Murder Is My Dish Page 9

  “Do you want it straight, or with sauce?”

  I turned around. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking up at the ceiling. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “There are maybe a hundred lawyers in D.C. who could represent them as well as you. Hell, maybe a thousand. But you’re your father’s son. Son of the great liberal jurist. That means something to them. It’s the name they want, and your father’s reputation here. That’s what they pay you for.”

  He said stiffly, “Hadn’t you better go, Chester?”

  “No, damn it, I hadn’t better go. The girl’s life may be in danger. Call down there. Call Grande himself. You could get through to him. Tell him that if the girl’s harmed or threatened in any way, you’ll quit. Tell him that.”

  “What do you think they are, Nazis? Reds? The girl’s perfectly safe, I tell you.”

  “Then it wouldn’t hurt if you made that call.”

  He studied the ceiling, sighing. I didn’t see anything up there. Maybe he was waiting for a message. “No,” he said. “I can’t do it. I can’t jeopardize what I have.”

  “You mean forty grand a year, like the pickets say?”

  “All right, yes. That’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I mean.” His voice had gone high and thin. His face was red. “It’s the bulk of my income, Chester. If I threaten them, they’ll take their business elsewhere. Then what would I do?”

  “They want your name. They’d take it from you.”

  “I assure you, the girl is perfectly safe.”

  “What in hell do you know about it?” I said, going over to the bed. “I saw Duarte, the security officer. You didn’t. I saw him kill two men. But go ahead and sit on your forty thousand bucks.”

  “I wish I could help you.” He laughed for no reason at all. It tore out of his throat like a sob. It must have been hell, living with himself.

  I went to the door. He said: “Wasn’t there something else?” His eyes had gone again to the attaché case.

  I shook my head and opened the door.

  He said, “No hard feelings?” He laughed nervously.

  Fawn Baylis’s perfume still lingered in the hall. Downstairs and outside, the pickets heckled me. On the way back to Washington I drove through a red light and almost took the fender off a car occupied by a soberly dressed couple probably on their way home from church. The near-accident was my fault, and they didn’t even yell.

  Chapter Ten

  I SPENT the middle afternoon in my apartment, reading Rafael Caballero’s manuscript. It wasn’t a shocker. That is, it wasn’t written in the style of a shocker. It was’ a carefully footnoted work, a scholarly tome weighty with words like moral lacuna and misoneism and caudillismo and Keynesian determinants.

  But factually it was a shocker. With documentary evidence in the form of photostatic positives, it chronicled the course of almost two decades of absolute dictatorship in a country bigger than the state of Texas with a population smaller than the city of Chicago. It chronicled the lies and the thefts and the behind-closed-doors bargains with astonishing objectivity. It was an authentic record. It was no one man’s opinion.

  And strangely, it was also a paean of love to a wild country the author had come to love despite its politics, a country of two great rivers, the Paraguay and the Parana, flowing south from the high mountains rich in tin and diamonds, through forests as dense as the Gran Chaco of Bolivia or the Matto Grosso of Brazil, to the bush lands of the great Paranaian ranches and a heritage as colorful as our own Western past and probably a lot more dangerous.

  When I finished reading, it was past four o’clock. I knew something about Rafael Caballero’s adopted country now. I knew the timeless, dim-lighted cathedrals of the tropical rain forest and the bustle of trade in tin, diamonds, cattle and mahogany in Ciudad Grande, the highest deep-water port on the Paraguay River. I knew something of Paranaian geography, and how an absolute dictator could rule there unchallenged for almost twenty years with the mountains of Bolivia to the north and west, the swamps of Paraguay to the west and south and the steaming jungles of Brazil to the north and east and south, keeping the prying eyes of the world away.

  I knew also that Rafael Caballero had been a great man, a very great man. I also knew, clearly, why Indalecio Grande had had to kill him.

  I found some wrapping paper on the closet shelf and wrapped the ream box with it. I addressed the package to myself care of General Delivery, Alexandria, Virginia. Uncle Sam, unaware, would keep Rafael Caballero’s manuscript for him. I found a dozen threes left in a book of stamps and stuck all of them on the package. Then I went outside and walked two blocks up Florida Avenue to a package drop. The box was red, white, and blue in the approved new style. I looked at it. I looked at the package. There were alternatives. I could deliver the manuscript in person to the head of the department at the university where Caballero had taught. But it might not be so easy getting out of New York a second time if they wanted me for Andy Dineen’s inquest. I could mail the package to the university, but couldn’t chance its falling into the wrong hands up there. It was something you delivered in person or not at all.

  A girl with a brightly wrapped Christmas package came along. “Well, mister?” she said, shifting about impatiently.

  I put the manuscript in the package drop and went home. I had an early supper of canned soup and canned pressed meat, then got Jack Morley’s house on the phone. Jack’s with the Department of State and, like Andy, Pappy Piersall and me, is an F.B.I. alumnus.

  Jack Jr., aged three, answered the phone. “Mph, ’lo.”

  “Hearty appetite,” I said as he chewed noisily in my ear.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “I’m fine,” he said stubbornly.

  He squawked as the phone was yanked away from him. He was still squawking in the background when his mother got on the phone. “I was about to tell him I’m Roy Rogers,” I complained.

  “Chet! Where are you? Jack said you were out of town. Jack said—”

  “Been out of town, kid. You think I’d have missed your corned beef and cabbage invite otherwise?”

  “How about tomorrow then?”

  “I think I’ll be going out of town again. A long way out of town. That’s where the man of the house comes in.”

  She said she’d get him, then sobered suddenly and added, “Chet, did you see in the papers what happened to Andy? My God, Chet, it’s—it’s— Andy was always so full of life.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry. He was’ working with you, wasn’t he?”

  I didn’t answer that one. Jack Morley came on the phone. He’s usually an easygoing guy but this time he greeted me with, “If you need any help getting the sons of bitches who did it, say the word.”

  “I need some help.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “No. Not like that. I have to go down where they live, in a hurry. The Parana Republic. My passport’s in order, but I’ll need a visa.”

  “They like you down there?”

  “Like the grandees liked Bolivar.”

  “Then they won’t let you in. You know how it is in most South American countries. You need a passport, a visa, a health certificate, immunization certificates, a dental chart, the name and address of your—”

  “Use your scissors to cut the tape.”

  “It wouldn’t help if they don’t like you. They’d declare you persona non grata before you left the airport. God, Chet. Are you really going down there after the ones who—”

  “Yeah,” I said. There was that, I thought. Burying Andy wouldn’t be enough. It never is. And there was Eulalia Mistral. Lequerica was a loyal Grande man. He wouldn’t help me. Preston Baylis was afraid to help. Which left only Chester Drum.…

  “Tell you what,” Jack was saying. “I know a guy in the Paraguayan Embassy. He ought to be able to get you a quick visa to Paraguay.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a plac
e called Puerto Casado on the Paraguay River near the Paranaian border. I know because the guy in the embassy’s old man has an alligator farm there or something. You could slip across the border through the swamps. Paranaians smuggle diamonds out of the country that way, he says. Well?”

  “Get me the visa as fast as you can.”

  “Chet, I wish I could go with you. Andy—”

  I heard Betty’s voice in the background. She said something about Chet having no ties and Jack having the boy to think of. Naturally, she was a hundred-per-cent right.

  “How’s the middle of the week?” Jack asked me.

  “Beginning of the week’s better.”

  “I’ll try, Chet. Call me.”

  “Good.”

  “Chet? How will you get out?”

  “Out?”

  “Of the Parana Republic?”

  “Same way I get in, I guess.”

  “You cocky bastard,” he said. But there was longing in his voice. What he didn’t know and what I didn’t tell him is, it works both ways. Sometimes guys like me long to change places with guys like him, but our way of life, such as it is, is finished if we say so out loud. We don’t even whisper it. After a while, if we’re lucky, or busy, we forget it.

  Monday morning we buried Andy. The sky had clouded over during the night and a cold rain which threatened to become snow fell on the cemetery. Jack and Betty Morley came to the funeral with the information that Andy had been a nominal Episcopalian. The minister delivered a short eulogy in the rain. He was a tall thin fellow whose white collar gleamed like bleached bone at his throat. He had never even seen Andy.

  The Morleys dropped me off at the office and I wasted an hour poking through my mail. The icy rain rattled on the window. You couldn’t even see the Treasury Building across the street. I felt like something wet and somehow obscene in a chrysalis, waiting to be born. It was too early to hit the bottle. It was too early to go home. I cleaned and oiled my Magnum and put a patch through the bore. It came out spotless, but I cleaned and oiled the Magnum again, anyway.

  Then Jack Morley called. An hour later I met him outside the Paraguayan Embassy. I was drenched. He had an umbrella which made Chamberlain’s look like a Japanese parasol.

  “Guy’ll do it,” he said glumly. “If you want.”

  I said I wanted, and we went inside together. Jack’s Paraguayan contact stared at me suspiciously as I did the paper work for my visa, as if he knew I had to leave the country in a hurry without permission. Jack looked at him when I had finished the papers. “Tomorrow, perhaps,” he said, and gave a Latin shrug. Jack winked at me. Outside he told me his Paraguayan contact was a pessimist. Tomorrow perhaps looked like a sure thing.

  Jack invited me home for dinner. I said no, then let him twist my arm. It was a pleasant, domestic evening, the kind Jack experienced every day of the year. Nobody mentioned Andy. Betty’s corned beef and cabbage would have melted the heart of even a Black Irishman. Her maiden name had been O’Leary.

  I got back to the converted brownstone at a little after nine. The rain had stopped during the late afternoon, but a raw wind had blown in from the Potomac all day and sleet was falling now. The landlady had sprinkled the outside stairs with rock salt and was just going in when I arrived.

  “Not a fit night out,” she mumbled. She had always been a little leary of me. She liked stenographers and clerks and Pentagon-stationed brass and civil-service hacks better than divorced private detectives who came and went at odd hours.

  I made an appropriate meteorological comment.

  “Man looking for you a while ago,” she said.

  “He leave a name?”

  “Nope.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Just a man. I ain’t a detective, Mr. Drum.” She slapped that one at me like a challenge. I didn’t accept it.

  She disappeared behind the door of her first-floor apartment. I went up the inside stairs, shrugging out of my sodden topcoat. It was supposed to be water-repellent. It was as water-repellent as a pail of sand.

  Cut it out, I said to myself. There must be somebody somewhere who feels meaner and more ornery than you.

  There was. I opened the door and found him.

  The hall light sent a narrow rectangle of yellow into my living room. A shadow moved alongside it. I reached for the light switch and froze reaching. Then I dove hard to the right, away from the yellow rectangle of light, clawing the Magnum out of its harness. A Brontosaurus kicked the back of my head. Something shattered and my Magnum clattered away across the linoleum. I fell to my knees. My forehead struck the linoleum as the shadow of a gigantic pair of legs, elongated by the hall light, fell across the narrow yellow rectangle. I grabbed for one of the legs and held on. Someone groaned. I never knew which one of us it was. The shadow stumbled, the door slammed shut, and it was dark again.

  The leg kicked. I held on and was dragged across the linoleum. The door opened a crack. A sliver of light darted into the room and found my face. I squinted and was kicked and almost let go of the leg. The door closed with a noise like a pistol shot. I let go of the leg and stumbled to my feet. The darkness swung and dipped.

  He was a big guy, as big or bigger than I am. I swung my left. His forearm cushioned the blow, my knuckles barely flicking against his face. He cried out in surprise and the terror of anticipated pain, as if he had never been hit before. I hit him again, better this time, with the right, and he began to blubber. He was big, like a sack of meal or a tub of lard can be big. I sank one into his belly and he sagged against the door and went down.

  I put the light on and looked at him. He held his hands in front of his face, expecting to be beaten. His mouth hung slack. His nose was bloody and would swell. There were tears on his cheeks. His fingers did a dance of fear in front of his face, like grubs of some impossibly large insect. His eyes beseeched me. Let me go, they may have said. Hit me again, they may have said. I wasn’t sure which. I don’t think he was, either. A sound escaped his throat, like the bellow of a gut-shot animal. Then he covered his face with his hands and began to cry. He’d stay put for a while.

  I went into the kitchen and got a bottle. He had sprinkled the living room linoleum with ceramic shards when he broke the table lamp over my head. I found my Magnum among them and holstered it. I walked over to him.

  Someone knocked at the door. The man sitting against it, whose name was Preston Baylis, stopped crying as if I had shut off a switch.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “What’s the matter in there?” my landlady called suspiciously.

  “Bad dream,” I said sheepishly.

  The door didn’t hide her satisfied smile. It was in her voice. “Well, I shouldn’t wonder,” she said. Her footsteps went away.

  I squatted near Baylis. “Drink this.”

  “I can’t.” He was crying again, softly. He let the words spill out between sobs. “I’ll gag. I’ll be sick.”

  “Then get control of yourself.”

  He took a deep breath, as if fighting for oxygen. The sobbing surrendered to an onslaught of hiccups. I dragged him to his feet and he came, unresisting, like the sack of meal he resembled. He was shapeless and flaccid, as if all the bones had been drawn out of his body without damaging the soft flesh and the well-cared-for skin. I took him over to the sofa. He sat down there, hiccupping. He looked up at me. “I’ll drink it now,” he said.

  I put the neck of the bottle to his lips. Its contents sloshed over his chin and down his shirtfront, but he drank plenty of it too. Then he took a breath and drank some more.

  “Anything,” he said. “Anything.” The hiccups had gone. “I can’t do anything right.” Tears glistened on his cheeks.

  “What were you trying to do right?”

  He started to say something, and blubbered. I waited, but not patiently. My head pulsed with pain. I said, “If you don’t get hold of yourself I’m going to call the cops.”

  His cheeks shook. He pawed at his trim mustache. His
fingers came away sticky with blood. The way he looked at them, I thought he would be sick on the sofa. Sweat beaded his forehead. He smelled of fear.

  “You the guy who came around before?” I asked him.

  “The landlady was cleaning your apartment. I talked to her. We went down the stairs together. Please don’t call the police, please. Please. I saw she didn’t lock the door. She went into another apartment on the first floor, so I came back upstairs.”

  “For what?”

  He smiled. It was as fleeting and meaningless as the smile of a politician just informed of his election defeat. He said, “It was your idea.”

  “What was?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I leaned over and lifted the telephone off its cradle. He heard the dial tone. He would have heard it from the other end of the room. “No,” he said. “All right. All right.”

  “What was my idea?”

  “Calling down there. I called Lequerica in Ciudad Grande. He told me you had Rafael Caballero’s manuscript.”

  Lequerica hadn’t known that. I had lied about it only to Duarte, but they had flown down to the Parana Republic together and could have talked about it.

  I waited without speaking. Baylis said, wrenching a laugh up from his guts, “Tell me, was it in that attaché case yesterday?”

  I nodded.

  He stared at the blood on his fingers and went pale, but managed a smile. “You were going to deliver it to me? Well; weren’t you? I almost had it in my hands, didn’t I? Didn’t I, Chester?”

  “That’s what you came here looking for?”

  “What do you think? Lequerica told me if I didn’t get the manuscript for them I could draw the rest of my quarterly pay and then forget about being the Paranaian legal representative here. You know what that would mean.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Lequerica.”

  “I swear on my father’s—”

  “Shut up. I wouldn’t believe you if you swore on a stack of Bibles as high as the Washington Monument. Now why’d you come here?”

  “Lequerica said … I wanted to … I should have hired someone to do it. I don’t know about these things. I don’t know. I didn’t know where to turn. I couldn’t … you see, my father’s name.…” He was wandering. He knew it and didn’t want to wander. This was the fight of his life. He clamped his lips shut. His cheeks quivered. Then he said in a flat, steady, faintly hopeful voice, “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars for the manuscript.”