Out on the Rim

by Ross Thomas

  “She tell you about Georgia and the Marcoses?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when I got to her house she was dead.”

  “So you think somebody tipped Georgia off that the Cariaga woman knew all about her and the Marcoses, and that’s why Georgia killed her?”

  Lt. Cruz nodded.

  “Sounds weak to me,” Stallings said. “Who tipped Georgia off—one of the Marcoses?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Since when does ‘possibly’ hack it in a murder case?”

  “It doesn’t,” Lt. Cruz said. “But an eyewitness does.”

  “And you just happen to have one, huh?”

  Lt. Cruz sighed in exasperation. “Miss Blue hired herself a frightener who worked for a very undesirable alien called Boy Howdy.”

  “A friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Stallings said to Durant.

  “Not quite,” Durant said.

  “She hired this frightener,” Lt. Cruz went on doggedly, “ostensibly to throw a scare into Mrs. Cariaga. But actually to blame him for the murder. She and Howdy may have conspired in this. The poor brute is very, very large and very, very dumb.”

  “So Georgia and Howdy set him up?” Stallings said.

  Lt. Cruz nodded. “As I said, the man is none too bright. He got the time mixed up and arrived at Mrs. Cariaga’s early, only to find her day guard dead from a broken neck—which, I understand, Georgia Blue is quite capable of doing.”

  “Is she?” Stallings said.

  Lt. Cruz ignored the question. But Durant said, “Yes. She is.”

  “After finding the body,” Cruz continued, “the dummy hid in the shrubbery, not sure what to do next. He saw Georgia Blue come out of Emily Cariaga’s house. After she drove away, he went in the house and found Mrs. Cariaga dead. Stabbed. He panicked and tried to leave, only to bump into Durant here. They fought. Durant lost, or so he says. When sufficiently recovered he quite sensibly called the police.”

  “And told you about the dummy,” Stallings said.

  Lt. Cruz gave Durant a disapproving look. “Not right away, unfortunately.”

  Stallings smiled slightly at Durant. “Held out on the cops, did you?”

  “For a while.”

  Stallings turned back to Lt. Cruz and asked, “Do you find him and his partner kind of devious?”

  “Extremely so.”

  Stallings nodded thoughtfully. “But you’ve talked to the dummy—the so-called eyewitness?”

  “At length,” Lt. Cruz said. “He freely admits what I’ve told you.”

  “So who shot Boy Howdy down in Cebu?” Stallings asked in a quick hard voice, as if trying to rattle Lt. Cruz.

  “Carmen Espiritu, of course,” Lt. Cruz said. “Probably because Howdy worked for whoever paid him—for the Espiritus, for Georgia Blue, even for the Palace. Apparently, Georgia Blue paid better than anyone else and his loyalty, such as it was, went to her. We can only presume the Espiritus found out about his duplicity and killed him. We’d like to question Carmen Espiritu, but I hear she’s dead. I do hear correctly, don’t I, Mr. Stallings?”

  Booth Stallings sat at the Formica table on the wobbly plastic chair, thinking not about Lt. Cruz’s question, but about the night he had gone to bed with Georgia Blue. He probed, rather gently, for feelings of revulsion or moral outrage, but found none. He did turn up a lot of regret and a measure of sadness. But what you regret, he decided, is that you won’t be jumping into bed with her again. And what you’re sad about is that these guys are going to ask you to do something to her, something high-minded, like bringing her to justice, and you’re going to say yes, although what you really want to do is run off to New Caledonia with her.

  He looked at Lt. Cruz and said, “You asked if Carmen’s dead?”

  Lt. Cruz nodded.

  “Yeah. She’s dead.”

  Lt. Cruz made no comment, as if waiting for Stallings to continue. Instead, Stallings asked a question. “Why don’t you and the Hong Kong cops go arrest Georgia right now?”

  “Because,” Lt. Cruz said, “you and she haven’t come out of the bank yet.”

  “You want to bust her with the money on her, right?”

  “I pray to God she won’t have it on her.”

  “I think I missed a beat there.”

  Lt. Cruz looked away. “For reasons of national security we prefer not to arrest her until she comes out of the bank.”

  Stallings nodded glumly, as if at the familiar punch line of some bad old joke. “In my dictionary, national security’s a synonym for politics.”

  “You have an excellent dictionary, Mr. Stallings,” Lt. Cruz said and rose. “Good evening, gentlemen.” He turned and walked out of the YMCA restaurant.

  Durant and Stallings sat in silence until Durant said, “It’s not the principle of the thing, Booth. It’s the money.”

  All Stallings said was, “We never did get that tea.”

  Durant rose. “Somebody else’ll buy you a cup.”

  Stallings also rose to follow Durant out of the YMCA and into the night. Durant’s eyes roamed over the sidewalk and the street, poking into the darker corners. Otherguy Overby seemed to materialize out of the shadows.

  “He’s all yours,” Durant said.

  Overby nodded toward the corner. “Let’s go, Booth.”

  Both men turned, but Overby turned back when Durant called to him. “Otherguy.”

  “What?”

  “Buy him a cup of tea, will you?”

  Their walk took them six blocks north of the Peninsula Hotel and two blocks east. The streets narrowed and the tourists thinned out as the shops grew junkier. When they came to a small restaurant with a Chinese sign, Overby said, “Take a good look because you’ll be coming back here tomorrow.”

  “I’ll never find it again,” Stallings said.

  Overby handed him a slip of paper with the name and address of the restaurant written in both English and Chinese. “Give it to any taxi driver.”

  They went in. A young Chinese woman seemed to know Overby because she smiled at him and asked him a question in Chinese. After Overby replied in English she led them toward the rear of the nearly deserted restaurant. They went along a row of booths whose seat backs rose to the ceiling, transforming the booths into small semiprivate cubicles.

  The young woman asked Overby another question in Chinese. He again replied in English. “Tea for three, please.”

  After the woman left, Overby waved Stallings into the far seat of the last booth. As he slipped into it, Stallings saw the woman diagonally across the table, almost huddled into the corner next to the wall.

  She smiled at him wanly. “So how’s it go, Booth?” Minerva Espiritu said.

  “It goes, Minnie,” Booth Stallings said.

  Otherguy Overby sat down next to Minnie Espiritu. “Any problems?” he asked her.

  “Not yet.”

  After looking around for eavesdroppers, Overby leaned toward Stallings and spoke in the low soft tones of the born conniver. “Okay, Booth. Now here’s what’s really going to happen.”

  CHAPTER 41

  The next morning, shortly before ten o’clock, two of them went to Hong Kong Island by ferry and three went by car. The two who took the Star Ferry were Georgia Blue and Booth Stallings. She wore a serious dark gray dress and a black leather shoulder bag. Stallings wore the tan suit Otherguy Overby had picked out at Lew Ritter’s in Los Angeles. He also carried a slim brown leather attaché case that looked new.

  Georgia Blue noticed the case and said, “Window dressing?”

  Stallings shrugged. “I don’t want to walk in, ask for five million dollars and then have no place to stick it, except my hip pocket.”

  “It won’t be in cash, Booth.”

  He grinned. “Still.”

  They took seats forward in the first-class section of the ferry during the crossing from Kowloon. The only time they spoke was when Georgia Blue asked, “What’ll you do with your s
hare, Booth?”

  “Endow myself,” he said.

  The car the other three rode in was a rented Jaguar sedan. Artie Wu drove, of course, and much too fast as always. Durant, seated next to him, kept closing his eyes at the near misses and close catastrophes. Otherguy Overby sat silent and relaxed in the rear, looking out the window.

  Wu turned to look at Overby. “Do you think—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Artie,” Durant snapped.

  Wu turned back just in time to avoid a bus and then finished his question. “—Booth can handle it?”

  “I kept him up till two this morning practicing,” Overby said.

  “How was he?” Durant asked.

  “I don’t think he’s got his heart in it.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “He did okay.”

  “Why don’t you think his heart’s in it, Otherguy?” Wu said, keeping his eyes on the road.

  “I think he’d rather fuck Georgia again instead.”

  “Instead of going for a million?” Wu asked, sounding more interested than surprised.

  “At sixty, that could be a tough call, right, Quincy?”

  Durant smiled slightly. “With her, it’s a tough call at thirty.”

  Booth Stallings, who doted on anachronisms, grinned at the eighty-eight-year-old double-deck streetcar that dinged and clanked its way down Des Voeux Road past the silver and gray Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation’s startling new sixty-story headquarters.

  He and Georgia Blue had walked the two or three blocks from the Star Ferry terminal to Des Voeux Road and were now waiting for a green light. Staring up at the towering bank building, which seemed to be mostly glass and exposed girders, Stallings said, “You can’t tell if it’s supposed to cash a check or launch a space probe, but I sure like that two-story Toonerville Trolley going by in front.”

  “Where’s Toonerville?” Georgia Blue asked.

  Instead of answering, Stallings said, “Light’s green.” They crossed the street and rode an escalator up to an entrance that led into an atrium seventeen stories high. A bank guard directed them to the desk of Mr. Henry Pow, an assistant cashier.

  Pow’s desk was in an open space just off the main banking hall. The bank apparently liked to do its business in full view of its customers. Confidentiality was assured by spacing its officers’ desks ten feet apart. Pow, a Chinese in his late thirties, wore a genial look and a dark blue suit. He glanced up at Stallings and Georgia Blue with what seemed to be genuine pleasure.

  “Miss Blue and Mr. Stallings—am I correct?” he said as he rose. Stallings replied that he was and Pow waved them to chairs beside his desk. Stallings made sure he got the chair closer to Pow and sat down, his new attache case on his lap.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” Pow said with another bright smile that displayed a gold crown far back on the left.

  “Any problems, Mr. Pow?” Georgia Blue asked.

  “No problems, none at all,” he said and chuckled. “Unless you forgot to bring along identification.”

  “Passports do?” Stallings asked.

  “Perfectly.”

  Georgia Blue handed hers over first. Pow inspected it with care and made a few notes. Stallings opened his attaché case, took out his passport and gave it to Pow who examined it even more closely than he had Georgia Blue’s, glancing from the passport photo to Stallings and back to the photo at least three times.

  With yet another smile and another small chuckle, Pow said, “You are what you are.”

  “Like Popeye,” Stallings said.

  “Yes. Quite. Now if you’ll just sign these release forms where the red check marks are. All three copies, please.”

  He handed the forms and a ballpoint pen to Stallings who signed and passed pen and forms to Georgia Blue. After signing, she handed them back to Pow, along with the pen. He compared the signatures with those in the passports.

  Satisfied, Pow handed the passports back, unlocked his center desk drawer and took out five buff checks. He examined each one deliberately before passing them to Georgia Blue. As she looked at them, one by one, Pow said, “You’ll notice they are certified checks for one million U.S. each and are made out to cash as requested.”

  Georgia Blue nodded and handed the checks to Stallings for inspection. He looked at each one and then at Pow. “Got an envelope?”

  “Of course,” Pow said as Stallings handed him the five checks. The envelope Pow removed from his desk drawer was a white number ten that bore the bank’s logo. It was also an exact duplicate of the one Lt. Cruz had given Quincy Durant the night before in the YMCA restaurant.

  Stallings watched, almost mesmerized, as Pow slowly counted the checks again, slipped them into the envelope, ran his tongue across the mucilage on its flap, sealed it carefully and, with only a moment’s indecision, handed it to Stallings. The expert on terrorism raised the lid of the attache case, as Otherguy Overby had instructed him, just enough to slip the hand with the envelope inside. It was then that Stallings went into the rest of his act. Frown first, he thought. So he frowned, as if struck by a sudden thought, and looked at Georgia Blue.

  “Maybe it’d be better if you carried them,” he said.

  “If you like,” she said, her relief nearly invisible. He brought his hand out of the attache case. In it was a sealed white number ten envelope that bore the bank’s logo. He handed it to her and watched as she tucked it down into her black leather bag.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Pow,” she said, rising and offering the assistant cashier her hand. Pow also rose, his smile at the ready as he shook hands with her and Stallings. “Thank you for your custom,” he said. “And whenever you have other banking needs, please keep us in mind.”

  “We’ll do that,” Booth Stallings said.

  Stallings stepped onto the down escalator first, Georgia Blue only two steps up and behind him, her right hand now deep inside her shoulder bag, her eyes back into their Secret Service mode and darting from face to face, classifying each one at a glance.

  She didn’t spot them until she and Stallings were across Des Voeux Road and walking through the park that was bounded by the Prince’s Building on the left and the courthouse on the right. She was walking one step back of Stallings and to his right. He couldn’t see them but he knew she had when her left hand took his right arm just above the elbow, as if she needed some slight support. Iron fingers dug into the elbow nerve then. The pain was immediate and awful. Stallings sucked in his breath, making a hissing noise.

  “See them?” she demanded.

  “Who?”

  “Two at eleven o’clock and three at one.”

  Stallings looked. He saw two Chinese men in their thirties, wearing casual clothes and bent slightly forward, right hands back on their right hips. To the right at one o’clock he located three more men, two Chinese and one European. The Chinese were young, not yet thirty, but the European was at least forty-five. He wore a gray suit. He also had a red face and well-chilled blue eyes that drilled into Georgia Blue. Stallings thought he might as well have had cop tattooed across his forehead.

  “See them?” she demanded again.

  “Sure.”

  “Notice my bag right against your gut?”

  “Hard not to.”

  “Just keep walking, Booth, and shake your head no at the guy with the red face.”

  Her fingers again dug into the elbow nerve and again Stallings sucked air at the pain. The red-faced European was staring now at him instead of Georgia Blue. As they drew near, Stallings shook his head no. After what Stallings knew was a week or ten days, the red-faced man jerked his chin down in an abrupt and angry nod.

  Once past him, Stallings said, “What the fuck’re you doing, Georgia?”

  “Catching a boat,” she said as she steered him into the crowd that was heading for the Star Ferry.

  It was at that exact moment that Booth Stallings, whose life study had been terrorism, came to a profound and utter und
erstanding of his chosen topic. He even settled on a definition, which, although not particularly original, was immensely satisfying. Terrorism, he decided, was that which terrifies. The headline for his soon-to-be-printed obituary seemed to write itself: Terror Expert Slain By Ex-Secret Service Terrorist.

  Normally, the labored irony would have made him chuckle or at least smile. But he did neither because of the new wave of fear and terror that rolled over him as he realized with absolute certainty that he would never make it back to Kowloon. Not alive anyhow, he decided. And dead doesn’t much count.

  Artie Wu and Otherguy Overby stood on tiptoe on the green iron bench in the park between the Prince’s Building and the courthouse and watched Stallings and Georgia Blue lose themselves in the crowd heading for the ferry.

  “Well,” Wu said, almost approvingly, “she made it.”

  “Told you she would.”

  “We listened to you, Otherguy—Quincy and I.”

  “The Hong Kong cops wouldn’t.”

  “They’re only trying to avoid a massacre,” said Wu as he stepped down from the park bench, frowning and puzzled. Overby also stepped down. “But why the ferry?” Wu asked. “She must know it’s a floating death trap.”

  “Well, that’s his problem now, isn’t it?” Otherguy Overby said. “That fucking Durant’s.”

  As the Star Ferry pulled out, Georgia Blue and Booth Stallings stood outside the enclosed first-class section, their backs to the rail. Georgia Blue was on Stallings’ left, her hand down in her shoulder bag, the bag still pressed against his side.

  “Artie set me up?” she asked, her eyes jumping from passenger to passenger.

  “Durant.”

  She didn’t seem surprised as she glanced quickly at her watch. “This is what you do, Booth. You count to sixty, very slowly and just loud enough to let me hear you. When you reach sixty you hand me that nice new attaché case.”

  She glanced at him briefly and resumed her vigil, smiling at the surprise that had splashed across his face. “That was about the worst switch I ever saw,” she said.