Damned if he didn’t look glad to see us. Not because we were protection. Because he liked us.
But he put on his sober face when he reached us. After a discreet look around to be sure that none of the other people leaving the bank could hear him, he asked, “Was Reston able to tell you anything?”
Something in his voice hinted at eagerness or anxiety. Or possibly humor.
Brusquely Ginny told him that Reston Cole was on vacation.
Haskell managed to look crestfallen, but I felt sure that we hadn’t ruined his day. He glanced up at my face, then back to Ginny. “So what do we do now?”
“Get your car,” she said. “We’ll follow you home.” She made no particular effort to sound congenial. “When we get there, stay in your car. One of us will go in first. Your playmates have had all day to set up for you, if that’s the way they work. Then we’ll all go in and see what we can do about turning your house into a fort.”
That didn’t seem to be exactly what Haskell had in mind. Maybe it wasn’t enough like playing cowboys-and-Indians. But Ginny was using her nobody-argues-with-me voice, and he didn’t try. With a shrug, he turned away toward a Continental the size of a yacht at the other end of the lot.
He looked too exposed for his own good. Instinctively both Ginny and I scanned the area, hoping that we wouldn’t see anyone who might be classed as suspicious.
We didn’t. When Haskell reached his car, unlocked it, and climbed in, Ginny let her breath out through her teeth. “If we are honest to God going to work on this case,” she said softly, “we’d better stop letting him walk around like that.”
I nodded. My heart beat a little funny. I was out of practice for this kind of job.
Ginny got into the Olds. I went back to the Buick.
Haskell pulled his boat out of its parking space ahead of us and sailed away like the captain of his soul, leading us farther into the Heights toward the mountains.
All of a sudden I wasn’t so sure that I wanted this case. The afternoon was getting dark fast. And at night everything changed. For no good reason, I believed in the danger again.
In less than a mile, the Buick’s heater had me sweating. I wanted to blare my horn at the other drivers, maybe try a little demolition derby, anything to clear the road so that our private procession could reach Haskell’s house before dark. I hate walking into unfamiliar houses in the dark when they might be full of goons. But thanks to Puerta del Sol’s layout, half the people in the Western Hemisphere live in the Heights, and they all want to get home between four thirty and five thirty.
Fortunately, Haskell turned off the main roads after ten or twelve stoplights, and we started up into the kind of suburban development where Puerta del Sol’s new money hangs out on its way to even better real estate. We didn’t go all the way to the foothills, but by the time we reached Cactus Blossom Court, off Foothill Drive, we were close enough to see what we were missing.
Cactus Blossom left Foothill on the spine of a ridge and dropped almost straight back toward the city for a hundred yards before it became a cul-de-sac. From there you could see the sunset turning the mountains pink above you. In the other direction, the whole city changed into lights and jewels.
I didn’t get a very good view of the neighborhood—just enough to see that the houses were pretty tightly crammed together, no more than six feet from each other or fifteen from the sidewalk. In this part of town, you paid for view and size, not land. Haskell’s house was on the south side of the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill.
In fact, it was built back against a deep erosion gully called Arroyo Hombre. The arroyo used to overflow every spring when the snow on the mountains melted, until the Corps of Engineers built a flood-control project that routed all the water somewhere else. As a result, Haskell’s house had an especially dramatic place to sit.
He wheeled his Continental into the driveway with considerable elan. But then he had enough sense to wait for us to catch up with him.
Ginny parked beside him. I snapped off my headlights and pulled in behind him. His lights and Ginny’s shone on the doors of the double garage, but there was enough reflection to show a front yard landscaped with gravel and scrub piñon, low walls separating the properties on either side, and a recessed entryway bracketed by young cedars so well groomed that they looked like artificial Christmas trees.
Ginny ditched her lights. Haskell did the same. She and I met at the driver’s window of the Continental. After the heat and frustration of driving, I felt the cold slide into my clothes like a shiv.
“Stay here,” Ginny said. Only someone who knew her as well as I did could’ve heard the edge of fear in her voice. Dusk hid the details of her face, but her purse hung from her right shoulder, and her hand was in her purse, gripping her .357. Neither of us could see what Haskell looked like. “I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t be silly,” I replied with my usual tact. “You got to be the hero last time. It’s my turn.”
She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t try to stop me either.
Well, nobody ever said I was smart. I took the key from Haskell. Trying not to shiver, I went to check out the house.
When I reached the cedars, I paused to loosen my .45 in its holster, but I didn’t pull it out. Instinctively I trust size and muscle more than firepower. You’d be surprised how many people are afraid to shoot at something as big as I am.
I took one more look at the last pink light gleaming from the snow on the mountains. My heart stumbled around in my chest like a drunk as I started for the door.
The door wasn’t just recessed, it was downright bashful. It hid at the end of an aisle twenty feet long set into the house. Overhead hung a trellis covered with something, probably wisteria, but without leaves it let in enough light to give me some vague idea of where I was. I felt like I was walking into a shooting gallery as I went to the door as quietly as I could.
At the door, I stopped. All right, Axbrewder. Just take it easy. This is why they pay you the big bucks.
I put the key in the lock and opened the door a few inches. Then I reached my arm in through the crack, feeling along the wall for the light switches.
Luckier than I deserved. I found a panel of three or four switches. So that I wouldn’t have time to panic, I flipped them all at once, pushed the door open, and started inside.
Lights came on behind me along the aisle and in the room I’d entered. The room was an off-center atrium with a dark railed hole in the floor—actually a stairway to the lower level. A walk around the hole gave access to other rooms on this story. No thanks to my light-footedness, I didn’t make a sound. The carpet was so thick that small children could have hidden in it. The decor was new-money garish—rococo wrought-iron for the railing, gilt on the door frames, Spanish bordello light fixtures. But the stairwell in front of me looked as ominous as a cave.
No one here but us chickens. So far.
As it turned out, there was no one in the house at all. But I’d aged at least six years before I was sure. The whole place was a maze, and by the time I’d searched it all I was expecting to find the skeletons of lost explorers. One wall of the entryway aisle proved, obviously enough, to be part of the garage. However, the opposite wing was so confused with closets and bathrooms and doors in odd places that I almost didn’t find the master bedroom. Fortunately, the rest of the upper floor was easier. To the left of the atrium, a living room with a spectacularly tasteless wet bar and several large windows stared out at the privacy wall. Across the stairwell, I found a study and a solarium. Opposite the living room lay a combination utility and laundry room.
The lower floor, on the other hand, was heaven for people who like to jump out at other people. Only one of the rooms was large, a den with enormous overstuffed furniture and two picture windows, one for Arroyo Hombre, the other for the lights of the city. Everything else was built into, around, or behind itself. Even the kitchen was hard to find without a compass. I kept turning left at the wrong
bathroom and ending up in the room with the pool table. And I needed three tries to reach the dining room, even though it shared one wall with the den.
Eventually I was sure that the place was empty. Maybe I’d searched every room, maybe I hadn’t. But I didn’t believe anyone hiding in there could stand to wait that long without shooting me in the back.
Luckily, I didn’t get lost on my way to the front door.
Ginny and Haskell were waiting for me in the aisle. I thought that was a pretty exposed place until I saw all the light flooding the gravel yard and realized I must’ve turned on the lights across the front of the house when I went in. Here Ginny could at least stand between Haskell and the street and keep her eyes open.
Something about the angle of her right arm gave me the impression that she was gripping her .357 too hard. Anxiety made her skin look tight across the bones of her face.
For something to say, I muttered, “We don’t get paid enough for this kind of work.”
She took her hand out of her purse and hugged the front of her coat. “What took you so long?” she asked unsteadily. “We’re freezing out here.”
Haskell wasn’t cold. He looked pleased. “It’s a big house.”
I wanted to say, Don’t be too proud of it. You’ll have a lot of fun getting around here with two broken legs. But he was the client, so I kept my mouth shut.
A funny thing happened when he walked into the house. Somehow he made the furnishings look less garish. They all belonged to him, and he was at home.
While I locked the door and Ginny glanced around the atrium, trying not to let her reactions show, Haskell hung up his coat in a closet I’d missed, then walked into the study to drop off his briefcase. He came back rubbing his hands. “Your partner has the advantage of you, Ms. Fistoulari,” he said with the smile of a happy man. “Why not let me show you around?”
“Fine,” Ginny said. “I need to look at the locks. See how many different ways there are in here.” But she didn’t do any unbending for his benefit.
Like a professional tour guide, he started right in. “The garage is over here. Doesn’t do us much good, I’m afraid.” A smile full of wry charm and self-deprecation. “It’s still full of our old furniture. We haven’t gotten around to selling what we don’t need.”
It’s hard, I thought, to dislike a man who enjoys himself that much.
I left him to it. Back down the stairs, I went hunting for the kitchen again to see what I could do about supper. I felt like I hadn’t had anything to eat for days.
At first I couldn’t find anything except liquor and wine—gallons of the stuff, backup supplies for the wet bar in the living room plus at least two other cabinets, one in the den, one in the game room. That didn’t seem fair to a man with my predilections. Fortunately, when I opened what I remembered as a broom closet, it turned out to be the refrigerator.
Although it was big enough to be a morgue, it wasn’t particularly well stocked. But I managed to locate a slab of ham and plenty of eggs and cheese. By the time Haskell had given Ginny the tour, I’d made enough omelets to feed six people.
We ate in the dining room like formal guests. Our host tried to interest us in a bottle of wine, but Ginny said that she didn’t drink while she was working, and I said I didn’t drink. Then he entertained himself by telling us the exciting story of how he and Sara found and bought this house.
We didn’t listen. I didn’t know about Ginny, but I was straining my ears to the noises of the house. I wanted to believe that I would be able to tell the difference between the creak of contracting joists and the snap of a forced window latch.
I’ve said it before. At night I believe in cases like this.
Before we finished eating, Haskell ran out of one-sided conversation. Watching him obliquely, I saw the lines of his face start to sag into something that looked like creeping unhappiness. Contrast made the difference more obvious than it would’ve been otherwise. If he’d looked like this when I first met him, I would’ve assumed that his expression was normal for a chief accountant. Dull and vaguely charmless, tired of numbers. Just like the man Sara Haskell thought she married.
Finally he pushed his plate away, gulped the last of his wine, and asked, “So what do we do now?”
Ginny studied him for a while. Apparently, she thought that he looked more like a man should when both his legs were in danger. She’d been as stiff as Sheetrock with him from the beginning, but now she eased back a bit.
“This is the boring part,” she answered. “We sit here and wait for something to happen. We’ll stay with you all night. The doors and locks look pretty sturdy. If you stay out of the den and the living room”—the only rooms with ground-level windows—“they’ll have to break in to get at you. When you go to bed, Brew and I’ll take turns on guard duty. Probably in the atrium. That’s the strategic center of the house.
“If nothing happens, we’ll take you in to work tomorrow.” She made an empty gesture with her hand. “It’s really that simple. The complicated part is tracking down the people who want to hurt you. We’ll tackle that problem while you’re at work.”
Haskell began to look a little nauseated. Maybe he hadn’t thought through what he was doing when he hired us. “You mean to tell me,” he asked slowly, “that I have to sit here and do nothing all tonight, and all tomorrow night, and all the next night, until something happens?” His eyes were dark with unhappiness or anger. “I’ll go out of my mind.”
Despite his age, he looked for all the world like a rebellious four-year-old.
But Ginny knew how to handle that. In her punishing-parent voice, she said, “It’s up to you. All you have to do is fire us. Then we won’t be in your way, and you can do anything you want.”
When she said that, I went stiff in my chair. She still wanted to get out of this case. And at the moment Haskell looked just childish or careless enough, or sufficiently convinced of his own immortality, to take her up on it.
I should’ve known better. Sure, she wanted out of this case. She was a responsible private investigator, however, and she took her work seriously. “But before you make up your mind,” she said straight at Haskell, “let me tell you something. You say you got into this mess by welshing on a bet at El Machismo.” She implied just enough disbelief to keep him on his toes. “As it happens, El Machismo belongs to a man who runs a whole series of illegal operations in Puerta del Sol. Some people call him el Senor.
“Ever heard of him?”
Haskell didn’t react. He just stared at her, his eyes wide.
“For people like you,” she went on like the edge of a knife, “people who get suckered into one of those operations, he’s the power in this town. The cops can throw you in jail. El Senor can throw you in the river. And he gets that power by violence. People obey him because they know that if they don’t, the consequences will be worse than they can stand.
“Violence, Mr. Haskell.” Her own emotions made her fierce. “He depends on it. It holds his whole empire together. There’s no chance in the world that he’s going to let you off the hook, even if you are just one small sucker. At this point, he won’t even let you pay him back. He can’t afford to. You cheated him, and the price is blood. He’ll keep after you until he gets what he wants.”
Haskell must’ve been crazy. While he listened, I could see that he was trying not to smile. A bit of his old gleam came back. Maybe he would get to play cowboys-and-Indians after all. Whenever anyone raised the ante, the game got better. When she was finished, he asked like he had a secret, “Where do you want to sleep? You can use the guest bedroom.” It was hidden somewhere behind the game room. “Or I have a cot we can set up in the atrium.”
Ginny sighed. “We’ll think of something.” She didn’t know what to make of him any more than I did. And it was only 6:00. We had the whole night ahead of us yet.
“Fine.” He got up, went to the nearest liquor cabinet, and poured himself a snifter of brandy. To my hungry nerves, it smelled like
VSOP. This time he didn’t offer us any.
Trying to keep the initiative, Ginny asked him for copies of all his house and car keys. He got a set for each of us. Then he led us into the game room and sat down on one of the sofas like he was suddenly content to spend the rest of the evening staring at the wall.
That lasted for nearly an hour. In the meantime, my mood deteriorated by the minute. Ginny was taking the only intelligent approach to this job, but I hated it. I hated the pale, tight, unreachable way she sat in her chair without so much as reading a magazine, even though I knew exactly what she was doing. She was listening the same way I was listening.
Every ten minutes or so, I took a tour of the house, checked the locks on the doors and the latches on the windows, made sure the curtains were closed. Unfortunately, the picture windows in the den didn’t have any curtains. Every time I passed one of the liquor cabinets or the wet bar, I felt more like murder. I wanted a drink just to prove that I deserved it.
Haskell had good timing. He waited until my tension was almost boiling. Then he looked at Ginny and me and asked out of nowhere, “Do either of you play bridge?”
I nodded. Ginny shook her head. Surprise will do that to you.
Before I could try to un-nod, he turned up the rheostat on his smile. “You do?”
“I did. Twenty years ago, for a couple of semesters in college.” Talking to him like he was dangerously insane. “I wasn’t very good.”
“That doesn’t matter. Believe me, your size alone will be good for at least one trick every board.” He was on his feet. “Ms. Fistoulari,” he said briskly, “I belong to Jousters. It’s a private bridge club here in the Heights. They have a duplicate game at seven-thirty tonight. I’d like to go. Mr. Axbrewder can be my partner.”
The Man Who Risked His Partner Page 7