Naked Came the Phoenix Read online

  Near the fireplace, a tabby cat, undoubtedly chosen by the decorator to coordinate with the rusty gold medallions in the Turkish carpet, had draped itself casually across the back of an overstuffed wing chair. When Caroline entered, the cat opened an eye, studied her, determined she was of no importance, and returned to its nap.

  Raoul was hardly napping. Piles of papers and what Caroline took to be case files littered his desk. He was shuffling through them frantically, oblivious to her presence.

  “Raoul? You wanted to see me?”

  “What?” His eyes were enormous behind his glasses. “Oh, Caroline. So good of you to come.” He shoved the folders aside until the space on the desk directly in front of him was clear, anchored the tallest pile with a substantial brass paperweight shaped like a propeller, whipped off his glasses, and stood. ″Sit down. Sit down.”

  Raoul emerged from behind his desk and motioned Caroline into the armchair. The cat didn’t budge. The handsome widower arranged himself opposite Caroline on a two-cushion sofa, beautifully upholstered in a reproduction of a medieval tapestry. Considering the money that had clearly been lavished on this place, it could have been a medieval tapestry.

  “Frankly, Raoul, after what happened yesterday, I’m surprised you’re keeping office hours,” Caroline ventured after a moment of uncomfortable silence.

  “What are my alternatives?” He spread his hands wide. “I’ve got a spa to run, as your mother keeps reminding me.”

  “That surprised me as much as it surprised you.”

  “Surprise is not the word I’d choose,” he said. “Surprise is for Christmas presents or birthday parties. It’s fair to say I was shocked, appalled, devastated.” He massaged the bridge of his nose with a thumb and index finger. “Claudia must have known something about your mother’s financial interest in Phoenix. You must have suspected.”

  Caroline had no answer for him, so she changed the subject. “Why did you send that fellow to find me, Raoul? It wasn’t just to discuss my treatment program, was it?”

  “No.” He flushed to the lobes of his exquisite ears.

  “Well, what then?”

  “I wondered if you could tell me what your mother’s plans are for Phoenix Spa.”

  “Mother and I were never all that close.” She paused to swallow the lump that had taken up residence in her throat.

  Raoul bowed his head. “I feel like a fish out of water. When Claudia was alive, I knew exactly what I’d be doing every day. But now …” He looked up. “Your mother can be difficult.”

  “What did Mother say to you?”

  “She ordered me to stop mooning about and get on with it.” He shook his head, and Caroline could see he was close to tears. “Carry on with what, for Christ’s sake. I have a wife to bury!”

  Caroline reached across the coffee table and laid her hand on his. “I’m so sorry, Raoul. Sorry about Claudia. About Mother …” She took a deep breath. “About everything.” She patted his hand, then settled back into the comfortable recesses of the chair.”Is there anything I can do?”

  “Nobody can do anything until the police release Claudia’s body, and who knows when that will be.” He leaned forward, fingers laced together, his elbows resting on his knees. “They’re not even sure how she died. Everyone assumes she was strangled.” He shuddered. “But what if she was still alive when whoever shoved her face into the mud?”

  “Don’t even think about it, Raoul. It’ll make you crazy.”

  “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.” He fixed his eyes, unseeing, on the wallpaper behind her head.

  “Raoul …”

  He shivered, seemed to snap out of it, then turned to look at Caroline as if seeing her for the first time. He reached across the table, covered her hand with his, and stood up, pulling her up along with him. “Caroline, Caroline! Please forgive me. I’ve been babbling like a fool.”

  Caroline thought the man was hardly a fool. Quietly, she extracted her hand and began to stroke the cat.

  Raoul seemed unperturbed. “We’re supposed to be talking about you.”

  That’s a subject best avoided, Caroline thought. Aloud she said, “Tell me about that young man you sent to find me. Dante. He’s booked me in for a deep-tissue massage after lunch.”

  Raoul beamed. “Splendid! Should do you a world of good. He’s quite the expert, Dante. We hired him away from the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. Claudia considered it quite a coup!″

  While Raoul pontificated on the solid-gold credentials of Dante, otherwise known as Daniel Shemanski, and oozed on about macrobiotics, homeopathy, and the miracle of colonic hydrotherapy, Caroline inched her way toward the door, hoping to escape. “Join me at my table for lunch?” Raoul inquired.

  Caroline felt her stomach knocking against her ribs. If she didn’t get something to eat soon, she’d end up looking like Ondine. “Of course,” she replied. “Why not?”

  Vince Toscana stared at the plate in front of him and considered where to begin. A scallion, its topknot fringed and curled, sprang like an astonished bird from the top of a pink, spongelike cube. A quartet of tiny shrimp flanked the scallion, each nestled in a rosecut carrot curl set on a nearly transparent cucumber round, sliced thin as a lab specimen. The whole mess was arranged on a bed of limp yuppie lettuce that reminded him of dandelion greens.

  Vince nudged his salad with his fork. Whatever happened to iceberg lettuce, he wondered. Saw off a hunk, pour on some Catalina dressing straight from the bottle. Now, that was a salad.

  Across the table from him Stick Girl had moved one shrimp to the edge of her plate where she was using a knife to cut it into four pieces. One tiny quarter went into her mouth where she chewed it, he swore to God, one hundred times while gazing at nothing in particular, as if all her energy was going into the chewing of that infinitesimal lump of seafood.

  Vince noticed her painfully thin arms and winced. Girls that skinny shouldn’t wear sleeveless clothes. But sitting just to her right, Christopher Lund was staring at Ondine with more than the usual agent-to-client interest, so Vince thought, well, what the hell did he know? He was just a happily married old fart who was going to die of starvation himself if he didn’t solve this case soon.

  At a table for four near the kitchen, Raoul de Vries sat with the congressman’s wife and that bitchy mother of hers. Vince would have given a Philly cheese steak with everything on it to overhear their conversation. Hilda was a no-go, but perhaps he’d be able to worm something out of Caroline later. As for Raoul, Vince had been avoiding the spa doctor ever since yesterday when the man had caught him practically red-handed in the file room. With only seconds to spare, Vince had stuffed Ondine’s folder back into the proper box and managed to cover his presence in the room by swinging into his rambling, rumpledraincoat, cigar-chomping TV cop routine.

  Chewing thoughtfully on a carrot curl, Vince allowed his eyes to wander. In front of the swinging doors that led from the dining room into the kitchen, he noticed King David deep in conversation with Emilio Constanza. Emilio started to say something, but the rocker raised a hand and cut him short. Emilio shrugged and watched King’s back as he approached de Vries’s table and rested his paw on the back of the empty chair. Almost without looking up, Raoul waved King David away. But it didn’t take the rock star long to find another luncheon companion. Soon His Majesty and that actress were sitting at a table by the window with their heads together, jabbering away like long-lost friends. Their four luncheon companions, with painful self-consciousness, dutifully ate their salads and tried not to gawk at the famous pair. So much for Lauren Sullivan’s claim that she didn’t know any of the other guests.

  Vince dragged the tines of his fork across the pink sponge on his plate and tipped the fork onto his tongue. Salmon mousse. The meal disappeared in three bites—shrimp, carrots, cukes and all. Vince chewed on some corrugated box tops that passed for bread in this godforsaken place, then snagged a bunch of grapes from the tray of a passing waiter.

  He poppe
d a grape into his mouth and turned, at last, to the girl. “So, Ondine is it?”

  The girl looked up from her plate, a bit of cucumber balanced on the end of her fork. “Yes, sir.”

  “Got a real name, Ondine?”

  “Ondine is my real name.”

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  She glanced at Lund as if seeking his approval to answer the detective, then turned her high cheekbones on Vince in a fullfrontal assault. Suddenly, even without the makeup, Vince saw what hundreds of photographers and millions of magazine readers must have seen—the gamin beauty, the childlike vulnerability of the woman. Her smile was dazzling. “Just Ondine.”

  Christopher Lund waved a knife. “Like she said, Ondine. Had it changed legal.”

  Did these people think he was a complete idiot? Vince polished off the last of the grapes and sighed. He considered starting on the floral centerpiece. “Look, miss,” he said. “You went to kindergarten, right?”

  She nodded.

  “So what name did they put on your report card in kindergarten?”

  Ondine laid down her fork, propped the knobs she had for elbows on the white tablecloth, and considered his question with a slight smile. “Mary Louise Thorvald.”

  “Thorvald.” He grunted. Probably had some fancy punctuation marks over the vowels. At least she wasn’t another goddamn Italian. “What kind of name’s Thorvald?”

  “Norwegian.”

  “So, Ms. Thorvald,” he began.

  “I haven’t been a Thorvald for years, Detective. I was a foster child. Changed my last name as often as my hair style.” She dabbed at her lips—the only plump thing about her—with her napkin, then folded it carefully and laid it down next to her fork. “I was a bit of a problem, you see. Nobody wanted me for long.”

  Vince stared at her in silence. What did it matter what her name was, Vince thought. Ondine didn’t have the strength to knock off Claudia de Vries. She could hardly lift a fork, for Christ’s sake, let alone strangle a one-hundred-thirty-pound woman and drop her into a tub of mud. Claudia would have broken those fragile arms in twenty-seven places.

  A waiter balancing a stack of dirty dishes on his left arm materialized at the model’s elbow and, as Vince watched incredulously, Ondine waved away her barely finished meal. Vince gazed hungrily at the lump of salmon mousse remaining on the lapis lazuli plate. “Aren’t you gonna finish your salad?”

  Ondine shoved the plate in his direction with two wellmanicured talons. “Knock yourself out, Detective.”

  Caroline leaned over the marble counter in the plush reception area while Ginger, the receptionist and keeper of the master appointment book, helped her select a body lotion, some moisturizer suitable for extra-dry skin, and an assortment of hair care products. Perhaps twenty bottles of various colors, shapes, and sizes, each bearing the spa’s distinctive silver label, were lined up along the counter. “I don’t know,” Caroline said as she studied the label on a bright lavender bottle of lotion. “This one’s got coconut oil in it. I hate the smell of coconut oil.”

  With a well-trained, plastic smile, Ginger plucked the bottle from Caroline’s fingers. “That’s about it in the body lotion department, Mrs. Blessing. Unless …″ Ginger turned, knelt, pulled open a drawer, and began to search through the neat rows of boxes it contained. While the receptionist’s back was turned, Caroline reached over the counter and flipped the pages of the appointment book back a day. Reading upside down, she noticed that the facilities had been busy yesterday afternoon about the time Phyllis Talmadge took her nosedive into the lake. Of the names she recognized, Lauren Sullivan and Ondine had been in at one-thirty and two o’clock, respectively, while Howard Fondulac had managed to drag himself over for a reflexology treatment at three. Her mother, to her surprise, had found time to spend the hour from three to four working out on the StairMaster while Christopher Lund was signed up for something, she couldn’t decipher what, in the weight room at five.

  “Here we are!” Ginger turned to Caroline in triumph, offering her a slender white bottle with some green leaves looking suspiciously like marijuana embossed on the label. “This stuff is wonderful, and not a speck of coconut oil!”

  Caroline took the time to read the list of ingredients as carefully as if it were a logic problem on the SATs. Lanolin. Aloe. Hemp. She unscrewed the cap and sniffed, enjoying the unexpectedly light, clean scent. “Yes, this might do quite well.”

  A few minutes later as she lay on the massage table of softly padded leather, facedown, naked, a sheet lightly covering her legs and buttocks, she found herself thinking about King David. Maybe it was the hemp that reminded her. Caroline had told Detective Toscana about her conversation with the rock star, of course, but why had she failed to mention the key King suspected Claudia of having? In his gruff, big-city way, Toscana had been as kind to her as he knew how, even letting her tag along like Junior Miss Jessica Fletcher while he interviewed Phyllis Talmadge after her near-fatal plunge. She owed him. She should have told Toscana about the key.

  Caroline had been massaged before, so she recognized the effleurage when it began: long, gliding strokes of Dante’s hands, open against and never losing contact with her skin. He’d prepared her for the deep massage with warm essential oils—mar—joram for grief and sandalwood for depression—and even tucked hot oiled stones between her toes. “I feel like such a hedonist,” she drawled.

  He bent down until he could look directly into her eyes. “And I forbid you to feel guilty about that. This is all about you, you, you.”

  Caroline prayed that this focus on me, me, me would make her feel important, worthy, loved.

  But right then, all she felt was boneless.

  As his hands and fingers, skilled as a surgeon’s, worked over her traumatized body, she could feel the muscles loosen, the adhesions breaking and falling away. She moaned. Once, as he loosened the contracted muscles along her spine, she screamed. This was normal, he told her. To be expected. As he worked to release the tension in her thighs, Caroline bit her lower lip and tried not to cry out. Was this what childbirth felt like? she wondered. Exquisite agony?

  Childbirth. She had hoped to have children. Douglas’s children. Now that would never be, and her biological clock was ticking, ticking, ticking.

  But she had a sister somewhere, or a brother! She counted backward to the year her mother was at Brown, 1962 or 1963. Her half-sibling would be thirty-something today. Had they ever met—on the metro, at the library, at a fund-raiser-without realizing the relationship?

  She could be sister to the cashier at Bread and Circus, to the mechanic at VOB Volvo, to her stylist at the Toka Salon. Even to Ondine! No, Ondine was too young. But Lauren? Christopher Lund? And how about Dante? As his hands massaged her feet and ankles, she wondered about Dante. It was hard to tell with him; his amber eyes were wise, but his face was unlined and somehow ageless.

  In her mellow state, Caroline wasn’t sure whether she felt them first or heard them, but she gradually became aware of helicopters chop-chop-chopping overhead.

  “Relax!” Dante warned. “Ignore them. It’s nothing to us.” His hands moved up to her shoulders.

  Helicopters! Silly of Raoul to think he could keep the press out of the grounds of Phoenix Spa forever. It had to be the tabloids, she thought dreamily, training their telephoto lenses on the grounds below, hoping to catch Lauren Sullivan without her makeup or Ondine without her clothes. Vultures! She remembered fuzzy photos of a lover sucking on a topless Fergie’s toes and knew that the tabloids would pay big bucks for a photograph of Congressman Blessing’s wife with another man’s hands grasping her upper thighs. Caroline was thankful that she lay indoors beyond the reach of their prying cameras.

  As ordered, she ignored the helicopters, and for the next ten minutes she wallowed in forgetfulness. Cocooned, she felt limp, drained. Maybe she’d died.

  “Caroline!” Douglas’s voice spiraled down to her, as if from the end of a long tunnel. Dante’s hands paused, rest
ing lightly against the small of her back. With great effort, Caroline willed her head to rise and turned it toward the door. She stared at her husband with languid eyes.

  He filled the doorway. She wondered, vaguely, why he was wearing jeans and a yellow cable-knit sweater instead of his usual three-piece suit. Brice, his pilot and sometime bodyguard, loomed large behind him, and Douglas must have brought other people along, too, because Caroline could hear the receptionist making fruitless stop-you-can′t-go-in-there noises.

  “Go away, Douglas.” She rested her cheek against the soft, terry cloth covering on the table and waved a sluggish arm.

  Douglas indicated to Brice that he should wait outside, then closed the door behind him. Caroline mused that Douglas would have liked to get rid of Dante, too, but the masseur’s hands began their final assault on the tendons in her neck, and she once again became one with the table.

  Douglas seemed to sense the wisdom of keeping his distance. He stood near the door, slim, tall, elegant as always even in his casual attire. Through half-closed eyes, Caroline was pleased to note that the suave self-assurance he showed in front of the television cameras and before his constituents had evaporated. His arms hung at his sides and he repeatedly opened and closed his hands, as if they were cold. “Caroline,” he blurted at last, “I need to explain.”

  “Don’t waste your breath, Douglas.”

  He took a step toward the table. “Honey, it’s not what you think!”

  Reluctantly, Caroline pulled herself up into a sitting position. She had never felt uncomfortable being naked in front of Douglas before, but now her nakedness embarrassed her. With elaborate care, she gathered the sheet around her, smoothing the fabric over her bare legs and twisting it into a knot at her breast. She skewered him with her eyes. “Congressman Blessing, you are full of crap!”