by Ross Thomas
“How much did he owe you?”
“Around four thousand dollars.”
“And you didn’t collect any? I would’ve.”
“That could be because you’re not into conceptual thinking. Let's say Dave was given the money to make a dope buy. His reputation won’t suffer if I reveal he did that now and then. And let's say the dope buy's for sixty thousand, but Dave's already blown six. If I’d ‘collected,’ as you call it, what he owed me, four thousand bucks, thatwould’ve left him ten thousand short, which is a lot of money in Mexico. And if you short a Mexican dope jefe that much, you can get yourself killed. That's why I neither collected nor stole any of Dave's money, if it was his, which I very much doubt.”
“That was a nice little self-exculpatory talk based on supposition,” Knox said. “What I want are details. I don’t care how trivial.”
“Okay. Trivial details. The taxi came. A Volkswagen. I gave the kid who drove me to the airport twelve American dollars, which is about two-thirds of what he said his usual daily take is. When I got to LAX I had thirty-four bucks left. I blew twenty-four on a cab. My net worth is now four dollars and change and I’d appreciate it very much, fella, if you’d get the fuck off my back.”
Knox's face went still. Nothing moved. His color remained the same light tan and Partain diagnosed the utter stillness as anger, certainly not embarrassment. The amusement in Knox's blue eyes had either died or gone away as he leaned toward Jessica Carver and perhaps would have yelled something at her, a threat or a warning, if Partain hadn’t said, “I’d like to ask her a couple of questions.”
Knox leaned back, his face again relaxed as the amusement in his eyes rekindled itself. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Partain arranged himself into a nonthreatening posture by resting his right elbow on a walnut side table and cupping his chin in his right palm. It made him look both slightly interested and slightly bored.
“You took a morning flight out of Guadalajara,” he said, making it sound more like an offhand statement than a question. She nodded. “Long flight?”
“Three hours and something.”
“You arrived at LAX around one or two?”
She nodded again.
“Who was on the door downstairs, Tom?” “Yes.”
“He let you in?”
“Sure. And offered to carry my bag up.” “You let him?”
“It was heavy and I was tired.” “You tip him?”
“Five dollars—which is why I’m down to four dollars and change.”
“Then what?”
“You mean after Tom left? Well, I dumped the bag on the bed, poured a double vodka on the rocks and drank it while the tub filled. I don’t remember how long my bath was. Maybe forty-five minutes. Maybe more. Then I took a long, long nap, woke up hungry and was heading for the kitchen when you materialized in the living room and threw your bag at me.”
“What bag?” Knox said.
“I told Mr. Partain not to move or I’d shoot. He spun around like a top and let go his leather carry-on. It hit me in the stomach and knocked the breath out of me.”
“What about the gun?” Knox said.
“There wasn’t any gun,” Carver said. “I lied.”
“What’d Partain do then?”
“He cooked us dinner,” Jessica Carver said.
It was 3:32 A.M. when Ovid Knox finally left and nearly 4 A.M.when Jessica Carver rose, yawned, and said she was going to bed.
After she left, Millicent Altford said, “You outwaited her.”
“I have to ask some questions,” Partain said.
“I can’t sleep anyhow so go ahead and ask.”
“This may sound personal but it's not. What's your birthday?” “That's sure no secret. July seventeenth, nineteen-thirty.” “You know your Social Security number?”
She rattled it off. “Four-four-eight—eighteen—thirty-four twenty-five.”
“A hundred dollars says the combination to your safe is either seven seventeen thirty or forty-four eight eighteen.” “No bet,” she said. “Which one?”
“My birthday. Seven right, seventeen left, nineteen right, thirty left. I changed the combination after the horse was stolen, but I haven’t memorized the new numbers because there's not much point.”
“That money you showed me in Santa Paula,” Partain said. “What about it?”
“I was sitting here, half listening to Knox, when it occurred to me that what you showed me could’ve been a flash bundle. One-hundred-dollar bills on top of bound packets of plain paper. Or maybe even dollar bills underneath, if you wanted to run the de luxe model by me.”
“I offered to let you count it.”
“What if I said let's go back up there tomorrow and count it together?”
“Swell. Let's go. Now do Iget to ask what the hell you’re getting at?”
“I’m getting at the ‘just in case,’ “ he said. “That was your reason for taking me up to Santa Paula: in case something happened to you, there’d be somebody who knew about the damp money.”
“It's damn well bone-dry by now.”
“But it was almost as if you had a premonition that somebody’d try to kill you. Or was it more than premonition—say a real honest-to-God threat, which is why you hired me in the first place?”
“No premonition. No threat. Just logic. Somebody stole one-point-two million dollars of nonexistent invisible money. Money I couldn’t even report stolen. I believe the thief knew that. In fact, nobody to this day knows it was stolen except you, me and the thief. Or thieves. That's why I decided I needed a just-in-case witness— somebody who’d go after both the money and the thief if something happened to me like being smothered to death with a pillow.”
“You have a will made out?” Partain said.
“Everything goes to Jessie.”
“And Jessie's broke.”
She frowned at him, although it was really more glower than frown, but then a merry grin erased it and she said, “Nice try. Hell, it wasn’t just nice, it was almost elegant. Jessie and Dave are broke in Guadalajara, right?”
Partain nodded, barely smiling.
“Dave wakes up one morning with his usual hangover and asks Jessie how much her mama's worth, and Jessie says she doesn’t know exactly, but maybe a million or two. So Dave says, Honey, why don’t we run up to L.A. and kill Mama and make it look like somebody else did it? Well, Jessie thinks inheriting all of Mama's money right away is a real fine idea. So they fly up here, but not together, and Jessie finds you in residence.”
“I got here after she did,” Partain said.
“Details,” Altford said. “Meantime, Dave gets a bit smashed, develops a case of cold feet and needs to talk to Jessie. But you’re in the way. Then you and I traipse off to Santa Paula to admire the invisible money while Jessie and Dave plot and plan. How's that sound?”
“Slick,” Partain said.
“Okay. Dave gets hold of some doctor clothes, sneaks into my hospital room and tries to smother me but botches the job. He calls Jessiefrom a pay phone on the corner and she says, ‘Don’t worry, darlin’, just wait right there on the corner and some friends of mine in a brown van’ll come by and pick you up.’ Sure enough, the van arrives, Dave hops in, they dump him out dead in my driveway and poor Jessie's net worth is still only four bucks and change.”
Partain grinned. “I like it—even if it didn’t happen.”
“The part about Dave happened. The part where he died.”
“Let's go back to the safe's combination. Who else knew it?”
“Just Jessie and me.”
“Did she write it down or memorize it?”
Altford frowned, trying to remember. “She wrote it down on some-thing—I remember now, on her driver's license so she wouldn’t lose it.” “Your birthday?”
“Who remembers Mama's birthday?”
“Then Dave could’ve accidentally run across it.”
“It wouldn’t have been an accident.”
/>
“Probably not,” Partain said, paused, then asked, “You discovered the money was missing the day after the election.” She nodded. “November fourth.”
“Where were you the evening and night of the election?” “After wandering for twelve years in the political wilderness? Out celebrating.”
“Had a drink or two, I imagine.”
“Five or six.”
“Get home late?”
“Very late. About three A.M.”
“Fall into bed?”
“Managed to get my clothes off first.”
“Then Dave could’ve flown in that afternoon or evening, opened the safe anytime after one A.M. when Jack, the night man, got off, thenbeen back in Guadalajara by midmorning, noon at the latest, before anyone knew he was gone.”
“Then where's my one-point-two million?”
“What's five percent of that?” Partain said.
The number came first, followed instantly by rage. “Sixty thousand dollars—just about what he dumped on Jessie's bed. The son of a bitch stole my money on commission, then mooched off my daughter. What a piece of shit.”
Partain merely nodded and said, “You ever give Jessie a key card to the building and your place here?”
“When I first moved in. Sometimes she’d stay a weekend or even a month, if she was between jobs. But three or four months ago she wrote she’d lost it and told me to get the locks changed or whatever they do when a key card's lost. I just never got around to it.”
Partain reached into his pocket and brought out the key card he’d removed from the dead Dave Laney's mouth. Altford stared at it for a moment, then asked, “Where’d you get that?”
“Somebody stuck it in Dave's mouth.”
“What's it supposed to be—a threat? A warning? A curse?”
“It's supposed to make you worry about what it is.”
“What I need to know is who the fuck put Dave up to it? Who talked him into stealing one million two hundred thousand dollars for a lousy five percent commission?”
“Someone who wanted the money, knew about it and had a total lock on Dave.”
“Okay. You’re my security wizard. What do I do now?”
“Call in reinforcements.”
“Aw, hell, Partain. Who?”
“Your old flame, General Winfield.”
“Why? I mean, why him?”
“Because he's a preeminent authority on Major General Walker Hudson.”
“What's a serving Army general got to do with me and my money?”
“For one thing, he's Dave's uncle. For another, he's the guy I beat the shit out of down in El Salvador.”
CHAPTER 17
The century-old red brick house was a tiny two-story affair in the 400 block of Fourth Street, Southeast, and a pleasant stroll from the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Capitol building and the birthplace of J. Edgar Hoover.
It was owned free and clear by Emory Kite, the private investigator, who sat on a red plush couch as old as the house itself, counting $50,000 in $100 bills onto a marble-top table with carved griffin legs that clutched glass balls in their claws.
It was 7:14 A.M. and Kite was still wearing a much too long green velvet bathrobe or dressing gown that Colonel Ralph Millwed thought made him look like one ofthe more unsavory Disney dwarfs. Grumpy, the Colonel decided, running through the seven names as he watched Kite count the money quickly, even expertly, licking his right forefinger after every tenth bill.
Once he reached the five hundredth bill, Kite replaced the ten banded packets in the big brown paper Safeway bag they had arrived in and folded the sack's top over three times, securing it with an enormous blue plastic paper clip.
Now cradling the bag, he wriggled backward on the couch until his short legs almost stuck straight out beneath the green robe. Kite gave the money a pat that was almost a caress and said, “When?”
“You have seventy-two hours,” the Colonel said.
“Not enough. Not near enough.”
“Make do,” the Colonel said.
“L.A.'s one big town, Ralphie. I gotta get situated, do some tracking, run the routes, figure the percentages. It all takes time.”
“Do it within three days and you get another fifty thousand. If it takes more time than that, you get just what's in the sack.”
“How about expenses?”
“You get expenses no matter what.”
Kite turned the corners of his wide mouth down, forming the twin hooks that Millwed had come to despise because they often meant the little shit had just thought up something elaborate, expensive and probably too good to turn down.
“How’d you like the way my Mexican friends out there handled that rush-rush order?” Kite said.
“I didn’t know they were Mexicans.”
“Yeah, well, they’re actually Mexican-Americans, but how d’you think they handled it—the nephew thing?”
“They did what they were paid to do,” the Colonel said, smiled slightly, then asked, “Do they need a letter of reference?”
“No, but while I’m there, I thought I might use ‘em as backup out of my own pocket.”
“Emory,” the Colonel said, his voice nearly toneless but full of warning.
Kite widened his eyes until they were brimming with feigned innocence. “What?”
“You will not under any circumstances subcontract this thing. Understood?”
“Never crossed my mind. I’m talking backup—contingency stuff. The General wants a custom job and I’ll do it just the way he likes. Set your objective, he used to tell me, then ram straight toward it. That's the way he likes a job done and the Captain and Mrs. Central America are a good example of it. So's the General's nephew. And you gotta admire the General for that because I can’t even imagine what it must’ve cost him. I don’t mean money. I mean the way it must’ve made him feel.”
“He felt nothing,” the Colonel said.
“I can’t believe that, Ralphie,” Kite said, obviously believing every word. “His own nephew.”
“General Hudson long ago decided that remorse and regret are counterproductive emotions. Once he decided that, he had his removed.”
Kite chuckled. “That's a good one. But you know what I hear? I hear that before he went to Vietnam, way back when he was a lieutenant or captain, he had his appendix out even though it wasn’t bothering him. He must’ve figured coming down with appendicitis way out in the boonies would’ve been sort of, like you say, counterproductive. So maybe while they were taking out his appendix, they also cut out his remorse and regret glands. What d’you think?”
“I think you’d better get to the point, if there is one.”
“The point is Twodees.”
“He bothers you?”
“Him? Nah. But after he's fixed, I figure he’ll be the last one—the last you guys’ll have to worry about anyway. Then it’ll only be me, you and the General who know what happened to those two kids from El Salvador, the nephew and Twodees.”
“Get to it, Emory.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking—and I’d like your advice on this—but what I’ve been thinking is maybe I oughta take out some insurance.”
“What kind?” the Colonel said.
“The usual kind. Find myself a lawyer and hand him one of those to-be-opened-only-if-something-nasty-happens-to-me letters.”
Colonel Millwed leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands together and studied Kite with icy gray eyes that never seemed to thaw.
“Do what you please, Emory. But should something bad ever happen to me, something equally bad will happen to you and General Hudson. I can only assume that General Hudson has made similar arrangements.”
Kite nodded contentedly several times and said, “That's good news, Ralphie. Each of us looking out for himself means that we’re all looking out for each other. Like the three musketeers. Sort of.”
“Sort of,” the Colonel agreed and leaned back in his chair.
/> Kite wriggled off the couch and rose, clutching the money bag to his chest. “Look. I better go call my travel agent at home and see if she can get me on that ten o’clock flight to L.A. You got any problem with me in first class?”
“None.”
“You gonna stick around till I find out about the flight?” “I thought I might.”
“Yeah,” Kite said. “So did I.” He turned and left the room, the money bag still clasped to his chest, the hem of his long green velvet dressing gown trailing after him.
Colonel Millwed rose and wandered around the parlor that took up half of the ground floor and was stuffed with furniture, photographs, paintings and souvenirs that dated from the 1900s to the mid-1950s. None of them had been supplied by Kite, who had bought the house and its contents from the great-great-grandniece of the woman who first lived there in 1905 as a 21-year-old bride. When her husband died in 1957, she lived in the house alone until her death in1980. A year later, her only heir, the great-great-grandniece, who lived in Oregon, sold everything to Kite.
Millwed had once asked Kite if living in the old place wasn’t like living in a museum. “Maybe,” Kite had said. “But it's my museum.”
The Colonel turned from his inspection of a corner whatnot stand as Kite reentered the room, wearing a Raiders sweatshirt, faded jeans, scuffed white Reeboks and on his big head a blue Dodgers baseball cap.
“That should make you invisible,” Millwed said.
“Think so?” Kite said. “I just checked the Weather Channel and it's gonna be sunny and about seventy-six out there. Maybe I’ll go to the beach this afternoon.”
“And Twodees?”
Kite seemed to give Partain some thought. “Well, maybe I’ll fix Twodees first, then go to the beach.”
CHAPTER 18
General Vernon Winfield was the last to board the German-made shuttle bus that ferried passengers to and from their planes at Dulles International. The shuttle started off smoothly enough but one of the standing passengers wasn’t quite prepared and stumbled against the General, forcing him to step back and onto the toe of a seated passenger.
Winfield turned to apologize and was surprised to find himself staring down at the equally surprised and upturned face of Emory Kite. The General recovered first. “Well, Mr. Kite. I am sorry.”
