by Ross Thomas
“I’m not sure, but I think that the Chevelle forced them to swerve. It came out of nowhere from the left. Then a tire must have blown.”
“Or someone shot it out.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Trippet said, “and that’s a damned difficult shot.”
“So were the ones that missed us this afternoon and I didn’t hear those either.”
“Wasn’t that some kind of signal that Nash gave the Chevelle when he blinked his lights?” Trippet said.
“It was a signal.”
“They had it worked out in advance.”
“Not all the way,” I said. “It must have been a contingency plan.”
“Now they’ll be looking for Sacchetti because of two dead policemen.”
“They’ll never prove it,” I said. “Did you see anything that you can swear to?”
“No.”
“Neither did I.”
There wasn’t anything to be done for Tan and Huang so we went back to the Jaguar and got in.
“They’re both dead,” Trippet told Nash.
“Too bad. You ready now?”
“We’re ready,” I said.
Two miles from the wreck Nash turned right onto a dirt road and bounced past houses that were built on stilts over swamp and water. It seemed to grow hotter. Nobody said anything until he pulled the car up at what was apparently the end of the road. “From here on, we walk,” he said.
We got out and followed him down a path that led to a crude dock.
“This the strait?” I said.
“This is it.”
“Now what?”
“We wait,” Nash said. “Somebody’ll be along.”
We waited five minutes and then I could hear the oar-locks of a rowboat. Nash said something in Chinese and a voice answered. It sounded familiar.
“This way,” Nash said. He headed out to the end of the dock and Trippet and I followed. A rowboat was drawn up alongside and a man was standing up, holding onto the dock. “You two into the stern,” Nash said.
The man in the boat turned on a flashlight and Trippet and I crawled down into the boat. “Let them hold the light for me,” Nash said. The man who was standing up passed the flashlight to Trippet and he shined it on the bow of the boat. Nash got in. Trippet flashed the light over the man who was standing up in the boat and I understood why his voice seemed familiar. He was the tall, lean Chinese who had once shot at me on Raffles Place and later had clubbed me unconscious with a revolver in the saloon of The Chicago Belle. He looked almost naked without his pistol.
The Chinese shoved us off from the dock and then sat down and unshipped the oars. He rowed for fifteen minutes. Then we bumped against a large dim bulk and Nash said, “Okay, up the ladder. Use the flashlight.”
Trippet shined the flashlight around until he found a rope ladder with wooden steps. “You guys first,” Nash said.
“This your kumpit?” I said.
“This is it.”
From its running lights the Wilfreda Maria seemed to be about sixty or seventy feet long. I climbed up the ladder and then helped Trippet onto the deck. We let Nash manage by himself. The deck was lighted by five or six haphazardly placed naked bulbs and by the glow from the windows of what seemed to be a cabin and a wheelhouse that was aft. Nash headed for it. “This way,” he said and I noticed that the Chinese who had rowed the boat was right behind us.
“You sure Sacchetti is here?” I said, and my voice cracked like a thirteen-year-old adolescent’s.
Nash grinned. “You’re really eager, aren’t you, Cauthorne?”
“I’ve waited long enough.”
“The great man is just inside,” he said. “Right through that door.”
I put my hand on the knob, then stopped, because it seemed for a moment that the shakes and the horrors were due, but that passed, and I opened the door. Inside there were two bunks, some chairs, and a deal table that held a gin bottle and a glass. The man in the blue shirt who sat behind the table stared at me curiously for what seemed to be a long time. Then he said, “Hello, Cauthorne,” but neither his face nor his voice belonged to Angelo Sacchetti.
They belonged to Sam Dangerfield.
CHAPTER XXIV
Trippet, Nash and the lean Chinese had followed me into the cabin whose stifling small space reeked of stale sweat, mingled with the odor of rotting copra that had the sweet and sour locker room smell of old jock straps and dirty sneakers.
“Hello, Sam,” I said.
“Sit down,” Dangerfield said. “Want a drink? Don’t think I ever offered you a drink before, did I?”
“Not of your own booze.”
“Well?”
“No thanks.”
“This your partner?” he said, nodding his head at Trippet.
“That’s right.”
“Trippet, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Sit down, Mr. Trippet.”
We all sat down, except for the Chinese who stood by the door, his arms folded across his chest. “You were getting too close, Cauthorne,” Dangerfield said as he burrowed his blue eyes into me. “You’re dumb, but you were getting too close.”
“Most of the pieces were missing,” I said. “They still are.”
“You’re Dangerfield,” Trippet said.
The heavy man behind the desk nodded his white domed head slowly. “That’s right, Mr. Trippet. Sam Dangerfield of the FBI as your partner here sometimes calls me. Special Agent Dangerfield with twenty-seven years in the bureau.”
“It’s a lot of money, isn’t it, Sam?” I said. “More than enough to pay off the mortgage at Bowie.”
“You don’t know how much, kid.” He looked at Nash. “Any trouble?”
Nash finished rolling a cigarette before he answered. “Two cops. They had a wreck.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
“That makes three,” I said.
Dangerfield smiled and he didn’t bother to make it a pleasant one. “You figured out the Lozupone girl, huh?”
“About two minutes ago. But you’re right, Sam, I’m a little dumb. I should have tumbled when we were at Toh’s house and you knew too much about the letter to the Panama bank. I didn’t know as much about it as you did and the only way you could have known was to have seen it. So you must have seen Carla. In fact, you must have been the last one to see her.”
“One of the last, Cauthorne,” he said. “One of the last.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now for the kicker. Where’s Sacchetti?”
“Tell him, Cousin Jack,” Dangerfield said.
I looked at Nash. “Sacchetti’s in Cebu,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Being dead.”
“Been dead for almost twenty months, hasn’t he?” Dangerfield said to Nash.
Nash looked up at the ceiling as if counting the months. “About that.”
Dangerfield poured gin into a glass. “I’m going to tell you about it, Cauthorne. I’m going to tell you because you got mixed up in it all accidental-like and I’m going to tell you because I like you, kid. I really do. You’re just not too bright.”
“I’m not much on keeping secrets either,” I said.
He took a swallow of his drink and stared at me over the rim of the glass. Then he put it down, belched, and reached for a cigarette. “You’ll keep this one,” he said and looked at Nash. “How much time we got?”
Nash glanced at his watch. “About a half hour.”
“Good a way to kill time as any,” Dangerfield said. He motioned to the Chinese by the door. “Open it up; it’s too goddamned hot in here.”
The Chinese opened the door and leaned against the sill again, his arms still folded across his chest.
“You were going to tell me what happened to Sacchetti,” I said. “I’m still interested.”
Dangerfield nodded. “I know you are, kid. I know you are. Well, it seems when Sacchetti went over the side of that junk he had a sampan close
by and swam underwater to it and then lit out for the Philippines. He didn’t know anyone there, but it seemed like as good a place as any to operate out of.”
“With Cole’s microfilm,” I said.
“That’s right. With Charlie’s microfilm. The only trouble was he ran out of money so he nosed around and learned that Cousin Jack here was loansharking it so he made the approach. Well, Jack loaned him—what was it, five thousand?”
“Six,” Nash said.
“Six. Jack loaned him six and was supposed to get back seven, but Angelo dropped the whole bundle on the ponies and then couldn’t pay up. Jack naturally got impatient and he took Angelo by the hand and showed him a couple of ex-gamblers who’d been customers until they couldn’t pay. They were scooting around Cebu on platforms built on roller skates because their legs wouldn’t work any more.”
“Nash told me about the baseball bats,” I said. “Only it was Angelo who was supposed to have used them.”
“Jack tells a good story,” Dangerfield said comfortably.
“Very good,” I said.
“Since he couldn’t pay, Angelo decided to cut Jack in. Angelo had always wanted his own shop. You know how he’d been around New York and Los Angeles, always on the fringe, always for peanuts. Well, his idea was to blackmail Godfather Cole for the nut and then set up an operation in Singapore. Except he didn’t think he could swing it by himself, so he cut in Jack, like I said, because Jack knew the territory which sounds like something out of a song, doesn’t it?”
“Not much,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, Angelo told Jack about how he could blackmail Cole and Jack told him about how to set up the fix in Singapore. So together they started the blackmail on Cole. Then Jack got a good look at all of the microfilm that Angelo had and it looked like a goldmine and I’m afraid that Jack got greedy.”
“Not too greedy,” Nash said. “I cut you in.
“I’m your cousin,” Dangerfield said. “We just kept it in the family.”
“What happened to Sacchetti?” I said.
“He had an accident,” Dangerfield said.
“What kind?”
“A fatal one. He got run over by a jeep taxi while crossing the street; it could happen to anyone.”
“Only his name wasn’t Angelo Sacchetti then.”
“No; I’m afraid that the papers they found on his body said he was someone called Jerry Caldwell.”
“You and Nash are really cousins?” I said.
“Grew up together,” Dangerfield said.
“In Baltimore,” Nash said.
“How much time now?” Dangerfield said to Nash.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Going to have to cut this short, Cauthorne. We have to catch the tide.”
“You’re going someplace?” I said.
“All of us are,” he said. “A short cruise.”
“I won’t keep you then.”
“You’ve been plenty of laughs, Cauthorne.”
“You’re sure Sacchetti’s dead?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Then who married Toh’s daughter?”
“My second cousin,” Dangerfield said. “Jack’s kid. With a mustache and longer hair who was to say that he wasn’t Angelo Sacchetti? Nobody in Singapore knew Angelo anyway.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Jack’s kid? In Panama City.”
“Picking up the Lozupone million from the bank?”
“You got it right, Cauthorne.”
“I’m sorry that I don’t,” Trippet said.
Dangerfield gave us another unpleasant smile. “Okay, I’ll tell it quick. Jack and I grew up together, like he said, in Baltimore. He got in a little trouble in thirty-nine and caught a boat to Manila and then did this and that until he wound up in Cebu. I went to law school. I was always the goody-goody. You believe that, Cauthorne, don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said.
“We kept in touch by letter and after the war, I helped him on a few things. Information from the bureau that he could use.”
“And you split whatever you made?” I said.
“It wasn’t much. So when he got Cole’s microfilm dumped into his hands, after Angelo had his accident, Jack got in touch with me. He needed somebody in the States who knew how Lozupone, Cole, and the rest of the boys operated, and how much they could be tapped for. That’s me. He also needed somebody who knew how numbers and the rest of it were set up, and again, that’s me. Jack’s part was to put the fix in at Singapore which he did through Toh for three hundred grand and didn’t make any secret about the fact that he’d bought protection.”
“Toh and his daughter know that Nash’s son isn’t really Sacchetti?”
“They know,” Dangerfield said. “But they don’t give a damn. The marriage was nothing but one of convenience anyway; Jack’s son doesn’t go for girls much.”
“He likes boys,” Nash said. “His goddamned mother ruined him.”
“That was Jack’s first wife,” Dangerfield said. “Now he’s married to a nice Chinese girl.”
“I heard.”
“So everything was going along smooth in Singapore. The numbers were making money, the loan-sharking was taking hold, the protection was paying off, and Toh kept everyone in line by threatening to call a race riot if anything happened to his son-in-law. Everybody played ball and then Charlie Cole got dicey and called Callese in L.A. without checking with me.”
“And that’s how I got in,” I said.
“Cole panicked and there wasn’t anybody else he could think of.”
“Or trust.”
“That’s right. Or trust.”
“And Callese was just a messenger boy,” I said.
“A high-priced one, but that’s all,” Dangerfield said. “I had it all worked out, but Cole screwed it up. I was going to squeeze a million out of Lozupone and then put him away. If he was out of the way in Atlanta, then the rest of them would ease up on Cole and he’d keep on paying.”
“What happened to Carla?” I said. “Why kill her?”
“I didn’t kill her,” Dangerfield said. “I never killed anybody.”
“Your friend at the door then.”
“Like the cops say,” Nash said. “Angelo Sacchetti killed her.”
“All right,” I said. “That was clever, but why kill her?”
“Carla turned bad when she found out that me and Jack were running the thing and that Sacchetti was dead. She threatened to tell her old man; blow the whole thing. She also had a soft spot for you, Cauthorne.”
“Carla was okay,” I said and somehow it seemed that I could have said more than that.
“So we set up another meeting with her; she brought the letter along; we took it, and then turned her over to the gentleman standing behind you. We just made sure that Angelo’s billfold was in her hand.”
“It looked like a frame,” I said.
“We wanted it to. It’ll keep them guessing for years. Angelo Sacchetti disappeared that same night. Jack’s kid cut his hair, shaved off his mustache, flew to Panama under his real name, and that’s it.”
“Extraordinary,” Trippet said.
“He used to be with British Intelligence,” Nash said to Dangerfield.
“Are you still, Mr. Trippet?”
“No, I’m in the used-car business.”
“Just like Cauthorne, huh?”
“There’re a couple of more loose ends,” I said.
“Afraid they’ll have to wait,” Dangerfield said. “We’re due to move out. Take the gentlemen’s coats,” he added, nodding to the Chinese. “They look all hot and sweaty.”
“I’ll keep mine,” I said.
Dangerfield shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, kid. That suit’s got a nice cut, but that gun in your belt spoils the hang. If you’ll look under the desk, you’ll find that something’s pointing at you and has been since you walked in.”
The Chinese came over and I let him take my coat. He also
took the Chief’s Special. My stomach, at least, was happy to get rid of it.
“Now what?” I said.
“Now? Well, we take a trip and rendezvous with the yacht. Toh and his daughter should be aboard by now and I’m sorry you won’t get to see them.”
“You mean you’re going to make us walk back?”
“That’s the way it cuts out. Toh gets the yacht and a few more bucks and we shut down operations in Singapore. It’s been one sweet deal, I can tell you. But if you know when to close the store, well, hell, you know what I mean.”
“You can always work the big con, Sam,” I said. “You worked it on me; you had the store and everything.”
“You’re a mark, Cauthorne,” Dangerfield said. “You’ll always be a mark, but always won’t be a hell of a lot longer for you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was getting to—” I never finished it. The same stunt had worked in three pictures and I thought I knew exactly what to do. So I yelled, “Trippet!” and kicked the deal table over into Dangerfield’s lap. He had a gun underneath it after all and it went off, but the bullet went into the floor and by then I was sailing across the table and both feet slammed into Dangerfield’s chest. He yelled and fired the gun again, but it didn’t seem to hit anyone. I kicked his hand and he dropped the gun and I scooped it up, noticed that it was a .38 caliber automatic and thought that an FBI agent should know better. Trippet seemed to be tangling nicely with Nash and the Chinese by the door was trying to get a clear shot at me so I shot him instead. He grabbed his stomach and amazement spread slowly over his face, the first real emotion that I had ever seen him display. He still wanted to pull the trigger of the Chief’s Special so I tried to shoot him again, but the automatic jammed. I threw it at him and missed as he folded slowly. His knees bent first, then his head dropped as if he were trying to take a close look at his stomach. Finally, he curled up on the floor and started to groan.
From behind Dangerfield brought the gin bottle down on my left shoulder. He ran out the cabin door and I got up after a while and started to follow. I tried to pick up the Chief’s Special that the Chinese had dropped, but Nash broke away from Trippet and kicked it under the bunk. Both of them dived for it and I went after Dangerfield.
He was moving towards the stern of the kumpit and shouting something. He stopped near what appeared to be a bale of copra, snatched up a wicked looking machete, and turned, his face red and dripping with sweat. “Don’t come any closer, kid, or I’ll cut your gizzard out.”