Brett Halliday - Caught Dead

She stopped him. “I know. I thought about it on the autopista. Trading me for your friend Rourke isn’t really such a farfetched idea, is it? I have to persuade you I can be valuable in other ways, and to do that, I have to tell you the exact truth, as far as I know it. Maybe you’ll see something I’ve missed. Where do you want me to start?”

“Were you in Alvares’ plane when it crashed?”

“Yes, and I’ve got bruises to prove it. I hated to come to Caracas this time. It’s in the middle of my busy season in the gallery, but he wanted me here. He knew about the movement against him, but thought it would all blow over, somehow. It didn’t, of course. It got rapidly worse. He had his pilot on twenty-four hour notice. When he got word that troops were coming to arrest him, he phoned me. I met him at the airstrip. We took off and crashed. After I crawled out I decided there was no reason to hang around and wait for the soldiers. He didn’t make a popular move when he tied up with a gringo. I’ve appeared in political cartoons, I regret to say, the blonde temptress with a great dollar sign on my bosom.”

“How much money was he carrying?”

“Not a great deal. I took what he had, but it was barely enough to buy that boat.”

“I’ve been hearing he had a fortune in cash stashed away somewhere.”

She shook back her long hair. “Perhaps. I’m not exactly a giddy young thing, but should I be expected to know how much money he had in the bank, or in which bank?”

“People assume you do.”

“When he paid for something, he simply opened his wallet and took out some money. Is that the police theory? That I bombed him to death so that only I, in all the world, would know the location of his wealth? Mike, that’s so far from the truth-He was a real Latin male. His women were helpless creatures who couldn’t add up a checkbook.” She looked at him critically. “Are you believing this?”

“Most of it sounds pretty straight. What happened after you walked away from the wreck?”

“When I got back to the city I called my niece, a sweet girl named Paula Obregon. She found me a place to stay.”

“Frost snowed me her picture. Rourke was seeing her.”

“Then you know she’s a revolutionary, a fierce enemy of capitalist governments. But what a nice girl, all the same. She went to school in the States for a year, and she stayed with me part of the time. When she came back she plunged into the movement against my dear friend and lover, so of course I’ve seen very little of her since. I think she’s too smart not to outgrow those juvenile ideas, or that’s what I keep telling her parents. When I heard Guillermo had been taken to La Vega, I had an idea. This will sound romantic to you, but damn it, it really could have worked. These guerrillas have a fabulous organization, absolute discipline. All of a sudden, there they are. Look again, they’re gone. Several of their leaders were being held in that prison, and my idea was that if they could smuggle in some smoke bombs and tear gas, enough to confuse and incapacitate the guards, a relatively small force could walk in wearing gas masks and deliver everybody, regardless of politics.”

“In a couple of cigarette cartons,” Shayne said, scraping his chin.

“That’s the way we worked it out. They jumped at the idea. I went to Senora Alvares-”

“Just a minute. Did she know you were her husband’s girl?”

“After a while it wasn’t much of a secret. They’ve had no marital life, by which I mean sexual contact, for years. Divorce wasn’t possible. If I could visit my friend in prison there would have been no problem, but that privilege of course was reserved for the wife. It wasn’t easy for me to go to her. She was angry and suspicious but I managed to persuade her, finally. He was her husband, after all, and did she want him to spend the rest of his life behind bars? That was the sentimental side of the argument. The practical side was that if we could help him escape, he would continue to support her. She’s quite a self-centered bitch, as a matter of fact, and when she agreed to help I’m quite sure she was thinking of herself. But that’s unkind and probably unfair.”

“Did she know what was going to be in the cartons?”

“Yes, but her part in it fell through. She couldn’t get permission to visit him.”

“Which is where Tim Rourke came in.”

“Paula knew him from Miami. She was supplying material for a series on the guerrillas, and I believe she was staying with him at his hotel, so if he thought of any questions to ask in the middle of the night, she could answer them right away. He agreed to help us. He made himself such a nuisance downtown that they finally set up an interview for him. You know how the other correspondent was substituted at the last minute.”

“Did Tim really know what he was letting himself in for?”

“It wasn’t really that dangerous, Mike. The timing device wasn’t supposed to go off until half an hour after he left. Meanwhile, another MIR detachment would be making a diversion downtown, robbing a bank and so on. I didn’t see how it could miss.”

“Did you see the cartons being prepared?”

“That was done by Paula’s people, somewhere else. And it was honestly just a beautiful job. They looked absolutely genuine, and felt absolutely genuine.”

“Now tell me how you planned to leave the country.”

“I had a car, the same Oldsmobile. The boat was fueled up and ready. Tim was going to meet us there and go with us. I was at the room Paula found for me, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Two longs and a short would mean that the truck had arrived, bringing my friend in a wig and false nose. I waited and waited, and of course nothing happened. I didn’t dare leave for fear of missing the signal. I heard sirens, and shooting. I stayed up on the roof most of the night. I knew something had gone wrong, but what if they’d been attacked after they got the prisoners out, and he was in hiding? In the morning I bought a paper, and there it was. And the whole thing had been my idea, Mike! I got it started and kept it going, and somewhere along the way somebody used my plan to murder him. And I did a stupid thing-I went to the farm. I thought I could persuade her I hadn’t done it, and if we went to the police together and told our story-but the woman was insane! She said I killed him, she’d told them everything, they were looking for me, I’d be arrested and put to death. She screamed horrible things at me and tried to tear out my eyes. I ran out of the house.”

She shivered, looked into her glass and drank some more cognac. Shayne had listened intently to her story, and now he began to push questions at her. How long had Tim Rourke had possession of the cartons? She counted backward; less than half a day. She herself had had them overnight, and had returned them to her niece in mid-morning, after the Senora had been denied permission to visit the prison.

“All right,” Shayne said. “Now we’re going to talk some more about the money. Try to be a little more convincing. I’m calling it money. I don’t know whether it’s in cash or securities or gold or real estate. You were big enough in his life so he wanted you down here at a time when he knew trouble could start popping any minute. He had his getaway plans made. As far as anybody’s told me, he didn’t have any shoe-boxes full of thousand-dollar bills when he crashed. That means the thousand-dollar bills were waiting for him somewhere else. You seem to be a bright, cool girl. If you didn’t want to leave your gallery in the middle of the season, you could have told him so.”

“He bought me that gallery! If what you’re saying is that I didn’t love him, Mike-”

“That doesn’t interest me.”