“Don’t move,” she said. “I know how to use this, but I hate guns, and I’m real nervous.”
“I can see that,” I said, holding my hands out, palms up. “Take it easy.”
“Sit down,” she said, “please, sit down.”
“Just take it easy with the gun, Carol,” I said. “I’ll sit.”
I was backing up, crunching broken glass beneath my feet, and I looked behind me long enough to locate a chair and sat in it.
“Tell me, Carol,” I said. “Did you kill Ray?”
“No!”
“But you know who did, right?”
“Shut up.”
“Does this all have to do with Sandy Meyer and the drugs? Or was this something personal? Were you . . . lovers, maybe?”
“Look, mister,” she said, holding onto the gun with both hands, “you’ve got to keep quiet so I can think, okay? I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you make me.”
I believed her. She didn’t want to shoot me, but she was spooked enough to do it.
“Can I make a suggestion, then?”
She frowned and asked, “What?”
“Call somebody,” I said. “Find out what to do. There is someone in this with you, right?”
She didn’t answer, but I could see I was right.
“Call them and tell them to come here,” I said. ‘“Together you’ll be able to figure out what to do.”
She licked her lips, took one hand off the gun, ran her hand through her hair, and then said, “Yeah, okay, that’s a good idea—but you can’t try anything while I’m calling. Promise.”
Jesus, I thought, I could get killed by someone who wants me to promise I won’t try anything.
“Make the call, Carol.”
“Yeah, right . . .” she said.
She moved to the desk phone, putting herself a good ten feet from me. She kept the gun in her right hand and dialed the phone with her left. I noticed she didn’t have to dial an area code.
“Hi,” she said, “it’s me . . . listen. Listen to me! He’s here . . . the guy, the detective, he’s here, damn it . . . I got a gun on him. . . . Because he didn’t give me a choice. He was asking too many questions. He came in while I was searching the place. You’ve got to come . . . you have to, I don’t know what to do. . . . No, I didn’t find anything.” Her tone softened then and she said plaintively, “Just come, all right? Please? Yes . . . yes, I’ll stay here with him. Yes, I will shoot him if I have to . . . just come!”
She listened for a few moments, nodding and saying, “Uh-huh,” and then she said, “All right. See you soon.”
As she hung up, I said, “How soon?”
“He should be here in about an hour and a half.”
“Oh, great. What do we do in the meantime?”
She didn’t have an answer.
“Can we talk?”
“No.”
“You have anything to drink?”
“No!” she said. “Look, just . . . just keep quiet, all right? If I can keep calm, we might both still be alive when he gets here.”
Well . . . the prospect of still being alive in an hour and a half appealed to me. The big question was, what happened then?
60
Okay, so I basically had two choices. I could just sit there quietly and wait for Carol’s partner to come, at which time he would probably shoot me. Or I could work on her, maybe rattle her enough for me to get the gun away—or for her to shoot me. Either way I had a good chance of getting shot.
“Carol, why don’t you tell me about it? I mean, talking might even make the time go faster, right?”
No answer. She was holding the gun in her left hand now and working on the nails of her right with her teeth. She had already finished with the nails of the left hand.
“How much time you think has gone by since you called? Huh?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “About an hour?”
“Forty minutes,” I said.
She blew some air out her mouth and looked at the clock on the wall.
“Jesus,” she said under her breath.
“Who killed Ray, Carol? You or your partner?”
“He’s not my partner.”
“Okay,” I said, “boyfriend, then. He did it?”
“He said . . . he said he had to. He said Ray wasn’t going to come across with the . . . the goods.”
She was repeating after her man, because those weren’t her words. She was a photographer; she didn’t usually say things like “come across” or “goods.” The words didn’t even sound right coming out of her mouth.
“So this is about the drugs, right?”
“Of course it’s about the drugs. What did you think?”
“I thought maybe you were . . . in love with Ray? Maybe his girlfriend?”
“No,” she said, her voice sounding dead, “I was never Ray’s girlfriend.”
“But . . . you wanted to be?”
“Once upon a time, but then working with him I saw how he was with women. He just used them He took their pictures, he slept with them, but they didn’t mean anything to him.”
“And what about Sandy Meyer?”
She gave a short, barking laugh. “That one. She thought she was going to change Ray. She came to him with this deal, to sell the drugs and make a lot of money, and he went for it. She thought he was going for her, too. Boy, was she in for a surprise.”
“Where is she, Carol?” I asked. “Where’s Sandy Meyer?”
She looked at me then and said, “You don’t know, do you? You don’t have any idea?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been tracking her for days, but I haven’t even gotten close enough to catch a whiff.”
“Oh, if you got close enough to her now you’d smell her, all right,” she said. She put her hand over her mouth then, as if she felt sick.
“Carol,” I said, my stomach going cold, “are you telling me she’s dead?”
She looked at me, almost mournfully, and said, “She’s been dead a long time, mister. Long before you got here looking for her.”
“Who killed her? Ray?”
“I . . . I think so. At least, he talked like he killed her. Of course, Ray talked big all the time.”
“Why would he talk to you about it?”
“I was helping him,” she said. “Ray thought he could . . . trust me. See, he thought I was still—he thought I was in love with him.”
“But that’s what he was supposed to think, right?” I asked. “So he’d keep talking to you?”
She stared at me for a moment, then made a face and said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Carol—”
“No more!” she said. She gripped the gun in both hands and pointed it at me. “No more.” Her voice was a whisper this time.
She meant it, so I started to do some thinking. Sandy came to Florida, met Ray, worked with him, and then approached him to help her make her deal. She had stolen the goods from her husband, and eventually Ray had taken them from her, apparently at the cost of her life.
Meanwhile, Carol’s boyfriend decided to use her to get to Ray and the goods, only Ray wasn’t coming across, so he killed Ray. That meant the drugs had to still be out there somewhere, evidenced by the fact that Carol was tearing the place apart when I arrived.
Well, this is what happens when you get a lot of amateurs trying to get into the big game. A pro would never have killed Ray Cortez until Ray turned over the drugs. I mean, they just would never have stopped trying. And Cortez, had he been dealing with pros, might have talked, thinking it would save his life. Of course, it wouldn’t have. Not with a pro. A pro would have killed him as soon as he verified his information. Either way, then, Ray Cortez would have ended up dead, but this way the drugs were still at large.
So who had Carol called? It could have been Angie Worth. It would take her that long to get from Sarasota to Tampa, except that Carol had already indicated that it was a man, her boyfriend.
So who did that leave?
How about Rick Delta? It would take him an hour and a half to get from Longwood to here. And he knew all of the principals. Who else made sense?
I laughed to myself. I had written Delta off as a player a long time ago. That showed how smart I was.
“What’s so funny?” Carol asked.
I looked at her. “I’m sorry, was I smiling?”
“Yeah, you were,” she said. “What about? I don’t think that you’re in a position to do any smiling.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe that’s just it. I mean, I’m the professional, right? And here I am being held at gunpoint by a photographer’s assistant.”
“I’m a photographer,” she said, “not just an assistant.”
“What difference does it make now, Carol? It doesn’t matter anymore, now that you’re a criminal.”
“What do you mean, a criminal? I’m not a criminal. What have I done?”
“You’re holding a gun on me, aren’t you?”
“So? I haven’t shot you. I haven’t shot anyone. I haven’t stolen anything. I haven’t hurt anybody.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” she said. “I’m not a criminal.”
“Well, you will be when your boyfriend gets here,” I said. “See, he’s going to shoot me, and when you watch, that will make you just as guilty as he is.”
“But . . . but I won’t—I mean, it won’t be me—”
“It doesn’t matter whether you pull the trigger or not,” I said. “You’ll be here when he does it. That makes you guilty of murder.”
“Murder?” She whispered the word, as if saying it out loud would make her guilty.
And suddenly, just like that, I knew she wouldn’t shoot me. The time for her to pull the trigger had passed.
I stood up and she did, too. She’d been half sitting on the desk the whole time, and now she stood up straight and pointed the gun at me with both hands.
“You won’t shoot me, Carol.”
“Why not?”
“Because you just finished telling me that you’re not a criminal,” I said. “You haven’t done anything wrong up to now, except maybe spy on Ray, and that’s not enough to send you to jail.”
“Jail?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, “when they catch you they’ll put you in prison.”
She looked away for a moment, then back at me.
“I can’t go to jail,” she said. “Jesus . . . what will my mother think?”
Leave it to a woman to worry about what her mother was going to think of her.
“I have an idea, Carol.”
“What?”
“Give me the gun,” I said, “and go home to see your mother.”
She stared at me, her head cocked to one side, and said thoughtfully, “You’d let me go?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe you,” I said. “I believe that you haven’t done anything up to now. Your boyfriend will be here soon, though, and then we’ll both have gone too far. You’ve got to make up your mind now, Carol. Give me the gun and go home.”
I looked at the clock behind her. Another forty minutes had passed. Her boyfriend was due any time, and if he had driven extra fast, he might even be pulling up in front at that moment.
“Come on, Carol,” I said. “It’s now or never.”
I believe she was ready to give me the gun, but that was when the front door opened and a man walked in.
“Carol!”
“In here!” Carol called out.
“Carol—” I said, but instead of giving me the gun she tossed it over my head. I heard it hit the floor behind me. I turned and looked down, trying to locate it. The door from the waiting area opened as I crouched down. As the man entered and saw me on the floor, his eyes widened.
“Aw. . .” he said, and his hand went inside his jacket.
I had no time left.
There was glass on the floor that I had broken, and one piece was a pretty good-sized shard, thick at one end and sharp and pointed at the other. I grabbed it in both hands without thinking and lunged forward. He had the gun out and was pointing it at me just as I drove the sharp, pointed end of the glass into his hip.
He screamed, and I think I did, too, because the glass cut both of my hands as I pushed it farther into him. His hand opened and his gun fell to the floor.
I released the chunk of glass and backed away. He reached for the glass and closed both of his hands on it, trying to pull it out. The pain must have been pretty bad, though, because he backed into the wall and then slid down to the floor, still trying to yank it free, cutting his hands in the process.
I turned and saw Carol still frozen against the desk. I looked around and picked up his gun, then found hers underneath a table. I pushed hers into my belt and held his in my lacerated right hand.
“Is this your boyfriend, Carol?” I asked.
There were tears streaming down her face as she said, “Yes, yes, that’s him.”
“Jesus,” I said, and turned to look down at Angie Worth’s husband, whose first name I still didn’t know.
61
“How are the hands?” Cathy asked.
I looked down at my bandaged hands where they lay on a table at Magadan’s Sports Cafe, and flexed them a little bit.
“They hurt.” It had taken a lot of stitches in each to close the cuts, but that was nothing compared to what Harry Worth had to go through. He was alive, but he wouldn’t be walking around for some time, and when he did it would be to go to court, and then jail.
“What time is this policeman supposed to be here?” she asked, looking around.
“Captain DeLeon should have been here fifteen minutes ago,” I said.
“The heck with him, then,” she said. “Let’s leave.”
“I’d love to,” I said, “but he’s going to give me the okay to leave town.”
“I know,” she said sadly, “that’s why I suggested we leave.”
“You’re sweet,” I said.
“So are you,” she said, covering my bandaged hands with hers.
It had been three days since I discovered that Angie Worth’s husband’s name was Harry, and that it was he who had killed Ray Cortez. He had also killed Carl Caggiano, Jr.’s, man in my room—actually, out in the hall—thinking he was me. When I thought about it, the dead man and I were about the same build and coloring, and at that time Harry Worth had only glimpsed me at his place of business, talking to his wife. Once she told him that I was looking for Sandy Meyer, he knew he had to get me out of the way. My luck he’d killed the wrong man, and in doing so created too much heat to make a follow-up attempt.
As far as anyone knew, Sandy Meyer was still missing. According to Captain DeLeon—whom I had finally gotten to tell my story to—they were presuming that she was dead, killed either by Ray Cortez or Harry Worth. To date Harry had only admitted to killing Cortez and the other man, but not to Sandy Meyer.
After I got out of the hospital that day, I had made two phone calls. One was to Carl Caggiano, telling him that the murders were wrapped up.
“And the drugs?” he asked.
“I don’t know where they are, Carl,” I said, “and Sandy Meyer’s missing. The police here are assuming that she’s dead.”
“We had a deal, Jacoby.”
“Yes, we did, Carl. If I found the drugs I’d hand them over to you. I haven’t found them.”
“Then find them!”
“Are you going to cover my expenses?”
“Let Meyer cover them.”
“I don’t work for Meyer anymore,” I said, “and I have a feeling he’s about to be out of work, too. He probably couldn’t afford me anymore.”
“You’re welching, Jacoby.”
“No, I’m not, Carl,” I said. “I had every intention of keeping our deal if I found the drugs. The simple fact of the matter is that the only people who knew where they are
are dead. There’s nothing I can do about that.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line.
“Carl?”
Suddenly there was a loud click and the connection was broken. Carl was mad enough to slam the phone down. Was he mad enough to be waiting for me when I got to New York? That was something I’d find out when I got back.
The second call was to Geneva. It was her call blinking on my phone just before Tony Allegretto laid me out. As it turned out her call had no bearing on the case. It was a bar business call, and she had handled it herself.
“Good,” I said to her. “That’s your job anyway, isn’t it?”
“Oh yeah?” she said. “How about a damn raise, then, if I’m gonna be making some decisions around here?”
“We’ll talk about it when I get back,” I said, and hung up quickly. . . .
“When you get back to New York,” Cathy asked now, “what are you going to do?”
“Well,” I said, “the first thing I’m going to do is make sure that Jerry Meyer gets put under a police microscope—not that it’s all that necessary, though. I imagine he’s in enough trouble with his backers.”
“Whoever they are,” she added.
I hadn’t mentioned Carl Caggiano’s name to Cathy. In fact, I hadn’t mentioned him to anyone, including Captain DeLeon.
With Harry Worth on the floor bleeding and Carol—whose last named turned out to be Huffman—crying silently, I had picked up the phone with bloody hands and called the captain. The first time I got to talk to him was when he responded to Ray Cortez’s studio, along with an ambulance. While my hands were temporarily taken care of, I had told him my story without mentioning Caggiano’s involvement—which was actually pretty peripheral. I did mention Jerry Meyer to him, and that the drug deal had been his attempt at becoming a yuppie hood.
“Lord save us from amateurs,” the captain had said, raising his eyes skyward.
Normally, I would have given him an amen, but the fact that I had been dealing with amateurs had probably saved my life.
“Is that him?” Cathy asked.
I looked at the front door and saw DeLeon enter. He was a short, dapper man who stood only about five and half feet tall, but he compensated for that with a commanding presence, which he accomplished with a combination of good grooming, impeccable fashion sense—like his friend, Desoto—and a full head—mane, actually—of prematurely gray hair, which extended to his mustache and beard. He was about forty-four or -five, and was in excellent physical condition.
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