Good for them.
“Juanita seems better than when I got here,” Barbara said. I nodded agreement. At dinner, the little housekeeper’s smile had been back in place.
“She’s getting over what happened at the house. I think she feels safe with you and Ed around, and she really likes Mr. Farrell. He treats her like a daughter.”
I nodded. I’d noticed that, too.
“We’re just bored, but we’re not complaining. Still, I wonder when this will be over.”
“I think it will be over soon,” I said. “A week. No more.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean that?”
“We’re making progress.” I had no absolute proof of Lorena Garcia’s participation. Only a feeling. Except that feeling buzzed like a bad transformer.
“You think you know where the money is?”
I shook my head. “Not even close. But I may be close to someone who does.”
“I spoke with Joe today. He said Claire was just wasting her money hiring you. He was emphatic. He said Claire doesn’t have much money left, the company isn’t making any, and if the government seizes her assets, she won’t have anything left at all.”
“That true?”
She nodded. “She’s fine for a while, unless they start taking her apart. And it could happen any time. If they do, she won’t have anything to pay you with.”
“Or him.”
“He mentioned that, too.”
“He ask where she is?”
“Uh-huh. I didn’t tell him.”
“Good.”
She studied my face. “You have more than just one reason for saying that, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t want to tell me, do you?”
“No.”
“No? Or not yet?”
“Not yet.”
“I can live with that,” she said. “It makes me trust you.”
“Why?”
“You’re protecting Claire from something. You can confide in me, you know, but if you don’t feel comfortable with that, I understand. But I know that you’re keeping your thoughts to yourself so you don’t hurt anybody.”
“Wow,” I said. “You’re good.”
“You’re protecting Claire because it’s about Paul, and you don’t want to hurt her any more than Paul already did. Isn’t that it?”
I said nothing. I didn’t need to.
“You’ve found the other woman, haven’t you?”
I looked toward the entrance of the harbor where Point Loma met the Pacific. Someday soon I’d take Olympia out there and head home. I wished I could go right now.
“Aren’t you glad this rain is finally over?” I asked.
She slugged me in the arm. “Okay,” she said. “You’ve got your reasons. But you just confirmed what I already knew. And,” she said, bringing her face close to mine, “what Claire already knows, too.”
“I don’t have anything,” I said. “But I think I have a link with a woman who may or may not have been with Paul. It seems likely. I can’t prove it. Not even to myself.”
“And so you’re watching her.”
“And so I’m watching her. And there’s something else. She may be tied to Claire’s attorney.”
“How do you know?”
“Wheels within wheels. They are all tied together somehow. I don’t know how, but they are. I’ve got the end of a string and I’m pulling it until it all unravels. So far I found one end tied to Stevenson and one end tangled around a woman in Tijuana who fits the description of a woman in San Diego who might have been involved with Claire’s husband. It’s nothing, yet it’s something.” I was not going to tell her about the gang kid. I had no idea how he fit, and I didn’t want to scare her. The implications of his presence after the shooting in Claire’s living room were scary, even for me.
“That’s what you’ve been doing? Following people?” She moved close to me. I found it pleasant, not something I wanted to avoid.
“That’s all,” I said, listening to my voice as if it belonged to someone else. “Sitting and watching and waiting for something to happen. And when it does, I follow to see where they go. It’s not as interesting as canasta, but I get to listen to talk radio, and I get to see some interesting landscape I’d probably never see otherwise.”
Barbara’s hands closed on my forearms. I could almost feel her heat through the leather.
“And tomorrow,” I continued, “I’m planting myself near the woman’s house. When she comes out, I’m going to follow her.”
She stepped away and stared at me, giving me the hard look. “If you find the money, I don’t want you to tell Stevenson.”
“That never entered my mind,” I said. In fact, I’d already thought to ask Ed Thomas for the name of another attorney. Maybe two, a tax attorney and one who sues other lawyers. Set one shark on another. Play a little game of “Let’s You and Him Fight.”
“I came up to see how you were. You seemed so distant during dinner, I thought something was wrong. I feel better now, after our talk. And I really needed the air, too. Claire was getting on my nerves.”
“I thought you were friends.”
“She can wear thin, even so. We’re all confined in a tight space where personality conflicts magnify. Here, give me a hand.” She climbed onto the transom and sat beside me, hooking her feet inside the railing. “Claire sometimes acts like a spoiled child. She’s had it very good for a long, long time, and she expects that her money and her position will continue. She doesn’t hear the pounding at the gate.
“She’s in a position where she could lose everything. Claire’s a tough woman. She’s weathered this whole thing with Paul. She was the one who asked me to find somebody like you. I didn’t force her. Yet, just before you got to the restaurant, she wanted to leave. Sometimes I think she really doesn’t want to know the truth.”
I nodded, but kept silent, listening intently.
“I’ve never trusted Stevenson. Now you tell me he might be involved. That would not surprise me, but it would Claire, and it would devastate her right now.”
“How?”
Barbara shook her head. “I’m not supposed to know, but Claire and Stevenson had an affair about a year ago, about the time that Paul began distancing himself from her. It may have started earlier, but it continued until Paul’s disappearance. Then they broke it off. Suddenly. I don’t know which of them did it, but there was some pain.
“Don’t you see? Every man she’s been in contact with lately has betrayed her. First Paul, then Joe. And there’s you.”
“Me?”
“She told me about your relaxation technique the other night, your Lomi Lomi massage? And she told me you’ve turned her down twice now. That’s a record for Claire. She’s not used to it. You’ve become a target, Mr. Caine. The more you turn her down, the more attractive you become.”
“I didn’t do it for that reason.”
“That may be true, but it doesn’t change Claire.”
“You don’t know much about me,” I told her softly, bordering on a subject I did not want to revisit, yet plunging ahead. Somehow, it was the right place and the right time and the right woman. “About a year ago I was in love. I lost my Kate a few months before Claire lost her husband. She’s still with me, most nights. I don’t think I could do Claire, or anybody else, any good until she leaves, you know?”
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“It’s okay. It happened so fast, the love and then the death, there wasn’t the time to enjoy the good before the bad took its place. I wasn’t in the right place to help her, and when I was in the right place, it was the wrong time. Too little, too late, that was my curse.”
“Claire said you’d offered to take her to Hawaii.”
“That’s right. Letting her down easy.”
“She’ll never go with you.”
“I sincerely hope she doesn’t,” I said. “But if she wants to come, I’ve made the offer. It’s up to her
.”
Barbara looked at me in a way I’d come to know: She cocked her head and stared when she didn’t get the answer she expected, as if turning her head would bring her a new perspective, a different dimension of empathy. “It’s up to her,” she said, the sentence ending in a flat monotone, although it was a question and not the flat declarative statement it resembled.
“He said, hoping she will not take him up on it,” I laughed, hoping she would get the joke.
“Claire’s a good person. I’m not disloyal. But I thought I should warn you.” Barbara’s face was turned toward mine, our shoulders touching. I could feel her body heat through my jacket and her sweatshirt and it was a pleasant touch, something I had missed.
Then she leaned over and kissed me. I guess it was supposed to be a sisterly kind of kiss, but our mouths found each other and suddenly I was kissing and being kissed back by a healthy, passionate woman. It was the kind of kiss that makes your toes curl. She put her arms around me and I enfolded her into an embrace, her body molding its way into mine as if the molecules of her flesh knew exactly where they belonged.
We parted, breathless, and stared at each other.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow, too,” she said.
“You’d better get below while you still can.”
She nodded. “You think your Kate would approve?”
“I think so.”
“So where does this leave us?”
“Nowhere. Until this thing is done.”
“I thought you’d say that,” she said, kissing me again, a gentle kiss this time, on the cheek above my beard. “You’ve got some white ones in there, Mister Caine,” she said, running her fingertips through the bristled hair on my chin. It tingled where she touched me.
“I’m leaving tomorrow. Flying back to San Francisco. Got to go back to work. I just wanted to get to know you a little better.”
“Did you succeed?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Better than I thought I would.”
Then she went below again, leaving me alone in the last moments of the sunset.
I found my cigar. It had gone out. I dug around in my pockets until I found my lighter and set fire to it again, turning it all the way around until it was perfectly lit.
My God, Caine, I thought. You are one dim-witted bastard. Life just isn’t long enough to turn down a woman like that. Under any circumstances. You’ll be dead someday and then who’ll know? Who will care?
But as I puffed away on the Cohiba Esplendido, the little voice in the back of my head told me that I would know when it was time. And in its way, it would be another betrayal of Claire. Not that I wanted to go to bed with her—well, that wasn’t true, either, but I knew that wouldn’t happen—but it would be, in essence, another betrayal, an insinuation between myself, her protector, and her best friend.
Better to stay aloof from the fray.
I had no one to answer to but myself. Sometimes it’s hard. And sometimes it’s even harder.
This was one of the hardest of all.
I remained on deck until the sun slipped over the Point Loma peninsula and the evening breezes came up and chilled me, even through Paul Peters’s leather jacket with the Thinsulate lining. I didn’t go below until the cigar had burned all the way down, and I probably broke all sorts of environmental laws when I tossed the butt into San Diego Harbor.
In my life I’ve learned many lessons, but one stands out above all the others: Most of the time doing the right thing is a thankless chore, and all the time it’s a monumental pain in the ass.
30
I crossed the border at five the next morning, full of purpose and hot coffee. When the sun rose two hours later, I was settled inside the Range Rover, parked at the curb between two other luxury cars about a hundred yards south of the estate. It looked different in the sunshine. The whole street looked better. What had been gray the day before was now vibrant. Even the walls were pretty. Vines and other tropicals covered some of them, giving the street a hanging-garden effect. I liked that. The greenery covered some of the broken glass.
No one bothered me. The street could have been populated, but I saw few people. In comparison to the crowded avenues of the poor, it was deserted.
It was purely a guess, but I thought the woman in the estate would come out this morning. The sky was blue after nearly a week of rain. Today was a day to play, or to work, if one worked.
It was a good guess. At eight-fifteen the electric gates opened. I started the Range Rover’s engine and waited.
A blue BMW convertible, a Z3, the same model and color as the one from the James Bond film, backed out of the courtyard and headed north, down the hill toward Tijuana. I followed. As I passed the estate, the gates slowly closed. Before they shut all the way, I got another glimpse inside. All I could see were red Mexican paver tiles and white stucco walls.
I kept the Range Rover over a hundred yards back until we reached the high-traffic area. She turned on Revolución and followed it until she turned on Internacional, a four-lane highway that ran parallel with the border, the same road Esparza had taken. I remembered that it ran near the bullring and then turned south, where it became the toll road to Ensenada.
I kept close behind the Beemer, about three cars back, unconcerned that the driver could pick me out of traffic. Her car was low to the ground, and I was up high and could see over the top of the cars ahead. Traffic thinned after Rosarito Beach, however, so I gave her a longer lead. The blue convertible was easy to spot, even when it hit 180 kilometers per hour. Peters’s car had no trouble keeping up and it felt good to let the Range Rover push its upper limits. After bumping along in second gear, it felt as good as stretching my legs.
I fell behind when we reached the coastal mountains, where the road twisted and turned through the narrow passes. Cliffs on the western edge of the road fell half a thousand feet to the Pacific below, giving me reason for caution that the young woman in the low two-seater didn’t seem to have. When we came out of the last pass, she was long gone. I used the straightaway to try to catch her, but she had vanished.
When I reached the northern suburbs of Ensenada, I realized I’d lost her, so I turned around and headed north again. Logic dictated that she wouldn’t travel faster than road conditions permitted. She didn’t seem stupid. She must have turned off the road soon after leaving the mountains. With that in mind, I drove slowly, watching both sides of the road for a sign.
Three kilometers below the final pass I found it. It wasn’t a sign from heaven, it was one that said RESORT TIME SHARE PROPERTIES. Under that, TOP PROPERTIES, S.A. stood out in bold red lettering. Parked behind a small stone building with a lot of glass and a waterfall artfully falling in front of the entry was the blue BMW roadster. I drove into the crushed-gravel lot, parked next to the Beemer, and got out.
I stretched my legs and put on my jacket. Then I thought about it and took it off and stowed it under the seat. If this was the woman Paul Peters had an affair with, she could recognize the jacket. I knew I had taken a chance with the Range Rover, but there are so many of them in Southern California it would not be remarkable to see another one the same color. But if I came in wearing an expensive suede jacket the same cut and style and color that belonged to her former lover, she would know.
Shivering a little, I hurried to the front door. When I opened it, a little bell tinkled on a string, just like an old-fashioned general store you’d see in the movies.
She sat behind a big oak desk, looking through some paperwork, when I entered. When she glanced up and saw me, her face became radiant, as if I were her long-lost twin brother she hadn’t seen since the womb. I don’t know how she did it, but she also managed to convey the impression that she’d like to screw my legs off.
“Hello!” she said. “Welcome to Baja Dunes. I am Elena. How may I help you?” Her voice had a lilt and a slight inflection, the only trace of an accent. She wore a conservative business suit that modestly bared only a tiny portion of cle
avage but made me wonder what she looked like unrestrained by cloth and latex. She was using a different name, but it was Lorena Garcia. It had to be. Once again Tim and Jim were correct in their reportage.
“I was out for a drive and saw your sign. You’re selling time shares in a resort?”
“Come over here,” she said, indicating a table in the middle of the room. That’s what she said. Those were the words she used. It sounded like she really said, “Come over here and take off your clothes.” “We have a scale model of the development.”
I joined her at the table and saw a model of a blue glass harbor bordered by a green golf course in what looked like a ravine. On the tops of the hills surrounding the golf course and the harbor were tiny white structures, snaking along the natural shape of the hillside in sinuous curves.
Other, larger buildings surrounded by walls occupied the peninsula between the harbor and the ocean, estates with private gardens. Sand dunes ranged behind the condominiums and the golf course, sheltering the community from intrusion. She took pains to point that out. The community was private and isolated. Just the thing for the upwardly mobile.
“That’s nice,” I said, impressed. It was an excellent design.
“Here is the hotel,” she said, pointing out the largest structure, straddling the south side of the sand spit, occupying the entire peninsula. “A big American company just bought that. They’re planning on two hundred rooms. Not so big it would draw crowds, but big enough to help with the expense of the golf course and the harbor.”
“Nice,” I said.
“They will have, of course, two gourmet restaurants. We expect them to have a French chef and an internationally qualified sommelier.”
“How nice,” I said, starting to sound like a parrot with a limited vocabulary.
“Are you interested in a condominium or a detached house?”
“A condo would be nice,” I said.
Sand Dollars Page 17
