Closely Akin to Murder (3 page)

I licked my lips. “Why did you kill him?”

“He came back unexpectedly—I think he'd fallen into a swimming pool and wanted to change clothes—and busted up the party. Fran managed to slip away. Oliver discovered me in his bed, and was attempting to rape me when I grabbed the knife and stabbed him. I kept stabbing him until he collapsed. I still have nightmares in which I'm screaming silently as my arm goes up and down and blood splatters my face. What I did was a monstrous thing. Oliver was too drunk to know what he was doing. He was a hero in Hollywood, and everybody worshipped him.”

“Earlier you said that his body was on the balcony. If he assaulted you in the bedroom, how did you and he end up out there?”

“I fought my way out of the bedroom, but he came after me. I grabbed a knife off the bar as I backed toward the balcony. Afterward, I stumbled to the bedroom and passed out again, I suppose this time from the trauma of realizing what I'd done. Fran's scream wakened me. She'd started worrying about leaving me behind, and had Jorge bring her back to the hotel. She was clear-headed enough to point out that I had no scratches or bruises to back up my accusation of rape,
and the police would believe I'd been in his bed to seduce him when he returned. It was such a sick idea that I was ready to throw myself off the balcony.”

“But surely the police would have believed you. You were only seventeen, and as you said, unsophisticated. He had to have been at least twenty years older. He'd been drinking, and he was angry about the party. It seems reasonable to assume he might have turned this anger on you, since you were vulnerable.”

“And very frightened and confused,” she said in a low voice. “Fran convinced me that my only hope was for his body to be discovered at the base of the cliff. Once we'd done that, I wiped up the blood while she disposed of my clothes and the evidence of the party. Then she gave me a sleeping pill, and I went back to my room.”

“But the police arrested you?”

“The body was found the next morning, and at first it was assumed that he'd fallen. My parents, Debbie D'Avril, and Chad Warmeyer all admitted they'd been drinking heavily at various parties, and that Oliver could barely walk. Fran went into shock. Her mother arrived that day and arranged for her to be sedated and kept in bed. Then my bloodied shirt was found in a garbage can behind the hotel restaurant. Details came out about the party, and Fran was forced to admit I remained there when everyone else left. The police searched my bedroom at the bungalow and found my diary. It was filled with accounts of sexual encounters, but the police refused to believe they were only the fantasies of an unhappy teenaged girl who'd never been kissed. I finally broke down and confessed. After that, everything was a hideous blur of interrogation rooms, a filthy cell, hearings held in Spanish with no
interpreters, and a mockery of a trial in front of a disapproving judge. I was not allowed to testify, and I don't know if my lawyer believed me, either. I'm not even sure my parents did after they were shown my diary, but at that point I was too depressed to care.”

“Where was Fran during all this?” I asked.

“I wasn't allowed to see her until the trial, when we were both found guilty. She was glassy-eyed and unwilling to speak to me, and I never saw her again after we were transported to the prison. I tried without success to find out what happened to her. She could have been transferred, released, or buried in the paupers' cemetery just outside the prison wall. Dysentery and tuberculosis were rampant. I had pneumonia numerous times because my cell was so damp. Someone sent me packages of food and medicine every month; without them, I would have starved.”

Ronnie's recitation had been unemotional and devoid of details, but it evoked such repugnant images that I felt nauseous. At seventeen, I'd not been obsessed with creature comforts or expensive toys. I wasn't at all sure, however, that I could have survived for eight years in a cell in a foreign country, with no one on the outside to fight for my freedom. Caron wouldn't have lasted eight hours.

“You were very brave,” I said. “I don't know if I could have gone through it.”

“I didn't call you to start a fan club,” she said drily. “What I did in Acapulco was unforgivable. Not a day goes by that I don't say a prayer for Oliver Pickett. I stole his life from him when he was at the peak, and I deserved to be punished. I never married or took a vacation, and I work eighteen-hour stints at the lab. Now, when I'm close to something that will have major
significance in the field of drug-resistant viruses, someone's trying to snatch it all away by exposing me. I'll lose my position, my grants, and my credibility in the medical community.”

“You're being blackmailed?” I said.

“A week ago I found a message on my answering machine. The voice was so raspy that I wasn't sure if it was male or female. The message was intelligible, though. If I don't deposit half a million dollars in a shielded bank account in Grand Cayman within the next thirty days, copies of the court transcript will be sent to my colleagues, along with a photocopy of my passport and other proof of my previous identity. I can't let that happen.”

Surely the private detective had reported on my financial status, I told myself. “I don't see how I can help,” I said. “I barely earn enough at the bookstore—”

“I'm not asking for a loan, Claire. I could borrow the money in a matter of days, but I know it won't stop there. I'll never be sure that this person won't send the evidence out of spite, or make further demands. I can't live with that kind of tension pervading my every thought. I want you to find this person and reason with him—or her. Make some kind of deal in exchange for the money.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, trying not to gurgle, “I'm a bookseller in a small college town. I have no idea how to deal with something of this magnitude. I may have assisted the police on occasion, but this is way out of my league. Why don't you talk to the private detective? He has the training and resources to track down people. I wouldn't know where to start.”

“Acapulco, I should think.”

I went ahead and gurgled like a coffeepot. “Call the
private detective. He has cohorts in Mexico who can determine who got hold of the court transcripts.”

“I don't trust him,” she countered, clearly having assembled her arguments in advance. “He knows I'm wealthy. How can I be sure he won't decide to blackmail me, too? You're the only person I can trust, Claire, and as far as I'm concerned, my only relative. I sent that magnifying glass on your eighth birthday; now I'm begging you to dust it off and use it.”

“
Think of it as the vacation we
can never afford,” I said to Caron as the cabin steward removed our untouched lunch trays. “We'll have a suite, a chauffeur, unlimited expenses, and a balcony with a view of Acapulco Bay. All you have to do is lie by the pool or play volleyball on the beach. I'm not going to drag you around with me.”

“I am missing the homecoming game,” she said, not for the first time, her sullenness having had a distinct impact on my appetite (the appearance of the food itself running a close second). When I failed to respond with adequate compassion, she added, “It was possible that I would have had a date to the dance afterward.”

“You didn't tell me that,” I said. “Ronnie offered to pay for you to come along and I thought you'd enjoy it, but you certainly weren't under any obligation. You could have stayed with Inez.”

“I said it was
possible
, Mother, but the boys at school are hopelessly infantile. I have such a load of homework that all I'll do is sit in some dreary hotel room reading Dickens.”

“It's a very nice hotel,” I said. “You were going to have to read Dickens anyway. At least you can do it in an exotic setting.”

“And if this cousin had been arrested in Bosnia would we have reservations at the Sarajevo Hilton?”

“Buckle your seatbelt, dear.”

“I'm serious, Mother. You haven't heard a word from her for thirty years, then all of a sudden she strolls out of the cemetery and you end up agreeing to take up her cause. For all you know, she's totally crazy and made the whole thing up in order to lure you out of the country.”

“So she can sneak into the Book Depot and steal a million dollars from the cash register?”

“How should I know? If this is so critical, why is it that she couldn't even bother to come along?”

“As Dr. Vera Gray, she made a commitment a year ago to speak at a symposium in Brussels. From what I could determine at the library, she's one of the preeminent figures in her field. She's been director of a research facility in Chicago for more than ten years. She's won all kinds of awards and been nominated twice for a Nobel prize.”

Caron yawned. “I don't see how that's going to help you. Your Spanish vocabulary is limited to the menu at the restaurant up the street from the bookstore. Do you honestly think you're going to say ‘Enchilada,' and Pancho Villa's going to leap out of the bushes to confess to blackmail?”

I turned my back on her and gazed out the window at the landscape below. The mountains were barren and unfriendly; roads slinked through them like dried tendrils. The pi lot had mentioned a volcano, but as fate always decrees, it was visible from the opposite side of the plane. It seemed appropriate.

Peter had been furious when I told him what I intended to do. He'd tried to control his temper, but by the
time he'd stalked out the door, bristling like a hedgehog, I had a much keener understanding of the concept of nuclear winter. He'd relented enough to confirm through professional channels the rudimentary facts of the story: Oliver Pickett had been murdered on January 1, 1966; two unnamed American girls had been charged with the crime. Subsequent legal proceedings had been closed because the girls were minors. The Los Angeles newspapers had run a lengthy obituary, but it alluded only fleetingly to a tragic accident and focused on Pickett's cinematic career. His only survivor was a daughter, Franchesca. A much shorter obituary of Arthur, Margaret (nee Gray), and Veronica Landonwood cited the automobile accident; there was no mention of a memorial service or survivors.

Ronnie was picking up the tab, as well as the small salary I was paying the bewildered retiree (aka the downstairs tenant) to mind the bookstore in my absence. She'd mentioned a fee, but I'd changed the subject and refused to return to it. Accepting money for a doomed mission went beyond the pale, even mine. I was much more likely to end up with an infamous traveler's malady than with any inkling of the blackmailer's identity.

Thirty minutes later we stepped off the airplane into blistering white sunshine. My guidebook had stated that the average temperature in November was ninety degrees, and every one of them was ricocheting off the tarmac. We followed worn yellow stripes into the airport and wended our way through the cattle chutes of immigration and customs without undue delays.

“What does that sign say?” asked Caron as we waited by the luggage carousel. “How are we supposed to know what to do if we can't read the signs? We'll
accidentally break some law and be locked up in jail. I'm supposed to take the SAT next month.”

“This is a tourist-friendly city,” I said uneasily. As a devotee of the written word—any written word—I was discomfited by my inability to immediately comprehend the sign under discussion. “Mexico's government is not a repressive communist regime with top-secret defense facilities tucked between scenic photo opportunities.”

“Oh, yeah? What about that guy over there by the door? He's been staring at us ever since we entered the airport, and if he's not sinister, then I'm the Farberville High School homecoming queen.”

I took a quick look. “You're exaggerating, Your Highness. He's just a businessman trying to remember his schedule. No one has any reason to think we're anything more than tourists on a four-day jaunt. Peter and Ronnie are the only people who know why we're here, and neither would alert the local version of the CIA.”

“Don't be so sure,” Caron said, already distracted by a group of college boys who'd clearly begun their vacation on the airplane.

We collected our luggage and went out to the street. Everyone else seemed familiar with the drill as they piled into vans, taxis, or cars crammed with beaming relatives. Several drivers held up cardboard signs with names, none of them mine. Within a matter of minutes, the sidewalk was uninhabited, except for a few airport employees sharing a cigarette. In terms of auspicious beginnings, this was not notable.

“I am about to Pass Out,” Caron said as she sat on a bench and took a tissue from her purse to wipe her forehead. “If I don't have something cold to drink in
the next minute, I'll keel over right here. You'd better look up the Spanish phrase for ‘heatstroke,' because you'll need it at the hospital. Maybe the food's better there than on the airplane.”

In that her sinister CIA operative was approaching us, I ignored her. I may have felt a little giddy myself, but I managed an amiable expression. “Yes?”

He was much too young and chubby to have been in a Cold War espionage novel. Despite his conservative gray suit and muted red tie, I estimated his age at no more than twenty-five. The small mustache, no doubt grown to make him appear older, looked as though it might slip off his lip if he smiled. His hair was cropped, his expression wary. His dark eyes met mine briefly, flickered in Caron's direction, and then widened as he took in the extent of our luggage (Caron insists on packing for any and all contingencies).

“I am Manuel Estoban from the Farias Tourist Agency,” he said in lightly accented English. “May I ask if you are Claire Malloy?”

“Yes, and this is my daughter. Are you our driver?”

“For the next four days, I am at your disposal.” He presented me with a crisp business card, then beckoned to a boy, who began to load the luggage onto a dolly. “The car is down here in the shade. I hope you find it satisfactory, Señora Malloy. I suggest we go first to the hotel so that you can register and unpack. Afterward, I will take you wherever you wish.”