“If you’re trying to ring me in the middle of this thing,” Sigmon burst out, “you’re wrong. I never saw Fred Eppling until he met our plane.”
“So you told me,” I said. “But Myrtle Higgins let it slip that Fred Eppling made one trip to Caracas for the señora while the old lady was still alive. Mostly Eppling never had to do more than drop by the house here occasionally. But on that one trip, he would have met Elena, and you as well, Sigmon.
“Your instincts told you that you were two of a kind, greedy and ruthless. Before you could bring in Ginny as Elena, Sigmon, you had to make sure that Eppling, the lawyer handling the estate, would go for the deal. I’m sure we’ll find a record of an overseas call when the cops start digging out and putting all the evidence and minor details together.
“Twenty million dollars was more than enough to go around, and when Eppling agreed to come in, the scheme got off to a flying start.”
“But I never killed anybody,” the old, hard man said. “It was Eppling who hired McJunkin, just as you say, Rivers. When Jean Putnam began to question us, I wanted to grab what was convenient for grabbing and make a run for it. Eppling wouldn’t let me. He insisted that twenty million was too much to lose—”
“Even if I was fond of Jean,” Eppling said quietly.
“Fond of her,” I said, getting slowly to my feet. “Just more fond of twenty million smackers.”
“I’m afraid that’s the case,” Eppling said. “You see... Jean came to me at the outset with her suspicions. Natural, I suppose, since I had been the señora’s lawyer and was handling the estate. I tried to dissuade Jean, convince her that her ideas were groundless. I was unable to do so. I had destroyed everything among the old señora’s personal things that might have pointed to the real Elena.”
“Including that missing portfolio?” I said.
“Including the crummy old briefcase.” Eppling’s lips twisted. “Jean remembered there’d been some snapshots of the old señora’s family in the portfolio. She had reached the point where she wanted to see a picture of Elena. Jean... You see, she gave me no choice, Rivers.”
“And Van Clavery’s confession and promissory note?”
“In my office safe,” Eppling said. “I planned to let them conveniently be found in some odd corner here in the house when things had quieted down.”
“I think we’ve talked enough,” Ginny said.
“Yes,” Eppling said. “Of course. You’re quite right, Ginny.”
“Blackbeard... Blackbeard darling,” sang a drunken little voice in the hallway. “You didn’t keep your promise to come back... Where are you, Blackbeard?”
Hildy’s sunny hair was a bright spot of color in the doorway. Keyed tight, the sound of her voice had brought a quiver and a glance from Eppling.
I went in under the the gun. With a snarl, Eppling swung it down, trying to slug me. The gun glanced off my back muscles as I hit him with my shoulder and carried him backward.
“Sigmon!” the word was jolted from Eppling as we hit the floor.
From the perimeter of my vision, I saw Sigmon’s foot swinging at me. I ducked, grappling with Eppling for the gun.
Hildy started screaming.
Sigmon piled on me and Ginny joined the fray with fingernails reaching for my eyes. I’d half risen, holding Eppling’s wrist. The bunch of us hit the floor in a writhing mass.
I felt Sigmon being yanked off me as the summons of Hildy’s scream was answered. I got an impression of Van Clavery using those tense, wiry muscles behind a small, hard fist. I heard Sigmon crash into a table, make kindling of it, and roll to the floor, an unconscious old man.
Eppling was trying to knee me in the groin and writhe from beneath me while Ginny kicked at my kidneys. Holding onto that gun hand, I took a second to grab her ankle and jerk her feet from under her.
While I had the hand free, I doubled it and stuck it in the side of Eppling’s face. My fist glanced off his cheekbone. He quit trying to rupture me with his knees. I stood, dragging him up with me. With his left he swung a roundhouse. I blocked it, got punching room, and aimed one straight at his nose.
My aim was good. His eyes rolled up. His knees folded, and he dangled from my grip by his gun wrist.
I let him slide to the floor and picked up the small gun where it had fallen from his fingers.
“Ginny,” I said.
She drew to a stop short of the door where sunny Hildy stood. She turned slowly, saw the gun, the wreckage in the room. She went gropingly to a chair, sat down, pressed her knees tightly together, and stared at nothing, at sheer emptiness. At her future, possibly.
“Catch,” I said to Clavery, pitching him Eppling’s small gun.
“I don’t think there’s time for a long explanation right now. So get this. Keep this trio covered. She’s not Elena Sigmon. She’s Ginny Jameson. It was a twenty-million-dollar hoax that didn’t quite pan out, even though Eppling hired Ben McJunkin as a long-reaching weapon. Get the cops and tell them to get with Caracas while they start a third-degree on these creeps. I’ll report in at headquarters as soon as possible, but they can tie up the Putnam-Thackery case, now that they knew where to start the knots.”
“Rivers—”
“Later,” I said. “Your note and confession are in Eppling’s safe.”
“How could Fred have—”
“For a slice of a twenty-million-dollar estate,” I said. “Now for cripe’s sake, can you do as I ask?”
“Of course,” he said quietly. The gun was steady, quite deadly in his high-strung, capable hand.
The ruckus had proved too much for Hildy. She had made herself scarce. I’d probably never have the chance to apologize for the destructive thoughts I’d had in regards to her very nice little rump.
A bigger, more lush, far more female woman than Hildy opened her door to me a short time later. She stood there looking at me, the light behind her spilling through the mane of dark-blond hair.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in, Myrtle?”
“I’m really tired, Ed. Like I told you... a good book is my present limit, as fetching as your costume is.”
“I want Ben McJunkin, Myrtle.”
“What makes you think—”
“It all adds up.” I pushed into the small living room of her apartment and looked at the open suitcases she’d been packing. An emptiness began to fan out inside of me. “Packing your books too?”
“Ed...”
“No,” I said. “Let’s not talk about it. I understand now. You almost fainted when I returned from the San Salvador Hotel. But not from relief. It was because my return meant I might have killed him. You did it all for him, didn’t you? Sticking close. As close as a bedsheet, if necessary, to keep tabs on his enemy, to help him in any way you could. When did you first meet him, Myrtle?”
“A long time ago... in an emergency ward... I was on duty. They brought him in one night. A colored fellow had cut him all to pieces, but he refused to die... He was too tough, too much a man to die like that.”
She walked to the window and watched the star-shells burst over the river. “I don’t suppose anyone would understand,” she said after a moment. “He never married me. He was restless and would be gone a large part of the time. But he always came back. Nothing else was more important. From the time he met a green kid wearing her first nurse’s uniform, he always came back.”
“For whatever he needed,” I said. “If it was medical attention he had a fine trained nurse — while the cops checked all the doctors for a wounded man.”