Susana described Morgan as bald and fat. He shouldn’t be hard to identify in this thin crowd.
KENNY KING, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
King is a movie producer who specializes in raunchy, quick-take R-rated films that appeal to teenage boys. His movies are cheap to shoot. He casts actors who are just about to hit or actors just past their peak, avoiding star-level salaries. Single, he’s in the gossip columns a lot with his love interests, usually wannabe starlets. He’s a local boy, went to Beverly Hills High School, his dad a psychiatrist, his mother an English professor, specialty Chaucer. Edging up on thirty, he has a seaside house in Malibu, a quick smile, hard eyes, and a world class collection of massive Aztec sculpture, much of it displayed in an interior garden.
Susana described him as having a red ponytail. I had yet to meet King, but his hair had to be the least interesting aspect of a young man who favored huge and, I was sure, often illegally obtained sculptures of a society that nourished the sun and glorified life by ripping the heart from sacrificial victims.
Five valued guests. One of them had a great deal in common with the Spaniards who rampaged across Mexico in their lust for gold. Missionary Father Bernardino de Sahagún carefully transcribed the feelings of the beleaguered natives who said of Cortés and his men upon their receipt of gifts of gold from Moctezuma:
“It is a certainty that they desire it with a great thirst. Their bodies swell for it. They have a furious hunger for it.”
That was four hundred and seventy years ago, but the continuum of human greed apparently never ends. Someone at La Mariposa had a furious hunger, too.
Cell phones aren’t secure from electronic eavesdroppers. I found a pay phone on the River Walk and called Maria Elena.
The maid said politely, “I am sorry. Mrs. Garza is not available.”
“She will talk to me,” I insisted. “Tell her that Henrietta Collins must speak with her.”
“She is not at home.” There was a sudden quaver in her voice.
“Please,” I said quickly, “it’s important that I know. Where is she?”
She spoke reluctantly, unwilling to admit the truth. “She and Manuel have gone to the police station.”
I hung on to the phone for a moment after I hung up. I’d known it was coming, but I’d hoped we might have today, I’d hoped Manuel would not have to be frightened and bewildered.
Susana’s haggard face had the brooding quality of a stone sculpture deep in the Yucatán jungle as she watched me walk through the main showroom of Tesoros. She stood at the cash desk with the prim-faced older woman who had served at the chili-cart desk last night. Susana paused in her obvious role of instructing to stare at me. She wanted to boot me out, but didn’t dare. I ignored her and scanned the room. There were a few off-the-River Walk customers, none of the special guests who interested me. I didn’t expect to find them here. Their location was unimportant to me until the preview opened in the auction room in half an hour. I knew where to find them and find them I would. But now I needed Rick and I wanted to talk to him without anyone observing our contact.
As I pushed through the rear door into the back hallway, I could feel Susana’s consuming stare. The door closed behind me, and it was abruptly as quiet as a monk’s cell. I looked up at the circular staircase. The quiet in the big hallway was as oppressive as a heavy, wet snowfall. No wonder Julian Worth’s fall wasn’t heard by anyone. I hurried, checking the offices and the big showroom. The sound of my footsteps seemed overloud and ominous. No Rick. No Iris.
I clattered up the circular staircase and had to stop at the top to catch my breath. When I opened the door into the hallway of La Mariposa, I saw the maid’s cart outside the third doorway. I squeezed past and entered the lobby.
I looked across the sparkling room toward the red velvet hangings. I glimpsed Tony and Celestina. Rick must be in the auction room. I turned toward the chili-cart desk.
The smile on Tom Garza’s face slid away faster than a margarita chasing jalapeño-laced chili. I felt like a cat in a dog pound. Obviously, he resented my attack on his father last night. When I placed my hands on the rim of the cart, he stood as stiff as a wooden soldier. “Tom, do you love your grandmother?”
His young face creased in misery. “You tried to get my dad in trouble.”
I avoided that bog. And I had to trust Tom. I didn’t think he’d had any opportunity to talk with Julian Worth. I’d better have guessed right. “I’m trying to save Manuel. Your grandmother wants me to do this. Will you please take a note to Rick and not tell anyone it came from me?”
I looked up at the massive old clock on the wall behind him. Twenty-two minutes from now the auction preview would begin. Even as I watched, the hall door opened and Susana scooted across the lobby. Everyone was gathering.
“A note.” He rubbed the edge of the old-fashioned ledger where guests were invited to sign their names and share their impressions of La Mariposa. “You are a guest.” He spoke slowly. “Every effort is made to satisfy any request made by a guest. Information about guests is never revealed.” He took a deep breath, stared at me with puzzled, worried eyes. “If you wish to have a note delivered by the staff, that will be done.”
Yes, I was taking a chance, but the clock now stood at twenty to the hour. I yanked out a pad, ripped off a sheet, scrawled, “Urgent. Room 6,” folded the paper, handed it to Tom.
I paced in the small room, forcing myself to stop looking at the clock and trying to decide what I could do if Rick didn’t respond. At ten minutes to the hour, the sharp knock sounded on my door.
I checked through the peephole. I had no difficulty remembering that I was hunting not only for a thief, but for a killer. The curved glass skewed Rick’s oblong face, made even longer by his sleek goatee. I yanked open the door, motioned him inside. Before he could say anything, I outlined what I wanted, precisely and specifically.
He hunched his shoulders, glared at me. “Why—”
“It’s better if we don’t get into that. And Rick, you’ve got to hurry. I want everything in here by no later than one-fifteen.” That gave him twenty minutes, which should be more than enough. “Finally—”
He was reaching for the door.
“—I want keys to these rooms.” I rattled them off.
He froze, looking like a law-abiding burgher face-to-face with a rampaging mob. “You can’t—”
“I must.”
Lights blazed in the copper chandeliers of the reception area outside the auction room. Crystal champagne glasses glistened on a table near the room. Nodding in satisfaction, Isabel shepherded a waiter with a service cart toward the serving table. She watched as he carefully unloaded the hors d’oeuvre trays. Everything looked fresh and appealing—guacamole, bite-size tostadas topped with chicken, cheese, lettuce and tomato, and picadillo, a spicy meat hash with corn chips.
Susana held open the double doors to the auction room for Tony, who was rolling a dolly with a worn stone statue of a jaguar. One eye still contained gleaming jade. Celestina trotted alongside. “Hurry, Tony. What took you so long? You’ve been hours.”
“Relax, Tina. Once I get this dude on his platform, we’re done. Ferocious looking beast, isn’t he?” His voice bubbled with good humor.
Celestina shot him a poisonous glance. “Tony, why are you so juvenile? Don’t let our guests hear you talk like that.”
Tony ignored her, maneuvering the dolly through the doorway with a flourish.
Susana tossed her dark hair and her silver earrings jangled. She, too, watched Tony with disdain. Magda looked irritated. Tony wasn’t charming anyone.
I was no more than a couple of feet inside the foyer when Frank barred my way. For once his diffident face looked bullish and determined. Obviously, he’d neither forgiven nor forgotten my demand of last night to know about his association with Ed Schmidt. Just as he stepped in front of me, I saw Isabel’s head jerk toward us, her eyes flare. She lifted a hand as if to restrain him, but he was looking at me.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Collins.” There was no regret in his deep voice. “I’ll have to ask you to leave. This is a private affair and—”
“Maria Elena asked me very particularly to come,” I said firmly. “I have a commission from her since she’s unable to be here.”
That caught him by surprise. Some of the bluster seeped from his voice. “Not here? But she always opens the doors, invites everyone to come in and see what Tesoros has gathered for its most favored customers.”
“Not this year. She’s at the police station, Frank. With Manuel.” I tried to hold his gaze.
But I no longer mattered to him. As clearly as though he spoke, I read in his face the stunning realization that his mother had not called upon him—he looked around the room—or upon any one of her children to accompany her and Manuel to the police station. Clearly she did not trust them and she intended to protect Manuel whatever the cost.
His face perplexed and stricken, Frank turned, seeking his wife. As he moved away, he looked diminished, a man whose world had suddenly been transformed from a familiar and comfortable landscape to uncertain terrain with all paths obscured and no boundaries in place.
Magda stood with her hands on her hips. She gave me a hard look, then turned to follow Frank.
The double doorway to the auction room, painted to appear as the doors of a village church, were now firmly closed. I scanned the foyer. All of the auction guests were there. Jolene Harrison gripped the arm of a tall, too-thin man whose head poked forward on a long neck. She and Wiley were poised like greyhounds waiting for the starter pistol. Cara Kendall gulped down a glass of champagne and leaned forward, her cherry red lips widened in expectation. Joshua Chandler leaned against a wall, a distant look on his sunburned face, an unlit pipe in his hand. Chandler looked vaguely professorial except for his sunburn. Bald, pudgy Bud Morgan watched the closed doors with avid eyes. Kenny King was unmistakable with his red ponytail and cold gray eyes. His moon face had a doughy, unhealthy look and he looked much older than thirty.
The Garza family had drawn apart in a half-circle, Frank, Isabel, Celestina, Tony, Susana, Magda, Rick. Iris stood a few feet away, her eyes on Rick. Frank waved his hands, pointed toward me. Like marionettes seeking the enemy, their heads swiveled toward me.
I looked up at the oversize clock and moved to the closed double doors. As the clock struck one, I faced the foyer. Ignoring the Garza family, I smiled at the assemblage. “Hello, I’m Henrietta Collins and I want to welcome all of you to the annual Tesoros auction, one of the premier art auctions of the world. I am speaking on behalf of Maria Elena, who regrets that a family emergency has taken her away this afternoon. However, she will be here in the morning when the auction begins at nine. For now, she has asked me to bid you bienvenidos.” I stepped to one side and flung open the doors.
On a chutzpah scale, it had to be off the meter and my heart thudded uncomfortably. I hoped my face wasn’t as red as Frank’s. I hadn’t catapulted myself into the limelight to offend the Garzas irremediably, although I was sure that had been the effect. It was a push-the-chips-into-the-pot attempt to convince the auction guests I was Maria Elena’s emissary. I would put that position to the test as soon as I could because the time was inexorably dwindling when I could count on these five people being engaged in this room.
The Harrisons beat Cara Kendall through the doorway by a nose. King slouched into the room, his cold eyes scanning the displays. Morgan’s thick-fingered hands were outstretched, like a seeking insect’s feelers. Chandler drifted to the right, going counterclockwise to the other guests.
Susana stalked toward me, her high heels clicking on the tiled floor. Her eyes glittered with fury. She stood so close I could see the fine drawn lines of her mascara and smell the penetrating scent of Obsession. Vermilion-tipped fingers clutched at her heavy silver necklace. The huge pendant was decorated with symbols from the Aztec Calendar Stone. She kept her voice low, as cognizant of the auction guests as I. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Maria Elena sent me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” I brushed past her. As I stepped into the room, the utter quiet assaulted me, a thick, suffocating quality like the airless confines of a huge bank vault, the same sense of unimaginable riches contained within reach.
I’ve seen vultures circling, huge, powerful birds with predatory eyes, skimming silently on air currents, seeking prey. There was the same aura in this room as the auction guests roved past the tables. There were riches indeed: an entire collection of mid-eighteenth-century paintings, oil on canvas, of the Stations of the Cross, the distinctive use of red, white, and green emphasizing the adaptation of the religious theme to Mexico; a concha from Guanajuato, the twelve-stringed instrument decorated with mother-of-pearl and armadillo shell; a magnificent Danza de los Negritos mask decorated with beads and foil and long silk ribbons; a brilliantly blue-and-white Talavera jar made by the Uriarte family in the late eighteen hundreds; and more and more and more—earthenware statues, animal pottery banks, lacquered dishes and plaques, jungle watercoolers, saddles with silver filigree; and more and more and more.
I looked at the collectors, moving as if in a stately dance, a step here, a glance there, but always their expressions determinedly empty so that their competitors could have no inkling of which pieces they coveted most.
Tony was striding purposefully toward me, no hint of good humor in his handsome face now.
On a high diving board, you can’t teeter on the end too long or you’ll never dive. Which one first, which one?
Joshua Chandler was nearest, stopping for an instant at a display of almost a dozen alebriges, the fantastic and inventively ominous papier-mâché flying monsters created by Pedro Linares. Chandler picked up a horned green dragon with glistening white teeth and curved red wings. A tiny smile flickered on his smooth sun-burnished face.
“Mr. Chandler.” I looked into pale green eyes with all the warmth of jammed glacier ice. Up close, I had a clear sense of his muscular grace and power. “Maria Elena wishes, of course, for all the guests to be able to enjoy their visit from beginning to end. She wants to offer transport to the airport after the auction.”
“Don’t need it. Thanks. Driving.” He turned away from me, gently replaced the green dragon, picked up a more serpentine creature with rippling orange-and-bronze-and-gold-striped wings. His back was to me, the message clear.
Tony hung a foot or so back. He obviously didn’t want to accost me within hearing of the guests.
I stepped past Tony and smiled at Wiley Harrison. Wiley’s face glistened red, too, but from rising blood pressure, not sun. I doubted collecting was going to do too much for his longevity. He poked his narrow head forward, lanky arms folded behind his back, as he studied a jaguar mask from Guerrero dating from the eighteen nineties. “The lord of the animals,” Wiley announced, his eyes dreamy, his voice a caress.
I had a sudden uncomfortable feeling he envisioned himself as a jaguar, striding through the night, sinuous and powerful, a force without peer. And yet he was just a man of late middle age with thin strands of graying hair, watery-blue eyes, and a too-tall, too-thin frame. But he was, of course, a very rich man of late middle age with thinning hair, a vacuous gaze, and weedy build.
I stepped close and spoke perhaps a little loudly. “We want to make sure your visit is quite comfortable. Can we give you a ride to the airport?”
Harrison blinked. “Oh, we haven’t decided when we’re leaving.” He spoke absently, his eyes still studying the mask. “May take a little spin down to Oaxaca. But Jolene heard about a new shop in Santa Fe. May spin up there.”
Anyone flying went off my list of suspects because no one would be fool enough to check a fortune in stolen gold, and even the most incurious of airport X-ray attendants might wonder about a valise filled with jewelry. So I almost turned away. But because I had spent a lifetime as a reporter—“The sky is blue. Check it out”—I asked, “So you haven’t even bought your airli
ne tickets yet?”
“Don’t need tickets when you own the plane, honey.” And he hunkered down for an up-front and personal look at the mask. The jaguar’s whiskers were made of boar bristle. I wondered if they had an odor.
The tick of an old grandfather clock was loud in the absorbed silence. Fifteen after one. I had to hurry. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Tony and Susana in a whispered disagreement.
I skirted the central line of tables. Jolene lifted an elegant necklace of black pearls and gold filigree, touched it to her neck, her smile as dreamy as her husband’s. But I didn’t need to speak to her. The Harrisons could easily have the stolen gold. A private plane made lots of sense.
Cara Kendall gave me a petulant glare when I stopped beside her. “Don’t know why I drove all this way. I simply don’t see a thing I want.” But her mouth had a secretive little curl.
“I’m so sorry.” No need to ask my question. “But I’ll certainly tell Maria Elena we’ve fallen short this year.”
She flounced away, but her eyes slid sideways for a swift look at the table with the very rare oil paintings of the Stations of the Cross. I forbore to pursue any philosophical thoughts about her choice.
Bud Morgan watched her go. “Ah, the stage lost quite an actress. Might buy the damn things just to thwart her.” He gave me a roguish grin. “And I’m lapsed. What the hell, may lead me back to piety. Heard your offer. Sure. I’d like a lift to the airport. Flying Southwest Friday morning.” Then he moved away, his pudgy face intent.
I wasn’t surprised to find Kenny King’s cold gray eyes studying the stone jaguar. He ignored me when I stopped beside him. If I’d sensed athletic power with Chandler, I had a darker sweep of unease near this man. “Mr. King, we’ll be glad to provide you with transportation to the airport.”
His eyes moved from the jaguar to me. He might have looked unimpressive, with his round freckled face, the swaying red ponytail. Instead, I had to force myself to stand my ground. He was young, but the eyes that looked at me knew evil I’d never envisioned. His lips quirked in a grotesque parody of a smile. “You’re so kind to ask. But I won’t need any help.” The words were deliberately arch, the tone offensive.
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