‘You’re in my way, God damn it!’ Larry bellowed at Degan, and Degan took the rest of the steps in one leap, hitting the floor on his hands and knees. For that instant, the men on the landing were sitting ducks, painted targets for the gun in Larry’s hand. The gun roared twice, the blanks sounding like dynamite charges going off in the low-ceilinged, stony vault of the cellar, and then there was the frantic chatter of an automatic weapon, a tommy-gun, from the landing which drowned out every other noise, every other thought.
Larry’s body slowly doubled forward as if it were leaning against the bullets smashing into it, then went down headlong. Degan’s body looked as if it had been pounded down flat into the cellar floor. The glassy eyes stared sightlessly at Chris. A trickle of blood oozed from the gaping mouth.
Chris weakly turned his head away from the sight and sat up. It should have been a scene to gloat over, he thought, but somehow it wasn’t.
‘Don’t move,’ warned one of the men at the top of the stairs. The cellar light went off and was replaced by a flashlight beam shining into Chris’s face, blinding him. The beach that night at Naples all over again, he told himself. Somebody wanted to look him over without being seen.
‘You all right?’ the man asked him.
‘Yes. I guess so.’
‘Not me,’ the other man said querulously to his companion. ‘Me, I’m still all over sweat. Did you see the way that son of a bitch had that gun right on me when he squeezed off those two shots? It felt like I was looking right into a tunnel. How the hell did he come to miss me?’ Another flashlight beam crawled up and down over the wall of the landing. ‘See that? He didn’t even hit the wall. How do you figure it?’
‘You’re Superman,’ the first man answered. ‘Bullets bounce off you.’
They came down the stairs, the light steadily fixed on Chris’s face, and got him achingly to his feet. They were neither rough nor gentle, just businesslike, as they searched him thoroughly, down to and including the insoles of his shoes. That he had already been put through this didn’t make it any pleasanter to take now.
‘Who are you guys?’ Chris said when they indicated they were done with him. ‘Why are you on my tail? What’s this all about?’
‘Who said we were on your tail, Mr Monte? We’re just good citizens. We don’t mind getting involved when someone’s in trouble.’
‘Crap.’
‘Don’t be ungrateful, Mr Monte. Look at this thing.’ The man turned his flashlight on it. ‘A foot of lead pipe all taped up and ready for business. Another minute, and we would have had to dig it out of your skull.’
The most chilling part of it was that the voice was placid, the manner bland. The reek of gunpowder in the cellar, the torn bodies sprawled on the bloodstained floor didn’t seem to concern these men at all. They were like something inhuman. Cut them open and you’d probably find transistors and wiring inside.
‘What now?’ Chris said wearily.
‘You get in your car and take off wherever you want. Except to the police, Mr Monte. I’m letting you in on that to save you a lot of misery. You go to the police, and next thing, the roof falls in on your wife and your brother. Not you. You’ll be around to hear all about it. Just them. You know I’m levelling about that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Chris said.
‘Outside of which, five minutes from now there won’t be anything left here to back up your story. Not these two stiffs, not me, not Superman. All gone like magic. So there you’ll be, fingering your nice wife and your nice kid brother for nothing. That would be a stupid play, Mr Monte. Don’t even think of making it. Understand?’
‘Yes. Can I look around the house before I go? There might be someone here I have to see?’
‘No one else is here. Not upstairs, not downstairs, not anywhere on the grounds.’
‘How do you know?’
‘That’s a trade secret, Mr Monte. But you can take my word for it. Now let’s get moving.’
His car keys lay on the floor near Degan’s outstretched fingers. He was handed them and steered up the stairs and through the door to the driveway. Before he could turn to catch a glimpse of his guide’s face, the door was slammed shut and bolted behind him.
He got the car away from there as fast as he could.
5
The worst of it was seeing it as it was.
He was a minute organism under a microscope. Minute, but important. Whoever was watching him through the microscope wanted him to stay alive and keep moving. If anything threatened to stop him, it would be destroyed. No sweat, Larry had said, fondling his lead pipe, and then he was destroyed. Whatever track Chris Monte wanted to take was being kept clear, all lights green, so he could keep moving.
And it wasn’t Teodorescu and Katia Danska at the other end of the microscope. Far from clearing the way for him, they’d gladly see him dead. It would make it impossible for Beth to claim her inheritance if he was, because Clive Valentine’s curious will required her to show up in court with a live husband.
And it wasn’t the Zucker mob. Not with this kind of cat-and-mouse deal.
And it wasn’t Greenberger and the Miami Beach Police. The last thing they had wanted him to do was run right out of their jurisdiction.
So all you know, Monte, he told himself, all you’re supposed to know, is that there’s somebody at the other end of the microscope, somebody with tommy-guns ready to make sure you don’t get ploughed under ahead of schedule.
When had it started? A week ago, the night he had set out with Hilary for Naples.
What had started it?
No answer. Just the rhythmic hissing of the windshield wiper, the reek of gunpowder still strong in his nostrils, the picture of Degan’s glassy eyes, the blood dropping from his open mouth.
On Route 3, approaching the bridge, he came in sight of a canvas-topped sports car standing at the side of the road, a police car parked just ahead of it interior light on. He slowed down. A cop was leaning over the sports car, ticket pad and pencil in hand, angrily talking to the driver. Another cop sat yawning behind the wheel of the police car.
Chris pulled up beside the police car. He leaned across the seat, rolled down the window.
‘Officer?’
‘Yeah?’
Chris drew a deep breath. It wasn’t easy, the way his diaphragm was suddenly, almost unbearably, constricted.
‘So there you’ll be,’ the warning voice whispered into his ear, ‘fingering your nice wife and your nice kid brother all for nothing.’
‘Commonwealth Avenue, officer,’ he said. ‘I just want to know how to get there.’
6
This time, Prendergast did not answer his doorbell. Thumb on the button, Chris heard the insistent, faraway ringing of the bell somewhere in the depths of the house, but no hall light came on, nothing seemed to be stirring anywhere inside.
He went along the porch trying the windows. Locked.
The rain had stopped, the porch was now made too visible by the streetlamp down the block. He found his way around the unlit side wall of the house, splashing blindly through puddles collected on the narrow cement walk alongside the building, his face whipped by the overgrown, naked bushes bordering the walk. A small extension was attached to the rear of the house, a pantry or store-room. This was obviously the kitchen entrance.
Pulling off a shoe, he used its heel to smash the pane of glass beside the doorknob. He gingerly reached through razor-edged slivers of glass to draw the bolt on the inside of the door, shoved the door open, felt his way in pitch blackness past a series of cabinets, and almost fell over the door-sill entering the room beyond.
He stood there poised, conscious of a presence close to him, of someone’s breathing softly in his ear. Prendergast, he thought, his hackles rising. The man had heard the breaking of the glass and was laying for him here. Like McClure, Prendergast preferred to have others do his killing for him, but, like a cornered rat – a cornered ferret, to go by looks – he could be murderously da
ngerous himself.
But it wasn’t Prendergast, he suddenly realized. It was his own breathing he heard. He took a cautious step forward, brave again, then as something coldly brushed his cheek he recoiled violently and almost shouted aloud. He reached out a hand and found himself clutching the chain dangling from the overhead light. The hell with this kind of game, he decided angrily, and tugged the chain. The room sprang into brightness. It was the kitchen, and it was empty.
‘Prendergast?’ he said. Then raising his voice, ‘Hey, Prendergast!’
Dead, he thought. Stretched out glassy-eyed and bleeding in those wild pyjamas and that fancy robe. He hadn’t known Chris Monte was like the Angel of Death, touch him and you’re done for. And, not knowing, he had more than touched him, he had tried to finish him off. That, as Degan and Larry would agree if they could, was a fatal mistake.
But upstairs in the master bedroom he found the pyjamas and robe flung on the bed, dresser drawers thrown open, evidence of a hasty dressing and departure. The evidence looked even stronger when he combed through the rest of the house from cellar to attic and found no sign of his missing host. Odds were that Prendergast had phoned Degan to find out how he had handled his assignment, and getting no answer, or the wrong one, had promptly taken cover. Prendergast thought fast and moved fast. If his attempt at murder misfired, he wasn’t going to stand around and wonder what the intended victim planned to do about it.
Anyhow, Chris decided, with Prendergast gone he had squatter’s rights to the house, and it was the place to be when Beth returned from wherever she was. He had no reason to believe anything had happened to her, not when he seemed to be the one everybody was really out to get. And she had a million dollars waiting for her in London. Whatever part she played in Prendergast’s affairs, she’d want to be there before the deadline, and with the necessary husband alongside her. Meanwhile –
Meanwhile, since there turned out to be no hot water in the tank, he showered gaspingly in cold, conscious now of every ache and pain accumulated during the night. The side of his head just at the edge of the hairline was raw to the touch, his shoulder was a solid black and blue bruise, the trick knee was badly swollen. He took what small comfort he could from the thought that he was, at least, still alive to suffer his pains.
The kitchen shelves were almost empty. He settled for a breakfast of black coffee and soggy crackers smeared with jam, and then, as the first unpromising light of dawn showed through the drawn window-shades, went upstairs to Prendergast’s office to see what could be dug up as a clue to the man’s real business. The more he saw of the house itself, the more he had the conviction – to judge from the quality and condition of its furnishings – that Prendergast had once had it very good and then had gone steadily downhill. It didn’t take a trained eye to know that this antique furniture everywhere in sight was the real thing, that these threadbare but still handsome Oriental carpets had cost a fortune. But inside and out, the place was dispiritingly shabby now. It looked as if it had taken years of wear with almost nothing invested in its upkeep.
It wasn’t likely that the real estate business had boomed for everyone else during those years and busted for Prendergast. Much more likely that some other business had paid for this house and its extravagant furnishings, and it was that operation which had gone bust for Prendergast. Now, from the way he was wheeling and dealing, it had just as suddenly come to life again.
What operation? Something to do with the mysterious shoe-sized merchandise Chris Monte had twice been searched for?
He made himself comfortable at the desk, and this time went through a random selection of the real estate folders with the thoroughness of an accountant. It was disappointing at first to see that everything in them really did concern real estate. Then the disappointment faded. There were a few receipts for cheap rentals and cheap sales, but the bulk of the stuff was made up of waste paper. Correspondence, memoranda, brochures, a lot of made-work stuff without any profit to it. Something to pad the folders with. And the figures listed in a day book marked Tax Records added up to almost no profit at all. Altogether, there were eight years’ worth of these day books neatly stacked in a drawer of the filing cabinet. None of them offered a different picture.
So Prendergast must have been getting along on money from some other source which had since dried up, but which promised to reopen very soon. More than promised. Guaranteed. Otherwise he would never have gone to McClure for that thirty thousand. No one in his right mind ever went to McClure for a loan with the idea of defaulting on it.
Which still didn’t explain what the other source was.
Chris shoved the folders back into the cabinet and turned his attention to the desk. Five unlocked drawers, one locked. The unlocked drawers contained nothing but stationery, writing supplies, and assorted junk. The locked one he forced open with a chisel and hammer brought up from the workbench in the cellar. Except for a single, rusting paperclip, the drawer was empty. As he resentfully slammed it back into place again he had the feeling there was something offbeat about that drawer, and it wasn’t only that it had been used to lock up one rusty paperclip. He pulled it out and saw what had bothered him. The drawer was at least three or four inches shorter from front to back than the desk. There had to be a compartment behind it; otherwise it didn’t make sense.
There was a compartment, he discovered when he removed the drawer completely. And in it was a litter of papers and what felt like a pack of playing cards with a rubber band around them. With mounting excitement he pulled everything out and laid it on the desk.
The cards, it turned out, were index cards. The rubber band holding them had become gummed to the packet and was so brittle with age that it crumbled into splinters under his fingernail. The handwriting on the cards, a precise, old-fashioned script, was identical with that of the notations on the correspondence in the filing cabinet.
None of the cards offered any date as a clue to their age, but their yellowing edges indicated that they had been written up a long time ago.
The first read cryptically:
BOTT
9
Wash, DC
17
NYC
39
Tampa
The next read:
SFR
2
Phila.
22
Wash, DC
40
Atlanta
71
Miami
It went like that, card after card, for sixty cards.
Chris finally gave up on them. Whatever secret they held remained Prendergast’s. And possibly Beth’s. He noted, as he stacked them together, that each was exactly of a size to fit into the sole of his shoe. It might be interesting to see what would happen if his guardian angels or demons or whatever they were, found one on him, if they ever had a chance to search him again.
Might be. It might also be interesting to try shaving with a cut-throat razor on a roller coaster.
He put the cards aside and unfolded the papers that had been jammed into the compartment with them. Time had been at work here, too. The papers were newspaper and magazine clippings, and when they were unfolded dried-out flakes of newsprint spilled from some of them. Among them were several small photographs, grainy and amateurish.
Poor as these were, their subject was easily recognizable. The same subject, over and over. Christopher Monte in his palmy days. Approaching the Royal Box at Wimbledon. Squinting into the sunlight on the Thames Embankment. Talking to Frenchy Barbeau outside Roland Garros Stadium in Paris.
Christopher Monte was also the subject of the clippings. An interview with Frenchy discussing Kramer’s offer to turn pro and why it had been rejected. A news story from the Miami Beach Sun about his taking the job with Frenchy at Cobia. The Cobia story was the one of most recent date. The one dated earliest was an article about him that had appeared ten years before in Queen, that glossy, upper-bracket British magazine. A highly professional photograph of him had been used wi
th the article. He studied it with fascination, marvelling that he could ever in his life have looked that fresh-faced youthful.
But that was beside the point. The point was that Prendergast knew all about him before coming down to Cobia. Had some secretive business which involved him. Then, when Warburton had showed up with the news of the Valentine estate, Prendergast had advised Beth to marry him, probably for the sake of that business.
What business?
Chris slumped down in the swivel chair, eyes closed, and tried to untangle this tangled skein. The Valentine estate? No, the fact that Prendergast had just connived at his murder ruled that out automatically. Prendergast was residuary legatee in Beth’s will, but if he had some wild dream of collecting the estate he also had to make sure nothing happened to Chris Monte, so Beth could collect it first.
Marty McClure? Prendergast had known McClure at least well enough to get a lot of money from him. The more one knew the real Prendergast, the more it seemed possible that, pressured by McClure about this debt, he, not the Zucker mob, was the one behind McClure’s death.
And what did that have to do with Chris Monte? Nothing.
The skein remained as tangled as ever.
Who else was Prendergast tied in with, Chris wondered.
It was the phone which rang to tell him who else, the unexpected ringing of it almost sending him right out of the chair.
‘Joseph?’ the caller asked, as he put the phone to his ear. ‘Are you there, Joseph?’
There was no mistaking that voice. High-pitched, reedy, exotically flavoured, it was the voice of Gosala Mookerjee.
Chris was on the point of quietly replacing the receiver, then thought better of it. He brought the receiver close to his mouth. ‘Yes? Yes?’ He could only hope it was a convincing imitation of Prendergast’s astringent tone. ‘What is it?’
The Valentine Estate Page 13