Whisper Death (22 page)

“And you?”

A raucous laugh. “Me, McGuire? They couldn't drive me to madness. They were convinced I had already arrived. Living in empty space with a crippled cat and my philosophy texts. Writing letters to the editor of the
Death Valley News
describing encounters with extraterrestrial beings. Walking the sad streets of Beatty, grinning at the foolishness around me, confident of the powers I controlled.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Listen to me, McGuire. Listen: reject greasepaint, costumes and other disguises of the physical. The cleverest disguise of all is madness. Because it can never be fully penetrated, McGuire. There are no masks to be removed from the mind of a crazy man.”

“What happened last month? Why did Amos decide to appear on Bunker Crawford's doorstep after all these years?”

Littleton replaced his glasses carefully on his nose. His eyes were red and moist. “Because of what I saw,” Littleton said. He walked to a plastic-covered chair and sat down heavily. “Because I told Bunker what I saw. And they knew.”

“Who?”

“Amos. Peppler. Marlowe. They knew we had been in contact, Bunker and me. But they didn't know what we said.”

“What had you told him?”

“That I saw her. After more than twenty years, I saw her again. She was back.”

“The girl in the desert.”

“Yes. Yes, but now a woman. A wealthy woman. A widow whose striking visage appeared in a copy of a Palm Springs magazine discarded in a bar just down the road. Picture it, McGuire. Me reclining in a bar in this dusty sunbaked burg. Defending myself against the fervour of the desert heat with cold beer. Knowing that each being around me is a watcher for Amos and his army. And being correct, of course. Is paranoia really paranoia when it's true? Think on it, McGuire. And there, discarded by some anonymous Las Vegas-bound tourist, is a magazine dedicated to overindulgence in Palm Springs. I open it. I scan the fashion advertisements. I assess the restaurant reviews. I turn the page. And those eyes, in a face atop a figure now mature and still alluring, McGuire, stare back at me, startled, from the steps of the Desert Museum.”

“Glynnis Vargas,” McGuire breathed.

“Perceptive,” Littleton nodded. “Very perceptive, Mozart.”

The voice on the telephone announced that Glynnis Vargas had departed The Beverly Hills

Hotel early that morning. And no, the desk clerk replied coolly, she had left neither a forwarding address nor a message.

There was no answer to the telephone at her villa on Via Linda.

McGuire leaned against the headboard, his mind racing through all that he knew, all that he could only speculate about.

Littleton sat on the floor again, playing with Lafaro. McGuire closed his eyes and felt the room rotate lazily.

The sound of the motel room door closing roused McGuire from sleep. He bolted for the door and ran out into the parking lot. It was after midnight and the interstate was straight, flat and empty, like an abandoned airport landing strip. Behind the motel, McGuire found Littleton sitting cross-legged on the ground, his head back, staring up at the sky. The cat was squatting awkwardly beside him.

“Nature calls,” Littleton said when McGuire stepped into his view, “even to a crippled cat.”

McGuire nodded and stood next to Littleton in the weak light of the desert stars. Littleton had been crying; tears coursed down his cheeks and through the thin white shrubbery of his beard.

“Have you noticed,” Littleton began, staring upwards. He swallowed and began again. “Have you noticed, Mozart, that there are fewer stars than before? Why is that? What . . . what do you suppose they are doing to the stars?”

Sam Littleton had folded his breakfast sausage into a paper napkin before leaving the roadside restaurant. Now he was feeding it to the cat, curled on his lap, as McGuire guided the Mercedes west through the desert, the late morning sun at their back.

“It doesn't make sense,” McGuire muttered.

“Life? Death? The Reagan presidency?” Littleton giggled. “None of it is supposed to make sense, McGuire. And that is why we have philosophy.”

“Crawford's death,” McGuire replied. “Who wanted him dead? Not Amos's people.”

“Who profits, McGuire? Locate the destination of the profits and you have found the likely investor.”

“You were watching Glynnis Vargas from the hill behind her house.”

“Safe I was, McGuire. Like a church. Marlowe's madcap minions knew nothing of my tunnels. Came and went like a free man.”

“You knew she wouldn't call the police.”

“Never. She would pose there in her naked beauty, knowing I was watching her, before her morning swim. But to call the police, you see, would have been to risk linkage with me.”

“What were you trying to do?”

“Send her back to where she came from. Without direct contact. The perils of paranoia, McGuire. Those you don't speak to, you don't taint.”

“And that's why you broke the head of the figurine that night in the museum.”

“A necessary desecration, McGuire. Isn't life regrettable at times?” He fed the last of the sausage to Lafaro, who swallowed it and sat purring contentedly, his pink tongue sweeping his whiskers.

“Did you meet Crawford when he arrived in Las Vegas a few weeks ago?”

The traffic was growing heavy as the highway twisted its way out of the desert and through the Cajon Pass.

“Meet Bunkie?” Littleton lifted the cat to his shoulder where it nuzzled against his neck. “Oh no, McGuire. Bunkie and I, we never laid eyes on each other since before Colonel Amos romped bare ass on the Zion Park Highway. Notes in newspapers and postcards to dead-letter drops that Bunkie would find. That was all we dared.”

“Then why did Crawford come to Las Vegas?”

“Response to a postcard from me, sent from Las Vegas, which told him to check General Delivery. The message was nothing, it was innocuous. But Amos and his gang of merry men must have intercepted it, not knowing its meaning. They waited for Bunkie to bolt out of his skin. But Bunkie didn't. Bunkie wasn't insane, McGuire. No, no. Harassed, yes. Driven to desperation by threats of who knows what punishment for unknown sins by the fanatical Colonel Amos and his thugs. But even though Bunkie's life and heart were shattered by the betrayal of the luscious Barbie, he remained aloof on the surface. Until Amos, impatient cretin that he was, stepped up his tirade. Telephone calls and such. Bunkie told me about them in a coded card sent the day before Amos appeared on his threshold and tilted poor Bunkie over the edge.”

“So Crawford fled here. To find what?”

“The Palm Springs magazine from the Baker bar. A ratty little place just down the road from our motel. And he discovered what Barbie had become. What she had achieved. How she had matured.”

“You were both driven mad by the bomb,” McGuire said, shaking his head. “You and Crawford. Knowing the government would never give up.”

“Two-thirds correct, McGuire. Add Amos to your looney list. Amos became mad in his own way too. Fixated, obsessed, call it what you will.” He cackled merrily. “But not just us, McGuire. Hardly us. Have you forgotten history? For forty years, the whole world was driven mad by elder, more muscular siblings of the same device.”

McGuire drove on in silence. Then: “Did you know Crawford would try to find her? That he would go to Palm Springs?”

“Never a doubt.”

“But why? Didn't it give the game away?”

“The game was dull, McGuire. It was in overtime. And no matter what happened, neither Bunkie nor I would win. We could never win.” He stroked the cat's chin. “All we could do was make sure the other side lost.”

Through San Bernardino they listened to newscasts on the car radio. The explosion at Death Valley was now a minor story, relegated to the last news item before the commercial break. Authorities had concluded, the announcer said without expression, that the rancher—Sam Littleton sniggered at the description—had been hoarding dynamite in his basement for a number of years. “Dynamite destabilizes with time and becomes prone to inadvertent explosion,” the announcer explained. There was also the possibility that Littleton had triggered the device himself, “since local residents considered him mentally unstable. More news in a moment.”

Littleton sat silently through the commercial that followed, looking out at the dreary landscape. “Did I vaporize them all, Mozart?” he asked in a small voice. “All who knew on Amos's team? By God, I don't think I did. Will the others know? Will they give a damn?” He covered his eyes with his hand. “Of course they will. Giving a damn is the basis of fanaticism, isn't it?”

McGuire drove directly to Glynnis Vargas's house, pulling to the side of the road just as a well-dressed man drove the last metal stake supporting a wrought-iron bracket into the irrigated lawn. Suspended from the bracket was a discreet sign bearing the name of a real estate agency.

McGuire stepped from the car as the agent drove away.

Littleton slid off the passenger's seat, the cat in his arms.

A metallic voice crackled through the air. “Surprise, McGuire.” McGuire looked toward the source of the voice, Donald Mercer's villa. “She fooled us all,” the voice continued. “You, me, the whole town.” It was Mercer, talking through the speaker of his security system, an eerie, disembodied voice whose words were slurred with alcohol. “She's selling the whole damn issue. House, furniture, all the cars, everything. Just disappearing back to Brazil, I guess. Didn't say a word to anybody except the real estate agent. How about that? Who you going to screw now, McGuire?”

McGuire stared through the iron filigree of the security gate at Mercer's house. A shadow moved behind a curtain. A weak wind rose and tried unsuccessfully to disturb the searing heat of the sun.

“There's an envelope in my mailbox, McGuire,” the voice continued. “Courier delivered it early this morning, addressed to you. You weren't there so he left it with me. Take it and leave, McGuire. You don't belong here. You never did.”

McGuire yanked the courier envelope from Mercer's mailbox. It had been sent by G. Vargas from The Beverly Hills Hotel.

Inside, wrapped in a note written on hotel stationery, was the owner's document for the Mercedes, transferred to McGuire. Her penmanship was exquisite, flowing with grace across the paper. “Now you can keep moving,” McGuire read. “P.S. Thank you.”

Something rattled behind him. McGuire turned to see Little Sam Littleton scurrying up the side of the hill behind Glynnis Vargas's villa, just as he had when McGuire first saw him almost a week earlier. Clutching the cat in one hand and steadying himself against the slant of the hill with the other, he paused to look back at McGuire.

“Forget it, McGuire,” he shouted. “It's all been illusions and assholes.” His laughter rolled down the hill as he scrambled sideways across the rocky terrain, the cat looking back at McGuire with fear and resignation in its eyes. “Illusions and assholes,” Littleton cackled again as he disappeared over the crest of the hill.

The security gate of Glynnis Vargas's villa responded obediently to McGuire's command from behind the wheel of the Mercedes. He guided the car past the courtyard and down the lane to the garage.

Nothing had changed inside. The furnishings were untouched, the electric power was still functioning and the telephone remained connected. McGuire scooped some ice from the refrigerator, dropped it in a crystal tumbler and poured three fingers of single-malt Scotch into it. He took a long sip, collapsed in the sofa next to the telephone and leaned back, willing himself to relax.

He didn't know who would be responsible for the long-distance call he placed to Boston. He didn't care.

“You're gonna give the wife a heart attack, you keep disappearing in the desert like this,” Ollie Schantz's gruff voice sounded in McGuire's ear.

“Tell Ronnie I'm okay,” McGuire assured him. Suddenly he missed Boston and the greenery, the fresh coolness of the sea air, the vibrant life of a city that didn't have to depend on water diverted from three hundred miles away for its existence.

He missed something more, he realized. He missed having someone care about him. Even if it was his best friend's wife.

“You gonna fill me in on all this stuff some day?” Ollie demanded.

“Some day,” McGuire assured him. “Right now, see what else you can find on this guy Getti Vargas, will you?”

“Told you everything I had.”

“This time, check on his company. When it was founded. Any scuttlebutt about how he got started.”

“Where the hell am I gonna find that?”

“Try Frank Rose.”

“Think he'd know?”

“He's in the same business, isn't he? He can poke around. He'll do it.”

Frank Rose was a prominent wholesale jeweller in Cambridge who had assisted the Boston Police Department in the past. Overweight and constantly brushing cigar ashes from a stained and perpetually out of fashion necktie, Rose was one of the fringe characters McGuire delighted in seeing as part of his police work.

“Yeah, Frank might know,” Ollie Schantz replied. “Or he'll know somebody who does. I'll call you back.”

After hanging up, McGuire walked to the windows overlooking the pool and the rocky slope behind it. There was no sign of Little Sam. He wandered through the house, touching the furniture, smelling traces of her perfume and staring moodily at her portrait over the fireplace. I know who you are now, he told the picture. If I only knew all you have done.

In the kitchen he examined cupboards and closets, not looking as much as sensing, searching for answers to questions not yet totally formed in his mind.

The link with Crawford's death. That's what he was missing. Bunker Crawford is shot while Glynnis Vargas is surrounded by city leaders at the museum.

She would want him dead. He was the connection between her and Lafaro, driven to panic and desperation by Amos and his years of harassment. But she didn't kill him. She couldn't have killed him.

He opened the door next to the closet. It led to the garage, where the cars waited in its grey gloom. The ferocious Ferrari. The glitzy Seville. Probably to be sold with the house, McGuire speculated. There will always be buyers for Cadillacs and Ferraris in Palm Springs. Always someone to drive them. Or have someone drive . . .

He snapped his fingers, shouted a curse, and bolted for the front door.

The metal drawer slid open and brought with it the familiar odour of death. Cool and dry and acidic.

The morgue attendant looked at Art Lumsden and raised his eyebrows. Lumsden nodded and the attendant pulled the plastic sheet away from the body's face. The man had been deeply tanned and surpassingly handsome, with a strong dimpled chin and thick black curly hair.

“Yes,” McGuire said. “That's him.”

“That's who?” Lumsden growled.

“The guy I saw in the police station, trying to talk with one of your Mexican cops the night Crawford was shot. He was there when Ralph and I left, saying we'd be back for Crawford. He heard Bonnar give Ralph and me directions to our motel. He knew where we were going and when we would get there.”

McGuire turned from the corpse. Lumsden nodded to the attendant again, who replaced the sheet over the dead man's face and rolled the drawer back into the refrigerated storage vault.

“What made you remember him?” Lumsden asked. He pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and peeled away the cellophane.

“Your Mexican cop couldn't understand him. It seemed strange to me at the time. A Mexican not understanding Spanish. Besides, I saw him again. Just a quick glance in the doorway of Glynnis Vargas's house. I didn't recognize him then. I do now.”

“So who the hell is he?” Lumsden stood with the cigar halfway to his mouth.

“I don't know his name. But he was Brazilian. See, he wasn't speaking Spanish, he was speaking Portuguese. And he was Glynnis Vargas's chauffeur.”

“Think paraffin tests will prove anything?” McGuire asked. They were seated in the police station cafeteria sipping coffee. Good coffee, McGuire noticed. And lots of fresh pastry. Christ, do these cops realize just how good they've got it down here?

“Not much,” Lumsden shrugged. He was chewing on his unlit cigar. “If he did it, shot Crawford and your buddy I mean, he got his one day later. Then spent a couple of days in the desert, couple more in cold storage. Couldn't be much powder left on his hands. Might try it though.”

“He shot Crawford and Innes,” McGuire said dully. “Then he was killed the next night. With the same gun.”

“By whom?”

McGuire looked at the black detective. “Didn't it bother you that he was stark naked when he was shot?” McGuire asked. “Not undressed after being murdered, but buck naked and alive out there in the desert?”

“Guess so,” Lumsden shrugged. “But hell, McGuire, it was more important to find out who the dude was than why he was stripped for action.”

“He was having sex,” McGuire said. “Or about to. Or had been. It doesn't matter.”

Lumsden's smile broadened to a wide vista of perfect white teeth. “You telling me his woman shot him because he was a lousy lay?”

McGuire allowed himself a small, quick grin. “No. She stripped him to slow down identification of the body. And she killed him because he was the link back to the murder of Bunker Crawford.”

“Who did?”

“The only woman who had any contact with him. She kept him hidden, out of sight most of the time . . .”