Sam Littleton had folded his breakfast sausage into a paper napkin before leaving the roadside restaurant. Now he was feeding it to the cat, curled on his lap, as McGuire guided the Mercedes west through the desert, the late morning sun at their back.
“It doesn’t make sense,” McGuire muttered.
“Life? Death? The Reagan presidency?” Littleton giggled. “None of it is supposed to make sense, McGuire. And that is why we have philosophy.”
“Crawford’s death,” McGuire replied. “Who wanted him dead? Not Amos’s people.”
“Who profits, McGuire? Locate the destination of the profits and you have found the likely investor.”
“You were watching Glynnis Vargas from the hill behind her house.”
“Safe I was, McGuire. Like a church. Marlowe’s madcap minions knew nothing of my tunnels. Came and went like a free man.”
“You knew she wouldn’t call the police.”
“Never. She would pose there in her naked beauty, knowing I was watching her, before her morning swim. But to call the police, you see, would have been to risk linkage with me.”
“What were you trying to do?”
“Send her back to where she came from. Without direct contact. The perils of paranoia, McGuire. Those you don’t speak to, you don’t taint.”
“And that’s why you broke the head of the figurine that night in the museum.”
“A necessary desecration, McGuire. Isn’t life regrettable at times?” He fed the last of the sausage to Lafaro, who swallowed it and sat purring contentedly, his pink tongue sweeping his whiskers.
“Did you meet Crawford when he arrived in Las Vegas a few weeks ago?”
The traffic was growing heavy as the highway twisted its way out of the desert and through the Cajon Pass.
“Meet Bunkie?” Littleton lifted the cat to his shoulder where it nuzzled against his neck. “Oh no, McGuire. Bunkie and I, we never laid eyes on each other since before Colonel Amos romped bare ass on the Zion Park Highway. Notes in newspapers and postcards to dead-letter drops that Bunkie would find. That was all we dared.”
“Then why did Crawford come to Las Vegas?”
“Response to a postcard from me, sent from Las Vegas, which told him to check General Delivery. The message was nothing, it was innocuous. But Amos and his gang of merry men must have intercepted it, not knowing its meaning. They waited for Bunkie to bolt out of his skin. But Bunkie didn’t. Bunkie wasn’t insane, McGuire. No, no. Harassed, yes. Driven to desperation by threats of who knows what punishment for unknown sins by the fanatical Colonel Amos and his thugs. But even though Bunkie’s life and heart were shattered by the betrayal of the luscious Barbie, he remained aloof on the surface. Until Amos, impatient cretin that he was, stepped up his tirade. Telephone calls and such. Bunkie told me about them in a coded card sent the day before Amos appeared on his threshold and tilted poor Bunkie over the edge.”
“So Crawford fled here. To find what?”
“The Palm Springs magazine from the Baker bar. A ratty little place just down the road from our motel. And he discovered what Barbie had become. What she had achieved. How she had matured.”
“You were both driven mad by the bomb,” McGuire said, shaking his head. “You and Crawford. Knowing the government would never give up.”
“Two-thirds correct, McGuire. Add Amos to your looney list. Amos became mad in his own way too. Fixated, obsessed, call it what you will.” He cackled merrily. “But not just us, McGuire. Hardly us. Have you forgotten history? For forty years, the whole world was driven mad by elder, more muscular siblings of the same device.”
McGuire drove on in silence. Then: “Did you know Crawford would try to find her? That he would go to Palm Springs?”
“Never a doubt.”
“But why? Didn’t it give the game away?”
“The game was dull, McGuire. It was in overtime. And no matter what happened, neither Bunkie nor I would win. We could never win.” He stroked the cat’s chin. “All we could do was make sure the other side lost.”
Through San Bernardino they listened to newscasts on the car radio. The explosion at Death Valley was now a minor story, relegated to the last news item before the commercial break. Authorities had concluded, the announcer said without expression, that the rancher—Sam Littleton sniggered at the description—had been hoarding dynamite in his basement for a number of years. “Dynamite destabilizes with time and becomes prone to inadvertent explosion,” the announcer explained. There was also the possibility that Littleton had triggered the device himself, “since local residents considered him mentally unstable. More news in a moment.”
Littleton sat silently through the commercial that followed, looking out at the dreary landscape. “Did I vaporize them all, Mozart?” he asked in a small voice. “All who knew on Amos’s team? By God, I don’t think I did. Will the others know? Will they give a damn?” He covered his eyes with his hand. “Of course they will. Giving a damn is the basis of fanaticism, isn’t it?”
McGuire drove directly to Glynnis Vargas’s house, pulling to the side of the road just as a well-dressed man drove the last metal stake supporting a wrought-iron bracket into the irrigated lawn. Suspended from the bracket was a discreet sign bearing the name of a real estate agency.
McGuire stepped from the car as the agent drove away.
Littleton slid off the passenger’s seat, the cat in his arms.
A metallic voice crackled through the air. “Surprise, McGuire.” McGuire looked toward the source of the voice, Donald Mercer’s villa. “She fooled us all,” the voice continued. “You, me, the whole town.” It was Mercer, talking through the speaker of his security system, an eerie, disembodied voice whose words were slurred with alcohol. “She’s selling the whole damn issue. House, furniture, all the cars, everything. Just disappearing back to Brazil, I guess. Didn’t say a word to anybody except the real estate agent. How about that? Who you going to screw now, McGuire?”
McGuire stared through the iron filigree of the security gate at Mercer’s house. A shadow moved behind a curtain. A weak wind rose and tried unsuccessfully to disturb the searing heat of the sun.
“There’s an envelope in my mailbox, McGuire,” the voice continued. “Courier delivered it early this morning, addressed to you. You weren’t there so he left it with me. Take it and leave, McGuire. You don’t belong here. You never did.”
McGuire yanked the courier envelope from Mercer’s mailbox. It had been sent by G. Vargas from The Beverly Hills Hotel.
Inside, wrapped in a note written on hotel stationery, was the owner’s document for the Mercedes, transferred to McGuire. Her penmanship was exquisite, flowing with grace across the paper. “Now you can keep moving,” McGuire read. “P.S. Thank you.”
Something rattled behind him. McGuire turned to see Little Sam Littleton scurrying up the side of the hill behind Glynnis Vargas’s villa, just as he had when McGuire first saw him almost a week earlier. Clutching the cat in one hand and steadying himself against the slant of the hill with the other, he paused to look back at McGuire.
“Forget it, McGuire,” he shouted. “It’s all been illusions and assholes.” His laughter rolled down the hill as he scrambled sideways across the rocky terrain, the cat looking back at McGuire with fear and resignation in its eyes. “Illusions and assholes,” Littleton cackled again as he disappeared over the crest of the hill.
The security gate of Glynnis Vargas’s villa responded obediently to McGuire’s command from behind the wheel of the Mercedes. He guided the car past the courtyard and down the lane to the garage.
Nothing had changed inside. The furnishings were untouched, the electric power was still functioning and the telephone remained connected. McGuire scooped some ice from the refrigerator, dropped it in a crystal tumbler and poured three fingers of single-malt Scotch into it. He took a long sip, collapsed in the sofa next to the telephone and leaned back, willing himself to relax.
He didn’t know who would be responsible for the long-distance call he placed to Boston. He didn’t care.
“You’re gonna give the wife a heart attack, you keep disappearing in the desert like this,” Ollie Schantz’s gruff voice sounded in McGuire’s ear.
“Tell Ronnie I’m okay,” McGuire assured him. Suddenly he missed Boston and the greenery, the fresh coolness of the sea air, the vibrant life of a city that didn’t have to depend on water diverted from three hundred miles away for its existence.
He missed something more, he realized. He missed having someone care about him. Even if it was his best friend’s wife.
“You gonna fill me in on all this stuff some day?” Ollie demanded.
“Some day,” McGuire assured him. “Right now, see what else you can find on this guy Getti Vargas, will you?”
“Told you everything I had.”
“This time, check on his company. When it was founded. Any scuttlebutt about how he got started.”
“Where the hell am I gonna find that?”
“Try Frank Rose.”
“Think he’d know?”
“He’s in the same business, isn’t he? He can poke around. He’ll do it.”
Frank Rose was a prominent wholesale jeweller in Cambridge who had assisted the Boston Police Department in the past. Overweight and constantly brushing cigar ashes from a stained and perpetually out of fashion necktie, Rose was one of the fringe characters McGuire delighted in seeing as part of his police work.
“Yeah, Frank might know,” Ollie Schantz replied. “Or he’ll know somebody who does. I’ll call you back.”
After hanging up, McGuire walked to the windows overlooking the pool and the rocky slope behind it. There was no sign of Little Sam. He wandered through the house, touching the furniture, smelling traces of her perfume and staring moodily at her portrait over the fireplace. I know who you are now, he told the picture. If I only knew all you have done.
In the kitchen he examined cupboards and closets, not looking as much as sensing, searching for answers to questions not yet totally formed in his mind.
The link with Crawford’s death. That’s what he was missing. Bunker Crawford is shot while Glynnis Vargas is surrounded by city leaders at the museum.
She would want him dead. He was the connection between her and Lafaro, driven to panic and desperation by Amos and his years of harassment. But she didn’t kill him. She couldn’t have killed him.
He opened the door next to the closet. It led to the garage, where the cars waited in its grey gloom. The ferocious Ferrari. The glitzy Seville. Probably to be sold with the house, McGuire speculated. There will always be buyers for Cadillacs and Ferraris in Palm Springs. Always someone to drive them. Or have someone drive . . .
He snapped his fingers, shouted a curse, and bolted for the front door.
The metal drawer slid open and brought with it the familiar odour of death. Cool and dry and acidic.
The morgue attendant looked at Art Lumsden and raised his eyebrows. Lumsden nodded and the attendant pulled the plastic sheet away from the body’s face. The man had been deeply tanned and surpassingly handsome, with a strong dimpled chin and thick black curly hair.
“Yes,” McGuire said. “That’s him.”
“That’s who?” Lumsden growled.
“The guy I saw in the police station, trying to talk with one of your Mexican cops the night Crawford was shot. He was there when Ralph and I left, saying we’d be back for Crawford. He heard Bonnar give Ralph and me directions to our motel. He knew where we were going and when we would get there.”
McGuire turned from the corpse. Lumsden nodded to the attendant again, who replaced the sheet over the dead man’s face and rolled the drawer back into the refrigerated storage vault.
“What made you remember him?” Lumsden asked. He pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and peeled away the cellophane.
“Your Mexican cop couldn’t understand him. It seemed strange to me at the time. A Mexican not understanding Spanish. Besides, I saw him again. Just a quick glance in the doorway of Glynnis Vargas’s house. I didn’t recognize him then. I do now.”
“So who the hell is he?” Lumsden stood with the cigar halfway to his mouth.
“I don’t know his name. But he was Brazilian. See, he wasn’t speaking Spanish, he was speaking Portuguese. And he was Glynnis Vargas’s chauffeur.”
“Think paraffin tests will prove anything?” McGuire asked. They were seated in the police station cafeteria sipping coffee. Good coffee, McGuire noticed. And lots of fresh pastry. Christ, do these cops realize just how good they’ve got it down here?
“Not much,” Lumsden shrugged. He was chewing on his unlit cigar. “If he did it, shot Crawford and your buddy I mean, he got his one day later. Then spent a couple of days in the desert, couple more in cold storage. Couldn’t be much powder left on his hands. Might try it though.”
“He shot Crawford and Innes,” McGuire said dully. “Then he was killed the next night. With the same gun.”
“By whom?”
McGuire looked at the black detective. “Didn’t it bother you that he was stark naked when he was shot?” McGuire asked. “Not undressed after being murdered, but buck naked and alive out there in the desert?”
“Guess so,” Lumsden shrugged. “But hell, McGuire, it was more important to find out who the dude was than why he was stripped for action.”
“He was having sex,” McGuire said. “Or about to. Or had been. It doesn’t matter.”
Lumsden’s smile broadened to a wide vista of perfect white teeth. “You telling me his woman shot him because he was a lousy lay?”
McGuire allowed himself a small, quick grin. “No. She stripped him to slow down identification of the body. And she killed him because he was the link back to the murder of Bunker Crawford.”
“Who did?”
“The only woman who had any contact with him. She kept him hidden, out of sight most of the time . . .”
“Glynnis Vargas?” Lumsden sat back in his chair. “You out of your mind, McGuire?”
“Not anymore,” McGuire assured him.
“Where the hell is she?”
“Brazil, I expect.”
Lumsden nodded and smiled coldly. “Back where she started.”
“That’s one distinction about the place,” McGuire agreed. “You know the other one?”
“Yeah,” Lumsden growled bitterly. “No fucking extradition treaty.”
“We signed the contract to sell three days ago,” the real estate agent said. Her hair colour had originated in a bottle and her skin bore the smooth, pale sheen of expensive notepaper. She smiled up at McGuire and raised one hand, a heavy gold charm bracelet dangling from the wrist, to adjust her rhinestone necklace. “Would you care to see the property?”
“I’ve seen it,” McGuire snapped, frowning. “I’m living in it.”
The agent jerked back as though she had been slapped. “Living there? With whose permission?”
“Mrs. Vargas’s,” McGuire said. He showed her the house key. “She gave me this.”
The agent brought her hands together where they rubbed and comforted each other. Lady, McGuire said to her silently, your hands are twenty years older than your face.
“Well, this is most extraordinary,” the woman fretted. She looked back and forth at documents scattered across her desk. “We have no record of an occupant in the house during the sale period. The maid had been dismissed. . . .”
“I’ll be there two more days,” McGuire said. “Three at the most. What I want to know is, what happens to the money when you sell the property?”
“Oh, that’s privileged. Between our firm and our client, Mrs. Vargas . . .”
“Who is under investigation for a number of felonies.” McGuire showed her his detective badge. “I don’t need details. Just a few quick facts. Where does the money go?”
She shuffled her papers nervously. “Mrs. Vargas? Under investigation? Obviously, someone has made an error. . . .”
“Obviously,” McGuire said calmly.
“Yes, here it is.” She selected a sheet of rag paper with an embossed letterhead. “Arrangements have been made . . .” McGuire snatched the paper from her hand and began reading it.
“Now see here!” she snapped, before walking quickly from her office.
She returned with two men who demanded to know what McGuire was doing, but he had learned everything he needed and brushed past them to the door, leaving the controlled coolness of the office interior and entering the unbridled heat of the afternoon sun.
“She set it up through her lawyer.” McGuire was propped against the headboard of Glynnis Vargas’s bed beneath the open skylight, the telephone receiver at his ear. “The day before Bunker was killed. Power of attorney. Transfer of funds to Geneva. Investments in Swiss securities with short-term roll-overs. No cash. So there’s nothing to be seized on this side of the ocean.”
“Not the move of your average brass-bound bimbo,” Ollie Schantz growled through the receiver. “Why in hell can’t a woman that smart do something worthwhile, like run for president? “
McGuire sipped his Scotch. “Find anything on her husband?”
“Yeah, a bit. Frank Rose knew of him. Jewel dealers move in small circles it seems. All built on trust and reputation. This Vargas’s rep was good except for one flaw when he got started. Rose called a buddy of his in New York to get all the dirt. Back in the late sixties, Vargas was a buyer for the biggest wholesale gem house in Brazil. Guy was an up-and-comer. Good looking, sharp, knew his stuff. Anyway, the company he worked for got a lead on a cache of goods, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, ready to be dumped. All legal, the owner had a cash-flow problem. Getti checked the gems, negotiated the deal, got a hell of a price for his company, and came to L.A. for the opening financing. He only needed ten per cent to get possession of the goods.”
“How big was the deal?” McGuire asked.
“About twenty-five million in all.”
“And?”
“You’ll like this part, Joseph. He holds off his Brazilian people and two weeks later he’s got the goods himself. Then he forms his own company. Pays two-and-a-half million to get the gems, peddles them in small lots on the open market, using all the contacts he’d built up working for his employer, pays off the balance and comes home to Rio with about ten million profit.”
McGuire smiled and nodded.
“See what a mere two-and-a-half million bucks can do for you, Joseph?” Schantz chided. “Once had a rich man tell me, ‘Turning a thousand dollars into two thousand dollars is hard work. But turning a million into two million is inevitable.’ Something to it after all, I think.”
“So that’s how Getti Vargas got started,” McGuire said.
“Your standard businessman’s double-cross. Happens on Wall Street a thousand times a day before lunch. You mix a few selling smarts with a little leverage, add some greed, and it’s gonna happen. The wholesaler he worked for never did figure out how he laid his hands on the two-and-a-half big ones to get the goods. Aside from bilking them out of some profit, everything was legal. After a while, all was forgiven.”
“I know where he got the two-and-a-half million,” McGuire said.
“Tell me about it when you get back.” Ollie’s voice dropped. “When the hell will that be, anyway?” he asked. “Lot of things you haven’t been telling me, Joseph. Whenever you’re not bitching at me it means you’re about to back your ass into a meat grinder.”
“Soon, Ollie,” McGuire replied. “Soon.”
After hanging up, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Two things disturbed McGuire when he awoke an hour later.
The first was the telephone, ringing insistently. McGuire reached for the receiver, rolled on his back, mumbled his name and opened his eyes.
“What the hell are you doing down there, McGuire?” Fat Eddie Vance sputtered through the receiver. “The motel tells me you checked out two days ago. You’re supposed to be either helping out down there or getting back here. I called Captain Bonnar and he gave me this number. He also says you’ve been both uncooperative and out of touch . . . did you decide to take a vacation? Just like that? Who do you think you are anyway, McGuire? McGuire?”
McGuire set the receiver aside without answering; Fat Eddie’s voice rattled, ghostlike, from the telephone as McGuire lay on his back, staring up at the skylight directly over his head, and at the footprints around its perimeter where one, two, he counted, three people had stood at the Plexiglas bubble and looked down at him as he slept. Their footprints were there on the glass, McGuire knew, because they wanted him to see them when he awoke. They wanted him to know.
Leaving the house five minutes later, he locked the door behind him and drove slowly through town, suspicious of every car he passed, every pedestrian who glanced in his direction.
Fat Eddie’s question echoed through his head as he sat on the balcony of a motel room near the interstate highway, staring out at the late afternoon shadows spreading across the desert.
Why was he still here? Because there were more answers to be found? Not many, he acknowledged.
He knew Glynnis Vargas had arrived in Palm Springs to begin a new life as a society widow, a patron of the arts prepared to enjoy a massive fortune accumulated by her husband and launched with her money more than twenty years ago. Only her photograph as a Palm Springs celebrity tripped her up. Otherwise Amos, Marlowe and Peppler would have died still chasing their tails. Or Lafaro’s. Who was as dead as the young girl Barbie, the bastard child who sat listening to Mozart at her grandmother’s knee in Shoshone.
Shoshone. Where Grams’s skeleton lay in a cave. “In a special place.” Deposited there by her adoring granddaughter.
He knew Glynnis Vargas had sent him—and, by connection, Marlowe and Peppler—to the cave in Shoshone as a diversion. Marlowe and Peppler assumed the skeleton was the missing woman who had driven the car through the Zion Tunnel, a car with cement blocks and enough radium clock faces in the trunk to fool a cheap Geiger counter.
This, Marlowe and Peppler had decided, was the missing link. The cool, unflustered woman who had driven Amos into the tunnel more than twenty years earlier. And McGuire, they suspected, had learned of the cave from Littleton. Mad Little Sam. When the tracking device on the Mercedes indicated that’s where McGuire was heading, they responded immediately. To cut him off. To invade Littleton’s house. To trip whatever device Littleton had set on the bomb.
Eventually someone would return and discover that the remains in the cave were of a woman too old to be young, sexy and provocative when the ransom had occurred. McGuire had taken time to examine the teeth. She had been at least sixty years old, probably seventy, when she had died.
Grams helped her pull off the ransom. Probably coordinated everything. It would be Grams who had driven the car west through the tunnel to pick up Glynnis and the ransom, while Amos sped frantically in the opposite direction searching for the code to deactivate the bomb.
“She despised authority,” Glynnis (was her real name actually Barbie? McGuire wondered) told him. Grams hated the war, scoffed at the military, worshipped the concept of the individual taking action in an unfair world.
She would have loved the idea of making the army look like fools.
It had all come apart one evening three weeks ago when Bunker Crawford saw the evidence for himself in a Palm Springs magazine and arrived at Glynnis Vargas’s house, driven by panic and desperation to demand . . . what? His share of the fortune? Something to compensate him for a life of quiet desperation and harassment? Or that she return to wherever she had been?
Crawford’s arrival demanded bold steps by Glynnis. The first was having her lover, the chauffeur whose body lay unclaimed in the morgue, kill Crawford and cripple Ralph Innes from ambush.
And the following night, the night McGuire drove her home from the museum, the night the chauffeur greeted her with a kiss at the door, was the night she took the handsome young Brazilian into the desert, perhaps with a promise of passion, to kill him with the same gun he had used on Crawford.
And now someone, somewhere, would continue to prevent information about the theft of a nuclear weapon being made public. Especially the fact that the US government had concealed the fact for over twenty years.
Little Sam had been right: the lie must be believed. Everything would be done to support the lie.
He wondered where Little Sam was now. Little Sam and Lafaro, his crippled cat. Wherever they were, he hoped they were finally free. Free from the grip of the bomb in the basement. Free from the paranoia.
But someone knows, McGuire reminded himself. The footprints on the skylight weren’t made by real estate agents.
Someone knows.
He entered the motel room, locking the sliding door behind him and sitting in a plastic-covered chair in the furthest corner.
The day grew darker. McGuire wouldn’t venture out in the dark. Not that night. Not in that place.
Several hours later, he fell into a shallow, restless sleep.