Slices of orange? Oh, Mother Machree. Besom cut his eyes up the beach. Not a soul in sight. He hesitated. Shit. He shrugged “why not” to her, nodded, and turned slowly in the water and headed toward her. By the time he got to her she had backed up a little, and the edge of the surf was swirling around her ankles.
“How long you been out there?” she asked as he walked up to her.
He looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”
“What are you fishing for?” she asked, breaking off nearly half of what she had left of the orange and handing it to him.
She was a little older than a college girl, he saw, now that he was close. Her hair was thick with the humidity of the salt air, and she had that lusty weathered look about her that gave him the impression that she had been on the beach most of the afternoon. The girl had an incredible body, and he just couldn’t help looking at her. She tossed her hair off her shoulders with the back of a bent wrist and when she did her breasts wobbled heavily behind the two small patches of her bikini top.
“Redfish,” he heard himself say, and he broke off the first wedge of orange and tossed it into his mouth, his rod cradled in the crook of his left arm, as his eyes found the little pad of pudendum where the mile of thighs came together at her pelvis. The wild, fragrant buds of citrus burst and squirted in his mouth as he bit into the fruit.
“Redfish,” she said.
He nodded. “What are you doing way down here?” he asked, managing to drag his eyes back to hers.
“Beth,” she said, turning to her dog. “Sometimes we go all the way, right down to the Rio Grande and old Mexico. The walk’s nothing to her, with those legs. And it keeps me in shape, too.”
“No shit,” he said, tossing a second wedge of orange into his mouth. He bit into it, a second burst of citrus, and she cocked her hip and smiled at him.
“You like that.” She grinned.
He was looking at her breasts when the second wedge of orange turned to napalm in his throat, vaporized napalm, a spray of napalm instantly saturating his sinuses, ripping up into the hollows behind his eyes, actually coloring his vision. He saw scarlet everything, bikini, breasts, navel, smile, and as he staggered back into the red surf he knew he was dying. His trachea and lungs and heart were melted, already dissolved by the napalm, and even the murky Gulf water could not extinguish it.
The last thing he was aware of was the girl bent over him trying to open his mouth, but his jaws had locked down tight on his tongue, and she could only grab and pull at his lips and cheeks.
Frustrated, she gave up and stood for a minute watching him convulse, watching him suck in enough surf to drown even though he was past drowning. When he stopped jerking and flailing in the water, she bent down and worked at his mouth again, finally managing to pry it open. She took out the piece of his tongue he had bitten off and fished around in the sides of his mouth for the orange pulp, digging around the base of his gums, sloshing the frothing salty water into his mouth to make sure it was all washed out.
In a few moments she was finished, and she stood and stepped back away from him. She bent and washed her hands in the water, picked up some sand and rubbed her fingers with it and then washed them off again. Then she stepped back out of the water and watched him roll in the tide, watched him finally go face down, and pitch heavily with the slam of each wave in the rolling surf. After a minute or two, she looked up the beach where she came from, and then she called the greyhound and started walking back, her long, tan legs sauntering, her thick black hair blowing in the Gulf breeze.
Some of the seagulls stayed with him, reluctant to leave, sliding along the margins of the water, back and forth, dipping down, squeaking in the wind. Finally they, too, moved on and in a little while they were all gone, the girl, the dog, and the gulls.
Chapter 16
They sat in the car with the windows rolled down, one of only two cars in the small, otherwise empty lot, a niche carved out of the vast Memorial Park that surrounded them like a rain forest. The lot was at the terminus of a narrow lane that circled around and down behind a chic condominium tower that overlooked the verdant margins of Buffalo Bayou. In the failing light of dusk an arched footbridge with a wrought-iron gate was still visible fifty yards away where it led from the parking lot across a creek to the walking paths that followed the northern bank of the bayou. On the other side of the bayou, obscured by the dense wall of the park’s semitropical vegetation, the emerald golf links of the River Oaks Country Club sloped up toward the city’s most prestigious neighborhood.
Panos Kalatis let a gentle blue tendril of cigar smoke leave his mouth and drift out the car window into the boggy evening air. He was sitting behind the steering wheel, his seat pushed back so that he could turn a little to the passenger beside him and at the same time, with only the slightest movement of his head, be able to see the other man in the back seat.
“No one had any inkling of this, I suppose,” Kalatis said, throwing a quizzical look at Burtell in the back seat “No intelligence about the possibility.” He had just pushed the buttons at his elbow and rolled down all the windows in the car.
“No, nothing,” Burtell said. “You normally don’t have intelligence about suicide,” he added dryly. He wanted to say something else, but he held his tongue. There would be time to say what he wanted to say.
“Then you do think he killed himself?” Kalatis asked, still looking over the back of the seat.
“Yeah, I think he killed himself,” Burtell said grudgingly. He was having a hard time swallowing his anger, his disgust at the two men in front of him.
Kalatis nodded, regarding Burtell with a meditative silence.
“You don’t think they could’ve gotten it wrong?” Faeber asked.
“I doubt it,” Burtell said tersely. Faeber was out of his element. The questions sounded stupid coming from him. He was merely mimicking Kalatis’s role, hoping that by going along with his own needless interrogatories he was ingratiating himself with the Greek.
“But if he was murdered, they’d want to keep that quiet, wouldn’t they?” Kalatis offered.
“You mean a cover-up? No way. Not a cop killing, not in CID.”
“I’ve seen it done before,” Kalatis said.
“Oh, Jesus, Panos. Come on.” Burtell shook his head, impatient with the idea.
Kalatis nodded calmly and leaked more smoke into the failing light. Just then two women in bright nylon jogging shorts and sport bras jogged into sight on the other side of the footbridge and stopped, their run completed, in the clearing at the end of the path. They paced restlessly as they caught their breath and then after a few moments they started across the footbridge to the parking lot.
Kalatis followed them with his eyes as they made their way across the lot and started up the narrow lane toward the condo. “The question is,” he said, still watching the women, “how is this going to affect us?”
“The question is, did he leave anything behind?” Faeber said.
Kalatis looked into the back seat, the dark circles around his eyes visible even in the twilight.
“If he left anything in that area it would have to be personal,” Burtell said. “His own little record-keeping operation or something. There’s nothing like that in CID. He didn’t have any kind of setup like that at the office.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Faeber asked.
“It’s my goddamned business to be sure of it,” Burtell said evenly. He hated having to answer Faeber. Faeber was important to Kalatis, no doubt about it. His data banks, his sleazy nature, his venality were all useful tools to Kalatis, but the man seemed to enjoy a closeness to the Greek that his talents did not warrant. Burtell was frustrated that he had not gotten beyond the business of these investigations. He had thought that by now he would have, but for some reason Kalatis had closed the door. Perhaps he had sensed a greater ambition in Burtell than he saw in either Besom or Tisler; perhaps he was wary of a more clever man.