Curse of the Jade Lily: A McKenzie Novel Page 22

  Hemsted glanced at Pozderac and then back at me. “That’s a damnable lie,” he said.

  Where have you heard that before? my inner voice asked.

  “Tell it to Fiegen,” I said.

  “Fiegen?”

  “The man you’re working for. I used to think it was the secretary of state. That’s why I let you frighten me before. Now I know better.”

  “Mr. Fiegen is an American citizen wishing to conduct business in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Hemsted said. “I am merely helping to facilitate matters as per my position with the Commercial Service Office of the U.S. Embassy.”

  “And if you can get a little something for yourself under the table, why not, right?”

  From the expression on his face, Hemsted clearly did not like to hear his character impugned. Pozderac, on the other hand, could not have cared less. He slapped the tabletop four or five times and shouted, “Where is Jade Lily?” From the way heads turned and mouths fell open, the hotel’s customers probably thought he was demanding to see a stripper.

  Hemsted leaned his head toward him and tried to say something, but Pozderac put his hand against his face and shoved him away.

  “Where is Jade Lily?” he repeated, only not quite as loudly.

  Hemsted was visibly shaken by Pozderac’s behavior yet refused to give in to his anger. He turned toward me and spoke between clenched teeth.

  “We know that you attempted to retrieve the Lily last Saturday—again without contacting us first,” Hemsted said. “We know about the bomb. We also know that there is no evidence that the Lily was destroyed in the subsequent explosion.”

  “Then where is it?” I asked.

  “You have it,” Pozderac insisted, his voice loud and clear. “You have Jade Lily.”

  “A lot of people seem to think so.”

  Pozderac pounded the table some more. “It is mine,” he said. “Give it to me.”

  “Say please.”

  “Do not fuck with me”—if you know what’s good for you, he might have added but didn’t.

  I paused for a moment before responding.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Was that meant to be threatening? Am I supposed to be chilled to the bone? Tell you what. Try it again, only this time sneer.”

  Pozderac rose quickly to his feet, knocking over his chair. “I am Branko,” he proclaimed.

  Just one name, my inner voice said. Like Elvis, Cher, Madonna, LeBron, Kobe, Fergie, Bono, and Liberace, only not nearly as entertaining.

  “I kill many.” He jabbed his finger at me. “Many. You are nothing. I kill you”

  I sat straight in my chair, not moving for fear the pain might cause me to wince in front of Pozderac, giving him the wrong impression.

  “Are you counting women, children, and old men?” I asked.

  Pozderac’s face reddened. He started to come around the table. Hemsted moved to block him, and Pozderac pushed him away. He couldn’t push Herzog, though. Without a word, the big man stepped between us.

  “Get out of way, nigger,” Pozderac said.

  For a long moment, the world became quiet. The loudest sound was the light shining through the hotel’s windows. To Herzog’s everlasting credit, he did not lose his temper. He merely glared at the man. Pozderac knew he had made a grievous error in judgment, but he was not one to back down. He placed his hand on Herzog’s chest and tried to shove him. Herzog didn’t give an inch.

  “Nigger,” Pozderac hissed.

  He said it again? My inner voice was amazed. What an idiot.

  “Herzy,” I said aloud. His head turned imperceptibly toward me. “I’m not paying you enough to put up with this shit.”

  Herzog closed his hand around Pozderac’s throat and squeezed. Pozderac’s eyes grew wide with terror. He seized Herzog’s wrist with both of his hands, and tried to pull the big man off. It didn’t work. Pozderac began gasping for breath. Herzog took hold of Pozderac’s shoulder and, with his hand still clasped over his throat, lifted him several feet in the air and then threw him more or less toward the elevators. Pozderac spent a lot of time in the air before crashing and rolling across the floor, colliding with a table and chair, knocking both over. About half of the people in the bar looked amazed. The rest looked away, not wanting to get involved.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hemsted said. He rushed to Pozderac’s side and cradled him in his arms like a fallen comrade. “McKenzie, what have you done?”

  “What have I done?” I stood up and looked at Herzog, who wore an almost beatific smile on his face. “What have I done?”

  “He’s a foreign dignitary assaulted on American soil,” Hemsted said.

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “You should call the police. Better yet, call the FBI. We’ll be happy to wait.”

  From the way his expression suddenly changed, I didn’t think Herzog liked that idea at all. As it turned out, Pozderac and Hemsted didn’t care for it, either.

  “Get out of here, McKenzie,” Hemsted said. “Just go away.”

  “Fuck you,” Pozderac added for dramatic effect.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” Pozderac repeated.

  Herzog and I moved slowly through the bar and across the lobby while people turned their heads to watch, some blatantly, others furtively. By our leisurely pace, we weren’t trying to prove how unconcerned we were. My sprained ankle simply wouldn’t let me walk any faster.

  Before we reached the door, I rotated my immobilized shoulder so I could glance behind me. Hemsted was helping Pozderac toward the elevator while the Bosnian shouted at him. I could not hear what he said.

  “We’re having some fun now, aren’t we?” I said.

  Herzog moved in front of me and opened the hotel’s heavy door. He held it open until I passed through.

  “You like Ella, huh?” he said.

  * * *

  Jenny once invited me to a party that she and her husband threw at their palatial estate on Lake Minnetonka not long after they were married. When we met at the door, she warned me about her new friends, warned me before I had even been introduced to them.

  “These are people,” she said, “who never go to ball games unless they have a luxury suite and who have never, ever been to the Minnesota State Fair. They don’t want to be bothered by the riffraff.”

  “Then why am I here?” I asked.

  “So I have someone to talk to,” she said.

  It was the only time I had been to Jenny’s home. Not long after that, she began trading her middle-class pals from Merriam Park for the company of her husband’s friends. My impression was that she wasn’t happy with the exchange. Still, I had lost track of her until she called a couple of years back and asked that I retrieve the jewels from her blackmailing lover. When I returned them she kissed me and hugged me and said I was the best friend she ever had, yet we didn’t speak again until I called her that morning. I asked for a meeting. She seemed reluctant if not downright frightened, yet she agreed. After all, she owed me one.

  Lake Minnetonka was actually a collection of sixteen interconnected lakes and heaven knows how many bays and inlets. It was Jenny who suggested we meet at a yacht club named after one of the bays, “where we would be alone,” she said. My guess was that her previous dalliances with infidelity had taught her to be discreet, whether she was cheating or not.

  Like most of the properties on and around Lake Minnetonka, the club was designed to be out-of-the-way. To reach it, Herzog had to navigate a series of private roads that were more or less unmarked. Its carefully landscaped grounds and antebellum-style clubhouse reminded me of an exclusive country club, and so did its members-only restaurant and bar. It seated just 105, yet it seemed much larger because of the huge windows that offered a panoramic view of the snow-covered marina with its 117 deepwater slips and the bay beyond. There were no boats in the slips, yet there were plenty of snowmobile tracks, and I could envision Chip and Buffy crossing the frozen lake on their machines—the snowmobile suits th
ey wore, of course, would have designer labels. Still, I wondered if the club did much business in January. A three-season porch that jutted out over the bay was closed, and a sign locked in a glass frame just inside the door announced that complete breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus would resume when the ice left the lake, although a limited lunch menu and dinner menu were available during the winter months.

  There were only three people in the restaurant when I arrived. A middle-aged man and woman, who were holding hands and leaning in so close that their foreheads nearly touched, sat at a table in the corner, and my first thought was that they didn’t need a bar, they needed a motel. The third person was Jenny. She was sitting alone and staring out the window at the deserted marina, a glass of gold-colored wine in front of her. Herzog and I would have made five, but he elected to remain in the Cherokee.

  “You tryin’ t’ do this on the down low,” he said.

  “So?”

  “A black man in a place like this gonna draw attention.”

  “Do you think a black man sitting alone in a car outside a place like this will go unnoticed?”

  Herzog waved at the nearly empty parking lot.

  “Take my chances,” he said.

  Jenny seemed anxious as I approached, her eyes darting right and left as if she were afraid someone might recognize us. She was tall, with the body of a gym rat, but definitely not young. Her hair was too shiny to be her natural color; over the years her thin face had lost the youthful prettiness that had originally attracted her rich husband, yet it somehow managed to retain its beauty. She was wearing an impeccably tailored blue dress with blue shoes that matched her dress and a blue bag hanging by a blue strap over the back of her chair that matched the blue shoes. I guessed that she bought all three in the same place at the same time off the same mannequin. When I reached the table, I said her name and leaned in to kiss her cheek, grunting at the effort. Her nervousness left her then, replaced by genuine concern.

  “McKenzie, are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I settled into the chair opposite her, slipping my coat off and sitting as straight as possible. “How is it that after all these years you still look like the girl in the yellow bikini?”

  Jenny laughed at the reference, laughed as if she suddenly didn’t care who saw her. “That was a long time ago,” she said.

  “I remember it like yesterday. You came home from college that summer, stretched out on a lounge chair, and never seemed to leave it.”

  “Yes, and I remember you and Bobby Dunston were forever cutting through our backyard.”

  “We were hanging out with your brother, Paul.”

  “You hated Paulie.”

  “Not that summer we didn’t.”

  “What little perverts you were.”

  “We were in junior high and you were the most beautiful woman we had ever seen.”

  “Long time ago.”

  “Not so long,” I told her.

  A waiter materialized out of nowhere. Jenny asked for another glass of German Riesling. I ordered a Seven and Seven. After we were served, Jenny said, “What happened to your shoulder? You didn’t get shot, did you?”

  I didn’t want to go into a long explanation, so I said, “Nothing as dramatic as all that. I broke a collarbone playing hockey.”

  “Oh, McKenzie, you’re too old to be playing hockey.”

  “Gordie Howe was fifty-two when he retired, and I’m nowhere near his age.”

  “You’re not Gordie Howe, either.”

  She had me there.

  “Were you playing without a helmet?” she asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why do you have a bruise on your forehead? Why is your cheek scratched and your hand bandaged?”

  “I’m accident-prone.”

  Jenny drank half of her wine in one gulp before setting the glass in front of her. She held the stem with fingers from both hands, but when her hands began to tremble, she released it and slid them under the table. All of a sudden, she was afraid again.

  “What’s wrong, Jenny?” I asked.

  Her eyes left the glass, met mine, and looked away. “You’re lying to me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s a very long story and I don’t want to go into it.”

  “Are you sure that’s the reason?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Jen?”

  “Why did you call me? Are you worried? You have to know I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Tell anybody what?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know anything. McKenzie, please.”

  “Jenny Hackert,” I said.

  “It’s Thomas now, and has been for almost twenty years.”

  “You’ll always be the girl in the yellow bikini to me, Jen. Tell me what’s wrong?”

  Jenny’s hands came out from under the table and took hold of the wineglass again. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Why do you think I’m here? What’s made you so nervous?”

  “Don’t be like that, McKenzie. You know what’s making me nervous.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “What happened to Patrick Tarpley—I don’t know anything about it. Anyone asks, that’s what I’ll say. You have to know that.”

  “Tarpley? Sweetie, what makes you think I’m interested in Tarpley?”

  Jenny gave me a puzzled look that wandered around the room before coming back to me. “Wait, wait a minute.” She covered her face with both hands. When she uncovered them, she had a thoughtful expression on her face. “Let me think.” She turned in her chair to look out the window. While she did that, the waiter reappeared. I ordered another round. He delivered it, and I sucked on the Seven and Seven until Jenny decided to start speaking again. She was excited. I knew because of the way she spoke in short, quick bursts as if she were conserving her breath.

  “Patrick Tarpley,” she said. “You didn’t—you didn’t kill him. Did you?”

  “No. Of course not. What would make you even think such a thing?”

  “Oh God, McKenzie. Oh God. I am so relieved. I thought…” She started to chuckle. “I thought you came here—I’m not sure what I thought.”

  “Jennifer, please, tell me what’s going on.”

  “You’re serious now. You’re using my full name, so I know. McKenzie, why did you come here? Why did you want to meet me?”

  “I needed to ask you a question, although I think I might have part of the answer already.”

  “What question?”

  “I’m sure you remember a couple of years ago I did you a favor.”

  “I remember.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone about that? About what happened?”

  “No. Well, yes. I mean … I’m not stupid, McKenzie. If my husband ever found out…”

  “But you told someone.”

  “I did,” she said. “You know that. At least I thought you did. Are you saying she never called you? She never got in touch?”

  “Who?”

  “Von Tarpley.”

  “Patrick Tarpley’s wife? How do you know her?”

  “We met through the City of Lakes Art Museum. We’re members of the board of trustees, my husband and I.”

  “When did you meet?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Just before the museum opened.”

  “You gave her my name?”

  “A few weeks ago. She was in trouble,” Jenny added. “She needed help. I told her—if it’s broken, you can fix it. I said, ‘McKenzie can fix anything.’”

  “Fix what exactly?”

  “That’s where it gets a little complicated. You see, I saw Von kissing a man who was not her husband a month or so ago. It was at one of those exhibit openings at the museum. It was an accident. I walked in on her, saw what I saw, turned around, and walked away. Either she or her lover must have seen me, because twenty minutes later Von sidled up to me in the buffet line and s
aid, ‘Please.’ No explanations, no excuses, no anything, just ‘Please.’ I never said anything to anyone, McKenzie. I never had any intention of doing so. I’m not a gossip. That’s not because I’m virtuous. It’s just that I’ve never been very curious about other people’s lives. I have enough problems of my own to keep myself occupied. Anyway, because I never tattled on her, I guess Von decided she could confide in me. A couple of weeks ago she told me she was sure her husband was cheating on her with someone at the museum.”

  “Her husband was cheating on her?”

  “That’s the complicated part. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about the kiss. You’re thinking she was the one stepping out. I’m not going to defend it, McKenzie, but a kiss doesn’t mean she was cheating. Some guy flirted with her and she let him. That doesn’t mean she stepped over the line. So many men pursued me after I was married, my husband’s business associates, employees, competitors. I never could figure that out. It was like they had to possess something that my husband had. But I never crossed the line until the one time I did cross the line, and then I made sure he wasn’t connected to my husband in any way. At least I managed that small bit of propriety. I felt sorry for Von. That’s what it came down to. She was in a May-December relationship like I was. Her husband moved her to the Cities from Phoenix, so her only friends were his friends, which is pretty much what happened with me. I saw her heading down the same path I had taken, so when she asked if I knew someone who could help, I gave her the name of the only man I trusted completely.”

  That explains a lot, my inner voice said.

  “Did Von tell you what she wanted done?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. My impression was that she wanted someone who could get the facts about her husband quietly. At the same time she said the man needed to be capable in case something went wrong. Her husband was a dangerous man, after all. He carried a gun. He knew security. He understood how the police worked. So I told her about you. Told her what you had done for me. Did I screw up, McKenzie? Is that why you’re hurt?”

  “Indirectly.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Tell me, have you spoken to Von lately?”

  “No. I—I guess you could say I’ve been avoiding her.”