Damage Control (19 page)

Chapter Forty-nine

DeHoic looked up at me, her expression mildly annoyed rather than scared or startled. My assumption that she expected Dierdorf to join the party was starting to look pretty good.

“That's probably nothing,” she muttered. “Old houses come with odd, random noises. But humor me, okay? Stand over there near the window on this side of the bed, facing the door, and get that Junior G-Woman cap gun of yours ready.”

I thought about it. I'd put the chances of company at no better than one in five. Sure, maybe Klimchock hadn't contacted Dierdorf, or maybe Dierdorf hadn't listened to him, but Dierdorf figured to see DeHoic's invitation as a low-percentage play, in any event. When you hear a dubious noise split the still summer air in an almost empty house, though, probability calculations get a second look.

I crossed the room. Didn't stand in front of the window, of course. Got my back against the wall in a space between the west-side windows and the corner. Unholstered my Colt. And without making a production out of it, took out my cell phone, punched a speed-dial number, and as I set the phone on the sill prayed that Mama would keep Uncle D's mouth shut when they accepted the call.

DeHoic went back to fingering the inside of the bed's long, solid side brace. A tiny, whispering, almost apologetic
thok
sounded from under the bed. As a small, hidden drawer slid smoothly out from the frame,
creak
came from the stairway—the main staircase, which you'd use if you came in the front door; not the back stair case that Jerzy and I had used the last time he'd used anything.

DeHoic took a thumb-drive out of the drawer and held it up so that I could see it. Not a server. Hmm…
What if there's a gun in that drawer, too?
For two terrible seconds I wondered if I'd blown the whole thing through sheer carelessness, but DeHoic stood up holding the thumb-drive and nothing else.

“It's all on here.”

Another
creak
, this one from the top of the stairs.

“Get ready with that gun!” she stage-whispered at me. Fierce but calm.

I kept the Colt held lightly in my right hand, along my right thigh. Cocked it because, really, why not? The edge of the bedroom door pushed maybe three inches into the room. Then it stopped. I held my breath.

“Steady,” she muttered, still under her breath, going for calm and reassuring and sounding wound-tight tense instead. “Ready…ready…”

Nothing happened. I stayed the way I was. The door didn't move another millimeter. No sound that I could hear from outside it. My gut tightened and every muscle in my body tingled. My nerves were screaming
Do SOMETHING! ANYTHING!
—and I had actually foreseen this and thought it through. I could only imagine what games DeHoic's neurons were playing with her.

“You can come on in if you want to, Dierdorf,” she called. “We're all friends here.”

The door crashed open, banging loudly against the bedroom wall. After a breathtaking two seconds, a large male figure filled the doorway for an eyeblink.

“Look out!” DeHoic shouted. “Gun! Shoot!”

Was she warning me, or telling Dierdorf that
I
had a gun and he should shoot
me
? I figured she wanted to have it both ways. It only took the entrant about a quarter-second to hit the deck, scurry along the floor toward the opposite side of the bed, and then roll toward the bathroom door next to the chest. I got just the barest glimpse of him—but that was enough to know how to play the rest of my hand.

“Negative on the shooting thing,” I said.

“You fucking wimp! Give me that!”

Throwing down the thumb-drive, DeHoic leaped across the room at me and grabbed the Colt, snatching it from my hands without much of an argument from me. The intruder was still prudently hugging the floor with everything but his right arm, which was reaching toward the bathroom doorknob. About a third of his body was visible from our side of the bed. DeHoic aimed my Colt at it. She squeezed the trigger.

Snap-CLICK.
No gunshot. Baffled, DeHoic squeezed it again and again. Same result:
Snap-CLICK!
every time.

Our guest had now gotten the bathroom door open. After the fourth
CLICK
, though, he
yelped at us instead of diving through the opening.

“Hey! What the Hell!” Klimchock's voice.

“Don't take it personally,” I called. “She thought you were Dierdorf. Feel free to join the party. No one is going to be shooting anyone.”

Klimchock came gingerly to a squat, facing us over the bed. DeHoic, still holding the gun, backed toward the head of the bed and flicked confused and wary eyes from me to him.

“Ms. DeHoic,” I said, “I am pleased to introduce Daniel Klimchock, an applications engineer. I'm surprised you haven't met before, as he is a former associate of your late ex-husband. Mr. Klimchock, this is Ann DeHoic, known to the tabloids as ‘the gray lady.' I hope you'll forgive her if she seems a bit jumpy today.”

“Seriously?” Klimchock said. “A revolver made by Colt Firearms Company serially misfired?”

“Oh, it fired those bullets just fine last night. I left the cartridge shells in the cylinder after I fired them, though, so just now that firing pin was only hitting empty brass. Figured if it got fired today it would most likely be by someone else.”

“Oh.” Klimchock shook his head from side to side as he stood up. “Well, I guess that explains that, then. What about the computer thing?”

“That's the thumb-drive lying on the floor over there.”

“Don't move!” DeHoic said, still holding the Colt with both hands and looking a bit wildly from me to Klimchock and back.

“Who you kidding, honey?” I demanded. “That gun ain't worth spit when it's not loaded. Why don't you just give it back to me?”

DeHoic turned a warrior-princess glare on me as a combination of loathing and contempt radiated from her eyes.

“Come and get it, you cracker bitch!”

“Now that's just plain rude.” Two determined strides brought me close enough to DeHoic to feint a punch with my left fist while I got my right ready to smack some manners into her.

My last fight had come at nineteen when I'd found myself bent backwards over the beer pong table in the basement of TKE House at Tulane, fending off a frat boy who had his hopes up and his pants down. We'd gone at it pretty well, with me holding my own until the racket pulled enough sober TKEs into the room to moot any prospect of non-consensual sexual union. The frat boy had had to see Campus Medical the next day about “painful urinary discharge,” so I'd called that one a win, fat lip and all.

DeHoic didn't have the frat boy's muscles but she had a lot more brains and her pants weren't down. Both hands still wrapped around the Colt, she stepped inside my right arm and smashed my nose and lips with the back of her right hand, reinforced by the weight of the gun and the strength of her left arm. I staggered backwards as stars exploded in my head and blood burst from my nose.

“Chick fight!” Klimchock yelled joyfully, moving toward the wall opposite the end of the bed. “Thank you, thank you, Jesus!”

Raising her right hand with that gun still in it, DeHoic strode forward to brain me with the thing. I managed to get my left arm up in time to block her, but when I tried to pop her with my right fist she half-blocked my arm and half grabbed it. Basically holding each other up, we must have looked to Klimchock like a couple of refugees from a remedial dancing class. With both arms tied up, I did the only thing I could think of: rocked my head back and snapped it forward as hard as I could to smack her right in the puss. I got the bridge of her nose with my forehead and her lips with my high, Creole/Cajun left cheekbone.

I heard something crack as white sheets of pure pain lanced through my brain. DeHoic screamed, tripping backward. Her grip on my right arm went slack. Loved the scream, but I wouldn't call the job more than half done yet. I raised my free right arm to clock her one. She somehow got her right arm swung around across her body fast enough to block my down-sweeping punch bone on bone, forearm on forearm.
Damn, this chick has some fight in her!
Only good thing was that the impact knocked the gun out of her hand, across the bed, and onto the floor.

I was running out of juice. Jogging nine-minute miles two or three times a week hadn't prepared me for the concentrated burst of total energy that this fight demanded. We'd only been at it maybe thirty seconds, but my legs were shaky, my arms felt like lead, and every breath I took seared my lungs.

DeHoic cocked her left arm to take another shot at my face. My first instinct was to duck and back up. Then I remembered “cracker bitch.” Instead of retreating I sucked it up, moved forward, lowered my head just a bit, and took the punch just above the side of my right eye. Hurt like a bastard, but I'm hard-headed as Southern belles go and it didn't take me out. More important, it left DeHoic exposed on her left side. Gritting my teeth against the pain from my throbbing forearm, I wheeled my right fist up, around and down. I planted a high, hard one right on her left ear, all four knuckles and plenty of attitude behind them. She stumbled backward, fell across the bed—and covered up. I thought about putting a couple of punches into her ribs just to help her remember the experience, but I didn't do it. Mama thought I wasn't a bully; I wouldn't want to disappoint her.

“That's what we crackers down South call fighting, bitch.”

I stepped back four paces with my guard still up, gulping air and keeping the one-and-a-half eyes I still had vision in on DeHoic. That ear-jab had rung her bell, all right. She rolled to a sitting position but she took her time about it and when she'd gotten it done the expression on her face made me think of a ten-year-old coming back from the woodshed. Uncle D jumped in at that point.

“Sounds like you won that little set-to, Josie.”

“She sure did,” Klimchock yelled with downright indecent enthusiasm. “TKO. Everything but the bloody towel in the middle of the ring. By the way, who's talking to me?”

“Oh, that's my uncle,” I said. “Darius Zachary Taylor Barry. We're all about to have a conversation here, and I think it will be more constructive if everyone knows there's an impartial witness listening to us.”

I guess that took the cake for DeHoic. She leaned way over at the waist and started throwing up. Tough to watch, but I couldn't think of anything to do about it.

Klimchock came through. He produced a mini-bottle of water from the right pocket of his blue blazer and a handkerchief from a rear pocket of his pants. He dampened the hankie liberally, brought it over to DeHoic, and started sponging off her mouth. He glanced at the top drawer of the chest while doing this. Taking the hint, I circled to the chest, found a month's supply of white cotton handkerchiefs in the top drawer, pulled out three of them, and brought them back around to Klimchock. He used them to dry DeHoic's mouth, then gave the bottle to her for a long swig. After scampering back to his post by the far wall, he looked at me.

“You said something about a conversation. This looks like a good time to start it.”

Chapter Fifty

“This is bullshit,” DeHoic spat.

“Now, Ms. DeHoic, I am very put out with you right now, and I am not interested in your opinions. What you need to do is keep your mouth buttoned up real tight while I tell you the way things are going to be.”

That shut her up. I took a breath, glanced at Klimchock, then turned back toward DeHoic.

“You stole Dierdorf's pistol and gave it to Jerzy. You substituted an identical make and model. Dierdorf is mostly a poser when it comes to rough stuff, and that gun was more a prop for him than anything else. Because of the switch, he didn't realize you'd relieved him of his weapon.”

“That's just pathetic,” Klimchock muttered. “Didn't know his own gun. What a loser.”

“How do I know this? Because that's by far the most likely way for Jerzy to have gotten the thing, and because you wouldn't have paid all that money for the pitch-file if you hadn't been up to your ears in Jerzy's scheme to grab Dierdorf's crony capitalism grant. Which brings us to the question that I, personally, find most interesting: Exactly what was that scheme?”

DeHoic opened her mouth, but I raised my index finger and she shut it real fast.

“Jerzy's plan had nothing to do with getting an audit started on Dierdorf's company. That was just the cover story he used when he started playing my ego like that violin of his. I was supposed to drive Jerzy in my car to a meeting with his key investor. Jerzy had the gun you'd taken from Dierdorf, but I didn't know it. Once we were well away from his estate, Jerzy was going to shoot me with Dierdorf's gun, leave me dead in my car, wipe the gun, and ditch it where the police would find it.”

“A dish like you?” Klimchock demanded. “World class bad call.”

“A dead body, a victim involved in making Dierdorf look bad, a murder weapon registered to Dierdorf, and a flight plan putting Dierdorf near the scene at the time of the murder. Never mind an audit. Sanford Dierdorf would either be a fugitive or held without bail, and either way he'd be out of the federal subsidy business.”

“Why, that is just despicable!” Uncle Darius offered that chirp over the phone. “If I were up there, I'd be inclined to give someone some serious creasing up.”

“That's why you're where you are, Uncle D. Luckily for me, Jerzy passed away about fifteen minutes before he would have terminated my career with extreme prejudice. If…someone hadn't murdered Jerzy, his plan would have worked real well.”

“Someone?” DeHoic asked. “You aren't trying to pin Jerzy's murder on me, are you?”

“Do I look like Nancy Drew to you, sweetheart? Solving murders isn't my chosen vocation.”

“Then what are you driving at?”

“Divorce or no divorce, you and Jerzy were still business partners. You pretended to break with him so that you could get close to Dierdorf and steal his gun. Whoever killed Jerzy, that makes you just as complicit as you can be in the plan to murder me, which is the main reason I am particularly pissed off at you.”

“Oh.” DeHoic shrugged. “Well, no harm, no foul. I'll buy you a new blouse.”

“You were the one who hired Bart Reuter to snatch the pitch-file, knowing that Dierdorf would get the blame for it and you'd save a ton of money to boot. That's why you were so hot to get Reuter off the hook, before the FBI could flip him. More important, you decided not to give up on Jerzy's subsidy-snatch plan. You knew Dierdorf was worried about me because it looked like I'd been working hand-in-glove with Jerzy.”

“So
that's
why that punk came after me in Denver,” Uncle D said.

“Right. Then Ms. DeHoic here told Dierdorf that she could get him together with me here to work out a deal. She figured that maybe I'd shoot him or maybe he'd shoot me or, in a pinch, maybe she'd shoot both of us, but any of those outcomes would set up a subsidy-switch even better than Jerzy's original plan would have. Thanks to you, Uncle D, I had a channel to Dierdorf and managed to get a message to him that he shouldn't show up.”

“You do realize that you can't prove any of this, right?” DeHoic demanded.

“I'm not really in the proving things business, dumpling. Being a politician, I'm more in the shameless insinuation and underhanded manipulation business.”

“So are we coming to the underhanded manipulation part?” DeHoic sounded like she'd gotten pretty much all of her piss and vinegar back.

“Uh huh.” I bent over and picked up the thumb-drive. “I strongly suspect that this is a plant and that you planted it. I know companies make bedframes with hidden compartments where guys can hide pot and coke and porn from their wives and their kids—but the police know about that too. No way a crime-scene search in a high-profile murder investigation missed that secret drawer. Whatever is on here, you put it there, planning to use me as a cut-out to get it to the police without any record of your involvement.”

“Get to the manipulation stuff,” DeHoic said, “because this background is pretty boring.”

“The most logical explanation for the murder is that Dierdorf got wind that Jerzy had targeted him and did unto Jerzy before Jerzy could do unto him.”

“So what?”

“So if it should somehow get back to Dierdorf that you were shopping around a database that you said would compromise him, his reaction would be predictable, don't you think?”

DeHoic glared at Klimchock.

“Did Dierdorf send you here?”

“Nope.” Klimchock shared a cheery smile with us. “I warned him off and that was it. He did mention to me that you'd said you'd leave the front door open for him—thanks very much—but no way he was coming. I'm an entrepreneur, though. I thought if there was something here that he might find it useful to know, he'd be grateful if I got it for him. We know from scripture that we are not to bury our talents but to multiply them tenfold. Matthew, Chapter twenty-five, verses fourteen to thirty.”

“If this thumb-drive ends up in brother Klimchock's hands, Ms. DeHoic,” I said, “the way I see things you would only have one real good option: have your shyster go to the FBI with whatever information potentially incriminating Dierdorf you have, and let the Feds take it from there. Immunity shouldn't be much of a problem. I can guarantee you the FBI wants him more than it wants you.”

DeHoic's face paled. There's fear and then there's FEAR, the kind you can smell, that makes you sick to your stomach. I sensed the second kind oozing out of her. She took a couple of breaths, though, and when she spoke she did it in a calm voice with only a little edge to it.

“Now listen to me. Carefully. This isn't a game. We're not talking about getting some in-bred halfwit elected to Congress from Lickspittle, Mississippi. This is real life about real people with real guns—and if you give that thumb-drive to this Bible-thumping yahoo to pass on to Dierdorf, you will have real blood on your hands.”

“As long as it isn't my blood, darlin', I have no problem with that.”

“That's my girl.” Uncle D said that with lip-smacking pride.