Black money (23 page)

"It was sometime in 1956, according to Allan, when Pedro was twenty. He came ashore at San Pedro. Perhaps he thought the place would be lucky for him. Anyway, he practically stepped off the boat into a classroom. He attended Long Beach State for a year - I don't know how he got the college to accept him - and then he shifted to Los Angeles State.

"He was there for two years, and Allan Bosch got to know him fairly well. He struck Allan in very much the same way he struck me - as a highly intelligent young man with problems."

"What kind of problems?"

"Social and cultural problems. Historical problems. Allan described him as a kind of tropical Hamlet trying to cope with contemporary reality. Actually that description applies to most of the Central and South American cultures. Domingo's problems weren't just personal, they belonged to his time and place. But he yearned for the luminous city."

Professor Tappinger seemed to be on the brink of a lecture. I said: "The what?"

"The luminous city. It's a phrase I use for the world of spirit and intellect, the distillation of the great minds of past and present."

He tapped the side of his head, as though to claim membership in the group. "It takes in everything from Plato's Forms and Augustine's Civitas Dei to Joyce's epiphanies."

"Could you take it a little slower, professor?"

"Forgive me."

He seemed confused by my interruption. "Was I talking academic jargon? Actually Pedro's dilemma can be stated quite simply: he was a poor Panamanian with all the hopes and troubles and frustrations of his country. He came out of the Santa Ana slums. His mother was a Blue Moon girl in the Panama City cabarets, and Pedro himself was probably illegitimate. But he has too much gumption to accept his condition or remain in it.

"I know something of what he must have felt. I wasn't a bastard, but I worked my way up out of a Chicago slum, and I knew what it was to go hungry in the Depression. I'd never have made it through university without the G.I. bill. So you see, I can sympathize with Pedro Domingo. I hope they won't punish him too severely when they catch him."

"They won't."

He noticed the finality of my tone. Slowly his eyes came up to mine. They were sensitive, rather feminine eyes, which had probably been fine-looking before strain reddened the whites. "Has something happened to him?"

"He's dead. A gunman shot him yesterday. Don't you read the papers?"

"I have to confess that I very seldom look at them. But this is dreadful news."

He paused, his sensitive mouth pulled out of shape. "Do you have any notion who killed him?"

"The prime suspect is a gambler named Leo Spillman. He's the other man in the picture I gave you."

Tappinger got it out of his pocket and studied it. "He looks dangerous."

"Domingo was dangerous, too. It's fortunate for Ginny that she got out of this alive."

"Is Miss Fablon all right?"

"She's as well as can be expected, after losing her mother and her husband in the same week."

"Poor child. I'd like to see her, and comfort her if I could."

"You better check with Dr Sylvester. He's looking after her. I'm on my way to see him now."

I rose to go. Tappinger came around the desk. "I'm sorry I can't invite you to lunch today," he said with a kind of aggressive fussiness. "There isn't time."

"I don't have time, either. Give my regards to your wife."

"I'm sure she'll be glad to have them. She's quite an admirer of yours."

"That's because she doesn't know me very well."

My attempt to treat it lightly didn't come off. The little man looked up at me with strained and anxious eyes.

"I'm concerned about Bess. She's such a dreamer, so addicted to Bovarysme. And I don't think you're good for her."

"Neither do I"

"You won't take it personally, Mr. Archer, if I suggest that perhaps you'd better not see her again?"

"I wasn't planning to."

Tappinger seemed relieved.

23

ON MY WAY into town I stopped at a gas station with an outside telephone booth and called Christman in Washington. He was still out to lunch. The operator transferred my call to the restaurant where he ate, and eventually I heard him say: "Christman here. I've been trying to get you, Lew. You're never in your office."

"I haven't been in for the last few days. Do you have anything more on our friend?"

"A little. Until a few months ago he was a second secretary at the Panamanian Embassy. He was fairly young for the job, but apparently he's very highly qualified. He has an advanced degree from the University of Paris. Before they transferred him to Washington he held the post of third secretary in Paris."

"Why did he leave the diplomatic service?"

"I don't know. The man I talked to said he resigned for personal reasons. He didn't explain what he meant by personal reasons. But Domingo didn't leave under a cloud, so far as I could ascertain. Do you want me to dig some more?"

"There wouldn't be much point," I said. "You might tell whoever you talked to in the Embassy that their boy was shot in Los Angeles yesterday."

"Dead?"

"Very. They'll probably want to do something about the body, when the police release it. Captain Perlberg is in charge of the case."

I was a few minutes late for my appointment with Sylvester, but he was later. He arrived at the clinic about half-past one, looking harried, and took me into his consultation room.

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting, Archer. I thought I'd better drop in on Ginny Fablon."

"How is she?"

"I believe she'll be all right. Of course she's woozy from shock, and I have her under fairly heavy sedation. But she's accepted the fact of her mother's death, as well as her husband's, and she can see beyond them to some kind of future."

"I still don't think she should be left by herself."

"She isn't by herself. The Jamiesons have given her a guest cottage. They're providing her meals, and Peter is there to wait on her, of course, which is all he ever wanted. She may have a happy ending yet."

"With Peter?"

"I wouldn't be surprised." He added with a sidewise cheerless grin: "You understand my idea of a happy marriage is essentially anything that works."

"How's your own marriage working?"

"Audrey and I will muddle through. We've both had a lot to forgive. But I didn't ask you here as a marriage counselor. I have some information for you."

He brought a manila folder out of a drawer of his desk. "You're still looking for Leo Spillman, aren't you?"

"I am. So are the police."

"What if I told you where and how to find him? Could I count on a certain amount of tolerance from you?"

"You'd better explain what you mean by that."

He bit his thumb and studied the dent his teeth made. "I let down my back hair yesterday. Frankly I was rattled. The fact is, you know more about me that anyone else in town. It's beginning to look as if everything connected with this mess if going to be spread out in the public prints. All I'm asking from you is a certain amount of decent reticence about my part in it. I have a great deal to lose."

"What do you want suppressed?"

"Well, I wouldn't want the details of my co-operation with Spillman - Couldn't we keep it a doctor-patient relationship? That's what it was essentially."

"That's what it became, anyway. I'll hold back the rest of it if I possibly can."

"Then the thing that Audrey and Fablon had - does it have to come out?"

"I don't see why it should have to. Anything else?"

"I won't try to press this too far," he said, with a wary eye on my face, "but that money Marietta tried to borrow from me Monday - could we keep it confidential?"

"I doubt it. Mrs. Strome at the club knows about it."

"I've already talked to her. She's safe."

"I'm not."

Sylvester's eyes became shallow and hard.

"Why are you balking at that? It's the least embarrassing thing, really."

"Not if Marietta was trying to blackmail you."

"For what? The Spillman-Fablon business? I thought that was settled."

"It isn't settled to my satisfaction."

"But you can't accuse Marietta of being a blackmailer. It was just a friendly loan she asked me for. Naturally I was hoping she'd keep quiet about the Spillman bit, and Audrey's mix-up with her husband."

"Naturally. Was there anything else you wanted kept quiet?"

"By you?"

"By anybody. I've been wondering for instance, why and how Ginny came to work for you. I understand she was a receptionist here for a couple of years."

"That's right, until two years ago this summer. Then she went back to school."

"Why did she leave school to go to work?"

"She'd been over-studying."

"Was that your opinion?"

"I agreed with Marietta about it. The girl needed a change."

"She didn't come to work here for personal reasons, then?"

"I wasn't her lover," he said in a grating voice, "If that's what you're getting at. I've done some lousy things in my life but I don't mess around with young girls."

He glanced up at his framed diplomas on the wall. There was a puzzled expression in his eyes, as if he couldn't remember how he had acquired them. His expression turned faraway, further and further away, as if his mind was climbing back over the curve of time to the source of his life.

I brought him back to the present. "You were going to tell me how to find Spillman."

"So I was."

"If you'd given me the information yesterday, you'd have saved trouble, possibly a life."

"I didn't have the information yesterday. That is, I didn't know I had it. I stumbled across it early this morning when I was going over Spillman's medical records."

He opened the folder in front of him. "About three months ago, on February 20, we had a request for a copy of the records from a Dr Charles Park, in Santa Teresa. I didn't fill the request myself - Mrs. Loftin's initials are on the notation - and she neglected to mention it to me. Anyway, as I said, I came across it."

"What were you looking for?"

"I wanted to check how sick Spillman really was. He was sick, all right. Apparently he still is. I called Dr Park's office as soon as I found the notation. He wasn't in yet himself, but his girl confirmed that Ketchel was still his patient. Apparently Spillman is using the name Ketchel in Santa Teresa."

"Did you get his address there?"

"Yes, I did. It's 1427 Padre Ridge Road."

I thanked him.

"Don't thank me. You and I have an agreement, for what it's worth. I want to add one other small item to it. You mustn't tell Leo Spillman I sicked you on to him."

He was afraid of Spillman. The fear hissed like escaping gas in his voice, and lingered like an odor in my mind. On my way north to Santa Teresa I stopped at my apartment to pick up a handgun.

29

THE CITY OF SANTA TERESA 1S built on a slope which begins at the edge of the sea and rises more and more steeply toward the coastal mountains in a series of ascending ridges. Padre Ridge is the first and lowest of these, and the only one inside the city limits.

It was a fairly expensive territory, an established neighborhood of well-maintained older houses, many of them with brilliant hanging gardens. The grounds of 1427 were the only ones in the block that looked unkempt. The privet hedge needed clipping. Crabgrass was running rampant in the steep lawn.

Even the house, pink stucco under red tile, had a disused air about it. The drapes were drawn across the front windows. The only sign of life - was a house wren, which contested my approach to the veranda.

I lifted the lion's-head knocker and let it drop, hardly expecting an answer. But after a while soft footsteps came from the back of the house, The door was opened, minimally, by a hefty middle-aged woman in a wet blue cotton bathing suit.

"My name is Archer. Is Mrs. Ketchel home?"

"I'll see."

The woman stepped out of the puddle that had formed on the tile around her bare feet, and disappeared into the back of the house. I pushed the front door wide open and walked in, conscious of the gun bulging like a benign tumor in my armpit.

There were several closed doors in the hallway, and an open door at the end. Through it I could see across a room, through sliding glass, to the dappled blue water of a swimming pool.

Kitty came out of the water dripping. She crossed the room, leaving wasp-waisted footprints on the rug, and faced me in the doorway. She had on a white elastic bathing suit and a white rubber cap shaped like a helmet which made her look like an Amazon sentinel.

"You get out of here. I'll call the cops."

"Sure you will. They're combing the state for Leo as it is."

"He hasn't done anything wrong." She hedged. "Not recently."

"I want to hear him tell me that himself."

"No. You can't talk to him."

She stepped forward, pulling the door shut behind her, moving so abruptly that she blundered into me. She put her hands on my shoulders to regain her balance, and recoiled as if I was very hot or cold.

She must hive felt the holster under my jacket. Her fear came back. It made her face work as if she had swallowed poison.

"You came here to kill us, didn't you?"

"You and I have been through all this before. You seem to have killing on your mind."

"I've seen too many-" She caught herself.

"Seen too many people die?"

"Yeah. In traffic accidents and stuff like that."

She tried to put on an innocent expression. With her paint removed, and her garish hair covered, she looked younger and realer. But not innocent. "What do you want from us? Money? We have no money."

"Don't try to snow me, Kitty. This is the head office of the money factory."

"It's true what I tell you. That cat who calls himself Martel eloped with our ready cash, and we can't realize on our investments."

"How did he get his hands on the cash?"

"He was supposed to be bringing it to Leo. Leo trusted him. I didn't, but Leo did."

"Martel was shot to death in Los Angeles yesterday. Another accident for your memory book. He had a hundred thousand dollars in cash with him."