"There is a stairway and an elevator, mi Coronel," Habanzo said.
"We will use the elevator," Martin said. "It may be necessary to seek evidence on the stairway. I don't think robbers would use the elevator; they make noise." He turned to the Capitan: "To judge from the position of the woman's body, I would say that she was sitting there when her throat was cut; that she was not moved there. Would you agree?"
The Capit n nodded. "Which suggests she was taken by surprise," he said. "Which in turn suggests she knew the people who murdered her."
"Possibly," Martin agreed. "Where is the elevator?"
The smell of blood in the apartment was even stronger than in the kitchen. And there were more flies.
Martin examined both bodies, then the trail of blood leading to the bathroom, and the towel used as a tourniquet. The tiles sur-rounding the bathtub were shattered, as well as the tub itself, which sat inside the tile base.
He returned to the bedroom and saw the Colt single-action revolver on the desk. A holster for a.45 automatic and an empty clip lay on the table. A bowl for pencils was on the desk. Martin picked up a pencil, hooked the trigger guard of the Colt revolver, and sniffed at the barrel. It had not been fired.
"Other weapons?" he asked.
"There is a.45 automatic, mi Coronel," Habanzo said. "It has been fired. It is in my possession."
"Where did you find it?"
"When the young Norteamericano opened the door to me, he had it in his hand. He gave it to me."
"A stolen Army pistol," the Capit n said.
"Not necessarily," Martin said. "This house is owned by el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade. The pistol may be his. It is con-ceivable that he loaned it to his son for protection."
"That is illegal."
"You tell el Coronel that, Capit n," Martin said.
He looked around the room again.
"I now wish to speak to the Norteamericano," he said. "Here. Habanzo, will you bring him up?"
"You wish to talk to him here, in the scene of the murders?" the Capitan asked.
"It sometimes makes people uneasy to be brought to the scene of the crime," Martin said. "Uneasy people often say more than they wish. Habanzo, just put him on the elevator. I'd like to speak to him alone."
"I'd prefer to be here, mi Coronel, when you speak with the suspect," the Capitan said.
"First of all, he is not a suspect. Secondly, he has refused to answer your questions. Perhaps he will answer mine."
"I respectfully protest, mi Coronel."
Martin shrugged.
"And when you have put the Norteamericano on the elevator, Habanzo, please telephone to el Coronel Savia-Gonzalez, apolo-gize for waking him at this house, and tell him that I consider it very important, in a matter of Internal Security, that he come here immediately."
"S¡, mi Coronel."
"Thank you, Comandante," Martin said.
He had a second thought.
"Where is the.45 automatic, did you say?"
"In my possession," Habanzo said.
"Can you give it to the Norteamericano and have him bring it up here?"
Habanzo's face registered surprise.
"Presumably you unloaded it?" Martin asked.
"Yes, mi Coronel."
"Then I don't think he will try to hold me at gunpoint, do you?"
"His fingerprints will be all over it!" the Capitan protested.
"Since el Comandante Habanzo has told us the Norteameri-cano was carrying the pistol when he opened the door to him, his fingerprints are already all over it," Martin said, with sarcastic patience. "Please have him bring the pistol."
"S¡, mi Coronel."
When Cletus Howell Frade stepped off the elevator, Martin was somewhat shocked at his appearance. He was naked, except for a pair of bloodstained white boxer shorts and cowboy boots. His face, chest, and legs were bloodstained, and there were finger marks where he had tried to wipe them. And he was carrying the.45 automatic by lopping a finger through the trigger guard.
"Teniente Frade, I am el Teniente Coronel Martin of Internal Security. We have met. Do you remember that?"
Clete nodded. He handed the pistol to Martin.
"This is the weapon you used to do that?" Martin asked, nod-ding toward the two bodies.
Clete was silent.
"We must talk seriously and quickly," Martin said. "Let me begin by saying I know you are an intelligence officer of the OSS. I am presuming that you are a very good one, or otherwise your government would not have sent you to Argentina."
Clete met his eyes but did not reply.
That was a shot in the dark, Teniente Frade. And, while I am not very good at judging reactions by watching people's eyes and other body signals, I'm not all that bad, either. I would wager three-to-one now that you are an OSS agent.
"I like to think that I am also a competent intelligence officer. A good intelligence officer does not choose sides. He simply gath-ers information and passes it to his superiors for their decisions. That luxury is no longer available to me. Because of who you are, I must either choose to offend your father... which may prove very costly to me in the future, I'm sure you know what I mean... or I must ally myself with him. I have decided to ally myself with your father."
Clete said nothing.
"You have no response?"
"Could I go in the bathroom and wash myself?" Clete asked.
"Not just yet," Martin said. "What I want from you now is for you to tell me what happened here tonight."
"Mi Coronel, I think I would prefer to wait until my father can find me a lawyer."
"You don't have that luxury," Martin said. "We need a cred-ible story, and we need it before the Chief of the Polic¡a Federal arrives. He's on his way. Just tell me what happened. We're alone, and you can deny anything you tell me now later."
Clete said nothing.
"I'm sure this doesn't frighten you, but I think I should tell you that unless we can come up with a credible story for el Co-ronel Savia-Gonzalez, he will insist that you be taken to police headquarters for interrogation. They won't kill you, but they will make you very uncomfortable, and it may be days before even your father can get you released."
What the hell have I got to lose?
"I was at the home of my uncle, Humberto Valdez Duarte, following the funeral of my cousin. Later, I drove my father home, then returned here with Se¤ora Pellano. I came up to my apartment. The blinds had not been raised, and it was very hot in here. I took a beer and went out onto the servants' balcony on the rear. I heard noises, came in here to investigate, and found two men, armed with knives. They attacked me, so I shot them. I went downstairs and found Se¤ora Pellano with her throat cut. There was a pounding at the door, and I opened it. A man who said he was Comandante Habbabo..."
"Habanzo," Martin corrected him.
"... was standing there with a gun. I gave him the automatic. He tried to question me. I refused to answer until I had a lawyer, and we argued about that awhile, until the police came. I was then locked in the library and was there until just now."
"Do you know the men whom you shot?"
Clete shook his head no.
"Do you have any idea why they wanted to kill you?''
"No."
"Where did you get that stolen.45 automatic pistol. Is it your father's?"
Clete was silent.
"All right. Now I will tell you what I believe happened," Mar-tin said. "You returned from your uncle's home, and did not raise the blinds because you thought there might be an attempt on your life. You believed this because you earlier met the German, el Capitan von Wachtstein, at the Alvear Palace Hotel. For reasons I cannot imagine, he warned you that the Germans would try to have you killed. That also explains why you went out on the servants' balcony with a pistol."
"When the attempt was made, you killed one of the men and wounded the other. You went looking for Se¤ora Pellano, found her with her throat cut in the kitchen, lost your professional de-tachment,
and returned here and shot the other man, who had by then dragged himself into the bathroom. The bullets ricocheted off the tile of the bathtub, which explains the blood on your body. And the human flesh, which I think is brain tissue." Clete said nothing.
"Killing the one and wounding the other was self-defense. Coming back here and killing the wounded man was murder... unless, should the matter reach trial, your lawyer pleads a crime of passion, based on your close personal affection for Se¤ora Pellano."
"Those bastards didn't have to kill her," Clete heard himself saying. "She never hurt anybody in her life."
"I'm surprised to hear you say that," Martin said. "Of course they had to kill her. It was at no cost to them. They were going to kill you, and they can only hang you once for murder. Killing her removed a potential witness against them."
"You're a cold-blooded bastard, aren't you?"
"I am beginning to suspect that I have more experience in these matters than you do," Martin said. "Professional judgment does not make me cold-blooded."
Clete exhaled audibly.
"This is the story we will tell," Martin said. "On your return from the Duarte mansion, you came to your apartment. You were surprised by armed robbers. You managed to put your hands on the old Colt and killed them both with it. Since the six-shooter was empty, you picked up the robbers' gun, the automatic, went downstairs, and found Se¤ora Pellano murdered in the kitchen. At that point, Comandante Habanzo knocked at the door. You let him in and gave him the robbers' gun."
"There's a couple of large holes in that story," Clete said. "For one thing, the Colt has not been fired. And what about the automatic?"
"Anything else?"
"There's a trail of blood on the floor, leading to the bath-room."
"That robber crawled in there during the gunfight," Martin said. "Where he threatened you with the.45. So you killed him with the old revolver."
"The old revolver has not been fired."
Martin ignored him.
"You are more seriously injured than you think you are," he said. "You will require immediate emergency medical treatment. I am going to summon an ambulance from the Military Hospital, which is nearby. You will be treated and placed under protective custody. I doubt if the Polic¡a Federal can gain entrance to you in the hospital, but if they somehow manage to-I really don't know how cooperative el Coronel Savia-Gonzalez will be in this; he is not an admirer of your father-you will refuse to answer any of their questions without a lawyer."
"The.44-40 hasn't been fired," Clete repeated. "The bullets in the bodies are.45 ACP, not.44-40."
"Your professionalism, Teniente, is returning," Martin said ap-provingly. He went to the desk and picked up both pistols. He went into the bathroom and pressed the.45 against the right hand of the man with the bullet hole in his forehead, then stood up. He took the Colt.44-40 revolver, fired two cartridges into the body, then went to the body of the man in the bedroom and fired two cartridges into his body. Finally he walked to the desk and fired two cartridges into the wall, one next to the bathroom door, the other through one of the closed blinds.
Then he laid both pistols back on the table.
"The revolver has less recoil than the automatic," he observed calmly. "I would have thought the reverse."
A few seconds later, puffing from the exertion of running up the stairs, Comandante Habanzo rushed into the room with a.32 ACP Colt automatic in his hand.
"What are you doing with that?" Martin asked.
"I heard shots."
"You heard a car backfiring," Martin said. "Habanzo, do you remember offhand the number of the Military Hospital?"
"No, mi Coronel."
"Presumably, you have it written down somewhere?"
"S¡, mi Coronel," Habanzo said, more than a little awkwardly stuffing his small automatic back into its shoulder holster and then producing a notebook.
[FOUR]
Room 305
Dr. Cosine Argerich Military Hospital
Calle Luis Maria Campos
Buenos Aires
0205 20 December 1942
Siren screaming, the ambulance, a 1937 Ford station wagon, pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital. The driver and his assistant jumped out, walked quickly to the rear, opened the doors, and pulled out the stretcher holding First Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, under a thick wool blanket.
He raised his head. A gurney was being hastily wheeled to the station wagon under the supervision of a very large and stern-faced nurse. He was moved, none too gently, from the stretcher onto the gurney. The wool blanket from the ambulance was jerked off and replaced by a thinner cotton cover.
The gurney was then wheeled into the hospital, now accom-panied by a man in a business suit, who made little effort to hide the.45 automatic he carried, riding high on his hip.
The gurney was rolled onto an elevator. It rose (three floors, Clete guessed) and stopped. It was then rolled down a corridor and into an operating room, which made Clete more than a little nervous.
He was transferred to an operating table. Its cold stainless steel was cool against his back and buttocks. A short, unpleasant-looking, mustachioed doctor in a white jacket bent over him, pried his eyelids apart, and shined a small flashlight in his eyes.
"I'm all right, Doctor," Clete said.
The doctor ignored him. He made a sweeping gesture with his hands, and the nurse snatched the thin hospital blanket away and then pulled off his boxer shorts.
Jesus Christ!
As the nurse wrapped a blood-pressure collar around his arm, the doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and then his throat. She gave him a sharp shove so he would roll onto his side; and a moment later, he felt the annoying and humiliating insertion of an anal thermometer. He watched as someone dropped his bloody shorts into a stainless-steel tray.
The anal thermometer was finally removed, his temperature announced orally, and then repeated by a woman in hospital whites holding a clipboard.
He was moved back onto his back. His blood-pressure reading was announced orally, repeated by the woman with the clipboard, and then the large nurse inserted a needle in his left arm to draw blood.
That completed, the doctor made another sweeping gesture with his hand. And the nurse, using what looked like a miniature spat-ula, began scraping his body.
Martin said that was probably brain tissue.
He felt slightly nauseous when she carefully scraped the brain tissue off the first spatula with a second one. The tissue was dropped into a second stainless-steel tray.
He was then given two sponge baths, first with water, then with alcohol. His face, chest, and legs stung uncomfortably. And when he moved his left leg, the large nurse firmly pushed it down against the operating table.
His chest stung, and he put his hand to it. Her hand grabbed his.
"I itch, goddamn it, take your hand off!"
She did not. There was a test of arm strength.
"Let him," the doctor said.
He scratched, and was sorry he did; he felt a sharp pain.
A tray of instruments appeared. The doctor took a scalpel in one hand and a ferocious-looking set of tweezers in the other. Starting at Clete's forehead, he began to remove tiny pieces of tile, dropping each piece into still another stainless-steel tray.
There is a moral in this, Clete thought, wincing at the pain: When you shoot someone in the forehead, be sure of your back-stop.
He smiled at his own wit. The doctor smiled, very insincerely, back at him.
Jesus Christ, you must be losing your marbles. You killed a man, and that's nothing to smile about. Not only killed him, shot him in cold blood. Well, maybe not cold blood. You were pretty goddamned pissed after seeing what they did to Se¤ora Pellano. But the bottom line is you killed a defenseless man.
He closed his eyes and kept them closed until he sensed the doctor stand up after he finished working his way down his body with the scalpel and tweezers.
The large nurse
then appeared with a stainless-steel bowl and what looked like a small paintbrush. She carefully wiped each small wound with an alcohol towel-it stung painfully. And then she painted each wound with the purple substance that was in the stainless-steel bowl-it stung even more painfully.
The doctor looked down at him once more.
"Thank you, Doctor," Clete said.
The doctor ignored him and disappeared.
W E B Griffin - Honor 1 - Honor Bound Page 53
