Heaven Is High (7 page)

“You got his license plate number?”

“Sure,” he said. “Guy shows up at your door, you don't let him in, he's trying to hold the door open or push it open, then off he goes, looking pretty sore. Interesting. I parked down the street, walked back in case he wasn't gone far. I'll run a check just for fun. And,” he said as she poured coffee, “I have some dope about piracy from 1960 to '65 in the Caribbean and Gulf areas. Four incidents. The accounts.” He put photocopies on the table. “Plus a pretty good article about the Santos Shipping Company of Belize. It's a biggie. The guy will have plenty of influence.”

“Great,” Barbara said. “Good work, and fast, the way I like it. I'll look over the piracy stuff while you look over this.” She gave him the summary she had made of Binnie's notes. “Her originals are there if you want to see them.” She pointed to a folder with the roll of film on it.

The third piracy attack was it, she knew, as she read through it, then put it aside to look over the fourth account. In one instance, the pirates had been caught and imprisoned. In two cases they were not apprehended, and in the one she had set aside, they had been killed in a gun battle in Jamaica. That one was dated May of 1961.

Bailey helped himself to more coffee and pushed her summary aside. He shook his head at the folder with the full accounts. “I get the picture,” he said morosely as he pocketed the roll of film.

“I need the sister,” Barbara said. “I think she married the American in 1960 or 1961. I need a name for her and a way to locate her. They could have come to the States, been divorced by now, or are living happily on an estate in Belize. Can do?”

“And she could be dead,” he said. “I don't know. Not in a day or two. Those newspapers could be helpful maybe, if they haven't gone belly-up. Or a Belize newspaper might be, but I'm not going to Belize to start running down a news story from twenty-two years ago that might not even be in the paper.”

“Why would an American have been in Belize that long ago?” Barbara said. “Government work? State Department minion? Probably not a tourist, not if he hung around long enough to get married to a local girl. A trade agreement? Buying mahogany? Sugar? Chicle? Chicle, for chewing gum,” she said when he raised his eyebrows questioningly. “Belize exports it. Get help if you need it. Lawrence somebody, married in 1960 or '61, most likely to Anaia Santos, whose daddy owns Santos Shipping. There's a record somewhere.”

“You left out drugs,” Bailey said. “And the name he used might be an alias. Maybe a CIA spook without a name to call his own.”

“I know,” she admitted. “A Peace Corps guy, exchange student, instructor. Probably a lot of others we don't have a clue about. God, I know that. Fishing for a particular minnow in the ocean, but give it a try. Do you know people who would be good for this kind of research? I'm thinking of the time element,” she added. “There isn't any to spare.”

“From the looks of it, there isn't any, period. Yeah, I can round up some people and sic them on it. It's going to cost a lot.” Then, pouring himself more coffee, he said, “I ran a credit check on Owens. You know, just part of the drill. He made about four and a half million playing football, and he spent a lot of it on houses and cars for his mother and sister. Other things. But he kept a lot. Like you said, he's good for it. He paid cash for his own car, the house, gutting and remodeling it to be a restaurant, and everything in it. No real debts, just current expenses. He probably still has a bundle left over.”

“He was saving to buy a restaurant,” Barbara said. “Okay. Anything else?”

“Just a thought,” Bailey said, his gloom not at all diminished. “The government already knows how much he's got, and to them it might look like he held out enough so he could make a run for it without leaving a paper trail.”

“And Nicholson already wants to know where he is,” Barbara muttered.

Bailey shrugged, got to his feet, and slouched to the door, where he saluted and said, “I'll get those pictures to you later today.”

*   *   *

Barbara waited until eleven o'clock to call Herman Krugman at Columbia. She got as far as his teaching assistant. “Ms. Holloway, I'm sorry, but Dr. Krugman is out all this week. You know, spring break. But he left two names for me to give you if you still want them.”

Better than nothing, she thought. “I'd appreciate that.”

She made a note of the names of two Los Angeles attorneys and thanked him. After getting telephone numbers from directory assistance she dialed the top name only to be told that he would not be in his office until mid-May, and if she wanted to leave a message.… She hung up and dialed the second one, with no better success. He was simply unavailable and there was not even a suggestion that she might leave a name or message.

God was telling her something, she thought, regarding the telephone and wishing it were a voodoo doll she could use as a pincushion. There were many immigration attorneys, she knew, but to consult any attorney without knowing something about him or her first was often foolish at best, and a catastrophe at worst, with a costly mistake somewhere in between.

She sat at her desk and considered what to do next. Even if she kept searching and found someone else, that person would most likely do exactly what she had done, tell the client she needed a little time to look into the matter, and use that time to try to verify as much as possible about what the client had said. She shook her head. They didn't have time for that.

“I just saved you a bundle of money, Martin,” she said under her breath. She would skip the expert advice altogether, assume that both Krugman and the Chicago attorney had already given it by saying the INS would win, in the short run at least. No need to go for strike three, she decided, and pulled the article about the Santos Shipping Company forward to read.

After reading the article Barbara sat thinking about Santos, Binnie's grandfather. He would have influence in his own country, she knew. A prominent businessman, important in a small economy. The question was, Would he help his granddaughter? Finally she dialed the number given in the article.

A pleasant woman's voice came on in a recorded message: “
Santos Shipping. I'm sorry. The offices are temporarily closed. For information regarding shipments please call
—

Carefully, almost gently, Barbara hung up, cursing under her breath. Another door slammed in her face.

7

On Tuesday afternoon Barbara opened her door to admit Bailey, whose long face probably mirrored her own, she thought, with a sense of foreboding.

“No beer, a little wine that might or might not be decent enough for human consumption, and a pot of coffee that's been sitting all day. Name your poison,” she said, leading him to the kitchen.

“Let's nuke the coffee,” he said. “You're going to need it.”

“In that case I'll put on a fresh pot. Tell me the worst while my back is turned.”

She busied herself with the coffee, listening to a rustle of papers, his reports, no doubt. His chair scraped, creaked a little bit, followed by a long silence.

“Get on with it,” she said impatiently, going to the table to join him. “Get it over with.”

“Right. Okay. No point in trying to find a guy named Lawrence at this end. No place to start. State Department, CIA, a university somewhere … I started in Belize. My team, headed by a research librarian, had a go at it. First the newspapers. Nada. Nothing easily found from the time we were after. Then public records. It's a wash, Barbara, no matter where they start. In October 1961, along came a killer hurricane that wiped out a lot of the country, including Belize City. That was the capital in those days. They moved it inland later on. Anyway, the old city was flooded to the rooftops of anything left standing, and there wasn't much. But that's where public records were archived, in the courthouse in the capital. Ninety-nine percent of them destroyed. Who knows where they've been since then, or how many were restored?”

“So we can't find out whom Anaia married,” Barbara said after a lengthy silence. “I think it's coffee.” She went to get cups and the carafe and took them to the table.

After a moment, Bailey rose and crossed the space to the counter, where she had left the sugar and cream. “We can't find him now,” he said, returning. “A crew of hundreds with unlimited time might do it eventually. Might never.” He fixed his coffee to his liking and again there was a lengthy silence.

“I've been thinking,” he said. “Maybe if they send her back to Haiti, Martin could go first and meet the plane. Meet all the planes until hers gets there.”

“She isn't going back!” Barbara said. “I'll think of something. She is
not
going back!”

Bailey shrugged. “The pictures and various attempts to get information,” he said, indicating papers clipped together. “And a little about that car Nicholson was driving, the plates I ran. Private car, registered to Rondell Emerson. Since it wasn't reported as stolen, seems he must have lent it to Nicholson. Emerson's in real estate and he's a partner in the Marcos Import store. Scuttlebutt has it that Marcos is dealing in more than just trinkets and doodads, stuff like that.”

“He's dealing drugs?”

“Not sure, but that's the rumor. Never charged, never really investigated maybe. Rumor.”

The coffee was foul. Barbara added sugar and cream to her own and made it worse. She pushed her cup back. “I spent yesterday and most of this morning cramming on immigration law,” she muttered. “No loopholes that I could find.” Although, she added to herself bitterly, an expert in the field might have known a dodge unavailable to her.

“Bailey, will you be around later? I need to think.”

“Until ten,” he said. “Phone rings after ten, we let it.”

“Sure,” she said. “Before ten.”

*   *   *

But walking and thinking were not helping, she admitted to herself later, sitting on a bench staring blankly at the river. She should not have told Martin that, she thought then. She should not have told him they wouldn't let Binnie go back. It amounted to a promise and she had no way of fulfilling such a promise.

A flash of memory rose in her mind. Not the incident that sparked it, something she had wanted as a child, something she had insisted on being promised in advance. Whatever that something had been was lost in time.

“I can't promise,” Frank had said. “I'll do the best I can, but I can't promise.”

“Just say it,” she had insisted.

“Honey,” he had said, “never make a promise you don't intend to keep, and never make a promise that you know you can't keep, or that you don't know if you can keep. Your promise is your word of honor and it's sacred. Promises should be very rare.”

Her words to Martin had constituted a promise, one that she could not keep.

God, how long ago was that little lesson? she wondered. She had been small, six, seven at the most. And there it was, stashed away in her memory to come back and shame her now. Slowly she rose and started to walk again. The air was cooling and she was getting chilled, but there was something important nagging her. Frank might not even recall that incident, he had no reason to recall it, but it had been faithfully stored away in her brain to come back now.

Memory seemed to be a bottomless purse, or the magic salt-shaker that contained all the salt in one's personal universe, waiting to be tapped. Who knew how many memories anyone stored away, how relevant they were, how to access those you needed? She suspected the answer had to be nobody. Maybe every minute of a life was there in the memory bank, irrelevant for the most part, and mostly inaccessible. She stopped walking. Relevance, that was what she was searching for.

Someone, more than just one person in Belize, would remember whom Anaia Santos had married, what her married name was.

Abruptly she turned and headed back to her car. It would take a human being talking to another human being to find out Anaia Santos's married name, to find out where she was, and to plead with her on behalf of Binnie. Not Bailey. She could not send him to plead with Augustus Santos, the tyrannical parent, or with Anaia, either. Bailey had his uses, but this was not one of them. He could sum up pages of reports succinctly and thoroughly, but then he withdrew, and this could take pleading, special pleading even.

You're tilting at windmills, she told herself, making a meaningless gesture because there simply was not enough time. She started her car, checked the rearview mirror, but her inner critic was still demanding a voice. Immigration would win because time would run out. Going there would be no more than another blindfolded stab at an impossible target. A waste of time, of Martin's money. It would be no more than an attempt to soothe her conscience, to try to make herself believe she had not taken on a case with zero chance of helping her client. To try to justify making a promise she had not known she could keep.

She shook her head as if to quiet that other voice. She had to try anything and everything she could think of to prevent a murder-suicide. Martin's words spoken quietly, and with absolute conviction, had elicited her promise, and now she had to go to Belize. That other voice was silenced.

She drove home too fast, hurried inside, and was dialing the travel agent used by the law firm before she had her jacket off. It was late, but the agency was used to handling emergency situations for the firm. An hour later she called Bailey to come by between one and two the following afternoon.

*   *   *

“Don't give me a hard time,” she said irritably to Bailey on Wednesday. “I already know all the arguments against it. And I don't see anything else I can do. They can't survive as fugitives, not with the government after them, and that's what they face. That creep in immigration is salivating over having a celebrity on his hit list to make an example of. He's practicing his strut for when he demonstrates that not even the rich and famous can get away with concealing an illegal alien. I know how that goes.”