Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (14 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Twelve hours after Franz Metzger died in Hell, his cousin Juan got summoned to the Casa de Oro. Metzger had sat up drinking all that night, even after Consuelo threatened to send the children to her sister in Morelia. Each day he drank more, slept less. He hadn’t been sober in a week. But when the message arrived that Franz had been murdered, the despair that trapped him included such a wicked nausea, he couldn’t drink anymore. Consuelo had gone with the children for a walk to the ocean. Metzger lay on the floor, his head propped against the wall.

Tom Hickey was the murderer, Metzger believed. He couldn’t remember what he’d told the gringo, but he must’ve betrayed his cousin, and the Bund. He breathed shallowly, listening, tormented by the kitten scratching at the door, a neighbor’s hens clucking, footsteps crunching on the gravel road, turning into his yard.

A boy from the grocery wedged a note into the screen door. It took Metzger five minutes to cross the room and read his summons to the Casa de Oro. They would pick him up in an hour.

He staggered into the bathroom, filled the tub with cold water and fell into it. He didn’t wash or shave, just lay there wondering how they’d kill him. When his shivering got violent, he stepped out, dressed in his sergeant major’s uniform, and paced until they came for him.

The white limo drove Metzger and four other officers around the hill, through the gateway to Las Lomas. The officers finished expressing their grief about Franz and sympathy for Juan. They turned to speaking of plans for revenge, while they sped past the race track and past meadows alongside the country club where thoroughbreds grazed, and up, winding between the orchards, the gardens, the high block walls.

The Casa de Oro was a Spanish colonial mansion the size of a football field, three stories high. White and square, with arching windows of inlaid tile, wrought iron window bars and balcony railings. The gate and front door guards presented their rifles and saluted. The officers passed through the entryway and ballroom, across the mosaic floor, beneath the golden chandelier, beside the rare paintings in gilded frames.

They climbed the stairs and waited in a parlor near a long hallway of bedrooms and offices. With them waited four captains and a lieutenant general. Sipping brandy, munching fruit and nuts, the officers talked of how Field Marshal Zarp was on his feet already, in spite of the dangerous gunshot wound in his side. A captain raised a toast to Zarp’s courage. Metzger didn’t toast. It was too late to pretend. All he could choose was to die with honor or shame. He wouldn’t have to beg for his family. Consuelo would escape, take the children to Baltimore, find a brave gringo like Tom Hickey.

The Presidente’s office door opened, let out an old German captain who marched down the hall and sat with the others. Raising his swollen, brown-spotted hands, he proclaimed the gringos would die today or tomorrow. He gathered the officers closer and whispered that Zarp had commanded three soldiers, three Federales and the police chief to bring back La Rosa.

***

On the drive downtown, Hickey said, “The girl’s treasure, Leo. I watch her and think, nobody’s this honest, everybody’s a little phony, nobody’s got this much heart.”

Leo said, “Looks to me like you’re stuck on her. Control yourself, Tom. Don’t go getting sympathy confused with love. Course, she’s some cutie, real nymph-like …”

“Whoa.”

“The faerie kind, I mean. Free spirit, until this coma or whatever the hell. She’s a kid, though, a moron kid, and you never been the kind’s gotta take any skirt he can get.”

“I’m not too sure she’s a moron.”

“Yeah? What is she then?”

“Don’t know. Seems like her brain dreams off. Not stupid. Punchy though. Maybe she’s gotten socked too many times.” Punchy, the way he felt right now, with his brain zinging off to visions of Clifford’s bloody head, Zarp writhing on the floor of Hell. Hickey’s conscience filled with the noise of gunshots, sirens, screams. Suddenly all went quiet and he saw Wendy running across the beach in white and polka dots, kicking up sand, jumping and clapping as the shorebreak got her in the knees. Soon that vision blurred to a room full of gold. One he’d seen almost twenty years ago. The memory that had flashed last night in Hell, of a room in the old Agua Caliente Casino. Madeline had shown him the place, one night when she was singing there. A salon full of golden statues, candlesticks, plates and bowls, two golden chandeliers, displays of jewelry and knicknacks, all polished to shine like noonday.

As they cruised down Harbor Drive past the wharves and ferry landing, Hickey lamented that he hadn’t stolen the gold in Hell. The chalices, the candlesticks, gold buttons off the uniform coats of the high officers. If he’d been thinking straight, he could’ve been a rich guy. Sailed off to Cuba and found a place where mountains ran down to the sea. Bought a nightclub resort where bigshots gathered and Elizabeth could stay with him every summer, to swim and dance and ride horses through the forests. A finer place than Paul Castillo could give her. A place that would prove to Madeline and everybody that Tom Hickey’d made a dent in this world. That he was a dad to make any kid proud.

Just as they reached the door to their office, the phone quit ringing. Leo thought it might’ve been his contact with the Federales. So he got on the phone to a Mexican operator, repeated the number four times, swatted his hat on the desk.

Hickey stood by the window that looked out over Broadway. He watched a pack of salesgirls stepping out of Marston’s, across the street and three stories down, laughing, their hair flung back, and skirts clinging tight in the wind. A couple sailors, enlisted guys, ran across the street, dodging traffic as they raced after the girls. They must’ve been new in town—didn’t know yet that girls like those could pick from a hundred officers and flyboys. Lookers like that didn’t need any lowly swab.

He turned and listened to Leo on the phone. “What’s up?…Yeah, sure…Who says?” Hickey sat in the wooden roller chair and took out his pipe. For a minute, Leo sat mutely, ear to the phone, his free hand wadding paper from a note pad and shooting baskets into the far trash can. “What’s the story on those guys?…Which del Monte?…That’s all you got.…Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Ruiz.”

Leo hung up, sat on the desk, and leaned close to his partner, then closer. His mouth pulled back grimly. “Four new stiffs down there.”

Hickey muttered, “Four,” and looked at his pipe a long time as if he expected a genie to come out and fix everything. Then he stuffed it full of Walter Raleigh. Slowly. Took a match out. Sat still for a minute. And without meaning to, he started to bite his tongue—just hard enough to feel some pain. Make it real.

“One kraut,” Leo said. “That’d be Franz Metzger. One gringo.” He sighed and looked at the door, as if Clifford might suddenly appear. “Two Mex fellas. No names yet.”

“Four dead men.”

“Yeah and nobody in jail. That means two of our guys got away. Maybe.”

Hickey lit a match and sat watching the flame. When it touched his fingers he shook it out. “Either of the Mexicans have an eye missing?”

“Shit, Tom, any of ’em might’ve had a lot more than that missing, taking on all those cops. But, yeah—I bet Tito got it. Else he probably would’ve called by now.”

“Maybe he did.”

“Naw, he’s got my home phone, too.”

“Call Vi.”

Leo’s cheeks puffed out. He glowered down at Hickey. “You been acting too damn bossy for my taste.”

When he reached for the phone, Hickey went back to the window, trying to shift his mind off the dead guys for now, telling himself, You got years to think about them, if you live so long.

Even at 3:30, before the rush, hundreds of pedestrians scurried below. Stockbrokers heading toward the Grant Grille for a shot of pedigree Scotch. Navy wives pouring off the buses, streaming into Woolworths. Pretty girls from Visalia, Barstow, Cucamonga, running in their wobbly high heels out of the YWCA where they shared little closet-size rooms. In this last year and some, since Pearl Harbor, San Diego had grown to be the most crowded city on earth. You couldn’t get a hotel room without bribing a desk clerk, and the Chamber of Commerce had declared, “Don’t come here until after the war.”

Yet among all the people down there, Hickey thought, you might not find a gem like Wendy Rose. Even if her brain
was
split in two.

“He didn’t call,” Leo said. “So we got nothing left to do but pray for the dead and figure how to pay back your money.”

“What else did the Federale tell you?”

“Nothing. Just four dead men and not a damned word in the paper.”

Hickey let that sink in for a minute. “What’s he make of all those officers up there last night, and Zarp in the general getup?”

“Aw, what the hell’s it matter? The kid’s dead. His sister’s okay. And you gotta speed your ass back to the army. And I gotta go to the john.”

As Leo trudged out, Hickey stepped back to the window. Four dead men, he thought, and started seeing them fall. Clifford’s brains flying. Franz Metzger screaming goodbye. A wave of nausea flooded him. He looked out, focused on the corner of C Street at the sign that said
the golden lion
, where it used to say
rubio’s steakhouse
. Less than four months ago. Until Hickey wised up, found out his partner Paul Castillo had bribed a guy on the rationing board, put some kind of heat on the boss at Central Supplies, the biggest meat packing house, and that was why they were getting half of the grade-A prime beef in town. So Hickey, the loser, who thought you didn’t need to cheat to make your mark, told Castillo to get straight or get lost. And Castillo got lost, all right.

Less than four months it took for Hickey to study the collapse of his world and realize he was a fool—not a shred of doubt anymore. Not when four dead men lay on his heart, and there was no Elizabeth to cheer him, to make him feel big and generous. In less than four rotten months, his life collapses like Europe, and he can’t even volunteer for a suicide mission or else who’d take care of the girl—this ignorant nineteen-year-old beauty he’d knocked into some crazy spell by confessing he wasn’t any angel? In a second she turns to a dummy, can’t hear you anymore, picks up handfuls of sand, tosses them up and lets them rain down on herself, starts humming one tune and changes to another every measure or so. What the hell could you do with somebody like that?

He gave the wall a light kick, smiled darkly and turned to meet Leo coming back from the john.

“Now,” Hickey said. “What’d the Federale tell you about Zarp and those creeps?”

“To forget the whole mess, keep it out of the papers. They’re gonna take care of everything. We’re supposed to bury our heads in the sand.”

“Yeah. Swell,” Hickey muttered, and went to the phone. He scowled through the bad connections and requests he had to repeat three or four times to the Mexican operator before she understood him. Finally he reached Groceria El Portal, told the clerk to run a message to Juan Metzger. He hung up, looked at Leo and shrugged.

“What’d you say, Tom?”

“I gave Metzger a choice. Either he can meet us at the border tonight at six, or I’m coming down to his place at seven.”

“You crazy? Go down there, you probably won’t get ten feet before some cop blasts you. Even if you got to Metzger, all you’ll find is the Gestapo waiting to boil you in oil and gnaw your bones.”

“Yeah,” Hickey said. “I know. I’m betting on Metzger. He was already spooked bad. You couldn’t reason with the guy. I’m betting a threat’s all he can hear.”

With a couple of free hours, Leo decided to drive up to La Jolla, talk to a lady about another case he had, trying to refute evidence against a rich shoplifter. Hickey caught a ride back to Leo’s house, to check on the girl.

She was on the beach with Magda, still in the white dress with bright balloons. Since morning her hair had gotten frizzed by the sun and breeze, her face had turned pink, her lips paled. Even when Hickey got close and said her name, she didn’t look up. He stood silently watching. Now and then she would smile and toss her head. Other times her brows furled, she drew her chin down to her throat and moaned softly, kneeling on the sand, rocking back and forth on her knees, in the same rhythm as when she’d danced at the Club de Paris. All the while, she picked up sand and let it pour through her fingers. Magda said she’d been like that all day.

Nearly three hours, until the tide had gone down and kids from the tent city were running home toward supper, Hickey sat beside the girl.

Four dead men, he thought. Maybe Tito. Clifford. His gut cramped just to think the name. A sweet kid gone to hell for his sister, and Hickey let him die, let him go down there playing soldier when any dope could see he was too heartsick and nuts with worry to know what he was doing. Clifford should’ve been standing guard outside or downstairs holding a gun on the drinkers. Better, he should’ve been waiting at the border.

And Tito. Three days ago the poor chump was just out looking for a fare. Then Hickey steps in with a deal he can’t turn down, on account of all his life hustling in TJ he’s learned you’ve got to go where the dollar is. And he makes this fatal mistake—thinking Hickey knows how to run a battle. Thinks Hickey’s a sharp guy.

Sparks flew up from Hickey’s pipe in the hot breeze gusting from the east. The wind hissed through the tops of palm trees, blew against the waves and made the whitecaps shudder. Wendy Rose gazed out to sea where sailboats glided, miles away but looking far closer. Cormorants swooped, pelicans sat on the breakers, trios of dolphin bobbed past. Kids rode the waves. Hickey watched the girl, ransacking his brain for what to do, how to fix her.

Chapter Nineteen

At 5:50, Leo dozed behind the wheel of his Packard, at the curb a block north of the San Ysidro border. Hickey stood about twenty yards from the walk-through gate with his back to the MP, talking to Mr. Chee whom he’d called to and motioned over while the MP harassed a Marine.

“Yes siree,” Mr. Chee said. “They all got your vital statistics and orders to grab you. For AWOL and accessory to homicide, both. But the corporal here don’t care. I squared you with him. So maybe you tell me about last night?”

While Hickey talked, each of them kept an eye on the border. Then Mr. Chee pointed. “Okay. Look at this guy. Could be he’s German.”

Hickey sneaked a glance and spotted Juan Metzger approaching the line. He dragged two large suitcases. A few steps behind, Consuelo followed, wearing a topcoat, probably to keep men from leering. She was tugging each of their kids by a hand.

“Let ’em all in, pal,” Hickey said. “Point ’em straight up the road.” He patted Mr. Chee’s shoulder and headed for the Packard, keeping his face turned away from the drive-through gate and the two MPs. He sat on the Packard’s front bumper, watched the Metzgers cross the line and walk his way, thinking he should act tough with this German, keep him afraid until he spilled everything. But the whole family looked so timid and spooked, he got up and walked a few steps to meet them, shook Juan and Consuelo’s hands. Metzger’s felt like raw beef. Consuelo’s was warm. He took their bags, stashed them in the Packard trunk.

The trunk door slamming woke Leo. After a minute he followed the others into Sally’s Café, a two-table, four-booth place with yellowed walls and tablecloths. Consuelo and the kids took a booth of their own. Leo and Hickey sat across from Juan Metzger. The German snatched a pint of tequila from a coat pocket and offered the other men a drink before gulping his own. Hickey studied the man and thought, Metzger’s changed. Now he could look you in the eye, for a second at least. His face didn’t sag or twitch.

“We are not going back,” Metzger vowed. Even his voice had deepened. It was gruff now, more German.

“Swell. Then you’re gonna need papers, contacts. You want that stuff?” Metzger nodded, and Hickey said, “You got it. All you gotta do is tell me what in Christ is brewing down there. These Nazis, Zarp, the del Montes—are they playing games or for real?”

“Not games.” The German’s voice cracked with outrage. “I’ll tell you.” He gulped a few breaths, rubbed his brow and started over. “Today Santiago del Monte called me into his office at the Casa de Oro. There is a very large desk. In front of it are two golden crosses, at least three feet high. On one of them is Jesus, nailed to the cross. On the other is a cobra. And Señor Zarp lies on a couch staring at me. His eyes are red like the devil’s, and he tells me they know I am the gringo-loving coward. The one who sends you to Hell.”

“Yeah,” Hickey muttered. “Thanks.”

Metzger shut his eyes, wiped his brow and finally looked over at Consuelo. She nodded. Her husband took a swallow of tequila, folded his hands.

He said, “Santiago screeches, ‘Ha!’ and thumps on the desk with his fist. Then Señor Zarp commands me to remove my clothes, and my crucifix and my wedding ring. The door is locked, the window is barred, the guard points a rifle at me. I can do nothing except cross myself and pray to die bravely. I undress …” He drew a long breath and squeezed his eyes closed. “My golden crucifix and wedding ring, del Monte orders me to place on the desk. He steals them. He stares at me, and laughs.” Metzger’s boyish face had reddened and swelled with impotent fury. He reached for his bottle, gulped twice and hissed, “Señor Zarp orders me to kneel in front of the two golden crosses and repeat after him a terrible blasphemy. To the Christ, I am to say, ‘Weak and miserable Jew, God of servants, old woman, beggar, poor lamb, I give you up to slaughter.’” Metzger whispered something more in German, then translated, “‘I serve the lord of victory, the destroyer of the meek with his sword of burning light and …’” He covered his face with his hands and sat rigid.

“Whew,” Leo said. “The hell.…Say, I’ll bet you folks are hungry.”

“First I wanta know what those guys are up to,” Hickey demanded.

Throwing his hands out as though in surrender, the German groaned, “They are to help the Reich. For this purpose, I hear, somebody close to the Bund will try to overthrow the government of Baja California.” His voice had cracked into a screech. The two gringos, Consuelo and her children, an old couple drinking cafe con leche, Sally the cook—everyone stared at Metzger.

“I’ll be damned,” Leo said.

“Which somebody?” Hickey growled. “Zarp?”

The German shrugged.

“Cárdenas?”

He shrugged again, miserably, and reached out, called for Consuelo, who left the children drinking sodas and came to sit beside her husband and hold his arm. She sat straight and gazed pensively from one man to the other. With Consuelo at his side, Metzger looked taller, younger, proud. Hope appeared in his widening eyes. He asked something in German and she answered, her voice making German sound almost pleasant. He folded his hands on the table and gave Consuelo a nod, allowing her to speak.

“We don’t wish to believe Lázaro Cárdenas is a friend of the devil.” She paused, watching Hickey and Leo as if to make sure they understood her English. “Franz boasted he dined with Cárdenas, but Franz would say any lie. That is why we don’t believe that Baja will be in German hands by the middle day of April, as Franz boasted. We trust in General Cárdenas.”

Hickey calculated and mumbled, “This Sunday.” He sat pondering until Consuelo touched his arm. When he looked up, they met eye to eye.

“It was you killed Franz?”

A few seconds was all he could hold her stare. His throat got stiff and dry. “Yeah.”

“Franz was a demon,” Metzger whispered, and Consuelo nodded fiercely.

Hickey asked for the tequila, sipped a few times and passed it to Leo who’d nudged him. “Last night. Upstairs in Hell. Tell me about the gold up there. Chalices. Buttons on the officers’ costumes. Gold bars where stripes ought to be. Who’s passing out the gold?”

Consuelo said, “Santiago del Monte. Do you know of the Casa de Oro?”

“Whorehouse for the ricos. In the Lomas.”

Metzger nodded. “Being there, one thinks of Heaven, El Dorado, the legend of Cibola. Del Monte believes gold contains elemental power that comes from the underworld. So Franz told us.”

“How about Cárdenas? If he’s on the level, why’s he hang out with the del Montes and why doesn’t he round up the Japs and Germans like he’s supposed to?”

“Whoever his friends are,” Consuelo said hotly, “the General is too humane to imprison innocent people.”

His next question, Hickey didn’t want to ask—from hearing the truth about Wendy Rose, he might wrestle Metzger for the tequila, swill it then stagger to Coco’s for mescal. “What’d they do to the girl? Why’d they want to keep her so bad?”

Metzger shook his head a long time. “She is beautiful. I don’t know any more. Only what Franz told me. I didn’t see her. I can tell you Señor Zarp has sent people to steal her back.”

Hickey bolted up with Leo right behind him. They bumped into each other, then Hickey fell over a chair, racing to grab the wall phone.

***

The Metzgers wanted a ride to the Santa Fe depot, to catch a train for Baltimore and Consuelo’s sister. As far as they could get from TJ. But Hickey drove them to a motel in East San Diego that Leo’s nephew owned. He warned them to stay put. They’d be watched. He’d track them all the way back east, or anywhere, if they tried to ditch before he gave the okay. Whereas, if they stuck around, told the whole unembroidered truth, he promised to call in a favor, get their immigration papers.

Downtown, Leo dropped Hickey off in front of their office and went hunting a parking spot, while Hickey ran up the stairs to make a phone call. He dialed the Surf and Sand Motel, where they’d sent Vi, Magda, and Wendy Rose. From Sally’s Café, Leo had told Vi to take the pistol out of the nightstand, sneak herself and the girls across the court to a neighbor’s, cut through there to the alley, back along the footpath to the seawalk, and hustle the three blocks to the Surf and Sand. To take a couple rooms and wait by the phone.

“Vi,” Hickey said. “Everything quiet?…Nobody tailed you…How’s Wendy? She say anything yet?…Okay. Now we’re sending a couple fellows, lookouts. They won’t bother you, just hang around outside. Okay?…Sure. Call you later.”

Leo walked in, panting. “You oughta remember to shut the door. Looks more professional.” He flipped his hat about six feet onto the rack. “All right, what’ve we got, Tom? A bunch of fruitcakes thinking they can take over Baja. That’s all.”

Hickey sat on the desk. He laughed bitterly. “Oh. That’s all.”

“Sure, just crazy talk. Look, there’s nothing to it. Old Santiago del Monte’s at the root of it, and he’s about fifty yards out of his mind. You heard him squawking. He’s sure too senile to run anything.”

“How many sons are there?”

“Six, seven, I don’t know. Look, suppose—what’s gonna happen—if they really got the nerve to try and aren’t just talking through their hats—if they got some weight in the Federales, the Rurales, the Army, and everyplace else, like they do with the cops. What’s gonna happen is, if they got all that, they’ll raise a little fuss and get blown to China and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Wait,” Hickey said. “Who’s this gonna blow ’em to China?”

“The Mex Army, Tom. Lázaro Cárdenas.”

“Makes sense. Nothing to worry about. As long as Cárdenas is on the level.”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, and even if he’s not, when the whole human race is blasting each other, who cares about some nuts in Tijuana, even if some of ’em are Nazis? And heck, what good is Baja anyway, even if they grabbed the place—a lotta rocks, sand, cactus. Right?”

“Yeah,” Leo mumbled warily.

“Course it’d give the Nazis a place to cremate San Diego from.”

“Hold it, Tom. First German troops set foot there, we’d blitz the joint. Wouldn’t be a thing but dust left on the whole peninsula.”

“That’d be swell.”

Leo got up, paced a few times around the desk and sat down again. With a pout, he said, “Sure, it’d be lousy. A lot of poor saps’d get massacred. But you know it won’t happen. That bunch, the del Montes, Zarp, and them—they’re not such dopes, except the old man. What you’re talking about’d be like spitting at a tidal wave. Nobody’s that cockeyed.”

Hickey slugged the ash from his pipe into the trash can. “Whatta you figure that meeting last night was about, all those gold-braided monkey suits? Maybe planning a boy scout troop?”

Leo reached into the desk for a letter knife and started cleaning his fingernails, looking down at his hands. “Hell, Tom, there’s Nazi meetings every day in Des Moines, Pittsburgh, Denver, right here in town. It don’t mean we’re in grave danger.” He gazed over Hickey’s head at a pinup calendar on the wall. “I’m hungry. You coming?”

“Naw. Bring me something back. I don’t want to go out, the fresh air might wreck my black mood.”

After Leo left, Hickey moved to the easy chair, and thought that no matter how he’d argued, this rumor of a coup seemed nonsense.

But just suppose. Then would the creeps try to take over in the open, or put a gun to the governor’s head and run things that way? He wondered how close an eye the Mexican government kept on Baja. Two thousand miles from the Capital, less than ten thousand people, and half of those were outcasts, refugees, foreigners, Indians, religious sects hiding out in the desert. The only great wealth was the seacoast. And Mexico had five thousand miles of that on the mainland. Anyway, if some honchos in the Capital got wise—Hickey’d never heard of a Mexican official who didn’t have his price. On his side of the border, he guessed, maybe one out of three was crooked. Mexico was almost twice as corrupt, with mordida being as great and honored a tradition as cutthroat free enterprise in the States. Hell, Cárdenas himself might be part of the scheme, wanting to run things like when he was President of Mexico. Suppose the Nazis offered a trade, a little something to help the Feds look the other way for a while. Like Texas. A hundred years later, revenge for the Alamo.

One thing Hickey felt sure of—you never could tell what craziness would come to pass, what the world would be like four months from now.

Four months ago, Hickey was a PI and partner in a restaurant looking to finally make the loot his wife had always craved. With Madeline and their precious daughter, he lived in a swell place on the bay. Every Sunday morning, he and Elizabeth walked four miles around the bay, or rode the waves on an inner tube, or found the best coffee cakes to take home for breakfast. Four months ago, Tito was driving his limousine. Enrique Peña had two sons. Stalingrad was German. Now the Germans were on the run, backtracking toward the Russian border, freezing in winter camps, getting buried under the snow. Four months ago, Clifford lived with his sister on a farm.

Hickey got up and went to Leo’s holster, where it hung across the back of a chair. He grabbed the gun, stared at it a second, then threw it across the room. It crashed a hole a yard around in the plaster. “Sorry kid,” he muttered.

You believe in a guy and he gets you killed. That was the worst, the one that drove Hickey down so far he might’ve taken a dive out the window, made a big splash on Broadway. If he’d had the guts. Or if Wendy Rose and the scent of gold hadn’t piqued his will to live.

He sat on the desk, head in his hands, trying to figure how he’d messed up so bad. He knew better than to go at something big without more scouting and concern for details. If mescal had rotted his brain, still he was the one who drank the poison. Nobody poured it down his throat. Sure, he started drinking hard when Madeline ran off with Castillo and took Elizabeth away. So maybe he could shove some blame onto Madeline.

Except she’d held on for sixteen years before she dumped him. What he did was to take an eighteen-year-old beauty headed for the stars, promise her the moon and give her the crumbs left over after the big rats ate their share. When he could’ve struck it rich, easy. There’d been plenty of chances. He just didn’t take them. Always trying to act like a swell guy. Probably, like she said, so he’d feel more noble than the next fellow.