LaBrava (29 page)

“I’m flattered,” Jean said.

“Maybe we can have a drink sometime,” Jim said.

“I’d like that,” Jean said. Pause. “I’d like that very much.”

Not a memorable performance, but not bad. About average. Not nearly as difficult to make convincing as the love scene in
Treasure of the Aztecs
. God—telling Audie Murphy that neither the sacrificial dagger of Montezuma nor the conquering sword of Cortes could stop her heart, her
pagan
heart, from throbbing with desire, “my golden Lord.” And Audie in his jerkin and codpiece squirming, eating it up. She wondered if she could update it and run it past LaBrava, just for fun.

She felt like performing . . . She could get on the freeway and be at Richard’s house in about fifteen minutes; she’d memorized the directions. They had planned to wait at least a week, give the police time to relax. But she was so close and her mood was perfect.

She could hear the elevator door close across the hall, the elevator begin to descend with McCormick and the two Palm Beach officers.

It might be the best time of all. Richard would be surprised. Just in case he had ideas . . .

Coming away from the door Jean paused, looking at herself in the wall of glass behind the sofa. She smiled. Too much. Staring at herself she saw a worried expression now, with a smile trying to break through. “Richard, is everything all right?” Make it a little more personal. “Richard, are you all right?” Maybe even, “Richard, I couldn’t wait to see you.” Well—disarm him, but don’t overdo it.

LaBrava stood by his window with the phone. He could see Franny in the park across the street, sitting at an easel in shade, painting one of the Della Robbia women who sat facing the ocean. When the slim girl, Jill Wilkinson, came on he said, “How was Key West?”

She said, “I love it. It’s the only place I know you can rest and not get hit on all the time. I mean a girl. Wait a minute.” She was gone several minutes. When she came back she said, “I’m sorry. We’ve got a guy took one of the panels out of the ceiling and crawled up into the overhead. He won’t come down because he says the office is full of alligators. Keeps saying ‘They’s gators down there.’ He’s right, but we’re not supposed to let on.” He asked her the name of the cop Richard Nobles had mentioned that night, the one Pam said she knew. Jill said, “Hold on.” He heard her call to Pam and ask her. Jill came back on and said, “Glenn Hicks, he’s Boca P.D. But tell me about Richard. What’s that subhuman piece of shit up to now?”

Franny looked naked at her easel; and her hair made her look like a little girl. The Della Robbia woman was getting up, walking around behind Franny to look at the painting. Watching them LaBrava phoned Torres and gave him the name of Richard’s friend. Glenn Hicks.

He crossed the street from the Cardozo to Lummus Park, two ice-cold cans of beer in each of his hands. Boy, did she look good: the mauve bikini top with cutoff jeans, artist at work under a palm tree, very nice if you can get away with it, if you’re any good. Artist concentrating, showing the tip of her tongue, touching up, canvas chair where the subject had been sitting, empty. Her weird hair moved, she was looking at him, waiting.

“Well, how’re you doing?”

She said, “How am I doing. I went home for a wedding three days ago, you didn’t even know I was gone.”

“You got married? Here I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Why, were you horny?”

“Reasonably.”

“You don’t get reasonably horny, Joe, you are or you aren’t.”

“I was more than horny, I missed you.” He handed her a can of beer, then paused as he was about to sink into the canvas chair, looking at the easel. “That’s very good. You know it?”

“Who is it?”

“It’s Mrs. Heffel. Don’t you know who you’re painting?” He was pretty sure it was Mrs. Heffel.

“
I
know. I didn’t think you did.”

“Even without the nose shield. You know how I know her? I took her picture. She’s got a little girl inside her that shows every once in a while, when she doesn’t think people are accusing her of something. You caught the little girl. A glimpse of her.” He sat down and popped a beer.

“You think so?”

He handed her the opened beer, took the one Franny was holding and popped it. “I think so. What happened to your hotels?”

“I like hotels okay, but hotels are things. I’ve decided my interests lie more in people. That’s your influence, LaBrava. I look at your work, I want to see what you see.”

“You do, you see things.”

“I don’t know. I see a certain thing in your work because you caught it, there it is. But I don’t know if I’d see the same thing before. I don’t know if I have the eye.”

“You got Mrs. Heffel.”

“I’ve been watching her for a week.”

“You’ve got the eye. The secret is, don’t look at everything at once, concentrate on one part at a time.”

She said, “Maybe I’m doing it, I’ll find out.” She sipped her beer and said, “So what’ve you been up to while I was in New York having the time of my life with my relatives?”

He said, “Not too much. I’ve been trying to think of a movie I saw a long time ago.”

“Don’t tell me, starring Jean Shaw. You still have the hots for her? She’s too old for you.”

“As a matter of fact it
was
a Jean Shaw movie. You saw it too, because you mentioned it that night we saw
Let It Ride
.”

“What’s the name of it?”

“Obituary.”

“The one, her husband knows he’s gonna die of an incurable illness so he kills himself, then makes it look like she did it because she and her boyfriend took him for a lot of money?”

“That one.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“How much of it do you remember?”

“I think I saw like the last half.”

“She go to jail?”

“Yes, there’s a trial, and she’s found guilty, not for what she did but for killing her husband, which she didn’t do. Heavy irony.”

“Who was the guy, the hero?”

“I don’t know. He had sort of a chiseled face and the muscle in his jaw kept jumping. He had sorta wet lips too. The other girl, the good one, is the daughter of Jean Shaw’s husband by his first wife. The daughter, when her dad starts getting his own death notices clipped from out-of-town papers, the daughter right away thinks Jean’s doing it, but nobody believes her, including the cop.”

“Victor Mature.”

“Yeah, that’s who it is. I forgot his name.”

“The husband’s afraid of death anyway—”

“It petrifies him. Anybody mentions death, he looks like he’s gonna throw up. Until near the end of the picture, when he finds out he’s got this incurable illness and he really
is
gonna die, then he accepts it. His daughter gives him a talk about dying being part of living and he buys it. It’s really dumb.”

“So they send the death notices to scare hell out of him, set him up . . .”

“Yeah, and then the death
threat
, pay up or you’re dead. Jean, the wife, is not only in on it, it’s her idea from the beginning.”

“She delivers the payoff?”

“Yeah, but not really. Let me think . . . They get a phone call to deliver the money to a motel somewhere, a certain room. She goes there, gets another phone call to go someplace else. But first she switches the suitcase full of money with a suitcase full of newspapers or something that’s already in the motel room. You understand?”

“Yeah, go on.”

“So then she makes the drop. Along comes some guy her boyfriend hired, a weirdo with big eyes—”

“Elisha Cook.”

“He swings with what he thinks is a suitcase full of money. He opens it, goes berserk when he sees newspapers and falls out of his hotel-room window.”

“He didn’t know the wife was in on it.”

“He didn’t know shit, he’s just sorta in the picture.”

“Then what? The boyfriend . . .”

“The boyfriend goes to the motel and picks up the real stuff. He takes it to a cabin up in the mountains, opens the suitcase . . . You think Jean is jobbing this guy too, but it’s all there.”

“Henry Silva.”

“Right, the same guy that played Mother in
A Hatful of Rain
. I just saw that one too.”

“So after a while Jean arrives at the cabin . . .”

“She comes in with her own suitcase, an empty one.”

“And what happens?”

“You’re going west on Lantana, okay, you take a right just past the county airport and go on up,” Richard had told her, “till almost you come to like a subdivision and you take a left onto Township, it’s a dirt road, and you go on out till you see a whole bunch of scrub pine and this house setting by itself, cute little place used to be painted white.”

No telephone, but it had propane gas and running water, inside toilet, stove, fridge, hundred a month, shit. Kind of place you think it’d been left to weather, no reason to go near it. Perfect spot, Richard said.

Poor Richard, peeking out the front door.

Jean parked in tree shade, left the key in the ignition and released the trunk. She did not look at the house now, knowing Richard was watching her open the trunk, lift out the tan leather suitcase. There was the sound of a light plane circling the county airport, the sound persisting, fading, coming back. There was dusty summer heat in the air, a depressed rural feel to the location; not anything like the cabin up near Big Bear. It had been cool, she’d worn a trenchcoat and a black beret. She had the line ready. “Richard, I couldn’t wait.”

But when he appeared in the doorway Jean revised it without thinking and said, “What happened to you?”

“I got my goddamn arm broke.”

“I can see that. How did you do it?”

He was squinting at the road, in the direction of the airport. “You sure nobody followed you?”

“I’m sure.”

“I wasn’t expecting you for least a week.”

“I couldn’t wait, Richard.” There, getting back to the script. But then forced away from it again with, “What happened to your arm?” Moving past him into the house, dim with shades drawn, depressing, a musty smell to the place.

“You want me to tell you? It was that goddamn friend of yours, that blindsider, same guy ‘at hit me the time up in Delray, that place they took you.”

They were way off the script and might not return for some time; but she had to sit down, stare at him and hear every word of this, Richard’s version of what happened in the park: how he was struck from behind, arm broken before he even saw the guy, hit in the legs, the head; man was like he was crazy.

Jean said, “He brought you there . . .”

“He tricked me.”

“To ask you questions?”

“I didn’t tell him nothing.”

She said, “Richard, how do you know you didn’t?”

“I know what I told him. He didn’t have no wire on him, I checked. Listen, with one hand ‘fore we were through there I punched the sucker out and I told him, ‘You got a surprise coming, asshole,’ just that much, without telling him nothing. Shit, I wasn’t gonna let the scudder get off.”

Jean said, “Oh, Richard,” her tone soft, almost loving. She sat in a wornout easy chair, her head back against the cushion, feeling the bristly mohair of the arms beneath her hands, damp with perspiration. Her straw bag was on her lap. She reached into it, found a pack of cigarettes and lighted one, inhaled, blew the smoke out slowly.

She said, “Well, it doesn’t matter.”

Nobles said, “Shit, no. We done it, didn’t we? You haven’t asked did I get the sack or not. You ready to have a look, divvy up?”

“I guess I’m ready,” Jean said.

Nobles walked into the bedroom and got down on the floor. She could see the bed from where she sat, blanket folded on a soiled mattress. He would try to get her in there, with sticky words, mouth curled. She watched him pull the Hefty bag from under the bed—each move separate, deliberate—rising to his knees, to one foot, standing, turning to come out . . . He sat on a straight chair facing her, the bag between his legs. Jean watched the fingers of one hand working to unwind the baling wire. She said, “Richard, how did you get here?”

“I didn’t know how I was gonna make it to the hospital, see. So I called this boy Glenn Hicks I know. I told you, he’s with the Boca Police?”

“Yes?”

“He drove me to Bethesda, the one in Boynton ’cause he didn’t know any others without going clear to Palm Beach.”

“Then how did you get here?”

“Yeah, Glenn drove me.”

She said it again, “Oh, Richard,” with that same weariness.

“Glenn’s a good boy, does what I tell him. Don’t you worry ’bout old Glenn.” He held the Hefty bag open. “Here, look-it in here. I want to see your eyes pop out.”

“Did you count it?”

“Did I count it?” He grinned at her. “I been counting it since I drug the sack in. It’s fun, you know it, count money?” He frowned then, reaching into the bag. “What I couldn’t figure out, what you put this in there for?” His hand came out holding the Walther PPK, the little bluesteel automatic.

Jean raised her hand from the arm of the chair and Nobles hesitated, then shrugged, reached over, and laid the grip in her upturned palm. “She’s on safety. That’s a cute little piece, but be careful now.”

Jean brought the gun up, looking at it. “I didn’t want to leave it at home, risk someone finding it. And with all those cops I didn’t want to carry it, have someone pick up my bag, feel the weight.”

Nobles sat hunched over the Hefty bag between his legs. “Lady carries around a suitcase full a money, she needs a gun. Keep the boogers off her.”

“That’s it,” Jean said. He was so close, hunched over, his cast resting on his knees. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

That got him up. “Well, sure. You want a cold beer or a warm one?”

“Cold, please.”

Nobles went into the kitchen and was out of view. She heard the refrigerator door, heard the popping sound as he opened the cans. Henry Silva had poured Scotch, no ice, turned with a tall glass in each hand . . . She raised the Walther in her right hand, six rounds in the clip, one in the chamber, extended it toward the doorway to the kitchen and waited for Nobles to appear.