Bone Key (14 page)
“This is just the way you found him?” A plainclothes officer stood beside Deal, who was watching numbly as the medical examiner finished his work with the body that had once been Dequarius.
“I closed his eyes,” Deal said.
The detective made a note on the screen of a handheld organizer, then glanced up. “You didn’t touch anything else?”
Deal shrugged. Before the sheriff’s men arrived, he’d taken the faded label and the notes from his pocket and slipped them under the cover of the ironing board stowed in his closet. He was long past the point of trusting anyone from the sheriff’s office.
“The phone,” he said to the detective. “The toilet where I threw up. The sink handles.”
The detective touched the tip of the stylus to his tongue and made more notes. When he noticed Deal watching him, he gave a smile that was more like a grimace. “They handed these things out first of the year,” he said, meaning the handheld. “I tried to lose mine a couple of times, but the hammer came down from up top.” The detective gave Deal his screw-the-brass look. “Now I learned how to use it, you’d be surprised how much time it saves.”
Deal nodded. He supposed it did save time. Reduce a life to a few strokes on a liquid crystal screen, from there on, everything’s done by machine.
“The ME says he bled out right there,” the detective said, nodding at the chair. There was a photographer at work now, using a digital camera to record various angles of the scene. Those images could go straight to the computer as well, Deal thought, untouched by human hands.
“But since it was a shotgun took him out and your windows are still intact, I’d say it was a safe bet he was shot elsewhere.”
Deal nodded again, trying to imagine a shotgun blast taking out those big windows, scattering glass over the putting-green grass below. Hardly the sort of thing the Pier House would be happy about. What had taken place so far was surely troubling enough for the public relations team.
The detective replaced his organizer in his coat pocket and reached for something on the nearby dresser. He turned back, holding up a plastic bag. Inside was an oblong card that might have seemed a duplicate of Deal’s room key, except for an inch-thick wedge of plastic affixed to one end. “This belong to you?” the detective asked.
Deal looked again, then shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” the detective said, gesturing over Deal’s shoulder. “It’s a universal master for locks like these, something only a thief would have. I found it lying on your hallway floor.”
Deal turned to glance at the door, then back at the detective. There could have been a dozen of the things lying there, he would never have noticed.
The detective replaced the bag on the dresser. “Our boy over there could have gotten into any room in the Pier House. The big question is, Mr. Deal, why did he pick yours to come die in?” The expression on the detective’s face was not unsympathetic. “Must have been a hell of a thing to come home to,” he added.
The big question for Deal was somewhat different, however. His major consideration was with just where to begin. “He called me earlier,” Deal said finally.
“Called you?” Deal waited for the detective to go for his handheld, but it didn’t happen. “This is a friend of yours?”
“No,” Deal said. “I met him in the bar downstairs, on Thursday evening, right about the end of happy hour.”
The cop’s expression was neutral. Deal suspected it would remain that way no matter what he said next.
We were lovers and I shot him in a jealous rage. He sold me phony gold coins and I killed him for it. If I’d given him the time of day he might still be alive.
“He wanted to sell me some jewelry he said had come up from a sunken treasure ship,” Deal continued. “I told him I wasn’t interested. The bartender noticed him then and chased him out.” Deal stopped, hating something about the way he was talking. “His name is Dequarius Noyes, by the way.”
He was also wondering how Ainsley Spencer would receive this news. Deal had consoled himself with the knowledge that the phone was inoperable at the old man’s house, but that was really just a cop-out. Now, the thought that someone like Deputy Conrad might deliver the news to the old man seemed a double blow.
The detective nodded. “We got that,” he said. “Kid’s got a history a yard long, dealing dope off that houseboat of his—”
“Houseboat?” Deal heard himself blurt.
“Yeah,” the detective said. “He’s got a place out on houseboat row, the worst of a pretty bad lot.”
He gave Deal a speculative look, then recovered his train of thought. “So if I got this right, the next thing you know, Dequarius is back on the phone with you earlier this evening, wanting to see if you’re still interested in this treasure.”
“I was never interested,” Deal said, his mind racing along. So Dequarius kept a place apart from his great-grandfather’s home in the quarter, then. It would make sense, he supposed, given the young man’s proclivities—a place to hide a stash in a pinch, that was the cynical take on it. But there was an upside as well. For all Deal knew, the police would make no connection between Dequarius and his great-grandfather. So long as Deal didn’t tell them of it, that is.
Deal forced his attention back to the moment then, wondering if the detective knew what had happened yesterday morning or was simply testing him. “And the fact is, I saw him again the next morning, while we were out jogging.”
“Who’s this ‘we’?” the detective asked.
“I was with Russell Straight, a man who works for me.”
“He staying here at the hotel?”
Deal nodded, deciding to leave out the “more or less” part.
“He approached you again about this jewelry while you were out jogging?”
“He was persistent,” Deal said.
“He must have been,” the detective said. “What time of the morning was this?”
Deal calculated. “Probably about six-fifteen.”
“That seems a little early for Dequarius to be on the hustle,” the detective observed. “Wouldn’t you say?”
Deal shrugged. “It could have been a little later. I’m sure you could look it up in the police report.”
The detective’s eyes narrowed. “I think you’re a step ahead of me, Mr. Deal. What report would that be, exactly?”
“The one you’re free to consult anytime, Dickerson,” someone behind them said, and Deal turned to see Rusty Malloy coming through the doorway, clad in a T-shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, and sandals. As far as Deal could tell, he hadn’t bothered to comb his hair since taking his phone call.
“My client intervened in an assault by one of your deputies upon Mr. Noyes yesterday morning,” Malloy continued, wincing as his gaze fell upon the bloody corpse. “The matter was disposed of, no charges filed.”
The detective took all this in with remarkable calm, Deal thought. “This was after Dequarius had approached you for the second time?” he asked.
“It was.” Deal nodded.
“So when Dequarius called you earlier this evening, that was the third time you’d spoken to him about this jewelry,” Dickerson said.
“We never really talked in any detail,” Deal said.
Three times thou hast forsaken me
, came the line swimming up out of his past. But surely that hardly applied in this case, he thought, stealing a glance at Dequarius’ body.
“Is there something funny, Mr. Deal?”
Deal turned back to Dickerson, feeling a tide of unreasoning fury swelling up inside him. He’d seen Driscoll pull the same stunt with suspects, lulling them along with innocuous questions before turning suddenly hostile. But he was no suspect and he wasn’t about to put up with an iota of bullshit from Dickerson, or anyone else.
“Was I laughing?” he said, careful to control his tone.
The two stared evenly at each other until Malloy cut in. “My client’s a bit tired, Detective. If it’s all the same to you, why don’t we continue this in the morning?”
Dickerson lifted his eyebrows and glanced toward the windows, where a couple of uniformed deputies were wrestling Dequarius’ body into a zippered bag. His expression didn’t indicate there was any great haste in the matter.
“Sure,” Dickerson said. “We can finish up in the morning.” He gave Deal what passed for a smile, then dug into his wallet for a card.
“Just give me a call in the morning, Mr. Deal, whenever you’re feeling up to it.” He glanced blandly at Malloy. “Couple more questions, that’s all,” he added.
Deal had heard that one before as well. He might as well have said, “We’ll get down to business the next time around.”
Malloy nodded. “I gotta go to the can. You guys doing anything in there?” He pointed at the bathroom, and Dickerson shook his head.
“Help yourself,” the detective said, and Malloy went off, closing the door behind him. “Careful,” he added to Deal, pointing as a couple of technicians came through the door of Deal’s room with a folded gurney.
Deal stepped aside as the men passed. In seconds they had the thing unclipped and raised and had secured the bag with Dequarius’ body atop it. The ME said something to the pair and in the next moment they were wrestling their burden away.
The toilet flushed and Malloy reappeared just as the gurney was disappearing out the door. He was mopping his pale face with a towel, and Deal realized then what had sent him to the bathroom in the first place.
“You all right?”
Malloy nodded, looking decidedly un-all right. There was a soft tapping at the door then, and the three of them turned to find a young man in a tropical shirt smiling brightly at them. “I’m here for the bags,” the kid said.
Deal turned to Malloy, who raised his finger in acknowledgment. “I stopped by the desk on the way in,” he said. “The hotel’s full, but they managed to find something.”
Deal nodded and turned back to the kid, who’d spotted the gore-drenched chair and pool of blood near the window. “Jesus,” he said. “What happened?”
Malloy gave him a scowl, then turned to Dickerson. “We can have his things moved out of here, can’t we?”
Dickerson glanced around the room. “Why not?”
“You want to pack up, John?”
Deal realized he’d been staring at the closet where he’d stashed the papers. He’d barely bothered to unpack his suitcase, which still sat atop the dresser at his side. He had nothing hanging in the closet, no reason to go there, even if he was willing to try to extricate the papers with Dickerson staring over his shoulder.
He turned to Malloy with what he hoped was a grateful nod. What was he going to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t leave without my ironing board”?
“Just take a second,” he managed. He thought Dickerson was looking at him strangely, but it was probably just his imagination.
He’d already stuffed most of his dirty clothes in an outer pocket of his soft-sided bag, so it wasn’t much of a process. He went into the bathroom, which smelled like the head of a tourist boat in a typhoon, swept his toiletries into his travel kit, then came back out and dropped it into the main compartment of his suitcase. The kid, who’d turned as pale as Malloy by now, snatched up the bag quickly and hurried out the door.
“I think we’re ready then,” Malloy said, pointing after the kid.
“I guess we are,” Deal said, careful to keep his gaze away from the closet.
Dickerson gave him a two-fingered salute. “Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Deal gave a last glance at the chair where Dequarius Noyes had spent his final minutes waiting for him, then followed Malloy out.
“Not bad, eh?” Malloy said, gazing around the living area of the suite the bellhop kid had led them to.
Deal stared up at his attorney from the soft leather couch where he’d collapsed. Malloy had pulled the cork on a bottle of red wine and was swirling a glassful in his hand as he surveyed the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows comprising two walls of the room. There was a view of a pool down below, for the sole use of the “suites residents,” the kid had assured them.
“Anything else I can do, gentlemen?” the kid called from the bar, where he’d been arranging liquor bottles and ice. “Anything at all?” He’d regained some of his color, Deal noticed, along with a bit of his programmed solicitousness.
“We’re fine,” Malloy said, handing him a bill. The kid seemed to find the tip more than generous, practically salaaming his way out.
“Can I get you something?” Malloy asked, hoisting his glass, as the door closed behind the kid.
Deal held up a hand. “Jack up the day and slide a new one under it,” he said.
“You do have a way with words,” Malloy said.
“That was one of my old man’s,” Deal said. “He had a million of them.”
Rusty nodded. “Barton would have liked this place,” he mused.
“He was always partial to the high-roller’s suite,” Deal agreed. He had another look at the glass in Malloy’s hand. “Maybe I’ll try some wine,” he added.
Malloy glanced over at him. “I thought you were a beer drinker. There’s a six-pack of Red Stripe in the fridge.”
Deal suppressed a sigh. The thought of explaining a diet right now seemed ludicrous. “As the president of a major development firm, I’m trying to refine my tastes,” he said.
If he caught the irony, Malloy chose to ignore it. He nodded, going behind the bar for a glass. “I know what you mean. Everybody’s getting into wine these days. Half my clients are drug dealers or worse, but I swear they all subscribe to
The Wine Spectator
.”
He checked the bottle, then poured a glass for Deal and brought it to him. “A Chilean Malbec.” He shrugged. “Tastes pretty good to me.”
“So you’re into wine now, too?” Deal asked.
Malloy shrugged. “In the old days it was the three-margarita lunch down here. Nowadays I have to bone up on my reds just to take somebody out to dinner.”
“Sounds like a tough life,” Deal said, raising his glass to Malloy.
“We’re a long way from Miami, John,” Malloy said, returning the gesture. He smiled and used his glass to point over Deal’s shoulder. “Did you catch the mirrored ceiling in the bedroom?”
“I didn’t,” Deal said without turning. “But I’m going to go watch myself fall asleep, any second now.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Malloy said, taking a healthy sip. “With any luck I’ll be able to get back to sleep myself.”
“Sorry,” Deal said, reminding himself that Malloy was doing him a favor. He rubbed his face with one hand and glanced out at the soft blue nimbus of the pool. Like a glowing, happy cloud, he thought. He could dive in and sink straight to the bottom. Unfortunately, he still had business to attend to before the night was over.
“I’m glad you came over, Rusty,” he said. “I was getting a little fried down there with our buddy Dickerson.”
“No apologies necessary,” Malloy said, lifting his glass. “’Tis the barrister’s lot.”
“You’re going to send me a bill for all this,” Deal added.
Malloy waved his hand in dismissal. “We’ll take care of that part once you get under way with Stone. I’ll take enough out of his hide to make me
and
my heirs happy.”
Deal glanced up. “There’s nothing certain between me and Stone, you realize that, don’t you?”
“Oh sure,” Malloy said. “He’s a pain in the ass, but don’t worry. I’ve been down here long enough to know how to handle him.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Forget it, John. We’re pals, all right? Whatever happens.”
Deal shrugged. He was way too tired for looking gift horses in the mouth.
“So what were you holding back from Dickerson?” Malloy asked abruptly.
Deal managed a humorless laugh. “Was I being that obvious?”
“Not at all.” Malloy grinned back. “But now my curiosity’s up.” He raised his glass in a salute.
“Pretty good the way you just did that,” Deal said.
“You’re just tired,” Malloy said. “And besides, as your attorney, I need to know what my client’s interests truly are.”
“If I was charged with killing somebody, you’d want to know whether I really did it?”
Malloy held up his hand. “If you shot Dequarius Noyes, I do not want to know about it.”
Deal shook his head. “That’s not it,” he said, then gave Rusty a quick version of what had transpired during and after the phone call he’d taken from Dequarius at the Dockside, leaving out any mention of the voice he’d heard after the shooting and of the papers he’d stashed.
No need for his attorney to be aware that he might have in fact concealed evidence, he told himself. But the truth was more complicated than that.
By the time he’d gone through it all, Malloy had finished his wine and was headed back to the bar for a refill. “Dequarius Noyes is like a bad penny,” he said, shaking his head as he poured.
“
Was
,” Deal corrected, and Malloy raised his brows in acknowledgment.
Malloy finished filling his glass, seeming to consider all that Deal had told him. “So what are you asking me, John?” Malloy said as he came back around the bar.
Deal turned his palms up in a gesture of uncertainty. “I just didn’t want that old man to have to take it for some of Dequarius’ bullshit, that’s all. That’s why I didn’t call the cops earlier. Then, after I found Dequarius and realized Dickerson didn’t know about the old man—”
“You’re telling me you want to go back over there and help the old guy clean out Dequarius’ stash before the storm troopers kick the door down?”
“Something like that,” Deal said. “Also, I ought to be the one to tell him about his grandson. Or great-grandson.”
Malloy laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Legally speaking, I think you’d be nuts to do it—you’d be open to charges of interference, concealment, I’m not sure what all.”
He broke off and took a slug of his wine. “But, I can understand why you’d want to,” he added.
“How I see it,” Deal said, leaning forward, “I go over there now, break the news to the old man, flush the dope down the toilet…then I go see Dickerson in the morning and tell him the rest of the story. That way Ainsley Spencer’s in the clear. It seems the least I can do.”
Malloy stared at him, shaking his head. “What are you talking about, ‘the least you can do’? You sound like a man who’s guilty of something. Whyever Dequarius Noyes got himself shot, it wasn’t your fault,” Malloy said.
Deal sighed inwardly. Part of him wanted to lay out everything in front of Malloy, but he worried that would simply confuse the issue.
His own suspicions about who might have killed Dequarius, not to mention the imponderables concerning why, were far too nebulous to discuss. What was on his mind right now was far more practical.
“You’re right,” Deal said to Malloy at last. He finished his glass and set it down on the bar. “But at least I can keep someone else from getting hurt.”
Malloy closed his eyes, nodding his weary assent. He finished up his own glass, then started toward the door. “Do what you have to do, John,” he said. “And be sure and call me when they pick your ass up.”