Tango Key (25 page)

Aline pocketed the keys he handed her and pointed. Midway up the wall was the rest room window, and Aline stopped under it. "Here." Kincaid was so tall that the window wasn't more than an inch or two beyond the top of his head.

"You're sure?"

"Of course I'm sure."

Kincaid reached into the pouch hooked to the belt at his waist and withdrew two pairs of thin rubber gloves. "What else is in there, anyway?" she asked, snapping on her gloves.

"Penlights, a Swiss Army knife, a couple of tools, a bag of marbles, toothpicks, odds and ends."

"Marbles?"

"They came in handy once." He rolled onto the balls of his feet and pressed his fingers against the pane of glass. It creaked as it swung inward. He crouched and Aline climbed onto his shoulders, her beach bag slung over a shoulder and snug against her hip. As he raised up, her arms tightened around his neck. "Hey, don't squeeze so hard. That's my throat," he said.

"You going to tell me the story of three years ago?" she asked.

"Now? You want to hear it now?"

She was tempted to increase the pressure on his throat, but didn't. "C'mon, push me through."

He did and she slid through the opening feet first, back against the edge of the window, hands holding the pane open, feet grappling for the corner of the sink inside. The moment she was all the way in, she turned, grabbed hold of the sill, and dropped to the floor. Then she climbed back onto the sink and held the window open as Kincaid hoisted himself up. It was like watching a giant at a carnival, trying to fit himself through a Hoola Hoop made for a kid. But he was surprisingly agile and slid through the opening much faster than she had.

Aline hurried to the door, opened it quietly, and peered out into the hall, hand digging into the pocket of her windbreaker for the four keys. Behind her, Kincaid switched on a penlight. "Getting a search warrant would've been simpler than this," he remarked as they stepped out into the hall.

"Ha." What did he know.

In front of Cavello's door, he aimed the penlight at the lock while she tried the keys. On the third try, there was an audible click and the door swung open and stopped at the edge of the rug, leaving a crack about a foot wide to sidle through. "Wait," he whispered, and shone the light over her shoulder. The beam danced around the room, seeking alarms, movement detectors, electronic gizmos. "Okay."

They slipped through the opening into Cavello's office.

Aline brought out the larger flashlights from her bag, passed Kincaid one, kept the other for herself. She went over to Cavello's desk, and Kincaid moved to the filing cabinets. Cool air hissed from the overhead vents, and a current struck the side of her face as she sat in the leather chair. Inside the gloves her hands were sweating.

The drawers were quite neat, but the first two contained absolutely nothing of interest. The bottom drawer, however, was locked. Aline knelt in front of it as she jimmied it with a bobby pin. Inside were two 8 x 11 envelopes with IRS: RECEIPTS printed neatly on the front and, beneath them, two black ledgers. She pulled out the ledgers and sat back on her heels, holding the flashlight with one hand as she turned the pages of the top ledger with the other. It appeared to be a record of Cavello's monthly income and expenses. Nothing too exciting here, she thought, setting the first ledger aside and opening the second.

Initially, she mistook it for a duplicate of the first ledger. But when she compared the two, she realized the second ledger quoted
         
considerably lower figures for income and
 
higher figures for expenses. She quickly perused the contents of the 8 x 11 envelopes, comparing some of the receipts and cancelled checks against the entries in the ledgers and smiled.

How considerate of Cavello to provide her with something to use as leverage for information: he was keeping a double set of books. Even a man like Cavello, who acted with such impunity when it came to local law enforcement, would whistle a different tune if threatened with exposure to the IRS.

The tax boys, after all, didn't mess around. If you owed Uncle Sam, they froze your accounts, seized your house, garnisheed your wages, claimed your soul until the account was settled.

She couldn't possibly copy all this stuff now, tonight, in under five minutes. So she slipped the ledgers in her beach bag, locked the drawer again, and hoped Cavello didn't go in there very often. She moved over to the filing cabinets to help Kincaid.

"Find anything?" she whispered.

"Yeah. Look at this." He passed her an open file and shone the flashlight on it so she could see it. Inside was a 5 x 7 color photograph of a gold frog with bright green emerald eyes. Aline drank in the magnificent luster of the gold, the deep green of the emerald eyes. The photograph was clear enough to show the minute etchings on the frog's body that were supposed to be folds of skins, webbed feet, a snout, each small detail finely hewn. It was quite possibly the loveliest thing she'd ever seen.

Attached to it was an embossed business card with a half-moon logo. Across the front of it, in fancy gold letters was, LILLY. Beneath the name was a post office box on Tango Key. Under the photograph of the frog was a flyer:

LILLY THE MENTALIST

Appearing weekly
from October—April at
The Flamingo Hotel
The Fontainebleau
The Palm Beach Breakers
(also available for private parties)

"Ever heard of her?" Kincaid asked.

"Nope." She opened the mouth of her beach bag and slid the folder inside next to the ledgers. "But if she's on Tango, she won't be hard to track down. Anything else in these drawers?"

"No. Let's get out of here."

They switched off their flashlights, which vanished into the beach bag, and Kincaid turned on the penlight again, keeping the tiny beam against the rug as they crossed the room. As Aline opened the door and started through it, her shoe sank against something under the rug. She felt it, she knew immediately what it was, but it was too late. The screech of an alarm pierced the cool, quiet air. Her heart leaped into her throat, and she threw herself forward, into the hall. For a split second, she considered flying out the front door. But if Cavello was clever enough to rig an alarm under the rug, then he'd probably made sure the alarm went off on a computer switchboard at some security company that would have a squad car here within sixty seconds.

The cops would be arriving at the front of the building, not the back.

They raced back into the ladies' room. Aline scrambled onto the sink, slammed her head against the edge of the window panel, and almost knocked herself to the floor. Her arms pinwheeled, she grabbed hold of the sill, poked her head through the window. She dropped her beach bag to the ground and pushed herself through the opening.

The alarm continued to shriek.

We aren't going to make it and I'm going to get fired and tossed in jail for B and E and I don't have the money for a lawyer and I'll get some court-appointed schmuck who won't like cops and oh Christ
. . . Then she landed hard on her feet, her left ankle twisted outward, and the bone smacked the pavement. Pain exploded through it. Tears sprang into her eyes. Her hands flew to the ankle, rubbing it. She bit her lower lip, sucking air in through her teeth, then heard Kincaid hiss, "Move out of the way, Aline," and she waddled to the left, pressed her back against the wail, and slid upward.

Kincaid landed less than a foot from her, grabbed her beach bag and her hand, and pulled her forward. The pain radiated up her calf. Halfway past Cavello's boat dock, she stumbled, Kincaid caught her, and then as they started up the incline, she stumbled again. Kincaid still had a tight grip on her hand and nearly wrenched her shoulder from its socket to keep her upright. The alarm's peal went on and on, and now, worse, much worse, she heard the all too familiar wail of police sirens. Near the crest, they flattened against the ground and peered through the branches into the lookout area to make sure it was clear. It wasn't. Headlights from an approaching car swam against the leaves just above her head.

Her ankle throbbed. She pressed her face against her arm, into the humus scent of leaves, earth. Her heart pounded in her ears. Maybe Murphy would be the arresting officer. Or Dobbs. Oh God, funny, funny, and she started to giggle.

The wails of the police sirens were almost on top of them. She glanced back down the hill, saw the ghostly swirling of the red and blue lights.
They'll have the dogs
. Panic galvanized her, and she scrambled the remaining distance up the hill and crashed through the trees to the lookout area—and the Saab.

Kincaid hastily unlocked the door and she threw herself inside, her breath raw, ragged. She dropped the beach bag to the floor. The Saab sprang to life and tore away from the lookout area spewing dirt and pebbles. Kincaid swung into a U-turn and aimed the car's nose south.

It sped through the moonlit hills, then down, whisking them toward town. Neither of them spoke. Her breathing started to return to normal. She looked over at Kincaid, at his hands clutching the steering wheel, and he glanced at her, and then they both started to laugh. They were still wearing the thin rubber gloves.

"T
hat hurts, Kincaid. C'mon, let it go."

"Ice will keep it from swelling more. Stop squirming."

"I'll hold it myself."

"You'll cheat. Just sit back, will you?"

They were in her kitchen, Kincaid crouched in front of her, holding an ice pack against her ankle which was dripping into a bucket of ice. It was 10:20. They were supposed to meet Juan Plano for a drink in forty minutes, and here she was, her ankle swelling, her T-shirt and jeans spotted with dirt, bits of twigs caught in her hair, and all she wanted was to be left alone.

She stared at the top of Kincaid's head, where his sandy hair was thinning slightly. He, perhaps sensing her eyes, looked up. "What?" he asked.

"I didn't say anything."

He flashed that winning smile, that Kincaid smile, that guileless smile. "You're thinking that Bernelli was right."

"You're goddamn right that's what I'm thinking. You can't deny that you withheld information, Kincaid." She pulled her foot free of his grasp. "I'll do that. Give me the stupid ice pack."

He patted the air with his hands and sat back on the floor. "My affair with Eve isn't relevant to any of this."

"Kincaid, I've got news for you. It's all relevant. For all I know, you killed Cooper because you're still in love with Eve." She hurled the accusation at him. The separate syllables of each word smacked the air like noisy sloppy kisses, and now that she heard it out loud, she saw that it made a twisted kind of sense—as much sense as anything else that had happened to her since Cooper's murder.

His eyes turned a deeper shade of blue, he rubbed his beard, sighed, and sat back on his hands. "The night of Cooper's murder, Ferret and I were in Miami. At the dogs. I was supposed to have breakfast with Ortiz the next morning, because he was at that seminar. I called him from the track around one that morning, I guess it was, and that's when he told me about Cooper. Asked me to look into it. I drove back to Tango from the track."

"I didn't ask you for an alibi."

"Sure you did. I don't blame you. I would too, if I were you." He looked down at her ankle. The washcloth that had held the ice was dripping on the floor. Kincaid moved the bucket closer to her chair and coaxed her foot gently into the bucket. The ice cubes closed over the swelling, numbing it. "I met Eve in Coconut Grove at an art festival. We were both admiring the same painting, and she struck up a conversation. We wandered over to one of the cafes, and things developed from there. We spent the next three days holed up in a motel room, then another week at my place. At the end of the week, I drove her back to Marathon, and I never saw her again."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why would it end that suddenly when you'd spent ten days straight with her? You must've been attracted to her."

"Attracted?" He laughed. "I was crazy about her. I couldn't get enough of her. That stage lasted about four days. Then we got back to my place and I started noticing things about her that didn't seem quite right."

"Like what?"

"Well, we were in a drugstore down on the boardwalk one afternoon and I saw her pocket a bottle of nail polish. We'd eat in a restaurant and the first thing she always did was take the packets of sugar and saccharin and drop them in her purse. Another time, in a bookstore, I saw her slip a couple of paperbacks into her purse. Then, one night, the last night, I came into my bedroom and found her going through my drawers. That's when I confronted her. She ended up in tears, gave me a song and dance about her deprived childhood and so on, and I said, 'Yes, that's very sad, Eve, now pack your stuff because I'm driving you back to Marathon.' A year later, she married Cooper."

"Wasn't she involved with Alan then?"

"It was during one of their splits. And my second wife and I had just gotten divorced, so I was ripe for it."

"What was she looking for in your bureau?"

"I never asked. It wouldn't have made any difference. It was the fact that she'd done it at all. The only other time I ever saw her was about five, six months later. I'd gone sailing one afternoon and I'd just come into the dock and there she was with Cooper, getting off his sloop." He paused, ran his hands over his jeans. "End of story."