“Why not?”
“Because when I got to her house she was dead.”
“So you think somebody tipped Georgia off that the Cariaga woman knew all about her and the Marcoses, and that’s why Georgia killed her?”
Lt. Cruz nodded.
“Sounds weak to me,” Stallings said. “Who tipped Georgia off — one of the Marcoses?”
“Possibly.”
“Since when does ‘possibly’ hack it in a murder case?”
“It doesn’t,” Lt. Cruz said. “But an eyewitness does.”
“And you just happen to have one, huh?”
Lt. Cruz sighed in exasperation. “Miss Blue hired herself a frightener who worked for a very undesirable alien called Boy Howdy.”
“A friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Stallings said to Durant.
“Not quite,” Durant said.
“She hired this frightener,” Lt. Cruz went on doggedly, “ostensibly to throw a scare into Mrs. Cariaga. But actually to blame him for the murder. She and Howdy may have conspired in this. The poor brute is very, very large and very, very dumb.”
“So Georgia and Howdy set him up?” Stallings said.
Lt. Cruz nodded. “As I said, the man is none too bright. He got the time mixed up and arrived at Mrs. Cariaga’s early, only to find her day guard dead from a broken neck — which, I understand, Georgia Blue is quite capable of doing.”
“Is she?” Stallings said.
Lt. Cruz ignored the question. But Durant said, “Yes. She is.”
“After finding the body,” Cruz continued, “the dummy hid in the shrubbery, not sure what to do next. He saw Georgia Blue come out of Emily Cariaga’s house. After she drove away, he went in the house and found Mrs. Cariaga dead. Stabbed. He panicked and tried to leave, only to bump into Durant here. They fought. Durant lost, or so he says. When sufficiently recovered he quite sensibly called the police.”
“And told you about the dummy,” Stallings said.
Lt. Cruz gave Durant a disapproving look. “Not right away, unfortunately.”
Stallings smiled slightly at Durant. “Held out on the cops, did you?”
“For a while.”
Stallings turned back to Lt. Cruz and asked, “Do you find him and his partner kind of devious?”
“Extremely so.”
Stallings nodded thoughtfully. “But you’ve talked to the dummy — the so-called eyewitness?”
“At length,” Lt. Cruz said. “He freely admits what I’ve told you.”
“So who shot Boy Howdy down in Cebu?” Stallings asked in a quick hard voice, as if trying to rattle Lt. Cruz.
“Carmen Espiritu, of course,” Lt. Cruz said. “Probably because Howdy worked for whoever paid him — for the Espiritus, for Georgia Blue, even for the Palace. Apparently, Georgia Blue paid better than anyone else and his loyalty, such as it was, went to her. We can only presume the Espiritus found out about his duplicity and killed him. We’d like to question Carmen Espiritu, but I hear she’s dead. I do hear correctly, don’t I, Mr. Stallings?”
Booth Stallings sat at the Formica table on the wobbly plastic chair, thinking not about Lt. Cruz’s question, but about the night he had gone to bed with Georgia Blue. He probed, rather gently, for feelings of revulsion or moral outrage, but found none. He did turn up a lot of regret and a measure of sadness. But what you regret, he decided, is that you won’t be jumping into bed with her again. And what you’re sad about is that these guys are going to ask you to do something to her, something high-minded, like bringing her to justice, and you’re going to say yes, although what you really want to do is run off to New Caledonia with her.
He looked at Lt. Cruz and said, “You asked if Carmen’s dead?”
Lt. Cruz nodded.
“Yeah. She’s dead.”
Lt. Cruz made no comment, as if waiting for Stallings to continue. Instead, Stallings asked a question. “Why don’t you and the Hong Kong cops go arrest Georgia right now?”
“Because,” Lt. Cruz said, “you and she haven’t come out of the bank yet.”
“You want to bust her with the money on her, right?”
“I pray to God she won’t have it on her.”
“I think I missed a beat there.”
Lt. Cruz looked away. “For reasons of national security we prefer not to arrest her until she comes out of the bank.”
Stallings nodded glumly, as if at the familiar punch line of some bad old joke. “In my dictionary, national security’s a synonym for politics.”
“You have an excellent dictionary, Mr. Stallings,” Lt. Cruz said and rose. “Good evening, gentlemen.” He turned and walked out of the YMCA restaurant.
Durant and Stallings sat in silence until Durant said, “It’s not the principle of the thing, Booth. It’s the money.”
All Stallings said was, “We never did get that tea.”
Durant rose. “Somebody else’ll buy you a cup.”
Stallings also rose to follow Durant out of the YMCA and into the night. Durant’s eyes roamed over the sidewalk and the street, poking into the darker corners. Otherguy Overby seemed to materialize out of the shadows.
“He’s all yours,” Durant said.
Overby nodded toward the corner. “Let’s go, Booth.”
Both men turned, but Overby turned back when Durant called to him. “Otherguy.”
“What?”
“Buy him a cup of tea, will you?”
Their walk took them six blocks north of the Peninsula Hotel and two blocks east. The streets narrowed and the tourists thinned out as the shops grew junkier. When they came to a small restaurant with a Chinese sign, Overby said, “Take a good look because you’ll be coming back here tomorrow.”
“I’ll never find it again,” Stallings said.
Overby handed him a slip of paper with the name and address of the restaurant written in both English and Chinese. “Give it to any taxi driver.”
They went in. A young Chinese woman seemed to know Overby because she smiled at him and asked him a question in Chinese. After Overby replied in English she led them toward the rear of the nearly deserted restaurant. They went along a row of booths whose seat backs rose to the ceiling, transforming the booths into small semiprivate cubicles.
The young woman asked Overby another question in Chinese. He again replied in English. “Tea for three, please.”
After the woman left, Overby waved Stallings into the far seat of the last booth. As he slipped into it, Stallings saw the woman diagonally across the table, almost huddled into the corner next to the wall.
She smiled at him wanly. “So how’s it go, Booth?” Minerva Espiritu said.
“It goes, Minnie,” Booth Stallings said.
Otherguy Overby sat down next to Minnie Espiritu. “Any problems?” he asked her.
“Not yet.”
After looking around for eavesdroppers, Overby leaned toward Stallings and spoke in the low soft tones of the born conniver. “Okay, Booth. Now here’s what’s really going to happen.”
Chapter Forty-one
The next morning, shortly before ten o’clock, two of them went to Hong Kong Island by ferry and three went by car. The two who took the Star Ferry were Georgia Blue and Booth Stallings. She wore a serious dark gray dress and a black leather shoulder bag. Stallings wore the tan suit Otherguy Overby had picked out at Lew Ritter’s in Los Angeles. He also carried a slim brown leather attaché case that looked new.
Georgia Blue noticed the case and said, “Window dressing?”
Stallings shrugged. “I don’t want to walk in, ask for five million dollars and then have no place to stick it, except my hip pocket.”
“It won’t be in cash, Booth.”
He grinned. “Still.”
They took seats forward in the first-class section of the ferry during the crossing from Kowloon. The only time they spoke was when Georgia Blue asked, “What’ll you do with your share, Booth?”