“Just to get some shots of her in action. Send them down to Venezuela for mass distribution.”
“Why?”
“Use your head, you silly bastard. They know her face down there. Two brothers-in-law in the government. Notorious heiress having fun in the United States. But he hasn’t been able to trap her.”
“Did he give up?”
“Chipper, baby, he never gives up. Some day he’ll juice up a couple of her drinks, and she’ll go wobbling in there like a lamb, with spit on her chin, and give a hell of a performance.”
“So if she brought this guy here, why not now? Two birds with one stone. Like the time with that state senator and that ambassador’s wife.”
After a silence, Claude Boody said, “We certainly got mileage out of that little session. You know, sometimes you show vague signs of intelligence. What he’ll want done is keep this character and the Melgar woman stashed until the last drunk leaves. If he approves.”
“I don’t see how he has too much choice.”
“I should get to a doctor,” Dru said plaintively. “Every breath is like knives.”
“What I’ll do,” Claude said, “you sit tight here and I’ll go lay it on for him, which I think we should have done in the first place.”
“He makes mistakes too.”
“How often? How big?”
‘’Look, he can punish me. He can give me the Melgar broad.“
“You’re very very funny.”
I gave a weak, heartbreaking groan and moved very feebly. I needed to manage a sudden change in the odds. And I couldn’t do it face down.
“He’s coming out of it,” Chip said.
I writhed over onto my back, then started up suddenly. They stood up and moved back. I got halfway to a sitting position, eyes staring, then fell back with a long gargling sound, held my breath, let my mouth sag open, left my eyes half closed.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Chip whispered.
“You hit him too goddam hard with that thing!”
I wondered how long they would take. I hadn’t oxygenated, but I thought I could manage two minutes of it. They moved in again, squatting close. I felt fingers on my wrist.
“He isn’t breathing, but his heart’s still going good,” Claude said. He released my wrist.
I snatched Claude by the windsor knot, and I hooked a hand on the back of Chip’s neck, and slammed their heads together as hard as I could. I had fear and anger and a desperate haste working for me. It was like using a simultaneous overhand right and a wide left hook. Bone met bone with quite a horrid sound, much like smacking two large stones together underwater. Bone met bone hard enough to give a rebound that sent them both spilling over backward, settling slowly into the floor, both heads split and bleeding.
I glanced at the girl, slapped at Claude, pulled the weapon out from between belt and soft belly. It was oddly light for such a large and ugly caliber. She had pushed herself halfway up, and she stared at me, eyes and mouth wide open. We were in a sizeable and elegant bedroom. I let her look down the barrel and she said, “Wha-wha-what are you going to do?”
I moved back to the door, stepping over new acquaintances. There was an inside bolt and a chain. I fastened them. There was a vent, a continuous whisper of washed air. The windows were closed and looked sealed. I had the idea sound would not travel far from that room. My conversational acquaintances hadn’t seemed concerned about it. If any did get out of the room, it would have to fight that ubiquitous Hawaiian cotton candy music.
There was an object in the side pocket of Chip’s green blazer. I took it out. I imagine our limey cousins would term it a home made cosh. It was an eight inch section of stubby pipe wrapped with a thick padding of black friction tape. I put Boody’s hand gun in my jacket pocket and went over to the bed and sat on the edge of it, facing the sun bunny. Her eyes were puffed and apprehensive, her bland little face tear-stained.
“What do you want anyhow?” she demanded with false bravado.
I gave her a light touch across the ribs with the piece of pipe. She gave a thin whistling scream, the noise a shot rabbit will sometimes make. She lay back and said, “Oh, don’t. Oh, golly, there’s something all broke. I can feel it kind of grind. You fell with your whole weight on me.”
“I have a headache, Dru, and a nasty burn on the back of my hand, and you were very anxious to play around with some sort of an electric needle. I lost a very marvelous woman in that clambake down there, and I am going to ask questions. Whenever I don’t like the answer, I’m going to give you another little rap, with this.”
“What if you ask something I don’t know?”
“You get a little rap for luck. Chip wired the explosive into Menterez’s boat. Why?”
“To kill Alconedo. Miguel Alconedo. He’d goofed somehow. I don’t know how. You see, we took down his orders for him. He was supposed to kill Almah, then take the boat up to Boca del Rio, ten miles off shore, where he thought we’d be waiting for him. He thought it was all set so we could take him someplace where he could go from there back to Cuba and be safe. But there wasn’t any intention of that. The other three kids aboard, they didn’t know anything about anything. Chip sneaked off the night before we left, after midnight when a lot of the lights went out, and fixed the boat.”
“Who did you think I might be? Why did you try to check me?”
“Chip wondered about you. You sort of didn’t look like a tourist. You see, Almah couldn’t be trusted any more. She told Taggart too much about things. And she got too anxious about getting that money. She was okay up until the time of the Mineros thing, and then she started cracking up. They thought that if she told Taggart too much, maybe she told somebody else too, maybe the wrong people, and maybe some C.I.A. was down there. Chip thought that’s what you might be. Who are you anyhow?” She attempted a small shy friendly smile.
“Who got Taggart?”
“Gee, I don’t know. I mean I’m not sure. I heard them making a joke about it. About the monkey’s paw. It could have been a man named Ramon Talavera. They laughed a lot about Taggart. I know they picked him up before he had made any contact. They knew where he was. So when they made a date with him, to make arrangements about selling those statues to them, nobody showed up at the meeting place and when he went back all the others were gone, and all he had left was the one he’d taken along to prove he really had them. Then they got the last one back too, after somebody killed him.”
“Tomberlin gave the orders about Almah and about the explosive?”
“I guess he told Claude what to do and who to pick to do it. Nobody meant for that woman with you to be…”
“Why do you do what they tell you to do, Dru?”
“Me?” She looked astonished. “Golly I guess it’s about the same with me as it was with Almah and a lot of other people. Those pictures of me, if they ever sent a print of even one of the cleanest ones to my daddy I swear it would kill him. You don’t know about the first pictures they take, and then they use those to make you do things for more pictures. Rather than have my daddy ever see me doing anything like that, his own daughter, I’d cut my wrists first. I’d do anything they ask. I think where Almah got out from under, her mother died while she was down there.”
I remembered the untidiness of Almah Hichin, the look of soil and wear and carelessness. It was easy to see now why she had ceased to value herself. And it was an ancient gambit, using the threat of the most horrid scandal imaginable to tame people to your will and use. And the son of a bitch had so casually mentioned his photo lab.
“You know what Tomberlin is? And Claude Boody?”
“I can’t help that. I don’t think about that.”
“Baby, you are going to have to think about it. You are an accessory to murder. And your dear daddy is going to have to know the whole filthy mess, and you are going to have to talk and talk and talk to save your sweet skin, sun bunny. Even so, you may spend ten years in a Mexican rest camp, living on tortillas and frijoles.”