Lemon Reef (34 page)

Suddenly, as if it had just computed, she said, “Commissioner?” Beasley stared at me for a moment. Playfully, she asked, “What are you, nineteen?”

I laughed. “After this week, I'm not sure anymore. I'm thirty.”

Until that very moment, the fact that the room we were in had no windows had not bothered me. Now I was sure the smooth-walled, halogen-lit space was shrinking to the size of her stare. She was taking measure, trying to decide what to make of me.

“Impressive,” she said. “And Adeline, how did she end up here?”

“Well
there's
a question. How much time do you have?”

Beasley conceded with a tilt and a nod, and let the question go. She opened and began sifting through the contents of the box I'd placed between us on the desk. When she got to the Post-its, she held one up and studied it. “What are these?”

I explained about the tasks and Talon's belief that Del was having an affair. I told her about the house and the cameras. “Do you know about his juvenile history?”

Beasley raised her brows, pressed her lips together, and nodded. “Of course I know about his juvenile history.” She paused, and then she said, “He took a poly, you know?”

The comment surprised me. It was information she probably shouldn't have shared. Maybe it was my professional position that encouraged a feeling of inclusion; or maybe it was our connection in a cosmic sense around being gay; or maybe it was her read of me as someone sincere, but I knew now she trusted me.

“He passed,” Beasley said. “They questioned him for several hours. He didn't lawyer up, and he agreed to do a polygraph, practically begged for one. Cried like a baby through the whole interview. By the end, the police felt sorry for him.” She continued, “Look, Jenna, Dr. Mansfield's information together with some of this stuff gives us enough to question Mr. Keller again, but…Mansfield's results are not admissible here, and…”

I knew where she was going. Without a murder weapon or physical evidence linking him to the death, this was a long shot.

“I can't prove it,” I said, “but I think Talon used cyanide to kill Del. I think he put cyanide in her cigarettes.”

“No way. I did this autopsy. I can smell cyanide, and I didn't detect any.”

“She was submerged for hours. Maybe that diluted the smell.”

“Venous blood was not the right color for cyanide.”

“She was anemic.” I knew from Doug it could explain this.

Beasley was quiet but her eyes were busy; she appeared to be running through a mental list, considering different possibilities. She put her glasses on and looked again at the box, in particular at the photos of Del's bruised face. “The truth is, the level of COHb has bothered me this whole time. I kept thinking she must have been off her peak. And her throat was a mess, but we just attributed that to swallowing saltwater. And”—she pointed to her own mouth, made small circles around it with her pointer finger—“some other things. Bacteria in her throat. Crabs got her lips, and…” She stopped speaking.

Crabs? Her lips?
The words coiled around my heart like a boa and began to squeeze. I heard Del say,
I'm a really good kisser. Do you wanna see?
My head fell forward to balance the sudden tilt in the room, and I took a few deep breaths, trying to ease the striking pain in my chest enough to continue the conversation. Hers were the first lips I'd ever kissed. Her lips had formed the smile that launched my heart into outer space, spoken the I love yous that brought purpose into my life, made the most private parts of me feel known and loved, mixed our insides, leaving us intertwined forever.

The expression on my face must have matched the horror I was feeling, because Beasley lowered her glance apologetically and seemed mildly embarrassed for having gotten carried away. “Suffice it to say, your explanation may be better.” She appeared again to be tossing ideas around in her mind. “I'll run more tests on the body.”

It was the best I could hope for.

“So, how do you think this actually worked? What's your theory?” She asked the question as if we were colleagues.

With the image of Del's scavenged lips stark in my mind, I began, “I think Del died where she was found. That's where Talon had anchored the boat, not on Lemon Reef as he claimed. The boat trip,” I said, “was part of a drug deal that Talon had arranged, with the exchange to occur underwater, on Lemon Reef. He went alone that morning to make the trade and left Del with a pack of cigarettes laced with cyanide. He knew the first thing Del would do when she woke up was smoke. When he got back from the reef, Del was unconscious. I think he believed she was dead. He dressed her in her bathing suit. Then he put a mask around her neck, some flippers on her feet, and a weight belt around her waist, to make it look like they had been diving, and he threw her overboard. But she wasn't dead. She woke up and struggled to get to the surface. That was when she took in water, had a heart attack, and died.”

I hesitated. “I'm not sure why he dragged her to the chain, though. Why not just let her sink and drift?”

“He was storing her there.” Matter-of-factly, Beasley added, “If you're correct,
if
this was murder, maybe he was planning to go back later and dump her body farther out at sea.”

Storing her.
I found myself nodding along with her, as if all of this made perfect sense. I knew I was in an altered state, present and not, believing it all and disbelieving it at the same time. I blew out my cheeks to gather my strength and finished us off. “Then he cleaned up, sanitized the head, moved the boat to Lemon Reef, set the tanks up to match his attempted rescue story, and swam for help.”

She leaned back in her chair, looked at me across her piled-high desk, and said, “We'll check her out. When are you heading back?”

“Sunday.” I met her eyes and felt myself begin to smile just a little. Relief, maybe, at having succeeded in getting Beasley to take seriously the possibility that Del had been murdered.

She smiled, too.

*

I was not quite out of the building when my cell phone rang.

“Jenna? Is this Jenna Ross?” The voice was reluctant, anxious. “I'm Steve. Steve McCulick. I, uh, I got your note about Del…You know, the window.”

“You're the guy Del's been seeing.”

“Seeing?”

He was like a frightened critter. One got the image of a trembling rabbit or some such thing. I was standing perfectly still in the threshold with the phone to my ear. The clerk at the front desk was sending me the evil eye for letting the air-conditioning out. He kept waving and pointing at the air vents, but I was not drawing breath in fear I might scare this jittery Steve McCulick away. I said in the gentlest tone I could muster, “I'm glad you called.”

“Yeah, well, uh, I know Talon killed her, and I want to help if I can. Even though”—a lengthy pause to take a few deep breaths—“he might kill me, too.”

I let the door close behind me, finally, and began walking toward Gail's car. “I understand. How do you want to do this?” Now I stood in the parking area, surrounded by rolling greens scattered with flowering pigeon plum trees and swamp dogwoods no longer in bloom. Cars buzzed by on Tenth Avenue. The air was perfumed with fresh-baked doughnuts from a bakery across the street.

“There's a café on Miramar Parkway and South University Drive, near where I work, called First Round. I could meet you there,” Steve said.

*

Pascale was on the couch, cigarette burning in the ashtray next to her, her eyes fixed on what appeared to be a high school report card. She was showered, made-up, dressed. I hadn't seen her so put together since, well, I couldn't remember when. The house had an airy, open feel. It reminded me of Saturday mornings when everybody was doing chores or had just done them.

She looked up when I walked in, let the paper she was holding sit open on her lap. “I heard what you did last night for Del.”

I shrugged, one of those single-shoulder, didn't-much-matter shrugs. “I was hoping we'd find some evidence to prove he killed her, but we didn't. You heard what we did find? What was in the box?”

She closed her eyes and nodded.

I went and sat beside her. “What are you looking at?” I asked, leaning over to see. It
was
a report card, Del's report card from the first semester of tenth grade. “Wow.” I reached into her lap and tilted the page a little to see it better. “She was smart, huh?”

Pascale put her hand on mine and squeezed it. “That poor child. What a life she had.” She removed her glasses to wipe tears. “I did it to her.” She paused, stared at the report card. “She was such a good girl. I chased her out.” She looked to me then, not for forgiveness or reassurance. She wanted me to accept this from her, to be a witness to her acknowledgment.

“Nicole told me you've done a lot to make it up to Del in recent years. She said you really took care of Khila for her.”

Pascale's face lifted a bit.

Ida came out from the hallway and greeted me warmly. “How'd it go with Beasley?”

“It went okay,” I said. “As best could be expected.” I made my way into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, and then I sat down at the dining-room table. “She did say she'd test for cyanide, so if there is any in Del's body, then we might still be able to prove that Talon killed her. It's a special test, though, so I don't know how long it's gonna take to get the results. There's nothing stopping him from leaving tomorrow.”

“The floater guy. What about him?”

I said I didn't know whether Jake's finding would matter or not. “Is Nicole still sleeping?” I was hoping to take her with me to see Steve.

Pascale said, “Nicole left early this morning. I have no idea where she went.”

“We've really got to get that girl's cell phone fixed,” Ida said. “Force her to join the human race.”

*

Ida went with me to meet Steve. On the way, she said she'd never actually been introduced to him but did know of him. Steve lived in the house across the street from Del and Talon. He became friends with Talon first. Over the past two years, he and Del had grown a lot closer, and Del had come to rely on him. In fact, these days, Steve knew Del better than anyone, because Talon trusted Steve, and Steve and Del could come and go from each other's houses without too much scrutiny or suspicion. Ida wasn't sure whether Del had ever slept with him; she suspected she had, but that they stopped because they were both too afraid of Talon finding out. I should have come to expect this from her by then, but as Ida explained all of this to me, I kept squelching the impulse to yell at her for not having bothered to mention these things sooner.

Ida dropped her chin and drummed with her hand on her thigh, as if giving herself encouragement. Then the conversation took a surprising turn.

“I'm sorry about the other day, in Del's room.” She blew out a breath, pushed her hair from her face to reveal her steep cheekbones. “I think I was hard on you. I thought it was fucked up how you dropped information about you and Del to Beasley. And I've been feeling like you just showed up and took over, acting like you're more important to Del than you really were. It's not like Del's here to set the record straight. And if she was here, I don't think you're the one she'd be calling for help.”

“Clearly not. Clearly, she'd die before she'd call me.” Now I took a breath. “Del always refused to let how we felt about each other make any difference.”

Ida seemed surprised by my agreeing with her.

“But what if she was important to
me
, Ida? Isn't that reason enough for me to be here, trying to help if I can?”

Softly, she said, “That's why I'm apologizing.” She faced the passenger window and tilted her head, revealing the long line of her neck. “I've been off about a lot of things, Jenna. I've got to make some changes. After I heard the tape last night, I decided I'm done. I'm
so
done. My job is easy money—sort of. But it's not worth it. I've gotta go back to school and figure it out for real.”

I felt like I had to ask. “Ida,” my voice was calm but a little wary, “how did you know which lot Kramer's boat was docked in?” There was an awkward silence. “Had you been on it before?”

“How else would I know? I fucked Tal on it.” Her stare was fixed on her window. “I know how bad that sounds, but Del wreaked plenty of havoc on my life, too. And Talon is complicated. You don't know him.”

I didn't know him, and I was sure she was right about him being complicated because people are. But still…this man, who had done these things?

As if in response to my thought, she said slowly and thoughtfully, “Talon's intense. He focuses on you with those black eyes and he grins, and you just feel like the most important person in the world. All is instantly forgiven when he pays attention to you. And he's strong and funny. He has a kind of boyish appeal that a lot of men lose, this giggle that is really so cute and contagious. It's hard not to feel swept away by him. One minute, you're just having an innocent conversation, and the next, you're mesmerized and you've slipped into something else. It's like you find yourself flirting, hoping something happens that you didn't even know you wanted.” Plainly, she concluded, “I got seduced.”

I noticed she was crying, and my heart went out to her. Ida had felt invisible for most of her life, wedged between a beguiling, endangered older sister and an insane, dangerous younger sister, both of whom had right of biology over her. Her own devastating loss had been eclipsed by the gratitude she'd been immediately expected to show for being taken in—but not really. Ida's provocations, I knew—and I knew Del knew—were a way of reassuring herself that she existed, had some effect on others.

“What was it about Del,” Ida asked, “that brought out the absolute best and worst in people?”