Death Under the Lilacs (26 page)

The party continued. Some guests wandered into the living room to sample the buffet, while others, the serious drinkers, seemed tethered to locations near the patio bar. Babel and noise overwhelmed Lyon until he was unable to differentiate individual sentences, phrases, or even words. Each voice seemed to speak in at least one register above normal, and it all merged into a sea of cacophony. He tuned out.

Rocco found him in the darkest corner of the patio wedged into a corner where the parapet met the house wall. “Are you blotto or hiding?”

“Definitely the latter and working on the former.”

Rocco handed him a fresh pony of Dry Sack sherry and pulled on his own voluminous vodka. “You know, Lyon, now that Dalton is back on our case, it makes me next on his list. It's not a question of if I'm going to get it, it's a question, of
when
I'm going to get it.”

Dalton steered Bea and a woman with cascading blond hair across the patio toward them. “Well, Pan, you've met Lyon and Bea. The large monster here is called a Rocco.”

Rocco took her hand. “We commiserate with your recent misfortune.”

“Something I don't know about?” she said in a puzzled voice with a strong Southern accent.

“Marrying Dalton is absolute disaster,” Rocco said.

“Pandora was voted Miss Conviviality in the Miss America Pageant,” Dalton said. “That was my immediate attraction. I had always wondered what happened to such gushingly sweet girls.”

“They become airline stewardesses like I did,” Pan said.

“Where I discovered her,” Dalton said. “High over the Mississippi Delta as she twitched down the aisle to bring my bourbon.”

“Thus the name of your boat,” Lyon said.

“Actually, Mississippi is where Pan's cousins intermarry and multiply in great numbers.”

“Most of them wore shoes to the wedding, darling.”

“Do you ever say anything nice about anyone, Dalton?” Bea asked.

“Not if it's avoidable.”

“If I don't divorce him, I'm going to kill him,” Pandora said as she grasped her husband's arm affectionately.

“Now there's the soul of a true Miss Conviviality,” Dalton said. “She gives me a choice.”

“After a few weeks living with you, darling,” Pan said, “Mother Theresa would become a terrorist.”

An extremely tall woman with a fully proportioned figure crossed the patio to them and put her arm over Dalton's shoulder. “Does our verbal venom have its usual tangy taste?”

Dalton's smile was diabolical. “Ah, Katrina, you must meet my old and dear friends.” He made the introductions. “And people, this is Katrina Loops, often known as the ‘Hartford Humper.' I won't describe exactly what she does, but suffice to say that when a telephone rings she begins to take off her clothes.”

Katrina smiled at him. “Only for French phones, darling.”

Lyon felt Bea plucking at his sleeve. He caught her eye and they retreated into the relative quiet of the kitchen.

“That Loops woman is really something,” Lyon said. “She's a very, very large lady.”

Bea's look not only told him that she knew what he was thinking, but that he knew that she knew. “Don't even think about it, Wentworth,” she said. “Don't even consider it in your wildest fantasies.”

“She's so big, and each part is so perfectly fashioned.”

“I'll gain weight if that's your bag.”

“You'd also need over a foot in height.”

“My enthusiasm makes up for what I lack in stature.”

Rocco stuck his head into the kitchen. “Phone for you, Bea. It's the Governor.”

“Tell the Governor that I'll call him back as soon as my cell meeting is over.”

“Are you sure you want me to say that?” Rocco asked.

“How about we're having a swingers party and I'm presently encumbered with three motorcycle guys.”

Rocco frowned. “I know the Governor's voice.”

“It's really him?”

“Really.”

“I'll use the phone in your study, Lyon,” Bea said as she hurried from the room. “That is if that couple in there are not yet obscenely occupied.”

When Lyon was alone in the kitchen he began looking for an additional bottle of sherry. He opened a lower kitchen cabinet and quickly snapped it shut. The sound evidently awakened the snakes and caused them to stir so that the basket thumped against surrounding glassware. He made a mental note to ask Dalton to make snake-removal arrangements before the evening was over. He found the sherry in a high cabinet over the sink and was uncorking it when she spoke from behind him.

“Mr. Wentworth … ah, Lyon.”

He turned to see Pandora Turman standing stiffly by the refrigerator. Her blue eyes, deeply shaded with makeup, squinted as she looked at him intently. He wondered if her intensity was due to astigmatism or emotion. “Can I get you something, Pan? I was just opening some sherry.”

“A bourbon and Coke would be great.”

Her words were truncated and fired in a rapid burst composed of a Southern accent mixed with nervous tension. He reached for the bourbon as she watched his movements carefully. His male antennae were not receiving. He wondered why the statuesque Katrina Loops could send him strong sexual signals while this obviously attractive woman seemed nearly asexual. Perhaps it was because she was the cheerleader type, the proverbial girl-next-door—so wholesome and sister-image provoking that lust became nearly incestuous.

He handed her the drink and she took a hefty swig. “I'm sorry we missed the wedding,” Lyon said, “but we just weren't able to get to Jackson on two days' notice. As I recall, I think Bea had an important vote in the senate and …”

“That's all right,” she answered. It came out sounding remarkably like “salright.” “You know Dalton. He's always on a spur-of-the-moment calendar. We woke up one morning and he said it was Tuesday, which it was, and that was probably as good a day as any to marry, but it turned out that it had to be on Thursday for complicated reasons. Believe me, it's hard for a girl to get ready and marry on two days' notice. Dalton said there were tax advantages if we did it before the first of the year.”

Lyon laughed. “That's as good a reason as any.” He knew of one mutual friend who married her long-time lover in order to cover him on her health insurance.

“Dalton says that you're his best friend,” she said as her hand brushed his sleeve as if asking for physical confirmation of the statement.

He felt vaguely embarrassed and tried to avoid eye contact for he detected a note of pleading in the remark. “We manage to see each other a time or two a year.”

“Then you two are close?” she pressed.

“Let's say that I owe him.”

The answer seemed to satisfy her. “Then his jokes don't really bother you?”

“If you're going to be around him you have to tolerate it.”

“Has he told you about the threatening calls?”

“Telephone calls?”

“They seem to come at all hours of the night. In the beginning Dalton tried to hide them from me. He'd either go into another room to take the call, or tell whoever it was that he'd call back. But the other night I got on the extension and heard what was said.”

“You might have misunderstood the conversation.”

“I tried to convince myself of that too, but then the accidents began to happen. A backhoe slid down an embankment, and if Dalton hadn't been able to jump into a nearby ditch, he would have been killed. Two days ago the brakes on the car just went. I was with him when it happened. We were both almost killed when he lost control and we went off the road into some high bushes.”

Lyon was having difficulty following her rapid-fire speech and the abrupt shifts in content. Pandora was afflicted with the same problem as others he knew. They assumed that you were aware of most things that transpired in their lives and could therefore initiate conversations in mid-thought. “Hold on a sec. Let's go back to the phone calls. What was said that made you think it was a threat?”

“It was the whole conversation. Like the guy would say things like, ‘It's over, Dalton. You've had it this time. You either come across or we get serious.' Sometimes Dalton hangs up, but they call right back and I try to listen in.”

“It's always a male voice?” Lyon wondered if the night calls could all be accounted for by a love triangle.

“I thought about women before I listened in. I mean, before Dalton and I got together he wasn't exactly a priest. But it's always the same voice. A deep, gravellike voice.”

“There could be perfectly reasonable explanations for the calls,” Lyon said. “After all, Dalton is a developer, and builders deal with a lot of men who didn't go to finishing school.”

“What about the accidents? We came within feet of getting killed in the car.” Her voice had risen to panic level.

“It was inches, my dear. Unquestionably centimeters, and perhaps even microns.” Dalton's high laugh punctuated his arrival in the kitchen. He put a protective arm around his wife. “Baby doll, if I cried every time I was in a near-accident I wouldn't be able to build a small doghouse.”

“I still think you should talk to Lyon about it. He's used to getting involved in things like this.”

“You have it turned around, orange blossom.
I
am the savior and Lyon is the savee.” He clapped Lyon on the shoulder. “Can you imagine this klutz trying to protect me on a construction site?”

“Is there anything to all this?” Lyon asked.

“Wanting to remove me with extreme prejudice? Sure, and it's a long list. I run a nonunion job and a few days ago I threw a union organizer off the property. That's about as smart as volunteering for Masada to complete your retirement time in the Jewish Legion. Then there are the idiots I bought the last piece of property from. They're crying that I took advantage of them now that they suspect what my bottom line is going to be when the job is completed. Finally, there's the people I pull pranks on, and that's a really long list.”

“You're not treating this seriously,” Pan said as she tore away from her husband's encircling grip. “If I'm going to be a widow, at least do the decent thing and make me a rich one.”

“Pandy baby, go circulate and see if any of the guests need coffee, tea, or their pillows fluffed.”

“Drop dead, duck butter.” She stiff-armed the swinging door as she left.

“She's right, isn't she?” Lyon said.

Dalton smiled crookedly. “Hell, yes. I'm in deep shit with a certain group. If things don't work out I'll be lucky to get off with a couple busted kneecaps.”

“That sounds like you're doing business with two-legged banking facilities.”

“God, Went! You're an incurable snoop. Let's just say that I take what I consider to be acceptable business risks. Okay? Let's leave it at that.”

Bea and Rocco burst into the kitchen. “All right, you guys. The party needs you. In other words, out!”

“What did the Governor allow?” Lyon asked.

“If I drop my day-care ammendment he will ask me to run as Lieutenant Governor.”

“Last I heard, Maggie held that job,” Lyon retorted.

“Fearless leader has dirt on Maggie. It seems she smoked a joint in nineteen seventy-eight.”

“That's despicable,” Lyon said. “Of course you have a duty to the people.”

“I'm going to seriously consider it after I have a hit. Anyone got any?”

“Don't look at me,” Rocco said. “I don't even confiscate single joints from the kids anymore.”

“I can't wait until his next offer,” Bea said with a laugh.

The tempo of the party had increased with the introduction of a combo that had miraculously appeared and started playing in a corner of the patio. Rocco resumed his stance by the French doors as he watched the dancers with a bemused smile on his face. Lyon stood next to his friend. Their disparity in size set them apart, as did their personalities: Lyon's fey, bookish approach to life, and Rocco's law enforcement career, which sometimes placed the large officer in violent confrontations. And yet over the years their friendship had grown, each man attracted to the other by the very characteristics that set them apart.

“If this party gets any noisier, the neighbors are going to complain,” Rocco said.

“You know damn well there isn't a neighbor within a thousand yards of here.”

Rocco gave his usual half-smile. “Maybe a cop will call the cops. You got any more pepper vodka left?”

“There's some in the lower kitchen cabinet.”

Rocco went through the swinging door. Lyon sipped on his sherry until his friend's bass voice thundered from the kitchen loudly enough to immediately silence the party.

“Snakes!” Rocco boomed. “They
are
snakes!”

Lyon dropped his snifter and spilled sherry across the carpet as he bolted for the kitchen. “Not your gun,” he said aloud as he pushed at the swinging door. “Please not the gun.”

The first shot from the .357 Magnum reverberated through the house and echoed from the surrounding hills. It was quickly followed by several other shots in rapid-fire sequence.

3

In midmorning sunlight, Bea Wentworth lightly ran her fingers along a teakwood rail on the houseboat's starboard side. “This is what Noah could have done with the ark if he'd had the money,” she said.

They had spent the last hour touring the
Mississippi
with an exuberant Dalton as their guide. Lyon was impressed, and even Bea, whose admiration of Dalton was far from gigantic, had seemed a little awed at the lavish accoutrements.

They had begun with the pilot house (“bridge” in Dalton's nomenclature) located above the saloon. The state-of-the-art electronic equipment would have rivaled the fire-control center on the aircraft carrier
Enterprise
. They had been lectured on each instrument's capabilities and functions, but to Lyon the descriptions had merged into a mass of amperage, bytes, and K memories. The final result of all the gadgetry seemed to be to allow someone to steer downstream. Lyon recalled that Mark Twain's river pilots performed these same duties on the Mississippi with far less equipment.