She led me into that enormous living room and sat me down on that enormous couch.
“I thought you’d like it. It’s as expensive as scotch gets.” She reached over to the cocktail table and poured me a glass-full from a decanter.
I took a couple of long, slow sips and thought about all the joys I’d been missing. Cheap scotch dulls the taste buds. Or was it just the passing of the years?
She put the decanter back on the table and glanced sideways at me with a hint of impatience. “Well, tell me. What did you find out?”
I hesitated. “Did you know that Alicia had been raped and badly beaten?”
She took a deep breath and shook her head slowly. “No, I didn’t know,” she said softly. “I thought we were friends. You should be able to tell your friend about something like that, you know. She never told me…”
She took a big drink of her scotch. Then she took another big drink. There was pain in her eyes. She looked down and closed her eyes so I couldn’t see the hurt. She didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she looked up at me and said, “What else did you find out?”
“It’s not pleasant,” I said.
“I’m a big girl. I can take it.”
“You sure can.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You were a lot closer to Alicia than you told me.”
It didn’t register at first. Then her eyes lit up as she got the picture.
“Tell me if you’re referring to what I’m thinking,” she said coolly.
There wasn’t any use pussyfooting around the subject, so to speak. I let her have it as plainly as I could. “You fucked Alicia.”
A nasty smirk played on her lips. “I didn’t fuck Alicia.”
I smiled too. “That’s technically correct. But you did have sexual congress with her.”
The smile left her face. “That’s like technically correct, if you must know.” She stared into the glass of amber liquid she cupped in both hands. “But, in my defense, I only have sex with people I like.”
I could buy that. “Tell me something,” I said. “Did you have a hard time convincing Alicia to do whatever it was you did?”
She took a large swallow of scotch. “Not really. I think she was like primed for it. I mean, she was surprised when I first suggested it, but she wasn’t angry or disgusted or anything like that. I think she was secretly flattered. It didn’t take long to convince her to do it.”
“How long?”
She gulped down the rest of her drink and quickly poured herself another glassful. She pursed her lips and said, teasingly, “Is this an official detective investigation or are you just curious?”
“How long?”
“Less than a week,” she said softly.
She kept rotating the glass in her hands so the ice cubes clinked. The glass was cut crystal with an intricate pattern that caught the light and gave off rainbow colors as it turned.
“What did you tell her to make her do it?”
Her eyes flashed. “I didn’t make her do it, buddy boy. She said she wanted to. She said she’d had it up to here with men. That they’d sold her like a bill of goods-and that included you.”
She pointed her glass at me for emphasis. “It was easy to get her into bed. I told her she’d understand her own sexuality better after she’d made love with a woman.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I had a hard time believing she was actually telling me all this. “I should have figured out you were bisexual.”
“Bisexual, ha,” she laughed. “I’m trisexual-I’ll try anything.”
I whacked her with the back of my hand. She wasn’t expecting that and it really shook her. She drew back and put her hand on her cheek. For the first time since I’d met her, she didn’t know what to say. She started to cry softly.
“You bastard,” she whispered. The tears ran down her cheeks.
Then, wordlessly, she made her way into my arms. And we had sex, her way. But it wasn’t really sex. It was more like warfare. Sudden, brutal, uncoordinated. Two armies of the night, struggling on a dark battlefield. Until both armies were battered, beaten and exhausted.
CHAPTER XXX
The eighth hole at Birchwood was a dogleg left par four with a little stream that served as a hazard. It was a good day for golf-cool and clear. And the course wasn’t crowded because it was a Tuesday.
I parked the BMW on a deserted side road and crossed the seventh fairway and a wooded area that bordered the eighth fairway.
Jergens and his two overweight buddies couldn’t see me standing in the shadows behind the treeline. Aside from the fact that the bodyguards had been drinking from brown paper bags, their eyesight didn’t seem to be particularly keen and they had no reason to be on the lookout for someone like me.
The men were getting ready to tee off, standing next to their carts practicing their swings. One of the men was punching the keys on a cell phone.
I started out of the woods and walked slowly up to them. The guy on the phone was calling Domino’s Pizza and ordering a pie to be delivered to them at the ninth hole. He was in the process of asking the others what kind of toppings they wanted.
They glanced over at me as I strolled up to them. You don’t often see a guy in a business suit on a golf course.
“Jesus, it looks like the secret service,” the bigger clown said. He could have been a junior league sumo wrestler, only he had a close-cut beard and an earring with a dangling crucifix.
I took off my sunglasses. “Jergens,” I said. “You’ll be happy to see me. My name is Rogan.”
He squinted at me. “You’re a persistent son of a bitch.” There was a notable lack of warmth in his voice.
“That’s what endears me to people.”
Jergens exchanged wary glances with his bodyguards. It was obvious they didn’t know what to make of me.
“This is a private club,” Jergens said.
“That’s OK. I’m a private citizen.”
The smaller guy pulled out what looked like a one iron to my unpracticed eye. He had a plug ugly face with a head that looked like it had been squeezed in a vice, front to back. His neck was thicker than his head. “Want me to get rid of him?” he asked Jergens.
Jergens started to nod, then held up his hand. “What the hell do you want from me, Rogan?”
He was a well-built man in his mid-forties, with a square jaw and longish light brown hair. His face was creased with self-satisfaction. His eyes were dark and narrow, with a nasty glint. He was wearing a pink Polo shirt and khaki slacks. And his swing was strong and sure.
“I want to know why you killed Alicia.”
That wasn’t what he expected to hear. He was the kind of man to whom people seldom spoke frankly. When you control a massive portfolio, people are invariably polite to you. He jerked his head in my direction.
“Kick the shit out of him,” he said without any emotion.
One iron stepped back and took a quick swing that caught me on my bad side. The pain was incredible. My legs felt like overcooked spaghetti. I went down faster than a two-year-old on an ice-slick.
“That’s about the only thing you could hit with a one iron, turkey,” I said, looking up at his inseam.
Evidently he didn’t like my evaluation of his golf proficiency. “Fuck you, scumbag,” he said as he brought the club down on my head.
I saw stars. Purple and black and yellow, like a kaleidoscope.
The junior sumo rocked back and let go a kick that caught me in the chest and knocked the wind out of me. This was turning out to be not much fun. If I were younger, faster and had better luck, I could be kicking the shit out of them right now. I didn’t think I could take it much longer without passing out. As it was, they were pummeling me without mercy, and I was just lying there trying to think of something witty to say.
The big guy caught me with a one-two kick to the head that left me dazed. I started to see things double and triple.
Then I blacked out.
Laura looked like an angel from one of those old Audrey Hepburn movies. She was wearing a white silk scarf over a white dress and her hair was drawn straight back. A preview of heaven or at least what it was going to look like after the environmentalists got around to cleaning it up.