Temple felt them gathering over her shoulder, drawn here by the rising voices. Janos and Renaldi, not innocents, but not murderers three decades after an old war.
"Poor Rudy. You never told your partners he had come here. Your deskside chats were uneasy explorations. You read blackmail into everything he left unsaid. But he never meant to tell, Mr. Colby. He never even remembered that there was anything fishy about one particular CIA drug run, I would bet. Only you remembered."
Colby watched Temple loosen the tissue, and the marijuana butt rolled onto his pristine desk surface like a rat turd.
Behind her, Janos spoke, and he spoke to her.
"You can do point for me anytime. You and that roach-sniffin', rat-rousin' cat of yours."
Chapter 35
The Last Twist of Hemp
"I ... I don't know what to say."
Colby looked beseechingly from one partner to the other, but they were looking at Temple.
"So Rudy came here," Renaldi asked, "to interview for a Santa Claus job and that started it all?"
Temple eyed her prey, still genteelly sweating behind his desk.
"You recognized Rudy," she said, "and Rudy recognized you."
"I . . . suppose so."
"You talked about old times."
"Rudy talked about old times. I've never been sentimental."
"Rudy wasn't sentimental, he just didn't get it. Easy-going Rudy, who paid the biggest price, just didn't get it. That's why he had been the perfect pawn."
Janos cut in without asking to dance. "I always figured he'd been paid off."
Temple shook her head. "Only in weed, right, Mr. Colby? Feed his head and he was happy. Story of his life. Story of his death."
"Listen!" Colby half-rose from his desk. "I didn't kill him."
"Are you sure you want to say that?" Temple was stern, and the partners kept quiet. They recognized a prosecuting attorney when they heard one.
Colby collapsed back in his chair. "I . . . don't know what you mean. Rudy was affable, as always. Grayer, thinner, but affable. He seemed to regard the coincidence as some kind of reunion."
"A reunion. What did he say?"
"Only how amazing it was that we should hook up like this, after all these years. How he couldn't wait to see Vic and Tony again. Imagine us three, big shots on Madison Avenue, and he was just an itinerant Santa Claus."
"You thought he was blackmailing you, didn't you?"
"Blackmailing?"
"All those genial comments, loaded with unspoken darts. Rudy tell you where he lived? Down in the Village in a rent-controlled railroad flat."
"He ... mentioned it. Him downtown. Us uptown. Him still dealing in rats and roaches. Us dealing in the varieties of both that wore Brooks Brothers suits."
"So you hired him on the sly, outside the agency."
Colby nodded unhappily. "That way I could pay him more."
"Aw, how magnanimous." Janos had grown quiet with rage. "How much more, Brent?"
"A couple thou."
"A couple thou." Janos's voice dripped sarcasm. "We each cleared a couple hundred thou from the drug deal and that was big-time lettuce in the sixties. Why were Tony and me honored with partner-ships, and not Rudy?"
"Maybe you had better memories," Temple said. "Maybe you'd have been harder to get rid of."
Renaldi nodded, and beneath the stainless steel exterior Temple glimpsed yesterday's pig-iron. "We weren't nobody's stooges, Vic and me. Not in 'Nam, not anywhere."
"So you killed the poor asshole." Janos had taken on the role of prosecuting attorney now. "You booby-trapped the chimney, like the gook tunnels that undermined the whole damn country. You set it up so he'd hang himself. Out of sight, out of mind."
Colby was silent, and sweating profusely.
"It's worse than that." Temple stroked Louie, who sat on her lap with a prickly suggestion of slightly protruded claws. His entire body was thrumming, not with a purr, but with tension, as if he understood the seriousness of this confrontation. "After his death, you destroyed his ID. Erased him. If my aunt hadn't known Rudy, he'd still be listed as missing in action.
"The innocent died for the wrong reasons, and the innocent killed for the wrong reasons," she went on. "Just like in 'Nam. Just like everywhere else."
"No!" Colby burst out, half-standing. "I plead guilty, not innocent. I was . . . afraid. I had so much to lose now. Everything I had built."
"We built it too," Renaldi put in. "Just because you were CIA didn't mean you were the mastermind. You were just ambitious beyond the pipe-dreams of us grunts, so we followed you."
"We could have as easily fragged you," Janos put in. "Maybe we should have. This whole . . . scam ... up here on the thirty-second floor isn't worth Rudy's life. He was innocent, man, you know? He was the most innocent guy among us. We owed him. We owed him more than a rat-hole in the Village."
"I've seen Rudy's rat-hole in the Village," Temple said. "Louie has too. Pretty grim. Even so, he played Santa Claus for a living. Ho-ho-hoed at children for hours. He never meant to blackmail anybody, he was just glad to run into old war buddies. Wasn't he, Mister Colby?"
Colby put his face in his hands. "No," he said. "He had to have had an angle. Everybody has an angle."
"You killed him for nothing'." Janos's rage was white-hot by now.
"No," Colby murmured to his own sweaty palms.
"No." Temple agreed with him. "Mister Colby meant to pay him off, to buy him off. If two thousand didn't do it, twenty would. Maybe even the original two hundred thousand. But he didn't get a chance. Neither did Rudy."
"What are you savin'?" Now Renaldi was hot. "That our trusted partner isn't a murderer? One of us other guys is? Do you really think we'd turn in another grunt over money? Rudy was a pothead from Day One. We figured Rudy had been offered the partnership gig, but we weren't surprised when he didn't go for it."
"But the deal kept you quiet, didn't it?" Temple asked.
"Sure." Janos was calmer, more dangerous. "That's why we were brought in. We knew too much. But... this don't make sense. Colby here put up with our rough edges, babied us along, found places where we could contribute to the firm in our own ways. Why would he suddenly turn to cold-blooded murder after all these years? Especially when Rudy, poor bastard, could have been bought off with a song? Or, as you say, a lunch with war buddies?"
Temple looked at Brent Colby, Jr., who, after a long, focused silence, finally parted his fingers and lifted reddened eyes to face the room.
He shook his head.
Temple had mercy on him. "I don't think he did turn to murder. But someone overheard Rudy talking to him and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Assumed the worst. Blackmail. Someone else killed Rudy so Colby and the firm wouldn't suffer."
"Not me!" Janos was truculent. "By God, not me."
"Not me," Renaldi was as fast to swear. "We would have known Rudy. We would have known he was harmless, but, of course, we hadn't screwed him out of a share all those years ago, so we wouldn't have that guilt on our backs."
"That guilt is nothing like Mr. Colby will have to bear now." Temple warned. "Let the punishment fit the crime, old as it was. It does."
"What punishment?" Janos, confused, was now ready to turn his wrath on the messenger, Temple. "This stuff is pretty tough to prove. All based on supposition."
"Maybe you three could tough it out, like you did in the old days. But I doubt the killer can. The killer is cracking already, madly trying to point even an amateur like me in the wrong direction. It was a spur-of-the-moment murder, a desperate move. I'm sure the police will find supporting evidence once they know where to look."