A door opened at the far end of the hall, and José Sotomayor stood in the doorway. He was wearing a silk paisley smoking jacket over a white shirt and pale gray Daks. He was barefoot.
“Welcome to my maximum security prison,” he said in English. “What does the warden want?”
“He didn’t send me. But he knows I’m in Madrid trying to get a lead on Luz.”
“Aren’t we all,” José said dryly. “Aren’t we all.”
He followed me into a living room not quite the size of a bull ring. High up on three sides there was a book-lined gallery with a few doorways scattered at random among the gilt-and-leather first editions. There was one wall entirely of glass that looked out across the city and the flat Castilian plain to the peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains. There was the sort of casually modern teakwood furniture you could have custom-made if you owned a Danish interior decorator or two. There was a bar that looked like a bar. It surprised me. José poured a couple of martinis out of a tall glass pitcher. His movements were slow and under tight control. He’d had a head start on the pitcher. A third glass, with a lipstick-stained rim, remained on the bar.
I took my drink to a chair near the window-wall and sat down and admired the mountains.
“Why you?” José said.
“Why me what?”
“Why are you looking for Luz?”
“I’m a detective working for Axel Spade.”
“On a contingency basis?”
“No. I get a daily rate.”
José nuzzled his martini and laughed. “Good for you. She won’t be found until she wants to be found. At least you get paid.”
“You mean the kidnaping is a phony? She arranged it herself?”
“Mais oui,” José said in French. He looked at one of the doors on the gallery and got no message from it and looked at me again. “Of course she did.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You’re a detective. Why don’t you find out for yourself?”
I offered a suggestion: “The treasure?”
José laughed again, politely, behind the back of his hand. “You’ve been speaking to brother Ramón,” he said. “Brother Ramón is rather paranoid on the subject of the family fortune, don’t you think? Not that there is any that anybody can get his hands on. Poor brother Ramón—he resents so being a career officer in the American army. Had he been in my place he would have resented being a señorito in a gilded prison. Some people are never satisfied.”
“Are you?” I asked. “That’s the second time you referred to this modest little pad of yours as a prison.”
“The man’s observant,” José said with a sneer as he filled his martini glass again. “I have one” thing in common with brother Ramón after all. I detest the old Captain General for what he did to me. So does Luz.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Look around you, amigo. I have everything and I have nothing. The old man wanted it that way. Boarding school in England. Boarding school in Germany. My own private plane. A Mercedes-Benz for serious driving and a cute little Maserati for sport. I am a pampered scion of a rich old bastard who chose me for that particular role because I resembled my father more than Ramón did. I was raised to be effete and a wastrel. I was raised to like it. I have a small talent with paint brushes, if you noticed the garbage hanging in the hall, and, the ladies tell me, a small talent for making them happy in bed, and just about nothing else. My uncle planned it that way. He wants to say I am my father’s son, with scorn. I’m a wealthy young man-about-town, and the Captain General could take it all away with one snap of his fingers. I drink too much and I get a kick every now and then out of dear little, dependable little Mary Jane, and one of these days it would surprise no one, least of all my uncle, if I tried something stronger. I’m a cipher with a few hundred million pesetas at my disposal unless the Captain General decides to kick me out into the street, which he might do any day now or never do at all. I’m spoiled rotten, and the hell of it is every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I like it.”
The toughest interview an investigator faces is with a drunk who feels sorry for himself. There’s no problem getting him to talk, but he’s always running off at the mouth about the wrong things. All you can try to do is keep him talking and hope he’ll get around to what you’re after.
“What do you do the rest of the week?” I asked.
“The rest of the week I hate myself. Maybe Luz had the right idea.”
“What idea would that be?”
I heard a sound overhead.
“Come down, querida,” José said in Spanish, “and meet the nice American detective.”
I looked up. A brunette with long, sleep-tousled hair was standing on the gallery. She was wearing a man’s satin bathrobe that trailed on the floor. She was the one who had had a little too much of Don Santiago’s champagne at the party.
“Oh, I did not know you had company.”
“Come down, I said.”
He snapped the order at her off-handedly, as though there weren’t a chance she’d disobey. She didn’t. She came down the open circular staircase slowly, tugging the lapels of the robe close around her throat.
“Buenos días,” she said. She was embarrassed.
“Ola, Carmen.”
José looked at me. “You already know each other?”
“We met at your uncle’s party.”
“I would like a very small drink,” Carmen said.
“I would like a big one,” José said.
She took his glass to the bar and poured out two more martinis, draining the pitcher.
“Make some more,” José said. “My guest might wish a refill.”
“Not me,” I said.
“Make some more,” José told Carmen flatly. His whole attitude had changed. He was a guy who needed a whipping boy. Or girl.
Carmen busied herself at the bar. “You were talking about Luz,” I reminded José.
He shrugged. “Suddenly I find the subject boring,” he said in English. In Spanish he added, “I’m beginning to find Carmen boring too. Would you like to borrow her?”
The girl dropped a tray of ice cubes and picked it up.
“Cut it out,” I told José.
“She likes it. Don’t you like it, querida, when I’m mean to you?”
“I said cut it out.”
“Look at that,” José said. “Look at that, Carmen. Did you ever hear of a detective with a soft heart?”
Chimes sounded suddenly, playing the first few bars of España Cañi. “Now who would that be?” José asked no one in particular. “And how did he get by the jailer downstairs?”
He rose and went somewhat unsteadily across the enormous living room. When he turned into the foyer that led to the door, I could no longer see him.
Carmen came to fetch my glass.
“I really don’t want one,” I said.
“Please? Otherwise he will be angry with me.”
“All right,” I said, “but a small one.” I felt sorry for her.
Unseen in the foyer, José raised his voice. He was speaking in rapid, angry Spanish, and I couldn’t make out the words. Carmen went back to the bar with my glass.
I heard a noise like a loud exhalation of breath. It came from the foyer and it was repeated. Something heavy crashed to the floor, bringing me to my feet. Carmen turned a startled look at me from the bar. The door slammed.
José lay on his back just in front of it. He made a gargling sound in his throat and tried to get up but couldn’t.
“The police,” I told Carmen. “Call them. I’ll be back.”
There was barely enough room to open the door and slip out. The elevator door and the fire door were both shut. The up and down arrows above the elevator were both dark. The Omo boxes on the wall stared back at me.
I jerked open the fire door and started down past battleship gray walls and large doors with numerals on them. My footsteps clattered on the metal steps. I stopped for a
n instant. There was no sound but my own loud breathing. I kept going down, racing against an elevator that wasn’t being used, trying to overtake a fugitive I couldn’t hear. More than twenty floors, I thought. He could have dropped off on any one of them. Maybe he lived in the building. Maybe he was visiting someone else. Maybe he worked here. José Sotomayor, from the little I’d seen of him, would be no stranger to trouble. Sooner or later a heavy-drinking playboy winds up with someone else’s woman. Or there might be other things I didn’t know about. There was no reason to connect the shooting with his brother’s belief in a lost family treasure, with his sister’s kidnaping.
I hit the ground floor, opened the fire door and strode across the deep carpet of the lobby, panting. The conserje looked from me to the door of the penthouse elevator and back.
“Anybody else use those stairs?” I asked.
“No, señor.”
“The elevator?”
“Not since you went up. But why—”
“There another way out?”
“The garage.”
He indicated the fire door.
I hurried through it and down another flight of stairs to the garage. As I opened the door a bell began to ring and kept on ringing until I shut it behind me. I liked that. If anybody else had come this way the attendant would have heard him.
Most of the cars were sleek and expensive sports jobs. A couple of Mercedes-Benz sedan parked among them looked out of place, like picador’s nags stabled with spirited Arabians.
Nobody came in answer to the bell. I drifted back among the cars and the smell of exhaust fumes to a glassed-in office. Two old men in black, white and gold sat inside drinking wine and playing dominoes.
“Hey,” I said.
One of them half looked up, waved a hand and moved a domino tile. When I didn’t go away he reluctantly got up and stood in the open doorway.
“Anybody come down here in the last few minutes?”
“I heard no one, señor. You, Paco?”
“No.”
“There is the bell, you see,” the first one said.
“For the guarda coche,” Paco said. “Someone is on duty always. Your car is safe.”
“You wish your car?” the first one asked. He scowled at me. “I do not recall you, señor.”
“Forget it,” I said, and they went back to their dominoes.
I returned to the lobby and waited for the penthouse elevator. In less than two seconds the doors slid open for me. They slid shut on the cornerje’s curious stare.
Carmen opened the door. Her hair was hanging down in front of her face. “He is dead,” she told me in a flat voice.
I slipped inside and knelt next to José, feeling for his pulse. He was dead, all right.
“You called the police?”
Carmen shook her head.
“Why the hell didn’t you?” I asked in English, and headed for the phone on the bar. I started to pick up the receiver, but Carmen’s hand came down on mine.
“Wait, señor. Give me ten minutes, then call them. I beg you. I could not leave until you promised. There will be an investigation, the police, everything. It must not be known that I was here. You understand?”
“What will you do, grow a pair of wings and fly out the window? The conserje booked you in, didn’t he?”
“We came through the garage. I can leave the same way. I have before. My father must not learn that I was here, that he and I were—lovers. The scandal—”
“That sort of leaves me holding the bag, doesn’t it?”
She shrugged, as though that were of no importance. Maybe it wasn’t, to her. She wasn’t disturbed by the dead man on the floor, either, but that didn’t have to mean anything. One response to violent death is apparent indifference. Not everybody goes to pieces. The reaction sets in afterward, but by then it is a little less real and if you are lucky you’re among friends. I’ve seen it happen.
“My name is Carmen Prieto y Azaña. I live on Paseo Reina Cristina, number 75. If you have trouble with the police, if it is impossible for you unless I testify we were here together, I will come.”
I said nothing.
“I swear it on the Virgin,” she said.
I lit a cigarette and just looked at her.
“It would destroy my father. This is Spain, not America. Here in Spain a girl does not—” She let that thought slip by her and said suddenly, “And also, I can tell you why Luz Robles came to Spain.”
“I’m listening, Carmen.”
“No, señor. Afterward. In gratitude for what I have asked.”
I had the prospect of a tough session with the cops, but I also had no lead on the disappearance of Luz Robles, unless you consider a corpse on the floor of a deluxe penthouse at Madrid’s best address a lead. Whether Carmen could deliver I had no way of knowing. What I knew was that I had to give her the chance.
“Go on upstairs and get dressed,” I said. Carmen was still wearing José’s blue satin bathrobe. “Then get out of here. Hurry up.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. “Señor, I don’t know how—I have no words to thank you.”
“Save it. I’ll come around.”
While she was dressing I washed the glass that had her lipstick stain on its rim. I wiped off bottles and a few other things she might have touched. Her prints were probably all over the place, but they’d have plenty of company. The cops might be discreet unless they could establish that she’d been here today.
She left without looking at the body on the floor. I gave her the ten minutes she had asked for and phoned the police.
SIX
If you’re a private eye mixed up in a murder investigation in the state where you’re licensed, chances are you have a buddy among the cops or in the D.A.’s office who can smooth the way for you. No private eye stays in business very long unless he cooperates with the buttons.
If you’re a private eye mixed up in a murder investigation in a foreign country, that is something else. You have no license, no official status, no friends, no right to investigate anything more than the tourist attractions and no hope except that the guy who runs the show didn’t have a fight with his wife that sent him to work with a disposition like a starving ocelot’s.
The guy who ran the show that day in Madrid was a studious-looking little specimen with rimless glasses, a high forehead and a receding chin. His gray-green Guardia tunic was too big for his narrow shoulders and the trousers were badly in need of a pressing. He had a blue ink stain on the side of his long nose and a scraggly mustache under it. He looked like a tired, myopic bookkeeper after a hard day entering rows of figures in a ledger, but he had a deep, bellowing baritone voice that he used like a mace on the cops who came scurrying in and out. They really jumped. His name was Captain Primo de la Vaca, and why anybody should have a name that translates as first from the cow I do not know, but inside of two hours from the time I had called, the lab squad had come and gone, the body had been removed, the next of kin had been notified and Primo de la Vaca was helping himself to half a tumbler of José’s Fundador brandy and bellowing to a fat Guardia who looked like a wrestler and sat with a steno pad on his knee and a pencil ready:
“You will take this down. First interrogation of the suspect Mr. Chester Drum in the matter of the murder of Don José Sotomayor.”
“Did you say suspect?” I asked.
He stared at me over the tops of his rimless glasses and nibbled at his mustache and nodded apologetically.
“This is when I ask if I can call the American consul,” I said.
He smiled. It was a patient bookkeeper’s smile. The boss just came in and saw a minuscule blot of ink on an otherwise neat column of figures and chewed his ass. “And if you ask,” he said, “this is when I say no, you call no one until you have been charged with a crime.” He cleared his throat self-consciously and barked in his deep baritone, “Now then, you are a detective in your country, sí?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Here you are no
detective. Here I could confiscate your passport for delivery to the border and if I said the word you would never set foot in Spain again. Would you like that?”
“No,” I said.
“Not only are you a foreigner, but for Spaniards your profession does not even exist. A well-ordered society needs no private detectives. Comprende?”
“Yes,” I said.
A blue-uniformed municipal cop came in. He was very young and Captain Primo de la Vaca gave him stage fright. He stammered for a while in an Andalusian dialect that I had trouble following. He saluted and backed out.
“The preliminary medical report,” Captain Primo de la Vaca bellowed at me. “José Sotomayor was shot at point-blank range with a small-bore hand gun firing soft-nosed bullets. One entered his stomach. One passed between his stomach and his diaphragm, flattening itself against his spinal column. The bullets were of English manufacture. Have you anything to say?”
“They used a silencer,” I said, just to be saying some thing.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I heard it. Or rather, I didn’t hear it.”
“Did you or didn’t you?”
“It made the kind of noise a gun would make with a silencer on it. I was standing here in the living room.”
“What time did this occur?”
“Fifteen minutes after I got here. You could pin it down to the minute if you check on when the conserje booked me in.”
“A man is murdered in your presence, and you do not call the police at once. Instead you leave the apartment, take the fire stairs down to the lobby and the garage and return in the elevator. Is that when you disposed of the murder weapon?”
“Sure,” I said. “Then I came back up here and called the police. That was my way of establishing a perfect alibi.”
Primo de la Vaca shook his head slowly. “Please spare me your jokes, Señor Drum. Murder is no joking matter.”
“I’ve seen violent death before, Captain. What did you expect me to do, go hide under the bed until you got here? I went out looking for the killer.”
Drumbeat Madrid Page 5