“You hear quite a few blockbusters, d’ya, Ned?”
“You know what I mean.” He laughed. “Helluva noise. Like when I was a kid and they had the big fire up there, you remember that one? Place must have a curse on it. Ambulance radioed down to Jerry at the police station, they found a body out in the driveway. Stranger.”
“Anybody see Benedictus or that wife of his? Were they at home?”
“Well, that’s funny. I seen ’em go up before the storm really got to goin’ hard, both of ’em in the Rolls—”
“So they’re up there? Christ, they didn’t have much of a chance then. … Musta been a gas leak, like over at the Timmons place ’bout five years ago—”
“Well, here’s the thing. I ain’t so sure they’re still up there, got ourselves a mystery here. There’s gonna be hell to pay, see, ’cause Benedictus’s other car, that Bentley, the two-door, damn thing’s gone. I had it in here for new plugs, and when I came down here ’bout ten minutes ago the damn thing’s gone! So did he take it and go back to town? Or what?”
Their conversation bounced along and Cassidy looked at his watch. Tash had an hour’s lead. If he’d been thrown clear of the Rolls, if he’d been able to walk, if he’d reached the village … an hour, yes, an hour had passed, maybe even a little more. Poking around the wreckage of the Rolls had taken forever. Yes, an hour, maybe even two.
The Plymouth was gassed and he was paying the bill when the attendant shook his head. “You ain’t gonna try gettin’ down the mountain, are you? Not tonight?”
“Thought I would.” His own voice was far away, unreal, and he couldn’t stop thinking about Terry Leary.
“State cops are out there. It may be blocked. Mudslides and they say you can’t see a damned thing. Say, where you comin’ from?”
Cassidy nodded vaguely.
“You see the fire up there?”
Cassidy shook his head. “I better get going.” He took the change from a five and left the gas station.
The road was invisible under the carpet of shifting silt and the storm itself acted like an immense mirror. He was struggling along at ten miles an hour when he saw the state highway patrol up ahead. Red flares like smudgepots burned, whipped by the wind. The patrol car was parked at the side of the road. The patrolman waving him to a full stop had a red face and a mustache and was shaking his head. He wore a broad-brimmed hat that was tied under his chin and dripping steadily. His ears were red as earmuffs.
“I don’t reckon you oughta try this road tonight,” he said.
“Believe me, I wouldn’t if I had a choice. This is an emergency.”
“What’s the problem?” The wind yelped at his voice.
“My wife’s having a baby in San Berdoo.”
“You don’t wanna get yourself killed going down here—”
“I’ll sure as hell be careful.”
“Yep, I guess you will. Okay, pal, but for God’s sake, take it easy. You got the best reason in the world to stay alive.”
Harry Madrid had said something like that, about having found Karin, about how life was supposed to be. He nodded to the patrolman, rolled up his window, and moved onward.
It was a scary ride because you couldn’t see the road, you couldn’t see anything. It was like flying through fog. A bumpy flight, but it gave him time to think.
Benedictus was on his way to pick up the minotaur.
He’d killed Manfred Moller to find out where it was. Cassidy figured he’d found out. If not from Moller, then from Mona. She’d probably have done just about anything to end what Benedictus had been doing to Moller. Yes, Mona had known where the minotaur was, it was the hole card she’d hoarded to save her life if she needed it. Well, it hadn’t worked, it hadn’t saved anybody’s life. …
Cassidy figured he knew where the stupid fucking minotaur was.
All he had to do was get off the mountain alive.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE RAIN SOFTENED ONCE HE was halfway down the mountain. The cold was gone; it was warm and muggy and you had to open the window to breathe and even then it was a chore. It had taken a long time to get off the mountain and by the time he could see the lights of San Bernardino it was two o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t imagine when he was going to get any sleep.
The rain just kept coming, rushing in the gullies, sweeping across the road now and then, overwhelming the windshield wipers. He reached the coast and followed it northward, occasionally hearing the roar of the surf. In Malibu part of the cliffs had collapsed. The highway was strewn with dirt and boulders and he followed the flares and the highway cops signaling like semaphore men, their slickers glistening in the red glow.
He turned on the radio and listened to dance music through the small hours and wondered how he was going to tell Harry Madrid about Terry. If he’d been killed on a battlefield, you’d write a letter. But it hadn’t been that kind of battlefield and he was going to have to tell him, face to face. He turned the radio up, trying to drown out what was going on in his mind. Like everything else, it seemed to be a losing battle. He was used to it by now.
It was still raining when he pulled off the highway in sight of the three bright lights shining on the sign that said Ocean View Motor Court. You could still just make out the old name. El Dorado.
It was dawn, barely, and there was a light in the office. He pulled the Plymouth up to the door and got out. It felt like somebody was pouring a big bucket of water down on his soaked hat. How had his hat survived crawling up and down that moutainside? Terry’s Dobbs hadn’t made it. Terry hadn’t made it.
He went into the office and hit the bell on the desk. He heard a sudden cough, a man coming out of a catnap in a state of confusion, and then Cliff Howard came out of the other room. He took a bleary look at Cassidy, squinted, then broke into a wide, toothy grin. “Well, you couldn’t stay away, could you?” He laughed quietly. “Place kinda grows on you, don’t it?”
“You always stay up all night?”
“No, Mr. Sheehan, to tell you the truth, I’m normally sawing wood at this time of day. Or night, that is. But tonight’s been a short one—”
“Let me guess, Cliff. But first, I smell coffee. I’m about out on my feet.”
“No sooner said than done.” He ducked back through the doorway, reappeared with a thick chipped cup full of the hot and black.
Cassidy sipped, burned his mouth to prove he was still alive and at his post. “I’ll bet a fella in a Bentley coupe has been here tonight. Eye patch, one arm, you couldn’t miss him, Cliff.”
“Damned if you’re not a quick one! Showed up here,” he yawned, looked at the Big Ben alarm clock on the counter, “three, four hours ago.”
“You were holding something for his wife, sort of for safekeeping, was that it?”
“No, no, not like that. I was as ignorant as a newborn babe … but there was somethin’ here he wanted, you got that right.”
“Just tell me, Cliff.”
“Well, whoever he was, he rolled in here, gave me a hunnert-dollar bill, just the one bill, for the use of a spade, no questions asked—”
“Where did he do his digging?”
“Well, he couldn’t do much with just the one arm, so he gave me another hunnert, honest to God another one, and asked me to go out there with him. Back of cabin eleven. Rainin’ like a bitch it was, mud ass deep, water runnin’ down the hill there, damn Dakota gull washer, real turd floater, y’know? So I started diggin’ where he told me to, dug this hole like a tiny grave, fillin’ with water fast as I could dig it out. … All it was, somethin’ wrapped in a gunny sack—was it a head or what? Like that move, Night Falls?”
“Night Must Fall,” Cassidy said. “No, it wasn’t a head.” He could see it in his mind, a gunny sack soaked with mud, a treasure beyond the telling, buried where El Dorado had once been. “Did you know the man in the Bentley?”
“Nope, never saw him before, but I sure seen that car, that Bentley, we don’t get many of them, you kn
ow, that Bentley’s been here before, six, seven times—”
“Who was driving it then?”
“Woman, real pale, black hair, I never got a really good look at her face, she’d drive in, go to cabin eleven, prob’ly for immoral purposes, y’know, but we’re in no position to be choosy. What can you expect from foreigners, anyway? She’d visit this guy, you knew damn well what they was doin’ in there, and if you didn’t she’d let out a yell every so often, damned embarrassin’ but the wife said we needed the bidness and she was right about that—”
“The pale woman was no foreigner.”
“No, not her. Him. The man. He kept to himself, stayed here a week or so, just before you got here, now I hate to say it of anybody but I think he was a German, kinda talked like a German but he had this funny accent, sorta English, but there was German underneath it, like that actor, Helmut Dentyne—”
“Dantine. Helmut Dantine.” Cassidy swallowed more coffee.
“Yep, that’s the fella. Dentyne. Anyway, this one-armed fella showed up—he wasn’t lookin’ so sharp either, had some blood on his face, like he’d had a fight, blood under his nose, little cut on his forehead.”
Cassidy peeled off five twenties but Cliff Howard shook his head. “No, no, you’re practically a friend of mine by now. Can’t take your money. Two hunnert bucks in one night’s plenty for me.”
“Take it, Cliff. It’s not my money anyway. If that makes you feel any better.” He put the money on the counter.
Cliff Howard left it there and walked to the door with Cassidy. He went outside and popped an umbrella open, stood in the rain while Cassidy got into the car. “Listen, Mr. Sheehan,” Cliff Howard said, “tell me one thing. What the dickens was in that gunnysack?”
Cassidy thought it over. “The stuff that dreams are made of, my friend.”
Cliff Howard leaned back and laughed. “That’s a good one. Just like the movies, right? Stuff that dreams are made of.”
“Exactly.”
“Say, you got somethin’ to do with the movies, right? Am I right or am I right?”
“Sure,” Cassidy said, starting the Plymouth. “We all do. Every damn one of us, Cliff. We all have something to do with the movies. We can’t help it. Am I right or am I right?”
“Well, I guess you are at that.” He stood in the rain and waved, smiling at the departing Mr. Sheehan, wondering perhaps what had happened to his own dreams.
He stopped at a diner outside Malibu and had breakfast. Then he went to the washroom and splashed cold water on his face, a face he barely recognized. He looked like hell, but then it had been a long night, a hard night—all night long.
So Tash had the minotaur. Moller had buried it behind cabin 11 where Mona Ransom had visited him regularly before he showed up officially at the Benedictus house. And now Tash had killed them both.
Of course, trusty Lew Cassidy was climbing over the bodies in hot pursuit.
But there was always one more question.
The auction.
Cassidy knew neither when nor where.
But by the time he was back on the road all he could think of was Terry Leary dying in the rain. He couldn’t wait to kill Tash Benedictus. It was, in the end, very reassuring to know who the villain was.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CASSIDY CALLED THE POLICE STATION across the road from Ned’s service station and learned that the man found at the Benedictus place had been alive. The cop was young and talkative and didn’t question Cassidy’s story that he was calling from the Los Angeles Times. The ambulance staff and the local sawbones had treated the injured man as best they could but the cop didn’t think he’d regained consciousness. There had been blood transfusions right from the start but they’d had to get him to a hospital. His name was Terry Leary, he was from New York City, and no, they didn’t know what he’d been doing at the Benedictus place, but he’d somehow gotten himself shot by somebody. No, they hadn’t been able to investigate the remains of the house. “Funny thing,” the young cop said, “it’s the second time a house on that spot has burned to the ground. I guess this one blew up first, though. Heck, we don’t know who was even in the house, if anybody. But they wouldn’t of gotten out alive. Still red hot up there. In the summer, the whole darned mountain would be on fire. Look for the silver lining, I always say.” Obviously they hadn’t yet noticed the wrecked Rolls among the trees on the mountainside. They had an interesting day or two ahead of them.
“Do you know where they took the survivor?”
“Just a minute.” Cassidy heard him asking Margaret and he could see the whole scene. The chief was up at the site of the fire. The all-purpose secretary/dispatcher, Margaret, was at the desk pretty excited about the whole thing. She’d know where this Terry Leary, gunshot victim, would have been taken. The young cop, Jerry, came back on the line. “Livingston Memorial in Los Angeles. What did you say your name was, anyway?”
“Walter Burns of the Times.”
“Walter Burns. Well, Walter, the chief wants me to get my fanny up the hill. I’ll tell him you called.”
He didn’t want to go back to the house, not yet. He didn’t want to tell Harry Madrid the story and he didn’t want to get into a wrangle with MacMurdo. The Colonel wouldn’t understand what had happened, would remind him that if he’d let Mona Ransom fend for herself Terry Leary wouldn’t be in the shape he was. The Colonel’s sympathies would be brief and when he found out that the whole plan had disintegrated he’d go through the roof. Mona was their agent inside, she was the source of information. Without her, they wouldn’t know where the auction would be held and when. Now she was dead and Moller, the man they had the leverage on, was dead. Everything was shot to hell and Benedictus could make a run. He had the minotaur and he might not even wait around for the auction. Take the minotaur and make a run for it. MacMurdo had worked hard to win this war of his and a civilian had just about lost it for him. He wasn’t going to like it.
But now Karin, at least, was out of it. Out of it and safe. With Manfred Moller dead she was excess baggage. Thank God.
He called Livingston Memorial and tracked down someone from the emergency room who could tell him what was going on. Terry Leary was in surgery and he had not been conscious at any time since he’d reached Livingston Memorial. There was nothing else to find out.
He called the house. Harry Madrid answered.
He told Harry what had happened. Harry took it in like an old cop. “You just can’t stay out of the shit, can you, son? Well, Terry’s the main thing. He’s a tough son of a gun. Colonel MacMurdo is off on yet another of his little missions. Karin is siting in the kitchen staring at the rain. And I’m about to perpetrate breakfast for the two of us. Lew, you gotta stay cool. Why don’t you come here and get a couple hours of sleep?”
“Not quite yet, Harry.”
“You want me to tell Karin about Moller?”
“Sure. Look, Harry, what are we gonna do about the auction?”
“You’ll think of something.” Harry Madrid chuckled softly. “The auction is soon, Lew. And I think Benedictus will be there. It’s his nature, he sees it through. Then he’s going to run for it. Soon. He wouldn’t have done what he did up there on the mountain if it weren’t time. He’s killed a bunch of people, now he’s ready.”
“I’m up against the wall, Harry. I wish I knew who killed Rolf Moller, y’know? Where the hell does that fit into all this? Whatever happened to the Englishman Benedictus was waiting for yesterday? Vulkan … who is Vulkan? See what I mean? We don’t even seem to get any closer … Harry, how did Tash Benedictus know we were coming to Maine?”
He found Dr. Langworthy in the Livingston Memorial coffee shop dunking a filled doughnut in a cup of milky coffee. A Camel was burning down in a glass ashtray. The rain was drumming at the window, palm trees struggling to stand upright in the gale. Langworthy’s bushy gray eyebrows drew together and he took a sloppy bite of doughnut. His eyes were set in dark circles on either side of a beaky, hoo
ked nose.
“I was in charge of the ER last night, this morning, when they brought your friend in.” His voice was tired. He’d had a long lousy night, too. “Pretty bad shape. He’s still in surgery. He’s going to be in surgery for awhile. He’s a mess. I have to tell you this. Shot in the chest, lots of blood loss, lungs full of blood. What ran over him? A truck? A bus?”
“A Rolls-Royce.”
Dr. Langworthy shook his head. “Hollywood. Shit. Well, the Rolls left him a lot flatter than a human being is supposed to be. Crushed pelvis, legs, internal organs shot to hell. The physical body can only withstand so much punishment. I was in OR for a while watching them try to put Humpty Dumpty together again—your friend has led quite a life. We found another bullet in him, lodged near his spine. Looked like he’s been carrying it around for several years. … What’s the story there?” He munched some more doughnut and lit another Camel.
“He was a cop in New York. Got shot four years ago.”
“What a life! So you’re a close friend of his?”
“I am that.”
“You a religious man?”
“My mother was a Catholic.”
“You ever pray? As a kid?”
“I guess I did.”
“You remember how?”
“I suppose so.”
“You’d better start. Your friend needs all the prayers he can get.”
“Do you think he might make it?”
Dr. Langworthy sighed, rubbed his eyes. “Oh, anybody’s got a chance, things being what they are. He might make it. That’s what I’m afraid of. Don’t pray for him to live, see. Pray for him to die. Trust me on this one.” He looked at his watch. “Christ, I’m tired. But right now I gotta go practice some medicine. I’m gonna practice until I get it right.”
He made a few more calls from the lobby of the hospital. He was casting about for any information he could get about the auction. There weren’t many angles to play until he remembered something he’d heard. It was a long shot. It was crazy. But it was the only shot on the table.
He placed a call to Teet Carle, who ran the publicity department at Paramount. “Lew Cassidy? You New Yorkers come out here, it starts to rain! Howsa boy, Lew? How’s your dad?”
Kiss Me Twice Page 33
