He Huffed and He Puffed

by Barbara Paul

  Jo rummaged through drawers looking for paper. Richard wouldn’t explain what he had in mind; he said only that we had to find a way to get back in here once the guards thought we had left. Crack Strode’s security system, in other words. A diversion, I suggested. He acknowledged the possibility and bent over the drawing Jo was making of Strode’s private quarters. “You said you left one of these doors unlocked?” he asked. “Which one?”

  “The door to the library,” she answered, pointing to the drawing. “From the library you can go through Strode’s dressing room to the bedroom and on to the other dressing room, currently unoccupied.”

  “Bathroom?”

  “One off each dressing room.” She sketched them in.

  Richard nodded. “All right, let’s map the rest of this place.”

  We split up. I got the exterior of the house. I went around trying every door and window I could find; everything was locked. The security guard at the front gate came up and wanted to know what I was looking for. I told him secret passages. He blinked and went back to the gate. I worked my way around back and found another gate, for deliveries. It was electronically controlled. I wrote it all down and made a little sketch.

  The kitchen staff had left a cold buffet for us, so we gathered in the dining room when we were finished. Jo and Richard drank coffee from the big urn on the sideboard, but I wanted something cold. I grabbed a can from the fridge, but it turned out to be one of those artificial lemonylimony things that taste like something dipped up out of a public swimming pool so I had to go back and make sure I got a beer that time. There was no comparing of sketches while we ate, because of the ever-watchful camera making sure we didn’t abscond with the silver. But we could talk, and I let Richard know I was getting just a trifle annoyed with his hush-hush approach to problem solving. He said be patient, as if he were talking to a child.

  “I found a wine cellar,” Jo said. “And it has its own outside door, around at the side of the house. If the key is in that little cabinet near the kitchen, that could be our way in. But I assume there’s a camera outside aimed at the door.”

  “Wait ’til we get upstairs,” I said. “I marked all the outside cameras in my sketch of the grounds.”

  We finished in a hurry and went up to my room. We spread out all our papers on the bed and started piecing them together. Jo located her wine cellar, and I found the corresponding place in my sketch of the grounds. Sure enough, there was a camera pointed at the wine cellar door.

  “Damn those things!” Jo exploded. “How can we hope to get anything done with those cameras watching our every move?”

  “Yes, we’ve got to do something about them,” Richard muttered. “Jack, a while ago you suggested a diversion. Could you plan one? To get the security guard away from his station so one of us can get in there and disable the cameras.”

  Ah wow, wasn’t that mahvelous. The man in charge was delegating authority. Showing his leadership qualities. “If I come up with a diversion, do you know how to disable that bank of cameras?”

  He shrugged. “Pull out wires.”

  “Uh-huh. And when exactly is this diversion to be pulled off? And how long must it last? And must I do it alone or do I get some help? And last but by no means least, why am I doing all this? Come on, Richard, stop playing mystery man.” I put on a phony-polite voice. “Some of us are beginning to wonder whether you really truly do have a plan, Mr. Bruce, sir, yes we are. And if you do have a plan, Mr. Bruce, sir, why, pray tell, do you keep it secret? Could it be, shocking though the thought is, could it possibly be, that your secret plan has Jo Gillespie and Jack McKinstry going belly-up while Richard Bruce, Esquire, comes out smelling like a rose?”

  His facial expression never changed. “Do you think you could do a better job of disabling the cameras than I could?”

  I made a noise of exasperation. “I know I could. I’ve done my share of wiring on helicopter control panels. Television monitors are child’s play.”

  “All right, plan it that way then. You—”

  Damn him, he was ignoring me. “Richard—”

  He used his hand as a stop sign. “I’ll tell you this much. My plan assumes that the original evidence we want is locked in a vault in Strode’s office. If it isn’t there, the plan isn’t worth spit. Now—do we go with it?”

  Jo and I exchanged a look; I rolled my eyes and shrugged. “We go with it,” Jo decided for both of us. Oh, why the hell not. Anything was better than sitting around doing nothing.

  It was growing late. None of us had gotten much sleep the night before and it was beginning to catch up with us. But on we talked, about doors and keys and cameras and security guards and other equally boring subjects. Jo and Richard between them decided the wine cellar door was the best way back into the house because it would be the least used of the house’s various exits and entrances. (Exactly why we wanted to come back into this place, Richard didn’t deign to explain.) Finally he announced he had to sleep on it and would tell us in the morning whether he thought the plan had a chance of working or not.

  That was fine with me; right then I just wanted him out of my room. I was tired, really beat. When Richard had left, Jo came over and gave me a little hug. “Don’t look so glum, Jack,” she told me. “It’ll be better in the morning.”

  I held on to her. “He’s enjoying himself, you know. Doing all the planning, keeping us in the dark.”

  She didn’t pull away. “I suspect that’s the way he does everything. Richard’s used to giving orders.”

  I held on tighter. “Yeah, well, I’m not used to taking them. And neither are you, I imagine. That had better be one hell of a plan.”

  She still didn’t pull away. “We’ll know in a few hours. Try to relax, Jack—you’re so tense.”

  Now I ask you, was that an invitation or was that an invitation? I kissed her. But before it could turn serious, she backed off. Not quite yet, it seemed. “I’m going to stand in a hot shower until I’m asleep on my feet,” she smiled and went across the hall to her own room. “Good night, Jack.”

  Sure, good night—I got it. Suddenly I didn’t feel so tired anymore. I took a shower and shaved and brushed my teeth twice. I hadn’t brought a robe or pajamas (never use ’em) so I pulled on a pair of trousers. Had I given her enough time? Yeah, I’d given her enough time.

  But I hesitated. An idea had been teasing at me, something I wanted to take to Richard. And this looked like the only chance I’d get to talk to him alone; ten to one tomorrow we’d be sticking to one another like leeches. A quick trip down the hall first, then Jo.

  I knocked on Richard’s door. His voice said, “Just a minute!” and I could hear him moving around inside. He was still pulling up his pajama bottoms when he opened the door. “Something wrong?” he asked, casually bracing his arms against the doorjambs and thus effectively blocking my entrance.

  “We need to talk, Richard. Let me in.”

  “In the morning. I was going to bed.”

  “Not in the morning—now. It won’t wait.”

  His facial expression didn’t change but his eyes bore holes in me. He dropped one arm and allowed me to enter the royal chambers, I felt so honored. “What is it, Jack?”

  “A proposition.” I cleared my throat. “If your great plan doesn’t work, there’s still a way you and I can improve the odds. It’s Jo. Say Strode turns in his evidence to the police—what happens to her? She pleads mercy killing, she gets a light sentence, she’s out again in a few years. It’s not going to be that easy for you or me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You know damn well what I’m saying. If we end up drawing straws, let’s make sure it’s just you and me doing the drawing. A fifty-fifty chance beats one in three any day. Jo doesn’t have as much to lose as we do. What do you say?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Just shut her out?”

  “Why not? What can she do about it?”

  “She can break your bloody head, that’s what she can do
about it.” It was Jo’s voice that said that, and Jo herself was standing in the doorway of Richard’s bathroom. I wanted to sink through the floor; she’d heard what I said, there was no way of denying it, how was I going to get out of this one, and what the hell was she doing in Richard’s bathroom? Jo was wearing a clinging robe-thing that made it pretty clear she didn’t have anything on underneath. She charged over to stand directly in front of me, her eyes blazing. “Gee, Jack, you sure are one swell fellow, you are. I feel so lucky, getting to meet you. What a prince of a guy.”

  Brazen it out. “Yeah? What about you? Using your bedroom charms on Richard—to get him to give me the shaft, no doubt. That’s okay, I suppose.”

  She punched me in the nose. She didn’t slap, she didn’t scratch, she didn’t beat on my chest with her fists. She punched. And immediately regretted it, I was delighted to see. “Oh my god—my hand!” she yelled. “What was I thinking of?” I felt the blood trickling down my lip and hoped every bone in her goddamned precious hand was broken.

  I had my fist up to hit her back but Richard stopped me. “Let’s see,” he said to Jo and took her hand. “Wiggle your fingers.”

  She wiggled them. “Oh, it’s all right. I just scared myself, that’s all. How foolish—risking my hand because of a piece of filth like Jack McKinstry.”

  “Tell me,” Richard said, pinning me with that icy look of his, “is ‘Jack’ short for ‘Jackass’? Haven’t you figured it out yet? Strode isn’t going to let any of us go. None of us walks away from this. You want to draw straws for who sells his House of Glass shares? Jack, it doesn’t matter who sells. He’s out to get us all. Now do you understand?”

  Jesus. Jesus.

  Jo laughed unpleasantly. “He hadn’t even thought of it. You trust Strode to keep his word, do you? Ah Jack, Jack! You’re about as sharp-witted as you are trustworthy. And absolutely terrific in a crisis.”

  I turned my back and walked away without answering. I can’t stand sarcastic women.

  6

  RICHARD BRUCE, SUNDAY:

  Joanna wouldn’t stay the night; that called for a greater display of trust than either of us was prepared to make, I suppose, although we did drift off to sleep for a bit. The day had been emotionally exhausting for her; it had taken her almost an hour to calm down after learning from Jack’s own lips of his inexcusable treachery. I wasn’t totally surprised, for the situation we were in was exacerbating all his worst qualities; but his approach seemed clumsy even for him.

  What an incompetent Jack McKinstry was. He was born rich, good-looking, and a fool; amazing how often those three attributes went together. Jack had thought no farther ahead than the immediate weekend: get the evidence back and all his problems would be solved. He’d overlooked the simplest, most obvious fact of his predicament—that even if he did get his hands on the statement the helicopter pilot had signed, all Strode had to do was get the man to sign another one.

  But recovering the original evidence would buy time, and that was something we desperately needed. Time for me to locate Mrs. Estelle Rankin and pry her out of Strode’s grasp. I bore no ill will against the woman; she was doing what she could to survive. It would be a simple enough matter to better Strode’s offer, whatever it was. So I would give her that option—cooperate or die. If she showed any reluctance at all, I would say what I always said in these situations: Do exactly as I say or you’ll never have to make another decision in your life. All thirty seconds of it. It worked most of the time; very few resisted after that. I once had to dispatch a man with my own hands, instead of delegating the job to someone hired for the purpose. That was messy; I didn’t enjoy it.

  As it turned out, I was in a better position than either Joanna or Jack. Once I destroyed Harry Rankin’s letter, Strode wouldn’t be quite so quick to accuse me of murder, not on the basis of the unsupported testimony of one woman as to the contents of a single letter written seventeen years ago. Jack’s pilot was different. He’d been there, on the scene; he was an actual eyewitness to what had happened on board that helicopter.

  In the same way, Joanna’s Texas mercenary was an eyewitness to her one attempt at hiring a killer. That alone was not evidence that she herself had killed, but it would be sufficient to create a cloud of suspicion that could prove fatal to someone in the public eye. I didn’t think the mercenary would prove an insurmountable obstacle; he was obviously a man who took money from whoever offered the most and such men can be dealt with. I offered my help; Joanna accepted.

  She’d unknowingly solved a problem for me, with that singular admission of guilt she made in the bar yesterday. I’d been wondering how to stop all the pretense, how to get it out on the table that we were all capable of killing and would do so again if sufficiently threatened. Now only Jack persisted in playing his role of the wrongly accused, but Joanna and I understood each other. I’d half jokingly taxed her with using confession as a diversionary tactic, and the answer she’d given me was just ambiguous enough to allow me to think whatever I wanted.

  In retrospect, I think her admission she’d killed both her parents sprang from a very real sense of imminent defeat and thus was to be trusted as to its accuracy. She saw what was coming and was laying the groundwork for her defense, perhaps even testing it out on Jack and me. She did not whimper and cry and expect someone else to solve her problem for her. That was one of the things that made Joanna Gillespie who she was.

  The first time she spoke to me across the dining table on Friday evening, I knew she was a kindred spirit. That sense of self-worth that has nothing to do with vanity—it is so rare to find that quality in a woman that I had long since abandoned any hope of finding a true partner for myself. My wife hadn’t had it; none of the women I’d known since her death had had it. But there it was in abundance, in a dark-haired woman sitting across the table from me in A. J. Strode’s dining room.

  But I’d never heard of her before Friday, when Castleberry introduced her and then Jack McKinstry later sneered at me for not knowing who she was. That same evening, before we got into that fruitless talk session that kept us up most of the night, I’d called one of my assistants in Los Angeles (not a Castleberry type at all) and told him to find out as much as he could about Joanna Gillespie and Jack McKinstry before morning. He already knew who Joanna was; he’d even seen her on television earlier in the year.

  When he called back, he’d had enough basic information to give me a handle on each of them. Joanna was clearly the tougher of the two. What with her diabetes and the demands of a difficult career, she had to be tough simply to survive. Jack McKinstry’s claiming she was the best violinist in the world had not been an exaggeration, my assistant said, passing along the consensus of the music world; but when he said she was unique, I accused him of exaggerating. Not so, he said; Joanna Gillespie was one of a kind, in a class of artistry all by herself. She’d even had to make a comeback of sorts; her career had been put on hold during the final illness and death of her parents. But while I was wondering what sword A. J. Strode was holding over her head, it never once occurred to me that she had murdered her father and mother. I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like, killing two people that close. What courage it must have taken! I hadn’t even known half the crew of the Burly Girl.

  What an extraordinary woman Joanna was. Her posture was abominable. She didn’t bother with make-up. Lovely high cheekbones and golden-brown eyes. Her clothes were good, but I suspected she wore them more as a concession to decency than out of any interest in fashion. She was intelligent, and she had to have strong survival skills to be where she was in her profession. Her appearance and her way of walking and talking all broadcast one clear message: You’ve got your rules, I’ve got mine—let’s not make an issue of it. She had that wonderful don’t-give-a-damn outlook that comes only from knowing one has a special gift that raises one up over the rest of the world. No matter whatever else happened to her in her life, she would still be Joanna Gillespie, violinist supreme. One of a
kind. That uniqueness made her exciting in a way she was all too aware of, and I wasn’t the only one attuned to it. Jack had been trying to move in on her all weekend.

  Jack McKinstry was more or less what he appeared to be—a privileged, careless man who could turn the charm on or off at will. Jack was the McKinstry who didn’t work. Or hadn’t worked, according to my assistant, until a close brush with death had changed his attitude some four years back. Jack himself later told us what Strode was accusing him of, and I for one had no difficulty in believing it at all. There was something of the cornered rat about Jack McKinstry, in spite of his glib speech and his carefully cultivated appearance of poise and self-control—centeredness, I believe it’s called now. He probably had no qualms at all about throwing his friends to the wolves to save himself.

  But Jack and Joanna both were amateurs when it came to dealing with the likes of A. J. Strode; I knew as early as Friday night that I was going to have to be the one to come up with a solution for our mutual problem. By Sunday morning I knew I could count on Joanna; she understood the need for drastic action and she had the backbone to go through with it. Jack was the weak link in our chain, but we couldn’t do it without him.

  We all asked for breakfast trays in our rooms. Then we had to wait a few minutes while Joanna tested her blood sugar. But at last they were both in my room, and we were able to get down to business. Joanna wouldn’t even look at Jack; as far as she was concerned, he wasn’t there. For his part, Jack affected an air of indifference.

  “First of all,” I said, “we’re going to need a diversion, something to get the guard away from his post long enough for Jack to get in and disable the monitors—and Jack, I asked you to give it some thought. Were you able to come up with something?”

  “Do I get some help,” he asked lazily, “or am I supposed to do both the diverting and the disabling?”