Naked Came The Phoenix (7 page)

"No, I made it all up," was her mother's sarcastic reply.

"You've got to tell me more than you told them!"

"All right, come over here where he can't hear us." Hilda cast a queenly look at her employee and called out to him, "What
is
your name, anyway?"

"Emilio."

"Emilio what?"

"Emilio Constanza, madam."

With that accent, Caroline thought, she wouldn't have been surprised to hear him say his name was Winston or Basil or Frederick, something as British as double-decker buses.

Her mother, who had honed her giving-orders skills on Caroline and her father for years, was already proving adept at taking charge and issuing edicts. That was the one part of this incredible turn of events that didn't surprise her daughter in the least. She'd always suspected that her mother must have been Napoleon in a former life.

Hilda ordered King David to call the police immediately, an assignment that he appeared to accept with relish and sardonic amusement. "Great publicity," he murmured, as he sauntered off to accomplish the job.

"Black forces still threaten us all," declared Phyllis V. Talmadge.

"Oh, mind your own business," Hilda snapped.

The psychic departed in a huff of outrage.

Hilda then shooed Christopher Lund and Ondine out of the building as well.

The only guest who hadn't appeared on the scene at all was Howard Fondulac, the producer Caroline suspected of being an alcoholic. So at least there was one guest whom her mother hadn't yet managed to order around or offend.

Now only Emilio remained with them. He stood with his back against the door, instructed by Hilda to keep out everyone except the police.

Caroline was determined to demand answers from this astonishing woman who was her mother. She had already heard Hilda tell Raoul that she herself was the majority stockholder in this privately owned company that was the spa. But what Hilda hadn't answered yet to anybody's satisfaction was, "How? Why? Mother!"

Hilda smiled in a satisfied, superior way. "Claudia and Raoul always thought their benefactor-their majority owner-was a wealthy attorney in Atlanta."

By the door, Emilio looked openly interested in this.

"But it wasn't? Was it you and Dad?"

"Not your father, dear, just me. It was my secret little investment that I made long ago with money your father gave me when I asked him for it."

Of course, Caroline thought, Hamlin Finch gave his wife anything she wanted to try to keep her happy, to try to keep the peace.

"But why did you keep it a secret, Mother? Why didn't anybody know? Claudia was your old roommate, for heaven's sake. Why didn't you tell her?"

"She was my roommate but not my friend."

Hilda glanced at their "guard" and pulled Caroline deeper into the room, away from his listening ears. And then in a few terse sentences, Hilda delivered to Caroline the biggest shock of her life. "Didn't you ever wonder why I stayed at Brown for only one year?"

"Well, no, I-"

"You thought I left to marry your father, didn't you? That was true, as far as it went, but that came later. The real reason I left was to have a baby."

Her daughter gasped, and the man at the door looked at them curiously, though she thought he was surely unable to overhear their conversation.

"My parents knew, and my roommate knew, but nobody else-not even the father-knew about it. I had the baby, and I put it up for adoption-"

"Oh, Mom," Caroline murmured, sympathy overcoming shock. But then she blurted in amazement, "I have a sister? A brother?"

"One of the above," her mother said, with a hard, brittle humor that Caroline suspected hid her real feelings. At least, Caroline hoped it did; she would have hated to think her mother could really be
that
cold and unloving. "I didn't want to know if it was a girl or a boy. I made them take the baby away without telling me. And then I let your father court and marry me, because I was afraid to go back to college."

"But why?"

Hilda cast a lingering glance at the woman whose mud-covered body still lay on the tile floor. "Because she said she would tell everyone what I had done. She hated me, she was jealous of me, and she didn't want me ever to return to school. I was afraid of her after that, always expecting her to divulge my secret someday. And then one day years later she called me and said she would tell your father about the baby if I didn't give her enough money to start this spa."

"Oh, Mom!" Caroline tried to clasp her mother in a comforting embrace, but Hilda didn't want it and pushed her away. Still, Caroline whispered, "I'm so sorry."

"Never mind that. The important thing is that I vowed my own revenge on that terrible woman. I began to buy her out, using an attorney, and she never knew it. It took me twenty years, but this year I finally did it. I finally became the majority owner of this place. And now I intend to run it my way." Her mother's smile was cold. "It's the best revenge, Caroline."

The owner of Phoenix Spa was dead.

The new owner was her very own mother.

But her mother was wrong, Caroline thought, even in the shock of the moment. That wasn't the most important thing. Not at all. And it never would be. The most important thing was that all those years ago another baby had been born and then disappeared, perhaps into another family. She
has another child! And I have a sister or
a
brother
.

Caroline's heart felt suffused with a warmth that nearly brought her to tears. But she saw at once that her mother wouldn't appreciate any show of emotion or, worse, sentimentality. And then a very unsentimental thought occurred to her like a cold wind that froze the warmth in her heart.

If the police were looking for a good motive for murder, her own mother certainly had one.

DETECTIVE VINCE TOSCANA SURVEYED the scene. A bunch of people who were already too beautiful, standing around a beauty spa that had more marble than the Vatican, and all the people were covered with mud. In fact, they had paid good money to be covered with mud. Vince didn't get it. Back home in Philly, if some knucklehead threw mud on you, you wouldn't
pay
him for it, you would break his face, no. question. You would have to break his face just to save yours, and you both would be better for it. Vince had learned that lesson from the boys on the corner, which is where he learned every lesson that mattered in life.

Vince sighed inwardly and wished, not for the first time, that he had never moved out of the city. He didn't belong in Virginia. There wasn't enough graffiti. Strangers greeted him on the street. People said "please" and "thank you" like it was going out of style. And now the mud people. It was crazy. But Vince loved his wife, Mary Elizabeth, who was from here, and so he had transferred, even though he was pushing sixty, two years from retirement, and the farthest south he had ever lived was a brick rowhouse on South Street.

And though Vince liked his fancy new house with the plush lawn, he often felt like the only Italian in the Confederacy. By day, he would find himself yearning for a steaming cheese steak and a growing crime rate. At night, his dreams were filled with the happy honking of congested traffic and the screaming of police sirens. He woke up relaxed when he had his recurring dream, the one where the cabbie cut him off and then cursed him out for it. Vince Toscana was homesick.

But now he had a job to do, and Vince loved his job almost as much as his wife. He flopped his tie over his shoulder, hitched up his khaki slacks, and eased onto his good knee beside the muddy body of Claudia de Vries. Vince suppressed his sympathy to serve his profession and appraised the lovely woman, now lifeless, with a critical eye. The medical examiner would determine the time of death for sure, but the pallor of the body and the tension in the facial muscles told Vince that rigor mortis had set in but not disappeared, so the murder was probably committed late last night. Plus the lady wore a fancy cocktail dress, like the kind his wife would wear at night. Then Vince noticed something strange. Down by the woman's manicured hand, the filmy dress concealed an object behind it, formless as a shadow.

Vince slid a ballpoint from his breast pocket and edged the cocktail dress away from the hand, exposing the article clenched in its death grip. What the hell was it? Vince leaned closer. The hand held a piece of clothing that looked for all the world like a skimpy bathing suit. He probed it with his pen, ignoring the surprised murmuring of the mud people behind him.

The swimsuit was made of white jersey, with some sort of bright gold pattern, and Vince couldn't tell without disturbing the suit if it belonged to a man or woman; it could have been either a man's suit or the bottom half of a woman's bikini. Vince wouldn't touch the suit until it had been photographed in place, so he had to settle for eyeballing it from the other side of the body. A swatch of material bulged through the corpse's thumb and index finger. A big yellow dot. A polka dot.

"An itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie, yellow polka-dot bikini," Vince said aloud, almost involuntarily, as the song sprang instantly to his mind. He heard more murmuring behind him, which he disregarded as his thoughts returned to the body.

What did it mean? Was it a clue? Did the color matter? Did the dead woman rip it from the killer? Or was it presented to her, in some sort of confrontation, as proof of an affair? Perhaps she was just doing her laundry at the time she was killed? A
bathing suit
? Vince could feel the mud people hovering over his shoulder at the discovery. "Please, step back," he said. He waved them off as politely as possible, not wanting the scene contaminated more than it had been, until he heard a well-bred snort.

"I assume we can leave now," a woman's voice said, and Vince squinted over the top of his bifocals at a broad who had introduced herself as Hilda Finch. She was a definite number for her age, but too high-rent for Vince's taste. Next to her stood her daughter, Caroline, who managed to look pretty even with mud covering her clothing and a frown tugging at the corners of her mouth. She looked confused at the sight of the suit, as if she hadn't seen it before, or was too young to know the song, and Vince made a mental note.

"Mrs. Finch," he answered, "you don't have to stand here, but please wait for me in the front room, with the others. I will want to ask you some questions. For example, do you recognize that bathing suit in her hand?"

"Questions?" Hilda Finch peered down her small nose at Vince. "Detective, we don't know anything about this matter. Caroline and I simply discovered the body. That's the extent of our involvement."

"I understand, but we will need a formal statement as part of our investigation." Vince rose to his feet with difficulty. His knee hurt more, down South. All this clean air, and nobody had shot at him in a year. And it hadn't escaped his notice that Mrs. Finch didn't answer his question about the bathing suit. So much for Southern hospitality. "The department likes to do a thorough job, Mrs. Finch."

"That is not my concern, Detective."

"See what I mean?" Vince ignored her and gestured to the door, where an army of techs in blue jumpsuits and white booties entered, carrying stainless-steel cases of crime detection equipment. Their appearance had nothing to do with anything; Vince was stalling Hilda Finch with his Crime Scene 101 lecture. She was an obvious suspect and he didn't want her going anywhere. "These people, they'll gather the physical evidence from the crime scene. It will give us clues as to the killer. Your statement can help us, too, Mrs. Finch. The department would appreciate it."

"Detective, you can't be serious, detaining me. Don't you know who I am?" Hilda Finch fixed a cold gaze on Vince. "I am the owner of this spa, and my daughter Caroline is the wife of a very important person, a United States congressman."

Vince nodded, no-nonsense. "In my book, if you two found the body, that makes you both important people. I have to talk to you about the circumstances of this homicide."

Next to her mother, Caroline looked confounded. "Aren't you curious?" she asked. "I mean, about how Claudia was murdered?"

Vince looked from one woman to the other, waiting for the answer but acting casual. It wasn't easy to act casual around such classy people, and Vince wasn't a casual man to start with. In fact, Vince hated casual. Casual meant nothing mattered, and to a detective, everything mattered.

Hilda Finch batted her eyes, recovering quickly. "Of course I'm curious, but I'm not morbid. I refuse to stand here, gaping like some fool at a car wreck. I trust Mr. Toscana will tell us what we need to know." She glanced at her jeweled Rolex. "Besides, I have an appointment in fifteen minutes. We can chat after that." She turned away from a startled Caroline, and Vince didn't need twenty-five years' experience to figure that this was the first the daughter heard about any appointment.

"Appointment, Mrs. Finch?" Vince asked. "No problem. I can accommodate you. Normally I would examine the scene first, then talk to witnesses, but we'll talk now. Then you can get right to your appointment."

She pursed thin but glossy lips. "Detective, I will not be delayed. I have a business to run, and the next few hours are critical to its success. I'm sure the word is already out on what happened. There is much to do to make a smooth transition."

Vince decided to let her go. She could run, but she couldn't hide. Joe Louis had said that, or was it Cooch, from the corner? "Suit yourself, Mrs. Finch. If I need you, I will subpoena you."

"Send it to my attorney, Detective." Mrs. Finch took her daughter's hand more rudely than necessary. "My daughter and I are leaving right this minute."

"Why your daughter?" Vince glanced at Caroline, who looked like she wanted to cooperate. "She doesn't have an appointment, or a spa to run." Vince addressed the daughter directly. "Do you?"