I caught Max's big shoe on his second try for point-after-touchdown. I twisted with both hands and made Max yowl. He sat down. I stood up. He abruptly flipped over on his stomach and went exploring for his automatic. I stepped on his wrist and wagged a negative finger at him. I kicked the gun out of reach with my other foot. Instead of scrambling after it, Max tried to regain his feet. I thought of the purple welts on Alex Lubrano's face before Del Rey shot him. That had probably been Max's work. I caught Max with my knee when he was halfway up. His head jerked back with a snapping sound. He went over on his back but caught me with his feet when I came after him.
We got up together, breathing like a couple of heavyweights in the fifteenth round of a title go. Max's big left fist made my ear ring. He pivoted expertly with a right cross but it sailed harmlessly over my shoulder. That left him open for a quick' hard southpaw hook, which he took on the side of his jaw. It drove him back a step and brought his guard up. My right fist hit a wall of muscle protecting his stomach.
At first I thought it did nothing to him. But his arms went down slowly, and although his face was not green, it had a green look. He left toothmarks on the knuckles of my left hand. He left them there again and he was bleeding from between the teeth. His front teeth were so loose he'd be mouthing gruel for a week. When he went down this time he did not sit. He fell.
I brought him some liquid assistance from the bottom drawer of my desk. When his eyes could focus again I was squatting near him and pointing his automatic at his face from a distance of half a foot. “Don't move,” I said. “Just answer.”
He nodded. His lips were swollen and bloody. The pain in his stomach had driven all the fight out of him.
“Who's idea was it?” I said.
“Del Rey.”
“Both times?”
“Yeah, both.”
“Even though he's in Venezuela now?”
Max shrugged. “I got my orders.”
“He's coming back?”
“I dunno,” Max said.
I raked his cheek with the front sight of the automatic. It left a welt which might turn as purple as the welt on Alex Lubrano's face.
“I dunno,” Max bleated.
“What were you looking for?”
“Aw,” said Max. This was a new role for him. He didn't like it.
“What?” I said. I jerked the muzzle of the gun toward his cheek again. He almost got cross-eyed looking at it.
“Del Rey didn't know what Lubrano told you. He wanted me to find out.”
“But you didn't?”
“I guess it ain't here.”
“It must have been a pretty long story if Del Rey thought I couldn't keep it in my head.”
“I don't know nothing about that,” Max insisted almost devoutly.
Probably, that was the truth. “Who are you working for?” I said. “Anybody besides Del Rey?”
“Miss Chandler,” Max Joy said. “Miss Joan Chandler?”
“Yeah. I think.”
I gave him my best I'm-disappointed-in-you smile and said, “Did you know that Joan Chandler has been dead for a month?”
“Naw,” said Max Joy. He looked genuinely amazed. “One of your bosses is dead and the other one is in South America, but you go right on doing their dirty work for them. Who's around to play the fall guy, Max? Fellow by the name of Joy, huh?”
“What the hell,” said Max Joy. “I don't know.”
“What 'was Joan Chandler paying you for?” He stared at the muzzle of the gun the way they say a cobra stares at his master's flute. He. said nothing.
“I could turn you over to the cops for breaking and entering.” I said.
“Yeah? They're looking for you, Drum.” I brought blood to his cheek with the gunsight. He writhed. His muscles bunched as if he might try something.
“The safety is off,” I said, showing him. I made my finger on the trigger go white. He subsided. “Now, about Miss Chandler,” I said.
“I stole something for her.”
“What was it?”
“I don't know what. Just an envelope.”
“You gave it to her?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Aw,” said Max. I think he really believed his reputation was at stake.
“Where?”
“In some Senator's house in Georgetown.”
“Senator Hartsell. His house?”
“Yeah.”
“Max, are you a Communist?”
He gave me a hurt look. “That's a pretty dirty thing to say,” he said.
“Are you?”
“Hell, no. Not me. A Communist? Hell, no.”
“The people you're working for are. You should make your employers give you references, Max.”
“Je-sus! “
It didn't help. It would have, if Max had known anything more. Finally, I let him get up. He looked hopefully at the gun. I shook my head. He patted the caked blood on his lips with a handkerchief and went out the door. He looked thoroughly confused. I hoped he was confused enough to keep him on ice for a while. The community at large would benefit by it.
Deirdre Hartsell—Joan Chandler—had paid Max Joy to steal something from her own house. Then Deirdre had killed herself. It figured less and less. Maybe the answer, if any, was waiting for me in Venezuela. Maybe it was buried with her.
I got out of there without checking my mail.
Part II: Venezuela
Chapter Seven
ON ONE SIDE WERE THE Sierra Nevada de Merida Mountains, a long-named member of the Andes family. On the other side was the blue Caribbean Sea. The airport, called Maiquetia, nestled in between, a thin flat strip of concrete with a cluster of administration buildings and hangars gleaming like bubbles in the sun as we made our landing.
The plane was Pan American's best, a big fast four-engined DC-7. It had eaten up a sizable chunk of my twelve hundred dollars, just getting me here. It deposited me and a few dozen other people on the hot concrete and taxied off toward one of the hangars for a well-earned rest. Tall moriche palms waved their feather-duster tops in the little wind there was. The public servant who examined my passport assured me it would not be so hot in Caracas, Venezuela's capital city. Caracas, he told me, was in the mountains. He had very little English, but he tried. I hoped he was right. I was beginning to feel awfully limp.
I shared my Caracas-bound taxi with a pair of Texas oilmen, complete with modified ten-gallon hats and a lot of Texas superlatives. “You think it's hot here in Maiquetia, friend?” one of them said. “You ought to try San Antone in July.”
I wanted to point out that this was December and it was hot in Venezuela twelve months of the year, a condition which even San Antone couldn't match, much to the embarrassment of Texans. But I didn't. Instead I listened to the taxi driver, who had even less English than the passport man but who tried even harder. We made the twenty miles to Caracas in twenty minutes, climbing steadily into the green, green mountains on a four-lane superhighway which the taxi driver said with pride cost six million dollars a mile. He said it with so much pride I began to think he had donated the money himself.
“Some autopista,” he said, waving demonstratively at the superhighway with both hands off the wheel.
“Yeah,” I said. The autopista clung to cliffsides and flung great gleaming spans across gorges and leaped from mountain crest to mountain crest like the road at the end of the rainbow. It was wide and it wasn't crowded, but I felt much better when we got to Caracas.
There I checked in with my two overnighters at the Tamanaco Hotel, which is not only Caracas's biggest and newest, but its only first-rate hostelry. The desk clerk, whose name, according to the little sign in front of him, was Fairfield, had more and better English than I did.
“Do you have a Dr. and Mrs. Homerson registered “here?” I asked him after I had signed the registration book. “From California?” I gave him a cheerful eager-to-meet-friends-from-back-home look.
“Why yes, I believe so, Mr. Drum.” He smiled and retreated to one of those hinged card files and was soon back with a big bronze and white grin. “Yes,” he told me. “They're in Four-fourteen. The house phones are to your left around the corner, sir.”
I didn't go to the house phones. I took the elevator up to my own room, which was on the third floor. I thought of meeting Lydia Hartsell Homerson and wasn't sure I liked the idea. She was Deirdre's identical twin and I had never seen her. Looking at her now for the first time, it would be almost like meeting Deirdre all over again. But Deirdre was dead.
The bellhop, a short dark fellow with long oily sideburns, showed me how to work the air conditioning and displayed my small terrace, which overlooked a sundeck and a swimming pool and a lot of sunbathers on bright orange chaise longues. I gave him a quarter and he looked satisfied but not happy.
I took off my shirt and trousers and stretched out on the bed without unpacking. I smoked three cigarettes, staring up at the ceiling and watching the smoke curl in the direction of the air-conditioning exhaust. I shut off the air conditioning and padded barefoot to the French doors leading to the terrace. I opened them and let in the cool mountain breeze which the passport man had predicted, the fragrance —mingled faintly with automobile fumes—of tropical flowers I couldn't name, and the pleasant sounds of laughing and Spanish talking and a rhythmic mambo beat.
It didn't help. My nerves were jangling like an alarm clock. It seemed logical to let Francisco Del Rey wait until I got the lay of the land, but the same did not apply to my ex-sister-in-law. She was here, right in this hotel; and the Senator had told me she was in Venezuela on vacation, and the Senator had oil interests here, arid Francisco Del Rey knew plenty about those oil interests and maybe Deirdre had died because she knew plenty too.
I unpacked, shaved and took a cold shower. The clothing I had brought to Venezuela from my stay in Jack Morley's place was going to be too warm, even for Caracas in the mountains, but there was no helping that. I dressed in brown loafers, a charcoal gray suit, a light green shirt and a brown tie with little gold crowns on it. I thought it would be out of place in Caracas and even more out of place anywhere else in Venezuela, but what the hell, I would be presentable enough.
The bar was called the Hibiscus Room and was decorated with hibiscus flowers, large and almost blood red, climbing all over the walls. I sat down at the bar and had rum-soda and it was good rum. One of the Texas oilmen waved at me from the other end of the long bar, and I waved back. There were a lot of empty stools between us, so he came over with his drink and sat down. He did a lot of talking about Texas and about off-shore oil and about how he'd seen the oil barges off the Gulf Coast of Texas and was sure they would be bigger, better and prettier than their opposite numbers in Lake Maracaibo, but he was here to find out if the lake was worth his company's trouble, anyway.
“Are you from Texas?” he finished.
“No,” I told him. “I'm from Cordoba, Argentina, where the cattle is much bigger than Texas cattle, and the beef is much tenderer.” I congratulated myself and thought I might send it in to the Saturday Evening Post or somewhere. Then I saw her.
She was wearing a stark white dress which made her tanned skin look like copper. Her hair was pale gold and worn long, the way I had remembered. I got up and I must have had a funny look on my face because the Texas oilman asked me if I was all right.
She was tall, and she walked very well with nothing practiced or artificial about it. She came straight toward the bar, which was straight toward me, and she smiled because I had a foolish grin on my face.
Deirdre, I wanted to say. I cried, “You're Lydia Homerson.”
She nodded. “Are you a friend of Ralph's?”
My heart was jumping around like a drunk mambo dancer. It was exactly like seeing a ghost and the fact that I had known it would be like this didn't matter. “I'm Chester Drum,” I said. “Your sister's husband.”
She gave me a smile just like Deirdre's best. We had been washed up for months before Deirdre died, but that didn't matter, either. She shook hands with me and said, “I used to hear a lot about you, Chet. Is it all right if I call you Chet? That's what Deirdre always called you.”
“Yeah,” I said. I thrust my hands into my pockets because I didn't want her to see how they were trembling. “Can I buy you a drink?”
She said, “I'd love one, Chet,” and then we were sitting down at the bar. The Texas oilman gave me a look which said he was envious and which also said that a girl like this must come from Texas. Then he drifted away and Lydia said she would like a Scotch on the rocks. Deirdre had liked bourbon straight, or bourbon-soda, or bourbon old-fashioneds, and even mint juleps.
We touched glasses and Lydia caught my eye in the mirror behind the bar and said, “I certainly was surprised when you told me who you were. Are you down here on business, Chet?”
“Sort of. But I wasn't surprised to see you. The Senator told me you were here.”
“Oh? You've seen Father?”
“Condolence call,” I said. “It was long overdue.”
“Deirdre loved you very much, Chet. Would it make you feel any better to know that? It's the truth.”
“Who needs to feel better?” I said too quickly, too defensively. “We were all through before it happened.”
“Yes, but Deirdre didn't stop loving you. That's what she said. She had no reason to say it unless it was true.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“You don't want to talk about her, is that it? I'm sorry.”
“Hell,” I said. “You're her sister. Go ahead and talk about her if you want.”
“This is very good Scotch,” Lydia said. “The Margarita Islanders smuggle it in from Trinidad when they're not diving for pearls. Which means almost all the time, because there isn't much of a market for pearls these days. There's a good market for smuggled Scotch, though. The import tax is enormous.”
“Yeah,” I said. I could close my eyes and listen to that voice and think it was Deirdre talking. I could open my eyes and stare at her and still think it was Deirdre. I hated Lydia at that moment. I had never realized I was carrying a torch for a dead woman until I met her.
“. . . Lake Maracaibo, Chet. You ought to go and see it, if you have the chance.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure.”
“You weren't even listening to me.”
“I'm sorry. Having a nice vacation down here, Lydia?”
“It wasn't my idea. Ralph thought I needed one. I was closest to Deirdre. Father suggested I come down here because he has friends here and it would be a complete change. I really think I should have remained in Washington and then perhaps gone north for a week end. I prefer winter sports, don't you?”
“No,” I said. Deirdre had preferred the beach and a lot of strong sun and aquaplaning. I ordered refills for us and asked, “Would one of those friends of the Senator be Francisco Del Rey?”
“Why, yes. But how did you know?”
“Oh, I met him once or twice.”
“Paco's cute,” Lydia said. I didn't look at her.
“Cute,” I said.
“Paco just flew down from the U.S. a few days ago.”
“Isn't that a coincidence,” I said.
“We're flying out to his camp near Angel Falls tomorrow. Shall I tell him you're here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You tell Paco his old friend Chester Drum is waiting to see him in Caracas.”
“Is something the matter, Chet? You sound funny, the way you say that.”
I shrugged and took a few swallows of my drink.
“He won't be coming back to Caracas for a while,” she said.
“Who won't?” I asked indifferently. “Oh, you mean Del Rey?”
“Yes. Ralph and I will go with him from Angel Falls to Lake Maracaibo by air.”
“Well, it doesn't matter,” I said. I had the feeling we were fencing. I didn't know what we were fencing about.
“Ralph should be d
own in a few minutes, Chet. You'll like him. He's the most absent-minded man I ever met, that husband of mine. But he's nice.”
“I should imagine so,” I said.
“Poor Ralph. He doesn't tan as easily as I do. He's got a sunburn which would make a boiled lobster envious.”
“That's too bad,” I said.
“Chet, why don't you have dinner with us? I'm sure Ralph would like that. He's heard Deirdre talk about you.” All at once, her fingers closed on my hand impulsively. “Oh, Chet,” she said. “I wish I knew. I wish I knew why it had to happen. . . .””
“Don't,” I said. “It can Strive you nuts. I know.”
“But she was so full of life, so happy and active and exciting. She was exciting, wasn't she?”
“Yeah.”
“Who would ever think a girl like Deirdre would commit suicide? I still can't believe it, Chet. We all loved her. Why did she go and do a thing like that?”
We cried on each other's shoulders through another round of drinks. Then Ralph Homerson came into the Hibiscus Room looking for his wife.
He was almost as pink as what they stuff olives with. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and was somewhat shorter than Lydia. He had a pleasant, boyish face with a look of slight bewilderment and much myopia on it. I could picture him in the sky-seat of a big reflector telescope, all bundled in sheepskin and scarves, gazing down with a look of rapt wonder on the night-black 'mirror. I could picture him at a convention of long-haired astronomers, expounding enthusiastically on why Cepheid variables are variable. But I could not picture him drinking with Lydia or dancing with her or doing some of the other things husbands do with their wives.
The introductions were short and consisted of I-heard-a-lot-about-you's and isn't-it-tragic-about-Deirdre's. The dinner was long and centered about big juicy homegrown sirloins from the llanos of the Orinoco basin. Ralph Homerson sat straight and stiff and I felt sorry for him. If the skin of his back was as red as the skin of his face, it was probably as stiff as cardboard.
“I'm sorry to be such a stick,” he told Lydia over dessert of rum-sauced ice cream, “but with this sunburn I'm afraid I won't be able to go down to Auyan-Tepui with you tomorrow.”
The Second Longest Night Page 7