Tama made it unanimous by glaring at me when I walked into his office at five after ten.
“Confessed yet?” I asked, and the glare intensified. I sympathized. It wasn’t a policeman’s dream, holding a multimillionaire Senatorial candidate who was a wood-chopping pal of the President’s. It was a situation fraught with dangers, and conductive to long deep thoughts about other fields of employment. “What about Duffieux’s meeting at ten?”
“Postponed,” said Tama shortly. “They’re trying to figure a graceful way to let Payton go.”
“Hrmph. So you still haven’t booked him yet?” His lips tightened.
“And you’re not getting anywhere with him, huh?”
“Listen, LaRoche,” he growled irritably. “If any one person can be said to be responsible—”
“Look,” I broke in, “sneak me in to see him and gimme fifteen minutes alone with him. I think I’ve got the key to unlock him.”
“What?” he demanded.
I shook my head. “It’s personal. It’ll either work for me, or for nobody else. If it does work, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered.
Neither did I but there was no sense in letting Tama in on the secret. I smiled purposefully. “Fifteen minutes?” I wheedled.
He grimaced in resignation and got to his feet. “If you tell anyone—”
“Mum’s the word.”
Tama led me down the hallway, to where a uniformed policeman sat in front of a closed door. “Take a break,” he ordered. When the cop had disappeared Tama unlocked the door and motioned me through. “Fifteen minutes,” he warned.
I found myself in an office that had been converted by the addition of a folding cot into a high-class cell—innate caution had kept them from tossing Payton into the tank along with the drunks. He could easily have smashed the plate-glass window or removed the air-conditioning unit from the wall and wriggled on through to freedom, but Payton obviously didn’t think along those lines. He was sitting at the desk, scowling at what he was writing. Probably a list of those to be readied for summary execution.
I didn’t have to guess whose name would top it.
He watched me walk around the desk, but recoiled in disgust as I leaned towards him—did I have bad breath, or did he think I was going to try to kiss him?
Instead I whispered in his ear. “This room might be bugged. We better not take chances. We’ll sit on the bunk and whisper.”
I moved to the bunk. He glowered at me, breathing heavily, then got to his feet. When he was sitting beside me, I leaned closer.
“They’re going to charge you at two o’clock,” I said with all the conviction I could muster. “The Procureur and the Juge d’Instruction just finished a conference call with the Minister of Justice in Paris and have got the go-ahead. It’ll take them a couple of hours to draw up the papers, and then you’ll be moved to the prison in Faaa. Then you’ll have access to your lawyers, but this isn’t the States, you know. The French don’t even give bail to petty thieves, never mind murderers.”
His mouth worked but he said nothing.
“I know that old Mayor Curley used to get re-elected from his jail cell,” I whispered, “but that was back in Boston in the twenties, not New Mexico in the eighties. What do you figure your chances are? Today’s what—Saturday? The election’s on Tuesday, huh? Too bad.…”
He turned bloodshot eyes to me. They were alive with hatred. “What do you want?” he whispered piteously. “Have you just come to gloat?”
“Gloat? Me? Hell no, I’ve come to see if you wanted to get out of here.”
“What do you think, you bastard?” he rasped.
I grinned at him. “Frankly, I think you belong in here, but Tamara wants you out for some reason, and…oh, hell, forget it, I’ll get you out. But first.…” I reached in my pants pocket and pulled out a notebook. “Here, you can copy this in your own handwriting.”
“What is it?” asked Payton, taking the notebook.
“A personal services contracted, dated October 22nd, hiring Alain LaRoche for unspecified duties for an indeterminate period of time, for a lump sum of one hundred thousand U.S. dollars, payable upon satisfactory completion of his duties.”
“You want me to sign that?”
“Yep. But not until you write out the whole thing first. And then on the bottom you’ll add, ‘October 29th, duties completed to my full satisfaction, payment in full made by check number 7834,’ and you’ll sign your name again.”
“What!”
I smiled. “Don’t worry: I’ll give you a receipt. ‘Paid in Full.’ Make sure the check is dated yesterday—we wouldn’t want anyone to say I’d tried to coerce you in a jail cell, would we?”
“You son of a bitch!”
“Isn’t it the truth? Oh, by the way: I brought your checkbook. Tamara was kind enough to find it for me. Isn’t it nice how much can be accomplished if people simply try to cooperate with one another?”
His hand trembled under the impetus of some strong emotion as he reached for the checkbook.
I didn’t bother to ask him what it was.
“Well?” demanded Tama.
I shrugged. “It’s dicey,” I said. “I’m going to have to check it out and get back to you.” I left him scowling at my back, and walked down to the post office, where I mailed the check to my bank in San Francisco.
I returned with as sprightly a step as my aches and pains would allow to the Commissariat and the Renault. I was a rich man. Now all I needed to do was think of a means of getting Charles Wentworth Payton out of jail before nightfall.
* * * *
I slumped half asleep on Mareta’s couch, trying to keep my chin from drooping to my chest, while she made coffee in the kitchen. I’d found her at the house she and Patrick had shared in town, anxiously awaiting the warrior’s return.
“You mean you’ve been here ever since…that afternoon at your place in the hills?” I asked. It seemed like years had passed.
“Of course. Didn’t you tell me to?”
I nodded, dumbfounded. It was hard to believe that such fidelity and self-discipline still existed in today’s slipshod world. I pulled her to me and we kissed, hard.
“Why don’t you go lie down?” she breathed into my ear.
“Because if I did I wouldn’t move for a week,” I muttered regretfully. “I’ve gotta stay awake. And try to get my brain awake, although that’s going to be a lot harder.”
“Lots of coffee, then,” she said.
“And just a tiny bit of loving,” I added.
“Too late,” she said primly. “It’s coffee time.”
I drank coffee until my stomach gurgled and told her what had been happening to her white knight since we’d parted a lifetime before. “So now,” I concluded glumly, “the question is: how do I get this guy off?”
“For $100,000?”
I nodded.
“Easy,” she said after a moment’s thought. “You tell the cops he was with me all day. I’ll be his…what do you call it? Alibi.” She grinned impishly.
I set the coffee cup down. “You know,” I said slowly, “that isn’t a half-bad—” I stopped.
“What’s the matter?”
“Lemme think.… Nope, it’s no good. The Wests were murdered on the 20th, 21st, something like that, that’s ten days ago. You were still in the hospital, remember?”
“Oh. I’d forgotten.” She looked downcast at being deprived of her moment of glory in the spotlight. “You think they’d check?”
I thought about it. “Yeah. Someone would remember that you were…associated with me—” she snorted delicately “—and that you’d been in the hospital. So that wouldn’t work. Sorry. It was a great idea.”
Actually, it was as lousy an idea as I’d ever heard, and it only shows how hopelessly ineffectual I felt that I even considered it.
“Hrmph,” she said, unconvinced. “What kind of a man is this Payton? I’ve never met him.”
“A jerk,” I said pithily. “Just like the Wests, only queer into the bargain.”
“Queer? What kind of queer?”
I waved a hand. “Who knows? I guess he just likes boys. Isn’t that enough? No, I recall now: he likes boys who dress up like girls. I guess he likes to dress up like that too. That kind of queer.” I sighed.
“Oh. Transvestites.” She giggled, then pursed her lips thoughtfully. “You’ve got lots of money, haven’t you?”
“I do now.”
She scowled, impatient with my dullness of mind. “Why don’t you get the transvestites to say he was with them? They’ll do anything for money, you know.”
There was a silence. I gaped at her foolishly, much as Sherlock Holmes might have stared when confronted by the vastly greater faculties of his brother Mycroft.