What of Terry Conniston?

by Brian Garfield

  He was a long time sick. Finally he wiped his mouth furiously on a handkerchief and came back across the street, taking a long detour to avoid going near Theodore. Billie Jean was crouching below the porch, watching Theodore anxiously as if she was waiting for him to get up.

  Full of fury Mitch kicked her in the thigh and when she looked up he said, “It’s your fault! You killed him!” His voice trembled.

  Billie Jean looked at him with a slowly changing face; with childish petulance she said, finally, “Bullshit.”

  He looked past her, up across the porch. Terry looked bleak and glazed. He climbed up and went over to her and sat down beside her. She didn’t say anything; she didn’t even look at him. There was a long livid scratch down her cheek and her clothing was torn, her hair a matted tangle. She was sucking on a broken fingernail.

  At the edge of the porch Billie Jean got up, rising into sight like a porpoise coming up from the sea. She said in a practical voice, “Let’s don’t just leave him out there in the middle of the street like that.”

  Mitch thought about it sluggishly. “Do what you want to do.”

  “I can’t move him by myself. He weighs too much.”

  Unreasonable and loud, he shouted, “What the hell do you want me to do? Bury him with full military honors? Embalm him and build a thousand-dollar casket? Leave me alone!”

  Very businesslike, Billie Jean only waited out his tirade patiently and then said, “Do the same thing he did with Georgie.”

  Mitch resisted it for half an hour but in the end he did what Billie Jean wanted because it was the only thing he could do. He didn’t know where Theodore had put Georgie and he didn’t want to find out. He put Theodore around back of the store near an anthill and left him there bloody and naked. He carried Theodore’s clothes inside and stuffed them into a knapsack with Georgie’s things. Working mindlessly, doing what Floyd had ordered last night, he policed the place, picked up every last scrap and carried everything across the street into the barn. The trunk of the sports car was not locked; he put everything into it and had to sit on the lid to close it.

  He stood in the barn entrance, soaked in sweat and caked with dirt and blood. He felt feverish, drugged. Across the powder-stripe between the buildings Terry Conniston was standing near the place where Theodore had died. She had picked up the knife. Billie Jean slumped resentfully against the edge of the porch, breathing hard, her big breasts rising and falling. Evidently they had both thought of the knife at the same time and Terry had won the race for it.

  Mitch still had the gun in his hip pocket. He took it out and after a minute discovered how to break the cylinder open. All the cartridges had been fired. He put it back in his pocket and started to cross the street.

  Billie Jean said, “Well?”

  “Well what?” he snapped.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Christ, how the hell should I know?”

  “You better think of something,” Billie Jean said. “I don’t think Floyd’s gonna come back.” By some simple animalistic process she had already put Theodore completely out of her thoughts. She said again, matter-of-fact, “He ain’t coming back. You know he ain’t.”

  C H A P T E R Twelve

  Carl Oakley sat in the Cadillac behind rolled-up tinted windows, wearing a hat and dark glasses and hoping he looked enough like Earle Conniston from a distance to pass the test. He twisted in his seat to sweep the picnic area and the cottonwood-sycamore copse that surrounded it; nothing stirred except a few birds and a few leaves, roughed up by the wind. He looked at his watch, because the dashboard clock like all dashboard clocks did not work—almost three hours since he had arrived. The engine had begun to overheat and he had switched it off, killing the air-conditioner; he had started it up at fifteen-minute intervals to cool down the interior. In these hills the heat wasn’t too bad but he was covered with a nervous glaze of oil-sweat.

  He chewed a cigar and felt an acid pain in his gut—the sense that it was already too late. They had likely murdered Terry long since: he ought to call in the police. But the police would insist on talking to Earle.

  Forty-eight hours ago Oakley had considered himself an honest man, within the acknowledged flexibility of business morals. He was surprised by the ease with which he had shattered that illusion. What he was doing was illegal, dangerous, and inexcusably dishonest, and during the night he had traveled the full length of rationalizations and faced the reality of his crime. All these years he had enjoyed the self-satisfied comfort of the knowledge that he did not covet what was not rightfully his. To the best of his belief he had never envied Earle Conniston, never resented the difference in their stations nor been tempted to cheat Earle—a temptation which, had it existed, would not have been difficult to fulfill. Earle had trusted him with unreserved confidence; Oakley had enjoyed the smug satisfaction of knowing Earle’s confidence was deserved. Today, in hindsight, he marveled at his own record of pious self-righteousness.

  The new ambitiousness could not have sprung full-blown into his consciousness like a fully shaped god from the head of Zeus; it must have been there all the time, undetected, waiting. What had triggered it had been the sudden awareness that Earle was shrinking—no longer the larger-than-life idol who had moved through the corporate world with demoniacal grace, pokerish imperterbability, uncanny judgment, athletic balance. Not until Earle had revealed unmistakably his own weakness had insidious thoughts wriggled past Oakley’s puritan conscience, changed wish to desire; and even then, he thought, it was unlikely he’d have done anything about it if Earle had lived. The options would have been unfavorable. Petty embezzlement? Even if he had been convinced he could get away with it, it was beneath him. A full-scale raid designed to wrest the empire from Earle? No: he lacked the calculated brutality for that, the rapier fineness, the stamina, the acrobatic agility. He was a good lawyer, sensitive to subtlety and nuance, alert to opportunity, keen to the openings that were to be found between the fine-print lines of financial documentation. He had discovered, investigated, discarded and recommended countless deals for Earle Conniston; he had protected the empire against incursion and insult; he had unerringly weeded out deadwood and dispassionately called for its amputation. But he had achieved these successes because he had been confident, and he had been confident because he was backed by Earle’s weight. Thinking it through relentlessly he had concluded that the lucky timing of Earle’s death had been the only event in the world which could possibly have given him both the opportunity and the resolve to make his grab.

  He didn’t know whether to feel grateful or angry. Something Earle had said ten years ago remained in his head as if written in letters of fire: In anything you do, risk is determined not by what you stand to win but by what you stand to lose. Today, for the first time in his life, Oakley had committed himself fully: he stood to lose everything. Absolutely, literally everything. It frightened him.

  In his way Oakley had always been a fatalist. Things were determined by chance as often as not. Luck: the very fact that he existed at all was only a matter of chance. How had his father happened to meet his mother? How had he, a bright but undistinguished young lawyer, chanced to meet Earle Conniston at precisely the opportune moment for them both? It had been, he recalled, at a poker game—the perfect setting. The shape of a man’s life was carved not only by his own decisions and reactions but, equally as much, by blind coincidence, sheer accident. Luck.

  It was Earle’s bad luck, and perhaps Oakley’s good luck, that Earle had blundered into Louise’s bedroom at the wrong moment, blundered into Frankie Adams’ drop-kick, blundered against the bedpost. It amazed Oakley that his conscience remained untroubled. Not responsible for Earle’s death, he felt no guilt about the course he had pursued since then—unless guilt could be defined as the gnawing fear that his whole scheme would collapse, with him under it.

  He inspected his watch irritably and shot his cuff. Ten past eleven. He had arrived before eight o’clock after making the ran
som drop along the road as instructed. Presumably Orozco’s operatives in Nogales were monitoring the radio signal from the bugged suitcase which contained the money.

  He sat it out another twenty minutes, at the end of which time he got out of the car and walked around the clearing, went into the woods and scoured the ground, not sure what he was looking for but half afraid he might stumble across Terry’s body. He found nothing at all to indicate the kidnapers had ever been there. He went back to the car and rolled out of the clearing with the air-conditioner roaring softly. The big car took the rutted roads fast, swaying on its springs, bottoming now and then with a sickening bang. By the time he reached Patagonia he had chewed his cigar to mangled shreds; he scraped the remains off his fingers in the dashboard ashtray and bumped across the railroad tracks and put the car onto the paved road to Sonoita, gunning it up to ninety across the rolling valley.

  Shortly before one o’clock he turned in at the main gate and started up the last few miles to the house. The ranch sprawled toward the horizons—a thousand miles of fence, a hundred windmills, fifteen thousand cattle, five thousand acres of irrigated Pima cotton, two hundred cowboys and farmhands, six hundred horses and eighteen tractors, uncounted coyotes and coveys of quail. The Conniston ranch: a small corner of the empire. Carl Oakley surveyed it with a proprietary air while he tooled the car expertly toward the big house.

  Orozco was waiting by the garage when he came out. Oakley said, “No sign of her. I waited three and a half hours.”

  “I’m sorry, Carl.”

  “You think she’s dead, then?”

  “I guess she is. But we got to keep lookin’ anyway.”

  They walked up to the house, Orozco talking on the way: “Your buddy at the Pentagon built a fire under the dispatcher at Davis Monthan. They let us have the flight plans of the planes they had in the air yesterday and we narrowed it down to five possibilities. I got men out checking all five areas now. One of them was right over downtown Tucson, which ain’t going to be much help. I told them we wanted to know where the planes were at twelve forty-four but the guy pointed out one of those jets covers maybe ten miles in one minute between twelve forty-three and a half, and twelve forty-four and a half. Not to mention if your watch was off by half a minute or two minutes.”

  They went inside. Louise and Adams sat gloomily at a table in the front room playing gin rummy. Oakley said, “She didn’t turn up,” and headed for the corridor, ignoring their questions. Orozco trailed him into the office and shut the door. Oakley said, “What about the bug in the suitcase?”

  “It went over the border at Lochiel and they lost the signal.”

  “They what?” Oakley wheeled.

  “Look, Carl, a little transmitter like that ain’t got a whole lot of range. Maybe we’ll pick it up again. I got men on every road south out of Lochiel.”

  “They’d damned well better find it.”

  “You get no guarantees in this business. We do our best.”

  “You sound like a God damned used-car salesman on South Sixth in Tucson.”

  Orozco grinned. “I used to be.” He pointed a pudgy finger and, following his glance, Oakley saw a map pinned up against the bookshelves; it hadn’t been there before. Orozco said, “’Scuse me for making the place into a war room but I’m tryin’ to run the whole operation by phone from here.” He went over to the map and beckoned. “Look here. I got men in Nogales and Magdalena. Ain’t all that many roads leading out of Lochiel—sooner or later the bleeper’s got to go through somewhere around there unless they get smart and ditch it or double back this side of the border, in which case I got a man posted at Lochiel. We’ll turn them up. Just a matter of time.”

  “Unless they stop to divide up the money and leave the suitcase on a junk heap at Cananea.”

  “I’ve got boys closing in. If it’s there they’ll find it.”

  “Sure. Then what?”

  Orozco shrugged. “You got to play this kind of thing by ear, Carl.”

  “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Sit here on my ass and diddle myself?”

  Orozco brought up a straight chair from the back of the room and reversed it, sitting down cowboy-fashion, astraddle with his thick arms folded across the high back of the chair. “Time we had that little talk about the ranch, Carl. I told you I’d bring it up today.”

  “This isn’t the time for it.”

  “Hell it ain’t. What else you got to talk about right now?”

  “I don’t want to talk at all.”

  “Too bad, because I got a few things to say.”

  Oakley sat back in Earle’s leather chair and closed his eyes painfully. It didn’t discourage Orozco; the fat man launched into a droning speech.

  “In the past year Earle’s had four fences pulled down and two barns burned to the ground. That’s just kid stoff, sure—nothing you can’t handle. But you keep turnin’ a deaf ear to these chicanos and their machismo is going to cause a rising. They see black people getting concessions all over the place and they figure it’s their turn, you know? If the blacks can do it so can the Mexicanos. You ever been out in the scrub behind this ranch out east, Carl? You ever visited a family of chicanos livin’ fourteen to a three-room ’dobe hut, the house full of malnutrition and TB and unemployment and infant mortality? When they can they pick peas for a dollar a day and when they can’t they live on tortillas and beans. Maybe one kid gets a job as a yard boy or carry-out boy. Sitting up there in the scrub hills lookin’ down on this ranch and this big house, all of which got stolen from those people’s grandparents. You know how they did that, Carl? Easy. A honnerd years ago the Mexican goes into the crossroads gringo store to buy a sack of feed and the storekeeper says, ‘Sign here and I’ll give you credit,’ and the chicano goes ahead and signs a paper he can’t read because he needs the credit. Turns out he’s signed a deed to his land. The judges and the lawyers and the tax collectors and every gringo in Arizona defrauded these people out of their birthrights. Now they want ’em back. They want to know if you’re gonna give it to them or if they’re gonna have to take it.”

  Orozco’s voice ran down; Oakley kept his eyes shut. His silence argued with Orozco.

  Orozco said stubbornly, “I got a cousin out in the back hills there livin’ on beans and bread. No meat, no milk. They get their drinking water from an irrigation ditch. Conniston’s been gettin’ farm payments from the government that exceed the income of every chicano in this county put together. My cousin’s gettin’ fed up, Carl.”

  Oakley opened his eyes with a grimace and studied the fat man with cool mistrust. “If he’s your cousin why do you let him live like that?”

  “Because he’s too proud to accept my help. I’ve offered him money plenty times.”

  “But he’s not too proud to demand title to land he never earned.”

  “That’s a redneck argument, Carl. I didn’ expect it from you. ‘Look at the lazy greaser, good for nahthing, livin’ on welfare.’ Only there ain’t no welfare down here to speak of. Just gringos complainin’ about the lazy nogood greasers.”

  “Don’t call me a bigot, Diego. You know damn well when I’m in trouble I’d sooner go to you for help than any gringo I know.”

  “Sure. And when was the last time you invited a chicano into your home for a nice sociable dinner?”

  Oakley tipped his head back and closed his eyes down to slits. “You’re way out of line, Diego. Don’t start calling me names just because your chicanos just can’t adjust to the times. How can you try to bulldoze me with a fantastic pipedream like this? Conniston Industries has firm, clear title to this ranch. This wild chicano talk is going to do about as much good as a girl saying she wants her virginity back.” Abruptly he shot his eyes wide open and leaned forward, elbows on the desk, as if to catch Orozco off guard. “The fact of the matter is you got roped into La Causa by some crazy fanatic or other who knew you had a pipeline to Conniston through me and now you’re going through the motions because you don’t
want your friends to call you a Tio Taco or a vendido or a Malinchista sellout Uncle Tom. All right, you made your pitch and I didn’t buy it. Let’s drop it, all right? Go back and tell them I’m not in the market.”

  “You don’ think much of me, do you?”

  “I think a lot of you, Diego, but I think you got yourself roped into a mistake because you didn’t stop and use your head first.”

  “You think I’m just an errand boy for some big-shot Mexican that runs the movement, hey?” Orozco smiled slowly. “I got news for you, Carl. I am the movement.”

  Oakley scowled. “I’m not impressed. I gave you more credit for brains.”

  “Did you? Did I mention I’m planning to run for the state senate next year?”

  “More power to you,” Oakley said with distaste; he was about to add a sharp remark when the phone rang. He grabbed it spitefully. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Oakley, please?” A girl’s flat-chested chirp.

  “Speaking.”

  “Mr. Burns calling, sir? Of Cleland, Burns and Lee, brokerage? Hold on, please, sir?”

  “… Hello, Carl? Jim Burns here. On that short-sell order of yours, Conniston Industries common. The stock opened an eighth of a point down this morning and it’s lost three eighths in the day’s trading.”

  “What of it?” Oakley snapped.

  “Well, just this. There seems to be a lot of short-selling in the stock and it’s disturbed the market. I feel obliged to remind you that you can’t complete a short sale unless there’s been an uptick since you placed the order. There has been no uptick. As of this afternoon’s close, New York time, the stock is half a point below the point where it was when you put through the order. In good conscience I felt I’d better warn you—you could easily be caught holding the bag.”