Chestra was looking at the floor, her voice soft. “It’s possible, I suppose.”
I was thinking about the diamond death’s-head—it could have been a calling card. It could have also been a death sentence.
“Marlissa was very young. She wanted the world. If powerful men told her things…lies…she may have pretended to believe them. Even pretended to help them. But not for long.
“Frederick was an extraordinary man. A genius. Decent and good. Marlissa adored him. Loved him like she would never love another. Why else…why else would she drown herself when Frederick didn’t return?”
I went to Chestra and made her face me. “Then she wasn’t aboard the boat.”
“No.”
“Because she knew that Goddard was going to kill Roth?”
“No!”
“But Goddard did kill him. He must have.”
The woman’s eyes were teary in the moonlight. “I don’t know. There’s no way to ever know. But I so wish, after all these years…Doc?” She was looking beyond me, toward the beach.
“Yes?”
“The inscription on Marlissa’s grave. Do you believe it? The old saw about the sea giving up its dead?” Her breath caught; a muffled sob.
I said gently, “I don’t believe the sea takes anything. Or gives.”
I watched two slow tears move down cheeks. “It’s the worst sort of romantic nonsense, I suppose, thinking people have only one love. That they search for each other through the ages. I’m sure you don’t believe that, either.”
I didn’t reply.
A gust of wind pushed rain through the screening. Her attention had turned inward. It brought her back. I felt a shiver go through the woman’s body. She sniffed, touched a knuckle to her eye, then made a gutsy attempt to sound cheerful.
“Of course you don’t believe it! You’re a scientist and I’m just a sappy saloon singer. But what a fool I am talking about another man!” She pulled away from me and reached for her rain slicker. “I am alone in the tropics with a guy who is absolutely scrumptious. The storm is wonderful”—she was walking to the door—“and in two minutes I’ll be back with a bottle of wine, which we will drink by a roaring fire. But after we make love again.”
I had a towel knotted around my waist. I watched her duck into the wind and walk beneath trees, through pools of moon shadow, following the sand trail that led past the family cemetery to the house.
I don’t know why I would risk something as indelicate but I did. I called after her, “Marlissa!”
The woman slowed, turned, waited.
I wanted to ask who was buried in the vault. One of the Cuban fishermen who washed up on the beach that October night in 1944? A fisherman’s wife? Or was it empty?
“Don’t forget to bring matches!”
She waved and was gone.
42
Was that someone coming in the back door…?
Bern was upstairs, standing next to the piano in the room with the balcony. He hoped he’d heard the door. Hoped it was Mildred Engle, not bicycle guy. Just the woman, alone. Bern had wasted enough time on Sanibel, he didn’t want to deal with some pissed-off boyfriend.
He paused…strained to listen: sliding doors opened, then closed. Footsteps on the stairs were light, like a dancer. Yes, the woman.
Good. If she’d come through the main entrance, she would have seen the trunk that he’d lugged down the front steps about thirty seconds earlier. It would have scared her. The trunk contained the loan documents. Big old steamer trunk like in the movies. Musty with leather straps. Bern put the thing next to the door so he could bring Moe’s truck around and load it without busting a gut.
Christ, now she shows.
He’d spent nearly an hour inside the house. When bicycle guy had decided not to break the door down but hadn’t started his truck and left either, Bern figured the woman must be at a neighbor’s house and the guy knew where to find her. She certainly wasn’t out in this storm. How crazy would that be?
He spent half an hour hunting for the promissory notes, looking through desks and files—places normal people kept important papers—hurrying like crazy. He wanted to be gone by the time they returned.
No luck.
So then Bern decided, screw it, he would wait until they came back and make the woman give him the papers. Maybe have some fun with her while he was at it…which would mean taking care of bicycle guy, something he didn’t want to do. Enough shit had hit the fan today…
Bern pictured Moe’s face, as he thought about what happened that afternoon…the way Moe’s face looked after he’d been shot. Disgusting; almost as bad as being seasick.
Just one more thing not in the game plan.
Well…he would play it by ear. If bicycle guy got snotty, what choice did he have?
Bern went to the woman’s bedroom and found a comfortable hiding place next to what turned out to be a great big musty steamer trunk. He waited ten minutes…twenty minutes, the illuminated clock on her nightstand sitting right there.
Where the hell is she?
He stuck with the plan, but decided ten more minutes, no more.
After that, he would ransack the fucking house because he was not leaving without those loan notes.
Bern got so bored he opened the trunk and started snooping through the old photos, letters, and papers inside.
Bingo.
T here it was, an envelope, Loan Documents, Mr. Frederick Roth, written in ink, plus other loan documents scattered throughout the trunk. Photos of Marlissa Dorn, too. The blond guy, Roth, was standing next to her in a couple of them. The most interesting shot, though, was taken at some fancy restaurant: the movie queen sitting at a table, men on both sides of her, a couple of them wearing Nazi uniforms and gun belts, the handles of their German Lugers showing.
That was cool. Like his Luger, only these were real.
One of the guys was wearing a suit, not a uniform—holy shit—it was his grandfather, back when he was using his real name, no doubt, Heinrich Goddard. No mistaking the old man’s piggish face, that sneering expression.
Amazing—but not because of his grandfather. His grandfather was sitting on the movie queen’s right. To her left, at the head of the table, was Adolf Hitler.
Goddamn. Was there anybody famous that old bastard didn’t know?
Bern decided to leave while the going was good and lugged the trunk to the front door, ready to load onto Moe’s truck. The only reason he returned upstairs was to retrieve his reading glasses, which he’d forgotten, but then he also decided to grab a few mementos while he was at it. Couple of bottles of booze…and that’s when he heard the sliding doors open and realized it was the woman.
A small woman…that big steamer trunk. Bern thought about it. Lots of room in the trunk; the woman couldn’t weigh a hundred pounds.
Bern walked tiptoe soft to the balcony curtains, a good place to hide in a room where lights were dim.
R umbling thunder; lightning struck nearby, dishes rattled. Standing behind the curtain, Bern heard the woman stop at the top of the stairs. He couldn’t see her, but he heard her—a long silence. Maybe she was worried lightning had hit the house…or waiting for bicycle guy to follow.
He hoped not. Shit. He’d left Moe’s chrome .357 downstairs on the trunk, thinking that he would grab his reading glasses, return a second later, and be out of there.