What of Terry Conniston?

by Brian Garfield

  “What’s the countryside like?”

  She had to think about it; finally she said, “Kind of flat and deserty. It’s the other side of these hills.”

  “In other words they could see somebody on foot for quite a distance?”

  “I’m afraid they could,” she answered, indicating by her reply that she understood what he had in mind. “You’d have a long walk.”

  “How long? Five miles? Ten?”

  “I don’t know, Mitch. It’s awfully flat to the south of it. Of course it would all depend whether they happened to be looking out in that direction.”

  “We can’t take the chance they won’t.” He chewed his lip. The road curled past the high bull ring—a coliseum papered with colorful posters—and ran on south through a widening canyon alongside the railroad tracks. The dark blue car absorbed sun heat through the roof; he drove with all the windows open, his left arm propped up. The traffic was steady and light, mostly old American cars and Volkswagens. The Ford fitted in beautifully.

  The last adobe buildings receded behind them and were absorbed in the mirror’s rear-view by the dun-colored hills. The road ran up a long easy grade ahead and disappeared over it. Terry said, “It’s down on the flats beyond this hill.”

  He pulled over to the shoulder before they reached the crest; got out and walked up just far enough to be able to see past the crest. From this high vantage-point he could sweep a panorama that sprawled a good many miles toward various mountain ranges, haze-blue in the distance. The road ran down the slope ahead of him two or three miles to a permanent roadblock and a solitary cubical building flying the Mexican flag; beyond, the highway ribboned south for miles before it twisted out of sight.

  He pinched his mouth irritably and walked back to the car. “That’s no good. We’ll have to wait for nightfall. Then you drive through the checkpoint while Billie Jean and I walk around the back of the place. We’ll make a wide circle, a mile or so—you’ll have to wait for us on the other side.”

  Billie Jean said, “You mean we got to kill the whole day here? It’s too damned hot.”

  “We’ll go back to Nogales and get some lunch and some beer.”

  “Yeah,” Billie Jean said. “I could use some.”

  He made a tight U-turn and drove back the way they had come. Terry’s hand rested on his thigh as he drove.

  C H A P T E R Fourteen

  Somehow Earle Conniston’s office—which had rarely been occupied by more than two people at a time during Conniston’s reign—had become the center of the household. They had all four congregated there on the night of Earle’s death; it seemed natural that they keep coming back to it.

  Halfway through this insomniac night they were gathered in the office—four people in the same room but not together. Carl Oakley was striding back and forth. Louise Conniston sat pushing her ice cubes around with a swizzle stick. Frankie Adams, graven-faced, was twisting his knuckles and chewing on a pencil and frowning at a newspaper crossword puzzle in his lap. Diego Orozco sat in his favorite straight chair with hands on knees, the weight of his huge belly sagging against his thighs.

  Louise wore a rustling silk dress. When she twisted in the chair to look at Oakley her breasts handled the cloth seductively. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I think better on my feet.”

  “You’re nervous. You’re making me nervous, so you must be nervous.” Her words ran together carelessly; she was tight, or high—Oakley had never pinned down the distinction.

  Frankie Adams said, “What’s the capital of Ecuador? La Paz? Five letters.”

  “That’s in Bolivia,” Oakley said absently.

  Orozco muttered, “Quito.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Oakley tugged back his sleeve and looked at his watch. Two seconds later if someone had asked him the time he wouldn’t have been able to answer. He resumed pacing with his hands in his pockets.

  Adams uttered a monosyllabic curse and slapped the pencil down on the newspaper. “I can’t do these damn things.”

  Louise said, “It beats hell out of me how you two legal and detective geniuses can identify both those dead bodies and still come up with nothing.”

  “We’ve got their names,” Oakley said, “and for the moment that’s all we’ve got. It’s worth about as much as a nun’s virginity—we’ve got it but what good is it?”

  Orozco said in his unperturbed growl, “We’ll have more information coming in pretty quick. My stringers are working up files on them.”

  “Sure—sure,” Louise said. “But what happens then?”

  “I’m not clairvoyant,” Oakley said. “All I can tell you is they didn’t leave her there dead. Which means she may be alive.”

  Louise knocked back her drink. “But if they let her go why haven’t we heard from her? And if they didn’t, why didn’t they?”

  Oakley didn’t answer. He went to the big leather chair and sat back, crossed his legs at right angles, laced his hands behind his head and knitted his brows. He kept looking at the telephone. All evening he had swung pendulantly from one extreme of emotion to the other—elation, despondency. They had found the spliced phone wires early in the afternoon and after that things had moved fast: they had found the two naked bodies in the ghost town before sundown. A discreet contact of Orozco’s in the Tucson police lab had run the fingerprints through for identification and Oakley had still been on his after-dinner coffee when the replies had come through—Orozco’s team had worked with remarkable dispatch. But what did it add up to? Oakley had even looked them both up in every one of the phone books in Earle’s cabinets. No Theodore Luke, no George Rymer. The two names hung suspended in a vacuum.

  None of the radio direction-finders had picked up any signals from the bugged suitcase. The two sets of tire tracks in the ghost-town barn meant very little, if anything—one set belonged to Terry’s Daimler, which had not been sighted anywhere, and the other set consisted of worn mismatched tires of a brand not used on new cars. Thus there was no way to identify the make of the larger car. Orozco’s operatives had put out the word on the red sports job but that, Oakley thought bitterly, was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Arizona was crawling with two-seater cars and half of them were red.

  Theodore Luke had a vague record of three arrests and one suspended sentence, on charges of simple assault and drunk-and-disorderly. George Rymer had a record of narcotics arrests. Both men had been musicians—New York City had refused Theodore Luke a cabaret license because of his criminal record. But there was nothing in the sum of that information to suggest that either of them had ever been involved in robberies, extortions, or any of the other varieties of crime that a lawyer might expect to find in a kidnaper’s background.

  It was all elusive, inconclusive, mocking. Oakley’s eyes were lacquered with weary frustration.

  Frankie Adams said crossly, “I’m going to bed,” and left the room. Louise stirred the melting ice in her glass; Oakley watched her moodily. She caught his eye on her and she smiled, her eyes half-closed; she looked warm and lazy. She sat up and lifted her arms to fiddle with her hair. Under the silk dress her breasts stood out like torpedoes, drawing Oakley’s masculine attention, arousing him and irritating him with the distraction. Louise, meeting his glance, became very still, her arms upraised; her eyes mirrored a sensual speculation. Still smiling, she yawned luxuriously and walked out of the room trailing musk.

  Oakley’s palms felt moist. He felt his face color when he caught Orozco looking at him, bland-faced. He sees everything, Oakley thought, and made a note to quit taking Orozco for granted—lunatic chicano land-schemes aside, Orozco was a vigilant and clever man, possibly dangerous. The inscrutable Mexican, he thought dryly: Orozco had superb control, he never let you see anything he didn’t want you to see.

  They kept vigil by the telephone, the prime umbilical. It did not ring. Oakley began to feel drowsy; he hadn’t had much sleep in the past three days. Getting old, he thought, and felt solemn
and sad, regretting all the things he had not done when he was young and all the things he would never do, either because of lack of time or because of lack of passion. He had never been a man of passions; he saw himself as a repressed man, cool, channeled, deliberate. He thought of the unsubtle suggestion Louise had left hanging in the air (anything but inscrutable) and it focused his weary thinking once again on the fact that he was no longer young, that it was time to settle for something less than the unachievable perfection of a Technicolor marriage with violins. Something made not in heaven but in kitchen, bed, living room. It seemed a wry irony that his reputation was that of a blade. He couldn’t even remember most of their names—an endless procession of soft humid bodies with interchangeable faces. It was always easiest that way: no attachments, no commitments, no passions. Yet it gave him little joy, left him ragged, sapped his energies—the timeless ritual of pretense and mutual seduction. Once he had met a girl in a bar who had said to him refreshingly, “You don’t have to buy me drinks and dinner. I only want to get laid.” Blunt, forthright—yet she had been attractive, young, charming. But she had been just passing through. They were all just passing through.

  He came back to Louise. Young, attractive, widowed, sensual. Rich besides. If he played his cards right she would marry him; he was certain of it. But it wouldn’t do. He could endure a marriage without love; he probably wasn’t capable of making any other kind. But marriage to Louise would be a duel—a constant abrasive antagonism; a clashing of desires, the headstrong against the reasoned, the passionate against the temperate. He didn’t need a Louise. He needed a milkmaid.

  His reveries began to distend and wander; he leaned back in the tilting chair and put his feet up on Earle’s desk, glanced drowsily at Orozco and closed his eyes…. The morning sun beamed across the desk and he came awake with a start, searched guiltily for Orozco and learned the room was empty. He mouthed a mild oath, lowered his feet to the floor, sat up.

  His tongue felt dry and bloated; he scraped a hand over his stubbled chin and blinked ferociously, cupped a big hand around the back of his neck and reared his head back until the bones creaked.

  He crossed the hall, tired and rumpled, and found Orozco sitting on his bed with a fat paw across the telephone receiver and a slight frown on his face. Orozco’s chin lifted: “I came in here to take the calls. Didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Thanks, Diego.” It had been an unexpected kindness. Orozco kept displaying new facets, each of which further eroded the slothful impassive image.

  Orozco said, “Things are starting to break.”

  “Good. Can it wait ten minutes? I’ve got to wash the sleep off.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He stripped to his underwear and closed himself into the bathroom to shower and shave and clean his teeth. He felt stiff and sore, with a particularly insistent ache in the muscles of his neck and knees; Getting old, he thought, and realized the phrase was becoming an obsessive repetition in his lexicon. It didn’t help to look in the mirror; the haggard face was not reassuring. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had really looked at his face in a mirror. When he shaved or combed his hair he never looked at himself to the extent of appraising the whole. Now he saw the creases that bracketed his mouth, the beginnings of sag under the eyes, the crow’s feet, the spreading gray in the hair. It was still a photogenic visage, younger than his years, but the flesh beneath his chin was beginning to loosen and he thought with a harsh defensiveness which he immediately knew was designed to mask deep-rooted panic, I’m forty-six, after all.

  He hurried out of the mirrored room, climbed into clean-pressed clothes and said, “I could use a cup of coffee.”

  “So could I.” Orozco went to the kitchen with him and stood hip-shot against the counter while Oakley searched the unfamiliar cabinets for a coffeepot and finally settled for a covered cooking pan in which he set out water to boil. He glanced at the electric clock above the door—seven fifteen—and took down a jar of instant coffee and a pair of cups. “You take anything in it?”

  “Just black.”

  “Me too.” Black for my youth: I’m in mourning. He made a wry face at his own melodramatic sourness and turned, leaning against the refrigerator with his arms folded across his chest. “Well?”

  “They found Terry’s car in Nogales. Parked on a side street. Nothing much left in it but there were fingerprints all over it and we’re running them through for identification. One funny thing, though—somebody’d hot-wired it. So the prints we come up with may belong to some clown who stole it from the kidnapers.”

  “Swell.”

  “There’ll be a plane coming in sometime in the next half-hour with dossiers on the two dead guys and the people they associated with. One of them had a brother—they all three worked in the same nightclub combo. There was a fourth guy in it too. That may be our gang.”

  “A band of musicians?”

  “They lost their last job in Tucson a few weeks ago. The skinny one we found dead was an addict. I don’t know what else he was but a habit his size would take a hell of a lot of money. It was his brother that was the bandleader. It adds up for motive and opportunity, Carl. They needed money bad, they had no work.”

  “And they’re as slippery as watermelon seeds. We’ve got to do better than this, Diego.”

  “It’s coming along,” Orozco said mildly. “We’ll crack it. You remember that voice on the phone—too much conceit there. When you get an amateur who thinks he knows more about strategy than Clausewitz you got a character who’s going to make mistakes. When he does we’ll have him.”

  Oakley took the lid off the boiling water and poured. “Maybe. But I can’t stand sitting around here waiting. Get a man in here to keep an eye on Adams and Louise. I’m going back to that ghost town with you. Maybe we’ll find something they missed yesterday.”

  An hour later he was ready to go when the phone rang. He answered it and heard the words he had been waiting for: “Carl? You’ve got your uptick. The market opened with Conniston up.”

  “Good. You’ve got your instructions.”

  He had to make a dozen phone calls to put the machinery in motion; now that things had begun to stir he found that he had snapped out of his melancholy dirge. It was like the opening rounds of a courtroom battle. After the morose night of stage fright he was at last in the arena of action; it brought him up on his toes, settled his mind into a new clarity of focus, rekindled his confidence and decisiveness. Before, trying to keep control of the whole mess had been like trying to hold onto his hat in a gusty wind. The risks had appeared formidable, the juggling task a formidable one. But now he moved with sure firm steps. He phoned Earle’s doctor, and while they waited for the physician he held a curt briefing session in Earle’s office, instructing Louise and Frankie Adams—in Orozco’s absence—in what they were to tell the doctor. The doctor arrived at ten, acquisitive and tame; the mendacious ritual was attended to and Oakley walked the doctor out to his car: “You’ll receive the—fee—in cash, of course, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t deposit it in any bank accounts. Put it in a lock box and spend it where nobody knows you. It isn’t reported from our end and we won’t want you reporting it as coming from us. You never know when they’ll hit you with a spot-check out of the computer.”

  “Of course.” The doctor was urbane, avuncular. “I’ll arrange everything with the funeral director. The embalming will be done here if that’s satisfactory. I presume you’ll want him buried here on the ranch?”

  “I believe he wanted cremation. It’s in his will.”

  “Excellent,” the doctor said, and added with a frank smile, “We wouldn’t want there to be any possibility of exhumation for autopsy, would we?”

  When the doctor had left, Oakley called his office and told his secretary of Conniston’s death. There was a brief exchange of appropriate solicitudes and eulogized phrases after which Oakley gave instructions for the release to the press of the news of Conniston’s death. T
hen he left instructions with the ranch staff to admit no journalists through the gates or into the main house; he would, he said, issue a formal statement on behalf of the family tomorrow afternoon—in the meantime Conniston’s wife and daughter, he said, were too grieved to meet with the press. Three of Orozco’s men stood guard around the house to insure that no one disturbed the weeping widow and orphan.

  By afternoon, he knew, the death of the tycoon would be known on Wall Street. The price of Conniston stock would dive through the floor. Oakley’s dummy-fronts would cover his short sales and use the money from that to buy up the stock again at its crippled price. He estimated it would take him about thirty-six hours to gain control. The key to his scheme was the fact that Earle had not owned a controlling interest in his own business—he had been expanding so fast he had to sell stock to raise capital; and he had made every effort to see that large blocks of stock never accumulated in the hands of possible rivals, even members of his own board of directors. Conniston had held about twenty-three percent of the outstanding common stock in Conniston Industries, the holding conglomerate which owned all the Conniston subsidiaries. That stock would go to Louise and to Terry if she were still alive. Thousands of stockholders owned the remaining seventy-seven percent—mutual funds, private investors, insurance portfolios. Oakley already owned eight percent; he needed forty-three percent of the rest—less than two thirds of the stock which would become available in the impending mini-panic. When the news of Conniston’s death hit the ticker the big funds would be the first to sell, trying to liquidate before the inevitable plunge. Their quick sales of large blocks would further depress the price. Even if the Exchange suspended trading in the stock Oakley’s brokers would pick it up over the counter. The beauty of it was that Oakley was not an officer of Conniston Industries—he had been Conniston’s personal attorney but held no official title—and he owned less than ten percent of the stock; thus, in legal terms, he was not an “insider” and was not required to divulge his activities to the SEC. He had broken no law except to conceal the facts in Conniston’s death; and it was hardly likely anyone would reveal his part in that. All of them had too much to lose.