Murder Is My Dish (12 page)

“There's a place called Puerto Casado on the Paraguay River near the Paranaian border. I know because the guy in the embassy's old man has an alligator farm there or something. You could slip across the border through the swamps. Paranaians smuggle diamonds out of the country that way, he says. Well?”

“Get me the visa as fast as you can.”

“Chet, I wish I could go with you. Andy—”

I heard Betty's voice in the background. She said something about Chet having no ties and Jack having the boy to think of. Naturally, she was a hundred-per-cent right.

“How's the middle of the week?” Jack asked me.

“Beginning of the week's better.”

“I'll try, Chet. Call me.”

“Good.”

“Chet? How will you get out?”

“Out?”

“Of the Parana Republic?”

“Same way I get in, I guess.”

“You cocky bastard,” he said. But there was longing in his voice. What he didn't know and what I didn't tell him is, it works both ways. Sometimes guys like me long to change places with guys like him, but our way of life, such as it is, is finished if we say so out loud. We don't even whisper it. After a while, if we're lucky, or busy, we forget it.

Monday morning we buried Andy. The sky had clouded over during the night and a cold rain which threatened to become snow fell on the cemetery. Jack and Betty Morley came to the funeral with the information that Andy had been a nominal Episcopalian. The minister delivered a short eulogy in the rain. He was a tall thin fellow whose white collar gleamed like bleached bone at his throat. He had never even seen Andy.

The Morleys dropped me off at the office and I wasted an hour poking through my mail. The icy rain rattled on the window. You couldn't even see the Treasury Building across the street. I felt like something wet and somehow obscene in a chrysalis, waiting to be born. It was too early to hit the bottle. It was too early to go home. I cleaned and oiled my Magnum and put a patch through the bore. It came out spotless, but I cleaned and oiled the Magnum again, anyway.

Then Jack Morley called. An hour later I met him outside the Paraguayan Embassy. I was drenched. He had an umbrella which made Chamberlain's look like a Japanese parasol.

“Guy'll do it,” he said glumly. “If you want.”

I said I wanted, and we went inside together. Jack's Paraguayan contact stared at me suspiciously as I did the paper work for my visa, as if he knew I had to leave the country in a hurry without permission. Jack looked at him when I had finished the papers. “Tomorrow, perhaps,” he said, and gave a Latin shrug. Jack winked at me. Outside he told me his Paraguayan contact was a pessimist. Tomorrow perhaps looked like a sure thing.

Jack invited me home for dinner. I said no, then let him twist my arm. It was a pleasant, domestic evening, the kind Jack experienced every day of the year. Nobody mentioned Andy. Betty's corned beef and cabbage would have melted the heart of even a Black Irishman. Her maiden name had been O'Leary.

I got back to the converted brownstone at a little after nine. The rain had stopped during the late afternoon, but a raw wind had blown in from the Potomac all day and sleet was falling now. The landlady had sprinkled the outside stairs with rock salt and was just going in when I arrived.

“Not a fit night out,” she mumbled. She had always been a little leary of me. She liked stenographers and clerks and Pentagon-stationed brass and civil-service hacks better than divorced private detectives who came and went at odd hours.

I made an appropriate meteorological comment.

“Man looking for you a while ago,” she said.

“He leave a name?”

“Nope.”

“What'd he look like?”

“Just a man. I ain't a detective, Mr. Drum.” She slapped that one at me like a challenge. I didn't accept it.

She disappeared behind the door of her first-floor apartment. I went up the inside stairs, shrugging out of my sodden topcoat. It was supposed to be water-repellent. It was as water-repellent as a pail of sand.

Cut it out, I said to myself. There must be somebody somewhere who feels meaner and more ornery than you.

There was. I opened the door and found him.

The hall light sent a narrow rectangle of yellow into my living room. A shadow moved alongside it. I reached for the light switch and froze reaching. Then I dove hard to the right, away from the yellow rectangle of light, clawing the Magnum out of its harness. A Brontosaurus kicked the back of my head. Something shattered and my Magnum clattered away across the linoleum. I fell to my knees. My forehead struck the linoleum as the shadow of a gigantic pair of legs, elongated by the hall light, fell across the narrow yellow rectangle. I grabbed for one of the legs and held on. Someone groaned. I never knew which one of us it was. The shadow stumbled, the door slammed shut, and it was dark again.

The leg kicked. I held on and was dragged across the linoleum. The door opened a crack. A sliver of light darted into the room and found my face. I squinted and was kicked and almost let go of the leg. The door closed with a noise like a pistol shot. I let go of the leg and stumbled to my feet. The darkness swung and dipped.

He was a big guy, as big or bigger than I am. I swung my left. His forearm cushioned the blow, my knuckles barely flicking against his face. He cried out in surprise and the terror of anticipated pain, as if he had never been hit before. I hit him again, better this time, with the right, and he began to blubber. He was big, like a sack of meal or a tub of lard can be big. I sank one into his belly and he sagged against the door and went down.

I put the light on and looked at him. He held his hands in front of his face, expecting to be beaten. His mouth hung slack. His nose was bloody and would swell. There were tears on his cheeks. His fingers did a dance of fear in front of his face, like grubs of some impossibly large insect. His eyes beseeched me. Let me go, they may have said. Hit me again, they may have said. I wasn't sure which. I don't think he was, either. A sound escaped his throat, like the bellow of a gut-shot animal. Then he covered his face with his hands and began to cry. He'd stay put for a while.

I went into the kitchen and got a bottle. He had sprinkled the living room linoleum with ceramic shards when he broke the table lamp over my head. I found my Magnum among them and holstered it. I walked over to him.

Someone knocked at the door. The man sitting against it, whose name was Preston Baylis, stopped crying as if I had shut off a switch.

“Yeah?” I said.

“What's the matter in there?” my landlady called suspiciously.

“Bad dream,” I said sheepishly.

The door didn't hide her satisfied smile. It was in her voice. “Well, I shouldn't wonder,” she said. Her footsteps went away.

I squatted near Baylis. “Drink this.”

“I can't.” He was crying again, softly. He let the words spill out between sobs. “I'll gag. I'll be sick.”

“Then get control of yourself.”

He took a deep breath, as if fighting for oxygen. The sobbing surrendered to an onslaught of hiccups. I dragged him to his feet and he came, unresisting, like the sack of meal he resembled. He was shapeless and flaccid, as if all the bones had been drawn out of his body without damaging the soft flesh and the well-cared-for skin. I took him over to the sofa. He sat down there, hiccupping. He looked up at me. “I'll drink it now,” he said.

I put the neck of the bottle to his lips. Its contents sloshed over his chin and down his shirtfront, but he drank plenty of it too. Then he took a breath and drank some more.

“Anything,” he said. “Anything.” The hiccups had gone. “I can't do anything right.” Tears glistened on his cheeks.

“What were you trying to do right?”

He started to say something, and blubbered. I waited, but not patiently. My head pulsed with pain. I said, “If you don't get hold of yourself I'm going to call the cops.”

His cheeks shook. He pawed at his trim mustache. His fingers came away sticky with blood. The way he looked at them, I thought he would be sick on the sofa. Sweat beaded his forehead. He smelled of fear.

“You the guy who came around before?” I asked him.

“The landlady was cleaning your apartment. I talked to her. We went down the stairs together. Please don't call the police, please. Please. I saw she didn't lock the door. She went into another apartment on the first floor, so I came back upstairs.”

“For what?”

He smiled. It was as fleeting and meaningless as the smile of a politician just informed of his election defeat. He said, “It was your idea.”

“What was?”

He didn't say anything.

I leaned over and lifted the telephone off its cradle. He heard the dial tone. He would have heard it from the other end of the room. “No,” he said. “All right. All right.”

“What was my idea?”

“Calling down there. I called Lequerica in Ciudad Grande. He told me you had Rafael Caballero's manuscript.”

Lequerica hadn't known that. I had lied about it only to Duarte, but they had flown down to the Parana Republic together and could have talked about it.

I waited without speaking. Baylis said, wrenching a laugh up from his guts, “Tell me, was it in that attaché case yesterday?”

I nodded.

He stared at the blood on his fingers and went pale, but managed a smile. “You were going to deliver it to me? Well; weren't you? I almost had it in my hands, didn't I? Didn't I, Chester?”

“That's what you came here looking for?”

“What do you think? Lequerica told me if I didn't get the manuscript for them I could draw the rest of my quarterly pay and then forget about being the Paranaian legal representative here. You know what that would mean.”

“That doesn't sound like Lequerica.”

“I swear on my father's—”

“Shut up. I wouldn't believe you if you swore on a stack of Bibles as high as the Washington Monument. Now why'd you come here?”

“Lequerica said … I wanted to … I should have hired someone to do it. I don't know about these things. I don't know. I didn't know where to turn. I couldn't … you see, my father's name.…” He was wandering. He knew it and didn't want to wander. This was the fight of his life. He clamped his lips shut. His cheeks quivered. Then he said in a flat, steady, faintly hopeful voice, “I'll give you ten thousand dollars for the manuscript.”

“I don't have it now,” I said. But I thought: I know just where to get it. I could go down to Alexandria tomorrow morning and pick it up at the General Delivery window. Hell, there wasn't any hurry. I could wait. They'd keep it at the Alexandria post office for thirty days before depositing it in their unclaimed file. Ten thousand dollars. I could wait. The offer would probably go up. Fifteen thousand. Maybe twenty. It was nice to think of, like a dying man's dreams of youth and health and the clean-lined, unwrinkled women he had loved. It was just about as tenable. Andy had died protecting that manuscript, without knowing what it contained. Eulalia Mistral could have sold out. But it was nice to think about.

“Fifteen thousand,” Baylis said. “They're tough, Chester. They're tougher than you think. They'll get it from you, and you won't have a thing.” He wasn't blubbering now. He was almost his sweet old self again. He gave me the nervous little laugh to prove it.

“Maybe they're tough,” I said. “But they didn't send you.”

A muscle at the back of his jaw skipped as he said, “How's about a retainer of five thousand dollars a year, for life? Lawyers retain private dectectives, you know.”

“Do tell.”

“No, I mean there won't be anything unusual about it. Five thousand a year. I'll write up a contract now, right now, if you wish.”

I picked him up by his lapels. He came upright flaccidly. If I let go of his lapels he would fall back into the chair, unjointed, boneless. “I don't want your money,” I said. “In any amount, in cash or on the time-payment plan. I don't want it in big bills. I don't want it in small bills. You understand? I don't want it. Not now and not at any time in the future.”

“What're you so mad about? If you think it's blood money …”

I released one of his lapels and struck his face with the flat of my hand. His jacket tore. I let go of him and he fell heavily on the sofa. “It's like you say, Baylis. Blood money. But you wouldn't understand what that means, so don't ever say it again to me.”

He chanted, on the verge of blubbering again, “Please don't call the police. Please don't call the police.”

“You called Lequerica. I'll buy that. Then what happened?”

“He told me about the manuscript.”

“But he didn't tell you to get it?”

“No. No, he didn't.”

“Because he didn't have to? Because he knew you'd make a try for it on your own?”

“There are things Caballero might have written … wild things.…”

There was nothing in the Caballero manuscript about Preston Baylis, but I didn't say that. I said, “I read the book.”

Brokenly he admitted, “No one told me to come here.”

I jerked my thumb toward the door. “Get out of my apartment,” I said. He didn't have to be urged. I heard him running down the stairs.

I left the door open and went to the window and opened that too. Cold rain came blowing in. After a while I shut the window and the smell of Preston Baylis was gone. I put the bottle away and undressed and slept like a baby.

In the morning Jack Morley called and told me to come and get my visa.

Chapter Eleven

C
AYMAN
alligators bawled on the swampy banks of the river. I had never been within bawling distance of a wild alligator before, never been in a swamp where with every step I floundered knee-deep in mud, never been entering a country illegally with a guide named Ansensio Martinez—or named anything else for that matter—and another man, also entering illegally, whose face I hadn't seen in the darkness of the Paraguayan night.