"How many were there?"
He shook his head. "You don't need to know. But that's why."
"That's why you shot Petty? So we'd have a garden spot?"
Kennett turned away. "We didn't like doing that. But we had no choice… O'Dell is trying to frame me, by the way. Supposedly had a witness who saw me when Waites was gunned down."
"I know."
His eyebrows went up. "You know?"
"Davenport found the kid who supposedly saw you. Found him in Charleston and broke him down. He knows it was phony."
Kennett smiled. "When he went to Minneapolis, he went to Charleston the next day. I thought it was weird that he took the day off-weird for a guy like Davenport."
"How about the others? Waites was a loudmouth, but…"
"They nurtured it, the festering. My God, look over there, look at that city, think what it could be…"
She looked across the water at the twinkling lights, like the lights of the Milky Way, seen large. "And you sold it out. And used me like a fucking Kleenex."
"Bullshit," he said. His face was getting red.
"When Walt was killed, I came over here and cried on your shoulder, and you took care of all the arrangements and patted me on the head and took me down below and made love to me, comforting me. I can't believe I did it."
"Yeah, well…"
"Well, what?"
"That's life." His teeth were clenched. "Now, go on, Lily, get the hell out of here."
Lily stood, took a step toward the dock. Then another step, toward Kennett.
"What…" Kennett began.
She hit him, open-handed, hard: a slap that almost knocked him down. He took a step toward her, hand on his face, and caught her arm. "Lily, dammit!"
"Let go of me," she said. She tried to pull away, but he held on, and for a moment, they struggled together, his face getting redder; then suddenly, he pinched his shoulders and let his hand drop away.
He turned, seeming to crouch, then went to his knees. "Oh, Jesus," he gasped. "Lily… in my bag, down below…"
His pills. His pills were in the bag. She started to turn toward the cabin.
A spasm hit him and he went flat in the cockpit, his face straining, the tendons standing out in his neck. "Lily…"
She stopped. Looked at the cabin and then back at him. And then carefully, as if in slow motion, she climbed out of the boat, stood on the dock a second, looked at the city and then back down at Kennett. His face was chalky, his mouth open, straining, his eyes large and staring. His hand scrabbled along the deck, as though he were trying to get hold of it. "Lily…"
"Say hello to Bekker," she said.
CHAPTER
32
O'Dell sat in his semidarkened office, an air of satisfaction about him, like a bullfrog who'd snapped up a particularly tasty fly. "I really don't give a fuck what you think," he told Lucas.
"Which makes me want to come across the desk and slap the shit out of you," Lucas snarled.
"The New York jails aren't pretty," O'Dell said, mildly. "I could guarantee you a tour…"
Lucas shook his head. "Nah. You wouldn't do that. I spent too much time with Red Reed. We had witnesses. So I slap the shit out of you, you put me in jail, and I tell the papers about Reed, and tell them that you hid a key witness in the murder of a well-known black politician. You'd be right in there with me."
O'Dell seemed to think about it for a minute, then sighed and half closed his heavy-lidded eyes. "All right. But look, if you're gonna slap the shit out of me, why don't we get it over with? I need some sleep."
They sat quietly for a minute, then Lucas said, "You know I won't. But you owe me, God damn it. You got me whacked by Kennett's hoods. What I want to know is, how much was set up? Did you know it was Kennett? Is Lily in it? How about Fell? And who else?"
"Lily's okay-she never had anything to do with it. And Lily says you believe Fell was an alarm. I don't know if I believe it, but I can see the possibility…"
"Kennett?"
"Yeah, I knew about Kennett and a couple more-and frankly, you and Lily should have known that," O'Dell said. "Petty's investigation wasn't a TV show. He didn't sneak off and do all the work and keep all of his conclusions to himself. He came up and sat here every day and told me what he thought. We had Kennett and a couple more people spotted-not Copland, unfortunately. We didn't know that Kennett had his own computer people. We figured we could go into the system anytime, print out our evidence. Then Petty got killed and his printouts were lifted. When I went back into the system, the files had been trashed. All I had were a few names and no way to push."
"So you set us up."
O'Dell smiled, still pleased with himself. "Yes. Lily had talked about you. Said you were smart. And I saw one of your simulations. So I put Kennett on Bekker, and you on Kennett, and brought Fell to work with you, and had Lily running you on the side. With all that pressure, something had to blow. Anyway, I had nothing to lose."
Lucas thought about it, stood, stretched, yawned, wandered to O'Dell's window, pulled back the heavy plush drapes and looked out at the twinkling city. "This goddamn place is one big patch, you know? Have I given you my rap on how the place is one big patch?"
"Yeah."
"And I was another one."
"Yeah."
Lucas stretched again, then wandered across the room toward the door. "Nice game," he said.
O'Dell looked at him, then laughed, low and long, genuinely delighted. "It was, wasn't it?"
Lucas sat behind a round, simulated-wood table the size of a manhole cover, in a plastic bar full of plastic pictures of old airplanes. Through the clear Plexiglas walls, he could watch the people streaming out toward the departure gates. He glanced at his watch: three twenty-seven in the afternoon, more or less. With a Rolex, he'd discovered, more or less had to be good enough. He sipped at his Budweiser, not interested, just holding his seat.
Fell showed up at three-thirty, thin, bird-gawky, tough. And maybe angry or something else. She stopped near the end of a long queue for the security gates, looked both ways, and spotted the bar. She paused again at the door, and Lucas raised a hand. She saw him and threaded her way through the tables. When she saw his suitcase by his leg, she looked from the case to Lucas and said, "So I was a three-night stand, or whatever it was."
"Not exactly," Lucas said. "Sit down."
She didn't sit down. Instead she said, "I thought we might go someplace for a while." Tears rimmed her eyes.
"Sit down," Lucas said.
"You fuck," she said, but she sat down, dropping heavily into the chair across from him, hands dangling dispiritedly between her legs. "You said we…"
"I thought about asking you to come down to the Islands with me," Lucas said. "I even called out to Kennedy, out to United, to find out what islands we could go to."
She looked down at the tabletop. "Tell me," she said.
"Well, I… couldn't." He dug in his pocket and tossed a red matchbook on the table in front of her. The matchbook had a horsehead on it. She picked it up and put it in her purse.
"So you were in the restaurant where Walter Petty got killed," he said. "You told me you weren't."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I saw the matches in your apartment."
"When?"
"Well, when we were up there…"
"Bullshit, I got rid of them. When I thought you might be coming over, I saw them, and I thought, 'I got to get rid of these.' I threw them out. So when did you see them?"
He looked levelly across the table at her. "The first day we worked together, I copped your purse, made molds of your keys. The next day I went in."