The Council of Ten (2 page)

Doris’s husband Sam had dropped dead of a heart attack at the tender age of fifty-two. It happened on the sixteenth hole of the members’ course at the Westchester, New York, Country Club ten minutes after he complained of gas and two minutes after he kicked his ball twenty feet closer to the green. Doris took over his manufacturing business, and in a few short months had it running better than Sam had ever dreamed of, only to have a fire destroy everything but a safe containing the insurance policy he had let lapse.

The fates weren’t finished with Doris yet, though. They sent a drunk driver into her son-in-law’s station wagon on a rain-slicked night two years later. Her son-in-law died instantly, but it was two more days before the doctors could convince her that her daughter’s brain was showing a permanent test pattern and the machines could be shut off.

So, at the age of fifty-four, Doris found herself raising her beloved five-year-old grandson, making the payments from various life insurance policies last until Andy hit college age. Then she tearfully sold the house she loved and headed south for what she hoped would be a simpler life in the sunshine. Even then, however, there were Andy’s college payments to consider, and after that her insistence on supporting him until his career got off the ground. Doris had promised herself all those years ago that her grandson would never want for anything. The money was just about gone when the Business had started, but now even all the money she had made and good she had done could do nothing to ease the guilt.

Still, Doris figured that when you came right down to it, it was Andy who gave her an edge on her three friends. They, too, had grandchildren and families of varying sizes scattered across the country. But besides an occasional holiday card, sometimes a call, they were estranged and isolated; forgotten in the great South, which for all of them had once been little more than a mall-filled graveyard they hadn’t known enough to lie down in. They had forsaken the repressed fear of South Beach for various locales throughout the Palm Beaches. The Business required that they spend summers as well as winters in the South, a condition that irked Doris because the summer convention trade spoiled the ambiance of the famed Breakers, where she had taken up permanent residence.

“Doris, are you all right?” Sophie was asking, all ninety shriveled pounds of her.

Doris blinked and realized that the plane had finished its taxi and people were crowding into the aisle. They were home.

“Just daydreaming,” she said. “That’s all.”

Fannie had plowed a path forward and Doris followed her up the aisle, wondering what Sophie’s tarot cards might have said if placed out five years before.

The grandmothers made their way slowly through Palm Beach International Airport. Doris would have opted for a quicker gait, except that Sophie seemed forever in slow motion these days and Fannie’s size eighteen bulk had her winded between water fountains. Doris could tell that the early fall day was hot, and she longed for the quiet cool of her air-conditioned Breakers rooms.

At last they reached the baggage claim area, where the conveyor belt had only just started its rolling display of bags. A number of travelers pushed forward to better their positions. The grandmothers hung back.

Four nondescript men stood apart from the scene, each with a large suitcase by his side. The casual observer would assume that their bags had been the first off the plane. Only the men hadn’t been on the plane and neither had these particular suitcases.

“There’s mine!” Fannie screamed. “Doris, see if you can grab it for me.”

Doris excused herself forward into the mass and grasped the handle of Fannie’s plaid monstrosity of a suitcase. One of hers emerged swiftly after, and she saw Sophie and Sylvie lifting one of theirs together from the conveyor.

The grandmothers set these bags back a bit and waited for the rest.

One of the four men started forward, sliding along a huge plaid suitcase. He feigned deep attention on the conveyor while he shoved his bag up next to Fannie’s. Grabbing the handle of her suitcase instead of his own, he began to back up again.

Another of the four men approached, this one carrying a perfect replica of Doris’s American Tourister.

The grandmothers kept their eyes fixed on the conveyor, searching for the rest of their bags. By the time all were accounted for, the nondescript men had melted into the crowd outside the terminal, each with a large suitcase dangling from his hand.

Doris went for a porter.

Chapter 2

LANTOS HELD THE BRIEFCASE
tighter as he approached the alley. Not that he sensed danger, but one had to be prepared for it nonetheless, especially because of what his briefcase contained. The Miami drop had been his domain for years, and Lantos had been happy with it. Only as of late—say, the last few years—had the city degenerated into the crime capital of the country. Foreigners were to blame if you asked Lantos; spics, Colombians, Cubans, and combinations thereof. Take them out of the picture and Miami might regain its old splendor and glamour.

Lantos had often considered requesting a transfer, but he always came up short of making it because he knew Miami and a new territory, even with all his experience, would be difficult to master. He knew every street, side street, and back road in Miami, and he had never used the same one twice. Never a pattern that might allow someone to turn him into a mark. And if they tried—well, Lantos was ready for that, too.

The problem with holstered or sheathed weapons was drawing them. For a weapon to be effective, you had to have it out at all times. But how? Lantos smiled at the memory of posing that precise question to himself years before. The answer was to rig three razor-sharp, four-inch blades into his briefcase—not at the front or back, but at the
side
, where maneuverability was at a maximum. When pressed, a button on the latch just beneath the handle forced the daggers to spring out. Assailants never knew what hit them. The very object they were after was turned into the instrument of their death. Lantos liked the justice in that. He had used the case often as a weapon, and always with success.

He heard the footsteps to his rear an instant before they were upon him. Lantos felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as he pressed the button. The three daggers, spaced inches apart, leaped out. From there he wasted no time, turning and swinging the now deadly weapon up in the same motion, the object being to take the assailant utterly by surprise.

But the assailant was already gone, a blur whirling by with something shiny in his band, a shape more than a person. Lantos swung his deadly briefcase in a wide arc. It swished through the air, again finding nothing as a big arm grasped him from behind and yanked backward. The knife bit into his back and made a neat slice straight into his heart. Lantos was dead instantly, even his grip on the cherished briefcase relinquished in the end.

The shape stooped to retrieve it and walked away into the night.

Doris Kaplan felt that Wednesday was going to be a bad day even before the phone call came. She had retired early Tuesday night, but by three
A.M
. had given up fighting to sleep and switched on the cable news channel. She watched it mindlessly until the sky showed its first brightness beyond the blinds, finally drifting off into an uneasy slumber with the words of the anchorman forming her dreams.

Awakening alone, in the darkness of her bedroom, was far more frightening than not being able to sleep at all, and it had been Sophie, of all people, who had advised her in this regard:
Always sleep with a glass of water on your night table
. Drinking water, Sophie said, was the best way to settle yourself down once coming awake in the black loneliness. Doris had found that the water worked exactly as Sophie had promised. She stored her red life pills next to the glass on the distant chance that they might be needed some night as well.

The phone’s chiming shook her awake, stiff and cold in her chair, just after nine. Joints rebelling, she stumbled to the phone at her bedside.

“Hello?”

“Doris.” The voice was soft between what sounded like sobs.

“Who—Sylvia, is that you? What’s wrong?”

“She’s dead, Doris,” Sylvia moaned. “Sophie’s dead… .”

The police were already there when Doris arrived at Sophie’s home on Embassy Drive in West Palm. Sylvia, seated in the living room, was being comforted by a police officer. Didn’t she remember that Sophie never used the living room? When company came over, they sat in the kitchen or den, never here. Otherwise there’d just be another room for Sophie to clean.

“Oh, Doris!” Sylvia shrieked and Doris hugged her, smelling the too sweet perfume she had loaded on even at this early hour. She and Sophie went for a walk every morning at nine sharp. It must have been then that she …

“Mrs. Kaplan?”

Doris turned to her left and saw an overweight man wearing a sports jacket with a badge pinned to his lapel.

“I’m Sergeant Nickerson, Mrs. Kaplan. Mrs. Mehlman informed us you’d be coming.”

Doris eased Sylvia away from her. When Sylvia tried to cling, Doris grasped her shoulders firmly. “I’ll be right back.” She moved to Sergeant Nickerson, not caring about the makeup she had neglected to put on, and sighed. “How did it happen?”

“The doctors are with her now,” Nickerson reported. “We think it was a heart attack. We’re almost certain. Did she have a history of heart trouble?”

“Can you name me a seventy-six-year-old woman who doesn’t? I’m sorry, Sergeant. Yes, she had a slight history. Nothing to speak of, though.”

“It happened in her sleep, Mrs. Kaplan. She went quickly.”

“Where is she?”

“Well, Mrs.—”

“I want to see her.”

Sergeant Nickerson had started to object, but he silenced himself and nodded. “In the bedroom. Just as we found her.”

There were no ropes or uniformed police anywhere on the stairs or on the way into Sophie’s bedroom. This was not a crime scene, after all. It was a simple investigation of a natural death. Doris reached the doorway of Sophie’s overly large bedroom and gazed in. The drapes were still drawn. Two men were hovering over the raised shape of her friend, who such a short time ago had claimed that the tarot cards predicted something terrible was going to happen. One man was taking notes while the other seemed to be performing some sort of perfunctory examination. Doris entered without announcing herself and moved to the foot of the bed where she could view her friend clearly.

The sight made her grasp her own heart fearfully and realize that her life pills were back in her room next to her water glass. There was never anything pretty about death. Sophie’s eyes and mouth hung open in a twisted mask of frozen agony, her last instant of pain captured forever. Her eyes looked more sunken than Doris had ever seen them before. She had died lying on her back, most of her body under the covers. Doris caught the soft whirl of the air conditioner humming and smelled the sweet lavender that Sophie oversprayed throughout the room.

“Was it a heart attack?” Doris asked.

The men at Sophie’s bedside seemed to notice her for the first time.

“Yes,” one of them said flatly, retrieving his medical bag from her night table.

“Aren’t you going to close her eyes?”

“I’m sorry?” said the other.

“Her eyes. Aren’t you going to close them?”

The two doctors looked at each other and shrugged. One of them leaned over and shut Sophie’s eyelids.

Doris was embarrassed with herself for meddling, for insisting that her friend not be left there with her eyes open. As if it mattered. It just seemed wrong. Everything seemed wrong, but it wasn’t until a few minutes after a pair of ambulance drivers covered Sophie atop a dolly and wheeled her from the house that Doris realized what was most wrong of all.

There had been no glass of water on Sophie’s night table.

Doris spent most of the drive to Fannie’s house in North Palm Beach in a daze. She was a slow driver to begin with, at her age unable to fathom having to replace her ancient Mercedes due to accident, and today only the honking of horns behind her kept her speed near thirty.

No glass of water on Sophie’s night table …
.

So what? Doris had never actually seen one there before, now had she? All she was going on were Sophie’s assertions that she never slept without such a glass within reach. Maybe one of the cops had clumsily spilled it and then returned the glass to the bathroom. He wasn’t exactly disturbing evidence since this was hardly a murder investigation.

It had been just three days before on the plane that Sophie had looked into the tarot cards and had seen death. Doris felt awful for having brushed her off without a word, not that it would have changed things.

She had called Sylvia’s doctor before leaving for Fannie’s. She could have also used the phone to break the news to Fannie, but that wasn’t the way friends treated each other, especially friends who had grown to depend on each other for so much.

Fannie lived in North Palm in yet another booming residential district of the famed Palm Beaches. Houses had been constructed virtually on top of each other, and all Fannie’s neighbors were young, uniformly hated by her for their loud parties, pain-in-the-ass kids, and wild dogs who, according to Fannie, “shit up a storm” on her lawn.

By the time Doris swung onto Fannie’s street, she was calmer, almost composed. The signs had been there. Sophie had given up, had seen what was coming and done nothing to avoid it, playing with the tarot cards long enough to hear what she expected them to say. Doris felt herself relax.

The police cars lining Fannie’s street with their lights still flashing changed all that.

“I’m sorry, you can’t go in there, ma’am. Ma’am!” said the uniformed officer blocking the entrance to Fannie’s house.

Doris tried to shoulder past him. “She’s my friend. Get out of my way.”

Beyond the policeman, Doris could see a horde of men in Fannie’s living room snapping pictures, taking notes, and dropping a powdery substance all over her furniture. In the center of it all lay a huge shape on the rug covered by a sheet. Fannie.