She chuckled. ‘Oh, quite a bit, but the pieces are scattered. He’ll never put them together in time.’
‘In time for what?’
She didn’t answer that but relapsed into silence. I waited a few more long, hot minutes before poking her again. ‘But you did kill Salton.’
‘I told you, he was still alive,’ she said irritably. ‘How many more times?’
There was something about the way she said it that caught my attention: still alive. I took a punt. ‘When did he have his heart attack?’
‘When he caught …’ She stopped. ‘There’s such a thing as knowing too much, Kemp. A little learning can be a dangerous thing.’
‘David Salton seemed to have learned something,’ I said. ‘Enough to bring on a heart attack. Were you scared he’d talk?’
‘You’re a fast man with a conclusion, Kemp,’ she said. ‘And the hell of it is that you’re right.’ Her teeth nibbled her lower lip again. ‘He couldn’t talk, though. The guy was paralysed. Christ, we thought he’d died on us. It might have been better if he had – we wouldn’t have had you coming here and screwing everything up.’
‘But you had to get rid of him,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t have him taken to hospital and recovering enough to talk, to tell anyone what had brought on his heart attack.’ I was jumping from conclusion to conclusion as a man jumps from boulder to boulder across a river; some of the boulders might move under foot and some are slippery with moss, and it’s only by moving fast that the man can get across.
‘Jesus,’ she said, remembering. ‘We thought Salton had loused everything up good.’ She laughed. ‘You wouldn’t think it, but it was that dumb clunk of a husband of mine who came up with the idea.’
‘So you put Salton in a boat and took him out to sea,’ I said flatly. ‘I suppose Haslam was waiting somewhere outside the lagoon to pick you up when you set the dinghy adrift.’
‘Turns out he has his uses.’
I thought of Salton lying paralysed in the dinghy, drifting under the hot sun. Perhaps he was conscious for a time. I hoped not. Maybe he died of thirst. It would have been better for him if he’d had another heart attack to finish him off. That would be more merciful.
‘That’s murder,’ I said.
‘Who cares?’ she said freely. ‘It solved the problem. Took the heat off.’
I glanced at Jill Salton. Her eyes were wide open and she held Bette Haslam with an unwinking stare. Her body was rigid and her hands had begun to tremble. Leotta had become tense again too: she had slid forward on the settee and was sitting on the edge, ready to take off. I put down my glass with a sharp crack and she jerked her head towards me. There was a feral glare in her eyes, which dimmed a little as I shook my head in a negative gesture.
‘That’s right,’ said Bette Haslam. ‘Cool it!’ The gun swung towards Leotta. ‘I don’t know what you’re so uptight about, sister. What was David Salton to you?’ Sudden comprehension came into her eyes and she burst into laughter. ‘Oh no, don’t tell me the saintly David Salton had a piece of ass on the side? Christ, wait till I tell the boys about this.’
Although she laughed heartily, I noticed that the gun in her hand stayed steady. Her chuckle died away and she said, ‘And what does Mrs Salton think about that? Did the three of you go to bed together? Must have been real cosy.’
Jill said, ‘Shut your foul mouth.’ Her voice trembled.
‘Don’t talk to me like that, Salton,’ said Bette, suddenly vicious. ‘I don’t like you and I never have. I don’t like people who treat me like dirt. You never knew I existed, did you? You bought an airplane and you bought a man to fly it. They existed so that David Salton could fly around the world and do his wheeler-dealing. But the pilot’s wife was just something that was around, something that didn’t matter, something that could be ignored. I could have dropped dead and you wouldn’t have known the difference. So don’t put on any airs with me, Salton, or I might just put that little bit of extra pressure on this trigger. You hear me?’
Jill was mute and Bette said in a rage, ‘I asked if you hear me, you frozen bitch?’
I nudged Jill and she said, ‘I hear you.’
I needed to bring down the temperature: antagonising a person with a gun can be fatal. I said, ‘Whatever it is you’re doing must be bloody important.’
‘It’s the biggest,’ Bette said curtly. ‘The biggest, Kemp.’
‘And it’s something to do with Salton’s plane?’
So far my poking was keeping her talking, but there was just a chance I’d push her too hard and she’d clam up. She twitched with irritation. ‘That’s another thing. You had to stick your nose in there too. You really wound me up when you talked about Mrs Salton selling it.’
I thought about that. What could they use an aircraft for? Smuggling? That was possible but somehow I didn’t think so. There was no necessity to isolate the El Cerco estate for a smuggling job. In fact, the reverse would be better: smuggling is something you don’t draw attention to. Of course, they could always steal the damn thing, but a Learjet is hardly the easiest of contraband to offload with a fence.
‘The biggest?’ I said, and put a sneer into my voice, an audible edge of doubt.
‘Yes, Kemp,’ said Bette. ‘The biggest. You don’t believe me, do you?’
I wondered just how vain Bette Haslam was. She was certainly vain about her prowess with a pistol and that might spill over into other things. I’d heard that criminals tend towards self-importance, which is why a lot of them get caught. They can’t resist boasting and sometimes they boast to the wrong ears. Maybe this would be an opening wedge.
‘Well, you’ve got to admit, it’s quite hard to believe, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I mean, what the hell could be that big on a tuppenny island like this?’
‘Oh, Christ!’ she said. ‘You don’t know anything, do you? I thought you did once, but you’re just dumb. Dumb and goddamn lucky.’
‘Lucky?’ I looked around at our situation and didn’t feel at all lucky right at that moment. ‘How am I lucky?’
‘Because I took a shot at you and missed, and it’s not often I do that. You’re a real lucky guy – so far.’
Unconsciously my hand went up and rubbed the tape that was still on the back of my neck. ‘That was you?’
‘That was me,’ she said.
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘Oh, come on, it’s not that hard to work out, surely? All right, Kemp, let me spell it out for you. I reckoned you’d caught on to us. I happened to be in the Salton Estate office when you were talking to Mrs Forsyth about the airplane and what she’d found in it. I didn’t hear it all because she came around and closed the door but I thought you were on to us. So I got back in my car, waited until you came out, then followed you until I got a chance to take a crack at you.’
So all the painfully built-up theories about political corruption and police cover-ups came down to this. It turned out Hanna had been right when he sensed a difference between Ogilvie’s murder and the attack on me. They’d had nothing to do with each other at all.
Or had they?
This woman and her confederates killed Salton because he discovered their criminal enterprise. But if Salton hadn’t died, neither Ogilvie nor I would have come to Campanilla. And if we hadn’t come to Campanilla, Ogilvie would still be alive. So in a way it could be said that Mrs Haslam and her crew killed Ogilvie. And they were responsible for a lot more than that, too. Because of them, fourteen Campanillans died in the Fleming Square mayhem. Because of them, the whole island was in turmoil. Because of them, Joe Hawke was inciting the people to riot. All because they had killed a man called David Salton.
It was a chilling illustration of the domino effect.
I said, ‘Do you really have any idea what you’ve done?’
‘We know what we’re doing,’ she said confidently. ‘We can’t lose.’
I shook my head. ‘You’ll lose this one, whatever it is. You’ve caused too many people
too much trouble. Too many lives have been lost. I know of at least a dozen myself. And there’ll be more.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ she demanded. ‘We haven’t killed a dozen people. You’re crazy.’
‘Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you know what’s been going on?’
‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘The political stuff. That’s nothing to do with us. It keeps the cops busy, though. That’s a real bonus.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I said. ‘Raid Mr Black’s casino? Rob a bank in Cardew Street?’
She smiled. ‘You really want to know, don’t you? That curiosity is going to be the death of you. But I’ll tell you this much, Kemp. You limeys hold the world record for the biggest ever theft. The Great Train Robbery was such a sweet job – nearly seven million dollars, and they got back peanuts.’
‘And you think you can beat that?’
‘I know we can beat it,’ she said.
‘Most of those robbers ended up in jail,’ I said. ‘Is it worth it?’
‘That won’t happen to us,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s all planned. A lead-pipe cinch.’
Over seven million dollars. But from where? And how?
I said, ‘I don’t believe a bloody word of it. You’ve been drinking too many margaritas.’
‘Two years in the planning, Kemp, and nothing is going to louse it up now. Today’s the day.’ She laughed delightedly. ‘You might call it Instant Millionaire Day.’
‘You’re out of your mind. There’s not that much money on the island.’
‘Oh, but there is, Kemp. And it’s not in any bank vault, either. It’s out in the open where anyone can get at it. And you know what? Transport is already provided.’
It was coming. She was on the edge of spilling it. I pushed her again. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘No one leaves seven million dollars lying around like that. You’re in cloud cuckoo land.’
‘Who said anything about seven million dollars?’ asked Bette. ‘You’ve got to think big, Kemp. You’ve got to think of twelve million bucks.’ She laughed when she saw the expression on my face. ‘Twelve million. In cash. What do you think of that?’
‘I think you’re nuts.’
She grinned. ‘Okay, you go on thinking that, Kemp. I’ll just collect my dough.’
She was slipping away so I made a last desperate attempt to reel her in. This time I targeted vanity’s close cousin, hubris. ‘You couldn’t handle a job that size, even if that kind of money really was ripe for the picking.’
She bristled. ‘Let me tell you something, you arrogant bastard. I’ve been working this out for two years, ever since I came to this crappy island, ever since I saw the tourists in the casinos pushing handfuls of dollars at the cashiers. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to gamble myself – the saintly Mr Salton had just made that illegal for residents – but I asked myself a question. You know what that question was?’
I had a good idea but I didn’t say. I wasn’t about to interrupt her flow. ‘You tell me,’ I said.
‘I asked myself, where do all those greenbacks go? They’re not legal currency here on Campanilla – residents don’t use them – so what the hell happens to all those lovely bills?’
‘Shipped back to the States?’ I mused.
She shook her head violently. ‘Oh no, not to the States. They’re too valuable for that. I studied it, Kemp. I studied it real good. I learned about international economics and damn near twisted my mind into a pretzel. You know what a Euro-dollar is?’
‘US currency that’s held in European banks?’
‘Damn right. Those places are stuffed full of American dollars – fifty-five billion of them, in fact. I hear Uncle Sam is real worried about that but I don’t lose any sleep over it. Those Europeans are so anxious to get hold of American dollars that there’s a thing called a Euro-dollar premium. You ever hear of that?’
I nodded. ‘In certain circumstances a dollar outside the States is worth more than one inside.’
‘You’re on the ball,’ she said. ‘Sometimes up to thirty per cent more. Now where the hell do you think all those Euro-dollars come from?’
I didn’t answer because it was obviously a rhetorical question and she was going to tell me. ‘They come in the billfolds of tourists,’ she said. ‘Maybe not much at a time – a dollar here, a ten-dollar bill there, maybe twenty dollars cashed for chips in a casino right here on Campanilla. But there are one hell of a lot of tourists, Kemp, and the dollar bills stack up.’
‘How high do they stack on Campanilla?’
‘Oh, brother,’ she said. ‘This place is real popular with Americans. Ten flights a day from Miami. In a year they leave behind maybe thirty million dollars in bills. Is that a high enough stack for you?’
I was surprised. I hadn’t thought it would be that much, probably because I hadn’t thought of it at all. Now that I did, I could see that it was probably true. Given enough of a tourist flow from the States, and given that every tourist had a few dollar bills in his wallet, then the dollars had to accumulate somewhere. I knew the Americans had a law about how much US currency could be taken out of the States – I had a feeling it was $100 a head – so Bette’s estimate of $30,000,000 would require just 300,000 tourists a year. The reality was that Campanilla had more than twice as many American tourists as that. Bette’s estimate could be low.
‘So that’s where your twelve million dollars are coming from,’ I said.
She was getting excited. ‘Imagine it. Twelve million bucks in currency. They can’t record all those goddamn numbers – in fact, I know they don’t. Singles, five-spots, ten-spots, twenty-spots – all spendable and untraceable.’
I said casually, ‘How are you going to hoist it?’
Maybe I was too casual; maybe I should have joined in her excitement. She became wary. ‘That’s my business,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t need to know.’
But she needed a plane, and that was a clue of sorts. What was Salton’s plane to be used for? The getaway? Perhaps. But it was still here at El Cerco. I had heard the engines and it hadn’t taken off, so it was still here. How were they going to transfer twelve million dollars to Salton’s plane while it was still at El Cerco?
Jill said, ‘So you killed my husband just for money.’ Her voice was dead.
‘Just for money,’ said Bette. ‘You can say that nice and easy, can’t you? Money doesn’t mean anything to you because you’ve never been without it. You ever wanted anything, you said, “David, dahlin’, I want a fur coat, a diamond bracelet, a new sports car.”’ She did a bad parody of an English accent. ‘And then David would say, “Sure, honey, just pick out what you want.” You had everything a woman could want. So don’t look at me with those freezer-green eyes and say “Just for money”.’
‘Why did Salton have a heart attack?’ I asked.
Her mood was angry and she snapped at me. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you just let it alone?’
‘I think Jill has a right to know. And besides, what difference will telling us make now?’
‘All right, Kemp, you win. You want to know the whole goddamn story, well here it is. Salton turned up while we were doing a dry run. We’d got everything figured – number of packages, weights and everything – and we practised like hell, because everything has to run real slick. We didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, watching and listening. Time enough, I guess, because the crazy fool came right out and asked us what we thought we were doing. Les Philips told him straight and the old guy’s heart went pop, right there and then. Next thing we knew, he was lying on the ground. That clear enough for you?’
Nobody said anything because there didn’t seem much to say, and there was another long silence. I looked past Bette Haslam at the body of Negrini – a bundle of rags casually tossed into the bushes outside the window.
Presently I said, ‘I think you’ve made a mistake. A big mistake.’
The look of triumph left her face. ‘What are yo
u talking about?’
‘The man you shot – out there. Do you know who he was?’
‘No. And I don’t care.’
‘You’d better care. Ever heard of Mr Black?’
‘Sure, everyone’s heard of …’ She stopped. ‘You’re saying that’s … I don’t believe you.’
‘That’s Gerry Negrini,’ I said. ‘And you’ve killed him. Shot him stone cold dead. You know who he was, of course, who was behind him? Chicago and New York, I understand. The Syndicate doesn’t like it when their operations are interfered with by small-time killers. What are you going to do when the Families get after you?’
‘What the hell would Negrini be doing at El Cerco?’
‘Minding his own business, I suppose. He and David Salton got on very well together. Isn’t that right, Mrs Salton?’
‘They were great friends,’ Jill said in a low voice.
‘In fact, Negrini contributed to Salton’s political fighting fund,’ I said. ‘They were that close. And now you’ve killed him. It’s possible you might escape the police, though I doubt it. But even if you do, I wouldn’t give tuppence for your chances. You see, the police need evidence that will stand up in court, but the Families don’t work that way. They don’t give a damn about that sort of evidence.’
‘What are you trying to do, Kemp?’ Bette’s voice was suddenly shaky.
‘Just trying to point out your mistake,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘As soon as those people in New York and Chicago figure out what’s happened – and it won’t take them long – you’ll be judged and condemned. You know how they work. They’ll put out a contract on you, a price on your head. So there’ll be a whole lot of people on the lookout hoping to collect on you, and the way they collect is with a bullet. You’ll be targeted by everyone from a Syndicate hitman to a doped-up kid with a mail-order pistol. And there are plenty of those around.’
‘Shut up!’ she yelled. ‘You know what I think? You’re conning me. That guy out there is no more Mr Black than grandad, here.’ She pointed a shaky finger at John.
I shrugged and settled back. ‘He’ll carry identification, of course. Credit cards, things like that.’
Domino Island Page 23