Skinny Dip Read online

  They were standing in the kitchen, Chaz with a Budweiser in his hand and Rolvaag sipping a Sprite. The detective had shown up at the front door not five minutes after Chaz had returned from work.

  “I’m really beat,” Chaz said for the third time.

  “Yeah, it was a scorcher out there today.” Rolvaag had seen on the news that an early spring snowstorm had hit the Twin Cities; he sitting in air conditioning in Florida. It was fairly astounding.

  He said, “Marta explained what you do on your job, and it sounds real interesting. I bet you run into plenty of snakes out there.”

  “Well, I run over plenty of ’em with my truck.” Chaz, unable to resist the smartass quip. “Look, I’m not trying to be rude, but, man, I am seriously whipped.”

  “Of course. I understand.” The detective finished off the soda and raised the empty bottle. “Do you recycle?”

  Chaz made a dunking motion toward the trash can. “Let God sort ’em out,” he said.

  Rolvaag placed the bottle on the counter. “There was just one point I needed you to clarify about that night on the Sun Duchess.”

  “You know who you remind me of? That TV cop, Columbo. He never quit with the questions,” Chaz said. “I bet that was your favorite show, am I right?”

  “To be honest, I never watched it.”

  “But I’m sure other people must’ve told you the same thing—that you remind them of Columbo. Not the way you look, but how you never let up. In a nice way, though.”

  Rolvaag said, “What night is the show on? I’d like to see it.”

  Chaz shook his head. What a hopeless dweeb. “It was canceled, like, a hundred years ago. Anyway, what did you want to ask me about?”

  The detective seemed relieved to get back to business. “Just one thing, really. Are you certain about what time Mrs. Perrone left the stateroom?”

  Chaz experienced a disconcerting twitch in his colon. “Three-thirty in the morning, like I told you before. I remember looking at my watch.”

  “And there’s no chance your watch was wrong?” Rolvaag’s tone was unbearably neutral. “The reason I ask, we’ve found some evidence raising the possibility that your wife went into the water a few hours earlier than you told us.”

  The detective was leaning against the countertop, his hands shoved casually in his pockets.

  Chaz said, “That’s impossible.”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

  “What kind of evidence did you find?”

  Rolvaag winced apologetically. “Afraid I can’t discuss it.”

  Locked in his desk at the office was the test confirming that the fingernail tips removed from the marijuana bale belonged to Joey Perrone.

  Chaz said, “This is my wife we’re talking about—and you’re saying you can’t tell me?” He felt his cheeks redden, but that was actually a good thing; he was supposed to look angry. “Did you find her body or not? Goddammit, I’ve got a right to know!”

  Rolvaag said, “No, sir, we didn’t recover a body. That I can tell you for a fact. Or even a body part.”

  “Then what the hell was it?”

  Chaz was racking his brain. Joey hadn’t been carrying her purse, so it had to be a piece of clothing that had washed ashore somewhere at odds with the computer model of where her body should have floated, factoring in that night’s currents and wind.

  “Is this why you wanted a DNA sample?” Chaz demanded.

  “It’s an active investigation. Certain aspects must remain confidential for the time being,” Rolvaag said. “I’m sorry, Chaz.”

  It was the first time the detective had used Charles Perrone’s nickname, and the sudden informality only heightened Chaz’s anxiety. He’d seen enough TV homicide shows to know you were in deep trouble when cops started acting like they were your asshole buddies.

  “I’ve lost my wife and you’re playing head games,” Chaz said, acting hurt and disappointed. “Just come out and say so if you think I’m lying.”

  “I think people make mistakes.”

  “Not this time.”

  “But you’d been hitting the wine pretty hard that night is what you told me. That’s not always good for the memory,” Rolvaag said.

  Chaz twisted the cap off another beer and drank slowly, stalling to let his emotions settle. It occurred to him that the detective had unwittingly provided a way out. The Coast Guard had ended its search for Joey, so what was the point in arguing about when she’d gone overboard? If there was anything left of her, which was unlikely after four days at sea, it wouldn’t really matter how far south she was found. One could always blame a shark or some other deep-water scavenger for carrying her remains out of the search grid.

  Chaz hung his head. “I was pretty hammered, that’s true. Maybe I did get confused about the time Joey left. Or maybe I misread my watch.” For effect he tapped the crystal of his inexpensive Timex, which he wore only on sampling days in the Everglades.

  As usual, Rolvaag’s expression was unreadable.

  “Those are two possibilities,” the detective said. “Something to think about anyway. Thanks for the pop.”

  Chaz laughed. “The what?”

  “The cold drink,” Rolvaag said. “By the way, somebody’s staking out your house—some big hairy guy in a minivan, parked down by the corner. The tag comes back to a rental agency.”

  “Oh?” Chaz thinking: Wait until I tell Red.

  “Any ideas?”

  Chaz poked his head out the doorway and looked down the street. “I’ve got no earthly clue who that man is,” he lied. “How do you know that it’s me he’s watching?”

  “Wild guess.” Rolvaag smiled. “You’ve got my card. Call if you need anything.”

  “Right,” said Chaz. When goats learn ballet.

  He stood at the bay window and watched the prying detective drive away. When the phone began to ring, he almost yanked it out of the living room wall.

  What the hell’s happening? he wondered dismally. Wasn’t I supposed to be home free by now?

  Off the hook.

  Cruising.

  Instead, that goddamn cop is still snooping around, some sadistic perv is sneaking into my house and messing with Joey’s stuff—and now I’ve got to deal with some knuckle-dragger of a bodyguard that Red’s dredged out of a sinkhole somewhere.

  When Chaz answered the phone, the man named Tool was on the other end.

  “That guy that just left?”

  “What about him?” Chaz said.

  “Want me to go after him?”

  “And do what?”

  Tool grunted. “I dunno. Bust his spleen.”

  Chaz sighed. “He’s a cop.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Unbelievable, Chaz thought. “Leave him be, please.”

  “It’s your party,” said Tool. “Hey, I gotta go take a dump. You gone be all right?”

  “I think I can manage.”

  Chaz stripped off his clothes and propped himself under a hot shower for twenty minutes. Try as he might, he still couldn’t see where he’d made a single mistake in the plan, not one wrong move.

  The crime was perfect. It was the rest of the world that was fucking up.

  “I lied,” Joey Perrone said.

  This was after a day of doing largely nothing; swimming, sunning, losing herself in a John D. MacDonald paperback that she’d found in Mick Stranahan’s tackle box.

  “I lied to you,” she said again.

  Stranahan didn’t look up. He was cracking stone crab claws by whomping them with the flat side of a spoon. It was all in the wrist, he’d explained. Fragments of shell were flying around like shrapnel.

  “Lied about what?” he asked.

  “About not touching anything in the house when I went back inside to take a pee. There was a stash of pictures in the hall closet.”

  “Wedding pictures, that sort of thing?”

  “Wedding, honeymoon, vacations. All shots of Chaz and me,” Joey reported, “in happier times.
”

  “Why were they in a closet?”

  “Because my shitheel husband pulled ’em off the wall,” she said, “probably within five minutes after he got home from the cruise. I guess he couldn’t even stand to look at my face.”

  Stranahan brushed an orange fleck of crab claw from her cheek. “Tell me what you did.”

  Joey spun away. “Another glass of wine, sir. Please.”

  “What did you do with the photos?”

  “Not all of them. Just one,” she said. “All I did was take it out of the frame and slip it under his pillow.”

  “Oh Christ,” Stranahan said.

  “But first I took cuticle scissors—”

  “And cut your face out of the picture.”

  Joey blinked. “How’d you know?”

  “No comment.”

  “Wife or girlfriend?”

  “Spouse number three, if memory serves,” he said.

  She sighed. “Next time I’ll try to be more original.”

  They ate inside, Strom whining for handouts through the screen door. Stranahan was quiet, and Joey began to worry that she’d done something foolhardy, something that might ruin the plan, whatever that was.

  Firmly she set down her wineglass. “If you want to yell at me for cutting up that picture, go ahead. Just remember, it’s my house, too. My stuff that he’s throwing away.”

  Stranahan said, “There was no car accident in Tampa involving Chaz and a drunk driver.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Checked with the Highway Patrol. There wasn’t any lawsuit, either,” he said, “according to the court files. And no big settlement, obviously.”

  “Meaning no nest egg,” Joey said quietly.

  “Highly unlikely. You want to hear our plan?”

  “If it’ll cheer me up, sure.”

  “We’re going to blackmail your husband,” Stranahan said.

  “I see.”

  “Actually, we’re only going to make him think he’s being blackmailed.” Stranahan dipped a jumbo claw into a cup of drawn butter.

  “Blackmailed by who?” Joey asked.

  “Somebody who knows that Chaz murdered you.” Stranahan smiled and took another bite of crab. “Somebody we’ll have to invent, of course.”

  Joey adored the idea even though she didn’t entirely get the point.

  “Misdirection,” he explained. “Chaz is probably freaking out that he’s being harassed by some mysterious intruder. I’m assuming you don’t want him to figure out it’s you, at least not yet. Correct?”

  She nodded emphatically.

  “No offense,” Stranahan said, “but these clever little messages you’ve left for him—the dress in the closet, the lipstick in the drawer, the photograph under the pillow—those are estranged wife–type moves. Too much of that and he’ll put it all together.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “So we need to make him believe it’s somebody else who’s screwing with his head.”

  “How about somebody who saw him push me off the ship?”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “A secret witness who gets greedy,” Joey said eagerly. “That would be cool. But who could we make up, Mick? And how would this imaginary person know how to find Chaz? Wait a minute—how would he get into the house unless he had a key?”

  “Whoa, slow down,” Stranahan told her. “I’ve got an idea how to set this up.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” Joey Perrone felt better than she had in days, and not just because of the wine.

  “But first it would really help to know why Chaz wanted you dead,” said Stranahan. “It would open up some creative opportunities, blackmail-wise.”

  Joey shrugged helplessly. “That’s all I think about, night and day.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll figure everything out,” he said with a wink. “This might actually be fun.”

  Ten

  Chaz didn’t find the photograph under his pillow until Tuesday night, because he’d spent Monday night at Ricca’s apartment in self-prescribed sexual therapy. He had blamed Joey’s lingering aura for impeding his finale in the bathtub, but leaving the house they shared had failed to solve the problem. Even in Ricca’s jasmine-scented bedroom Chaz couldn’t shake the image of his dead wife’s slinky black dress in the closet, or the wanton memories it conjured.

  Ricca had worked on him as deftly as a sculptress, but the results had been unsatisfactory. For the first time in their relationship—in any relationship—Chaz had heard that most hollow and dreaded of consolations:

  “Don’t worry, baby, it happens to everybody.”

  In a panic he’d dragged Ricca to a nearby music store and purchased a replacement copy of George Thorogood’s greatest hits, to no avail. Even digitally remastered, “Bad to the Bone" could not rally Chaz’s bone to its usual badness. The gloom of failure followed him all the next day as he drove up and down the levees of the Everglades. It weighed on him still when he returned home, although Rolvaag’s visit had offered a brief, though grating, diversion.

  Toppling into bed that night, Chaz was emotionally unprepared for yet another ghoulish shock. He stared at the picture and absently poked a finger in the scissored hole where his wife’s pretty face had been.

  Too vividly he remembered the circumstances of the photograph, which had been taken the previous New Year’s Eve at a ski lodge in Steamboat Springs. He and Joey had just emerged from their room after one hour and seventeen minutes of spectacularly rowdy sex. It was the only time Chaz had ever tired before his wife, and he’d signaled breathless surrender by making a T with his hands in the manner of a sacked quarterback. He and Joey were still laughing about it later when they’d handed the camera to the bartender.

  Now, hunched over the photo, Chaz should have been worrying about who had retrieved it from the closet and, literally, defaced it. He should have been wondering when the act of venomous mischief had occurred, and how the perpetrator had entered the house without breaking a window or prying a doorjamb. He should have been summoning the hulking hairy bodyguard, Red’s goon, to find out if any suspicious persons had been lurking in the neighborhood.

  But instead Charles Regis Perrone found himself thinking of that night only four months ago in Colorado, reliving in erotic detail how the woman he fondly once called “my monster blonde" had turned him inside out. Soon Chaz found himself saluted by a formidable hard-on, which sent him scampering in unwarranted optimism to the bathroom. There he labored doggedly, his face crimson and contorted, until one and then both of his fists cramped. No relief would be forthcoming.

  Chaz glared down at himself and cursed. My cock was never faithful to Joey while she was alive, he thought, so why all of a sudden now? It was crushing to consider that whatever puny conscience he possessed might manifest itself in such a humiliating way.

  “I didn’t want to kill her!” he shouted at his chafed and shrinking tormentor. “She gave me no choice!”

  Chaz tore the photograph to shreds over the toilet bowl. After checking the doors and windows, he gobbled a half dozen Maalox chewables and collapsed on the living room sofa. Tomorrow he’d get the locks changed and call the alarm company and move Joey’s jewelry to his personal safe-deposit box at the bank. Afterward he would scour the house one more time until nothing remained of his deceased spouse, not one blond eyelash, to arouse him against his will.

  Then, on the way back from the county landfill, he’d stop at Wal-Mart and buy himself a gun.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have herbal tea, would you?”

  “The best I can do is coffee,” Karl Rolvaag said.

  “Poison,” said Rose Jewell with a frown. “No thanks.”

  She was about forty years old and fearlessly attractive. The detective office had come to a standstill when she’d walked in—white cotton pullover, tight stonewashed jeans, high heels. Her hair was a wattage of blond unknown in Minnesota, the land of blondes. Even Rolvaag was slightly nervous.

&nb
sp; “I’m Joey’s best friend. Was Joey’s best friend,” Rose said, “and I just want you to know, she would never, ever kill herself. If that’s one of your theories.”

  “It’s too early for theories,” Rolvaag said, which wasn’t true. He was certain that Charles Perrone had pushed his wife off the Sun Duchess. He was equally sure that proving it would be impossible without a corpse, evidence or eyewitnesses.

  Captain Gallo had thought it interesting that Mrs. Perrone’s fingernails were found embedded in a bale of marijuana, but he said it proved only that she’d survived the plunge—not that she had been shoved. Her husband giving the wrong time she’d left their room was suspicious, Gallo agreed, but it wasn’t enough on which to file charges.

  “And she didn’t get bombed and fall off the ship, either,” Rose was saying. “I saw that business in the newspaper about her having all that wine—what a bunch of bull! I’ve never seen Joey drunk, not even close to drunk. Not since her DUI.”

  “How was her marriage?”

  “Chaz Perrone was a total slut. He cheated on her all over town.”

  “Did he ever try with you?” Rolvaag asked, somewhat startled at his own nerve. Perhaps Rose’s frankness was contagious.

  She smiled and crossed her legs in a way that made the detective feel like a fumbling teenager. “If Chaz ever laid a hand on me,” she said sweetly, “I would’ve kicked him in the raspberries. But no, I never even met the guy.”

  Rumors of multiple infidelities did not, in Captain Gallo’s biased view, automatically make Charles Perrone a murder suspect. In three weeks Rolvaag would be heading back to Minnesota, and it was dismaying to know that his final case in Florida would end in failure—a cold-blooded killer escaping justice. The captain had made it plain that he saw the Perrone investigation as a dead end and that no more time or manpower would be committed.

  Often Rolvaag imagined Mrs. Perrone alone in the ocean, clinging so fiercely to that floating bale that the tips of her nails snapped off one by one. The daydream was more haunting for its detail, since Chaz Perrone had provided a snapshot of his wife to the police and Coast Guard. In the photograph, taken on a beach somewhere, Joey Perrone was dripping wet. The morbid irony had been lost on her husband but not on the detective, who could now envision Chaz’s victim—her blond hair slicked back, her cheeks sparkling with beads of water—as she must have looked when she burst to the surface after that long, harrowing fall.