John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 05 - A Deadly Shade of Gold

by A Deadly Shade of Gold(lit)

  "But it isn't the way you think!"

  "How do you know what we think?"

  "You sound... you make it sound as if I'm there with Carlos out of some kind of loyalty or something. My God, it isn't like that! Honestly, I don't know anything about the political side of it. Listen, I came down here a lot, when there were parties and all. By boat a couple of times and private airplanes. For over two years, and I'd stay on for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Okay, so I belonged to Carlos when I was here, and that was understood. Is that some kind of a crime all of a sudden? His wife is crazy. Ever since he built that house, she'd been out of her head. He liked me. He wanted me to stay there all the time, but I went back and forth. I mean I have a life of my own too."

  "You should have left for good when you had the chance, Almah."

  "You have to understand something. I lost some good opportunities on account of him. I mean they would have called me for more things, if I'd been handy all the time. A good series I could have been in. But they couldn't get hold of me for the pilot because I was here. So he owes me something. Right?"

  "What are you driving at?"

  "Look. There's a boy there with me. Gabe. Gabriel Day. You could check it out. He's a lawyer. He can't practice in Mexico, but he knows the right forms and everything they have to use down here. He's been down here for three weeks. I sent for him. You can check that out. Carlos is going to sign something for me, and people are going to witness the signature, and then Gabe and I can go get the money. It's in Mexico City. He's got over six hundred thousand dollars there. That's why I'm staying. It isn't political or anything like that. This is all some kind of mistake."

  "Sweetie, that's what they used to say in Batista's prisons and what they say now in Fidel's prisons. This is some kind of a mistake."

  "I didn't have anything to do with the political part."

  "No more than Sam Taggart did? He had enough to do with the political part so that it got him killed."

  She stared. "Sam is dead?"

  "'Thoroughly."

  "Gee, it's hard to believe. He... He told me it was time to get out, when Carlos got the stroke and Sam couldn't get the money Carlos promised him. I guess they could have guessed it was Sam who... got rid of those people."

  I sat on my heels, my back against the tree. I said, "I don't want to play psychological games with you, Almah. We know some of it, and there's some of it we don't know. But you have no way of knowing the parts we know and the parts we don't. I can't promise you anything, because there's nothing to promise. Suppose you just tell me the whole thing."

  "And you'll let me go?"

  "I want to see if you put in any mistakes."

  "The way it started? All of it?"

  "Yes."

  "I guess you could say it started when Cal Tomberlin came down on his boat, with a lot of kids I know. That was about five months ago. Cal is sort of spooky. Maybe from having everything he ever wanted, and getting it right now. His mother was Laura Shane, from the old movies. And she put all the money she made into land. No taxes then. She got fabulously rich and Cal was the only child. He'd met Carlos one time in Havana, and they didn't get along, and he didn't know that Carlos was here calling himself Garcia. It made Carlos sort of nervous when Cal showed up. Carlos had three collections in his study, in glass cases. The gold statues and the jade and the coins. But Cal Tomberlin saw the gold statues and wanted to buy them. He couldn't imagine anybody saying no. When he wants something, he has to have it. And sooner or later he gets it. It can be a boat or a special kind of car or a piece of land or somebody's wife or those horrid little gold statues. They were here about five days and he kept after Carlos all the time, and it got pretty ugly. Toward the end, Cal Tomberlin started making little hints, talking about what a nice hideaway Carlos had found for himself. But that just made Carlos more stubborn. Finally they left. Some of the kids stayed on for a while.

  "About a month later, Cal Tomberlin came back on the boat again. What I think he was doing, he was just trying to put some pressure on Carlos to make a deal with him. Maybe he knew how much trouble he was causing. Maybe he was just trying to get even with Carlos for turning him down. But he brought a Cuban man with him, and the Cuban man stayed sort of hidden on the boat until there was a big party and Cal Tomberlin went down and got the man and smuggled him into the party. I was there when Carlos saw him. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I didn't know anything could terrify Carlos so much.

  "He never talked to me about such things, but that night in bed he had to talk to somebody I guess. He said that he had been in a business deal in Havana with that man's brother. It had gone wrong somehow, and the brother had killed his wife and himself, and then their son had tried to kill Carlos and had been arrested and had died of sickness in prison. He kept saying he would have to leave Mexico and go somewhere else. But after a few days he quieted down. He stopped going outside the walls for anything. I guess he couldn't think of a place where he would be safer.

  "About two weeks later, that boat came down, that Columbine N out of Oceanside. It anchored out. That same man was on it, and two other men. They looked Cuban. I saw them in the village. They called me a filthy name. Carlos had Sam find out everything he could about them. The boat was chartered, and they were running it themselves. It was small enough so they could have tied up at the docks, but they anchored out. They didn't do anything. It made Carlos very nervous. He'd watch it with binoculars. The other two men were younger. I guess they could have been friends of the one who died in prison. They just seemed to be waiting for something.

  "Then one night they tried to kill Carlos. When they ran, they left the ladder against the wall. They'd fired at him, he thought with a rifle, from the top of the wall, from a place where you could see into his bedroom. It ripped through his smoking jacket and made a little red line across his belly, and just barely broke the skin. Instead of going all to pieces about it, he got very calm and thoughtful. I said he should get the police, but he said there were political reasons why he couldn't ask for that kind of protection. He had to make do with the people he had brought from Cuba.

  "I think it was two nights later he came to my room as I was going to bed and told me he knew all about me and Sam. He knew I'd been cheating on him with Sam from just about the second time I'd come down to visit. He said it had amused him. I made some smart remark and he gave me a hell of a slap across the face and knocked me down. He wanted me to work on Sam to get Sam to do what Carlos wanted him to do. He told me the lie he had told Sam. He had told Sam that the men on the boat were Castro agents, and that for several years Carlos had been financing underground activities against Castro, and those men were assigned to kill him so it would stop.

  "I guess Sam never thought much about that sort of thing. I guess it would sound reasonable to him. He offered Sam a hundred thousand dollars in cash to get rid of those men on the boat. Carlos had it all worked out how it could be done. But Sam didn't want to kill anybody. It made me feel funny to think of Sam killing anybody. With Carlos not going out in his own boat any more, not since Cal had brought that Cuban man around, Sam didn't have much to do. The man who helped him on Carlos' boat is named Miguel. He's still at the house.

  "When I was with Sam, it was usually on Carlos' boat, and sometimes in Sam's room. It wasn't anything important with us. It was just something to do. And I enjoy it. Unless there were parties, it was quiet around there. Sort of sleepy. Siestas in the afternoon. I don't like to sleep in the day. Maybe I'd be by the pool and Sam would give me a look and go away and I'd stay there and think about him, and then I'd have to go find him. I thought the servants probably knew. I didn't know Carlos knew.

  "Anyway I made Sam tell me about it, not letting on I knew, and then I worked on him to do it. I told him if he didn't have any guts, I wasn't interested any more. And besides, it was sort of patriotic. I said if he did it, I'd arrange to go away with him for a while. He was always a little more eager than I was. I
guess guys always are. I didn't tell him Carlos had promised me a little money for talking him into it. And I wouldn't do anything with him until he said yes. I told him when he said yes, it would be the most special thing that ever happened to him. It did get me pretty excited, thinking of him killing those men in the way Carlos had it all figured out.

  "They did it. Sam and Miguel. On the first calm dark night. They went out in the dinghy from Carlos' boat, I guess about three in the morning, making no sound at all. They went aboard barefoot. Sam told me all about it. He held onto me, shivering like a little kid. He was too sick to make love. Twice he got up and he went and he was sick. It wasn't like he thought it was going to be. One of the men was sleeping on deck. Miguel sneaked over to him and cut his throat. Sam said the man flopped and thumped around while he was dying. But it didn't wake the others. They went below. One of the men was easy. The other one put up a terrible fight. He knocked some of Sam's teeth out, hitting him with something. Sam strangled him. Then there was the woman. Nobody had known anything about the woman. She'd stayed below the whole time. There was some kind of little light on below. She came out of the front of the boat somewhere, and flew at Sam. He got her by the wrists. He said she was dark and pretty. He said that holding her, he could feel Miguel putting the knife into her back, and he could see her face changing as she knew she was dead. That was what made him so sick. He cried in my arms like a little kid.

  "The dinghy was tied astern. They cut the anchor lines. Sam started the boat up and they went out the main pass, dead slow, without lights, heading southwest. Once they were pretty well out, Sam put the boat on automatic pilot. Miguel had taken the other body below. Sam disconnected the automatic bilge pumps and opened a sea cock. He said Miguel had been scrambling around with a sack, getting money and watches and rings and cameras and things like that. He made Miguel quit and got into the dinghy. Sam closed it up below.

  "He went to the controls then and yelled to Miguel to cast off, and he put it up to cruising speed, and ran and dived over the rail and swam back to the dinghy. They sat in the dinghy. He said they could see the boat for just a little while, and then they could hear it for a lot longer. When they couldn't hear it any more, they started the little outboard on the dinghy and came on back. They were about five or six miles out. They stopped the motor and rowed the last mile in.

  "Sam said he estimated that the cruiser would run for maybe an hour before the bilge got full enough to stop the engines. Then it would go down pretty fast, and it would be nearly twenty miles out by then. About two or three days later we heard they were hunting for a boat. There were some search planes. Some men came and asked questions at the hotel. But all they could say was that the boat had left one night. That was about two months ago. After he did it, Sam wanted the money right away so he could leave. But Carlos stalled him. He said he had to make a trip to Mexico City to get it. He said he would go soon. I guess I was going to go with him. I don't know. Maybe I was partly to blame. He wanted to shove some of the blame off on me, so he could feel a little better about it.

  "Then one morning Carlos was sitting by the pool and I was swimming. I heard a woman scream. I climbed out and I asked Carlos if he heard it. I was looking around. He didn't answer me. I looked at him again, and I realized he had made that sound. The doctor came up from Mazatlan by float plane. At first he thought Carlos would die. He was unconscious for four days. Then he was conscious, with his whole left side paralyzed and he couldn't talk. The doctor said there might be some future improvement, but probably not much. Dead brain cells don't come back. Sam was drunk for days.

  "Then I found him in the study. He'd opened the glass case and he was putting those gold statues in the case Carlos had had made for them when he left Cuba. They go in little fitted places. He said he was going to get his money one way or another, and the whole thing made no sense at all unless he got his money. He said he was going to take them away and sell them to Cal Tomberlin. He said he'd earned them. I said they were worth more than what Carlos had promised him, that Cal had offered Carlos a lot more. He said then it would have to be a bonus, and the way he felt about it, the bonus could be for the woman.

  "But maybe Cal wouldn't want to pay him as much as he had offered Carlos anyway. He told me I should leave with him. But he was acting sort of wild and unreliable. I didn't see how he could get those things across the border. He looked as if he was going to get into terrible trouble. And by then-I didn't tell him-I'd gotten into Carlos' wall safe, in his bedroom. He'd watch me with that one eye whenever I was in there. I looked everywhere and found the combination in his wallet, written on the edge of a card. I thought there would be a lot of money in there, but there was just some pesos, a little over twenty thousand pesos. And some bank books for accounts in Zurich, and the keys and records of the bank drawer in Mexico City. The money there is in American dollars.

  "Sam left. That case was terribly heavy. He fixed it so he could sort of sling it on his shoulder. He wanted to take one of the cars. I didn't want any trouble to be traced back to Carlos. I told the men not to let him take a car, to let him take the heavy case, but no car. But before he could leave, two men came. They had been at the house before. Friends of Carlos, from the old days in Havana. When they would visit him, they would have long private conferences about money and politics. They didn't know Carlos had had a stroke. It made them very nervous.

  "I took them to him and showed them how to talk to Carlos. He can blink his good eye for yes and no, and if you hold his wrist steady he can scrawl simple words on a pad. I wanted to stay there, but they shoved me out of the room and locked the door. At dusk they were still in there. Sam decided that they were going to take over, and if they knew what he was going to take, they would stop him. So he left, and he told me to tell those men, if they asked, that he'd left by boat. He thought they would get around to looking for him.

  "Those men spent a long time with Carlos. They talked to me about what the doctor had said. They spent most of the next day with him. I guess it was slow work, finding out things from him. Maybe he didn't want to tell them. That would make it slower. Once I listened at the door and heard Carlos make that terrible sound he makes when he gets frightened or angry.

  "At last they knew all they wanted to know, from him. They found out I could open the safe. They made me open it. I'd hidden the keys and records for the Mexico City box. They didn't seem to know or care about that. They took the Swiss bank book. They said fast things to Carlos and laughed, and the tears ran out of his good eye. They took the jade and the coin collection too. They asked me about Sam. One's English was good, as good as Carlos'.

  "They said Carlos had done a very stupid thing, and that Sam had been very stupid to obey Carlos' orders. They said that the friends of the people who had been on that boat would be told what had happened, so that nobody would start blaming the wrong people. And they said it would be very nice if they could turn Sam over to those friends, because that would satisfy them, and then the security of a lot of people living quietly in Mexico would not be endangered through political pressures. They said it would be nice if I told them every helpful thing I could think of about Sam, because if the authorities caught him with all that gold, and if Sam talked too much about where he got it, a lot of private and semi-official arrangements might collapse, and the newspaper publicity might make certain officials take steps they had already been bribed not to take.

  "I made a sort of arrangement with them. I said I would stay on and sort of take charge of the household. They gave me some money. They said they would send me draughts on the bank in Culiacan to cover household expenses, plus a salary for me. Then when Carlos dies, they'll send people to arrange about disposing of the house, getting the staff resettled, getting Mrs. Menterez into an institution. And they said I'll get a bonus at that time. But I was to live quietly. No big parties and lots of house guests like before.

  "They gave me an address in Mexico City to write to if anything happens. So... I t
old them all I knew about Sam, about how he planned to sell the statues to Cal Tomberlin. And I told them his village slut, Felicia, might know something. They went away in their car. After a few weeks I... thought of Gabe and sent for him. He's been here three weeks. Then yesterday I got that note... and I wanted to know what the message was. From Sam.

  Her voice had gotten increasingly husky. Her head lolled. "Please," she said in a faint voice. "I'm getting awful uncomfortable."

  Perspiration darkened the blue blouse, pasting it to her midriff. I got up and stretched the stiffness out of my legs and went over and gave her three feet of slack and made the line fast in that position. She brought her arms down, moved in a small circle, rolling her shoulders.

  "I've leveled with you," she said. "Completely. I've told you everything. Maybe it doesn't make me look so good. I can't help that. I know one thing in this world. If you don't take care of yourself, nobody else is going to."

  "Have they sent you money?"

  "Once. I guess it's going to come once a month. It wasn't as much as they said it would be."

  "What are the names of those two men?"