Their finger strength gave out and they slid down to their feet.
“A red convertible,” A.C. said. “She was driving. I think she was alone.”
The less injured of the two strangers was already moving up the steps to the door. He twisted the knob, to no avail, then lunged at it with his shoulder. There wasn’t room or purchase enough for him to have much effect.
“Forget it!” Lanham said. He turned to A.C. “Give me that thing.”
“No,” said A.C., pulling out the pistol. “I’ll do it.”
He motioned the other man to come back down the stairs, which, wide-eyed and wordless, he did. A.C. positioned himself on the landing against the wall, aiming the gun at the door lock obliquely. Then he adjusted the angle slightly, making the mechanism the target instead of the latch. Lanham had come up the stairs behind him but halted, watching intently.
“Have you ever done this before?” he said.
“Yes. Have you?”
“Come to think of it, no.”
A.C. pulled stiffly on the trigger, jerking the gun slightly, but the powerful round demolished the lock and a considerable section of the wood paneling, flinging the door open. They all rushed into the hallway.
“Son of a bitch,” said Lanham.
Their possessions were scattered all over the floor. The pistols were missing. In her haste, Camilla had left their keys.
Lanham and A.C. got to their car first.
“I’ll drive,” Lanham said. “With the knock you took on the head, I don’t feel safe with you at the wheel.”
“I’m all right.”
Lanham got into the driver’s seat anyway.
“What about those two men?” said A.C., settling in beside him.
“Get your pistol ready. I’m going to pull up next to their car.”
“You want me to shoot them?”
“I want you to shoot out the front tire.” Lanham jammed the Buick into gear.
It took A.C. two shots. The expressions on the others’ faces went from surprise to intense hatred. Lanham left them sitting in a cloud of hanging dust.
“Insurance,” Lanham said, once they were speeding down the road.
“They can change the tire.”
“Not in any great big hurry.”
Lanham took a sharp curve too widely, skidding badly as he jerked the car back into the right lane. New York cops weren’t much used to winding country roads. A.C. had grown up on them.
“I should drive,” he said.
“Later maybe.”
“Where are we going?”
“Let’s just get a few miles behind us. Then we’ll pull over and talk.”
They roared into Dandytown well over the speed limit, slowing at the intersection but shooting through against the red. Instead of taking the road that led back to the interstate, Lanham headed south. A few miles farther, they came to an old stone church. There was a parking lot in back. He pulled into it, stopping the car close to the building.
Lanham stretched out his arms a moment and then rubbed his eyes.
“Hand me the briefcase I put in the back, or did Camilla ditch that, too?”
“It’s still there.” A.C. pulled it over the seat.
The detective snapped open the catches, but left the lid closed.
“We haven’t exactly been straight with each other,” he said. “I’ll go first. You’re not a fugitive. You’re not wanted for murder. What I’ve got in here is a subpoena for your appearance at Bailey Hazeltine’s inquest next week. That’s all. You’re nothing more than a material witness. We know you didn’t shoot her.”
“And just how do you know that?”
“For one thing, we have a statement from Mrs. Vanessa Meyer.”
“She saw me standing over Bailey with a gun. This gun.”
“According to her statement, she was with you all the time. You discovered the body together.”
Vanessa had lied for him, had doubtless committed perjury.
“That’s not entirely true.”
“I wasn’t about to argue with her. We got something else.”
He opened the briefcase lid and searched through the papers inside, taking out a manila envelope. “We got a picture of a guy in your apartment. The time it was taken checks out to the probable time of Bailey Hazeltine’s death.”
He pulled out an eight-by-ten glossy photograph. It was shot with a telephoto lens through A.C.’s French doors and the focus was a little fuzzy, but the man’s dark features were clear enough.
“How did you get this?”
“Your wife brought it in. She had a P.I. on your case. He was staked out on the rooftop across the street.”
“P.I.?”
“Private investigator. In TV shows like ‘Magnum P.I.,’ they ride around in helicopters shooting bad guys. In real life, they do scuzzy divorce work like this. He’d been on you for a couple of weeks. I gather he also got some hot shots of you and Miss Hazeltine in the sack, but these your wife did not bring to our attention.”
A.C. sank back against the seat, staring at the face in the photograph.
“Kitty came to you with this?”
“Apparently she’s not so pissed at you she’d let you squirm on a Murder One.”
Lanham reached into his pocket. He’d retrieved the mantlepiece picture of Jacques Santee from the farmhouse floor. He held it up next to the one the private investigator had taken.
“Same son of a bitch, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes,” A.C. said unhappily, wondering what Kitty must think of him.
“And he’s the guy you saw on the motorcycle?”
“Yes. I was pretty sure of that the first time I saw him in a photograph Camilla had in her apartment.”
“Jacques Santee.”
“Yes. Why didn’t you tell me about this private investigator’s picture last night?”
“I wasn’t sure where I stood with you. More to the point, I wasn’t sure where you stood with the Southern blond lady. We’re pretty clear on that now, aren’t we?”
“Yes. I guess we are.”
There was a white frame house next to the church. An old woman was standing on the back steps, watching them.
“So let’s go find them.”
“Them? We want Jacques.”
Lanham shook his head impatiently. “They’re all mixed up in this, A.C. Find one, and we’re going to find the others.”
“When we were in Bermuda, she talked to someone on the phone one night. I overheard her. I could hear a man’s voice on the other end. I’ve no doubt it was Jacques.”
“What did she say to him?”
A.C. took a deep breath. “I think she was telling him to deal with Pierre. She said she didn’t care what happened to him.”
“Like, if he got murdered.”
“Yes.”
“But he stopped off at your place first. Why would he hit your girlfriend Bailey?”
“I’m sure he went there to kill me. Camilla warned me I was in danger. I’d given Bailey a key to the apartment. She picked the wrong time to use it—again.”
“Again?”
“She came in a few days earlier, when my wife was there.”
“You’ve had a hell of a run of luck, haven’t you? Let’s hope it’s going to change. Why would he want to kill you? Just because you were fucking his sister?”
“He was probably afraid she’d told me something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. There’s some bad trouble in that family, some bad blood between them and Pierre. He’d taken over Camilla’s apartment on Sutton Place; probably the brother’s horse farm, too. I’m pretty certain they were paying him money. At least Camilla was. That’s why she was working so hard, why she came out of retirement. She’d been living in France until a few months ago.”
“Pierre has something on her—on both of them. Just like he had something on Belinda and the others. Is Camilla married?”
“No, I don’t think s
o. She never mentioned a husband. There were no pictures of a husband. Nothing like that.”
“Wedding rings can be removed. Did Pierre know about you and Camilla?”
“Whatever their problem is, it was going on before I met her.”
“Do you think it’s possible Camilla and the brother were sleeping together?”
“No!” A.C.’s voice carried far enough for the old woman at the house next door to hear. She hurried inside.
“Sorry. I’m just covering all the bases.”
Lanham drummed on the steering wheel a moment. He had turned off the car’s engine. Returning his briefcase to the back seat, he restarted it.
“I don’t think Pierre has hung around Washington for any more gala receptions,” he said. “According to the computer printout, he has a condo on Hilton Head, and a yacht moored there, too.”
“It’s near Charleston,” A.C. said. “Camilla’s from Charleston. Her family is very prominent socially there. A very old family. Dates back forever.”
Lanham shifted the car into reverse.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going south. You want to come with me, or do you want to go back to New York and face your wife?”
A.C., frustrated, said nothing.
“Look, man,” said Lanham. “You’re trying to do the right thing. You said the Hazeltine girl was ‘very dear’ to you. She got whacked because of you. You and I know who did it. I’m going after him. What are you going to do?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“If Camilla is heading for Charleston, she has a little head start. If we go back to the hotel to get our bags, she’ll have a big one.”
“Skip the bags. I have a lot of money on me. We can buy whatever we need.”
“If you’ve got a lot of cash, why didn’t you use it at the hotel and the car rental?”
“I thought it would attract attention to me.”
Lanham shook his head, then got the Buick back onto the highway. A.C. had a lot of money in his pocket, but he was missing something else. It sadly occurred to him that Camilla had taken back the red silk scarf.
CHAPTER 16
They traversed the state of Virginia on country highways, heading diagonally toward Interstate 95, the main coastal artery leading to the deeper South. The sun crossed over them high in the sky, beginning its slide to the west, the afternoon heat barely noticeable in the breeze from the open car windows.
The little towns they passed through all seemed much the same. Gas stations and fast-food franchises appeared on either side of the road, followed by a jumble of badly painted shacks and small houses with black people on the steps and porches, then square brick buildings as the road became the town’s main street, then—often climbing a hill—the grand old nineteenth-century houses of the best section of town. After that, a final stretch of roadside businesses, and then the dusty open countryside again. Sometimes they’d come upon the grand old houses first, and find the black district on the other side of town. Never were they juxtaposed. It had doubtless been like that since the Civil War, when the blacks were first given the right to own their own places.
Except for the addition of the garish commercialism of the fast-food emporiums, these antique communities could not have changed much in 130 years.
Some of the place names were familiar from history books. This sweep of aged farmland from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Tidewater coastland had been one vast and continuous battlefield throughout the four years of the War Between the States. Historical markers stood in testament to the carnage. Gazing over the undulating cornfields, one could well imagine the limitless swarms of blue and gray and brown, the roiling smoke and din, the ghastly cries, the tilt and fall of flags and regimental colors.
“I hate the fucking South,” Lanham said.
“It’s changed a lot.”
“Yeah, right. I grew up in Baltimore, and that was bad enough. Did you know the Maryland state song still has the words ‘Northern scum’ in it? And Maryland wasn’t even in the Confederacy.”
“They have a black governor in Virginia, the first black governor of any state in the history of the country.”
“Well, that’s a recent goddamned development. They used to have a miscegenation law down here that might as well have been written by the Nazis. If you had as little as one thirty-second black blood in you, you were officially black, and all that that meant. You couldn’t be white. That lasted right up until World War II. They changed it to one sixteenth after Pearl Harbor so that some plantation owner in Charles City County—some guy descended from Pocahontas—could be a colonel in the Virginia National Guard.”
“The general who’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff now is black.”
“I’ll bet there’s no black general in the Virginia National Guard. I’ll bet you we’ll hear the word ‘nigger’ more than once before this is over.”
There was a hawk wheeling lazily above a tree line. Some small, furry squeaking creature would shortly die. A.C. was feeling very tired. His head was beginning to hurt.
“You know, I’m mostly white,” Lanham said. “I’m half white, because of my mother. But my father had white in him, too. Most blacks do, you know. Alex Hailey, who wrote Roots? He had two white great-grandfathers. Both Irishmen. Sometimes I wonder about my boys. They’re three-quarters white, but they’re still black. If they should marry white women, and have kids, their kids will be seven-eighths white, but they’ll still be black. Another generation like that, and my family would be officially white in the state of Virginia. Except they’d still be black. Because of me, because of my father and his family, they’d always be black.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, Ray. It certainly doesn’t matter with me.”
He could think of nothing more to say. Sliding down in the seat, he rested his head against its back and closed his eyes.
“I think I’ll get some sleep, Ray.”
Lanham looked at him, thinking about the blow to A.C.’s head.
“You all right, man?”
“I’m all right. Just need some sleep.”
“Guess you probably didn’t get much in Bermuda.”
A.C. said nothing.
When A.C. finally stirred from his slumber, it was to the dark of night. They were pounding along Interstate 95, a few red taillights visible in the distance ahead. A green highway sign flashed by, its white letters flaring in the glare of their headlights. They were approaching Fayetteville well into North Carolina.
A.C. looked at his watch. It was past ten o’clock.
“You put a few miles behind us,” he said.
“I thought I’d let you catch some Z’s. You were really out.”
“Shouldn’t we stop for gas?”
“I already did. You slept through it.”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“No doubt you do. I’ll stop at the next service station.”
“Pick a place with a restaurant. I’m hungry. Or did you stop to eat, too?”
“No. I could use a burger. Cop food.”
They rumbled on awhile, the white lane lines stretching on into an infinite blackness.
“You didn’t pass a small red convertible with a blonde in it?” A.C. said.
“No such luck.”
“This could be a hell of a wild-goose chase.”
“I hate to tell you how many times I’ve been on one of those. But I’ve got an itch, A.C. I think they’re going home. I think we’re going to score.”
“We’re going to get there in the middle of the night.”
“Before dawn, anyway.” Lanham glanced up at the rearview mirror.
“When I was in college, I set the world land speed record from New York to Boston on a night like this. A friend of mine and I left a bar on Park Avenue at one o’clock and arrived on the campus of the Endicott College for Women at four-fifteen, but when we got there we had nothing to do but sit in the car and drink whiskey for three hours. Our dates for that weekend were t
ruly pissed when they found us.”
“I have a pint bottle in my briefcase.”
“No, thanks.”
“The middle of the night is a good time to arrive in a strange town, when you’re looking for trouble.”
Lanham looked over his shoulder as a car came up on their left to pass them. It was a state police cruiser. Lanham had slowed, but they were still five miles an hour over the fifty-five-mile-an-hour official speed limit. As in all states, there was probably an unofficial speed above that which motorists were allowed to attain without hindrance, but, as in all states, they had no idea what that was.
The trooper slowed to keep pace with them. A.C. could see his young face in the light from his dashboard.
Lanham decreased his speed further, staring straight ahead.
“A black man and a white man in an out-of-state car,” Lanham said. “And we’ve got two guns and a bottle of whiskey aboard.”
The trooper was talking into his microphone.
“You’re a police officer, Ray. For God’s sake.”
“He could still cause us some considerable inconvenience.”
“I think you’re getting paranoid.”
“I’ll tell you about my days at Fort Bragg sometime.”
The police car fell back, and trailed them for a while.
“Checking our plates, maybe,” Lanham said.
“I don’t believe this.”
“I’ve done it myself—for the same reason.”
Other cars were coming up behind them. Finally, the trooper made a decision, and shot ahead. Lanham kept to fifty-five until the cruiser had disappeared into the night, into the South.
“When we get to a gas station,” he said, “you take over the wheel.”
A.C. drove much faster than Lanham, and they reached Charleston before one A.M. It was a surprisingly small city with tall trees and church steeples rising above old pastel-colored buildings that glowed eerily in the pale light of antique street lamps. They drove through a run-down commercial section briefly, then A.C. found the street he sought and turned into it, heading for the historic district.
New York, Kitty—all that seemed very far away, as though on another planet.
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