He Huffed and He Puffed (15 page)

So it was kind of then or never; I didn't know if I'd ever get him up again. But still, I was pretty much resigned to not doing it, because of Sandy and the others. And I
wouldn't
have done it, if Dwyer had just had enough sense to keep his mouth shut. But he couldn't resist the captive audience he unexpectedly found himself with. We were all wearing headsets so we wouldn't have to shout and Tony Dwyer was having himself a ball, indeed he was, oh yes. He told them how much money I owed and how Phil was going to put me on an allowance like a kid because I was incompetent to handle my own affairs and how Phil might not even give me
that
if he knew about a few other debts I'd managed to keep hidden from him.

Chris told him to shut up but he just went on and on. He named names and amounts and even dates; one or two of those debts were over fifteen years old. It was bad enough for my friends to be hearing all that, but the pilot (whom I'd never seen before in my life) was sitting there soaking it all in like a man who couldn't wait to sell what he knew to the nearest gossip columnist. And still Dwyer kept talking.

He was giving too much away. It wouldn't do; it simply wouldn't do.

I still get a sick feeling in my stomach when I think about Sandy and Robin and Chris. It was just monumentally bad luck that they happened to be on
that
helicopter on
that
day. If they hadn't crashed my carefully planned party or if Dwyer had kept his mouth shut or if the pilot hadn't been there … well. But that was just part of a whole string of things that went wrong. The pilot saw what I was doing and got out, alive, and had been squeezing me ever since. I actually had to go to work for Phil to pay him. A. J. Strode found out and had put a different kind of squeeze on me. And what did it all come down to? It came down to this weekend and its carefully orchestrated horrors.

I examined my two fellow squeezees and wondered what the hell
they
had done. I'd asked Joanna Gillespie what Strode had on her, but she'd ducked the question by saying it was too ugly to talk about. Somehow I didn't think it could be much. What dreadful thing could a world-class violinist be caught doing? Pushing plastic chopsticks in China? Smuggling trolls out of Norway? Neither of us, I noticed, had asked Richard Bruce what he had done.

“His office,” Richard said out of the blue, “that's where we ought to look next.”

I stared at him. “Weren't you the one who said something about an office vault?”

“The combination has to be recorded somewhere.”

“So we just waltz in and look for it? Jesus, Richard, even if we could get in that'd be a
tremendous
job!”

“Then we'd better get started.”

“Oh, let's go give it a try,” Jo interjected. “I want to get out of this house anyway.”

“Outvoted two to one,” I sighed. “Okay, let's do it, troops.”

Let's do it, troops
—hah. Break into A. J. Strode's office? We couldn't even get into the
building
.

The building was closed on weekends. We could look into the lobby and see two security guards at a bank of monitors much like the one in Strode's home, only much larger. Richard Bruce tapped on the glass door until one of the guards came to see what we wanted. Richard said we had an appointment to meet Castleberry in A. J. Strode's office, but the guard said nobody had told him about it and we'd have to wait until Mr. Castleberry got there. He said even if he did let us go up, the guard on Mr. Strode's floor wouldn't let us off the elevators. He himself wouldn't even let us wait in the lobby. It didn't take us long to decide this was not a profitable avenue to pursue.

“Any more bright ideas, Richard?” I asked.

“It had to be tried,” he said patiently.

So there we were, stranded on Forty-seventh Street following our second straight failure to breach A. J. Strode's defenses, what a
sterling
day this was turning out to be. Joanna Gillespie announced she had to eat something. We found a bar and slid into the first empty booth we came to, Jo and I on one side and Richard on the other. The menu listed nine different sandwiches; we told the waitress to bring one of each. What with our drinks and the food and the ashtray and the salt and pepper shakers and a stand-up card pushing some “specialty” the bar's kitchen was trying to get rid of, there wasn't room to put your elbows on the table. The club sandwich was closest to me and I started off with that; but everything kept slipping out from between those little triangles of toast so I switched to the Reuben.

There'd been a little eye contact going on between Jo and Richard that I didn't much care for, so to break that up, I asked Jo, “Were you a child prodigy?”

“No, thank god.” She was slumped down in the booth, halfheartedly picking a piece of cheese out of one of the sandwiches. “Prodigies usually burn out by their early twenties. I intend to play for another fifty years at least.”

I don't know what I was thinking of, I must not have been thinking at all, my brain was on vacation dammit, but it just slipped out: “You figure you're going to be the one to sell to Strode?”

Jo looked startled, but it was the way Richard Bruce was looking at me that made my skin crawl. Nothing to do but bluff it out. “C'mon, you've both been thinking of it, you know you have. Fess up.”

“Well, it's clear
you
have,” Jo said indignantly. “Whatever happened to our agreement not to accept Strode's rules?”

“I'm
sticking to it,” I said as earnestly as I knew how and blotted my hands on my trousers. “But I can't help but wonder whether you guys are having second thoughts. Are you?”

They were both silent a moment. Then Richard said, “It's a little early to give up yet. We still have some time left.”

“That says it for me,” Jo added.

I allowed myself to look relieved, and it wasn't entirely show. “Okay, sorry I doubted. It's just that I've got so much riding on this weekend … it's not just me that might get hurt, it's the whole family business that could go down the toilet.”

“McKinstry Helicopters,” Richard said, not asking.

So he knew my company—and was working hard at not looking impressed. “That's it. I'm one of those McKinstrys. Unless they all disown me after this weekend.”

“Do you think so?” Jo asked, not really interested.

“They might. My brother's always ready to believe the worst.” I told Richard the same story I'd earlier told Jo, that Strode had manufactured evidence to implicate me in a helicopter crash that had taken place in France four years earlier. “People
died
in that crash,” I pointed out. “That means I could be charged with murder if Strode convinces the French police I'm responsible.”

“But only if they think you caused it deliberately,” Jo objected. “The charge might be criminal negligence or something like that, but not murder.”

“Oh, that's the cute part,” I said. “You see, I was in that helicopter when it crashed, and only one other guy and I got out alive. The other guy was the pilot, and Strode has bribed him to say I wrecked that bird on purpose.”

“Why?” Wouldn't you know, Richard just had to ask that.

“Why am I supposed to have wrecked it? Strode's version is that I owed money to one of the passengers and killed them all to get rid of him. Good god! For one thing, I'm not in the habit of taking my creditors with me on little jaunts along the southern coast of France. For another, those four other people in the helicopter were my friends, I'd known them all for years … I could no more kill them than I could kill myself. And I'm supposed to have risked my
own
life just to get out of paying a debt? It's absurd.”

“Can you get to the pilot?”

I shook my head. “Strode's got him hidden away somewhere.”

Jo evidently saw something in Richard Bruce's face. “That's what he did to you too, Richard, didn't he? He got somebody to sign something and then hid the person away.”

“That's exactly what he did.” Without any prologue he went into some song and dance about a ship called the
Burly Girl
that sank with a full crew and an insurance check that came when it was needed most. Then he turned to me. “You're in danger of being charged with killing … what, four people, Jack? Strode has accused me of killing thirty-seven.”

Jesus, a mass murderer sitting right across the table from me! I couldn't think of a damned thing to say. Thirty-seven people!

Jo was frowning. “But if the entire crew went down on the ship, who was left to sign something that could implicate you?”

“The first mate's wife,” Richard said. “The mate told her I had sanctioned the plan for scuttling the
Burly Girl
—to quiet her doubts, I suspect. If the boss himself was behind it … well, that takes the onus off the poor lowly seaman who was sucked into a whirlwind of events he couldn't control, don't you see. And now
I
can go to the gas chamber just because some thieving son of a bitch of a sailor didn't have the nerve to tell his wife the truth.”

“Your word against hers,” I suggested.

“Not entirely. He put it all in a letter before he died.”

“Ah. And Strode has the letter.”

“You guessed it. Something went wrong on the
Burly Girl
—the captain was in on it too, but neither he nor the mate ever got off the ship. So the mate's credibility increases a thousand-fold by virtue of his being dead.”

I felt like applauding, he did that so nicely. Just the right touch of bitterness in the voice, the troubled look in the eye, the mouth drawn into a straight line—none of it overdone. I was fascinated. Why oh why do you suppose King Richard the Bruce would suddenly choose to reveal such damaging information about himself? I watched Jo watching Richard. Was it for her benefit? Was Richard hatching some little plot involving her that would leave yours truly out in the cold?

“The first mate's wife,” Jo said, “is she the one Strode has hidden away?”

“She's the one. She's even changed her name, according to Castleberry.”

“Then you'll never find her,” I said. “Not if Strode doesn't want you to. No more than I can find Billy—he's the helicopter pilot Strode bribed. Those two are
gone
. Forget 'em.”

“I already did. The answer isn't in looking for a sailor's widow and a helicopter pilot and …?”

Ah, that was it. He wanted to know what Jo had done. She was aware of both of us watching her, waiting for her to complete the sentence. She didn't. She didn't squirm, she didn't look away, she didn't
anything
. Finally I said, “C'mon, Jo, we told you our secrets. Who's Strode got locked up from your dark and undoubtedly disreputable past?” I grinned to show I was kidding.

She slumped down farther in the booth. “In my case, it's a mercenary.”

I couldn't believe my ears. “A mercenary …
soldier?”

She sighed. “Yes.”

“You were, er, planning to take over a country? Start your own survivalist camp? What?”

“It was a mistake. I never hired him.”

“But you were thinking of hiring him. For what?”

“It doesn't matter for what. What matters is that Strode got him to sign a statement saying I offered to hire him—which I didn't.”

It was like pulling teeth. “Hire him to do what? Talk to us, Jo.”

“All right, all right,” she said irritably. “Strode paid him to accuse me of trying to hire him … to kill my parents.”

Pow! Talk about
awesome
. “You mean … mother-and-father-type
parents?
Jesus Christ.” In a way, that was even worse than Richard's thirty-seven victims. Umm, on second thought, no it wasn't. Richard was worse. “Strode must have gone off the deep end. Your parents! Why are you supposed to have wanted them dead?”

“For their money. They both died recently—my mother two years ago and my father a year before that. They left me money—a
lot
of money. So Strode has decided I killed them for it.”

“Yeah, everybody knows what a failure you are,” I said with disgust and gave her hand a squeeze. “I can't imagine anyone believing that story.” Sympathetic Jack, crying shoulder available without prior notice, that's me.

Richard said, “Did you try to buy off the mercenary? Or is he in hiding too?”

“He's not in hiding—he's at his home in Texas. But Strode's got him in his pocket now … and I can't get him out. I tried.”

“You know,” I said, “of all the rotten stunts Strode has pulled, that one has got to be the worst. I'm sorry, Jo. I wish I could help.”

She was in the process of mustering up a smile for me when Richard stacked up a few of the plates of half-eaten sandwiches and reached across the table to take her hand away from me and hold it in his own. “It won't wash, Jo,” he said gently. “You did seek out the mercenary, remember. Whether you ultimately hired him or not doesn't matter. You were trying to buy yourself some firepower.”

She jerked her hand away. “That's no concern of yours.”

“Yes, it is—unfortunately. The same way that what happened to my ship and to Jack's helicopter is
your
concern. We've each got to know what the others are up against if we're going to come up with a workable plan. You can't hold back now. There's more to the story than you're telling us.”

I'd never before seen a woman age ten years right before my eyes, but I swear to god that's what happened then. Everything that made Joanna Gillespie vital and special drained right out of her as I watched. It scared the shit out of me. Richard saw it too, and for once I was glad to let him take the lead. He waited a moment or two and then simply said her name.

She roused herself with an effort. “God, I just can't take this anymore. You might as well know—what difference does it make now? It's all coming out anyway. Yes, I killed them. I killed my mother and my father. You two may be pure as the driven snow, but Strode was right about me. I'm a murderer.”