Caught Dead

TEN

“How long will it take him?” Shayne said. “He’ll be driving fast because he won’t want to miss anything.”

“Twenty minutes at least, but can you be sure he’ll actually go?”

“I think so, to pick up the cash. He’s going to consider that two thousand bucks potentially his.”

He closed the doors of the sideboard and they returned to the other apartment, where Shayne rigged a simple device to let them know if anyone entered the apartment they had just left. He found a thin reel of picture wire in the kitchen, tacked one end to the inner side of the other living-room door, ran it beneath the door along the hall and under the door of Rubino’s apartment, where he anchored it to a tumbler in which he placed several coins. When the other door was pulled open, the glass would spill.

Lenore, meanwhile, was working on her appearance at the two-way mirror. She turned, and they looked at each other. The striped man’s shirt was just right for her. The nipple of her unbandaged breast pressed clearly against the cloth.

“How old was Alvares?” Shayne asked.

She moved her shoulders uncomfortably and sat on the sofa, knees together.

“Fifty-six when I met him. That was four years ago. I know what you’re really asking, and don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same thing, more than once. Well-he was a man of force, shall we say. I’d been painting and painting and painting, and getting nowhere. I literally wasn’t eating in those days except when somebody took me to dinner. I know that sounds ridiculous, in this day and age. But it’s true. I was sure I had talent. Sooner or later, I thought, someone would recognize it. And he recognized it. He really did, Mike, he bought one of my paintings before he met me. What he offered at first was a kind of scholarship, so I could concentrate on painting without worrying about bills. Of course it didn’t stop there. And after it really began with him I stopped painting, which may prove something about me. Heaven knows there’s no shortage of early Dantes.” She gestured ironically at the one on Rubino’s wall. “I am chic now. But in only two places, Palm Beach and Caracas.”

Shayne had left his cognac in the car, but he found another bottle in Rubino’s liquor cabinet.

“I think this really does help,” she said, accepting a glass.

“Twenty minutes isn’t much time,” Shayne said, moving a side chair so he could sit down facing her. “We’ve got a lot to cover. First I want to be sure you know where I stand.”

She stopped him. “I know. I thought about it on the autopista. Trading me for your friend Rourke isn’t really such a farfetched idea, is it? I have to persuade you I can be valuable in other ways, and to do that, I have to tell you the exact truth, as far as I know it. Maybe you’ll see something I’ve missed. Where do you want me to start?”

“Were you in Alvares’ plane when it crashed?”

“Yes, and I’ve got bruises to prove it. I hated to come to Caracas this time. It’s in the middle of my busy season in the gallery, but he wanted me here. He knew about the movement against him, but thought it would all blow over, somehow. It didn’t, of course. It got rapidly worse. He had his pilot on twenty-four hour notice. When he got word that troops were coming to arrest him, he phoned me. I met him at the airstrip. We took off and crashed. After I crawled out I decided there was no reason to hang around and wait for the soldiers. He didn’t make a popular move when he tied up with a gringo. I’ve appeared in political cartoons, I regret to say, the blonde temptress with a great dollar sign on my bosom.”

“How much money was he carrying?”

“Not a great deal. I took what he had, but it was barely enough to buy that boat.”

“I’ve been hearing he had a fortune in cash stashed away somewhere.”

She shook back her long hair. “Perhaps. I’m not exactly a giddy young thing, but should I be expected to know how much money he had in the bank, or in which bank?”

“People assume you do.”

“When he paid for something, he simply opened his wallet and took out some money. Is that the police theory? That I bombed him to death so that only I, in all the world, would know the location of his wealth? Mike, that’s so far from the truth-He was a real Latin male. His women were helpless creatures who couldn’t add up a checkbook.” She looked at him critically. “Are you believing this?”

“Most of it sounds pretty straight. What happened after you walked away from the wreck?”

“When I got back to the city I called my niece, a sweet girl named Paula Obregon. She found me a place to stay.”

“Frost snowed me her picture. Rourke was seeing her.”

“Then you know she’s a revolutionary, a fierce enemy of capitalist governments. But what a nice girl, all the same. She went to school in the States for a year, and she stayed with me part of the time. When she came back she plunged into the movement against my dear friend and lover, so of course I’ve seen very little of her since. I think she’s too smart not to outgrow those juvenile ideas, or that’s what I keep telling her parents. When I heard Guillermo had been taken to La Vega, I had an idea. This will sound romantic to you, but damn it, it really could have worked. These guerrillas have a fabulous organization, absolute discipline. All of a sudden, there they are. Look again, they’re gone. Several of their leaders were being held in that prison, and my idea was that if they could smuggle in some smoke bombs and tear gas, enough to confuse and incapacitate the guards, a relatively small force could walk in wearing gas masks and deliver everybody, regardless of politics.”

“In a couple of cigarette cartons,” Shayne said, scraping his chin.

“That’s the way we worked it out. They jumped at the idea. I went to Senora Alvares-”

“Just a minute. Did she know you were her husband’s girl?”

“After a while it wasn’t much of a secret. They’ve had no marital life, by which I mean sexual contact, for years. Divorce wasn’t possible. If I could visit my friend in prison there would have been no problem, but that privilege of course was reserved for the wife. It wasn’t easy for me to go to her. She was angry and suspicious but I managed to persuade her, finally. He was her husband, after all, and did she want him to spend the rest of his life behind bars? That was the sentimental side of the argument. The practical side was that if we could help him escape, he would continue to support her. She’s quite a self-centered bitch, as a matter of fact, and when she agreed to help I’m quite sure she was thinking of herself. But that’s unkind and probably unfair.”

“Did she know what was going to be in the cartons?”

“Yes, but her part in it fell through. She couldn’t get permission to visit him.”

“Which is where Tim Rourke came in.”

“Paula knew him from Miami. She was supplying material for a series on the guerrillas, and I believe she was staying with him at his hotel, so if he thought of any questions to ask in the middle of the night, she could answer them right away. He agreed to help us. He made himself such a nuisance downtown that they finally set up an interview for him. You know how the other correspondent was substituted at the last minute.”

“Did Tim really know what he was letting himself in for?”

“It wasn’t really that dangerous, Mike. The timing device wasn’t supposed to go off until half an hour after he left. Meanwhile, another MIR detachment would be making a diversion downtown, robbing a bank and so on. I didn’t see how it could miss.”

“Did you see the cartons being prepared?”

“That was done by Paula’s people, somewhere else. And it was honestly just a beautiful job. They looked absolutely genuine, and felt absolutely genuine.”

“Now tell me how you planned to leave the country.”

“I had a car, the same Oldsmobile. The boat was fueled up and ready. Tim was going to meet us there and go with us. I was at the room Paula found for me, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Two longs and a short would mean that the truck had arrived, bringing my friend in a wig and false nose. I waited and waited, and of course nothing happened. I didn’t dare leave for fear of missing the signal. I heard sirens, and shooting. I stayed up on the roof most of the night. I knew something had gone wrong, but what if they’d been attacked after they got the prisoners out, and he was in hiding? In the morning I bought a paper, and there it was. And the whole thing had been my idea, Mike! I got it started and kept it going, and somewhere along the way somebody used my plan to murder him. And I did a stupid thing-I went to the farm. I thought I could persuade her I hadn’t done it, and if we went to the police together and told our story-but the woman was insane! She said I killed him, she’d told them everything, they were looking for me, I’d be arrested and put to death. She screamed horrible things at me and tried to tear out my eyes. I ran out of the house.”

She shivered, looked into her glass and drank some more cognac. Shayne had listened intently to her story, and now he began to push questions at her. How long had Tim Rourke had possession of the cartons? She counted backward; less than half a day. She herself had had them overnight, and had returned them to her niece in mid-morning, after the Senora had been denied permission to visit the prison.

“All right,” Shayne said. “Now we’re going to talk some more about the money. Try to be a little more convincing. I’m calling it money. I don’t know whether it’s in cash or securities or gold or real estate. You were big enough in his life so he wanted you down here at a time when he knew trouble could start popping any minute. He had his getaway plans made. As far as anybody’s told me, he didn’t have any shoe-boxes full of thousand-dollar bills when he crashed. That means the thousand-dollar bills were waiting for him somewhere else. You seem to be a bright, cool girl. If you didn’t want to leave your gallery in the middle of the season, you could have told him so.”

“He bought me that gallery! If what you’re saying is that I didn’t love him, Mike-”

“That doesn’t interest me.”

“Well, I’m sorry! Of course I knew he was rich, and I must have assumed it wasn’t money he saved out of his official salary. But I didn’t know any details.” She added, “Maybe I was afraid to ask.”

“You understand I’m not talking about the money he took out of his pocket to pay waiters. I’ve heard various sums quoted, from twenty million down.”

She looked startled. “Twenty million dollars!”

“That’s only a skim of about a million and a half a year. But pick a number. It doesn’t have to be twenty. Ten million, five. Call it five million, and I take back what I said about thousand-dollar bills. Fifties are as high as he’d want to go and that many fifties would fill a couple of trunks. You can’t buy real property without leaving a trail of paper. Somebody like you, sleeping in the same bedroom, using the same phone, would have to know what he was doing. Don’t go on denying it.”

He looked at his watch. “Rubino’s on his way back, and I know from driving with him that he doesn’t pay much attention to traffic lights. We’ve got a pretty good situation here, if we can work out, a way to exploit it. I want him to sneak in next door and listen to us talking. People who depend on surveillance techniques usually believe everything they hear.”

“I’m glad you’re finally using the word we.”

“You’re in enough trouble so I think you’re about to start helping. I’m not the only one who thinks you know where that money’s buried. Or can you think of any other reason that guy was waiting to knife you?”

“He could think it and still be wrong, Mike. Find out for me! I still want to hire you, but I can’t be too free with my promises, or you’ll think I have keys to all his safe deposit boxes. I’m thinking of my skin!”

She forgot and took a deep breath. “Damn it, that hurt. I’m willing to play ‘let’s suppose,’ if you are. Let’s suppose there is such a cache of money and we find it, who would it belong to?”

Shayne smiled. “We can ask a lawyer.”

“Perhaps I’d deserve some of it. I’m in his will.”

Shayne’s smile broadened, and she said, “I know! If it gets as far as the lawyers, the new junta will simply gobble it up.”

“Somebody has to turn it in first. I don’t think that’s likely. Let’s name a percentage. If I get you out of the country and wind up this bombing so they don’t come after you with extradition papers, I think fifty percent would be about right.”

Her eyes changed. “Fifty percent of nothing would be nothing. Fifty percent of five or ten million would be damned high.”

He made a quick gesture. “Then it’s settled. We’re partners. Now give me a few dribbles of information.”

She drew her eyebrows together and set her lips in a thin line. But she forced herself to relax, and drank.

“Fifty percent of nothing would be nothing for me, too, so-” She hesitated. “I think I may know what you’re talking about, but it certainly doesn’t amount to anything like twenty million, or ten or even five.”

“Four?”

“Less than four. That doesn’t matter. I know exactly what the police will do if they get hold of me. We talked about it. Guillermo thought he could defy them for ninety-six hours. I couldn’t last ninety-six minutes. That’s why I’m so concerned about this Andres Rubino. What if he brings the police back with him?”

“He hasn’t decided yet whether or not that’s his best deal.”

“They’ll try to hang those three murders on me, won’t they?”

“On you and Rourke. You’re both Americans. Palm Beach and Miami are in the same part of the world. It stands to reason that you know each other, and have been working together all the way. If they can’t find Paula Obregon, you’re cooked, and everybody tells me she’s going to be hard to find.”

He stood up. “I’ve got something to do before he gets back.”

She sat forward, alarmed. “Mike, you aren’t leaving me.”

“Only for a couple of minutes.” He took out his revolver, snapped off the safety, and laid it on the sofa beside her. “If he comes in, shoot him.”

“I couldn’t!”

“Yes, you could,” he told her. “Wait till he comes around the end of the sofa. Point it at him and pull the trigger. I’ll clean up after you.”