Kiss of the Bees (21 page)

For a moment Davy gazed in wondering, hushed silence at the medicine basket’s missing treasures. “Where did you get them?” he asked finally.

“I stole them,” Brian said casually. “Quentin had them hidden in his sock drawer, and I stole them back.”

“When he finds out, he’ll kill you.”

“No, he won’t,” Brian answered. “He’ll only beat me up. He does that all the time. It’s no big deal.”

For the first time in his life, Davy Ladd realized he had a friend, a real one—a friend whose name wasn’t Rita.

“But Tommy and Quentin are so mean,” Davy said. “Aren’t you afraid of them?”

“Not really,” Brian replied with a cheerful shrug. “They’re so afraid of getting caught, they never hurt me enough so it shows.”

7

Coyote had listened to the council in the village before Old Limping Man and Young Man started on their journey across the desert. Ban had decided that anything important enough to take men back into the burning lands was worth examining. When Coyote’s stomach is full of food and water, his curiosity is very active. So Ban had gone ahead of the two men to find out for himself what it was that Buzzard had seen and Jackrabbit had told him about.

But now in that burning desert, Coyote was running for his life. The
Ali-chu’uchum O’othham
—the Little People—were after him—the bees, flies, ants, wasps, and insects of all kinds.
Gohhim O’othham
—Old Limping Man—could still speak the language of
I’itoi
which all the animals and all the Little People understand. He called out to the
Pa-nahl
—the Bees—and to the
Wihpsh
—the Wasps—to ask what was the trouble.

The Little People were very angry, but they stopped. They told
Gohhim O’othham
that the two men must go with them and that they must keep Coyote away. But there was no danger from Coyote anymore.
Ban
was too busy rubbing his sore nose in the dirt.

And so the two men—Old Limping Man and Young Man—followed
Ali-chu’uchum
—the Little People. After a time the men saw a strange cloud made up of the flying ones—the bees and flies and wasps. They looked down and saw the ground covered with moving specks. And the moving specks were ants of all kinds—big and little, brown and black.

The word of the coming of the men became known. The cloud of Little People spread out and parted. Then the men saw a woman lying with her eyes closed. The woman was being kissed by the wings of hundreds of bees. They were fanning her and keeping her cool, and all the while
Pa-nahl
—the Bees—were singing very softly.

At first the men were afraid. They knew that while the Little People are very, very wise, they are also very quick-tempered. But Old Man listened to the song the bees were singing. The song was a prayer for help for this woman who was their friend. So the two men went to the woman and gave her water.

The woman moved and spoke, but the men could not understand what she said. She did not open her eyes. They gave her pinole and water. Then they raised her up and began the return trip to the distant village.

Driving to his appointment, Mitch Johnson couldn’t help gloating. All morning long he had made a conscious effort not to rush, even though the clock had been ticking inevitably toward his scheduled appointment with Diana Ladd Walker. Gradually—vaguely, at first—the girl’s form had taken shape on the paper. The perspective was masterful—graphic without being anatomical. He wanted her to be sexy in this one. The dissection part, the one that peeled away the outside layers—would come later.

For Mitch, one of the most difficult aspects of the drawing came when it was time to detail the girl’s softly rising and falling chest. With Lani sound asleep, the virginal breasts had gone so soft and flaccid they were almost flat. The only solution for that was for Mitch to touch them and caress the nipples until they stood at attention. The difficulty and thrill of that was bringing the body to wakeful attention without necessarily disturbing the girl. If she had awakened and started struggling and fighting right then, it might have done irreparable harm to the pose. It would have spoiled the whole mood, destroyed the magic exhilaration of creation.

But of course, the full force of the drug was still upon her, and she hadn’t awakened. Lying there still as death, she had stirred only slightly beneath his touch, an unconscious half-smile on her lips as though, even in sleep, Mitch’s tender caress on her body somehow pleasured her. That almost drove him crazy. Breathing hard, Mitch once again retreated to the safety of his easel, forcing himself to regard her inviting body as an artistic challenge, as an enticing morsel to be avoided at all costs rather than as defenseless territory begging to be conquered and exploited.

And the fact that he could do that—put her on paper without giving in to the raging river of temptation—left him with a feeling of power and incredible superiority. Touching her body without immediately tearing into it was something Andy Carlisle never could have done. Mitch had the pleasure of knowing right then that he was a better man than his teacher. Godlike, Andy had tried to mold Mitch in his own image, but in this instance the created had moved beyond his creator.

After the breasts it had been time to do the face and hair. If anything, he wished the girl’s hair had been a little longer than it was. That way the dark edge of the hair would have concealed some of the breasts rather than simply falling across the shoulders. But that couldn’t be helped. This was to be a study of the actual girl, and so he copied the line of hair exactly as it presented itself.

The final item on his morning’s agenda had been the necklace. Mitch had been around Tucson long enough to know that the maze design on her necklace had something to do with Indians, but he wasn’t exactly sure what. He took great pains to see that he got it right, that he copied it exactly. You never could tell when . . .

As soon as the thought came to mind, it had left him shivering. That was a way to top Andy’s tapes, something Andy never would have conceived of. Andy had talked a good game—murder as art—but he wouldn’t have had the skill to execute such a breathtaking idea.

Mitch would re-create the design on the flat plane of the girl’s belly, carving it into her flesh so that slowly oozing blood would be the actual ink. That meant Mitch would have to do that final act while the girl was still alive—maybe drugged again so she wouldn’t move and mess things up. One question in Mitch’s mind was whether or not, working free-hand with an X-Acto knife, he would be able to get the nested concentric circles right. The other difficulty would be placement. The most artistically unifying concept would be to use that fine little belly button of hers as the head of the man in the maze.

That would see Andy’s goddamned tapes and raise him one better.

It was on that note that he walked into the hotel to meet with Lani Walker’s mother.

With her hair, nails, and makeup all professionally attended to, Diana Ladd Walker headed for La Paloma and the scheduled Monty Lazarus interview. His wasn’t a byline she recognized, but that didn’t mean anything. The magazines he wrote for were name brand, and Megan had been delighted to schedule an interview with him.

As Diana wended her way through Tucson’s relatively light summertime traffic, she smiled at the idea that she was going to a fashionable hotel to be interviewed by a reporter with a national audience. As a general rule, interviews were something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Still, considering Diana’s humble origins, the very fact that she was being interviewed at all had to count as its own peculiar miracle.

Diana Cooper Ladd Walker had spent her early life in the clean but shabby caretaker’s quarters at the garbage dump back in Joseph, Oregon. Diana’s mother had scrubbed and fussed and worked to keep the place up, but it had remained indelibly “the old Stevens place”—a run-down one-house slum that was theirs to use only as long as Max Cooper managed to hang on to his unenviable position as Joseph’s garbageman.

The job was anything but glamorous. Other than the house, it paid little more than a pittance, but it kept a roof over their heads. With a marginally motivated and often drunk husband, it was the best Iona Dade Cooper could hope for. Max kept both the job and the house for years—far longer than anyone expected—but only because Iona carried more than her share of the load. Max owned the official title of garbageman. Iona did most of the work—his and hers both.

As a child Diana hadn’t been blessed with many friends. The few she did have usually found dozens of excuses to explain why they could never come play at her house. For years Diana had searched for ways to make her house more acceptable, more welcoming.

Once when she was ten or so, she had sat at the kitchen table after dinner, poring through the exotic pages of one of the several Sears and Roebuck catalogs that came to the house each year with her mother’s name on them.

“Look at these,” Diana had said, pointing to a set of sheer, frilly pink curtains. The curtains could be purchased as part of a set along with a matching bedspread. “Wouldn’t those look nice in my bedroom?”

Diana’s question had been intended for her mother’s ears, but at that precise moment, Iona had stepped across the kitchen to the pantry where she was just taking off her apron. Before she could finish hanging up her apron and return to the table, Max Cooper had banged down his beer bottle and then leaned toward Diana. He peered over her shoulder, glowering at the page in the catalog.

“Won’t matter none,” he announced morosely. With a quick jab, he grabbed the catalog out of Diana’s hand and dropped it into Iona’s box of kitchen firewood. “Curtains or no, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And all those hoity-toity girls from school still won’t have nothin’ to do with you. You know what they say,” he added with a leer. “Once a garbageman’s daughter, always a garbageman’s daughter.”

He had leaned back on his chair then, watching to see if she would try to rescue the catalog from the trash heap which, of course, she did not. Even at that age, she already knew better than to give Max Cooper’s meanness the kind of satisfaction he wanted.

In the books Diana had devoured every day—fictional stories peopled by the likes of Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton and the Dana girls—the heroines had slick rooms, speedy little roadsters, loving parents, and enough money to do whatever they liked. If they wanted something, they bought it themselves or some nice relative gave it to them. Diana Cooper’s life wasn’t like that. She never had a matching set of curtains, sheets, and pillowcases until after she had been married and widowed and was living alone in the little rock house in Gates Pass.

She had left the catalog where her father threw it, but she had never forgotten what he had done. And she had never forgiven him either.

Now, driving toward her interview with Monty Lazarus, Diana Ladd Walker was struck once more by how far she had come from those bad old days. It was a long way from the garbageman’s house in Joseph, Oregon, to the lobby of the La Paloma in Tucson, Arizona. A damned long way.

When she pulled into the covered driveway in front of the hotel, a valet-parking attendant stepped forward to open the door and claim her car. “Are you checking in?” he asked, helping her out of the seat.

“No,” she said. “I’m here for a meeting.”

“Very good,” he said, handing her a claim ticket.

She stood for a moment watching as he took the Suburban and drove it out of sight. The miracle was that she didn’t feel as though she were out of her league or that she had somehow overreached herself. No, she was here at a first-class hotel, and she felt totally at ease.

Smiling, Diana smoothed her dress and started inside, nodding a thank-you to the attendant who opened the door.

Not only was it a long way from Joseph to here, she thought, but every single step had been worth it.

As she entered the room a tall, gaunt-looking man with a headful of bushy red hair, slightly stooped shoulders, and an engaging grin rose and came toward her. “Mrs. Walker?” he asked.

Diana nodded and held out her hand. “Mr. Lazarus?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he said with a courtly bow. “Monty Lazarus at your service.” He led her toward a low, comfortable-looking couch. “I’ve managed to corral this little seating area for just the two of us. I thought it might be nicer for talking than the restaurant would be. Would you care for a drink?”

“A glass of wine might be nice. A drink sometimes helps take the edge off.”

“In other words, you’re not looking forward to this.”

She smiled and shook her head. “About as much as I look forward to having a root canal,” she told him.

For some strange reason, that answer seemed to tickle his funny bone. Monty Lazarus laughed aloud.

“The lobby bar isn’t open yet,” he said. “You hang on right here. If you’ll excuse me for a few seconds, I’ll go get you that glass of wine, then I’ll do my best to make this as painless an interview as possible.”

Diana sat back, closed her eyes, and waited, forcing herself to relax, to forget how nervous being on the subjective side of an interview always made her feel.

“Have you ever been to a bullfight?” Andy had asked Mitch once.

“A long time ago,” Mitch answered. “Down in Nogales back in the early seventies. Lori and I went together. I wasn’t especially impressed.”

“The Nogales ring wasn’t noted for the quality of its fights,” Andy replied. “It’s like small-town sports everywhere. The bush leagues. You get the young guys who aren’t quite good enough to make it in the majors and a few major-league has-beens that aren’t tough enough to cut the mustard anymore. But bullfighting, if it’s done right, is a thing of beauty.

“The bullfighter has to be able to kill. That goes without saying, but the art of it is all in the capework, in the bullfighter controlling the drama with his cape. The whole point is to bring the bull’s horns so close that physical injury or even death are less than a fraction of an inch away and yet, when the fight is over the bull is always dead, and usually, the bullfighter walks away unscathed. It’s fascinating to watch.”