Friday morning, after a couple of portrait sittings, Bobbi went apartment hunting. The locksmith arrived shortly before lunch and changed the locks on the stairwell door and in the elevator. After lunch, I tilted my chair back, put my feet up, closed my eyes, and began composing an ad for a new lab tech. Around one-thirty I was roused from a half doze by the annoying warble of the telephone. I was tempted to let it ring through to the service – Mrs. Szymkowiak didn’t work Fridays – but I picked it up. After all, it might be a client wanting a portrait of his prize-winning poodle.
It wasn’t. It was Chris Hastings.
“Carla’s here,” he said. “On my boat.”
“Lucky you. I hope you’re not insured by Pacific Casualty.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“She’s hurt,” Hastings said.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Not seriously,” he said. “She was beaten up.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But what do you want me to do?”
“She asked me to call you. She wants to see you.”
“I don’t think I want to see her,” I said.
“She says you’re the only one she can trust.”
“I hope that didn’t hurt your feelings,” I said.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I’m rather relieved, to tell you the truth.”
“All right, I’ll be there in an hour or so.”
“She told me to tell you to make sure you’re not followed.”
* * * * *
Bobby had taken the Land Rover. It took me twenty minutes to get back to Granville Island and pick up the Porsche. Keeping an eye out for a white Buick and cops, I opened it up across the Burrard Bridge, turning right onto Pacific, then right again and looping under the bridge approach onto Beach. I cruised along Beach toward Stanley Park. At Jervis I executed a quick right, then right again at Harwood and back down Bute to Beach. I did it again at Broughton. No one seemed to be following me.
I parked near the bicycle rental place, locked up, and walked through the pedestrian tunnel under Georgia. To be on the safe side, I strolled around for a few minutes, watching the roller girls in their Spandex shorts and halter tops, then walked over to the marina. The gate was open. I wandered through the marina for five minutes, pretending to admire the boats, before finally stepping aboard the Pendragon.
Chris Hastings was mopping bird droppings off the sail covers. Reeny Lindsey, hair tied back and looking very young, was polishing chrome. Sailboats are not low maintenance toys.
“She’s below,” Hastings said.
I went into the wheelhouse and knocked on the sliding cover over the hatch leading down to the main cabin.
“Who is it?” Carla’s voice demanded.
“It’s me,” I said.
The hatch opened and Carla pointed a small automatic pistol at my face.
“Christ,” I said, stepping back, heart thudding.
“Quick,” she said. “Come in.”
“Put that thing away first.”
She did something to the pistol and shoved it into the side pocket of her motorcycle jacket. I went down the steep narrow steps of the companionway into the cabin. Carla closed and dogged the hatch.
By landlubber standards the interior of Pendragon was cramped, but for a sailboat it was moderately roomy. It would have been roomier still were it not for the books. Hardcovers and trades and paperbacks. They were stacked everywhere, on the deck, the chart table, the dining table, the shelf behind the long upholstered bench that ran the length of the salon, even in the galley. Any leftover space was filled with magazines, yellowing newspapers, and thick stacks of computer printouts.
“At least you won’t run out of reading material,” I said. I picked up a heavy hardcover volume, a high school geography text.
“I’m not much of a reader,” she said. Atop the pile of books on the chart table was a small colour television, flickering silently, a rerun of Cheers.
“Where did you get the gun?” I asked.
“It’s Chris’s.”
What did Hastings need with a gun? I wondered. They weren’t easy to come by in this country.
“It’s awfully stuffy in here,” I said. “Why don’t we go out on deck and talk.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. Her hair was growing back quickly, already black at the roots.
“It’s time you started levelling with me, Carla. It’ll be a stretch, I know, but give it a try. Who knows, you might find it refreshing.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“I mean it,” I said. “No more bullshit. If you lie to me, I’m going to walk.”
“And what have you got, a handy-dandy little Radio Shack lie detector? Your own personal polygraph?”
“If you lie,” I said, “I’ll know it.”
Her indigo eyes flashed. “Tommy, if I put my mind to it, I could make you believe the sky was falling.”
“If that’s the way you want it, I wish you luck.” I started toward the hatch.
“All right, fine,” she said. “The truth. I need you to run an errand for me.”
“I’m not interested.”
“I can make it worth your while.”
“You don’t have anything I want,” I said.
“At least listen, for crissake.”
“All right,” I said. “I can do that.” I made room on the bench by the end of the dining table and sat down. The table had a raised edge around it. It wouldn’t do much to keep the books and magazines from sliding off in rough weather. Carla sat on a high stool by the chart table, hooked the heel of her scuffed cowboy boot over the foot rest, but when she leaned back against the table, she winced suddenly and sat up straight.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Just a little banged up.”
“Let’s see,” I said.
She raised the hem of her T-shirt. There were dark bruises on her stomach and ribs. She slipped her jacket off her left shoulder, showed me fresh dollar-sized bruises on her upper arm, darker than the fading yellow of other, older bruises.
“It might be a good idea to have those ribs looked at.”
“It hurts a bit when I take a deep breath,” she said, shrugging the jacket back over her shoulder, “but nothing’s broken.”
“What happened?”
“I was on my way to a meeting when a couple of uglies tried to hustle me into a car. They weren’t pros, thank god. Just guys who thought they could get by on size and bad manners. But I know a few nasty tricks. I got one in the kneecap with my boot heel and jabbed the other one in the eye.” She held up her hands, waggling her fingers. Her fingernails were half an inch long.
“Who were they?”
“Thugs working for Vince. Who else would they be? The same ones who tried it last week.”
“One of them wasn’t missing a couple of fingers from his right hand, was he?”
“I didn’t have time to count their fingers,” she said, “but, no, I don’t think so.”
“Ryan told me you took something from him. Maybe if you gave it back…”
“I can’t do that.”
“You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?” I said. “All right, what was it?”
“A video tape,” she answered. I waited for her to elaborate. She found a cigarette pack on the chart table, but it was empty. She crumpled it and tossed it in the general direction of the galley. Just as well; I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of her smoking around all that paper. I waited some more, the silence broken only by muted footfalls on the deck above us. Finally, she said, “It was a tape of…a well-known divorce lawyer extorting sex from his clients.”
“Of course,” I said. “It would be something as banal as blackmail. The lawyer,” I added. “He wouldn’t happen to be named Brian MacIlroy, would he?”
Her eyes widened. “How…? Ah,” she said. “Ginny.” I nodded. “I took the tape from him four years ago. He’s got a whole collection of them. The silly son of a bitch likes video taping himself getting it on in his office. And he likes watching them with company.”
“He should be more careful about the company he watches them with,” I said.
She gave me a twisted smile.
“I take it that not all of the women with whom he has sex are completely willing.”
“The tape shows him having sex with half a dozen woman,” she said. “But he forces one to give him a hand job by telling her that if she doesn’t he can guarantee she won’t get custody of her children. Another agrees to have sex with him only after he threatens to arrange for some compromising information to fall into the hands of her husband’s lawyer.”
“You weren’t planning to send the tape to the bar association I’ll bet.”
“What do you think?”
“Well,” I said, “I won’t say he doesn’t deserve it.”
“I told him that unless he deposited three thousand a month into an account I set up, he could kiss his legal practice good-bye. Not to mention his political ambitions.”
“He paid, of course.”
“Of course he paid. He isn’t that stupid. Besides, he can afford it. He probably wrote it off on his taxes or charged it to his clients. I could have taken him for a lot more, but I’m not that greedy.”
“Hmm,” was my only comment on that. “So you weren’t broke when we first met,” I said.
“Sure I was,” she said. “Three grand a month isn’t much and, well, I had expenses.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “Okay, you’d been blackmailing MacIlroy to the tune of thirty-six grand a year for – what? – three years, when you hooked up with Ryan. Why did you give him the tape?”
“When Vince came up short on the Rainbow Mountain deal – the insurance company is dragging its feet about paying off on his wife’s policy – I told him I knew someone who might be interested in buying in. Brian’s always on the look out for good investment opportunities for himself and his clients.”
“And with the tape hanging over his head,” I said, “how could be refuse?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He couldn’t.”
“So he went along,” I said. “That is, until he came up with a way to force you to double-cross Ryan. You were on your way to deliver the tape to MacIlroy when Ryan’s goons jumped you, weren’t you?”
“Christ,” she said. “I should never have showed Vince that fucking tape.”
“Don’t whine, Carla,” I said. “You cooked your own golden goose. You sicced Ryan on MacIlroy. Thirty-six thousand a year he could live with, but Wes Camacho told me Ryan needed two million to keep his end of Rainbow Mountain alive and that may have been just too much for him to handle, especially since he’s got political ambitions and a by-election not too far down the road. How am I doing so far?”
“Oh, just great.”
“What was it, Carla? What does MacIlroy have on you?”
“What makes you think he’s got anything on me?”
I had to laugh at the self-righteous indignation in her voice. “You wouldn’t have double-crossed Ryan for mere money. If Rainbow Mountain paid off, Ryan stood to make millions. No, it has to be something else.”
“What difference does it make?” she snapped. “I don’t need a fucking confessor.”
“I can’t promise I’ll help you, but if you don’t level with me, I can guarantee I won’t.”
She glared at me, blue eyes darkening almost to black. From somewhere toward the stern of Pendragon a pump kicked in, producing a low-pitched thrum that I could feel through soles of my shoes.
“All right” she said. “If you have to know, I killed someone.”