The Lonely Silver Rain (7 page)

I was early and I stood outside until Millis arrived. She'd taken the dark blue Continental out of storage and the man driving it seemed to be wearing the uniform of the security troops at Dias del Sol. One of Decker's pale young men went out and escorted her in, holding her in gingerly fashion by the elbow. She wore a tailored black suit, a small hat with a short black veil, no lipstick.

The Rev. Dr. Barnell Innerlake conducted the service. He seemed hesitant, as though working from a revised script. He recounted Billy's humble beginnings and his good works after God blessed his energies with some cash money.

So I was standing near the door of the big Continental when the guard held it open for the widow. She started to duck into the car and then stopped and faced me. I saw the green tilted glint through the veil.

"You heard?" she asked in a rusty voice.

She was too tough to play games with. "Yes, I heard."

"Come out to the penthouse, please."

"Right away?"

She looked at a diamond watch. "Noon?"

"Fine."

Away she went, small against the back-seat upholstery.

Millis opened the door as soon as I pressed the bell. She had changed to baggy white cotton slacks and an orange cotton shirt with long full sleeves. She had tied her hair back with a piece of orange yarn. She was barefoot.

She murmured a greeting, bolted the door and led the way back through the long living room with the wide glass expanse overlooking the sea, a room done in quiet blues and grays. I followed her down a short broad corridor into a small room which was evidently her dressing room.

There was a dressing table with a tapestried bench and a mirror encircled by frosted bulbs. There was a French desk in dark wood with a maroon leather desk set. There was a love seat and two chairs, two walls of sliding doors which evidently concealed her wardrobe and an arched entrance into a much larger room with a queensize pedestal bed.

She gestured vaguely toward the love seat. I lowered myself into it carefully. It looked fragile. There were no windows. The room was shadowed. The only light was that which shone through the arched entrance from the bedroom.

She turned the desk chair around and sat, hunching her shoulders and squeezing her eyes shut in a strange grimace.

"This isn't easy for me," she said.

"I'm sorry about Billy."

"He was fond of you. And I resented that, because I didn't want anybody to have any part of him, any part of his attention."

"I didn't know you cared. That much."

Her wistful smile was upside down. "Neither did I. I didn't at first. I thought I was going to marry Billy because I was looking for a safe haven. I thought I was going to marry him because it would mean an end to scuffling. But in the end I married him because I loved him. He made me feel loved. Nobody else ever did that. Wanted and loved."

"He was very proud of you."

She frowned. "So I had to keep living up to what he thought I was. Can that make you a better person, McGee?"

"Could happen. If you get into the habit."

"I guess. Maybe. Anyway I've been awake since Frank Payne phoned me at five and told me somebody had killed Billy. I've been awake and thinking. There's a pattern to this. It's a very ugly pattern. Plus too many guesses."

"I'm not following you."

"I don't expect you to. Not without knowing more. So I have to tell you more. I don't like telling this to anybody. Did you ever hear of Enelio Fortez?"

It took a deep dip into memory. "Is he the one… about eight years ago… they found pieces of him all over Greater Miami?"

"Pieces of Nelly as reminders to the others to be careful. They planted the pieces near drug distribution centers. I'd been his live-in chum for three years when they killed him. Nelly got too greedy. It happens to people. He thought he could get away with it, but he couldn't. He just wasn't bright enough. I moved in with him just before I turned twenty. A big fun life. Lots of money, clothes, champagne, flights to Vegas and the islands. A very nice apartment. I heard later that some of them wanted to waste me too, just in case I'd been part of it. But a man named Arturo Jornalero said he would vouch for me. And I moved in with Art. Not full-time, like Nelly. Art has a wife and kids. But he's more important than Nelly could ever have became. He's right near the top, and it is a seventy-billion-dollar-a-year business. So at twenty-two I'd moved a couple of steps up the ladder. And when I was twenty-five I woke up. I saw some lines here by any eyes and some lines across my throat, and I knew that when I stopped being some kind of rarity that Art could show off to his buddies, I would be out on my keister with maybe a little gift of money to ease the transition. After I walked out and after Arturo located me, he sent some of his guys to talk me back home, but I wasn't having any. After a couple of phone calls he gave up. I had answered an ad in the local paper, and I wanted somebody who couldn't toss me out whenever he felt like it, so I took dead aim at my new boss, Billy Ingraham. I wanted a longer future than I was going to get in Miami. I have to tell you all this so you'll understand the rest of it."

"I wondered about you, Millis. You seemed a little out of focus."

"You've got a good eye. You made me nervous. Anyway, right after the identity of the girl from Peru broke in the news, Arturo got in touch with me. He said it was very important, and it had nothing to do with our previous friendship. That's what he called it. Friendship. So I sneaked off to a motel room and met him there.

"He told me that he was facing a very heavy situation. He said that the girl, Gigi, who got her throat cut, was the niece of the top man in the drug business in Peru, in Lima. This man, Isidro Reyes, is the brother of Gigi's father, the diplomat. It is a big powerful family, and apparently this Gigliermina was the darling, the apple of everybody's eye, and engaged to a young lawyer from another strong family down there. Everybody down there was enraged, and word had come through that they wanted everybody involved in that killing to be punished. Arturo said he had been keeping track of me, for old times' sake, and he said it was strange that our lives should cross again in this manner, but he had to find out if somehow Billy had gotten those kids killed in the process of getting his stolen boat back,

"We talked a long time. I told him about you and how you had found the Sundowner using aerial photography, and how you had phoned the Coast Guard and Billy the day you located the boat with the bodies aboard. He wanted to know if I was sure you hadn't found it several days earlier and then maybe got impatient when nobody else came across it and reported it. I said I was positive it had not happened that way. And I said Billy would never have told you to get the boat back no matter who you had to kill. And I said that the counterfeit money didn't make any sense in any scenario where you killed them. He thanked me for my time and said I'd been a big help. We shook hands and then we realized how funny that was and we laughed and I kissed him, and that was that. Now Billy is dead. Murdered. And I can't think of anyone who'd want him dead except some crazies in Peru who got the whole thing wrong."

So I told her all about my gift book, and the blood of children sprinkled to a height of fifteen feet on the back wall of the storage room of a dress shop named the Little Boutique. She looked at me in total consternation. "I know Artura believed me. We had good communication. He'd gotten over being hurt and angry. I know he believed me. He said it was going to make it more difficult. Usually nobody would be interested in some bloody little mess down in the Keys. Somebody delivered too little or asked too much, or somebody else stepped into the picture at the wrong time. Nobody would care. But this time the wrong person died and so they would have to unravel it. It begins to sound like what I was thinking early this morning, McGee. They can't find out what happened, so they're killing people who could have done it, just to have something to show."

"There's another way to guess it."

"How?"

"They found out who really did it and they would rather not touch them."

She agreed, saying that could be possible. I then asked her if it would be a good idea to see if I could find Arturo Jornalero, and she turned and reached into a desk drawer and handed me his business card. Jornalero Management Associates. She said it was in a fairly new office building, the top two floors, two blocks south of the Miami Herald building on Biscayne, and half a block west, on the right-hand side of the street. No name on the building, just the huge gold numerals 202 over the entrance.

She wrote a note I could send in to him which might make it possible for me to see him. She sealed the envelope, handed it to me and I put it away.

She hunched her shoulders and said, "I feel as if I were falling and failing into some dark cold place, over and over, down through the dark."

She put her hand out to me, and when I took it, she led me into her bedroom. A very feminine room. Through a half-open door I could see into another bedroom, and an the far wall I saw the vital leaping curve of a stuffed game fish on a plaque. She turned by the bed and hugged me, her forehead against my chest. "Could you just hold me?" she asked. "Just hold me and if you don't mind maybe I'll cry a little."

So we stretched out on her queen-size bed, and I held her close and she cried. There wasn't much to her-just a slenderness, a vulnerability. The vulnerability was what had been missing before.

When the crying had ended, she said, "This is the first I've been able to cry for him. I wondered if I would, when I would. I guess I've never been able to feel very strongly about anyone, except Billy."

Her voice broke on his name, and the tears were not ended. When they finished for the second time, I thought she had gone to sleep. A narrow segment of jalousied window was open. I could hear the Atlantic swells curling and thudding on the beach far below. I could hear faint music from somewhere. Her head rested on my left arm. Her hair was fragrant. My right hand lay against the small of her back. A round hard knee pressed against my left thigh.

I wondered how I had gotten into this. I had not been with a woman since a few weeks before I had flown out to bring Hubie's sloop home. I could feel her warm and steady breathing. I thought about the time I had broken three ribs, and how it felt to breathe. I thought about icicles, hailstorms, broken glass. But nothing I thought of stopped my right hand from stretching the fingers wide and exerting a small pressure against her back. The knee pressure fell away and she came closer. I hoped she was still asleep and had not noticed a thing. But her breathing changed, and she pushed her hips so close she could not fail to notice what all thought of ice and pain had failed to quell.

She sat up abruptly and unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She kept her eyes shut as though unwilling to watch what she was doing. She made a mouth, as the French say, a mouth of resignation and self-contempt. She knelt, put her thumbs inside the waist elastic of the baggy white slacks and peeled them down, rolled back and kicked them off. She had worn nothing under either the blouse or the slacks. Her body was elegant, sleek as fire-warm silk and ivory, with a deceptive flavor of immaturity about it, the nipples small and pink, the pubic hair a soft sooty smudge.

I would say that there was not a hell of a lot of tenderness going on. We were daytime thieves, rifling a strange bedroom, looking for the treasure as quickly and quietly as possible, hearts racing, hands trembling, small cries muffled. Found it all too quickly.

She came out of the bathroom in a long ivorycolored robe. I was dressed, and standing by the window looking down at the sea. I turned and we looked at each other, partners in a small crime. "That's not me," she said.

"Or me either. Wrong time, wrong place." I put my hands on her shoulders and bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. They were cool and slack. "Who can tell what anybody is like? Living and dying, loving and dying. We share the planet with some tiny critters which make love one time and then die. Nine months after earthquakes and floods and the dropping of bombs, lots of babies are born."

"It was my fault," she said. "It wasn't intentional."

"Who knows from intentional? I gave it a chance to happen to prove that it couldn't. But it did. And I'm ashamed."

"Don't be. Don't be."

As I drove away from the glossy abode of the Widow Ingraham, I appealed to Billy Ingraham to please understand. And I told him we were both ashamed.

She had good reason to want to be held. And maybe one of the obscure reasons for what had happened was that she had confessed a somewhat grubby past to a stranger. The aftershock of confession is lessened if the stranger becomes a lover. Such confessions are more easily rationalized.

I knew I would not seek Meyer's judgment on the whole scene, and I realized that I want him to have a better opinion of McGee than I seem to have lately. The world was a bewilderment and I was having image problems. And so was Millis.

A phone buzzed. She answered it and told me how to find Mr. Jornalero's office. Through that door, second door on your left.

There was no desk in his office. Some leather furniture, bookshelves, a small conference table, windows with a view of a nearby windowless building and a small slice of the bay and the candy towers of the Beach.

He met me at the door and shook hands and ushered me over to a couple of leather chairs facing each other across a low coffee table. He was a big man, probably in his early fifties. Thick dark hair tinged with gray. Pale face, heavy features, a broad big-boned body with a look of sedentary softness in spite of some expensive custom tailoring. The patterned yellow silk tie had the Countess Mara logo. Yellow gold ring on his little finger with an emerald almost too big to be true. The flavor was of money and power and importance. And an unexpected friendliness.

"Millis and I were good friends for a long time," he said. "We've been out of touch lately. If there's any way I can help you…"

"She told me about your coming to see her back in October. She told you I located Billy Ingraham's boat. She said you were upset because the girl from Peru was important."

"Forgive me, Mr. MeGee, if I seem a little disorganized. This is the third day of the new year. I've been out of the office for several days. I've been listening to problems since seven this morning and it is difficult to shift gears. I didn't realize why your name sounded familiar."

"You know about Millis' husband."

"Yes, of course. Stories like that get a lot of coverage. How is she handling it?"

"Well enough."

"The news stories imply she is under suspicion. That's nonsense, of course. From talking to her I know how fond she was of Mr. Ingraham."

"Billy's murder seems to have something to do with the girl from Peru."

He stared at me. "I don't see the connection."

"Did she. convince you that Billy and I had nothing to do with what happened aboard the Sundowner?"

"Yes. Of course. As I told her, it seemed a strange and horrible way for our lives to overlap again. Yes, she convinced me."

"When I went aboard the flies were working. I had to sniff at a gasoline rag to be able to stay below long enough to see what happened."

"I told you, Mr. McGee, she convinced me."

"On Saturday, three days before Christmas, a bomb went off behind a Lauderdale shopping center and killed two kids. Did you read about it?"

"Yes, I remember reading about it."

"The bomb that went off was, I think, a gift package I had gotten through the mail and hadn't opened. I went shopping there and didn't lock the car, and it is a good guess those kids swiped it and took it around behind the center to open it. The experts say it was a sophisticated bomb."

Arturo Jornalero frowned down at his right thumbnail. Then he took a delicate nibble at the edge of the nail, got up quickly and wandered over to the window, stood looking out, his hands locked behind him.

Without turning, he said, "Let us imagine that the young son of a dear friend or a valued business associate went down to Peru on vacation, and let us say he went up to Cuzco and was slain by thieves on a dark street at night. The bereaved father might come to me and I might make contact with business associates in Peru, and they might arrange to have the guilty punished without waiting for any slow process of law. It would be a matter of friendship and honor."

"Wouldn't they feel some kind of obligation to get the guilty parties?"

He came slowly back to the chair, settled into it and sighed audibly. "That does bother me, Mr. McGee. When the girl was identified, there was… considerable communication between Miami and Lima. The immediate suspicion was that whoever had tipped off the Coast Guard as to where to find the vessel could have been the one who killed the three of them. People have killed for a lot less money than you got for finding that boat. I told my associates that I knew Mr. Ingraham's wife and that I would look into it. I had a private meeting with her. After that I had someone look into your lifestyle and reputation, and also the character and reputation of your pilot friend out at Southdale Airport. I then reported to my associates that it was highly unlikely that you had anything to do with the trouble, or that Mr. Ingraham was involved in any way, except that it had happened aboard his boat, which had been stolen up at Citrina last July. I told them I thought the murders had been the result of a deal going bad."

"I was very nearly blown to bits and Billy was killed in Cannes with a wire shoved into his head. There was somebody you didn't convince."

"I haven't been keeping track. I am going to look into it."

There was enough of an edge behind his quiet and pleasant voice to make me guess he was going to make some people unhappy.

"What kind of business are you in, Mr. Jornalero?"

"We're an international management and consulting corporation. When, during consultation, we find an enterprise that pleases us, we try to buy into it. So, over the years, we've come up with a strange mix. We own pieces of motion picture distribution and production companies in South America and the Orient. We own portions of factoring companies and financial houses in the Bahamas, Cartagena, Bolivia, South Africa. We have a contracting branch and an architectural service here, and an employment agency and a large interest in a pipeline, and some small coastal freighters. When management is good, we believe in retaining it rather than get into the details of operation ourselves."

"And you're involved in a company in Lima?"

"Several, as a matter of fact. And some of those companies own pieces of companies in other countries, in partnership with us. It gets complex."

"I suppose you'd be in a pretty good position to invest at all times, because you have to handle such a big cash flow coming in from the drug business."

He stared at me, jaw sagging, and then he laughed and thumped himself on the thigh with a big white fist. "Millis has a very active and dramatic imagination. I must confess that while we were… together, I did tell her some melodramatic stories about my life. I am an ordinary businessman, and when a woman demands glamor and mystery, one tries to satisfy her. I can assure you, Mr. McGee, I have never seen a kilo of cocaine much less arranged for its purchase and sale. I have seen some foolish people at social gatherings snuffing it up their nostrils, an ugly and demeaning performance. You are the victim of a cliche, that any successful Latin businessman has to be involved somehow in drugs. We have a good cash flow because we arrange it that way. We get a good return from our investments and it is corporate policy to be ready at any time for the unexpected chance. Many good deals have fallen through because neither money nor credit was quickly available. Right now, this week, through our banking connection in Hong Kong we are buying some bonded warehouse facilities in Panama."

"Okay, then. If you are so completely aboveboard, what's all this about bypassing the police to do somebody a favor?"

"Do you know the word pundonor? It means a point of honor. The girl was sexually abused before they cut her throat. This is very distressing to her family. They are rich and powerful and very, very angry. And they know that convicted murderers can spend years and years in airconditioned cells eating good food and watching television waiting for the execution that never happens. Personal vengeance is primitive. But in such a case it is satisfying."

"What about the counterfeit money?"

"As I told you and told them, I think it was a deal that fell through."

"Can you tell them again? Can you get to anybody who might know somebody who mailed me a bomb and tell them to get the word down the line to lay off? It makes me very nervous to be stalked by professionals."

"I think something can be done about it."

"I appreciate that, and I appreciate your giving me so much time."

"Tell Millis that if there is anything at all I can do, she need only ask."

After I parked my blue pickup and walked back to the Flush, I opened the little panel to see if I'd had visitors while I was away. I was so used to finding nothing wrong that I stood staring stupidly at the unlikely object which had been placed inside the recessed area where the lighted bulbs were. It was a stick figure of a cat made of red pipe cleaners, with whiskers made of nylon fishline. The bulbs were all lighted. I'd had no visitors who broke in, at least. If it was a message, the meaning eluded me.

And when I showed it to Meyer ten minutes later, it did not mean anything to him either, nor had I expected it to.

It was a clear day, chilly in the shade, hot in the bright sunlight, even at quarter to four. Meyer lay supine on a sun cot on my sun deck, his heavy chest pelt glistening with sweat from the exercises I'd talked him into. Meyer equates exercise with obligatory games and all the other enforced boredoms of childhood. But he is never in as bad shape as I expect him to be. I have accused him of secret calisthenics and he looks at me as if I had accused him of watching General Hospital or Dallas. He says his semifitness, a rubbery condition at best, is an inherited characteristic.

I sat in the lotus position on a beach towel on the deck, my back to the late sun as I replaced a broken eyelet on a boat rod, winding the waxed linen around and around and around.

"Jornalero could have been half right," he said from under the straw hat that shaded his face.

"Half right about what?"

"He wouldn't have to have any direct connection with the trade. He's perfectly set up to be a laundryman. If he could absorb two hundred million a year, spread it around the world and bring it back in as wages and bonuses and dividends and fees, he might earn three percent on the transactions, which would be six million."

"Somebody would have to trust him with the money."

"So he would know where it came from. Which, in a sense, would make him a part of the whole mess, wouldn't it?"

"He's very impressive. I'd trust him with money"

"From what he said, do you have any clue as to what could have happened?"

"I think he thought somebody got impatient. They got too eager to show some results and make the people in Peru happy. And it made him angry.

"That would fit," Meyer said. "From October into late December, with nothing happening. So they make some moves just to be doing something, whether it makes any sense or not."

"Maybe he can fix it. But I'm not going to unwrap any gifts."

"Why should they send gifts when they can put a man with a rifle and a scope sight on any of those roofs over there?"

I looked over my shoulder at the roofs on the high buildings beyond the boat basin. When you aim down at a forty-five-degree angle, you cut the estimate of distance in half. That keeps it from throwing too high. The effect of gravity on the slug is diminished by the angle. I felt a circle of ice as big as a silver dollar three inches below the nape of my neck.

My little chore was done anyway. I had tied off the heavy thread. All that remained was the shellac, and I could do that below. I gathered up the towel and the spool of thread, the knife and the broken eyelet. When I turned to face the distant buildings, the circle of ice slid around my body as I turned, and ended up on the left side of my chest. I forced a yawn, and for an instant the ice was in the back of my throat, then reappeared on my chest.

"Sun's about gone," I said.

"If you say so," said Meyer.

I went below. He went back to his beamy cruiser to await the arrival from the airport of one of his female executive friends, a California lady who owns vineyards and sends him the occasional case of rare vintage wine. According to Meyer, whenever he takes her over to the islands, they sit around and discuss economic trends and international trade. And drink wine. Whatever happens, I do know that each one of his lady executive friends believes in her heart that she is the great love of Meyer's whole life. It shows when they say good-by. And in Meyer's special way, perhaps it is true. They all are. Not that there have ever been that many of them. Six perhaps. Or seven.

And that evening when I wasn't thinking about dying, I nearly did. Again.