“Going somewhere?”
Startled, Stevenson dropped the shirt in his hand as he saw me. “What are you doing here?”
“I ask myself that question every morning, and I just don’t seem to get an intelligent answer.”
Stevenson reached into a drawer in his nightstand and came up with a gun. He pointed it at my face, a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, a little five-shot revolver favored by off-duty cops because it was so small and light.
“You’re trespassing, Caine. Get out of here.”
“You going to shoot me? I’m not armed.”
“Got another one here.” He gestured toward the night-stand. “It’s registered to a dead man and reported stolen from his estate. I put it in your hand after I shoot you.”
“Cute,” I said. “I hate cute.”
“You found the money.”
“Yep,” I said. “I know where it is.”
“Where?”
“You know. You buried it.”
“Buried it? Where?”
I shook my head. I’d told him too much. “No need to confirm what you already know. I’ll get Claire’s money back. That’s why you hired me.”
“If I knew where the money was, why would I hire you?”
Because you were told to, I thought. Because you would have been burned if you didn’t. Perhaps because you knew you couldn’t resist when Barbara and Claire forced you into it. “Why did you give a thousand dollars to a bunch of kids to burn down Claire’s house?”
“Who said I did that?”
“The kids.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Showed me the thousand. Kind of elaborate to make up a lie like that, just to frame a honky lawyer.”
Stevenson shook his head. “It’s a lie.”
“Sure it is. These were the same kids you sent to my room to get me off the case. That didn’t work. Still, we got a problem. I’m not leaving and you won’t shoot me.”
“I will.”
We stood there looking at each other like two kids daring one another to fight. I’d pushed him into a corner but he held the gun and neither of us knew what to do next. I calculated the odds he might miss me with that short barrel. They weren’t good. Three to one he’d hit me. I didn’t like getting shot. It hurt.
The only thing I had going for me was his reluctance to shoot. I had to be careful not to push him too far. Until I had the gun.
“I’m not going to tell you again, Caine. Get out of my house.” Stevenson shook the gun to emphasize his anger, the barrel pointing toward the bridge of my nose.
“Okay. But you’ll have some explaining to do. I leave here, I call the cops. I’ve got you on arson for hire. Slam dunk. Then there’s attempted murder, accessory to murder, a couple of other minor items. Then the bar association might be interested in your friends.”
“Huh?”
“The Garcia woman. And her buddies, that Latino gang in Chula Vista. They live in your building. You stopped by there this afternoon but they weren’t home.”
“You followed me.”
“It wasn’t difficult. I’ve got the whole bunch of you. I just can’t figure out what you were doing.”
He shook his head again. “You can’t leave now, Caine.” He cocked the revolver.
I made sure I had my balance and could move when I needed to. Stevenson put both hands on the gun, aiming it straight-armed at my face. A .38 isn’t a large caliber, but it’s big enough. Six feet away and pointed at your head, the barrel looks enormous.
His hand shook as he pulled the trigger. I dove across the bed, rolling under the tongue of flame, landing on the balls of my feet. He fired again as I charged him. Something tugged at the collar of my jacket. I reached him as he fired the third bullet, kicked his feet out from under him, deflecting the gun with my elbow. Glass shattered in another room.
He still had the gun and the gun still had two rounds.
I stomped on his hand and the pistol went off again. The bullet ricocheted off a rock hearth and thumped into one of the pillows. Down feathers exploded over the bed, an indoor blizzard.
Stevenson still had the gun.
I broke his trigger finger and twisted the revolver away. He howled like a wounded animal and clubbed me on the head with his left hand. I saw stars. He clubbed at me again, his big fist curving in over my shoulder. I blocked his punch with my forearm. My whole arm went numb.
I kicked the revolver into the hall.
He hit me a one-two combination that jarred me to the soles of my feet. This guy knew how to box, even with a broken finger. He slammed me with two lefts, spaced so close together they felt like one big one, but I managed to turn my shoulder into them, protecting my face. I like getting hit in the face almost as much as I like getting shot.
“Joe,” I said, breathing hard. “You’re going to get hurt if you don’t stop this.”
His answer was a fast right-left-right-left that staggered me, driving me back against a bench. He hit me again with a solid right to my forehead and I fell backward over the bench.
He waited for me to get up, backing away to the center of the room, dancing on his toes like a prizefighter ordered back to his corner after a knockdown.
I couldn’t believe it.
“One more time,” I said, dragging myself to my feet.
“Stop hitting me. You’re ahead on points right now, but you don’t know what you’re getting into.”
He came at me, faking a right, then a left, jabbing, faking, then committing himself to a big right.
I caught his arm, raised it toward the ceiling and turned so he was just behind me. Using my elbow, I broke a rib or two on his right side with a series of kites, then followed with another elbow kite to his right clavicle, shattering it. He fell to the floor and lay still, conscious, but not moving, immobilized by the pain.
My ears rang. There’s nothing like a short-barreled pistol fired in an enclosed space to make your ears ring. My face felt hot and swollen.
I found the gun in the corridor, opened the chamber, and tilted it. One live round dropped into my palm, the other four empty shells remaining in the cylinder, expanded by their use.
I reloaded the remaining live cartridge and slipped the gun into the pocket of my leather jacket. It was mine now. Now that I knew Peters wasn’t ever coming back.
A laptop computer in a black leather case lay on a table near the bathroom. I wondered briefly of its origins, then dismissed the thought. It didn’t matter now.
A wayward round had broken the bathroom mirror, but there were enough pieces still glued to the wall to let me see my face. Under my beard my chin was raw and bleeding. My lip was cut. I had a mouse on my forehead that matched the cut from the edge of the door. In a day or so my face would look like a Technicolor nightmare. My arms would bruise up, too. I’d probably make small children cry for a couple of weeks. I was glad I wasn’t young and movie-star haridsome in the first place.
“Who is that other lawyer that fights? Shapiro? That O. J. defense guy? Is that what you fellows do in your spare time? Take boxing lessons?”
Stevenson was silent.
“You made a mistake when you backed off. You’d be tough to beat if there were rules. Just remember the only rule of street fighting. There are no rules.” I bent over him, violating his space. He looked at me, pain etching permanent lines into his face. “You want to talk now?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Now we talk.”
“Need a doctor, Caine.”
“Yeah, you do. You’ve got broken ribs and a broken collarbone. It hurts a lot, but those aren’t serious injuries. That’s why I broke them. You’ll get over it, in time.”
“Fuck you.”
“What did you do with Paul Peters?”
Stevenson was silent.
“You know the alternative to doing this voluntarily?”
“You’re going to call the police. I wish you would. You break into my house and—aaaaaaaah!” The big lawyer
nearly leaped off the hardwood floor when I punched his shoulder. A jagged portion of the broken bone tented the skin, nearly penetrating it.
“Wrong. We don’t call the police. I’ll just sit here and play with the ends of your bones until you talk to me. Like this.” I punched him again. It was more a slap than a punch, but it worked.
“No! No! Aaaaaaaah!”
“There’s no Constitution here, Stevenson. I am not the police. I am not the courts. You’ve got no protection. You lost that when you pulled the trigger. I’m just the guy you’re going to tell the truth to. We’ll worry about rules of evidence later.”
“You can’t torture me!” He gasped, his breath coming hard. He’d lived his life in violation of society’s rules, expecting protection under those same rules when caught. He was a lawyer. He knew the Byzantine labyrinth of the law, knew how to circumvent, delay, and prevent justice. He wasn’t prepared for this. Even though he’d participated in years of violence, he wasn’t prepared for me.
“This isn’t torture,” I assured him. “This is creative questioning. You don’t have to hurt. You’ve got the control. Answer my question and nothing will happen. What did you do with Paul Peters?”
I reached for him, but he shrank away.
“He’s dead!”
“I knew that,” I said. “When? After Claire saw him in Calafia?”
“Yes. He had been hiding from us. He’d been having second thoughts and wanted to think it through. He hid the money. Nobody knew where it was. But after he saw Claire, he panicked and ran to Elena. He told her everything. Once she knew, she killed him. Or had him killed.”
“Who killed him?”
“Her brother, Chico.”
“Young kid, lives in your building in Chula Vista? That’s her brother?”
“Yes. Of the seven million dollars, Peters gave us two million to start. He gave it to Elena, really. He thought they were going to start a new life together. It was a down payment.”
He gasped, though I didn’t touch him.
“Go on,” I urged. “Tell me the rest.”
“This isn’t actionable … . You can’t use any of this … .”
I raised my hand.
“Elena can get a man to do anything. Especially after she’s gone to bed with him.”
“Why?”
“She’s, well … she’s very well trained. She’s also got herpes, and she tells them she’s HIV positive, tells them she got it from a blood transfusion, some such story that makes her the victim. She can play the victim, let me tell you. She lets them know only after she’s got them, tells them she just found out. She makes it a tragic romance. Just as she’s found the love of her life, she’s dying, and she’s killing the only man she ever loved. She tells them she doesn’t have any symptoms. They can’t check, because it takes at least six months to show up once someone’s infected. By then, it’s over. She’s got their money, and they’re dead.”
He clutched his side. “This hurts,” he said.
I nodded. “It’ll feel better in a week or so. Maybe two. Tell me more.”
“Once she gets a man in this situation, he thinks he’s dead. He’s a pariah. He can’t go back to where he was, so then she loves him to death, keeps him from thinking about going back to his wife. Makes it impossible for him to go to bed with his wife again. She makes plans for their future together. Turns tragedy into a triumph.”
“When did this start?”
“We thought it out years ago, after she came down with herpes,” murmured Stevenson. Now that he started telling me, it was like he wanted to get it all out, confess the whole thing. Maybe the Catholics have it right. Confession is good for the soul, although it can also be detrimental to your health if you’re not careful who you confess to.
“We had a similar thing going when she looked young, underage. It was a chicken trap. She played a teenage kid and seduced wealthy men. We had another partner then, her brother was too young. He would come in and discover them in the act. The target was always married, always successful, and always liquid enough to buy his way out of the problem. That’s where I came in. They took it to their lawyer. I drew up the paperwork. Legal documents always scare people. They were good legal documents, too.”
Stevenson almost smiled, proud of his craft.
“It never failed,” he continued. “But it was small money. Then her partner died, and one of her targets gave her herpes. We never knew which one. About that time the AIDS scare came up. We knew we’d have to change direction.”
“What happened to your old partner?”
“Died in a traffic accident. Chico took care of him when he started to get greedy. Her brother was coming up, too, and we didn’t need the man anymore.” His eyes were glassy, staring past me, looking at something a thousand yards distant.
“Since the mid-eighties?”
“Yeah. We’ve gone after the big money since then.”
“How many?”
He shook his head, and winced, his face pale. Sweat ran down his cheeks. I felt his forehead. It was clammy. He was going into shock.
“Her victim doesn’t know what hit him,” he continued, the words flowing as if he couldn’t stop himself. “He can never sleep with his wife again. And he can never tell her. He believes he’s dying. Elena made it seem like they would die together, a tragic couple facing life’s cruelties … . Oh, shit!” Stevenson’s face turned white as a wave of agony passed through him. He vomited.
Then he passed out.
35
I cleaned him up as well as I could so he wouldn’t drown in his own fluids and then splashed water on him. That had no effect, so I looked in his medicine cabinet and found smelling salts. They did.
“You know where the money is?” I asked him when consciousness returned. It was time to focus on the problem.
“Buried.”
“You know where?”
“Yeah. Me and Elena. We never told the boys. But you said you knew.”
“I just took a wild guess and said that to see what you’d do. Where is Elena?”
“Don’t know.”
“Where were you going?”
“It’s falling apart. I was getting out.”
I considered that. It didn’t make any sense. Trust a lawyer to lie. “Where does de la Peña fit?”
“He’s the Mexican connection. We work both sides of the border. He protects us down there.”
“That’s all?”
“He’s also enforcement, working with Chico.”
“So he sent the two kids to Claire’s house? To do what, clean the slate?”
“Yeah. He and Chico. After you snooped around with those San Diego cops, he thought you were onto him. He went around the bend. I gave you his number knowing he’d never talk to you. I never dreamed you’d get the San Diego cops involved.”
“People underestimate me all the time,” I said. “It’s a gift.”
“He sent the boys up to the house after you left. They were already in Chula Vista, waiting for the order. He’d already set that up when he found out a private detective was on the case, looking around. I didn’t know about it. I didn’t want Claire hurt.”
“Nice to see you have ethics. Steal her money, kill her husband, ruin her company, destroy her life, but don’t hurt her.”
“Things just got carried away,” said Stevenson.
“De la Peña was so hinky when I talked to him he didn’t leave anything to the imagination. He sweated guilt.” I remembered Ambrosio’s reading of him on the way back from Ensenada.
“He’s not bright,” said Stevenson, gritting his teeth. “He’s just powerful.”
“That’s a bad combination.”
Stevenson grunted. “You know why I’m telling you all this?”
“Because nothing you say can be used against you?”
“No. Because right now Chico and the boys are after de la Peña. He’s become a liability. He’s a dead man, or soon will be. Once they get rid of him, they’re go
ing to dig up the money and vanish. It’s too dangerous with him alive. If he knew where the money was, he’d kill all of us. That’s why we never told him.”
“What were your plans?”
“I’m joining them as soon as we get rid of you.”
“You aren’t going anywhere, Joe.”
“Chico will be here soon. He’ll take care of you, and then we’ll head south to meet Elena. Once we dig up the money, we all vanish. There are places in Mexico and Central America that are lovely all year, where you can live like a king.”
“That’s your dream? That’s why you kill people?”
“Well, it was more before, but it’ll do now. You’ve limited my options.”
I heard the front door open and pulled the revolver from my pocket.
“Chico! In here!” Stevenson shouted, then held his side as the force of the shout caused the ends of his broken ribs to rub together. The sound of footsteps echoed off hardwood floors.
“I’ll see you, Caine.” Stevenson smiled. “Don’t send me a bill.”
I saw a door near the bathroom and opened it. It led to a service corridor. Another door at the other end opened to the outside. I could see the lighted pool through a sidelight.
I ran through the hallway, crossed the backyard, and made it to the cover of trees on the steep slope at the back of the property and hugged the earth, facing the house. The little revolver with its single cartridge was next to useless, but it was something. I cursed myself for leaving the big Colt in my briefcase aboard Olympia. It wouldn’t do me any good there. What was it I told Claire the first time I met her? Only people who made mistakes needed guns and I tried not to get into situations where guns were necessary? It sounded good at the time. Made me sound smug and smart and a little superior. Well, at least those who carried had their guns when they needed them and weren’t hiding in the ivy in somebody’s backyard armed only with a borrowed, nearly empty popgun.
Nothing happens the way you expect. The sound of four spaced gunshots came from the house. Then I heard the front door opening and closing and the wrought-iron gate slamming against the brick. A motor raced, tires chirped, and the sounds receded into the distance.
I approached the house, holding the little revolver in front of me. Nothing moved. No sound came from the house. I entered the way I’d exited and moved down the corridor to Stevenson’s bedroom. I listened at the closed door for anything that might tell me someone was inside. I lay on the floor, cocked the gun, and pushed open the door until it swung wide.
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