A Deadly Shade Of Gold

He put the tools away and walked to his office. I walked along with him. He stopped suddenly and stared across the small boat basin.

“Maybe we can both stop worrying about La Chispa,” he said.

I looked over and saw a swarthy little man in khakis trot out along the finger pier and leap nimbly aboard the boat, a cardboard carton under one arm, and a bulging burlap sack over the other shoulder.

“That one worked as mate aboard,” he said. “Hola! Miguel!” he called.

The man looked around the side of the trunk cabin. I could not see him distinctly at a hundred and fifty feet, but I saw the white streak of grin.

“Buena tarde, Senor Heintz!” he called back. Heintz said about two hundred words at high speed, ending in an interrogating lift of his voice. Miguel answered at length. Heintz laughed. Miguel disappeared.

“I told him he should be ashamed of the condition of the boat, and he said that if one works twenty hours a day, there is no time for playing with toys. Now he is ordered to put it in condition to sell it, very quickly and cheaply, and perhaps he will buy it himself and compete with the hotel for fishing charters. That was a joke. He’s not that good with a boat, and you couldn’t run that thing at a profit. I’ve been relieved not to have him around for a couple of months. He’s a violent little man. He hurt two of my men badly. They were making loud remarks about the Cubans, for his benefit. If Taggart hadn’t broken it up, he might have killed them both. He looked as if he wanted to. Taggart grabbed him and threw him off the dock.”

“Was he taking supplies aboard?”

“Maybe. There’d be a better market for it in La Paz or Mazatlan. The owner will never use it again. But I wouldn’t want to trust Miguel to get it there. I’ve seen him at the wheel. He tried to handle it like Taggart did. That is like letting a child drive a sports car.”

After I had left Heintz, I went up to the pool level and sat at a shady table overlooking the boat basin and had a bottle of beer. I watched Miguel working around the boat and I felt curious and oddly uneasy about it. It made sense that Almah should try to pry loose all the money she could. Sell everything that wasn’t bolted down. Maybe Carlos would sign the boat documentation, releasing ownership. And perhaps the title papers on the automobiles. But by doing that she would be delaying the day when she could force him to sign the bank papers. And from the look of him, she couldn’t count on too much time.

I saw Miguel squatting and fooling with the dockside power outlet, trotting back and forth. Finally dirty water began to squirt off the bilge. Then, one at a time, I saw him lug four big batteries over to the office shed, where Heintz probably had a quick charger. Miguel went back and stood and studied the lines. It was well moored, with four lines and two spring lines. He took three lines off and coiled them, leaving the bow line, the stern line and the bow spring line on.

Then he went up the steps on the far side, and up the path and disappeared, moving very spryly. A few minutes later I saw a car going up the road, one of the three I had spotted while scaring hell out of myself. It was one of those Datsun things, the Nipponese version of a Land Rover. Carlos was fine for cars-the Datsun, the Ghia, and a big black Imperial.

In addition to the steps and walk there was a steep curve of narrow road which came down to the boat area. And I wondered why Miguel hadn’t used that. He had the car for it. The Boody jeep would make it easily. And I wondered if Miguel hadn’t been just a little too jolly in his long range conversation with Heintz. Also, he was doing nothing about dressing the boat up. Maybe she wanted to sell it in a hurry. That much of a hurry? Ninety-nine percent of the things that ninety-nine percent of the people do are entirely predictable, when you have a few lead facts. Drunks, maniacs and pregnant women are the customary exceptions. Everyone has the suspicion he is utterly unique. But we are a herd animal, and we all turn to face into the wind.

I sat and tried to read that bloody little man from long range. I could presume he had been with Menterez a long time, and had done him many violent favors, and had had the protection of Menterez to hide behind. He had had years of exile from the homeland. He would know that Menterez was an attractive target. Assume a hell of a lot of pride. The shot which had nearly killed Menterez would have been a personal affront to Miguel. Possibly his duties aboard the boat were more as bodyguard than mate. Assume he had itched to take care of the men aboard the Columbine IV, and could perhaps have handled that part of it alone, but Sam had to be along because it had to be done silently, and Sam would know just how to set up the controls to send them on their way. So it was done, and then the king was laid low when something burst in his head. The partner in murder took off.

Then there was the next affront, a bold invasion of protected ground, the treasured dog killed, a head broken. Perhaps the collapse of Menterez had made Miguel begin to feel a little insecure. He was, after all, a murderer. There can be an end to loyalty. This was not his country. Things were beginning to fall apart. The invasion would alarm him. And then, perhaps, he would see Menterez’s woman come home, soiled and sick, dazed and broken. That special look would be meaningful to Miguel. It would be something he had seen before. The marks on the wrists would be significant. And he would know she had known about the boat business. Chucho’s revolver had been taken. A revolver had been found in the room of a hotel guest, a big brown man who looked as if he could come over a wall in the night. The same man had been seen in the red car with the dark woman who was at the hotel with him.

Loyalty must stop, and a small bloody man must start thinking of his own skin.

Once aboard the boat and clear, he had a lot of choices. Angostura. Topolobambo. A little brown spry man with a sad face, and some pesos in hand, abandoning the boat and melting into an alien countryside.

I shook myself out of it like a wet dog. Imagination is useful, but it turns treacherous if you depend too much upon it. But it was like a picture hanging crooked on the wall. I wanted to go over and straighten it. If that violent little man was leaving, I did not think he would leave quietly.

Nursing another bottle of beer, I waited and watched. A half hour later the Datsun came back and parked along the road at a place I could not see. Miguel came down the path, heavily laden, and pounced aboard. He had comported himself in that super-casual manner of someone who wishes to avoid attention by seeming to perform perfectly ordinary acts. He went and got the batteries, one at a time, and brought them back and spent enough time aboard so I was certain he had strapped them in and hooked them up. The cruiser rode higher. The bilge outlet was spitting dirty spray. He took his power line off the dockside connection and it stopped. He coiled the power line, knelt and tied it, and took it aboard. Again he hurried back up to the truck and went back up to the last house at the crest of the knoll.

What if Carlos’ condition had suddenly worsened? Miguel would know it would make sense for him to take off the moment Menterez died. I could not imagine him being very close to the other Cubans in the compound. Those little deadly ones are loners, just as his dog had been.

I went to the desk and made arrangements about the bill. The fun-loving, sun-loving tourists were milling around. Arista was looking for an opening, perhaps to cover himself in the absurd eventuality that I had some sort of official status. I told him we would pay cash for breakfast, so he could have the account ready. The luggage would be ready to bring out at ten-fifteen. Yes, the bus would leave at ten-thirty, and make the air connection in Culiacan in plenty of time.

“I shall turn your property over to you upon departure, sir.”

“What property?”

“Uh… the weapon, sir.

“I don’t know anything about any weapon, Arista.”

“But, sir, you admitted that…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t have anything of mine. If you think you have something of mine, why you just keep it.”

“But it was found…”

“I’m not responsible for what other guests leave in the rooms.”

When I looked back at him he was dry-washing his hands, and I think his underlip was trembling. The rooms were empty. I went looking for Nora. I found her coming out of the bar. She was looking for me. She had changed. She wore a very simple sleeveless white dress with a sun back. She had flattened her hair, fastened it into severity. The white dress deepened her tan. She looked very composed. I steered her back into the bar, back to the far table where we had first sat. She wanted bourbon on ice, and I got two of them.

“Get some sleep?”

“No. I just… did a lot of thinking, Travis.”

“Any conclusions?”

“A few. I felt very savage about Sam. It all seemed so black and white. Maybe that’s my flaw, to see everything as totally right or totally wrong. But it isn’t like that, is it?”

“You mean the bad guys and the good guys? No, it isn’t like that, not when you know enough about it.”

“I can’t be some sort of abstract and objective instrument of justice, Trav, when I don’t even know what justice is any more. I don’t think I ever really knew Sam. I know that you brought me along as… as a disguise.”

“And because you had to get it out of your system one way or another.”

“One way or another,” she said. She nodded. “Did you know that all that thirst for vengeance was going to sort of… fade away?”

“No. But I knew it was possible.”

She took the last swallow and the ice clicked against her teeth. She shook her head. “It’s such a… such a lot of bloody confusion And here I am, wandering around in it with my dime store morality. I feel like such an ass.”

“It got to me yesterday. It shouldn’t have. God knows I’ve been dry behind the ears for a long long time. But the little mental image of Sam holding the arms of the woman they didn’t know was there, and that bloody little monster sliding up behind her with… ”

“Don’t!” she whispered. “Please.”

“I’d be better off without a little taint of idealism, Nora. Then I could accept the fact that man is usually a pretty wretched piece of work.”

“You asked for conclusions. Okay. I’m dropping the dime store morality bit, darling. Yesterday you had it up to here. I don’t care what you did. I don’t even care if you slept with that Felicia. Maybe it would have been a kind of brutal therapy. I don’t have any special privileges. I haven’t asked for any or granted any. If you left me in kind of… an agony of suspense, I should have had the sense to know that whatever you had to tell me would keep. So I am still in your bed, if I please you.”

“You do.”

“Everybody is so damned lonely, you have to take what there is. And if there are any good guys at all, you’re one of them.”

“You’ll turn my head.”

“Further conclusion. When we leave here, I would be perfectly content to head all the way back. I’ll reimburse you for everything, and I want no argument on that. But if you want to take it further, in California, and you think I’d be of any use to you, I’ll go with you and do as I’m told. I can let it all drop right here. But I can understand that you… might feel as if you’d left something unfinished.”

I went over and brought back two more bourbons. I thought it over and said, “I don’t know. Tomberlin interests me. Maybe I better try the California thing alone. In one sense, he started the whole mess. In another sense, Menterez spent profitable years building it up to the ultimate mess, and it had to happen sooner or later. Let me think about it. The first thing we have to do is survive that airplane ride to Durango.”

“If you hold my hand, we’ll make it.”

“You sank those nails in pretty good the last time.”

“And we made it.”

“Did you get any lunch at all?”

“No. Look. It’s after five. I can last. I may get kind of glassy if you force another drink on me, but I can last. If you forced another drink on me, you could lead me off to the room and have your way with me, sir.”

“Even without another drink?”

“One never knows unless one tries, does one.”

Fifteen

SHE WANTED to put on something else, but I asked her to put the white dress back on. I liked the way she looked in it. We went out onto the sun deck at the end of the corridor and sat where we could look down upon the pool people and, at the further level, the boat basin.

I told her about Miguel and the boat. Jose brought us drinks and a plate of little hot pastries with something baked into the center of each one-shrimp, steak, ham. She gobbled like a shewolf, licking her fingers, making little sounds of pleasure not entirely dissimilar to the sounds the previous pleasure had elicited. The tautness was entirely gone out of her face, and she laughed more readily than ever before.

Then I finally realized that I had to do what I had been trying not to think of doing. The sun was low. The shadows were turning blue. And I told her I had to walk up the road and see if I could get a word with Almah. I said I would wear a disarming smile and stand well away from the gate and bellow Senorita Heechin por favor until the guard understood the message. I said I had to find out what shape she was in, and if she came out to the gate, I had a few questions about Tomberlin which might be helpful. I said that if there was any imminent ugliness, I would dive for the brush. It made her nervous for me to go up the road. She wanted to come along. I told her to stay and keep an eye on the boat. It was a make-work project, to make her feel useful.

When I started up the road, I looked back. I saw her going down the steps toward the pool, a slender distant figure in white. I stretched my legs and made pretty good time up the curves of the road. I was better than halfway to the pink house when I heard the pounding of running footsteps. An instant later the young lawyer appeared around the next curve. He wore pink shorts, a knit shirt, white sweat socks and tennis shoes. Those heavy white muscular hairy legs were not built for running. He was making a tremendous effort, but not covering much ground. The handsome face was mostly gasping mouth.

“Hay-yulp! Hay-yulp!” he bawled, and tried to point behind him and run at the same time. He ground to a stop in front of me, gasping hard, and said, “My God! He… My God, the blood! Almah! My God… with a knife…”

With a sudden rising roar, the Datsun came rocketing and sliding around the curve, and got a good grip and charged at us. I got the lawyer around the chunky waist and churned hard for the side of the road, with the tan vehicle aiming at us in a long slant. I scrabbled at the side hill beyond the ditch and almost pulled him clear, but the vehicle swerved into the ditch, bouncing hard, and one wheel caught his thick ankle against the stones in the ditch bottom and crushed it like pottery. He yelled and fainted.

I left him there and took off after the vehicle. I came around a bend in time to see him pass the top of the path and brake hard and swing down the little steep side road to the boat basin. I swerved into the path. I was going too fast, slipped on loose stones, fell on one hip and skidded off into the brush. I got up and went on, running more slowly, and with a slight limp.

When I got to the top of the steps, I could see the vehicle below me and see Miguel out on the finger pier, snatching the lines off and tossing them aboard. I raced down the steps and around the truck. I thought I might have a pretty good chance of running out and leaping aboard before he could get it started. He was aboard and scrambling toward the controls. Off to my right I suddenly saw Nora out of the corner of my eye, just past the sign saying boat owners and guests only, her hands clasped together, her eyes wide with alarm.

I didn’t know how good an idea it might be to leap aboard with that desperate murderous little man, but I thought that if there was a handy boat hook, I might do some good.

The problem did not arise. A white blooming flower of heat picked me up and slammed me back against the side of the Datsun. I rebounded from it onto my face in the dust, too dazed to comprehend what had happened.

Once upon a time I had been a hundred yards from a damn fool in a Miami marina when he had stepped aboard his jazzy little Owens and, without checking the bilge or turning the blowers on, had turned the key to start the engines. The accumulated gas fumes in the bilge had made a monstrous Whooompf. His fat wife was on the dock, and it had blown the sunsuit off her without leaving a mark on her. The owner had landed twenty feet away, in the water, with second degree burns and two broken legs. His crumpled beer cooler had landed on top of a car in the nearby parking lot. And what was left of the little cruiser had sunk seconds later.

This was no whooompf. This was a hard, full throated, solid bam. It silenced that immediate portion of the world, and sent a thousand water birds wheeling and squalling. I picked myself up and fell. I saw Nora fifty feet away, trying to sit up. I started crawling to her. I stood up and took a dozen lurching steps and fell again and crawled the last few leet. She could not sit up.

The white dress was not soiled. Her hair was not mussed. The only new thing about her was a crisp, splintery shard of mahogany. It looked as if it had been blown out of a portion of the rail. The rounded part of it was varnished. It was about twenty inches long. It was heaviest in the middle, tapering toward both ends. The middle of it was about as big around as her wrist. It was socketed into the soft tan hollow of her throat, at a slight angle so that the sharp splintered end stuck out of the side of her throat, near the back. She was braced up on one elbow, and with the fingertips of the other hand she touched the thing where it entered her throat.

She looked at me with an expression of shy, rueful apology, as though she wanted me to forgive her for being such a fool. Her lips moved, and then she frowned and coughed. She put her hand to her lips and coughed a bulging, spilling pint of red blood. She settled back. On hands and knees, I looked down into her eyes. She gave a little frown, as though exasperated at being so terribly messy, and coughed once again, and the dark eyes looked at me and then suddenly they looked through me and beyond me, and through the sky itself, glazing into that stare into infinity. She spasmed once, twitched those stupendous legs, and flattened slowly, slowly against the ground, shrinking inside that white dress until it looked too big for her, until she could have been a thin child in a woman’s dress.

They said that things fell into the water for a long time, speckling the bay. They said that a broken piece of bronze cleat landed in the swimming pool. It blew the windows out of the office. They said that even flash-burned, with broken ribs and a sprained wrist, I kept four men busy getting me away from the body of Nora Gardino. They found some bits of Miguel. Enough for graveyard purposes.

The doctor who flew up from Mazatlan sprayed my burns, taped wrist and ribs. He treated the woman who had been so startled she fell down a short flight of stone steps. He did what he could with Gabriel Day’s ruined ankle. I lay in bed and fought against the shot the doctor had given me. Then the first of the out of town police arrived, and after the first couple of questions, I stopped fighting the shot and let it take me under. It was easier down there.

With a hundred thousand U.S. citizens resident in Mexico, and with God only knows how many hundred thousand tourists wandering around, seeking access to the inaccessible, and with the economy waxing fat on tourist dollars, they are geared to swoop down upon any unpleasant happening and minimize it. We had special police from the state of Sinaloa. We had federal police and federal officials. And we had an influx of earnest young Mexicans in neat dark suits, carrying dispatch cases. They spoke fluent colloquial American.

I decided that I had better stay dazed for a while. I soon realized that they weren’t looking for all the answers. They merely wanted something that sounded plausible. Something they could hand over to press association people as soon as they unlocked the gates and let them in.

As I saw the official version taking shape, I helped them along with it, and they seemed very pleased with me. I was just a tourist. Nora Gardino had been a friend of mine from Fort Lauderdale. I wouldn’t want anybody to think, just because we had come down here together, that it was anything more than friendship. I had just taken an evening walk up the hill and ran into that fellow coming down, with some kind of a truck after him. I had done what I could, of course. What was he running from?

It made the men in the dark suits uneasy. But they had an official version for me. Mr. Day and Miss Hichin had been house guests of Carlos Garcia. Garcia had been seriously ill for many weeks, and Miss Hichin had stayed on to help care for him, as a gesture of friendship. She had asked Mr. Day to come and visit, with Garcia’s permission. Now, to the consternation of everyone, they had discovered that Carlos Garcia was, in fact, Carlos Menterez, living in Mexico with falsified papers. He was a Cuban exile. Obviously, neither Miss Hichin or Mr. Day had known this.

Apparently one Miguel Alconedo, also Cuban, a servant in the household, evidently emotionally unbalanced, had become infatuated with Miss Hichin. Perhaps he had made advances to her and she had rebuffed him. At any rate, poor Mr. Day had been walking toward the swimming pool to ask Miss Hichin if he could bring her a drink when he had seen the aforesaid Miguel Alconedo go up behind the chair where Miss Hichin was sitting, grasp her by her blonde hair, pull her head sharply back and slash her throat with such a ferocity the head was almost severed from the trunk. Mr. Day had hidden in the brush. He had seen Miguel run to the gates, speak to the guard there, and swing the gates open. In terror, Mr. Day had run through the open gates and down the hill.

The demented murderer, after trying to run him down, and succeeding only in injuring him badly, had sought to escape on the boat which he had made ready for flight. But, as everyone now knew, there had probably been an accumulation of gasoline fumes in the bilge, a highly explosive situation. It was a tragic thing that Miss Gardino should have been killed by the bit of flying debris. It was fortunate that more people were not injured.

In the reports it would be clearly indicated that the murderer of the lovely young actress was also in Mexico without proper and complete documentation. Now the authorities had stepped in, of course, and would see what could be done officially about the invalid and the rest of the household and staff.

I knew and they knew that Menterez had greased some palms, probably with the understanding that his cover would remain intact so long as he had no trouble. And they knew and I knew that it had been more than gas fumes. But the fun-lovers will not patronize a resort area where people go around wiring bombs into boats.

It had to be a Columbine IV, of course. Perhaps they had worked their dinghy ashore in the dark of night. It had acted like a six stick blast, plus the added push of all that gasoline. Based on the habits of the pre-stroke Menterez, such a device had a good chance of getting him. And hate can be so strong you cease caring whether you get some other people too. You can tell yourself the other people would be either his friends or his employees, and the hell with them.

It wouldn’t have been hooked up after the stroke. No point. And the boat hadn’t been used since the Columbine had been there.

The rest of the staff knew absolutely nothing, of course.

And there wasn’t much danger of Nora getting much publicity Not with an Almah Hichin and a young pretty lawyer to write about. The hotel had no legal responsibility in the matter, of course. After all, the lady was in an area clearly marked as private.

The wrist was a minor sprain. It throbbed when I let it hang. It was more comfortable if I walked with my thumb hooked over my belt. I had lost eyelashes, singed hair and eyebrows, lost the white sun-baked hair on hands and arms. I wanted to get to Mr. Day. Because his ankle was like a bag of marble chips, they were making complex arrangements about flying him to the nearest hospital with special facilities for that kind of work, in Torreon. They had him in room twenty. I got to him at ten in the morning. They were due to tote him down to the dock and slide him aboard an amphib at noon. He had a couple of the black-suited ones with him.

He looked at me as I came in and said in a mild drug-blurred voice, “You are the man who saved my life.”

I asked if I could have a little time alone with him. They bowed and smiled their way out, like oriental diplomats. They liked us. We were being good boys. We had taken our indirect briefing like little soldiers.

I took the straight chair beside the bed. Staring out of all that hair and hard white meat and handsomeness were two ineffectual blue eyes.

“I lost my head,” he said. “I would have kept running right down the middle of the road. They said your name is McGee.” He put his hand out. “I’m very grateful to you.” The handshake jiggled the bed, making him wince.

“What kind of law do you practice, Gabe?”

“Oh, theatrical mostly. Contract setups for independent producers. Special services contracts:”

“Are you honest?”

“Of course!”

“Then how did you happen to team up with Almah Hichin in a conspiracy, boy?”

The pain-killer had slowed him. He blinked at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Almah’s scheme to loot Menterez’s lock box in Mexico City, boy.”

“Whose?”

“Come off it!”

“Who are you anyhow?”

“I’m a tourist. Didn’t they tell you that?”

He put the back of his hand across his eyes. “Jesus, I can’t think. You… you have no idea how it was, seeing a thing like that. The way he jumped back, and all that blood…”

“Was the money the big thing to you, Gabe? Over six hundred thousand in U.S. dollars. And Menterez in no shape to lodge a complaint. You had the papers all set up, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “Power of attorney. Doctor’s affidavit.”

“Was it the money?”

He took his hand away, but kept his eyes closed. “No. If she’d asked me to crawl through fire, I’d have done that too. She knew I was hooked. She knew I’d been hooked for a long time. When she could use me, she sent for me.”

“It seems strange. You’re good-looking, and in a show biz area, and I’d think you could round up forty duplicates of her in one month.”

He turned his head and looked at me. “Don’t ask me to explain it; McGee. Infatuation. Sex. Put any word on it you want to. She was selfish and cruel and greedy. I know all that. She had a ring in my nose. And even when… it was the best for her, I had the idea it just happened to be me, and it could have been anybody. You know a funny thing? The closest I ever felt to her was the day before yesterday. She was out almost all afternoon. I don’t know where she went. She didn’t usually go out much at all. I didn’t hear her come in. I didn’t see her until she came out of the shower. She had a white robe on. She came to me and just wanted to be held. That’s all. Just held close. She cried for a long time. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. It was the only time… it was ever tender. He did it so quickly. He just yanked her head way back and… Jesus, I am never going to be able to forget it. How could a man do a thing like that to so much loveliness?”

“How did you meet her?”

“Down here a year ago. I was at Claude and Ellie Boody’s house, and the two house parties sort of got combined.”

I wondered if I should tell him that his little cruel darling had been a big help in getting four people murdered, and that was why Miguel had finished her off before leaving. A last minute errand.

But Mr. Day had all he could manage. And I decided I might as well leave her one mourner. Suddenly he realized what he had been saying.

“There was no conspiracy involved, Mr. McGee. Almah was going to get that money out and bring it back to Mr. Garcia. That was the basis on which I agreed to help her.”

“Sure, Gabe. They’ll get a court order and open the box. A couple of bonded officials will discover about ten thousand dollars there, just enough to cover Menterez’s hospital bills from now until he dies. But, of course, you didn’t know his name was Menterez and his residency here wasn’t entirely legal.”

There was one knowing glimmer in the mild blue eyes. “I thought his name was Carlos Garcia.”

“If we don’t know our lines, they can make an investigation down here drag on forever.”

“I… I’m sorry about that friend of yours, Mr. McGee.”

I gave him a big empty glassy smile and got out of there. Later I watched them load him and his luggage aboard the amphib. They joggled him and he let out a very sincere yell. It taxied out and turned into the wind. There was a pretty good chop, and I could hear the distant sound of the aluminum hull going bang bang bang before they got up enough flying speed to lift off. Gabriel Day was paying for his sins out there.

I went back into the lobby just in time to be told my call had come through. It was my first chance to get through the heavy traffic on the single phone line. Shaja’s voice was very faint. Apparently she could hear me all too well. It was the first inkling of disaster she’d had. Nora had been accidentally killed when a boat had blown up. Her people would probably want the body sent to New Jersey. There was a lot of red tape. No need for her to come down. I was all right. I would try to handle everything. I heard that faraway voice break into drab little heartsick fragments. I told her to inform Nora’s local attorney.

The big league baseball players live by an ancient myth. Watch the next one get hammered in the shoulder muscle by a wild pitch, or get slammed in the meat of the thigh by a line drive. They believe that if you rub it, you make it hurt worse. The impulse is always to rub the place that hurts. They are very stoic. They walk around in little circles, moaning, but they don’t rub it.

That was the only way I could handle Nora. I would get right up to the edge of taking a second look at that deadly shard of mahogany, and then I would walk off in my little circle, not rubbing it. I didn’t want to get into all the ifs. You can kill yourself with ifs. If I hadn’t had my little emotional tantrum which had dropped me into the tequila bottle, we would have been long gone. If I’d told her to stay the hell away from the boat basin… If she had been standing three inches to one side or the other… If my luck had gone bad long ago, I wouldn’t have been around to bring her down and get her killed.

The it’s can kill you, and the never agains can gut you. Never again to feel the smooth and eager musculature of that smooth narrow back. Never again to hear the smug and murmurous little pleasure sound. Never again to watch the lilt and swing of those marvelous legs as she walked with the guile of the trained model. Never again to make her laugh.

So what you do, if you have been down that road other times, is unhook the little hook and let the metal shutters bang down. When things have quieted down back there, you can lift them again. Time, divided by life, equals death every time. It is the deadly equation, with time as the unknown.

I heard one of those heavy Germanic jokes one time. An enormously wealthy industrialist fathered an only son and, knowing death is often a matter of luck and circumstance, vowed to give the boy maximum protection. He was raised behind steel walls mid shatterproof glass, breathed filtered air, was tended constantly by doctors, dieticians, tutors. He was permitted no toy or tool which could harm him in any way. On his twenty-first birthday, when they let him out into the world, the kid died of excitement.

Almah, Miguel, Nora. They had gone in quick succession like popcorn. And Carlos, the half-man, was still breathing. And his wife was still rocking.

I completed the necessary arrangements, with plenty of official help. To the couple of wire service stringers who filtered in, I was a very dull party. I was the fellow who answered the first question with a half hour lecture on boating safety. Newsmen have a very short attention span. It is a prerequisite in the business. That is why the news accounts of almost anything make sense to all ages up to the age of twelve. If one wishes to enjoy newspapers, it is wise to halt all intellectual development right at that age. The schools are doing their level best to achieve this goal. For the first time in history it is possible to earn doctorates in obscure professional techniques without upsetting the standard of a twelve year old basic intellect.

But after all the white-washers had moved along, back to other pressing PR problems, a little man moved in on me who was considerably more impressive. He was bald and wide and brown, and had a face like the fake Aztec carvings gullible tourists buy. He had an eye patch, and carried himself as if he were in uniform. His name was Marquez. I had been vaguely aware of him in the background, coming and going, keeping to himself. He came to me at the bar and suggested we go over to a table. He smiled all the time. He had a tiny gold and blue badge, and something that said he was Colonel Marquez, and something else that said he was in Investigationes Especiales for some kind of national bureau.

“That boat went up with one hell of a bang,” he said.

I gave him my water safety lecture. He listened to it with total attention, and when I ran down, he said, “That boat went up with one hell of a bang, eh?”

“Yes it did indeed, Colonel.”

“Down in Puerto Altamura, in the village, you’re a pretty popular tourist, McGee.”

“Every tourist should be an ambassador of good will.”

“That Garcia house, it’s like a fortress, eh?”

“Maybe they have sneak thieves around here.”

“A man handles himself pretty well, and then he hides a gun in a john tank, for God’s sake.”

“Colonel, you skip around so much, you confuse me.”

“This was the last place the Columbine IV was definitely seen.”

“Was it?”

“How many women do you need for one little vacation, McGee?”

“Now look, Colonel.”

“You pretend to be mad, then I’ll pretend to be mad, and then we’ll quiet down and play some more riddles, eh?”

He looked perfectly happy. I said, “Can I play a game?”

“Go ahead. But watch yourself. You’re semi-pro. This is a pro league. Even if you’re a pro in your own country, you’re semi-pro here. We play hard ball.”

“Let’s just imagine that a rich man hides himself away here because it’s a place where he’s hard to get at, and he expects sharpshooters. He would expect some because they plain hate him, and some because they think he might be in a situation where they can pick some of the loot off him. I guess they’ve picked him pretty clean. There’s one thing left, maybe, like a lock box in a Mexico City bank with better than six hundred thousand U.S. dollars in it.”

The smile remained the same size, but suddenly looked hemstitched. He got up and patted my shoulder and said, “Wait right here, please.”

I had a twenty minute wait. He came back. He signaled for a drink, and said, “I suddenly thought of a phone call which could prevent a little error in bookkeeping. I am enjoying your game.”

“Thanks. We’ll imagine a man comes down here after there’s some trouble and tries to figure out who’s been trying to do what to whom. The dust is settling, and he isn’t too anxious to kick it up into the air again. How do we classify the little lady with the sliced throat? She brought along legal aid, so let’s say she was after the loot. Maybe, along the way, she earned an assist on the Columbine thing, because she was anxious not to have anything drastic happen before she could get the loot.”

“And what have you been after?” he asked.

“Just a little fun in the sun, Colonel.”

“Like looking at the pictures on Heintz’s wall? Heintz wants to be a company man, but he thinks it was a hell of a bang too. What if Taggart thought he would sleep better if Miguel for sure, and maybe the Hichin girl along with him, had one of those boating accidents you give the big talk about?”

The man had a very flexible and interesting mind. I checked his concept for about twenty seconds. Sam did have the opportunity. And it would be a horrid irony if the package he had prepared had waited right there until Nora was in range.

“No. It wasn’t his style.”

He shook his head sadly. “You spoil the fun. You tell me too much too fast, McGee. See what you told me? That you knew him that well and that he’s dead.”

“I’ve lowered my guard because I trust you, Colonel.”

“My God, that is so unique, I don’t know how to handle it. I seldom trust myself, even.”

I was fascinated by the computer mechanism behind that Aztec face, so I put another little piece of data into the machine. “Of course, Miss Gardino knew him better than I ever did.”

“So! An emotional pilgrimage. I’m disappointed in you, McGee. Or did I speak too fast, eh? Emotional for her? Loot for you?”

“Something like that.”

“One little area of speculation is left. It will never be proved one away or another. I think these things entertain you too. Taggart and Alconedo do some very dirty work for Don Carlos. Certain people are getting too close to Don Carlos. Perhaps he has promised them much money for special work they have done. So he makes a sly scheme, eh? He will leave the house with Miguel and Taggart to go to the boat. His pockets are full of bank books, eh? Perhaps an old and trusted friend is at the hotel with a car. There is a hell of a bang, and the car drives away, with Don Carlos hiding under a blanket, maybe.” His smile broadened. “But it is so difficult to arrange, so intricate, so full of suspense, eh? With the strain, a little blood vessel goes pop in Don Carlos’ head. How many times can a man successfully disappear?”

“Son of a gun!”

“It entertains me too. Taggart left with loot. What if he had left, or planned to, on that boat. Perhaps with Miss Hichin. The possible combinations are interesting. Ah, well. You are scheduled to leave tomorrow. You can leave.”

“Thanks.”

“You were discreet with those drab little news people. There is no need to kick up dust now. Let it all settle. The dead women are in transit. Don Carlos and his wife will be in institutions. We have the problem of those other Cubans. The land syndicate will find a buyer for the house. May I say a few things to you, McGee? On a personal level?”

Si, mi Coronel.“

“My God, what a horrible accent! I think you are a reckless man. I think you are a mischievous man. But you have good intentions. You have a sour view of yourself, eh? You are… I would say a talented amateur in these matters. But an adult, I think. One finds so few American adults these days. To you, the village Mexicans are people. Not quaint dirty actors we supply to make the home movies look better. I have some problems I work on. Tampico, Acapulco, Mexicali. Three kinds of nastiness. If you’re bored, we could have some fun. I can give you no official protection. I would use you, and pay you very little out of some special funds they give me. I would throw you into those situations, and see what happens.”

“I’m flattered, but no thanks.”

“No temptation at all?”

“Not very much. I guess I get into things, Colonel, because I get personally and emotionally involved.”

“The stamp of the amateur, of course. But why set up an order of which has to come first, my friend? Because you have the soul of an amateur, you will find that personal emotional involvement after you get into these things. You will always bleed for the victims. And always have the capacity for terrible righteous anger. This recruiting is very irregular, McGee. But when you are in the business of using people, it is hard to let a special person slip away.”

“Give me a great big medal for what I accomplished here, Marquez.”

“Don’t be bitter about the woman. If she wasn’t willing to accept risk she wouldn’t have come here. She could stand there unharmed while a thousand boats blew up. This was the thousand and first.”

“You are overvaluing me, Colonel.”

“Maybe you mean this thing is not over for you yet.”

“Possibly.”

He put his hand out. “When it is over… if you survive it… if you have some curiosity, write me at this address. Just say you are going to visit Mexico and would like to have a drink with me. By then I will know much more about you than I know now. But I don’t overvalue you, McGee. The affair of the knife at the Tres Panchos was very swift and competent. One day I would like to know just how you managed the dog. And before leaving, do not forget the interesting photographs in the base of the lamp.”

“Colonel, you are showing off.”

He made a sad face. “That is the flaw in my personality. Vanity. And your flaw is sentimentality. They are the flaws which will inevitably kill us both. But let us enjoy them before the time runs out, eh? Buena suerte, amigo. And good hunting. And God grant we meet again.”

Sixteen

UPON RETURN to this country from any quiet corner of a foreign land, the most immediate impression is that of noise; continuous, oppressive, meaningless noise. Highway noise-from the labored snarl of the big rigs shifting on the grades to the pneumatic whuff of fast passenger traffic. The bell sounds of wrenches dropped on cement garage floors. Diesel bray. Restaurants all clatter and babble like huge cocktail parties, the sound rising above that stupefying placebo of Muzak, which is like cotton candy being stuffed into the ears. Sound trucks, brash snatches of radio music and TV laughter, shuffle and tick-tock of sidewalks full of people, rackety clatter of machines filling out paper forms, horn blatt, brake squeal, yelps of children, shrieking passage of the jets.

There is a spurious vitality about all this noise. But under it, when you come back, you can sense another more significant and more enduring vitality. It has been somewhat hammered down of late. The bell ringers and flag fondlers have been busily peddling their notion that to make America Strong, we must march in close and obedient ranks, to the sound of their little tin whistle. The life-adjustment educators, in strange alliance with the hucksters of consumer goods, have been doing their damnedest to make us all think alike, look alike, smell alike and die alike, amidst all the pockety-queek of unserviceable home appliances, our armpits astringent, nasal passages clear, insurance program adequate, sex life satisfying, retirement assured, medical plan comprehensive, hair free of dandruff, time payments manageable, waistline firm, bowels open.

But the other vitality is still there, that rancorous, sardonic, wonderful insistence on the right to dissent, to question, to object, to raise holy hell and, in direst extremity, to laugh the self-appointed squad leaders off the face of the earth with great whoops of dirty disdainful glee. Suppress friction and a machine runs fine. Suppress friction, and a society runs down.

As I holed up in the City of the Angels, I was also aware of a comforting feeling of anonymity. In the world’s biggest third-class city I could pass unnoticed. I spoke the language. I was familiar with the currency. I could drink the water. I could almost breathe the air, late April air, compounded of interesting hydro-carbons.

I wanted transient accommodations, of a very special kind. I did not want to sign in anywhere as McGee or anybody else. I did not want to impose on old friends and get them implicated in anything.

I did not want to be within that strata subject to routine police checks. I wanted anonymous transportation and freedom of movement. I wanted to be the nearest thing to an invisible man I could achieve. It might turn out that all such precautions were unnecessary. But I had to follow my hunch. The hunch said that this might get messy before it was over-0r, more accurately, might continue to be messy.

I got in at six in the evening. By seven I was prowling the area where I hoped to work something out, the trash end of Sunset Boulevard. My luggage was in a bus station coin locker. By nine o’clock, in several assorted bars and lounges, I had surveyed several groups, ingratiated myself with a few and then given them up and gone on. By ten I had a promising group in a crowded corner of a place called The Pipe and Bowl.

Extremely local cats, in the restless middle twenties, overdressed and slightly stoned, trying to look as if they hadn’t spent their week in insurance agencies, department stores, dental labs and office buildings. They accepted the amiable stranger, with the usual reservations, indirect challenges, the waiting to see if there was any angle, any kind of hustling.

I did my verbal card tricks, and struck the right attitudes, and bought my share. I was Mack, a boat chauffeur by trade. They shuffled me around to one of the two free lassies, perhaps on the basis of a girls’ room conference, and amalgamated me into the group. Her name, unfortunately, seemed to be Junebug. She had a round merry face, a lot of gestures and animation, cropped brown hair. Her figure, as revealed by a little beige stretch dress, was quite pretty, except for a potentially dangerous case of secretarial spread. She was careful to tell me her boyfriend was an engineer working on some kind of rugged project up in Canada.

From time to time, according to mysterious signals, we all left and piled into cars and went to other places which seemed to be identical to the ones we left, the same music, the same drinks, the same faces at the bar. We had drop-offs, and we picked up some new recruits. By the third stop I had become an old time buddy. At the fourth stop, well after midnight, I had her trapped in a dark corner and made my pitch.

“Junebug, I’ve been living a little too much tonight. This check will take me down to cigarette money.”

“Gee, Mack, I’ve got a few bucks in my purse if…”

“It isn’t only that, honey. What happened, this isn’t home base for the boat I was running. And I got fired today. It’s no real sweat. The owner got a wrong idea of me and his wife. I’ve got money coming. And no problem about a job. The man said get off my boat, and I got my gear and got off. But now I am definitely hung up for a place to stay. My gear is in a bus locker.”

She moved as far away from me as she could get, which was about six inches, and she stuck her underlip out and said, “if you think you’re going to shack with me, buddy boy, if this is one of those cute ideas, I haven’t had that much to drink. No sir. Oh-you-tee. Out.”

“Honey, believe me, you are a very exciting woman, but that wasn’t my play. I want a place where I can hole up until the money comes through. That’s all. Not your place. I thought you might know of a place. As soon as the money comes through, I’ll pay you a going rent.”

“So how long is that supposed to be?” she asked with great skepticism.

I unstrapped my watch and handed it to her. “This is a solid gold case. You can check it anywhere.”

“No. I don’t want it. Look, I just thought you were trying to make it cute. Okay? Maybe one of the guys has an open couch.”

“As a last resort. But maybe if somebody is away. How about your engineer?”

“No. He lives with his folks in Santa Barbara. Let me think.”

She sat and pulled at that protruding underlip and scowled into her drink. Then she glowed with inspiration and went off to phone. She came back and wedged herself in again and in a conspiratorial tone said, “Bingo. And we’re neighbors yet. The girlfriend I phoned was sore as hell at being waked up at all hours. But she’s the one Francine left her key with. And she’ll go over and put it in my mailbox she said.”

“Who is Francine?”

“Oh, she’s away on this thing. What it is, the executives where she works, they take this trip and go to a whole mess of regional offices and have sales meetings. She’s gone every year for a month about this time. It’s pretty nice, going in a company plane and all, and they ball it up pretty good. She sacks out for days when she gets back believe me. She shouldn’t be back for another couple weeks anyway.”

When the group decided to hit one more place, we broke away. Junebug had a little grey English Ford. She drove it with slap-dash efficiency. When I came out of the bus station with my bags and put them in the back seat, she said, “You know, Mack, I damn near drove off. I was thinking, this is pretty stupid, not knowing you or anything.”

“I wondered if you would drive off.”

“What would you have done, baby?”

“Had some naps in the bus station.”

“Am I doing something real stupid?”

“I think you’re smart enough to have a pretty good idea of whom you can trust.”

“Well… I guess that’s the way it has to be.”

The place was off Beverly Boulevard, not too far from City College. It was one of those depressing little residence courts, small attached bungalows, about thirty of them, in a hollow square, facing a common courtyard. You drove in through an ornamental arch, from which hung a sign saying Buena Villas. There was a weak night light and a dead fountain in the middle of the court. Cars were parked in front of most of the bungalows. The bungalows all had shallow porches, one step up from minuscule yards with low iron fences.

She parked in front of hers. Number 11. While I got my gear out of her car, she went onto her porch and got the key from her mailbox. Then we went diagonally across the court to number 28.

After she put the key into the front door lock, she turned and whispered, “Honey, honest to God, you got to promise me you won’t make me regret this. I mean no big phone bills, or messing the place up, or breaking stuff or stealing stuff. I told Honey it was a girl friend I wanted it for. Even so, she dragged her heels.”

“You have no cause for alarm, Junebug.”

We went in. She found the lights. Living room, bedroom, kitchen and bath. Quick tour of inspection. No side windows. It would be depressingly dark by daylight. And Francine was a miserable housekeeper. Junebug found beer in the small noisy refrigerator. I agreed to replace anything I used up. We sat on the couch in the living room. She was mildly, apprehensively flirtatious. She expected the pass, and I knew she could react in only three possible ways-rebuff, limited access, or totality-and I had not the slightest curiosity about finding out. Perhaps she wanted a chance to dizzy herself then bravely retreat, for the sake of the engineer. When I sensed she might get a little bolder, I cooled the situation by asking friendly questions about the engineer. Finally we said our polite goodnights, with thanks and reassurances, and she left.

I poked around my new domain. Francine had left dirty sheets on the double bed. I found fresh ones in a narrow cupboard in the bathroom. She had left long blonde hair in all the expected places. I got rid of those, and the ring in the tub, and the hardened fragments of cheese sandwich on the kitchen table. I am a confirmed snoop. I went through the living room desk and found out she was Mrs. Francine Broadmaster. Divorced. Age 27. I found some treasured little packets of love letters from several males. They were semiliterate, and so shockingly clinical they awed me.

I found myself conducting a search for whatever it was she would hide away. Everybody hides things. They think they have dreamed up the most perfect place, but it is always a very ordinary place. Hers was a brown envelope Scotch-taped to the underside of a bureau drawer with the flap paperclipped shut. She had three one-hundred-dollar hills in there, and six fifties, all crisp and new. And she had twenty or so polaroid pictures in there. Evidently she or her boyfriend had a polaroid camera with a timing device. She was featured in them. She was a medium-sized blonde, with more than her share of jaw and breast. The boyfriend was a burly rascal. In the pitiless glare of the flash bulb they looked toward the camera, whenever possible, wearing that dazed blind nervous grin typical of all amateur pornography. I could imagine nothing of a more ghastly sadness than these little souvenirs.

After I had gathered up stray garments and shoved them onto a closet shelf, I did the minimum of unpacking for myself and went to bed.

I had become a city rabbit and found a burrow. In the darkness, stretched out in Mrs. Broadmaster’s play pen, aware of the late mumbles of the city I took a tentative rub at the place that hurt. “Forgive me,” her dying eyes said. “Forgive me for being such a bloody mess.”

And the black anger came rolling up, turning my fists to stones, bunching the muscles of arm and shoulder. Don’t go away Mr. Tomberlin.

At eight in the morning the people of Buena Villas started going to work. The court made for considerable resonance. Apparently standard procedure was to bang every car door at least three times, rev up to 6000 rpm, then squeak the tires and groan out in low low. I could have sworn half of them drove back in and did it all over again. By nine it had quieted down, and I got another hour of sleep before the phone started ringing. I began counting the rings, waiting for it to quit. It was beside the bed. It was a white phone. It had lipstick on the mouthpiece. After twenty-seven rings I knew who it had to be, so I reached and picked it up. “Boy, you sleep pretty good,” Junebug said.

“I wanted to make sure it wasn’t for her.”

“I was beginning to think you cleaned out the place and took off.”

“What would I steal, honey? Dirty underwear? Eddie Fisher records? That beautiful refrigerator?”

“Look, is everything okay? Honey didn’t come over to check on who I borrowed it for before she went to work?”

“No callers.”

“Baby, you want to get in touch with me, you ask for Miss Proctor. You got something there to write down the number. I’ll give you both numbers, my place and here. You got plans for after I get off today?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“What I’ll do to keep from waiting so long next time I want to phone you, I let it ring once and hang up and dial you right back. Okay?”

“Fine.”

After I got dressed I checked the emergency reserve in my money belt. I had eight hundred there, in fifties. I moved half of it into my wallet. I had a Lauderdale account I could tap at long range, but I still didn’t want to have my name on anything. I imagined the car in front of the bungalow belonged to Francine. It was a sand-colored Falcon. It took a ten minute search to turn up the keys. They were in a bowl on the table by the front door, under some old bills and circulars.

It was one of only four cars left in the court. The battery sounded jaded, but it started in time. After I was out of the neighborhood, I filled the tank and had a soft tire pumped up. I found a breakfast place, and then looked in a phone book and found no listing for Calvin Tomberlin. I reviewed what I knew about him. Loads of money from his mother’s real estate investments. Several residences, including a lodge up near Cobblestone Mountain. A boat big enough to go down the coast with. A persistent buyer of art objects, perhaps. And unlisted phones.

It wasn’t a difficult problem. There are dozens of ways. My problem was to find a way which would leave no trace. I did not want anyone remembering the invisible man. Money can buy a lot of fences. Try phoning Howard Hughes sometime. Tomberlin could be on the other side of the world. He would find that wasn’t far enough. But I hoped he was nearby. I had a pretty good hidey-hole. He had enough money to be wary of anybody with cute ideas, like selling him back to himself. Almah had called him spooky.

I started phoning the expensive retail establishments. I hit a vein on the third one, Vesters on Wilshire. I got a Mrs. Knight in the credit department and said, “This is Mr. Sweeney of Sweeney and Dawson, Mrs. Knight. We’re doing an audit on Mr. Calvin Tomberlin’s personal accounts. Could you please tell me his present credit balance with you?”

“Just a moment, sir.”

I waited. If she thought to look in the yellow pages, she would find the accounting firm of Sweeney and Dawson listed therein. If she was bright, she would have suggested she call me back.

“It’s just under eight hundred dollars, Mr. Sweeney. I imagine you want the exact figure. Seven hundred and eighty-eight twenty.”

“Thank you. Could you give me your billing address on that, please?”

“Yes sir. Care of the trust department, First Pacific National Bank.”

I thanked her for her cooperation, not heartily, but with the little touch of ice she might expect from diligent auditors.

I got First Pacific and asked for the trust department, and asked for the person handling the Tomberlin retail accounts. After some delay a very cool and cautious young voice said that she was Miss Myron.

“Miss Myron, I hate to bother you with this sort of a problem. This is Mr. Harmer in the credit department at Vesters. We show a balance in Mr. Calvin Tomberlin’s account of seven hundred and eighty-eight twenty. Would it be too much trouble for you to check that for me, please?”

“One moment, Mr. Harmer.”

Sooner than I expected, she was back on the line, saying, “That’s the figure I have here. These accounts are set up to be paid on the fifth working day of each…”

“Good heavens, Miss Myron! I am certainly not pressing for payment on Mr. Tomberlin’s account. We have a confusion on another item. I wanted to make certain you had not yet been billed for it. It was a phone order from Mr. Tomberlin late last month, and we had to special order it. You see, I thought that if you had been billed, your copy of our bill form would show delivery instructions. The sales person who took the order cannot remember which address to send it to. I thought of sending it along to the Cobblestone Mountain lodge… but you understand, we want to give Mr. Tomberlin the best possible service. It just came in and I do so want to send it to the right place. It took longer than we promised.”

“He’s at the Stone Canyon Drive house, Mr. Harmer.”

“Let me see. I believe we have that number. Our records are in horrible shape. We’re changing systems here.”

“Number forty, Mr. Harmer.”

“Thank you so much for helping us.”

“No trouble at all.”

Her girlish caution had evaporated when the figure I gave her checked with hers. We had become companions then. We shared the same arithmetic. And we were both eager to be of maximum service to Mr. Calvin Tomberlin. He used that handy tool of the very rich, special services from the trust department of a bank. All his bills would go there and they would pay them all, neatly and promptly. At the end of the year they would make up a detailed statement, take a percentage of the total as a service charge, send the statement to the tax attorney handling Tomberlin’s affairs.

I had to buy a city map to locate Stone Canyon Drive. It angled west off Beverly Glen Boulevard, a winding road like a shelf pasted against the wall of a dry canyon. The houses were very far apart, and so were the numbers. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty. Everybody had a nice round number. I came to 40 after the canyon had gradually turned north. But the house was invisible. A smooth curve of asphalt flowed down around the rocks. Where it entered the main road, a small sign on one side said “40” and the sign on the other side said “Private”. There was a rubber cable across the asphalt. I could assume that the weight of a car set off a signal somewhere.

I had to keep going. There was no place to pull off. After I passed a house-or rather a drivewaywith the number 100 on it, I came to a turnaround, and there was no place to go but back. It was three and a half miles back to the boulevard. Ten houses in three and a half miles is reasonable privacy. I went back to Sunset and over to Sepulveda, and wiggled my way around through some semipretentious little areas, trying to work back toward Stone Canyon Drive.

At last I found what I thought was a pretty good view of the ridge that formed the west wall of the canyon. The houses were set along the reverse slope of the ridge. They weren’t going to burn in tandem. There was too much bare rock up there. But each house was in a private oasis of green, or I should say near one, or perched over ome. Various architects had hung them up there like strange little toys. Other ridge areas, lower and brushier, were clotted thick with houses.

According to demand, I could imagine that each of those far houses was taking up at least a million dollars worth of barren real estate. In a sane world it would be 501$ an acre, but there it is, status-symbol Iiond, rocks and brush, ridges and gulleys, fires and mud, all the way to Pacific Palisades. The highest houses get to see the pizza signs, and the night sea beyond.

Perhaps the only greater idiocy is visible in Beverly Hills where, on the older roads sit, jowl to jowl, on small plots, huge examples of the worst architectural styles of the past two hundred years, from Uncle Georgian to Casablanca Moorish. When San Andreas gives a good belch, they can start again at 500 an acre.

All I had learned was that if I was going to get any closer to C. Tomberlin, I was going to have to walk in. Or get him out of there.

At three o’clock, guessing I could catch Raoul Tenero at home in Miami, I loaded up with quarters and made a station to station call from a booth. Nita answered. I asked for Raoul. She carefully worked out the tense and construction and said, “I am calling him now soon to be here with the phone, thank you.”

Raoul came on, chuckling. “Yes?”

“No names. This is the hero of Rancho Luna, boy.”

“You have something to tell me? Maybe I heard it.”

“Maybe you did. The man we talked about is alive, but if he had the choice maybe he wouldn’t want to be.”

“There have been some discussions about that. We wondered if it was the sort of story he could arrange to circulate, to take the pressure off.”

“I saw him.”

“Then I’ll tell the others. We’ll have a drink to that tonight. We’ll drink to a long life for him.”

“Now for a name. Mineros.”

“Yes?”

“Can you fill me in a little? Background?”

“Of all the men in the world, perhaps he had the best reason to want to find the first man we were talking about. He disappeared, aboard a chartered boat.”

“I know. Who was with him? I could check old newspapers, but this is quicker.”

“Rafael Mineros. Enrique Mineros, his eldest son. Maria Talavera, who was at one time engaged to Rafael’s nephew, who died in a Cuban prison. Manuel Talavera, her brother.”

“They are dead.”

“Presumed dead?”

The operator came on and told me to buy another three minutes. I fed the quarters in, and then said, “Definitely dead. The man you are going to drink to-he gave the orders.”

“God in heaven, what a disaster that man has been to the Mineros family!”

“You can tell from the money how far away I am.”

“I have a pretty good guess.”

“Raoul, I need one contact here. Somebody I can trust. Trust as much as I trust you. Is there any kind of organized group here?”

“My friend, when two Cubans meet, the first thing they do is organize a committee. Out there, it is not like here. Comparatively few, but mostly a heIl of a lot richer. There are several kinds of cats out there. Some of them cashed up and left six, seven, eight, ten years ago. Some at the right time, some scared out by Mr. B, or his buddies, who wanted what they had to leave behind. Then there am the ones who cashed up and got out when the brothers C looked as if they were going to make it down out of the mountains. Then there are the disenchanted, who stayed and saw red. There are other exiles too, South America, Central America, from old friends of little Eva to reasonably genuine patriots. But I don’t have to think a long time to think of a man out there. Paul Dominguez. I have it here in the book. Just a moment. 2832 Winter Haven Drive. Long Beach.”

“Thanks. How do I let him know I have your blessing?”

“Hmmm. Tell him he still owes me a pair of boots. If that isn’t enough, he can phone me.”

“He is sensible?”

“More so than you or I, amigo. And as much man as the two of us.”

I found Dominguez in the book. A woman with a young and pleasant voice said he would be home about six. There wasn’t enough time left to go down to Oceanside and find out who had chartered the Columbine to Rafael Mineros. I looked the name up in the book and found a Rafael Mineros in Beverly Hills and an Esteban Mineros in the Bel Air section.

I got back to Buena Villas at four thirty. About ten cars had come home. I parked in front of 28. As I got out of the Falcon, a woman came striding toward me. She looked like the young George Washington, except that her hair was the color of mahogany varnish.

“Who are you and what the hell is going on?” she demanded at ten paces. She wore a Chinese smock and pale blue denim pants.

I let her march up to me and stop and wait for the answer. “Are you Honey?”

‘Yes. What the hell is Junebug trying to pull around here?“

“Maybe you can solve my problem, Honey.”

“I’m the one with the problem. I’m responsible. Turn over the house key and her car key and clear the hell out of here.”

I extricated one fifty dollar bill and said, “My problem is do I give this to Junebug? Do I leave it on the desk in there for Francine? Or do I turn it over to you?”

Her eyes wavered and her belligerence diminished. “What do you think you’re buying?”

“A quiet place. No fuss, no muss, nothing to upset Mrs. Broadmaster.”

“You know her?”

“I’ve seen quite a bit of her. Should I give this to Junebug?”

“I’ve got a responsibility.”

“In a few days you get the key back. And Junebug gets another of these.”

Her hand, faster than light, snapped the bill away and shoved it into the pocket of the oriental coat. “I look after the place for Fran. I can see she gets this. But you shouldn’t use the car. It’s not right you should use the car. It should be more if you use the car. Did Junebug say it would be so much, like making a deal with her?”

“I don’t think she realizes I intended to pay for it. I’ll tell her the kind of deal I’ve made with you.”

“Why bother? It’s my responsibility isn’t it? Fran left the key with me. Maybe I’ll have to go in and clean up when you leave. Junebug wouldn’t do that, and you know it. So it can be between us. What Fran said, if I want to put somebody up, okay. A favor for a favor. But it should be more for the car.”

“How much more, Honey?”

“Well… the same again?”

“You know, if it was that much, I’d have to ask Junebug if she thought I was being taken.”

“You know, I don’t have to dicker with you. You can get out.”

“Give me back the money and I’ll give you the keys.”

“If you need a place, you need a place. How about twenty?”

“Twenty is fine.”

“Suppose you do this for my protection. You get a key made and give me hers back. Then… if somebody is looking for you and they find you… ”

“That’s fair enough.”

She looked around, checking to see if anybody was looking at us. “After dark, you put the regular key in my mailbox tomorrow. With that twenty dollars like we agreed. You won’t bust the place up or anything?. ”

“I want to live quietly.”

“You tell Junebug I came over and we got along, and I said any friend of hers. Okay?”

“Fine.”

“Fran is back May tenth.”

“Oh, I’ll be long gone. Don’t you worry.”

“I worry about everything all day long and half the night. I worry about things you never heard of,” she said. She went scuttling away, up the line, and went into a bungalow four doors from mine.

Junebug rapped at my door at twenty after five. I got up and let her in. She hadn’t been in her place yet. She wore her office outfit, a tight dark skirt and a white nylon blouse. She grinned a significant grin with her little comedy face, and squinched her jack o‘ lantern eyes, and hugged up for a big kiss of hello. Then she went stilting around on her office heels in a proprietary manner, and exclaimed at how I had neatened it up, saying I’d probably make a good husband even if I didn’t look it. I told her Honey had been to call.

She looked stricken. “Oh dear Jesus,” she said.

“What’s the trouble? We got along fine. She said any friend of yours is a friend of hers. She gave me Francine’s car keys and told me to drive carefully.”

“You’re kidding!”

I showed her the car keys.

“I will be damned,” she said. “Who would have thought? Well, it just goes to show you never know, do you? Mack, dear, I’m just sick about not thinking of something. I got paid today and when I cashed my check I thought of it. You poor dear, what have you done about food? Gee, I could have left you a few bucks, you know. Did you get your money yet?”

“I looked a guy up and got a small loan. I’m okay.”

“Well, thank goodness for that. Can I loan you some more?”

“No. I’m fine, thanks.”

“What do you want to do tonight, honey? I like to swing a little on Friday because I can sleep in.”

“I have to go see a man.”

“About a job?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a sultry glance, with some contrived eyelash effects. “Well, that won’t take all night will it?”

The glance matched the unanticipated kiss of hello at the door. Obviously she had been thinking about the situation, and had come to specific conclusions. The engineer was in Canada. I was the stranger, on my way through, and the place was perfectly safe, without likelihood of spying or interruption. She had found me presentable. She had done me a big favor. She wanted a little pre-marital fling. But it had to go by the rules. I could guess what her rules would be.

Once she had induced me to make the pass, then she could dramatize, perhaps shed a few obligatory tears about not wanting to betray the man she was going to marry. After token resistances, enough of them to lay a firm foundation for the rationalizations she would need later on, she would find herself-to her horror and astonishment-seduced. After the enjoyment thereof, she could wallow in a delicious guilt, the dramatic agony of betrayal, with tears and protestations. The image would be preserved, and it would be a practice session for the infidelities after marriage, when Engineer was in Yucatan or Kenya and the babies were in their beds.

She was a reasonably ripe and lusty-looking little woman, but in my adult years I have lost my taste for soap opera intrigue and high school solutions. I knew exactly what she would say, and exactly what she would expect me to say. The two of us would be able to convince her, after the fact, that she was truly virtuous, that it had been just one of those things redblooded people can’t help. Doomed to that vapid kind of communication, there could be no real contact between us, and no importance to it. I had to make the pass or we would never get to the corny dialogue. So I did not make it, thus saving herself from herself, or me from her, or something, and managed to leave such a tiny scratch on the surface of her pride any Miracle Cleaner would make it invisible in a moment.

I drove to a pay phone and called Paul Dominguez. His accent was very slight. I didn’t tell him my name. I merely said that I needed help, and Raoul Tenero had said to remind him that he still owed Raoul a pair of boots.

After a thoughtful silence he asked me where I was, then told me to meet him at eight o’clock at the bar at Brannigan’s Alibi, a place near the Long Beach Municipal Airport. He said to look for a man with two packs of cigarettes on the bar in front of him, stacked one on the other. He named the brand. It was a very tidy little identification device, and I knew I would remember it and perhaps use it myself one day.

I got lost and arrived at ten past eight. It was one of those sawdusty places with joke signs on the wall, doing a good neighborhood trade. I went to the bar and looked around and saw the two packs in front of a man who stood alone at the far end of the bar. He was tall and quite slender, with a tanned and almost bald head, a youthful face, big, powerful-looking hands. He wore slacks, a white sport shirt and a pale blue jacket.

I moved in beside him and said, “Hi, Paul.”

He gave me a quick look of inventory, smiled and greeted me, and then looked beyond me and gave a little nod. I turned and saw two men get up from a booth near the door. One finished the dregs of his beer, put the glass down and followed the other one out.

I got myself a beer and we carried them over to a booth.

“Precautions?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I phoned Raoul. I got the description, McGee. Maybe somebody had you place that call to him. If somebody else had showed up, it would have turned out to be a different thing. Old habits, I guess. But I don’t think they’d take the trouble over me, not after all this time. How is Raoul actually?”

“His stomach is getting better. He’s busy. He’s making out.”

Dominguez smiled. “We never knew it was going to turn out like this, neither one of us. We were so goddam idealistic, you know. Up in those goddam mountains, sitting at the feet of our leader. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The great democratic revolution. Raoul and I were galloping idealists. Havana Yacht Club idealists. We grew the club beards. Three months after the triumphal march into Havana, we knew we’d been had, McGee. Dupes of the first order. When they started shooting our friends, we got out. That makes us traitors to the new order. So I take precautions.”

“What was it about the pair of boots?”

“Raoul and I were specialists. We called ourselves the ordnance supply corps. We had a group of ten. We’d raid small army posts. Homemade bombs. Lots of fire power. Sneakers, blackface, absolute discipline. Hit hard, grab weapons and high tail it the hell out. Raoui was very proud of a pair of paratrooper boots he had. I said one guard area was clear, and Raoul went in, but I missed one of them. The son of a gun must have been asleep behind a bush. He cut loose with a weapon on full automatic, and as Raoul dived for cover, one slug tore the heels off both boots and stung his feet so badly he thought he’d been hit. From then on he wore sneakers like everybody else on our little team.”

We had measured each other. I liked the way he had explained the boots. He had the look. I can’t explain what it is. Raoul has it, in smaller measure. Sam Taggart had it, also in lesser degree. This Paul Dominguez was so slender as to look almost frail, but no sane man who’d had a good long look at him would try pushing him around. It isn’t class. It isn’t a special style. It isn’t anything in his eyes. Perhaps you can call it the smell of a man who lives by absolutes. If you take him on, you have to be prepared to kill him, because there is no other way of winning. I realized that Felicia Novaro had that flavor too-and his eyelashes were as long as hers.

“Raoul says you used to play those games too,” he said.

“In a different war. You didn’t go on the picnic?”

He shrugged. “I went over there to a training area. Man, I didn’t like the way it was shaping up. First, it was too soon. The big sell was still working. Full bellies and new schools. In the second place, it was too holy grail. A nice clean mission against the infidel, banners waving. Like the Children’s Crusade. In the third place, too many different people were promising too many different things. And there were dog fights between the groups going in, with no guarantee of any decent communication between the invasion and the working underground. I’ll go back. I’ll go back when it is going to be bloody and professional and smart, like forty simultaneous landings of small infiltration groups coordinated with massive sabotage from within. I’ll go in when we accept the fact it will take a year to make a good dent in the worker’s paradise, land of peace and freedom. Nobody is going to have to trade me for four cases of headache remedies. I’ll trade myself for about two dozen red hot reds. Big talk, huh? In the meanwhile, McGee, I sell sports cars. If there is anything I can help you with, let me know.”

I started it. I had intended to let him in on bits of it, the pertinent little parts of it. But doing it that way made me sound like a bystander buzzard, watching death, waiting for the tidbits. And I found myself wanting his approval, even though I didn’t have very much self-approval in this thing. He had that way about him, to make you seek his understanding. So I backed up and started again. It took a long time. When I got to the end of Nora, it uncorked a little more emotional involvement than I had intended to show, hoarsening my voice.

When I had finished, he got up without a word and brought two more bottles of beer back to the table. “My youngest kid,” he said, “the other day he fell off a chair. He jumped up and gave that chair such a hell of a kick, he nearly broke his toes.”

I saw what he meant. “It isn’t like that, Paul. Tomberlin had something to do with it. He took Mineros down there. He lit the fuse.”

“It was already an unstable situation. Carlos Menterez was too sociable. Sooner or later somebody who wanted him dead was going to find him. Once he had to leave Cuba, Menterez was an embarrassment to everybody, even to the little wolf pack of crypto-fascist exiles in Mexico City who think they can rebuild a Batista-type regime in Cuba when a power vacuum occurs after a successful invasion. God knows they funneled enough money out to finance it, but they don’t realize how fast the world is changing. Those boys you talked about, in the white car. Luis and Tomas. They would be with that group. And those people know that their crazy dream would need the goodwill of families like the Mineros. So they would have to get the word back that what happened was all Menterez’s doing. They would have to disavow Menterez, and explain how it had happened. If they could have found your friend Taggart and killed him, it would have been a goodwill gesture.”

“To whom? Who is left, for God’s sake?”

“Senora Mineros, the matriarch. In Cuba she lost a son, a daughter-in-law and a grandson to Menterez. In Mexico she loses the other son and another grandson. There are left I think, two more grandsons, the younger sons of Rafael. They are about fifteen and sixteen. And the other daughter-in-law, Rafael’s widow. Remnants, and tradition, and a hell of a lot of money. The family still exists. There would be property claims in Havana, a basis for cooperation. Oh yes, and there is another one too. Her brother. Esteban Mineros. An old man.”

“So you can assume word got back to the family about Taggart.”

“Yes, word that he would get in touch with Tomberlin to sell him what he had taken from Menterez, the statuettes Tomberlin wanted. Then it would be necessary to make some arrangement with Tomberlin so they could get their hands on Taggart. From what you say they got the gold, all but one piece of it, and missed the man.”

“When I talked to Sam, he at first wanted me to help him get the gold back. Then he decided to sell the one piece he had left. He seemed to think he was in a good bargaining position. He said something about being able to raise political hell.”

“All kinds of hell, man. Figure it out. The Mineros mystery. The Menterez collection in Tomberlin’s possession. An anonymous letter to any good reporter out here could create an international incident. The Castro propaganda machine could have a lot of fun with it.”

“So who killed Sam?”

“Rhetorical question? If he’d died easy, I could make up a list of names. But it sounds like a very personal execution. There were three young Talaveras. Two died on that boat. Maria and her brother, Manuel. There is a third brother, a little older. Ramon. Not only Maria’s brother, but a very good friend of Enrique Mineros. It surprises me he was not with them.”

“He would use a knife?”

“He is a very intense man. And he would consider it an obligation.”

“You know all these people?”

“I used to know them well. Just as Raoul used to know them well. Upper class Havana was a small community, McGee. But now there is… a considerable financial difference between us. Raoul and I came out later. It is the Castro equation, my friend. The later you left, the cleaner you were plucked. So we no longer travel in the same circles.”

“What does Ramon Talavera look like?”

“Slender. Dark hair. Medium height. Pale. A quiet man. Unmarried. Do you think he should be punished-if he is the one? Do you see these things in such a cloudy way, my friend?”

“No. But if he did, he was pretty damned coldblooded about it.”

“Somebody, for hire, kills his brother, his sister and his best friend with a knife. Man, you can expect a certain amount of indignation.”

“It all comes down to Tomberlin.”

“The way my kid kicked the chair.”

“But he does have the gold.”

“It isn’t his. Okay. Is it yours?”

“I’ll ask you a question. Maybe it was Ramon Talavera who decided it wasn’t just that Sam should keep on living. Is it just that Tomberlin should be the only one who winds up ahead?”

“Greed or justice?”

“A little of both. Plus curiosity.”

He smiled. “That’s an answer I like.”

“Do you know the man?”

“I met him once. At a banquet at a big hotel. One of the rare times when the latino guest list is so big, it includes Pablo Dominguez. He is a grotesque. He likes the Spanish-Americans. I think it is a taste for our women. Apparently he can be depended upon to give money to certain causes. I think he is tolerated. I think he is a man who would have to buy his way into any kind of group.”

“How do I get close to him?”

Dominguez leaned back and ran his hand over his bald brown pate. “It’s an interesting problem. He is suspicious of strangers, I understand. I heard some gossip about him. His personal habits are not very nice. He buys his way out of trouble from time to time. He has a look of corruption. A rancid man, I think. And a very acquisitive man. A collector. Let me think about this, McGee. I must ask a few careful questions. I think if you try to make contact carelessly, you’ll spoil any future chance. Can you meet me here tomorrow night at the same time?”

“Of course.”

Seventeen

AGAIN I managed to get lost and again I was a little late. Paul Dominguez was sitting in the same booth, dressed much as before. He stood up and introduced the woman. She was attractive in a flamboyant way. She was big. Big shoulders, big hands, a big and expressive wealth of mouth and eyes. She was swarthy, with heavy black brows. Her hair was expertly bleached to a cap of soft silver curls. Her eyes were a pale yellow-green, feline, mocking and aware. Her voice was a baritone drawl, with an edge of Spanish accent. He introduced her as Connie Melgar. And he gave my name as John Smith.

Her hand was warm, dry and strong. Dominguez hesitated, then slid in beside her and pulled his drink over. I sat facing them.

“Constancia is Venezuelan,” he said. “Very rich and very difficult.”

Her laugh was vital and explosive. “Difficult! For whom? For you, Pablo, with all that machismo?” She winked at me. “I throw myself at his head, and he calls me difficult.”

Dominguez smiled. “I told her the problem,” he said.

“Your problem, Mr. Smith-certainly that cannot be your name-is to find a way to approach Calvin Tomberlin. I can arrange that, of course. Certain groups always have access to that gentleman. But I think it would be very pleasant if I could be assured that you will not waste the opportunity Mr. Smith.”

“In what way?”

“If you can do him some great harm, I will be delighted.”

“If things work out, I hope to make him reasonably unhappy Mrs. Melgar.”

She looked at me for five long seconds, her head tilting, then exhaled and patted Paul on the hand and said, “Thank you, dear. Mr. Smith and I can get along very nicely.”

Paul looked at me in interrogation. I nodded. He stood up and said, “When you see our friends, give them my best wishes.”

“Thank you for the help.”

He nodded and bowed to Connie Melgar.

After he had left, she said, “He is such a very cautious man. But a very good man. Do you know that?”

“I met him through a friend. I like him.”

“He has asked me this favor, Mr. Smith. I owe him several favors. He told me not to ask you questions. That is a terrible burden for me, not to ask questions. And this is not a simpatico place to talk in any case. There is an animal at the bar who leers. You have a car here? Why don’t you follow me?”

She drove a Mercedes 300 SL, battleship grey, with great dash and competence. I had to keep Francine’s little car at a full gallop to keep her taillights in view. She stopped on a dark street and I pulled in behind her and parked. She had me get into her car, and we went another half block and down into the parking garage under a new high rise apartment house. She left it for the attendant to put away, and led me back to a passenger elevator, punched the button for ten. In her high heels she stood a vivid and husky six feet.

She smiled and said, “You are damn well a big fellow, Mr. John Smith. You make me feel almost girlish and dainty. That is a rare thing for me. But not so rare in California as other places.”

Her apartment was 10 B. It was huge, with dark paneling, massive dark carved furniture, ponderous tables, low ornate lamps with opaque shades. As she opened the door, a little maid came on the run to take her wrap. Constancia rattled off a long spate of Spanish which seemed to be half query and half instruction. The maid bobbed and nodded and gave small answers and went away. An older, heavier woman, also in uniform, made an appearance, and stood stolidly while more orders were given.

Connie Melgar led me to the far end of the room, on a higher level, to a grouping of giant chairs and couches.

She said, “The way it was here, it was like trying to live in a doll house. I had it all torn out and paneled in honest wood, and had the furniture shipped up from my house in Caracas, then I had to have walls changed to make two apartments into one. But still I feel cramped here. I like the ranch much better. I have a nice ranch in Arizona.”

“This is very nice here, Mrs. Melgar.”

She fitted a cigarette into a holder. “I own the building,” she said. “As Pablo said, I’m filthy rich. I’ve been riding the winds of change by slowly liquidating at home and reinvesting here. I don’t like what’s going on at home. It scares me. Could you fix us some drinks, please? That thing there is a bar when you open the door. Dark rum on ice for me, please.”

As I fixed drinks I said, “Apparently you don’t feel friendly toward Tomberlin.”

“I don’t like the man. I have no idea why I keep seeing him. Perhaps it’s some manner of challenge to me. I have one horse at the ranch I should get rid of. His name is Lagarto. Lizard. Hammerheaded thing with a mean eye. He is very docile, right up to the point where he sees a good chance to run me into a low limb or toss me into an arroyo. He may kill me one day.”

I took her the drink, and as she started to raise it to her lips, I said, “Maybe I want you to get me close enough to Tomberlin so I can kill him.”

The drink stopped an inch short of her lips. The yellow eyes watched me, and then the drink moved the rest of the way. She sipped and lowered it. “Was I supposed to scream?”

“I don’t know you well enough to make any guesses.”

She studied me. “If that’s what you want, I would assume you have a reason. If you want to do it, you will do it in some way which will not implicate me. But he is not that kind of a nuisance.”

“How do you mean?”

“He’s just a rich, sick, silly man. He might be killed by some other silly man. But a serious man would know he is not worth so much risk. He is an insect.”

I sat at the other end of the gigantic couch, facing her. “What sort of insect?”

“You don’t know him at all? He is a political dilettante. He supports strange causes. Each one is going to save the world, of course. He gives money to ugly little fringe groups and makes them important, and then he loses interest. He collects exotic things, and many of them are quite nasty. Antique torture instruments. Dirty books and films and pictures. Sickening books. Shocking bits of sculpture. He’s impotent, apparently, and he is a voyeur. Bugged bedrooms, and two-way mirrors and group orgy, that sort of boyish amusement. A sad and tiresome case, really. Sometimes he can be quite charming.

“Many people who get too closely mixed up with him seem to get into very sticky trouble. But Cal goes on forever. There is something mildly dangerous about him. Perhaps it’s a sense of mischief. I don’t really know. He is an intuitive blackmailer. He generally gets exactly what he wants out of people. He gets indignant when he can’t have his own way. He loves to find some way of pressuring people to make them do things they had no intention of doing. It is an almost feminine taste for intrigue. He loves to make dark hints about all kinds of conspiracy going on, all kinds of nastiness. His latest cause is that Doctor Face.”

“Who?”

“Doctor Girdon Face, and his American Crusade. Oh, it’s very big lately. Lectures and tent shows and local television and so on. And special phone numbers to call any time of day or night. The liberal-socialist-commy- conspiracy that is gutting all the old time virtues. It has a kind of phonied-up religious fervor about it. And it is about ten degrees to the right of the Birchers. The president is selling the country down the river with the help of the Supreme Court. Agree with us or you are a marked traitor. You know the sort of thing, all that tiresome pea-brained nonsense that attracts those people who are so dim-witted that the only way they can understand the world is to believe that it is all some kind of conspiracy.

“The most amusing thing about it is the way Dr. Face keeps plugging for virtue and morality. He wants to burn everything since Tom Swift, and he is not too certain about Tom. He wants a big crack down on movies, books, plays, song lyrics, public dancing. And he wants to be the one to weed out the evil. If he ever was turned loose in the west wing of Cal’s house up there at Stone Canyon, he would have a stroke. Cal keeps his various fields of interest quite well compartmented. It is a little frightening though, to think how quickly his little Dr. Face has established a huge eager following.”

“I heard Tomberlin gives money to Latin American projects too.”

“They tap him every chance they get. But he is most generous with the militant right, the savage little groups who want to buy arms and smash the peons right back to where they belong. He’s not a moderate, my friend. What should I call you? I want you to call me Connie.”

“John Smith is a little too much, I guess. Mack Smith?”

“You want to play it close, don’t you?”

“The name might mean something to Tomberlin.”

“How about the face?”

“It won’t mean a thing. When can you set it up?”

“Tomorrow evening. We’ll go to his house. He seldom goes out. There’ll be the usual group of sycophants hanging around him. I’ll invent some excuse for dropping by You’ll have to play a part, Mack Smith.”

“Who will I be?”

She stretched her long and opulent body and said, “I think the proper designation is Connie’s Latest, if you don’t mind too much. I shan’t kid you, my dear. It is the best protective device you could imagine. I am the complete bitch, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. I have a very rational approach to my needs and desires. I am thirty-five years old, darling, and I shall never marry again, and there is no reason why, with my looks and my money, I should settle for an empty bed. My nerves get a little flippy when I do. But I also treasure my emotional independence. So I am notorious for averaging about three young men a year. They are usually somewhat younger than you, but built along the same lines.

“My God, this California has the world’s greatest supply of huge, healthy, beautiful young men. Tomorrow night you must act as they always do in the beginning-earnest and humble and anxious to please. That is when they are very nice, seeing to drinks and cigarettes and wraps, and holding doors, and looking so humbly grateful and happy. After a few months, when they begin to take too much for granted, then they get tiresome and I have to boot them out. Mack, my dear, I would look naked in public places without one of my young men at my side. I got rid of the last one over two weeks ago, and enjoying my little spell of spinsterhood, and I’m not yet ready to go prowling for the next. But Cal will be perfectly willing to accept you as the next one, the current one. Where did I find you?”

“I was running a boat for some friends of yours.”

“Perfect. I was up at Monterey last week. Their name is Simmins. Gordon and Louise. I hired you away from them because I am thinking of buying a boat. But Cal won’t be particularly curious.” S

he held her glass out and I made her a fresh drink. She brushed my hand with her fingertips and said, as she took it, “Are you going to suggest that we might as well have the game as well as the name?”

I sat closer to her and said, “It would be normal to think about it, Connie. You are pretty spectacular, and you know it. But I don’t think it is a very good idea.”

“That is what I was going to tell you. If you suggested it.”

“What are your reasons?”

“My dear, my young men think they are so bold and wild and free. But they are so easily tamed. And it is to my taste to have them tame. They respond to reward and punishment. So there is no emotional involvement. They are a charming convenience. Can you understand why I want it just that way?”

“I think so.”

“You and I would be another thing, my friend. It would take us too long to find out who is winning, and in the process I might lose. I would not want that. It would diminish my personal liberty. I fought hard for it and I enjoy it. I am a violent, petulant, spoiled woman, and I wouldn’t suit you unless you could dominate me and teach me manners, in and out of bed. I can sense that in you. And the money does not impress. I can sense that too. So I would not have that weapon either. No, I don’t play the games I can’t win, Mr. Smith, Mister Mysterious Smith. But what were your reasons?”

I smiled at her. “It would feel a little too much as if I had been standing in line, Connie.”

Her eyes changed to narrow slits of gold and her lips lifted away from her teeth. Then suddenly she gave that huge laugh and gave me a punch on the shoulder that made my hand go numb.

“See? You would beat me with that sort of talk. One day I would find myself weeping and begging your forgiveness. Like a woman. My God, we might be good enough together to take the risk. But no. Maybe five years ago. Maybe. Not now. I am too old to be physically beaten, and that is one of the things you would find it necessary to do. Because I am insufferable. I know it. Come with me.”

She took me into a study which was also a trophy room. African game. Some very good heads. Leopard, lion, buffalo. There was a case of fine weapons behind glass. There were framed photographs of her, younger, slimmer, just as vital, standing by the dead elephant, rhino, great ape.

“My guns,” she said. “My dear dead animals. I took my sainted husband on safari five years running, thinking it would turn him into enough man for me. He killed like an accountant signing a ledger. He bent over a bush to pick a flower for me and a snake struck him in the throat. He was dead before he could fall to the ground. If it was permitted, I would have his head in here, mounted like the others. And the heads of all the young men. Now you know me better, Mack Smith. You might be enough man for me. I think I will always wonder about that. It’s bad luck we’re past the years of finding out. Be here at six tomorrow. We will use my car. Good night.”

I found my way out. I heard that laugh as I was leaving. I wondered if she had laughed the same way after downing old jumbo, the tusker, shown in the framed glossy, recumbent beside Mrs. Melgar in her safari pants, her smile, her big bore weapon at port arms.

I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelts, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero’s grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white tail deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast.

They have all their earnest rationalizations about game control. It is good for animals to shoot them. It may serve some purpose to gut shoot them with a plastic arrow. We have so bitched up the various ecologies in all our areas, game control is a necessity. But it should be done by professionals paid to do it, the ones who cherish the healthy flocks, the ones who do not get their charge out of going bang at something with thrice the animal dignity they can ever attain.

I do violate my own concepts by slaying the occasional fish. And eating him. But spare me the brotherhood of the blood sports, the hairy ones, all the way from Macmillan and his forty grouse a day to some snot kid who tries to slay every species of big game in the world, with the assistance of his doting daddy.

There is one thing which strikes me as passing strange. Never have I met a man who had the infantry memories, who had knocked down human meat and seen it fall, who ever had any stomach for shooting living things. I could not imagine Paul Dominguez ever shooting even a marauding crow. He would need no romantic fantasies about himself. His manhood would need no artifical reinforcing-Now I was momentarily associated with a killer female. Perhaps with her too it was a search for balls. She tended to scare the hell out of me. In fact, she reminded me of that horse she mentioned. If I got involved, she would feign docility for the chance of heaving me into an arroyo or crushing me against a stone.

A hard rain came smashing down as I ran for Mrs. Broadmaster’s tiny front porch. It was a little after ten. Ten minutes later Junebug knocked at my door. She said she had seen the lights. She wore a transparent rain cape with hood over a fuzzy yellow jump suit. She carried most of a bottle of scotch in her hand. She’d had a couple of belts to build boldness. She said she’d come for a cozy nightcap.

She was like a sad and anxious little yellow chicken in that jump suit. It was raining hard, and she was spanking clean and smelled soapy and fresh, and she was touchingly nervous about her earthy intentions, and I did not want to prove that most females were not as overwhelming as Mrs. Melgar, and I had the hunch that the slightest touch would slip her out of that jump suit like a squeezed grape, and afterward she could have a nice little cry about Poor Engineer. But it was not my night for Junebugs. I played dense, evaded small traps, and finally managed to send her off home with just a few small scratches on her pride.

I felt virtuous as all hell. I took a hot bath in Francine’s pebbly tub. But suddenly as I was sweating it out, and sipping a strong nightcap, I felt a sudden slide into depression. It was compounded of the old scars on my legs, of the garishness of the bathroom light, of the lingering soreness in my ribs from being hurled against the Jap truck, of the look of Francine’s plastic tile, and a douche bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and the scrawniness of the pink towel I would have to use to dry off for bed. I felt the brute rejection of my apartness in this world, of too many losses and too few gains, of too much of the dirty underside of things, of too much vulnerability.

It had all the sour tang of that post-coital depression which occurs when something hasn’t meant enough. On the floor of my mind, splintered mahogany floated in the puddled metallic blood. Connie had talked of the empty bed. But I still weaseled it. I left it to chance. I put a robe on and let the Junebug number ring once before I hung up. I left the door ajar and sat in the dark living room. She pushed the door open cautiously and said, “Was that you?”

And she was a warmth to cling to, to keep from drowning.

I had a drink in Connie’s apartment while she finished dressing. She came out with the happy walk of a woman who knows she will be approved. She wore a dark sheath dress of some kind of knitted material. She was almost but not quite too big for knitted fabrics. Her shoulders were bare and honey-brown, smoothly muscled and magnificent.

“You’re very elegant, Connie.”

“Thank you. Wear that same look all evening, dear, and you’ll fit the category.”

“Drink?”

“The same as before. Please.”

She went to the phone and called the basement and told them to bring her car around front. She came back and took her glass, touched it to mine. “To whatever you’re after, Mack Smith. Mysterious Mack Smith. Your eyes intrigue me, Mr. Smith. Are pale-eyed people cruel? Your eyes are the color of rain on a window in the early morning. At first glance last night, I thought you looked quite wholesome. That’s a deception, isn’t it?”

“I have wholesome impulses.”

“Kindly keep them to yourself. You know, I think you are just as violent as I am. But your control is better. What are you after?”

“A close look at Mr. Tomberlin.”

“That’s all?”

“I might bend him a little.”

“What did he do to you, dear?”

“Let’s say he set something in motion and it didn’t work out very well for anybody except him.

“Who did you last work for?”

“Gordon and Louise Simmins of Monterey. Why?”

“Am I a better employer?”

“The relationship is a little more personal.”

“My dear, the people at Tomberlin’s will be a mixed bag. Fragmented groups spread about the place, serviced by his Hawaiian army. Circulate at will. I phoned him today. He is leaving in two or three days. He likes to go down to Montevideo this time of year. He has a beach house down there. It’s autumn there. Tonight is part of the series of little parties he gives himself before he leaves. He’ll stay in Uruguay a few weeks, then go up to Canada for part of the summer, then back to his Cobblestone Mountain lodge for the rest of the summer and into the autumn here, then back into the big house October through May. That is the overall pattern, but he is forever whipping off on mysterious little trips. He has the boat, of course. And, one big bastard it is, some sort of a converted Canadian cutter. And a small airplane. But he has never learned to drive a car.

“Do you want to know these things about him? He drinks iced tea, gallons of it a day. Strangers think he is belting strong highballs, but it is always iced tea. He designs his own clothes and has them made, and some of his outfits are very strange. He has these enormous living expenses, and platoons of accountants and tax attorneys in the background somewhere, but he is very cheap about odd little things. The liquor will flow freely this evening, but it will be the cheapest you can buy. He never carries any money with him, and he’s never been known to grab a check anywhere. His drivers have to buy those strange kinds of gasoline that nobody has ever heard of.”

She put her empty glass down and said, “Are we ready?”

I draped the pale fur over her shoulders, a broad stole about ten feet long, big enough for a big woman. She wore cat’s eye studs in pierced ears, and a single ring, a narrow oblong emerald that reached from knuckle to knuckle. She brought no purse. She loaded me with her cigarettes, lighter, compact and lipstick-typical burden for the captive male. She led me like a small parade. Down in front the doorman handed her into the car with humble tender ceremony. He gave me one glance of knowing appraisal. I got behind the wheel, idenьfied the right gadgets, and stomped the car off into the bright evening.

Eighteen

THE TILTED rocky area immediately surrounding the Tomberlin place was enclosed by a high wire fence. The gate was open. A broad little uniformed man with a merry Chinese face intercepted us, peered in at Connie Melgar, then backed, grinning, touching his cap.

There were at least twenty cars in the parking area, ranging from a glossy Bentley to a scabrous beach buggy. The big house was spilled down the rock slope. The garages were on the highest level, at the brow of the slope, with what seemed to be servants’ quarters off to the right. We went down a broad stone stairway to the left of the house, sheltered by a cantilevered roof affixed to the side of the house.

The house was of bleached grey wood, pale stone, glass, aluminum and slate. It was like three sizeable houses, each on stilts, each on a different level down the rock slope, all butted against each other. If there was an architectural unity about it, one would have to get a long way off to see it.The middle house was over a swimming pool big enough to extend half of itself out into the last of the evening sunlight, where there was a wide apron and a garden.

Our staircase crossed the pool and continued on, I saw, ending at a huge deck in front of the lowest portion of the house, a deck overlooking a steep drop and a broad and lovely view. But Connie turned off down a narrow branching staircase that brought us down to poolside under the middle segment of the house. Some sleek young things were enjoying the pool, swimming back and forth from sunlight to shadow.

We climbed a curve of staircase into the middle portion of the house, to a vast room vaguely reminiscent of a Miami Beach hotel lobby, but in better taste. People stood in chatting groups. Tawny little men in white coats brought their drinks to them. Chunky little Eurasian girls in uniform circulated with trays of little hot meats and pastries. The guests seemed like glossy people, filling the room with a cocktail buzz, a controlled laughter. Eyes slanted toward us in swift appraisal, and I adjusted my mild and fatuous smile.

A slender blonde woman detached herself from her group and came hurrying over to us. She was slightly long in the tooth, but she had carefully preserved a lot worth preserving. She gave little coos of pleasure and she and Connie exchanged a small kiss of greeting and told each other how marvelous they were looking.

“Rhoda, dear, may I present Mack Smith. Rhoda Dwight, one of my oldest and dearest friends.” There was a dirty little emphasis on “oldest”.

Rhoda beamed at me, squeezed my hand. “Connie, darling, where have you been hiding such a beautiful man?”

“Mack is helping me find a nice boat, dear. When we find one, he’s going to run it for me.”

“What fun! I hope I’ll be asked to come cruising with you, dear. But don’t you get quite horribly seasick, Connie?”

“We may never take it away from the dock darling. How is Norm, by the way?”

“Who? Norm? But why in the world should you ask me how he is? Shouldn’t I be asking you?”

Connie gave her a tiger smile. “Now isn’t that strange! I haven’t seen the dear boy in months. It must be some mistake, darling. I was told you were seen with him in Santa Barbara just last week. Really I didn’t think anything of it. After all, you and Quenton both seemed to like the lad.”

“I haven’t been to Santa Barbara in decades, darling.”

“There’s no reason for you to be upset, Rhoda.”

“Upset? What gives you that odd idea?”

A little man came up to take our drink orders. Connie began slapping at my pockets to locate her cigarettes. Rhoda gave us a glassy smile and drifted away.

“Bitch,” Connie rumbled. “Scavenger bitch.” Our drinks came. As she had promised, they were inferior. She touched my arm. “There’s the man. Come on.”

Calvin Tomberlin was in a small group. He was a grotesque. He was of middle size, fairly plump, and stood very erect. He was completely hairless, without brows or lashes. He wore a toupee so obviously fraudulent it was like a sardonic comment on all such devices. It was dusty black, carefully waved, and he wore it like a hairy beret. His eyes were blue and bulged. His face was pale pink, like roast beef. His lips were very heavy and pale, and they did not move very much when he spoke. His voice was a resonant buzz, like a bee in a tin can. He wore a pewter grey silk suit, with a boxy jacket, cut like a Norfolk jacket but without lapels. He wore a yellow ascot with it.

Be greeted Connie with what I guessed was supposed to be warmth, gave her a little hug, and placed two firm pats on her ample knitted stern. But it was done in a curiously mechanical fashion, as though he was a machine programmed to make these social gestures.

Connie introduced us. His hand was cold and soft and dry. He looked at me as a butcher looks at a questionable side of meat, and turned away. I had it feeling a relay had clicked and my file card had fallen into the right slot. I was next to him, but in an identity where I could not establish contact. Stud for the Venezuelana. Ambulatory service station. I sensed the same recognition and dismissal in the others. They weighed me with their eyes, so much captive meat, and turned away. I did some drifting. Groups formed, broke, reformed, changed. I saw the pool people. I paced the big suspended deck. The lowest level was bedrooms. The upper level was lounge area, dining areas, a library. The day was gone, and the lights came on as they were needed.

I found Connie and, after a patient time, cut her out of the pack.

“What was that about a west wing or something?”

“Cat’s little museum. Up the stairs and to the left. Locked tight.”

“Any way to get to see it?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. I can try. Hang around this area, dear. If it works, I’ll be back to get you.”

While she was gone a wobbly type came up to me, a big blond kid with a recruiting poster face. He looked ready to cry.

“You have some good laughs when she pointed me out, pal?”

“You’re wrong. She didn’t.”

“I saw it, buddy. I saw it happening. You know what you got to do. You got to take her a damn big bug.”

“A what?”

He wavered and held up a thumb and finger, a quarter inch apart. “There’s a hell of a smart spider. A spider, no bigger’n this. When he goes to see the old lady spider, he wraps up a big juicy bug and takes it along, like an offering. He’s one smart little old son of a bitch, because he knows that it’s the only way he can have his fun and get away alive, because she gets so busy eating that bug she doesn’t get around to eating him. You got the message, buddy boy? You take Connie a hell of a big bug, and remember I told you so.”

“Thanks a lot. Take off.”

He shook his head. “You’re so smart, aren’t you? You know every damn thing. She’s worth millions, and she’s the best piece you ever ran into, and you’re set forever. That’s the way it is, huh? Living high, boy. Well, brace yourself, because she’s going to…”

“Chuck!” she said sharply. He swung around and stared at her. She shook her head sadly. “You’re turning into the most terrible bore, dear. Run along, dear.”

“I want to talk to you, Connie. By God, I want to talk to you.”

“You heard the lady” I said.

He pivoted and swung at me. I caught the fist in my open hand, slid my fingers onto his wrist. He swung the other fist, off balance, and I caught the other wrist. He bulged with the effort to free himself, then broke and started to cry. I let him go and he went stumbling away, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand.

“Nicely done,” she said.

“I am supposed to bring you a wrapped bug.”

“Yes. I remember that little analogy. He got very fond of it. He did turn into a dreadful bore. Come along. Cal is waiting. I told him I wanted to see how you’d react.”

“How should I react?”

“Suit yourself. It gives me a funny feeling.”

He was waiting for us, mild as a licensed guide. He unlocked a very solid-looking door, closed it and locked it again when the three of us were inside. Lines of fluorescent tubes flickered and went on. There were little museum spotlights. The room was about twenty by forty. There were paintings and drawings on the walls. There was a big rack of paintings and drawings. There were pieces of statuary on pedestals and on bases, and set into glassed-in niches in the walls. There were display cases. It was all very tidy and professional and well organized. The windows, two small ones, were covered with thick steel mesh.

“I have here, and in the next room,” he said in that buzzing voice, “what is probably the most definitive collection of erotica in the world today. It has considerable historical significance. The historical portion of the collection, the library of over two thousand volumes, the ancient paintings and statuary, are available for the use of qualified scholars by appointment. Because so many of these things are irreplaceable, I could not venture a guess as to the value of the collection.”

Each major piece of art in that tidy room was shocking. There was a curious clinical horror about it, a non-functional chill. I had the odd feeling that walking into this room was precisely like walking into Cal Tomberlin’s mind. I glanced at Connie. Her eyes were narrow and her rich mouth compressed.

He showed us the cases of ancient instruments of torture and ecstasy. He turned a ground glass easel on, took large Ektachrome transparencies from a safe file and showed us a few of them, saying, “These are studies of the Indian temple carvings at Konarak and Khajuarho, showing the erotic procedures which were always a part of the Hindu religion.”

He put them away and said, “Beyond here we have the special library of books and films, a small projection room and a small photo lab. A recent project has been to duplicate the Konarak carvings, using amateur actors and period costuming. Stills, of course.”

“A project?” Connie said. “Really Cal! You make your own diseases sound so terribly earnest.”

He looked at her blandly. “Connie, my dear, any time you wish to lend your considerable talent to any of these little projects…”

“I would look a bit out of place among your poor hopped-up little actors and actresses, darling.”

“You are wonderfully well preserved, Connie.”

I wandered over to the side wall. The individual niches were lighted. I had counted one area of thirty-four of them. The gold statues were behind glass.

“Are these real gold, Mr. Tomberlin?”

He came up behind me. “Yes. I recently had more space made for these. Most of these were a recent acquisition. As you can see, many of them do not fit in with… with the general theme of the entire collection. But I decided not to break the collection up. Strange and handsome, aren’t they?”

I moved over and got a close look at the squatty little man. Borlika Galleries had sold him to Carlos Menterez y Cruzada. Carlos had taken him from New York to Havana to Puerto Altamura. Sam Taggart had taken him from Mexico to California to Florida. He had unwrapped him there and shown him to me. And somebody had come and taken him back to California. Now I had traced him down, and I imagined I could see an ancient sour recognition in his little eyes.

“Where would you go to buy stuff like this?” I asked.

“I purchased a collection, Mr. Smith. I haven’t had them properly identified and catalogued as yet.” He was bored. He had no interest in my reaction. He turned to Connie and said, “Would you like to see a new film, dear? It’s Swedish, and quite extraordinary.”

She shivered. “Thank you, no. Once was enough for all time. Show it to Rhoda, darling. She adores that sort of thing. Thank you for the guided tour. Let’s all get back to the people, shall we?”

After we were alone again, she shivered again and said, “That’s pretty snaky in there, isn’t it?”

“He’s a strange man.”

She pulled me into a corner and put her hands on my shoulders. “Is it those gold things, dear?”

“Was I that obvious?”

“Not really. But it would be nice if it were those gold statues. He was so delighted to get them. He’s had them only a few months. He must have made a very good deal. He kept chuckling and beaming. But, darling, it would be quite a project. That room is like a big safe. This place is alive with people at all hours. And I think he has burglar alarms.”

“It presents a few little problems.”

“Including the police.”

“No. They wouldn’t come into it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“They’re not his. Twenty-eight of them aren’t.”

She looked amused and astonished. “Now don’t tell me he stole them!”

“He sort of intercepted them after they’d been stolen.”

“It’s very confusing, my dear. And you are… employed by someone?”

“Paul told you about asking questions.”

“I remember something about that. Don’t you trust me, my dear?”

“Implicitly, totally, without reservation, Constancia. But if you don’t have any answers, you can’t answer any questions.”

“Will people ask me questions?”

“Probably not.”

“Darling, do as you wish. I am the middle one of five daughters in a very political family, and we were all born to intrigue.”

“The idea of there being five of you is a little disconcerting.”

“Don’t be alarmed. The other four are little satin pillows, surrounded with children. I am twenty-one times an aunt. Tia Constancia.” She hooked a strong hand around the nape of my neck. “Be kissed by an aunt,” she said. It was quick and pungent and most competent. And loaded with challenge.

“I think there’d be a nice place for me, just to the left of the lion.”

“I would be more concerned about what your trophy room looks like, Mack Smith.”

“It’s very dull. You see, I don’t go after the record heads. In fact, I don’t go after anything at all. I’m not a collector, Connie.”

“That makes you a little more dangerous. I understand collectors. You see, I… What’s the matter?”

“I just wondered if I know that man.”

She turned and looked. “Oh, that’s one of Cal’s show business connections. A dreary little chap. Claude Boody.”

There was no hint of the imperiousness the artist had put into the oil painting in Puerto Altamura. The jowls were the same. The eyes were sad, wet, brown and bagged, like a tired spaniel, and he walked with the care of a heart case.

“I guess he just looks like someone I knew once.”

“He has some dreary little syndicated television things, and he buys old foreign movies and dubs the English and resells them to independent stations.”

“You sound knowledgeable, Mrs. Melgar.”

“I have some money in that, too. But not with him.”

“Does Tomberlin have some business association with him?”

“Heavens no! Calvin cultivates a few people like Boody because they can always round up some reckless youngsters for fun and games. Poor Boody travels the world over scrounging properties, and he always looks tired. I guess he does well enough. He lives well. His wife is a neurotic bitch and his children are spoiled rotten.”

We went back to the upper lounge where Tomberlin’s hard-working staff had laid out a generous buffet. It was delicious, and we took loaded plates down to the big deck and ate like a pair of tigers. She licked her fingers, patted her tummy, stifled a belch and moaned with satisfaction. There is a direct relation between the physical approaches to all hungers. This great hearty woman would ease all appetites with the same wolfish intensity, the same deep satisfaction. She would live hard, play hard, sleep like the dead.

Her strong rich body had that magnetic attraction based on total health and total use. She did not relate in any way to the sick subtleties, the delicate corruptions in Tomberlin’s private museum. And I got the hell away from her before I had more awareness than I could comfortably handle.

I wandered again. The party kept shifting and changing, people leaving, people arriving, various states of various kinds of intoxication achieved, small arrangements, made and broken, small advantages taken and rejected. Music boomed from hidden speakers when somebody turned the volume up. All evening it had been incurably, implacably Hawaiian. I heard the reason in a snatch of conversation. Tomberlin liked it, and would have nothing else.

I mapped the place in my mind. Then I rechecked my dimensions. I wandered outside and identified the windows and the relationship between them. I charted in the power sources. I wondered how many Hawaiians the damned man had. I wondered what kind of nippers would bite that wire, and how I would get up to the window, and how I would get back up to it from the inside bearing a hundred and a half of ancient gold, if I could get it out from behind those glass ports.

I went out into the darker end of the garden beyond the lights of the now empty pool, and sat on a pedestal, sharing it with a welded woman perched upon one steel toe. I smoked a cigarette and felt again the monstrous dejection which had nearly foundered me in Francine’s tub. There can be a special sort of emotional exhaustion compounded of finding no good answers to anything. Too much had faded away, and the only target left was a grotesque pornographer with a voice like a trapped bee, and he seemed peripheral to the whole thing. Too much blood. Too much gold and intrigue. Too much fumbling and bumbling. It was like taking a puzzle apart and having the pieces disappear the instant they came free. From the talk with Sam, all the way to the hard tasteless gallop in Francine’s bed, I had handled myself like an idiot, suffering all the losses, enjoying no gains.

And, except for Nora, the whole thing had seemed like a long bath in yesterday’s dish water. The house lights faded the stars, but I looked up at them and told myself my recent vision of reality had been from a toad’s-eye view. The stars, McGee, look down on a world where thousands of 4-H kids are raising prize cattle and sheep. The Green Bay Packers, of their own volition, join in the Lord’s Prayer before a game. Many good and gentle people have fallen in love this night. At this moment, thousands of women are in labor with the fruit of good marriage. Thousands of kids sleep the deep sleep which comes from the long practice hours for competitive swimming and tennis. Good men have died today, leaving hearts sick with loss. In quiet rooms young girls are writing poems. People are laughing together, in safe places.

You have been on the underside of the world, McGee, but there is a top side too, where there is wonder, innocence, trust, love and gentleness. You made the decision, boy. You live down here, where the animals are, so stay with it.

I got up and went back to the party. A new batch of faces had arrived and some had fallen off. A dusty little man in his middle years, with fierce eyes and a froggy bassoon of a voice was standing orating in the big room, surrounded by a mixed group of admirers and dissidents. He wore a beret and a shiny serge suit and he had a great air of authority. I drifted into the edge of the group and heard an earnest woman say, “But Doctor Face, isn’t it part of our heritage for anyone to be entitled to say what they think, right or wrong?”

“My dear woman, that is one of the luxuries of liberty, not one of the definitions thereof. And it is traditional and necessary in war that we forgo the luxuries and concentrate on the necessities. My posture is that we are at war, with a vile, godless, international conspiracy which grows in strength every day while we weaken ourselves by giving every pinko jackass the right to confuse our good people. I ask you, my dear. Who takes the fifth? Known hoodlums and fellow travelers. Our so called traditional liberties provide the bunkers in which these rascals hide and shoot us down. I say we must work together. We must silence all the divisionist voices among us.

“If we are to be strong, we must impeach all traitor justices of the Supreme Court, give greater powers to the investigating committees of the Congress, decentralize our socialistic central government, institute wartime censorship of all mass media, expand the counterespionage efforts of the FBI, smash the apparatus of the Communist Party as it exists within labor unions, the NAACP, the CLU, and the hard core of sympathizers on all college campuses, both students and faculty.

“We are engaged in a bitter war for the hearts and minds of men, and our enemy is without soul or mercy. To be strong we must silence, once and forever, every jackass who tells the people that we can win through weakness rather than strength. Over twelve thousand people have signed up as Crusaders. We’re tough. We’re smart. We’re wary. And we raean to save this country in spite of itself.”

The delivery was effective. It radiated sincerity, concern, earnestness. But he had it all down just a little too pat. He had said it too many hundreds of times. And as I stood there I had a curious feeling I had been there before. It took me a time to remember. Then I recalled it, lifetimes ago, as a small kid in a Chicago park, hanging onto the big hand of the daddy, listening to this same dusty little man with his smeared lenses and the same general impression of dirty underwear. Not the same man, of course, but the same mechanical messiah approach. And that duplicate little man of long ago had been calling upon all decent men to arm themselves against the dirty capitalistic conspiracy, bread for the workers, break the chains, unite, save America.

I moved away, to a different level of the house where, over the goopy strings of the grass skirt music I could hear his occasional clarion phrase “… ninety miles off our doorstep… sense of purpose… show them we mean what we say… bleeding hearts…” but I could not follow the strange line of his reasoning. There are a lot of them running loose these days, I thought, fattening themselves on the sick business of whipping up such fear and confusion that they turn decent men against their decent neighbors in this sad game of think-alike.

It seemed an odd business for Tomberlin to be backing, but I have long since learned that the very rich specialize in irrational causes. Insulated from the brute reality of the money drive, they expand into the unreality of Yoga, astrology, organic foods and marginal politics. Tomberlin was immersed in the mismatched fields of erotica and the clanking of crypto-Fascist right. Next year it might be voodoo and technocracy. It was the search for importance, and the ones who could recognize that could con him very nicely and profitably.

I found that one of the strategic little bars had a fair brand of domestic brandy, so I got three fingers and one lump of ice and sat on a corner couch and looked across to where a group of young were sprawled up the side of some wide stairs. Some of them were the pool people. They had their private jokes, and their cool-eyed apartness from the rest of the party. They were a swinging little pack, with a flavor of tension and disdain.

There is one typical characteristic of both nightmare and delirium. Both these conditions of mind involve the grouping of people from random points in the past. A dead childhood companion will appear with last month’s girl. A man who once tried very earnestly to kill you dead will show up and tell you symbolic things about your dead brother’s wife.

When there is an inexplicable association of people during a waking and rational moment, it inevitably recaptures that faint and eerie flavor of nightmare.

Suddenly one of the little blonde cupcakes on the stairway jumped into focus as though I was using a zoom lens. It was the nameless sun bunny from the pool at La Casa Encantada, the one who had come over tipsy, sat on her heels with brown thighs muscularly flexed, wanting to know if I’d been an end with the Rams. She wore a little white linen dress and had her hair piled high and wore considerable eye makeup, but it was the same one. I felt as if I could not take a very deep breath. I looked at the others. There had been five of them on that motor sailer, three young men and two girls. I found one of the men, a big dark hairy one, the one who had seemed to be in charge of the scuba outing. What had she called him? Chip.

I could accept the presence of Claude Boody. A mild coincidence. But I could not accept the presence of the sun bunny. It was a little too much. And so nothing had been as I had imagined. I had to let the structure fall down and then try again. I had to find a new logic. I was frightened without knowing why I should be. It was fright with a paranoid flavor. All I needed was for Heintz or Arista or Colonel Marquez to show up, humming a Hawaiian melody.

I knew the awareness was mutual. The bland, sensual little pug-face made automatic smiles and grimaces at the things people said to her. But she would angle her eyes at me now and again. Never a direct look, but only when her head was turned. It was unconsciously furtive. I could not read her big hairy friend. He was further up the stairs and seemed totally involved with a little brunette who squirmed and giggled and squirmed.

I moved casually away, but not entirely out of range. I was considerably more alert. I had an uncomfortable feeling. Like a herd animal, shuffling along with the group, and gradually beginning to wonder what that faint thudding and screaming means, way up at the head of the line. I was growing points on my ears and walking softly on my toes. I found Connie talking to a big broad balding fellow with tiny eyes and a large damp mouth and considerable affability. She introduced him as George Wolcott, introduced him in a way that told me she did not know him and found him boring.

“What kind of a boat are you going to help this lovely lady find?” he asked me, chuckling though no joke had been made.

“Just a comfortable day cruiser of some kind. Displacement hull. A good sea beam. Nothing fast or flashy.”

“I suppose you got all the licenses to run one. Heh, heh, heh.”

“To run a charter boat for hire, with Coast Guard blessings, Mr. Wolcott.”

“Good. Heh, heh, heh. What kind of a boat do the Simrnins have?”

“It is a great big gaudy vulgar Chris Craft,” Connie said. “It’s called the Not Again! Excuse us please, Mr. Wolcott.”

He chuckled his permission. His loose smilings did not alter the dead bullet look of his eyes. I was getting hyper-sensitive. When we were far enough away from him, I asked her who he was.

“Oh, he’s part of that Doctor Face deal. Chairman some goddam of arrangements or rifle drill or thing.”

“He asks a lot of questions.”

“I think it’s just Dale Carnegie. Show an interest. Keep smiling. Remember names. Darling, how much of this can you take? My God, this music is hurting my teeth. I’d much rather take you home to bed.”

“Give me another half hour here.”

I turned her over to Rhoda Dwight for some more infighting, and wandered on. The sun bunny appeared at my elbow, showing teeth that looked brushed after every meal. But she seemed uneasy.

“I never was with the Rams,” I said.

“I know. Look I have to tell you something. Not here. Okay? Go down to the deck and over to the end, to the right as you go out onto the deck.”

Without waiting for my answer, she walked away. Suspicion confirmed. There can only be so much coincidence in the world. So I went where requested. I had that end of the deck to myself. I looked at the night view. She hissed at me. I turned and saw her looking out of a dark doorway. I went to her. “This way” she said. It was a wide corridor in the bedroom area, a night-light panel gleaming.

She opened a corridor door and said in a low voice, “I didn’t want to be seen talking to you. We can talk in here.”

She walked in first, into darkness. I hesitated at the doorway, and went in. But I went in at a swift sidelong angle, and something smashed down on the point of my right shoulder, numbing my arm. I went down and rolled to where I thought the girl would be. The room door slammed. I rolled against her legs and brought her thrashing down, got an arm around her throat and one hand levered up behind her and stood up with her just as lights came on.

Claude Boody stood with an ugly gun aimed toward us, and I turned the sun bunny quickly into the line of fire. But there was the faintest whisper of sound behind me, and before I could move again, a segment of my skull went off like a bomb and I fell slowly, slowly, like a dynamited tower, with the girl underneath. I was vaguely aware of landing on her, and of her strangled yawp as my weight drove the air out of her, and of tumbling loosely away.

I was not out. I retained ten percent of consciousness, but I could not move. The room was at the far end of a tunnel, and the voices seemed to echo through the tunnel.

“Oh God,” a girl whined. “I’m all busted up inside. Oh God.”

“Shut up, Dru.”

“Both of you shut up,” an older male voice said, enormously weary. “You let him get a look at me. It’s a brand new problem.”

“I’m hurt bad,” the girl moaned.

Hands fumbled at my pockets, shifting and hauling. Down in my trauma drowse I had the comfy awareness they would find nothing. I was entirely clean, just in case. My cheek was against a softness of rug. They hitched and tugged at my clothing.

“Nothing,” the tired voice said. “This stuff must belong to the Melgar woman.”

“It’s a Miami label in the suit. That mean anything?”

“Chip, I could be dying! Don’t you care?”

“Lie down on the bed, Dru. And shut up, please.” Chip, Claude and Dru. Three voices from far away. I heard the click of a lighter. A moment later, I felt a little hot area near the back of my hand.

“What are you doing?” Chip asked.

“Let’s see how good you got him. Let’s see if he’s faking.”

Heat turned into a white stabbing light that shoved itself deep into my brain. Pain was like a siren caught on a high note. Pain cleared away the mists, but I would not move. I caught a little drifting stink of my own burned flesh.

“He’s out,” Chip said. “Maybe I got him good enough so there’s no problem.”

“Or a worse one, you silly bastard,” Claude said. “Depending on who he is.”

“Isn’t anybody going to do anything?” Dru wailed.

They were kneeling or squatting, one on each side of me, talking across my back. The girl was further away.

“You slipped up on this one,” Claude said. “I don’t mean here and now. I mean down there.”

“I told you, I wondered about him down there. So I had Dru check him out. She’s no dummy. She has a feeling for anything out of line. You should know that. She threw the Garcia name at him and didn’t get a thing back. He was with a woman down there. Gardino. And that was what it looked like, to be there to be with the woman and she looked worth it. And that was the same woman who had the bad luck. Honest to God, it was a one in a million chance, but she caught it. I’m still sick about that. It seemed like a hell of a big charge to me when I wired it in, but your expert was supposed to know what he was doing when he put it together. We were long gone by then, but still that woman didn’t have any part of…”

“Shut up! The problem is finding out who this bastard is and what he. wants.”

“Honest to God, Claude, when Dru spotted him and pointed him out to me about forty minutes ago, you could have knocked me over with a pin.”

“Shut up and let me think. This is beginning to go sour. I don’t like it. He’s no fool. Coming here with the Melgar woman was almost perfect cover. And he made some good moves in this room. He nearly got out of hand. And he had good cover down there too, good enough to fool you and Dru, boy. So who is he working for? How did he trace it back to here? I thought we closed the door on that whole operation. I thought everybody who could make any connection was gone-Almah, Miguel, Taggart. But now this son of a bitch comes out of nowhere. I don’t like it.”

“And you know who else isn’t going to like it.”

“Shut up, Chip, for God’s sake!”

“Why don’t you drop it in his lap?”

“Because he doesn’t like things fouled up. Let’s come up with some kind of answer before I tell him.”

“One answer,” Chip said, “is to make this character talk about it. The name he used down there was McGee. Tonight it’s Smith. God knows what it really is.”

The girl made a groan of effort, as though struggling to sit up. “Jesus, he ruined me. Chipper, you get him tied up and let me get at him with that little electric needle thing, and I’ll make him talk about things he never heard of.”

“Shut her up,” Claude said.

There was a sudden movement, a solid and meaty slapping sound, and then the girl’s muffled and hopeless sobbing. “Goddam you, Chip,” she sobbed.

“Hasn’t he been trying to work out something with the Melgar woman?” Chip asked.

“Just to get some shots of her in action. Send them down to Venezuela for mass distribution.”

“Why?”

“Use your head, you silly bastard. They know her face down there. Two brothers-in-law in the government. Notorious heiress having fun in the United States. But he hasn’t been able to trap her.”

“Did he give up?”

“Chipper, baby, he never gives up. Some day he’ll juice up a couple of her drinks, and she’ll go wobbling in there like a lamb, with spit on her chin, and give a hell of a performance.”

“So if she brought this guy here, why not now? Two birds with one stone. Like the time with that state senator and that ambassador’s wife.”

After a silence, Claude Boody said, “We certainly got mileage out of that little session. You know, sometimes you show vague signs of intelligence. What he’ll want done is keep this character and the Melgar woman stashed until the last drunk leaves. If he approves.”

“I don’t see how he has too much choice.”

“I should get to a doctor,” Dru said plaintively. “Every breath is like knives.”

“What I’ll do,” Claude said, “you sit tight here and I’ll go lay it on for him, which I think we should have done in the first place.”

“He makes mistakes too.”

“How often? How big?”

‘’Look, he can punish me. He can give me the Melgar broad.“

“You’re very very funny.”

I gave a weak, heartbreaking groan and moved very feebly. I needed to manage a sudden change in the odds. And I couldn’t do it face down.

“He’s coming out of it,” Chip said.

I writhed over onto my back, then started up suddenly. They stood up and moved back. I got halfway to a sitting position, eyes staring, then fell back with a long gargling sound, held my breath, let my mouth sag open, left my eyes half closed.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Chip whispered.

“You hit him too goddam hard with that thing!”

I wondered how long they would take. I hadn’t oxygenated, but I thought I could manage two minutes of it. They moved in again, squatting close. I felt fingers on my wrist.

“He isn’t breathing, but his heart’s still going good,” Claude said. He released my wrist.

I snatched Claude by the windsor knot, and I hooked a hand on the back of Chip’s neck, and slammed their heads together as hard as I could. I had fear and anger and a desperate haste working for me. It was like using a simultaneous overhand right and a wide left hook. Bone met bone with quite a horrid sound, much like smacking two large stones together underwater. Bone met bone hard enough to give a rebound that sent them both spilling over backward, settling slowly into the floor, both heads split and bleeding.

I glanced at the girl, slapped at Claude, pulled the weapon out from between belt and soft belly. It was oddly light for such a large and ugly caliber. She had pushed herself halfway up, and she stared at me, eyes and mouth wide open. We were in a sizeable and elegant bedroom. I let her look down the barrel and she said, “Wha-wha-what are you going to do?”

I moved back to the door, stepping over new acquaintances. There was an inside bolt and a chain. I fastened them. There was a vent, a continuous whisper of washed air. The windows were closed and looked sealed. I had the idea sound would not travel far from that room. My conversational acquaintances hadn’t seemed concerned about it. If any did get out of the room, it would have to fight that ubiquitous Hawaiian cotton candy music.

There was an object in the side pocket of Chip’s green blazer. I took it out. I imagine our limey cousins would term it a home made cosh. It was an eight inch section of stubby pipe wrapped with a thick padding of black friction tape. I put Boody’s hand gun in my jacket pocket and went over to the bed and sat on the edge of it, facing the sun bunny. Her eyes were puffed and apprehensive, her bland little face tear-stained.

“What do you want anyhow?” she demanded with false bravado.

I gave her a light touch across the ribs with the piece of pipe. She gave a thin whistling scream, the noise a shot rabbit will sometimes make. She lay back and said, “Oh, don’t. Oh, golly, there’s something all broke. I can feel it kind of grind. You fell with your whole weight on me.”

“I have a headache, Dru, and a nasty burn on the back of my hand, and you were very anxious to play around with some sort of an electric needle. I lost a very marvelous woman in that clambake down there, and I am going to ask questions. Whenever I don’t like the answer, I’m going to give you another little rap, with this.”

“What if you ask something I don’t know?”

“You get a little rap for luck. Chip wired the explosive into Menterez’s boat. Why?”

“To kill Alconedo. Miguel Alconedo. He’d goofed somehow. I don’t know how. You see, we took down his orders for him. He was supposed to kill Almah, then take the boat up to Boca del Rio, ten miles off shore, where he thought we’d be waiting for him. He thought it was all set so we could take him someplace where he could go from there back to Cuba and be safe. But there wasn’t any intention of that. The other three kids aboard, they didn’t know anything about anything. Chip sneaked off the night before we left, after midnight when a lot of the lights went out, and fixed the boat.”

“Who did you think I might be? Why did you try to check me?”

“Chip wondered about you. You sort of didn’t look like a tourist. You see, Almah couldn’t be trusted any more. She told Taggart too much about things. And she got too anxious about getting that money. She was okay up until the time of the Mineros thing, and then she started cracking up. They thought that if she told Taggart too much, maybe she told somebody else too, maybe the wrong people, and maybe some C.I.A. was down there. Chip thought that’s what you might be. Who are you anyhow?” She attempted a small shy friendly smile.

“Who got Taggart?”

“Gee, I don’t know. I mean I’m not sure. I heard them making a joke about it. About the monkey’s paw. It could have been a man named Ramon Talavera. They laughed a lot about Taggart. I know they picked him up before he had made any contact. They knew where he was. So when they made a date with him, to make arrangements about selling those statues to them, nobody showed up at the meeting place and when he went back all the others were gone, and all he had left was the one he’d taken along to prove he really had them. Then they got the last one back too, after somebody killed him.”

“Tomberlin gave the orders about Almah and about the explosive?”

“I guess he told Claude what to do and who to pick to do it. Nobody meant for that woman with you to be…”

“Why do you do what they tell you to do, Dru?”

“Me?” She looked astonished. “Golly I guess it’s about the same with me as it was with Almah and a lot of other people. Those pictures of me, if they ever sent a print of even one of the cleanest ones to my daddy I swear it would kill him. You don’t know about the first pictures they take, and then they use those to make you do things for more pictures. Rather than have my daddy ever see me doing anything like that, his own daughter, I’d cut my wrists first. I’d do anything they ask. I think where Almah got out from under, her mother died while she was down there.”

I remembered the untidiness of Almah Hichin, the look of soil and wear and carelessness. It was easy to see now why she had ceased to value herself. And it was an ancient gambit, using the threat of the most horrid scandal imaginable to tame people to your will and use. And the son of a bitch had so casually mentioned his photo lab.

“You know what Tomberlin is? And Claude Boody?”

“I can’t help that. I don’t think about that.”

“Baby, you are going to have to think about it. You are an accessory to murder. And your dear daddy is going to have to know the whole filthy mess, and you are going to have to talk and talk and talk to save your sweet skin, sun bunny. Even so, you may spend ten years in a Mexican rest camp, living on tortillas and frijoles.”

“Leave me alone, you son of a bitch! I think I’m bleeding inside. You can’t do anything to me. I bet you can’t even get back through the gate out there.”

I turned and looked at the two slumberers. Chip was still bleeding. Boody had stopped, though his gash looked bigger. I had a sudden idea about him. I went over and put my ear against his chest. When I was still a foot away from him, I realized there wasn’t much point in it. I was aware of the girl moving from the bed to go and bend over Chip. I listened to utter silence. All I could hear was my own blood roaring in my ear, like listening to a sea shell. Boody didn’t live in there any more.

As I slowly got to my feet, there was a sharp brisk sound, like somebody breaking a big dry stick. The sun bunny had backed over toward a dressing table. She had a little automatic in her hand, a little more weapon than my shiny bedroom gun. She held it at arm’s length, aiming it at me. She was biting her lip. She had one eye closed. The small muzzle made a wavering circle. It cracked again and I felt a little warm wind against my ear lobe.

“Cut it out!” I yelled, fumbling for Claude’s gun, tugging it out of my pocket. She fired again, and I knew she was going to keep right on, and I knew she couldn’t keep on missing at that range, particularly if it occurred to her to stop trying to hit me in the face. The third shot tingled the hair directly on top of my head, and Claude’s pistol was double action, and I tried to get her in the shoulder. It made a ringing deafening blam, and the slug took her just below the hairline on the right side of her head, and the recoil of that light frame jumped the gun up so that it was aiming at the ceiling.

The slug slammed a third of the top of her skull away, snapped her neck, catapulted her back into the dressing table, smashing the mirror, soiling the wall, leaving her in a limp, grotesque, motionless backbend across the dressing table bench. The silent room was full of the stink of smokeless powder. I made a sound that was half retching and half hysterical giggle. Hero McGee wins the shootout. He’s death on sun bunnies. Stomach contents rose in an acid column against the back of my throat and slowly subsided. Dear daddy wasn’t going to make out too well after all.

Bits of mirror still in the frame gave fragmented reflections of her. No more the bikinied prance, thigh-swing, hair salt, gamin sun bunny smile-no working hips or droll wink or busting with fun, no loads of love to daddy from your loving Dru, no surfer teeter on the dipping board, or the slow greeny world down by the coral heads with the fins scooting her along. Her bright dreams and visions, stilled into paste, were clotted onto a bedroom wall.

I wondered if she had really known that it was all real. When she had been popping that little gun at me, perhaps she had still been one step removed from the trueness of it, seeing herself as a TV second lead making up the script as she went along, seeing both me and herself as symbol figures in one of the dramas that would always end with everybody sitting around, having coffee before the next take. I hoped she was taken dead so quickly she was given no microsecond of the terrible reality of knowing that she was ended. I stood tense, half on tiptoe, trying not to breathe, listening, listening. I moved to the door, listening. I could not risk opening it. Not yet.

The little gun was under the dressing table bench. I managed not to look at her as I retrieved it. I had assembled a rude script for my own survival, and I went through the motions like a wooden man, with everything but the necessities of the situation blocked out of my mind. I took the little gun over and stood over Claude and fired one slug down into his dead heart. I took the gun back and put it into Chip’s hand and curled his fingers around it. I knelt beside him and gave him a solid blow on the side of the head with the length of pipe, to keep him sleeping. And, in the event he woke up too soon and wanted to rearrange the scene to fit some other pattern, I used the pipe to give him a knee that would keep him still and bother him as long as he lived.

I folded the bigger gun into Claude’s slack hand. I saw where the three times she had missed had put raggedy little holes into the panel meat of the door. I stood and looked at the scene. I knew I was going to wear it for a long long time, right in there on one of my back walls, with studio lighting. I tasted blood and realized I had nibbled a small piece out of the inside of my under lip.

I was still so rattled that I came dangerously close to wiping the door hardware clean. That is like leaving a signal flag. I recovered and smeared it, using the heel of my thumb, bases of my fingers.

I had to leave the room light on. I opened the door an inch. The corridor was silent. I heard steel guitars. I slipped out and pulled the door shut and went to the end of the corridor. The deck was empty. I went out there and closed the corridor door. Somebody had left half a drink on the rail. I picked it up. My right arm ached. There was a very tender area behind my right ear and slightly above it, but the skin was not broken. I fixed my tie and took deep breaths of the night air. I had the length of pipe in a trouser pocket. I ambled back to join the party.

I had the eerie expectation of finding everyone gone, chairs overturned, drinks spilled, signs of hasty exit. But the groups were still there, unsteadier now. Some of the kids were on the stairs, and others were dancing. Dr. Face still brayed disaster at his captive circle. I looked at my watch. It had all happened in about twenty-five minutes. I saw mine host in pewter silk standing in a group, his dull black wig sitting trimly on his naked skull, iced tea in his right hand, his left hand mechanically honking the buttock of a slender woman who stood beside him, like a child playing with an ancient auto horn. No one paid me any attention.

I searched for Connie without haste, and found her down by the sheltered part of the pool, sitting on a bench, talking real estate tax laws with a slight young man with a mild face and fierce mustache. The young man, after the introduction, excused himself to go off and find his wife.

Connie stood up and said, “Now can we go back to my place? My God, darling, this is turning into one of the dullest evenings of my life.”

I hauled her back down onto the bench and she was a little off balance and came down too solidly.

“Hey? Are you tight?”

“Listen one damned minute, Mrs. Melgar. Listen to a suppose. Suppose you got a little foolish and reckless one night, and you got a little drunk, and you went back into that studio or whatever he has beyond that jolly museum of his, and somebody took some very unwholesome pictures of you…”

“That may be his little hobby, dear, and he may have scads of friends who are sick enough to play, but it leaves me absolutely cold. He has made his oily little hints. For God’s sake, you heard him. I may be lusty, dear, but I’m not decadent, not in any exhibitionistic sense.”

“So suppose he sets you up sometime, with something in your drinks, and he picks a couple of choice negatives and sends them to somebody in Caracas who will make a couple of thousand prints and distribute them. What would happen then?”

Her big hand clamped my wrist strongly. “Dear God!”

“Two of your sisters are married to men in the government. What would happen?”

“My grandfather and my dead husband’s grandfather were terrific men. They’re sort of folk heroes now. It didn’t help very much, having me leave for good. A thing like that would… It could be put to terrible frightening use. What are you trying to tell me? That Cal would do a thing like that? But, my dear, it doesn’t make sense! Everybody knows that Cal helps a lot of people fight the sort of people who would put pictures like that to political use. He gives loads of money to people who are fighting Communist influence in Latin America.”

“What if he strengthens the groups who are going about it in the wrong ways, in ways that merely help rather than hinder.”

“But that would mean he…”

“He is a grotesque. He loves intrigue. Maybe he hates his own class, and particularly himself. Maybe he hides behind this facade of… political gullibility and this collection of erotica. Maybe he is not quite sane.”

“For goodness sake, he is just Calvin Tomberlin, a dull, self-important, rich, silly, sick little man.”

“I don’t like wasting time with these questions, but I have to ask them. Was Rafael Mineros doing anything effective about the Cuban situation?”

In the shadowy reflections of the pool lights, she looked startled.

“He asked me to come in with them. Maybe I was too selfish. Maybe I didn’t have his dedication. He had organized a group of wealthy people, about half of them from Cuba and the others from sensitive areas, Guatemala, Venezuela, Panama. They formed a syndicate to try to stifle trade with Cuba. They weren’t working through governments, with sanctions and embargos and things like that. They were dealing directly with the businessmen in Japan and Greece and Canada, the ones who wanted to buy from Cuba and sell to Cuba. They would line up other sources and other markets, and then put in enough money to make the deal more attractive than if they’d dealt with Cuba.

“It was his idea that if they could hasten the economic collapse of Cuba, they would be hastening the fall of the Castro government. He showed me where they could prove they had stopped forty-three ships from taking cargoes to Cuba and bringing Cuban goods out, just by locating other deals elsewhere. I guess it wasn’t very dramatic and exciting, like buying little airplanes and hiring madmen to drop little bombs on refineries, but I imagine it is dull negotiations like that which do a lot more damage. Rafael was completely tireless and dedicated. I think he was flying a million miles a year. It is probably all falling apart now. It was an expensive project. His son Enrique and Manuel Talavera were his aides, and Maria Talavera did a lot of the office work. Now they are all gone.”

I took her by the upper arms and shook her. “Now listen to me. Listen to two things. Make it three things. One. Tomberlin had that group killed. And then he had the people killed who had killed them. He used his collector’s mania as window dressing. Two. I told you precisely the plan Tomberlin has in mind far you. Three. In one of the bedrooms of this house there are two very dead people right now, dead by violence, and this whole situation may blow up in our face at any moment. But there is too damned good a chance that Tomberlin can cover the whole thing up. He has too many personal pictures of too many people in his files. His big levers are money and blackmail. I didn’t want to get you too involved. But now there isn’t much choice. You can still say the hell with it. Or you can help. It depends on how much any of this means to you.”

She huddled her big shoulders. “I… I’ve never been what you would call a p-patriot. But the way they think about my family… that’s a precious thing. And… Rafael was a good man. What do you want of me?”

“Let’s get him back into that museum.”

“How?”

“Be a little drunk. Tell him you want your picture taken. Tell him it has to be with me, and it has to be now, before you change your mind.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You said that layout is built like a safe. Nobody is going to get in and upset anything. Let’s see what happens.”

Nineteen

IT TOOK her about fifteen minutes to set it up. The party was now visibly dwindling. Tiresome drunks were in the majority of the diehards still left. I noted with approval that when we went in, Tomberlin locked the heavy door. Connie was doing a good job of simulating a constant high foolish giggle. I was unsteady on my feet, and wore a vacant, lecherous, fish-eating grin. Tomberlin was very soothing, and kept turning a quick broad smile off and on as though he were hooked up to a repeating circuit.

He took us back through a library to a small studio. There was a shiny jungle of lighting equipment. A technician was fiddling around with cameras. I had not anticipated his presence. He was a little old fellow, a mixture of oriental blood lines, part Japanese.

“As I explained, my dear, you will have absolute privacy.” Tomberlin said. “I wouldn’t want you to feel too restrained. Charlie will get the cameras set up and then we’ll leave you alone.”

The equipment was interesting. There were three 35 millimeter Nikon cameras, still cameras with automatic drive and oversized film carriers. One was locked to a track directly over the low broad couch, aiming down. One was on a high sturdy tripod at the foot of the couch, slanted down. One was on a low tripod beside the couch.

Charlie led the drive cables over to jacks in a timer box. He adjusted lights, one a direct flood, but softened and diffused, and the other a bright bounce light from the white ceiling. Charlie turned the timer on. One camera clopped, and after about six seconds another one clopped and buzzed, and at the same interval the third one fired. Charlie turned the timer off and nodded.

“The film will last about fifty minutes, dears,” Tomberlin said, wiping his pale lips on the back of his hand. “Do try not to be too dull and ordinary.”

“What are you going to do with these pictures, Cal?”

“Darling, it’s just a fun game, that’s all. We can go over the contact sheets together and see what we have worth enlarging. I’ll give you all the negatives. You’ll have some very interesting souvenirs, Connie dear. The lady in her prime. Don’t be too quick dears, and waste all that film.”

“Is anybody likely to walk in?” she asked.

“There’s not the slightest chance.”

“Where will you be?”

“I might rejoin the party and come back in an hour.”

I rambled over to the timer box and turned the switch on. The little old fellow hissed at me and slapped my hand away and turned it off. I’d wasted one exposure.

“Please don’t touch the equipment,” Tomberlin said.

I went grinning over to where he stood. Bashful guy. The old Hank Fonda in a farm picture. Shucks. I studied my fingernails, head bent, and said, “There’s one thing about all this, Mister Tomberlin.”

“Yes?”

I pivoted a half turn. I had screwed my legs down into the floor, and I pivoted with thighs, back, shoulder and arm, to see if I could drive my fist all the way through softness above his belt, right back to the backbone. The wind yawffed out of him and he skidded backward, bowing low, spilling tripod and camera, hitting the couch with the back of his knees, rolling up into a kind of curled headstand on the couch before toppling over onto his side.

Even though I started moving the instant I hit him, I still almost missed the old man. He had the speed of a lizard. I got him by the back of the collar just as he went through the doorway and hauled him back. He began to jump up and down and whoop and bat at me with his hands. He was too hysterical to listen to anything. I held him at arm’s length, got the length of pipe, timed his leaps, and with due regard for the long fragile look of his skull, bumped him solidly right on top of the head. His eyes rolled out of sight and I lowered him to the floor. I don’t think he weighed a hundred and ten. Within moments he was snoring heartily. They do that quite often.

Connie stepped out of my way as I went over to the couch. Tomberlin was on his side, his color dreadful, knees against his chest, semi-conscious, moaning softly with each breath. I shook him and said, “Greetings from Almah. And Sam. And Miguel. Rafael, Enrique, Maria, Manueh Greetings from the whole group. Dru is dead too. And so is Boody.”

“Boody!” Connie gasped. “Claude Boody?”

“World traveler.”

I shook Tomberlin but I couldn’t get through to him. I’d given him too much. He was going to be out of touch for a long time. I tore one of the cables loose and wrapped him up. I wondered if I should stuff his mouth. The black toupee peeled off with a sticky sound and I wedged it into his jaws. It muffled his moans. Connie stared at me with a wide and horrified grin, wringing her big hands.

“N-Now what?”

I took her out and we found his photo files. It was an extensive and complex system, with thousands of negatives cross indexed to proof sheets and print files. There was another complete filing system for color, and a third for movies both black and white. It wasn’t a collection you could burn in a wastebasket. Connie was fascinated by the files of finished prints. She kept dipping into them, looking for familiar faces, gasping with a mixture of horror and delight when she found them.

I set her to work emptying all the files, dumping everything into a pile in the middle of that small room which adjoined the photo lab. I went back out into the museum part. The glass covering the gold statue niches was set permanently in place. I could see no clue that the niches were hooked up to any alarm system. It took three solid blows with the pipe to open up each niche, one to shatter the glass, two more to hammer shards out of the way so I could pull the heavy images out.

I remembered the two big cushions on the couch and went back to the little studio. I ripped the covers off, and had two sizeable sacks. I divided the statues evenly between the two sacks. I took the whole thirty-four. The Menterez collection had grown. The sacks weighed close to a hundred pounds each, though the contents were not bulky. They were all jumbled in there, like jacks in a child’s game. I bound them with twine. Little Santy Claus packs for good children. I lifted them carefully, one in each hand. The stitches held. I put them back down again.

I went back to the file office. Connie had finished her work. It was spilled wall to wall in the middle of the room, about three feet high at the peak. She was pawing through it, still looking at things.

“You have no idea!” she said. “My God, some of these people are so proper! How in the world did he ever…”

“Listen to me. I’ve got Tomberlin’s keys here. Take them. I think this one unlocks the museum door. I’ve got things to carry. Now get the sequence. We take Tomberlin and the little guy out into the museum. I unwrap Tomberlin. I come back and get this stuff burning. We’ll have to wait a few minutes to be certain it is going real good. Then we unlock the door and go out, yelling fire. Because there is going to be a nice fire, there is going to be considerable confusion. You head for the car as fast as you can. I’ll be right behind you. We go to your place and split up. My car is there. You are going to pack quickly and get out quickly and take a little vacation.”

I saw fifty questions in her eyes, and then she straightened her shoulders and said, “Yes dear.”

It nearly worked. It came within inches and seconds of working. She was trotting ahead of me, the ends of the big stole flying out behind her, a rather hippy and bovine trot but she was making good time. We were almost at the car when the voice of authority called “Halt!” I risked a glance. It was George Wolcott, of the little leaden eyes and the large damp mouth.

“Keep going!” I ordered Connie.

“Halt in the name of the law!” he yelled with stentorian dignity and precision, fired once in the air as the book says, and fired the second one into my back, without a suitable pause. I was fire-hot-wet in back, and fire-hot-wet in front, without pain but suddenly weakened. I wavered and stumbled and got the gold into the car with a vast effort, ordering her to take the wheel and get us out of there. I clawed my way in.

She had it in motion the instant the engine caught, and she slewed it between and among the few cars left, then straightened and headed for the gate. The man there jumped out and then back, like a matador changing his mind about a bull. We went over a hump, screeched down the long curve of drive and onto Stone Canyon Drive, accelerating all the time. She slammed into curves, downshifting, shifting back, keeping the rpm well up toward the red, showing off, laughing aloud.

“Okay,” I said. “Ease off. You’re great.”

She slowed it down. “My God, it’s too much!” she said. “What a change in a dull evening! My God, that couch for a frolic, and those cameras clucking like a circle of hens, and those dirty pictures curling and steaming in that lovely fire. And the great Tomberlin with his mouth full of wig. And a lovely lovely madman smashing glass and stealing gold. And shots in the night. For God’s sweet sake, I haven’t felt so alive in a year. Darling, wasn’t that that dull fellow, actually shooting?”

“That was that dull fellow.”

“But why?”

“It didn’t seem a very good time to ask. I’m glad it was a fun evening for you. There’s a pretty little girl back there with the top of her pretty head blown off. And Claude Boody is dead. He’s always good for laughs.”

The edge of delight was gone from her voice. “So there is going to be a big and classic stink about all this?”

“Yes.”

“But then I don’t think it would be so very smart for me to go away, do you? I don’t know very much. The little I do know, I can lie about. I think you had a little gun in my back. You forced me to do things. I don’t know who you are or where you went.”

“That’s fine, if it’s police questions. But Tomberlin will have some questions. He won’t ask them himself. He might send some people who wouldn’t be polite.”

She thought that over as we waited for a light. “But if I am just… absent, there’ll be a stink about that, officially. I think the best thing is to… report this myself. As an injured party. I can make a statement, whatever they want, and tell them I am going away, and be very careful and go quickly”

“That probably makes more sense.”

“How will I ever find you again?”

“Maybe you won’t.”

“But isn’t that a horrible waste? Don’t you feel that way about it?”

“I can’t guarantee the same kind of evening every time, Connie.”

“Are you sleepy? You sound sleepy. It’s a reaction, I guess.”

“I parked around in that back street, the same as before.”

She spotted the little English Ford and pulled up behind it. I was assembling myself to get out. No pain yet. Just numb-hot on the right side, from armpit to hip. I had the feeling I was carrying myself in a frail basket. As with my care with the stitching on the pillow covers, I felt I had to stand up very slowly and carefully. I opened the car door. She put her hand on my knee. “Will you be all right now?” she asked. “You have everything all planned?”

“Nearly everything.”

I got out, feeling as if I moved in separate parts and pieces. I felt as if the left side would work better than the right. I got one sack in my left hand and took the strain of it as I swung it out. Nothing seemed to tear, in the sack or in me. The sack weighed a mere thousand pounds. I marched slowly to the rear of the little car, put the sack down, found the keys, opened the trunk. I was cleverly constructed of corn flakes and library paste.

Her car lights were bright on the trunk of the little car. I got the sack in and floated back to her car and got the other sack. I had dry teeth and a fixed grin. I put the second sack in and when I closed the back lid I folded against it for a moment, then pushed myself back up to my dangerous height. Her car lights went off and suddenly she was with me, a strong arm around me.

“You’re hit!” she said.

“There’s probably some blood in your car. Wipe it off. Go home. Make your statement. Get the hell out of this, Connie.”

“I’ll get you to a hospital.”

“Thanks a lot. That’s a great idea.”

“What else?”

“Anything else. Because they’ll nail me with some of the trouble back there. And make it stick. And I’d rather be dead than caged. So would you, woman.”

I expected the moral issue then and there. Did you kill anybody? But she was the kind who set their own standards.

“Do you have a place to go?” she asked. “A safe place?”

“Yes.”

She helped me to the passenger side of the little car, and helped me lower myself in. She wrested the car keys out of my hand. I made protest.

“Shut up, darling. I won’t be long. Try to hold on. In case you can’t, tell me the address now.”

After hesitation, I told her. She hurried off. She didn’t start her car for a few moments, and I suspected she was swabbing my valuable blood off her leather upholstery. She swung out and went up the street and turned into the underground garage. I undid my jacket, pulled my shirt out of my pants and looked at the damage in front, by the flame of my lighter. It was on the right side, in the softness of my waist. Exit holes are always the worst, unless it is a jacketed slug. This seemed about half dollar size, so the slug hadn’t hit anything solid enough to make the slug mushroom very much. My posture kept the lips closed, and it was not bleeding badly.

I tucked the soaked shirt tail back in and hugged myself. I wished I knew more anatomy. I wondered what irreplaceable goodies were within that line of fire. From the absence of pain I knew I was still in shock. There was just a feel of wetness and looseness and sliding, and a feel of heat. But there was another symptom I did not like. There was a metallic humming in my ears, and the world seemed to bloat and dwindle in a regular cycle. I hugged and waited, wondering if on the next cycle the world would dwindle and keep dwindling and be gone. If she was a very smart woman, if she came back and found me too far gone, she would do well to take me to the address I gave her, and walk away from it.

That son of a bitch had been too eager. The look of people hurrying away with a burden had gotten him terribly excited. The business shot had come about a second and a half after the warning shot. He sounded official. Maybe he was after a citation.

I hung on. I felt suspended in a big membrane, like a hammock, and if anything jounced, it would split and I would fall through.

Suddenly she opened the car door and bounced in. The bounce stirred the first tiny little teeth of pain.

“How are you?” she asked. She threw a small bag into the back seat. She had changed her clothes. She was breathing hard.

“I’m just nifty peachy dandy, Mrs. Melgar.”

She got the little car into motion very swiftly, giving the little teeth a better chance to gnaw. She said, “Just as I was leaving, the phone rang. Men down at the desk. Police. I told the night man to send them right up. I went down the stairs.”

“Fun and games. The romantic vision. Have fun, Connie.”

“My friend, once you decide you want the animal to charge, and once he begins the charge, you cannot change your mind. You stand there and you wait until he is close enough so you can be absolutely sure of him.”

“Grace under pressure. Kindly spare me the Hemingway bits.”

“Are you always so surly when you’re wounded?”

“I hate to see people being stupid for no reason. Get out of this while you have the chance.”

“Darling. I will take every chance to feel alive, believe me.”

The little man inside me decided that teeth weren’t enough. He threw them aside and got a great big brace and bit, dipped it in acid, coated it with ground glass and went to work, timing each revolution to the beat of my heart. She parked in front of 28. I leaned against the side of the bungalow while she unlocked the door. She took me in. My legs were too light. They wanted to float. It was hard to force them down to the floor to take steps.

She managed the lights and the heavy gaudy draperies. She had changed to a dark pleated skirt and a dark sweater. I kept my jaws clamped on the sounds I wanted to make, and settled for the occasional snort and whuff. We got the ruined jacket and shirt off. I sat on a low stool in the bathroom, forearms braced on my knees, head sagging.

She said, “It’s off to the right, in back just under the last rib. You’ve got to have a doctor.”

“I’ve lasted pretty good so far.”

“You look ghastly,” she said. “I think we can stop the bleeding, though.”

She went scouting around and I heard her tearing something into strips. She found a sanitary napkin and fashioned two pads and bound them in place by winding the strips around my middle and knotting them. Now I felt as if I had a heavy bar of lead through me, from back to front, red hot. She found the bourbon and poured me a heavy shot. I asked her to leave the bathroom. I urinated, but it was not bloody. I could take a deep breath without any inner rattling or gargling. But something essential had to be messed up.

As I headed for the bed, I went down. Very slowly, protecting myself, bracing myself, rolling onto my good side. She helped me up and onto the bed. I stretched out on my back, but it felt better to keep my knees hiked up.

She looked down at me and said, “I’m going to use the phone.”

“What are you thinking of?”

“Pablo Dominguez. He might have an idea. At three in the morning, he might have an idea, you know. But is that all right with you?”

“That’s very much all right.”

“Is it hurting a lot?”

“It didn’t help it very much, falling down. This is a borrowed place.”

“It looks it.”

“And a borrowed car. I was planning on getting out of here without leaving a trace, without leaving people around with a lot of questions. Tell Paul if he can manage it, if he can manage anything, getting out of here should be part of it.”

“I don’t think you should be moved any more.”

“Tell him I have some interesting things to tell him.”

I heard her on the phone, close beside me, but I couldn’t keep track of what she was saying. Her voice turned into three simultaneous voices in echo chambers, overlapping into a resonant gibberish. I raised my hand to look at it. It came into sight after a long time, hung there, and then fell back into darkness.

I was jolted awake. Somebody was saying in a husky whisper, “Careful. Easy now!” They were trying to get my legs up over a rear bumper. It was a panel delivery truck. I had clothes on. There was a faint grey of dawn over Buena Villas. My gear was in the truck. There was a mattress in there.

I helped them. I crawled toward the mattress. I had been sawed in half and glued back together, but both ends worked. I saw Dominguez and Connie staring in at me.

“There’s one thing,” I said.

“Don’t try to talk, baby.” Connie said.

I made her understand about the promise and the money, and she agreed that she would immediately put the key and the seventy dollars in Honey’s mailbox, don’t worry about it, the house is in good shape, everything’s fine, don’t worry. In the middle of trying to form the next question, my arms got tired of chinning myself on this bottom rung of consciousness, so I just let it all go.

When I awoke again it was hot. Light came into the truck, dusty sunlight. I was being juggled and bounced. Connie sat on a tool box. It was a bad road. She looked tired. Her smile was wan. She said something I couldn’t hear and felt my forehead. I saw my gear and her small bag and the two sacks of golden idols. I wanted to say something vastly significant, about a woman and gold and a wound, like those things you say in dreams, those answers to everything. But when I unlocked my jaw, all that came out was a bellow of pain.

She knelt and held me and said, “Just a little bit more, dear. Just a little bit more now.”

I was on my face, in a rough softness, in a smell of wool and a sharper smell of medicine. They’d let something loose at me and it was eating its way into my back. I tried to roll over, but a hand came down on my bare shoulder and forced me back. I heard Connie in an excited clatter of Spanish, and a man’s voice answering. Suddenly a huge pain towered shining white and smashed down on me and rolled me under.

I awoke slowly. I was in bed, I accumulated the little bits of evidence one at a time, with a great slow drifting care. I was naked. I was well covered.

I felt a stricture around my middle. I felt a wide, taut, professional bandage. It was dark where I was. There was a yellow light on the other side of the room. I turned my head slowly. Connie Melgar was over there, sitting, reading a book by a kerosene lamp, near a small open fire in a big fireplace. She seemed to be wearing pyjamas, and a man’s khaki hunting jacket. There was a huge night stillness around us. I could hear the small phutterings of the fire.

“Connie?” I said, with somebody else’s voice. A little old man’s voice.

She jumped up and came over and put her hand on my forehead. “I was going to have to try to wake you up,” she said. “You have pills to take.”

“Where are we?”

“Pills first,” she said. She went out of sight. I heard the busy ka-chunking of a hand pump.

She came back with two big capsules and a glass of chill water. Nothing had ever tasted better. I asked for more, in my little old voice, and she brought me another glass. She brought the lamp over and put it on a small table, and moved a straight chair near. I saw that I was in a deep wide bunk, with another above me, and a rough board wall at my left.

She lit two cigarettes and gave me one.

“Are you tracking, Travis? Do you think you can understand what I tell you?” she asked.

After a slow count of ten, I said, “Travis. My wallet?”

“That’s the way a snoopy woman amuses herself, Mr. McGee. It is now midnight, my dear. You were shot about twenty-two hours ago. I am sorry we had to bring you such a terrible distance. I wouldn’t have taken the risk. But Paul gave the orders and did the driving. You are in a cabin which belongs to one of Paul’s friends. It is near the San Bernadino National Forest, and not far from Toro Peak, and it is five thousand feet in the air. You’ve been winking off and on like a weak light. You’ve had a doctor. He’s a good doctor, but he doesn’t have a license in this country. He also is a friend of Paul’s. He works for a vet in Indio.

“He did a lot of prodding and disinfecting and stitching, and he put in some drains. He doesn’t ask questions and he doesn’t report gunshot wounds. He says you are fantastically tough, and you took the bullet in a very good place. If he had you in a hospital, he would open you up. And it may still come to that. We’ll wait and see. He’ll be back tomorrow. We have provisions, firewood, water and an old jeep. There isn’t a living soul within six miles of us. You are not to move, for any reason. He gave you some shots. Paul went back. When you want the improvised bedpan, shout. It seems you might live. In the meantime, you are a big nuisance to everybody.”

I closed my eyes to think it over. I drifted away and came back.

“Are you still there?”

“I think so.”

“You can have some hot broth, if you think you can keep it down, and if I can make that damned wood stove work.”

“I could keep it down.”

She had to wake me up for the broth. She wanted to feed it to me, but after she got my head braced up, I was able to handle it.

“What about… have they said anything? Have you heard any news?”

“Strange news, Travis. Television executive slain in gun battle over beach girl, at millionaire’s canyon home. Beauty contest winner slain by stray shot in bedroom gun battle. Charles ”Chip“ Fertacci, skin-diving instructor, held in connection with the dual slaying, found unconscious in bloody bedroom. All very sexy and rancid, dear.”

“No mystery guest sought?”

“And no Venezuelan heiress either, according to the news. But they could be looking.”

“You can be damn well certain they are. What about Tomberlin?”

“Oh, he’s in the hospital. Smoke inhalation and nervous collapse after successfully fighting a fire that broke out mysteriously in his photo lab. It seems he is a hobby photographer. The official diagnosis is that it was some sort of spontaneous combustion of chemicals. Minor fire damage. No report of anything missing.”

“They don’t tie it up with the other story at all?”

“Just that it was a coincidence it happened the same night at the same house, and that Tomberlin’s collapse might be partially due to shock and learning of the murders.”

“When is Paul going to come back?”

“He didn’t say. But he’ll be back.”

I started to take the last sip of the broth, and without warning my teeth tried to chatter a piece out of the rim of the mug. My arm started twitching and leaping, and she reached and grabbed the mug. I slid down and curled up, wracked with uncontrollable chills. She tucked more blankets around me. Nothing helped.

She went over and put logs on the fire, came back and took off the khaki jacket and came into the bunk with me. With tender and loving care, she wrapped me up in her arms, after unbuttoning the front of her pyjama coat to give more access to her body warmth. I got my arms around her, under the pyjama jacket, and held her close, my face in her sweet hot neck, shuddering and huffing and chattering. I was not a little old man. I had slipped back to about ten years old. I felt cold and scared and dwindled. This was the mama warmth, sweet deep musk of hearty breasts and belly, of big warm arms enclosing, and soft sounds of soothing, down in the nest of wool. At last the shudderings came less frequently. I was waiting for the next one when I toppled off into sleep.

I awoke alone in stillness, red coals on the hearth, a white of moonlight patterning the rough floor. I listened until I found the slow heavy breathing mingled with that silence, and traced it, and found it came from above me. At the foot of the bunk I could make out the rungs of the ladder fastened there. I swung my legs up and sat up. At the count of three I made it to a standing position. I held onto the edge of the upper bunk. She had her back to me, pale curls on pale pillow. The khaki jacket was on the straight chair. I was nine feet tall, and I had been put together by a model airplane nut. I got the jacket on, realizing it was not a case of gaining strength, but merely using what I had for what I had to do, before the strength ran out.

I made the door, opposite the fireplace. I leaned on the frame and slid the bolt over. It creaked as I let myself out. Porch boards creaked under my feet. There were no steps, just a drop of a few inches to stony ground. It was a pale landscape on the far side of the moon, sugar stones and a tall twist of pines and silence. Something far off made a sad sad cry.

I braced my back against one of the four by fours that held up the porch roof. Huge and virile project for a hero. Relief in the night, a stream to arch and spatter, small boy’s first token of virility. As I finished the porch creaked again and she said, “You fool! You absolute and utter idiot!”

“How high are we?”

“Five thousand feet. Come back inside.”

“What makes that mournful sound, Connie?”

“Coyotes. Come back inside, you burro.”

“I can make it.”

But I probably wouldn’t have. I put a lot of weight onto those big shoulders. She sat me down, took the jacket, swung my legs in, tucked me in.

“If you want anything, wake me! Understand?” She laid the back of her hand on my head. She made a snort of exasperation and climbed back up her ladder. She flounced around up there, settling herself down.

“McGee?”

“Yes dear.”

“You are muy macho. You have to be the he-mule. Too much damned pride. That pride can kill you, the way you are now. Let me help you.”

“I’m not going to die.”

“How do you know?”

“I keep remembering how you cured my chill. If I was going to die, I wouldn’t have that on my mind.”

“God help us all. Go to sleep.”

The little doctor came in an old Ford in the late afternoon, roaring up the final grade in low. He had a leathery frog-face, and it was part of the deal that he did not give his name. He asked questions about fever, appetite, elimination. He inspected the wounds. He made clucking sounds of satisfaction. He bandaged again. He left more pills. He said he would be back. He would skip one day and then come back.

On the following afternoon I was stretched out on a blanket on the side yard in my underwear shorts when I heard another car come up that last pitch. It sounded like more car than the little doctor had. Connie brought Dominguez and another man around the corner of the cabin and out to my blanket.

“See him?” she said. “Disgusting. He said weak men have to have meat. I drove that foul jeep to Indio. I bought four steaks. He ate two for lunch.”

“How do you feel, amigo?” Paul asked.

“Perforated.”

“Permit me to introduce Senor Ramon Talavera.” Talavera was a slim dark-haired man, with a Spanish pallor, a dark and clerical suit. I hesitated and then held my hand out to him. His hesitation was longer than mine, and then he bent and took it.

Paul turned to Connie. “If you don’t mind, chica.” She plumped herself down on the corner of the blanket, affixed her stretch-pants legs Buddha style and said defiantly, “I sure as hell do mind. What do you think I am? The criada around here?”

Paul looked inquiringly at Talavera. The pale man gave a little nod of agreement. Paul got two fat unsplit chunks from the woodpile, and they used them like stools. Connie handed cigarettes around.

Paul said, “It could be a mistake, but from what Connie said to me, I thought it would be wise to bring Ramon here to talk to you.”

I looked at the pale man and said, “You have my sympathy in the loss of your sister and your friends.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

“I think I know what you want to know, Mr. Talavera. Tomberlin wanted to stop Mineros’ activities. He knew that, because of past history, he could make Mineros lose his head if he could bring him face to face with Carlos Menterez. If Mineros killed Carlos and was caught, it solved the problem. If Carlos killed Mineros, it solved the problem. Tomberlin had two people planted down there. Miguel Alconedo, on Menterez’s staff, and Almah Hichin, his mistress. I imagine he got word to them to try to take care of Mineros. Tomberlin used the collection of gold figures as a smoke screen. He is a very devious man. Almah Hichin talked Taggart into helping Miguel kill those four people. Then Tomberlin began to worry I think, about the reliability of Almah and Miguel. He sent people down-Fertacci and the beach girl-to deliver an order to Miguel to kill the Hichin woman and escape in the boat. They booby-trapped the boat. Tomberlin’s orders were given through Claude Boody.”

“Who is dead,” Talavera said gently. “We got word that one of the men who killed them was on the way up from Mexico to sell things to Tomberlin. We approached Tomberlin. He did not know anything about anything, but he promised to cooperate. When he was contacted, he let us know at once. We tricked the man out of the gold, but we missed him. When he made contact to sell the last piece, I had the honor of being selected to go and deal with him.” He looked into my eyes. “I understand he was your friend?”

“He was. He didn’t know there would be a woman aboard. He had been sold an entirely false story about the whole thing. Almah Hichin was a sly woman. She made me believe she was telling me the whole truth by only telling me a part of it, in great detail.”

“Your friend, Taggart, tried to tell me these things, but it was too late by then. A sister can be the most special person one can have, Senor McGee.”

“He tried a bad gamble and it went wrong. There’s been too much blood since then. It happened a long time ago, Talavera, and I have lost interest in it.”

“Thank you. These other things you say, are they guesses?”

I held my hand out. “Boody burned my hand to be certain I was unconscious. But I wasn’t. I listened to Boody talk to Fertacci about these things. I was able to fill in the blanks. I took a chance and knocked their heads together. I think Boody’s heart gave out. The girl got a gun and started shooting at me. She missed with three shots from close range. I tried to knock her down with Boody’s gun without killing her. But it threw high and to the right. So I disabled Fertacci and set the scene and let myself out. Neither Fertacci nor Boody nor the girl had the slightest idea who I could be. The girl remembered seeing me at Puerto Altamura. It made them very nervous. And I think that having Chip Fertacci in custody is going to make Tomberlin very nervous.”