Spiral

windshield I could see opaque blue sunglasses and a wide, Kewpie-doll frown.
    ”Berto, you bastard, open this fucking gate.”
    Reyes took a long, slow step toward the gazebo, and then he flicked at something. The gate swung outward, and the woman burned a little rubber moving her car the twenty feet to where we were standing.
    She wore a placket-collared shirt over a tennis skirt that rode about eighty percent of the way up her thighs. The veined hands and facial lines also brought her a little closer to forty than to twenty. ”And just who might you be?”
    ”John Cuddy.”
    ”Ah, Nick’s dick from Boston. You’ll want to talk with me. Duy can guide you to my suite.”
    The woman took off, leaving a little more tread on the driveway as she spun the convertible around the corner of the house toward the garage doors.
    I said to Reyes. ”Let me guess. She refers to herself as ‘moi,’ too.
    ”And to the rest of the world as ‘bastards.’”
    ”Well, she’s got some standing to be upset.”
    Reyes looked at me oddly. ”I don’t get you.”
    ”The woman just lost her daughter.”
    Umberto Reyes started to grin, then iced it. ”That’s not Jeanette Held.”
    ”It isn’t?”
    ”Uh-unh. That’s Mrs. Cassandra Helides, the Colonel’s wife.”
    I just closed my eyes.

    ”You found your way.”
    I’d knocked on the door at the end of a second-floor corridor, and Cassandra Helides’s voice had told me to come through it. She stood hip-cocked—and nearly six feet tall — in front of a four-poster bed, wearing a powder-blue terry-cloth robe with some emblem on the left breast.
    Helides said, ”I’ve got to take a shower, or I’ll be late for a drinks date. Sit down and you can yell to me through the sliding glass door.”
    ‘That might be kind of awkward.”
    Without the sunglasses, her eyes were big, white showing around both irises. ”Then maybe you should join me?”
    I gave it a beat. ”That would be more than awkward, Mrs. Helides.”
    She wagged her head, the tip of her tongue sticking out between her lips. ”My Nick sure can pick them.”
    I wasn’t thinking the same thing.
    Helides stood hip-cocked a moment longer. ”So sit. Won’t be two minutes.”
    She broke the pose and swayed under the robe, entering the bathroom without closing the door. As water began drumming against tiles in the other room, I moved to a chair and looked around me.
    Helides had a suite with the same floor plan as Tranh’s but maybe a third again as large. The living area where I sat included pink upholstered chairs and a settee that might have been an antique but struck me as schlock. The color motif was carried over to the four-poster, the cloth skirting the box spring bordered with white lace, though the pink bedclothes themselves lay tousled, pillows at domino angles to each other. Full-length mirrors rose on either side of a walk-in closet, and the wall paintings were all of flamingos. The entertainment center contained components of so many sizes and shapes, I could identify only about half by function.
    ”Told you I could do it quickly when I had to.”
    Turning toward the bathroom again, I realized I couldn’t hear the water anymore. Cassandra Helides’s platinum hair was plastered against her skull, and she wore only a large towel wrap this time, her breasts pushing forward more dramatically through the tucked towel than they had under the robe.
    Helides smiled slyly. ”Caught you, didn’t I?”
    ”Caught me?”
    ”Licking your chops over my little babies here. Want to see the wonders modem surgery can wreck?”
    I guessed she meant ”wreak.”
    ”You always come on this strong?”
    Helides pouted, the lips seeming glossed. ”Strong is what I never was before.”
    ”Before what?”
    ”Before marrying Nick.” She stopped and pouted again, putting a bit more into it. ”No, that’s not right. It was after I seduced him but before I married him that I felt it.”
    ”Felt what?”
    Her sly smile again. ”The power.” Helides raked a hand through wet hair. ”I’ve got to dry this, but the portable’s pretty quiet. So, what can I tell you?”
    As she rummaged through the unmade bedclothes, I said, ”You’re the one who said I’d want to talk with you.” Helides turned back around, a Star-Wars appliance in her right hand. She clicked something on it, and the thing came to life, even though I didn’t see any cord running to a socket. ”About who killed Very, right?”
    ”Your