Part 4 (1/2)
She looked across at me through candlelight and said, ”Old Millis. If I could trade bodies, I'd pick hers. Absolutely flawless. All silk and ivory. And those strange tilty eyes of green. Perfect features. And tough clean through, Travis. There is not an ounce of mercy in there anywhere. I'll tell you something I probably shouldn't. I found out by accident, and I never let on I knew. But she w.a.n.gled old Billy into the sack long before Sadie died. A very hot, very heavy affair. That's one of the reasons he took Sadie's death so hard. Pure guilt. I'd guess from what I remember of the books that Billy would net out about ten to twelve million. Millis likes nice things. Millis lives for nice things.”
”Background?”
”I do not know one d.a.m.n thing for certain. This is all guesswork. And it was well over five years ago. She hadn't been working in the office very long. Several times men stopped in the office to see her. One at a time. It made her very angry. I had the feeling they were making demands and she was turning them down.”
”What kind of men?”
”My old granddad would call them city slickers. Very tan men with hard eyes and Dior s.h.i.+rts and Gucci shoes. Men with fifty-dollar haircuts, imported convertibles, strong aftershave, gold chains and diamond rings. Men who stay in suites and know the number to call to have girls sent up. Maybe they were mob people, labor leaders, or maybe they were important lawyers. She used to get outside phone calls too. They made her furious.”
”You mentioned guesswork, Annabelle.”
”Okay. From her clothes and her habits it was easy to guess that she had been making more at her previous job than she was making for working for Billy. I think she was involved in something that paid good money but didn't have much of a future. So she got out of it maybe because she was scared or tired or something. They wanted her back, and kept after her for a little while. But she refused. Her office skills were rusty, but she got them back fast. And then she started looking around and saw Billy. A new career.”
”Had she been living in Lauderdale before she went to work for Ingraham?”
”Oh, no. Miami.”
About an hour later I drove her home. She had started yawning. We had agreed it had been a good evening, and we ought to try it again. ”Next time I'll cook Duck Annabelle,” she said drowsily. ”Love this weird old truck of yours.”
She was way down the beach in one of the prehistoric condos, renting a one-bedroom job that came cheap because it was on the sixth floor and the elevators had been out of service for a year.
The roof leaked badly, but that was up on the tenth floor. There were no corridor lights, so she had to carry a flashlight in her purse. The Condominium a.s.sociation had run out of funds when the big stuff started breaking. The pool was full of bushes, and the landscaping was returning to its original condition of pepper bushes and palmetto. Only a third of the units were occupied. n.o.body knew who owned the empty ones, the city, the county, the banks or the estates of deceased retireds who'd moved into the Plaza del Rio long ago. She was anxious to get a job and move out before she got mugged in the stairwell. It was such a sad and sorry place I was tempted to ask her to move aboard the Flush until she got her life rearranged, but I was not ready for complications. She was pleasant and she was fun and she was a handsome woman, and she needed help but she wouldn't accept any.
I walked her up to her door, kissed the tip of her nose and felt my way back out into the night. The book bomb kept going off in the back of my mind, ripping Horatio and Emiliano to bits. That night I dreamed I was looking through a huge hole in a cement-block wall, staring in at racks and racks of bright dresses. I heard a ticking and looked down and saw the package addressed to me, right in front of my bare toes.
Six.
IF SOMEONE makes a careful and sophisticated and almost foolproof attempt to kill you and they miss, it is, as Meyer announced on Sunday, two days before Christmas, a reasonable a.s.sumption they will try again.
”Also,” he said, ”one can expect the next attempt to be as subtle and as deadly as the first. You do realize, Travis, that the theft of a gift book and an explosion behind a mall may not be linked.”
”But I should live as though they were.”
”Precisely. Now let's see if we can come up with a list of people that anxious to send you to that big marina in the sky.”
We discussed it for an hour and a half, and to my surprise we could come up with but six names, and they went way back, most of them. The seventh was not a name. The seventh, in Meyer's professorial script, read: ”Someone who thinks you killed the three young people aboard the Sundowner.”
”Let's break that last one down,” Meyer said. ”I say we rule out the dentist. If he thought you murdered his little girl, he might come after you with a gun. But with a certain hesitation. And from what you say, the Cannon clan would not care that much who did in their son Howard. So we have the girl from Peru. I happen to have the clipping right here. Gigliermina Reyes y Fonseca. A diplomat's daughter. Both those G's are p.r.o.nounced as hard G's, as in 'begin.'”
”Thank you.”
”But the contemporary nickname is usually with soft G's. Gigi. You're welcome.”
”There were the three little men in business suits who came to Billy to find out who found his boat. Latins. Two didn't have any English, apparently. Why would they want to know?”
Meyer went into meditation for several minutes. He finally said, ”We can play with another variation, Travis. Boat owner hires man to get boat back any way he can, and punish those who took it. You will say that it would be out of character for Billy Ingraham to give that kind of an order, and out of character for you to follow through if he did. Yet, in certain circles, that would be standard operating procedure. It might be difficult for them to imagine any other response to theft.”
”Then Billy would be a target too.”
”If they a.s.sume you were following his orders. You would be a hireling, a secondary target.”
”Aren't we getting pretty fancy?”
”In testing any hypothesis, one useful method is to carry it to the ultimate limits of absurdity and find out if it still hangs together. This scenario a.s.sumes that Gigliermina was well connected with powerful people in Peru, and they are not concerned with degrees of intention or degrees of guilt. The girl is dead and vengeance requires that anyone who had anything to do with her death be killed.”
”By a diplomat?!”
”By someone anxious to do him big favors.”
”Okay. But back up a little, Meyer, d.a.m.n it. Somebody did kill the three of them. See how absurd this is, for example. They came back from Yucatan with cocaine. Free-lance. He had some kind of contact, and he phoned from the gas station across the road from the Starfish Marina. He set up a meet, and somebody came with the money to buy it. Cannon or the NicBride girl noticed that it was funny money, and that turned it into a bad scene.”
”But from your description, Travis, it looked more as if the three aboard were trying to buy something with that money. It was discovered and they rammed it into his mouth. If the people who came aboard wanted to buy something with counterfeit, and it was discovered, they would have kept the counterfeit and whatever they came to buy. The ugly gesture said, 'Don't try to cheat us with counterfeit!'”
”It looked like very good quality.”
”And probably could be pa.s.sed one at a time with no trouble, but not in a batch.”
”So maybe Cannon didn't notice it was counterfeit. Maybe he got paid already for what he brought in, and somebody hijacked them for the money, searched for it, made them tell where they had hidden it aboard, found it and found out it was no good.”
Meyer shook his head sadly, a black bear who couldn't get at the honeycomb. ”We're getting too far down too many roads, friend McGee. We need more bits and pieces.”
”While they adjust their sights?”
Meyer looked grim, aimed a finger at me and said, ”Bang, you're dead.”
”That's very funny! That's truly hilarious. Maybe you'd write it down so I won't ever forget it.”
”I'm sorry,” he said, looking dismayed. ”That was out of character. Just an impulse. Everybody steps out of character now and then.”
”You seldom do.”
”I am as surprised as you are.”
On Christmas morning, in a hotel suite in Cannes, R. William Ingraham died of a ma.s.sive cerebral hemorrhage. It was in the morning Lauderdale newspaper on Wednesday the twenty-sixth. The story covered his many accomplishments in altering the local landscape, and the awards and honors given him. They had contacted a few politicians on the state level, and the tenor of their response was that Ingraham had been a good citizen, civic-minded and responsible. and his death was a loss to all Floridians. The page one article said that the grieving widow, Millis Hoover Ingraham, was bringing the body home for burial.
I knew that Frank Payne, who is my lawyer whose services I seldom require, had been Ingraham's attorney for many years and would probably, along with the bank, be handling Billy's estate. So I went to see him that afternoon in his bank building offices. He was in a new firm. Those fellows group and regroup as often as square dancers. This one was Marhead, Carp, Payne and Guyler. I sat for fifteen minutes wondering how good the legs were on the receptionist. Her desk had what is called a privacy screen. Frank's secretary came and got me and took me back to a corner office that looked like a small library in a British club. Frank shook hands and patted his growing gut apologetically, saying he was about to join a health club. He always says that. I suggested Loie' outfit. He asked me if I had come to change my will, and I said that it was still okay as is, but I would like to talk about Billy Ingraham's estate.
We sat down across the desk from each other and he said it was a tragic thing that Billy had to lose out on a lot of good years remaining, and he said the estate was in very clean condition because Billy had done a lot of neatening up after he sold out his business interests, getting rid of little cats and dogs, small partners.h.i.+ps, shelters, tag ends of land. Everything that could be put into a discretionary trust had been put into it, so there would be very little to go through probate. Mostly the cars and his collection of western art. ”Millis the sole heir?”
”Looking to marry her, Trav?”
”Or get a job in a sideshow handling snakes? Sure. I don't really have to know how she's going to be fixed, Frank. I would guess she gets the bulk, less a few bequests to causes here and there. What I want to know about is insurance.”
”Why?”
”Because if there are any policies on him that pay off double in the case of accidental death, there's a chance of collecting.”