"Hm," said Tiffany. "Arrested. My God. And Verger told me my spa days were a stupid expense. Just goes to show you, doesn't it? Well, toodle, girls." She got up, feet squelching with that annoying sound, and turned before she reached the French doors. "By the way. When all this is over? I want that appointment book back, if at all possible. The tabloids would pay a pretty stiff price for it. 'Kay?"
"The tabloids?" asked Meg.
Quill, thinking hard, didn't respond. She waited until she heard the click of the front door closing, then said, "Did you notice that Tiffany was wearing those slides with bare feet?"
"You mean her shoes? Yes, but so what?"
"That crackling devil Maria talked about. Close your eyes. Pretend you're tied up in a closet, blindfolded, scared to death. You hear one of the kidnappers come back. Snap-snap. Snap-snap. Bare feet in slides, Meg?"
Meg, who had leaned back and closed her eyes, opened them with a thoughtful expression. "Slides like Linda Longstreet was wearing? Thin, Quill, very thin."
"She's got a motive. According to Carmichael, she's been taking rake-offs from the deliveries. She's got a lot of big strong cousins with vans. All that nervousness makes sense if she's involved with criminal activity."
"So we want to check her out." She waved her hand grandly. "Make a note, Watson."
"You make the note. You're Watson."
"Okay, I will." Meg jotted down L.L. interview? on the notepad with an amiable expression. "Anything else for right now?"
"You know, at first I thought Tiffany might be the one behind all this."
"So did I," Meg agreed. "But did you notice that spa alibi? Pretty good."
"I noticed." She hesitated. "You don't think that Verger staged this thing himself, do you?"
"Why in the name of goodness should he?"
"Anything's possible. Well, let's take a look at what his day was like." She opened the address book at random. "Oh, my!" She closed the book with a gasp, then promptly opened it again.
"What?" Meg demanded.
Quill started to laugh. "He's - er - rating his women!"
"You're kidding! Let me see that!" Quill held it out of reach. Meg got out of her chair, leaned over Quill's shoulder, and shrieked at what she saw.
"It's a separate section from the appointments." Quill gasped, still laughing. "Oh, my. Oh, my. Tiffany was a three-star but he's crossed it out! Oh, ugh!"
Meg shook her head in disgust. "What a jerk." She refilled her coffee cup and sat down again. Quill continued to read, shaking her head. "Good grief, this guy got around. And he didn't even code the names, Meg. I mean, Tiffany's right, the tabloids would pay a - " She bit off her words abruptly.
"What?" Meg demanded. "What?"
Quill closed the appointment book slowly. "Linda Longstreet. She's in here. She is - was - one of Verger's women."
-10-
Luis shook his head. "You don't go down Australian Avenue." He leaned one elbow in a friendly way on the driver's side of the Mercedes.
Quill squinted at him in the sunlight. "Your computer printout says all three addresses are right off Australian," she pointed out. "How do we get to addresses off Australian without going down Australian? Longstreet Catering, Longstreet Hauling and Trucking, and poor Linda Longstreet herself."
"It's a very bad section."
"You mean it's a poor section?" Meg asked. "We haven't seen any poor sections since we came to Palm Beach. What we've seen are a lot of drop-dead gorgeous homes and some terrific landscaping. Even the regular-people type sections, the middle class, have drop-dead gorgeous homes and terrific landscaping, on a much smaller scale, of course."
"You do not know how West Palm Beach came into being? I will tell you. Then you will know not to go down Australian A venue. This man who built Palm Beach... "
"Mr. Flagler," said Meg. "His name's allover the island. The Combers are off Flagler Drive, there used to be a Flagler Hotel, there's a Flagler Inn..."
"Please." Luis held up his hand. "This man built the Royal Poinciana Hotel."
"'There's a lot of Royal Poinciana's, too," Meg said merrily. "There's Royal Poinciana Drive, there's..."
"Shut up, Meg," Quill said. "Go on, Luis."
"Almost a hundred years ago, this man used the sons and daughters of slaves from Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi to build this hotel. The biggest, grandest hotel in the world. All this - " Luis swept his hand in a grand gesture. "This was jungle. Tropical jungles. Snakes, alligators, all these terrible things, the sons and daughters of slaves fight to build this hotel. So, the hotel is built. It is beautiful. But this man thinks, these black people are not so beautiful. I will get them off my island. So. They have built shacks, these Americans around the hotel, and one day this man invites them all to a festival. To thank them, he says, for a job well done. And while all are at this festival, he and his men burn their homes. These workers, they watch the flames and all they own" - he spiraled a finger skyward - "gone.
" `Too bad,' says this man. 'Too, too bad. But I have land for you. Very cheap. Across the Flagler bridge. I will take you there.' "
"Australian?" Meg said.
"The same. These workers, if they are black, if they are African-American, the sons and grandsons of slaves? They must carry a pass to get over the bridge. A worker's pass. And they are not allowed anywhere on this island except for the boss's home."
"Johnson's Civil Rights act took care of that," Meg said.
"Since nineteen sixty-five, it has not been true. Before that, it was true. I found out by browsing the Net." Luis backed away from the Mercedes. "So you are warned."
"Not to go down Australian because it's a ghetto?"
Meg said. "It's the middle of the day. And I've never heard of the Australian A venue ghetto in all the stuff I read and heard about Palm Beach. Phooey."
Meg directed Quill off the Flagler Bridge, down Broadway to Blue Heron Boulevard and then to Australian. The transition from monied homes with beautifully treed lots was abrupt. Not, Quill realized, because the residential districts were poor and ill-kept, but because the zoning boards had clearly fallen prey to business interests. Broadway was filled with decaying, boarded-up buildings with signs faded from the Florida heat and humidity. Earl's Gas Station and Fran's Upholstery and similarly named small businesses would run for entire city blocks. Then the homes, smaller and smaller, but neatly kept, with fenced yards and late model cars in the driveway, would appear for a short stretch, to be replaced by dead and dying commercial property, then reappear again.
The faces of the people on the street were like those of the people in Hemlock Falls - working people, middle-class people. The only difference was the color of their skin.
Traffic in this area was modest, and Quill relaxed behind the wheel. Whoever had laid out West Palm Beach had done a neat, sensible job. It was a grid pattern, with numbered streets running east-west and avenues and boulevards running north-south. The Longstreets lived within a few blocks of one another. Meg, who was navigating, directed Quill to Linda's house first.