What of Terry Conniston?

Chapter Fourteen

Somehow Earle Conniston’s office — which had rarely been occupied by more than two people at a time during Conniston’s reign — had become the center of the household. They had all four congregated there on the night of Earle’s death; it seemed natural that they keep coming back to it.

Halfway through this insomniac night they were gathered in the office — four people in the same room but not together. Carl Oakley was striding back and forth. Louise Conniston sat pushing her ice cubes around with a swizzle stick. Frankie Adams, graven-faced, was twisting his knuckles and chewing on a pencil and frowning at a newspaper crossword puzzle in his lap. Diego Orozco sat in his favorite straight chair with hands on knees, the weight of his huge belly sagging against his thighs.

Louise wore a rustling silk dress. When she twisted in the chair to look at Oakley her breasts handled the cloth seductively. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I think better on my feet.”

“You’re nervous. You’re making me nervous, so you must be nervous.” Her words ran together carelessly; she was tight, or high — Oakley had never pinned down the distinction.

Frankie Adams said, “What’s the capital of Ecuador? La Paz? Five letters.”

“That’s in Bolivia,” Oakley said absently.

Orozco muttered, “Quito.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Oakley tugged back his sleeve and looked at his watch. Two seconds later if someone had asked him the time he wouldn’t have been able to answer. He resumed pacing with his hands in his pockets.

Adams uttered a monosyllabic curse and slapped the pencil down on the newspaper. “I can’t do these damn things.”

Louise said, “It beats hell out of me how you two legal and detective geniuses can identify both those dead bodies and still come up with nothing.”

“We’ve got their names,” Oakley said, “and for the moment that’s all we’ve got. It’s worth about as much as a nun’s virginity — we’ve got it but what good is it?”

Orozco said in his unperturbed growl, “We’ll have more information coming in pretty quick. My stringers are working up files on them.”

“Sure... sure,” Louise said. “But what happens then?”

“I’m not clairvoyant,” Oakley said. “All I can tell you is they didn’t leave her there dead. Which means she may be alive.”

Louise knocked back her drink. “But if they let her go why haven’t we heard from her? And if they didn’t, why didn’t they?”

Oakley didn’t answer. He went to the big leather chair and sat back, crossed his legs at right angles, laced his hands behind his head and knitted his brows. He kept looking at the telephone. All evening he had swung pendulantly from one extreme of emotion to the other — elation, despondency. They had found the spliced phone wires early in the afternoon and after that things had moved fast: they had found the two naked bodies in the ghost town before sundown. A discreet contact of Orozco’s in the Tucson police lab had run the fingerprints through for identification and Oakley had still been on his after-dinner coffee when the replies had come through — Orozco’s team had worked with remarkable dispatch. But what did it add up to? Oakley had even looked them both up in every one of the phone books in Earle’s cabinets. No Theodore Luke, no George Rymer. The two names hung suspended in a vacuum.

None of the radio direction-finders had picked up any signals from the bugged suitcase. The two sets of tire tracks in the ghost-town barn meant very little, if anything — one set belonged to Terry’s Daimler, which had not been sighted anywhere, and the other set consisted of worn mismatched tires of a brand not used on new cars. Thus there was no way to identify the make of the larger car. Orozco’s operatives had put out the word on the red sports job but that, Oakley thought bitterly, was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Arizona was crawling with two-seater cars and half of them were red.

Theodore Luke had a vague record of three arrests and one suspended sentence, on charges of simple assault and drunk-and-disorderly. George Rymer had a record of narcotics arrests. Both men had been musicians — New York City had refused Theodore Luke a cabaret license because of his criminal record. But there was nothing in the sum of that information to suggest that either of them had ever been involved in robberies, extortions, or any of the other varieties of crime that a lawyer might expect to find in a kidnaper’s background.

It was all elusive, inconclusive, mocking. Oakley’s eyes were lacquered with weary frustration.

Frankie Adams said crossly, “I’m going to bed,” and left the room. Louise stirred the melting ice in her glass; Oakley watched her moodily. She caught his eye on her and she smiled, her eyes half-closed; she looked warm and lazy. She sat up and lifted her arms to fiddle with her hair. Under the silk dress her breasts stood out like torpedoes, drawing Oakley’s masculine attention, arousing him and irritating him with the distraction. Louise, meeting his glance, became very still, her arms upraised; her eyes mirrored a sensual speculation. Still smiling, she yawned luxuriously and walked out of the room trailing musk.

Oakley’s palms felt moist. He felt his face color when he caught Orozco looking at him, bland-faced. He sees everything, Oakley thought, and made a note to quit taking Orozco for granted — lunatic chicano land-schemes aside, Orozco was a vigilant and clever man, possibly dangerous. The inscrutable Mexican, he thought dryly: Orozco had superb control, he never let you see anything he didn’t want you to see.

They kept vigil by the telephone, the prime umbilical. It did not ring. Oakley began to feel drowsy; he hadn’t had much sleep in the past three days. Getting old, he thought, and felt solemn and sad, regretting all the things he had not done when he was young and all the things he would never do, either because of lack of time or because of lack of passion. He had never been a man of passions; he saw himself as a repressed man, cool, channeled, deliberate. He thought of the unsubtle suggestion Louise had left hanging in the air (anything but inscrutable) and it focused his weary thinking once again on the fact that he was no longer young, that it was time to settle for something less than the unachievable perfection of a Technicolor marriage with violins. Something made not in heaven but in kitchen, bed, living room. It seemed a wry irony that his reputation was that of a blade. He couldn’t even remember most of their names — an endless procession of soft humid bodies with interchangeable faces. It was always easiest that way: no attachments, no commitments, no passions. Yet it gave him little joy, left him ragged, sapped his energies — the timeless ritual of pretense and mutual seduction. Once he had met a girl in a bar who had said to him refreshingly, “You don’t have to buy me drinks and dinner. I only want to get laid.” Blunt, forthright — yet she had been attractive, young, charming. But she had been just passing through. They were all just passing through.

He came back to Louise. Young, attractive, widowed, sensual. Rich besides. If he played his cards right she would marry him; he was certain of it. But it wouldn’t do. He could endure a marriage without love; he probably wasn’t capable of making any other kind. But marriage to Louise would be a duel — a constant abrasive antagonism; a clashing of desires, the headstrong against the reasoned, the passionate against the temperate. He didn’t need a Louise. He needed a milkmaid.

His reveries began to distend and wander; he leaned back in the tilting chair and put his feet up on Earle’s desk, glanced drowsily at Orozco and closed his eyes... The morning sun beamed across the desk and he came awake with a start, searched guiltily for Orozco and learned the room was empty. He mouthed a mild oath, lowered his feet to the floor, sat up.

His tongue felt dry and bloated; he scraped a hand over his stubbled chin and blinked ferociously, cupped a big hand around the back of his neck and reared his head back until the bones creaked.

He crossed the hall, tired and rumpled, and found Orozco sitting on his bed with a fat paw across the telephone receiver and a slight frown on his face. Orozco’s chin lifted: “I came in here to take the calls. Didn’t want to wake you.”

“Thanks, Diego.” It had been an unexpected kindness. Orozco kept displaying new facets, each of which further eroded the slothful impassive image.

Orozco said, “Things are starting to break.”

“Good. Can it wait ten minutes? I’ve got to wash the sleep off.”

“Go ahead.”

He stripped to his underwear and closed himself into the bathroom to shower and shave and clean his teeth. He felt stiff and sore, with a particularly insistent ache in the muscles of his neck and knees; Getting old, he thought, and realized the phrase was becoming an obsessive repetition in his lexicon. It didn’t help to look in the mirror; the haggard face was not reassuring. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had really looked at his face in a mirror. When he shaved or combed his hair he never looked at himself to the extent of appraising the whole. Now he saw the creases that bracketed his mouth, the beginnings of sag under the eyes, the crow’s feet, the spreading gray in the hair. It was still a photogenic visage, younger than his years, but the flesh beneath his chin was beginning to loosen and he thought with a harsh defensiveness which he immediately knew was designed to mask deep-rooted panic, I’m forty-six, after all.

He hurried out of the mirrored room, climbed into clean-pressed clothes and said, “I could use a cup of coffee.”

“So could I.” Orozco went to the kitchen with him and stood hip-shot against the counter while Oakley searched the unfamiliar cabinets for a coffeepot and finally settled for a covered cooking pan in which he set out water to boil. He glanced at the electric clock above the door — seven fifteen — and took down a jar of instant coffee and a pair of cups. “You take anything in it?”

“Just black.”

“Me too.” Black for my youth: I’m in mourning. He made a wry face at his own melodramatic sourness and turned, leaning against the refrigerator with his arms folded across his chest. “Well?”

“They found Terry’s car in Nogales. Parked on a side street. Nothing much left in it but there were fingerprints all over it and we’re running them through for identification. One funny thing, though — somebody’d hot-wired it. So the prints we come up with may belong to some clown who stole it from the kidnapers.”

“Swell.”

“There’ll be a plane coming in sometime in the next half-hour with dossiers on the two dead guys and the people they associated with. One of them had a brother — they all three worked in the same nightclub combo. There was a fourth guy in it too. That may be our gang.”

“A band of musicians?”

“They lost their last job in Tucson a few weeks ago. The skinny one we found dead was an addict. I don’t know what else he was but a habit his size would take a hell of a lot of money. It was his brother that was the bandleader. It adds up for motive and opportunity, Carl. They needed money bad, they had no work.”

“And they’re as slippery as watermelon seeds. We’ve got to do better than this, Diego.”

“It’s coming along,” Orozco said mildly. “We’ll crack it. You remember that voice on the phone — too much conceit there. When you get an amateur who thinks he knows more about strategy than Clausewitz you got a character who’s going to make mistakes. When he does we’ll have him.”

Oakley took the lid off the boiling water and poured. “Maybe. But I can’t stand sitting around here waiting. Get a man in here to keep an eye on Adams and Louise. I’m going back to that ghost town with you. Maybe we’ll find something they missed yesterday.”

An hour later he was ready to go when the phone rang. He answered it and heard the words he had been waiting for: “Carl? You’ve got your uptick. The market opened with Conniston up.”

“Good. You’ve got your instructions.”

He had to make a dozen phone calls to put the machinery in motion; now that things had begun to stir he found that he had snapped out of his melancholy dirge. It was like the opening rounds of a courtroom battle. After the morose night of stage fright he was at last in the arena of action; it brought him up on his toes, settled his mind into a new clarity of focus, rekindled his confidence and decisiveness. Before, trying to keep control of the whole mess had been like trying to hold onto his hat in a gusty wind. The risks had appeared formidable, the juggling task a formidable one. But now he moved with sure firm steps. He phoned Earle’s doctor, and while they waited for the physician he held a curt briefing session in Earle’s office, instructing Louise and Frankie Adams — in Orozco’s absence — in what they were to tell the doctor. The doctor arrived at ten, acquisitive and tame; the mendacious ritual was attended to and Oakley walked the doctor out to his car: “You’ll receive the — fee — in cash, of course, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t deposit it in any bank accounts. Put it in a lock box and spend it where nobody knows you. It isn’t reported from our end and we won’t want you reporting it as coming from us. You never know when they’ll hit you with a spot-check out of the computer.”

“Of course.” The doctor was urbane, avuncular. “I’ll arrange everything with the funeral director. The embalming will be done here if that’s satisfactory. I presume you’ll want him buried here on the ranch?”

“I believe he wanted cremation. It’s in his will.”

“Excellent,” the doctor said, and added with a frank smile, “We wouldn’t want there to be any possibility of exhumation for autopsy, would we?”

When the doctor had left, Oakley called his office and told his secretary of Conniston’s death. There was a brief exchange of appropriate solicitudes and eulogized phrases after which Oakley gave instructions for the release to the press of the news of Conniston’s death. Then he left instructions with the ranch staff to admit no journalists through the gates or into the main house; he would, he said, issue a formal statement on behalf of the family tomorrow afternoon — in the meantime Conniston’s wife and daughter, he said, were too grieved to meet with the press. Three of Orozco’s men stood guard around the house to insure that no one disturbed the weeping widow and orphan.

By afternoon, he knew, the death of the tycoon would be known on Wall Street. The price of Conniston stock would dive through the floor. Oakley’s dummy-fronts would cover his short sales and use the money from that to buy up the stock again at its crippled price. He estimated it would take him about thirty-six hours to gain control. The key to his scheme was the fact that Earle had not owned a controlling interest in his own business — he had been expanding so fast he had to sell stock to raise capital; and he had made every effort to see that large blocks of stock never accumulated in the hands of possible rivals, even members of his own board of directors. Conniston had held about twenty-three percent of the outstanding common stock in Conniston Industries, the holding conglomerate which owned all the Conniston subsidiaries. That stock would go to Louise and to Terry if she were still alive. Thousands of stockholders owned the remaining seventy-seven percent — mutual funds, private investors, insurance portfolios. Oakley already owned eight percent; he needed forty-three percent of the rest — less than two thirds of the stock which would become available in the impending mini-panic. When the news of Conniston’s death hit the ticker the big funds would be the first to sell, trying to liquidate before the inevitable plunge. Their quick sales of large blocks would further depress the price. Even if the Exchange suspended trading in the stock Oakley’s brokers would pick it up over the counter. The beauty of it was that Oakley was not an officer of Conniston Industries — he had been Conniston’s personal attorney but held no official title — and he owned less than ten percent of the stock; thus, in legal terms, he was not an “insider” and was not required to divulge his activities to the SEC. He had broken no law except to conceal the facts in Conniston’s death; and it was hardly likely anyone would reveal his part in that. All of them had too much to lose.

Luck, he thought, swinging back toward the ecstatic extreme. It was all working out perfectly... But later, driving back from Soledad with the Rymer file on the Cadillac seat between them, he felt a sudden chill when Orozco said, “My boys could work a lot faster if I told them what we’re really up against. They don’t even know it’s a kidnap caper.”

“Are you suggesting we tell them?”

“No. I imagine by now it’s too late for you ever to reveal the kidnaping to anybody. You’d have to admit how you took advantage of it to get control of Conniston’s business.”

Oakley stiffened. He held his tongue for a long while, thinking fast. The highway two-laned down through the cow-country valley and in spite of the air-conditioning he felt the sudden pressure of the day’s torpid heat. Dark sweat-circles stained the armpits of his shirt. Unnerved, he said, “Maybe you’re jumping to conclusions, Diego.”

“I’m a detective, remember? Maybe I heard some of those phone calls you made this morning.”

“You mean you listened in?”

“I’d rather call it monitoring the conversation.” Orozco turned in the seat and tapped Oakley on the shoulder. “Maybe what really worries you is the possibility Terry’s still alive.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If she’s alive, she knows about the kidnaping. How you going to shut her up?”

Oakley showed his teeth around his unlit cigar. “I’m not that cold-blooded. What do you take me for?”

“I honestly don’ know, Carl. I ain’t got you figured out yet.”

“Let me know when you do,” he said, recklessly vicious.

“I’ll do that.”

The road took them east between yellow-grass rolls of cattle country. Some distance ahead and a bit to the right they could see the gray rise of the Chiricahuas beyond the cliff of Biscuit Mountain. All forest up there, and abandoned old diggings; you could ride forty miles horseback through those mountains and never cross a road, never raise the lights of a human habitation. Oakley, who had room in his soul for a streak of ardent conservationism, knew those mountains from boyhood and felt, once in a while, a keen sadness at the passing of such beasts as the timber wolf and the mountain lion, which had been hunted relentlessly out of the region.

Is it a sign of encroaching old age that the mind starts to wander? He squirmed his buttocks back in the seat, sitting up straighter, scowling.

Orozco said, “How come a character with all Conniston’s money didn’t have a big staff of house servants and all? Mrs. Conniston like to cook? All’s I’ve seen around there is the housekeeper coming in during the day.”

“Earle had a few spartan streaks. He liked to fool with electric wiring and plumbing himself — he did all the repairs around the house, he was a pretty fair Sunday carpenter and painter. They used to have two or three live-in servants but Earle” — he paused, and concluded lamely — “got tired of them.” No point in revealing to Orozco that a few months ago Earle had decided he didn’t trust any of them. Another sign of paranoia he had missed at the time. Storm signals had gone up all over the place, he realized now, but it had taken him the longest time to start recognizing them. Once you formed in your mind a picture of a person it was hard to dislodge it; you were reluctant to change your feelings about him.

He glanced sidewise at Orozco and felt a little better for knowing that Orozco’s mind could drift off the subject at hand too.

But not for long. Orozco said, “Sonoita coming up soon. Stop a minute and I’ll check in with my boys.”

The pavement unrolled into Sonoita two miles ahead — a crossroads which could only be called a town by an act of charity. There were half a dozen buildings around the road-crossing, a few houses scattered on the slopes farther away, and a great litter of weathered high-fenced corrals and loading pens by the railroad tracks. From the four-cornered intersection roads ran north toward Tucson, west toward Nogales, south toward the Elgin cow-country, and east across the Army’s missile-artillery range to Fort Huachuca and old Tombstone, the onetime bailiwick of fabulous ones like John Slaughter and Wyatt Earp. It was a country full of violent history. At a local rodeo in Sonoita only a few years ago two ranchers, disputing their claims to the same Nogales girl, had shot it out in a gunfight the traditions of which went back to feudal duels. The antagonists had been an Anglo and a chicano; the Anglo, a wealthy rancher, had armed himself with a Mannlicher rifle, while the chicano, an only slightly less wealthy Mexican-American rancher, had brought a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun. The Anglo had taken advantage of his firepower by opening fire before they had walked within shotgun range of one another. Nonetheless the jury — all gringos — had denied the state’s murder charge, found that defendant had acted in self-defense, and freed him. There had been a round of ranch-parties in celebration afterward, to which no Mexicans came; the valley, cut by the Santa Cruz River, was known accurately enough as the Santa Booze Valley; the chicanos had burned down a few barns in angry rage but the partying gringos had been too cheerful about the whole thing to retaliate. And this was the country in which Orozco wanted the gringos to give the land back to the chicanos. Oakley gave him a wry glance when he pulled over by the green-painted roadside phone booth.

He waited in the car while the fat man made his calls. He thumbed through the dossier on the Rymer group again but it didn’t hold his attention. He checked the time — just coming up on two o’clock — and twisted the radio knob to catch the news-on-the-hour. A plane crash in Indiana, an airliner highjacking in Greece, Russian rumblings over the Czechoslovak hippies, a Chinese H-bomb test in Sinkiang Province, terrorist bombings of government radio stations in Bolivia; and now on the state and local scene, Democratic gubernatorial candidate flays flabby record of incumbent Governor, newspaper strike continues, three-alarm fire in downtown Tucson slum dwelling. The newscast gave twenty seconds near the end to Earle Conniston; the tycoon had, the announcer said in his relentlessly smiling voice, “succumbed to a sudden illness during the night.”

Oakley switched it off, satisfied. Orozco came waddling back toward the car, got in and closed the door with a grunt. “Stay put a minute — I got to make one more call.”

“Qué pasó?”

“We’re gettin’ there... we’re gettin’ there. The Baird kid bought a ten-year-old Ford from a used-car lot in Nogales yesterday afternoon, not too far from where we found Terry’s car. The bleeper we planted in that suitcase showed up headed west on Highway Two across Sonora, toward Altar and Rocky Point. And here’s the funny thing. Terry Conniston went through the Mexican checkpoint five miles south of Nogales last night. Driving a ten-year-old Ford. Alone.”

“Alone?”

“By herself.”

Oakley closed his eyes momentarily. “I don’t get that.”

“Well, look here, maybe they planted the fear of God in her. They could have walked around the station while she went through it. Picked her up on the far side.”

“How in hell could they persuade her to keep her mouth shut?”

“I got no idea. Thing is, she did it. She can get anyplace in Mexico on that road, just about. It’s the main highway down through Hermosillo and Guaymas. Or she could turn right on Highway Two — the same road the suitcase took.”

Oakley tried to picture the map in his mind. “Where would that get them?”

“Eventually to Rocky Point. On the Golf of California. They could maybe hire a fishing boat there and head for just about anyplace. I sent a couple operatives down there in a seaplane. Meanwhile we’ve got two boys in a car at this end of Highway Two. That should bottle them up between the two ends of the road, unless they got through Rocky Point already and put out to sea — but there’s no sign they did. The bleeper ain’t showed up at Rocky Point. I’d hazard a wild guess they all rendezvoused together at some town along the road, Altar or Caborca, stopped overnight. They could still show up any time this afternoon at Rocky Point. Now I got to get back on the wire and give orders. You’re payin’ the bills, you’re the boss. How you want us to handle it?”

Oakley was still absorbing it. She’s alive. His contradictory feelings made him react sluggishly but finally he said, “We’ll handle it ourselves. The less your men know, the better. We’ll drive down there and follow their route — if we catch up we’ll deal with them and if they go on to Rocky Point then your men can keep tabs on them until you and I get there. I don’t want outsiders or police involved.”

“It’s your party,” Orozco said, and unlatched the door.

Oakley said, “Tell your people in Nogales to have things ready for us in an hour. We’ll need guns and a radio direction-finder to zero in on the suitcase.”

“Okay,” Orozco said. If he was displeased he didn’t give much indication, but he didn’t look overjoyed. He got out of the car and tramped to the phone booth. Oakley settled back in the seat. Whatever the outcome now, there was at least a measure of relief in the prospect of action.