"Last name?"
Markov shrugged.
"You'd know her if you saw her? At the morgue, I mean?"
"I think I would. Not sure."
"I hate to ask you, but—"
Markov, man of the world, waved away the cop's compunction. He realized now how sloppy he'd been, how foolish to imagine that the very puniness of his crime sufficed to make it unsolvable. If returning to the morgue allowed him to lead the cop away from the garage with the dead woman's things so carelessly hidden, from the seawall with the overturned table sunk in the muck at its base, then he was only too happy to return to the morgue.
"Will be painful to see that place again," he said. "But as citizen of course I will help." And he gestured with Old World graciousness for the lieutenant to precede him out the door.
"Aaron," Suki said, "let's not eat in the kitchen tonight, okay?"
He said nothing, just looked up from the pan in which the grouper was sauteing. Suki was holding a pair of candlesticks; he had no idea where she'd found them. Then again, there were cupboards, crannies in the Mangrove Arms he'd never yet got around to opening, and the old hotel was day by day becoming her place as well as his.
"Nicer," she said.
He looked at her and his throat was closing down. Her hair was drying, not dry all the way, it had a sheen like licorice. Her neck was very tan where it joined her shoulders and tucked beneath her blouse. There was a happiness about her that didn't need to smile, that Aaron almost let himself recognize as desire.
"Maybe the coffee table right out here," she said, pointing through the kitchen doorway to a sitting area where no guests ever sat, and where Suki and Aaron had never taken time to rest.
Aaron couldn't speak just then, he nodded and looked back at the stove, down into the pan where the fillets were nestled in beds of shallot and olives and sweet pepper. Something was happening in the muscles above his knees, they kept tightening then letting go. He turned the fish and thought about his stubborn suffocating gallantry. Was it fair to make love to Suki, trapped there as she was? Was she free to open up her arms, or not to?
She was standing in the doorway now. She smiled and her disconcerting upper lip twitched slightly at the corners. "Looks civilized," she said with satisfaction. Aaron saw candlelight licking at the slatted walls behind her.
She moved into the kitchen once again. "Plates?" she said, and Aaron, strangling on his chivalry, could only nod.
He watched her reach up to the high shelf above the counters, her body lengthening as though in a dream of leaping into flight, heels flexing from the floor, hips lifting as back sinews stretched, shoulders tilting to raise one full tan arm in a ballet of the sublimely ordinary.
He turned off the stove and opened the wine.
Tarzan Abramowitz could not bring himself to face Ivan Cherkassky.
He'd failed. He'd spoken with six, eight people, feeling maladroit and foolish the whole way through, and he'd learned nothing about who Suki was supposed to have joined for dinner at Lucia's.
But of course he'd failed. Listening for the tiniest of glitches in a language not his own—it was impossible, ridiculous. Still, the failure embarrassed him, and feeling embarrassed made him mad. He was mad at Cherkassky, though that was an anger he could not afford; so he got mad, instead, at the people he had called.
He sat on a high stool, his feet impatient on the rungs, in the back room of a T-shirt shop on Duval Street. Behind him loomed stacks of open cardboard cartons, and behind that wall of shirts was stashed the more valuable inventory of cash and gems and art—spin-offs of the traffic in fissionable material. Abramowitz had a phone book on his knees, and he was jotting down addresses.
Cherkassky didn't want him to be seen; well, Cherkassky was still as meek as your basic civil servant. He, Abramowitz, was bold. Let people recognize his suspenders and his muscles and his short legs and his hairy back; he didn't care. He wanted to try things his own way now. Confront; intimidate; punish.
He closed the phone book, folded the paper on which he'd written the addresses, and put it in his pocket. Then he sprang out into the deepening dusk to jump into his electric blue Camaro and see what information he could shake loose not with his voice but his hands.
Chapter 39
Driving his unmarked police car back to Key Haven from the morgue, Gary Stubbs said, "These two deaths, Mr. Markov—you think they could be related in some way?"
Markov had been looking out the window, still seeing the nose holes in Ludmila's gray face. He swiveled fatly in the seat, gave a world-weary shrug. "You are the policeman, Lieutenant. I only wish to know, no matter what, who killed my nephew."