THE REST OF the morning and well into the afternoon was spent with ice packs and Band-Aids and a long, slow soak in the club’s Jacuzzi. I limped back to the office by midafternoon to find Bunch sitting at the desk, which was littered with fresh photographs, and talking on the telephone to Kiefer.
“I don’t care if he didn’t leave a note, Dan. He killed himself because of Nestor and the two women. He confessed it to Dev.”
Bunch put a hand over the mouthpiece. “Kiefer says he still doesn’t have enough tangible evidence to move against Gilbert.”
“Yeah,” he said into the telephone again. “I do understand, Dan. But what happens if that bastard gets away with it? How many others is he going to cut up and sell?”
I glanced through the photographs; they showed Taylor grappling my head under his arm and flailing away with a fist, Taylor hauling back to kick me as I curled on the ground, Taylor using both hands as a club across my shoulders.
“No,” said Bunch, “I’m not blaming you. But Gilbert’s not going to close up shop just because Matheney’s dead. There’s too much money in it.” Kiefer said something and Bunch answered, “All right. We’ll see what we can find out. Tell fucking assistant DA Maddox we’ll give him a case so tight even he can’t screw it up. Right—good-bye.”
He hung up and heaved a long sigh. “They’re still not going to move against Gilbert. Nothing in Matheney’s suicide supports a warrant for Antibodies.”
“I didn’t think it would,” I said. “Tell me, Bunch, why couldn’t you take at least one shot with me on top?”
“Tell you the truth, Dev, you’re not very photogenic.” He held up one that showed me struggling to get back on my feet, a close-up from the rear. “That’s your best side.”
I chose half a dozen of Taylor’s most active poses. “Have you faxed these on to Schute yet?”
“No, just got them back from the lab.”
I dialed New York, hoping it wasn’t too late to catch the man in his office. He was there, his secretary said, waiting to hear from me. I noted the relief in her voice.
“Kirk? What’s the story?”
“We have the evidence. Hang on and I’ll fax you the stills so you can get started. I’ll send the videotape by Fed Ex as soon as it’s developed.”
“Fine—good work! Do the pictures show him pursuing a normal life?”
“Well, yeah—for a motorcycle gang.” I added, “They’ll convince a jury he’s able to move around.”
“Fine, fine! I’ll get your check to you in the morning.”
On that pleasant note we wished each other long life, the best of everything, and so on. When I hung up, Bunch was standing by the door. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“We. We’re going to talk to Gilbert’s two minions.” Bunch liked that word, minion. And there wasn’t much chance to use it.
It was almost quitting time when we made it across town through the afternoon traffic. Bunch drove and I held on, trying not to let the stiffly sprung vehicle stir up the twinges and the bruises that were now turning puffy and discolored. We parked down the block from Antibodies’ gate and waited until the Blazer and the Toyota pickup pulled out. One turned north, the other south.
“Which one?” asked Bunch.
“The little guy. I’ve had enough of big ones for today.”
Bunch swung into traffic behind the Toyota. “Hell, Dev, none of those guys were that big.”
“All together they were.”
We tailed the truck south on Santa Fe into Littleton and an ugly building on South Broadway. It had been converted from a storage shed into a country and western bar complete with sawdust on the floor and wormy barn siding on the walls. Rodeo posters were splotched here and there between wagon wheels, branding irons, and horse tack.
“Is this Vercher or Dunlap?”
“Earl Vercher. Toby Dunlap drives the Blazer.”
The short, pudgy man went to the bar instead of to a table and waved a familiar hand at the blonde serving drinks. She bobbed her head, stiff curls twanging. Bunch and I sat on each side of him. The jukebox moaned something about someone whose heart was hung over because it had chugalugged on love.
“Hello, Earl,” said Bunch. “How’s the shoulder?” I watched in the bar mirror as he turned a startled face toward the big man.
“I know you?”
“You do now. More important, I know you.”
The bartender brought Earl his Pabst and asked us what our pleasure was. “Same.”
“What you want with me?”
“We want to beat the shit out of you, Earl. Whether we do or not is up to you.”
“Hey—what—”
He tried to get up but I gripped the back of his neck and pushed him down onto the stool. Turning, he saw me, and his eyes widened. “Jesus—what happened to your face?”
“That’s his war paint, Earl. Always puts it on before he kills somebody.”
“Now listen, you people … .”
“Let’s step out back a couple minutes, Earl.”
“Hey, now, no—”
We each took an arm and lifted him a couple inches off the floor, striding quickly for the hallway that led past the Pointer and Setter doors to a fire door. It opened to the alley.
“You people, you hurt my shoulder! I’m going to call the—”
He didn’t get anything else out. Bunch’s fist caught Earl just below the sternum, and he doubled and fell knees first and then face flat onto the gritty tar beside the overfull trash can. A ragged figure poking through the garbage looked at him for an instant and then at us, and turned and hunched quickly away.
“Get up, Vercher. Get up or stay down for good. It’s your choice.”
“Goddamn, my shoulder!”
“Better make that choice, Earl. Or we’ll make it for you.”
“What you people want? For God’s sake, I ain’t done nothing—what you people want?”
“We want you to tell us about Gilbert and Antibodies.”
“Oh, man. Oh, no—no, I can’t—”
I lifted him by the collar and belt; Bunch hit him again—nothing hard, just scientifically placed. After a while the man stopped retching and looked up from the ground. “I ain’t got but one good arm. You people think you’re real tough beating up on a man got only one good arm.”
I explained things to him. “You’re not going to have any good arms in about two seconds.”
“Honest to God, I don’t know what goes on there, I just work there, that’s all!”
“You broke into my office.”
He hesitated, peering at me. I hauled him up so he could get a good look. “Yes—yes—we broke in! Gilbert told us to! He wanted us to look for anything you had on the company. Anything in your files.”
“You didn’t find anything.”
“No. But you came by asking questions. Gilbert wanted to know what you were up to.”
“You snatched Nestor Calamaro too, didn’t you?”
“Who?”
“The guy who worked at the Apple Valley Turkeys plant—you and Dunlap, you grabbed him when he was walking home from work.”
“No—nothing like that. We give him a ride, is all. Doc Matheney wanted to talk to him and he asked us to go out and give him a ride over. That’s all.” He looked from Bunch to me. “You guys ain’t the cops. You can’t get the law on me.”
“We don’t need to get the law,” Bunch said with a smile. “We’ve got you.”
I leaned over the sweating man, whose skin was now slightly green. “You’re going to wish we were cops. We do things cops can’t.”
“Steady, Dev. Don’t get excited, now.” Bunch explained to Vercher: “My friend’s streak of mean comes out when he really gets mad. You don’t want to see that.”
“I told you already I only work at that place. I don’t know what Gilbert and that other doctor’s up to. I swear to God!”
“He protesteth too much, don’t he, Dev?”
I nodded. “You know enough to be worried about it.”
Vercher’s mouth tightened above the bone of his long jaw and the sweat popped out again in the lines of his brow. “I’m gonna be sick.”
He was. We waited. Finally, Bunch hauled the soggy face up from the tar. “Gawd, you stink.”
“Well, I just been sick!”
“You’re going to be a hell of a lot sicker real soon,” I said. “In fact, you might get sick enough to die.”
“Oh Jesus—don’t, fellas.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can control this rabid animal, Earl.”
“What is it you people want?”
“A written statement for the cops.”
He looked from Bunch to me. “About what?”
“Just tell the truth about what you do for Gilbert. About picking up Nestor Calamaro in the van. About taking him to the plant. And about what happened to him and the two women.”
“I ain’t … I didn’t see them do nothing. We clean up, is all. We help get things ready and then we clean up when the … the operation’s done.”
“You don’t help out with the operations?”
“No! Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Matheney, they do the technical stuff. Toby and me, we take care of the shipping and supplies and stock and the janitorial stuff—you know.”
“That includes the burner? Putting parts in the burner?”
“Well, yeah … .”
“Write it down.”
He didn’t want to, but we convinced him. He wrote it out right there, using a garbage can lid as a desk and our presence as inspiration. It wouldn’t be worth a thing in court, but it would provide Kiefer with ammunition to get the assistant DA involved.
“I wasn’t around when … I mean, they—Gilbert and Matheney and Miss Whortley—they wouldn’t let us in the operating room, you know?”
“Just put down everything you know about it. And cheer up,” said Bunch. “The first liar always has an edge.”
“I ain’t lying!”
“You ain’t writing, either,” I said. “And you’d better.”
When he had it down, he signed and dated it, and we drove him to a small tavern near police headquarters and called Kiefer to meet us. The detective slid into the booth and stared at my face. “That something I better know about?”
“Something you’d better not know about.”
He grunted and turned his attention to Vercher, and sniffed the sour air around the man. “You’re doing this of your own free will?”
“Tell him yes, Earl.”
“Yes.”
“Earl knows the game is over,” I said. “He wants to get a break by making a statement.”
“I can’t promise a thing, Mr. Vercher. You ought to know that.”
“He knows.” I handed him the statement. “Read it over. See what you think it’s worth.”
The sergeant read the handwritten pages carefully, pausing here and there to work through the awkward penmanship. When he looked up, he shook his head. “A lot of this about Matheney and Gilbert is hearsay. He didn’t see them actually operate on those people.”
“I never witnessed nothing, officer. I told these gentlemen I never knew what Gilbert was doing.”
“But it corroborates what we suspect, Dan. And it makes a definite link between a missing man who turned up dead, Dr. Matheney, and Antibodies Research. It’s good enough for a warrant,” I said.
Vercher had been doing some thinking while Kiefer read. “Toby might make a statement too. Maybe if you can work a deal for us both, you’ll have both our statements.”
Bunch smiled. “See, Dan? Citizenship at work.”
Kiefer finished his coffee and stood, gesturing to Vercher. “Yeah. All right—let’s you go call this Toby. We’ll see what he has to say to me.” He glanced at us. “Voluntarily.”
We watched the two men leave the tavern. Bunch sipped at his beer. “You think Maddox will act on Vercher’s statement?”
“He won’t want to, that’s for certain.” I drained my beer, keeping my face in shadow so it wouldn’t scare the other patrons. “In fact, he’ll probably delay as long as he can, and that’ll be enough to let Gilbert hear about it and get away.”
Bunch rubbed his jaw, the bristles rasping. “Yeah. It would save a lot of important people a lot of embarrassment if Gilbert just disappeared.”
“And if they had time to sell their Antibodies stock before the story made news.”
“Wouldn’t Maddox be popular then!”
“A real boost to an ambitious man’s career.”
Bunch drained his glass. “Let’s go see the Mother Superior. I got an idea.” He explained it on the way over.
She did not want to see us. The maid said the senora wasn’t home. I recognized her as one of the janitorial crew, and she recognized me too, because a slight tilt of her head told me that Mrs. Chiquichano was listening at the top of the stairs.
“We’ll come in and wait for her,” I said, and gently lifted the woman aside. “Please tell her we’re enjoying her hospitality.”
Mrs. Chiquichano came quickly down the stairs, heels driving against the carpet like a pair of hammers. “I want you out of my house. You have no right to be in my house—get out!”
“You know Dr. Matheney committed suicide last night?” asked Bunch.
The woman’s black eyes widened slightly and she seemed to hold her breath. “No!”
“It’s in all the papers. Got some more good news for you too: Gilbert’s two assistants are down at police headquarters right now. They’re making statements, lady, to the district attorney, trying to save their asses. Your name’ll come up sooner or later.”
She shook her head, voice stifled by tension.
“Maybe you and Gilbert should talk things over.”
“What do you mean?”
“Call him. Tell him you have to meet him. Tell him it’s important.”
“He won’t come—that one doesn’t do what I tell him.”
“If he doesn’t, say you’ll go to the police.”
She still couldn’t bring herself to agree to that. “Why? Why should I call him?”
“It’s you or him.” Bunch told her the details of Vercher’s statement. “So you better call him. You tell him you want more money to keep silent or you’ll go to the police yourself. He’ll believe you.”
“What do you mean, it’s me or him?”
“I mean if you call him, we’ll tell the police you cooperated. If you don’t, we’ll see that you’re prosecuted and sent to jail as an accessory to murder.”
It was a good reason. She was vulnerable, and she knew it. But she still wanted some kind of guarantee. Knowing what she herself was capable of, she couldn’t trust anyone else.
Bunch sketched in the facts: “Lady, we’re not guaranteeing a damn thing. We’ll tell the DA you helped us get Gilbert, but that’s it. And as far as I’m concerned, we shouldn’t be doing that much for you. As far as I’m concerned, we should just call the cops right now and have them nail your fat ass to the wall. But we want Gilbert more than we want you, and you’re the way we can get him.”
She thought that over and finally nodded. “You will give me time after I call? You will give me time to get my money before you call the police?”
“Yeah. We’ll give you time. Now here’s what you say.” Bunch told her exactly what to say and where they should meet. She dialed and we listened to her follow the script, complete with a few convincing variations when Gilbert, angry and worried, tried to get out of meeting with her. She hung up. “He’s coming.”
“Fine,” smiled Bunch. “And so are you.”
Our plan was to use Senora Chiquichano to get Gilbert alone. Gilbert, I was certain, had no intention of volunteering his presence to Kiefer’s tender embrace, and when he learned of Vercher’s statement, he would be gone. But not if we had him, and especially if we had him on tape talking to Chiquichano about the murders.
The place was a tangle of overgrown riverbank along the South Platte, near enough to downtown for a quick drive to the police station, yet secluded enough that we could handle Gilbert if necessary without witnesses. Chiquichano had told the man that she didn’t want to chance being seen with him, and he’d finally agreed, saying he would be there between seven-thirty and eight. That would make it just about dark, and it gave us time to get set up and hidden in the bushes that formed a thick screen between the riverbank and the almost empty railroad yard behind. Across the narrow stream and its banks of dried gray mud, the bike path ran like a ribbon of tar, and the occasional jersey of a cyclist zipped by, a flicker of brightness behind the colorless undergrowth.
“I don’t like this place.” The woman stood restlessly while Bunch arranged the microphone and transmitter under the light jacket she wore. “I don’t like doing this thing.”
From my seat behind a thicket of hackberry, I said, “Think of it as another investment, senora—the chance to spend your money in the near future.”
She gingerly paced back and forth across the corner of open field and tried not to cut her shoes on the broken glass that always marks forgotten corners of the city. After a while, she said, “I don’t think he will come.”
“He can’t afford not to. Relax.”
Bunch, about twenty yards away and hidden in the undergrowth that grew rank along the damp riverbank, gave a low whistle. I peered through the leaves and saw, moving with slow deliberation across the wide and empty rail yard, which was marked here and there with rusty spur lines, a brown Cadillac, lights out and ghostly in the gloom of twilight.
“He’s on his way. You remember what to tell him?”
The answer came slightly breathless over the transmitter. “About the two men—yes.”
On the horizon, the towers of the city were beginning to light up with glowing windows, and toward the north, a steady river of headlights flowed across the Sixth Avenue overpass. Nearby but elevated out of sight, the traffic on busy I-25 made an unbroken rushing noise that drowned out the feeble sound of the South Platte.
The senora stood and watched the brown car pick its way across the uneven bumps of railroad track to come within fifty yards and halt. She waited. I waited. Bunch waited.
The driver’s door swung open; the car’s dome light remained dark, and the fuzzy haze of twilight made it difficult to see clearly. Dimly, I saw a shadow hunch at the car door’s hinge and hold still. A moment later, an explosion of flame speared toward Mrs. Chiquichano from the muzzle of a powerful hunting rifle. She gave a strangled, high-pitched noise and flung her hands up to the empty sky as she fell backward and thudded unmoving onto the dirt.
“Son of a bitch!”
I saw Bunch’s shape sprint out of the shrubbery toward the Bronco as the Cadillac swung away and started lurching and jouncing toward the city streets.
The woman was dead. The shot had caught her in the throat and sliced an artery, and the gush of blood had sprayed up the side of her face and down across her shoulder and arm. By the time I reached her, only a last tiny pulse or two throbbed out, and, looking at the corpse, I knew that the heavy slug I found in my Healey’s fire wall would match the one that had driven like a hammer through the woman’s jaw to almost sever her neck.
The straining engine of Bunch’s Bronco roared away across the tracks as Gilbert’s Cadillac fishtailed in a patch of loose gravel and tried to avoid being cut off. I saw a long arm balance momentarily against the outside mirror of the Bronco, and Bunch’s pistol spurted flame as the brown car made a squealing turn for another exit. Bunch floored the pedal and leapt high across an embankment to pancake in a cloud of gravel and weeds and spin toward the heeling Cadillac. Another shot by Bunch, and I saw the windshield of Gilbert’s sedan splinter and the car careen wildly in a full turn before aiming back at me. It gained speed and roared, dented and steaming, straight at me. I managed to squeeze off one quick round at the shattered windshield before diving for the thin shelter of a clump of saplings as the straining metal scorched past in an odor of dust and steam and burning oil. It flew by, Gilbert’s eyes bulging and his mouth open helplessly. Two hubcaps sprung like satellites as the Cadillac sailed over the bank and plunged with a foaming wash into the shallow river. A broken branch bobbed gently against the windshield, then swirled free to drift downstream.
The paperwork took the rest of the night and once more reminded Bunch and me why we left police work in the first place. Kiefer finally let us go home as the dark towers of the city were being outlined by a sky lightening into gray. It was the same obscure mix of night and day that had seen the beginning of things, and for a moment it seemed as if no time at all had passed, as if we had simply moved in a big circle back to the start. But this time the sun was coming up, and when I reached my apartment, Mrs. Ottoboni’s porch light could barely be seen against the growing dawn.
Early the next afternoon, I detoured through North Denver on my way to the office. In the hard daylight the barrackslike apartment house looked even dingier, its scabrous paint and neglected roof no longer hidden in shadow. A clutch of children played in the dirt of the front yard, and as I stopped the car, they fell silent and stared. When I opened my door, they slipped into the dark hallway like timid animals.
A nervous woman answered my knock at apartment 1, her eye and cheek peeking under the door’s taut chain.
“Do you remember me? The private detective looking for Mr. Calamaro?”
The answer was a silent half-nod.
“I came by to tell you Senora Chiquichano is dead. No more mordida.” The rent on the cramped apartments should go down, too, but they would find out about that soon enough. “You understand?”
“La patrona? Murió?”
“Dead. Yes.”
The eye did not blink as the door slowly closed. A click of the lock. I didn’t know if the woman believed me or not.
I hoped to find the check from Security at the office among the letters. Or at least a job offer. But no one offered, and the check was still in the mail. I did have an ornately inscribed letter from El Salvador, however, signed by Felix Frentanes, which, with all the formal politeness a professional scribe could muster, asked for information about his wife. There were no job offers on the telephone either. Instead, a somber little message from Mrs. Gutierrez told Bunch that Nestor’s family had received a large check from some company in America and were grateful. The only other message was from Archy. He had transplanted the engine of my old Healey into the body of another one and, if he did say so himself, thought he did a pretty good job.