeth’s mother for not giving him a future king by having her head chopped off.”

“Obviously, you think the message is that the Prince of Wales was going to be a wife killer, too. Tell me some more about the display at the Abbey.”

“I found out from Tussauds that the costume Howler ripped off was designed for Henry VIII. Add the woman’s head on bloody old Henry’s lap, and you have Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard. Henry was a brutal bastard, nuttier than a Christmas cake. He fell in love with Anne Boleyn when she was just twenty. He divorced his wife and cut England off from the Catholic Church when the pope refused to grant an annulment from the wife. Not that it did Anne much good—Henry soon bored of her, threw her in the Tower on trumped-up charges, and had her head chopped off.”

“What were the charges?”

“Witchcraft, adultery, and incest with her brother. It’s all pretty well documented that they were contrived by Henry to get rid of her. She lost her head when she was less than thirty, but she has a connection to two world-shattering events—a Church of England separate from the church in Rome, and birthing a daughter, Elizabeth, who would one day lead England to greatness.

“He was especially cruel to Anne because the charges were false. He also had his wife Catherine Howard beheaded. That was a bit unfair, too. She was accused of adultery, but it’s probable that her love affairs occurred before she married Henry. She did compound her error, though, by appointing a former lover as her personal secretary. Along with his wives, he had the heads of a bunch of others separated from their bodies.”

She said, “Henry was a real charmer. By today’s standards, he would probably qualify as a serial killer.”

“You can bet today’s Royals have wet dreams about the good old days when kings could get rid of troublesome wives and dissenters with a wave of their hand.”

“The problem with your friend Howler’s art piece, Henry holding the head of one of his wives in his lap, is that in our case, it wasn’t the wife who died but the husband.”

“True, but consider this about Howler—he’s smart, real smart, book smart, street smart, and at this stage of his life when he’s lost a few trillion brain cells from addiction, he’s crazy smart. He graduated first in his class from university and medical school and he was the best plastic surgeon in the country before the white and brown ladies stole his soul.”

“Which ladies?”

“Crack cocaine and tar heroin, his lovers of choice. Look, I’m certain Howler is on to something big about the prince, princess, and the killing. There has always been a rumor of a letter that the princess is supposed to have written in which she charged that the prince and his cohorts wanted to kill her because she was such a bother.”

“Who did she write it to?”

“I don’t know, no one’s come forward with it, but it fits in with her paranoia. You know she once claimed she’d been shot at while jogging at Kensington Park?”

“A car backfired?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? But we do know that she was hated and feared by the prince’s entourage. First she fought them because she felt they worked against her, prejudicing her husband about her, then they feared her because she couldn’t be managed, wasn’t a starter, as they thought of it. The point is, maybe the people around the prince had a lot to lose, or might strike at her out of a sense of loyalty.”

“You think Howler has this letter?”

I believe he has the letter, that the Abbey horror and having a tabloid reporter show up were signals to the palace that he meant business and wants those millions he’s been telling people he’s coming into. It’s just too coincidental for Howler to have a connection to the prince just before the prince is killed, and then gets picked up by the Royals and hidden away in a mental ward. It bears looking into.”

Marlowe found herself torn between running to the airport and back to the States, back to her apartment, where she would barricade the door and hide her head under the blankets … and tackling the mystery that Dutton believed he was on to. In her heart of hearts, she felt that she had let the princess down, that the woman was sacrificing herself because the only path Marlowe had found for a defense was one that the princess could not abide by.

Dutton said, “My proposal is this: Help me track down Howler and get the truth from him. He won’t talk without money. You have it, I don’t.”

“You said there were two things that needed to be taken care of.”

“Sex. We need to take care of that right away. I’ve been horny for you since the first time I jumped on your bones and got a feel.”

*   *   *

A
S THEY STEPPED THROUGH
Marlowe’s room door, Dutton let the door swing shut behind them and pulled her to him. She moved out of his arms. “I have to freshen up,” she said, then went into the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

She’d told him she busted her telly, but the one in her room wasn’t damaged. He turned it on with the remote and sat on the end of the bed. Another news story about the princess’s plea came on and he turned off the set. He hesitated a moment and then went to the bathroom door and opened it a crack. The shower was running.

He took off his clothes, went into the bathroom, and opened the shower door. He was surprised at her body. A woman who was not naturally thin or slender, her flesh was creamy and lush, her hips and behind generously rounded.

Her back was to him, with the shower spray coming down on her. He stepped into the shower and pulled the door closed. He touched her back, letting his hand slide down the curve of her spine, feeling the smoothness of her well-rounded buttocks.

“You have a beautiful body,” he said. “I’ve wanted to be with you since the first moment I saw you on the telly.”

He reached around her and cupped both her breasts with his hands. They were firm and full, the strawberrylike nipples getting hard beneath his fingers. His hands slipped down and touched her dark pubic mound.

He suddenly realized she was sobbing. He leaned closer, pulling her tightly against him.

“What’s the matter?”

She shook her head and twisted so he couldn’t see the tears.

“What is it?”

“I don’t want to just have sex,” she said, “I want to make love, not be jumped and humped.”

He drew back. “I’m sorry.”

She turned and pulled him back to her. “It’s not you, it’s the goddamn booze and memories. I was thinking about my husband, about the good times, the good sex at first, but when we started having troubles he’d grab me and ram it in like I was a piece of meat to beat. It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a man who didn’t think the longest time in the world was the time between coming and going.”

“Coming and—” Then he got it.

The tears came again and she sobbed, “I’m sorry, I didn’t want you to see me cry. It’s not you. I’ve been lonely for so long, not so much for sex, there’s always some guy who wants to knock off a piece, but for love. I’m so stupid, I’m just like the princess, I’m lonely and I’ve been waiting for a knight to pick me up and carry me off.”

“I’m no knight,” he said.

She put her arms around him and pulled him close, pressing his nakedness against hers. “Yes, you are, you’re my knight.” She put her hand around his penis and lowered her eyes at the swollen red glans. Her hand slid back and forth, stroking it gently.

She kissed him on the lips, the shower spray coming down on them.

“You must be a knight,” she whispered. “You have a long lance.”

He cupped both her breasts. He kissed the hard nipples, licking them with his tongue. She leaned back against the wall of the shower as his lips slid down her stomach, kissing and nibbling her flesh. Kneeling, he reached her pubic bush of hair and traced the hairline with his tongue, running the tip of his tongue along her bare skin.

Using the shower wall for support, she bent her knees and spread her legs. He placed his head between her thighs, pressing his mouth against the lips of her vulva. He kissed her fleshy lips, savoring them several times, then pushed his tongue into the opening.

The sexual hunger in her body was growing as his tongue found her sensitive clit and she squirmed with delight as he began to bring her to an ecstasy she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She tried to push his head away from her electrified organ, but he pushed back, keeping up the pressure until she dropped to her knees. She hugged him and ravished him with kisses.

“That was nirvana,” she told him, kissing him again.

Still being caressed by the shower spray, she kissed his nipples, surprised at how firm and hard they grew under her tongue as her hand went down, grasping his stalk until she had his stone-hard testicles in the palm of her hand.

She kissed his ear and whispered, “It’s your turn.”

Still cupping his balls, she kissed the tip of his penis, then traced it with her tongue. She pulled it slowly into her mouth at first, then sucking it harder as she moved it in and out, masturbating it with her mouth.

After a moment he pulled her from him. “I want to be inside you.”

They stood and stepped out of the shower, leaving it running behind them as they went into the bedroom. She lay on the bed on her back and pulled him toward her.

“Fuck me hard,” she said.

“You wanted love, not—”

She stopped him with a kiss, her mouth chewing impatiently at his lips. “I wanted love a minute ago, now I want to be fucked.” She pulled him down on her, spreading her legs, directing his penis into her. “It’s a woman’s right,” she whispered. “Sometimes we’re a princess and sometimes the slut in us comes out.”

The next morning they hired a car for their trip to the mental hospital in the York region to find Howler. Dutton drove. Leaving London, Marlowe was silent.

“You look like you’re mulling over serious affairs of state,” Dutton said.

“I’m still trying to grasp this puzzle in an enigma. Tell me about the prince.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. I want to understand him.”

“Then you should start with the fact that he didn’t choose his life—and that it hasn’t been an easy one. I know it’s hard for people who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps to understand”—he gave her a sideways grin—“but it’s not easy to meet the demands the nation puts on the queen and the Prince of Wales. The rest of the Royals are a bunch of freeloaders, but the woman on the throne and the guy next in line earn their bread.”

“The princess told me he was barely held by his mother when he was a baby, something like thirty minutes a day.”

“Maybe so, though that was probably in the morning—I think he got another hug in the evening. So what does that tell you? Do you think his mum, the queen, lacks maternal instincts? Is that it … or did she realize from day one that the last thing her son needed was to be a touchy-feely kind of guy, that she had to toughen him up straight from the womb so that he would survive in this cold, cruel world? You really have no idea what he went through, do you? As a kid, a teenager, a young man.”