"I don't understand why you're here. The trial... that's what we call this audition period, not that it's a dog obedience show. Sorry, Louie. A cat obedience show, although that seems a contradiction in terms. Not as if the trials, er, auditions, are over."
"I'm sorry too." Temple sat on a cushy visitors' chair and unfastened Louie. "I may have given you the wrong impression. This visit has nothing to do with the cat-product auditions."
"No?" He leaned back in his swivel chair, tilted his head, waited.
"I'm afraid it's about Kendall."
"My daughter?"
"She has been distraught about what almost happened to you."
"No, no! She's been distraught over what she thought might happen to me."
"I see. Anyway, I didn't want to leave you out."
"Leave me out?"
"Kendall was excited about my role as advisor to a Las Vegas hotel on an upgraded facility. She trotted me around to meet the partners and make my pitch. But she neglected to include you."
"Daughters. They think you're God, and they sometimes forget you for that very reason. So you wish to make up for her daughterly oversight. Commendable."
"No. In my own interest. My employers would be impressed if I were able to intrigue a major New York advertising agency with their account."
"One hand washes the other."
"Always."
He nodded. "You were right to persist and come to me. Have you seen... the others?"
"Oh, yes. Kendall saw to that."
"Kendall?" He looked disturbed now.
"She is such an adoring daughter, and so fearful that your trusted partners wanted to kill you. She wanted me to see if either of them were unduly greedy over the Las Vegas account."
His steepled fingers had stopped tapping one another. "And were they?"
"Not in my opinion. I'm afraid your daughter has been seriously disturbed by the recent events here. I wanted to warn you, so you could attend to her."
"Are you saying Kendall is crazy?"
"Well, she's been kept in the dark; what else is she to think?"
"Kept in the dark? How?"
"Vietnam," Temple mentioned, bending over to release Louie. "Do you mind? He's getting restless."
"I'm getting restless. You're saying that Kendall isn't. . . normal. Now you're bringing up Vietnam, which was a long time ago."
"Not in your generation's lifetime. Did you know that the murdered Santa Claus was a Vietnam vet?"
"Murdered? I can't agree to that. I still think that some bit of carelessness ... he must have brought in that chain as a sound effect, only it backfired on him."
"First he came to see you. The day Louie and I arrived."
"It's amazing, Miss Barr. The way you keep referring to that cat. Almost as if he were human. Certainly it's a good recommendation for you to get the job. Yes, I think I can strongly advise Allpetco to take on you and your stunningly smart Louie."
"How wonderful. Were you as enthusiastic when you hired Rudy?"
"Rudy?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. That was the name of the Santa Claus."
"I don't remember."
"No. No more than you would recall a certain Air America flight out of South Vietnam during the war. I found an obscure story at the public library. 'Vietnam mystery.' The plane loaded with illegal drugs, that were diverted to China. Wasn't Rudy the pilot.'"
"Rudy? I don't know any Rudy. As for this Air America--"
"An infamous arm of the CIA, according to library sources, which no one would question if it carried contraband. Drugs. Marijuana? A feeble base for a killing, both financial and--years later--physical, but you were all there: I've seen the memorabilia on all your office walls and can picture the rest. The two lowly but heroic draftees, the nobody pilot and the CIA man who wanted to make a financial killing out of Vietnam, to start a business his blue-blooded father abhorred. The library had an article on your Yale-man father, but you weren't like him. You wanted to be an advertising man. A hypester. A manufacturer of smoke and mirrors. The other two men you blackmailed to go along. They became your partners. The third man you lost track of, a pot-smoking zoned-out pilot who hardly knew where he was, much less what he was doing.
"I saw it on Janos's and Renaldi's walls: the Golden Hemp Award. No real trophy, except from the pot-smoking brotherhood. You are the only partner who keeps no war memorabilia on your walls. You didn't want to advertise it, savvy spin-master that you always were. You were a shadow-player. But you played crooked and had to consort with the underlings."
"Who told you this? Who betrayed me? Janos? He always agonized over the deaths."
"No," said Temple. "Your daughter did, because she was searching so frantically for whoever would want to harm her beloved father. Oh!" Temple lifted a leg. "That Louie has snagged my hose. I think he's found something, under your desk."
She bent down and rose with her thumb and forefinger pinched around a tissue paper. "Oh, look, Louie! It's a nasty brown cigarette butt. Do you suppose that it has anything to do with poor Rudy, who could never outgrow sixties habits? Do you suppose the police department will be able to find just this mixture of weed and paper in Rudy's place? No, it's not catnip, old fellow, it's cannabis, as in I'd walk a mile for a Camel.' Would your war partners walk a mile for you, Mister Colby?"
Temple felt them gathering over her shoulder, drawn here by the rising voices. Janos and Renaldi, not innocents, but not murderers three decades after an old war.
"Poor Rudy. You never told your partners he had come here. Your deskside chats were uneasy explorations. You read blackmail into everything he left unsaid. But he never meant to tell, Mr. Colby. He never even remembered that there was anything fishy about one particular CIA drug run, I would bet. Only you remembered."
Colby watched Temple loosen the tissue, and the marijuana butt rolled onto his pristine desk surface like a rat turd.
Behind her, Janos spoke, and he spoke to her.
"You can do point for me anytime. You and that roach-sniffin', rat-rousin' cat of yours."
Chapter 35
The Last Twist of Hemp
"I ... I don't know what to say."
Colby looked beseechingly from one partner to the other, but they were looking at Temple.
"So Rudy came here," Renaldi asked, "to interview for a Santa Claus job and that started it all?"
Temple eyed her prey, still genteelly sweating behind his desk.
"You recognized Rudy," she said, "and Rudy recognized you."
"I . . . suppose so."
"You talked about old times."
"Rudy talked about old times. I've never been sentimental."
"Rudy wasn't sentimental, he just didn't get it. Easy-going Rudy, who paid the biggest price, just didn't get it. That's why he had been the perfect pawn."
Janos cut in without asking to dance. "I always figured he'd been paid off."
Temple shook her head. "Only in weed, right, Mr. Colby? Feed his head and he was happy. Story of his life. Story of his death."
"Listen!" Colby half-rose from his desk. "I didn't kill him."
"Are you sure you want to say that?" Temple was stern, and the partners kept quiet. They recognized a prosecuting attorney when they heard one.
Colby collapsed back in his chair. "I . . . don't know what you mean. Rudy was affable, as always. Grayer, thinner, but affable. He seemed to regard the coincidence as some kind of reunion."
"A reunion. What did he say?"
"Only how amazing it was that we should hook up like this, after all these years. How he couldn't wait to see Vic and Tony again. Imagine us three, big shots on Madison Avenue, and he was just an itinerant Santa Claus."
"You thought he was blackmailing you, didn't you?"
"Blackmailing?"
"All those genial comments, loaded with unspoken darts. Rudy tell you where he lived? Down in the Village in a rent-controlled railroad flat."
"He ... mentioned it. Him downtown. Us uptown. Him still
dealing in rats and roaches. Us dealing in the varieties of both that wore Brooks Brothers suits."
"So you hired him on the sly, outside the agency."
Colby nodded unhappily. "That way I could pay him more."
"Aw, how magnanimous." Janos had grown quiet with rage. "How much more, Brent?"
"A couple thou."
"A couple thou." Janos's voice dripped sarcasm. "We each cleared a couple hundred thou from the drug deal and that was big-time lettuce in the sixties. Why were Tony and me honored with partner-ships, and not Rudy?"
"Maybe you had better memories," Temple said. "Maybe you'd have been harder to get rid of."
Renaldi nodded, and beneath the stainless steel exterior Temple glimpsed yesterday's pig-iron. "We weren't nobody's stooges, Vic and me. Not in 'Nam, not anywhere."
"So you killed the poor asshole." Janos had taken on the role of prosecuting attorney now. "You booby-trapped the chimney, like the gook tunnels that undermined the whole damn country. You set it up so he'd hang himself. Out of sight, out of mind."
Colby was silent, and sweating profusely.
"It's worse than that." Temple stroked Louie, who sat on her lap with a prickly suggestion of slightly protruded claws. His entire body was thrumming, not with a purr, but with tension, as if he understood the seriousness of this confrontation. "After his death, you destroyed his ID. Erased him. If my aunt hadn't known Rudy, he'd still be listed as missing in action.
"The innocent died for the wrong reasons, and the innocent killed for the wrong reasons," she went on. "Just like in 'Nam. Just like everywhere else."
"No!" Colby burst out, half-standing. "I plead guilty, not innocent. I was . . . afraid. I had so much to lose now. Everything I had built."
"We built it too," Renaldi put in. "Just because you were CIA didn't mean you were the mastermind. You were just ambitious beyond the pipe-dreams of us grunts, so we followed you."
"We could have as easily fragged you," Janos put in. "Maybe we should have. This whole . . . scam ... up here on the thirty-second floor isn't worth Rudy's life. He was innocent, man, you know? He was the most innocent guy among us. We owed him. We owed him more than a rat-hole in the Village."
"I've seen Rudy's rat-hole in the Village," Temple said. "Louie has too. Pretty grim. Even so, he played Santa Claus for a living. Ho-ho-hoed at children for hours. He never meant to blackmail anybody, he was just glad to run into old war buddies. Wasn't he, Mister Colby?"
Colby put his face in his hands. "No," he said. "He had to have had an angle. Everybody has an angle."
"You killed him for nothing'." Janos's rage was white-hot by now.
"No," Colby murmured to his own sweaty palms.
"No." Temple agreed with him. "Mister Colby meant to pay him off, to buy him off. If two thousand didn't do it, twenty would. Maybe even the original two hundred thousand. But he didn't get a chance. Neither did Rudy."
"What are you savin'?" Now Renaldi was hot. "That our trusted partner isn't a murderer? One of us other guys is? Do you really think we'd turn in another grunt over money? Rudy was a pothead from Day One. We figured Rudy had been offered the partnership gig, but we weren't surprised when he didn't go for it."
"But the deal kept you quiet, didn't it?" Temple asked.
"Sure." Janos was calmer, more dangerous. "That's why we were brought in. We knew too much. But... this don't make sense. Colby here put up with our rough edges, babied us along, found places where we could contribute to the firm in our own ways. Why would he suddenly turn to cold-blooded murder after all these years? Especially when Rudy, poor bastard, could have been bought off with a song? Or, as you say, a lunch with war buddies?"
Temple looked at Brent Colby, Jr., who, after a long, focused silence, finally parted his fingers and lifted reddened eyes to face the room.
He shook his head.
Temple had mercy on him. "I don't think he did turn to murder. But someone overheard Rudy talking to him and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Assumed the worst. Blackmail. Someone else killed Rudy so Colby and the firm wouldn't suffer."
"Not me!" Janos was truculent. "By God, not me."
"Not me," Renaldi was as fast to swear. "We would have known Rudy. We would have known he was harmless, but, of course, we hadn't screwed him out of a share all those years ago, so we wouldn't have that guilt on our backs."
"That guilt is nothing like Mr. Colby will have to bear now." Temple warned. "Let the punishment fit the crime, old as it was. It does."
"What punishment?" Janos, confused, was now ready to turn his wrath on the messenger, Temple. "This stuff is pretty tough to prove. All based on supposition."
"Maybe you three could tough it out, like you did in the old days. But I doubt the killer can. The killer is cracking already, madly trying to point even an amateur like me in the wrong direction. It was a spur-of-the-moment murder, a desperate move. I'm sure the police will find supporting evidence once they know where to look."
"Where? Not here! You finally admitted yourself that Colby's clear." Renaldi was fighting back too, for the cause, for the ill-gotten gains, for the firm. They were still the three musketeers from the sixties.
" A' Colby's clear. And 'a' Renaldi's clear, as is 'a' Janos. But Kendall Colby Renaldi is not clear, and I doubt she ever will be."
"Kendall?" Renaldi sounded incredulous, even contemptuous.
"Are you surprised a woman masterminded this? Don't be. Kendall was a rock-climber in college. She could have rigged the trap easily."
"But she was devastated when the body was found and everyone assumed the victim was her father," Janos put in eagerly, too stunned to stay furious.
Temple nodded "She acted out the fears that drove her to destroy Rudy. Those same fears made it easy to point hysterically in directions away from her father when she was aghast to realize that the very man she had killed to protect might be suspected of killing Rudy himself."
"But--" Colby had found his voice again, and a measure of authority. "It was all a mistake, a misapprehension, if it happened the way you said. Janos is right. It's going to be hard to prove."
"Maybe. But this roach under your desk isn't the only piece of evidence Midnight Louie found."
"What else is there?" Colby sounded defiant.
"Something he found on the floor of the chimney and batted around. I picked it up, but I didn't realize what it was until yesterday when I dug it out and turned it over: a broken-off fingernail, a ragged, pretty big hunk. That's one thing I noticed about you gentlemen after the death: your fingernails. None were missing, and rigging that step and chain in the narrow dark chimney would probably have shown on the culprit's hands. When my aunt and I went to the ME's office to identify Rudy's body, none of his nails were broken, not that he had much fingernail to lose; they were chewed down.
"Kendall's fingernails, though, are perfect salon models, exquisite. It's her trademark."
"So?" Janos was unimpressed. "She's always beautifully groomed. So what?"
"Yes, but women get to don false claws. I keep seeing her that night, so distraught, her fingers tightly curled over each other, only the thumbs visible. I took it for a sign of extreme stress, and it was, but it was also a form of concealment until she could repair the broken nail, which has traces of the same bronze enamel she wears."
"But Kendall--" Renaldi was still unconvinced. "Granted the death-trap was a simple rigging job. A loosened rung on the way up, the chain anchored to the top brace. Rudy could have slipped and the noose could have failed to have tightened on his neck. He could have grabbed it to save himself. The whole scheme might have failed."
"But it didn't. If it had, the chain could have been dismissed as it almost was: a jingly prop someone had added to the traditional routine without mentioning it to anybody. A miss wouldn't have been significant enough to investigate."
"And then?"
"I don't know. I don't know if Kendall would have tried again. Maybe the delay would have encouraged her to talk to
her father."
Janos sighed and Renaldi echoed him, but Renaldi spoke first. "I think Kendall should talk to her father now."
Colby didn't disagree, but he glared at his two partners. "She's been taking her divorce from Carl hard, feeling she let down the firm and the family. I guess I'm all the family she's got left, and when she thought I was in trouble ... if my daughter's involvement in this comes out, so will our self-serving drug deal in Vietnam."
"That was only money, Brent, money made off a killing ground." Janos shook his head. "This is murder."
"Rudy didn't have much of a life."
"It was his life," Renaldi said. "You know, Brent, it's pretty ironic. We all killed in Vietnam, and tried not to put faces on the dead. You did your share, and I bet we could all kill again, given extreme enough circumstances, but I never thought a kid of ours would ever grow up to do the same thing. I thought that's what we all went through 'Nam for . . . for the future. Nothing we bought, or stole or made of ourselves afterwards is worth protecting the past at the cost of one goddamn more death."
And that was that.
They rose and went into the hall, the men's feet dragging as they neared the ajar door of Kendall's office. They could hear her on the phone, her voice animated with the unflagging energy of an advertising account exec making a call.
Temple began hooking up the CatAboard for Louie.
"Aren't you coming in?" Renaldi asked.
She shook her head. "Too many people for a small office. Besides, it's not my job; this is private firm and family business."
Chapter 36
Louie's Last Laugh
Well, I never expected to be renowned for my superior snout.
That is such a canine characteristic.
Nevertheless, I am carried in triumph back to Miss Kit Carlson's digs, where she is much gratified to see Miss Temple and me return no worse for wear.
Rudy is revenged, and Colby, Janos and Renaldi are facing a troublesome reorganization.
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