Black Joint Point

40

Claudia went with Whit to the Coastal Psychics Network on Sunday afternoon, not having slept that night. He had a spare key Lucy had given him two weeks ago and he opened the doors. The business was closed, the psychics mourning at home.

‘I didn’t think straight. Didn’t think about where she’d hide it,’ he said.

‘We don’t have to do this now, Whit,’ Claudia said.

‘She loved this place. And I don’t want it here,’ Whit said. ‘If I’m right. Her office is this way.’

Jean Laffite’s treasure was finally confirmed to consist of twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold bars, ten thousand in silver bars, and a cache of rare 1820-minted Monteblanco coins worth, in numismatic and historical value, five million dollars. Scattered among the coins and bars in the crates used by Alex and Stoney were fragments of bone and soil from the Gilbert dig site, including a finger bone. The Corpus Christi police kept the treasure in the warehouse under heavy guard while they processed the shooting scene and called the Texas Historical Commission. But the Devil’s Eye was yet to be found.

In her office, Whit glanced at the small foil mobile, the scattered books on ESP and phone marketing, still with their little neon Post-its as bookmarks, worn from her thumbing. On the mantel above her desk were the crystals, amber and yellow and clear and green and red. Arranged just so for the healing powers they emitted. He didn’t feel healed.

‘There,’ he said.

‘Oh, Whit,’ Claudia said. ‘I don’t think so. These are too small.’

‘No. Look,’ he said. He inspected several, then ran his finger along the largest green one. It was the muddy green of a riverbed. He scraped paint off the stone with a thumbnail and the soft green glow came through, the color of time. The seductive green of envy.

‘Jesus. It’s really sort of ugly.’ He handed it to her. ‘Iris Dominguez can tell us if this is it. Or a gemologist. Right now I don’t know where else to look. Hiding it here is classic Lucy. Plain sight. She-’ He stopped.

‘Whit…’

‘I never want to see it again, okay, Claudia?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Listen. I’m worried about you. We need to talk.’

He stared at her. ‘The way you shot your boyfriend. I meant to say that was well done, what with it being so dark.’

A day later four gemologists said the Devil’s Eye was worthless: the right size, but not the valuable emerald. A nicely done copy, not worth millions, not worth anything at all. At some time – either by a thief in Mexico before Santa Barbara sailed or by Jean Laffite or by Stoney – the Eye was replaced with a worthless hunk of green crystal.

Claudia stopped by his house and told Whit about the report. He was silent. She wondered if he had slept.

‘Whit?’ she said after the silence grew too long.

Finally he said, ‘People will keep looking for it, won’t they?’

‘I suppose they will, after all the news coverage. Dig up Stoney Vaughn’s yard, or the rest of Black Jack Point. David’s mentioned they’ve already chased some folks off Stoney’s land. Thinking he hid some of the treasure there.’

He turned away from her.

‘Whit?’

‘I figured out the person who snooped through my house was Lucy. She knew where my key was, under the fern on the porch. I guess she wanted to know if I had notes on the murders, if there was any way she could be implicated. Or if Stoney was implicated. Whatever might lead back to her.’

‘Maybe Lucy came here, waited for you to come home, wanted to tell you the whole truth. Then she lost her nerve, left.’

‘It’s nice to think that,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

When Claudia got home David was waiting there in shorts and a T-shirt. He sat on the stairs leading to her apartment with a cold twelve-pack of Shiner Bock.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

‘I think we should get drunk,’ David said. ‘I’m more likely to apologize when I’m drunk.’

‘That’s a good reason.’

‘Someone finally put you through more hell than I did,’ David said. ‘Jesus, that sucks. I’m sorry, Claudia.’

She let him in and they drank the beer, her sitting on the couch, him on the floor. She drank the first one fast, too fast, and made herself promise to take longer for the second.

‘So Ben was in it with Alex Black from the beginning?’

‘I wasn’t the only seduction in Ben’s life,’ Claudia said.

David raised an eyebrow.

‘Ben got seduced himself. Living with a wealthy brother who was living on the edge of the law in more ways than one and wasn’t paying a price for it. Of course Ben is not talking and he’s using Stoney’s money to hire some fancy defense lawyer from Houston.’ She sipped her beer. ‘I won’t get a chance to say this on the stand at Ben’s trial unless we find evidence, but I think Ben found out about Stoney’s plan to steal treasure from Patch Gilbert’s land and fake an archaeological dig on Lucy’s land. And if he’d gotten to know Alex Black through Stoney, he would have seen that Alex was more interested in the treasure’s financial value than in the fame of discovery. Ben didn’t have Stoney’s blind spot for glory. So he must have cut a separate deal with Alex. They would have grabbed the treasure and then Alex would have eliminated Stoney. But then they didn’t plan on Patch and Thuy Tran showing up and having a double murder complicate their whole deal. And they sure didn’t count on Danny Laffite coming after them with a gang and a vengeance.’

She finished her beer. David handed her another. ‘You know what pisses me off?’ she asked.

‘What, honey?’

‘That fucker,’ she said. ‘He abandoned me with Danny and Gar, maybe he even cut a deal with Zack Simard to get him to leave us behind on the other boat. He knew Gar would kill me, kill Danny. I’m sure he killed Zack Simard at some point, dumped the body, ran the boat aground. He looked like the poor little victim. The whole time he was in with Alex Black. I’m pretty sure Stoney never called Ben that night, apologizing and asking him to come to the warehouse. That was Alex and Ben’s plan: get rid of Stoney, get rid of me since I was pushing on Ben to help the cops, leave the country with the treasure.’

‘He should have stuck with teaching.’

‘Ben molding young minds – I may puke.’ She downed more beer, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I don’t think it would surprise me if he and Alex had planned on getting rid of each other, in the end. Greedy bastards.’

‘Claudia, it’s not your fault.’ David rested his chin on his knees, gave her a sad smile.

‘What?’

‘I know you. You’re pissed at yourself for not having seen through this guy. Listen, his own brother didn’t see through him.’

‘I’m smarter than Stoney Vaughn ever was, please.’ She shook her head. ‘I think my career at the PD just flat-lined. Jesus, he’s ruined a couple of major league pleasant high school memories for me.’

‘Memories?’

‘He was my first, David, back when we were in high school.’

He opened another beer. ‘You mean I wasn’t?’

‘I never told you you were. You were my second.’

‘Well,’ said David, ‘you weren’t my first either.’

‘I think I’ll wear a red dress to Ben’s trial,’ she said, a little drunk. ‘That asshole.’

‘I’m sorry,’ David said. ‘For you. For Whit.’

‘You can’t stand him.’

‘I’m gonna try to stand him, Claud.’

She smiled for the first time. ‘Now you’re drunk.’

They drank too much, both of them, and they ended up kissing but she wasn’t drunk enough to sleep with him. She wouldn’t let him drive, so David slept on her couch and at one point in the night, dehydrated and hungover, she got up for water and she watched him sleep and to her surprise a little part of her missed him.

Then she went back to bed, hoping it was just the beer.