Excalibur Rising (3 page)

        “Bring it,” he said. “I don’t know nothing about this woman but most people are impressed by your connections.”
        Ryan backed away across the acres of carpet but before he reached the door Mandretti raised a hand to stop him.
        “The police want to talk to you,” he said, “seeing as how you’re the only witness.”
        “Not really,” said Ryan, “the waiter saw everything.”
        “Yeah, well,” said Mandretti, “he ain’t gonna tell us nothing.  He’s long gone.”
        “I suppose so,” said Ryan.  “I wonder if the eye patch was real.  Well obviously it was real, but I mean, I wonder if he really had a fake eye or___”
        Mandretti raised a hand to silence him.  Ryan knew he was babbling but somehow he was unable to stop himself. Events were moving too fast.  He was a historian accustomed to sifting through the slow accumulation of centuries.
        “Peacock told him the eye patch was a bad idea,” Ryan said, “you know depth perception and___”
        Mandretti raised his hand again.  Ryan lapsed into silence, and in the silence he replayed the sound of Peacock’s last shuddering breaths.
        “Talk to the police,” Mandretti said, “and then call the next of kin.”
        “Me?” said Ryan. “Why me?”
        “You knew him,” said Mandretti, “and it’s kinder than getting a call from some “don’t care” Las Vegas cop telling you your dearly beloved has departed. You know how it is.”
        No, I don’t know, Ryan thought, but I’m sure the Mandretti clan is used to getting those kind of calls.
        Taras Peacock’s next of kin as listed in his passport was Crispin Peacock with a London telephone number. Not surprisingly, he was not available to answer the telephone at 2:00 in the morning London time.  Ryan recorded a message delivering the bad news along with his own phone number and the phone number of the Las Vegas police.  At the prompting of the detective working the case, he added that an autopsy would be necessary before the remains could be returned to England for burial. 
        He knew that his message sounded cold and impersonal and he wondered what kind of relationship Taras had with Crispin.  Was Crispin a brother or a cousin? Could he be a son that Taras had never mentioned?  There was no way of knowing.  Would someone weep, Ryan wondered.  Would someone care?
        He returned to the hotel, packed a bag and included his old network blazer. When the bag was packed, and the last of the Jack Daniels was gone, he made a call to his ex-wife Veronica, on Marathon Key.
        “Hi.”
        “Marcus?”
        “Yeah.”
        “What do you want?”
        The passion, Ryan reflected, had truly gone out of their relationship.
        “I’ll be in Key West tomorrow,” he said. “I’d like to see the girls.”
        “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said.
        “I haven’t seen them in months,” he protested.
        “More like years,” she countered.
         Years, he thought, had it really been years? 
         “They’re settled Marcus,” said Veronica.  “They’re used to Erik now.  They don’t need to see you.  You’ll just confuse them.”
        He wondered how he had ever loved this woman, or how he had ever imagined that he could spend the rest of his life with her in that pretty little house in the Keys.  But then he thought about his daughters, surely he was entitled to see his own daughters.
        “Just for an hour,” he said.
        “All right,” she said grudgingly, “but don’t even suggest taking them out to eat.  They’re both on a new diet.”
        “I eat healthy,” he lied. “I even stopped eating meat.”
        “We’re only eating vegetables,” his ex-wife informed him.
        “For heaven’s sake,” he snapped. “You’ll starve them to death.”
        “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped back. “They’re teenaged girls, they’re very body conscious.  Do you want to see them or not?”
        “Of course I do.”
        “One hour,” she said. “At the house.”
        “Okay.” He felt like a whipped puppy and decided that he might as well whine a little.
        “Taras Peacock died,” he said.
        “Oh no.  Oh, I’m sorry.” Suddenly she was Veronica again; the woman he had loved and who had lived with him and loved with him all the way through four different colleges and two changes of major.
        “How did it happen?”
        He told her. 
        She was silent for a moment and then she said. “How do you know they meant to poison Peacock?  How do you know it wasn’t meant for you?”
        With that comforting thought in the back of his mind, Ryan walked out into the cool of the desert night and climbed into the back of Michael Mandretti’s stretch limo for the ride to the airport.
        Mandretti’s personal Gulfstream taxied out onto the runway and rose smoothly into the star studded desert sky. Hours later it dropped out of the clouds and began a long descent following the necklace of tiny islands leading from the mainland to Key West.  Michael Mandretti had slept for the entire flight, and only awoke when the cabin attendant came back to tell him to fasten his seat belt for landing.  Ryan had flown in the Mandretti corporate jet before and had previously succeeded in sleeping in its comfortable seats but sleep eluded him now.  Whenever he closed his eyes he saw the red wine spilling across the white carpet.  The image seemed to have burned itself into the inside of his eyelids. He was happy to replace it with a view of the white sand beaches and turquoise seas of his home state.
        “Did you call ahead like I asked?” Mandretti asked the attendant.
        She nodded her elegant blond head. “Yes, Mr. Mandretti.”
        “And she’s expecting us?”
        “I think so,” said the attendant, “but she sounded a little confused.  I reminded her again that she had provided services to your brother, and that you called her last night.  She asked me why you had to come so early in the morning.   She said she needed more time to prepare.”
       “She’s had all night to prepare,” said Mandretti, “either she knows where the sword is, or she don’t know.”
      “Perhaps she has to get a chicken,” said Ryan.
     “Chicken?” said Mandretti. “We don’t want no chicken dinner.”
     “For the voodoo,” said Ryan.
     Mandretti shot him a dark, angry, glance.
     “This is serious business,” he said. “Don’t you be making fun of her.  If my brother says she’s okay, then she’s okay.”
     “Of course,” said Ryan, hating himself for the fact that he had become no more than Mandretti’s hired lackey.
        Mandretti smoothed his short hair and ran his hand across his stubbly chin. “They got a shower in the terminal?” he asked.
        The blond nodded her head again. “For the pilots,” she said.
        “Good.”
        Mandretti looked at Ryan.  Ryan smoothed his hair.
        “You look like a bum,” Mandretti said.
        “I had a rough night, “he explained.
        “We gonna shower,” Mandretti said, “and you can put on that jacket I told you to bring, and we’re gonna make a good impression on this dame.”
        The plane made a smooth landing and taxied towards the private aviation hangar.
      “So you’ve never met her?”  Ryan asked.
      “If my brother says she’s good, she’s good,” Mandretti replied.
     “I just wondered what her name was,” Ryan said mildly. “I’m from the Keys myself, so I thought I might have heard of her.”
     “Violet Chambray,” said Mandretti.
      Ryan shuffled through his memories of Key West. “No,” he said, “I’ve never heard of her.  Of course that might not be her real name.  It sounds like a made-up name.”
     “Leave it alone,” said Mandretti. “She might not be no Harvard professor, TV star, but we’re gonna give this a try.  If she can find Excaliver I don’t care what her name is.”
         He unfastened his seat belt and pulled himself to his feet. He looked at Ryan with a cold, calculating expression. “We gonna keep her waiting a few more minutes,” he said, “but we ain’t gonna let her know that. We’re gonna keep her guessing; let her know whose running the show.”
        Ryan and Mandretti made their way into the terminal.  They showered briefly, and Mandretti emerged looking immaculate in an off-white seersucker suit and a pastel tie. Ryan wore grey slacks and his old network blazer as instructed.  A taxi idled outside the terminal, waiting to take them downtown.
        Ryan rode through the familiar streets of the old town and noted how the gentle breeze from the south-east lifted the leaves of the palm trees and ruffled the waters of the harbor.  A cruise ship hovered on the horizon waiting for the tide to turn so it could come into port and discharge its cargo of shop happy tourists.  On Duval Street the vendors and shopkeepers were coming sleepily to life, and a garbage truck clattered along removing the evidence of the previous night’s revels.  He breathed deeply.  He was home.
         Three blocks from Duval Street, within sight of the Havana Dock, the cab came to a halt in front of a turn of the century house.  The building was one of the few remaining jewels of Conch architecture and Ryan knew it must have cost a fortune.  Although the house was virtually hidden from the street by a mass of tropical foliage, he caught glimpses of three screened porches, one facing the Gulf, one facing the Atlantic, and the other one overlooking the town, all painted in bright Bahamian blue.
     Mandretti paid off the driver and they entered along a narrow path through a jungle of bougainvillea and hibiscus. Three shallow steps led them to a front door flanked by Tiffany glass windows. Ryan automatically assessed the condition of the windows; obviously genuine, but in need of cleaning and restoration.  The whole house spoke to him of neglect, an architectural jewel rotting in the Florida sun.
         “Nice change from Vegas,” Mandretti said, ringing the doorbell and looking around at the gardens, “but too damned hot.”
          The sun had burned through the clouds and the air was beginning to steam.  They were heading into an average Florida day.
      “It’ll be cool inside,” Ryan said. “These old houses were designed to catch the trade winds.”
     “No air conditioning?” Mandretti asked.
     “I doubt it,” Ryan said. “Real Conchs don’t need air conditioning.”
     A dark haired young maid in a black and white uniform opened the door. 
     “We’re here to see Miss Chambray,” Mandretti said, shouldering his way forward. 
     The maid held her place in the doorway “She is not here,” she said in halting English.
     “Yes, she is,” said Mandretti.
     “No,” said the maid. “She is not in the house.  She will see you in the garden.  You come, I will show you.”
      Ryan looked longingly into the cool interior of the house.  He could see a black and white tile floor, a ceiling fan, and a series of louvered doors leading off the central hallway. Why, he wondered, would Violet Chambray be in the garden, when she could be in the breezy interior of her house?
     “You come,” said the maid, stepping off the porch and leading them along a graveled walkway between massive stands of fountain grass and bamboo.
     They emerged onto a tiny space of recently mowed lawn; Ryan breathed in the aroma of freshly cut grass.  A screened gazebo, trimmed in gleaming white lattice work stood in the center of the lawn.  The maid indicated that they should go into the gazebo and seat themselves on the white wicker patio furniture.
     “She will join you shortly,” the maid said, placing the emphasis on “she” as though it was a royal title.  She bent her knees in what could have been a curtsey and departed.
     Mandretti dropped down into one of the chairs. His face was red beneath the Vegas tan, and sweat stains were appearing on his seersucker suit.  “How can anyone live here?” he asked.
     “You get used to it,” Ryan said.
     “Yeah, well, give me the desert any day,” said Mandretti.
     And that’s what she’s counting on, Ryan thought.  Violet Chambray, whoever she was, had managed to turn the tables on Mandretti.  He had kept her waiting, and now she was keeping him waiting, and doing so in the heat and humidity of a Florida garden.  Obviously she was a force to be reckoned with.    
     “So, how did your brother know about her?” Ryan asked. “She doesn’t exactly have a sign on the door?”
     “He asked around,” said Mandretti.  “It was a personal thing. He’d been out on the town, taken off his wedding ring, you know how it is….”
     “Sure,” said Ryan, imagining Mandretti’s brother enjoying some extra-curricular activity in the night clubs on Duval Street, his wedding ring tucked into his pocket.
     “So she found it,” Mandretti said. “Saved his marriage.  Sit down, Doc, you gotta learn to relax.”
     Ryan looked towards the house, and saw that someone was approaching.  He allowed his hand to rest on the lattice for a moment and then snatched it away.
     “Wet paint,” he said.
     “What?” said Mandretti.
     “So sorry about that,” said a husky voice behind Ryan’s right shoulder.
     He turned his head and found himself looking at a slightly built, handsome man in his late twenties or early thirties.   He was dressed in pressed white pants, a crisp blue blazer, a white shirt, and a striped Ascot. The man inclined his head in a gracious half bow.  “I’m Todd,” he said. “I choose not to use my last name.  Miss Chambray will join you in a moment.  Please be careful of the paint.”
     Todd retreated towards the house, and then stopped by the French windows, his hand placed on his hip. 
     “She is coming now,” he said with a sweeping gesture towards the house. 
     Ryan felt as though they were playing a scene from a Noel Coward play. In fact everything he had seen so far had an air of theatricality; the stereotypical Hispanic maid, the strange posturing of Todd-who-chose-not-to-use-his-last-name, the wet paint on the gazebo, even the tiny expanse of newly mown lawn.  And why, he wondered, were they being kept in the heat of the gazebo rather than the cool of the house?
      The doors opened and Violet Chambray emerged.  Ryan studied her as she crossed the lawn to greet them. He didn’t know what he had expected, but certainly he had not expected this.  For years he had been dividing his time between television stations and high visibility treasure locations.  In both these areas, the women were lean and tanned and quite muscular, and they were nothing like the woman who was now approaching. 
     Violet Chambray’s skin was so pale as to be almost white, and she was very far from being lean and muscular.  The blue suit she wore was obviously expensive and designed to flatter a figure that was not now, and probably never had been, svelte.  Her wrists and ankles were small and slender, the wrists accented by a series of gold bracelets, the ankles flattered by very high heeled blue pumps.  Her knees and elbows, both displayed by the cut of the suit, were round and dimpled.  Her breasts appeared to be more than ample and her hips were definitely what could be described as generous.  When she smiled dimples appeared on her cheeks. She was younger than he had expected, maybe no more than thirty, or thirty five. He had been mentally prepared to debunk and dismiss a withered crone, or  a voodoo priestess with a crown of dusty dreadlocks but he was not ready to face the vibrant young woman whose curvaceous figure and peaches and cream complexion were causing him to rethink his long-held attraction to sun-bronzed athletic woman.