This whole scheme might have gone along as planned except for one thing. Me. I wondered what had happened earlier tonight. Had Farkas, thinking I knew everything, decided to beat me to Buchanan and confess? It seemed so. And had Buchanan, in a fit of appalled horror at Farkas’ activities, his political career at stake, resolved to silence everyone who knew about the half-baked blackmail scheme? And now that he knew about Valerie’s infidelity, so to speak, was she about to follow his first wife, and become another victim of his homicidal jealousy?
If so, then poor Buchanan—his night’s work was unfinished. There were still two of us running around loose who knew what Farkas had been up to. Lester Baines. And me. And, of course, he still had the problem of Val.
I parked on the street across from the Buchanans’ condo apartment, and wondered how I was going to get someone to talk to me. Vacationing on the mainland were they? In a pig’s eye. I was willing to bet that Buchanan was haunting the city looking for Lester, and Val was upstairs blissfully oblivious to all these machinations.
Squinting through the fog, I saw the open mouth of the parking garage. Perhaps a tour of the residents’ automobiles would tell me if Baxter was in or out. Then I could concentrate on wearing down Val’s housekeeper. Or getting her out of bed to answer the phone.
As I had hoped, Buchanan was out. At least the car I had seen at the studio, the one whose vanity plate read WINNER, was gone. Val’s white Porsche was there, however.
I ran across the street to the pay phone at the marina, and dialed Val’s number again. This time I let it ring. Twenty-nine rings later a sleepy Scottish voice answered. It was the obstructionist housekeeper.
“This is Doctor Reece from Jubilee Hospital,” I said in my most officious voice. “I must speak to Ms. Frazier at once.”
“I’m sorry—” the housekeeper began.
“Madam,” I interrupted. “I must insist. It’s about Mr. Buchanan. There’s been an accident and we must contact next of kin.” Half a lie, but who cared at a time like this?
Silence. Then, amazingly, acquiescence. “Very well. Please hold the line.” Vacationing in the Okanagan, eh? Sure. “Hello?”
I hardly recognized Val’s voice. It sounded slurred. Drugged. A shiver ran up my spine. “Val, it’s Caitlin. Baxter isn’t there, is he?”
“Um ... no,” she said, sounding terrible.
“Where is he?”
“Well...I’m not sure. At the office? Or did he go to his farm? I just can’t think. Baxter gave me some pills, and I’ve been sleeping, you see.”
“Are you all right?” Ye gods. So he’d drugged her. “What day is this?” she asked.
“Saturday. No, Sunday now.”
“Did you...”
“Call off the blackmailer? Yes. But there’s a little problem.”
“Oh?”
I doubted if she could stay awake long enough to hear about it, so I didn’t bother explaining. There were more important things to impress upon her.
“Valerie, listen to me. You can’t stay there. Baxter will be back, and he’s likely to do something terrible.”
Silence.
“Valerie, answer me!”
“Yes,” she mumbled. “I’m here.”
“Did you understand what I said?”
“Hmm? What?”
This wasn’t going to work. “Get your housekeeper to buzz me up when I ring your apartment from the lobby,” I said.
“All right.”
To my surprise, when I got there and rang the bell marked Frazier, the door buzzed at once. I leaped for it before someone changed her mind, and ran to the elevators. On the penthouse floor I loped along to P1 and pounded on Val’s door. A feisty little woman in a blue quilted dressing gown barred my way. I pushed her aside.
“Val?” I called.
“I’m in here,” a slurred voice called from the apartment’s nether regions.
She was in her bedroom and, to my surprise, about half dressed. Perhaps what I had told her had made some impression after all. She pulled on a pair of fawn wool pants, tucked a dark green shirt into them, and ran her hands over her hair. I picked up her purse from the dresser and held it out to her.
“Caitlin, I have to go to work tomorrow. I need some things.”
“Buy them,” I told her. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“All right,” she said in a dazed, frightened voice.
I traded glares with the housekeeper, then held my breath, fingers crossed, as the elevator arrived. Mercifully for my jangled nerves, it was empty. It looked as if I might be able to do something right yet.
I waited at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel’s registration desk while a sleepy clerk signed in an even more sleepy Val. When I judged she was safely on her way up the stairs to the second floor, I raced back outside to my MG and roared off down the dark, empty streets.
A quick tour revealed that Buchanan wasn’t at Lester’s new house, or at the house on Redfern Street. I had to conclude that he had given up and gone away. Or gone home. As I was about to do. By now it was close to five in the morning. I thought about the dead people in the house on Redfern, and the living ones in my house on Monterey, and decided to wait to call Sandy. I was in way over my head—it was certainly time for the police. But a few more hours wouldn’t matter. The dead didn’t need me. Tonia and Lester did.
Chapter Eighteen
Home. I took a fond look at my dark, quiet house, turned off the MG’s engine, and hauled myself wearily out of the driver’s seat. The steps to the front door seemed especially steep and numerous, and I sighed as I locked the door behind me, tossing my windbreaker over a chair in the living room. I’d just clean up a little before going upstairs, I thought. I washed my face, and deliberately avoided looking at myself in the mirror. Failure is never a pretty sight. Well, maybe Lester and Tonia wouldn’t dwell on the subject.
I wondered what to tell Malcolm and Yvonne about their unexpected house guests. Maybe the truth. It would blow my cover as a business consultant, but what the hell. The two of them weren’t due home until Sunday about noon—gosh, I had hours and hours to dream something up if I so chose. I turned on my bedside light and kicked off my sneakers. Dizzy with fatigue, I took off my .357, wrapped my leather belt around the holstered gun, and put it on the bookcase. Where was Repo, I wondered. Unless he had somehow gotten upstairs in all the coming and going earlier tonight, he should have been in evidence, sitting eloquently in the middle of my bed, eyeing me with reproachful yellow orbs for keeping such late hours.
“Repo?” I said.
Then the closet door burst open and an enormous piece of the darkness hurled itself at me—a shape with hands that reached for my throat and eyes that burned with cold fire. Fatigue and surprise made me slow, and the shape grabbed me. I cried out in alarm and twisted away, feeling the stitches break loose in my shoulder, falling backwards and hitting the side of my head on a sharp corner of the bed frame. A sunburst exploded behind my eyes, and consciousness began to slip away. I never did see a face, and my last thought was one of abject terror—the Dark Lady had finally found me.
There was a hot throbbing pain in my shoulder, an unbearable pounding in my head, and I wanted to tell whoever was thumping so noisily on the ceiling to stop. But I also wanted to stay in whatever dark, safe place this was. I couldn’t remember why I shouldn’t open my eyes, so I did. A mistake. I was lying on my bedroom floor where I had fallen, my body twisted to one side, my nose on the floorboards in a puddle of blood. What had happened? Alarmed, I turned my head, and someone prodded me with a foot. Then I remembered, and opened my eyes. On the floor about four feet away from me crouched Baxter Buchanan. How had he found me? Val. Of course. He’d extracted enough information from the drugged Val ...
“Awake, I see,” he said. “Good. We can do this one of two ways: the hard way or the easy way. It’s up to you.”
I struggled to sit up. “Do what?” I managed. “Why should I cooperate with you? You’re going to kill me anyho
w.”
He laughed. “How very perceptive of you, my dear.”
I looked at the gun in his hand. It was a US officer’s model Colt .45 automatic. It would make a horrible noise, but I guessed Buchanan intended to be well away before the neighbors came to investigate. I decided this was no time to take affront at his patronizing remarks. I should address myself instead to the problem of how to get at my own gun which was directly behind Buchanan on the bookcase. I leaned back against my nightstand, and touched my head gingerly. I had an egg-sized lump on my temple, and it was sticky with blood. It hurt like hell, and worse, it had affected my vision. I couldn’t focus properly. If I looked directly at Buchanan, there were at least three of him. I closed my eyes, feeling nauseated. Not now, I told myself. You can be sick later.
“It won’t work, Buchanan,” I told him. I needed to engage him in conversation. Stall.
“Oh? what won’t work?”
I made a global gesture with the arm not immobilized by pain. “What you’ve done. It’s too late to keep it quiet.”
“Ah, but that’s why I’m here,” he said. “Of course it’s not too late. That’s what we’re going to chat about.” So that’s why he hadn’t yet finished me off—he needed to know who I’d been talking to. Good. If he thought I had something he needed, he would have to give me the thing I needed most—time.
I tried a laugh. It sounded a trifle panicked to me, and I hoped he hadn’t noticed. “Forget it, Buchanan. Even if I told you what you want to know, it won’t do you any good.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, a note of doubt creeping into his voice.
“The trail for this night’s work will lead right back to you.” I embellished a little more. “No, it’s too late to cover up.”
He stood up, and took a few steps away from me. “You’re wrong there,” he told me. “Mistakes can always be covered up.
“Come off it, Buchanan. You can’t kill us all and expect to walk away from this.”
“Why not?” he said, smiling. “That fool Farkas was doing the blackmailing, not me. He and his young friends had a falling out. The disagreement led to murder.” He shrugged. “There’s no way to connect any of this to me.”
“Farkas really messed things up for you, didn’t he?” I taunted, trying to distract him. “If he’d just left well enough alone, none of this needed to happen.”
Buchanan smiled. “True. But he paid for his meddling. I don’t need anyone’s help to chastise my own wife.”
Chastise? Was that what he thought he was doing thirty-one years ago? “Are you going to chastise Val?”
He gave me a flat, unblinking reptilian stare, and I shivered. “Oh yes,” he said. “She’ll pay.
This was crazy. He didn’t really think he could do these things and get away with them, did he?
“What a lot of problems Victor Farkas caused for you,” I tried again. Damn it, there had to be a way to provoke him. “And to think he was only trying to help you. That’s a rotten way to repay someone’s devotion, Buchanan. Or was it more than devotion? How close did you two get overseas, anyhow?”
He stared at me, the gun steady in his fist.
I decided to try something else. “Val wasn’t cheating on you, Baxter,” I told him. I saw a flicker of interest in his eyes and forged ahead. Hell, maybe I could appeal to his conscience. “Farkas was an idiot. If he had read the letters more carefully he’d have known that Val never did anything with Tonia. But once he realized he had an entrée to your gratitude, he couldn’t think of anything else. There was no need for any elaborate plot to get her to go back to you.” I decided not to tell him that Val had intended to leave him anyhow. Better to concentrate on the positive aspects, like Val’s innocence. “You didn’t have to kill Farkas and the boys. Just like you don’t have to kill me. Or anyone else.”
“Oh, I do,” he said sorrowfully. “You don’t seem to understand. My political future is at stake here, too. No one must ever know any of this.”
It wasn’t going to work. Buchanan had his mind made up. Well, maybe I should mention Val’s plans for leaving him. What did I have to lose? If I could make him angry, distract him long enough, I could make a lunge, grab my own gun, and equalize the odds a little. I wondered how implacable he’d be staring down the barrel of my .357.
“You’re a crazy man,” I told him heatedly. “Do you know that? You murdered your first wife, you’ve killed three people tonight, and you’re standing here talking about killing three more. When did you finally lose it, Buchanan? When you murdered the first woman you imagined was philandering?” I forced a laugh. “I don’t blame her a bit. Or Val. No one should have to live with a psychopath.”
That did it. His florid face turned dark red, and he took one step toward me. As he drew back his foot to deliver a kick, I realized that my desire to provoke him had backfired. His foot landed squarely in my ribs, and I expelled a whuff of air. I barely had time to roll into a ball as he kicked me again, and this time I heard a rib crack. No good, Caitlin, no good.
“So we’ll do this the hard way,” he said, panting a little from such unaccustomed exertion. “It doesn’t matter. Oh, you’ll talk to me, all right. And after I’ve finished you off, I’ll attend to the others. You don’t understand, do you? I will get away with this.”
Atta boy, Baxter. Kill us all. I had to do something fast, because soon I’d be unable to do anything. He’d simply kick me into insensibility and shoot me. Taking one pain-racked breath, I got my feet underneath me, and lurched off the floor at him. It would have worked, but I miscalculated how disoriented and weak I was. I tottered, grabbed for his gun hand, and he slapped me down. It was all over. I couldn’t summon the strength to get up again. I rolled over so I could see him. If he was going to shoot me, he’d damn well have to look me in the eye. He raised the gun and aimed it at my head. The opening in the end of the muzzle seemed as big and black as a mine shaft. There was nothing to do but wait for the bullet.
I heard the floorboards creak and at the same time saw the white flash of her arms. Buchanan heard something too, because he started to turn his head in the direction of the sound. But Tonia was already completing her swing. My heavy Smith Corona portable typewriter descended on Buchanan’s head with a thunk like an axe hitting wood. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell towards the bed, discharging his gun as he did so. The bullet missed my head by six inches, and I felt it fan my face as it went by. Then Buchanan slid off the bed and lay on the floor beside me, one hand outstretched as if in supplication. His baffled brown eyes were wide open, and very dead. I looked up at Tonia.
She stood in the bedroom doorway, pale as a ghost. Looking at her hands as if they, not she, had done this horrible thing, she wiped them on the sides of her jeans. “We heard noises,” she said. “I came down to see what was happening. When I saw him about to kill you, I...I...I had to do something.” She looked at me for confirmation. “I had to do it, Caitlin.”
“Yes,” I told her. “You did.” Not quite the truth, but close.
“But my God, I’ve killed him.”
“You saved my life,” I said, shifting the focus a little.
She looked from Buchanan to me, and blinked several times. “Yes, I did, didn’t I?” she said. She nodded as if the idea made sense to her.
I hoped it did, because when she had the leisure to reflect on this, she was going to realize that she had traded her philosophy for a human life. Mine. Caitlin Reece, thug. Had it been a fair trade? I was the wrong person to ask. Only Tonia could answer that question.
Chapter Nineteen
I lay on the couch in a pleasant haze of inebriation. Bach’s Cantata 147, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, was playing, and I was struck again by the chill beauty of that wonderfully mathematical music. There’s nothing like Bach to convince you that God’s in her heaven and all’s right with the world. Of course, a little Glenfiddich Scotch—a gift from a very grateful client—was proving helpful, too. I poured myself another dr
am. Toasting Repo, who lay beside me playing nursemaid, I thought with a surge of glee that I had absolutely nothing to do this afternoon. Nowhere I was supposed to be. No one to see. Nobody’s problems that required attention. I could just lie here and vegetate.
Nor did I want to think much about the activities of today’s earlier hours. They bore too much resemblance to the last act of Hamlet. I was genuinely grieved that Lester’s friends had to die. I couldn’t say the same about Victor Farkas. Or Baxter Buchanan. Well, at least Val was finally free of him.
The window was open behind me, and happy chirping sounds floated in from the garden. The robins had resumed nest building now that the sun had come out. I stretched luxuriously. Life might be worth living after all.
On the coffee table was an enormous bunch of daffodils and tulips from Gray. Good grief, you’d think I was convalescing or something. Just to prove I wasn’t a complete invalid, I sat up. Not too bad. My rib protested only a little, my shoulder itched just a bit, and my newly sutured head throbbed, but it was nothing incapacitating. It had better not be. I had business to do next week: lunch with Virginia; long overdue trip to Texada Island to see Jan; dinner with Sandy and Mary; and the pursuit of Yvonne and Malcolm’s slippery Oliver Renbo, he of the Rainbow Fund. But that was next week. This was now.
The strains of the cantata came to an end, and I sighed. I’m not exactly a believer in God, but from time to time I find it comforting to think that there might be a guiding hand in all this mess. A pattern. A meaning. I looked over my shoulder at the robins in the apple tree and smiled.
Reaching past Repo, I turned off the stereo. He protested, and I apologized. One should never antagonize one’s nurse.
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