Murder Is My Dish (9 page)

“But how did you—”

“It was nothing. The
Mistral
has a crew of three officers, counting myself, and eighteen men. Three of these men, including Ramon Fuentes, had contacts in New York. They were kept under constant watch. The only one behaving suspiciously for a simple sailor in port was Fuentes. Finally I followed him to the Hernandez apartment. Then the three of them went away. Inside, I found some samples of a ransom note. I waited. The rest you know.”

He was a craggy-faced giant in the deep shadows thrown by the ship's wheel lamp. He smiled at me—or his mouth smiled. I couldn't see the eyes in their pockets of shadow. “They deserved to die,” he said softly, “didn't they?”

I said, “Did Dineen deserve to die too?”

“Dineen? I don't know that name.”

“Rafael Caballero's bodyguard.”

He came around the desk and hulked toward me. I moved the Magnum. “No. You better wait right there.”

He said, “You interest me, Mr. Drum. You are with Ramon and his friend when they return. Obviously you can't be of the Bureau Federal. But the Bureau Federal says you are. I have curiosity, Mr. Drum.” He smiled again. “But if I were you I wouldn't satisfy it all at once. If you do, who is to say a reason exists for letting you off this ship alive?”

“I'll remember that.”

“Did you ever dabble at international intrigue, Mr. Drum? It's the world's most exciting game. It is the only exciting game left. And for a man in my position, that includes women.” He chuckled. The chuckle was as incongruous as the washed-out blue eyes which I couldn't see now, as unexpected as the sudden world weariness in his voice or the admission he had just made.

“You're jaded.”

“Jaded? Perhaps. But you're alive and that's the reason. Now then.”

“I'm a private detective. My associate was Rafael Caballero's bodyguard.”

“He wasn't big enough.”

I let that one float by. I tried to see his eyes, but the shadows hid them. He was playing with me. If he grew tired of his little game he had twenty men behind me and the gun in my hand might hurt him but wouldn't do me much good. I took a deep breath and shuffled and tried dealing myself some life insurance.

“A city cop's on West Street waiting for me.”

“Congratulations. You're a private detective who gets along with the police.”

“Live and let live,” I said. Hopefully.

He chuckled. He had brains to match his size. He could read me easily, too easily. “What else do you have?”

“This gun. I can get you first.”

“In the jungles in the northern part of my country, I hunt the jaguar for sport with our
caudillo
, Indalecio Grande. We often use only bow and arrow, Mr. Drum. Death and I, we are old friends. What else do you have?” If anyone else had said that I would have laughed in his face or maybe marched him out of there at gunpoint and over to Manhattan Homicide, where they could find people who would recognize the big man fleeing from Julio Hernandez's place. But with Pablo Duarte it was different. He lived the life usually reserved for the video melodramas. He didn't merely live it, he played at it. He meant what he said.

I said, “If I poked this gun in the small of your back and told you to get moving?”

“Try it. I wouldn't.”

I sighed. There is something which the ancient Egyptians called the
ka
, the life-force which goes out of the body at death. Part of it left me with that sigh and I said, “You killed Rafael Caballero because his book could rip hell out of Indalecio Grande's regime. You killed him, but you didn't get the book.”

“I killed Ramon Fuentes and his friend. You saw me do that. It is all I admit.”

I said, “I have the book.”

We breathed. The ship rolled slightly. We breathed some more. On the other side of the world, the gangplank creaked. His big hands came up. I tensed. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. The gangplank creaked again. It seemed much closer. I was watching his hands. He wanted me to watch them. This time the ship hadn't rolled. An arm mugged me from behind and the edge of a hand came down on my wrist. I swore and stamped down with my left heel on someone's instep. A cold wind blew behind me. Pablo Duarte laughed. I stamped again. A cry escaped unseen lips and I got out of the mugger's grip. I swung around and hit the man standing there. My hand went numb. I brought the Magnum around and hit him with that too. Two teeth flew like erratic white bullets from his mouth, and blood welled. He fell against the open door, sobbing with pain.

Then Pablo Duarte got hold of my right arm and twisted it behind me in a hammerlock. “I'll break it,” he said.

My upper arm got as tight as it was going to get. Any more, and something had to give. I let go of the gun. Pablo Duarte released my arm and went back to the desk. He broke the Magnum under the light of the ship's wheel and tapped the bullets from their chambers. When he had them all in his hand he tossed the Magnum back at me. The man on the floor groaned.

“Is this of the book true?” Duarte asked me.

“Go ahead and gamble it's not. If I don't show up when I'm supposed to, you'll find out.”

“I'll find out. Be assured.”

“I'm walking out of here.”

His massive shoulders lifted and fell. “I wish I could follow you. I like you, Drum.”

“Like you like your jaguars?”

His laughter boomed. “Yes,” he said. “I only wish I could follow you.”

I made a motion toward the cabin door with my hand and bowed a little. “Alphonse,” I said, trying out a smile.

He shook his head. “It is the one drawback to my size. For such work we have other men.”

I said, “You killed Caballero. You killed Dineen.”

He said, smiling, “Do you believe in the afterlife?”

“What about it?”

“Let Caballero and Dineen tell you. Now get out of here.”

I stepped over the man slumped at the door. It was still raining. The deck was slippery underfoot. “Don't forget to ask them,” Pablo Duarte called after me, and laughed.

Chapter Eight

W
HEN
I opened the self-service elevator door in the lobby of Rafael Caballero's apartment building half an hour later, Eulalia Mistral smiled at me from inside the car and told me I was just in time to carry her bags out.

“The only reason I haven't thanked you for last night is because I don't know how to thank you enough, Chet,” she added.

She had two tan cowhide valises. I carried them and we went outside together. The collar of her trench coat was up. We walked down the block. The rain had given way to a fine cold mist which sparkled in her hair.

“Sometimes you have to park blocks away,” she said.

“There's one way you can thank me.”

“I'd love to, Chet. Really. Just tell me how.”

“Don't go.”

“Chet, I told you about my mother.”

“They killed Caballero. You were close to him. His wife didn't take any interest in his work, did she?”

“No, I guess she didn't.”

“You did.”

“Poor Rafael wasn't even safe in the middle of New York.”

“But down there you—”

“Please. My mother has a bad heart. She's an invalid. Every year might be her last Christmas.”

I said coldly, and knew it was a mistake when I saw Eulalia's face, “Isn't she kind of old for that sort of thing?”

“Christmas was also their wedding anniversary. Well, here's the car.”

We stood at the curb. I put down the bags while she opened the trunk lid. I put the bags inside and she closed the trunk. “You donating the car to Pan American or someone?” I asked.

She laughed. “A friend of mine will pick the car up at the airport for me, silly.”

“Well, call him up and tell him not to. I've got some time. I could drive you.”

“It's a her. Invitation accepted, Chet, with thanks. I'll call her from Idlewild.”

We started to drive. I was behind the wheel. “How's Mrs. Caballero?”

“With the police, arranging to have the money returned. Now she's blaming me for giving it to the phony kidnapers. Boy, that Frances!”

“Hate her?”

“No, I feel sorry for her. Chet, don't look now, but I think we're being followed. You made three turns, and he's still behind us.”

“Taxi cab?” I said.

“Yes, but how did you—”

“We're old friends. When he sees where we're going, he'll be righteously indignant. I'm not supposed to leave town.”

“Are you going to?”

“Not from Idlewild. When I get ready to leave, the guy in the taxi won't know about it.”

We took the expressway south. I watched the signs on top of the pier buildings to our right. Pretty soon we went by Parana Republic Lines. It gave me a funny feeling, like walking over your own grave on the family plot after you've had the stone set in place with everything already on it but the final date.

We drove all the way down to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel in silence. Eulalia was nice, to sit next to. She wasn't one of those girls who had to keep the chatter going compulsively. We drove out on the Belt Parkway and when we came up alongside the gleaming glass façade of the Veterans' Hospital beyond Fort Hamilton, Eulalia said, “You must lead an exciting life. How'd you ever get to be a private detective?”

I told her about the F.B.I. and the little office on F Street. She told me about her early years, when her father had been a member of the Parana Republic's diplomat corps, stationed in England and. the U.S. It was why she spoke English as well as she did. Then she told me about the revolution and Indalecio Grande and the seven years she spent in a convent on the Parana River. There were some wild dogs living on the convent grounds, four or five males and one bitch. Then one day the bitch was in heat and the girls got a lesson not meant to be part of the convent curriculum. The dogs were driven away, the girls were upbraided for their curiosity, and señor Mistral withdrew his daughter from the convent.

Eulalia laughed. “Dad was like that. What was natural was good, he used to say. He loved to read Rousseau. He …” Her voice choked up then and she added softly, “A year after I left the convent they killed him.”

We drove the rest of the way without talking. I parked at the Idlewild lot and a redcap took Eulalia's bags and checked them in for her flight, a Pan American DC-7 first-class and tourist combination through to Ciudad Grande with a stopover at Caracas, Venezuela. We still had forty-five minutes after Eulalia's luggage was weighed and after the dispatcher assured us the flight would take off despite the weather, and we spent most of them at the Brass Rail Restaurant in the Administration Building.

Eulalia had a whisky sour and I had Jack Daniels on the rocks, and there was nothing compulsive about her drinking now. We talked about nothing very important, and the more we talked the more I found myself liking Eulalia. Then a voice on the P.A. said, “Pan American Flight Twelve for Caracas and Ciudad Grande now loading at Gate Seven,” but we waited, still talking, until the voice said, “Pan American Flight Twelve for Caracas and Ciudad Grande now ready for departure at Gate Seven.” Then we got up and I paid the bill and we went on over there.

“I'm sorry it's time,” Eulalia said. “I like talking to you. Will you call me when I get back to the States?'

“I'll call you. Have a good trip.”

The usual words, trite and with much less meaning than they should have had because everyone used them, and then afterward the thought of the other words, the better words, the cleverer words you never thought of when you should have spoken them.

“Be careful.”

“Sure I will, but I'm not the pilot.”

“I mean when you're down there.”

“Look, Chet! Look at the distinguished company I'll have.”

I looked. Filing through the gate and out into the drizzling rain and past the double cyclone fence to the taxiing apron and the waiting DC-7, were Primo Blas Lequerica and Kiki Magyar.

“She's lovely, isn't she?” Eulalia said.

Before I could answer, someone tapped my shoulder. It was Grundy's little gray man. “I been watching you,” he said, wagging a finger. “You wouldn't be going any place?”

“Not this trip,” I said.

Then Eulalia turned and came against me impulsively, her lips brushing mine. I placed my hand on the small of her back and she only had time to say, “Hey, now,” before I pulled her to me and really kissed her. At first she was surprised, but then her lips parted to show me she liked it. After a while we both let go and she smiled at me and I smiled at her idiotically, and she turned and went across the apron to the flight stairs, walking very fast.

Grundy's man had moved off to a discreet distance. Eulalia went up the flight stairs without waving. I still had her taste on my lips. I stood there against the first cyclone fence, waiting. Two passengers, a woman and a young girl, went out after Eulalia. A couple of ground crewmen trotted efficiently out to the flight stairs, ready to remove them.

Just then a man came up swiftly behind me and rushed with long strides through the space between the fences. He didn't have to run. He was a very big man and his strides were enormous. He wore a black leather trench coat and a black snap-brim hat. The ground crewmen waited officiously at the flight stairs.

I hadn't seen his face, but I didn't have to. He was Pablo Duarte, and he wasn't taking a slow boat home to the Parana Republic. He went up the flight stairs, and the passenger door of the DC-7 was slammed shut behind him. Then the flight stairs were wheeled away.

Eulalia Mistral. Primo Blas Lequerica and Kiki Magyar. Pablo Duarte. All going south in a hurry, in the same plane.

The engines started with puffs of blue exhaust smoke. The Pan Am flight dispatcher tossed a fancy highball up at the DC-7's nose and the plane turned and taxied slowly, then with gathering speed, along the runway. It looked like a small silver midge when it made its turn at the far end of the field. Then it came back very quickly, engines roaring, and was airborne, barely seeming to top the cargo buildings beyond the flight tower.