The Storm Murders (31 page)

“Don’t tell me that y’all don’t drink on duty,” Dupree warned him, “or I’ll pound the living crap out of your bones right now, squeeze whatever mush you got left in your hanging balls to secrete out your ears.”

Flores was silent as he leaned his body into a turn, then straightened up again. “Christ,” he murmured under his breath. “Get a grip, will you?”

“Me?” Dupree challenged him again. “Me get a grip?”

Flores wanted the man to be both civil and reasonable, but gathered that any such desire was not realistic tonight. He yielded to a burning premonition that matters were not destined to go well.

The worry redoubled as they entered Sinners Too at the same moment that a local drunk fell into a psychotic episode. Kicking, flailing, and bellowing straight out of his diaphragm, so rambunctious and out-of-whack was the tall, thin man’s behavior that his companion dipsomaniacs chipped in to help subdue him, assisting the bartender by grabbing an arm or an ankle, a fury that closed out only when Sergeant Pascal Dupree lent his significant bulk to the fray. This would seem to be a case for an ambulance, but the cops had already been summoned and they arrived first, surprised to find a top-drawer detective sitting on the afflicted man.

“We got this,” an officer told him, in one sense a complaint.

“Take him away,” Dupree allowed, and they did, although with difficulty and some violence.

The detective then nonchalantly settled into his favorite seat.

Adjusting his tie, not the least pinch out of place, skimming back the sides of his hair, which lay perfectly flat to his scalp, and pulling back the lapels of his suit jacket, which did not require attention either, Everardo Flores examined the seat presented to him to ascertain that no cockroach or chameleon had pitched a tent upon it first and built a nest, that no crusty aged puke preceded him.

Finally, tentatively, he sat.

Dupree leaned in to release his initial volley, even as he simultaneously raised a finger to signal the Irish barman over. “We’ve got a private patio out back where we lay the drunks down to sleep it off. Sometimes, Everardo, we lay them down out there to their eternal rest.”

“Why are you talking to me like this, Dupree? What did I do wrong?”

Despite his evident flaws, Flores demonstrated backbone.

“Because I have a mind to speak to y’all this way, Everardo. That’s why. It’s the only reason I require. I don’t need a good excuse. Anyway, you’re to blame. You’re the one who put me into this frame of mind.”

“What did
I
do?” That he did anything to disturb his alliance with Dupree seemed preposterous to him.

First, Dupree addressed the Irishman. “Bourbon and my usual chaser, times two.”

“I
am
supposed to be working again tonight,” Flores protested. The comfort of work was appealing to him at the moment.

“Why did I tell y’all before? Don’t you listen?”

“Don’t get your damn back up,” Flores conceded.

“It’s up.”

“I got that part. Why?”

“First, I want y’all to understand the evening, how it’s going to go.”

“What evening?”

Dupree nodded, slowly, emphatically. “I intend to sit here and enjoy my bourbon and my beer after a torturous day. It’s not my wish to be disturbed. If y’all disturb me, with lies, with falsehoods, with untruths, with innuendo, with ripe dog shit in this heat, I will be furious, Everardo Flores. Maybe I’ll take y’all into the back alley to be introduced to my volatile temper. Though I like to keep it a secret, y’all will discover that side of my nature. It ain’t noble. I’m advising y’all as a friend right now, to spare the surprise to your small body later on. I will leave my badge with the bartender, but not necessarily my gun, while I go whale on y’all in a haphazard fashion. It’ll be impossible to predict, but most likely I will bruise your fine bones. Am I being understood? Let me know if at any time y’all require an interpreter.”

Flores gazed back into the intent eyes of Pascal Dupree and did not doubt his fury. Finally, he said, swallowing once in mid-sentence, “I don’t need any interpretation, Dupree, but—no offense—I sure could use an explanation.”

The detective slid a hand up from under the table and gripped a single lapel of the man’s spiffy jacket and crushed the fabric, drawing Flores’s head down closer to him and to the tabletop. “On the night that Mrs. Cinq-Mars was kidnapped, y’all claimed to be heading home. But the good ol’ boys in the FBI, they have their methods, they have their fancy electronic toys to play with. They say that Everardo Flores never left the vicinity. The hotel, maybe. The vicinity, not at all. That he did not go home. That he did not even head home. So answer me this, are we going to have a polite conversation here so I can enjoy my drinks, or do I pass the bartender my badge for safekeeping so we can go out to the alley and talk this over like a couple of white-assed Neanderthals? Flores? It’s been a long time since I seen myself this pissed off with somebody. That last guy is still recovering. Mind, he has the time to do so. First we made him wobbly on his feet, then we put him away for a good long stretch.”

Flores thought it over. Dupree let him. He was serious about wanting to do this in as polite a manner as possible.

“Some things about me you don’t know,” Flores said, and Dupree let him go.

He sat back in his chair as their drinks arrived. He took a sip of the bourbon and enjoyed it and the barman departed. “I’m listening,” the policeman said.

“I’m gay,” Flores said.

Dupree’s eyes went sideways once, then back upon the hotel security man. “So?” he said.

“I’m also married,” Flores said.

“That’s what I thought.”

“So I was at my boyfriend’s place. We were having sex. All right? I can be more specific, but I doubt you want to hear it. Why would you?”

“I’ll have to talk to him.”

“Just don’t hit him. And don’t talk to my wife about this, that’s what I’m asking for and that’s all.”

Dupree kept his gaze on the man, but he already believed him. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, huh?”

The question, he supposed, was an invitation to discuss all this, but Flores didn’t bite. “I wasn’t so gay in the military.”

“
So
gay? What the hell is that?”

“I’m just saying. It is what it is now. I didn’t think it would be this way when I got older and got married and started having kids. But I work long nights. Things happen. I got to understand some things about myself. For the record, since you’re asking, I’m bi, but I used to be less gay. That’s just how I talk. What I used to need less of once upon a time I need more of now for some reason. I don’t know why.”

“I see.”

“I’m not asking you to understand it. You think I do? I’m just saying, I had nothing to do with the kidnapping. But I was in no position to explain my whereabouts.”

“I’ll make sure of all this—”

“Up yours, all right?”

“Hear me out, you little shit. I’ll investigate what you say, but just between y’all and me, for now, I believe you.”

That seemed to mollify Everardo Flores, and he sat back, then took his bourbon as a shot, wiped his mouth, grabbed his beer bottle, and poured it into a glass. A regular, Dupree had never been delivered a glass and took a good long swig from his bottle.

“Holy shit,” Dupree said, and wiped his mouth.

“What else do you want to know?” Flores asked him.

“Is this why nobody’s letting y’all be a real cop?”

Flores had never considered that before, but as the seconds ticked by the possibility took hold. “Crap,” he agreed. “Did the cat get out of that bag?”

“Yeah,” Dupree said. “Maybe. But this helps. At least it’s not because y’all got flat feet or no big flaw like that.”

Sandra Cinq-Mars had hesitated selecting a wine in the basement. Her hand rested first on a bottle that she thought they might enjoy, but then she remembered the price, which was high, and questioned whether the evening might not be too far along, and the men too inebriated, to appreciate it. She mulled through a number of cheaper bottles, which had their place, but none appealed. Then she noticed a pair of bottles tucked away in a corner that weren’t so cheap, but she didn’t like them very much and this might be the occasion to get rid of one. She doubted that either man would notice. She might not be able to distinguish flavors either, and anyway she wasn’t planning on imbibing for much longer. She chose one. She had recently discovered a number of decent Ontario wines from Prince Edward County—this was not one of them, but came from there. Now would be as good a time as any to put it out of its misery.

She hesitated again departing the makeshift room they used as a wine cellar.
É
mile had been working down there lately, adding data to his flip chart. Perhaps her own level of inebriation caused her to take a moment, reading absently what was written on the facing page, heedless of the time. After further study, she began to flip pages. Soon though, she was feeling quite sober and returned upstairs with her head abuzz from what she learned.

Vira noticed him long before he ever laid eyes on her. She hadn’t been looking around and was just starting her dinner, when she spotted him. The gentleman was eating alone, his back to her, yet somehow, in some mysterious way, she liked the cut of his jib.
Oh damn, I’m projecting again.
The usual indicators: broad of shoulder, nice threads, well-groomed hair and a healthy crop, too. Between courses, and he was ahead of her in this regard, he put his cloth napkin down and pushed himself up from the table to use the washroom. An assessment in a glance: muscle-tone unexceptional, yet he passed muster with a standard-issue paunch, nothing egregious, no facial hair, a lined brow, a decent jaw and a favorable overall look to him. An apparent pleasantness and a measure of confidence. He might have had fifteen years on her, or twelve, but that was not a road she hadn’t traveled numerous times.

On the negative side, he failed to notice her as he went by.

On the plus side, he
was
dining alone.

If this was Vegas, she’d bet that he was a traveler, too.

Married? Unmarried? This was of no consequence. More importantly, he did not make a point of looking gay nor did he advertise the preference.

Although she remained alert for his return, he slipped up behind her unnoticed, and his only negative washed away the instant he accorded her an appraising look.

Vira regretted being on her main course as his desert and coffee had arrived.

Damn!

A somewhat upscale restaurant was not a great meeting ground. No elegant way was ever devised to uproot an interested party from one table to attach him or her to another across the room. When he departed ahead of her, speaking cordially to the waitress, she figured that his ship just sailed.

And so Vira took her time with dinner before heading out. Had she known that he was waiting in the restaurant’s adjacent bar, she’d have masticated her food more vigorously. Said no to coffee. Passing the small room, she paused, needing to ascertain that her reading of the situation was appropriate and not mere wishful thinking. He smiled, the only encouragement she needed to step inside the room for a nightcap. A gentlemen, he took over from there.

The guy was confident, smooth, and interested, and Vira was well pleased.

Sandra Cinq-Mars was well acquainted with her husband’s ideas on intuition. A religious man in his own idiosyncratic fashion, in mind and at heart a spiritual man, he might properly be described as a mystic. Yet he was nobody’s space cadet.
É
mile preferred ideas to be well grounded. If the facts did not readily align, then he preferred a reasoned hypothesis, not some wide-eyed claim descending from the ether. Intuition, he postulated—and he quoted the science to bolster his claim—was a cognitive sense. Every brain possessed a supercharged thought process at least eight to ten thousand times faster than conscious human thought. At that speed, the individual who was unknowingly doing the thinking on a subject was kept unaware of the thought process or the rationale as it was all too swift for his conscious mind to process. When a light dawned, that beacon seemed to shine out of nowhere, or descend from the heavens on a beam, spun from gossamer threads and knit in another dimension, or, at least, that was the illusion. In reality, according to recent theory, the thought owed its brilliance to mere rapid computation. What people termed
intuition
, then, could be considered a thoroughly processed thought accomplished at warp speed.

Sandra had been flummoxed by an intuitive notion of her own upon returning with her chosen bottle of wine from the cellar and letting the dog back in. She noticed her husband check the label, then glance at her quizzically. That surprised her. She was equally intrigued when he took his first sip, stifled a critical grimace, and carried on with his chat. That’s when she knew—intuition just told her so, but in a trice she was aware of the evidence, that he never poured as much for himself as for his guest—that
É
mile was not nearly so drunk as he appeared. A moment later, she elaborated on the notion, tracing an obvious deduction. Appearances be damned! Her husband,
É
mile Cinq-Mars, the eminent detective, was not nearly as drunk as he
pretended
to be. Given that he was putting on an act for his guest—surely not for her benefit, as she was not amused—for whatever reason, she chose to keep her most recent discovery, until such time as she could speak to
É
mile alone, secret.

Their guest really did seem to be under the impression that the wine was wonderful, so she supposed that his intoxication, at least, was genuine.

Merlin went over and nudged his thigh, deciding that it was high time the dinner guest earned his keep by giving him a pet. “Dear Sandra,” Rand Dreher intoned, “I do hope that my gluttonous self has not ruined my reputation with you for life, that in the circle of time you may find it in your heart to forgive me.”

“Don’t be silly, Rand—” He was sounding such a fool and she really did wish he’d stop.