"Think it if you want," Suki went on. "I don't blame you. But look, I'm supposed to be dead. I'm safer if they think I am. That much makes sense, right?"
The two men looked at one another. They weren't betting if it made sense or it didn't.
"Can you hide me for a day or two?" said Suki.
"Hide you?" Piney said.
"Till I think things through a little."
Piney looked over at his roommate. Fred had the guilty lump of fifties in his pocket and they both knew that they owed her.
"Well, sure," said Piney. "But we don't exactly have a home."
"We have a home," corrected Fred. "But it's a hot dog."
"A hot dog," Suki said. She reached up and gently touched her ravaged throat. She laughed weakly and it felt like a fist was pushing up her gullet. "They'd never think of looking for me there."
Chapter 16
Around ten o'clock that morning, when Ludmila the Belorussian housekeeper let herself into Lazslo's apartment to clean, the first thing she noticed was a meaty smell. It was somewhat strong and gamy, but not at all unpleasant. It smelled like salt and iron, like a butcher shop in the old country, where the refrigeration wasn't very good, and streaks of blood and smears of fat would collect at the low edges of dented pans. She thought, with vague surprise, that Lazslo had been cooking without her help, feeding some pointy-breasted American tramp to get her into bed. But when she went into the kitchen she found no pots on the stove, no dirty dishes on the counter, except for one tall glass with a stain of bourbon at the bottom.
Curious, she looked around the living room. No rumples in the sofa, no pillows on the floor; no lipstick-covered filters in the ashtrays.
She moved into the hallway that led to the bedroom. The meaty smell got more insinuating as she went, though the corridor was as it always was, save for the crookedness of the sports prints and Harley posters on the walls.
The bedroom, on the other hand, was a housekeeper's hell.
Bureau drawers had been yanked open, they gushed out sleeves and cuffs and collars. The dresser top had been swept clean of change and papers and souvenirs, all of which were strewn along the carpet. In the master bathroom, the medicine chest mirror hung askew on flaccid hinges, jars and bottles had been smashed against the tiled floor. Through the open closet door, Ludmila saw anarchic twisted piles of silk and linen clothes, tormented hangers poking through them.
And on the bed, wearing tight jeans and a mostly open shirt, lay Lazslo, his throat cut ear to ear.
The blood had all drained out of him. Some of it was matted in his chest hair but most had spilled onto the sheet, giving its folds the engorged and spongy look of springtime moss. His eyes were open, the irises rolled up toward the brows. It was an expression that in old church paintings suggested ecstasy, but Lazslo didn't look ecstatic. He looked confused, affronted, his shattered arrogance still unbelieving that things were turning out so badly. The two sections of his neck were stretched into a ghastly smile by the weight of his head; his gold chain had found its way into the appalling slot and was lodged against a notch in his windpipe.
Ludmila looked at him a while. She didn't scream, her stomach didn't turn. She was neither glad nor sorry he was dead. His dying, probably, had something to do with the false-bottom vases with the little tape machines inside, but that was not Ludmila's problem. She did what she was told, she didn't have to understand what happened.
She went to the telephone and called Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky. She told him what she'd found.
Cherkassky expressed his shock and sorrow. A violent country, barbaric, he complained. A terrible crime, a tragedy. Lazslo's uncle would be devastated. But in the meantime, Ludmila, as a good citizen, must call the police, and only the police. Did she understand?
She understood. She called the cops. And by the time the lady officer arrived with her clipboard and her walkie-talkie, Ludmila had forgotten most of the little English she could speak. She was sent home, having been told she might be asked more questions later. She got back on her scooter and she gave the dead man no more thought.
The taxi driver took one look at the three of them and demanded payment in advance.
Two dirt-bags, one with shoes, and a beat-up barefoot woman in a torn and filthy dress, calling from a pay phone on the highway late on a weekday morning. God knew what the story was. Coke-whore, maybe. Some wacko triangle with sex rights in dispute. No concern of his. This was the Keys, where lost souls were free to travel their chosen route to hell, as long as they could pay the fare. The driver looked surprised when Fred handed him a new if somewhat soggy fifty.
They drove from Big Coppitt past the Navy base at Boca Chica, past the rancid clutter of Stock Island, retracing the path that Fred had driven, barely twelve hours before, in Lazslo's Cadillac. At the top of Key West they turned left, toward the ocean side, and when they'd passed the houseboats but before they'd reached the airport, at a stretch where there was nothing but mangroves on one side and Cow Key Channel on the other, Fred leaned over the backseat and said, "Here's good."