“Oh that’s right,” he says. “Teddy and Sue. Have you swung with them before, Cleopatra?”

“No,” Carla says. “Only some cyber. They like to show, you know.”

“Do they ever,” Herb says. “And Sue is such a sub.”

“Really? Every time I cybered with them Teddy was the submissive. Not Sue. Sue was always the dom.”

Paris’s head is spinning with the terms, the Cleavers-in-bondage atmosphere of this kitchen. For a moment, he thinks they’ve been made.

“Is that a fact?” Herb says, staring intently at Carla, his neck craning upward at what looks like a painful angle. Then his resolve breaks. “Sorry. Just testing you a little. We’ve got to be careful, you know.”

“I understand.”

“Sue really is the beastmaster around here. There’s a half-dozen guys scared to death of her.”

“I’ll bet,” Carla says.

“But they like it that way,” Herb adds. “Here, let me take your coat.” He steps behind Carla, purposely in front of Paris. Paris can smell the scotch, the breath freshener. Herb also reeks of moth flakes and Obsession.

When Herb slips Carla’s coat from her shoulders, he gasps slightly, an involuntary heterosexual male reaction that Paris himself has to stifle. Carla is wearing a skintight white dress, cut nearly down to her waist in the back, the hem about halfway up her thigh. Her toned back muscles and narrow waist accentuate her hips, her long, sinewy legs; her skin looks smooth and radiant in the candlelight.

She turns to face the two men, taking her coat from Herb. “I’ll carry it, thanks,” she says.

If Herb has an objection, seeing Carla Davis from the front makes it jailbreak his brain. It is just chilly enough in the kitchen to clearly define the contours of Carla’s breasts, the outline of her nipples through her dress. She wears a dazzling silver cross on a delicate chain. Herb is nearly catatonic with lust. Paris isn’t too far behind him. He’d never seen Carla Davis in anything but business suits or blues.

“Oh my,” Herb says. “You are . . .”

“I am what, honey?” Carla says, flashing a smile, touching Herb’s cheek lightly.

“You are . . . . going to be very popular.”

“You’re a doll,” Carla says. “Now, do you have a little girls’ room where I can freshen up a bit?”

“Of course,” Herb says. “Right this way.”

Paris is left by himself in the kitchen for a minute. The desire to start opening cupboards and drawers and cabinets is almost overwhelming, the need to know what kind of cranberry sauce people who do this sort of thing prefer.

Herb returns, flushed from his interaction with such a new and delicious and by God black and gorgeous amazon female. He motions to Paris to sit at the dining room table, a thoroughly unused walnut French provincial set. Paris sits, knowing that Carla needs a few minutes to activate the small video surveillance camera she’s carrying in her clutch purse.

“So how long have you two been in the lifestyle, John?”

Paris hesitates for a moment before answering. “A year, maybe.”

“First party?”

“No,” Paris says, and leaves it at that, hoping Herb might get the point that he is the strong, silent type. Herb does not.

“Cleopatra is stunningly beautiful.”

“Yes,” Paris says.

“Are you two married?”

“Yes.”

Herb pauses for a moment. “How long?”

“Writing a book, Herb?”

“No . . . I . . .” Herb begins, starting to color. “We just like to know a little about the people we let into our homes, that’s all. Surely you can understand that in this day and age.”

Paris actually does understand. He sure as hell wouldn’t want Herb at his house. “Five years.”

Herb nods, silently absorbing the notion of five years with a woman like Cleopatra. “You are a very lucky man, John. A very lucky man.”

Paris leans forward and smiles at Herb in a man-to-man, swingin’-cat-to-swingin’-cat kind of way. He says, softly: “Luck has nothing to do with it, Herbie. Nothing at all.”

Herb, thoroughly outcocked, laughs, but it is a dry, mirthless sound, a sound born of intense envy and plain macho rivalry.

“Either of you boys wanna escort a lady to a party?” Carla says, inches behind Herb.

Herb nearly knocks his chair over as he stands up. “I know this boy would.”

Paris rises, buttons his blazer. He looks at Carla’s purse. Although he knows it is there, he cannot see the tiny lens of the hidden camera.

Perfect.

“Allow me,” Herb says, once again ignoring Paris, offering his arm to Carla. She takes it, but not before glancing at Paris with a look all police officers recognize.

The look that precedes the door.

Except, this time, the door is deceptively benign. It is a door that Paris had originally thought might lead to a closet or a pantry. A door behind which one might ordinarily find an ironing board, or a broom closet, or any other of a thousand kitchen adjuncts in this waxed and pine-scented version of suburbia.

Instead, Herb opens the door and Paris can see that it leads to a rather undistinguished stairwell. A stairwell leading downward. Paneled walls, soft lighting, a narrow wooden handrail. Paris can hear polite conversation, subdued music.

“Shall we?” Herb says.

Carla looks at Herb and offers a slight angling of her head, a very seductive half-smile. It is another look Paris has seen before, perhaps on the Discovery Channel, or maybe in an old episode of Wild Kingdom: the mien of the young jaguar in that airless instant before its legs uncoil.

Herb takes his arm from Carla’s, clasps his hands together, smiles at his two new recruits, then gestures for them to enter his carnivale—a grinning, false-toothed doorman to another kind of suburbia altogether.

38

Forty-eight thousand three hundred and fifteen dollars is not an easy thing to hide. Not if it is in small bills. And the biggest bill she has is a twenty. Plus, she has at least twelve thousand dollars in singles. Every time you think you have found a perfect place to hide it in your house or apartment—a place you are certain no burglar in the world would think of—you realize that it is the absolute first place any burglar with five functioning brain cells would think of.

So you move it.

Again. And again. And again.

She takes the cash from the plastic trash bag, stuffs it into a WVIZ tote bag, and covers it with a bath towel. She has decided to break down and finally rent a safe-deposit box somewhere with one of her myriad sets of ID. Tonight she will sleep with the bag’s canvas handle wrapped around her wrist; a butcher knife on the nightstand.

She knows she has to end this. And that the best defense is a good offense. And that there are two things she must do if she has any chance of surviving.

One. She has to get the photographs and negatives of her running from the Dream-A-Dream Motel.

Two. She has to find a way to get Isabella back before the police kick her door in.

A pair of seemingly impossible tasks she knows she cannot accomplish alone. A pair of dangerous endeavors that will probably require the mind of a master thief, the hands of a magician. She knows of only one person with that reputation.

She stashes the tote bag back in the hatbox, puts the hatbox in her closet for the time being. She then picks up the phone and dials Jesse Ray Carpenter’s number.

It is time to meet in person.

39

Paris takes in the room. Twenty or so people, mostly white, a mix of men and women in their forties and fifties. They descend the steps into the recreation room. Herb elbows them to the center of the room, introducing them to the other guests. Peg and Chazz. Lisette and Wolfie. Barb and Tug a lesbian couple.

You are a very beautiful young man, Fayette Martin had said to her killer. No one here, as yet, seems to fit that bill. Nor does anyone resemble the sketch of the woman from Vernelle’s.