Caught Dead

SEVEN

As they entered the Jaguar, Rubino said, “I will be very much surprised and astonished if the police don’t follow us.”

“You’ve been telling me what a hot driver you are. Lose them.”

Rubino moved out from the curb and joined the traffic, watching the mirror.

“There they are. A black Chevrolet, and if it’s the car I think, it has a special engine, a double carburetor. Never mind, I can outrun them. But there will be a second car. At present I don’t see it.”

“Shut up and drive.”

While Rubino slipped smoothly from lane to lane, using his full range of forward gears, Shayne concentrated on the muffled signals he had received from Rourke.

“You’re too early. What’s half a day? Back in Miami, second cup of coffee, opening the morning mail. Tried to protect myself. That goddamn Tanqueray gin. The Pulitzer prize was mentioned. The hell with the female-look for the male. Paula Obregon, nice kid, but forget the female, go after the male.”

And then the pattern hit him. Not the female, the male. Male-mail. Back in Miami, opening the mail.

Rubino turned onto the curved freeway running between the twin towers of the Centro Bolivar. He was as relaxed as a cat, smiling slightly, holding the wheel with only his fingertips.

“I want a phone, Andres,” Shayne said. “I don’t want any cops crowding me.”

“Yes. I see the second car now. We’ll worry them a little first.”

He accelerated smartly, swinging into the oncoming lane, then back. He forced a taxi to veer away and turned a corner. A traffic policeman glanced at the Jaguar’s plates. Rubino waved, smiling, and turned again. He shot down a one-way street, up an alley, and emerged into another avenue.

“Walk in the building where I stop. There are phones by the elevators. I’ll circle to confuse them. When you are finished, walk through the building. Have you Venezuelan coins?”

He gave Shayne a handful of change, executed another quick series of linked turns and braked hard. Shayne was out of the car before it stopped rolling.

He entered an open arcade lined with specialty shops. The entrance to the elevator lobby, halfway through the block, was between a boutique and a shop selling Indian artifacts.

There were two phones. Shayne found the coin that would get him a dial tone, and dialed the operator. As soon as she answered he said, slowly and firmly, “Do you speak English?” He repeated the question twice more before he was switched to someone who could understand him. He placed an overseas call to his own Miami number.

When a girl’s voice answered, he identified himself and asked if she’d been able to get back to sleep after he left.

“Not a wink! Mike, how does it look?”

“Worse than I expected. Much worse. I’m just beginning to feel my way. Has the mail come in yet?”

“Not yet, but a messenger just brought an envelope for you and it’s on Hilton Hotel stationery-Hilton Hotel, Caracas. I couldn’t decide what to do with it.”

“Open it, for God’s sake.”

He heard the envelope being torn open. “It’s from Tim! And there’s something else, something in Spanish. Wait a minute.”

There was a brief pause. “You know what Tim’s handwriting is like-this is a real scrawl. I’ll try to puzzle it out. ‘Dear Mike, I’m onto something really hot. If it works biggest story of career.’ I think that word is ‘career.’”

She waited, and continued, “‘… Something… something risky. It could go sour on me, and if so I’m in bad trouble. It’s a jailbreak. Tear gas, smoke bombs-far out, man.’”

There was a pause. She went on haltingly. “Here comes a bad stretch. ‘Something the enclosed.’ I guess ‘Translate the enclosed. Something something to-whet? To whet my appetite. If you don’t hear from me by noon, get your ass down here. I’ll give you half the net. The magazine rights alone should be fantastic. Life, Playboy- they’ll be bidding like madmen. It’s Alvarez’ diary. First person account of everything that happened. About 35,000 words. If this page is a sample we’ll make the history books. His wife has the rest. Strategy: get the full diary and use it to blast me loose. You owe me this! Tim.’”

Shayne was scraping his jaw with his thumbnail. “All right, what’s the enclosure look like?”

“I was bragging about my Spanish, Mike. It’s not that good. And this writing is even worse than Tim’s.”

“All I want is the general idea.”

“It’s a sheet torn out of a book. It starts off in the middle of a sentence. The next entry is ‘Tuesday,’ in a different color ink. Let me see. I’ll just give you the words I’m sure of. Here’s a proper name. That’s easy-Felix Frost. CIA. An oil company, somebody else’s name. They’re paying-well. Let me skip this part. A cable from Washington. ‘Private payments to-’ Hmm. North American somethings off La Guaira. Submarines? I guess submarines. Commercial airline, fourteen planes ready to take off in Guatemala City-guns and ammunition, I finally have absolute proof of U.S. involvement in plot against me-”

“That makes the point,” Shayne said. “Now read Tim’s letter to me again. See if you can fill in the blanks.”

He listened carefully. She read it with fewer pauses, and was able to decipher one or two more words.

“O.K.,” he said. “This is going to put me one step ahead of the cops. Get a better translation of that diary entry if you can. I’ll try to call you later today.”

He broke the connection and dialed the number Frost had given him.

“What news of our boy?” Frost said cordially.

“He’s in fairly good shape. I had to talk with Mejia. He knew the Senator called you, by the way. Does that mean he has a tap on this phone?”

“That’s another number, not this one. I don’t mind too much. I have a tap on his.”

“He’s giving me twenty-four hours before he starts working on Tim. They have little tricks they do with electricity, he tells me. Is that the kind of threat he’s likely to carry out?”

“Oh, yes.”

Shayne’s lips came back from his teeth. “Twenty-four hours. I’ve already used up fifteen minutes. Mejia didn’t sound too interested in Tim. The big subject he wanted to talk to me about was the grease Alvares has been accumulating over the years.”

Frost sighed. “That old story.”

“Do you mean there’s nothing to it?”

“Something, of course. The Bull was, above all, prudent, and he must have known the cushy days wouldn’t last forever. He had an airplane ready to fly him to the States. I’m sure he had something laid aside to pay his bills after he got there.”

“Mejia thought you could be more specific.”

“In what way?”

“About how much and where. He said it’s the kind of information you like to collect.”

“How discerning of him. Yes, economic warfare is one of my things, perhaps because I’ve never been very good at the other kind of warfare, with fists. But I’m not omniscient. Alvares maintained several Swiss bank accounts for years. He closed them out some eighteen months ago, when he began to smell trouble. That much I’ve been able to discover. But the Swiss, as you know, are very chary with information. I pulled all the available strings, but I couldn’t come up with even an approximate evaluation of his holdings.”

“Will you explain that? Why did he close his accounts?”

“For one thing, those numbered accounts are no longer as sacrosanct as they used to be. The successor regime here might have been able to tie them up.”

“In his position, what would you do with the money-keep it in cash?”

“I’d put it in gold bullion, I believe. In retrospect, considering the recent changes in the price of gold, that would have been a clever move.”

“Wouldn’t there have to be records if he bought that much gold?”

“Records can be hocussed and faked. There are dozens of ways to cover your tracks if you buy enough of the stuff. Was Mejia willing to hazard a guess as to the amount?”

“He said in the neighborhood of twenty million.”

“The wrong neighborhood,” Frost said, laughing. “Much too high. It’s true the Alvares administration was notoriously corrupt, but he had to cut it up a number of ways to stay in power. How does this connect with the subject you were presumably discussing-namely, Tim Rourke?”

“It seems that Alvares spent his vacations in Miami-”

“Palm Beach, actually,” Frost said.

“Palm Beach, then. Tim has friends there. Maybe somebody who knows where the money is talked him into pushing for that interview, and then screwed him by giving him a bomb instead of Pall Malls. I said I doubted it very much. That’s when he said I had twenty-four hours to come up with a different theory.”

A soberly dressed youth walked quickly along the arcade, stopping a shade too abruptly when he saw Shayne. He came into the elevator lobby to look at the directory of tenants.

Shayne said, “I want to see what I can get from Alvares’ widow. Do you think she’ll see me?”

“You have to remember,” Frost said doubtfully, “that her husband was blown into little pieces last night. She won’t feel too happy about talking it over with a stranger. Still, you must run into that all the time.”

“It’s never easy. Were they happy together?”

“One doesn’t know. He was a typical Venezuelan. He had a succession of little mistresses, one or two of whom,” he added with a leer that came over the telephone line clearly, “were arranged for him out of this office.”

“What does the widow stand to inherit?”

“Virtually nothing. They lived in the Presidential Palace, the property of the nation. Her family has a little money. She lives on a farm west of the city, and that, I believe, is in her name. If not, it will undoubtedly be taken. She’s been a good friend of ours on occasion, and if she doesn’t want to be bothered today I hope you’ll respect her wishes.”

A second man, another obvious cop, came into the lobby and pretended to look up a number in the phone-book, one ear cocked toward Shayne.

“I seem to be surrounded here,” Shayne said. “I’d better find out how good they are. Stay on tap. I’ll be calling you again.”

He hung up. Before opening the folding door he lifted up on it hard, dislodging it from its overhead track. He beckoned to the man at the phonebooks.

“Come here a minute,” he said in English.

The man sent an uncertain glance at his partner and started toward Shayne, scowling. Shayne head-faked toward the street. His adversary had obviously never played one-on-one basketball. He went for the fake. Shayne caught him off-balance and pulled him into the empty phone booth. The second man reached inside his coat. Shayne feinted a kick, and when the cop doubled forward Shayne grabbed his hair in both hands. He pivoted, going backward. The first cop was trying to get out of the booth. The two Venezuelans collided, hard. Shayne gave the door a powerful yank and it jammed, shutting them both inside.

He grinned at the knot of people waiting for the elevators.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said pleasantly. “I do this sort of thing all the time.”

He walked out of the building.