Star Island (41 page)

Sasha looked up from her ink tracing and said, “Is only gossip, no?”

“This stuff?” Ann tapped the face of Claude’s phone. “Yes, it’s pretty dreadful.”

“Do you know who is Matt Damon?”

“Sure.”

“Does your BlackBerry know where is he? Someday I would like to meet.”

“I’m afraid he’s married,” Ann said.

“Shit,” said Sasha. “Then can you look up for me Owen Wilson?”

The phone began to ring. Ann usually let Claude’s voice mail pick up, but she felt inspired by Sasha, who said, “You answer. I take a break.”

On the other end, a gruff man demanded money.

“This is Fremont Spores. Where the hell’s Abbott?”

Ann said, “He’s not available right now. I’m his assistant—can I help you?”

“His assistant. That’s a good one.” Fremont Spores sounded crusty and perturbed. “Yeah, you can ask Claudius where was he yesterday. How come he didn’t show up like he said.”

In her most soothing PA imitation, Ann said, “I’m so sorry. Did you two have an appointment?”

“The Mickey D’s on Lincoln, same as always. Only he blew me off.”

“Well, Mr. Abbott’s had a very hectic week.”

Fremont said, “Who
are
you? That greasy A-hole owes me two hundred bucks.”

Ann was thinking about how Claude had locked her in the trunk of the car; she still had marks on her knuckles from trying to slug her way out. The handcuffing, too—completely unacceptable.

She said, “I wouldn’t get your hopes too high, Mr. Spores.”

“What?”

“About getting your money. Claude’s not the most honorable person.”

“Look, I always been straight with him. Now he fucks me over for two lousy C-notes?”

“For what it’s worth,” said Ann, “he owes me, too.”

“How much?”

“Three days of my life.”

Fremont said, “Lady, it ain’t no joke. This is how I pay the rent.”

“Hey, I’ve got something you might be interested in.” Ann told him about a text message that had arrived an hour earlier: party tonite @ pubes. megan fox. lil wayne. u pay for more? word is lindsay mite crash it.

She said, “If Claude hears about this, he’ll be there.”

Fremont knew the girl was right. They’d all be there, the whole maggot mob. “Tonight, you said. Okay then.”

“Maybe you’ll get your money after all.”

“Somethin’ like that.”

“Oh, one more thing.” Ann could feel Sasha the henna artist pinching her elbow.

“Make it fast,” said Fremont.

“You wouldn’t happen to know if Owen Wilson was in town.”

“I will if he gets busted, or maybe totals a car. That happens, you want a call? It’s on me.”

Sasha overheard and was nodding excitedly.

“You’re a prince,” Ann said to Fremont Spores, who grunted dubiously.

She added, “You got the name of the club, right? It’s Pubes.”

“Oh, I got it. Don’t worry.”

Chemo informed Maury Lykes that he’d decided not to kill the actress.

“Keep your damn money,” he told the promoter.

“That’s the same thing
she
said. Is it something in the fuckin’ water?”

Maury Lykes was worried; he could not imagine Ann DeLusia fading quietly from the scene. “I’m starting to wonder about you,” he said irritably to the bodyguard. “First you pass on Abbott, and now the girl.”

“Abbott I can use. The actress, her I like.”

They were sitting across from each other in the back of Maury Lykes’s limousine, idling in the driveway of the Stefano.

“But she can wreck everything,” the promoter said.

“Leave her alone.” Chemo wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want Maury Lykes hiring another hit man to go after Ann. He felt strongly about this.

“Anything happens to her,” he said, “I’ll hunt you down and chop your little monkey cock to the nub.” To help Maury Lykes visualize, Chemo pressed the covered rotor of the weed whacker into the Y of the promoter’s crotch, which was already chafed from a carpet romp with the Czech gymnasts.

“Okay, I get it!” Maury Lykes pushed the prosthesis away. The limo driver’s eyes were as wide as a doll’s in the rearview mirror. “Who’s baby-sitting Cherry?”

“Mom and dad,” said Chemo.

“What’s on tap for her later?”

“Big night. Room service and Pay-per-View.”

“And no actors!”

“Don’t worry, Maury.”

The promoter’s phone began to ring, so Chemo got out of the car. He was approaching the lobby doors when he heard Maury Lykes shout his name.

What now?
Chemo thought. He turned and walked back to the limo.

“That was Janet! You won’t believe this,” the promoter steamed.

“Let me guess.”

“She said they left her alone for ten minutes and now she’s gone. These people, they’re goddamn idiots!” Maury Lykes was an unhealthy shade of purple. “Morons! Boobs!”

Chemo didn’t disagree. The genetic proof was Cherry herself.

“I’ll check the service exit,” he said.

The woman who answered the door was blond and good-looking. She wore a hotel robe. Her coral toenails were freshly painted. When Detective Reilly flashed his badge, she invited him to come in. The room was small and furnished in trendy Caribbean; white drapes, ceiling fans and lots of tropical hardwood. The four-poster bed was made.

“My name’s Ann,” the woman said.

“Ann what?” Reilly asked.

“DeLusia. With a capital
L.”

“Are you alone?”

She pointed at the bathroom door. “I’m with a friend. He’s in there.”

“I’m looking for an individual,” the detective said, “for questioning.”

He told her the suspect’s name was Clinton Tyree, and provided a short, graphic description. “I believe these belonged to him.”
Reilly held up the shotgun-shell braids. “I found them outside on the ground beneath your window.”

The woman named Ann examined the plaits and said, “Wild.” Then she knocked on the bathroom door. “Captain, you busy?”

Reilly was caught off guard by what happened next. A large man stalked out of the bathroom singing, “Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’!”

He wore an expensive-looking blue suit and a matching eye patch. His sun-bronzed head was decorated with mystic-looking slashes and symbols, drawn with what appeared to be dark lipstick. Around his neck was a string bolo tie, cinched with the desiccated beak of a dead bird.

“Are you Governor Tyree?” the detective asked.

“‘The strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone.’”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s Ibsen. Another gloomy Nord, but palatable in small doses.”

The woman named Ann said, “You two chat. I’ve gotta go get beautiful.” She went into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar.

Reilly didn’t sit down because he felt intimidated; the one-eyed man already towered over him. “Are these yours?” he asked, displaying the braids.

The suspect laughed. He had to be well into his sixties, yet he looked uncommonly fit. His fists hung at his sides like dented cowbells. “You seem like a decent sort,” he said to the detective. “Kindly get to the point. The winsome Ann and I are preparing for an event.”

Reilly asked him first about the bus hijacking and the sadistic assault on Jackie Sebago. “You match the description of the suspect—except for those expensive threads.”

“You think it’s too much?” The one-eyed man pinched the pleats of his pant legs. “The things we do to please the ladies, no?”

“We found a campsite not far from the crime scene.”

“Boy Scouts would be my guess. A radical cell.”

The man was admitting nothing, and there wasn’t much Reilly could do. He didn’t have a speck of physical evidence connecting
this character to the crime—one lousy fingerprint on a water bottle found far in the boonies, which proved nothing.

The detective said, “Sebago turned up dead yesterday in the crocodile refuge. Shot through the heart with a speargun.”

“My, my.” The big man cocked his illustrated head. He looked authentically surprised.

“Do you know anything about it?” Reilly asked.

“This murder, or death in general?”

Ann came out of the bathroom and said, “The captain was here with me all day yesterday, Detective. And the day before that and the day before that.” She was putting on silver hoop earrings. “I need to get dressed, if you don’t mind.”

Reilly knew they didn’t have to speak to him at all. He also knew he could call in one of the Beach cops and they’d haul the one-eyed guy down to the station and bust his balls for not having any ID, some bullshit like that. No actual crime solving would be achieved, and Reilly would end up spending an extra night in the city, which would piss off his lieutenant when he got the per diem voucher.

“Do you own a sawed-off shotgun?” Reilly asked the man.

“I’m not a hunter in the traditional sense. I prefer to eat what’s already dead.”

The detective patiently turned to Ann. “The passengers on the bus said the hijacker had a woman with him. Possibly a captive.”

She smiled and nodded toward her companion. “He’s
my
captive. Does he not look absolutely killer in pinstripes?”

Reilly, who’d seen many improbable couples in Key West, did not comment on the gaping and somewhat creepy age difference. “Why does she call you ‘captain’?” he asked the man.

“I was in the army.”

“Vietnam, right? And you came home and got elected governor.”

The man turned his back on the detective and walked to the window.

Ann led Reilly to the door. “Sorry we weren’t more helpful,” she said. “He can be quite the scamp.”

“His name is Clint Tyree, isn’t it? You can tell me.”

“Truly I don’t know.”

Reilly doubted that the one-eyed man had raced back to Monroe County just to shoot a fishing spear into Jackie Sebago. As for the earlier twisted mischief on Key Largo, Reilly had an equally strong feeling that he was looking at the culprit. They could stick the man in a lineup, just to rattle him, but then they’d have to fly in the eyewitnesses, a budget-busting gamble that Reilly’s superiors were unlikely to approve. The passengers from the hijacked bus were scattered all over the country. Even if Reilly could get them back to the Keys, the suspect himself would be practically unrecognizable after his fresh grooming and dapper remake.

Still, the detective went ahead and told Ann that he might need to talk to both of them again. “It would be a more formal type of interview,” he added for weight, “at the sheriff’s office down in Marathon.”

“Of course,” she said pleasantly, and gave him a cell number. “This is my first time being somebody’s alibi. It’s kind of exciting.”

Reilly took the stairwell down, the braided gun shells clicking like castanets. He was sure that a DNA test on the silver hair would lead back to the man he’d just met, but it was hardly enough on which to hang a criminal prosecution. There were plenty of bad Rasta jobs wandering around South Florida. His lieutenant wouldn’t be impressed.

A larger question in Reilly’s mind was what would be accomplished by locking up Tyree, if that’s who it really was. The guy gave prime years to his country, won a boxful of combat medals—if he wants to grow old alone and whacked-out in crocodile country, who cares? He seemed to pose no threat to the innocent, only to scoundrels and fools who crossed his path.

Outside the hotel, the detective paused briefly, trying to recall where along Collins Avenue he’d parked his car. He didn’t relish the long southbound drive to the Keys at rush hour. Somebody whistled, and he looked up. Framed in Ann DeLusia’s window was the man who might or might not have been governor in another life. He grinned down at Reilly and snapped the elastic band on his designer eye patch.

“I wish I were riding with you,” he called out. “Two ghosts on a cloud!”

Reilly offered a small salute and said, “G’night, captain.”

The former Cheryl Gail Bunterman snuck out of the Stefano when her parents went to the Larks’ suite to preview the fabricated account of their daughter’s “kidnapping,” in advance of its Internet release. Cherry, who’d previously packed an outfit for the evening, took a service elevator to the first floor and then grabbed a cab to Star Island.

Tanner Dane Keefe was in a forlorn state, having sniffed out a rumor that Quentin Tarantino was cutting some of the actor’s best scenes from his upcoming shocker, a blood-drenched takeoff of the beach-blanket films of the sixties. Evidently the director had been persuaded by the studio’s marketing department to rethink the importance of the necrophiliac-surfer role to the script’s core message. Key distributors in Japan, India and parts of the Mideast had emphatically stated they weren’t interested in selling a movie in which drowned tourists were sodomized to the tunes of Frankie Avalon under the pier at Newport Beach. It was the prevailing sentiment that some foreign audiences would be confused, and possibly provoked to riot.

“Quentin won’t even text me back,” Tanner Dane Keefe lamented, “the cowardly prick.”

Cherry was of course more interested in the actor’s stash than in his career travails. She shamelessly sucked on his fingers while groping chimplike through the pockets of his jeans. “Baby, where are my vikes?” she cooed. “Tell momma now.”