The Frighteners (19 page)

The nameless woman was rubbing her rawhide-chafed wrists. She took the glass I offered her with a curt nod of thanks. Lean and moderately tall, she was one of the short-haired girls who look a bit like boys, except that the boys mostly wear it to their shoulders nowadays. The light brown hair was trimmed closely enough to her head to display her ears and the nape of her neck. She was wearing white jeans tucked into high brown boots with moderate heels. A man’s blue shirt hung outside her pants, cinched in at her waist by a concha belt that must have weighed several pounds and cost several hundred bucks, maybe several thousand. The prices of that silver stuff are getting stratospheric. There was also a very good squash-blossom necklace.

She was handsome in a severe way, but she didn’t do anything for me. I guess I prefer soft, skirted females to hard, panted and booted ones. This one was in her late twenties, I judged, and she looked tough—well, call it competent—with a square jaw, a firm mouth with long, thin lips on which she wore no makeup, a thin, straight nose, and a good tan. Looking at her, I realized that I was being stupid. She not only looked a bit like a boy, I knew the boy she looked like. He was standing right beside her. Well, at least she wasn’t the susceptible kind of dame, past her girlhood and aware of it, who’d deliberately pick that kind of handsome, immature young stud to travel with. Who gets to pick their siblings?

Still watching the lady, I shoved a glass down the bar toward Mason Charles. “Brother and sister?” I asked.

The woman nodded, but it was Charles who responded dryly: “After I told her over the phone about our. . . well, encounter, Jo decided she’d better come down to keep her baby brother out of trouble.”

The woman murmured, “Charging around a foreign country with an illegal gun, shooting the wrong people.”

Mason Charles protested: “He calls himself Cody, how could I know he wasn’t? You didn’t really know it yourself until this girl told us just now. And anyway, I didn’t shoot him, did I?”

Disregarding him, I spoke to the sister, “Jo for Josephine?”

“Jo for Joanna,” she said. “Joanna Beckman, but Beckman doesn’t live here any more, thank God.”

I studied her for a moment. “You objected to your brother’s shooting the wrong people. Are you in favor of his shooting the right people?”

“Like the people who killed our mother?” She shrugged. “It’s not a big thing with me, Mr. Cody or whoever you are. I don’t have the burning yearning for retribution that Mason does. Maybe the mother-daughter bond isn’t quite as strong as the mother-son bond, if you know what I mean. But my brother feels he has to do it, and I guess I’ve kind of got into the habit of looking after him. Little Mother Jo.”

“Ain’t that the everlasting truth,” Mason Charles said ruefully. He grinned. “Well, I suppose somebody had to, after Pop rolled his pickup on a county road in the rain. I was all of four years old at the time. Jo was ten. She kind of took over the house, and me, while Millie went to work to support us—she liked us to call her Millie; we only called her Mom or Mother to tease her.” His mouth tightened. “God, she was so . . . she was such a wonderful person; and after all those years she had to spend slaving in those lousy oil company offices, just when it looked as if things were finally going to break right for her, that slimy, gun-smuggling sonofabitch set her up for murder!

Just because he was afraid of what his partner might have learned poking around down there in Mexico and thought some of it might have rubbed off on her!” He made a wry face. “But it seems I’ve been practicing my Mad Avenger act on the wrong Cody!”

Jo Beckman said, “I knew there had to be something funny going on. That’s why I came down here to see for myself. . . . According to Junior, you behaved in such a reasonable and civilized way in that rest room that I couldn’t help wondering if he wasn’t making a horrible mistake. I thought I’d better come down and see this paragon of courage and self-control with my own eyes before . . . before something irrevocable happened.”

“You mean, before your brother took another crack at me and killed me?’’

She shook her heard. “No, before he took another crack at you and you killed him.” She was watching me steadily. “Of course, I didn’t want him to have it on his conscience, shooting the wrong man; but I was more afraid . . . He’s pretty good at targets, and he’s done quite a bit of hunting, but it’s not the same thing, is it? Making neat little bullet holes in paper and shooting deer and antelope, and maybe an elk or two, doesn’t really qualify an amateur to go up against a professional, does it?”

I frowned. “What makes you think I’m a pro?”

She laughed shortly. “What else can you call a man who’ll calmly size up a tense situation involving firearms—and it had to be very tense from what Junior said—and then trust his judgment to the extent of putting away his gun and turning his back on a loaded weapon in the hands of ... I guess I really knew, the minute I heard it, that you couldn’t be Cody, although it took me a while to accept it because it seemed so very far out. But no macho, self-made Texas millionaire would ever walk away from a scene like that, even with his wife’s life at stake. What, run from a wet-nosed kid with a toy pistol when he had a gun of his own? Sorry, Junior, but what I’m trying to say is that it would never happen, no matter who got killed!”

I said, ‘‘So you told your brother over the phone that I couldn’t be the man he wanted. And I suppose he told you you were nuts.”

She laughed ruefully. “Well, you can hardly blame him. He’d seen a tall, bald, gray-bearded man all dressed in white go into a church in Texas and come out with a beautiful bride. A few hours later he saw a tall, bald, gray-bearded man in white go into a restaurant in Mexico with the same beautiful bride, a girl Junior recognized although we don’t move in the same social circles as the former Miss Pierce, and she’d made a point of not getting to know us in spite of the fact that her father and our mother were . . . Well, never mind that!”

I glanced at Antonia, who’d stirred uneasily. “Did you wish to say something, señorita?”

She shook her head. “No. No, I have nothing to say. It has already been said: You are not Cody. But I would like another cerveza, please.”

I opened one and gave it to her. I turned to the boy. “Unlike Miss Sisneros, you obviously didn’t know Cody by sight.”

“No, we never met any of the people Millie worked with,” he said. “Except Will Pierce, after. . . Well, when they started talking marriage, Millie brought him home to meet us, but the proud daughter stayed away. I only recognized her because I’d seen her picture in the paper.” He shook his head angrily. “Dammit, how could I guess somebody’d switched Codys on me? The man at the wedding had to be Cody; no phony could have fooled all his friends at the wedding reception. And hours later, in Cananea, there was Gloria still playing the loving bride; if she continued to accept you, why shouldn’t I?” He grimaced. “I told Jo she was out of her tree. I told her she was hallucinating, and she’d better stop smoking that strong stuff and settle for cancer and emphysema.”

“That was when I decided I’d better come down here,” the sister said to me. “It was all wrong! You were behaving all wrong and so was Gloria. The fact that she wouldn’t listen to a word against you and defended you hotly against Junior’s accusations ... I mean, a young girl madly in love with a boy her own age might shut her mind to any hint that her beloved wasn’t perfect, but one who’d deliberately married a man so much older, well, you’d expect her to see him more clearly—clearly enough to be just a bit uneasy when she heard him accused of dreadful crimes, clearly enough to want to hear a bit more before launching into indignant denials. But young Mrs. Cody didn’t. Junior said she just lit into him the minute the door closed behind you.’’

The boy laughed. “She surely did. Whew!”

Jo Beckman said, “It wasn’t natural, not for a girl like that.”

“A girl like what?” I asked, a bit sharply.

Even if it had only been a brief midnight incident initiated by her, you tend to feel protective—maybe the word is possessive—about a girl you’ve slept with; and I do hate to hear females running each other down. Not that males haven’t been known to do a bit of backbiting on occasion.

“All right, all right, I’ll admit I’m prejudiced,” Jo Beckman said. She was looking at me knowingly as if she’d just learned something about me; and perhaps she had. She went on: “All I really know about Gorgeous Gloria is what I’ve read on the society pages and what Millie used to tell us about Will Pierce’s snooty debutante daughter giving her a hard time.’’ Jo shrugged. “Well, to be fair, I suppose any girl, particularly an only child, is going to find it traumatic when her widower daddy starts fucking his secretary and talking about marrying her. But I really wouldn’t have expected Miss Gloria, brought up wealthy and spoiled the way she was, to put on such a touching demonstration of loyalty. Childlike faith isn’t very big in society circles; but Junior said she showed no hesitation, no suspicion, no doubts at all, no uneasy curiosity about her daddy’s death, just total anger at the suggestion that her wonderful new husband could be involved in any way. It couldn’t be for real. It had to be an act.”

Mason Charles said defensively, “She was damn convincing. It never occurred to me she could be lying.”

His sister said, “But that’s just the point. She was damn convincing because she wasn’t lying. She insisted that this wonderful man hadn’t had her daddy killed. Well, this wonderful man hadn’t. Cody had, but this man wasn’t Cody and she knew it, so she could proclaim his innocence with perfect sincerity. Obviously she was doing her best to help him with his impersonation. It was the only answer that worked, loony though it seemed.” Jo frowned at me. “Which brings up the question, why would she help you pretend you’re her husband? It’s got to mean she’s working against him. Why? We know what we’ve got against him, Millie’s murder. We know what the Señorita has against him, the death of her man, what was his name, Medina?”

Antonia spoke: “His name was Jorge Miguel Medina de Campo.”

“Whatever,” the tall girl said. “But what was Glorious Gloria’s motive? And please don’t try to tell me she was charging around a foreign country with a strange man who was pretending to be her husband simply because she’d learned about her would-be bridegroom’s gunrunning project, and it was against her fine, nonviolent principles!”

I said, “Well, the guns were part of it; but she’d also learned that once she was safely married to him, Cody planned to kill her for her money. We can go into the details some other time. ’ ’ Jo said sharply, “That’s more like it! I can see her getting very upset about a threat to her own lovely skin.”

I said, “Miaow, miaow.”

Jo flushed slightly. “All right, I told you I was prejudiced. Even if there was nothing personal between us, I just can’t stand those useless, pampered beauties.”

I asked, “What’s your feeling on the subject of munitions smuggling?”

She shrugged. “That’s a pretty dumb question, Mr. Cody or whatever your real name is. It depends on whom the munitions are being smuggled to, doesn’t it? If George Washington had been running short of muskets and lead and gunpowder at Valley Forge, and we could have got a shipment to him, wouldn’t we have been all for it, even high-minded Gloria Pierce or whatever her name is now? I suppose you can find equally worthy causes nowadays if you look hard enough. To say that guns are always evil is to say that nothing’s worth fighting for.” She grimaced. “God, Soapbox Beckman strikes again!”

Mason Charles said, “Did Cody really plan to marry Princess Gloria and then murder her? The man must be a real monster!”

I said, “It seems to be pretty well established that he had an elaborate plot going, first to scare her into his arms and then to dispose of her after she’d made a will in his favor, which she’d undoubtedly have done if she hadn’t been tipped off to his plans. His connection with your mother’s murder, and Pierce’s, is a little more tenuous. He gained by them, of course, to the extent that Pierce was a threat to him; but as you probably heard me tell Miss Sisneros, the murders were actually committed by the people for whom the shipment of arms was intended, a movement calling itself the National Liberty Party that plays feebly at Mexican politics to make itself look harmless and ineffectual while secretly it’s making plans to take over the government by force. The name to remember is Carlos Mondragon.” I hesitated. “Talking about names, does the name Sabádo mean anything to anybody? Señor Sabádo? Mr. Saturday?”

I was watching the Mexican girl as the most likely source of information on this subject. She looked blank, and Jo Beckman shook her head without hesitation.

“Charles?”

He shook his head. “I was just going to say it when you did, that it’s the Spanish word for Saturday.”

“Yes, I know.” I changed the subject. “So your mother was going to marry Will Pierce? That was the break you said she’d got at last?”

The boy nodded. “Yes, she was pretty happy about it; but they had to put off the wedding for this Mexico trip. Will had just learned, somehow, that Cody was involved in some kind of a shady deal down here that could be disastrous for the partnership. Apparently it wasn’t the first time Cody had got greedy and almost ruined them. Will had to rush down here to investigate the situation and, if possible, repair the damage. Millie insisted on going with him; she called it her honeymoon-in-advance.”

“Some honeymoon!” Jo Beckman said grimly.

I said, “Keeping weapons from self-styled Latin patriots is about as safe as keeping meat from hungry lions. I’m surprised Pierce would let her come along.”

Brother and sister both laughed. Jo Beckman said, ‘ ‘You didn’t let or not-let Millie do things, right, Junior?”

Señorita Antonia Sisneros, rather rudely ignored by the three of us at the bar, had taken her second beer to the big chair in which—with her prisoners gagged and hog-tied on the honeymoon bed in the next room—she’d awaited the arrival of Horace Hosmer Cody earlier. She was listening with interest. I didn’t lake her heavy accent too seriously. I had a hunch she understood most of what was going on, even though we were employing pretty rapid-fire English.