Suspicion of Deceit (43 page)

In her intense concentration, with every sense focused on the zipper rasping smoothly around a corner of the suitcase, Gail did not register the other sound until a second after it had occurred: the creak of wood in the doorway.

By then it was too late.

Thomas Nolan had come home.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

What are you doing here?"

Nolan spoke in nearly a whisper, not believing what he saw—Gail Connor kneeling at the foot of his bed unzipping a small brown suitcase.

In those few seconds she managed to find in his expression more astonishment than anger. "Oh, Tom. I'm really sorry. I wanted to—to see your house. That's all." Legs shaking, she stood up. She found her breath again. "I mean—I'm such a fan. I wanted something of yours. A memento."

Looking at her sideways as if studying an apparition whose reality was still not certain, he moved slowly into the room. A blue denim shirt was tucked neatly into black jeans. His hair was free, curling past wide shoulders, and the stage makeup was gone. Once more the eyebrows were only vague arches on the bony ridge over deep-set eyes. His lips had vanished entirely, sucked inward as he continued to watch her.

"I thought ... a shirt . . . some pages from a piano score. You were at the party."

"So you decided to burglarize my house."

"Please don't have me arrested. I'll leave. You'll never see me again." With a foot she shoved the suitcase under the bed.

"Why were you opening that?"

"I wasn't. I didn't actually open it."

He stooped to check the zipper.

"I'll pay for the glass I broke. And the bother." She moved toward the door. "Whatever you want."

His eyes fixed on her. "Did you come looking for this?"

"Tom, I don't know what it is, and I don't care."

He came across the room. "What else did you look at? What did you touch?"

"Nothing." She was walking backward in the hall. "I'm really sorry."

She whirled around and ran. Fingers slid off her shoulder as if a cat had swiped at her. The heels of her pumps pounded out of the hall, across the living room, everything a blur, then toward the open French door.

Across the patio. She lost a shoe taking the turn around the cottage. A scream for help died in her throat when trees and sky whirled and the grass rushed toward her. She put out her arms and rolled.

Tom Nolan's hand became a fist. In the next instant her head exploded. The light wavered and went out.

Gail came slowly out of the darkness, and for a while she drifted. Then the pain dragged her into full consciousness. It burned down the side of her head into her neck. She shifted her jaw. Nothing broken. Her eyes opened. She saw a grand piano. A worn oriental rug prickled her cheek.

Then she felt the constriction around her wrists and ankles. She was bound with rope and lying on the floor in Thomas Nolan's cottage. The window behind the piano showed a colorless sky. The light was fading. The curtains across the French doors were drawn shut.

Music soared from the stereo on the bookcase opposite the sofa. An opera. Wagner. Then a deep voice from somewhere behind her joined in.
Tristan und Isolde.
Gail concentrated to orient herself. Her back was to the kitchen. She heard a cabinet drawer shut.

She shifted. Her hands were tied behind her, numb and tingling. The blood came back into the arm she lay on, and she grimaced. With effort she twisted around. Saw the dining area between herself and the kitchen. Everything at a crazy angle, the lamp hanging sideways, the table coming from the other direction to meet it. The French doors were closed. Someone in a blue shirt stood in the kitchen doorway on long black legs.

She turned her head and the world righted itself. Tom Nolan said, "How could you screw things up like this?" She didn't know if he was talking to her or to himself.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

He squatted down beside her and flipped his hair over his shoulder. "Where are you supposed to be right now?"

"My mother's house. She's expecting me. My daughter—Karen—''

"Do they know where you are?"

The
yes
caught in her mouth. If she said it, then what? Would he go and find them? She shook her head. "I didn't tell anyone."

"Where is Anthony Quintana?" Nolan poked her shoulder when Gail felt dizzy and closed her eyes. "Where is he?"

"Having dinner with a client."

"Does he have a portable telephone? How do you get in touch with him?"

Hesitantly she asked, "Why do you want to know?"

Nolan exhaled, then said patiently, "I want him to come and take you out of here. If he gives me any trouble, I'll call the police and press charges against you."

"Call his voice mail. He has a beeper." Gail gave Nolan the number. When he stood up, she started trembling with relief. Nolan didn't know. He didn't know what she had found in the drawer. He didn't know why she had come.

Her eyes followed him across the room to the stereo. The Wagner went off, and the room was silent. "Tom, untie me. My arms hurt. I won't run away."

He held up a hand—wait—and picked up the cordless telephone by the sofa. After a few seconds, he said, "Hi. Mr. Quintana, this is Tom Nolan. I've run into a problem. You're probably busy, but this is extremely urgent. Could you call me back as soon as you get this message?" He left his own number and hit the button for disconnect.

With a bubble of fear rising in her chest, Gail said, "Why didn't you mention me?"

Nolan hung up the phone. "When he gets here, you can go."

"Please don't hurt him."

"Why would I hurt him? And I'm not going to untie you. Just lie there and be quiet." He sat in the armchair and tapped tented fingers on his forehead in a steady rhythm. "I have to think."

When the telephone rang, Nolan slowly lowered his hands. It rang again. He picked up the handset and carried it down the hall into his bedroom. The door closed.

Gail rolled against the sofa and used it to get herself on her knees. Pressing her lips together not to let out a sound, she walked herself across the rug. The skin on her knees burned through torn hose. She would somehow get to her feet, maneuver through the curtains, and turn the doorknob on the French doors. She swept the curtain aside with a shoulder and saw that the hurricane shutters had been rolled across the doors. She collapsed to a sitting position, then struggled up and went toward the kitchen.

A knife. She could visualize it. Heavy, sharp, with a wooden handle. Somehow get to her feet. Open a drawer. Sit down. Wedge the knife between her heels, cut the rope on her wrists. There had to be a way. There was time. Anthony was with a client. He wouldn't want to come. Nolan would have to convince him.

The ice chest was on the kitchen floor. Gail dropped her shoulder on it, intending to lever herself to a standing position. Her knee dragged through a puddle of water. Gasping for breath, she got up halfway and saw a man lying next to the cabinets. The water had run from his clothing.

As if in slow motion her mind pulled in the details: rumpled black clothing, gray mustache, close-cropped graying hair. Everything gray. The face. The hands. He lay on his side. Arms crossed on his chest and tied in place. The rope around his knees was looped around his neck, pulling him into a tight package.

Gail noticed that the left hand had only a thumb and two fingers. It was Felix. She let out a scream of horror and rage. Now she knew how his fingerprints had been placed on the evidence. The night, the bomb went off, Felix was already dead. She knew where Nolan had kept him.

A few seconds later Tom Nolan was dragging her by an elbow to the middle of the living room. He dropped her, then pushed a hand through his hair to get it off his face. "I told you to stay where you were."

Gail was shaking with terror. "Anthony—"

"He's on his way. I told him the police were about to arrest me for beating up a member of the crew. I had just hung up when you screamed." Nolan pulled back his cuff to see his watch. "He said he'd be here in half an hour."

Numbly Gail said, "Seth and Rebecca and Felix. Now you want Anthony. Please don't. Please."

Nolan stared down at her.

"I know everything, Tom. Your piano teacher. Miss Wells. Oh, my God. It was there all the time. Los Pozos. Emily Davis went to Los Pozos in 1978. You left school in the spring semester of 1979.1 never connected the two. Is that why you tried to kill yourself? I remember they found you in the bandmaster's cottage."

Gail twisted to a sitting position and leaned on the sofa. "The State Department sent a report to Emily's aunt. Did she show it to you?"

"Yes. It had all their names."

"Anthony didn't kill Emily Davis! Neither did Seth or Rebecca. Tom, please. It was Felix Castillo. Felix confessed to me."

"What do you mean? Felix wasn't there. His name wasn't in the report."

"Of course not. He was a Cuban spy."

Nolan bent down to look into her face, and his hair swung forward. He slowly enunciated every word. "Felix Castillo was in Cuba until 1980. Rebecca Dixon told me that. Oh, very good, Gail. Blame Emily's murder on a man who wasn't there."

"But he was there. He shot her because she spied for the CIA."

"Emily?
That's ridiculous."

Gail shouted at him, "If Felix wasn't there, then why did you kill him?"

"He was asking me questions. Where had I been the night Seth died? What friends had I been with? Where did we go? I came home late after the recital at the Dixons' apartment. I beeped Felix and said someone had just threatened to come over and kill me. Felix arrived and I shot him as he got out of his van."

"You vicious, heartless son of a bitch," Gail said between clenched teeth. "Why did you have to kill his girlfriend, too?"

"I'm sorry about her, but she started screaming. I had to go to Felix's house, and I didn't expect her to be there."

The tears were rising again, and Gail forced herself to hold them back. "How did you know Seth was going to WRCL?"

"I was following him. I had planned to do it that night at his house, but Rebecca came over, and then you. When the two of you had left, I followed him to the radio station. A stroke of luck."

Laughing, Gail lowered her head to the sofa cushion. "I thought—at one point—that you were working for Lloyd Dixon. And then I thought you did it for the CIA, and the CIA had framed Felix Castillo."

Nolan narrowed his eyes, studying her in that sideways fashion. "The CIA again. You're raving." He walked to the bookcase.

"Tom, please don't hurt Anthony. He didn't do anything to her, I swear it."

From behind a row of books he pulled out a red metal can and a small cardboard box. "You've been seduced by a master. I tried to warn you several times, but it went right over your head. Too bad you're not more observant."

"Tom, he didn't do it! None of them did!"

With slow deliberation he set the box and metal gasoline can on the table. The hanging lamp made his hair into a penumbra of light. "They destroyed the most beautiful creature—the sweetest, most gentle—They took her to that backward, violent, filthy place, murdered her, and left her there."

"But
why?"

"Why? Because she discovered the real purpose of their trip—to establish a connection for illegal drugs— and they thought she would tell the authorities."

Gail wavered on the edge of hysteria. Version number five. She thought she might lose her sanity. "Where- did you hear that?"

With slow paces he walked across the room, his soft-soled boots making no sound. "Emily told me she was involved with a Cuban named Tony. She said he wanted her to go with him to Nicaragua. I begged her not to. She said, 'Oh, it's only for the summer. I promise I'll be back. I'm going to be your accompanist. You'll be a great opera singer someday.' She kissed me. She said ... I was the one she would always love. Then she was gone."

Nolan paused to get his voice under control. "Three months later this same Tony informed Emily's aunt that she had fallen in love with one of the men in the town. That was impossible. Emily had such talent, such beauty and promise. When I read the report from the State Department—Emily was presumed dead—I fell into despair. I tried to kill myself. Later, I vowed to find out what had happened to her. There was civil unrest in Nicaragua until 1991. In 1992 I spent a week in Los Pozos. People remembered the four Americans, one of whom called himself a Cuban. They remembered Emily. They called her
la rubia
—the blonde. Her friends made connections with a supplier.
La rubia
found out and tried to leave. They killed her."

He now stood so close that Gail was forced to look up the length of black jeans and blue denim torso. His nose projected like the beak of a bird of prey. "I have planned this for a long time. I learned all about them. Their history, their habits. I even know about you. No, I don't know which one of them killed her, but they're all guilty—Anthony Quintana the most culpable of all." Nolan laughed. "And now he defends criminals. Drug dealers and murderers. He hasn't changed."

Gail leaned against Tom Nolan's legs and wept. "Please, you don't know him at all. He isn't what you think. We're engaged to be married. I love him!"

Tom pushed her away, and she toppled over. "Where's your purse? I need your keys to move your car."

"Please don't do this. Please!"

He grabbed her shoulders and shook her, and pain rocketed through her head. "The keys."

"In my pocket," she gasped.

He patted her skirt pockets and found the keys. Then went to get more rope. He bound her knees together, then looped a line through her wrists to her ankles.

"You were fifteen years old! She was being nice to you. Tom, think!"

From his pocket Nolan pulled a handkerchief and tried to cram it into Gail's mouth while she writhed on the floor. She bit him. He slapped her. She tasted blood. Softly he said, "Gail. Don't make this difficult. You have to be quiet." He tied another handkerchief around her head to hold the first one. She thought she might vomit. She pushed with her tongue, then choked and coughed on saliva. Nolan rechecked all the knots.