SMOKE ROSE FROM THE FARMHOUSE chimney and you could smell the distinctive burning peat as we approached. There were a couple of outbuildings, a generator to take care of what seemed to be extravagant electrical needs, a battered old truck that could only be used for hauling provisions brought over by boat. Morris Fleury wasn’t really holding the gun on us. Our roles were not so clearly defined. He walked with Cotter Whitney, their heads bent against the wind as they talked. Employer and employee. But what, I wondered, was really going on?
As we reached the house the weather-beaten door creaked open and Thumper Gordon stood there looking at me. It had been twenty years since we’d last seen one another, but as he peered through thick glasses at me, the penny dropped, his face slowly broke into a broad smile behind a beard that was now all gray. He wore a heavy blue sweater and jeans faded and worn threadbare in spots. He stretched his arms out toward me, a welcoming elf, and I ran the last few steps, threw my arms around him. Tears mingled with the rain on my face. I couldn’t help it. My God, how the time slips away.
We held each other at arm’s length then, adding up the years, accounting for the changes. Slowly he winked at me. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he said. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Oh, hell, I knew it was bound to happen, sometime, someplace.”
“Well, it seems we’ve got ourselves a situation here.” He looked at our bedraggled faces and shook his head. “Man with the gun calls the shots. Come on in, folks.”
We were sitting at the kitchen table. The main floor of the two-story building was one big room. There were thousands of books and records, which must have been a laff riot to transport to the island, comfortable couches and chairs, a smoky fire of peat in the stone fireplace, several oil lamps—presumably in order to conserve electricity—heavy hooked rugs. The kitchen table was round and could have seated a dozen people and must have weighed two hundred pounds. Thumper had hot coffee and brandy and single malt Scotch at the ready as we all sank tiredly onto chairs at the table.
Once everybody was clear on who was who, Sam Innis bubbled over, slammed his fist down on the table, and let his frustration hang out. His thin voice was shaking with fatigue and anger.
“We’ve gone about as far as we can go on this one, fans. Three people have been killed—no, make that four, some asshole tried to kill Lee here in Zurich and I am exceedingly glad to report”—he was breathing hard, veins in his neck protruding—“that Lee punched his lights all the way out … I have spent a helluva lot of money, we’ve got people running all over hell’s half-acre, we’ve got people blackmailing Magna—among them, you, Mr. Gordon—”
“Whoever you may be,” Thumper said in his soft raspy voice, “I suggest you go off somewhere by yourself and shove it up your ass. I don’t even know you, man, and I’m real tired of you.” He smiled, ever the elf.
Only Morris Fleury had remained standing, leaning against a hutch containing plates, mugs, bowls, crystal. He’d shed the trench coat to reveal drooping corduroys, a ratty old cardigan, and he still held the double-barreled shotgun.
Sam Innis went on as if Thumper’s comment hadn’t registered at all. “Now I want to know the answer to the question that started the whole damn thing—we have no place else to look. Is Joseph Christian Tripper alive? Is he on this godforsaken shit pile of an island right now?” He was trembling, staring at Thumper Gordon.
Thumper grinned. “JC? You lookin’ for JC? Well, sure, he’s here. Of course. You don’t mean to tell me you came all this way without bein’ sure? What a bunch of intrepid guys. And one intrepid lady. I haven’t had this many people out here at one time in an age. I came here … to get away from my fellow man.”
Innis shouted in his comic reedy voice; “Alive, goddamn you! I mean is JC Tripper alive?—don’t play games with us, my little friend. Whatever else we may be, we are desperate men indeed. We didn’t come this far to play games—”
“Games?” Thumper looked at him contemptuously. “I’m not playing games. Yes, alive, of course. You think I’ve got him stuffed and standing in a corner for old times’ sake? Yes, certainly, Joe—JC—he’s alive, you great red-faced git.”
Maybe it was so unexpected an exchange that we were all dumbstruck. I sure as hell couldn’t think of anything to say. Everybody was staring at Thumper. The wind gusted outside and blew down the chimney, puffing peat smoke into the room, then sucked it back up.
I looked up and saw Fleury watching me. He alone didn’t seem interested in what Thumper had said. Maybe he already knew the truth.
I broke the terrible silence. “Tell me, Fleury, did you ever find out who was paying Clive Taillor all these years?”
“Yes. I did, Mr. Tripper.”
“And do you know where JC is?”
“Yes, I do.” Fleury stared at me impassively.
“Do you actually know what’s going on here?”
He gave me that gray-faced look, his hair plastered across his cement-colored skull, jowls wobbling. But he wasn’t funny or pathetic anymore. “Yes, I do. That’s why I’m the one with the gun. I have every intention of getting out of this room alive.”
“Are you going to tell us, pal?” There was the sense of our breath, collectively held.
“That is exactly what I’m going to do, Mr. Tripper.”
He managed to fill and light his corncob pipe, adding to the smoky fug the dread smell of the sweet cherries, without setting the gun down or having it go off and kill somebody. He didn’t look like a dangerous man. He looked tired and sad and depressed but willing to see it through. He did, however, look like a man who was sorry he’d ever started whatever the hell he was up to. He kept licking his cement-colored lips with a matching gob of tongue. He made a sound, then cleared his throat as if he was still doubtful as to where to begin. He clearly wasn’t accustomed to having such close attention paid to his each and every word.
“Well, lookee here, folks … mighty nice you could all drop by this way.” He either coughed or laughed, impossible to tell. “I do know what’s going on here. It wasn’t easy to get it all straight, but, what the hell, I do this for a living. Never had one like this before, but, but …” He couldn’t seem to think but what. “Anyways, forgive the blunderbuss, but my momma didn’t raise no idiots, as they say. If anybody dies here—and I’m not saying anybody will, for sure—I damn sure don’t want it to be me. So, remember the gun, it’s all loaded and ready to blow pieces of you all the way back to Inverness—”
“Look,” I said, “I hate to interrupt a man’s threat, but frankly, the suspense is killing me.”
“Right, right, I’ll get on with it. Right you are … now”—puff, puff—“where the hell am I gonna start?” He looked around the table, face-to-face-to-face. “All began with Cotter Whitney here.” He smiled moistly. “I’m Security Director of Magna, you all know that—well, if you go far enough up, you could say Mr. Whitney’s my boss, one of my bosses. Freddie Rosen’s another boss of mine. My bosses make jokes about me sometimes, hell, that don’t bother me, I’m that kind of guy—people make jokes about me, always have. Well, that’s okay. I use it. Somebody rates me low, underestimates me, fine, I use it. I may look kinda funny, my taste in clothes is not exactly Ralph Lauren or somebody … but I am one tough old motherfuck, as they say.
“So Whitney knows when it’s time to cut the crap, skip the jokes, and get down to cases. He knows when Fleury’s the answer to his problems … so what, coupla months ago, Cotter calls me back to Minneapolis there, takes me for a walk around that swell house and yard of his and the fact is he was outta sorts.” Cotter Whitney was staring at his hands, folded on the table before him. “And I sat Cotter down and listened to his story and first thing I told him was ‘Cotter, don’t get your hair in the butter’ …”
“He did, too,” Whitney murmured. “Don’t get your hair in the butter. That was a new one on me.” His fingers began interlocking, intertwining, unlocking.
“Cotter had problems. Somebody was beginning to put the fire to the feet, and Cotter, Rosen, some of the other top boys, they was beginning to scream like something was chewin’ on ’em. Someone, maybe someone inside Magna, was setting out as a freelance information broker … someone was building a series of dossiers tracing the big-time narcotics traffic that Magna had once been involved in—oh, starting way back in the fifties and early sixties, when rock hit, drugs hit, the two went together like lox and cream cheese. You know what an information broker is? A blackmailer, a spy … a very dangerous person. And in a deal like this one, a very smart person—someone starting something big and not wanting to blow it and willing to preserve it. What’s involved? Money, power, the works.”
Ledbetter said, “What did the blackmailer want?”
“Wouldn’t say. Just kept letting us know how much he knew. Little dribs and drabs of very, very privileged information. That was the question, what the hell was he after? But he kept us in suspense … Now the men at the top who were deep in all that shit back then, they’re all long gone from Magna … Roarke, Bernstein, D’Allessandro, Levitsky, all gone. All dead but D’Allessandro, who’s got the Alzheimer’s, thinks his dick is his old schnauzer Otto, keeps petting it and sticking it in the dog’s dish—sad, sad—D’Ally was very well connected, y’know what I mean? But gone is not necessarily forgotten. What they did could make Magna look like something you step in, even today. The spotlight on Magna today might pick out a whole lotta zits … for instance, Cotter’s daughter and the All-American Stryker kid; there’s dope there, it’s not big, but it’s jail time anybody starts looking too close—”
“Enough,” Whitney said. “Leave them out of it.”
“Right. Enough. My master speaks. But the blackmailer wasn’t done. He played the Murder Card. Subtle indications that he knew about a murder in Magna’s past—a very big murder …” He nodded smugly.
“And how, pray tell, did he convey this?”
“Ah, Miss Dillinger—he really had the inside dope on that one. One word was all he had to send them. Bellerophon. A bit of Greek mythology. In this case it was a code name and our blackmailer knew it. The word arrived, Cotter called me, asked me if I knew anything about it—he knew, he’d known for years, and I knew some of it … which brings us to the fella who named it and saw to it that it was carried out. Fella by the name of Martin Bjorklund, nicest fella you’d ever wanta know. Pardon me, folks, but I mist up a little when I think of Marty Bjorklund—he died not long ago, six weeks. Marty—old son of a gun hired me at Magna twenty-five, thirty long years ago, taught me what the hell I was getting into …
“Well, I went looking for Marty when we got the Bellerophon notice. I was thinking about lookin’ him up anyways, about the blackmail thing in general, but I’d lost track once he retired. Finally tracked him down up near Seattle, in a hospice, with his daughter living nearby. Four packs of Luckies a day for fifty years—well, I hope he’d enjoyed ’em ’cause he was payin’ a helluva price by the time I got to him. Emphysema, cancer, but he was still pretty alert. I told him the story, and when I got to Bellerophon, old Marty came to life, so to speak. Spit the bit. He starts to wheeze and cough and sputter, I think he’s gonna croak on the spot. But he gets calmed down and tells me the whole story … and it’s a murder story okay, a real stunner. But I’ll get to that in a second. I was more interested in exactly how the blackmailer hooked into Bellerophon. It wasn’t exactly in the company history, y’know what I mean? So how’d he know? I figured it was the key to identifying him. After all, how many guys could know? So Marty says no, it ain’t exactly in the company history, but in another way it is … Marty knew his job, he did what he was told and that covered some very hairy operations, but he always sat in the gunfighter’s chair, back to the wall. Old Marty liked to cover his ass in case any of the big boys decided to sell him out, let him take the fall for some blown deal … y’see, old Marty used to be a rumrunner, Catalina to San Pedro, routes like that, up from Mexico, used to tell me about the flyin’ fish, and he supplied dope for one of the big studios back in the thirties when he was a young fella, had to waste a movie star once who was being uncooperative, and in the sixties he was Magna’s drug overseer to the stars.” He looked at me, frog’s eyes blinking heavily, slowly, tip of tongue between his lips. “Why, you musta known Marty Bjorklund pretty good, now I think of it.”
“That’s right,” I said, “I knew Marty pretty good.” I had that sick, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Y’know, now I think of it, didn’t old Marty say he passed through Tangier there when you fellas were making your last stand?”
“Why, yes, I believe he did. Of course, I was pretty groggy. It could have been another guy in some other town.” I shrugged. “My memory’s pretty hazy about Tangier.”
“Everything’s hazy in Tangier, right, Mr. Tripper?”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“Come on, snap out of it, you two.” Innis sounded pissed off. “Where is this heading?”
“Oh, why don’t you shut your yap? I’m getting there, never you fear. Once Cotter here knew how deep the blackmailer was into all this stuff—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s go back to Marty covering his ass on Bellerophon … murder … how’d he do that?”
“Ah, yes. Well, a coupla ways. For one thing, he held on to the key evidence in the Bellerophon murder. Which meant the killer was on the hook to Magna ever after ’cause they could nail him anytime … and before he left Magna, which was about five years ago, Marty succeeded in having the facts of Bellerophon inserted into Magna’s computer system. Not in one place, mind you, but bits and pieces in four or five different places—find them all, you’d have the whole story. Smart, smart cookie. Marty held on to the access codes, one each for the various entries. Anybody rattles Marty’s chain, Marty can rattle right back—that’s how he covered his ass, got it?”
“Got it,” I nodded.
“So, once Cotter here and his fellow bosses realized that somebody inside was looting the computer files, collecting all the old garbage, once they knew just how fat the blackmailer’s dossiers were getting, once they knew he was on to the Bellerophon stuff—well, you can imagine how scared they were. This was bad stuff, it sure as hell couldn’t come out. I mean, it had almost come out twenty years ago. They were—excuse my French—shitting bricks.”
Ledbetter was shaking his massive head and running his fingers through the tangle of his beard. “I seem to be missing something here, my man. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t we supposed to be looking for JC Tripper? Wasn’t that the point of the exercise? You talk about blackmailers and murderers and ancient rumrunners, but not a word do I hear of Mr. JC Tripper—”
“—Who’s supposed to be alive on this fucking island?” Innis shouted.
“What, may I ask,” Ledbetter continued, “has any of this admittedly thrilling material to do with JC Tripper and the Allan Bechtol novel the world is waiting for?”
Morris Fleury was tamping at the ash in the bowl of his pipe. “Well, let me try to put this in … context, as they say. JC Tripper is very much a part of all this. You see, Mr. Ledbetter, twenty years ago, JC Tripper had had a bellyful of the life of a rock star, the drugs, the waste, and the bullshit and the endless hype … and, yes, the drugs, I said that, didn’t I? The drugs. JC was a powerful man but not perhaps as powerful as he liked to think he was. They were prey to that, the excess of ego, the rock stars. JC … miscalculated. Rather seriously. JC threatened to blow the whistle on the Magna drug operation and record kickbacks and payoffs and who knows what else. He and his brother were hooked on pills, injections, that’s all quite true, but JC was going public or to the police in Los Angeles … they could either try to keep him on the Magna team or they could try to shut him up, exercise some of their leverage one way or another …
“They brought Marty Bjorklund in on their final plan. Maybe they could frame him—child molestation, statutory rape, something to get him under their thumbs. What to do? Then Henry Bernstein spoke up and spoke sense to the group … and Bellerophon was born—”
Ledbetter interrupted excitedly. “Bellerophon! I’ve got it—they decided to frame JC Tripper for murder and hold it over his head to keep him in line! By God, how devilish!”
“Not exactly. Devilish? Yes. But not exactly a frame-up.”
“How do you mean?” Innis said.
“It was JC Tripper who was murdered … Bellerophon was the plan to murder JC Tripper …”