The Demolishers (8 page)

It was an odd little moment. I knew that if I’d been her contemporary, she’d have had no hesitation about discarding the garment that had come to grief; and if it gave me any ideas, to hell with me. But now that the excitement was over, she was remembering that I was twice her age. Older people had funny ideas. We’d been getting along fine; she didn’t want to spoil it by offending my notions of maidenly modesty, whatever they might be.

She spoke carefully: “I hope you have no serious objection to bottomless girls, Matt.”

I grinned. ‘‘I’ve never had any prejudice against topless, why should I object to bottomless?”

Relieved, she wriggled out of the panty hose, dropping them on the car floor. She stuck her bare feet into her shoes and smoothed down her dress, which was smudged but intact. She checked her injured arm.

‘‘Well, I don’t seem to have developed any new bone cracks,” she said dryly. ‘‘But it seems that I can’t get dressed up nowadays that I don’t get a load of bricks dumped on me. God, look at my knees, I just got the Band-Aids off and now they’re all skinned again! With a father-in-law like I’ve got, punching me in the face and knocking me down in the street, who needs terrorists?” She glanced at me quickly. “Please don’t take me seriously. I’m just prattling away. Reaction, I guess. I know you saved my life, and I didn't make it easy for you. Is it proper to say thank you?”

“Proper, but unnecessary,” I said.

“I’m grateful, really. But you’re not a very nice man, are you?”

“Nobody ever told you I was, did they? Certainly I didn’t.”

“He was just a boy,” she said.

“There’s an old country saying: If they’s big enough they’s old enough.”

She said, “I don’t think that was meant to apply here.” I said, “I don’t understand your complaint. You’re a mere slip of a girl but nobody hesitated to blow you up with a bomb. Matthew was just a boy, himself, by some standards, but they didn’t spare him. Why should I worry about a punk’s birthday when he’s waving a gun at me?” I cleared my throat. “As far as I’m concerned, anybody who’s old enough to shoot is old enough to get shot. Am I supposed to let somebody empty a cheap .22 into me just because his ID says he can’t drink legally yet? Anyway, I was aiming for his lower leg. Don’t you ever sight in your weapons? That damn peashooter of yours throws over a foot high at fifteen feet.”

“It’s just something Daddy gave me when I said I wanted a gun to carry. Its main virtue, he said, was that if I did shoot somebody with it, it couldn’t be traced.” “Main and only virtue,” I said. “Do you want the lousy clunker back?”

“No, but I suppose Daddy’ll want to bury it, now that it’s killed somebody.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t blaming you for shooting him. He did have a gun. It was what . . . what you did to him afterwards, a dying boy, that was a little hard to stomach.”

I said, “Did you want me to have killed him for nothing? Well, just to save my skin?”

“What do you mean?”

“He had only a minute or two left. If there’s a pressure point you can use to check the bleeding when that big leg artery is cut that high, I don’t know about it. I could either just stand there and watch him exsanguinate, or I could get something useful out of him while he was still breathing. In order to accomplish that, I had to keep him from realizing what was happening to him; what leverage can you use on a man, or even a boy, who knows he’s dying? So I went at him hard and bullied him, threatened him, scared him; and I got a couple of words before he went. What they mean, if anything, I don’t know yet, but it didn’t hurt him much more than he was already hurt, did it?” I took a fake-alligator wallet out of my pocket and opened it to check the driver’s license. I read the name aloud: “Antonio Morelos.”

We drove for a while in silence; then she said, “It’s
el no mb re.”

“What?”

“When you were browbeating him. Your Spanish is lousy.
Nombre
is masculine.
El nombre,
not
la nombre.”

“Thank you, teacher.”

“Just what did he say?” she asked. “He was so weak we couldn’t hear.”

I said, “Your daddy’s probably going to go for a big debriefing scene; they’ll have given him a preliminary report over one of the car phones. So let’s save the postmortem until we get there.”

She glanced at me sharply. “If you’re thinking of holding out on him, please don’t. He ... he gets very rough sometimes.”

I said, “Oh, gee, golly, you mustn’t scare me like that, ma’am.”

Her mouth tightened. “Just because his men have been trained not to behave like movie hoods, just because they say mister and missis and please, don’t underestimate what they’re capable of.”

I said, “What are you trying to do, tease me into telling you how we big, tough characters from Washington eat little fellows like that for breakfast and spit out the bones?”

She laughed, and stopped laughing. “I guess ... I guess I just don’t want any unpleasantness between the two men who are left in my life now that Matthew . . . now that I no longer have a husband. Please don’t fight with Daddy if you can help it, Matt.” She went on quickly, without waiting for me to commit myself: “That was the bridge across Lake Worth we just crossed. Now we’re driving through Richville-by-the-Sea, vulgarly known as Palm Beach. You should really take your hat off to show respect, like in church. If you had a hat.” “They gave you a hard time here when you were a kid, huh?”

“And still do. It doesn’t seem quite fair to my mother’s family; that half of me is quite respectable. But they act as if my disreputable daddy managed to produce me all by himself. To them, I’m all nasty Varek. Untouchable.” She grimaced. “Oh, well, I guess it’s good for the character to learn what it’s like being a despised minority, or is it?” After a while, as the car slowed, she said, “Here we are, the entrance to the old ancestral mansion.”

I looked at the tall gates and whistled. “Not bad for a despised minority.”

“It was built by my maternal grandpa, Homer Ganson, back in the gaudy old days when the Palm Beach
ricos
were all trying to outglamour each other .... As you can see, we’ve got security coming out our ears. Don’t try to pet these dogs; they hunt people, not ducks.”

The ornate old iron gates had been wired for electricity; they opened without anybody pushing at them. There was a gatehouse with a guard, presumably the man who’d pressed the button to let us in. Another husky gent stood by with a Doberman pinscher on a short, quick-release lead. The dog was lean and glossy and handsome, brown on black, a good specimen of its breed. It watched us pass but expressed no opinion; it hadn’t been told to hate us, yet.

We drove on into the grounds. The drive wound its way through a jungle of flowering trees and blooming shrubs; it was hard for me to remember that this was autumn and the duck season was already open in Texas.

I noted that the planting wasn’t quite as dense as it looked; there were clever little camouflaged paths to let the guards and dogs slip up on any intruder who breached the perimeter defenses. Then we broke out into the open to see a wide green lawn, a monstrous house, and the Atlantic Ocean.

“Not much protection from seaward,” I said.

“More than meets the eye. You wouldn’t want to land a boat down there unless you were invited,” Sandra said. “What do you think of our little beach shack?”

“You didn’t need a wedding cake. All you had to do was cut a slice of that.”

“Isn’t it awful?” she said. “But I’ve become very fond of it lately, after all my years of sneering at it. It’s got character, unlike the glass boxes people are putting up nowadays .... There’s Daddy now, and my current stepmother. Number Four, I think, but I could have missed one or two over the years. You’ll have to admit he picks them decorative.”

The car made a wide sweep, following the paved drive bordered by flowerbeds. It pulled up before the couple waiting in front of the house. The woman was spectacular, dark and slender and moderately tall; but I put off further appraisal for the moment. The man was my immediate concern. He was no taller than the woman: a blocky, middle-aged gent with a deeply tanned face and a head full of white, wiry, tightly curling hair that looked strangely innocent as a frame for his heavy features. I
mean, it’s hard to accept a racketeer and drug smuggler, even retired, with sweet, white, curly locks. He stepped forward to greet his daughter as the driver opened the door to let her out. There was no kissing or hugging. They faced each other like ancient enemies.

“Are you okay, Sis?”

“Thanks to Mr. Helm I am,” Sandra said.

“Well, you don’t look it. Go wash your face and put on a clean dress.”

The girl’s voice was sharp. “If you don’t like the way I look, don’t look at me. All I need is a couple of Band-Aids and a stiff drink. I think my father-in-law, here, might also accept a drink if you asked him nicely. . . . Daddy, Mr. Helm. Mr. Helm, Daddy.”

Alexander Varek hesitated, and decided not to lose his temper. There was a hint of challenge in the way he held out his hand to me. I suppose he’d met occasional moral citizens who’d refused to shake the dirty hand of the notorious Sonny Varek; and I was a government employee from whom such corny signs of disapproval could be expected. To hell with him. Going around disapproving of people is a fool’s game; and I’d shaken bloodier hands than his. His grip was a little firmer than it needed to be; but at least it wasn’t a macho bone-crusher performance, just a good manly handshake between relatives by marriage.

“I guess, from what Sis says, I owe you one,” he said. I said, “Let’s not start adding up the score yet. What’s the police situation? Do we need a call from Washington to the local constabulary?”

He studied me for a ntoment, apparently a little surprised by my cooperative attitude; then he shook his head. “It’s being arranged. The fuzz isn’t going to lose any sleep over a dead terrorist punk who was part of a deadfall that didn’t work; all they’ll regret is that they didn’t get to him before you did.” Varek smiled thinly. “And they’re damn well not going to cry in their beer because I lost a couple of my boys, either. Just so we wipe up the blood and don’t keep the honest taxpayers awake nights with all the gunfire. . . .”

“Alex, are you not going to introduce this nice tall man to me?”

It was the stepmother. As Sandra had said, she was closing in on thirty, but fighting every step of the way. Her taut figure was nicely displayed in snug black slacks and a filmy white blouse designed to reveal the pretty, lacy garment underneath—the word that pops into my mind, not necessarily correct, is camisole—and the firm breasts barely concealed thereby. The black hair was drawn smoothly back from the lovely oval face to a comb at the back of the head, Spanish fashion. There was a full red mouth and there were big dark eyes emphasized by a great deal of elaborate makeup; the lashes seemed to be an inch long. Her nails were also very long, and very red; and her shoes had three-inch heels. They brought her up to a convenient height for a man my size. I don’t suppose that was the idea. Guys like Varek just like to own, and display, tall girls who attract attention.

She reminded me of someone. It took me a moment to track down the memory, then I had it: our cool computer lady, Dana Delgado, another tall and slender brunette, who’d have been deeply insulted if she’d known I was comparing her to this overstated sexpot. The latest Mrs. Varek’s name was Rosalia, but I was given her gracious permission to call her Lia.

“Did you really save Cassandra’s life?” she murmured. “You must be very brave, Mr. Helm.”

“Matt, please.”

“Was it very frightening, Matt?”

“Getting shot at is never fun, Lia. You learn to run like hell.” I glanced at Sandra. “We both showed pretty good speed over the short course, wouldn’t you say, Sandy?”

The new wife wasn’t entirely pleased to have me bring the stepdaughter into the conversation in such a friendly manner, indicating that we shared the special relationship of two people who had faced death together. However, she was smart enough to give the girl a look full of sympathy.

“Oh, my dear, it must have been terrible! And you’ve hurt your poor knees again. Come and let me put something on them.”

The kid said irritably, “God, I’m all right! It’s just a little scrape. The way some people act, you’d think I was covered with mud and bleeding to death! Leave me alone!”

I said, “Well, Sandy can suit herself, but personally I’d like to clean up a bit before I have that drink that was mentioned earlier. ...”

Later,
with night at the windows, I headed towards the gunroom as I’d been instructed. A dinner jacket had been mentioned, but mine was feeding the moths in Washington; I was wearing -my slacks and sports coat with a clean white shirt and dark tie. The gunroom had been pointed out to me when we passed it, by the pretty Hispano maid named Maria who’d shown me to the guestroom on the second floor where my suitcase awaited me; but the house was enormous and, trying to find my way back, I made a wrong turn somewhere and got lost. They might have had to send the dogs after me eventually if I hadn’t bumped into Sandra in a corridor. She was all cleaned up and wearing a long green silk dress with a high neck and long sleeves. It was a rather severe garment, and somehow it went well with her cropped hair, emphasizing what an attractive young lady she was, even shorn and scarred.