Nothing In Her Way (12 page)

“Oh,” he said easily, “I think you can come around to my way of thinking. Life is essentially a series of compromises.”

“But just supposing, for the sake of argument, that we didn’t?”

“In that case, I’d have to call Lachlan.”

“Would you, really?”

“Certainly.”

She smiled. “I like your frankness. I’ll be equally open with you. The telephone is right over there by the door.”

I couldn’t see what she was driving at. Neither could Bolton. He studied her face, trying to figure it out.

“You mean that?” he asked.

“Why, surely. And I’ll even let you use it, first,” she said. “I’ll send my telegrams after you’re finished talking to Mr. Lachlan.”

“Telegrams?” he asked. I hadn’t got anything yet, but maybe he could hear the bomb beginning to tick.

“Yes. Oh, I didn’t show them to you, did I? I wrote them out while we were waiting for you. Here.” She shoved them across the table, all except one. “The first one is to the chief of police in Denver. And the other is to the bunco squad in Miami. They’re still anxious to contact a Major Jarvis Ballantine, I understand. And, of course, as far as the police here in San Francisco are concerned, I could just call them on the telephone and suggest they check with Denver and Miami and that they might find you at the Sir Francis Drake or the airport.”

He was the one who was sweating now. You could see it working on him. “You don’t mean that,” he said.

“I’ll tell you an excellent way to find out. Call Mr. Lachlan and see.”

“You couldn’t.” He was blustering a little.

“I’ve already suggested a way you can test it. You won’t know for sure until you do. You say life is a series of compromises; in a way, it’s also a series of uncertainties.”

“Yes, but there’s one thing you’ve forgotten,” he said. “And that is that I could call the police in Wyecross and tell them where you are.”

“But, why, Judd, for heaven’s sake?” she asked innocently. “Or have you forgotten something? I didn’t have anything at all to do with that, but you did.”

She had him there, in this colossal game of bluff. There was no way Goodwin or the police could ever pin any of it on her. All she had was the money.

He ground out the cigarette in a tray and got up. His face was dark with anger.

“You’re not going, Judd?” she asked. “Why, you haven’t even finished your drink.”

“What’s in it?” he asked harshly. “Arsenic, or cyanide?” He stopped at the door and looked back, and I could see him beginning to get hold of an idea. Some of his assurance returned.

“You won’t get away with it,” he said, grinning coldly. “You really overlooked something, Cathy.”

“And what is that?”

“I might—I say, I just might call Lachlan tomorrow or next week or ten days from now from Seattle or Los Angeles or Jersey City. And you wouldn’t know it. Maybe you didn’t think of that. There’s an interesting little uncertainty for you. How would you like working on a mark who’s been wised up and has the bunco squad sitting on the side lines waiting for you to make your pitch?”

I hadn’t thought of that, and now that I got a look at all the deadly beauty of it I could feel the butterflies in my stomach. Wouldn’t that be a setup? We’d never know whether Lachlan had been tipped off or not until the actual moment they closed in on us. It would be like trying to disassemble an unfamiliar land mine in the dark; the only way you’d know when you had the trigger was when it went off. She couldn’t have any answer for that one. Or did she? I looked at her and she was smiling again.

“Oh, how stupid of me,” she said. “I knew I had forgotten something. I didn’t show you the other telegram.”

“The other one?”

“Why, yes. This one.” She held it out, but he made no move to take it. “It’s to the Chicago police. Just a little tip that they might get in touch with you by contacting your mother out in Oak Park. Think what a revelation that’ll be. To both the police and your mother. Can’t you just see the headlines? ‘Son of Prominent Committeewoman Sought.’”

I watched his face. It was the first time I’d ever been able to see very far into Bolton, and now that I did I didn’t find it a very comforting sight. He looked at both of us with his hand on the door and said, “That’s one I’d advise you not to send, Cathy.”

That was all. He went out and closed the door.

He’d called it an interesting uncertainty, and that was probably the understatement of the year. Would he, or wouldn’t he? It could drive you crazy. Who had outbluffed whom?

Fortunately, I didn’t have time to stew about it that night. I met Lachlan, at last.

We were going out to dinner and stopped in the cocktail lounge in the building. It was the usual chi-chi sort of place, with white leather upholstery in the booths, a girl playing a Hammond organ, and just enough light to grope your way around. The place was almost empty. We had just sat down at a booth and ordered our drinks when I saw him come in. He didn’t notice us at first, and sat down at the bar. When his drink came he looked up and saw her in the mirror.

He didn’t know me, and she hadn’t asked him. He came over anyway, with his drink in his hand. “Hello, there,” he said.

It was just the sort of break we’d been hoping for, but it still got under my skin. She looked up, pretending she had just noticed him, and smiled. “Why, hello. It’s Mr.—ah—”

“Lachlan, folks,” he said heartily. “Remember? The parking-lot attendant.”

She made the introduction. “This is my husband, Dr. Rogers. Darling, Mr. Lachlan. The man who helped me park the car.”

I stood up and we shook hands. “Join us?” I asked, with as little invitation as I could get into it. I was supposed to play it very cold and close-mouthed, the way we had it worked out, but it wasn’t any act.

He jerked his head for the waiter to bring a chair, and sat down at the end of the table. We’d hardly touched our drinks, but he insisted on ordering two more.

“Doctor?” he asked. “Are you an M.D.?”

I shook my head curtly. “Veterinarian.”

He dismissed that with a grunt. “Oh?” he said, and turned to Cathy. “You know, Mrs. Rogers, I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere before. You’re not in the movies, are you?”

It was pretty crude, especially from a middle-aged goat who was old enough to be her father. I had a pleasant moment thinking of how, normally, she’d let the air out of any oaf who’d pull something like that, but now she took a bow on it, looking flattered and a little overcome, like a girl at her first prom. “No,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “I’ve never been any nearer Hollywood than right here.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” he boomed. He turned and included me in the conversation again. “Doctor, I notice you drive a Jaguar. How do you like it?”

“Pretty well,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance to race it yet.”

“They’re not bad. I had one for a while, but I got rid of it and picked up that Italian job I’ve got now. There’s a car. Of course,” he added, with an offhand wave of the paw, “it costs a lot more.” He was one of those people who manage to rub their money in your face like grating a nutmeg.

“By the way,” he went on, “Mrs. Rogers said you lived a long time in Peru. You ever do any fishing around Cape Blanco?”

This was one of the ticklish parts of it. Cathy’d been to Peru with her mother one year, but I’d never been there. We were pretty sure he hadn’t either, but weren’t absolutely certain of it.

I shook my head. “No. I was mostly up in the mountains. Little trout fishing was all.”

“Oh, trout.” He consigned trout fishing to the category of sissy pastimes like making your own clothes or painting teacups. “I was hoping you might have tried it. Never been there myself. The usual places, Bimini, Acapulco, and so on, but somehow I always missed Blanco.”

“Oh?” I said.

He brought us up to date on what kind of physical condition you had to be in to fight martin, and asked us to guess his age. We both knew he was either forty-eight or forty-nine, so I said forty-one and Cathy said forty. He told us he’d played football in college, and that he could go out there right now and run through a scrimmage without raising a sweat. He knew several movie stars. He kept a forty-foot cruiser at San Diego. But I kept noticing he never mentioned Central America. That was good.

Most of this was directed at Cathy, but occasionally he would remember I was there too and make an effort to work me into the conversation. “What kind of work do you do mostly, Doc?” he asked. “Horses? Dogs? That sort of thing?”

“I’m not doing any at all at the moment,” I said.

Cathy took it off the backboard. “Dr. Rogers hasn’t practiced for several years, though he used to work mostly with race horses. Lately, he’s become interested in research.”

“For the government?”

She shook her head. “Just for himself. You see, his father was a medical missionary in the Andes and as a child he became interested in the Indians and—”

I shot her a dirty look, trying not to make it too obvious, and she let it trail off rather lamely into something vague about high altitude and diet. While she was still floundering around with it, I glanced at my watch and said curtly we had to start to dinner. The whole thing was brusque to the point of rudeness. I shook hands rather coldly with Lachlan as we stood up, thanked him for the drink, and said with no sincerity at all that I hoped we would see him again. As we were leaving and were almost, but not quite, out of earshot, I snapped at her in Spanish, “Long tongue!”

That night after dinner we worked on the plan some more. We had an argument to begin with, but she finally won me over. I said her whole idea was too subtle for a meat-headed egotist like Lachlan, that he never stopped talking about himself long enough to be curious about anything or anybody.

She disagreed with me. “You’re wrong, darling. He’s just intelligent enough to get it, without being smart enough to see through it or be afraid of it. God knows you’re right about his egotism, but you shouldn’t cry about that. I’m the one who’s going to have to listen to him. And it’s in our favor, anyway. What could be more intoxicating to a conceited gas bag like that than the knowledge that he’s outsmarted us and found out what you’re doing—when he does, of course? And he’s already put one thing over on us. He understands Spanish as well as we do, and we don’t know that. I suppose you noticed that in all that monologue of his there was never anything about Central America.”

“Yes. I noticed that.”

“I was afraid he’d brag about it—the way he does everything else—before we had a chance to nail it down. He won’t now. Your bawling me out for being a
lengua larga
has scotched that.”

She coached me on the Peruvian angle until I felt as if I’d lived there for years. Complete saturation was what she was after, and nothing less would satisfy her. I protested, pointing out that Lachlan had never been to Peru and wouldn’t know if I did make a mistake, but she paid no attention. I not only had to know everything about Dr. Rogers; I had to be him.

The next day Juan Benavides showed up and he went through the mill.

It was about two in the afternoon. The buzzer sounded, and he was in the corridor looking very sharp in his electric-blue suit and wide-collared shirt.

“Come in, Juan,” I said. I took his hat and he looked around in awe, probably kicking himself for not having started his bargaining at five hundred instead of three hundred dollars.

I gave him a cigarette and called Cathy. She was wearing blue pajamas and a long robe with wide sleeves, and you could see he was much impressed with her. She shook hands and smiled, and then curled up in a big chair.

“We are very fortunate,” she said, giving him an approving glance. “Already I can see that Juan is just the man for the job.”

From then on he was hers. The two Spanish-speaking gringos were without a doubt completely crazy, but this one was of unbelievable beauty and she thought highly of him.

She told him everything he was supposed to do and say, and then she told him again. She sweated him through it for an hour. I wrote down the telephone number of the hotel where he was staying. We told him to be there where we could reach him any afternoon after four, and then I went back downtown with him and let him pick out the gold watch chain.

“Where is your watch?” I asked.

“Perhaps someday I will have one,” he said. “Who knows?”

I gave him some more expense money and asked him about the bus ticket. He thought it over and decided El Paso would be a good place to go. After I dropped him off I went around to the bus station and bought it. We were all ready for the next act.

On an impulse I ducked into a cigar store and called the Sir Francis Drake. Bolton had checked out and had left no forwarding address. It could mean anything at all, and probably meant nothing, but for a moment I felt a chill just thinking about it. He could tip Lachlan off from anywhere, and we’d never know it until they slipped the handcuffs on us.

When I got back to the apartment she was gone again, and she didn’t get back until nearly six. She was elated when she did come in. She’d run into Lachlan and he had taken her down Bayshore to San Jose in that Italian car of his to show her how it performed. Or at least, that was his excuse.

It was good, but I was irritated. “Wait a minute,” I said. “How much of this are we going to have, anyway? I mean, going off with him all afternoon—”

She laughed. “Mike, for heaven’s sake, have you forgotten who he is? That’s Lachlan, the man we both wanted to kill when I was ten years old. Stop growling and listen. We’re doing wonderfully.”

She’d got a pretty good line on his plans this time and we could set up some sort of timetable. Apparently they had talked a lot. He was going to be around San Francisco for at least another month, she said, before he went back to Mexico for some more fishing. His lawyers wanted him to stay around until they got this latest property settlement worked out.

But that wasn’t the big news, she told me excitedly. “He actually stopped talking about himself long enough to ask me what you were doing. Incidentally, he was curious about me, too—his idea being, of course, that I must be the one with money, since you obviously couldn’t be. I dispelled that by telling him my father was a bookkeeper for the Lima office of a mining company. I said we both grew up in Peru, but that we didn’t meet until we were at Columbia. So now, if it’s bothering his sense of logic any, he’s right back where he started. You don’t do anything resembling work, your father was a missionary, mine was a bookkeeper, and still we live like millionaires.”

She jumped off my lap and started prowling the living room the way she always did when she was excited or thinking. She paused to light a cigarette, then waved it at me. “He asked me outright what kind of research you were doing—or had been doing. I was properly evasive about it, and vague. He wouldn’t have to be a genius to figure out that you had given me unadulterated hell for talking too much the other night and that I still remembered it.

“I told him you’d been at the Hipodromo San Felipe in Lima as a veterinarian for the track, and then somehow”—she paused and grinned wickedly—“somehow we got onto horse doping and saliva tests, and I said that although they weren’t part of your work, you’d become interested in them. Just chatter, you see. And then I shut up and listened to him.”

We ran into Lachlan again that night in the cocktail lounge as we were going out to dinner, but declined his drink invitation a little coolly and eased out without talking to him. The following night we avoided the bar altogether. The thing to do was to let him rest a little.

The night after that, however, we went back and he was there ahead of us, sitting at a booth this time. He stood up and insisted we join him.

The drinks came. “How about having dinner with me tonight?” he urged.

“Why, we’d love to,” Cathy said. “Wouldn’t we, Mike?”

“Sure,” I said, with scarcely any enthusiasm at all.

“Fine,” he said. “I know a swell place down in the financial district. Never find it unless you knew this town like a book.”

Cathy had her head down and was poking into her purse. “Oh, darn,” she said. “I left my lipstick upstairs.” She stood up. “If you’ll excuse me. I’ll only be a minute.”

She went out and we sat down again. I wondered how the thing would come off. She had gone to call Benavides.

She was gone about ten minutes, stalling to give him time. Lachlan and I nursed our drinks and made an attempt at conversation. Without her there it fell apart like bricks without mortar.

I thought about him and tried to figure him out. Somehow he either wasn’t the man I’d always expected or he was putting on an act too. The boasting and ostentatious show of money and bully-boy virility that characterized this middle-aged clown didn’t seem to match up with the cold-nerved piracy of the man who’d engineered a coup like that one in Central America sixteen years ago. Maybe it was just a front, or maybe he was over the peak and softening up now, degenerating into a sort of propped-up wolf chasing girls half his age.

In the face itself there wasn’t much evidence of breakdown. The eyes were steel-blue and sharp and a little too domineering, and the hawk nose and solid jaw gave him the look of a man who was able to take care of himself. Maybe it was in a number of small things. He was a little too loud. He dyed his hair to cover up the gray at the temples. You could see it—the reddish brown around the ears didn’t quite match the rest of it. His clothes were too young for him. He wore double-breasted gray flannel suits with built-in shoulders and Hollywood drape, and topped them off with explosive ties and the modified Texas hat. It was funny, I thought; at first glance, when you knew his record, he looked dangerous, but when you got closer to him he began to sound a little hollow.

Was it an act? That was the bad part of it—there was no way to know until it was too late. But the thing we couldn’t afford to forget for a minute was that he’d lived by his wits for a long time, and he’d always come out on top.

“Mrs. Rogers tells me you used to be with the Peruvian Jockey Club,” he said, leaning back against the white leather.

I shrugged. “Not as a member, if that’s what you mean. I worked at San Felipe as veterinarian for a while. A long time ago.”

“How is the racing down there? Pretty crooked?”

“No,” I said, a little impatiently. “Probably as clean as it is here.”