Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (11 page)

“Who’s the guy next to her?” The man I was referring to looked odd, even from the rear. He was tall and had an extraordinarily large head. His hairstyle really didn’t help the matter much, either, as his wiry gray tight curls were longish and looked almost like an afro. The narrow shoulders and thin neck didn’t look strong enough to support that huge Brillo Pad head. When he turned to shake hands with an elderly man, I saw that the suit he was wearing had a Western cut, complete with string tie.

“That’s Janet’s brother, Richard Hunter. The one Nick gave a job to as captain of the TropiCruz IV. He stayed with the new owners when the company was sold. He’s like ten years older than Janet, but they’re very close. It seems he raised her after their parents died, or something like that. Since Nick married Janet, he’s over at the house too much. Molly doesn’t like it.”

A sort of reception line was passing along the front row and Janet was the center of all the attention. Leon Quinn’s obsequious mannerisms toward her went unrewarded, as she smiled and nodded at all the passing mourners. God, she
looked
like a queen accepting the attention of her court. Her brother attempted to put his arm around her, and when his fingers touched the back of that elegant white neck, she reached back and flicked them off as though an insect had just landed on her skin.

“It must have been so hard on Molly to get dumped for that,” I whispered to Jeannie.

When Janet turned her head aside to accept the cheek-to-cheek kiss from a gray-haired gentleman, the brilliance of her red shiny lip-gloss looked out of place for a funeral.

“Nick was a prick,” Jeannie said, a little too loudly under the circumstances. “Molly should have felt lucky to be rid of him.” I slid a little lower in my seat and hoped none of the folks around us had heard her.

I watched Janet greet the mourners and I tried to see what Molly saw. I consider myself a pretty good judge of character, and I watched how Janet interacted with the people around her. She thanked those who offered condolences, presented her cheek to close friends, and genuinely seemed to be struggling to put on a good front. It all looked like normal funeral stuff. But the more I watched her, the more I began to notice the little gestures from Leon Quinn. He kept touching her, and it probably wasn’t something he was conscious of doing. He touched her elbow, the small of her back, her shoulder. It was more than just a touchy Greek thing. He even moved his body closer to hers whenever other men approached. It’s a thing men do when they feel possessive about a woman. I’d be willing to bet that Leon Quinn and Janet were lovers, I thought.

Most of the mourners, when passing by Molly and Zale, nodded politely or shook hands. Their coolness toward the ex-wife was apparent. There was one woman, though, an artsy type in a shawl and long skirt, for whom Molly stood. The two women embraced with a familiarity I had once enjoyed. It had never occurred to me before that Molly might have a new best friend.

At that moment the priest came out and started chanting, and most of the crowd realized the service had begun. They either found a seat or pressed back against the walls in the rear of the church. The family settled into the front pew. I looked around and saw a few people I recognized. The mayor of the city of Hollywood was there, along with many of the corporate kings of Broward County. Standing next to political and financial bigwigs were several boat captains and bartenders I recognized from around town. The majority of the crowd, though, looked like this was their home church. There were families with dark-moustached men and well-made-up women, people who looked like they would have fit in just as well during the 1960s. They looked like working people, and some of the men still wore dark pants and white shirts with company names sewn over the pockets, shirts they had worn to work that morning.

It was difficult to judge when the service actually started. People continued to light candles and walk down in front near the coffin. But at some point a couple of guys dressed in suits got up and began their strange chanting at a raised platform over on our side of the church. There was a microphone there for them, and their tenor voices echoed in the church as the talking and movement ceased.

I had been raised without reverence, and yet in that simple little church, watching these people perform rituals that dated back hundreds of years, I could not help but think of Zale’s questions. Where was Nick? What did I believe? In a way, I envied these people who seemed so sure in their beliefs. They reminded me of the Haitian voodooists I had met the year before. They didn’t seem to live with my unanswered questions.

About fifteen minutes after the service started, three very large men entered through the main door at the rear of the sanctuary and many heads turned to stare, then bent to the side as they whispered to their neighbors. The men crossed to the far wall and stood with their feet spread shoulder-width apart, their hands clasped in front of them. There was something decidedly military about their bearing. I looked at Jeannie, my eyes asking the question.

“Russians,” she whispered.

“Kagan?” I asked quietly.

She shook her head. “His henchmen. Kagan’s out of the country. Conveniently.”

After what seemed like hours of singing, standing, sitting, and standing some more, and nothing being said or sung in English, the priest stepped forward and began talking about Nick. In English. He went on about what a great father, entrepreneur, and humanitarian he had been. After the priest’s eulogy, Leon Quinn got up and, with his large gestures, bouncing moustache, and tears he dabbed with a handkerchief, he described what a fine friend Nick Pontus had been, and how he seemed to have a golden touch when it came to business. At a certain point I wanted to gag. The Nick Pontus I knew had been no saint.

Next, though, one of the fellows in work clothes with a broad handlebar moustache came forward and told a story of how Nick had loaned him money when he wasn’t sure how he was going to feed his family. Nick had even set him up with a franchise sandwich place and made it possible for him to own his own business and be his own boss. A woman went to the front and told us how Nick had paid off the mortgage on her house when her husband, a cook in one of Nick’s restaurants, had died of cancer. She wept as she explained how he had helped her keep her children in their familiar home. Others came forward with similar stories, and I began to realize that there had been a side of Nick Pontus that I had never known. Maybe that was what Molly had seen. Maybe that was how she had been able to leave Pit and choose Nick for a husband.

The priest came back out again with a brass incense burner on the end of a bunch of chains, and he clanked it all around the coffin, all the while chanting in that foreign language. The air—which was close already, with what must have been over three hundred people jammed into that tiny church—became doubly difficult to breathe. I was looking around the chapel, trying to figure out some excuse to leave, when I saw Molly’s head turn. Our eyes met. She tipped her head forward ever so slightly. We’d always been able to say more to each other with a glance than most people can say with words, and in that moment, I was glad I’d come.

When it was finally over, Leon Quinn led a group of men in dark suits who came forward and carried the coffin out, the family following behind in a procession. As we stood and inched our way to the back door, I saw that we were going to have to pass by Molly and Zale and Leon and Janet, who were thanking the mourners as they left the church. I looked all around.

“Isn’t there another way out?” I asked Jeannie, looking longingly across the church at a door on the far side.

“Hush,” Jeannie said, and she gave me a shove in the small of my back.

But when I got there, I found I needn’t have worried about what to say to Molly. B. J. was the first of us to reach her, and he enveloped her in a hug that was so powerful and lasted so long that a big gap opened up in the exit line ahead of him. I knew the people behind us were probably as anxious to leave as I was, so I walked around him, stepped up to Zale, and shook his hand.

“If there’s anything I can do for you guys, just call me. I mean it, okay?”

He nodded solemnly. His eyes were unfocused, and I remembered what it was like as a kid having to stand there while adults told you that everything was going to be okay and you knew they were lying.

At that moment, B. J. released Molly and she looked at me. I reached out and our fingers touched and intertwined. I could not speak. I nodded to her and she nodded back, her eyes filled with the first tears that I’d seen her cry that afternoon. I released her hand and turned, hurried past Quinn, mumbling how sorry I was, and then I was standing in front of Janet. When she saw me, her face went flat and slack. For a moment she looked like some horrible wax imitation of a beautiful woman. Then she turned to B. J. and her face lit up like some Disney mechanical mannequin, and she looked beautiful and alive again. Finally, I found myself outside, squeezing through the crowd, dodging around the hearse, desperate to be alone, running.

I was standing in the late afternoon sunlight, leaning against a tree not far from the El Camino, trying to catch my breath, when B. J. walked up.

“Jeannie said to say bye.”

I bounced the toe of my shoe against a root that protruded from the dirt. “It was all that incense. It was making me sick. I couldn’t breathe in there.”

“That’s what it was, huh? The incense?”

I nodded, still focused on scraping the dust off my shoe. He put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me softly on the lips. “I think what you need is some food in your belly.”

When we walked through the doors of the Downtowner, the TV over the corner of the bar was showing the intro for the six o’clock news, and the lead story was—surprise—the Pontus funeral. Pete was behind the bar and Nestor and several of the other charter boat captains turned to greet us as we walked in. I nodded and turned away from them, headed instead for a booth in the back where we would be able to avoid the regulars who would want to chew on the gossip. They’d know we’d been to the funeral and, especially since I’d been an eyewitness to the murder, I knew they’d be eager to pump me for details.

Tonight I wanted to talk about anything but the Pontus family. Especially after that long and tight clinch B. J. had delivered to Molly on our way out of the church. What was that about?

I ordered a half pound of peel-and-eat shrimp and asked Terry, the waitress, to bring me extra garlic bread along with a draft beer. B. J. went for the New River Salad and ordered his tuna rare. I shivered at the thought.

“How can you eat that fish all pink and raw like that? It’s disgusting.”

He smiled at me and didn’t take the bait. We’d been friends long before we became lovers, and he knew when I was fishing for an argument.

“You still haven’t told me what you want to do for your birthday,” he said.

Five days. In five days, on Monday, I was going to turn thirty. At times it felt like a big deal, but really, it was just a number. Three. Zero. The world out there had certain expectations for a woman my age, but I had decided a while ago that I wasn’t going to let that rule my life.

“I don’t know, B. J. The only thing I know I don’t want is a surprise party. I do want to do something to make the day memorable, though. I mean it’s halfway to sixty. And when I turn sixty, I’d like to be able to look back and remember exactly what I did on the day I turned thirty.”

I took a welcome drink of the beer the waitress had just brought, and when I looked back at him, B. J. was staring across the room. I followed his line of sight. There, on the TV screen, was a close-up of Molly. She was standing outdoors and, from what little I could see of the background, it must have been at the cemetery. Long wisps of her dark hair had escaped the mound on top of her head, and instead of it making her look disheveled, the tousled, gaunt look only made her look more beautiful. It was so late in the evening that the TV people had their camera lights on and she was shielding her eyes from the brightness. Quinn stepped in front of the camera then and motioned for the press to move back. He opened the door to a limousine. Molly’s lips moved as she climbed in, then Zale got in after his mother. Quinn shut the door and climbed into the front, by the driver. If the sound on the TV was not muted, it wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the bar music and laughter. I wondered what she had said.

I looked back at B. J. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the TV screen.

When I first met B. J., and during those early years we were friends, I had watched from the sidelines as he dated a string of the most gorgeous women I had ever seen. I was working as a lifeguard on Fort Lauderdale Beach and helping Red out sometimes on jobs aboard
Gorda
. B. J. and I, we’d run into each other around town from time to time. He’d be with some tall, lithe thing in a tube top, miniskirt, and little strappy high-heeled sandals while I’d be standing there in my flip-flops and gray sweats with
Fort Lauderdale Lifeguard
stenciled across the front, my nose peeling and my salty hair in wind tangles.

I was attracted to him from the very first, but I was determined never to be one of those flings of his. Even if he did always seem to part on friendly terms with them, the problem was he always did part with them. No relationship lasted longer than six months. And not only that, B. J. was an amazing, sexy, smart, attractive man, and I’d learned early on that men who looked like B. J. were not interested in women who looked like me. Flash attracted flash, and flashy I’m not. I’d started that education back in high school as Molly’s best friend. The only time the good-looking guys ever talked to me was to ask me if I knew where Molly was.

The TV went to a commercial, but B. J. was still someplace far, far away, his eyes unfocused, staring at something across the bar and yet not seeing. How had it happened? How had this man come to want me? And with women like Molly in the world, how much longer could it possibly last?