Whisper Death (16 page)

“How long will you be in the bank?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes, I guess. Maybe longer. This is a languid town, Joseph. Things don't move along here quite as crisply as they do back east.”

“Why don't I wander over to the museum while you're in the bank? Give me a chance to look things over, let you know what I think.”

She brightened at the idea. “Would you really? I would appreciate it so much, Joseph. I really would.”

It was several blocks from the bank to the museum. McGuire parked the Mercedes in the VIP area, paid the general admission fee and walked through the painting gallery to the Getti Vargas Court. A heavy tapestry covered both entrances, and a painted sign on a brass music stand announced “The Getti Vargas Court is closed until further notice.”

McGuire parted the tapestry to look inside. The figurines were gone; otherwise it appeared that nothing had changed.

“Hey. You.”

McGuire turned to see a security guard striding toward him, an officious frown on his face. It was the same guard who had been on duty the night the figurine was damaged. “It's all right,” McGuire said, dropping the tapestry back in place. “I was with Mrs. Vargas the other evening. Remember?”

The guard's face clouded, then creased into a broad smile of recognition. “Yeah, I remember.” The smile faded. “What do you hear? They any closer to finding out who broke that little statue?”

“I thought you would know.”

“Who, me?” the guard scoffed. “They don't tell us nothing. All's I know is they took all those things, the little statues, away the next day. I don't know what's happening. Just keep people out of here, that's all I've been told.”

Descending the museum steps, McGuire noticed a man peering under the Mercedes who stood and grinned sheepishly as he approached. The man was wearing garish Bermuda-length shorts and a lightweight jacket. “Thought I saw a leak under your car,” he explained. “See? Here? But it's just water from your air conditioner, I guess. How do you like this model? I had one, an earlier Benz. Never should have sold it.”

McGuire said he liked it fine and stared silently until the man shrugged his shoulders, smiled pleasantly and sauntered off toward Palm Canyon Drive.

On his hands and knees, McGuire looked under the car. Sure enough, a small puddle of water had formed below the air-conditioner condenser. Nothing to worry about, he told himself. Another dose of desert paranoia. But he held his breath as he turned the ignition key, relieved when the motor came to life.

“They've done nothing?”

Glynnis Vargas stared across at McGuire as he drove along Palm Canyon Drive half an hour later.

“Just closed it off,” McGuire said. He recounted his conversation with the security guard.

“I can't believe it,” she replied. “I'll certainly speak to Henry about it. As soon as I return from Los Angeles.”

She made small talk while McGuire drove, gossiping about board members at the museum, all the while resting one hand lightly on McGuire's thigh as he turned off Palm Canyon Drive onto Vista Chino.

McGuire saw the car first, parked directly in front of Glynnis Vargas's house. “You have company,” he said guardedly.

Richard Bonnar stepped out of his unmarked car into the desert heat as they approached, his body trim and taut in a short-sleeved golfing shirt and casual slacks.

McGuire lowered the window on his side, and Bonnar leaned into the car. “Nice to see you, Mrs. Vargas,” he said, directing his broadest smile at her. “Got somethin' for you, McGuire.”

“How did you find me?” McGuire asked.

“Friends at the motel. They called me as soon as you checked out. Been lookin' all over for you. Care to tell me where you've been?”

McGuire smiled coldly back at him. “As a matter of fact, no. So what've you got?”

Bonnar stood back from the car and rested his hands lightly on his hips. He stared off toward the hills as he spoke.

“Found some dude a couple of nights ago out near the Coachella nature preserve area, a few miles south and east of here. Quite a mess. Guy was wearin' nothing but a couple of thirty-eight bullets in his skull.”

“Art Lumsden told me about it.” McGuire pushed the button on the dashboard, activating the security gate. He glanced at Glynnis Vargas, who was staring trancelike at her hands, folded loosely in her lap.

Bonnar's eyes shifted in McGuire's direction. “Did he, now?” He looked carefully at McGuire, shot a glance at Glynnis Vargas, and caught McGuire's eye again.

“You go ahead and drive it in,” McGuire said to Glynnis. “I'll see you inside in a moment.”

She slid quickly across to the driver's side and guided the car through the gates while McGuire and Bonnar watched.

“We got the slugs out of this dude back from forensics in pretty good shape,” Bonnar said, his eyes still on the Mercedes. “Did a readin' on the riflin' marks. Care to guess what we found?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

Bonnar stared back at McGuire, watching for his reaction. “They match, McGuire. The gun used to kill that poor sucker was the same one used to poke holes in Bunker Crawford and your partner. Now just what in hell would you make of that?”

McGuire mixed two vodka tonics at the bar while the portrait of Glynnis Vargas looked down at him with its seductive expression. Sipping from one drink, he sat staring through the tinted glass at the heat of the desert afternoon and thinking about the news Bonnar had brought with him.

The body of a naked man found in the desert. Two bullets in his head. No identification. Aged between twenty and thirty. “‘Course, it gets kinda hard to tell much after a couple of days in the sun and all,” Bonnar had added. “Wouldn't have found him at all except a couple of young fellows in a dune buggy ran out of gas and started hikin' cross country to Indio. Saw some buzzards in the air. Thought it was nothing but a dead dog.”

“You're sure about the bullets matching?” McGuire had asked.

“Got the best damn forensics man in the state here,” Bonnar assured him. “Willing to bet his Porsche on it.”

“Was he killed there?” McGuire asked. “Or somewhere else and just dropped?”

“Happened there. Looks like he was kneeling in the sand and somebody put the muzzle at the back of his head. Naked when he was shot. Blood, brain tissue, all down his bare back. No sign of the weapon. No tracks, either. Somebody dragged a tumbleweed back to a rock shelf that stretches all the way to the road. Very tidy son of a gun.”

“None of his clothes around?”

“Not a sock.”

“Any idea when?”

“Two days ago. Maybe more. Like I say, you leave a body in the sun out here for a couple of days, all kinds of nasty things happen to it.”

McGuire recounted Bonnar's information to Glynnis in the atrium room, avoiding graphic descriptions of the body. She turned quickly away and covered her mouth with her hands. “Please make me a drink,” she implored McGuire, laying a hand on his arm. “I think I would like something cool and strong.” She stood and walked to the rear of the house, leaving McGuire with his thoughts.

Who was the dead, naked man? And what connection did he have with the death of Bunker Crawford?

“A lot of things go on out in the desert I don't want to know about,” Bonnar had said. Like an unidentified man being murdered with the same weapon used to kill a prisoner two days earlier? Naked in the desert. How did he get there? Where were his clothes?

“I have to talk to you.”

McGuire looked up to see Glynnis Vargas gliding toward him wearing an embroidered silk dressing gown. She lifted the drink he had made for her from his hand and continued walking to the window, where she stood, her back to McGuire, and took a long swallow before speaking again.

“This has to stop,” she said, in the same take-charge voice she had used with the museum curator. He recognized it as the voice of someone with the clarity and strength to make the correct choice among a confusing range of alternatives. It was a business voice, a commanding voice free of sentiment. A voice military men might assume in the heat of battle.

“You mean us?” McGuire asked. “You and me?”

“No.” She turned and smiled briefly at him. “I mean the killings.”

McGuire watched, waiting for her to continue. When she didn't, he said: “I think you and I had better talk about some things.”

“Like what?” She began to sip her drink again, then set it aside.

“You tell me.”

Drawing a deep breath that raised her breasts high and bold against the fabric of the dressing gown, she said softly:

“I lied about Lafaro.”

“I'm not surprised.”

The smile appeared again and was gone, a fleeting, unconscious expression, like blinking an eye. “I didn't recognize it as a name Getti might have mentioned,” she said, walking to the sofa where McGuire sat. “I heard it from Grams. The last time I saw her alive.” She seated herself at the far end of the sofa, her eyes still focused on the arid landscape beyond her window.

“Who was he?”

“She didn't know. He was living in a cave high on a hill just beyond town, near the entrance to Death Valley. A place called Tecopa Canyon. Grams used to hike there in the day and sit on a ledge outside the cave, watching the sun set. She told me he was an army deserter. There were a lot of them out there at one time, men who didn't want to go to Vietnam. They would live in the desert looking for a hippie commune or waiting to go to Mexico or up to Canada. Grams let some of them use my room after I left. Then she found this one living in the cave. She would bring him food and drink. Books and newspapers, blankets . . . he was somebody to mother, he was a partner in her fight against the war and the government, against authority. Grams was always fighting against authority.”

“Did you meet him?”

She leaned to place her head in her hand. “No,” she said. “I never knew him. I just remember the name. It was the last thing we talked about. A few months later, Grams died.”

“And where was Lafaro?”

“I don't know.” She suddenly became animated. “But listen, Joe, she told me something. She said he was keeping a journal, and that he had places in the cave to hide things. There might be something there now. It's very desolate and nothing much happens around Shoshone anyway.”

McGuire set his drink on the floor. “What are you saying?”

“Somebody may think I know about Lafaro because of my connection with Grams. Perhaps that's why that man . . . Crawford? Maybe that's why he was here.” She pressed her hands to her temples and shook her head. “I don't know . . . I just want it to stop. I want the killing to stop.”

“I'll tell Bonnar.”

She nodded. “Whatever you think is best. But please do something else first.” She stood again. McGuire could see one knee trembling against the folds of her gown. “I've . . . while you were making the drinks, I made reservations for Los Angeles. At the Beverly Hills Hotel. I'll be meeting my . . . Getti's lawyers there tomorrow. Drive me there, Joe. I need to settle a few things. I'll return after a few days and we'll have a wonderful time together.”

They drove into the afternoon sun, her Louis Vuitton luggage overflowing the Mercedes' trunk. McGuire asked why they weren't taking the Seville with its extra room and she responded that she hated the car, that it was only used to drive friends downtown for dinner at a Palm Springs restaurant.

“Besides,” she said, toying with her hair, “I told you, you suit the Mercedes. And you enjoy driving it. I can tell. You get an expression on your face like a little boy riding a new bicycle. You're like so many tough men I've met. All grown up on the outside, but on the inside you're still little boys, walking down the street with your fists clenched, looking for a tin can to kick.”

Twice during the journey along the California freeways he asked her about Lafaro. Did Grams ever describe him?

“Only in sketches. Dark, swarthy. Good-looking in a rough-hewn sort of way.”

Wasn't she frightened of him?

“Grams was never afraid of anyone. Or anything.”

Did she mention his presence to anybody?

“No. She didn't dare. Some of the rednecks in Shoshone would have turned him in.”

Why had Glynnis lied to him about Lafaro, saying she might have heard his name from her husband?

“I was fooling myself. And fooling you too. I didn't want anything to affect my life here. I'm sorry.”

“You should follow your own advice,” McGuire admonished her.

“About apologizing? I owed you this one. Watch for the Hollywood Freeway exit coming up. We'll be going north.”

They had been driving for over an hour through an endless landscape of suburban sprawl. The roadside signs announced communities that were like relics of a dead civilization, remnants of settlements swallowed in the seamless Los Angeles sprawl. Ontario, Pomona, Covina, El Monte. The western slope of the mountains faced the outer chaos of Los Angeles, and no litany of community names could contradict that fact. The expanse of shopping malls, fast-food strips, tract housing, freeways and scrapyards stretched from the mountains to the sea, the effect more lifeless in its own way than the open desert could ever be.

She guided him to Sunset Boulevard and the Beverly Hills Hotel. In the lobby he watched her take charge once again, dealing correctly with the concierge and bellman, polite yet aloof, the posture of someone accustomed to wealth and the respect it commanded.

They were escorted to a villa by the pool, a flowery room decorated in pinks and greens with a matching floral pattern on the drapes, the walls, the love seat and the canopied bed. She sat on the edge of the bed and removed her shoes. McGuire walked to her, took her head in his hands and kissed her long and deeply, feeling her mouth broaden into an expectant smile beneath his.