What of Terry Conniston? (19 page)

Approaching Nogales he obeyed the speed-limit signs, which brought him down to fifty, then thirty-five; driving the high hillside bend with rocks above on the right and the Santa Cruz river below on his left, he said to Terry, “Have you got any money in your bag?”

“I did. Unless somebody went through it while we were back there.”

He was hoping nobody had. She pawed through her handbag, took out a red leather purse-wallet and snapped it open. “It's still here. What do you know.”

“How much?”

“More than you might think,” she said with a small grin. “My daddy got me in the habit of carrying a lot of cash. Just in case of emergency, he always says—or in case you see something you want to buy and they don't take credit cards.”

He swung right into a side street that angled between gas stations and warehouses. “How much?”

She was counting, frowning, moving her lips. He glimpsed the edges of twenty-dollar bills. She gave a nervous little laugh and said, “I almost hate to admit it. Almost three hundred dollars.”

“Don't apologize,” he said grimly.

He bought a $235 Ford from a used-car lot and drove it back to the quiet street where they had parked the little red car. He took everything out of the trunk and packed it away in the Ford. Terry helped him put up the canvas top of the sports car; they couldn't lock it because they didn't have a key. There were no No-Parking signs in sight; he judged it would be quite some time before the parked car would draw attention. He shooed Billie Jean and Terry into the Ford and they drove down through town, had to wait ten minutes in the queue of cars at the bottleneck, and went on through the international border with a nod and a smile at the Mexican guards who waved them through, as they waved all cars through. Mitch said, “That part was easy. The rough stuff comes down below. They'll let anybody into the border towns. It's when you get out of town on the highway that you've got to show your tourist permit. Which we haven't got.”

Terry said, “I've got my passport with me. They'll accept that.”

“Not for all three of us.”

Thinking on it, he drove on slowly through thick horsefly-crowds of pedestrians—tourists and peddlers. They went past Canal Street, which climbed steeply to the right, a row of whorehouses with girls sitting on the shaded porches. He said uncomfortably, “This is as far as I've ever been. Where do we go from here, to get out of town?”

“Down past the bull ring—keep going.” Terry gave him a wry look.

The Ford was an oil-burner. Its radio didn't work. It needed springs and shock-absorbers and he hesitated to think what else. But at least it ran—and it was clean, for the moment. It would take the cops a long time to trace them through the car. Not that they couldn't do it, eventually. But eventually, he thought.
Eventually…. Who the hell knows?
He looked at Terry, on the far side of the seat trying to comb the tangles out of her hair. He said, “Where's the entry station where they check your papers?”

“Four or five miles down the road after we get out of town.”

“What's the countryside like?”

She had to think about it; finally she said, “Kind of flat and deserty. It's the other side of these hills.”

“In other words they could see somebody on foot for quite a distance?”

“I'm afraid they could,” she answered, indicating by her reply that she understood what he had in mind. “You'd have a long walk.”

“How long? Five miles? Ten?”

“I don't know, Mitch. It's awfully flat to the south of it. Of course it would all depend whether they happened to be looking out in that direction.”

“We can't take the chance they won't.” He chewed his lip. The road curled past the high bull ring—a coliseum papered with colorful posters—and ran on south through a widening canyon alongside the railroad tracks. The dark blue car absorbed sun heat through the roof; he drove with all the windows open, his left arm propped up. The traffic was steady and light, mostly old American cars and Volkswagens. The Ford fitted in beautifully.

The last adobe buildings receded behind them and were absorbed in the mirror's rear-view by the dun-colored hills. The road ran up a long easy grade ahead and disappeared over it. Terry said, “It's down on the flats beyond this hill.”

He pulled over to the shoulder before they reached the crest; got out and walked up just far enough to be able to see past the crest. From this high vantage-point he could sweep a panorama that sprawled a good many miles toward various mountain ranges, haze-blue in the distance. The road ran down the slope ahead of him two or three miles to a permanent roadblock and a solitary cubical building flying the Mexican flag; beyond, the highway ribboned south for miles before it twisted out of sight.

He pinched his mouth irritably and walked back to the car. “That's no good. We'll have to wait for nightfall. Then you drive through the checkpoint while Billie Jean and I walk around the back of the place. We'll make a wide circle, a mile or so—you'll have to wait for us on the other side.”

Billie Jean said, “You mean we got to kill the whole day here? It's too damned hot.”

“We'll go back to Nogales and get some lunch and some beer.”

“Yeah,” Billie Jean said. “I could use some.”

He made a tight U-turn and drove back the way they had come. Terry's hand rested on his thigh as he drove.

C H A P T E R
Fourteen

Somehow Earle Conniston's office—which had rarely been occupied by more than two people at a time during Conniston's reign—had become the center of the household. They had all four congregated there on the night of Earle's death; it seemed natural that they keep coming back to it.

Halfway through this insomniac night they were gathered in the office—four people in the same room but not together. Carl Oakley was striding back and forth. Louise Conniston sat pushing her ice cubes around with a swizzle stick. Frankie Adams, graven-faced, was twisting his knuckles and chewing on a pencil and frowning at a newspaper crossword puzzle in his lap. Diego Orozco sat in his favorite straight chair with hands on knees, the weight of his huge belly sagging against his thighs.

Louise wore a rustling silk dress. When she twisted in the chair to look at Oakley her breasts handled the cloth seductively. “Why don't you sit down?”

“I think better on my feet.”

“You're nervous. You're making me nervous, so you must be nervous.” Her words ran together carelessly; she was tight, or high—Oakley had never pinned down the distinction.

Frankie Adams said, “What's the capital of Ecuador? La Paz? Five letters.”

“That's in Bolivia,” Oakley said absently.

Orozco muttered, “Quito.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Oakley tugged back his sleeve and looked at his watch. Two seconds later if someone had asked him the time he wouldn't have been able to answer. He resumed pacing with his hands in his pockets.

Adams uttered a monosyllabic curse and slapped the pencil down on the newspaper. “I can't do these damn things.”

Louise said, “It beats hell out of me how you two legal and detective geniuses can identify both those dead bodies and still come up with nothing.”

“We've got their names,” Oakley said, “and for the moment that's all we've got. It's worth about as much as a nun's virginity—we've got it but what good is it?”

Orozco said in his unperturbed growl, “We'll have more information coming in pretty quick. My stringers are working up files on them.”

“Sure—sure,” Louise said. “But what happens then?”

“I'm not clairvoyant,” Oakley said. “All I can tell you is they didn't leave her there dead. Which means she may be alive.”

Louise knocked back her drink. “But if they let her go why haven't we heard from her? And if they didn't, why didn't they?”

Oakley didn't answer. He went to the big leather chair and sat back, crossed his legs at right angles, laced his hands behind his head and knitted his brows. He kept looking at the telephone. All evening he had swung pendulantly from one extreme of emotion to the other—elation, despondency. They had found the spliced phone wires early in the afternoon and after that things had moved fast: they had found the two naked bodies in the ghost town before sundown. A discreet contact of Orozco's in the Tucson police lab had run the fingerprints through for identification and Oakley had still been on his after-dinner coffee when the replies had come through—Orozco's team had worked with remarkable dispatch. But what did it add up to? Oakley had even looked them both up in every one of the phone books in Earle's cabinets. No Theodore Luke, no George Rymer. The two names hung suspended in a vacuum.

None of the radio direction-finders had picked up any signals from the bugged suitcase. The two sets of tire tracks in the ghost-town barn meant very little, if anything—one set belonged to Terry's Daimler, which had not been sighted anywhere, and the other set consisted of worn mismatched tires of a brand not used on new cars. Thus there was no way to identify the make of the larger car. Orozco's operatives had put out the word on the red sports job but that, Oakley thought bitterly, was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Arizona was crawling with two-seater cars and half of them were red.

Theodore Luke had a vague record of three arrests and one suspended sentence, on charges of simple assault and drunk-and-disorderly. George Rymer had a record of narcotics arrests. Both men had been musicians—New York City had refused Theodore Luke a cabaret license because of his criminal record. But there was nothing in the sum of that information to suggest that either of them had ever been involved in robberies, extortions, or any of the other varieties of crime that a lawyer might expect to find in a kidnaper's background.

It was all elusive, inconclusive, mocking. Oakley's eyes were lacquered with weary frustration.

Frankie Adams said crossly, “I'm going to bed,” and left the room. Louise stirred the melting ice in her glass; Oakley watched her moodily. She caught his eye on her and she smiled, her eyes half-closed; she looked warm and lazy. She sat up and lifted her arms to fiddle with her hair. Under the silk dress her breasts stood out like torpedoes, drawing Oakley's masculine attention, arousing him and irritating him with the distraction. Louise, meeting his glance, became very still, her arms upraised; her eyes mirrored a sensual speculation. Still smiling, she yawned luxuriously and walked out of the room trailing musk.

Oakley's palms felt moist. He felt his face color when he caught Orozco looking at him, bland-faced.
He sees everything
, Oakley thought, and made a note to quit taking Orozco for granted—lunatic
chicano
land-schemes aside, Orozco was a vigilant and clever man, possibly dangerous.
The inscrutable Mexican
, he thought dryly: Orozco had superb control, he never let you see anything he didn't want you to see.

They kept vigil by the telephone, the prime umbilical. It did not ring. Oakley began to feel drowsy; he hadn't had much sleep in the past three days.
Getting old
, he thought, and felt solemn and sad, regretting all the things he had not done when he was young and all the things he would never do, either because of lack of time or because of lack of passion. He had never been a man of passions; he saw himself as a repressed man, cool, channeled, deliberate. He thought of the unsubtle suggestion Louise had left hanging in the air
(anything but inscrutable)
and it focused his weary thinking once again on the fact that he was no longer young, that it was time to settle for something less than the unachievable perfection of a Technicolor marriage with violins. Something made not in heaven but in kitchen, bed, living room. It seemed a wry irony that his reputation was that of a blade. He couldn't even remember most of their names—an endless procession of soft humid bodies with interchangeable faces. It was always easiest that way: no attachments, no commitments, no passions. Yet it gave him little joy, left him ragged, sapped his energies—the timeless ritual of pretense and mutual seduction. Once he had met a girl in a bar who had said to him refreshingly, “You don't have to buy me drinks and dinner. I only want to get laid.” Blunt, forthright—yet she had been attractive, young, charming. But she had been just passing through. They were all just passing through.

He came back to Louise. Young, attractive, widowed, sensual. Rich besides. If he played his cards right she would marry him; he was certain of it. But it wouldn't do. He could endure a marriage without love; he probably wasn't capable of making any other kind. But marriage to Louise would be a duel—a constant abrasive antagonism; a clashing of desires, the headstrong against the reasoned, the passionate against the temperate. He didn't need a Louise. He needed a milkmaid.

His reveries began to distend and wander; he leaned back in the tilting chair and put his feet up on Earle's desk, glanced drowsily at Orozco and closed his eyes…. The morning sun beamed across the desk and he came awake with a start, searched guiltily for Orozco and learned the room was empty. He mouthed a mild oath, lowered his feet to the floor, sat up.

His tongue felt dry and bloated; he scraped a hand over his stubbled chin and blinked ferociously, cupped a big hand around the back of his neck and reared his head back until the bones creaked.

He crossed the hall, tired and rumpled, and found Orozco sitting on his bed with a fat paw across the telephone receiver and a slight frown on his face. Orozco's chin lifted: “I came in here to take the calls. Didn't want to wake you.”

“Thanks, Diego.” It had been an unexpected kindness. Orozco kept displaying new facets, each of which further eroded the slothful impassive image.

Orozco said, “Things are starting to break.”

“Good. Can it wait ten minutes? I've got to wash the sleep off.”