I take a deep breath, though the arrow is still pointed at me.
She’s smiling.
“What’s so funny?”
“The irony of it. The concept of legal absolution and getting paid for the deed at the same time.”
“I didn’t need to hear that. I’m not sure I did. And if I did, I already forgot it. If anyone ever needed killing, you’re looking at him right there. If it were up to me I’d give you a medal.”
I spend the next several minutes bringing her current on how I got involved, along with an abbreviated version of the events of the last two months. I skirt the edges on some of the facts, the details concerning Betz and some of the names of the people involved.
By the time I’m done, the arrow is at least pointed down, somewhere near my knees. I take this as a sign that maybe I’ll live. But I’m still not sure.
“That’s all fine,” she says. “But if you’re still around, what are you going to tell the authorities?”
Lady of few words, she arrives at the pivotal question. It is upon this that I will live or die. “Leave that to me. I’m not going to tell them about you.”
“Then who killed him?”
“Who knows? He was a bad man. I’m sure he had his share of enemies.”
“He had at least one that I know of.”
“All I know is, I came out to get a signature on a document from someone who wasn’t here, found the door open and a dead body inside. I don’t even know who he is. Never saw the man before. And that’s the truth. The man I met the last time I was here, the one who said he was Mr. Becket, was someone else. Seems you can’t trust anybody anymore.
“The white lies I am prepared to tell the cops really don’t matter, at least they don’t to me, not under these circumstances. You may have been hired to come here to commit a criminal homicide, but that’s not what you did. There was an intervening force, his attempt on my life. That absolves you of the act. If you hadn’t shown up at the door I would be dead. We have a bond on this.”
I suspect that some wily prosecutor probably could work up a case against her of conspiracy to commit, but I really don’t care. And I keep the thought to myself. No sense giving her something to worry about.
She considers it for a few moments. “How do I know I can trust you?”
“What would I have to gain by telling the cops?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Nothing. I don’t even know your name. I don’t want to know.”
Slowly she lowers the bow, unstrings the arrow with my name on it, and drops them both into the bag at her feet. She leans over the body and starts to unscrew the tip of the arrow that is protruding from his back.
“What are you doing?”
“I never leave anything behind.”
“Forget I asked.”
She kicks the body over and from the front she pulls the arrow out. She snaps the shaft in half and drops all of the parts, including the tip, in a plastic bag, then deposits this in the duffel as well. “Do you want me to take the gun from his hand?” she says.
“Leave it. It might be better that way. Someone killed him, but at least he put up a fight.”
She picks up her bag and turns to go out the way she came.
“Why don’t we use the front door,” I tell her.
“I have to get my stuff,” she says. She walks around the broken chair to the side of the partner’s desk and grabs the handle on the large metal rolling case, the one I noticed when I first came in.
“That belongs to you?”
“Yeah, it’s mine. He stole it from me and used it twice.” She starts to roll it away when something catches her eye. She stops, looks down, and runs her finger along the side of the case. “Damn it!” she says.
“What’s wrong?” My heart skips a beat.
“He put a hole in it. A small fortune in cutting-edge auto-electronics, and that ungodly sack of shit goes and shoots it!” She starts cursing in some language I don’t understand, hands in the air, stamping her feet.
I don’t know where she’s from. I don’t want to know. But if pressed to the wall, I’d have to say she has a Latin temper.
“After all of this.” She leans over and examines the bullet hole. It is dead center in the middle of the box. “And he turns it into junk.”
“What’s in the box?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.” She gives me a look to kill.
“Let’s pretend I never asked.”
As we head for the front door I have visions of Casablanca, Bogart and Rains on a fog-shrouded runway. “Round up the usual suspects, Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
EPILOGUE
If I had to guess, I would say that whatever was in the large metal box that the lady archer rolled out of Becket’s office that afternoon had something to do with the two fatal auto accidents. It was her use of the words “auto-electronics” to describe what was inside, and the fact that she said he had stolen it and used it twice. This and the research I had done leads me to conclude that whatever was in that box, it was used to kill Serna, Ben, and her boyfriend.
The panicked expression on the girl’s face, the woman I knew as Ben, and the frantic and futile efforts of her boyfriend to control their car on its way to a fiery hell are engraved in my mind.
The woman with the arrows disappeared like a wisp in the wind two minutes after we left the house. I waited a respectful period for her to get out of the area. This gave me time to clean up before I called the cops. In the bathroom I washed my face and got rid of the blood. I didn’t use any towels. I used toilet tissues and flushed so there would be no trace of blood in the drain.
I grabbed my suit coat from the floor in the study to cover my soiled shirt, buttoned it up, straightened my tie, ran a comb through my hair, and called the cops. I told them the same story I’d given to her. The one where I came to the house with documents to be signed and found the dead body.
The Eagle is dead, but so is Rubin Betz. Fifty-seven days after I walked out of the house in Del Mar, the one I thought was owned by a man named Rufus Becket, who appears not to have existed, Betz finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. When he died, I felt as if I had lost a friend. For all of the mystery surrounding the whistleblower in the end, his motives for much of what he had done were simple and to the point. He was protecting his daughter, and to this I can relate. Call it the fraternity of fatherhood.
In the meantime the world has exploded. Whoever had the documents, wherever they were, they began to surface after Betz died, just as he said they would. Within little more than a week the details of political corruption saturated the media of the world. Heads began to roll.
In less than forty-five days, indictments were announced. Maya Grimes was charged, along with eight other members of Congress. And these were just the openers. Other names began to surface. It is likely that indictments will continue for at least another year, perhaps longer.
Many have proclaimed their innocence and vowed to fight, insisting that in the end they will be vindicated. Much of this is disintegrating under their feet even as they and their lawyers dodge the microphones and cameras. New details of foreign money and what it bought seem to surface each day. For some of them, the drip of information is becoming death by a thousand cuts.
As for Grimes, she and her attorneys are already huddled with federal prosecutors hunting for a deal. Rumor is she has offered to pay more than a billion dollars in fines on her offshore holdings, along with a promise to resign from the Senate. This for some short-term sentence, a rap on the knuckles.
She would be wise to move quickly before the Senate Ethics Committee and the entire chamber expel her. The rats are not only leaving the ship but are eating their own on the way. The media is asking serious questions as to the source of some of the money and what was sold, talk of possible capital punishment for acts of treason in which lives may have been lost.