Ringer (21 page)

Tony had no reason to fight me; he just wanted to scare Robert Tyson Grant, not this little blond girl. Besides, he had just inhaled his mustache up into his sinuses, which by the looks of it seemed quite painful. A kick in the nuts truly would have been an assault to injury.

Tony pivoted and dove headlong back through the hedge, rolled once, and began running across the golf course.

I kicked the hedge and yelled after him, “You will pay dearly for this!” I had no reason to chase the scoundrel, much less ruin my suit by diving through the hedge. I turned to the limo.

Purity was still behind the back door to the limo, eyes wide.

An Asian chauffeur stood next to the open driver’s door. “What happened?”

“A strange man attempted to ambush your vehicle.” I straightened my jacket. “I have chased him off.”

The chauffeur looked me over. “Who are you?”

“He’s a friend of mine, Earl,” Purity said. “He’s OK.”

“Wait a minute.” Earl pointed at me. “You’re the guy from the papers. The one who caught Purity when she fell in court?”

“One and the same.” I bowed. “My name is Morty Martinez.”

A Mercedes rolled down the road behind the limo and honked.

Purity cocked her head at my green car. “That your ride?”

“It is not, but I drove it here.”

“Follow us to the house. I owe you a cocktail, but NFN I want to know what you were doing here, and who that dude was that ran off across the country club.”

The Mercedes honked again.

“As a matter of policy, I never refuse a drink from a beautiful lady.”

*   *   *

Dixie was still in the yellow polka dots, a black coffee before her. Robert was in a three-piece worsted suit, a tea before him. They sat in the booth where I first met him, at the end.

“It itches.” Robert twisted his neck. “The damn calludaroo itches. It is caught in my chest hair. Can’t I put it in my pocket?”

“No. She said you must wear it around your neck. So you wear it around your neck, silly goose.”

“You think this is for real? I mean, come on, a pygmy hand? A talisman? This is the twentieth century.”

“
Twenty-first
century. Sweet cakes, the fortune-teller was right about the Mexican, about the anger, about all those things. How can she not be right about this?”

“She said a lot of stuff. She even said I should be afraid of you.”

“The important thing is that she was right about most of what she said, and knew things she could not possibly have known. How did she find you, and know who you are?”

“Maybe she recognized me from the papers or magazines.”

“So her grand scheme is to shake you down by making you wear a pygmy hand around your neck?”

“You saw it.” Grant scratched at his chest. “Have you ever seen a pygmy that small?”

“Darling, I have never met a pygmy, but maybe this was a dwarf pygmy, or a child.”

“Do pygmies have dwarfism? And if so, what kind of God allows such irony? We should have a charity for dwarf pygmies. The African charities are hot now.”

Dixie shot him a stern look and wagged a finger. “Don’t you dare blaspheme, Robert, not now of all times. We need Him on our side.”

“Hmph.” Grant sipped some tea, his foot tapping audibly under the table. “I’d rather we met at my place. I could take this thing off there, and we could be screwing instead of sitting in this lousy dive.”

“We need the alibi, punkin’. We need to be in public doing something perfectly ordinary when it happens. Besides, I hear the grilled cheese is good here.”

“I hope the Mexican didn’t make a mess, that there’s not a lot of blood. I hope Earl the chauffeur is OK.”

“Well, darling, what with Purity
isn’t
messy?” Dixie sipped her coffee, looking at the ceiling, her thoughts drifting briefly to the previous evening. “That said, our Mexican doesn’t seem the messy type.”

“You’re sure he went?”

“The green car is gone from where I parked it. The hotel clerk said he checked out.”

“That car can’t be traced?”

“Officially, that car has been demolished, so the VIN number won’t register with any database. I got it from the Grant Foundation donation lot. Nobody else was there.”

“What about being seen with the Mexican?”

“I only met him in parks, in public places, and I’ve only been talking to him on this disposable cell phone. You only met him once here, the first time. Let me see the fake ring again?”

Grant checked his surroundings before pulling the ring from his vest pocket. Dixie took the ring and his hand and compared the rings. “It’s damn good. Those Jewish people are amazing.”

In a close-up, we see the original ring and the copy. The genuine item is a darker gold color.

“They’re good business people.” Grant puffed his chest and winked. “So when this is over, what do you say we go to Cabo and take the motor yacht out for a few weeks? We’d be grieving.”

“Boo-bear, the press needs to
see
us grieve.”

“Oh, they will. I was thinking that we should set up a separate charity: Purity Cares. A fund to rehabilitate injured dogs and cats.”

“Brilliant!
Yes,
fixing broken puppies! I can see the promo now—I’ll call that ad man Scott Conti and start him pulling the stock footage right away. We’ll want that by the funeral. I’ll put my assistant on this, figure out whose relatives to hire. Have you seen that video on the Web, the one where the dog has no front legs and has to walk on his hind legs, like a human?”

“I can’t say as how—”

“We’ll find his agent. He’d be the perfect spokesdog. Or maybe we can find a cat on wheels? What a tearjerker, simply perfect, Robbie! There’s a reason you’re a captain of industry.”

“Sometimes the substance of a matter is all in appearances.” He grasped her hand. “I like it when you call me Robbie. You think it’s done, that I’m free of my curse, that we can move on?”

Dixie’s cell phone rang (the tune it played was “Dixie”), and she scrambled through her purse to find it. “Hello?”

It was me on the line, so let’s make a split screen. Put me near to the camera, aglow in the afternoon sun and standing on the upper deck of Grant’s beach mansion. In my hand is a glass of red wine that I am clearly enjoying. At some distance and out of earshot is Purity in a bikini on a lounger behind me, soaking up the sun. She, too, is on the phone. Behind all that is the beach and ocean.

“Dixie?”

“No names! How’d it go?”

“Fine.”

Dixie gave Grant the thumbs-up across the table and winked. Robert bit his lip and thumbed her back.

“Where is she now?”

“Right over there, on the lounger.”

“On the lounger? Where are you?”

“At the East Hampton mansion.”

Dixie switched ears. “I don’t understand. You intercepted her on the road?”

“Of course.”

“Then why are you at the mansion?”

“I was invited. Just the same, the little green car’s water pump appears to have expired, and now I must stay here until tomorrow.”

“Explain what happened when you intercepted the limo. I’m a little confused.”

“
Querida,
I think we are both a little confused. To be honest, I am sometimes mystified by how the rich operate. I thought I was to have the ring today. Instead I have Purity. I know you said she would be delivered to me, but that confuses me as well. While she is quite pretty, she is a child—what am I to do with a child? I have my God to think of, I must restore the defiled relic of my ancestor and the integrity of Nuestra Señora de Cortez’s inner sanctum.”

“We have the ring and will give it to you when the job is complete, that’s the deal.”

Robert leaned across the table. “Did he do it or not?”

“I’m not sure,” she whispered, brow knit.

“Job? Perhaps it is me. At heart, I am a simple Brooklyn boy upon whom fortune has seen fit to shine the warming rays of a life as La Paz gentry.”

Dixie and Grant unconsciously slid their coffee cups to the edge of the table to a Mexican who sidled up to their table, presumably the busboy.

“Yes,
the job
,
the wrong to be set right
.
What we talked about
?” Dixie shot an annoyed glance at the busboy.

“We spoke of the ring,” I said, sipping my wine.

“You’ll get the ring when the job is done.”

“The ring
is
the job. That is why Father Gomez sent me. Perhaps I have been in La Paz too long, but this seems perfectly simple.”

Dixie held a hand over the phone and focused a scowl on the busboy. “Are you done?”

Robert looked exasperated and said to the bus boy, “What is it you want?”

The busboy said, “I come to this place.”

“And?”
Dixie spat.

“I come a long distance.”

“Dix, I think he’s retarded, they sometimes hire them at places like this. Look, Pedro, we need privacy, please go back to the kitchen.”

“My name is Paco, and I have come from Mexico, to this very table in this restaurant. You have job for me. Are you not the ones who contacted me to kill?”

Dixie and Grant couldn’t have looked more flash frozen if they’d been shrimps, shrimps with their mouths hanging open and their pupils extremely small. I suppose shrimps don’t have mouths that hang open, or eyes with pupils, but you see what I’m saying, yes? They were stunned.

Seemingly without moving, Dixie snapped her cell phone shut.

A waitress appeared. “Is this man bothering you, sir? Sir? Ma’am?”

Grant finally mumbled, “Not at this time, no.”

*   *   *

The Red Flame Diner side of our screen goes away, and now you see only me with my wine at the beach mansion looking at my phone.

“Hello? Hello?” I snapped my phone shut as well. “Bah, these cell phones and their
signals
. It is just as well. I think they need to realize it is time to stop playing games.”

Purity lifted her head. “What was that?”

“Nothing. Just a bad connection.”

Let’s cut to comely Purity on the phone with Skip Baker, split screen, and the reporter is reclined at his cramped desk in a hectic newsroom. Purity is near the camera, and now I am standing out of earshot at the far railing of the deck looking out to sea.

“Skip, tell me you sent Morty out here, that you had that creep in the stocking attack the limo. Otherwise, it is just too freaky, something bizarre is going on.”

“Babe, I can only say it so many times. This is not my doing. I didn’t rig this. You’re right, something is going on, and I can’t wait to find out what it is because there is front page written all over it. Just the fact that the guardian angel saved you yet again is pure gold. Did you call the cops?”

“The cops? LMFAO, you must be kidding. And stand around waiting for them to fill in their little reports?”

“Did Morty say why he was standing on Hill Road when you just happened to drive by?”

“He says God sent him, and that he was there on a holy mission that he can’t discuss.”

Skip snorted. “That’s the same thing he told me—more or less—at 100 Centre Street. You don’t suppose he actually is your guardian angel, do you?”

“True, the white suit is what angels are wearing this year. Check this out: It seems he only eats grilled cheese sandwiches and is some sort of La Paz lothario. What kind of angel is that?”

“Previous life?”

“Morty speaks his mind, I’ll give him that. He’s as honest a person as I think I’ve ever met. At least he didn’t lie about why he was on Hill Road; he just won’t or can’t tell me why. IMHO, he must have been there waiting for me, waiting for the limo to come along. He was waving his arms as we drove past, and it took me a second to realize who he was.”

“How would he have known you would be driving that way?”

“Good question.”

“Morty must have arranged for the attack.”

“Or someone else knew he was going to be there.”

“Like who?”

“If the creep tried to kill me with a machine gun I’d say it was Robbie who set it up, or that CU-next-Tuesday Dixie, but OMG the creep looked like he was in a Halloween costume, and he didn’t even seem to have a weapon, just black gloves. I dunno, he was like a pro wrestler.”

“That is just too good.” Skip barked a laugh. “
If only
your dad would put a hit out on you. We’d run out of ink selling papers, and the Web site would jam.”

Purity scowled. “Gee, thanks, Skip, and FYI Robbie is
not
my father.”

“Sorry, babe, but can you imagine?”

“If anybody should be putting a hit out on anybody…” Purity lowered her sunglasses, her gaze fixing on me.

“Yeah? Hello?”

“It should be me on Robert.”

Skip slapped his knee. “Now you’re thinking! Perfect. You could put a hit out on each other. Let’s get this rolling. Wait first, I’m sending a photographer out to Hill Road. Can you two go out and reenact the whole attack thing for him? I can also provide an actor to play the creep wrestler guy if you want.”

Purity wasn’t listening to him; she was transfixed by me.

“Spiffy.” Her thumb disconnected Skip.

CHAPTER

THIRTY

CUT TO THE GRANT INDUSTRIES
tower on Sixth Avenue, and Robert’s pixie-like assistant on the phone at her desk. Before her is a yellow legal pad on which she taps a pencil. Cue the subtitles—Kathy is speaking Spanish into the phone.

“Good morning, is this Nuestra Señora de Cortez?… I would like to speak with Father Gomez … I’m calling from Grant Industries in New York … It is a private matter about Morty Martinez … Yes, I’ll hold…”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

WE START WITH A CLOSE-UP
of Helena’s crooked, angry finger in Tony’s face.

“Fool!”

When we pull back, we see Helena, Tony, and Abbie arrayed around a park bench in a secluded corner of Washington Square Park, the giant iconic archway in the background lit by the setting sun.

Tony had his arms folded across his chest. “I thought it was the right move.”

“Idiot!” Helena stamped her foot. “I told you to wait! Why did you not wait?”

“I thought it was the right move. I thought it was Grant in the limo. It was his limo, so…”