“All right. We’ll talk a bit—Jimmy and me—and then I’ll be in.”
Kelsey turned around and walked back into the house. When she entered the office, she held still, a scream caught in her throat.
She wasn’t alone.
Liam drove back up to the new side of the island, looking to see if Chris Vargas was out pounding the pavement again with a sign and a cup.
He didn’t see him.
He went to the station and dropped off the magic trick that had so badly scared Kelsey, and the rare-book room registration ledger, asking Ricky Long to get it to a handwriting expert. He wanted to know if Gary White had been the person who had signed in as Bel Arcowley.
Art Saunders had been with the officers who had gone through Gary White’s tiny efficiency studio on Petronia Street. Liam stopped to talk to him, and Art assured him that he hadn’t found a rare book.
In fact, he hadn’t found a book at all.
“I looked at his bills, found his checkbook, searched his drawers, his shelves—I didn’t find anything at all. He didn’t have a cell phone or a landline. There was nothing.”
“Thanks. I’ll probably do a double check,” Liam said.
Art nodded. He wasn’t offended. Another pair of eyes was never discounted.
Liam left instructions for Art to question a number of the bars where Gary had done his one-man song-and-guitar routine, and left. He drove up and down Duval looking for Chris Vargas again, and at last saw him with his rickshaw on Front Street.
Vargas saw him and flinched, but he didn’t try to move away from the corner where he’d been standing, calling out his services to passing tourists.
“What?” he groaned when Liam pulled his car over and came out to talk to him.
“What do you mean what?” Liam demanded. “A man is dead. A man who was supposedly your friend.”
“My friend, that’s the point, Lieutenant Beckett. Please…”
Vargas winced, looking down at the ground.
“I need to know what Gary White was doing before his death,” Liam said.
“Doing? The usual. He was playing his guitar. Trying to make ends meet. He bussed tables and washed dishes sometimes. When he was lucky, he played his guitar and sang. You know, neither one of us needs all that much, and so, even at what it was, his life was good the way he saw it. We’re not druggies. We know the cheap bars and the cheap eats. If anything is cheap down here. But we did well enough.”
“If you were so happy with the status quo, why were you in the Merlin house?” Liam asked.
Vargas groaned. “Can’t you figure that by now? Kids had broken in. It seemed like something easy to do. We weren’t going to steal anything big. We were just looking for an easy object to pawn and make enough to get ahead a bit, that’s all.”
“And that was the last time you saw him?”
“Yeah, that was the last time I saw him.”
“Do you know why he was going to the library, entering the rare-book room with an assumed name?” Liam asked.
“What?”
“Never mind. Let’s start over. Whose idea was it to break into the Merlin house?”
Vargas flushed, looking away. “Mine,” he admitted.
“Have you been visiting the library?” Liam asked him.
Vargas’s face twisted in a frown. “The library? No. I’m not much of a reader. Neither was Gary. I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“There’s a book missing from the rare-book room.”
“I didn’t steal any book,” Vargas said. “Look, I’ve been telling you the truth. I knew about the kids breaking into the house. I thought we could slip in, find some little thing and slip back out. I admitted it that night. I did not steal a book. I’m not a library kind of guy.”
“Who else was Gary hanging around with?” Liam asked.
Vargas shrugged. “I don’t know. Gary just hangs around. Look, can I go back to work now?”
“It didn’t really look like you were working,” Liam commented.
“I was trying to work. And a cop hanging around me doesn’t help bring in the inebriated tourist who may need a little help getting back to his hotel room.”
“Yeah, yeah, go ahead,” Liam said, frustrated.
Vargas stared at him.
“Go on.”
“I need you to leave. This is my corner,” Vargas told him.
One of Key West’s innumerable roosters crowed off-hour and went walking by them. “Watch yourself, Vargas,” he warned.
“I will. Swear it,” Vargas said.
Liam returned to his car. He sat there a minute, wishing that he wasn’t grasping at straws.
“You see me,” the apparition said quietly.
It was the pirate. The outline she had seen walking behind Liam. She was either falling under too much pressure, or she was staring at the ghost of a long-gone swain, a handsome man, perhaps thirty, decked out in the fashion of his day.
He might have been flesh and blood as he stood there. He had been staring broodingly out the study window, until she had opened the door.
And seen him.
“I see…” she whispered, “something.”
She blinked. He didn’t disappear.