Whisper Death (23 page)

“Glynnis Vargas?” Lumsden sat back in his chair. “You out of your mind, McGuire?”

“Not anymore,” McGuire assured him.

“Where the hell is she?”

“Brazil, I expect.”

Lumsden nodded and smiled coldly. “Back where she started.”

“That's one distinction about the place,” McGuire agreed. “You know the other one?”

“Yeah,” Lumsden growled bitterly. “No fucking extradition treaty.”

“We signed the contract to sell three days ago,” the real estate agent said. Her hair colour had originated in a bottle and her skin bore the smooth, pale sheen of expensive notepaper. She smiled up at McGuire and raised one hand, a heavy gold charm bracelet dangling from the wrist, to adjust her rhinestone necklace. “Would you care to see the property?”

“I've seen it,” McGuire snapped, frowning. “I'm living in it.”

The agent jerked back as though she had been slapped. “Living there? With whose permission?”

“Mrs. Vargas's,” McGuire said. He showed her the house key. “She gave me this.”

The agent brought her hands together where they rubbed and comforted each other. Lady, McGuire said to her silently, your hands are twenty years older than your face.

“Well, this is most extraordinary,” the woman fretted. She looked back and forth at documents scattered across her desk. “We have no record of an occupant in the house during the sale period. The maid had been dismissed. . . .”

“I'll be there two more days,” McGuire said. “Three at the most. What I want to know is, what happens to the money when you sell the property?”

“Oh, that's privileged. Between our firm and our client, Mrs. Vargas . . .”

“Who is under investigation for a number of felonies.” McGuire showed her his detective badge. “I don't need details. Just a few quick facts. Where does the money go?”

She shuffled her papers nervously. “Mrs. Vargas? Under investigation? Obviously, someone has made an error. . . .”

“Obviously,” McGuire said calmly.

“Yes, here it is.” She selected a sheet of rag paper with an embossed letterhead. “Arrangements have been made . . .” McGuire snatched the paper from her hand and began reading it.

“Now see here!” she snapped, before walking quickly from her office.

She returned with two men who demanded to know what McGuire was doing, but he had learned everything he needed and brushed past them to the door, leaving the controlled coolness of the office interior and entering the unbridled heat of the afternoon sun.

“She set it up through her lawyer.” McGuire was propped against the headboard of Glynnis Vargas's bed beneath the open skylight, the telephone receiver at his ear. “The day before Bunker was killed. Power of attorney. Transfer of funds to Geneva. Investments in Swiss securities with short-term roll-overs. No cash. So there's nothing to be seized on this side of the ocean.”

“Not the move of your average brass-bound bimbo,” Ollie Schantz growled through the receiver. “Why in hell can't a woman that smart do something worthwhile, like run for president? “

McGuire sipped his Scotch. “Find anything on her husband?”

“Yeah, a bit. Frank Rose knew of him. Jewel dealers move in small circles it seems. All built on trust and reputation. This Vargas's rep was good except for one flaw when he got started. Rose called a buddy of his in New York to get all the dirt. Back in the late sixties, Vargas was a buyer for the biggest wholesale gem house in Brazil. Guy was an up-and-comer. Good looking, sharp, knew his stuff. Anyway, the company he worked for got a lead on a cache of goods, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, ready to be dumped. All legal, the owner had a cash-flow problem. Getti checked the gems, negotiated the deal, got a hell of a price for his company, and came to L.A. for the opening financing. He only needed ten per cent to get possession of the goods.”

“How big was the deal?” McGuire asked.

“About twenty-five million in all.”

“And?”

“You'll like this part, Joseph. He holds off his Brazilian people and two weeks later he's got the goods himself. Then he forms his own company. Pays two-and-a-half million to get the gems, peddles them in small lots on the open market, using all the contacts he'd built up working for his employer, pays off the balance and comes home to Rio with about ten million profit.”

McGuire smiled and nodded.

“See what a mere two-and-a-half million bucks can do for you, Joseph?” Schantz chided. “Once had a rich man tell me, ‘Turning a thousand dollars into two thousand dollars is hard work. But turning a million into two million is inevitable.' Something to it after all, I think.”

“So that's how Getti Vargas got started,” McGuire said.

“Your standard businessman's double-cross. Happens on Wall Street a thousand times a day before lunch. You mix a few selling smarts with a little leverage, add some greed, and it's gonna happen. The wholesaler he worked for never did figure out how he laid his hands on the two-and-a-half big ones to get the goods. Aside from bilking them out of some profit, everything was legal. After a while, all was forgiven.”

“I know where he got the two-and-a-half million,” McGuire said.

“Tell me about it when you get back.” Ollie's voice dropped. “When the hell will that be, anyway?” he asked. “Lot of things you haven't been telling me, Joseph. Whenever you're not bitching at me it means you're about to back your ass into a meat grinder.”

“Soon, Ollie,” McGuire replied. “Soon.”

After hanging up, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Two things disturbed McGuire when he awoke an hour later.

The first was the telephone, ringing insistently. McGuire reached for the receiver, rolled on his back, mumbled his name and opened his eyes.

“What the hell are you doing down there, McGuire?” Fat Eddie Vance sputtered through the receiver. “The motel tells me you checked out two days ago. You're supposed to be either helping out down there or getting back here. I called Captain Bonnar and he gave me this number. He also says you've been both uncooperative and out of touch . . . did you decide to take a vacation? Just like that? Who do you think you are anyway, McGuire? McGuire?”

McGuire set the receiver aside without answering; Fat Eddie's voice rattled, ghostlike, from the telephone as McGuire lay on his back, staring up at the skylight directly over his head, and at the footprints around its perimeter where one, two, he counted, three people had stood at the Plexiglas bubble and looked down at him as he slept. Their footprints were there on the glass, McGuire knew, because they wanted him to see them when he awoke. They wanted him to know.

Leaving the house five minutes later, he locked the door behind him and drove slowly through town, suspicious of every car he passed, every pedestrian who glanced in his direction.

Fat Eddie's question echoed through his head as he sat on the balcony of a motel room near the interstate highway, staring out at the late afternoon shadows spreading across the desert.

Why
was
he still here? Because there were more answers to be found? Not many, he acknowledged.

He knew Glynnis Vargas had arrived in Palm Springs to begin a new life as a society widow, a patron of the arts prepared to enjoy a massive fortune accumulated by her husband and launched with her money more than twenty years ago. Only her photograph as a Palm Springs celebrity tripped her up. Otherwise Amos, Marlowe and Peppler would have died still chasing their tails. Or Lafaro's. Who was as dead as the young girl Barbie, the bastard child who sat listening to Mozart at her grandmother's knee in Shoshone.

Shoshone. Where Grams's skeleton lay in a cave. “In a special place.” Deposited there by her adoring granddaughter.

He knew Glynnis Vargas had sent him—and, by connection, Marlowe and Peppler—to the cave in Shoshone as a diversion. Marlowe and Peppler assumed the skeleton was the missing woman who had driven the car through the Zion Tunnel, a car with cement blocks and enough radium clock faces in the trunk to fool a cheap Geiger counter.

This, Marlowe and Peppler had decided, was the missing link. The cool, unflustered woman who had driven Amos into the tunnel more than twenty years earlier. And McGuire, they suspected, had learned of the cave from Littleton. Mad Little Sam. When the tracking device on the Mercedes indicated that's where McGuire was heading, they responded immediately. To cut him off. To invade Littleton's house. To trip whatever device Littleton had set on the bomb.

Eventually someone would return and discover that the remains in the cave were of a woman too old to be young, sexy and provocative when the ransom had occurred. McGuire had taken time to examine the teeth. She had been at least sixty years old, probably seventy, when she had died.

Grams helped her pull off the ransom. Probably coordinated everything. It would be Grams who had driven the car west through the tunnel to pick up Glynnis and the ransom, while Amos sped frantically in the opposite direction searching for the code to deactivate the bomb.

“She despised authority,” Glynnis (was her real name actually Barbie? McGuire wondered) told him. Grams hated the war, scoffed at the military, worshipped the concept of the individual taking action in an unfair world.

She would have loved the idea of making the army look like fools.

It had all come apart one evening three weeks ago when Bunker Crawford saw the evidence for himself in a Palm Springs magazine and arrived at Glynnis Vargas's house, driven by panic and desperation to demand . . . what? His share of the fortune? Something to compensate him for a life of quiet desperation and harassment? Or that she return to wherever she had been?

Crawford's arrival demanded bold steps by Glynnis. The first was having her lover, the chauffeur whose body lay unclaimed in the morgue, kill Crawford and cripple Ralph Innes from ambush.

And the following night, the night McGuire drove her home from the museum, the night the chauffeur greeted her with a kiss at the door, was the night she took the handsome young Brazilian into the desert, perhaps with a promise of passion, to kill him with the same gun he had used on Crawford.

And now someone, somewhere, would continue to prevent information about the theft of a nuclear weapon being made public. Especially the fact that the US government had concealed the fact for over twenty years.

Little Sam had been right: the lie must be believed. Everything would be done to support the lie.

He wondered where Little Sam was now. Little Sam and Lafaro, his crippled cat. Wherever they were, he hoped they were finally free. Free from the grip of the bomb in the basement. Free from the paranoia.

But someone knows, McGuire reminded himself. The footprints on the skylight weren't made by real estate agents.

Someone knows.

He entered the motel room, locking the sliding door behind him and sitting in a plastic-covered chair in the furthest corner.

The day grew darker. McGuire wouldn't venture out in the dark. Not that night. Not in that place.

Several hours later, he fell into a shallow, restless sleep.

“You kiddin' me?”

Bonnar's face crinkled into a skeptical grin from across his polished teak desk.

“I'm telling you what I suspect,” McGuire said flatly.

“That Glynnis Vargas had Crawford killed by her chauffeur? Then shot him herself, hung around town for a couple of days with you and took off for Brazil?”

“Check with Brazilian immigration or somebody.”

“Don't have to.” Bonnar's smile grew even wider. “She called the mayor yesterday. From Gstaad. That's in Switzerland.”

“Why?”

“Why Switzerland?” Bonnar was teasing McGuire.

“Why call the mayor?”

Bonnar shrugged. “To say hello. To explain that she's lookin' forward to comin' back and buildin' a new home on Summit Ridge. Up there where Bob Hope and William Holden built their mansions. Best address in town. Said the Via Linda house was a tad too small for her.”

“Bullshit,” McGuire spat.

“Aw hell, McGuire.” Bonnar waved his hand and looked away. “I think you've kinda overstayed your welcome around here. You get my drift?”

“Do you still have buddies up at Twentynine Palms?” McGuire asked.

“Lots of 'em.”

It was McGuire's turn to smile. “Call them,” he suggested. “Ask if they ever heard of a man named Lafaro. And watch what happens.”

“Hell, I'll do it now,” Bonnar said, reaching for the telephone. “Just to prove how a good cop runs down a lead.” He spun his Rolodex, muttered a number under his breath and began punching the buttons on his telephone.

Bonnar's office door swung open and the two men turned to see Art Lumsden's round face looking back at them. “How ya doing, McGuire?” the black detective inquired.

Bonnar placed his hand over the receiver. “What's up?” he asked, before removing his hand and asking to speak to Colonel Vander Hagen.

“Got us one out in the Indio Hills,” Lumsden said. He entered Bonnar's office, holding the door slightly ajar behind him. “Another weird one. Cop on the site says it looks like he was hit from a helicopter or airplane. Maybe a skyhook, I don't know. Shot from a height anyway, and there's nothing around him taller than a cactus. Anyway, I'm going out to check. Thought I'd let you know.”

Bonnar nodded, waved Lumsden away and began speaking quickly into the telephone.

“What do you mean, from a helicopter?” McGuire blurted at Lumsden. He felt his pulse quicken, his body grow tense.

“Shot. Took a bunch of slugs from a high angle.”

“What did he look like?” McGuire demanded. Behind him, Bonnar looked up curiously, still speaking into the receiver. “The victim, did you get a description of the victim?”

Lumsden glanced at scribbled notes on a sheet of paper in his hand. “Caucasian, male, aged between forty and fifty, no identification, dressed in lightweight clothing, long white hair, white beard . . .”

McGuire slumped in his chair. “Anything about a cat?”

Lumsden glanced back at him. “Yeah, something about one,” he said frowning. “It was shot too. Lying next to the body. What the hell you know about this, McGuire?”

Bonnar finished his telephone call and leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “What'd you say that name was, McGuire? Lafaro, something like that?”

McGuire forced himself to turn and look into Bonnar's smug face. “Something like that,” he repeated. He felt tired, old, defeated.

“Well, they never heard of him at Twentynine Palms,” Bonnar smirked. “Didn't ring a bell with them at all.”

McGuire rose and brushed past Lumsden to the door.

“You know anything about this one?” Lumsden repeated, waving his notes at McGuire.

“No,” McGuire said without looking back. “No, I don't know anything. Nothing at all.”

He drove west to Palm Canyon Drive, his senses numb. He wanted to get drunk, blind, unfeelingly drunk.

At a bar near the museum he chose a table in the furthest corner of the room and drank three double Scotches before leaving, with only a hint of unsteadiness, to walk among crowds of shoppers and tourists strolling through the late afternoon sun.

He stood waiting for his head to clear, watching people pass, happy and carefree, at ease with their friends. Teenagers in shabby, well-scrubbed jeans. Mature couples in country-club slacks and cotton skirts. Young women glowing in their practised, cool glamour. Men half McGuire's age carrying themselves with more assurance than he had felt in years.

You're starting to feel sorry for yourself, McGuire thought bitterly. Get your plans straight. Get out of here. To some place where you won't be haunted by memories. Memories of Janet Parsons and Glynnis Vargas.

He froze at the sound of a woman's voice behind him. She was chatting easily with someone, the distinctive tone and inflection of her voice penetrating his ear like a dagger.

“. . . but I don't believe it was the right thing to do . . .” she was saying.

McGuire whirled to see a man and woman turn and begin ascending the steps of a resort hotel behind him. Others were passing between McGuire and the woman with the voice, the voice McGuire knew he had heard before, and he bolted through the crowd. A man shouted angrily at him as he brushed him aside; someone else struck him from behind; but he reached the couple as they arrived at the hotel entrance, their backs to him. The woman's hair was thick and coal-black; she was wearing an off-the-shoulder dress patterned in brightly coloured flowers. Her escort was barely as tall as she was, with a bony face, gold wire glasses and short hair. He was reaching for the door, speaking to her, when McGuire touched her shoulder and she turned to him, a smile on her deeply tanned face.

“I know you,” McGuire hissed.

“You do?” she asked pleasantly. Her eyes swept quickly up and down, assessing him. “Really?” She tilted her head.

When she spoke again, McGuire knew it was her.

“Friend of yours, Marci?” The man smiled. He was holding the door open, waiting for her to enter the hotel, one arm raised to guide her through.

“I know your voice,” McGuire said. He was shaking. Someone jostled him from behind.

“Great voice, isn't it?” the man said pleasantly. McGuire glanced at him. He had the open, friendly face of an insurance agent making small talk, and his hand rested on the woman's shoulder, ready to propel her away from this madman and into the hotel.

“First you were Amos's widow,” McGuire insisted, moving closer to the woman. She was attractive in a less than stunning way, her face a little too full, her features a little too coarse. “Then it was you who answered the phone in Las Vegas.”

She recoiled from his breath and winced. “He's drunk, Kenny,” she said to the man with her.

Kenny's smile widened. “Hey, buddy,” he said to McGuire. “Go have another drink, okay? Sorry, but I saw her first.”

She was moving away from him, entering the hotel lobby. Somebody behind McGuire told him to kindly move along, he was holding up traffic. “I know her,” McGuire repeated weakly.

“Well, I've known her for twelve years,” Kenny said. “And I've been married to her for ten. And believe me, she's nobody's widow.” He held out a hand. “Nice talking to you, okay?”

McGuire stared through the door into the lobby where the woman waited for her husband, who reached for her and took her arm. They walked away, whispering and giggling, while McGuire watched.

“It was her voice,” he said aloud. “That's her. I know that was her.”

He drove east out of the valley, past Desert Center and through Blythe into Arizona. At midnight he was in Phoenix, parking the car in the bright lights of a motel-chain office. He rented a room on the ground floor, then sat hidden in the darkness of a grove of pine trees, watching the door of his motel room and his car until dawn arrived.

When the sun rose he finally entered the room, collapsed on the bed and dreamt of women standing over him, pointing guns at his head as he slept.

At noon he awoke, famished, and drove through the suburbs until he found a fast-food restaurant in a large, nearly empty shopping mall. He circled the lot several times before he parked the Mercedes well away from buildings and other vehicles and walked briskly to the restaurant, feeling the heat rising from the asphalt and penetrating the soles of his shoes.

He stood in line at the restaurant counter, ordered coffee and a sandwich and carried his tray to an inside table, where he had a clear view of the car. Around him, groups of mothers with young children shared soft drinks and gossip. Truck drivers attacked impossibly tall sandwiches. Salesmen read newspapers and sipped coffee.

McGuire checked the car again. No one had approached it.

When he turned away to begin eating, it disappeared in a ball of fire and shredded metal.

Children and their mothers began screaming hysterically. “Holy shit!” shouted one of the truck drivers. Debris landed on the open patio of the restaurant. The counter staff stood frozen and open-mouthed at the sight.

McGuire set his sandwich aside, stood and walked casually to the washroom, then detoured through the kitchen area, abandoned by staff who had run to the front counter where they watched the remains of the Mercedes burning a hundred yards away, four flaming tires marking the corners of the blackened, twisted hulk.

He left through the employees' entrance, keeping the restaurant between him and the wreckage, telling himself it had been a warning, damn it, a warning, and not just his good luck.

An airport. He needed an airport.

He needed somewhere to hide.

Even Paradise can become a bore, Koko admitted. Especially when you've grown up. And she had grown up so much over the summer.

Standing sullenly on the upper deck of the Abaco Cay ferry, she watched the yachts manoeuvre out of the harbour. It was late August; another three weeks before college resumed.

She had no regrets about working in the Bahamas all summer. At the beginning, the parties had been fun, the laughter plentiful, the boys interesting. But she wouldn't be as sad to leave as she had expected back in June. Twice she had almost returned home. Once when her parents and young sister came for a visit and she stood at the airport sobbing openly as they boarded their plane for Miami and home. And once when that jerk Louis, the weightlifter, treated her like a piece of meat. The bastard. Stuck on his muscle-bound body. Which was a lesson, she assured herself. Good looks, a great tan, curly hair, they're all silly reasons to choose a boy. Or a man. Louis had made her grow up. Louis had reminded her that she had choices. Hers to make. Hers to live with. Knowing that, accepting that, realizing that, it was all part of maturity.

She began her final trip of the day. One stop at Green Turtle Cay and then back to Abaco, where she would curl up with a book, one of the Faulkner novels her mother had brought. That's how she planned to spend her evenings from now until school began. Doing something with her mind.

The ferry nosed into the dock at Green Turtle Cay. Nothing ever changes here, she mused, except the faces of the tourists. The same boats at anchor in the harbour. The same bar and restaurant perched at the end of the pier, where the same palm trees wave in the dusky light, shading the path to the tourist villas and swimming pool and beyond to the crest of the hill and the small cabin.

Koko blinked and raised her sunglasses to her forehead. Something had changed after all.

There was a light in the cabin window. A figure stood on the small deck facing the harbour. At this distance it was only a silhouette, resting its weight on its arms. But the stance looked familiar.

She left the ferry at Green Turtle, the Bahamian captain smiling and nodding, reminding her the last sailing was at one o'clock. She entered the bar, chose the last stool and ordered a beer and conch fritters. Two yacht sailors hit on her almost at once, but she smiled silently and shook her head, avoiding eye contact, and they left her alone with her Miller Lite and greasy dinner.

“Been here a week now,” the manager of the bar replied to her question. She was a large, grey-haired Bahamian woman who seemed to be always smiling and laughing. “Comes down every night,” she said, her face clouding over and acquiring a rare serious expression. “Sits over there in the corner and has one drink all alone.”

Koko asked for another beer, took it outside and sat on the rotting hull of an overturned dinghy that lay between the bar and the path up the hill to the cabin.

He came loping down the path soon after the sun disappeared behind the other side of the Cay, walking silently in moccasins, wearing a grey sweatshirt and lightweight slacks. He nodded at her as he passed on the far side of the stony walk.

“Welcome back,” she said, and he studied her from the corner of his eye and nodded again. “Remember me?”

He paused at the corner of the building, glancing quickly at the entrance to the bar, across the harbour, back up the path, and finally meeting her eyes again. “Twisted Sister,” he muttered.

“Hey,” she laughed. “Not any more. I've changed. Anyway, I wondered if you wanted to talk?”

His eyes narrowed. “About what?”

“Just talk.” Koko stood up. “I've been here nearly three months and nobody talked to me the way you did that first time we met. I mean, people talk but they don't
listen
, you know?”

He studied her for a moment, then angled his head toward the entrance. He watched her enter ahead of him, looked over his shoulder at the boats bobbing in the harbour, and followed her into the darkened bar.

“Faulkner?” McGuire asked almost an hour later. “You're reading Faulkner? That's good.” He nodded and sipped his drink. “That's good.”

“Things like that mean something to me now.” She scooped a handful of peanuts from a bowl, popped several in her mouth and talked around them. “The thing about growing up is, a lot of it happens when you don't expect it, doesn't it? I mean, sometimes it's not a gradual process. Sometimes you just wake up one morning and a lot of things that were stuffy and boring the day before just look more interesting. And all the stuff that used to be important is shit. Sorry,” she added.