Jeopardy Is My Job Read online

  Pez Espada dropped the revolver. He grasped the hafts of the banderillas and pulled. The barbs wouldn’t come free. There was very little blood at first, but his face had drained white. He shook himself the way a bull that has just received the banderillas shakes itself, and the sticks rattled. Then he grasped them again, his eyes wild, and tugged as hard as he could. The hook between his left shoulder and throat found the carotid artery. Dark blood swelled, pumped, jetted—and still Pez Espada pulled and twisted the banderilla.

  He fell near Ruy, his hands still on the brightly-colored stick. Tenley whimpered. I reached Ruy before she did, and felt for his pulse. I shook my head. It was not necessary to feel for Pez Espada’s pulse. He had lost too much blood.

  Then Tenley turned away and whimpered again, and I saw a man, big and in a rumpled, white linen suit, handsome but needing a haircut as he had needed a haircut on the picture his father had shown me in the States, standing in front of the French doors.

  I should have been surprised. An hour ago I would have been. I wasn’t now. There was, of course, only one man he could be.

  Robbie Hartshorn.

  chapter twenty-two

  He swayed there before the doors that led out to the terrace. I remembered what Tenley had said at the very beginning. He was drunk. He stayed drunk from the time he woke up until he brushed his teeth with bonded bourbon at night.

  Despite the lines and wrinkles of dissipation, despite the dark, swollen smudges under his eyes, his face had an unformed look—not vacuous but blank like the face of a very young man still unscarred by life and the difficult job of survival in a world none of us ever makes.

  “You had proof, you had incontrovertible proof,” Nancy Huntington told Tenley mockingly, “that your father was dead.”

  Tenley looked at me. She had no words, but her eyes said it: what else could I have done? What else could I do? I guess pity is the worst emotion you can feel for someone you love, but that’s the way I feel.

  Tenley went to him. Ruy was dead. Ruy wouldn’t need her now. “Dad, this man was sent from the States to … find you.”

  “The Governor sent him?”

  “Yes, Dad. The Governor.”

  “Congratulations,” said Robbie Hartshorn, smiling at me. “It would seem you’ve found me. That’s more than I’ve ever been able to do, and I’ve been looking for years. When you fly back you can tell the Governor when last seen I was heading for Africa with a fortune in contraband. I won’t need him any more. I won’t need the monthly check. I won’t need the sanctimonious sermons that come with it.”

  “Dad,” Tenley said, “get a grip on yourself, please. That’s not the way it’s going to be. They’re on their way to Alicante. Diego and Estebán. With the contraband.”

  He said, “That’s ridiculous. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Paco and Ruy—”

  “Ruy is dead.”

  He saw Ruy and Pez Espada on the floor then. He went slowly to them, fifteen years of heavy drinking and fifteen years of experience with too much alcohol making it possible for him to do it without staggering. He bent near Ruy, clucking his tongue. Maruja was already there, her head on the boy’s chest, crying. Paco was squatting near her, trying to comfort the gypsy woman with clumsy words and the gentle touch of a huge hand. Robbie Hartshorn bent again near Pez Espada. He stood and turned slowly.

  “I’m going to Africa,” he said. “You see, I’m going after all.” He was holding Pez Espada’s gun.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “You’re too drunk to shoot straight. I’m not.”

  “But I’m desperate, mister. I’m desperate, and you’re not.”

  We stood facing each other. He glanced down at the gun in his hand, as if surprised to see it. I could have shot him then. I didn’t. He wasn’t ready to fire, just as I hadn’t been sent to Spain to kill him.

  “I’m going to Africa,” he said again, as if trying to convince himself.

  “What will it get you?” I said. “A couple of weeks of running? You won’t get far.”

  “That’s the story of my life, old man. I never got very far.”

  I took a slow step toward him and said, “You got sick and tired of the Governor’s checks and sermons, so you had to go out and earn a pile for yourself—the hard way.”

  “Every month,” he said. He mimed the Governor’s voice: “‘My dear boy, don’t you think it’s time you settled down to some valuable work, valuable at least to you if not to the community?’ I almost puked every time I opened his monthly letter. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I just couldn’t.”

  I took another step. If he noticed it, it meant nothing to him. The gun was held slackly in his hand. “So you decided to try your hand with the highjackers?”

  “Of course, old man. Stu Huntington was a drunk, you know. Aren’t we all, all honorable drunks? The soused society of remittance men. He’d talk a little every now and then until I had the whole picture. How they operated. Pez Espada as broker for the cargoes, the Fuentes brothers highjacking with the Jímenez boat, Stu disposing of the contraband. I found his list of contacts, and the rest just sort of fell into place.”

  “There were two people you had to work on,” I said, and by then I’d cut the distance between us in half. “The first was Nancy Huntington. The second—”

  “Ah yes,” he said, “the fat, frowsy Nancy. Actually, I didn’t ‘find’ her husband’s list. She gave it to me. She detested him, you see. Or so she said. I suppose she really did, and if so, he was the only male of the species she ever detested. It was easy to convince her we could run off together with a few hundred thousand dollars worth of contraband. Not that I would have taken her with me, old man. But she leaped at the chance.”

  “The Fuentes brothers and Maruja were disturbed because Huntington was upping his own take at their expense—which gave you the opportunity you needed.”

  “Pero cómo no?” he said in Spanish. “But why not? Ruy was easy to work on, figuring if we were working together I couldn’t very well disapprove of his relationship with Tenley. But of course I had no intention of working with them, not permanently. I just wanted to make my pile, old man, and then be free of them. Of all of them. The Governor and his checks and sermons, my wife and the way one minute she wanted to possess me utterly, telling me what a perfect marriage we had and no one understood us and we were so wonderful together, the next minute going off solitary as a cat.… It got so I couldn’t stand it. If I had money, if I were of independent means.…”

  “You told Ruy you could do everything Huntington did, and for less money. He told Maruja and Paco, and Nancy Huntington arranged for Fernando to drive with her husband to the cave in Fuengirola. Where they killed him.”

  “Not Ruy,” Robbie Hartshorn said. “Paco did it, hitting him with a tire-iron. Then, once it was done, of course, Ruy couldn’t very well turn his family in.”

  “That was when I came along,” I said. “Paco and Ruy already were scared because I was looking for you, and then when I showed up at the cave the night Huntington was murdered, they decided to make it a double-header. It would be made to look like an accident, and Sergeant Martinez, being on the take, would close his books on it as an accident. The only trouble was, I got out alive.”

  “Ruy had nothing to do with that either,” Robbie Hartshorn said slowly. Though he was looking at me, his words were for Tenley. “I’d have no reason to say this, old man, no reason at all because the boy is dead, unless it were the truth. Ruy was confused, and the gypsy could wrap him around her little finger, but he was no killer. He never was a killer. You must understand that. He never was a killer.”

  “Then,” I went on, and by then I was very close to him, “Martinez dutifully tried to scare me off by saying I’d been seen—indicating that he meant in a compromising position—with Nancy Huntington. If it was murder, I would be a likely suspect. So I was supposed to lope off for the nearest airport with my tail between my legs. And that idea was put in his
head by the one person who could have put it there, the only one who saw us on the terrace of La Atalaya the night before the murder, the only one who could claim we did anything but say a few words—Nancy Huntington herself.”

  I was almost close enough to take the gun from his hand. I said, “Martinez let me go that time, but then after I’d been to Algeciras to see Pez Espada he set me up with a pro in a Fuengirola hotel, and that’s when I got the boot. But he never would have condoned highjacking; smuggling, that was something else. I put a bug in his ear, and he did some investigating, and that’s when the roof started to fall in. Rafael Jimenez in Carihuela, a man named Short in Torremolinos, Pez Espada in Algeciras—”

  “Swordfish came here. We could start again in Alicante, he said, and probably he was right. But I’d never wanted that, not in Fuengirola and not in Alicante either. I said Africa, and Ruy backed me because after all I was Tenley’s father, and I still don’t know why it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Estebán and Diego were just a little bit tougher than Ruy and Paco,” I told him.

  Then suddenly he smiled and thrust the gun in my hand and said, “Will you kindly stop sneaking up on me like an elephant trying to walk on tiptoe, old man? Here—is this what you want?”

  That gave me a gun in each hand. Robbie Hartshorn looked at them and at me, and briefly and with regret at Tenley. Then he turned and walked out through the French doors. I went after him, fast. Just as he hadn’t taken a shot at me, I didn’t fire at him. I couldn’t shoot him in the back. A gun wasn’t the final answer. Except in the black and white world of TV, it never is.

  He was running, and he didn’t have far to go. He climbed the low terrace wall and sat there. “Keep back,” he warned me. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness.

  “I want Tenley to think the boy was better than he was,” he said in a conversational tone. “That’s very important, old man. And I want her to think I—I couldn’t shoot you. I couldn’t, you know. Not in front of her.”

  Tenley came out. I turned at the sound of her footsteps. She screamed. When I pivoted again, the terrace was empty.

  Robbie Hartshorn had a long way to fall.

  chapter twenty-three

  Paco made a run for it while we were on the terrace. I caught him at the door and fired once over his head. He came back inside with his hands up.

  After that, I picked up the phone and called the Guardia. The fat colonel and a platoon of winged patent-leather hats arrived in less than ten minutes. With Pez Espada dead, the colonel was all through covering up. He fell on Paco and Maruja like a ton of bricks. The charge was murder, and Nancy Huntington and Fernando would be booked, he said, as the Spanish equivalent of accessories before the fact.

  Nancy Huntington called us all horse’s asses. “How could I help murder my own husband?” she wailed.

  North Country told her: “For you, love, it was easy.”

  The colonel was all politeness and sympathy to Tenley. He put her up in the Victoria hotel. She was questioned there, gently and with restraint. The colonel was a true Spanish gentleman—once the hand that fed him was cut off at the wrist.

  I had the room next to Tenley’s at the Victoria. By two in the morning the Guardia were through with us, and I turned in. I heard Tenley’s door open and shut before I’d taken my shoes off. I followed her along the deserted corridor.

  She went outside, and down through the Victoria’s gardens and along the path that led to the paseo, a park on the edge of Ronda’s high cliff. She sat on the rampart there with a million stars over her head.

  “You must be all in,” I said softly.

  “No, it’s funny, but I’m not sleepy.” She stared down eight hundred feet to the blackness that was the valley of the Serena. “He took me here when I was a little girl,” she said. “He wasn’t drinking so much then. An old Spanish teller of tall tales came over and fed us a yarn. I’d been throwing St. John’s breads over and watching how the up-drafts brought them back. He saw a man throw a dog over, the old man told us. Two hours later the dog reappeared, on the very same spot.”

  She kept on staring. She was silent.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve got to stay with Mother now. She’ll need me. But not here. I’m taking her back to the States. You think she’ll come?”

  “If you work on her, she’ll come.”

  “Was my father a killer?” Tenley asked suddenly.

  I said nothing.

  “It was his idea to kill Huntington, wasn’t it?”

  “He just wanted to ease Huntington out of the picture,” I said, remembering the man sitting on the terrace wall as Tenley was sitting on the rampart of the paseo. “Paco killed him.”

  “But my father—”

  “Listen,” I said. “He could have shot me tonight. He didn’t.”

  “You were armed too.”

  “He couldn’t do it,” I said. “He couldn’t kill a man in cold blood—any more than Ruy could have.”

  “You really think so?”

  I looked at her back. “I’m sure of it,” I said.

  She sighed, and then she started to cry. I led her back inside, and this time she slept like a baby.

  They wanted to hold us in Torremolinos until the trial, but the Governor pulled the strings that a Governor could pull, and they were satisfied with our signed depositions instead.

  Three days after we returned to the coast, we took off from Malaga on the first leg of our flight home. Andrea Hartshorn wasn’t drinking. She had found strength in Tenley, and with all the weight of her grief was leaning on it. I thought it would do Tenley more good than it did her.

  The last I heard, the Guardia were looking for Estebán and Diego—without any success and not very hard.

  THE END

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