Port Vila Blues

Twenty-six

Wyatt had gone looking for Frank Jardine first, on the premise that even a trusted friend, a child, or a nun in a habit could do him harm. If it had been Jardine who’d sent the hired gun to the cafй in the hills, Wyatt was prepared to kill him.

But it hadn’t been Jardine. Instead, Wyatt found the grieving, angry sister, who talked about a visitor, about a stranger who’d literally frightened Jardine to death. All Wyatt could do now to find the man behind all this was backtrack the Tiffany, see what names he came up with. He grieved a little, felt a twinge of guilt, gave the twenty-five thousand dollars to Nettie, and flew to Sydney.

He didn’t tackle Cassandra Wintergreen at her house, knowing how spooked she’d be there after the burglary. Using information supplied in Jardine’s original briefing notes, he staked out her electoral office, half a groundfloor shop, ‘Cassandra Wintergreen, Member for Broughton’ in a broad, thick-lettered arc across the window glass. Between it and the other ground-floor tenant, a Radio Shack outlet, was a foyer sealed from the street by sliding glass doors.

He waited until late afternoon, went in, looked at the list of tenants: five floors of accountants, dentists, osteopaths and firms with names like Allied Exports Inc.

He looked at his watch: 5.45 p.m. According to Jardine’s notes, the nightwatchman would be locking the sliding doors at six-thirty, and Wintergreen always worked late and would let herself out-small pieces of knowledge, but Wyatt and Jardine had built all of their jobs on an accumulation of small details. Wyatt crossed to the stairwell, climbed to the fourth level, found a men’s room and prepared to wait.

After the groundwork there was always the waiting- for Wyatt a kind of self-hypnosis in which his senses registered only the essential: the foreseeable dangers, the wild cards, the variables, the job at hand. He knew how to let part of himself disengage while the other part remained wound tight and watchful. He knew how to sit, rest his limbs, and still keep a part of his mind sufficiently stimulated to stop himself from shutting down.

Not that his tooth would have let him drift into sleep. He’d swallowed painkillers and had others in his pocket. According to the pharmacist at the airport, they wouldn’t make him feel drowsy, but, just in case, he’d also swallowed a five-grain, heart-shaped Benzedrine. Now he was on edge a little, but he figured that was better than the searing pain in the rotting stump of his tooth.

At six-forty-five Wyatt turned off the power to the ground floor, let himself in the rear passageway door to Cassandra Wintergreen’s suite, and went straight to the inner office. Wintergreen, fiddling with the light bulb on her desk lamp, looked up, startled, mouth opening to cry out.

Wyatt clamped his hard, dry palm over her mouth. ‘I won’t hurt you, I want information,’ he said softly, staring fixedly at her until something in him convinced her to nod and go slack.

He removed his hand.

‘About what?’ she asked.

‘The Tiffany butterfly stashed with your fifty thousand.’

She jerked against him. She smelt musty, stale with old perfume. ‘You lousy bastard. Give it back. It was a gift, great sentimental value. And it might interest you to know that that money represents the hard work of my constituents, a downpayment for a shelter for-’

There was only one way to reach a mind like hers. He slapped her left and right and told her that he didn’t have the time or the patience for this. ‘You are bent,’ he said slowly, his face close to hers. “The Tiffany was stolen from a Melbourne bank in February and there’s no way you can account for it legitimately. Your only choice is to tell me who gave it to you. If you don’t, I’ll hurt you and later tell the media where the kickback came from. Someone will listen.’

He knew that much about how her world worked. He watched her, saw the rapid calculations behind her eyes, still caked with mascara, and finally learned about De Lisle’s apartment in Woollahra, his house on the northern New South Wales coast, his yacht, his work in Fiji and Vanuatu.