Caught Dead

TWELVE

Passing out of the line-of-sight from the wall mirror, Shayne tightened the picture wire near the front door so the glass would fall over again and Lenore would know that the door to the next apartment had been opened.

Downstairs in the parking area, he found an unlocked Renault, with the starter on the floor. One of Shayne’s standard items of equipment was a short length of cable with a spring-clamp at each end, for bypassing a locked ignition switch. A moment later, he was moving.

He located the conspicuous towers of the Centro Bolivar and used them as aiming stakes. He drove east on Bolivar Avenue until he saw the bullring on his right and made the necessary turn to the south. The street he had picked looped back on itself. He returned to the avenue and tried another. This time he had found the road to Valencia.

He followed it into the mountains.

As he approached the farm he noted the pattern of roads and the arrangement of out-buildings. This was the hottest part of the day, and the fields were empty. He turned into the long cypress avenue. Halfway to the house he had to stop to open a stock gate. Then he came to the main wall, where he sounded his horn. A stocky peasant with two sidearms, a pistol, and a machete, came out to look him over from under a broken sombrero.

“I’m a detective,” Shayne said slowly. “Police. Policia. To see the Senora.”

Nothing changed in the man’s face.

Shayne motioned toward the house. “She wants to talk to me.” He pantomimed a conversation. “Very important. Norte Americano. Mejia sent me. The President of the United States sent me. El Presidente.” When none of this had any effect, he said more harshly, “Get out of my way, goddamn it, or I’ll run you down. Felix Frost sent me.”

Either the angry manner or Frost’s name worked. The man retired to open the gate. After getting out of the car, Shayne walked past a chained Doberman pinscher, which bayed at him furiously. He clanged an ornate wrought-iron bell at the front door and entered the building without waiting.

A uniformed maid was on her way toward him. He nodded and walked past, waving away the question she was asking.

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

She went with him, protesting, as he looked into the big front room, then into a formal dining room beyond. The furniture was dark and forbidding.

“Where do I find the Senora?”

The maid tried to hold him, but he brushed her aside. This building, like Frost’s, surrounded a central court. As he came out on one side of this court, a woman in black appeared on the other. The maid, waving her arms, shrieked something in Spanish.

Shayne crossed the courtyard on a raked walk. Senora Alvares was a severe woman, and somewhat on the plump side, tall, with her black hair pulled into a tight knot. She wore no makeup or jewelry.

“I hope you speak English,” he said, approaching. “I don’t seem to be coming across too well.”

“I speak a little English, badly. Who are you?”

She had a deep voice, a heavy accent that at first sounded somewhat Germanic.

“I’m Michael Shayne, a private detective from Miami. I’ve been retained by the Miami News to see what I can do about one of their reporters, Tim Rourke, who’s in jail here. I have some questions. I know it’s a bad time, but they can’t wait.”

“Questions,” she said, putting her hand to her face. “About the death of my husband.”

“And one or two other things.”

She looked him over deliberately, then, surprisingly, reached out to pinch the muscle of his right arm.

“You are a powerful, powerful man.”

She started carefully along the paved cloister. She was wearing high heels, but she was so tightly girdled that the jolts had no sensuous effect. She went in under a stone archway.

Shayne followed. It was a sitting room, as gloomily furnished as the other rooms at the front of the house, but with one splash of color-a geometric painting in light reds and greens. Even before checking the signature, Shayne recognized this as one of the works of her husband’s mistress.

“May I offer something to drink?” Senora Alvares said.

Without waiting for his answer, she drew an open split of champagne from a silver ice bucket and filled two glasses.

“Champagne. I am not celebrating the bombing apart of my husband; this is the only liquid the doctors have let me drink in recent years. To you, sir. That you remain in your present state of health.”

She seemed to want to clink glasses with him, but he avoided that. She lowered herself into a tall-backed chair.

“I see you looking at my painting,” she said. “And it astonishes you, because of the relationship between the painter and my poor husband. Have you met her? A cheap woman, with such fraudulent hair. Unquestionably a talented artist, however, would you not agree? I have owned this painting and others, and I thought to hang them, to show Caracas that for my husband to fall between this woman’s legs was of no consequence to me. But in the end I was too frightened! Until this morning, when I called my little servant and we hung this one, to remind me of my great cowardice. It is valued at twenty thousand bolivars, those few simple shapes. Do you believe it? Some people are taking their Dantes down since the recent events. As for me, I am putting mine up.”

She drank deeply, set the glass on a low chest and looked at him.

“You are the famous detective who always captures the ones who do the murder.”

“Some of the time,” Shayne said. “On this one I’ll settle for getting Tim Rourke out of jail.”

She reached for her glass and Shayne watched her drink. There were two more splits in the ice-filled bucket, and he saw two empties on the sideboard.

“I’ve been talking to Miss Dante,” he said. “She told me about the plan to rescue your husband. I’d like to get your version of that.”

She blinked. “On the whole I think I should imitate your friend Mr. Rourke and stay silent.”

“That’s your privilege. I think I have most of it already, but naturally she told it from her own point of view. I liked her. Very juicy, I thought. That doesn’t mean I believed every word she said.”

The Senora drank, emptying her glass. “Believe every third word. That would be my piece of advice.”

Shayne opened another split and refilled her glass.

“How long have you known about your husband’s association with her?”

“From its beginning, I think. That has no significance. He has announced for many years already that he would do what he pleased, in the matter of who shared his intimate moments. But to become so much in the clutches of a North American was a mistake. His people ask each other, are there no equally juicy Venezuelans?”

“How much of the week did he spend with you?”

“All! There is a mode of behavior to be observed in a Catholic country. So he was with me every day for either dinner or breakfast, rarely for both. Why do you think this important?”

“I’m interested in a diary he was keeping at the end.”

He had noticed that whenever a question bothered or puzzled her, she drank before speaking. She reached for her glass.

“What is meant by the word diary? Something that is written from day to day?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Then you should ask that question of his mistress. Here is where he had his clothes washed, where he read his mail.”

“You never saw him writing in a little book with lined pages?”

She lifted her face from the champagne. “No, Mr. Shayne. I know nothing of any such book of that type.”

“You didn’t give Tim Rourke a page torn out of it, to persuade him to carry in those cartons of cigarettes?”

“No, no. I have no meeting with that person Rourke. When you speak of a diary, I hear about it for the first time.”

“Will you look around the house and see if you can find it? I might be able to use it to buy Rourke off. Then I’d go home and you people could work things out without any more interference from me.”

“But why would I care if you stay or go?”

“It’s a funny setup,” Shayne said. “The minute I showed up everybody started telling me things. That doesn’t always happen. I think it was to keep me busy so I wouldn’t stumble on something I shouldn’t be worried about, such as money.”

“Money,” she said vaguely, and drank. “The odds and ends he was able to put aside. I have heard this mentioned, but who knows how much or where it is?”

“Somebody must. How much luggage did he have with him when he left for the plane?”

“None. Look here, will you open another bottle? Those tiny thin things are not adequate for two persons.”

Shayne popped another cork and more champagne fumed into their glasses. She drank greedily.

“I was with him when he received the phone call. I know now it was the one that said all was over, resistance was hopeless. He was calm. If he had packed a suitcase I would know he was leaving. I might demand that he take me to safety. He merely said he would go outside to smoke a cigar in the garden. In casual shoes, not even a necktie. Presently I heard an airplane motor. Soon after that, a smash.”

“What will you do now,” Shayne said after a moment, “go home to your family?”

“I will make them move me out of this house bodily! One of their tame judges is even now preparing such a measure. If I had that diary you speak about, do you know what I would do? I would sell it. I am not a wealthy woman, far from it. If my husband had other sources of financing, I never saw or touched any of that. He made me a miserable allowance to run the household, and I had to go down on my knees and beg for such things as a new dress, a color television.”

“Lenore says you agreed to help get him out of jail because you thought it would pay off financially.”

“I did it out of softness! Out of sentimentality! Perhaps it occurred to me to bargain a little-if we succeeded, I would expect one third of his property, and that would certainly be fair because I was the one who ran the danger-but it wouldn’t be dignified at such a time. If she told you I said one word to her about money or shares, she is lying in her teeth! I was carried away with the idea that a wife should assist her husband in times of trouble. That has always been the rule in my family.”

“How hard did you try to get permission to see him?”

“I went from office to office. I talked to Mejia, the members of the junta, the judges of the high court. I persuaded Mr. Felix Frost, the most powerful man in the North American Embassy, to intercede on my behalf. But they are inhuman, they wouldn’t grant a wife the favor of looking at her husband for the last time. Politics turn men into animals.”

“Maybe they were afraid he’d manage to tell you where the money was.”

“I’m sick of listening about this money. Don’t speak about it any more because it makes me physically ill.”

“Did you have any contact with Paula Obregon?”

“No, only with the girl’s aunt. I have knowledge of her socially, you understand. Her parents have been to my table. But on this occasion, the one who induced me to make that fatal commitment was the Dante woman, and how coarse, how degrading to me was the moment of weakness. I put my arms around her, we shed tears together as we agreed to conspire to save the life of the man we had in common. But not so much in common, when you think of it. She had the person, the future, I had the empty title.”

“Do you have any idea how I can get in touch with the Obregon girl?”

“One day she will take one chance too many, and she will be captured. But until then-” She waved. “If there is no more champagne in the bucket go to the door and shout. They will bring some.”

He opened the last split and poured. She was still very erect, sitting at the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together, but her color had risen.

“I think it was Dante who did the bomb. You know that it was her idea from the beginning, the minute she came to me! Do you think a woman of that sort would be very overjoyed at the scenery of spending the rest of her life with this poor grim Guillermo? Definitely not. This is a wild goose chase on my part… but if you knew him… She was a scribbling artist when he picked her out of the gutter, and the dear child slobbered with gratitude. He made her paintings fashionable. She has a certain foothold on the edge of Palm Beach society; she amuses them. And the price she had to pay was not too much… Thank you, a drop more… Two weeks annually, now and then a wild weekend. Sometimes she would be asked to come to Caracas and be available. He was nothing to sing about in that category of sex, I can tell you. Mediocre. He was in power too long, his human qualities suffered. And his ordinary conversation. He would look at you with sleepy eyes and defy you to entertain him. I am quite certain she killed him.”

“How could she put together that kind of bomb?”

She waved her glass airily. “I never deny that she’s intelligent. And the reporter Rourke would be blown into pieces by the same explosion, the only person who could give the police her name. That’s what makes me so bloodthirsty.” The word didn’t sound right. “‘Bloodthirsty’?”

“Yeah, that fits,” Shayne said. “I don’t know if you’ll let me get away with this question. We’ve been talking about your husband’s women. Fair’s fair. Do you have any men?”

She looked at him haughtily, her lips beginning to shape a chilling answer. Then she smiled.

“She is intelligent; so are you, Mr. Michael Shayne. I have had precisely the right amount of wine. There are those who have admired me, I believe, but it is a formidable thing, you know, to admit this to the wife of the president, who rules absolutely and has a sudden temper. Those conditions are no longer present. No, I will not return to my family in the provinces. I intend to travel. I wish I had that diary you speak of, then I could travel en luxe. But I am not on that account to be pitied.”

“How soon is the funeral?”

“They have not told me. It will be decided by the politicians.”

She sat back in her chair for the first time and looked at him over her raised glass. “You are a sudden man. I was speaking of my personal desires and you ask the date of the funeral. I wish to ask you how you find me. The wife of the president will always receive flattery she perhaps does not deserve, but you come into my house now when I am the wife of a dead president who no longer holds power. I can trust your opinion. Is life over for me? Shall I sit on a veranda drinking coffee with unmarried cousins?”

He let her drink before he answered.

“No, you don’t fit that scene. I could tell better if you weren’t wearing a girdle.”

Her lips parted. “Do you think, then, that I am asking to be embraced and handled? You are not such an intelligent man, after all.”

“What’s your guess about how much money your husband managed to get away with?”

“Impossible!” she exclaimed. “Now it is money again. We were talking about the fascinating subject of how I impress you, a sophisticated man from another country, and all at once, the dull matter of money. I am indifferent to money. Men don’t feel themselves drawn to women who talk always of money. Why do you think the not wearing of a girdle is so important?”

“It’s a symbol. Did your husband drink champagne?”

“Diet-Cola.”

“It must have been a pretty rough life for you in some ways.”

“Dreary, so dreary. I don’t bother about the insults, the humiliation. That is the lot of women in this world. But the endlessness. Do women tell you that you have a way of moving that draws the eye? In a film, you would fill the screen. You are the one that the audience would watch. My head is whirling, I think you are pressing me to drink.”

“It’s your champagne.”

“You noticed that I am confused by questions, so to keep my composure I drink before answering.” She demonstrated. “And you keep coming toward me with questions.”

“Did he tell you he’d closed out his Swiss accounts?”

She drank again. “What do you want from me?” She studied him, and it was clear that she was trying to make the images hold still. “You are mentioning my girdle, and yet I know you have no erotic plans. Why do you wish to disturb me-so the wine will take command?”

“I want to look through a few bureau drawers.”

She moved a hand in a gesture of permission. “I have hidden nothing. But I will warn you, he was careful about burning papers. It was his religion. Always, in wash bowls, in waste baskets, the servants and I found ashes. Look. Why should I be afraid from you? Before you go, move the champagne within my reach.”