Were those tire marks in the damp lawn? I stopped the Renault some distance from the house and got out cautiously, although once again I was a dead duck if a rifle was already tracking me from inside the house or from behind the generator shed. More as a morale booster than as a practical measure, I took the automatic out and shuffled slowly forward. At the edge of my consciousness there was a faint buzzing. I stopped and looked around but located nothing that could be causing it. Maybe it was just my ears ringing from the altitude.
At 1,000 feet? Pretty delicate ears, LaRoche.
Forget it.
I moved on.
I stooped to examine what might have been tire marks in the long grass and soft earth, but I was a city boy, not Natty Bumpo. Maybe Tama’s team of experts from France could make something of them. I got up and continued on around the house, going low and fast around each of its corners, feeling foolish, but preferring that to suddenly feeling dead.
By the time I got back to the garage the buzzing sound was nagging at me, as well as a faint sickly odor that came and went with the breeze that blew down from the mountains. I stopped and flared my nostrils but couldn’t identify it.
I got the key from above the kitchen door, then slammed it open with my foot while jumping to one side. Nothing happened.
After a while I went on in and through the house. There was nobody home and nothing that hadn’t been there on my only previous visit with Tamara Payton.
I stepped back into the garage and locked the door behind me. A peculiar situation, I thought. If someone wants to ambush me, why doesn’t he do it? Or if he wants to give me a ransom note, why doesn’t he leave it where I can find it?
I moved forward to the end of the garage and my eyes scanned the property. They found the water tank and moved on to the generator shed. They stopped. Something, somewhere, was different. I blinked, and tried to concentrate. There, by the shed.
Something cream-colored. I blinked again.
Suddenly it came into focus.
It was the suitcase in which I’d delivered one million dollars the night before.
I swallowed and took half a step backwards, the Biretta clutched in my fist. Once again I scanned the trees and bushes, the top of the water tank, the hill beyond. Nothing.
I moved forward through the ankle-length grass.
My foot suddenly jolted painfully against something hard and I pitched headlong. I landed heavily on a patch of concrete, twisting my wrist and scraping the knuckles where I still clenched the Biretta.
I lay spent and scared on the concrete, the wind knocked from my lungs, my heart pounding. A rank, overpowering smell of putrefaction assailed my nostrils and I felt my stomach turn over. I pushed myself to my knees and looked down.
I’d tripped over the concrete apron that surrounded the leach pit of a septic tank system. It was a couple of feet around. A concrete slab about eighteen inches square was set askew in the apron, its joints gaping. It rocked slightly beneath my weight. I got to my feet and started to move away from the ripe, putrid smell. I stopped.
Why would a leach pit smell like a dinosaur’s outhouse? Especially at a house that had been shut for years?
I tried to remember what the gardener at the Payton’s place in Punaauia had told me one idle afternoon. All the sewerage from a Tahitian house flowed first into a septic tank, he’d said, and from there the excess water drained to the leach pit, where it filtered out into the surrounding earth. It was a fine place to plant a tree, whose roots would absorb the nutrients in the soil.
I turned back toward the house. There in the grass was the larger, rectangular concrete apron of the septic tank with its two inset slabs. I bent over to examine them. They fit snugly into the apron, and the joints were jammed with dirt and caked mud. A cold sweat suddenly broke out on my forehead, and a taste of bile rose to my mouth.
It’s the septic tank with its accumulated solids that has to be pumped out by the honey-wagon every year or so, he’d told me. The puissard, or seepage pit, or leach field, merely drained off the water and in theory never had to be emptied.
I moved reluctantly back to the oval concrete of the leach pit and its wobbly cement slab. I didn’t have to bend over to see from the heavy scratch marks in the concrete that the slab had been recently pulled up and carelessly set back.
The sickening smell of total corruption assaulted me, and I nearly gagged. I’d grown soft in Tahiti. Human, maybe.
I looked up and saw the suitcase by the generator shed. I took a step toward it, then stopped. I walked back to the garage and a closetful of tools against the wall. Inside was a pickax. I walked slowly, reluctantly, back to the leach pit, the pickax dangling heavily from my hand.
The buzzing in my ears had become louder now but I ignored it. I gulped once, and then again. I drew as much air as I could into my lungs and tightened my lips till they hurt.
There was a small metal loop set in the top of the slab. I poked the sharp end of the pickax under it and pulled back on the handle. The broad end of the ax lay on the edge of the apron and acted as a lever. The four-inch thick slab of concrete rose slowly, torturously. A miasma of evil rose with it, poisoning the air.
With a gasp I jerked back on the handle and toppled the slab out on the grass. Cockroaches fled from the edge of the hole, scuttling deeper into the pit. My ears pounded and my lungs ached. I bent forward and forced my eyes downward.
The roaring in my ears was deafening.
I looked down into the pit.
Dark auburn hair glinted in the sunlight. A cockroach too sated to move lay on top of a pale white ear.
I thanked God I couldn’t see the face.
I staggered backward, half-collapsing as I gulped fresh air while my stomach tried to spew up its contents. My eyes watered and my vision blurred.
The roaring now was nearly on top on me, and I was suddenly nearly knocked from my feet by a gust of wind that slammed me like a giant hand. I raised my eyes and stared unbelievingly.
Tama and Schneider were jumping down from a bubbletop helicopter that was still settling into the grass.
Two more gendarmes followed them. They carried submachine guns in their hands.
I closed my eyes, in relief, I think. It was out of my hands now: the Marines had landed.
A gendarme dug a submachine-gun butt into my ribcage and shoved me aside. Tama and Schneider strode past grimly as if I didn’t exist. They looked down into the leach pit without visible signs of emotion.
Tama turned his great brown face towards me. His eyes were as hard and cold as Schneider’s had ever been. “You have some explaining to do,” he said in a tight, controlled voice, his lips hardly moving.
“It’s easy enough,” I said. “I got a note telling me to come up here to get instructions for the next drop. I saw that suitcase and I was on my way to get it.” Their heads turned to follow the direction of my outstretched arm. “I stumbled on…the side of that thing. So I opened it.…”
“So you did,” said Tama, his disgust no longer contained. “And the suitcase?”
“It’s the one I delivered the ransom in last night.” I stepped forward, but at a nod from Schneider his pet gendarme clubbed me in the ribs again.
“Don’t move,” ordered Schneider. “Don’t move a step.” He nodded at the second gendarme, who trotted obediently over to the generator house. We watched him in stony silence as he went, his heavy boots and long socks moving in and out of the thick grass. His hand was reaching out for the handle when the thought that had passed through my mind an hour earlier reoccurred to me.
Suppose that was a bomb they’d been wiring under your seat while you were hauling suitcases around up in the hills? I’d said to myself.
“No!” I screamed. “Don’t touch it!”
He looked up at me curiously as his hand tightened around the handle.
I threw myself at Tama, knocking him to the ground, just as it exploded.
CHAPTER 30
There were two
interrogations.
The informal one took place at the Gendarmerie.
Colonel Schneider studied me with the intensity of a psychopath. There were clots of blood on his clothes and in his cropped grey hair. Pieces of the gendarme had splattered as far away as the white stucco walls of Danielle Payton’s Japanese playpen. I looked at his eyes and tried not to shiver.
“How convenient for us that you’re already well-covered with bumps and bruises,” he mused softly. “No one will notice a few more, will they now?” He slapped me lightly across the face and stepped back against the wall, never taking his gaze from me. “But how extremely unfortunate for you.”
He nodded, and the beating began. The three gendarmes who administered it were young and willing but obvious amateurs. After a few initial blows that left me numbed and gasping with pain I was quickly smashed into oblivion.
I came out of it when water was splashed on my face, and I was dragged off the floor and this time tied to a wooden chair. Consciousness flickered on and off. My head lolled on my chest. Suddenly it was jerked up painfully. Schneider had grabbed a fistful of what hair remained on my head. He leaned over until his face was inches from mine.
“A taste of what you’re going to get,” he said bleakly. His eyes were those of a leather-freak we’d busted in Noe Valley who had strangled his biker playmate with a stainless-steel chain and tried to feed his body into the basement furnace.
“I want a lawyer,” I muttered between lips that felt like beefsteaks.
He laughed in harsh gasps. “A lawyer. Monsieur LaRoche thinks he’s still in America and wants his lawyer.” The other gendarmes stood grim and silent.
“Are you just going to beat me,” I managed, after enormous concentration, “or is there something you want to know?”
“You want to talk? In that case, I want to know the following: when did you kidnap the Payton woman, who are your associates, when and where did you kill her, where did you hide the million dollars, and why did you blow up one of my men? Not much, LaRoche, just that.”
My brain struggled to make sense of his words. They were so preposterous as to be incomprehensible.
“You’re crazy,” I mumbled, “absolutely crazy.”
He slapped me twice, stinging blows that clouded my vision. “We’ll see who’s crazy by the time you leave here!” he shouted. A gendarme stepped in from my left and raised his arm. I flinched and tried to hunch my shoulder to protect my face.
“That will suffice nicely, thank you,” said Commissaire Tama in clipped tones from across the room. The gendarme hesitated, startled. I looked up blearily. Tama was standing in an open doorway. He was still the fattest man I’d ever seen but he was the loveliest sight I had ever seen. “You exceed your authority, Colonel Schneider,” he said formally. “You may be certain that it will not be overlooked.”
Schneider took a step forward. “You—”
Tama held up a hand. “One more word, Colonel Schneider, and I will be on the phone to the Juge d’Instruction.” He handed Schneider a paper. “These, incidentally, are his written orders that the interrogation is to be conducted at the Commissariat by the Police Judiciaire. The Gendarmerie may designate a representative with observer status if it so desires.”
Schneider glared with naked hatred. “If I hadn’t had a beeper put on his car this morning—” he began, but Tama was unmoved. “Kindly untie those ropes and get him cleaned up. For your sake I hope he will not need an ambulance.”
“Good cop, bad cop, eh, Tama?” I muttered weakly as I staggered to my feet. “Next time you don’t have to make it so realistic.”
His icy smile had no trace of sympathy. “You were the one who said something about keeping out from under our feet, weren’t you? I wonder: do bugs complain when somebody steps on them?”
* * * *
For the formal interrogation they did it by the book.
“You recognized Susan West as soon as you got here.”
“You knew she’d been involved with kidnappings, didn’t you?”
“Maybe you’d known her in San Francisco, is that it?”
“Was it her idea or yours to snatch the Payton woman?”
“How much was your share going to be?”
“Did she fuck you, LaRoche? Is that how she got you interested? While her husband watched, maybe?”
“Kicked off the force for brutality, eh, LaRoche? No job, no money. So how could you afford a month in Tahiti?”
“Maybe you’d planned it with the Wests before you came down, huh?”
“Who did the snatch, LaRoche? You?”
“Whose idea was it to put the blame on the paratroopers?”
“Quite a gag, LaRoche, telling us how you saw the Payton dame on board their boat.”
“Almost as good as stealing their lighter and leaving it up at her house in the mountains.”
“When did you kill her, LaRoche?”
“What made you think of the paras, LaRoche? Maybe she’d told the Wests about them?”
“Maybe the Wests even knew that she’d mentioned them in her diary?”
“You really thought we’d think they were the kidnappers?”
“You think we’re idiots, don’t you, LaRoche? Answer me!”
“That made you laugh, getting yourself hired to find the broad you’d just kidnapped, didn’t it, LaRoche?”
“But you aren’t laughing so hard now, are you?”
“Who chopped off her fingers, you or West?”
“Who was the guy you hired to go to the bar and pick up that Hitler idiot to go get the ten million francs?”
“Thought you’d throw us off the track, didn’t you?”
“So why did you kill the Wests, LaRoche?”
“Maybe she wasn’t putting out for you, is that it?”
“Or you decided you wanted all the money for yourself?”
“Who took the photographs?”
“How did you kill them? Maybe your pal in the bar went to take care of them, huh?”
“Pretty smart, LaRoche. You’ve kidnapped the Payton dame, you’ve kept her alive and taken a bunch of photos, you’re sending us fingers, and then you decide to get rid of your partners.”
“Because you know we’re not gonna keep swallowing this gag about the paras, don’t you?”
“So you spring the paras and set up the Wests, don’t you, LaRoche?”
“Where were you hiding her, LaRoche?”
“Why didn’t you leave the gun you used to shoot them, huh?”
“That wasn’t very smart, was it, LaRoche, carrying a .25 around with you?”
“Especially when you go to say hello to your girlfriend in her hole, huh?”
“You’re lucky Schneider’s goon didn’t blast you on the spot when they found that gun.”
“They don’t like watching other gendarmes being blown to bits.”
“Funny, aren’t they?”
“Why did you dump her in the leach pit, LaRoche?”
“That was pretty dumb.”
“But you’re not as clever as you think you are, huh, LaRoche?”
“If you were, you might look up once in a while and see a helicopter following you around.”
“So what were you digging the Payton broad up for, LaRoche?”
“A guilty conscience, LaRoche?”
“Who killed her, LaRoche?”
“Was it you, LaRoche?”
“Did you fuck her first, LaRoche?”
“Why did you wire that suitcase, LaRoche?”
“Maybe you were going to try to blow up your partner, huh, LaRoche?”
“No more witnesses, eh, LaRoche?”
“Just you and one million dollars, right, LaRoche?”
“But why did you kill the Wests, LaRoche?”
“Maybe they’d guessed you were the kidnapper.”
“You’re the one who said Susan West was involved with kidnappings, aren’t you LaRoche?”
“Just another one of your little stories,
wasn’t it, LaRoche?”
“They knew too much, didn’t they?”
“Maybe they were trying to blackmail you.”
“What made them suspicious of you?”
“You met the Payton broad at one of their sex parties, is that it, LaRoche?”
“What’s it like, fucking a hundred million bucks, LaRoche?”
“You figured you could get some of that for yourself, didn’t you, LaRoche?”
“And not just her pussy, eh, LaRoche?”
“A bad cop gives all of us a bad name, LaRoche.”
“Maybe we should give you back to Schneider’s goons.”
“Where did you hide her out, LaRoche?”
“That must have scared you, being asked by her daughter to go look for the woman you’d just kidnapped.”
“Is that what made the Wests start to wonder about you?”
“Why didn’t you kill her then and take the first plane out?”
“They still guillotine people, you know, LaRoche.”
“But you figured no one would be looking for you if you were muddying things up by pretending to look for somebody else, didn’t you?”
“Why did you go back to the leach pit, LaRoche?”
“When you saw that your gag about the paras wasn’t going to work, that’s when you decided to kill the Wests and set up those two hash-heads on the boat to be the fall guys, isn’t it, LaRoche?”
“You know, LaRoche, I can almost admire a guy like you. I mean, you didn’t kill anybody that didn’t need killing, and look at the brains you’ve used in this.”
“Anyone else would have just kidnapped the broad and killed her and tried to get away with some of the money.”
“But not you. You decided you could find someone else to take the heat.”
“So first you set up the paras.”
“And then the Wests.”
“And then those assholes on the boat.”
Trouble in Tahiti Page 19
