Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  Pat wasn’t doing so well these days. He told me not to worry, saying that some weeks you were good and some weeks you were bad. His doc told him to expect that. It would be a sine curve of health, up, down, up, until the final cataclysmic plunge.

  He coughed most of the time now and as I got stronger and put on weight, he balanced me out, getting paler and losing weight. Most nights now I fed him soup and did my best to keep his apartment clean.

  Pat and I were really getting on and I felt a bit guilty about leaving him. But leave him I must. Either for jail or the afterlife or maybe even for Ireland. In case of the latter, I had changed my airline ticket once again, deciding that if I survived the assassination, I’d fly to Dublin that night on my real passport.

  And I might shoot Charles and get out, but more likely I’d be killed at the scene or arrested. Congressman Wegener would be there and a senator from one of the logging states and they were bound to have protection. Peelers and FBI and maybe a few private security guards.

  “Hey, Pat, does Colorado have the death penalty?”

  “No,” Pat said, with a little cough. “But you won’t get that far,” he added with an ironic grin.

  He was wrapped in his blankets. He had a cold. A cold can kill an AIDS patient. He’d given me the list of numbers to call if we had to run him up to Saint Joseph’s.

  “Do you want some tea?” I asked. Pat shook his head.

  “Did you take your AZT?”

  “Everybody I know on AZT is dead,” he said.

  “Pat, do us all a favor and take your prescription. I don’t need you dying on me.”

  “I’ll take it, don’t freak. I’ll be fine, I’m a survivor,” he said, his eyes lighting up to convince me….

  Two days before the fund-raiser.

  Pat was very sick in the morning and I didn’t get out to inspect the Eastman Ballroom until the afternoon. Six blocks north of Colfax on Comanche Street. A large, boxy building with grille-covered, high-arched windows. Plain all the way around, but at the front a lovely art deco facade: marble columns that held up a statue of two seminaked figures who were either ballerinas or angels or prisoners on a starvation diet. It was a beautiful structure, though, elegant in its simplicity.

  The ballroom sat on its own block, opposite an empty ball-bearing factory and an old warehouse. The closest apartment building was four blocks south and derelict. I couldn’t quite understand how the neighborhood had worked; the sidewalks were large, the streets wide. No traffic, no people, no apartment buildings. Perhaps this had been the equivalent of a factory town and when the factory had closed, it had killed the neighborhood completely. Definitely an area waiting for redevelopers to swoop in and convert everything into condominiums.

  The CAW “white attire” ball was by ticket only, but I felt I couldn’t take the risk of attempting to buy a ticket, even under a fake name, since I’d have to have it sent to my Colfax address. Someone would put two and two together.

  I’d have to find another way in.

  I stared at the Eastman Ballroom entrance. A dozen steps led up to a set of double doors under the columns. There’d be ticket takers up there, and if I tried to bluff my way past, I knew it would all go wrong from the start. If I tried to shoot my way in, that would give Charles plenty of time to get to cover. I walked all the way around the building again and leaned against the wall of the old ball-bearing plant.

  A dry, sunny Denver day and the factory made big, bold shadows on the road and sidewalk. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to actually go inside the ballroom, have a check and see what the layout was. But then, what if there was a guard or a cleaner or even someone from CAW making preparations? Why show my face to a security guard when I didn’t have to?

  I took a final look and walked away, in case people started taking an interest in me. I hadn’t come up with anything. Maybe I’d try and bluff my way in regardless, I’d say I’d lost my ticket. We’d see. The one thing I now definitely decided that I wasn’t going to do was to wait for him on the sidewalk while his limo or taxi pulled up. Since there were absolutely no pedestrians in this weird part of town, I’d be totally suspicious.

  The getaway was another problem. Car could get roadblocked in the nasty Denver traffic, so I went to Kmart and bought a hundred-dollar mountain bike and a fifty-dollar lock and chain. If I could get out of the ballroom somehow, I’d bike quickly to Colfax, and once on Colfax, I’d be safe.

  If I could get the fuck out.

  * * *

  We didn’t talk the whole day. Pat tried to make me eggs for dinner, but I took over the cooking. He couldn’t eat, I couldn’t eat. When night fell, I dressed in the white suit I had bought from the Arc Thrift Shop for five dollars. A third of the price of the dry cleaning bill. I grabbed the bike from the hall. Pat looked up from the Rocky Mountain News with a face full of tears and said:

  “Have you got your passport?”

  “I do.”

  “Your tickets?”

  “Aye.”

  “Your gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want me to toss the rest of your stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat for a minute, swallowed. Now even his hair was graying. I went and sat beside him.

  “Alex, there’s nothing I can say to stop you?”

  “No, Pat.”

  “Ok, then, give me a hug.”

  We hugged, Pat kissed me on the cheek.

  “I’m worried about you, Pat,” I said.

  “Fuck that, mate, worry about yourself, I’m not dead yet,” he said.

  “If the police come for you, Pat?”

  “I’ll handle it, Alex, I’ll be ok,” he said, his face in a fixed grin that neither of us believed. I nodded, stood, and looked at him, I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I didn’t want Pat to convince me of anything, but I needed something. I needed some word.

  “Pat, you don’t have to tell me I’m doing the right thing, I know you don’t think I am doing the right thing, but at least tell me you understand. You knew John, you saw what Mulholland did to him. And Victoria and maybe another girl. You know that. Tell me at least that you understand.”

  Pat looked at me, smiled weakly.

  “I understand,” he said softly, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  I picked up my backpack and left the apartment for the last time. I never saw him again….

  I rode the bike along Colfax and up to Comanche Street. At the ball-bearing factory, I dismounted. It was darker now, and with no streetlights I would have been practically invisible, apart from the white shirt, white tie, white seventies suit, and white pimp hat. And I still hadn’t figured out a way of getting into the CAW party.

  I locked the bike. Hid my bag with my change of clothes and passport.

  I walked to the Eastman Ballroom. A lot of activity at the front of the building. Town cars, limos, taxis. Rich white people getting out, the women wearing too much jewelry, the men paunchy, older.

  I walked around the back, waited, tried to think. Maybe get in one of the fire exits. I skulked in the shadows of the derelict factory, my mouth dry.

  An hour went by. I didn’t even have smokes.

  Getting tense. Sooner or later, I’d have to go around the front and try to bluff my way in. I didn’t want to, I figured it wouldn’t work, but soon I’d have no choice.

  I counted a final fifteen minutes on the watch. I could hear a band playing inside.

  I started making my way to the front of the building and just then I got a break. An emergency exit opened and a man in a dinner jacket came out for a smoke. He left the exit open, lit his cigarette, and then decided to take a leak up against the dimly lit ball-bearing factory wall. I crossed the street out of the shadow.

  “Hi,” he said.

  I nodded.

  I went in the open emergency exit, walked down a concrete corridor, pulled a door, was in the ballroom.

  A large floor, a closed balcony, a band up on the stage, a chandelie
r, tables ringing the ballroom with waiters in dinner jackets bringing hors d’oeuvres and booze. About two hundred and fifty people. Half of them dancing whitey fashion to light jazz and Muzak versions of Rat Pack standards. The rest sitting at tables or standing to the sides, chatting, flirting. White dresses, white suits, a couple of people in more creative white lab coats, white boiler suits. Dull as dishwater. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect at a fund-raiser for an organization like the Campaign for the American Wilderness: middle-aged, wealthy, satisfied, not a person of color who wasn’t carrying a tray. Trophy wives and girlfriends. Grizzled men in their forties and fifties who had dodged the draft, made money in real estate, swung from left to right, and whose dream was to someday make the cover of Cigar Aficionado.

  I zeroed in on a group of tables near the stage. Charles, sitting there in a white morning suit, Amber in a dazzling cream dress. Everyone in orbit about her. God, I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. I couldn’t see Robert or the retiring Congressman Wegener, though there was a fat man in a white vest, flanked by goons, so that was a possibility. The congressman had been getting death threats for his antigay stance. The guys with him might be armed. It wouldn’t matter, I’d be quick. Amber was talking to a man who looked so like her, aged thirty-five or forty years, that I knew instantly it was her father. He and a couple of hoods with him were wearing black jackets with a white buttonhole. It made them look like the wait staff. I smiled. I might have been right about my assessment. Maybe I’d brought them together. Having had to find men to kill me had been the great family rapprochement. Touching. The taller of the two goons looked like one of the shooters from Fort Morgan a few weeks ago.

  A waiter came by with caviar on a piece of Melba toast.

  “Sir?” he asked.

  “Thanks,” I said, and forced myself to relax. I unclenched my fists and pretended to be looking at a large 1930s WPA mural of people dancing in various eras of history. I saw that the best route to Charles would be to avoid the dance floor and make my way clockwise through the crowd along the ballroom’s circumference.

  Ok, no more dicking around, I told myself.

  Now or never. I checked in my pocket for the gun and the smoke bombs from Pat’s apartment. I pulled down my pimp hat and walked completely into the room….

  Time slows. The world blurs. Movement. People. The disco lights come on. Snatches of conversation:

  “Oh, he did it, O. J. killed her first and then the waiter…. Winter Park is so over….” “Not Heston, not Sinatra, the worst wig in television is Jack Horkheimer, he’s this astrology dude….” “Clinton will win for certain….” “Norm McDonald plays a great Bob Dole….”

  Couples dancing. Perfume on the women. The band onstage. The lights. The people. But I can see only one. Charles, talking to a man who is doing something to a microphone stand. There are to be speeches later.

  Well, I can safely say the audience isn’t going to have to suffer through that.

  I ease my way through the crowd.

  No one pays me the slightest bit of attention.

  Closer.

  Closer.

  I get bumped by a flapper.

  “Sorry,” she says, gives me a winning smile.

  “Not at all.”

  Twenty feet from his table.

  I feel for the gun again. Swallow. I feel sick.

  Time slows further.

  My legs begin to tremble. Can I do this? Can I kill another person? Didn’t I kill that guy in the cemetery? I had the hate. I had it. Victoria alone would have been sufficient. But John and possibly that girl Maggie too? So close.

  Fifteen feet. No dancers between me and him. I can see his eyes, his confident sneer. A direct line, a clear shot. He’s standing next to Amber. He scratches his ear, takes a drink of champagne. His last. My veins are throbbing, I can count my heartbeats. One, two, three, four…

  I blink. Loosen my fingers. Sweat in beads rolling down my palms. My knee hurts. I have stopped breathing.

  Ten feet.

  I touch the .38. I cock it in my pocket. I force my legs to stop shaking. The metal of the gun is warm, the grip drenched with sweat. Did I load it? Of course I did. I pull it out.

  Time stops.

  I grin.

  I’m really here. This is really happening. This is it. It’s too late now. You can do what you like, Charles. Grab your rosary. Sing your songs. Your existence is hereby erased.

  People are moving behind me, talking. The music plays. A drum solo. The room sways slightly.

  My throat is dry. I try to swallow, but when you’re not breathing, you can’t swallow.

  Charles leans forward to hear something, I begin to lift the gun.

  Charles turns his head slightly.

  I momentarily catch his eye.

  My grin widens.

  He looks away. There’s a lot of things going on in this room.

  Charles says something to a man with enormous whiskers. The man looks puzzled. Charles has begun an anecdote or joke, but he has lost the plot, he looks confused, he begins to stutter, like his brother. I bring the .38 to full extension, Charles’s confused face in the middle of the sight.

  Amber leans in. Charles relaxes. Amber, beautiful and clever and hard. She says something and the man laughs and Charles looks at his feet and perks up and finishes his joke. And suddenly I see the whole dynamic of their relationship. Everything depends upon her. She’s not just the one behind the scenes. She’s the one that gives him confidence. She’s the one that lifts him up. It’s her. The heroin concealed it from me.

  And then the gun feels weak in my grip as suddenly I see it all.

  It’s Amber. Of course. It’s her. Jesus.

  Charles could never have killed anyone. Too effete, delicate, too sensitive, he wouldn’t have had the bottle. And Amber under the ketch already told me as much. She told me everything already. I just didn’t see it. That perfect skin, that razor smile, those quirks, that steely look.

  It’s her.

  Charles probably never killed anyone in his life. Not John, not Victoria. Probably not Maggie, either. If it was one of those lacrosse boys, it was more likely Houghton. Charles just doesn’t seem the type. Of course, the blackmail game would still be on. Charles meets Maggie, Houghton shows up. There’s an incident. Houghton’s word against his. But no, I don’t think he did it. Charles is no killer.

  Not even bloody John. I had assumed a man had done it, but why? Look at her. Strong, fast, fit, lithe, a fucking martial artist. Why not her? Tough enough and lucky enough to get one blow right in the heart.

  Amber stroking her hair in midflirt with the powerful man next to Charles, who I recognize as a famous senator. And then I laugh. I really laugh. She had outplayed me from the very beginning. She had seduced me, to enable me to unveil myself. She had been hot and cold, all to get me off my guard, to find me out, make me slip. She was the detective, trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing here. Maneuvering me into a situation so that I would slip, reveal that, yes, I did know Victoria, I was on her trail. Ha. Me thinking I was mining her for information and all the time it was the other way around.

  Amber, her mother a thief, her father a player. School of hard knocks. A real piece of work. Her body was the weapon she had used on Victoria and me, but her mind was the really impressive instrument.

  How long have I been standing here? With my arm outstretched and the big coat sleeve partially but not wholly concealing a gun held in my hand.

  One second? Two?

  But in that moment, that brief increment of time, I see everything. From its very beginnings. After years of paying off Alan Houghton, Charles confesses or lets slip to his wife about the blackmail. Amber knows Charles is her ticket from the shanty-Irish muck. An old-money WASP with political ambitions. There is only one thing to do. She decides to kill Houghton. The easy way would be to tell her da. But she’s burned that bridge. She will do this on her own. Her da is the past she’s escaping from. She will make
her own future. She plans it all. She plans the murder. She’s learned well from her da’s success, her ma’s failures. Yes. Handle this on her own, keep Charles out of it, keep Dad out of it, she’ll do it by herself. Just as she worked hard to get into Harvard, reinvented herself, probably forced the coincidence whereby she and Charles would meet at Vail. This was one more obstacle to be overcome.

  Yes.

  Then Victoria Patawasti finds out about the slush fund. Victoria leaves a trail in the accounts. Charles notices that someone has been looking at the secret account file. He panics, tells his wife. Of course it could only be Victoria and silly, poor, doomed Victoria writes up her suspicions in her computer. Only Charles, Robert, and, what was that Klimmer said, yes, Mrs. Mulholland, only those three ever went into Victoria’s office. Amber has to know what Victoria knows. Seduces her, gets her to reveal her password and what she knows. And once the decision is made to kill Alan Houghton, Victoria has to die too. Victoria can’t be bought. Amber has to act quickly. Hector Martinez is working at the CAW offices. Maybe he drops his license, maybe she rifles through his wallet. It doesn’t matter, she gets the license and knows she can use it to set up an innocent man. She kills Houghton and Victoria on the same night, sets up Hector as a burglar. Brilliant.

  Does Charles know about it all? He must have told her that someone had been looking at the secret account. Is he in on the murders? Did Amber tell him? Did he have anything to do with Maggie Prestwick’s death? Does it matter? I don’t think I even care now.

  And only after she botched my murder did Amber see she was at the limit of her power. She needed professional killers to kill me. The risk of hiring unknowns—who could blackmail her—was too great. Who to turn to? Daddy. Because she needed him. Because blood was thicker than water. A rapprochement. Oh, Amber. It had to be you.