“What were some of the details?”
He shrugged. “He mentioned some involvement for Annie if she was interested and I told him I thought it would be wonderful for her but he might have a tough job convincing her. And, let’s see … oh yes, Mr. Gordon, the drummer. Thumper Gordon. He was most interested in getting hold of him—said he was having the very devil of a time. Said the man had gone to ground. He said Mr. Gordon would be the perfect technical adviser. He said all the band members were scattered across the planet, selling real estate or cadging drinks in exchange for anecdotes about the old days … or just plain dead, drug overdoses and so on. No, Thumper Gordon was the only one who would do … He thought Annie or I might know his whereabouts—” He caught Heidi’s eye and smiled at her intent expression.
“And?” She nodded at him to get on with it.
“Well, it was all utterly aboveboard, of course. Frankly, I am interested. It works for me in so many ways. So I told him that while I barely knew Thumper Gordon, he belongs to Annie’s other life, her old life. Annie and I had once visited him on that island of his.” He smiled, then yawned. It was getting late.
“Don’t tell me he’s still got that place in the Channel Islands—what was it, the Isle of Wight?” I visibly racked my brain. Thumper had never mentioned any island to me.
“Ah, that must have been in the days of your youth,” Truman said, “days gone by. This island is way to hell and gone in the Outer Hebrides. My God, what a lonely, blasted, forgotten place!”
Twenty
“THIS IS UTTERLY UNCONSCIONABLE. MY well-known mask of geniality is shattered.” The voice of Hugo Ledbetter was heard in the land and one or two of the leaded casement windows were left intact. We were gathered at Magna’s London headquarters, a penthouse in Greek Street overlooking Soho Square and the ceaseless bustle of Oxford Street beyond. As was his custom, Ledbetter was surveying the view, leaving the rest of us to survey several square miles of navy-blue chalk-stripe on his back. The sun shone brilliantly and London was in for what was for them a scorcher. “I must say, Cotter, this is an appalling situation. The man is running amok. He’s gone bloody rogue is what he’s done. Awful man.” He coughed softly into his gigantic fist, then ran his fingers down through his beard as if lackadaisically searching for survivors. Maybe it was more like raking the rough at St. Andrews. He was a man who tested your mettle when it came to the apt simile. “Forgive me, I get terribly English over here, every other word turns out to be either ‘bloody’ or ‘rum’ or ‘quite.’ But mark my other words … I’ll be damned if I’m putting my publishing house into the hands of people who find it impossible to control a nitwit like Morris Fleury.”
“Now come on,” Sam Innis said, “relax. Don’t screw up a deal that’s mutual ‘on bofe sahds,’ as my old colored nanny used to say.”
“You never,” Ledbetter rumbled, “had a nanny of any color whatsoever. The very idea is absurd.”
Innis was slouched in a deep chair with his feet on a coffee table. He wore desert boots and what appeared to be a faded tan uniform from the North African Campaign. He was smoking a fat cigar. Heidi Dillinger was looking cool in gabardine slacks and a teal silk blouse and a flat-brimmed straw hat. She was leaning, arms crossed on her chest, against a glass-fronted bookcase. Cotter Whitney was sitting behind his desk, his cherubic face somewhat crestfallen, like a boy who’d been passed over for the cheerleading squad. He wore an immaculate white suit, a French-blue chambray shirt, a cream-colored tie. We were a curious lot and doomed to get even curiouser before we were done. It reminded me of a reunion of the hapless scoundrels last glimpsed in Beat the Devil.
“Well,” Cotter Whitney said, twisting his University of Minnesota class ring around his finger, “I’m in the dark on all of this.” He seemed poised to suck his thumb.
“That would seem to be the problem, wouldn’t it?” Ledbetter stood at the edge of the desk and must have looked to Whitney rather like a displeased Jehovah contemplating payback. “You have this employee, this insect, running across the English countryside badgering a man the substance of Alec Truman, lying to him … and according to Miss Dillinger and Mr. Tripper, he has also indulged in a program of mass murder. The mind—my mind—reels, boggles, does nip-ups and falls in a heap.” He turned to Innis. “We have a major problem here. The inmates are running the bin.”
“Why don’t you take a load off your feet, Hugo? You’re forgetting the larger dimensions of our project. I want to do a book based on JC’s life … and Magna is JC in a very real way. And besides, Lee here is into me, us, for a fair country piece of change—”
“This is a perfect example of your problem,” Ledbetter said. “You attempt to think. Writers should write, not think. I’ve told you that acting as your own agent is penny-wise and pound-foolish—you see, there I go, jabbering like a Brit! It is not the wisest path. You insist. Fine. But if you had an agent, he or she would tell you that your book—indeed, you—is equally as valuable to a dozen publishers without our having to put one foot inside this enchanting combination zoo-and-morgue Whitney is running.”
“But I like him, Hugo. He’s a spud, God knows, but I like him. I like Magna. Connecting with Magna is the beauty part of the project. You may recall that I am famed for my research—”
“You are famed,” Heidi said coolly, “for my research.”
“Don’t quibble,” Innis snapped. “Heidi is plugged into Magna. It works. That’s the point.” Whitney had decided to fill Ledbetter’s place at the window. I went and stood beside him. I found myself looking down through someone else’s skylight where a large woman in a white T-shirt and sweatpants was professionally kneading and massaging a naked woman who lay facedown on a table. Whitney turned to me as if he’d missed the show completely and said, “He’s trying to raise money from Alec Truman? You have Truman’s word on this?”
“Why would he make up such a story?”
“I suppose. Still … Fleury in his seersucker suit?” Disbelief trudged across his round face.
“Truman didn’t actually comment on his tailoring.”
Heidi Dillinger said impatiently, “To the point, is Magna actually interested in raising money from Alec Truman?”
“Good Lord, no! The thought is deranged.”
“Well, Truman was interested,” she said. “Fleury was offering the moon and the stars, of course.”
“Well, I did not send him to Alec Truman, period. Magna has no interest in Truman. It would be like an interest in Kirk Kerkorian or Boone Pickens or Marvin Davis. One day you’d wake up and discover you’d been lunch. No, Fleury’s off on his own. Perhaps he’s lost his mind.” He put his hands in his pockets and his round shoulders slumped.
“Did he find out who was putting the money in Taillor’s bank account? He said you were going to have to exert some personal pressure on the big boys at your Swiss bank.”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about, old sock. Don’t you understand, the man is acting on his own. Hugo is absolutely correct … could happen in any large corporation. Or small, for that matter.” He turned to the bearded, shaggy-browed giant. “That’s what you’ve got to understand, Hugo. There’s no point in rushing to judgment. There are problems that can be fixed like any other problems—”
“Problems,” Ledbetter muttered. “The man is a master of understatement. Murder is, indeed, my idea of a problem. We are in agreement.” He plunged his hands into the pockets of his suit coat, straining the buttons. “Blackmail, rock music, drugs—”
“Now, Hugo!”
“Oh, stop fussing. It’s a great steaming mess.”
I said, “But seriously, folks, is it too late to just back out of the whole thing? Let bygones be bygones, we could all turn over a new leaf—”
“Yes, Tripper,” Whitney said sadly, “it is too late. We’re going to find your brother if he’s still alive. And I know darned well he is—”
“Why,” Ledbetter asked weightily, “is it we think
JC Tripper is alive? I lose track of things.”
Heidi said, “Because people who knew him very well are being murdered. Shadow Flicker, Sally Feinman, Clive Taillor. What they have in common is knowing our man intimately enough that they might know if he’s alive. Sally didn’t know him personally, but she’d done a great deal of digging into the subject … Yet Lee here, who knew him best of all, as only a brother can know a brother, hasn’t been harmed, tortured, strong-armed, or even approached on the subject of JC’s whereabouts—which could be for the simple reason that JC in his hideout, in his new life, doesn’t wish Lee any harm.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I know my brother is dead, but I can’t help wondering who sent the goons to kill me in Zurich?”
Whitney’s head jerked up. “What goons in Zurich?”
“One was the goon I killed.”
Whitney’s mouth dropped open. “You what?”
“I killed a man who tried to kill me with a length of piano wire. I broke his back over a railing—”
“When? Who? Miss Dillinger—Heidi, I mean—what do you know of this? What’s going on here?”
“In the dark. In the street. In Zurich. And he was a stranger.”
“Good God!”
A bit of explanatory babble ensued before Heidi regained the floor with her explanation for Ledbetter of why we—they—thought JC might be alive. “We also have the song purportedly sent by Thumper Gordon. It could be old but it could be new—JC’s way of getting back into the game. And there are the monthly payoffs to Taillor ever since JC’s death. Taillor was in a position to know if JC had agreed to pay him for helping JC fake his death and start a new life … It adds up,” she concluded, “but we don’t quite know to what—”
“Tell me,” I said, ever the searcher for truth, “are we looking for a killer or a blackmailer?”
Sam Innis said, “We’re looking for JC Tripper.” He stretched, as if rousing himself to eventual action that he was regretfully beginning to contemplate. “There’s a trail to follow here, just like one of my books. It isn’t hard to follow, my fellow morons. Thumper Gordon on his island. It’s obvious. That’s the one reason, the sole reason Fleury went through his fancy dress with Alec Truman … to find out where the hell Gordon was. Now he knows.” Innis stood up, wearing his through-hell-and-high-water face. He was getting ready to go after both Stanley and Livingstone. “For all we know, Gordon’s dead out there in the Hebrides and, depending on who Fleury’s working for, JC is maybe safely out of our reach forever and having a good laugh with Fleury … or Fleury is his nemesis and may have tortured the truth out of him and now Fleury knows for his own reasons where JC is—”
“There are,” I said, “other possibilities.”
“None that really matters,” Heidi said.
Sam Innis went on, “Who says JC isn’t out there on the island with Thumper? In fact, nobody’s seen Thumper for years—who says JC didn’t become Thumper? We’ve got to climb on our horses and get going. Never let it be said Sam Innis doesn’t want to be in at the kill!”
Twenty-One
I FELT LIKE ONE OF the sadder specimens manning a Winslow Homer fishing boat in a high gale, dwarfed by waves that would have blotted out the sun had there been one, huddled in a ratty old slicker that came with the boat, blinded by wind-driven winter-cold rain blowing angrily, as if the North Atlantic had something very specific against Scotland and the Scots as a people. Somewhere up ahead, infrequently glimpsed through the fog, was a small nubbin of rock, gorse, and discomfort that as far as we knew had never been singled out as deserving a name. About a hundred and fifty yards separated the large Isle of Lewis from the boulder where Thumper Gordon lived his lonely existence. I mean, it had to be pretty lonely out there. That was the Outer Hebrides for you, last stop before you reached North America, which was a hell of a lot of water away.
I felt it coming again and got myself draped over the side of our little craft and threw up. This was not a good thing. This was a man out of his element was what it was. Heidi Dillinger sat in the back of the boat—aft? fore? stern? Could anyone possibly care? It was back near this hellacious noisy motor. She was clutching her huge leather shoulder bag as if it were a new baby. She wore an oilskin hat that matched her torn slicker; her blond hair was plastered across her forehead. Cotter Whitney crouched beside me, trying very hard not to notice what I kept doing over the side. I told him if any of it got on him, the rain and the sea pouring down on us would wash it right off. He may have been bailing too hard to take notice. He was looking pretty green around the gills himself, as if the power of suggestion might do him in.
Ledbetter seemed impervious to the weather or any attendant discomfort. He sat quiet and unmoving, arms folded across his chest. Thus, in a manner of speaking, must the great stones have been ferried to Salisbury Plain for the building of Stonehenge. Sam Innis, writer in residence and self-appointed captain, sat by the motor, steered our hapless, rented vessel, and inspired—at least in me—the absolute minimum of confidence.
The rain was everywhere, from every direction, like random machine-gun fire. Thick, pulpy fog shrouded both Lewis behind us and the lump toward which we were slowly making our way. It was awful. Up, slammed down, rammed sideways, shoved wildly upward, only to be half-drowned. It went on and on. We were out in the gap, in no-man’s-land, suspended in the last minutes of the old world I’d created for myself twenty years ago. In the gap, waiting for it all to explode in my face. Once we reached Thumper Gordon’s island, everything would change forever …
We had flown from London to Inverness, landing in a gathering fog that grabbed us as we slipped down out of a watery sun. The fog kept getting worse as we stood in the airport waiting room. In the end we got seats on the last plane out to Stornoway, the town on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It was a two-engine job of great age and remembered dignity, one of those planes that would give a determined struggle before descending into the drink. The wind kept trying to blow us back to Inverness. We strained against our seat belts, and the smell of people being sick in little brown bags slowly filled the cabin. It was damp and cold and clammy. We kept nosing into the fog seeking holes, tunnels. It was, somebody said, a typical summer day in the north. The man sitting next to me said, “You’ve never known cold until you’ve spent a fine July day out on Loch Ness.”
We landed like a load of coal in Stornoway, which was reputed to be a town but could barely be seen at all under the gray shroud. At an all-purpose garage we rented an old Dodge four-door from 1955 and a motorboat of an age that made a query impolite. Innis and I engaged the garageman in conversation about exactly where Thumper’s island might be and got squared away with directions, landmarks, distances, where we might launch our little craft.
I drove and Innis navigated. He kept talking about how the three of us—JC, Innis, and yours truly—had once driven through fog and rain to the Cape, Provincetown, and I nodded. But I had no memory of such an event. This road wound and dipped through fields of peat that were in some places cut six or eight feet deep. You had the feeling you had landed on a vast chocolate cake with mint frosting and somebody was carving big chunks from it. Most folks used the peat to heat their homes and you could smell it, smoky, like single malt Scotch, a shot of which would have come in handy just then. …
We found the point described by the garageman and wrestled the boat down the rocky slope to the narrow gravel shingle. The wind roared off the sea and the rain screamed around us and I suggested that anybody with an ounce of sense would wait until the storm blew itself out. Sam Innis gave me a hard look and told me we weren’t racing the storm, we were racing Morris Fleury. “It’s your brother,” he said accusingly.
“My brother,” I said as carefully and distinctly as I could, “is dead.”
The tiny island took shape in the fog, brown and green and gray and wet. There wasn’t much time left now. It was almost over. I wondered what was about to happen. What if Fleury was on the island? Was he a
ctually a killer? It seemed a strange idea, now that I thought about it in the last moment. Morris Fleury sitting sound asleep on my terrace in New York a thousand years ago didn’t seem like a murderer … Still, he’d had a gun. He’d known all about Sally Feinman, he’d been there. Well, you never knew. I suddenly wished I’d had a gun to bring with me now. My God, were we about to go to battle unarmed?
Suddenly the choppy, malevolent channel sea was hurling us toward the rock-strewn beach that was more accurately a gravel-and-stone-slab ledge. The wind cut like a frozen knife and our little boat seemed out of control now, pitching and jerking, thrusting nearer and nearer the rocks where it would surely be smashed to pieces. But at the last moment we slid between outcroppings of stone that jutted like bookends into the sea and gave cover from the wind. Sea foam sprayed us as we settled with a heavy bone-jarring crash on the gravelly ledge, but there was no splintering of wood, no outright destruction. Sam Innis sagged across the motor and tried to wipe the seawater out of his eyes. He looked spent. “Jesus and the horse he rode in on,” he said, but I barely heard him. The waves crashed like cannon fire, artillery blasting away at the island.
There was a steep escarpment to negotiate and it was slippery, dark, and wet, with running water coursing down on us. The fog clung to the top of the rock face, but dogs were barking, welcoming us. We climbed the steps, which had long ago been hewn from the cliff. I helped Heidi, who was struggling with her bag. Ledbetter followed, then Whitney, Innis last.
The Suspense Is Killing Me Page 24
