It was almost midnight.
Through the skylight over the bed, McGuire watched the moon suspended like a peach in the darkness above him. He rolled on his side to draw a hand lightly along the bare, bronzed back of Glynnis Vargas and trace the line of her spine down, down, until she rose out of sleep long enough to laugh softly and roll away from him.
He lay back again, his hands behind his head, his eyes on the moon, recalling the events of the previous few hours.
She had remained silent on the journey back to Palm Springs, staring out the window at the passing landscape. When he’d stopped at the security gates in front of her home, she reached across him to press a button below the dashboard and the gates parted obediently.
Leading the way into the house, Glynnis spoke briefly to the maid, who made a short telephone call before leaving to stand in the street just beyond the security gate. Twenty minutes later, McGuire watched from the living-room window as a battered pickup truck arrived, driven by an expressionless, brown-faced man. The maid climbed aboard and the truck drove away, one fender dangling from a length of wire.
As the truck disappeared on Chula Vista, Glynnis Vargas entered the room wearing a light cotton robe and carrying a small, intricately carved wooden box. “I want you to see something,” she said, seating herself on a large sectional couch and patting the cushion beside her. “Come sit by me and look at these,” and she lifted the lid of the box.
Inside were candid photographs of Glynnis Vargas in lush tropical settings and snapshots of her on a secluded beach. In many of the pictures she was accompanied by a tall, strikingly handsome man with a full head of thick, silvery hair, a neatly trimmed moustache above a strong mouth and square jaw, and eyes that beckoned and smiled.
“Getti,” she said as she handed a stack of photographs to McGuire. “If you can assess a man by his face, surely you can begin to understand what this man was. And how much he meant to me.”
She shuffled quickly through the remainder of the pictures before dropping them in McGuire’s lap.
“He looks like the kind of man you described,” McGuire said, examining them one by one.
“Look, look at this one,” she said quickly. She tapped a photograph in McGuire’s hand with a long, elegant index finger. “This was taken at our villa on Itaperica. It’s an island off the coast of Bahia. . . .” Her voice softened. “The most beautiful part of Brazil. So beautiful.” She pointed to the image of her husband. “It’s my favourite picture of Getti. Look how happy he is. Look at the smile on his face.”
The man was indeed happy, beaming at the camera from a beach chair, his sunglasses pushed high on his forehead to reveal his laughing eyes.
“I think I want a drink,” she said suddenly.
McGuire watched her walk to a sideboard, the contours of her body moving languidly beneath the fabric of her robe. She poured herself a large glass of cognac from a crystal decanter and stood gazing out the window before returning to sit beside him again.
“I used to look at these and cry for days after Getti died,” she said, gathering the pictures from McGuire’s hands and returning them to the carved wooden box. “Since I arrived here, I haven’t looked at them at all. Until now.”
“Why now?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “Perhaps it was just to say goodbye to him.” She set the box aside. “I don’t expect to look at them again. For a very long time.”
McGuire recalled something from the evening at the Desert Museum. “When I brought you home from the museum the other night,” he said, “a man met you at the door. Who was he? You were obviously more than just friends.”
She took another long sip of cognac before answering. “My cousin. From Brazil. Getti’s cousin, actually. He returned to Rio the following day. I miss him already.”
“Was there something between you?”
“No.” She lowered her glass and turned away, avoiding his eyes. “Yes,” she corrected herself. “Yes, there was. But not anymore,” she added quickly.
McGuire set his empty glass on the floor.
“You never waste words, do you?” she asked when he looked back at her. She too had placed her glass on the thick carpet. Before McGuire could speak, she raised herself onto her knees and dropped her hands to the belt of her robe. “I find that so appealing in a man. So let’s not waste words, shall we?”
The robe parted and, still kneeling, she brought McGuire’s mouth to her breast, her hands behind his head and a soft, low moan rising from her throat.
Remembering the moment, McGuire reached to touch her again. Her body was more firm, more lithe than he had expected. And he had expected much.
Afterwards, she had cried. A small girl, sobbing on his shoulder. He had carried her in his arms across the living room, past the entrance to the Florida room, beyond the kitchen to the music room where her portrait hung, and through the white louvred doors down the darkened hall. “At the end,” she had said, her arms around his neck.
He laid her on the bed in the desert dusk, her eyes closed, one arm flung aside. After closing the drapes he returned to the bed, unsure whether to stay or remain, until her eyes and her arms both opened to him again.
Now, awake in darkness softened only by moonlight, he crept from the bed and watched her sleep for a few moments before exploring the house.
When he had carried her down the hall, he had passed three closed doors. Now he tried them, to discover that all were securely locked. A doorway leading from the music room was also secured, as were two others, which should have opened to the living room.
McGuire estimated that half the area of the house was sealed behind locked doors.
He traced his way back to the bed and lay silently for several minutes watching Glynnis Vargas sleep, reaching to stroke her body lightly with his fingertips, barely brushing her skin as though sensing the texture of an eggshell.
He awoke again to desert light leaking around the drawn drapes and flowing through the skylight. Beside him, Glynnis slept soundly on her stomach, one foot extending vulnerably from beneath the single sheet covering her.
Dressing quickly, he walked down the hall to the music room, unlocked the sliding doors and stepped out of the air-conditioned veil of the house into the warm cloak of the desert day.
McGuire skirted the pool and unlocked the rear security gate. Within a few steps he had left the green environment of the landscaped grounds and entered the harsh reality of the desert, scrambling up the steep face of the rocky hill behind the house.
He found what he expected about a hundred feet up the face of the hill.
A small hollow had been formed behind a massive boulder. The ground behind the boulder was pressed smooth with footsteps; a crumpled paper coffee cup and several food wrappers lay scattered on the ground. McGuire followed a worn path leading away from the boulder and traversing the hill until it ended at a short service road leading off Chula Vista.
He returned to the shadow of the boulder and stared down at the house with its swimming pool, the sliding glass doors off the music room, the patio running along the side of the house to similar sets of doors, and the large skylight over Glynnis Vargas’s bed, where they had made love and slept bathed in moonlight.
The sliding door to her bedroom opened and McGuire watched Glynnis Vargas emerge barefoot, carrying an over-sized towel and wearing an emerald silk robe. At the edge of the pool she shrugged out of the robe and dove naked and without hesitation into the water, her body gliding beneath the surface like a bird in flight.
She swam several lengths with easy, practised grace. Then, casually towelling herself off without glancing around her, she returned to the bedroom. Only the shimmering surface of the water and her damp footprints, drying in the sun even as McGuire continued to watch, remained as evidence of her presence.
McGuire suspected he had been treated to another piece of theatre.
He found her in the kitchen, preparing coffee. Her hair was wrapped in a towel and she wore a thick terry-cloth wrap that extended just to her knees.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said as he entered from the music room. “You’re thinking this is not normal behaviour for a Palm Springs widow. You’re thinking I should have a cook to make my breakfast, a butler to serve it and a maid to tidy up.” She looked at him, a smile bringing out the half-moon dimples in her cheeks. “Am I right?”
“Only partly,” McGuire said. He sat at the breakfast nook in the corner of the large, brightly lit room. “I was really thinking you had better be more careful.”
“About what?”
“About appearing for your morning swim like you did just now. I was watching you from the side of the hill. . . .”
“I know,” she interrupted. “I saw you.” She opened a cupboard door. “Croissants? They were fresh yesterday.”
“Doesn’t anybody surprise you?” McGuire asked.
“No,” she said, placing the croissants on a gilt-edged plate. “Not even you.”
“Glynnis, somebody has been watching you from that hill out there,” McGuire warned, gesturing over his shoulder. “And more than once. He’s brought food and drink with him and for all I know binoculars and a gun. I saw him, the first day I was here. He was scrambling up the hill, probably back to a car parked on that road off Chula Vista.”
She turned to face him, the dishes in her hands. “And what do you want me to do? Remain inside like a hermit? Invite him down for a swim?”
“You could call the police, at least.”
“That’s a wonderful idea, Joseph.” She walked toward him, the plates in her hand. “Then, instead of some harmless peeping Tom, I’ll have an entire shift of police officers watching my every move. No thank you.”
“How long has he been doing it?” McGuire asked.
She returned to the counter for the coffee. “Doing what?”
“Watching you, damn it.”
She carried the coffee to the table and sat down before answering. “I don’t know,” she said as she filled his cup. “Does it make a difference?”
“Don’t you care? Aren’t you concerned?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Look, this guy could be dangerous.”
She filled her cup, then began separating the croissant, pulling it apart delicately with her fingertips. “We both know, Joseph, that there are two kinds of maniacs. Dangerous ones, and the rest of us. I don’t think a man who spies from a hilltop is a danger to me or anyone.”
“How can you be so calm?”
She lifted a piece of croissant to her lips. “I have had many years of practice in avoiding panic.” She chewed her food, her eyes never leaving McGuire’s. “You’re dying to ask, aren’t you?”
McGuire forced his eyes from hers and lifted his coffee cup. “Ask what?”
“Ask what I meant a minute ago when I said not even you surprised me.”
He smiled. “So go ahead. Tell me.”
Extending a hand to his, she touched him with the tips of her long and polished fingernails. “I knew you would be that good last night,” and she smiled like a naughty little girl.
“What are you thinking?” she asked. She lay on her side, one finger tracing circles on McGuire’s chest.
“I’m thinking I better decide if I should stay here in Palm Springs and help find the man who shot Bunker Crawford and my partner,” McGuire replied. “Or just leave it to the locals. It’s their case. Not mine.” The skylight above him was cobalt blue. Music drifted in from the other room like the sound of the tide echoing through a seashell. His clothes were on the floor, her robe was back in the kitchen.
“If you stay, you could move in here.” She was already smiling at his answer with her eyes.
“I hadn’t thought of it.”
“Good thing I did.”
McGuire shook his head. “I really should return to Boston.”
“For what?”
McGuire wasn’t sure.
“I’m leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow,” Glynnis said. “There are still some things to be settled regarding Getti’s estate. I’ll be gone two days. Three at the most. Why not stay here? When I come back, we’ll talk about your career.”
“In Palm Springs?”
“No, silly.” She patted the bed beside her. “Here.”
She followed him in the Mercedes, as he drove first to the motel to check out, then to the rental agency to return the car.
“You drive,” she said when he emerged from the rental office. She was already sitting in the passenger seat of the Mercedes. “You like driving this car, don’t you?” She smiled as he slid behind the wheel.
“It’s a nice car,” McGuire agreed. He checked the traffic behind him and pulled quickly away from the curb.
“You look good driving it too,” she said. “Some men look especially good behind the wheel of certain cars. You look better in a Mercedes than you do in a Ford.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” McGuire punched the buttons on the car radio. He wished he could hear some vintage jazz. A little Miles Davis, maybe a walking blues by Zoot Sims, some classic Basie, a rollicking Oscar Peterson piano solo. But all he could find was Barry Manilow and syrupy strings.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Good jazz.” He gave up and switched the radio off.
“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” She laughed and touched him gently when he frowned at her. “Some day you’ll have to teach me about jazz,” she said. “Anyway, not everybody looks good in a Mercedes. But you do. You look terrific.” She was watching him, her head angled, her eyes flashing. “Would you mind if I turned you into a chauffeur for a few minutes?”
McGuire said he wouldn’t mind at all.
“Then stop at my bank, would you please? I have a few transactions to make.” She became thoughtful and serious. “I wonder how they’re coming along with the new figurine display? I should go and inspect it, but I don’t know anything about the security arrangements . . . how am I to judge?”
“How long will you be in the bank?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes, I guess. Maybe longer. This is a languid town, Joseph. Things don’t move along here quite as crisply as they do back east.”
“Why don’t I wander over to the museum while you’re in the bank? Give me a chance to look things over, let you know what I think.”
She brightened at the idea. “Would you really? I would appreciate it so much, Joseph. I really would.”
It was several blocks from the bank to the museum. McGuire parked the Mercedes in the VIP area, paid the general admission fee and walked through the painting gallery to the Getti Vargas Court. A heavy tapestry covered both entrances, and a painted sign on a brass music stand announced “The Getti Vargas Court is closed until further notice.”
McGuire parted the tapestry to look inside. The figurines were gone; otherwise it appeared that nothing had changed.
“Hey. You.”
McGuire turned to see a security guard striding toward him, an officious frown on his face. It was the same guard who had been on duty the night the figurine was damaged. “It’s all right,” McGuire said, dropping the tapestry back in place. “I was with Mrs. Vargas the other evening. Remember?”
The guard’s face clouded, then creased into a broad smile of recognition. “Yeah, I remember.” The smile faded. “What do you hear? They any closer to finding out who broke that little statue?”
“I thought you would know.”
“Who, me?” the guard scoffed. “They don’t tell us nothing. All’s I know is they took all those things, the little statues, away the next day. I don’t know what’s happening. Just keep people out of here, that’s all I’ve been told.”
Descending the museum steps, McGuire noticed a man peering under the Mercedes who stood and grinned sheepishly as he approached. The man was wearing garish Bermuda-length shorts and a lightweight jacket. “Thought I saw a leak under your car,” he explained. “See? Here? But it’s just water from your air conditioner, I guess. How do you like this model? I had one, an earlier Benz. Never should have sold it.”
McGuire said he liked it fine and stared silently until the man shrugged his shoulders, smiled pleasantly and sauntered off toward Palm Canyon Drive.
On his hands and knees, McGuire looked under the car. Sure enough, a small puddle of water had formed below the air-conditioner condenser. Nothing to worry about, he told himself. Another dose of desert paranoia. But he held his breath as he turned the ignition key, relieved when the motor came to life.
“They’ve done nothing?”
Glynnis Vargas stared across at McGuire as he drove along Palm Canyon Drive half an hour later.
“Just closed it off,” McGuire said. He recounted his conversation with the security guard.
“I can’t believe it,” she replied. “I’ll certainly speak to Henry about it. As soon as I return from Los Angeles.”
She made small talk while McGuire drove, gossiping about board members at the museum, all the while resting one hand lightly on McGuire’s thigh as he turned off Palm Canyon Drive onto Vista Chino.
McGuire saw the car first, parked directly in front of Glynnis Vargas’s house. “You have company,” he said guardedly.
Richard Bonnar stepped out of his unmarked car into the desert heat as they approached, his body trim and taut in a short-sleeved golfing shirt and casual slacks.
McGuire lowered the window on his side, and Bonnar leaned into the car. “Nice to see you, Mrs. Vargas,” he said, directing his broadest smile at her. “Got somethin’ for you, McGuire.”
“How did you find me?” McGuire asked.
“Friends at the motel. They called me as soon as you checked out. Been lookin’ all over for you. Care to tell me where you’ve been?”
McGuire smiled coldly back at him. “As a matter of fact, no. So what’ve you got?”
Bonnar stood back from the car and rested his hands lightly on his hips. He stared off toward the hills as he spoke.
“Found some dude a couple of nights ago out near the Coachella nature preserve area, a few miles south and east of here. Quite a mess. Guy was wearin’ nothing but a couple of thirty-eight bullets in his skull.”
“Art Lumsden told me about it.” McGuire pushed the button on the dashboard, activating the security gate. He glanced at Glynnis Vargas, who was staring trancelike at her hands, folded loosely in her lap.
Bonnar’s eyes shifted in McGuire’s direction. “Did he, now?” He looked carefully at McGuire, shot a glance at Glynnis Vargas, and caught McGuire’s eye again.
“You go ahead and drive it in,” McGuire said to Glynnis. “I’ll see you inside in a moment.”
She slid quickly across to the driver’s side and guided the car through the gates while McGuire and Bonnar watched.
“We got the slugs out of this dude back from forensics in pretty good shape,” Bonnar said, his eyes still on the Mercedes. “Did a readin’ on the riflin’ marks. Care to guess what we found?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
Bonnar stared back at McGuire, watching for his reaction. “They match, McGuire. The gun used to kill that poor sucker was the same one used to poke holes in Bunker Crawford and your partner. Now just what in hell would you make of that?”
McGuire mixed two vodka tonics at the bar while the portrait of Glynnis Vargas looked down at him with its seductive expression. Sipping from one drink, he sat staring through the tinted glass at the heat of the desert afternoon and thinking about the news Bonnar had brought with him.
The body of a naked man found in the desert. Two bullets in his head. No identification. Aged between twenty and thirty. “‘Course, it gets kinda hard to tell much after a couple of days in the sun and all,” Bonnar had added. “Wouldn’t have found him at all except a couple of young fellows in a dune buggy ran out of gas and started hikin’ cross country to Indio. Saw some buzzards in the air. Thought it was nothing but a dead dog.”
“You’re sure about the bullets matching?” McGuire had asked.
“Got the best damn forensics man in the state here,” Bonnar assured him. “Willing to bet his Porsche on it.”
“Was he killed there?” McGuire asked. “Or somewhere else and just dropped?”
“Happened there. Looks like he was kneeling in the sand and somebody put the muzzle at the back of his head. Naked when he was shot. Blood, brain tissue, all down his bare back. No sign of the weapon. No tracks, either. Somebody dragged a tumbleweed back to a rock shelf that stretches all the way to the road. Very tidy son of a gun.”
“None of his clothes around?”
“Not a sock.”
“Any idea when?”
“Two days ago. Maybe more. Like I say, you leave a body in the sun out here for a couple of days, all kinds of nasty things happen to it.”
McGuire recounted Bonnar’s information to Glynnis in the atrium room, avoiding graphic descriptions of the body. She turned quickly away and covered her mouth with her hands. “Please make me a drink,” she implored McGuire, laying a hand on his arm. “I think I would like something cool and strong.” She stood and walked to the rear of the house, leaving McGuire with his thoughts.
Who was the dead, naked man? And what connection did he have with the death of Bunker Crawford?
“A lot of things go on out in the desert I don’t want to know about,” Bonnar had said. Like an unidentified man being murdered with the same weapon used to kill a prisoner two days earlier? Naked in the desert. How did he get there? Where were his clothes?
“I have to talk to you.”
McGuire looked up to see Glynnis Vargas gliding toward him wearing an embroidered silk dressing gown. She lifted the drink he had made for her from his hand and continued walking to the window, where she stood, her back to McGuire, and took a long swallow before speaking again.
“This has to stop,” she said, in the same take-charge voice she had used with the museum curator. He recognized it as the voice of someone with the clarity and strength to make the correct choice among a confusing range of alternatives. It was a business voice, a commanding voice free of sentiment. A voice military men might assume in the heat of battle.
“You mean us?” McGuire asked. “You and me?”
“No.” She turned and smiled briefly at him. “I mean the killings.”
McGuire watched, waiting for her to continue. When she didn’t, he said: “I think you and I had better talk about some things.”
“Like what?” She began to sip her drink again, then set it aside.
“You tell me.”
Drawing a deep breath that raised her breasts high and bold against the fabric of the dressing gown, she said softly:
“I lied about Lafaro.”
“I’m not surprised.”
The smile appeared again and was gone, a fleeting, unconscious expression, like blinking an eye. “I didn’t recognize it as a name Getti might have mentioned,” she said, walking to the sofa where McGuire sat. “I heard it from Grams. The last time I saw her alive.” She seated herself at the far end of the sofa, her eyes still focused on the arid landscape beyond her window.
“Who was he?”
“She didn’t know. He was living in a cave high on a hill just beyond town, near the entrance to Death Valley. A place called Tecopa Canyon. Grams used to hike there in the day and sit on a ledge outside the cave, watching the sun set. She told me he was an army deserter. There were a lot of them out there at one time, men who didn’t want to go to Vietnam. They would live in the desert looking for a hippie commune or waiting to go to Mexico or up to Canada. Grams let some of them use my room after I left. Then she found this one living in the cave. She would bring him food and drink. Books and newspapers, blankets . . . he was somebody to mother, he was a partner in her fight against the war and the government, against authority. Grams was always fighting against authority.”
“Did you meet him?”
She leaned to place her head in her hand. “No,” she said. “I never knew him. I just remember the name. It was the last thing we talked about. A few months later, Grams died.”
“And where was Lafaro?”
“I don’t know.” She suddenly became animated. “But listen, Joe, she told me something. She said he was keeping a journal, and that he had places in the cave to hide things. There might be something there now. It’s very desolate and nothing much happens around Shoshone anyway.”
McGuire set his drink on the floor. “What are you saying?”
“Somebody may think I know about Lafaro because of my connection with Grams. Perhaps that’s why that man . . . Crawford? Maybe that’s why he was here.” She pressed her hands to her temples and shook her head. “I don’t know . . . I just want it to stop. I want the killing to stop.”
“I’ll tell Bonnar.”
She nodded. “Whatever you think is best. But please do something else first.” She stood again. McGuire could see one knee trembling against the folds of her gown. “I’ve . . . while you were making the drinks, I made reservations for Los Angeles. At the Beverly Hills Hotel. I’ll be meeting my . . . Getti’s lawyers there tomorrow. Drive me there, Joe. I need to settle a few things. I’ll return after a few days and we’ll have a wonderful time together.”
They drove into the afternoon sun, her Louis Vuitton luggage overflowing the Mercedes’ trunk. McGuire asked why they weren’t taking the Seville with its extra room and she responded that she hated the car, that it was only used to drive friends downtown for dinner at a Palm Springs restaurant.
“Besides,” she said, toying with her hair, “I told you, you suit the Mercedes. And you enjoy driving it. I can tell. You get an expression on your face like a little boy riding a new bicycle. You’re like so many tough men I’ve met. All grown up on the outside, but on the inside you’re still little boys, walking down the street with your fists clenched, looking for a tin can to kick.”
Twice during the journey along the California freeways he asked her about Lafaro. Did Grams ever describe him?
“Only in sketches. Dark, swarthy. Good-looking in a rough-hewn sort of way.”
Wasn’t she frightened of him?
“Grams was never afraid of anyone. Or anything.”
Did she mention his presence to anybody?
“No. She didn’t dare. Some of the rednecks in Shoshone would have turned him in.”
Why had Glynnis lied to him about Lafaro, saying she might have heard his name from her husband?
“I was fooling myself. And fooling you too. I didn’t want anything to affect my life here. I’m sorry.”
“You should follow your own advice,” McGuire admonished her.
“About apologizing? I owed you this one. Watch for the Hollywood Freeway exit coming up. We’ll be going north.”
They had been driving for over an hour through an endless landscape of suburban sprawl. The roadside signs announced communities that were like relics of a dead civilization, remnants of settlements swallowed in the seamless Los Angeles sprawl. Ontario, Pomona, Covina, El Monte. The western slope of the mountains faced the outer chaos of Los Angeles, and no litany of community names could contradict that fact. The expanse of shopping malls, fast-food strips, tract housing, freeways and scrapyards stretched from the mountains to the sea, the effect more lifeless in its own way than the open desert could ever be.
She guided him to Sunset Boulevard and the Beverly Hills Hotel. In the lobby he watched her take charge once again, dealing correctly with the concierge and bellman, polite yet aloof, the posture of someone accustomed to wealth and the respect it commanded.
They were escorted to a villa by the pool, a flowery room decorated in pinks and greens with a matching floral pattern on the drapes, the walls, the love seat and the canopied bed. She sat on the edge of the bed and removed her shoes. McGuire walked to her, took her head in his hands and kissed her long and deeply, feeling her mouth broaden into an expectant smile beneath his.
“You want to go back, don’t you?”
They were on the flowered quilt, McGuire on his back, his hands behind his head, Glynnis Vargas on her side watching him.
“Back where?”
“Back to Palm Springs. You want to know all about Lafaro and about the man in the desert.”
“I’ve been thinking about it.”
“That’s all you’ve been thinking about . . .”
“Not all.” He turned and cupped her breast in his hand.
“Except for the last fifteen minutes, I mean.”
“But who’s counting, right?”
“I think you should. Go back and tell Bonnar. Do your homicide detective act with him.”
“It can wait.”
She rose from the bed and began searching through her luggage for a robe. “I don’t want it to wait. I want it to be over. Besides, there’s another reason.”
McGuire watched, waiting for her to continue.
“I’ll be in meetings with my lawyers for the next two days. There are a number of decisions to be made about Getti’s estate.” She removed the robe and began shaking out the wrinkles. “Decisions have to be made about some substantial funds destined for charities and art groups. I take the responsibility very seriously. And there’s something else.”
Again, McGuire waited without prompting, playing the experienced interrogator, letting her continue at her own pace.
She stood fastening the robe around her waist, avoiding his eyes. “Getti was not a jealous man. But he was, after all, a Brazilian. There is a codicil in his will which states that if I should remarry or enter a long-term relationship with a man, I must share the management of the estate with the lawyers. It was put in for my protection. At least, that’s how the lawyers explain it. To keep me from being exploited by some greedy man with a waxed moustache and black top hat, I suppose. And I don’t want to share this responsibility with anybody. Especially with a team of high-powered Beverly Hills lawyers who would dearly love to exercise the codicil and become co-executors.”
“So you don’t want them to see me here,” McGuire offered.
“That’s right.” She leaned across the bed to him. “You understand, don’t you?”
“Just how much money do you have?”
She smiled at him, either deciding whether to tell him or in anticipation of his response. “Cash? Property? Securities?”
“The whole ball of wax.”
She said it slowly as though measuring it for him. “Two hundred and thirty million dollars.”
McGuire dropped back on the bed in shock. “What the hell . . .” he began, and looked away.
“I did it, Joe,” she said without trying to hide her amusement. “I became as rich as I wanted to be.”
She gave him the keys to the Palm Springs house and explained how to disarm the security system when entering. Then, with only the briefest of smiles and a lowering of her eyelids, she excused herself and walked to the bathroom. “I want to relax in a long bath and enjoy a good night’s sleep,” she explained. “I’ll call you in the morning.” Pausing at the door, she looked back at him. “Be careful, Joseph,” she said before closing it behind her.