Whisper Death (11 page)

“Mrs. Vargas . . .” McGuire began.

“Who are you?” the man in the tuxedo demanded. His demeanour had snapped from sympathetic to authoritative.

Glynnis Vargas turned to McGuire. “It's all right,” she cautioned the man, who was bristling with anger. Her hand touched his shoulder. “This is Mr. McGuire. He's a police officer. Mr. McGuire, this is Henry Gruenstein, the museum's curator and manager.”

Gruenstein extended a pink, sweaty hand in reluctant greeting. McGuire shook it, his eyes on Glynnis Vargas. She opened her hand, displaying the severed head in her palm.

“Look what someone has done to the Mona Lisa of the Andes,” she said. “Look what a barbarian did to one of my babies.”

“Who?”

Gruenstein answered for her. “We don't know. It happened after Mrs. Vargas inspected them just a few minutes ago. . . .”

“Mr. McGuire was with me,” Glynnis Vargas interjected. “We examined them together.” Her sadness had turned to quiet seething.

“Our security guard, Wayne,” gesturing at the man, now sullen and defensive, who had barred entry to the sculpture court, “discovered this vandalism on his rounds.”

McGuire turned to the guard waiting in the doorway. “How often do you make your rounds?”

“Every twenty minutes,” the guard replied. “I go from here, though the McCormick Gallery, up along the north hall, check the Western American Art Wing and return by the south hall . . .”

“It doesn't matter,” Glynnis Vargas interrupted. “It's too late for this Sam Spade nonsense. The damage has been done.” She set the figurine's head gently back on the shelf, looked at it with sadness for a moment, then turned to the men. “Henry, I want the court closed immediately. From now on the figurines will be mounted behind tempered glass to protect them from further damage. Have the new display designed, priced and submitted to me for approval. Until then no one,
no
one, is to enter this court without two security guards accompanying them and their names recorded. And don't bother reporting this to the police. There's always a risk of inspiring other hoodlums.”

Gruenstein closed his eyes and nodded.

McGuire arched his eyebrows in surprise.

“Mr. McGuire, you have a car I presume?” Glynnis Vargas asked.

“It's parked across the lot,” McGuire began.

“Then please be kind enough to take me home.”

“It may have been an accident.”

They left the parking lot in silence, McGuire driving through the desert dusk along Palm Canyon Drive. The sun had set behind the San Jacinto Mountains an hour earlier. An hour's less sunlight each day was another price paid by Los Angeles citizens who fled to Palm Springs to escape the smog, chaos and climate of the city.

On Palm Canyon Drive, McGuire noticed young men in valet uniforms standing impatiently in front of restaurants in the downtown area, awaiting the arrival of late diners in their limousines. Their presence amused McGuire—he wondered if the restaurants were rated as much for the quality of their valet service as for the texture of their béarnaise sauces and the selection of their vintage Bordeaux wines. He grew aware of something else. Something about the valets that puzzled him, nagged at his mind.

“It was no accident,” Glynnis Vargas said icily. “It was wanton destruction. Someone seized her with one hand and snapped off her head with the other.”

“Any idea who? Or why?”

She lowered her head, a hand across her eyes. “No,” she replied softly.

“It looked as though it could be easily repaired,” McGuire offered.

She smiled across at him. “What's your background, Mr. McGuire?” she asked. “Where are you from?”

McGuire told her. “Worcester, Massachusetts. A factory town. My father worked in a foundry. My mother was a housewife. I was a street kid.” He turned west off Palm Canyon onto Vista Chino. “A totally different world from yours.”

“Of course it is,” she purred. “But not better or worse. Only different.”

“You weren't born wealthy either, were you?”

“No. Just with a desire to be rich. I knew that if I was rich, I could acquire things that matter. Like culture. And freedom. Maybe even wisdom. And I almost have. Unfortunately, I have discovered the wretchedness of being rich is that you spend most of your time around other rich people.”

“You seem to fit in well,” McGuire offered.

“Do I?” She leaned against her door, as though searching for a fresh perspective on McGuire. “Now, you see, I don't know whether I have been flattered or insulted.”

“I didn't mean to do either.”

“No, you didn't. A man like you wouldn't. Which makes you so different from everyone else who was there tonight. Do you read philosophy, Mr. McGuire?”

McGuire snorted. “I'm a cop, Mrs. Vargas. Philosophy's not worth much to a cop.” Not true, a voice in his head began. Ollie Schantz was talking about philosophy just the other day.

“Ignorance is degrading when found in the company of riches. That's what Schopenhauer said about wealthy people. And he was right.”

They were at the end of Vista Chino, where Via Linda began its ascent up the hill to the three isolated villas.

“Then why did you come here?” McGuire asked. There was no reply, and McGuire wheeled the car in front of her security gate. In the near darkness cast by the hills around them he turned to her. “You're as rich as these people, but you're not like them. What brought you here from Brazil?”

Her answer startled him. “Poverty,” she said. Her eyes were on the massive shadow of the hill rising behind her house.

“Poverty?” McGuire laughed drily. “Here? In Palm Springs?”

“In Brazil. In Rio, Sao Paulo, everywhere. I couldn't take it anymore. So I had a choice of either staying and trying to ignore my conscience or claiming my American citizenship and coming here. The poverty is still down there. It's just out of sight.” She twisted the door handle.

“Mrs. Vargas,” McGuire said. “Somebody doesn't want you here. Bunker Crawford didn't show up at your house by accident. And what happened tonight was no coincidence. Crawford's dead and my partner is barely alive. Can you tell me what's going on?”

“No,” she said, stepping out of the car. “I can't.”

McGuire sprang from his seat. “I noticed a man around the back of your house when I left this afternoon. He scrambled up the hill when he saw me watching him. I don't think he belonged there.”

“What are you saying, Mr. McGuire?” She extended a finger and pushed a button on the side of her security wall.

“I'm saying I don't think you should go into your house alone. . . .”

A man's voice crackled through the speaker. “
Sim?
”

She spoke a few non-English words in reply and McGuire was reminded again that the second language of California was Spanish. The gate slid open, its metal wheels squeaking in the silence, and Glynnis Vargas looked back at McGuire as she strode between them. “I appreciate your concern, Mr. McGuire,” she said. “Thank you for escorting me home. Please call me tomorrow.”

She entered her lush gardens, and the gate closed behind her.

A dark figure awaited her in the open doorway. They embraced briefly and the door closed. The sound of a security latch sliding in place echoed beyond the palms and shrubbery to McGuire, who stood in the darkness longer than he should have before entering the car and driving away.

Art Lumsden answered McGuire's knock, a cigar clenched between his teeth. He removed it slowly, blew a cloud of blue smoke over McGuire's shoulder and grinned. “Yeah, I'm still here, McGuire,” his voice rumbled. “What's up? Or you just here to borrow a cup of gin?”

“What do you know about Glynnis Vargas?” McGuire asked. He moved away from the door to draw Lumsden outside, and to avoid inhaling his cigar smoke.

Lumsden's smile widened. “Ah, the elegant Miz Vargas. Yes, yes.” He stepped down the walk to join McGuire and rested his considerable weight against the trunk of a sturdy palm. “You ever see so much money and sex on two legs before?”

“You talk to her?”

“Yeah. This morning. She even let me come in the front door. Didn't send me around to the wetback entrance.”

“Where was she when Crawford was shot?”

Lumsden lowered his massive chin and raised his eyes in an expression of disbelief. “Now let me see here. Are you suggesting that Miz Glynnis Vargas, the pride of Palm Springs society, could have stood over there in her Gucci pumps with a two-handed grip on her Smith-and-Wesson and pumped four bullets into poor old Bunkie?”

McGuire rubbed his eyes. His day's supply of adrenaline had dissipated hours ago. “No. I'm just curious to know where she was.”

“At the Desert Museum,” Lumsden replied. “Sipping tea and sherry with half the heavies in town. Arrived about six. Left about eight. Couldn't be more than a hundred, two hundred witnesses with her. How's that?”

McGuire smiled, shrugged, and turned to climb the stairs to his room.

“Hey, McGuire,” he heard Lumsden call after him. “You want I should check what Sinatra was doing at the time? Hell, he lives just down the road a piece.”

For an instant, McGuire was disoriented by a sudden arousal from unconsciousness. Where was he? Blackness all around. A valley of silence following . . . what?

The telephone rang a second time. McGuire looked at the glowing hands of his watch; it was after two o'clock. He groped for the receiver in the dark, brought it to his ear, lay back against the pillow and scratched out “Hello,” still half asleep.

The voice in his ear had a singsong lilt, like an awkward adult befriending a very young child.

“Well, well, well. Did I awake you, sir? Drew you from the arms of Morpheus, did I? Tell me, do you record your dreams? Some idiots do. Kind of like describing hallucinations, isn't it? What would you think of somebody . . .”

McGuire sat upright. “Who the fuck is this?” he almost shouted into the receiver.

He heard cackling laughter in reply. “Oh, that's precious, Mozart. Precious, precious, precious. If you can't be witty, be loud. I agree. Beat their eardrums with decibels . . .” McGuire cursed, reached in the dark with his free hand for the telephone and slammed the receiver down.

He lay back again and closed his eyes.

As he expected, the phone rang again. This time, McGuire sat on the edge of the bed, switched on the bedside light and pulled his pen and notepad to him before answering.

“What do you want?” he said in a flat, threatening voice.

The caller's tone was now serious. “Don't do that, Mozart. Don't hang up on me like that. A late hour it is, I agree. Can't be helped. But there are things to be done in the cover of darkness. No other time. Understand?”

“What's this Mozart stuff?” McGuire asked. He wrote “Mozart?” on the pad.

The caller's voice resumed its friendly singsong patter.

“Yes, yes, the boy genius. Vomiting string quartets all over the place. And there you were in the midst of it, tippling Bordeaux wine. None of that uppity Napa Valley turpentine for those who keep the flame of Palm Springs culture burning like a bright beacon of taste. And nothing for us gathered in the public area, our snotty noses pressed against the class-defined window separating culture from crud. Eh, Mozart? Speak up, sir. Don't just lie there swallowing your bile.”

“So you were at the museum tonight?” McGuire wrote “Museum?” on the pad and underlined it.

“Oh my, oh my.” The voice acquired an upper-class British accent. “Watson, the man perceives all, knows all, commands all.” Then, dropping an octave: “And understands nothing.”

“You're crazy,” McGuire replied. He tossed the notepad aside.

“I retract that opinion. He doubts my sanity. Thus he is beginning to get smart.”

“Look,” McGuire began, “I don't know who the hell you are, but when I hang up, I'm pulling the telephone out of the wall. And if I ever come across you . . .”

“You have to,” the voice said urgently.

“I have to what?”

“You have to listen. Because I know who you are, McGuire. I know what you don't know. Which is a hell of a lot.”

“All right.” McGuire dragged his notepad back. “If you've got information for me, let's have it. Where do you want to meet?”

“Meet?” the voice said in amazement. The singsong delivery returned. “Meet? Oh no, no, no, Mozart. We can't meet. Never. Twains can't meet, or don't you know your Kipling? What am I saying? He's a cop. It's astonishing that he has a nodding acquaintance with Mozart. Kipling? Is that a kind of smoked fish?” The caller laughed again. “But I insult you, Mozart, with my British references. No, speak not of monarch-land to a Bostonian whose backyard patio was the site of a raucous tea party, am I right? Am I right, Mozart? So I'll feed you something else, something poor Bunkie might have liked, although Bunkie had all the culture of a rat turd when you came down to it.”

“What do you know about Crawford?” McGuire demanded.

The voice continued its mad patter. “Bunkie knew limericks, yes he did. ‘There once was a man from Virginia . . .' Do you suppose dirty limericks are banned as unseemly in Palm Springs, Mozart? Could there be an inspection booth on the road from Riverside where they squirt something in your ear to flush away tasteless ditties? Interesting thought . . .”

“Look, if you have any information on what happened to Bunker Crawford, I want to hear it.” Keep him talking, McGuire told himself.

“Bunkie? Yes, Bunkie. First-rate patriot. So he wouldn't appreciate Kipling, not Bunkie. Whitman's more his style, but he wouldn't understand him either. Except maybe the dirty parts. Relax, Mozart. I won't read the dirty parts.” And the voice dropped to a conspiratorial hiss. McGuire pictured the speaker's lips against the mouthpiece as he recited the words. “‘Delaying not, hurrying not, it whispered me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, lisped to me the low and delicious word, Death.' Like it, Mozart? It whispered death. A tad dramatic I grant, but I thought you would be amused by its presumption.”

“If you knew Bunker Crawford, I'd like to talk to you,” McGuire said, trying to maintain calm in his voice.

“Talk? Talk, Mozart? Yes, we must. We must. But not now. Can't. It's Lafaro. He needs to be fed.”

And he was gone.

McGuire dialled the front desk and asked a sleepy night clerk if he had just placed two calls to McGuire's room. Yes, the clerk replied. Normally they question calls to guests between midnight and six a.m. but the caller insisted it was urgent, that he was McGuire's brother, there was a family emergency. The clerk was worried. Was it all right? Would McGuire accept more calls if they came in?

McGuire assured the clerk he would and hung up.

He ran through the caller's message in his mind. Had he been drunk? Probably not. His words weren't slurred. Was he insane? Maybe so. But when he called a second time, there had been a profound urgency in his voice. Not the rambling babble of a psychotic, but the focused pleading of a desperate man.

Mozart. And wine. He had been at the museum tonight. He had watched and listened to McGuire during the evening. He knew Crawford. And who was Lafaro?

He must have fallen asleep. The sun shining through the palm trees beyond his window woke him. Rolling to the edge of the bed and holding his head in his hands, McGuire stared at the notepad on the night table. “Mozart?” he read. “Museum?”

He showered, dressed, walked downstairs and rapped on the door of the police investigation room.

“What the hell.” Lumsden stood in the open doorway, his immense body wrapped in a tattered blue terry-cloth robe. He grunted before turning and padding slowly back into the room, where a rumpled folding bed sat in the corner.

“I got a phone call,” McGuire said to Lumsden's broad back. “About two o'clock this morning. From some nut who was at the museum last night. And he knew Crawford.”

Lumsden sat on the edge of the bed, his elbows resting on his knees. “Wonderful, McGuire. Me and five of my guys break our asses eighteen hours a day and can't find shit on the guy and you get a phone call. Restores a man's faith in the powers of deduction, doesn't it?” He reached for a notebook. “What's the guy's name?”

“I don't know,” McGuire said. “He didn't give it.”

“So how did he know Crawford?”

“He didn't mention that either.”

Lumsden rolled his eyes up to meet McGuire's. “All right. Then why did he call you?”

McGuire shrugged. “I don't know. I called the desk as soon as he hung up. All the night clerk could tell me was that it was an outside call.”

The laughter began in Lumsden's belly, rattled through his chest and emerged from his broad mouth with the sound of coal spilling down a metal chute. “An outside call? Now isn't that something. You managed to eliminate everybody here in the motel. You are one hot-shot detective, aren't you?”

“He mentioned somebody named Lafaro,” McGuire said coldly. “That name mean anything to you?”

“Naw,” Lumsden grinned. “But hey, all we have to do is check the motel registry, right? If there's nobody there named Lafaro, we can cross off everybody here all over again. Just like your outside call.” He lay back on the cot, still laughing, an arm over his eyes. “Shee-it, McGuire. Don't slam the door on the way out, okay?”

Ralph was conscious, but he lay with his eyes closed while McGuire stood over him, one of the police guards hovering at his elbow. As promised, Bonnar had relaxed the rule against McGuire visiting Ralph.

A nurse changed the IV bottle and recorded Ralph's pulse rate before leaving, closing the door silently behind her.

“Ralph, it's me, Joe,” McGuire said softly. “Can you hear me?”

Ralph's eyes fluttered open, tried to focus on McGuire's face, and closed again. He whispered “Yes.”

“You're going to be all right. They're planning to fly you home in a day or two. Chartered air ambulance. This time next week you'll be stuffing yourself with clams and cold beer.”

A grin flickered at the corner of Innes's mouth. “Kind of like it here. Cute nurses.”

“Ralph, listen,” McGuire said urgently. “Do you remember anything at all? Did you see anybody? Anything?”

Ralph's mouth formed the words, once, twice, before they emerged. “Nothing, Joe. Son of a bitch was invisible. Nothing.”

McGuire touched the man's arm. “Okay, Ralph. It's okay. I'll be back tomorrow.”

Ralph's eyes opened. Still unfocused, they searched the room in McGuire's direction. “Do me a favour,” he said.

McGuire said sure, anything.

“Call Janet,” Ralph said. “Tell her . . . tell her you were talking to me. And that I'm okay.”

“Sure,” McGuire repeated.

“Nice of you to do it.” Janet Parsons's voice carried barely a trace of irony. “Boy Scouts give you a badge for this?”

McGuire sighed. He was stretched out on his unmade bed, a cup of takeout coffee in his hand. “I would have called even if he hadn't asked me.”

“They're flying him out tomorrow,” Janet continued, as though she hadn't heard him. “Fat Eddie's arranging the air ambulance. I'm trying to hitch a ride down. But Eddie may come too.”

“You're going to spend eight hours in a cramped aluminum tube with Fat Eddie Vance? That'll be fun.”

“I'll do it for Ralph,” she said. “Six months ago I would have done it for you, too.”

He wished she hadn't said that.

Moments later, lying back with his eyes closed and hearing the phone ring, he was still wishing she hadn't said that. He reached for the receiver.

“Ah, Mozart.”

McGuire sat upright. “Who are you?” Where the hell was his notepad? On the chest of drawers across the room where he had tossed it.

“Not yet, Mozart. Not yet. I'll tell you when the time arrives. And when it does, it shall pass. The time, I mean. But it doesn't, does it Mozart? The core of human tragedy. Time doesn't pass. Time stays. People pass.”

“I need to talk to you.” McGuire stood, holding the phone in one hand, his other hand extended to reach the notepad.

“But you
are
talking to me, Mozart. You are.”

“I mean about Crawford.” He couldn't reach the chest of drawers.
Damn
it.

“Yes, let us indeed speak of dead men. But let us deal with the living, Mozart. The dead are beyond redemption, beyond recall. It's the living we must fear. Except for desert ghosts, of course. Like Lafaro.”

“Who's Lafaro? You mentioned him last night. Something about feeding him.”

“Not your kind of man, Mozart. No culture. No sense of the exquisite, of the ethereal. But interesting. Fascinating even.” The caller's voice dropped. “Find him, Mozart. Find him, learn of him, and you will begin to understand.”

“I'd like to . . .” McGuire began.

“Drive to Las Vegas,” the voice ordered. “Today. Through the insanity of the desert, Mozart. Five, maybe six hours of insane landscape and you emerge in the totally irrefutable logic of Las Vegas. Logic, Mozart. Never heard that putrid plastic city described in such terms, have you? But perfectly logical it is. In the midst of the hottest, driest, most inhospitable region of our great and magnificent land, where they do unspeakable things to the earth such as pummel it with radiation, it is indeed logical to build neon palaces as temples to unhindered greed and middle-class glitz. Glitz, Mozart. Yin to culture's yang. Sugar to its salt. String me no quartets in Las Vegas, Mozart. . . .”

“I'll meet you there,” McGuire interrupted, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Just tell me where.”

“Eager he is! Hold on to that eagerness, Mozart. You're going to need it.”

“Where?” McGuire repeated.

“The casino in the Flamingo,” the voice replied. “A blackjack table. Bit of advice, Mozart. Draw on fifteen. Hold on seventeen. Pull sixteen, and you're on your own.”

And he was gone again.

Ronnie Schantz's voice was soothing, even over thousands of miles of wire and untold numbers of satellite reflections.

“Ollie's sleeping,” she replied after McGuire's greeting. “He and I are working a couple of grey files for Eddie Vance. One's especially nasty, Joe. The kind of thing you would like. Husband and wife found in a locked house, both dead from stab wounds. No motive, no suspects. Definitely not a robbery either. Nothing else in the place was touched. Ollie's got a theory, though, and I'm cross-checking the husband's employment record with some trips he was making up to Canada.”

“Ronnie, you're turning into as good a cop as your old man.”

“Don't be silly,” she admonished him. “All I'm doing is working the computer while he makes the connections. But I'm telling you, Joseph. It's playing hell with my baking. Ollie's complaining he hasn't tasted a macaroon in weeks.” Then, lowering her voice: “How's Ralph? Is he really coming home tomorrow?”