Tango Key (34 page)

"Grits."

"Shee-it. My ma fed me grits, too, but I ain't got bones like yours. Pleasure to make your acquaintance." He glanced back at Aline. "So if it's not dah poker game you're here for, what d'ya need, Al?"

"To take a look around the boatyard."

"Shore. C'mon. I'll unlock dah gate back yonder."

He stepped outside and they followed him around the side of the boathouse to a door. He unlocked the padlock. "Dis have sumthin' to do with Murphy, Allie?"

She nodded.

"I told him dat woman would be trouble." The words hissed into the damp air. "I knows Murphy for how many years, Aline? Eight? Ten? We's been good friends. He does fine work for me here. But you think he listens to me when it comes to dat woman? No way. Because of her, he gets fired from his po-leese job. What the hell, he says. He didn't like dat job no how. I told him dat was bullshit, 'cause I know how much he liked dat job. He refused to talk 'bout it anymore with me.

"She comes down here on his lunch hour, you know, and I sees dem smoochin' and carryin' on like nobody's business, and when I remind her lunch hour's over and she'd best be movin' on, she gives me one of dem,
Who ya talkin' to, nigger?
looks. Bums me, I'll tell you. But more dan dat, it pains me to see Murphy makin' such a fool of himself." He shook his head, raised a long, skinny arm, and pointed. "Her boat's down yonder, at the dock. She's payin' me a pretty penny to have Murphy work on it."

"What kind of work, Willie?"

"Fixin' 'er up, dat's all I know. I invited Murphy and Dobbs to dah game, but I don't know whether Murphy'll be showin' or not. Hope so. Maybe Dobbs can talk some sense to him. But I ain't holding my breath."

They weaved their way past all kinds of boats in various degrees of disrepair, past engines that had been covered by tarps, through the pungent smell of grease and diesel. Waves broke against the narrow beach and slapped the sides of the dock that jutted out into the dark waters. High tide: the sloop bobbed at her moorage, regal as a queen, her single mast reaching for the reluctant moon.

"She's a beauty, all right," Kincaid said quietly as they approached. "A boat was something Eve wanted in the worst way when I knew her. It was one of the first questions she asked me that night at Sloppy Joe's. 'Ya got a boat?' " He captured the intonation of her voice perfectly. " 'Nope, no boat,' I told her. 'Someday, I wanna have a yacht. Y'know the kind I mean?' she says. 'Like a Saudi prince?' I asked. And she laughed and seemed sort of embarrassed by the whole thing."

This wasn't a yacht, but it wasn't a bad step in the right direction.

They stepped on board. The cabin door was locked, but the lock was rusty, and Aline picked it with a bobby pin as Kincaid kept the beam of his flashlight on it. "Nifty trick," he commented when the door swung open. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

"My last time around, I was a thief on the streets of Chicago."

"Yeah." He chuckled. "And I was a madam in New York."

"You think we knew each other?"

He touched the small of her back, urging her into the cabin. "You bet. You were one of my customers."

She poked him in the ribs and he closed the cabin door behind them. The air smelled strongly of varnish. The galley table was covered with pots and pans and utensils which had been removed from the storage area under the sink, where the piping was being replaced. They checked out the cabinets, the drawers, the sleeping area at the stern, even the head with its sloping floor and tiny shower.

"I can see now why they're storing all those supplies up at the farmhouse. No room here if they're refurbishing." Kincaid remarked, as he slid open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. "Quite an impressive pharmacy. Looks like they're prepared for everything short of diphtheria and rabies." He held up a bottle, shook it. "Keflex. Isn't that a penicillin derivative?"

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean she killed Waite. I've got Keflex in
my
bathroom, Kincaid."

"Now you're defending her?"

Aline let out a curt laugh. "I'm just trying not to jump to any conclusions."

"Uh-huh." He replaced the bottle of Keflex. "I suppose that means you don't think they're really going to leave, either."

She leaned into the doorway. "Let's see. You're trying to pick an argument or you're playing devil's advocate or you're just being cantankerous. Which is it?"

He slid the cabinet door shut and passed her the flashlight. "Hold this, will you?" He lifted the top of the toilet tank and she shone the light inside. Nothing but murky water; Kincaid replaced the top and took back the flashlight. "Let's take another look in the galley."

"You're avoiding my question."

"Murphy does that, Allie. Not me. All I'm saying is that despite the supplies at the farmhouse, you're still hoping that it's all a mistake, that Murphy wouldn't do something like this."

"I am not," she snapped. But she was. Deep down, that was exactly what she'd been thinking, and it annoyed her that Kincaid knew it, that he read her like the Sunday funnies. "Stop telling me what I think."

"Okay. Sorry. You're not thinking that. What the hell do I know?"

"Besides," she added, "we still don't know why they took stuff like lamps to the Pleskin place."

They made a thorough search of the cabinets in the galley this time and, wedged between two hardback books, found a waterproof pouch. Inside was a stack of nautical maps. Kincaid removed the top one and they spread it open on the table. Three different routes had been laid out in thick red ink. The first shot from Tango Key south to the Caribbean, touching shore at Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, east to the Windward Islands, then south to Trinidad. The second route meandered south to the Panama Canal, then west to the South Pacific with a final destination as Australia. The third route flew southeast toward Brazil. Each route was marked every couple of inches in nautical miles and dates. The departure dates from Tango Key were all the same—July 6—and next to the date, the time. 0500 hours. Five A.M.

Can't get any clearer than that, kid.

"Don't say it, Kincaid. Please."

He was silent.

When they left a few minutes later, neither of them saw the man hugging the shadows behind an old hull less than four yards away. He slipped unseen toward the sloop.

She couldn't sleep.

She would close her eyes, and for a moment nothing would happen, then suddenly she would see a wooden decoy, the kind hunters used to lure ducks during the hunting season up north, and this duck would have her face. Then she would think:
He used me. He's going to do it.

Murphy was going to split with Eve. They would sail across hundreds of miles of open sea and start over again in someplace like Manaus or Perth or Trinidad. Aline could visualize Eve and Murphy huddled in the sloop's galley, their dream of the future infused with a passionate belief that it was them against everyone else, that they had no choice. She imagined them making lists of supplies, of things they needed to do before they left, lists upon lists that added reality to the plan, fleshed it out.

Had Murphy put his house on the market?

Had they found buyers for the Mercedes? The Scirocco?

Had their bank accounts been closed?

Were their passports current?

Had they gotten their visas?

It doesn't fit, something doesn't fit
. Cooper had been dead a little more than three weeks. Even if Murphy's affair with Eve had started shortly afterward, even if this idea of theirs had been born within days of the affair, it took time to plan there was that tape Bernie had played for her, the tape of Murphy and Eve indulging in a little S and M, and what she and Kincaid had seen at the farmhouse last night. That twisted familiarity wasn't something Murphy would've acceded to in a matter of weeks. Sexually, he was slow to change. Even Monica had said it, griped about it. And what about all those weeks since early January when the little boxes on her calendar had no red L's?

She sat up, turned on the lamp next to the bed, dug in her purse for her calendar. She flipped through it, counting up the red L's since January. Her heart raced. Her head throbbed.
No way. I would've known
.

But she had known. All the symptoms had been there—his diminishing ardor, the days and weeks he hadn't called, his gradual withdrawal, and then that little talk about his need for space the last night they'd spent together. She'd blamed herself. She'd believed it was something she'd done. But all along, it had been only the same old story. Another woman. A woman named Eve Cooper whom Murphy must've met in December, maybe earlier. They'd started having an affair. He'd fallen for her so hard that he had consented to help her murder her husband: another old story. So they had planned it. They had planned it carefully, meticulously, down to the last detail.

They'd planned it for the summer, when the police staff was cut back. Murphy would be out of town "at a boat race," then he would arrive at the scene of the crime sometime later, after the other cops had gotten there. That way, there would be a witness or several witnesses—preferably Dobbs or Aline, someone who knew Murphy well enough to understand the effect Eve's resemblance to Monica would have on him. The witnesses would see the astonished, haunted look on his face as he came into the living room; people would think they'd just met.

A setup, all of it.

No wonder he had backed down so fast when she'd told him she didn't think he was impartial enough to work on the case. He'd never intended to work on it. But it had been important that Murphy maintain his relationship with Aline until the murder so she'd believe he was guilty only of bad judgment about Eve, nothing more.

But what about Plano? And Ed Waite? Had Murphy and Eve killed them, too? For the frog? Had the seven-million-dollar frog been part of all this? Did they have the goddamn frog? Was that what was going to finance their sojourn and their new life?

Is Murphy "Cracker"?

Was that how this had all started? Had Cooper perhaps offered Murphy a sum he couldn't refuse to make sure the artifacts got through on this end? It made sense. What better insurance than a cop? And then Murphy had met Eve, of course, and everything had snowballed from there.

She tossed her calendar into her purse, choked back a sob, and got out of bed. She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Wolfe, curled on the rug at the foot of the bed, lifted his head. Aline picked him up, pressing her face against his fur, wanting desperately to sit here and just weep against it. "He tricked me good, Stinko," she whispered, and set him down again.

She grabbed her purse and was halfway down the loft ladder before she realized she was barefoot. She hurried back up, found her running shoes under her bed, and slipped them on. Less than a minute later, she was backing out of the driveway.

Lightning sutured the sky in the west; it had started to drizzle again. She hit the switch for the wipers and they slid over the windshield once, smearing dirt, then stopped. She slammed her hand against the button. "Thanks, you sack of shit." The wipers swung into motion again, like dual pendulums marking off time.

Murphy's house was eight miles north of where Aline lived, and for three years that distance had been close enough for temptation but too far for a quick peek. But tonight, who cared?

It was constructed of Florida pine and, in the daylight, looked like the kind of place where a young family might live – sanguine and cozy. But now the windows were dark, there was no porch light on. It reminded Aline of those weeks just after Monica's murder, when Murphy had sat in the dark of the townhouse he and Monica had shared, sat there night after night, drinking himself into a stupor.

She parked around the corner and sprinted back through the dark, beneath the overhang of acacia trees, her shoes crushing the saffron blossoms that had fallen to the sidewalk. She crept between his house and the vacant lot to the left, following the fence that enclosed the yard. The gate was locked, but she climbed over it and sprinted toward the house, grateful that Murphy had never requested the return of the spare key.

But on the stoop, she hesitated. Did she really want to walk in there and find that the rooms were barren? That he'd sold his furniture? That he'd already closed on the house and had moved into Eve's until they left? Her options then would be pretty limited. She could try to talk to him, and if that didn't work, which it probably wouldn't, she would have to go to the chief. Murphy would be arrested. Because of her.

The other option, of course, was that she could keep it to herself. Say nothing. And on July 6, Murphy and Eve would sail off to their new life. The end.

Either way, she had to know.

She inserted the key in the lock and sucked in her breath as she walked into the kitchen. A light over the stove was on. The fridge hummed in the silence. She leaned into the door, closing it softly. The round butcher block table was still here, the table where she'd sat innumerable Sundays, reading the paper, playing out scenes from their ersatz marriage. Directly in front of her were two flower boxes that jutted out from either wall and billowed with ivy. Over them and through the foyer they created, she could see the family room. The coffee table in there was the same one that had been in the townhouse where he and Monica had lived. For a second, she could see the ghosts of herself and Dobbs, Murphy and Monica playing Scrabble around it on hot summer nights. He hadn't sold the furniture. But it didn't prove anything. Not really. He might've sold the house fully furnished.