The Crasher (40 page)

There had always been people in his life who said he aped his father. Even his mother had accused him of it at some time or
another, and Dolores had never stopped.

Johnny thought of both women now as he cut his chin with the straight-edged George Trumper razor he’d bought years ago in
London. The kind his father always used, although Johnny had never seen so much as a scratch on the old man’s face.

He scowled at the blood as it spurted into the basin. Actually, he rarely cut himself. He couldn’t blame his father; he could
probably blame Ginny Walker. In fact, he did blame Ginny Walker.

Whoever wrote “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” sure knew what he was writing about. He’d got Ms. Walker under his skin all right,
and he didn’t like it one little bit. He didn’t want to fall in love again; therefore he wasn’t in love—certainly not with
a giraffe-legged, kooky, crazy girl with such a major personality flaw that she spent half her time going where she wasn’t
wanted. He corrected himself: where she wasn’t expected.

The phone rang, but as had happened before, when he picked it up there was no one there. Very James Bondish; but then this
drug business could have come straight out of Ian Fleming’s imagination, it was so bizarre—and brutal. Johnny shivered. He’d
always suspected he didn’t have his old man’s guts. Now he knew he didn’t.

It was ironic. He’d received the tip in the first place only because of a mix-up: Trager, one of the FBI contacts he’d made
through his Princeton pal, Matt Fisher, had dropped it thinking Johnny was working with the elder Peet

It hadn’t been much of a tip, more of an eye-opener, which should have been obvious. It had recently been announced that Limpo
Delchetto, one of the most famous, fearless—some said foolhardy—journalists based in South America, had won the Pulitzer Prize
for the
Miami Herald
with his series exposing close business connections between prominent South American industrialists and the biggest drug
czar in Cali.

“You and your dad better get busy,” Trager had said casually. “Delchetto’s walked away with the big one this year and I hear
he’s moved to Puerto Rico, working on the Venezuelan Villeneva drug connection…”

Puerto Rico! Of course! The hottest new playing field for the drug business. Why hadn’t he thought of that before. Johnny
had immediately called for a transcript of the “war on drugs”
Nightline
he’d watched back in February, reading and remembering, still with some embarrassment, how smoothly his father had interrupted
Tom Constantine, the new chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Constantine’s scowl as QP had sailed right on.

“I often wonder why it took Cali so long to use it as a major
drug corridor into the United States,” Johnny read. “What do they say? With no Customs to worry about, Thursday in San Juan,
Friday in South Dakota. Now it’s the number two route after Miami, with about eighty-four tons of cocaine and high-purity
heroin coming in a year…”

When Johnny had finished the transcript, he’d made a few phone calls, including one to Detective Armitage, still working on
the Villeneva heist, and one to Alfredo Relato, an influential, well-connected cousin of Dolores in San Juan, a man he’d always
liked and the only member of her family who’d taken the trouble to tell him how sorry he was over their breakup. “Marrying
you was the only wise thing she ever did,” he’d written.

With Delchetto’s clips from the
Miami Herald,
the Pulitzer Prize announcement, the transcript and his own notes he’d gone into Steiner’s office, who hadn’t needed any
persuading to fund his trip.

Steiner came into Johnny’s mind now. He grimaced as he tried to stem the blood flow. His boss had thought that at last he
was going to follow in his father’s footsteps—something he’d always hoped for and never bothered to hide. Well, Steiner was
going to be disappointed, that was all there was to it. The lead to the Villeneva jewel heist and, more important, its connection
to the drug world was as dead as the dodo, as dead as Limpo Delchetto apparently was.

God, how his father would laugh, for instead of feeling aggressive and determined not to give up, Johnny’s major emotion was
immense relief that there didn’t seem much point in hanging around. He could return home without showing how lily-livered
he’d discovered himself to be when surrounded by real danger.

He’d lived with fear since his arrival, when he’d learned from Alfredo that although it had not yet been announced, Limpo
Delchetto had disappeared.

“At eleven o’clock he left La Mallorquina in Old San Juan, saying he wanted an early night, but he never reached home
and he hasn’t been seen since.” Alfredo had sighed. “Life is cheap here these days and getting cheaper.”

Searching for clues, an agent in the San Juan DEA office told Johnny casually, “He’s probably been pulverized in an auto wrecker’s
yard.” The agent’s eyes had reminded Johnny of Ben Abbott’s. Cool, piercing, revealing nothing, not even distaste, as the
agent added, “It’s the method the Cali drug family most favors to dispose of interlopers.”

Was this another warning to stay away? In his head Johnny could hear Rosemary say, “Put the pieces together, one by one, until
the jigsaw begins to make sense.” With his luck, he’d end up in the wrecker’s yard before he found any pieces to put together.

He filed a story about Delchetto, “missing in action,” capturing, he thought, the newly sinister atmosphere in San Juan, “the
number two drug route into the United States.”

When he’d returned to his hotel room on the third day of getting nowhere, he’d been sure someone had been looking through
his things… and wanted him to know it. There had been a broken penknife in the bathroom, which the maid swore she knew nothing
about; and his alarm clock had been missing, until he found it, stopped, under his pillow, at twelve o’clock.

High noon or midnight? The hour of Delchetto’s death?

He’d toughed it out, wondering every day if his own famous, fearless (but apparently never foolhardy) father would care if,
in pursuit of a story to expose a necessary truth, he disappeared off the face of the earth? Would QP expect his son to aspire
to his own impossibly high standards, and imperil his life for his work?

Yes to both. His father would care, well, certainly publicly. Johnny could imagine him proclaiming, “I’ll stop at nothing
to bring those responsible for my son’s death (ditto disappearance) to justice.” And dear old Dad really would stop at nothing,
yet would manage to stay alive and probably earn next year’s Pulitzer for his trouble.

Would Ginny care? God damn it, he’d had an erection just thinking about her. Yes, she would care. Dear naive Ginny.
She actually thought she could impress his father once they met or at least make him look on her with favor. Johnny could
write the scenario.

“What does Ms. Walker do for a living, Johnny?”

“She’s a very talented dress designer.”

“For whom?”

“For herself—her own label. She just hasn’t made it yet, but she will. And, oh yes, in her spare time she gate-crashes—eh—for
me. She’s getting material for a book I’m writing on today’s society, its values—or lack of them.”

“Gate-crashing. How unusual. And you pay her? How dignified.” The famous Peet eyebrows would do their elevating act and that
would be the end of Ginny.

The cut on his chin still spewed blood.

He couldn’t even stand the sight of a cut made by his own shaky hand, so what made him think he could act the hero? And why
should he? To try to prove something to a father who’d shown for years he didn’t think he was capable of anything?

Four knocks sounded on the door. It would be Alfredo, but he couldn’t join him until his chin dried up. He looked and felt
a mess, but it didn’t matter anymore. He was quitting, getting out before Cali declared him an enemy.

“I’m on the phone long-distance,” he called through the door. “I’ve decided to leave today on the afternoon flight. I’ll meet
you in the lobby around noon to say goodbye.”

But it wasn’t to be. At noon Alfredo told Johnny that the governor, embarrassed and mortified by Delchetto’s disappearance,
had sanctioned a surprise attack by the National Guard on a San Juan housing project, thought to be the headquarters of a
major drug supplier. If Johnny wanted to see some action, they could follow behind. Johnny, ashamed of his lack of fire-in-the-belly,
agreed.

It didn’t produce any of the answers he was looking for, but it took three more days of surveillance to penetrate and break
up what turned out to be a more sophisticated drug distribution center than anyone had understood.

It wasn’t the story he’d come down to Puerto Rico to break,
but Steiner had been happy with his first piece and now he had another one—about the one-of-a-kind governor, who, to fight
the gigantic drug invasion of his island, was willing to go out on a limb against the civil libertarians and install the National
Guard inside the housing project, for as long as it took to declare it drug-free.

The piece almost wrote itself. It touched on another issue Johnny felt fervently about: how “civil liberties” could be interpreted
to the detriment of society. He’d been writing about this on and off since he’d landed at
Next!
He’d written about the damage done by civil libertarians back home who were sticklers for following the civil liberties movement
and laws of the sixties; die-hard types who railed against the concept of taking those too mentally sick to take care of themselves
off the street, back into hospitals or institutions. People like the homeless “Madame Sacks of Saks” he’d made famous in his
column.

“The other Rosemary,” as he sometimes thought of the homeless woman, had been a teacher in an Indianapolis suburb. Introduced
to “recreational drugs” when hot-tub parties were all the rage, she had had a love affair with a pusher, drifted into addiction
and lost her job, her husband, her family. When he’d first looked into Rosemary’s story, she’d already been living on New
York pavements for almost a year, screaming awake and asleep, slowly drowning in her own sickness.

It wasn’t too much of a leap to compare the courage of the Puerto Rican governor with the courage of a New York mayor, who
despite an enormous hue and cry decided that the meaning of the law had to be changed. That instead of narrowly reading the
law as “no one can be removed from the streets who is not in imminent danger to himself or others,” one could read it more
broadly to mean “in danger of harming themselves in the reasonably foreseeable future.” Rosemary had been one of those taken
away for treatment, cursing every inch of the way.

He felt a surge of satisfaction as he typed the last word. It was good. He hadn’t solved the Villeneva story, but this piece
had heart, lots of heart, linking the streets of San Juan with the
streets of New York, and describing the ordinary people who got caught up in the life of the streets and who got lost there.

“You write so well,” Ginny had once said to him. “What do you want to do… to write…” Ginny, wonderful supportive Ginny.

He’d talked to her more or less every day he’d been away, and reluctantly had come to the conclusion that absence could definitely
make the heart grow even fonder. What had the mighty La Rochefoucauld said?
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fires.
One day he might even pass that piece of information on to Ginny. One day. Perhaps.

She hadn’t mentioned meeting his father again; hadn’t even hinted, let alone nagged him about the Literary Lions dinner, which
was now only a few days away. She had obviously forgotten all about it.

He decided to give her a surprise. He would call and book her for the evening, make up some occasion or other, then arrive
early at the loft and announce he was taking her to the library after all. Would he introduce her to QP? Perhaps, perhaps
not. It all depended on the old man’s mood, which he could sense from a mile away.

It would be a perfect coming-home present. For her and for him, too. He couldn’t wait to see her face.

Johnny had called to say he was coming home and wanted to book her on Tuesday night to stand in for him at some American Cancer
fund-raiser.

What nerve!

Ginny had never felt so humiliated, so angry, listening to his oh-so-confident voice, “booking” her, assuming that although
he’d been away for over two weeks, she wouldn’t have any other plans or worse, that she’d cancel them as soon as she received
orders from Mr.
Next!
Magazine.

She’d never doubted he’d be home later than the first week of May. He wasn’t coming home because he missed her. As his week
away had stretched into two weeks and then a day
more, she’d told herself that no matter what, Johnny Peet would not miss his father’s big night at the library, and of course,
she’d been right.

Nothing had changed; she was still Cinderella without the magic slipper; he hadn’t invited her to the library. He’d called
to “book” her to take his place at an event, which he’d suddenly found conflicted with the Literary Lions dinner. Well, he
was in for a big surprise. It was time Mr.
Next!
learned he could no longer take her for granted. He would be at the library dinner honoring his father—and so would she.

In her imagination she saw Johnny watch her arrive, sweeping up the grand library steps on Fifth Avenue. He would be stunned
at first, perhaps a little angry, but finally he would be so impressed by how she looked, her magnificent cloak, her panache,
her bravery, he would offer her his arm and together they would go to meet his father. It was a wonderful daydream and whenever
she felt downcast, nervous, she brought it out until her spirits lifted.

She’d been working nonstop since Johnny’s departure, helping Lee style a couple of shoots, spritzing perfume at Bloomingdale’s,
even swallowing her deep dislike of the runway to fill in for a sick house model to help a friend of Sophie Formere’s.

With all this part-time work, it had been difficult to get all the clothes finished, hers and Poppy’s. Night after night she’d
worked into the early morning, until Poppy’s georgette wraparound number had been delivered and her own cloak and dress needed
only last-minute touches.