Only it didn’t work out that way. Just as I started moving toward the way station with Antonio slung over my shoulder, his arms and legs dangling, I saw headlights. I stood frozen in place. It could have been Santiago Sotomayor. It could have been a truck driver deciding to skip Zaragoza and get a free night’s sleep instead on the bare floor of the caminero way station.
It was Sotomayor’s big Chrysler station wagon. Whoever was driving pulled up in front of the Peugeot. I sat Antonio on the front fender and propped him there with my shoulder. He groaned and his weight shifted. He was beginning to come around.
“Chet?” It was Axel Spade’s voice.
“Everything under control,” I said. We were fifty yards from the way station door. Luz wouldn’t hear our conversation, but as icily cool as she was she’d be waiting breathlessly now. She would have heard the Chrysler coming.
Axel Spade came out of the darkness. Silhouetted by the Chrysler’s headlights, dapper in a dark, raw silk suit, he was toting a small revolver.
“I couldn’t stop him,” he said. “At least I talked him into letting me do the driving.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you said it would be a mistake coming.”
“I mean about Luz.”
“Nothing. How could I?”
“What will you tell him now?”
“I don’t know,” Axel Spade said. “Who’s this?”
“Luz’s playmate, name of Antonio Lopez. He was going to work the old man over before Luz killed him. She wanted information about the family jewels, or whatever the hell they are.”
“Where is she?” Axel Spade asked.
“Tied up inside, but otherwise safe and sound.”
“I still can’t believe—here comes the old man.”
Spade had rushed out of the Chrysler without helping the Captain General. It was the only way he could have a few minutes with me first. As proud as he was, Santiago Sotomayor probably thought Spade was doing him a favor.
I heard slow footsteps, and then Sotomayor came into view. He was walking with the help of a pair of aluminum crutches braced to his arms, his broad shoulders and torso thrusting forward powerfully with every step.
“Where is my niece?” he demanded.
“Inside,” I said.
“Has she been hurt?”
“No,” I said.
Spade looked at me. I said nothing else.
Antonio blinked his eyes. He began to slide off the fender. I propped him up again as Sotomayor asked in a calm voice, “This is the kidnaper?”
I nodded. Bracing himself on one crutch, Sotomayor raised the other and took a swipe at Antonio’s head with it. I caught the crutch in midair. “He’s pretty harmless now,” I said.
Sotomayor glared at me but lowered the crutch and began to propel himself toward the way station.
Antonio blinked again and opened his eyes. He looked at Axel Spade and me. “For the love of God you’ve got to listen to me,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“Whose idea was it?” Spade said. He wasn’t looking at Antonio. He was looking at me.
“The woman’s, I swear,” Antonio said.
“The woman inside?”
“Sí, sí, her.”
Spade’s shoulders slumped. He ran a hand over his perfectly groomed hair. His voice seemed small and distant as he said, “I want to talk to her alone. Is that all right?”
“Later, I guess. She’s your fiancée.”
Spade walked slowly toward the way station, studying the gleaming tops of his black shoes. The revolver dangled limply from his right hand. It was probably the longest walk he ever took.
“Are you all right?” I asked Antonio. “We’re going in there now.”
“You believe me? That it was the woman? She made me do it, I swear on the life of my—”
“She hired you, chico. She wasn’t holding a gun at your head. Let’s go.”
Antonio lurched toward the small adobe building. I walked at his side. Once he stumbled and I helped him.
The door was wide open. We went through it. Antonio had, placed the lantern on a bare wood table, the only item of furniture in the small room except for two hard chairs. In the orange light of the lantern I saw Axel Spade leaning over Luz, who was seated on the floor with her back against the wall. He had already untied her arms and was working on her legs now. A strand of that beautiful auburn hair was down over her eyes. She was crying softly, and Axel Spade was saying, over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s going to be all right now.” He was staring down at her face adoringly. He looked up at me and then away quickly. When he had finished untying her, Luz reached up and patted his cheek.
“Querido,” she. murmured. “Querido, how I prayed you would come.”
Sotomayor was seated on one of the chairs, watching them.
“It was all like some terrible dream,” Luz said, brushing at the tears in her eyes. Spade kissed her cheek. “Don’t talk about it now,” he said. “There’s time.”
Luz got up, with Spade’s help. She leaned against him. She was disheveled but still gorgeous. She glanced at me. She glanced at Antonio. She and Spade made a pretty good-looking couple. Even Sotomayor’s eyes softened at the sight of them. He stood up awkwardly, bumping the table. The lantern and something else slid a few inches across it. The something else was Axel Spade’s revolver.
Uncle and niece met in the center of the room. “Uncle,” Luz said, bowing her head modestly.
The old man bent over her hand and kissed it. I’d almost forgotten they hadn’t met since Luz was a little girl. His voice was tremulous when he said, “You look so much like your mother. I always knew you would.”
While that touching reunion was going on, I had a moment to study Axel Spade. His eyes never left Luz’s face. He was staring at her like a hungry kid at all the candy shop windows in the world.
What Antonio might have done was accuse Luz in front of all of us. But he must have gotten the same message from Axel Spade’s face that I did, and when he saw the abrazo that the old man gave his niece, both arms around her shoulders and the crutches dangling, he must have gotten the notion that accusing Luz now would be like bearding the lion in its den.
Whatever went through his mind, he had a moment when no one was watching him. He turned and bolted for the door. I could have stopped him. I didn’t. If he had in mind to hole up somewhere until Santiago Sotomayor learned the truth, at which time the old man could decide whether or not he wanted to face the scandal of a niece who had plotted to murder him, I was all for it. Or maybe he was just desperate and not bothering to think at all. I let him go.
Luz didn’t. She broke away from her uncle, who hit the floor hard with his crutches to keep from falling. “He’s getting away!” she cried, and ran past the table, scooping up Spade’s revolver.
It took us all by surprise. I was out the door right after her. Antonio, still groggy, had tripped and fallen. He was on his feet again, facing Luz and coming toward her.
She screamed and fired the revolver three times, the kick jerking her arm back. I caught her hand on the third shot. That one went harmlessly skyward. One of the others had either missed Antonio or gone into his body where I couldn’t see it. The remaining one had pulped his left eye and flopped him over on his back. His leg jerked in a spasm as I reached him, but that didn’t mean anything one way or the other to Antonio. He was already dead.
Axel Spade came out. Luz crumpled into his, arms and sobbed.
TWELVE
I paced the floor and went through a pack of cigarettes in my hotel room in Zaragoza, mulling things over. I came up with no answers. If Axel Spade wanted to go ahead with his wedding plans, that was no skin off my teeth. He was the guy who’d have to live with Luz Robles, knowing what she had planned to do. I could either stay on as best man or go back to Geneva or Washington and wait for a nice, simple, clean-cut case to drop into my lap. Only it wasn’t that easy.
Spade, if he kept his
mouth shut about what Luz had been up to, as he gave every indication of doing, had committed no crime. Failure to report hearsay evidence about a conspiracy to commit murder is no crime anywhere I know of. Spade was clean. I wasn’t. On the floor in the back of the station wagon I had heard a run-through of a murder conspiracy. With luck and a reasonable amount of guts, I had foiled it. But the intent was still there. In Washington I’d have had no choice but to dictate my story to a police steno and let them take it from there. That’s one reason they license guys like me.
But this wasn’t Washington. Maybe, I tried to tell myself, Axel Spade was putting the fear of God into Luz right now, while the old Captain General was in conference with his former Guardia cronies. Maybe Luz would see the error of her ways and settle down to being the dutiful and coddled wife of a man who came complete with a hundred million bucks and a yacht they once did a story on in Life magazine. But maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe one of these days when no one was around to stop her, Luz would find herself another El Macareno II and begin all over again. Maybe, if you could discount the fact of cold-blooded murder, she was even justified. The law, such as it is in Spain, wasn’t about to jump on Santiago Sotomayor for betraying Luz’s father.
Get out, I kept telling myself. You’ve had it. Your talents for ferreting out unwholesome facts are definitely lost on this mob. Leave the whole mess to Captain Primo de la Vaca. Pack your bag and blow the joint.
And read in the Paris Trib a week or a month or a year from now that Captain General Santiago Sotomayor, former commander-in-chief of the Guardia Civil, has been murdered. Read it knowing you might have been able to stop it, if it should have been stopped.
“Hell,” I said out loud, and Axel Spade’s voice came through the connecting door to his room:
“Are you awake?”
I said I was awake.
He came in wearing a silk dressing gown, with one of those little black cigars in his mouth and a tired look on his face. He smiled tentatively and sat down on the window ledge. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for him to say anything at all. He said:
“I never did thank you.”
I said, “Uh-huh.”
He said, “Sotomayor told me he’s writing you a check for five thousand dollars. As a reward. Not bad for a few day’s work.”
“I can’t take his dough,” I said. “You ought to know that.”
“Why can’t you?”
“The girl wanted to kill him. That was one little detail I forgot to mention to him. I never was much of a detail man.”
“If you told him, he’d never believe you.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Do I what?”
“Believe me.”
He dropped ash out of the open window. “She denies it,” he said stiffly.
“Yeah, and it sure was convenient the way she was able to shoot Antonio Lopez before he started singing.”
“He kidnaped her. He made a break for it and he was getting up off the ground and coming for her when she shot him. You admitted that yourself.”
“That’s the way it looked, all right,” I said.
He studied his cigar. A small, white, very expensive ash was beginning to form again. “When will you be leaving Spain,” he asked me, “in the morning?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“I’m asking you to decide now.”
“I’m a member of the wedding,” I said.
“We’ll probably be able to tie the knot without you.”
“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Luz hadn’t been kidnaped when we drove down. A guy’s best man is usually his best friend or his brother or like that. I’ve handled a few cases for you and once I got your daughter out of a jam and I guess maybe I admire you as a guy who has earned a hundred million bucks without turning into an absolute son of a bitch in the process, but all that didn’t make me a candidate for best man at your wedding. What did?”
“I hired you as my bodyguard. I have enemies in Spain.”
“That’s a lot of crap,” I said.
He stood up. “You have no right to talk to me like that.”
“Pardon me. I forgot I was the hired hand.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. No hard feelings?”
“Will you get it through your head it has nothing to do with hard feelings or any feelings at all? I’ve walked out on cases because I didn’t like the way they smelled. I’m not going to walk out on this one,” I said, and realized I’d just made up my mind.
“There isn’t any case,” he said, looking out the window. “I’ll pay you through the end of next week, if that’s satisfactory. I’ll mail the check to your Geneva office. You’re finished here.”
“Okay, I’m fired,” I said. “But I asked you a question before.”
“I told you why I hired you.”
“No, I mean do you believe the kidnaping was a phony and Luz was planning to kill her uncle?”
“It’s over,” he said. “No one was killed.”
“José Sotomayor was killed. So was Antonio.”
“It’s all over, I told you.”
“What if I went to the Captain General with what I know?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t I? It’s the least I could do—if I’m fired. It might give him a little warning, in case she tries again.”
“And if you’re not fired?” Spade said slowly.
“Make up my mind,” I said.
“What do you want from me? Money? Name your price and I’ll pay it. Just get out of my hair.”
“I want you to level with me,” I said. “I want the truth.”
“It’s too late to argue with you. I’m tired. I need some sleep. The truth, my friend, is a relative commodity, to be bartered on the market of morality, also relative, for whatever price it has earned under whatever circumstances it has earned it.”
“I’m kind of dense,” I said. “I don’t see it that way.”
“Damn it, you’re wasting your time. I’ve got to fire you.”
“Why?”
He didn’t look at me. “Luz insisted,” he said.
I laughed. His eyes narrowed, but he took it.
“I’m going to hang around,” I said. “I’ve got some unfinished business. I’ll accept your hundred bucks a day severance pay through the end of next week. I need the dough. I’ll take care of the expenses myself.”
“What kind of unfinished business?”
“Luz Robles is going to marry a hundred million bucks,” I said, and his face colored, but he took that too. “Still, for some reason, that isn’t enough. Maybe she’s got expensive tastes. Maybe—”
“What do you mean, it isn’t enough?”
“She’s got her eye on her father’s fortune, wherever it is and whatever it is.” I said suddenly, “I had a little talk with a guy named Prieto y Azaña last night, by the way.”
He looked genuinely bewildered. “Who?”
“Prieto. He’s a fan of yours. He was wondering when you two were going to get together and figure out a way to lift three quarters of a billion dollars in Spanish gold from a bank in Moscow. I said you might get in touch with him.”
The furrows left his brow. “Prieto, of course. The economist. We did have some correspondence about it a few years ago. Purely hypothetical. There is no way to reclaim that money for the Spanish government. No way at all.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“No way at all,” he repeated musingly to himself. “But if there were …”
“I got the notion that might have been the reason you brought me along for the ride.”
“Really? That’s ridiculous.”
“If there’s some kind of a tie-in between Hernando Sotomayor’s treasure and the Spanish Loyalist loot, you might have decided you needed a bodyguard.”
“I don’t need you for any reason at all,” he said. “I want you to get out of Spain, but I can’t make you do that. Just keep away from Luz,
and keep away from her uncle. Is that clear?”
His self-righteous arrogance made me say, “Well, if I run short I could always apply to Luz for hush money.”
“Keep away from her, I’m warning you,” he said loudly. I didn’t answer him. He turned his back and returned to his room through the connecting doorway and shut it.
I stretched out on my bed for a good night’s sleep before joining the ranks of the self-employed.
THIRTEEN
They had cleared out by the time I awoke. It was ten o’clock and already hot. The day was going to be another scorcher.
Nobody had left a message of any kind for me, and if Santiago Sotomayor had really planned on giving me five thousand bucks he’d left no hint as to how I might collect it. All the principals in the case seemed quite content to have me drop out of their lives. I felt frustrated.
An old rattletrap of a Plymouth taxi took me out to the Poor Country Boy’s Garage. Luis was at the pumps servicing a Karmann Ghia with French plates. He looked up at me and started to smile and then looked away.
“I came for my car,” I said.
He nodded. “My sister is inside.”
She was seated at the desk in the office, looking down at a color photograph of Antonio Lopez dressed as a novillero in a purple and silver suit-of-lights. He was holding the severed ear of a bull in his hand and gazing up triumphantly. He looked very young and clean-cut. Margarita’s eyes left the picture. They were swollen from crying. She stared at me dully.
“The Guardia was here earlier,” she said. “You and I, together. We killed him.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” I said.
“It’s the same as if you fired the shot. I never should have released you. I am responsible.”
“No you’re not, Margarita.”
“I am not blaming you. You did what you had to do. I blame myself.” Her gaze dropped to the picture again. “Look at him. Oh, he was so young and beautiful, but the worst part of it is that he was a good boy. Truly he was. Above everything he wanted to be a bullfighter. When he realized he could not be, it—destroyed something in him. But he was a good boy.” She opened the desk drawer and took out a key, the Jag’s ignition key. “Take your car and go.”
Drumbeat Madrid Page 11