The Hours of the Virgin (24 page)

I took her chair. “Slow night.”

“It picks up on payday.” Madelaine/Laurel sat down and folded her arms on the table.

“Who are you hiding from?”

“Gordon. Well, everyone. I never should have left Louisiana.”

“Did you ever go?”

“I mean before. I moved up here with my mother. She didn't tell me, but I think she knew she was dying then. Some people are like wild creatures. They want to die where they were born.”

“She came from Detroit?”

She nodded. “She wasn't really my mother. She raised me after my real mother died when I was eight. She came from Detroit too. They were friends here before. My real mother came down to stay with her when she was pregnant with me.”

“In Baton Rouge?”

“New Orleans. We moved to Baton Rouge, Mom and I—my second mom—when I got my first modeling job. I supported both of us after that.”

I felt a tingle. It might have been the hashish.

“Are you a drinking man, Amos?” She got up and opened a cupboard.

“Just water. I didn't have lunch.” I was beginning to enjoy the sensation of blood singing in my brain. Einstein must have skipped breakfast the day he cracked the secret of the atom.

She took out a square bottle of gin and two glasses. She filled one glass from the tap, splashed an inch into the other, and topped it off from the bottle. She carried the glasses to the table and sat down. She lopped off half an inch, rolled it around her mouth, and swallowed. That first sip of nine parts gin to one part water is like jumping into an icy mountain lake; it makes your breath catch. Not hers. She'd swum plenty of laps for someone still two years away from legal age.

“I'd offer you some cabbage,” she said, “but I think I'll keep you on a liquid diet a while longer. Tit for tat. You hit me pretty hard in the theater. I still can't chew anything on that side.”

“It threw off your friend North's aim. If it hadn't, the worms would be chewing on me.”

“Earl didn't—” She stopped and took another swallow from the glass. It brought a flush to her pale skin. “I didn't go there to distract you. I went to warn you. I was pretty sure Harold didn't tell you the whole story.”

“It's Harold, is it? Earl and Harold.”

“Protective camouflage,” she said. “It's easier to get information out of people when you know them well enough to use first names. That shouldn't be news to a detective.”

“You seem to know a lot about me. Am I famous?”

“You're not Madonna, but you've had your fifteen minutes. I saw your picture in the paper when you testified against that man Matador. Of course, I heard your name before that. If I told you how
long
before that, you'd call me a liar.”

I changed my mind about the gin. I got up and dumped out my glass into the sink. Then I filled it from the square bottle on the drainboard and returned to my seat. It wasn't my favorite drink—I don't like the smell of junipers, let alone the taste—but it was more honest than a Bubonic Plague and it kicked. “You haven't asked me how I found you.”

“Haven't I?”

“Up until a little while ago I thought it was Boyette who sent that card. I figured he'd stashed the Hours of the Virgin here before he went to meet North and sent the card as insurance. If everything went as planned, he'd have made away with it long before I got the card, but if it didn't and I recovered the manuscript, it would be safe for posterity. Whatever else he was, he cared about such things. Only he didn't send the card. You did. Why?”

“I didn't want you to find the manuscript. I wanted you to find me.”

“I passed a telephone in the hall.”

“Yours might be tapped. Gordon doesn't trust anyone.”

“You're hiding from your husband?”

“I'm hiding from everyone, except you. Not that that made much difference. The card was a last resort. I was running out of jewelry.”

I reached into my pocket and tossed the earring onto the table. “I left the other one in the office. Did you lose that one on purpose too?”

“No, but it gave me the idea. I couldn't go to see you; you might be watched. But I know enough about you to know you could come to me without anyone following.”

I thought about the Jeep Ranger. “If you wanted to be found, why'd you send your luggage to Louisiana and have it sent back to Detroit?”

“Because it had to be you who found me. As long as Gordon thought something had happened to me down there before I could get on the plane, he wouldn't turn Detroit inside out looking for me here. His love for me—dependence, call it what you like—it's frightening. He'd never stop to think that bringing all that attention might put me in more danger.”

“He's offering a million dollars for your safe return.”

“Only a million? Well, he has stockholders. But you see what I mean.”

The doorbell rang. “Venus, If You Will.” I got up and went to the swinging door and pushed it open a crack. The little Korean girl slapped out into the hall from another curtained opening and unlocked the front door. She led a heavy-shouldered brute in dirty overalls through the curtain by one huge hand. I went back and sat down.

“Some hiding place,” I said. “Strangeways owns That Touch of Venus.”

“He owns the whole chain. If you were him, where would be the last place you'd expect to find your wandering wife?”

“That only works in fiction. What makes you think nobody's tipped him?”

“No one here knows who I am.” She smiled with a kind of shamefaced pride, and I remembered with a start how young she was. “I got the job on my own merits. The woman who raised me was an experienced masseuse.”

“Who was she?”

“You wouldn't recognize the name. When she was younger than I am now she worked in a house of prostitution in Detroit. That's where she met my mother.”

“Your mother was Star LaJoie.”

She wrinkled her nose. “That awful name. Her real name was Ariadne—that's Greek. She knew a little mythology. That's how she came to name me Laurel. Laurel North.”

27

I emptied my glass, taking care to drink slowly. I didn't want to get the bends. I set it down just as carefully. A thump seemed disrespectful. “Earl North's your father.” It wasn't a question. It wasn't a response of any kind. It was just four words to drop into the long dark shaft with my brain at the bottom.

“He didn't know my mother was pregnant when she left. She cleared out in a hurry. She was on the morning train to Florida four hours after my father killed your partner.”

“So you know about that.”

“Of course. Did you think you were picked at random?”

That invited a question, but I parked it for now. I almost knew the answer anyway. “The cops in North Carolina found her body.”

“It wasn't her, obviously. A lot of working girls in Detroit made that Miami run in winter. Mother was no fool. When she'd had time to think, she knew North would look for her in Florida, so she changed trains and went to Louisiana instead. She had a friend in New Orleans: Mama Carrie. That's what I called the woman who raised me. Mother had a bad heart, though you wouldn't know it judging by what she'd seen and done.”

“She saw North shoot Dale Leopold?”

Laurel drank without taking her eyes off me. “I'm repeating family history here. What my mother didn't tell me, or what I forgot, Mama Carrie filled in. Hookers have a reputation for keeping quiet, but not inside their own circle. Mother was standing at the window of the motel room looking down on the porch. She saw everything.”

“Did North and Dale speak?”

“Briefly. She couldn't hear what they said and North didn't tell her afterwards. He ran into the motel and up to the room and gave her the gun and told her to hide it. He said he'd be back for it and left. She was packed and gone ten minutes later.”

“Did she pack the gun?”

“Uh-huh.” She drank.

“North didn't kill Dale because Dale knew he was stepping out on his wife. He killed him because he knew North was robbing the insurance company he worked for. That's helpful, but the courts would need the murder weapon to convict. That gun can send him to Jackson for life.”

“Uh-huh.”

The gin was working. My arteries were opening, flooding my gray cells with oxygen. “So that's why you're hiding out. You're using the gun to blackmail him.”

“That's the short form. Would you like to hear the long?”

“What the hell. I'm not due on the slopes for an hour.” I sat back.

“The gun's a family heirloom. I've never had it out of the protective case Mother bought for it, to keep it from rusting and to preserve the fingerprints. When I moved up here with Mama Carrie, I packed it along with my lingerie and makeup without giving it much thought. Gordon doesn't know about it. The Napoleonic Code isn't in force here, a woman doesn't have to inventory her possessions when she marries. I'd just about forgotten I had the damn thing when I saw Earl for the first time.”

“When he came to work for Strangeways.”

“No. Before that, when I went with Gordon to talk to Harold Boyette about a manuscript Gordon was thinking of buying. He was in Boyette's office and introductions were made. I didn't hide my emotions very well when I heard the name; I'd been hearing it all my life and never expected to meet the man it belonged to. I'd assumed he was dead. Everyone else was. Mother was, and by then so was Carrie.”

“Carrie Triste.”

“Yes. I took her name. Mother gave me North's because she was old-fashioned about that kind of thing—respectability counts high with reformed prostitutes—but she kept her own. Anyway, my reaction made him suspicious. Otherwise he might have chalked up these damn freak eyes of mine to coincidence. I inherited them from my mother.”

“The clerk at the motel didn't share that with the cops.”

“According to my mother, he wouldn't have been able to describe an orange elephant. He was higher than the Milky Way three-quarters of the time and strung out the rest. Anyway, I could see Earl's brain working. He went as white as a sheet, but he recovered quickly and left the room. I can't say I was surprised when a week or so later he came to work at the house.”

“Strangeways said he sensed something between you,” I said. “That's the only thing he got right.”

“Gordon's rather a Victorian, in spite of the way he made his fortune. Maybe because of it. I think he believes I'm the only truly respectable thing in his life. I couldn't tell him who my mother was, or what she was involved in. He'll always be recovering from what happened to him in Little Rock. I'm afraid this would kill him. Can I count on your confidence?”

“It'll come out,” I said. “From some other source if not from me. This has been too big for a family secret since the beginning.”

She drained her glass. “You're right. I should have told Earl my mother got rid of the gun before I ever saw it.”

“He wouldn't have believed you. Killers always believe the worst. And there was money to be made.”

“Go to hell. Is that what you think this is about? I'm married to two and a half billion. I wouldn't bargain with a snake like my dear father for anything less than my freedom.”

I looked around the kitchen. “So this is freedom. It smells like cabbage.”

“I mean freedom from Gordon.”

The stout Korean in the fuzzy pink robe came in, went to the stove, lifted the lid off the pot, stirred the bubbling contents with a wooden spoon, then replaced the lid and went out, shuffling the soles of her dirty white sneakers on the worn linoleum. She would be a hard woman to shut up once you got her started talking. Getting her started would require twelve volts from a Delco.

“I've been to his place on Grosse Ile,” I said when the sound of shuffling faded down the hall. “I didn't see any bars on the windows, but I didn't see the whole house. I forgot to bring a compass.”

“He wouldn't try to keep me if he knew I wanted to leave. He cares too much for me to do that. But it would kill him. All my life I've had to take care of someone: first my mother, then Carrie. I've been a working model since I was thirteen. Gordon has nurses, but he needs someone he isn't paying to coo over him and fluff his pillows and ask him if he needs to take a pill. I thought that was me. It isn't. I need a life for myself. I don't want his money. I've turned down more than a million in job offers since I married him.

“There's no way I can make leaving him easier for him,” she said. “But I can give him a parting gift, one a collector like him can appreciate. I can give him the Hours of the Virgin.”

I'd started to light a Winston from the new pack. The cooking smell was getting to me. I shook out the match and let the butt hang off my lip. “You have it?”

“No. But I know where I can get it, and at a bargain. What's the current market price on a Beretta thirty-two-caliber semiautomatic pistol, twenty years old?”

“So that's the deal.”

“It was. It can be again. I don't know how much Harold told you about the setup at the Tomcat.”

“He said he thought North stole the Hours and he was going there to ransom it back for a hundred thousand in cash. He carried a thick mailer into the theater, but I never saw what was inside. I think I can guess now.”

“Earl was still working at the house when he bragged about the Hours. He said knowing what I knew about illuminated manuscripts thanks to Gordon, I'd be proud to know my old man had something my husband would trade his legs for if they worked. He liked saying that:
your old man
. He's a gray little person except when he thinks he's cock of the hill. Then he's slimy. They say some chromosomes skip a generation. I may not have children.”

“This one might not have skipped.”