Last to Know: A Novel(46)
Mal might have left her job in a huff but her office still functioned, as did her assistant, Lulu, who was always at the end of a phone and always on the job.
Lulu answered immediately. “I knew you’d be calling,” she said. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”
“Not without a man to wrap myself around, I can’t,” Mal agreed, then proceeded to give Lulu a quick breakdown of her and Harry’s current situation, or lack of it.
“I mean, what’s wrong with me, Lulu?” She glanced critically at her reflection in a shop window: black pencil skirt, high suede boots, winter-white jacket, and a new blue cashmere scarf tied exactly the way the French tied theirs; there was definitely an art to French scarf-tying. Her earrings were small gold hoops, the dark glasses hiding her swollen eyes were Dior, her perfume Hermès. “I mean, I’m the kind of girl a guy can take anywhere.”
“Yeah,” Lulu said, practical as ever. “Except this man doesn’t want to. Not right now anyway. So, what else is up?”
“I want you to check on someone. Name of Lacey Havnel. Also her twenty-one-year-old daughter, name of Beatrice. They were involved in a fire at Evening Lake.”
“Harry’s Evening Lake?” Lulu asked, surprised.
“The very same. He saw their house burn down with the mother in it, rescued the beautiful blond young daughter from the waves, and has not been seen by me since. I’m just curious about the girl, Lulu, you know how it is.”
“I do,” Lulu agreed. Men were men and women were women and jealousy usually reared its head at some point in that game.
“Anyway,” Mal said briskly, “supposedly they’re from Florida, Miami area … leads one to wonder how they could afford a big house that just burned down. One might question the insurance on it, for instance, and exactly where they got the money to buy it in the first place.”
“Mafia?” Lulu asked.
“Drugs?” Mal answered, thinking either might be true. “Oh, and if, just by chance, Harry calls and asks, tell him nothing.”
“Will do,” Lulu said, ready to get to work.
Satisfied, Mal rang off. She would go and sit in the movies, watch a French film in un-understandable French, just to torture herself in her aloneness; after that she would drown her sorrows in some more champagne. Or maybe she would just drive out into that lovely countryside where they didn’t issue so many parking tickets, and no dogs lifted their legs on your tires, and the coffee was just as good anyway. Actually, she was getting to like France.
It wasn’t until much later that she heard from Lulu of the murder of Jemima Forester, and Wally Osborne’s arrest.
35
For once, Harry was at home, in his apartment in the converted brownstone with its stainless-steel-equipped chef’s kitchen, barely used now except for the micro because he never had the time; the bathroom with its oversized shower with five jets and plain white subway tiles; the living room with its dark wood floors and the ebony baby grand in the bow window and the faded antique silk rug that Squeeze, as a puppy, had chewed at the corners; the plain leather chesterfield and the red leather wing chair, set next to the original marble fireplace, where a damp log currently burned in a desultory fashion, and where a bottle of Jim Beam stood on the chrome side table next to that red leather chair, next to Harry’s hand, so he might replenish his glass without the effort of getting up and going to the bar counter to fetch it. Because tonight Harry was drinking.
It was not the first time Harry had seen a murdered woman. But it was the first time it was a woman he knew. Gutsy, feisty, daredevil Jemima Puddleduck was no more, and Harry was remembering her wild red hair, her ruby-red mouth, her joy of life. His heart was not broken; it was a lump inside his chest, a meaningless organ because the life he was leading was meaningless.
He had been thinking of quitting the force, thinking of coming to terms with a new life, considering seriously settling down with Mal, the love of his life. But not for this reason. Not because he could stomach it no longer.
Without even glancing at the bottle on the table, he reached out blindly and refilled his glass. A couple of ice cubes would have been good but he couldn’t make the effort to get up and get them. Tonight, booze was meant to numb him, take away his feelings, remove his despair in the knowledge that he had probably been the cause of Jemima’s death. If it were not for him, Jemima would not have been involved in the Havnel mystery. She would never have gone to the lake house. Though why she had done so was also a mystery. He remembered Jemima saying she had a bad case of curiosity. “Nosiness” Harry had called it. He recalled that she’d overheard him say to Rossetti he would meet him and they would go to the lake. He had no doubt Jemima had followed. In fact, she had gotten there first, because Harry had to make a detour to the precinct to collect Rossetti. It was Jemima’s small silver Honda he’d noticed parked to one side, and Jemima’s pearls—the ones he remembered gleaming on her slender alabaster neck—that lay scattered, like the trail of crumbs in the woods in that fairy tale, that lay on the ground around her bled-out body.
As he poured another glass the dog nudged urgently at his knee, wanting his attention. Harry patted him absently. His thoughts turned to Mal, to Paris, where she had run after their fallout. What if he had just gotten on that plane? Gone to meet her? Would any of this have happened? Would any of it have happened if he had kept his promise to himself to quit the force, to turn his life around, to give himself and the love of his life the time together they needed if they were to remain together?