Whisper Death (14 page)

“Art Lumsden tells me you might have uncovered something,” Bonnar said as McGuire approached the car.

McGuire stood waiting for the other man to continue.

“Lumsden told me he ran a name through the trace computer and the damn thing practically did a dance.”

“Lafaro,” McGuire said.

“Sounds like the name. Where'd you pick that up?”

You're good at playing dumb, McGuire said to the other man silently. “Somebody keeps calling me at the motel. He even sent me to Las Vegas.” McGuire leaned on the door of the car, looking at Bonnar, ready to evaluate his response. “Where I met your two Secret Service buddies.”

“They're no buddies of mine, McGuire.” Bonnar jabbed a manicured finger at McGuire. “Look, you're crossing state lines and that makes this an FBI matter. Besides, you're out of your jurisdiction down here. If you want to help us find out what happened to your prisoner and your partner, you work hand in glove with Art Lumsden, is that clear?”

“Lumsden seems like a good guy,” McGuire offered.

“He is a good guy,” Bonnar agreed. “Either stay in your motel room and work with him, or get the hell out of town. Choose one or the other, McGuire.” He spoke to the driver and the limousine sped away, followed by the patrol cars, as the plane carrying Fat Eddie, Janet Parsons and Ralph Innes began its take-off.

He felt free. With Ralph Innes no longer in a nearby intensive-care ward to remind him of his folly two evenings ago, McGuire was free to follow his instincts.

And his instincts led him back to Via Linda.

The maid's voice crackled through the speaker on the stone pillar in response to McGuire's ring. McGuire introduced himself and asked to see Mrs. Vargas, then waited for a response, scanning the sky and the hills behind the house.

The gates began sliding silently apart, and McGuire walked through the courtyard to the carved wooden doors. As he arrived, the doors swung open and the maid, her eyes avoiding his, stood aside and nodded toward the rear of the house.

He entered the high-ceilinged room where Glynnis Vargas had made her first appearance. The stereo was playing soft and vaguely familiar music. McGuire walked to the white brick fireplace and looked up at the portrait of Glynnis Vargas. He wondered how her husband had responded to such an erotic presentation of his wife. He might have wanted it painted that way, McGuire speculated. Some men, especially men of power, enjoy exhibiting their wives as objects of desire. It was a way of displaying another facet of their success.

“Do you approve?”

McGuire turned to see Glynnis Vargas watching him from the doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms folded across her chest and a mischievous smile on her face. She wore a brilliant crimson blouse, tied just below her breasts, and tight denim jeans; her feet were clad in delicate leather sandals. Lacy lines radiated from her eyes and small dimples formed quarter-moons at the corners of her mouth.

On the evening at the museum she had carried her beauty like a benediction, a gift to be bestowed upon whomever she chose. Now, relaxed and with just a trace of make-up, she was an attainable goddess.

McGuire breathed deeply, struck as he had been so many times in his life by the power that the beauty of some women had over him. It was a power he tried to deny, as though by denying it he would defend himself from its consequences.

“Of course,” he said casually, glancing back at the portrait. “Did you break the artist's heart?”

Her smile broadened and she entered the room, touching a bouquet of fresh flowers as she passed. “What an interesting thing to ask, Mr. McGuire. I have had many responses to that portrait, but no one has ever asked me that.”

“I bet you did,” McGuire replied. “Break his heart, I mean.”

“I believe I did as well.” She stretched out on the sofa, her legs extended. One hand threaded its way through her hair and began twisting its copper locks. “But we can't be responsible for other people's fantasies, can we?”

“What did your husband think of it?”

“He approved. He approved of everything I did, which is why I loved him so much. Please sit down, Mr. McGuire. May I have Rosalie bring you a drink?”

McGuire shook his head no.

“I expected to hear from you yesterday,” she said. Her eyes were fixed on McGuire's. “Rosalie said you called with a message. I was disappointed when you didn't phone again. But I assumed you had other things to do, perhaps other people to see.”

“I was contacted by somebody who was at the museum Wednesday night,” McGuire explained. He described the calls from the strange man who referred to McGuire as Mozart and who spoke of Bunker Crawford as though they were friends. As he talked, he watched her face grow cloudy and dark.

“He mentioned someone else,” McGuire said. “Someone named Lafaro. Do you know that name?”

She turned her head away and closed her eyes. “It's familiar,” she said. “That's all. Only familiar.”

“From where?”

“My husband. He may have mentioned the name.” She looked back, her eyes filled with tears.

“Mrs. Vargas, just what did your husband do?”

“I told you. He was a wholesaler of gems in Brazil.”

“Which could have put him among some tough customers,” McGuire suggested.

Her face tensed, and for a moment McGuire expected her to explode in anger. Instead, she dabbed at her eyes with her hand and shook her head. “I'm sorry, Mr. McGuire.” She pulled her hand away and gave him a sad smile. “May I call you Joe? Or do you prefer Joseph?”

McGuire told her Joe was fine.

“Forgive me, Joe, but I become angry and impatient with Americans who assume that anyone who deals with gems and is from South America must be tainted with a criminal past. It simply isn't so. Getti was the most honest man I ever met, with very high integrity. The absolute highest. Many times I watched him agree to deals involving tens of millions of dollars on a simple handshake. That was his word. That was his bond. And for someone to accuse him of wrongdoing is simply unacceptable to me.”

“But you admit you recognize Lafaro's name.”

“I admit it sounds familiar to me. Perhaps my husband mentioned it, or I might have read it in the paper, I simply don't know.” She sat upright, her eyes avoiding McGuire's. “But you know something about this person, don't you?”

“I know some federal characters have been looking for him for over twenty years.”

“How?” she asked. She leaned back against the sofa, still avoiding his eyes. “How did you discover that?”

McGuire told her of his trip to Las Vegas, his being directed to a telephone booth and his abduction and interrogation. He said nothing of the theft of military equipment or the three-million-dollar ransom paid for it.

“Why was Crawford here?” she whispered when he finished.

“You tell me.”

“I don't
know
!” She stood up quickly and walked to the window, her arms folded and her head bent. Her shoulders heaved with sobs. “I don't know,” she repeated.

McGuire walked hesitantly towards her. “Mrs. Vargas . . .” he began, and touched her arm.

She turned and clung to him, and McGuire stood impassively, feeling the loneliness, the sadness, the need, ebb from her body to his and back again.

“It was a mistake coming here.”

They were in the Florida room, facing an inner courtyard which McGuire had not known existed in the immense house. A stone fountain babbled merrily in the centre of the courtyard where poinsettias grew in wild profusion.

The room itself was finished in hand-painted Mexican tiles that covered the floor and ran halfway up three walls, where they gave way to textured white plaster. The entire expanse of the fourth wall was tinted, multi-layered glass that curved up to form the roof. Light flooded the room, reflected back from the polished tiles and white walls. Tropical plants hung from the metal frames of the glass ceiling, reaching down to others that sat in massive oriental and Mexican planters on the floor. Two oversized white wicker love seats flanked a matching side table; a large, weathered, free-form bronze sculpture completed the room's furnishings. The total effect was a melding of cold white and vibrant green, extremes of sterility and life.

The maid brought a pitcher of iced tea and departed in sullen silence. Glynnis Vargas tucked her legs beneath her on one love seat; McGuire sat upright on the other.

“You told me you wanted to escape the reminders of poverty back in Brazil,” McGuire said. His arm swept in an arc encompassing the courtyard and the world beyond. “You did it.”

“Perhaps something followed me.” She was looking into her drink.

“Something your husband did or was involved in,” McGuire offered. “Something you don't know about.”

“Perhaps.” She sipped her iced tea. “But that's not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“I meant that my husband's money bought me everything I desired in Brazil. If you could block out the suffering around you, if you could forget about all those pleading eyes in the
favelas
, the slums on the hills above Rio, you could enjoy so much culture, so much of life that really matters. With enough money you can buy almost anything, Joe. But not everything.”

“What are you missing?”

“A life. Stability. Someone to share things with. I had all that with Getti. When he died, I thought I would find it here, and I was wrong.”

“I saw the way you were treated at the museum Wednesday night,” McGuire said. “Like a queen. They respect you. They like you. And as for the men, well . . .”

“You're missing the point,” she said impatiently. She set her glass on the tiled floor. “Just how much have I told you about myself?”

“That you're a small-town California girl,” McGuire said.

Her eyebrows rose. “That's all?”

“And you did what thousands of small-town girls do every year. You went to Los Angeles looking for a career. And you found a husband. This one was foreign and wealthy. I'd say you did pretty well compared with most small-town girls who head for Hollywood.”

“Only because of Grams.”

“Grams?”

She smiled a sad, sweet smile and leaned back on the love seat again, reaching up to finger a hanging bougainvillea branch as she talked.

“I was following my mother's footsteps, in a way. But with a much different result. You see, my mother went to Los Angeles with ideas of being discovered in Schwabb's drugstore, like Lana Turner. Well, she was discovered all right. She returned home a year later, pregnant with me. No husband, no money, nothing. Just Grams, her mother, waiting for her. After I was born, she stayed around for a few months, trying to put her life together. But you couldn't do that in a small town back then. Everyone thought she was a whore. Me, I was just a little bastard. So she left one day with nothing but a suitcase. No one ever saw or heard from her again.”

There was no self-pity in her voice. No dramatics. No hints that she was telling anything but the truth.

“So Grams raised me. She was such a character. My grandfather had died in an accident, working the silver mines during the war. Grams took charge of everything. When the people in Barstow—that's where I was born—when they became too cruel and unforgiving, and it was clear my mother was never returning, Grams said ‘Who needs them?' or something like that. So we moved to Shoshone on the edge of Death Valley, and that's where Grams raised me.”

She looked into the courtyard and fixed her gaze on the patch of blue sky visible above the fountain. “Grams told me it's better to have roses on your table than diamonds on your neck. But then she would always wink and add, ‘Of course, if you can have both, why not?'”

“Is she still alive?” McGuire asked.

“She died a few years after Getti and I were married. From a stroke. Sometimes I still miss her so terribly. It was Grams who introduced me to music and art. She came from a good family back east and graduated from Radcliffe with a degree in fine arts. Then she ran off with a good-looking man who had no interest in her money. He wanted to earn his fortune in the western mines and she followed him here. You can imagine her family's response.”

Glynnis drained the iced tea from her crystal glass.

“Would you pour me another glass please?” she smiled across to McGuire.

He rose and walked to the table. As he filled her glass, he was aware of her eyes on him, a fragile smile playing on her face.

“Is there a story behind that scar?” she asked.

“Nothing worth talking about.” McGuire handed her the drink and returned to the other love seat. “You were telling me about growing up with your grandmother,” he prompted.

Glynnis Vargas began running the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass. “She never abandoned her love of culture. It was part of her and became part of me too. Her husband was killed in a mine accident when my mother was still a young child. Soon after that, Grams's father died. He never really forgave her for running off to California, but he left her a bequest in his will. That's what she survived on for the rest of her life. By the time I came along, it was just enough to support us, her and me. With a little left over to purchase classical music records and a few prints.”

She smiled that same secret smile again and watched her finger trace the rim of the glass, around and around.

“Grams always said that if you took two identical rooms and played Mozart in one continuously for a week, she could enter both rooms a year later and tell which one was still resonating with the music. When she died. . . .” She swallowed, turned away, blinked twice, and continued. “When she died, I looked after the burial arrangements myself. In a special place . . . where I knew she wanted to be.” She smiled, embarrassed. “Isn't it strange how meticulous we can be with the wishes of the dead and how careless we are with the needs of the living?” Lifting her finger from the glass, she looked across at McGuire. “Tell me how you got that scar,” she pleaded.

McGuire prided himself on his resistance to manipulation, especially the manipulations of available women. Available, willing and beautiful women.

“Your grandmother,” he replied, “sounds like quite a woman.”

Glynnis dropped her eyes to her glass again. “An amazing woman. I could never measure up to all that she was. In some ways, I never even tried. She was cultured and liberated, proud of her heritage, and yet she despised authority.”

“Sounds like a female John Wayne,” McGuire offered.

Her eyes flew at McGuire and narrowed with anger. “No, not a bit!” she responded. “She wasn't a jingoist or a flag-waver. None of those things. She hated the idea of blind obedience and dying for a piece of cloth that was called your flag. During the Vietnam War she sat and watched protesters burn the flag on the television news. Do you know what she said? She said ‘They're fools. They shouldn't be burning the flag. They should be washing it.'”

She sat upright and placed her glass on the side table. “You know what?” she said, brightening. “I think I'd like to go for a drive in the desert.”

She collected her purse, spoke briefly to the maid and led McGuire through the house to the garage. A silver Cadillac Seville, white Ferrari and red Mercedes roadster waited in the dim light until Glynnis tripped the automatic door behind the Mercedes and it opened to flood the garage with sunshine.