As usual, Rolvaag's expression was unreadable.
"Those are two possibilities," the detective said. "Something to think about anyway. Thanks for the pop."
Chaz laughed. "The what?"
"The cold drink," Rolvaag said. "By the way, somebody's staking out your house-some big hairy guy in a minivan, parked down by the corner. The tag comes back to a rental agency."
"Oh?" Chaz thinking: Wait until I tell Red.
"Any ideas?"
Chaz poked his head out the doorway and looked down the street. "I've got no earthly clue who that man is," he lied. "How do you know that it's me he's watching?"
"Wild guess." Rolvaag smiled. "You've got my card. Call if you need anything."
"Right," said Chaz. When goats learn ballet.
He stood at the bay window and watched the prying detective drive away. When the phone began to ring, he almost yanked it out of the living room wall.
What the hell's happening? he wondered dismally. Wasn't I supposed to be home free by now?
Off the hook.
Cruising.
Instead, that goddamn cop is still snooping around, some sadistic perv is sneaking into my house and messing with Joey's stuff-and now I've got to deal with some knuckle-dragger of a bodyguard that Red's dredged out of a sinkhole somewhere.
When Chaz answered the phone, the man named Tool was on the other end.
"That guy that just left?"
"What about him?" Chaz said.
"Want me to go after him?"
"And do what?"
Tool grunted. "I dunno. Bust his spleen."
Chaz sighed. "He's a cop."
"Yeah, so?"
Unbelievable, Chaz thought. "Leave him be, please."
"It's your party," said Tool. "Hey, I gotta go take a dump. You gone be all right?"
"I think I can manage."
Chaz stripped off his clothes and propped himself under a hot shower for twenty minutes. Try as he might, he still couldn't see where he'd made a single mistake in the plan, not one wrong move.
The crime was perfect. It was the rest of the world that was fucking up.
"I lied," Joey Perrone said.
This was after a day of doing largely nothing; swimming, sunning, losing herself in a John D. MacDonald paperback that she'd found in Mick Stranahan's tackle box.
"I lied to you," she said again.
Stranahan didn't look up. He was cracking stone crab claws by whomping them with the flat side of a spoon. It was all in the wrist, he'd explained. Fragments of shell were flying around like shrapnel.
"Lied about what?" he asked.
"About not touching anything in the house when I went back inside to take a pee. There was a stash of pictures in the hall closet."
"Wedding pictures, that sort of thing?"
"Wedding, honeymoon, vacations. All shots of Chaz and me," Joey reported, "in happier times."
"Why were they in a closet?"
"Because my shitheel husband pulled 'em off the wall," she said, "probably within five minutes after he got home from the cruise. I guess he couldn't even stand to look at my face."
Stranahan brushed an orange fleck of crab claw from her cheek. "Tell me what you did."
Joey spun away. "Another glass of wine, sir. Please."
"What did you do with the photos?"
"Not all of them. Just one," she said. "All I did was take it out of the frame and slip it under his pillow."
"Oh Christ," Stranahan said.
"But first I took cuticle scissors-"
"And cut your face out of the picture." Joey blinked. "How'd you know?"
"No comment."
"Wife or girlfriend?"
"Spouse number three, if memory serves," he said.
She sighed. "Next time I'll try to be more original."
They ate inside, Strom whining for handouts through the screen door. Stranahan was quiet, and Joey began to worry that she'd done something foolhardy, something that might ruin the plan, whatever that was.
Firmly she set down her wineglass. "If you want to yell at me for cutting up that picture, go ahead. Just remember, it's my house, too. My stuff that he's throwing away."
Stranahan said, "There was no car accident in Tampa involving Chaz and a drunk driver."
"How do you know?"
"Checked with the Highway Patrol. There wasn't any lawsuit, either," he said, "according to the court files. And no big settlement, obviously."
"Meaning no nest egg," Joey said quietly.
"Highly unlikely. You want to hear our plan?"
"If it'll cheer me up, sure."
"We're going to blackmail your husband," Stranahan said.
"I see."
"Actually, we're only going to make him think he's being blackmailed." Stranahan dipped a jumbo claw into a cup of drawn butter.
"Blackmailed by who?" Joey asked.
"Somebody who knows that Chaz murdered you." Stranahan smiled and took another bite of crab. "Somebody we'll have to invent, of course."
Joey adored the idea even though she didn't entirely get the point.
"Misdirection," he explained. "Chaz is probably freaking out that he's being harassed by some mysterious intruder. I'm assuming you don't want him to figure out it's you, at least not yet. Correct?"
She nodded emphatically.
"No offense," Stranahan said, "but these clever little messages you've left for him-the dress in the closet, the lipstick in the drawer, the photograph under the pillow-those are estranged wife-type moves. Too much of that and he'll put it all together."
"Yeah, you're right."
"So we need to make him believe it's somebody else who's screwing with his head."
"How about somebody who saw him push me off the ship?"
"Now you're talking."
"A secret witness who gets greedy," Joey said eagerly. "That would be cool. But who could we make up, Mick? And how would this imaginary person know how to find Chaz? Wait a minute-how would he get into the house unless he had a key?"
"Whoa, slow down," Stranahan told her. "I've got an idea how to set this up."
"I'll bet you do." Joey Perrone felt better than she had in days, and not just because of the wine.
"But first it would really help to know why Chaz wanted you dead," said Stranahan. "It would open up some creative opportunities, blackmail-wise."
Joey shrugged helplessly. "That's all I think about, night and day."
"Don't worry. We'll figure everything out," he said with a wink. "This might actually be fun."
Ten
Chaz didn't find the photograph under his pillow until Tuesday night, because he'd spent Monday night at Ricca's apartment in self-prescribed sexual therapy. He had blamed Joey's lingering aura for impeding his finale in the bathtub, but leaving the house they shared had failed to solve the problem. Even in Ricca's jasmine-scented bedroom Chaz couldn't shake the image of his dead wife's slinky black dress in the closet, or the wanton memories it conjured.
Ricca had worked on him as deftly as a sculptress, but the results had been unsatisfactory. For the first time in their relationship-in any relationship-Chaz had heard that most hollow and dreaded of consolations:
"Don't worry, baby, it happens to everybody."
In a panic he'd dragged Ricca to a nearby music store and purchased a replacement copy of George Thorogood's greatest hits, to no avail. Even digitally remastered, "Bad to the Bone" could not rally Chaz's bone to its usual badness. The gloom of failure followed him all the next day as he drove up and down the levees of the Everglades. It weighed on him still when he returned home, although Rolvaag's visit had offered a brief, though grating, diversion.