McGuire smiled, shrugged, and turned to climb the stairs to his room.
“Hey, McGuire,” he heard Lumsden call after him. “You want I should check what Sinatra was doing at the time? Hell, he lives just down the road a piece.”
Chapter Eight
For an instant, McGuire was disoriented by a sudden arousal from unconsciousness. Where was he? Blackness all around. A valley of silence following . . . what?
The telephone rang a second time. McGuire looked at the glowing hands of his watch; it was after two o’clock. He groped for the receiver in the dark, brought it to his ear, lay back against the pillow and scratched out “Hello,” still half asleep.
The voice in his ear had a singsong lilt, like an awkward adult befriending a very young child.
“Well, well, well. Did I awake you, sir? Drew you from the arms of Morpheus, did I? Tell me, do you record your dreams? Some idiots do. Kind of like describing hallucinations, isn’t it? What would you think of somebody . . .”
McGuire sat upright. “Who the fuck is this?” he almost shouted into the receiver.
He heard cackling laughter in reply. “Oh, that’s precious, Mozart. Precious, precious, precious. If you can’t be witty, be loud. I agree. Beat their eardrums with decibels . . .” McGuire cursed, reached in the dark with his free hand for the telephone and slammed the receiver down.
He lay back again and closed his eyes.
As he expected, the phone rang again. This time, McGuire sat on the edge of the bed, switched on the bedside light and pulled his pen and notepad to him before answering.
“What do you want?” he said in a flat, threatening voice.
The caller’s tone was now serious. “Don’t do that, Mozart. Don’t hang up on me like that. A late hour it is, I agree. Can’t be helped. But there are things to be done in the cover of darkness. No other time. Understand?”
“What’s this Mozart stuff?” McGuire asked. He wrote “Mozart?” on the pad.
The caller’s voice resumed its friendly singsong patter.
“Yes, yes, the boy genius. Vomiting string quartets all over the place. And there you were in the midst of it, tippling Bordeaux wine. None of that uppity Napa Valley turpentine for those who keep the flame of Palm Springs culture burning like a bright beacon of taste. And nothing for us gathered in the public area, our snotty noses pressed against the class-defined window separating culture from crud. Eh, Mozart? Speak up, sir. Don’t just lie there swallowing your bile.”
“So you were at the museum tonight?” McGuire wrote “Museum?” on the pad and underlined it.
“Oh my, oh my.” The voice acquired an upper-class British accent. “Watson, the man perceives all, knows all, commands all.” Then, dropping an octave: “And understands nothing.”
“You’re crazy,” McGuire replied. He tossed the notepad aside.
“I retract that opinion. He doubts my sanity. Thus he is beginning to get smart.”
“Look,” McGuire began, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but when I hang up, I’m pulling the telephone out of the wall. And if I ever come across you . . .”
“You have to,” the voice said urgently.
“I have to what?”
“You have to listen. Because I know who you are, McGuire. I know what you don’t know. Which is a hell of a lot.”
“All right.” McGuire dragged his notepad back. “If you’ve got information for me, let’s have it. Where do you want to meet?”
“Meet?” the voice said in amazement. The singsong delivery returned. “Meet? Oh no, no, no, Mozart. We can’t meet. Never. Twains can’t meet, or don’t you know your Kipling? What am I saying? He’s a cop. It’s astonishing that he has a nodding acquaintance with Mozart. Kipling? Is that a kind of smoked fish?” The caller laughed again. “But I insult you, Mozart, with my British references. No, speak not of monarch-land to a Bostonian whose backyard patio was the site of a raucous tea party, am I right? Am I right, Mozart? So I’ll feed you something else, something poor Bunkie might have liked, although Bunkie had all the culture of a rat turd when you came down to it.”
“What do you know about Crawford?” McGuire demanded.
The voice continued its mad patter. “Bunkie knew limericks, yes he did. ‘There once was a man from Virginia . . .’ Do you suppose dirty limericks are banned as unseemly in Palm Springs, Mozart? Could there be an inspection booth on the road from Riverside where they squirt something in your ear to flush away tasteless ditties? Interesting thought . . .”
“Look, if you have any information on what happened to Bunker Crawford, I want to hear it.” Keep him talking, McGuire told himself.
“Bunkie? Yes, Bunkie. First-rate patriot. So he wouldn’t appreciate Kipling, not Bunkie. Whitman’s more his style, but he wouldn’t understand him either. Except maybe the dirty parts. Relax, Mozart. I won’t read the dirty parts.” And the voice dropped to a conspiratorial hiss. McGuire pictured the speaker’s lips against the mouthpiece as he recited the words. “‘Delaying not, hurrying not, it whispered me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, lisped to me the low and delicious word, Death.’ Like it, Mozart? It whispered death. A tad dramatic I grant, but I thought you would be amused by its presumption.”
“If you knew Bunker Crawford, I’d like to talk to you,” McGuire said, trying to maintain calm in his voice.
“Talk? Talk, Mozart? Yes, we must. We must. But not now. Can’t. It’s Lafaro. He needs to be fed.”
And he was gone.
McGuire dialled the front desk and asked a sleepy night clerk if he had just placed two calls to McGuire’s room. Yes, the clerk replied. Normally they question calls to guests between midnight and six a.m. but the caller insisted it was urgent, that he was McGuire’s brother, there was a family emergency. The clerk was worried. Was it all right? Would McGuire accept more calls if they came in?
McGuire assured the clerk he would and hung up.
He ran through the caller’s message in his mind. Had he been drunk? Probably not. His words weren’t slurred. Was he insane? Maybe so. But when he called a second time, there had been a profound urgency in his voice. Not the rambling babble of a psychotic, but the focused pleading of a desperate man.
Mozart. And wine. He had been at the museum tonight. He had watched and listened to McGuire during the evening. He knew Crawford. And who was Lafaro?
He must have fallen asleep. The sun shining through the palm trees beyond his window woke him. Rolling to the edge of the bed and holding his head in his hands, McGuire stared at the notepad on the night table. “Mozart?” he read. “Museum?”
He showered, dressed, walked downstairs and rapped on the door of the police investigation room.
“What the hell.” Lumsden stood in the open doorway, his immense body wrapped in a tattered blue terry-cloth robe. He grunted before turning and padding slowly back into the room, where a rumpled folding bed sat in the corner.
“I got a phone call,” McGuire said to Lumsden’s broad back. “About two o’clock this morning. From some nut who was at the museum last night. And he knew Crawford.”
Lumsden sat on the edge of the bed, his elbows resting on his knees. “Wonderful, McGuire. Me and five of my guys break our asses eighteen hours a day and can’t find shit on the guy and you get a phone call. Restores a man’s faith in the powers of deduction, doesn’t it?” He reached for a notebook. “What’s the guy’s name?”
“I don’t know,” McGuire said. “He didn’t give it.”
“So how did he know Crawford?”
“He didn’t mention that either.”
Lumsden rolled his eyes up to meet McGuire’s. “All right. Then why did he call you?”
McGuire shrugged. “I don’t know. I called the desk as soon as he hung up. All the night clerk could tell me was that it was an outside call.”
The laughte
r began in Lumsden’s belly, rattled through his chest and emerged from his broad mouth with the sound of coal spilling down a metal chute. “An outside call? Now isn’t that something. You managed to eliminate everybody here in the motel. You are one hot-shot detective, aren’t you?”
“He mentioned somebody named Lafaro,” McGuire said coldly. “That name mean anything to you?”
“Naw,” Lumsden grinned. “But hey, all we have to do is check the motel registry, right? If there’s nobody there named Lafaro, we can cross off everybody here all over again. Just like your outside call.” He lay back on the cot, still laughing, an arm over his eyes. “Shee-it, McGuire. Don’t slam the door on the way out, okay?”
Ralph was conscious, but he lay with his eyes closed while McGuire stood over him, one of the police guards hovering at his elbow. As promised, Bonnar had relaxed the rule against McGuire visiting Ralph.
A nurse changed the IV bottle and recorded Ralph’s pulse rate before leaving, closing the door silently behind her.
“Ralph, it’s me, Joe,” McGuire said softly. “Can you hear me?”
Ralph’s eyes fluttered open, tried to focus on McGuire’s face, and closed again. He whispered “Yes.”
“You’re going to be all right. They’re planning to fly you home in a day or two. Chartered air ambulance. This time next week you’ll be stuffing yourself with clams and cold beer.”
A grin flickered at the corner of Innes’s mouth. “Kind of like it here. Cute nurses.”
“Ralph, listen,” McGuire said urgently. “Do you remember anything at all? Did you see anybody? Anything?”
Ralph’s mouth formed the words, once, twice, before they emerged. “Nothing, Joe. Son of a bitch was invisible. Nothing.”
McGuire touched the man’s arm. “Okay, Ralph. It’s okay. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Ralph’s eyes opened. Still unfocused, they searched the room in McGuire’s direction. “Do me a favour,” he said.
McGuire said sure, anything.
“Call Janet,” Ralph said. “Tell her . . . tell her you were talking to me. And that I’m okay.”
“Sure,” McGuire repeated.
“Nice of you to do it.” Janet Parsons’s voice carried barely a trace of irony. “Boy Scouts give you a badge for this?”
McGuire sighed. He was stretched out on his unmade bed, a cup of takeout coffee in his hand. “I would have called even if he hadn’t asked me.”
“They’re flying him out tomorrow,” Janet continued, as though she hadn’t heard him. “Fat Eddie’s arranging the air ambulance. I’m trying to hitch a ride down. But Eddie may come too.”
“You’re going to spend eight hours in a cramped aluminum tube with Fat Eddie Vance? That’ll be fun.”
“I’ll do it for Ralph,” she said. “Six months ago I would have done it for you, too.”
He wished she hadn’t said that.
Moments later, lying back with his eyes closed and hearing the phone ring, he was still wishing she hadn’t said that. He reached for the receiver.
“Ah, Mozart.”
McGuire sat upright. “Who are you?” Where the hell was his notepad? On the chest of drawers across the room where he had tossed it.
“Not yet, Mozart. Not yet. I’ll tell you when the time arrives. And when it does, it shall pass. The time, I mean. But it doesn’t, does it Mozart? The core of human tragedy. Time doesn’t pass. Time stays. People pass.”
“I need to talk to you.” McGuire stood, holding the phone in one hand, his other hand extended to reach the notepad.
“But you are talking to me, Mozart. You are.”
“I mean about Crawford.” He couldn’t reach the chest of drawers. Damn it.
“Yes, let us indeed speak of dead men. But let us deal with the living, Mozart. The dead are beyond redemption, beyond recall. It’s the living we must fear. Except for desert ghosts, of course. Like Lafaro.”
“Who’s Lafaro? You mentioned him last night. Something about feeding him.”
“Not your kind of man, Mozart. No culture. No sense of the exquisite, of the ethereal. But interesting. Fascinating even.” The caller’s voice dropped. “Find him, Mozart. Find him, learn of him, and you will begin to understand.”
“I’d like to . . .” McGuire began.
“Drive to Las Vegas,” the voice ordered. “Today. Through the insanity of the desert, Mozart. Five, maybe six hours of insane landscape and you emerge in the totally irrefutable logic of Las Vegas. Logic, Mozart. Never heard that putrid plastic city described in such terms, have you? But perfectly logical it is. In the midst of the hottest, driest, most inhospitable region of our great and magnificent land, where they do unspeakable things to the earth such as pummel it with radiation, it is indeed logical to build neon palaces as temples to unhindered greed and middle-class glitz. Glitz, Mozart. Yin to culture’s yang. Sugar to its salt. String me no quartets in Las Vegas, Mozart. . . .”
“I’ll meet you there,” McGuire interrupted, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Just tell me where.”
“Eager he is! Hold on to that eagerness, Mozart. You’re going to need it.”
“Where?” McGuire repeated.
“The casino in the Flamingo,” the voice replied. “A blackjack table. Bit of advice, Mozart. Draw on fifteen. Hold on seventeen. Pull sixteen, and you’re on your own.”
And he was gone again.
Ronnie Schantz’s voice was soothing, even over thousands of miles of wire and untold numbers of satellite reflections.
“Ollie’s sleeping,” she replied after McGuire’s greeting. “He and I are working a couple of grey files for Eddie Vance. One’s especially nasty, Joe. The kind of thing you would like. Husband and wife found in a locked house, both dead from stab wounds. No motive, no suspects. Definitely not a robbery either. Nothing else in the place was touched. Ollie’s got a theory, though, and I’m cross-checking the husband’s employment record with some trips he was making up to Canada.”
“Ronnie, you’re turning into as good a cop as your old man.”
“Don’t be silly,” she admonished him. “All I’m doing is working the computer while he makes the connections. But I’m telling you, Joseph. It’s playing hell with my baking. Ollie’s complaining he hasn’t tasted a macaroon in weeks.” Then, lowering her voice: “How’s Ralph? Is he really coming home tomorrow?”
“They hope so. He’s mending. He’ll make the flight all right. Time will take care of the rest.”
“Are you any closer to finding out who did it?”
“A step or two,” McGuire answered. He explained the telephone calls. “This guy keeps mentioning a name as though I should know it,” McGuire said.
“What’s the name?”
“Sounds like Lafaro.”
“I’m right here at the computer,” she said. “Give me a second and I’ll log on to federal files, see if there’s anything there.”
The soft clicking of the computer keyboard sounded in his ear over the laughter of children from the pool area, the hum of traffic on Palm Canyon Drive, the scratchy roar of an aircraft rising from the airport. . . .
Ronnie’s breath sounded over the receiver, a sharp intake.
“What’s the matter?” McGuire demanded.
She laughed nervously. “I’m not sure,” she replied. “I did a global search on Lafaro and got one. A Rocco S. Lafaro, last known address, Mercury, Nevada. So I did a request for information and a file comes up I’ve never seen before.”
“What’s on it?”
“The usual. He’s five-foot ten, a hundred and seventy-five pounds, black hair, dark complexion, brown eyes, tattoos on both forearms. One says ‘USMC’ and the other . . . now why would a man have that tattooed on his arm?”
“Have what?”
She sighed, and he could visualize her shaking her head at another outrage
ous male trait. “Joe, I’m not going to repeat it, but I’ll bet he uses it as a noun, verb, adjective and preposition in every sentence he ever speaks. He sounds like that kind of guy.”
McGuire grinned. “Okay, Ronnie, you don’t have to say it. What makes the file so special?”
“Wait a minute, I’ll get to that. This . . . this character was born March 25, 1947 in Davenport, Iowa . . . never finished high school, enlisted in US Marine Corps October 11, 1964 . . . promoted to master sergeant before being assigned to special field tactical training March 21, 1968 . . .”
“Ronnie, what’s he wanted for?”
“Going AWOL,” she replied.
“When?”
“This is a hoot, Joe . . .”
“Come on, Ronnie. Just tell me when.”
“September 19, 1969.”
McGuire spoke slowly, dragging the words out as though examining them carefully before speaking. “The guy’s been gone for over twenty years? And they’re still looking for him?”
“More than that,” she said. “That’s what makes this file so different. There’s a bar flashing off and on across the bottom. It says no action is to be taken against Lafaro without first contacting Military Intelligence Directorate in Twentynine Palms, California. They give an access code here.”
“What is it?”
“‘Lark.’ Like the bird.”
“Try it.”
More soft clicks in his ear. McGuire’s stomach growled.
“They’re asking me for my security code number, Joe.”
“So use it.”
“They want a federal code.”
“Try yours anyway,” McGuire suggested. But he knew what the response was going to be.
“‘Access denied,’” she quoted over the wire. Another nervous laugh, then: “Joseph, just what in God’s name have you got yourself involved with this time?”
He had less luck dialling Glynnis Vargas’s house.
“Mis’ Vargas, she ees res’ing,” the maid said in her heavily accented English.
Whisper Death Page 11
