Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Pallifer rose to follow. He would have said a polite thank you, but the man had turned away too fast. Well, fuck you, too, Pallifer thought.

The office was actually a two-room complex, the outer one with a pair of desks for the Farrellys and a number of filing cabinets, the inner one a kind of mailroom, with fax and computers. These rooms were being kept locked when not in use so long as Manville was a guest in the house, so this was only the second time Pallifer had been in here.

Helen Farrelly sat at her desk, typing a letter on ranch stationery, but she stopped when Pallifer and her husband came in and said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Pallifer. The phone’s right there.”

So the woman was at least making an effort to be polite. “Thank you, ma’am,” Pallifer said, and crossed to the side table where the phone waited off the hook. He picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Mr. Pallifer?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“This is Otis,” said the dry and whispery voice, “from Unico Bank. Mr. Richard Curtis requested that we phone you about certain credit card information, concerning a Mr. George Manville.”

Pallifer’s spirits suddenly lifted. The trail! The credit card trail that would lead to the missing girl, if she were still there. Well, we can only hope.

A pen and notepad were by the phone. Picking up the pen, “Yes, go on,” he said.

“On Thursday last,” the whispery Mr. Otis said, “Mr. Manville made two telephone calls from the Brisbane area to the United States, charging them to a credit card.”

“Telephone calls.” Pallifer had been hoping for a hotel or some such thing, but of course hotels don’t put through the credit card slip until after the guest checks out. Hoping this might still be useful somehow, he said, “Can you identify where the call was made from?”

“Yes, of course,” Mr. Otis said. “Both calls emanated from a pay telephone on the property of the Lee-Zure-Lite Motel in Surfers Paradise.”

Bingo! “Surfers Paradise?” Pallifer asked, as he wrote the name on the notepad, “is that the name of a town?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Otis said. “On the Gold Coast, I believe.”

“Well, thank you,” Pallifer said. “That was Leisure Light Motel?”

“Yes. It has a rather unusual spelling,” Mr. Otis said, and went on to spell it.

Pallifer wrote that also on the notepad, thanked Mr. Otis again, said he wouldn’t be needing any more information, and hung up. Then he thanked Mrs. Farrelly, pointedly ignored Mr. Farrelly, and went outside, where Raf stood in the shade of the house, leaning against the wall. He straightened when he saw Pallifer, and said, “Our friend was here. He listens at windows.”

Pallifer stopped. “Does he.” He didn’t like that, it suggested Manville might be up to something after all, not just obediently waiting, the way Mr. Curtis thought.

Pallifer reflected; what, if anything, would Manville have heard? The phone table in the office was against a wall between two windows, but the windows were shut because of the air-conditioning. But say Manville could have heard his part of the conversation, what was there in it?

The name of the motel. He’d repeated it when Otis said it.

“Well, you know,” Pallifer said, “it might be a good thing to collect our pal and lock him away a while. I got to drive back to the coast, be gone overnight, that might excite Manville even if he didn’t hear anything. Where is he now?”

“He went back in the house.”

“You and Steve round him up, while I pack a bag.”

“Sure thing.”

Pallifer went back to the spare barracks and packed his smaller bag, and brought it to the main house. In the garage, he could choose between a green Land Rover and a white Honda Accord. The Land Rover appealed to him, but the Honda would be more anonymous once he got back around Brisbane, so he shrugged and tossed his bag into the trunk of the Honda. Then he went looking for Steve and Raf, to see how they were doing with Manville.

Not so good. “Can’t find him,” Raf said. He sounded more irritated than worried.

Pallifer felt the same way. “Well, where the hell could he be? He can’t go anywhere. If he’s hiding, it’s because he wants to catch somebody. So if he makes a move at you, just kill him and fuck the whole event. I can’t stay around here, I don’t want to lose the daylight. Tell the Farrellys I’ll call here tonight, find out what’s going on. If fucking Manville’s dead, so much the better.”

“What if, when we find him, he’s peaceable?”

Pallifer shook his head. “Then we go on babysitting,” he said. “And you lock him away till I get back.”

“Okay.”

Pallifer grinned, feeling better about things. “But if it turns out the job’s over,” he said, “that would be okay, too.”

Two hundred miles east of Kennison, with the sun low in the sky behind him, Pallifer pulled off the road — he was the only car in sight — got out of the Honda, and went around a hillock to relieve himself. When he came back to the car, Manville was seated in back, giving him a calm look.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Pallifer muttered, and went around to get behind the wheel. Staring at the irritating bastard in the rearview mirror, he said, “Now what?”

“Just keep going,” Manville said. “I like the way you drive, so keep doing it.”

“And where do you think you’re going?”

“Same place as you. Lee-Zure-Lite Motel.”

Pallifer nodded. “So you did hear things at that window.”

“If you’re going to that motel,” Manville said, “then Curtis still wants Kim Baldur dead, no matter what he said to me.”

“So the deal’s off, is that it?”

“That’s it. Drive, Mr. Pallifer.”

He might as well; there was no point just sitting here, on an empty highway. He put the Honda in gear, and they started again to drive east.

When he’d got into the car, back at Kennison, he’d put a pistol in the glove compartment, the one he figured to use on the girl. Now he glanced at the glove compartment, thinking about it.

Manville said, “It isn’t there anymore.”

“I thought not,” Pallifer said. He looked at that expressionless face in the rearview mirror, then watched the road. “You heard me on the phone, then you hid out till I put my bag in here, so you knew which car I’d be taking, and then you got in the trunk. Where were you, before?”

“On top of the framework for the garage doors, between that and the ceiling.”

“So you could look to see which vehicle I was gonna take. But what if I just got in it and drove away?”

“At first,” Manville told him, “I was going to drop on you as soon as you opened the driver’s door. But then, when you came in and opened and closed the trunk, and went away again, I saw I could do it more quietly.”

“Well, you’re pretty cute,” Pallifer said, and slammed on the brakes, sluing the wheel hard right across the empty road with his left hand while his right hand snaked inside his jacket to whip out his other pistol. Pressed against the door, he turned, whipping the pistol around, and Manville shot him in the head.

It was half an hour up the new dirt road through the jungle, twisting and turning up into the Mayan mountains of Belize. Colin Bennett, half asleep in his third-floor rear room in the Race Course Court Hotel, traveled in memory, however reluctantly, back to the day of the disaster. Outside the closed window here, the chattering sounds of Singapore continued as the day waned, but in the dim hotel room where Bennett sat beside the small radio receiver there was the heavy silence of the Belizean jungle, surrounding you as you drove up that yellowish white fresh dirt road, that new scar upward through the jungle to parallel the rushing cold Cobaz River. And at the end of the road was the worksite, the dam.