“I’m tired,” Fleury said. “Need some java.”
He led the way to a dark coffeehouse he seemed to know. We settled down at a corner table not far from the steaming, spitting espresso machine. Candles sputtered on the tables. The windows were steamed up and streaked with rain. And somebody, I kept thinking, had just died trying to kill me …
We got coffees on the table and I told him I wanted to know who the hell he was working for and what his role was. I told him I had seen him at Cotter Whitney’s and with Heidi Dillinger in Tangier.
“Relax, chumley, you’ve had a tough night. You don’t want to get all worked up. Ever kill anyone before?” He started spooning sugar into the thick black brew.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Let me explain things to you. Just calm down—”
“Tell me that again and you’ll be wearing your coffee.”
“You’re looking at the head of security for Magna. Whole shootin’ match. Now I may not fit the image in your mind, but I am what I am and Mr. Whitney will tell you the same thing. I go back to the old days when Harry Mirsky ran the studio, but Whitney knew he was on to a good thing when he got me as part of the package. There’s damn little I don’t know about the movie and record ends of this outfit. I report directly to Whitney, you got that?”
I nodded, fumbling the pieces together in my mind, hoping the picture would eventually come clear.
“The first order of business for me these days,” he went on, sucking a tooth and puffing the pipe, “is the blackmailing of Magna. You heard about this, am I right? Okay. We’ve got a blackmail situation—only we’re not sure who’s doing it and we’re not sure what they want. It’s a one-way street so far. We can’t contact them, so we wait to hear … so they keep proving things to us, telling us things they know that they shouldn’t know. They’ve got a pipeline for information, no doubt about that—”
“Like what?”
“It has nothing to do with you, my friend. But you heard about the song we got and then Thumper Gordon’s letter … Well, we’re trying to fit that into the picture, see?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, we’ll get it all straightened out sooner or later.” He noisily slurped some coffee and gave it a thorough chewing. Vivaldi was playing in the background and losing the battle with the espresso machine. Most of the patrons at the small tables seemed to be students, deep in conversation. “You and Bechtol and Sally Feinman and Miss Dillinger, you all arrived on my plate at the same time. And Bechtol’s idea about a novel based on your brother coincided with the first blackmail overtures and the arrival of that damn song and the dead disc jockey and then the Feinman killing, and then Bechtol brings you into it and that goddamn Hugo Ledbetter …” He ran his hand over the broad bald scalp where his hair would have been. “Where to start? It’s like one of those whatchamacallits … Möbius-strip things, like a snake twisting around and eating its own tail. What parts are hooked together? Do we have two entirely different deals going on here? Not connected at all?” He sighed, leaned back, pushed one hand down inside the top of his baggy, rumpled trousers, behind the big belt buckle with the silver longhorn on it. “I’ve got too damn much to do is what it comes down to. On top of trying to figure out all this craziness, Whitney tells me he sorta wants me to keep an eye on you so you don’t step into any deep shit. I’m stretched too thin, that’s the truth of it. He needs fuckin’ Pinkertons and he throws it all in my lap … but he’s obsessed with the idea that none of this gets out, so it’s up to poor old Fleury to keep the lid on. And now Ledbetter, he’s making waves and Whitney’s bouncing off the walls. He hears about this little escapade of yours tonight, he’ll have my hindquarters for a paperweight, I promise you.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them hard. When he opened them he didn’t give the impression that the view had improved.
“So what’s going on with you and Heidi Dillinger? After I saw you sneaking around Whitney’s place in Minnesota I asked her if she knew you and she told me she didn’t. But there you were together in Tangier. What’s she lying about?”
“She wasn’t lying. She didn’t know me from Adam until she got to Tangier and Bechtol told her over the phone who I was, that I’d be on the lookout for her and she should keep it under her hat once we connected. She’s a straight shooter, Heidi is. Whitney told me I had to let her in on it so she could then report to me if she couldn’t reach him or Bechtol—hell, I’m the one on the case they’re watching from a sky box somewhere. And Heidi’s on the Magna team, she worked for Magna before she hooked up with Bechtol … you, Tripper, you’re a guest, more or less. She’s on the inside, she’s got responsibilities to the greater glory of Magna and Allan Bechtol. She’s working for us, see, and you’re more of an independent contractor, on board for just this one job … frankly, I wish I’d never heard of you or your brother. Nothing personal. Just makes my life a helluva lot more complicated.” He dug a pouch of Cherry Blend tobacco from his coat pocket and filled the old corncob again, sucking it to make sure of the draw.
“Who tried to kill me? He—or one of them if they were working together—was on the plane from Rome. He checked me out at dinner, he followed me, playing one of JC’s songs on his cassette player. He led me right to the guy who attacked me … Who are they?”
Fleury applied a match and the tobacco curled up over the rim of the bowl. He puffed, watching me through the clouds of smoke. He pushed the tobacco down with the side of the matchbook.
“Well, one of them is past tense.” He grinned in the worst possible taste, gaps between his yellowed teeth. “Look, I don’t know who they were … I wish to hell I did know.” He puffed reflectively. “Somebody who doesn’t want you to find JC Tripper, wouldn’t you say? You must be getting too close …”
“How close can you get to a ghost?”
“Have it your way, my friend. Nobody’s trying to kill me. I gotta go with what makes sense to me. Who the hell else would want to kill you? You’re looking and JC is hiding—”
“All right, all right. I guess I’m the only one who thinks JC is dead.”
“There’s always Taillor,” he said. “Maybe he knows.” He yawned.
“Did you leave me a note about Taillor at the hotel?”
He shook his head. I told him of my pointless trek to Taillor’s house. He kept shaking his head. Embers dribbled over the rim of the bowl, burning little black holes in his seersucker coat. “No, I’m not here to see Taillor. I’m investigating him from another angle altogether. Banking. I’ve been spending the day going through Taillor’s banking records—”
“Why would he stand still for that?”
“I didn’t ask him, Tripper.” He gave me a damp, quizzical smile.
“Silly me, I was under the impression that the secrets of the Swiss banking system are more or less inviolable.”
“Less. At least where clout like Magna’s is involved. All our European financial dealings come through a bank here in Zurich. Which means we’re a hellish large account.” He nodded smugly. I couldn’t bear to watch. “And Clive Taillor is a client of the same bank.” He chuckled nastily in that odd way unimportant men sometimes do. “The bank does us a favor every now and then. When we want to check up on Taillor, it’s not exactly something that requires board approval.” His power, however third-hand it was, gave him considerable pleasure.
“Find out anything interesting?” I was trying to act as if I were only making conversation, but it was the most important question I’d asked anybody since I’d thought I was picking up Heidi on Fifth Avenue.
“Yes, Mr. Tripper, I did.”
“Is it a secret?”
“Surely is.” He sighed at the notion of his own importance, puffed his corncob. “But you, you’re okay. You’re involved—but you don’t really give a shit how this comes out, one way or the other, right?”
“I can live with it. Unless somebody kills me.”
“What I found out is this: I proved JC Tripper
is alive. Hear me out. Ever since JC died, or was reported to have died, for these twenty years, Taillor’s been getting a regular payoff, by wire—from here in Switzerland, or from the Bahamas, or from the United States. Just like clockwork, with cost-of-living increases, you might say … same amount for a year or two, once a month, then it increases for a year or two, then it increases again. So on and so forth. I ain’t a rocket scientist, but I can see the evidence of my own two eyes.”
“Any way to trace where these wire transfers are coming from? I mean the specific account holder?”
He massaged his chin, scraped his fingers in the stubble. “That’s a little harder to do. Oh, we can do it, but Whitney’s going to have to apply some personal pressure. Swiss bankers draw the line pretty quick once they start breaking rules. One rule, okay. The second rule comes harder … but when we do find out who’s paying Taillor, who’s been paying him for twenty years, I think I know what we’ll find. We’ll find your brother, Mr. Tripper. And I think you’d better get ready for that little reunion. You were a vegetable back there twenty years ago; he could have left Tangier in a camel caravan and it wouldn’t’ve made no never mind to you … Clive Taillor faked the whole thing, that’s my theory, he helped your brother disappear and he’s been getting paid off ever since. And, buddy boy, I’m about to show Cotter Whitney how Morris Fleury became a legend in this business.”
“Which business is that?”
“The find-out business, chumley. That’s what I do better than anybody else … find out. And I’m gonna find out who’s been paying Taillor off … and when I do we’re gonna have all the answers—who’s the blackmailer and where JC Tripper is these days—I’m real close. And then we’ll have the big reunion, buddy boy.”
“The big reunion?”
“Sure. You and your brother—who the hell else?”
“Aren’t you afraid somebody might wait for you in the dark and kill you?”
“Nobody gonna kill Morris Fleury, don’t worry about that.”
Watching Morris Fleury have a good laugh was not the sort of thing likely to give wings to your spirits and put a smile on your face.
“Say, chumley,” he said moistly, savoring what was to come, “she’d kill me if she knew I was running off at the mouth, but … but, man to man, I owe you, right?”
“How the hell should I know?” A man inside my head was trying to break out. All he had was a ball-peen hammer, but he was making do.
“Well, I got the idea from little things she said that our Heidi is sweet on you. Never knew her to get involved, not with any guy, ever. She’s always been all business, but she gets that look when she talks about you.” He chuckled. Damp, very damp. “I’d like to hear about that, if you ever get any, y’know? Poon. Love a good poon story.”
Believe it or not, Mr. Ripley, my head got worse.
Sixteen
“YOU HEARD HIM BREAK?”
She turned toward me and I felt her warm breath on my chest. She took my hand and held it against her breast, squeezed my fingertips around her nipple, then brought the palm to her mouth, kissed.
“You poor darling,” she said, “you poor, poor darling. And Fleury—our Morris Fleury, the phantom of the Minnesota night—repaired your head?” She kissed my hand again. “You can’t be allowed out on your own again, my darling. Now we’ve got to get you relaxed … You’re so stiff—”
“That’s not tension, Heidi.”
“I’ve heard it said that violent death excites some people.” She giggled.
“This is serious.”
“I know.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
It was so much easier dealing with her now that I knew she wasn’t one of Fleury’s people. Easier, but something still bothered me. I was beginning to think Fleury might have been right about her feelings for me. That hadn’t been part of the deal.
She’d been waiting for me when I’d arrived back at the hotel, after Fleury had drifted away into the night. Past two o’clock, the middle of one of life’s darker nights, the mist having turned to rain, my head splitting. Really. Splitting. Morris Fleury’s bank investigations twisting my brain. The sound and feeling of the man’s back breaking over the railing, the memory of the wire flicking against my face. The emptiness of Clive Taillor’s house, the sound of “MacArthur Park” from next door … Heidi Dillinger waiting for me in the lobby, curled up on a couch reading a copy of the International Herald Tribune, looking up sleepily, telling me she’d been wondering if I was dead or something. Then she asked me if I’d been with Clive Taillor all this time. Had I gotten her message about meeting him at his place? She’d called him from Madrid, where she’d been attending to a Spanish-rights matter for Bechtol, and then she’d called the hotel to leave word for me …
We made love until one of us fainted. I think it was me, which is probably the standard post-killing performance level. The little death, Hemingway—or somebody like him—called it. It helped to erase the memory of the big death a little earlier in the evening.
It also made me stop thinking about Annie DeWinter, which was probably a good thing. I didn’t start thinking about Annie DeWinter again until Heidi herself brought her up later and opened the door to the final stage of our little saga. But I’ll get to that shortly.
Come morning, I staggered to the shower while Heidi was already on the telephone with Bechtol or Whitney or parties unknown. She wasn’t telling anyone about my previous evening’s activities. She’d become very protective about me.
I stood for a long time under the hot water, feeling the steam rising around me, while I tried to put my finger on the exact nature of what was going on between Heidi and me. There was an uneasiness I couldn’t shake. We weren’t, of course, in love. But was she? I couldn’t imagine what there was in me to love, and I hadn’t loved anyone in so long I’d forgotten how one managed it. We were, I suppose, drawn to one another, but it was the kind of thing co-workers, a couple of smartasses, sometimes find themselves embroiled in almost before they know it. We climbed one another because we were there, as the mountaineers say. Still, there was more to it than that. But for me it was shallow; I’d thought it was for her, too. Maybe seeing what a mess I was, how vulnerable I could be, had touched a nerve in her. Maybe she never trusted anyone and then found herself trusting me. … Maybe.
I’d made no move on her. She’d been the one who got it going that night at Whitney’s. Thinking about it, I was getting angry with both of us. What did she think she was doing, anyway? What was in it for her?
Heidi was a thinker. When Heidi looked at me, what was Heidi thinking?
I had no idea, not anymore.
And what was I thinking of when I looked at her?
It was time to admit it to myself.
Annie DeWinter. Like a song, a melody of the past, she kept coming back to me.
When I came out of the bathroom she was off the phone, sitting at the little desk waiting for me, tapping her front teeth with a Waterman pen, smiling crookedly. I’d seen the expression a thousand times before on the faces of countless women, and I knew it meant trouble. It was impossible to know just what kind of trouble, but I was going to be finding out right away. With emotional women, it could signal a firestorm up ahead. But Heidi wasn’t emotional; she was a thinker. Something had set her thinking about me. Some women have a sense of what’s going on inside your head and there’s no damn point in arguing about it. When I saw her I felt guilty about my thoughts in the shower, not because I’d had them but because she knew. I was going to pay, now or later; the crooked smile, the sidelong appraising glance told me that.
“Well, Lee, there seems to be an increasingly popular view that you, my dear, know where JC is … that you may, in fact, be in cahoots with him.” She was all mischief. It made me nervous. “Cahoots,” she said. It sounded like a sneeze.
“Whitney and Bechtol,” I said. “A pair of mental giants. Nobel winners for character judgment.”
She
shrugged. “I’ve known dumber in my time.”
“So what do you think?” I was getting dressed, avoiding eye contact.
“Oh, I think you’re an elusive, secretive devil. A complicated man who has spent a lifetime concealing himself. Nobody knows you. You won’t allow it.”
“God, how I hate cheap pop psychology.” I was buttoning my shirt, making hard work of it. “Soap-opera crap.”
“Apparently I hit a nerve.”
“Look, I’m just a guy who had a famous brother and I can’t seem to get past it. JC may not be alive but he’s the un-dead, so far as I’m concerned.” I was pulling my pants on, hopping about on one leg.
“You are such a liar!” She laughed. “But I like that in a man.”
“Bullshit.” Up with the zipper.
“But, my darling, you are. A liar and a scoundrel. You can’t fool me. He is alive and you know it, don’t you? And you’ve always been part of the cover-up, haven’t you?”
“Socks,” I said. “I must have clean socks somewhere.”
“You are in love with Annie DeWinter, too, aren’t you?”
Ah, the curveball at last. Set me up with the fast balls, then the slow curve from nowhere. “What a question. I have not seen the woman in twenty years. She was twenty-five. Now she’s forty-five. I don’t even know her, let alone love her.”
“Now, don’t get all petulant. But if you’re not, that makes it all the more peculiar.”
I found my socks and sat down on the edge of the bed to put them on. “What,” I sighed, “could you possibly be babbling about?”
“You kept saying her name, ‘Annie, Annie,’ in your sleep. Oh, it was terrible.” She was smiling very slowly. “It made me feel like a wife checking up on her husband. Or do you know some other Annie?”
The Suspense Is Killing Me Page 19
