The Little Death (27 page)
“You recognize it?” Louis asked.
“It’s a vandaceous hybrid called
Renanthera diabolus,
” Green said.
“Is it expensive?”
Green nodded. “They’re expensive because they’re really rare. They used to grow wild in the Everglades, but the damn poachers nearly made them extinct. So, the state put them on an endangered list. Now, only a handful of growers are allowed to propagate them from seeds. I get good money for them.”
“You have them here?”
Again he nodded, this time with pride. “I’m the only one in the county who grows them. They take a lot of patience and love. You have to wait a long time for them to bloom.”
Louis thought suddenly of the red flowering plant
he had seen hanging over Rosa’s front door. He couldn’t remember if it was an orchid or not. “Mr. Green, could Emilio Labastide have had one of these?”
Green thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, he was really interested in orchids. It’s possible I might have given him a
keiki
.”
“Keiki?”
“That’s a Hawaiian word for ‘baby.’ That’s what we call orchid cuttings.” He held up the sprig. “Where’d you get this?”
“From a home over in Palm Beach,” Louis said. “Do you sell these orchids to anyone there?”
“Nope,” Green said. Seeing Louis’s disappointment, Green smiled. “But I do supply them to a flower shop on Worth Avenue. It’s called Fleur de Lee. Talk to Bianca Lee, the owner. She’s a regular buyer of my devil orchids.”
Louis was writing in his notebook and looked up. “Devil orchid?”
“Yeah,” Green said. “That’s its common name.
Renanthera diabolus.
Devil orchid.” He held out the sprig to Louis. “Look closely. The flower looks just like the devil’s head.”
On the drive back to Palm Beach, Louis had tried to make sense of it—three luxury items seemingly unconnected that were undoubtedly parts of a big puzzle. What the hell did an old humidor, an antique sword, and a rare orchid have in common? And maybe it was just a coincidence that the orchid had the same name as the place where Mark Durand had been murdered. But it was a damned intriguing one.
Fleur de Lee was a tiny shop not far from the antique
military store. Inside, Louis took off his sunglasses and stood perfectly still, afraid that if he moved, he’d break something. The place was stuffed with plants and flowers, including orchids of every size and color.
Except red.
As he waited for the owner, he pulled the sprig out of his pocket and stared hard at one of the tiny blossoms. Green was right. Its center looked exactly like a devil’s face.
“Can I help you?”
Louis turned. The woman who had come out of the back was small and dark-haired, in her forties, and exotically attractive. She wore a green smock over dark slacks and a sweater and was carrying shears.
When she saw him, she stopped cold. Louis had gotten used to people staring at him here. But the look on Bianca Lee’s face was different. It was just a flash, but it was there before the mask went up. It reminded him of the cheating husband he had caught last month coming out of the Days Inn in Fort Myers.
Busted. But for what? Selling flowers?
Louis palmed the orchid sprig. As he introduced himself, Bianca Lee nodded. “You’re the one who’s working for Reggie Kent,” she said with one of those patented Bizarro World smiles. “He seemed like such a nice man, but you can never tell about people, can you? Imagine, cutting off a man’s head.”
“A man is innocent until proven guilty,” Louis said.
“So they say,” she said. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“I’m interested in orchids,” Louis said.
“Really? Cut flowers or a plant? I have some lovely phalaenopsis that are quite reasonable.”
“Do you have a devil orchid?” Louis asked.
Bianca Lee’s smooth olive face went a shade lighter. She carefully set the shears down before she looked back up at Louis. “Devil orchid,” she said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Well, I don’t know the fancy Latin name,” Louis said. He uncurled his hand. “But it looks like this.”
Bianca took the sprig and gave Louis a wide smile. “Oh, yes,
Renanthera diabolus
. I didn’t know it had another name.”
“Do you carry them?”
She nodded. “Yes, but we don’t have any right now. I could probably order one for you. But it’s frightfully expensive. I’m sure you would rather have—”
“Nope, I’m really interested in devil orchids.”
Bianca stared at him, then held out the sprig. “Maybe you could check back later.” Her smile was gone. There was ice in her voice.
“Maybe you could tell me who you sell these to,” Louis said as he took the flower.
“Why would you need to know that?”
“I have my reasons.”
Bianca shrugged. “Well, I have dozens of clients on the island. But I would never give out their names.”
“Flower sales are confidential?”
“Privacy is everything here, Mr. Kincaid.”
There was something about the way she said his name. He was close to snapping. He’d had it with these people.
“Look, lady,” Louis said, “I can be back here in an hour with a county deputy and a search warrant for your records. Or we can do this nice and easy.”
She just stared at him.
“How about if I name a few names and you just nod?” Louis said. “You know, like in that movie with Deep Throat?”
She didn’t move. Louis could almost read her mind: The nice fellows at the pink police station would protect her. If she could just get to the phone.
“Okay, first name,” Louis said. “Tucker Osborn.”
Nothing. Not even a blink.
“Let’s try again,” Louis said. “Richard Lyons.”
Still nothing. The woman was good.
Or maybe he was wrong. Maybe the orchid meant nothing. Maybe he was wasting precious time and needed to be concentrating on the humidor. Maybe it was time to go back to basics and see if the sword’s blade matched the wound on Mark Durand’s neck. It was possible that Dr. Steffel had something by now.
“Thanks for your help,” he said, and left the shop.
Outside, he paused to put on his sunglasses. He was about to toss the orchid sprig but put it in his pocket instead.
He was almost to South County Road when a horn beeped behind him. It was a red BMW 325, not the newest model but shined to a gleam. Swann was behind the wheel. He pulled to the curb, and the window whirred down.
“I’ve been looking all over for you. Get in.”
“Where we going?”
Swann couldn’t hide his eager smile. “We’ve got a third body.”
It felt good to get off the island. Maybe it was just that he was sick and tired of doing the Bizarro World boogie-woogie, or he just longed for something plain and real. Whatever the reason, out here on the open highway, fifty miles west of Palm Beach, Louis felt freer than he had in a week.
Swann was a good driver, weaving the BMW through the truck traffic on US-80 like a cop used to car chases. Louis doubted Swann had ever had to push his police cruiser past forty over on his home turf. But the guy had changed in the last few days, taking to his role in Reggie Kent’s case with the eagerness of a raw recruit.
Swann had found the third headless victim buried in the records of the Hendry County Sheriff’s Office. Now they were on their way to find out if the body had any connection to their case.
As they drove, Louis filled Swann in about his visit to Tink Lyons. Swann was stunned into silence. Part of it was disgust, Louis suspected. But there was also something personal in Swann’s silence, like he was angry at himself for being so naïve about the people who paid his salary. Or worse, he was feeling incompetent, eclipsed by a private investigator.
Finally, Louis broke the quiet in the car. “How’d you find this guy exactly?” he asked.
Swann glanced over at him then looked back at the road. “I’ve got a contact high up at the FDLE,” he said. “Once I got somebody on the computer, it didn’t take long. I just asked him to do a search for
young male victims who had been decapitated or tortured.”
Louis knew the Florida Department of Law Enforcement didn’t jump at just anyone’s request, and they sure didn’t cough up information overnight.
“Must be somebody with some juice up there,” Louis said.
Swann just stared straight ahead. “My father’s a retired major for the state police. His name still carries some weight in Tallahassee.”
Swann reached down and turned on the radio. He began stabbing at the buttons. Louis watched him, wondering how heavy that weight sometimes felt on Swann’s shoulders. Heavy enough to flee all the way down to Palm Beach?
After a flurry of country music, sports talk and static, Swann finally gave up on the radio.
“How old’s this one?” Louis asked after a few more minutes of Swann’s silence.
“He was found three years ago, fall of ’86,” Swann said. “A couple of Seminoles found him in a swamp. Or what was left of him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“All they found was a torso with one arm,” Swann said. “He was pretty chewed up by alligators. But there was enough for prints, and turned out he had a minor drug record in Fort Lauderdale.”
“But we don’t know if he was decapitated or a damn gator just bit the head off?”
“No, but when I found out he worked as a bartender in Palm Beach, I thought the connection was too big to ignore.”
“How’d you find out he worked in Palm Beach?”
“County health records,” Swann said. “You’ve got to have a card to work in the food and beverage business in Palm Beach.”
“Good work, Andrew.”
Swann glanced at him but said nothing.
The Hendry County Sheriff’s Office was located in La Belle, a sleepy town of cracker houses, oak trees, and an old white courthouse on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. The station on Bridge Street had two Hendry cruisers out front. But it was the third one that caught Louis’s eye. It had the Palm Beach County seal on its door.
Barberry was in the detective’s office when they walked in. He looked like he’d been caught on his day off. He wore baggy Bermuda shorts, white tube socks with loafers, and a Hawaiian shirt. His gold badge hung on a chain around his neck.
Swann’s contact in Hendry County, a Detective Hernandez, stood nearby. He was a few years under thirty, with messy brown hair, a meager mustache, and an ugly polyester jacket that ballooned over his slender build.
Barberry was reading a file, but he must have heard the footfalls across the tile floor because he looked up. His sneer at Louis was expected, but his expression changed when he saw Swann. It registered disbelief, then he chuckled.
“Well, well, Andrew Swann,” Barberry said. “Papa Hewitt know you’re here, boy?”
Swann stopped in front of Barberry, but Louis could see he was having a hard time holding Barberry’s eye. He had the same look that Bianca Lee had had in her fancy flower shop: busted.
Louis introduced himself and Swann to Hernandez. Hernandez mumbled a hello and looked at Swann.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” he said to Swann. “I had to call you back for something, and I thought you worked for the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, but they told me they didn’t know you, so I just asked for the officer in charge of the headless-corpse case, thinking he would be your partner, and then, well, they gave me to this—”
“Shut up,” Barberry said. He looked to Louis and Swann. “What do you two jackasses think you’re doing, calling people all over the state and getting them worked up into thinking we got a serial killer on the loose here?”
“We think we
do
have a serial killer,” Louis said.
“On two lousy bodies that have nothing in common?”
Louis wasn’t ready to tell him they had a third victim named Emilio Labastide or that they had already exhumed and examined the body, but he had to give Barberry something just so they would be allowed to stay in the damn room.
“They were both headless,” Louis said.
Barberry gestured to the file Hernandez was holding. “Oh, for crissakes,” he said. “This one here was probably made that way by a damn alligator.”
“Well, now, Detective,” Hernandez began. “That might not be accurate. If you’d take a look at the ME’s report, you’ll see that—”
“Shut up,” Barberry said.
“Don’t tell him to shut up,” Louis said. “Go ahead, Detective Hernandez, what were you going to say?”
Hernandez stuck out his hand. “If I could have my file, sir?”
Barberry gripped the folder tighter, but even he knew the contents belonged to Hendry County and, more specifically, to this skinny, pimple-faced cop.
“Please, sir,” Hernandez said. “Don’t make me have to exert my authority and ask my guys to come over here.”
Louis looked over Hernandez’s shoulders. Apparently, his guys were the two uniformed officers lurking near the water cooler. They were watching the discussion with interest.
“Look, we’re in a mess here,” Hernandez said. “Our sheriff died suddenly, and the undersheriff was arrested last week for taking bribes. My boss is out sick, and our two other detectives are working 24-7 on a boat theft ring. Right now, we’re looking out for each other. So, in other words, don’t fuck with me here on my turf, okay?”