Goodbye California (12 page)

‘Sorry. Finders keepers. Want to admit in court that you abetted burglarious entry? Don’t be upset. Jeff’s got a little present for you.’ Jeff placed
the wad of banknotes on the table. ‘Ten thousand dollars exactly. All yours. How many consecutively listed brand new two-dollar notes are there, Jeff?’

‘Forty.’

‘Manna,’ Dunne said reverently. ‘I’ll have the names of the bank, teller and drawer by noon tomorrow. Pity you weren’t able to find out the name of the drawer.’

‘Told you. Donahure was asleep. I’ll go back and ask him later on.’

‘Like that? May be pushing your luck, Sergeant.’

‘No. I’ve had the great misfortune to know Chief Donahure longer than you have. Man’s a bully. I know it’s commonplace to say that all bullies are cowards, which is not at all true: but in his case it is. Take his face. A disaster, but the only one he has and he probably cherishes it. He saw what happened to his stake-out’s face tonight.’

‘Mm.’ Dunne’s momentarily beatific expression had been replaced by a frown, and it wasn’t because of anything that Ryder had said. He tapped the bundle of notes. ‘This. How am I to account for this, to explain it away? I mean, where did it come from?’

‘Yes.’ It was Jeff’s turn to frown. ‘I didn’t think of it either.’

‘Easy. Donahure gave it to you.’

‘He what?’

‘Despite the fact that he has about half a million in ill-gotten gains salted away under seven or eight forged names, we all know that he’s basically a decent, upright, honourable man, deeply committed to the welfare of his fellow man, to upholding the rule of justice and ruthlessly crushing bribery and corruption wherever it raises its ugly head. He was approached by the syndicate responsible for the San Ruffino break-in and given this money in return for a blow-by-blow account of the steps being taken by the State and Federal authorities in investigating this case. You and he worked out a plan to feed false and misleading information to the crooks. Naturally, he handed you this tainted money for safe keeping. You have to admire the man’s unshakeable integrity.’

‘Ingenious, but you’ve overlooked the obvious. All Donahure has to do is to deny it.’

‘With his fingerprints all over those notes – especially those new ones? He’s either got to go with the story or admit that he had the notes cached away in the house which would leave him the awkward task of explaining where he got them from. Which option do you think he’ll elect?’

Dunne said admiringly: ‘You have a very devious mind.’

‘Set a thief to catch a thief?’ Ryder smiled. ‘Maybe. Two things, Major. When you or whoever handle those notes don’t touch the top right. Fingerprints, especially on the two-dollar bills.’

Dunne looked at the notes. He said: ‘I’d estimate there’s about two thousand bills there. You expect me to try them
all
for fingerprints?’

‘I said you or whoever.’

‘Well, thanks. And the second thing?’

‘Have you got a fingerprinting set here?’

‘Lots. Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Ryder was vague. ‘You never know when those things might not come in handy.’

Judge LeWinter lived in a splendidly impressive house as befitted one widely tipped to become the next chairman of the State Supreme Court. Within a few miles of the Californian coast is to be found a greater variety of home architecture than anywhere, but, even by such standards, LeWinter’s home was unusual, a faithful replica of an Alabaman ante-bellum house, gleaming white, with its two-storey colonnaded porch, balconies, a profusion of surrounding magnolias and a plethora of white oak and long-bearded Spanish moss, neither of which seemed to find the climate very congenial. Within so imposing a residence – one couldn’t call it a home – could only dwell, one would have thought, a pillar of legal rectitude. One could be wrong.

How wrong Ryder and his son found out when they opened the bedroom door without the courtesy of a prior knock and found the legal luminary in bed, but not alone: and he wasn’t being not
alone with his wife, either. The judge, bronzed, white-haired and white-moustached, the absence of a white winged collar and black string neck-tie an almost jarring note, looked perfectly at home in the gilded Victorian iron bedstead. Which was more than could be said for his companion, a sadly over-painted and youthful demi-mondaine who looked as if she would have been much more at home in what could delicately be termed as the outermost fringes of society. Both wore startled and wide-eyed expressions as people tend to wear when confronted with two hooded men bearing guns, the girl’s expression shading gradually into a guilty fear, the judge’s, predictably, into outrage. His speech was equally predictable.

‘What the devil! Who the hell are you?’

‘We’re no friends, you can be sure of that,’ Ryder said. ‘We know who you are. Who’s the young lady?’ He didn’t bother to wait for the inevitable silence but turned to Jeff. ‘Bring your camera, Perkins?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Pity.’ He looked at LeWinter. ‘I’m sure you would have loved us to send a snapshot to your wife to show that you’re not pining too much in her absence.’ The judge’s outrage subsided. ‘Right, Perkins, the prints.’

Jeff was no expert, but he was not long enough out of police school to have forgotten how to make clean prints. A deflated LeWinter, who clearly found the situation beyond him, offered
neither objection nor resistance. When Jeff had finished he glanced at the girl and then at Ryder, who hesitated and nodded. Ryder said to her: ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you, Miss. What’s your name?’

She compressed her lips and looked away. Ryder sighed, picked up a purse which could only be hers, opened it and emptied the contents on to a dressing table. He rifled through those, selected an envelope and said: ‘Bettina Ivanhoe, eight-eight-eight South Maple.’ He looked at the girl, frightened, flaxen-haired, with high and rather wide Slavonic cheekbones: but for her efforts to improve on nature she would have been strikingly good-looking. ‘Ivanhoe? Ivanov would be nearer it. Russian?’

‘No. I was born here.’

‘I’ll bet your parents weren’t.’ She made no reply. He looked through the scattered contents of the purse and picked up two photographs, one each of the girl and LeWinter. That made her more than a one-time visitor. There had to be a forty-year gap in their ages. ‘Darby and Joan,’ Ryder said. The contempt in his voice was matched by his gesture of flicking the cards to the floor.

‘Blackmail?’ LeWinter tried to inject some contempt of his own, but he wasn’t up to it. ‘Extortion, eh?’

Ryder said indifferently: ‘I’d blackmail you to death if you were what I think you might be. In
fact, I’d put you to death without any blackmail.’ The words hung chillingly in the air. ‘I’m after something else. Where’s your safe and where’s the key to it?’

LeWinter sneered, but there was – it could have been imagined – a hint of relief behind the sneer. ‘A cheap-jack heist-man.’

‘Unbecoming language from the bench.’ Ryder produced and opened a pen-knife, then approached the girl. ‘Well, LeWinter?’

LeWinter folded his arms and looked resolute.

‘The flower of southern chivalry.’ Ryder tossed the knife to Jeff, who placed the tip against LeWinter’s second chin and pressed.

‘It’s red,’ Jeff said. ‘Just the same as the rest of us. Should I have sterilized this?’

‘Down and to the right,’ Ryder said. ‘That’s where the external jugular is.’

Jeff removed the knife and examined it. The blade was narrow and only the top half-inch had blood on it. To LeWinter, who had stopped looking resolute, it must have seemed that the arterial flood-gates had burst. His voice was husky. ‘The safe’s in my study downstairs. The key’s in the bathroom.’

Ryder said: ‘Where?’

‘In a jar of shaving soap.’

‘Odd place for an honest man to keep a key. The contents of this safe should be interesting.’ He went into the bathroom and returned in a few seconds, key in hand. ‘Do you have staff on the premises?’

‘No.’

‘Probably not. Think of the stirring tales they could tell your wife. Believe him, Perkins?’

‘On principle, no.’

‘Me neither.’ Ryder produced three sets of handcuffs – all, until very recently, the property of the police chief. One set secured the girl’s right wrist to a bedpost, the second LeWinter’s left to the other bedpost, the third, passing behind a central head-rail, secured their other two wrists together. For gags a couple of pillow-slips sufficed. Before securing LeWinter’s gag Ryder said: ‘A hypocrite like you, who makes all those stirring speeches against the Washington gun lobby, is bound to have some lying around. Where are they?’

‘Study.’

Jeff began a meticulous search of the room. Ryder went below, located the study, located the gun cupboard and opened it. No Kalashnikovs. But one particular hand-gun, of a make unknown to him, took his attention. He wrapped it in a handkerchief and dropped it into one of his capacious coat pockets.

The safe was massive, six feet by three, weighing well over a quarter of a ton and built at some time in the remote past before safe-breakers had developed the highly sophisticated techniques of today. The locking mechanism and key were woefully inadequate. Had the safe been freestanding Ryder would have opened it without
hesitation. But it was set into a brick wall to a depth of several inches, a most unusual feature for that type of safe. Ryder returned upstairs, removed LeWinter’s gag and produced his knife.

‘Where’s the cut-off switch for the safe?’

‘What damned switch?’

‘You were too quick in telling me where the key was. You wanted me to open that safe.’ For the second time that night LeWinter winced, more in apprehension than pain, as the knife tip punctured the skin of his neck. ‘The switch that cuts the alarm relay to the local sheriff’s office.’

LeWinter was more obdurate this time, but not markedly so. Ryder returned downstairs and slid back a panel above the study door to expose a simple switch. He clicked this off and opened the safe. Half of it was designed as a filing cabinet, the files, in the customary fashion, being suspended by metal lugs from parallel rails. Nearly all of those were given over to personal notes on court cases that had come before him. Two files were marked ‘Private Correspondence’, but apparently weren’t all that private, as some of them had been signed on his behalf by his secretary, (Miss) B. Ivanhoe: the young lady upstairs seemed to have carried secretarial devotion to her boss to lengths above and beyond the call of duty. In the shelves above only three objects caught his attention and were removed. One was a list of names and telephone numbers. The second was a leather-bound copy
of Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe.
The third was a green and also leather-bound notebook.

As notebooks go it was large – about eight inches by five – and secured by a locked, brass clasp, a sufficient deterrent against the young or merely curious but of no avail against the ill-intentioned armed with a knife. Ryder sliced open the spine and rifled through the exposed pages – which told him nothing, inasmuch as they were covered with neatly-typed figures, not letters. He wasted no time on the notebook. He knew nothing of cryptography, which didn’t worry him: the FBI had its own highly specialized department of code-breakers who could decipher anything except the most highly sophisticated military codes, and even those they could do if given enough time. Time. Ryder looked at his watch. It was one minute to eleven.

He found Jeff methodically going through the pockets of LeWinter’s considerable number of custom-made suits. LeWinter and the girl were still resting comfortably. Ryder ignored them and switched on a TV set. He didn’t bother to select any particular station: the same programme would be on every one. Ryder didn’t bother to look at the screen. He didn’t appear to be watching anything at all but, in fact, he didn’t allow the couple on the bed to move out of peripheral vision.

The announcer, who might just coincidentally have been dressed anyway in a dark suit and tie,
used his State funeral voice. He confined himself to the facts. The San Ruffino nuclear power reaction station had been broken into that late afternoon and the criminals had made good their escape, taking with them weapons-grade material and hostages. The precise amount of material taken was specified, as were the names, addresses and occupations of the hostages. Neither the person giving this information nor the source from which it had come had been identified, but the genuineness of the information was beyond dispute as it had been confirmed in detail by the authorities. The same authorities were carrying out an intensive investigation. The usual meaningless poppycock, Ryder thought; they had no leads to investigate. He switched off the set and looked at Jeff.

‘Notice anything, Perkins?’

‘The same thing as you were noticing. What you can see of Casanova’s face here didn’t show much change in expression. Didn’t show anything, in fact. Guilty as hell, I’d say.’

‘Good as a signed confession. That news was no news to him.’ He looked at LeWinter and appeared momentarily lost in thought before saying: ‘I’ve got it. Your rescuers, I mean. I’ll send along a reporter and a photographer from the
Globe.’

‘Isn’t that interesting?’ Jeff said. ‘I do believe Don Juan has registered a slight change of expression.’

LeWinter had, in fact, registered a marked change in expression. The bronzed skin had assumed a greyish hue and the suddenly protuberant eyes seemed bent on parting company with their sockets. One could enjoy the
Globe
without being able to read too well. It specialized in artistic portraits of unclad feminine illiterates who spent their evenings reading Sophocles in the original, in candid shots of the newsworthy caught in apparently compromising or undignified situations, and, for the intelligentsia among their readers, extensive muck-raking couched in terms of holy crusades against shocked morality. All of this was, perforce, in the very simplest of prose. And such was the intolerable pressure brought to bear through the demands imposed by the clamorous urgency, the evangelistic immediacy and the socially important content of those journalistic imperatives that the overworked editorial staff were frequently and reluctantly compelled to encapsulate, hold over or, most commonly, altogether forget, such trivia as the international news or, indeed, any but the most salaciously elevating items of the local news. One did not require telepathic aid to guess that the judge’s mind was touching on such matters in general and, in particular, on page one, where the unretouched and considerably enlarged picture of himself and his handcuffed amorita would leave room only for the appalled caption.