“Who were they?”
“Thugs working for Vince. Who else would they be? The same ones who tried it last week.”
“One of them wasn’t missing a couple of fingers from his right hand, was he?”
“I didn’t have time to count their fingers,” she said, “but, no, I don’t think so.”
“Ryan told me you took something from him. Maybe if you gave it back…”
“I can’t do that.”
“You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?” I said. “All right, what was it?”
“A video tape,” she answered. I waited for her to elaborate. She found a cigarette pack on the chart table, but it was empty. She crumpled it and tossed it in the general direction of the galley. Just as well; I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of her smoking around all that paper. I waited some more, the silence broken only by muted footfalls on the deck above us. Finally, she said, “It was a tape of…a well-known divorce lawyer extorting sex from his clients.”
“Of course,” I said. “It would be something as banal as blackmail. The lawyer,” I added. “He wouldn’t happen to be named Brian MacIlroy, would he?”
Her eyes widened. “How…? Ah,” she said. “Ginny.” I nodded. “I took the tape from him four years ago. He’s got a whole collection of them. The silly son of a bitch likes video taping himself getting it on in his office. And he likes watching them with company.”
“He should be more careful about the company he watches them with,” I said.
She gave me a twisted smile.
“I take it that not all of the women with whom he has sex are completely willing.”
“The tape shows him having sex with half a dozen woman,” she said. “But he forces one to give him a hand job by telling her that if she doesn’t he can guarantee she won’t get custody of her children. Another agrees to have sex with him only after he threatens to arrange for some compromising information to fall into the hands of her husband’s lawyer.”
“You weren’t planning to send the tape to the bar association I’ll bet.”
“What do you think?”
“Well,” I said, “I won’t say he doesn’t deserve it.”
“I told him that unless he deposited three thousand a month into an account I set up, he could kiss his legal practice good-bye. Not to mention his political ambitions.”
“He paid, of course.”
“Of course he paid. He isn’t that stupid. Besides, he can afford it. He probably wrote it off on his taxes or charged it to his clients. I could have taken him for a lot more, but I’m not that greedy.”
“Hmm,” was my only comment on that. “So you weren’t broke when we first met,” I said.
“Sure I was,” she said. “Three grand a month isn’t much and, well, I had expenses.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “Okay, you’d been blackmailing MacIlroy to the tune of thirty-six grand a year for – what? – three years, when you hooked up with Ryan. Why did you give him the tape?”
“When Vince came up short on the Rainbow Mountain deal – the insurance company is dragging its feet about paying off on his wife’s policy – I told him I knew someone who might be interested in buying in. Brian’s always on the look out for good investment opportunities for himself and his clients.”
“And with the tape hanging over his head,” I said, “how could be refuse?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He couldn’t.”
“So he went along,” I said. “That is, until he came up with a way to force you to double-cross Ryan. You were on your way to deliver the tape to MacIlroy when Ryan’s goons jumped you, weren’t you?”
“Christ,” she said. “I should never have showed Vince that fucking tape.”
“Don’t whine, Carla,” I said. “You cooked your own golden goose. You sicced Ryan on MacIlroy. Thirty-six thousand a year he could live with, but Wes Camacho told me Ryan needed two million to keep his end of Rainbow Mountain alive and that may have been just too much for him to handle, especially since he’s got political ambitions and a by-election not too far down the road. How am I doing so far?”
“Oh, just great.”
“What was it, Carla? What does MacIlroy have on you?”
“What makes you think he’s got anything on me?”
I had to laugh at the self-righteous indignation in her voice. “You wouldn’t have double-crossed Ryan for mere money. If Rainbow Mountain paid off, Ryan stood to make millions. No, it has to be something else.”
“What difference does it make?” she snapped. “I don’t need a fucking confessor.”
“I can’t promise I’ll help you, but if you don’t level with me, I can guarantee I won’t.”
She glared at me, blue eyes darkening almost to black. From somewhere toward the stern of Pendragon a pump kicked in, producing a low-pitched thrum that I could feel through soles of my shoes.
“All right” she said. “If you have to know, I killed someone.”
Chapter 32
My stomach clenched and my heart rattled against the walls of my chest. Had her tearful denial of complicity in Ryan’s wife’s death been just another lie?
“It happened in Acapulco,” she said. “Five years ago. A crooked Mexican cop named Miguel Alvarez. I didn’t mean to kill him, but he was trying his best to kill me. Somehow Brian found out about it and told me that if I didn’t get Vince off his back, he’d tell Alvarez’s friends where to find me. Alvarez was bent as they come and his friends were some very unpleasant people. I have no desire to spend the rest of my life in a Mexican prison or chained to a crib in a Mexican whorehouse.”
“How did you get mixed up with a corrupt Mexican cop?” I asked.
“He was a business associate of Frank’s.”
It didn’t require much imagination to deduce the sort of business Poole and a corrupt Mexican cop were into.
“You were smuggling drugs in the boats you were transporting for Frank Poole.”
Value systems are curious things. That Carla was a liar and a thief and a blackmailer, that she’d apparently killed one man and had possibly been involved in the death of Ryan’s wife, that she’d twice been arrested for prostitution, none of that disturbed me half as much as learning that she’d been involved in drug trafficking.
Seeing something in my face, she said, “You’re not going to get all self-righteous on me now are you, Tommy? It was just a little grass.”
“That makes it all right?”
“People have been using naturally occurring drugs like marijuana, peyote, opium or coca for as long as they’ve been using alcohol,” she said. “Maybe even longer.”
“Don’t try to rationalize it,” I said.
“And don’t you be such a fucking hypocrite,” she said. “Like you’ve never fudged on your income tax a little.”
“There’s a difference between that and smuggling dope,” I said.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“A matter of degree.”
“Right,” she said sourly. “Like being a little bit pregnant.”
This wasn’t getting us anywhere. “Why was Alvarez trying to kill you?” I asked. “Surely you weren’t so stupid as to try to rip him off.”
“No,” she replied. “Alvarez had been trying to get me into the sack for months. He was a pig but one night, when I was down there to pick up a boat, we were at a party and I let him talk me into going back to his boat with him. I didn’t make it easy for him, though, and by the end of the evening he was so loaded on booze and coke he could hardly walk. I helped him to his boat, put him to bed, then crashed in the galley.
“About four in the morning I heard someone banging around in the cabin. It was Alvarez. He was tearing the place apart and ranting in Spanish about something, I’m not sure what. I tried to calm him down, but he started hitting me and throwing me around the cabin. I tried to get away, but he grabbed me, threw me down, and fell on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. I must have blacked out for a second
or two, because the next thing I knew he was standing over me. He had a spear gun in his hands and was pressing the tip of the spear against my throat. I could feel the blood running down my neck.” She put her hand to her throat.
“What happened next isn’t too clear,” she went on. “I think I screamed and kicked him. I remember scrambling toward the hatch, but he caught me and pulled me back. All the time he’s crying and babbling in Spanish. He had a diver’s knife and showed me how sharp it was by slashing his arm. I knew then he was going to kill me. I told him I’d do anything he wanted, but he didn’t hear me. The spear gun was lying on the deck. I picked it up. It had a handle like a pistol. I pointed it at him. He just laughed and came at me with the knife. I pulled the trigger and the spear went straight into his mouth.
“It was awful,” she said. “He staggered around, making these horrible choking sounds and spraying blood everywhere and trying to pull the spear out. But I could see these spring-loaded barbs sticking out of the back of his neck. Then he fell, thrashed around for a few seconds, and lay still. I thought he was dead, but when I checked, he was still breathing. I didn’t know what to do, so I went up on deck and waited.”
“Waited for what?” I asked. A feeling of unreality crept over me like a bitter January fog.
Carla looked at me. “For him to die,” she said. “What do you think?”
“Why didn’t you call for an ambulance, take him to the hospital?” I asked.
“He was into more than just dope and he had a lot of very rough friends. If he died, I’d be arrested for sure, maybe even killed. And if he lived…” She shrugged. “I couldn’t very well count on him being grateful for saving his life.”
“What did you do?”
“I thought about taking the boat out a few miles and scuttling it or setting the auto-pilot on a course to Hawaii, but I just turned the air-conditioning up full blast, locked up and got the hell out of there. I figured it would be a couple of days at least before anyone went looking for him, plenty of time for me to get out of the country. I called Chris and he wired me some money.”
It was warm in the saloon of Hastings’ boat, but I was as cold as if it were mid-winter.
“What about Frank Poole?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Did MacIlroy’s investigation uncover him too?”
She shook her head. “He kept a low profile,” she said. “He hardly ever went down there.”
“Does he know about Alvarez?”
“That I killed him? Hell, no. He’d’ve sold me out to Alvarez’s pals a long time ago.”
I took a deep, deep breath and blew it out quickly, emptying my lungs, but it did nothing to relieve the tension. It felt as though a dull spike had been hammered into the base of my skull and the ache spread down my back and across my shoulders.
“Will you help me?” she said. “There’s no one else I can trust.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“All you have to do is deliver the tape to MacIlroy and pick up a package.”
“So Ryan’s thugs can beat up on me instead. No thanks.”
“They probably won’t bother you,” she said. “It’s me they’re looking for.”
“I’m not sure ‘probably’ is good enough,” I said. “What’s in the package?”
“The money I mentioned,” she said. “Compensation for my trouble.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand,” she said. “He didn’t want to pay, but I told him if he didn’t I was prepared to take my chances with Alvarez’s friends. And then he’d either be out two million bucks or facing disbarment. It was a small price. C’mon, Tommy, I’ll just make a call and set up another meeting. You be there, make the exchange, and bring the money here. Once I’ve got the money, Chris has arranged for a boat to take me out of here.” She got up and went to a locker below the chart table, from which she removed a padded Jiffy pack. Handing it to me, she said, “Go ahead, take a look, if you want.” She pointed to the little television. It had a tape slot next to the screen.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll pass. You’ve kept a copy, of course.”
“I have to protect myself, don’t I?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“I’ll pay you,” she said. “Five thousand dollars, how’s that? Not bad for a couple of hours of your time.”
I could use the money, I thought, but I said, “I don’t want your money.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you out of my life. For good.”
“Aw, Tommy,” she said, pouting. “I’m hurt. Fine,” she added. “Do me this favour and you’ll never see me again.”
“I should know better,” I said. “All right, make your call.”
She found the handset of a cordless telephone and punched in a number. “It’s me,” she said a few seconds later. After a pause, she said, “Yeah, well, circumstances beyond my control and all that. But I’m sending someone with the tape. His name’s Tommy McCall. You just say where and when.” She listened, then said, “He’ll be there,” and hung up.
She wrote something on the corner of a magazine cover, tore it off, and handed it to me. It was a downtown address, one of the office towers near Canada Place. “Be at Brian’s office at five today,” she said.
Carla stood close to me at the hatch, kissed me on the cheek. She smelled of soap and shampoo and musk. Even on the run Carla managed to keep herself cat-clean.
“Thanks, Tommy,” she said. “You’re a sport.”
“I’m an idiot,” I said.
Chapter 33
I had a couple of hours to kill before my appointment with MacIlroy. I thought about going back to the studio, but went home instead. After locking up the Porsche, I dropped by the dive shop to see if Francine was around, but she was in the pool conducting a class. I hadn’t spoken to her since returning from Whistler, had left a couple of messages, which she hadn’t returned, and I wondered if something was wrong. My pulse quickened just thinking about her and that was not a good sign. Normally, that happens to me only when I fall in love and I didn’t want to fall in love with Francine. Of course, I’ve been known to fall in love involuntarily, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.
The Land Rover was parked illegally in a space reserved for staff of the art college. As usual in the summer, the free parking lot was full to bursting and some tourist with Seattle plates had parked in my reserved slot. There was no sign of Bernard Simpson and his crew. The flotation bags were still in place under the hull, but most of the other equipment had been removed. I patted the purple pump and congratulated it for a job well done and let myself into my house. I could still detect the residual chemical odour of the hydraulic cement, but I could no longer smell sewerage. The bilge hatch was closed and everything looked level. I went into the kitchen. Bobbi was sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread out in front of her, opened to the classified section.
“How’d it go?” I asked her.
“Not good,” she said. “How would you feel about a permanent boarder?”
“Ah…”
“Don’t panic,” she said. “I’m just kidding.”
“Thank god,” I said.
She made a face, then said, “Speaking of panic, Nigel called. He’s got a quick and dirty job he needs on his desk first thing Monday morning. Product beauty shots. Looks like we’re going to have to work tomorrow.”
“Swell,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, and Mr. Baggins said they’d be taking out the flotation things tomorrow.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Baggins, the contractor?”
“His name is Bernie Simpson,” I said.
“I thought you said his name was Fred Baggins or something.”
“Bobbi, haven’t you ever read Lord of the Rings?”
“The story about the kids stranded on the island?” She shook her head. “I saw the movie, though.”
After I explained who Frodo Baggins was, I
went upstairs and took a shower, then headed downtown for my appointment, telling Bobbi on my way out that I was taking the Land Rover before it was towed away.
* * * * *
The Friday afternoon traffic was horrendous, but by five I was cooling my heels in the spacious but austere reception area of the offices of MacIlroy & Raymond, Attorneys at Law, watching the trim rump of the flaxen-haired thirty-something receptionist as she fed and watered the dozen or so potted African Violets scattered about the room. When she came near me to tend the plants on the coffee table I caught a whiff of her perfume, so heavy and sweet it made me want to lick her. I controlled myself; she probably wouldn’t have understood. At five-fifteen, without any apparent communication from her boss, she rose from her post behind the reception desk, announced that Mr. MacIlroy would see me now and opened the door to the inner office.
Brian MacIlroy was tall and sleek, carefully coiffed and impeccably tailored. The only jarring note was thick dark-rimmed eyeglasses, through which his pale hazel eyes appeared coldly reptilian. He stood behind a huge, dark wood desk that was bare except for a modern black and chrome telephone, an antique wood and brass desk set and a thin buff business envelope.
“Come in, Mr. McCall,” he said as the door hissed closed behind me.
MacIlroy’s office resembled my lawyer’s office like my home resembled the Queen of England’s — that is, not at all. It was a matter of scale. Glenda had a nice antique partner’s desk, a little too big for her office and usually piled high with files, but MacIlroy’s desk was the size of a snooker table. And there was plenty of room left over for the two matching four-seat leather sofas that faced each other across a massive black marble coffee table.
“I assume you have brought the, ah, package.” His voice was as smooth and unctuous as his smile was thin and icy.
“Yes,” I replied, showing him the Jiffy pack. I looked around the office, wondering where the video camera was hidden. Next to a bar that would have put a four-star resort hotel to shame there was a tall, mirror-fronted cabinet. It was positioned directly opposite one of the big leather sofas. Perfect.
If Looks Could Kill Page 22