The Lonely Silver Rain

by John D. MacDonald

  “So they bury old Billy and we can sit around and wonder.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to make out an affidavit saying he came to me before they left for France and told me that if he died over there I was to make absolutely certain it was a natural death. So I’m doing my duty to a client. And maybe Billy told you to check up on me and make sure I do as he asked.”

  “Easy enough.”

  He sighed. “I’ve done dumber things, but I can’t remember when.”

  The call came from Frank Payne at quarter to three on Sunday morning, the next-to-the-last day of the year, waking me from some kind of turbulent dream which faded before I could retain any part of it.

  His voice was guarded. “I’m at Decker’s. We’re in real trouble, pal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leaving out all the medical gibberish, somebody knocked him out somehow. Probably too late to find out if it was a drug. Maybe it was just a good whack on the skull with a sock full of sand. They then stuck something thin and sharp and curved right into the inside corner of his left eye. Something like a length of piano wire sharpened at one end, stiff wire. So they got it in there and turned it a little bit each time they jabbed. It was curved, so it created massive hemorrhaging, just as if a major artery in the brain had ruptured. No bleeding to speak of at the point of the puncture wound.”

  “So why are we in trouble?”

  “We didn’t think it through. There has to be an official report. The finding has to be verified by other medical authorities. We have to move into a full-scale autopsy with laboratory samples of the organs and so on and so on. There has to be a grand jury verdict of death at the hands of person or persons unknown, and everything will have to be turned over—copies at least—to the Sûreté or whatever they call it in France. And because Billy was prominent, everybody around here is going to want a piece of the action so they can get their name in the paper. Trav, the wire services and the networks are going to pick this up, and it is all going to point right at Millis, especially if they can find any trace of a strong sedative when they do the full-scale autopsy. The funeral is, let’s say, indefinitely delayed. What they are going to do tomorrow at the church is have a memorial service. This is a real mess. Thanks a lot, McGee.”

  “Does it make the estate any bigger?”

  “Maybe by a hundred and fifty thou, which is like saying the swimming pool is bigger if you pee in it.”

  “Millis know yet?”

  “Not yet. I might go over to St. Kitts for a week. Get some rest.”

  “You need it, Frank.”

  “I’ll take the wife and kiddies, and my spinning rod.”

  “I want you to think about something.”

  “Such as?”

  “Millis is a bright, bright woman.”

  “Granted.”

  “She is careful with money.”

  “I’ll buy that too.”

  “It costs a lot less to bring home an urn full of ashes, and if you killed somebody, it’s a lot safer.”

  The silence was so long I thought he had hung up. “Frank?”

  “I’m right here. I don’t do the courtroom scene but Roger Carp does. I think he could get a lot of mileage out of what you just said. If she still wants us in her corner.”

  I was at the ten-thirty service at United Baptist. The big church was about half full. Had he still been in business, it would have been full. Commerce creates social obligations. Besides, it was the next-to-the-last day of the year.

  I was early and I stood outside until Millis arrived. She’d taken the dark blue Continental out of storage and the man driving it seemed to be wearing the uniform of the security troops at Dias del Sol. One of Decker’s pale young men went out and escorted her in, holding her in gingerly fashion by the elbow. She wore a tailored black suit, a small hat with a short black veil, no lipstick.

  The Rev. Dr. Barnell Innerlake conducted the service. He seemed hesitant, as though working from a revised script. He recounted Billy’s humble beginnings and his good works after God blessed his energies with some cash money.

  So I was standing near the door of the big Continental when the guard held it open for the widow. She started to duck into the car and then stopped and faced me. I saw the green tilted glint through the veil.

  “You heard?” she asked in a rusty voice.

  She was too tough to play games with. “Yes, I heard.”

  “Come out to the penthouse, please.”

  “Right away?”

  She looked at a diamond watch. “Noon?”

  “Fine.”

  Away she went, small against the back-seat upholstery.

  Seven

  The young security types in the small foyer of Tower Alpha at Dias del Sol wore black armbands, and I guessed it was one of the services that went with a duplex penthouse. Or, I suppose, it could have been an expression of a genuine grief. Billy was a likable man, easy to work for and generous.

  Millis opened the door as soon as I pressed the bell. She had changed to baggy white cotton slacks and an orange cotton shirt with long full sleeves. She had tied her hair back with a piece of orange yarn. She was barefoot.

  She murmured a greeting, bolted the door and led the way back through the long living room with the wide glass expanse overlooking the sea, a room done in quiet blues and grays. I followed her down a short broad corridor into a small room which was evidently her dressing room. There was a dressing table with a tapestried bench and a mirror encircled by frosted bulbs. There was a French desk in dark wood with a maroon leather desk set. There was a love seat and two chairs, two walls of sliding doors which evidently concealed her wardrobe and an arched entrance into a much larger room with a queen-size pedestal bed.

  She gestured vaguely toward the love seat. I lowered myself into it carefully. It looked fragile. There were no windows. The room was shadowed. The only light was that which shone through the arched entrance from the bedroom.

  She turned the desk chair around and sat, hunching her shoulders and squeezing her eyes shut in a strange grimace.

  “This isn’t easy for me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry about Billy.”

  “He was fond of you. And I resented that, because I didn’t want anybody to have any part of him, any part of his attention.”

  “I didn’t know you cared. That much.”

  Her wistful smile was upside down. “Neither did I. I didn’t at first. I thought I was going to marry Billy because I was looking for a safe haven. I thought I was going to marry him because it would mean an end to scuffling. But in the end I married him because I loved him. He made me feel loved. Nobody else ever did that. Wanted and loved.”

  “He was very proud of you.”

  She frowned. “So I had to keep living up to what he thought I was. Can that make you a better person, McGee?”

  “Could happen. If you get into the habit.”

  “I guess. Maybe. Anyway, I’ve been awake since Frank Payne phoned me at five and told me somebody had killed Billy. I’ve been awake and thinking. There’s a pattern to this. It’s a very ugly pattern. Plus too many guesses.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I don’t expect you to. Not without knowing more. So I have to tell you more. I don’t like telling this to anybody. Did you ever hear of Enelio Fortez?”

  It took a deep dip into memory. “Is he the one … about eight years ago … they found pieces of him all over Greater Miami?”

  “Pieces of Nelly as reminders to the others to be careful. They planted the pieces near drug distribution centers. I’d been his live-in chum for three years when they killed him. Nelly got too greedy. It happens to people. He thought he could get away with it, but he couldn’t. He just wasn’t bright enough. I moved in with him just before I turned twenty. A big fun life. Lots of money, clothes, champagne, flights to Vegas and the islands. A very nice apartment. I heard later that some of them wanted to waste me too, just in case I’d been par
t of it. But a man named Arturo Jornalero said he would vouch for me. And I moved in with Art. Not fulltime, like Nelly. Art has a wife and kids. But he’s more important than Nelly could ever have become. He’s right near the top, and it is a seventy-billion-dollar-a-year business. So at twenty-two I’d moved a couple of steps up the ladder. And when I was twenty-five I woke up. I saw some lines here by my eyes and some lines across my throat, and I knew that when I stopped being some kind of rarity that Art could show off to his buddies, I would be out on my keister with maybe a little gift of money to ease the transition. After I walked out and after Arturo located me, he sent some of his guys to talk me back home, but I wasn’t having any. After a couple of phone calls he gave up. I had answered an ad in the local paper, and I wanted somebody who couldn’t toss me out whenever he felt like it, so I took dead aim at my new boss, Billy Ingraham. I wanted a longer future than I was going to get in Miami. I have to tell you all this so you’ll understand the rest of it.”

  “I wondered about you, Millis. You seemed a little out of focus.”

  “You’ve got a good eye. You made me nervous. Anyway, right after the identity of the girl from Peru broke in the news, Arturo got in touch with me. He said it was very important, and it had nothing to do with our previous friendship. That’s what he called it. Friendship. So I sneaked off to a motel room and met him there.

  “He told me that he was facing a very heavy situation. He said that the girl, Gigi, who got her throat cut, was the niece of the top man in the drug business in Peru, in Lima. This man, Isidro Reyes, is the brother of Gigi’s father, the diplomat. It is a big powerful family, and apparently this Gigliermina was the darling, the apple of everybody’s eye, and engaged to a young lawyer from another strong family down there. Everybody down there was enraged, and word had come through that they wanted everybody involved in that killing to be punished. Arturo said he had been keeping track of me, for old times’ sake, and he said it was strange that our lives should cross again in this manner, but he had to find out if somehow Billy had gotten those kids killed in the process of getting his stolen boat back.

  “We talked a long time. I told him about you and how you had found the Sundowner using aerial photography, and how you had phoned the Coast Guard and Billy the day you located the boat with the bodies aboard. He wanted to know if I was sure you hadn’t found it several days earlier and then maybe got impatient when nobody else came across it and reported it. I said I was positive it had not happened that way. And I said Billy would never have told you to get the boat back no matter who you had to kill. And I said that the counterfeit money didn’t make any sense in any scenario where you killed them. He thanked me for my time and said I’d been a big help. We shook hands and then we realized how funny that was and we laughed and I kissed him, and that was that. Now Billy is dead. Murdered. And I can’t think of anyone who’d want him dead except some crazies in Peru who got the whole thing wrong.”

  So I told her all about my gift book, and the blood of children sprinkled to a height of fifteen feet on the back wall of the storage room of a dress shop named the Little Boutique. She looked at me in total consternation. “I know Arturo believed me. We had good communication. He’d gotten over being hurt and angry. I know he believed me. He said it was going to make it more difficult. Usually nobody would be interested in some bloody little mess down in the Keys. Somebody delivered too little or asked too much, or somebody else stepped into the picture at the wrong time. Nobody would care. But this time the wrong person died and so they would have to unravel it. It begins to sound like what I was thinking early this morning, McGee. They can’t find out what happened, so they’re killing people who could have done it, just to have something to show.”

  “There’s another way to guess it.”

  “How?”

  “They found out who really did it and they would rather not touch them.”

  She agreed, saying that could be possible. I then asked her if it would be a good idea to see if I could find Arturo Jornalero, and she turned and reached into a desk drawer and handed me his business card. Jornalero Management Associates. She said it was in a fairly new office building, the top two floors, two blocks south of the Miami Herald building on Biscayne, and half a block west, on the right-hand side of the street. No name on the building, just the huge gold numerals 202 over the entrance.

  She wrote a note I could send in to him which might make it possible for me to see him. She sealed the envelope, handed it to me and I put it away.

  She hunched her shoulders and said, “I feel as if I were falling and falling into some dark cold place, over and over, down through the dark.”

  She put her hand out to me, and when I took it, she led me into her bedroom. A very feminine room. Through a half-open door I could see into another bedroom, and on the far wall I saw the vital leaping curve of a stuffed game fish on a plaque. She turned by the bed and hugged me, her forehead against my chest. “Could you just hold me?” she asked. “Just hold me and if you don’t mind maybe I’ll cry a little.”

  So we stretched out on her queen-size bed, and I held her close and she cried. There wasn’t much to her—just a slenderness, a vulnerability. The vulnerability was what had been missing before.

  When the crying had ended, she said, “This is the first I’ve been able to cry for him. I wondered if I would, when I would. I guess I’ve never been able to feel very strongly about anyone, except Billy.”

  Her voice broke on his name, and the tears were not ended. When they finished for the second time, I thought she had gone to sleep. A narrow segment of jalousied window was open. I could hear the Atlantic swells curling and thudding on the beach far below. I could hear faint music from somewhere. Her head rested on my left arm. Her hair was fragrant. My right hand lay against the small of her back. A round hard knee pressed against my left thigh.

  I wondered how I had gotten into this. I had not been with a woman since a few weeks before I had flown out to bring Hubie’s sloop home. I could feel her warm and steady breathing. I thought about the time I had broken three ribs, and how it felt to breathe. I thought about icicles, hailstorms, broken glass. But nothing I thought of stopped my right hand from stretching the fingers wide and exerting a small pressure against her back. The knee pressure fell away and she came closer. I hoped she was still asleep and had not noticed a thing. But her breathing changed, and she pushed her hips so close she could not fail to notice what all thought of ice and pain had failed to quell.

  She sat up abruptly and unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She kept her eyes shut as though unwilling to watch what she was doing. She made a mouth, as the French say, a mouth of resignation and self-contempt. She knelt, put her thumbs inside the waist elastic of the baggy white slacks and peeled them down, rolled back and kicked them off. She had worn nothing under either the blouse or the slacks. Her body was elegant, sleek as fire-warm silk and ivory, with a deceptive flavor of immaturity about it, the nipples small and pink, the pubic hair a soft sooty smudge.

  I would say that there was not a hell of a lot of tenderness going on. We were daytime thieves, rifling a strange bedroom, looking for the treasure as quickly and quietly as possible, hearts racing, hands trembling, small cries muffled. Found it all too quickly.

  She came out of the bathroom in a long ivory-colored robe. I was dressed, and standing by the window looking down at the sea. I turned and we looked at each other, partners in a small crime.

  “That’s not me,” she said.

  “Or me either. Wrong time, wrong place.” I put my hands on her shoulders and bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. They were cool and slack. “Who can tell what anybody is like? Living and dying, loving and dying. We share the planet with some tiny critters which make love one time and then die. Nine months after earthquakes and floods and the dropping of bombs, lots of babies are born.”

  “It was my fault,” she said.

  “It wasn’t intentional.”

  “Who kn
ows from intentional? I gave it a chance to happen to prove that it couldn’t. But it did. And I’m ashamed.”

  “Don’t be. Don’t be.”

  As I drove away from the glossy abode of the Widow Ingraham, I appealed to Billy Ingraham to please understand. And I told him we were both ashamed.

  She had good reason to want to be held. And maybe one of the obscure reasons for what had happened was that she had confessed a somewhat grubby past to a stranger. The aftershock of confession is lessened if the stranger becomes a lover. Such confessions are more easily rationalized.

  I knew I would not seek Meyer’s judgment on the whole scene, and I realized that I want him to have a better opinion of McGee than I seem to have lately. The world was a bewilderment and I was having image problems. And so was Millis.

  Eight

  I had phoned ahead to be certain Mr. Jornalero was in. I did not make an appointment. I waited fifteen minutes after I sent the note in by way of the receptionist. The other five chairs were empty. There was a small table with a pile of architecture magazines. No windows. Indirect fluorescence. Handsome color prints of various structures on the walls. Small banks. Drive-ins. Office buildings. Each had a trim logo of the JMA initials in the bottom right corner. Elevator music was piped in. From time to time one of the phones on the receptionist’s desk would ring or buzz and she would murmur into it, push buttons and hang up.

  A phone buzzed. She answered it and told me how to find Mr. Jornalero’s office. Through that door, second door on your left.

  There was no desk in his office. Some leather furniture, bookshelves, a small conference table, windows with a view of a nearby windowless building and a small slice of the bay and the candy towers of the Beach.

  He met me at the door and shook hands and ushered me over to a couple of leather chairs facing each other across a low coffee table. He was a big man, probably in his early fifties. Thick dark hair tinged with gray. Pale face, heavy features, a broad big-boned body with a look of sedentary softness in spite of some expensive custom tailoring. The patterned yellow silk tie had the Countess Mara logo. Yellow gold ring on his little finger with an emerald almost too big to be true. The flavor was of money and power and importance. And an unexpected friendliness.