The Naked Detective(70)

I dumped the contents onto the coffee table. No surprises—it was cash. Tens and twenties mostly, with bent corners, the bills gone grayish and greasy with mold. We didn't bother counting it, though I guessed it was five, six hundred dollars. Not a bad take for a weeknight late shift at a bar; then again, a pretty paltry sum to die for.

I guess that's what Maggie was thinking too. She looked at the money and bit her lip. I thought she might start to cry. I guess she and Kenny had been pretty good friends.

I reached into the bag and seized the other pouch. With her eyes alone, Maggie made it clear that she didn't want to touch it. So once again I tried the zipper; then, with clumsy and unsteady fingers, tore the wretched thing open. Tiny sand grains bounced onto my legs. A dank smell wafted up. Probing past the sundered closure, I felt something hard but flimsy, damp but not porous, sharp-edged yet nearly weightless.

I pulled out a videocassette. There was no label on it. It had a superficial crack in the black plastic of its casing, though it seemed like it would play.

I held it up and stared at Maggie. She took my free hand and placed it on her chest. Her heart was jumping. We both knew there was something on that tape it would be better not to see. We both knew we had to finish. We got up from the sofa. I took my pistol and my drink and we went toward the music room to watch the video.





36


I switched on the dimmered lights but kept them low. The heavy insulated door swung closed behind us, blocking out the deepening dusk and the memory of the weirdly empty streets. I put my gun and grappa on the small table between the room's two cushy chairs, then crouched before the VCR and slipped in the cassette. I sat down next to Maggie and picked up the remote. Squeezing it way harder than I had to, I turned on the TV and started the tape.

The screen stayed black a moment, then brightened to an image that was only gravel. I found myself both hoping and fearing that perhaps the long-buried cassette had been spoiled, its secrets leached into the sand of Sunset Key.

Abruptly, though, the gravel resolved into a picture. It was a picture of a room that looked familiar, but which I couldn't place at first. Heavy lamps stood in thick carpeting. Another decade's furniture was arrayed around a space with many mirrors. I realized it was Lydia Ortega's condo. The camera shakily panned ... and there was Lydia herself, sitting on her sectional. Her eyes were much too wide and much too black, and even I could tell that she was wigged on coke. She was wearing a bizarre half-bra that pushed her breasts up but stopped short of covering her nipples, and a G-string that drew the eye to the cleft of her sex.

For an instant, plain embarrassment overwhelmed fear and curiosity. I said to Maggie, "We don't have to watch this."

She didn't answer. The tape ran. Lydia massaged herself, did lewd things with her tongue. There was a wine bottle on the coffee table in front of her. She slid her hips down toward it.

My head swam. Arousal and bewilderment. Lefty had said his daughter had a problem. That a woman had put the pouch into the safe. Lydia had claimed that she was being blackmailed. Had hinted that the blackmailer was Mickey Veale ...

On the TV screen, she writhed, she cooed, she pulled away the G-string with her red-nailed fingers. My eyes went where her fingers did.

Then something happened in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, something all but unimaginable. An electronic stamp suddenly flashed on. It hung there for a second, maybe two, and then switched off again. The stamp read kwpd.

I blinked. I forgot to breathe. I thought, But wait—if Lefty owned the cops . . . ?

The tape was running. Lydia had grabbed the wine bottle, was bringing it up between her legs.

I was thinking, and if Veale owned the cops... ?

That was as far as I got. Because that was when the heavy door of my silent room slammed open, came crashing in as though the hot and urgent breath of the entire outside world had been aimed at it. Barreling behind the crash were Officer Cruz and Officer Corallo. Their guns were drawn and they held them the way real shooters do, with a hand braced on the wrist.

Time froze as thoughts trampled one another. Affront kicked in even quicker than terror—how dare these bastards violate my haven? I glanced at my pistol on the little table, useless, unready, as I always knew it would be. I saw Maggie out of the corner of my eye, pasted back into her chair; sinews stood out in her neck.

Cruz bulled into the middle of the room. Corallo held his ground and blocked the doorway. Cruz's crazy hairline crawled as he gestured toward the filthy video. "So," he said, "the amateur gets lucky."

I didn't feel that lucky. I said nothing. The tape ran. Lydia Ortega had gotten down onto her knees. The electronic stamp flashed once again. This seemed to embarrass Cruz—not too bright, after all, to use the department video-cam—and so he shot the television. Vaporized colors seemed to waft from the obliterated screen, a wisp of pink, a fog of sickly yellow. The sound of the gun went on and on; first the explosion, and then a shattering, and then an echoing whine.