I told them I hadn’t meant to kill anybody, which was true. I’d hoped to take him alive. It just hadn’t worked.
They told me the real estate company could press charges. I remembered the FOR SALE sign had said Gascoyne Enterprises and I told them I didn’t think so.
They gave me funny looks but I knew I was right. Gascoyne wasn’t that big an agency, and yet their properties had been connected with Frake and two murders. I remembered that a Mr. Lorio was the manager, but I had a good idea who he worked for.
They let us leave at two o’clock, and Sandy drove me up to the hospital.
Jake Kelso was sitting up in bed, pillows propped against his back, his daughter and her husband in attendance. When the pair saw us their faces registered disgust and then anger. I wasn’t surprised: Sandy was perpetually elegant, but I was hollow-eyed and dirty, with Jake’s blood still on my shirt.
“You almost killed my father,” the woman said.
Kelso roused himself in protest. “Now, Elaine, the boy didn’t make me do anything. I’m old enough to get into trouble all by myself. And what glorious trouble it was! By the way, Micah, did they say anything about a reward?”
“Not yet,” I said drily. The husband’s mouth puckered and then he took a deep breath and guided his wife from the room.
“You doing okay?” I asked.
“I’m sore as hell but they say I’ll be out in a day or so. The bullet went all the way through.” He turned his head to look at Sandy. “Whatever I can do for you, darlin’, you let me know.” And to me: “It was a shrewd move having her there as backup.”
“I’d rather have gotten him alive,” I said.
“Sure, but he’s better off dead. A mean one with God knows how many murders on his soul.” He pushed himself up farther, grimacing as he did so. “You didn’t happen to bring a little drop of whiskey with you?”
“Sorry.”
“No matter. I’ll be out soon enough.” He cackled evilly: “And I guess Arthur Mulvaney is about to have kittens. I’d love to see his face. It serves him right, throwing his weight around. I’ll never let him forget this, by God.”
“You probably won’t have to,” I said. “Take it easy. I’ll be back.”
He gave me a mock salute and sank back into his pillows. We went out, past Elaine and her husband, who watched us pass with gimlet eyes.
“It was Mancuso’s fault,” Sandy said when we were alone in the elevator. “He was supposed to be there. I called him like you wanted and he said he’d come.”
“I talked to him at the station,” I said. “He got caught in a fender-bender on the bridge. He feels like hell.”
“He ought to. If he’d come like he was supposed to they’d have caught the bastard in the backyard, before he got into the house.”
“Well, he tried,” I said. “He couldn’t have pulled a second raid after the first one went to hell. His superiors wouldn’t have gone along. And if anybody finds out now that he went to another jurisdiction, and involved civilians …”
“I know. So you take the heat.”
“For now.”
We went down to the parking lot and found her car.
“You’re dead,” she said.
“Yeah.” I let my head rest against the glass of the window. I knew she was right, but I also knew I might have too much adrenaline still running through my system to go straight to sleep. Thoughts kept jumping into my consciousness and it took an effort to shove them back down. Max was out there, he was watching, he was dead, he was old and sick.…
“Gascoyne,” I said.
“What?”
“The realty company that manages the house. They’re owned by Tommy Noto.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s all that makes sense. But we won’t ever find it: The ownership records will be hidden in about a dozen holding companies that own one another.”
“So Noto really is a part of this.”
“Always has been,” I said. “He knows more than he’s saying. But there’s no getting to him.”
“He hired Frake?”
“No,” I said, because now I thought I knew who had.
“Then who did?”
“No proof.” I yawned and dozed. A few minutes later I stumbled up my stairs to bed. At least there wouldn’t be a killer stalking me tonight.
Instead, the killer stalked my dreams.
I was in a fetid swamp this time, blundering forward along a trail as vines and branches ripped at my skin. I had lost my gun, my compass, my water. I tripped on a root and went down into thick slime. I heard his steps behind me and turned.
He was looming over me, smiling. Then I saw that his smile was really a skull’s grin, for the flesh had sloughed off his face. I backed away, feeling the water seep up to my waist.
He started toward me again and I saw white ribs where his black pajamas gaped.
I pulled myself up and started away again. A bony hand came down on my shoulder and I screamed. Then a form stepped out from behind a mangrove in front of me.
A man in a coat and tie, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Max.
He smiled.
I awoke sweating and my hand went out to touch the cold comfort of the pistol on the bedside table.
I had the feeling I was not alone, that eyes watched me from the dark. I flipped on the bed lamp, but I was alone. I got up, stumbled to the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of milk. Midway through I started shaking again, until the milk started to slop out of the glass.
I had killed people before, so why was this different? Was it because the grand jury might ask some questions? I could answer them, and nobody was going to cry over the death of a hired killer.
No, it was something else.
Max.
I had the feeling he was very near, and yet, like some forgotten name, he vanished as soon as I tried to focus my memory.
And all at once I knew what it was: With Frake dead I might never know what had happened to Max. The skeleton in the dream was Max, crying for revenge. But the man who had stepped from behind the tree was Max, too, telling me he was alive and it didn’t matter.
Max alive?
I didn’t really believe it.
But there was one person who knew for sure. Lydia Chantry Goodfather.
I finished the milk and went back to bed.
Maybe, I told myself, I would luck out this time and dream about Katherine.
CHAPTER 25
The next morning I called Julius Chantry’s office but he wasn’t in, so I drove over to the house on Fontainbleau. I knocked on the door and waited while I heard footsteps inside.
The door was opened by a black woman in a nurse’s uniform.
“I’m looking for Mr. Julius Chantry,” I said, “but his mother will do.”
The woman gave me a stony stare.
“Nobody here.”
“Is Mrs. Goodfather sick?”
“I said nobody’s here.”
“I need to talk with her. It’s urgent.”
The woman was about to close the door when I caught movement behind her, and Julius emerged from the shadows.
“I’ll handle this, Gloria.” He stepped in front of her. “What do you want?”
“May I come in?”
“No. In fact, I want you off my mother’s property this minute.”
I sighed. “Julius, I’m tired and I didn’t sleep worth a damn. I keep getting the shakes, mainly because I had to kill somebody yesterday. He needed killing but that doesn’t make it any easier. Somebody hired him because they don’t want to have me find out what happened to your father. That means I may have to go through this whole goddamn thing all over again, with the next goon they hire. Now, you know and I know that your mother knows more than she told me. So why don’t you do me a big favor, before all this hits the papers and the TV, and let me talk to her. It may save a life.”
His face was suddenly very pale.
“I can’t let y
ou. She’s desperately ill. Any shock could be disasterous.”
“She’s not in the hospital?”
“She’s a kidney patient. She can be dialysed at home, but any emotional disturbance can affect her physically.”
“I’m sorry. But not that sorry. She’s still alive, at least. But if you want, you can ask her the questions.”
“There aren’t any questions,” he protested. “It’s all over. It has been for years. Please …”
“I’ll bet your family has pretty good pull at City Hall,” I said. “So they may not send a couple of detectives to talk to her. But how about the press, when they get hold of this?”
“Oh, my God,” he choked. He sighed and then the door opened. “Come in, then.”
I followed him through the living room, past the painting of his grandfather, and down the dim hallway to the sun room. He pushed open the door and I saw the nurse bending over the dialysis console, like a hovering bird. Her form hid the woman in the recliner chair, but she moved away as we entered so that I could see Lydia.
Her eyes were closed and she lay inert, like one dead, while the machine made its quiet thump-thumping like an oil-well pump. Lydia was wearing a house robe, one sleeve of which had been cut off to allow for the tubes.
“The treatment takes three hours,” Julius whispered. “Three times a week.” He walked over to the chair. “Mother.”
Lydia’s eyes fluttered, then opened. She looked up at him, then over to me, and frowned. I suddenly noticed how pale she was, like a wax mannikin.
“Mother,” he repeated. “This man wants to ask you some more questions. I’m so sorry.”
Her left hand came up and grasped his own, squeezing. I looked over at her right arm, where surgery had refashioned the skin for her shunt.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Goodfather. But I need to know the whole story,” I said. “People have died. I don’t want any more to.”
She stared at me for a moment and then nodded, as if she understood.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The room smelled of alcohol and formalin, but there was another smell that seemed to overwhelm them. The smell of death.
“What does Tommy Noto have to do with it, Mrs. Goodfather?”
“Noto?”
“He took over from Al Silvano. Silvano was one of the people your husband was after. Why is Noto involved? Why would he hire a killer to stop me?”
She shook her head back and forth.
“Your father didn’t like Max, did he? Your father was part of the establishment Max was trying to upset. Did your father make some comment about wanting Max out of the way? Something that somebody else took seriously, passed along to Noto?”
Her lips parted but no sound came out.
“I found Idola Marsh,” I said.
Her eyes flashed to my own and then away. I had scored.
“I talked to her. But someone killed her right afterward.”
She seemed to shrivel as I watched, an aged shell being kept alive only by the steady rhythm of the machine.
“What religion are you, Mrs. Goodfather?”
She closed her eyes.
“We’re Catholic. What has that got to do with anything?” Julius asked.
I ignored him. “Your husband’s bones were cremated. Isn’t that against Church doctrine?”
“My God,” Julius objected. “That’s a private thing. Anyway, the rule was changed some years ago. I checked with the Archbishop.”
“Mrs. Goodfather, listen to me: I’m not here to upset you, but I need to know the truth. Too much has happened and I have to find out why people have died.” I leaned over close to her ear. “I know part of the truth,” I whispered. “I know who hired the killer but I don’t have proof yet. And I don’t know why nobody wants the truth to come out.”
Julius stiffened as if he’d been poked by a cattle prod.
“She’s really too tired for this to go on,” he said.
I tried a final shock treatment: “Was your husband killed at all? Is that it? He’s not dead? Did they leave him mangled or something, and he’s been kept under cover for all this time?”
Lydia gave me a look of astonishment.
“Max is dead,” she said laboriously. “I saw him.”
“Great God, man, whose bones did you think they dug up?” Julius demanded. “This is ridiculous.”
I saw I wasn’t going to get any more from either of them.
“All right,” I said. “But I’ll be back.”
I found Carol Busby at Geofind. There was a single police car outside. She told me they’d called off the high security when Frake was killed. They’d leave the cop car outside for a few days and then withdraw completely. I knew it wouldn’t do any good for me to tell them the person who’d hired Frake could get somebody else: It wasn’t the kind of thing they wanted to hear.
“So what about Sam?” I asked her.
She gave me a moody shrug.
“I haven’t seen him. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Like I told you, we’re through.”
I nodded.
“You’re going to run the business alone?”
“Why not? I can always pick up people to work. There isn’t any labor shortage in archaeology.”
She looked good in her cutoffs and orange blouse, and I found myself wondering why I’d ever turned her down.
“They called me about Ship Island, you know. Right before you came. They want me to go out there tomorrow and make an assessment of what all will be necessary to finish.”
“Congratulations.”
“Yeah.” She shook her head. “Trouble is, I really don’t want to go. I keep thinking about him, buried in the sand all those years. It’s like I disturbed his rest and unleashed all this. It’s like we desecrated his grave.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I’ve been dreaming about him, you know,” she said suddenly. “I’ve been seeing him the way he must’ve been when he was alive. He must have been a very proud man.”
I sat down in one of the basket chairs. “Tell me about your dreams,” I said.
“They’re just dreams. You don’t want to hear them.”
“Yes, I do.”
She shifted in her seat and looked me in the eye. “I dreamed I was a reporter and I was following him. He smiled at me and I wanted to be with him. It was the only time I’d ever felt that way about somebody I hadn’t even met. I felt like I wanted to have sex with him.”
She was still looking at me and I let my eyes drop.
“You could go to the coast with me,” she said. “I’m driving over this afternoon.”
I thought for a minute: Would I be able to turn her down again? Then another part of my brain reminded me that there was still danger out there. All I needed was that rationale.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we’d better stick close until this thing is solved.”
She gave me a half-smile. “You really think it will be solved?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that why you agreed to come with me, then? To protect me?”
“Isn’t that a good enough reason?”
“I lied,” she said. “I dreamed about Max but in the dream he looked like you.”
We left at two. It was steamy hot and the interstate shimmered ahead of us. We crossed the Pearl River into Mississippi and took the right turn that headed us through pine woods, past the Stennis NASA facility and to the coast.
Once on the coast we took the shoreline drive, a slow boulevard that wound its way from Bay St. Louis all the way to Mobile. She was driving and I kept an eye on the mirror, but either there was nobody following or they were very good. I’d packed my extra pistol, but I kept it under the seat, out of sight, because it was a federal violation to take it across state lines.
I looked out into the gray-green waters of the Gulf and saw a few sailboats. Before ’Nam I’d liked yachting. Now, I yachted infrequently, favoring my albums instead. Maybe, I told myself
, it was a way of denying what had happened.
I wondered what hobbies Max Chantry had developed.
We checked into the Sea Gull Motel, between Gulfport and Biloxi. I went in and got a room and signed for both of us, using the card that said Dunninger. They gave us a cabin on the right, halfway back.
Once in the room I put my AWOL bag on the second bed. Carol looked at me, waiting.
“Did you know the Levinthals kept a cabin on the coast near here?” I asked. “I’m sure it’s gone now.”
“Probably. What difference does it make?”
“My guess is it was where Max was killed.”
She stared at me.
“You mean …?”
“It’s all that makes sense. Why else would he have been over here?”
“But how did he get here, then?”
“Maybe after he left the office that day he picked up a car and drove over here.” I was thinking of Idola, begging me, who she thought was Max, not to go.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he came to meet somebody.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure. But it’s the only thing that makes sense, considering he was buried on an island only twenty miles from here.”
“So what now?” she asked, as I pulled a pair of bathing trunks from my bag.
“I don’t know,” I said, moving toward the bathroom to change. “I guess I’m going to try to pretend I’m Max.”
For the next hour I walked on the beach, kicking at seashells and letting the water lap over my toes.
Lydia knew more than she was telling, but she was afraid.
Idola had looked at my chest and thought I was Max.
“I told her everything I know,” Idola had said. I thought she’d been talking about Sandy. Now I knew better.
But what did it mean?
The only answer was to try to be Max, to put myself in his place and try to imagine the sights, sounds, feelings. Mainly the feelings.
The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 19