Tango Key (3 page)

At the edge of the yard, she stopped. A steep, narrow wooden staircase snaked down the hill to a beach. Beyond it was a dock that jutted out into the water.

"There. Down there."

Aline descended. Lights speckled the Gulf like earthbound stars. A gibbous moon painted the surface of the water a nicotine yellow. The tide was out, leaving a prayer rug of a beach the color of pancakes. Against it, the body looked like a sooty smudge—water-dark loafers, slacks, a pastel shirt, wrinkled hands, and . . .

No head.

Her knees went soft. Sourness slid up her throat. "Christ, sweet Christ," she whispered, and grabbed onto the railing to steady herself. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply once, twice, three times, until the black dots inside her eyes had evaporated. Then she stepped down onto the sand and crouched next to the body. She shone the flashlight on Cooper's left hand. She lifted it. The skin was cold, damp, as wrinkled as raisins. He'd been in the water awhile before washing up onto the beach. She examined his nails, but even with the flashlight she couldn't see well enough to tell whether there was anything significant under them.

She checked his pockets and found his soggy wallet still tucked in the back pocket of his slacks. She removed it. The beam of the flashlight slid up his back to . . .

No head no head Jesus no head who would do such a thing

A crab skittered toward the place where Cooper's head should've been, and its pincer nabbed a flap of loose skin. Aline scrambled to her feet and hurried away from the body, fighting down another wave of nausea.

She stopped at the dock, the breeze lifting strands of her hair and cooling her damp, feverish cheeks.
So where's his head?
Was he tossed over the side of the boat?
She squatted at the end of the dock, passing the beam of the flashlight under it. Shadows eddied over the wet sand and rocks and clumps of seaweed. She didn't particularly want to look for Cooper's head, but reminded herself that nothing could be worse than finding her dad's body that morning a decade ago when she'd walked into the living room of the house he'd shared for nearly fifty years with her mother. He was slumped low on the couch, eyes still open, a beatific, oddly peaceful smile on his face. It was as if, in his final moment, he'd glimpsed something lovely. Her mother, perhaps. Aline had just stood there, suspended in disbelief, and then a wall of grief had slammed into her.

Finding the head of a man she had barely known couldn't be worse than that.

She walked up and down the tiny beach, the flashlight dancing this way and that. The breeze picked up. She spotted more crabs, more seaweed, more rocks. An occasional fish splashed in the dark waters just beyond her. But there was no head. She finally climbed the wooden steps back to the yard. The Skeleton Crew—her nickname for the boys from forensics—came around the side of the house, Bill Prentiss leading the way.

"The body's down there on the beach, Doc," she said when Prentiss saw her and stopped, letting the other guys move on ahead of him.

"We've got to stop meeting like this, Al." He took her hand and kissed the back of it, then pulled her against him. "My wife . . . your husband . . . the gossip on the island . . . oh Jesus, the gossip . . ."

She laughed, surprised that she could do so, and disengaged herself. She and Prentiss were Tango born—on the same day, same year, thirty seconds apart. They both suspected their mothers—who had rooms across the hall from each other in the maternity ward—had made some sort of pact about marrying them off. If neither of them had left the island, it might've happened that way. As it was, they'd grown through childhood, puberty, and adolescence together—first kiss, first date, first lover. Although their erratic affair had lasted almost five years, until Prentiss had entered med school, its demise had been civil and mutual. Their similarities—which had created so many problems for them as lovers—were ideally suited for friendship. There had been so many parallels in their lives that at times, Aline had only to look at where Prentiss stood in his life—Prentiss who was born thirty seconds before she was —to understand where her own was headed.

"You have a macabre sense of humor," she admonished.

"All coroners do. It's a professional hazard." He ran a hand along the side of his face. "Is it bad?"

"He doesn't have a head."

Prentiss jammed his hands in the pockets of his slacks and gazed off toward the water. He had a wonderful profile, strong and proud, the kind that should have been embossed on the face of a coin. "Great. Tango's first decapitation."

"I think he's been in the water awhile. How soon can you do an autopsy?"

"First thing tomorrow morning, Al. But it'd sure help to have the head."

"Hey, be glad you have your own." She ruffled his black curly hair, something that used to drive him nuts as a kid. Still drove him nuts. He made a face and smoothed his hand over his hair.

"I wish you wouldn't do that. Lanie can always tell when I've run into you because my hair stands up weird."

Prentiss's relationship with Lanie, she knew, was headed on the same course as Aline's relationship with Murphy. "What do you know about Eve Cooper, Bill?"

"What everyone knows. The story of Pygmalion. Girl from the wrong side of the tracks marries millionaire twenty years older who's determined to make her over. Frankly, I think Audrey Hepburn played the part better in
My Fair Lady
."

"Is she the sole heir?"

"Don't know. Look, I'd better get down there and see what's what." He jerked a thumb toward the beach. "Talk to you tomorrow. Let's get together for a drink or dinner or something soon." He flashed one of his winning grins. "I gotta find out where my life's going."

"What makes you think I've got the answer?"

"Things with you and Murphy are always a step ahead of things with Lanie and me."

Funny, she'd thought it was the other way around.

She trotted up the steps to the back porch, past a Styrofoam cooler, and stepped into a family room. Comfortable, but nothing special, considering Cooper's wealth. The living room, however, where she found Eve, was something else altogether. A Steinway piano graced a corner of the room, its dark wood as shiny as a mirror. Bookshelves climbed two of the walls. A picture window overlooked the bay. The furniture was pale blue, the sort of stuff that discouraged bare feet, lovemaking, and anything else that was fun. And although that was where Eve was sitting, she seemed rigid, uncomfortable, like someone who was visiting. Behind her and on either side of her was a jungle of plants.

She was lighting a cigarette, and for the first time Aline noticed her long, thin hands. Graceful hands. Her nails, painted a soft cinnamon, were thick, perfectly contoured, and curled over the tips of her fingers.
Too long
, Aline thought. And so many rings. There must've been a ring on every finger except her thumb. She lit her cigarette and held it in a self-conscious way, as though Cooper were whispering instructions in her ear.

"Do you feel up to answering a couple of questions, Eve?"

"I guess so. Sure. I'd like to get it over with." The words came out in a pother of smoke. She crossed her slender legs at the knees and kicked one bare foot forward, back.

"When did you find your husband's body?"

"Sometime after nine, I guess it was. It was hot, and I thought I'd go for, you know, a swim. I . . . I found him then."

"You didn't call the police department until nine-thirty. What took you so long?"

Those blue eyes took on a hard, defensive edge. "You ever found a body with no head on it, Aline?"

Aline admitted that she hadn't.

"Well, you stop thinking. Something goes weird in your head. Especially when it's the body of the man you've been married to for two years." Her voice quavered—the first sign of grief she'd displayed, except for her moist eyes.

"When was the last time you saw him alive?"

"This afternoon. I came home for a late lunch and—"

"Home from where?"

"The beach. The one out on Old Post Road. I was sunbathing, and digging for clams. So I came home and he'd just gotten back from court. He was going to have dinner with Ted Cavello tonight at the Hibiscus Inn. That's what he said."

Cavello: who managed the Cove Marina and owned the marine supply shop there. "A business dinner?"

She stabbed out her cigarette. Her foot continued to swing. "Listen, I didn't ask, all right? I never asked him about business. But yeah, it was probably business. He's done some work for Cavello over the years."

"Doesn't Doug have a son by his first marriage?"

"Yeah. Alan. He lives in Marathon."

"Did he and your husband get along?"

She laughed, a quick, fluvial sound, the music of water sliding over rocks in a stream. "Christ, no."

"Any particular reason?"

She'd been sitting with her arm extended along the back of the couch, and now she brought it forward and examined her thumbnail, fiddling with the cuticle. "Because of me. Alan thought it was gross that his father married someone young enough to be his daughter. They haven't talked to each other since . . . since Doug and I got married."

"You were home all evening?"

She nodded; it made her thick black hair with its salubrious sheen bounce like hair in a commercial for Wella Balsam. "Watching TV mostly. I thought Doug would be home around ten, maybe eleven. Then, like I said, I went for a swim."

"Who would want to see your husband dead, Eve?"

She stopped pushing at her cuticle and looked up A small smile shadowed her face, but it was quite possibly the most rueful smile Aline had ever seen. "Probably everyone who knew him."

Thanks. That's real helpful. "Could you be a little more specific?"

She lit another cigarette and dropped the match into a crystal ashtray next to its predecessor. "Well, he . . ."

Just then the door in the other room slid open, shut, and a moment later Murphy strolled into the room. He glanced at Aline, his sunburned face crinkling at the eyes like tissue paper, then his gaze flicked to Eve, and beneath the sunburn his skin took on the consistency of waxed beans.

His eyes, which were darker than walnuts, paled. All six feet of him seemed to be on the verge of collapse as he blinked, opened his mouth, closed it, shook his head, looked helplessly at Aline. His eyes supplicated. His eyes shouted,
What the fuck's going on?
How can Monica be sitting there?

Then his gaze slid slowly back to Eve. His hand jerked up and gripped the door frame. He tried to smile and failed miserably. He tried to move forward and didn't do a very good job of that, either.

"This is Eve Cooper, Murphy," said Aline, her voice flat and soft in the strange silence of the room.

"Eve. Right. Eve Cooper." His head bobbed. "I'm, uh, Detective Murphy— Steve Murphy." He took baby steps into the room, as though he were afraid of moving too fast because Eve might vanish. He smiled. He walked over to Eve and held out his hand. His eyes never left her face. Aline knew that for him Eve Cooper wasn't just a ringer for his dead wife. He actually believed Monica had risen from the dead.

B
y the time Murphy had sat on the chair to Eve's right, Aline knew the score. In the blink of an eye, in the split second it had taken him to pass through the doorway, to see Eve, she had lost him to the past. Lost him completely.

She wanted to get up. To leave. To fly back to the sanctuary of her own place at the other end of the island. She would crawl into her bed piled with laundry and yank the sheet up over her head. She would wrap herself in the hammock. She would ignore the heat, the discomfort, the din of the crickets. She would embrace it all gladly just for these moments not to be happening.

Roll back the clock. Let's start this scene over again.

But the world worked like that only in her head, which was throbbing. Okay.
Easy does it
, she thought. Maybe she was imagining all this. Maybe if she really looked at Murphy, at Eve, she would see that the only thing going on was a routine interrogation.

She looked. She looked real hard. And what she saw was the sheen in Murphy's eyes, that expression that used to melt across his face when he gazed at Monica in a moment of sweet repose. Sometimes it had happened when Monica was chattering away with Jack Dobbs or even with Aline herself, or when Monica was crossing a room with a couple of drinks in her hands. Aline had seen it openly one evening when Monica had stretched out on the couch in her living room and fallen asleep. It was a look of complete absorption, of a love so deep, so total that it bordered on obsession.

Monica. Three years, two months, and five days ago she had been raped and disemboweled in the bedroom of the townhouse she and Murphy had rented at the western end of the island. There were no leads, just a weak theory that her death was connected somehow to a vice investigation he and Dobbs had been working on at that time. The case was still open.

Murphy had taken a two-month leave of absence from the department after it had happened. It was during those two months that his interest in fast boats had become his passion. In some ways, it had become a substitution for Murphy's obsession for Monica. And in another way, a darker way, it was Murphy living out a death wish.