The Price of Blood Part 17

"Are you sure you want to mix in our dirty business, Phil?"

Broker looked directly into LaPorte's metallic eyes. "The Hue gold is...morally ambiguous."

"The Eagle Scout I knew twenty years ago wouldn't have said that."

"People change."

Something merry danced in LaPorte's eyes and Broker thought it might be the old male slow dance; LaPorte wanted him to admit he was rolling over and baring his throat to the stronger alpha wolf. "Please continue, Phil," said LaPorte.

"I don't want Tuna hurt."

"The man is dying," LaPorte said impatiently. "Do you know where he is?"

"Not yet."

The heat left LaPorte's eyes and they froze with a subtle click of calculation above his smile. Broker had ceased to be important.

And Broker's own false smile masked the ice pick that suddenly pinned his heart. He'd made a fatal mistake. A number of them. LaPorte had probably shut his eyes and drawn a circle on that map. The treasure map had no leverage power because it was a phony. Easy bait for an eager Nina. And he knew Fret wasn't alone. His whole act was designed to siphon Broker off to New Orleans. And if I could figure out that the trail to Tuna led through his banking records, so could Cyrus LaPorte. They were still following her. And if they grabbed her coming out of the bank in Ann Arbor...

"How much?" said LaPorte with a convincing pained expression. Broker was treading water. LaPorte was comfortably standing on the bottom.

"Five hundred thousand. For Nina, for my silence, and for Tuna. Half now. Half when it's done. And do it some way it can't be traced."

"I'm willing to pick up the note on your dad's white elephant and hold it. If everything works out, you'll get another hundred thousand."

"That's a hundred and fifty thousand shy of the figure I had in mind."

"Let's think about it." LaPorte stood up briskly and pressed the b.u.t.ton on his desk. "When are you leaving New Orleans?" he asked.

"Ten tomorrow morning."

"Where are you staying?"

"The Doniat. On Chartiers."

"I'll pick you up at eight and drive you to the airport. We'll see where we're at then." They shook hands.

The old black guy in the s.h.i.+ny trousers appeared at the door and LaPorte said cordially, "Hiram, show Mr. Broker out. I'm leaving through the garage. I'd drop you but I'm going in the other direction. Hiram can call you a cab, but you should really take the streetcar." LaPorte smiled and walked energetically down the hall and through a doorway.

"I need to use a phone," Broker immediately said to Hiram.

"Uh-huh, but you wait a second." Hiram c.o.c.ked his ear out the open balcony doors. Seconds slid by like abacus beads on a wire of sweat. Broker heard the faint squeal of tires on hot cement down near the pool ap.r.o.n.

"Okay. Now you use that phone right there," said Hiram, pointing to the raised desk. Then he turned and shuffled into the hall.

Broker stabbed in Nina's number. On the third ring a rough male voice answered, "h.e.l.lo," and Broker hammered the desk with his fist. Then the voice said, "I say, Merry. What do you say?"

Broker shook his head, blinked and then almost shouted, "Weather."

"Hi there," said Nina in a bright voice.

"Who-"

She cut him off. "I told you we shouldn't split up. The only guy who was good at that was Robert E. Lee."

"Nina?"

"Relax. I'm playing Scrabble with Sgt. Danny Larkins of the Michigan Highway Patrol. We took a grad course together, remember."

In the background the deep voice said, "Sociology of deviance. It was boring."

Nina continued. "For an outrageous amount of cash Danny has taken two personal leave days to squire me around and tuck me on an airplane. And he's got this great big gun."

"She's just dying to touch it," yodeled Danny Larkins. They both laughed.

Broker, glad that someone was having fun, sagged on LaPorte's desk. "I screwed up."

"That's okay. I didn't. How's it going?"

"You're it. They got me down here on a draw play. The map's all bulls.h.i.+t. Watch yourself." He wondered if the call could be monitored. "Especially tomorrow."

"About what I figured. No sweat. We're having a poker party tonight. Six cops. I'm buying the beer."

"Strip poker. And all of us are these huge motherf.u.c.kers," crowed Larkins.

"I gotta go, I'm using LaPorte's phone," said Broker.

"I'm covered. You take care," said Nina. Broker thought he heard her blow a kiss into the receiver. He hung up, dismounted the dais, and started for the door. Hiram appeared in front of him.

"You ain't leaving yet," said the old man.

Broker glowered down at Hiram's mostly bald beige skull. "Say again?"

Hiram shook his head. "Out there on the balcony. Go ahead. Somebody you gotta talk to."

"Who? Why?"

Hiram's voice was eloquent with the absurdity of watching white people. "Cause they in over they head just like you."

Lola LaPorte smoothed her hands through her hair as she walked along the pool deck toward the balcony. When she was within easy speaking range, she looked up. Through a haze of anger and humiliation Broker saw that her features keyed to the way she moved, hard and soft, a mobile pentagram of squares and triangles seamlessly turning inside of circles. He thought that her wide, somber eyes might be light brown.

"He's gone," she called up to him. Nice voice when her husband wasn't around. Full range, like the rest of her. Mature and disciplined. "When policemen visit my husband it usually concerns money. What exactly is Cyrus paying you to do, Mr. Broker?"

With a tight smile Broker grabbed at the only straw in sight. "Get some counseling for a girl named Nina Pryce and let Bevode Fret out of jail in Minnesota."

She put her hands on her hips in a self-consciously mocking feminine pose and pitched her voice to match. "Nina Pryce is hardly a girl and I myself, given the opportunity to keep Bevode Fret in a jailhouse, would never consent to letting him go; a sentiment shared, I a.s.sure you, by half the sensible people of New Orleans. But then, half the sensible people in New Orleans would be a distinct minority."

"What can I say-"

"Are you corrupt, Mr. Broker?"

"Only in Louisiana, so far."

Broker tried to make out her expression, but she stood in a subtle riot of shadow cast by the hedges and he couldn't tell.

"Relax, we're alone for a while. I'll be right up," she said.

30.

HE RETREATED FROM THE BALCONY AND THE HOT sensation stoked in his cheeks and in his hands. LaPorte had made a fool of him. The fury banked like coals when he recalled Bevode Fret's a.s.sured smile. Broker prayed that Danny Larkins and company knew their stuff better than he did.

The second wave of anger was packed harder and took a direction. Get even. No. Punish...

His eyes tracked the office as his hands burned to seize on something. Something that would make LaPorte feel as foolish as he felt right now. He yanked in frustration on a locked desk drawer. He kicked the desk.

Lola's cool voice reined him in. "Forget it, Broker. Cyrus is crazy as a March hare but he wouldn't leave anything valuable just laying around."

The breeze carried the tangerine scent of sweat from her damp clothing. She'd tied a filmy purple silk scarf around her throat and put on a pearl silk kimono with billowing sleeves. She was around five seven. Hard to estimate the weight she packed in all that velvet muscle. He'd been close on the eyes, brown but lighter, sand-colored. A streak of premature gray twisted above the left side of her widow's peak.

And Broker was suddenly very eager to discover the exact dimensions of the marital tension between Lola and Cyrus LaPorte.

She padded toward him, her bare feet sinking into the Persian carpet, and at twenty feet she engaged the eyes like a translated idea. Like art. At ten feet he could see the tiny suggestion of lines around the corners of her mouth and her eyes. Uh-huh. Surgeons had airbrushed some of that artwork. She had her fingernails dug in to the quick, hanging on to forty. But like LaPorte said, very well preserved. Maybe he saw a wisp of curiosity rise from the bored ashes in her eyes. Her lower lip bunched in a bittersweet smile and that's where some of the lines got their exercise.

She misread his steaming bold stare and mocked him with an adult smile. "Wrong room, Cowboy. I keep the s.e.x drive in the kitchen now, on the Cuisinart, right between chop and puree."

Broker patiently tried to melt his agitation. Not fast enough.

She sighed. "Yes, Mr. Broker, I was a cheerleader and I can still do the splits and I was homecoming queen and I was Miss Baton Rouge and I even was the Sweetheart of Delta Chi. Eye-f.u.c.king. That's one of your Vietnam words, isn't it?"

He said, "I was in on the end. I missed the fun cultural nuances."

"Well don't get hot at me. I haven't got it. It's in there." She pointed to the safe. "Seven ingots." She dropped her eyes. "What happened to your hand?"

"Some geek tried to bite my thumb off resisting arrest."

"Sounds like you got too close. Close could be dangerous," she said, and watched his reaction.

Broker was thinking clearer now. Hiram the butler had kept him from leaving. Lola had been waiting for a chance to talk.

About what? He wondered if Lola liked her money cooked in blood like Cyrus and Bevode.

Cooler, he retreated to the safe and squatted and ran his hands over the door. "This is old." He fingered the keyhole in the handle. "Takes a key."

"It was forged in eighteen sixteen. Fourteen-hundred pounds of solid steel. According to the legend, cannon from Royale LaPorte's s.h.i.+p were melted down to make it."

Broker stood up and pointed to the portrait. "The pirate."

Lola sat in the leather chair and crossed her knees in a silken swish.

"I boned up," said Broker. "Royale LaPorte lost an arm fighting under Andy Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. President Madison pardoned him. The books say he danced with Marie Laveau the voodoo queen and kept his severed left hand pickled in rum in a gla.s.s jar. The hand is said to continue with the LaPorte family to this day."

Lola clapped her hands in slow applause. Very deliberately, Broker pointed at the ancient safe and raised his eyebrows.

She nodded. "Probably climbed out of its gory pot and is in there caressing those bars at this very minute."

Broker glanced at the imposing painting on the wall. "Maybe the Hue gold's the general's way of sailing back into history to commune with his ancestors?"

"What a kind way to put it, Mr. Broker," she said tartly. "The fact is that with the travel time on the boat, paying off the Greenpeace kids, bringing in the diving crew and the new undersea excavation equipment-you can tell Nina Pryce that Cyrus is barely breaking even with his seven bars of gold."

"You know Nina Pryce?"

"I met her at the party the other night when she robbed the place. I remember the tattoo. It was out of place on her."

"Do the Vietnamese have any idea?"

"You and I having a conversation about Cyrus's business is dangerous." It was a frank statement.

"Do they?" Broker repeated.

She folded her hands and raised them just under her chin. "No. This is a case where knowledge really is power. Do you feel powerful? With your treasure map?"

"The map's a phony. I'm down here chasing wild geese."

"Then you should be wondering why Cyrus would purchase your silence when he can insure it."

Broker, unfazed, crossed the room and pointed to the whip on the wall. "What's this?"

"Family heirloom. Cyrus's great granddaddy used it to motivate the help." She got up and walked to a closet in the wall of antlers. She opened the door and dug in a drawer and removed a frayed, discolored red silk hooded robe. "That whip was there, along with this, right next to old Bedford Forest when the order was founded." The bittersweet smile crinkled the corners of her mouth. "I'm a little over the hill to be a princess, but I sure as h.e.l.l married a dragon." She c.o.c.ked her head and he wondered how she got her hair to move in place all the time. Maybe it was a secret only taught to millionaires' wives. "You always talk like this to strangers?" he asked.

"You know the Tennessee Williams line about us southern girls relying on the kindness of strangers."

"She was a drunk and I ain't Marlon Brando."

"True. Brando has gone to fat. You don't look like you ever will. Does it bother you that so many police officers have Michelin tires around their waists these days?"

Lola got up and mounted the dais and sat behind her husband's desk. She opened the manila folder that LaPorte had referred to earlier and held up a sheet of paper. "On the other hand, Cyrus can't resist a clean cop." She folded her arms on the desk. "Another cop who was too good to be true stood in this office once. Cyrus knew Bevode Fret was so good that he was only one cold-blooded murder away from being very, very bad. You see, my husband has turned into a collector. Before I met him he used to collect medals and honors. But after that incident in seventy-five they were holding him back in the army. He decided he needed a trophy wife to talk up the generals' wives at the club. And there I was, a Tulane graduate with two years of law school up against the financial wall so I was clerking in a firm downtown and he sized me up like a doll on a shelf and said, 'I'll take that one.' He always said when he retired we'd raise a family. I think he started to come apart when the Berlin Wall came down." She smiled bitterly. "That f.u.c.king wall was apparently holding up his character..."

She placed her palms together. "Well, we didn't have a family. Instead he went through his antler phase. Cyrus has come a long way since he won those medals. Now he has a little bottle where he collects people's souls."

"Sounds like true love."

She frowned. "I've lived with that man so long I'm not sure I'd recognize a good guy when he's standing right in front of me."