As I moved toward them, Keith Sigmon released her, pushing her slightly to one side. The dissipated handsomeness of his face became old and hard, with a vicious old man’s desire to live at whatever cost.
“Keith Sigmon and a slut of a call girl from Venezuela,” I said. “Ginny Jameson, alias Elena Sigmon.”
“Ed Rivers alias Blackbeard,” Sigmon said thinly. “Check.”
“You... you don’t know what you’re talking about!” the girl said. “I think so.”
“A girl can kiss her daddy!”
“Not like that, honey. Neither does the sheltered granddaughter of a fine old Venezuelan family of aristocrats know how to dance the way you were dancing earlier. Your professional dancing experience was showing all over the place.”
“That’s no proof...”
“Venezuela is lousy with proof,” I said. “All we’ve got to do is air-express a photograph over there and let people who knew you and Elena Sigmon have one look.”
She lifted her arms and hugged herself. It didn’t stop the shiver from crossing her shoulder.
Sigmon seemed incapable of movement, except at the lips. “Just what do you think happened, Rivers?”
“I know what happened,” I said. “When she got the news that her grandmother had died in the States, your daughter, the real Elena, went up to the mountain cottage. To give you the news, Sigmon. She found the two of you there, and I imagine it was pretty sickening. It hit her hard, coming on top of news of her grandmother’s death. No girl has probably ever felt more alone. She’d lost her grandfather and her mother to a terrorist’s bomb. Her grandmother was lying dead in a distant land. And you, her father, were in the midst of an orgy with a slut.
“Demoralized by all that emotional dynamite, she started down the mountain road recklessly. She never reached the final mile of the road. Her reactions failed at a curve. The car went over, caught fire.
“I imagine you were following her down, Sigmon. If you didn’t see the actual crash, you saw the flames. In either event, you couldn’t save her. How about it? Am I substantially correct? When the heat of the wreckage drove you back, I suppose even a louse like you had a moment of grief. Was the next part your idea or Ginny’s?”
“It wasn’t mine,” Sigmon said in a suppressed voice.
Ginny’s vixen face sharpened. “It didn’t take much to talk you into it!”
“Of course not,” I said. “Grief and remorse wouldn’t bring Elena back. Her accidental death was an unalterable fact, a thing of the past. But it had a vital effect on the future. At stake was a twenty-million-dollar estate. When Elena died, the old señora’s vast assets would go in trust to charities and foundations.
“So why permit Elena to die? It seemed so simple at the time, didn’t it, Sigmon? All you had to do was toss a few items belonging to the real Ginny into the burning wreckage, go to the police and report the death of Ginny Jameson — not the death of Elena Sigmon, heiress to a fabulous estate. You knew the investigation would be routine and brief. The Venezuelan authorities were glad enough to get Ginny Jameson off their hands. Later you picked up Ginny, boarded the plane with her as your daughter. Being an American by birth, you had no passport problem. With your type of friends in Caracas, I’m sure you had no trouble in obtaining any necessary changes and bits of forgeries in whatever papers Elena would need.
“It seemed quite clever, Sigmon. With Ginny waiting under cover, probably at a hotel, you posed as the lone witness of the auto accident. Your word, uncontradicted, that it was Ginny Jameson who’d left the mountain cottage and crashed to her death.
“But a man can be too clever. I talked with Caracas. Not one time was Elena mentioned as being present during the investigation. You had to do it solo, giving them the impression you’d come down the mountain alone. You couldn’t produce an Elena Sigmon to corroborate your story because there wasn’t one still in the land of the living. This was an additional point, Sigmon, that steered me toward the truth.”
He made a noise like a snuffling dog as he tried to get some moisture in his mouth. “All right,” he said. “So you send a picture back to Caracas...”
“Keith!” Ginny said sharply.
He motioned her not to come nearer to him. “So I left my daughter in a desecrated grave,” he said, the oldness growing in him. “I took a seat in a game for one of the world’s fabulous fortunes.” He laughed softly, briefly, bitterly. “Twenty million dollars... it still isn’t worth dying for.”
“Two young girls, Jean Putnam and Lura Thackery, paid a damned heavy price, Sigmon.”
“But I didn’t kill them. Neither did Ginny. Whatever happens, I intend to live. In jail. In the gutter. Anything beats dying — and you can’t pin murder on me, Rivers.”
“I know,” I said. “I—”
The back of my head exploded. The carpet hit me in the face. The thick, plush nap ceased to exist for a few seconds, then returned to reality like stiff, stinging little barbs against my cheek.
Distantly, I heard Sigmon say, “You can’t... I won’t be a party to...”
“You’ve no choice now, darling,” Ginny said with renewed brightness. “Let Rivers feed the fish in the bay and no one else will ever connect it up.”
An expensive shoe pinned my knuckles against the carpet, and a third voice, male, said: “You were coming after me next, weren’t you, Rivers?”
“Yes, Eppling. From here to you. I knew it all, once I got the final details in place.”
“I thought so, when dear little Hildy started asking everyone who the big, black-bearded pirate stranger was,” Fred Eppling said. “She really let the cat out for you, Rivers, when she said you were looking for Sigmon and had come in here. I decided it was time I came in quietly myself.”
“Bless little Hildy,” I said, “who surely deserves a twice-busted rump.”
Twenty
The pressure of the shoe eased from my fingers. I turned slowly, sat up halfway, supporting myself with my palm against the carpet while my head endured a fresh blast of pain.
I raised my eyes slowly and saw the lawyer standing quietly over me, a small gun in his hand. Small, but quite capable of killing.
“For a bright lawyer with the lust for power and wealth, the cold-blooded drive to tear himself out an education and start at the bottom of the heap in criminal law... for such a lawyer, Eppling,” I said, “you pulled some bloopers. But maybe no human brain is smart enough to deal in murder — unless you’re a totally brainless gunsel who contents himself in going out and knocking off other gunsels in gangland killings.”
“Name me a blooper, Rivers.”
“Sure,” I said. “Always glad to oblige. Where shall I start? With Ben McJunkin? One of those pro killers who should have stayed with the mobs and mob killings. Just any citizen can’t hire a guy like McJunkin, Eppling. How many ordinary working stiffs would even know how to go about hiring a murderer?
“Sigmon might have had some shady connections in Caracas who could have whispered a name in his ear. But neither he nor Ginny knew where to find a hired gun in Tampa. Van or Natalie Clavery? Nonsense. They wouldn’t know where to start looking for a man like McJunkin.
“But you, Eppling... Everybody was ruled out but you. One-time small-peanuts criminal lawyer. A gunman in and out of Tampa for many years. It was a natural for you, Eppling, when you realized Jean Putnam had to be silenced.
“Want another blooper? Okay, serve up Keith Sigmon and Ginny Jameson. Keith could palm her off here as his daughter provided that no one here had ever seen the real Elena. Or — and this is how you cut yourself into a twenty-million-dollar gravy, Eppling — if anyone here who’d ever seen the real Elena would accept Ginny as a proxy.”