For The Death Of Me

by Jardine, Quintin

  ‘How do I find her?’

  ‘Easy. You go along Nassau past the main campus, until it becomes Stockton. Then you turn right into Elm Road. Mimosa Avenue is second left.’ She handed me a credit-card slip and a pen. ‘That’s how you find her house,’ she said as I signed, ‘but you won’t find Trey. She’s on vacation or, rather, a lecture tour, in India.’

  ‘Damn,’ I muttered. ‘I should have phoned her. Of course, I don’t have the number either, do I?’

  ‘I can give you that.’ She took a bookmark, wrote on the back and handed it to me. I thanked her, and took my purchase. I was about to leave when she asked if she could have a photo taken with me to go on a board at the back of the store. Naturally, I agreed. ‘Jerry!’ she called. A tall slim guy came out of a back office. ‘My husband,’ Aline said. ‘And photographer.’

  I was really pleased with myself when I left. The team leader had come up trumps. I walked back towards the Blue Point, and saw Prim standing there waiting for me. ‘Mimosa Avenue,’ I told her.

  ‘I know. I found her hairdresser.’

  We’d have had to wait another half-hour for Dylan, but I spotted him coming out of a coffee shop and gave him my best piercing whistle. ‘Any luck?’ I asked, as he drew close.

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Just as well you’re with us, then. Come on.’

  42

  If I’m ever a Princeton academic, and my life has been so strange that I will never discount the possibility, I’ll want to live in a place like Mimosa Avenue. It was quiet, it was secluded, it was exactly the sort of place you would want to hide out if you were on the run from a murderous gang . . . and from a movie star.

  We sat in the Caddy, parked outside number six, with a clear view of Trey Raymond’s place. It was a white two-storey house, the sort of dwelling I’d hire as a location if I was making a movie and needed a home for a model American family. But it was still and silent: nothing was moving, the garage door was closed and there were no toys, or anything else, in the yard.

  ‘And now?’ asked Prim. ‘We go up and ring the doorbell?’

  ‘That would be a very bad idea,’ Dylan, in serious mode once more, told her. ‘The last guy who walked in on this lady had a gun placed against the back of his head and his right eye blown out.’

  ‘So? We just sit here? Which one of you two guys is Dumb and which one is Dumber?’

  ‘Neither,’ I said. ‘This is what we do.’ I took out my mobile, checked the signal strength, then keyed in the number Aline had given me. The phone at the other end rang, ten times, unanswered. I disconnected and tried again. The fourth time I called, it was picked up, on the sixth ring.

  ‘Yes? Is that you, Trey?’

  ‘Maddy,’ I said, as gently as I could, ‘why the fuck are you running from me?’

  ‘You bastard!’ she screamed. ‘Leave me alone. Come near me and I’ll kill you too.’

  ‘I’m not going to come near you if you don’t want me to. But I want you to tell me why you’re acting like this. We made a deal in Singapore, remember? I’m ready to complete: I’ve got fifty thousand dollars with me right now, as agreed.’

  ‘Sure,’ she snarled. ‘And when I show up to meet you, someone else is waiting, your other hired killer.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘What happened to Tony?’ she shouted. ‘What happened to my husband? Are you telling me he isn’t dead?’

  ‘I’d love to be able to tell you that, Maddy, but if I did I’d be lying. Tony was killed in the Next Page, when he turned up to meet me, like you just said. Somebody was waiting for him. If Tony had the film, I guess he took it after he stabbed him.’ I heard her sobbing. ‘If it’s any consolation in the long term, you killed the guy on Dayang.’

  ‘And now the Malaysian police will be after me for murder. Very neat, Oz. If I escape from you, they hang me.’

  ‘The Malaysian police aren’t after anyone, Maddy. Sammy Goss had a very quick funeral at sea, well away from where the scuba-divers will ever go. Maddy, think about this: he had a cool box with him, and you know what that was for. Suppose I did want you killed, a huge overreaction by the way. When you consider the size of the threat you pose to my brother-in-law, why the fuck would I want your head? If I’d sent Sammy, I’d have told him to take a photograph of you dead, for Christ’s sake. That would have been all the proof I’d have needed. It’s the Triads who go in for extravagant gestures.’

  I looked at Prim as I spoke. ‘Ouch!’ she mouthed. ‘You’ll terrify her.’

  I ignored her. ‘Why, Maddy? Why would I do that?’

  ‘I saw you with him,’ she blurted out. ‘I watched you all the way up the hill at Fort Siloso. I watched you, with him and your other heavy. Then they went and hid and you met me on your own. You were showing them what I looked like.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t turn up at the Next Page?’

  ‘No. I trusted you then. It was Tony who didn’t. He wouldn’t let me go; he insisted on making the trade himself, and he went armed. He sent me on ahead to Dayang, and told me that he’d pick me up from there in a boat and we’d cross to Vietnam.’

  ‘That’s five hundred miles.’

  ‘We could have done it in three days. But we didn’t, though, did we? Because it wasn’t Tony who showed up, it was your man, the little fair-haired guy. I watched him go to Aur, then head across to me in Dayang. When he got close enough I recognised him, and I realised that this wasn’t about me photographing some Triad boss, at least not any more. It was about you, taking care of family business.’

  I sighed. ‘Maddy, everything I know about these guys, and everything I’ve learned since we met, tells me that you were right to be terrified. You were in huge danger, and you still are. You’re right to run, but you’re dead wrong to believe you’re running from me. I didn’t know what Sammy Goss was. I didn’t find him, he found me, and I still haven’t figured out how or why. I want you to trust me and to meet me again.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘If you come to the window and look to your right, you’ll see a car.’

  ‘I’m coming to no fucking window!’ she screeched. ‘I show myself and I’m picked off. Oz, I promise you, as soon as you step into this house, you or anyone else, I’ll kill you. I have another gun, my sister’s gun, and I’ll shoot the first person who comes near me.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m not going to rush you. You’re paranoid, woman, but you probably have a right to be. So I’m going to propose something else. I’m going to send someone across, someone you knew when you were in Edinburgh.’ I looked at Prim: I’d had a feeling it might come to this. She nodded. ‘She won’t be armed; given what she’s wearing, you’ll be able to see that. I want you to let her in, and let her talk to you. She’ll be your hostage if you want to look at it that way. She’ll even bring the money if you like.’

  ‘I don’t want your fucking money!’ she snapped. ‘I want to stay alive.’

  ‘Then let me do this, and you’ve got a chance.’

  I listened to her breathing. I felt Prim’s eyes on me, and Dylan’s, but I kept mine fixed on the house, looking for anything, the faintest twitch of a blind or curtain.

  ‘Okay,’ Maddy said eventually. ‘Send her across. But no tricks, or her brains will be all over the hall.’

  I ended the call and turned to Prim. ‘She’s says she’s armed and we have to believe her,’ I told her. ‘Plus, she’s very emotional. If you say no, I’ll drive away right now, but I don’t know what we do to help her after that.’

  ‘You give me as long as it takes,’ she replied. ‘While I’m in there, you do not phone again. If either of you gets out of the car, you keep your hands where they can be seen from the house at all times.’

  ‘All of the above,’ I murmured.

  She squeezed my hand, leaned over and kissed me quickly on the cheek, then opened her door and slid out.

  We watched her as she walked away from us, her brown body see
ming to glow with health, her hips moving rhythmically, encased within the skin-hugging shorts.

  We watched her as she stopped at the door of number seventeen. Almost at once, it opened. ‘There’s only one place she could possibly be carrying a weapon,’ said Dylan, as she stepped inside, with a flash of the crudity for which he had been famous in Scotland, ‘but no way could she ever get it out in time.’

  43

  We waited there for thirty-seven minutes. I know this because I must have checked my watch at least thirty-seven times. My patience control was set at one out of ten, but I managed to keep it in check. After half an hour I stepped out of the car, laying my hands on the roof as Prim had specified. The metal was burning hot, but I didn’t care: it gave me something else to think about.

  I jumped when my phone rang. I snatched it from my pocket and flipped it open. ‘Yes? I snapped.

  ‘Hey,’ Susie exclaimed, ‘what’s with you?’

  ‘Can’t talk now, love,’ I said. ‘We’re almost there. I’ll call you when it’s all sorted.’

  It rang again two minutes later, and this time it was Prim, calling from the house. ‘Okay,’ she whispered. ‘Maddy says you can come in, but only you.’

  ‘Sorry, pal,’ I said to Mike. ‘You’re not invited.’ He wasn’t bothered. He’d started on my book; looking for ideas, I supposed.

  I crossed the street quickly and took the steps in front of the house three at a time. Prim opened the door for me. Maddy was in a sitting room to the left of the entrance hall. She bore no resemblance to the assertive, well-groomed woman I’d met on Sentosa Island; even her hair was a mess. A gun lay on a coffee-table, a big Colt automatic, forty-five gauge at least. I’d fired one in a movie, blank rounds. If she’d tried to use it, the recoil would have taken it right out of her hand.

  I held up both of mine. ‘Hello,’ I began. ‘I am the Lone Ranger, honest. Tonto’s out in the car.’

  After everything that had happened to her, she managed a laugh. A weak one, but I took it as something positive, a sign that she didn’t feel alone any more.

  ‘What do I do now, Oz?’ she asked.

  ‘Whatever I say, would be a good place to begin. I think we should all get out of here. This is a dead end, Maddy, we don’t want to be cornered.’

  ‘Where do we go?’

  ‘Anywhere out of Princeton. Pack what stuff you have, and let’s move. We can make decisions on the road.’

  ‘Will I be safer?’

  ‘Sure. The Triads may be looking for you, but they’re not after me. With me, you’re less visible.’

  She agreed, and she didn’t have a lot to pack. We were heading out of Princeton inside ten minutes. She was going to leave a note for her sister but I vetoed that. Just in case the opposition arrived and broke in (classic security: the key had been under a big flowerpot in the back garden) I didn’t want to leave any clue that she’d been there.

  I decided against going back to New York. Instead I went back to Highway One and headed south for Trenton, the state capital, less than fifteen miles away. We didn’t shop around for a hotel: I spotted a big Marriott, almost on the Delaware River, which at that point divides New Jersey from Pennsylvania. We headed straight there.

  We took three rooms; Madeleine wanted Prim to share with her, but there was no way I was bunking with Dylan. I filled out the registration forms, using phoney names (I registered Maddy as Ms April July and the clerk didn’t bat an eyelid) and hoping that I wasn’t as famous in Trenton as I was in most other places. I paid for two nights up-front, cash.

  Once we were settled in, I went out and bought a case of beer from a liquor store I’d seen on the way in. Back in the hotel I called the girls’ room; they’d showered by that time, so I went along. I opened a beer, handed it to Maddy and she guzzled it like she’d been dying of thirst. I gave her another; that went the same way. Half-way through the third, there was a knock at the door, and Prim let Dylan in. He’d brought some Miller’s; great minds and all that stuff.

  ‘Were you and Tony really married?’ I asked, when everyone was relaxed.

  Maddy nodded. ‘We did it in Singapore. They can be a bit old-fashioned about living together over there. Plus, I loved him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He was a gangster, Oz,’ she said philosophically. ‘I suppose danger comes with the job. If he’d bothered to tell me . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d probably have stayed with him. As it was, he loved me. He gave up his life trying to protect me.’ She started to sob quietly. ‘If only I wasn’t so pathologically jealous. I had a bad experience with that Australian faggot, Sandy. When Tony started keeping odd hours, I thought the worst . . . and the worst happened, although not as I’d imagined.’ She killed her third can. I gave her another. ‘Now,’ she belched quietly as she tore it open, ‘I’m royally fucked. Tony didn’t leave me in any doubt about these people. They will keep coming.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to stop them,’ I said.

  She sighed. ‘And just how are we going to do that?’

  ‘Good question,’ Dylan chipped in.

  ‘If you’re writing this book,’ I asked him, ‘what happens?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ he said wonderfully tactlessly. ‘Maddy keeps on running or, like I said in jest a while back, lives with me in New York till the heat’s off?’

  Madeleine scowled at him: clearly she didn’t fancy that idea.

  I leaned back against the headboard of Prim’s bed. She was reclining beside me, wrapped in a hotel dressing-gown. ‘Way I see it,’ I took time to kill some beer of my own, ‘there’s only one thing you can do to break the cycle. You’ve still got these pics, am I right?’ She nodded. ‘Stored on a PDA?’

  ‘Clever boy.’

  ‘Then use the power they give you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I laughed at her amazing ability to think in everything but a straight line. ‘Maddy, why do these people want to kill you? What did Tony tell you? The man you saw with him, the man in the photographs: his identity is unknown to anyone outside his organisation. The Singaporean government has been trying to identify him for years, and shut him down, but they can’t because he’s too strong, and too clever. At least he was, until you came stumbling into his life.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So put an end to him. Use the fucking knowledge: give the photographs to the Singapore police.’

  She stared at me. So did Dylan: I’d just written a new twist into his book. (By the way, Maddy thought that his name really was Benedict Luker.)

  ‘It’s that simple?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Nothing in life is that simple, but it’s all you can do unless you fancy sharing Benny’s humble loft for the foreseeable future.’

  She frowned. ‘But I’m in New Jersey,’ she murmured. ‘I’m not going back to Sing, Oz. I can’t do that.’

  I shook my head. ‘You don’t need to,’ I told her. ‘I’ll arrange for Sing to come to you.’

  44

  By the time Maddy had been convinced, with Prim’s help, I have to say, that she had run out of healthy options, it had gone eight thirty. We ordered room-service sandwiches and ate them in virtual silence.

  Pretty soon, the effects of the beer started to show on Madeleine. I motioned to Dylan that we should leave the girls to settle down for the night, and led him back to my room. I did a quick calculation and reckoned that it would be mid-morning in Singapore; Sunday morning, granted, but the guy I was planning to call wasn’t the type to go off watch, ever.

  As we’d done in the Stamford, I put the hotel phone on hands-free mode and dialled Jimmy Tan’s mobile number. I’d been wrong: there was no answer. We watched some baseball on TV, then I tried him again an hour later. This time I came up lucky.

  ‘Who this?’ he asked suspiciously. The readout on his cell-phone wasn’t giving him any clues.

  ‘Oz Blackstone and Benny Luker,’ I told him.

  ‘Ah, you guys. You sti
ll chase the lady? If you find her tell her from me there no problem with that thing in Malaysia.’

  ‘We have found her, Jimmy.’

  His chuckle filled the room. ‘There no escape from you bad boys,’ he said. ‘But so what?’

  ‘So plenty,’ Dylan cut in. ‘She has something you’ve been trying to get your hands on for years, and she’s ready to hand it over.’

  ‘What she got that I would want?’

  ‘The picture that started all this off: the one of Tony Lee and the Triad chieftain. We assumed that he had burned it with all the rest, and maybe he did, but Maddy made another copy, on computer.’ We could hear Tan’s gasp.

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘Never more so,’ I told him.

  ‘This is great news; I tell the prime minister about this.’

  ‘You don’t tell anybody, Jimmy,’ Mike insisted, ‘until you have the pictures in your hands and until Maddy’s well clear of pursuit.’

  ‘Okay, he can wait. Where are you?’

  ‘We’re in the US; Trenton, New Jersey. How soon can you get to us?’

  ‘Oz, I never leave South East Asia. I send someone, my most trusted person.’

  ‘Jimmy, we want to deal with you.’

  ‘I send you my right hand. You want me cut off real one, send that as proof?’

  I looked at Dylan. He shrugged and nodded. ‘Okay,’ I conceded. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Where is nearest airport?’

  ‘There’s one in here in Trenton,’ Dylan volunteered. ‘I saw a sign for it as we came into the city.’

  ‘Then that where we meet; you find meeting room in terminal, my person find you, give you letter of introduction from me. You hand over photos and have plane waiting; soon as it’s done, you all get hell out of there, you, woman . . .’ he paused ‘. . . and Mr Luker.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Simple precaution, Oz,’ Mike said. ‘Jimmy doesn’t like to admit it, but the Triads are everywhere and there’s an outside chance they’ve penetrated his organisation. If his messenger has been followed, well, we don’t want to get caught there. Right, Jimmy?’