Inherit the Dead (5 page)

In theory.

A cacophony of horns up ahead shook him from his reverie, the obvious reason for all the traffic. Some fool in a delivery truck had tried to beat the light and wound up in the intersection, and now nothing could move in any direction. While others honked and cursed, Perry, who always had a backup plan, turned right at what looked to others like a dead end, cut through a gas station, and headed down to Hill Street, where he turned left. He would rejoin Route 27 half a mile or so up the road, the jammed intersection behind him.

The traffic snarl brought to mind a casual conversation with that Columbia economist who had hired him to investigate his boyfriend. Perry had remarked that they should widen the expressway. The professor had laughed and told him that widening roads made congestion worse: “Add more lanes and you lower the effective cost of
driving. If you make a resource cheaper to consume, people take more of it, not less. The way to cut congestion, narrow the road, or add tolls. Lots of tolls. You have to make it harder, not easier. Then people will use it less.”

Perry supposed that the same wisdom applied to families, too. If you want to see less of your daughter, let the other parent raise her. There, at least, Perry and Julia were in the same boat.

Passing through Southampton, he did his best to ignore the past but couldn’t. It had been almost two years since his last trip to the Hamptons, and he had never expected to come back. He was half tempted to head south and join the brave tourists who, even in winter, dawdled along Meadow Lane gawking at the homes of the superrich. If you hit the water and turned right, you headed for even bigger mansions. If you turned left onto Dune Road, you’d pass the weather-beaten St. Andrew’s Dune Church, and beyond the church was some of the most expensive beachfront in the country. The beach was where, on a moonless winter night two years ago, he had cornered mad Derace McDonald; and although Perry had drawn his gun many times, that was the only time in his life he’d fired at another human being.

Perry rubbed at a sudden pain in his side and drove straight ahead. The events of that night were still a blur, and he saw no reason to jog the memory.

That was the other reason he hated Long Island, at least the eastern end where the rich people lived. The last time he was in the Hamptons was the last time he got shot.

P
erry squinted through his windshield, taking in the barren white dunes to his right, the rolling, black ocean to his left, and the vast, gray canopy of sky. As he shifted his gaze back to the wide two-lane highway that had finally emptied out of traffic, he was suddenly conscious of a strange, unsettled feeling.

Now that he thought about it, the feeling had begun to creep in a while ago, hovering just below consciousness. He again scanned the austere landscape searching for an answer. And found it. Openness. That’s what it was. The sense of near-limitless space. And quiet. No concrete canyons that echoed with eardrum-shattering horns, no teeming-humanity sidewalks. It should have been soothing. Instead, it made him anxious, scared. As though he was floating alone and untethered through space. Perry struggled to rationalize the sensation, reasoned with himself that it was just a reaction to the long stretches of lonely road, but the panic continued to surge. He was barely breathing.

He quickly rolled down the window and gulped cold, wet blasts of air. The sobering slap brought him back to earth, and he huffed with relief. But the relief brought only disgust. What kind of loser gets freaked by some empty sand dunes? A familiar lead weight sank
in his chest. As usual, he’d found yet another way to despise himself. And no sooner had that feeling wormed its way to the surface than the march of Perry’s parade of horribles began: his ruined career on the force, his failed marriage, a daughter he loved dearly but saw only on weekends, and sometimes not even then. He gripped the steering wheel in frustration. He didn’t have time for this now. With an effort that was almost physical, Perry forced his mind to push down the lid on that treasure chest and work on the problem at hand: Julia Drusilla.

What was her angle? After years as a homicide dick, Perry accepted nothing and no one at face value (his ex-wife used to say he’d been that way long before he was a cop—he’d always tell her he doubted that). Julia Drusilla claimed she wanted the chance to reconnect with her daughter. Perry could identify with the sentiment, but that didn’t mean he believed her. Yet he couldn’t think of any other reason for Julia to want to find her daughter. The usual motive—money—didn’t work. If Angel didn’t turn up in time to sign the papers, the entire inheritance would go to Julia. So as far as Julia’s financial empire went, things only looked rosier if Angel stayed gone.

On the other hand, if Julia was so bent out of shape by her estrangement from Angel, why wait a year to reach out? And why had it taken everyone two weeks to figure out that they should call in the troops to help find the girl? The pieces didn’t fit. But that didn’t worry him. Not yet. The jigsaw puzzle couldn’t come together when all he had were pieces of sky. With a little luck, the interview he was headed for now would give him at least one central piece of the puzzle: Norman Loki, Angel’s father.

The fact that Norman Loki had wound up with custody of the girl child had surprised him, no matter what Julia said. In Perry’s case, his lawyer had nixed the idea of even trying for custody. Teenage daughter goes with mom, end of story. He didn’t like it, but given his circumstances, he didn’t have the stones to put up a fight. That
didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt . . . badly. He’d been a good father. Hell, a great one. At least he’d tried to be. So maybe that was Julia’s angle: having been knocked for a loop after losing custody—even though she denied it—she finally felt strong enough to fight for her daughter.

Perry sat with that idea for a few moments, then shook his head. That wasn’t it, either. The steely crone who’d hired him didn’t get “thrown” by much, if anything. And certainly not by loss of custody. When he’d met Julia, he’d been prepared for the rage and recriminations that usually swirled through these family dramas. But there’d been none of that. Julia had been as icy cool as a dry martini.

Even when it came to a discussion of her ex—a topic almost guaranteed to kick up clouds of wrath—she’d barely reacted. She’d handed him Norman Loki’s information as though she were sharing her prescription for a colonoscopy. No anger, just distaste. The neutrality of her response had intrigued him enough to put in a call the moment he’d left her apartment to a source at the
Post,
who might have the dirt on their divorce. Only, surprisingly, there was none. The reporter had called him back an hour ago with the news that the divorce had been fairly civilized. No trial, no hearings, but most important, no custody battle. Just a rapid settlement with the bare minimum in court appearances. Lord knew, if anyone had the means to tear into a fight over who gets “baby,” it was Julia Drusilla.

No, whatever was driving Julia’s current zeal to find her daughter, it wasn’t hurt feelings over custody.

The shoreline up to that point had been narrow and rocky, uninviting. But now, a sizable stretch of white sand beach came into view, the kind where you see handsome couples strolling hand in hand as if in a Viagra commercial. And signs of civilization were beginning to appear. Homes—okay, mansions—but informal, ranch-style mansions, with wraparound porches and grounds filled with hardy shrubs and squat wild-looking trees, dotted both sides of the highway. As
dialed down as these manses were, Perry knew the smallest of them cost at least a few million. And the limited number that occupied the bluffs overlooking the ocean went for a great deal more. Norman Loki had scored one of them.

Perry spotted the road that led up to Loki’s place just ahead. He pulled off the highway and followed a private lane until it stopped in front of a five-car garage.
Only
five cars. Nice to know the rich could rough it when they had to. Perry didn’t see any security gates or cameras. But he guessed that made sense. Why would burglars make the trek out to the edge of the world when there was a whole city’s worth of conveniently located marks within walking distance?

Looking for a place to park, Perry noticed a weather-beaten Jeep whose scarred and pitted paint said it had habitually been left out in the cold. Thinking that Jeep would make good company for his ancient Datsun with its dangling exhaust pipe, Perry parked alongside it. He climbed out and started to lock the doors then looked from the Jeep to the Datsun. He put the keys back in his pocket.

Out here on the bluff, the wind cut into Perry like an icy blade. He wrapped Nicky’s scarf around his neck and dipped his head to spare his face but willfully left his trench coat open (a wardrobe choice he freely admitted was a bit on the nose, but he liked the zip-out lining feature—currently zipped in).

The ranch-style house looked to be about ten thousand square feet, judging from the size of its bleached-white facade. Like the other houses in the area, it had a generous veranda that wrapped around the entire perimeter and several large shuttered windows. Just beyond the house, Perry spotted the pool. He climbed the steps to the front door, then stopped and turned to enjoy the view for a moment. The sky and ocean blended to form a vast, seamless gray expanse that made Perry feel smaller than a grain of sand. Oddly, the thought relaxed him.

Through the door, he heard Jimi Hendrix crooning his mournful version of “Hey Joe.” Perry let his hand hover over the doorbell to listen for a moment. When he finally pushed the button, it played some tune, something sweet and syrupy. Was it “The Impossible Dream,” of all things?
Jesus.
Luckily, it played for only a few seconds and he got another full minute to listen to Hendrix’s guitar solo. He had just raised his hand to try knocking when he heard a man call out, “Yeah, I’m coming, gimme a sec.”

Perry instinctively reached for his badge and gun, preparing to bang the door open, then stopped himself. Shook his head. Old habits died hard. Whatever this guy was hiding—and it was a fair assumption he was hiding
something
—it was unlikely to have anything to do with Angel.

Thirty seconds later, a man Perry presumed was Norman Loki stood in the doorway.

In spite of the near-freezing temperature, Loki’s feet were bare. And very well-tended feet they were. At a glance, the rest of him looked equally as well groomed. But his wardrobe choices were a strange, almost dissonant counterpoint. His jeans were holed out and ripped, but they were neatly rolled to a precise few inches above shapely golden, and seemingly hairless ankles. His T-shirt (bearing the bull’s skull logo that even Perry—no big fan of the group—recognized as that of the Grateful Dead, circa 1970s) was thin and faded, but sparkling clean. A silver skull pendant hung from a leather cord around his neck, and an engraved leather cuff snapped around his wrist. Hippie-esque threads on a country-club body just starting to lose its battle against time.

Perry would’ve tagged Norman’s age at no more than mid-to-late forties had he stopped at the neck, but the face edged his estimate up by about twenty years. Though still blondly handsome, time—and no doubt sun—had leached the bounce from his cheeks, turned the
few remaining wisps of hair to straw, and left deep creases in the skin around his large, age-paled blue eyes. Still, there was a gap between body and face that seemed to be commonplace among baby boomers. Perry guessed that meant his own nascent paunch, despite hours spent at the gym, showed he was part of the younger generation. Nice to know all those beer and pizza dinners were good for something.

Behind Loki, an impressive stack of wood was burning fast and high in a large, brick fireplace. The heat rolling out of it gave Perry welcome relief from the stinging cold wind that whipped behind him.

Loki peered at him cautiously. “You the PI?”

“Yep.” Perry held up his ID. “You Norman Loki?”

“Yeah. Come on in, man. It’s a bitch out there.”

Julia Drusilla had obviously called ahead to announce his arrival.

Perry walked into what he imagined the interior decorators called a “great room,” and he had to admit, it earned its name. Three thousand square feet of gleaming wood floors, thick Oriental rugs, and overstuffed, comfy-looking furniture for sitting, lounging, sleeping, and “hanging.” The high, wood-beamed ceilings gave a sense of spaciousness but also warmth.

“Get you something to drink?” Loki offered. “Warm you up a little.”

“Thanks, no,” Perry said, with regret. It would’ve been nice to kick back with a shot of whiskey in front of that blazing fire on a day like this. He supposed he could opt for something wimpy, like tea, but that would only make him miss the whiskey more. “I’m good.”

He recalled Julia’s comment about her ex-husband:
He drinks . . . or did . . . and when he does . . . But he’s stopped drinking . . . at least I think so.

Norman took his coat and directed him to a pair of matching leather lounge-style chairs with ottomans near the fireplace. Perry
sat and immediately found himself sinking back into the down-filled cushions. If he’d been alone, he would’ve been asleep in seconds. He pulled himself up and perched on the edge of the chair. Loki settled into the lounger opposite him and swung his feet up onto the ottoman in one elegant movement. On the wall behind Loki, Perry noticed a framed diploma from Harvard Law School.

“You still practice?” Perry asked, nodding at the diploma.

“Ah . . . no, not really. Not anymore.” Loki smiled. “And don’t worry, I never did criminal defense.” His smile twisted with a shrewd look. “Bet you hated those guys.”

Either Julia Drusilla’s heads-up phone call to Loki had been a lot newsier than she had let on, or he had done a little quick digging into Perry’s bona fides on his own. Perry suspected the former. Loki didn’t seem like the digging type. Unless it was for clams. Perry shrugged. “Most of ’em were okay. They had their jobs; I had mine. So what was your game?”

“I had a civil rights practice.”