The Lonely Silver Rain Part 4

She looked across at me through candlelight and said, "Old Millis. If I could trade bodies, I'd pick hers. Absolutely flawless. All silk and ivory. And those strange tilty eyes of green. Perfect features. And tough clean through, Travis. There is not an ounce of mercy in there anywhere. I'll tell you something I probably shouldn't. I found out by accident, and I never let on I knew. But she w.a.n.gled old Billy into the sack long before Sadie died. A very hot, very heavy affair. That's one of the reasons he took Sadie's death so hard. Pure guilt. I'd guess from what I remember of the books that Billy would net out about ten to twelve million. Millis likes nice things. Millis lives for nice things."

"Background?"

"I do not know one d.a.m.n thing for certain. This is all guesswork. And it was well over five years ago. She hadn't been working in the office very long. Several times men stopped in the office to see her. One at a time. It made her very angry. I had the feeling they were making demands and she was turning them down."

"What kind of men?"

"My old granddad would call them city slickers. Very tan men with hard eyes and Dior shirts and Gucci shoes. Men with fifty-dollar haircuts, imported convertibles, strong aftershave, gold chains and diamond rings. Men who stay in suites and know the number to call to have girls sent up. Maybe they were mob people, labor leaders, or maybe they were important lawyers. She used to get outside phone calls too. They made her furious."

"You mentioned guesswork, Annabelle."

"Okay. From her clothes and her habits it was easy to guess that she had been making more at her previous job than she was making for working for Billy. I think she was involved in something that paid good money but didn't have much of a future. So she got out of it maybe because she was scared or tired or something. They wanted her back, and kept after her for a little while. But she refused. Her office skills were rusty, but she got them back fast. And then she started looking around and saw Billy. A new career."

"Had she been living in Lauderdale before she went to work for Ingraham?"

"Oh, no. Miami."

About an hour later I drove her home. She had started yawning. We had agreed it had been a good evening, and we ought to try it again. "Next time I'll cook Duck Annabelle," she said drowsily. "Love this weird old truck of yours."

She was way down the beach in one of the prehistoric condos, renting a one-bedroom job that came cheap because it was on the sixth floor and the elevators had been out of service for a year.

The roof leaked badly, but that was up on the tenth floor. There were no corridor lights, so she had to carry a flashlight in her purse. The Condominium a.s.sociation had run out of funds when the big stuff started breaking. The pool was full of bushes, and the landscaping was returning to its original condition of pepper bushes and palmetto. Only a third of the units were occupied. n.o.body knew who owned the empty ones, the city, the county, the banks or the estates of deceased retireds who'd moved into the Plaza del Rio long ago. She was anxious to get a job and move out before she got mugged in the stairwell. It was such a sad and sorry place I was tempted to ask her to move aboard the Flush until she got her life rearranged, but I was not ready for complications. She was pleasant and she was fun and she was a handsome woman, and she needed help but she wouldn't accept any.

I walked her up to her door, kissed the tip of her nose and felt my way back out into the night. The book bomb kept going off in the back of my mind, ripping Horatio and Emiliano to bits. That night I dreamed I was looking through a huge hole in a cement-block wall, staring in at racks and racks of bright dresses. I heard a ticking and looked down and saw the package addressed to me, right in front of my bare toes.

Six.

IF SOMEONE makes a careful and sophisticated and almost foolproof attempt to kill you and they miss, it is, as Meyer announced on Sunday, two days before Christmas, a reasonable a.s.sumption they will try again.

"Also," he said, "one can expect the next attempt to be as subtle and as deadly as the first. You do realize, Travis, that the theft of a gift book and an explosion behind a mall may not be linked."

"But I should live as though they were."

"Precisely. Now let's see if we can come up with a list of people that anxious to send you to that big marina in the sky."

We discussed it for an hour and a half, and to my surprise we could come up with but six names, and they went way back, most of them. The seventh was not a name. The seventh, in Meyer's professorial script, read: "Someone who thinks you killed the three young people aboard the Sundowner."

"Let's break that last one down," Meyer said. "I say we rule out the dentist. If he thought you murdered his little girl, he might come after you with a gun. But with a certain hesitation. And from what you say, the Cannon clan would not care that much who did in their son Howard. So we have the girl from Peru. I happen to have the clipping right here. Gigliermina Reyes y Fonseca. A diplomat's daughter. Both those G's are p.r.o.nounced as hard G's, as in 'begin.'"

"Thank you."

"But the contemporary nickname is usually with soft G's. Gigi. You're welcome."

"There were the three little men in business suits who came to Billy to find out who found his boat. Latins. Two didn't have any English, apparently. Why would they want to know?"

Meyer went into meditation for several minutes. He finally said, "We can play with another variation, Travis. Boat owner hires man to get boat back any way he can, and punish those who took it. You will say that it would be out of character for Billy Ingraham to give that kind of an order, and out of character for you to follow through if he did. Yet, in certain circles, that would be standard operating procedure. It might be difficult for them to imagine any other response to theft."

"Then Billy would be a target too."

"If they a.s.sume you were following his orders. You would be a hireling, a secondary target."

"Aren't we getting pretty fancy?"

"In testing any hypothesis, one useful method is to carry it to the ultimate limits of absurdity and find out if it still hangs together. This scenario a.s.sumes that Gigliermina was well connected with powerful people in Peru, and they are not concerned with degrees of intention or degrees of guilt. The girl is dead and vengeance requires that anyone who had anything to do with her death be killed."

"By a diplomat?!"

"By someone anxious to do him big favors."

"Okay. But back up a little, Meyer, d.a.m.n it. Somebody did kill the three of them. See how absurd this is, for example. They came back from Yucatan with cocaine. Free-lance. He had some kind of contact, and he phoned from the gas station across the road from the Starfish Marina. He set up a meet, and somebody came with the money to buy it. Cannon or the NicBride girl noticed that it was funny money, and that turned it into a bad scene."

"But from your description, Travis, it looked more as if the three aboard were trying to buy something with that money. It was discovered and they rammed it into his mouth. If the people who came aboard wanted to buy something with counterfeit, and it was discovered, they would have kept the counterfeit and whatever they came to buy. The ugly gesture said, 'Don't try to cheat us with counterfeit!'"

"It looked like very good quality."

"And probably could be pa.s.sed one at a time with no trouble, but not in a batch."

"So maybe Cannon didn't notice it was counterfeit. Maybe he got paid already for what he brought in, and somebody hijacked them for the money, searched for it, made them tell where they had hidden it aboard, found it and found out it was no good."

Meyer shook his head sadly, a black bear who couldn't get at the honeycomb. "We're getting too far down too many roads, friend McGee. We need more bits and pieces."

"While they adjust their sights?"

Meyer looked grim, aimed a finger at me and said, "Bang, you're dead."

"That's very funny! That's truly hilarious. Maybe you'd write it down so I won't ever forget it."

"I'm sorry," he said, looking dismayed. "That was out of character. Just an impulse. Everybody steps out of character now and then."

"You seldom do."

"I am as surprised as you are."

On Christmas morning, in a hotel suite in Cannes, R. William Ingraham died of a ma.s.sive cerebral hemorrhage. It was in the morning Lauderdale newspaper on Wednesday the twenty-sixth. The story covered his many accomplishments in altering the local landscape, and the awards and honors given him. They had contacted a few politicians on the state level, and the tenor of their response was that Ingraham had been a good citizen, civic-minded and responsible. and his death was a loss to all Floridians. The page one article said that the grieving widow, Millis Hoover Ingraham, was bringing the body home for burial.

I knew that Frank Payne, who is my lawyer whose services I seldom require, had been Ingraham's attorney for many years and would probably, along with the bank, be handling Billy's estate. So I went to see him that afternoon in his bank building offices. He was in a new firm. Those fellows group and regroup as often as square dancers. This one was Marhead, Carp, Payne and Guyler. I sat for fifteen minutes wondering how good the legs were on the receptionist. Her desk had what is called a privacy screen. Frank's secretary came and got me and took me back to a corner office that looked like a small library in a British club. Frank shook hands and patted his growing gut apologetically, saying he was about to join a health club. He always says that. I suggested Loie' outfit. He asked me if I had come to change my will, and I said that it was still okay as is, but I would like to talk about Billy Ingraham's estate.

We sat down across the desk from each other and he said it was a tragic thing that Billy had to lose out on a lot of good years remaining, and he said the estate was in very clean condition because Billy had done a lot of neatening up after he sold out his business interests, getting rid of little cats and dogs, small partnerships, shelters, tag ends of land. Everything that could be put into a discretionary trust had been put into it, so there would be very little to go through probate. Mostly the cars and his collection of western art. "Millis the sole heir?"

"Looking to marry her, Trav?"

"Or get a job in a sideshow handling snakes? Sure. I don't really have to know how she's going to be fixed, Frank. I would guess she gets the bulk, less a few bequests to causes here and there. What I want to know about is insurance."

"Why?"

"Because if there are any policies on him that pay off double in the case of accidental death, there's a chance of collecting."

"Accidental! Look, the man was overweight and out of condition. He had high blood pressure. He had a lot of stress all his life. And he died in bed."

"Is murder an accidental death?"

"Are you nuts, McGee? Have you been watching TV?"

"You know about the Sundowner of course."

"I know all about it. I know how much of a bath he took. I know you found it for him. Don't look surprised. That's confidential information, lawyer and client. And I know what you were paid. A nice windfall. I hope you're going to declare it. That's my legal advice."

"I always declare everything that will show up in somebody else's tax records. You taught me that a long time ago."

"What's this murder nonsense?"

"Again, legal confidentiality, Frank please."

"You've got it."

"Those two little kids who got killed by a bomb last Sat.u.r.day. The bomb came to me in the mail. I forgot to lock the truck. I was parked in that mall lot. The package looked like a book. When I got home, it was missing. Those kids had petty theft records."

He stared at me, biting his lip, then said, "And you haven't gone to the police?"

"You know all the good reasons I have to keep a low profile with the local law. Maybe the theft of the gift and the explosion are unrelated."

"Who wants you dead?"

"Maybe somebody who thinks I punished those kids for stealing the boat. And they might think Billy hired me to do just that. I don't know who. If I don't know who wanted to bomb me, then I don't know who killed the little boys, do I? What would I go to the police with?"

"Okay. But it sounds like a very outside chance."

"Can you get an autopsy?"

"Millis told me on the phone the body is being embalmed there. If they did an autopsy there, she would have mentioned it. Jesus, Trav, what basis have I got for ordering an autopsy? You know what would happen. Everybody would think it was Millis I was suspicious of. Somehow I don't want her mad at me."

"What's the timing?"

"Let me see here. She flies in late with the body on Friday, gets in at eleven-twenty at Miami. Decker and Sons will have a hea.r.s.e there to bring it up to the funeral home. Services Sunday morning, the thirtieth, at United Baptist, and burial at noon out at Elysian Fields, next to Sadie."

"How about unofficial? It would just be the skull."

He thought it over. He shook his head. "I just can't do that and I'll tell you why. Suppose we do come up with evidence of a different cause of death? Even though it's way out of our jurisdiction I would have to advise the local law and I guess they would advise the French authorities. I never had one like this before. I think it can be done officially, but very quietly. I am going to have to use up some tickets I've got out all over town. Judge, a.s.sistant state's attorney, doctor, Floyd Decker. Jesus, I hate to waste all that clout, McGee."

"So they bury old Billy and we can sit around and wonder."

"Well, I'm going to have to make out an affidavit saying he came to me before they left for France and told me that if he died over there I was to make absolutely certain it was a natural death. So I'm doing my duty to a client. And maybe Billy told you to check up on me and make sure I do as he asked."

"Easy enough."

He sighed. "I've done dumber things, but I can't remember when."

The call came from Frank Payne at quarter to three on Sunday morning, the next-to-the-last day of the year, waking me from some kind of turbulent dream which faded before I could retain any part of it.

His voice was guarded. "I'm at Decker's. We're in real trouble, pal."

"What do you mean?"

"Leaving out all the medical gibberish, somebody knocked him out somehow. Probably too late to find out if it was a drug. Maybe it was just a good whack on the skull with a sock full of sand. They then stuck something thin and sharp and curved right into the inside corner of his left eye. Something like a length of piano wire sharpened at one end, stiff wire. So they got it in there and turned it a little bit each time they jabbed. It was curved, so it created ma.s.sive hemorrhaging just as if a major artery in the brain had ruptured. No bleeding to speak of at the point of the puncture wound."

"So why are we in trouble?"

"We didn't think it through. There has to be an official report. The finding has to be verified by other medical authorities. We have to move into a full-scale autopsy with laboratory samples of the organs and so on and so on. There has to be a grand jury verdict of death at the hands of person or persons unknown, and everything will have to be turned over-copies at least-to the Surety or whatever they call it in France. And-because Billy was prominent, everybody around here is going to want a piece of the action so they can get their name in the paper. Trav, the wire services and the networks are going to pick this up, and it is all going to point right at Millis, especially if they can find any trace of a strong sedative when they do the full-scale autopsy. The funeral is, let's say, indefinitely delayed. What they are going to do tomorrow at the church is have a memorial service. This is a real mess. Thanks a lot, McGee."

"Does it make the estate any bigger?"

"Maybe by a hundred and fifty thou, which is like saying the swimming pool is bigger if you pee in it."

"Millis know yet?"

"Not yet. I might go over to St. Kitts for a week. Get some rest."

"You need it, Frank."

"I'll take the wife and kiddies, and my spinning rod."

"I want you to think about something."

"Such as?"

"Millis is a bright, bright woman."

"Granted."

"She is careful with money."

"I'll buy that too."

"It costs a lot less to bring home an urn full of ashes, and if you killed somebody, it's a lot safer." The silence was so long I thought he had hung up. "Frank?"

"I'm right here. I don't do the courtroom scene but Roger Carp does. I think he could get a lot of mileage out of what you just said. If she still wants us in her corner."

I was at the ten-thirty service at United Baptist. The big church was about half full. Had he still been in business, it would have been full. Commerce creates social obligations. Besides, it was the next-to-the-last day of the year.

I was early and I stood outside until Millis arrived. She'd taken the dark blue Continental out of storage and the man driving it seemed to be wearing the uniform of the security troops at Dias del Sol. One of Decker's pale young men went out and escorted her in, holding her in gingerly fashion by the elbow. She wore a tailored black suit, a small hat with a short black veil, no lipstick.

The Rev. Dr. Barnell Innerlake conducted the service. He seemed hesitant, as though working from a revised script. He recounted Billy's humble beginnings and his good works after G.o.d blessed his energies with some cash money.