The Consummata (16 page)

Bunny gave me a funny look then, then shook her head.

I said, “What is it?”

“Oh, just something Best said to me, not too long ago. Couldn’t be anything important.”

“Damn it, who the hell knows
what
might be important, in this damn mess? Spill.”

“Well,” she said, and paused, thinking back, “I had a birthday party a few weeks ago. Best wasn’t here for it, but he called to wish me happy returns. He sounded half in the bag, and I was a little potted myself, so...”

“So?”

“So he said he was sorry he didn’t have a present for me,
but he’d stop by with something when he got a chance. And then what he said after that was weird....”

“Weird how?”

“Weird and then some—Morg, he said that if anything happened to keep him from visiting the Mandor Club again, I should expect to receive a late birthday present.”

I frowned. “Has anything shown up? In the mail, or from a shipping firm?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Well, keep a goddamn sharp eye out. Do you think Best thought his life was in danger?”

Her shrug was almost comically exaggerated. “I don’t know. Like I said, he sounded drunk. And I
was
drunk. I’m really not sure I should be trusting my memory on this subject....”

“Perhaps,” Gaita said from her seat on the sidelines, where she’d been quietly taking it all in, “Tango might know something of this.”

“Tango, kitten? Who’s that?”

But it was Bunny who answered. “Just one of the girls, Morg. Real name’s Theresa Prosser. Gaita’s right—this Best character, or Parvain or whoever he was, was pretty smitten with Tango. Even took her out to supper a few times.”

“Is she here now?”

“No! Look, Morgan, the last thing we need to do is get anybody
else
involved in this mess...”

“Let me worry about that. Tell me about Tango. How special was she to Best?”

Bunny was rolling her eyes. “Christ, Morg, don’t make more out of it than what I’ve already told you! Best just
seemed to prefer Tango’s company, if she was available.”

“Meaning, Best might have told her something that he didn’t tell you or any of the other girls.”

Bunny seemed openly annoyed now. “This is a business like any other—employees get days off, and this is hers. She’s probably at the Vincalla Motel. Goes there and sits around the pool all day, when she’s not working. At night she reads or watches TV. Quiet girl.”

“Is there a boyfriend in the picture?”

Now Bunny seemed strangely amused. “Gaita, why don’t
you
break it to him?”

Gaita made a resigned gesture with her shoulders. “Tango, she is a lovely woman. One of the loveliest and most in demand here at the Mandor. But she does not like the men.”

“Funny game to go into, then. So, she’s a lesbian?”

“No. She is...how you say...frigid.”

Bunny said, “Tango says the act of sex is no more exciting, or meaningful, to her than brushing her teeth or using the john.”

I frowned. “What, so she puts on an act for her clients?”

“No. She takes great pleasure in having them work hard to please her while she remains bored. It’s her way of feeding her hatred for men.”

“Why is she popular, then?”

Gaita took that one: “Because she is very beautiful,
señor
.”

Yeah, and what man doesn’t think he’s just the right guy to melt an ice queen?

I asked, “Yet she went out on...what,
dates
with this Best character?”

“Him she did not mind,” Gaita said. “He was more the father to her. My guess is, they never did the act of sex together.”

Bunny cut in: “To what degree she can put up with men, Tango prefers older ones, like Best. Younger men, closer to her own age, she has a supreme contempt, even hatred, for.”

“Why in hell?”

Again, it was Gaita who responded: “It is because of her older brother,
Señor
Morgan. He is dead now. Because he raped her. And she killed him.”

“Okay, I’m starting to get the picture.”

“This is why she left Cuba,
señor
. To flee the police for this crime, but it was really self-defense.”

I nodded. “How old is she now?”

“She is twenty.”

“Brother,” I whispered under my breath. “How long has she been at the Mandor?”

Bunny took that one: “Four years,” she said, too casually.

“That’s rape, too, you know,” I told the madam pointedly. “Statutory rape.”

“She had papers saying she was twenty-one when she came here,” Bunny said. “I take my girls at their word.”

“Even when you know they’re lying.”

“Excuse me if I don’t take morality lessons from Morgan the Raider.”

I raised a hand to quell any argument.

Then I crawled off the other side of the bed, got to my feet and tried to shake the tiredness out of my body.

“Okay,” I told them, “I’m going to speak to Tango, then I’m coming back here. In the meantime, Bunny, you rack that memory of yours for anybody else who might have been involved with Parvain and your hubby in that Possibilities company. Come up with
somebody
we can track down.”

Her eyes flared. “Morgan, damn it, that was
years
ago.”

“Phone operators are the best tracers of missing persons in the world. Let your fingers do the walking—just don’t bust a nail.”

Bunny came over and touched my arm. Suddenly the good-looking old broad had what seemed to be a genuine look of concern. “Going to that motel—aren’t you taking a big chance?”

“Who isn’t?”

“Morgan...”

The tone of Bunny’s voice made me meet her eyes. “What, kiddo?”

She whispered, though surely Gaita could hear. “Tell me ...please...what did you do with that...that
person
who was killed at my building?”

“I left him in Domino Park behind some bushes.”

She had the expression of a startled deer. “There was nothing about it in the papers.”

“Yeah, I know. Kind of curious, isn’t it?”

Her mouth was a tight line now. “Morgan...sometimes you frighten me.”

“Just sometimes?”

Then I got a closer glimpse of myself in the dressing table mirror.

“No wonder,” I said. “You think maybe I could scare up a shower and a shave around here someplace?”

Bunny didn’t answer me—maybe this simple indignity was the last straw.

But Gaita came over, took my arm and gave me one of her funny, sexy grins. “Why, of course,
señor—
we attend to all of a man’s needs here at the Mandor Club.”

She was good as her word.

I was halfway through the shower, the spray like hot little friendly needles that were bringing me to life even as the steam soothed me and uncoiled muscles that were tight with stress and too little sleep. I was washing my hair with a bath bar, eyes tight shut as soapy water trailed down my face, when I heard the shower stall open.

Gaita slipped inside and she was naked, with her hair pony-tailed back, and her makeup already washed off, a fresh, youthful girl but no kid, not with breasts so full and high, their dark nipples taut, not with that supple belly where a little whisper of dark hair worked its way from her navel down to gradually expand into the lush dark tangle of the delta between her legs, the rest of her a coppery smoothness that the water seemed to love, to caress, to turn her into a gleaming goddess, pearled with moisture, her parted lips dripping water down like nectar flowing from a goblet.

She began to soap my front, lathering up my chest hair, then lathered lower and had she spent any more time down there, we’d have been finished before we started; but then
her arms slipped behind me as she soaped my back while the front of her was pressed to me, the breasts splayed against me.

“Gaita...no...I’m....”

She covered my mouth with hers, lips with a full plumpness that seemed to consume mine, and over the hammering of the shower and the splash at our feet and the gurgle of the drain, she drew away from me and said, “You are
not
married. Did you not tell me so yourself? You have not consummated the act. You do
not
betray her. You do not.”

This time
I
kissed
her
.

We moved away from the spray of the showerhead, to the rear of the stall where she pushed me against the wall like a suspect, but she did not interrogate me, she went down on her knees, she went down on me, and for a moment I thought of Kim, but just a moment, because then the Cuban kitten was rising and turning and leaning against the wall with her hands flat against the tile, glancing back at me with sultry insistent invitation, offering the rounded cheeks of the most perfect posterior that fool Castro ever banished from his country.

And not doing something about it would have been goddamn insulting, so I entered her and she said, “
Si!
” with every stroke, grinding back at me in a rhythmic sexual samba that required no music but our heavy breathing and the percussive insistence of the shower.

We wound up on the floor of the bathroom on a fluffy little rug, first with her riding me, her eyes shut dreamily, her mouth beaming with bliss, rocking, grinding, rocking,
then with me on top, stabbing her sweetly, and when she came, she cried out in a language neither Spanish nor American, but I understood it perfectly.

Finally I was sitting, out of breath, on the lid of the can, feeling like I was the one who’d been ravished. She had already disposed of the rubber she’d so stealthily slipped onto me, practiced doxy that she was.

Now she stood and toweled herself off, shamelessly at ease with her body, and then in the mirror carefully applied her lipstick, put on a touch of eye makeup, and undid the ponytail and shook all that hair like the lioness mane it was, looking at herself, pleased with what she saw.

“I told you,” she said into the mirror but speaking to me, “that
I
do the choosing.”

She turned to her exhausted conspirator and said, “You are not married. You will not be married until the marriage it is consummated. This is no sin,
señor
. You remain pure.”

That was a hell of a way to look at it.

On the other hand, she was the first woman I’d been with since I married Kim.

And maybe it didn’t hurt to stay in practice.

The taxi let me out on the corner and I walked the rest of the way to the Vincalla Motel. Traffic had dwindled and— while the lights of Miami Beach still lit the sky across the bay—this side was quiet and sleepy, the only activity around being restaurants and nightclubs catering to the singles scene.

I looked like just another Miami swinger, Bunny having come up with a black sport jacket, charcoal sport shirt and black slacks for me. I had requested black sneakers, wanting to keep the sound of my footsteps minimal, and the madam of the house had come through for me on that score as well.

Between Bunny and Gaita, I could hardly have any complaints about the service at the Mandor Club.

I skirted the motel office out front, crossed the lawn that circled the pool, and headed toward the room I’d been told was Tango’s, down on the right.

At the opposite end, a party was going on, split between two rooms, the blare of a hi-fi playing rock ’n’ roll and raucous drunken laughter covering the sound of my feet on the concrete walk. The motel’s parking spaces, outside the bottom tier of rooms, were filled, license plates about evenly divided between local and out-of-state. With the exception of three rooms up top and four below, all windows were darkened, Tango’s among them.

For a second I stopped, checked behind me, and slow-scanned
the area toward the street to see if anyone was silhouetted against the street-lamp and traffic glow. Five feet away was Tango’s room, and I could see the windows curtained with no light bleeding through at all.

If Bunny was right, the man-hating hooker was probably just asleep—the motel was where she went to relax and cool it. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with the play.

You can’t call it instinct, because it’s learned; but it’s nothing mental, strictly physical, as the back of your neck prickles and your belly tightens and your eyes narrow and your mind becomes a resonating space where caution calls to you in vague yet not uncertain terms.

So I just stood there, looking around again and sorting out the details until my inner warning system found the flaw for me.

Tango didn’t have a car. She always traveled by cab, Bunny had said.

Yet all the car slots were filled.

Maybe some of the partygoers down at the other end weren’t guests at the Vincalla, and the overflow had filled up some extra slots.

But down here on this very quiet end of things, a blue Mustang convertible was parked in the stall right outside Tango’s room, and its hood was still very warm. Hot.

I snaked the .45 out, cocked the hammer back and took a run at the door, smashing it open with a kick, then rolling inside just as the
phut
of a silenced gun poked two fingers of light directly over my head. I scrambled to my knees,
brought the .45 up, and a foot kicked the gun out of my hand.

But I got that hand on my would-be assailant’s other leg, yanked hard, and a cursing, flailing heavyweight came down on top of me, the rod in his fist smashing against my back and shoulders trying to find my skull.

I gave him just enough leeway to think he had me nailed, then drove my head up against the point of his chin and, when he reeled back, grabbed him between the legs and squeezed so hard the scream that started in his throat never got anywhere, choking off into an anguished sob as he jackknifed forward with incredible pain.

That put me over onto my back, and I was under him, with no idea where my .45 had got to, and for all the pain he was in, he did still have that silenced rod in his mitt, he’d managed to hold onto it, so I glommed onto his gun hand before he could get his pain in check, and twisted my grip on his wrist, thumb slipping under the butt of the gun into the fleshy palm, digging my thumbnail in, hoping to make his grasp go away, but instead in the struggle I again heard that little
phut
and a bullet angled up and into him, his sob whistling off into a throaty rattle that had bubbles in it.