Nothing In Her Way (10 page)

“Mike,” she said suddenly, staring at me with a startled expression, “what makes your clothes so lumpy?”

“Oh.” I’d forgotten all about the crap game. “Money.”

She started laughing and slid down off the hood. I caught her and held her up. She was shrieking, and in a minute it struck me as funny and I began, too. We leaned on each other and howled.

Donnelly was very far away then—Donnelly and Bolton and Charlie. And even Lachlan. But it didn’t last long.

She said a strange thing as we got into the elevator to go up to the room I’d got at the hotel. I only half noticed it at the time, but I remembered it later. We were standing in the rear of the car, and I wasn’t paying any attention to anyone except her.

“Darling,” she asked quietly, “will there be another one at Hialeah?”

I turned and stared at her. “Another what?”

She looked confused and changed suddenly to Spanish. “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “I’m so sorry. I just forget.”

We were on our way up to our room, and I didn’t think any more about it then.

Who would?

We had fought a lot when we were married, and the thing we had fought about more than anything else was Lachlan. I could forget him once in a while, but she never could. She’d flare up and accuse me of being easy-going, lazy, and aimless. I wasn’t dedicated.

I took the attitude that since we hadn’t found him yet, there was no use staying in a perpetual uproar about him. He might even be dead, as far as we knew, and I didn’t see any future in devoting our lives to anything as frustrating as trying to get even with a dead man. She couldn’t see it that way, though. Weren’t we still looking for him? We had to be ready to move in on him if we ever picked up his trail.

We watched the airline and steamship passenger lists in the New York, Miami, and New Orleans papers for all travel to and from Latin America. For a long time we had a detective agency working on it. We wrote endless letters to consuls in Central and South American cities. We picked up his trail in half a dozen cities, but it was always an old trail and he was gone. He’d disposed of his interest in the old firm of Dunbar & Belen long ago, and had moved out of the country when a new regime came into power. He’d been mixed up in oil in Venezuela, an airline in Colombia, and a land-development swindle of some kind in Panama. He made a lot of money, one way or another. But so far as we could learn, he still hadn’t come back to the States.

All this effort had been to find Lachlan himself. We’d never bothered much with Goodwin; that is, until Cathy had heard of him from her friend Elaine Holman. She said she’d learned from a few things the Holman girl had let drop that her uncle, whose name was Goodwin, had spent some time in Central America during his younger days. This and the name had started her wondering, so she had made a trip to Wyecross to find out. This had still been a more or less side-line issue, however; Lachlan was always the one we were after.

But it hadn’t been the search that caused all the fights. The thing I could never go along with was her preoccupation with confidence games. She collected them. She studied them the way some people study chess, or Lee’s campaigns in the Civil War. She read everything she could find about them, and devised endless ones of her own, and always she’d lose patience with me because I couldn’t keep up any steady interest in them. It wasn’t surprising that she knew people like Charlie and Bolton, because bunco artists had always fascinated her. It was part of getting ready to cut Lachlan down, because we were going to find him someday, weren’t we?

And now we had. But I didn’t know the half of it yet.

It was early afternoon. I lay on the bed and watched her. She was sitting at the writing desk, dressed in a blue robe and mules, and the red hair was all in a jumble from running her hand through it. She was chewing a pencil and writing something.

“This would be a fine day to be married,” I said. “If you’d comb your hair.”

She frowned at the paper. “You can make an honest woman of me sometime when we’re not busy.”

“Are we busy?”

“Well, I am,” she said pointedly.

I lit a cigarette. “Well, let me know when you can work me into your schedule.”

“You’re already in it, amigo. Do you know how much money you won?”

“No,” I said.

“Guess.”

“Four pocketsful. Or is pocketfuls?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mike, you’re hopeless. You won nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars.”

“Well, it’s better than a kick in the backside with a frozen boot. What are you driving at? Besides going through my pockets while I’m asleep?”

“I’m adding up how much money we have altogether. With the sixty-five thousand—”

“You realize, of course,” I said, “that you’re going to get a bill from Charlie and Bolton for half of that, sooner or later.” I was still kidding on the outside, but I was serious.

She smiled, a little coldly. “I have no objection to their trying, I’m sure. If they didn’t learn last time—”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll try. Incidentally, do you suppose they’re wise to it yet?”

“Oh, certainly. They weren’t fooled for any longer than it took them to discover that wasn’t a police car. It was a U-Drive-It.”

I don’t know what made me think of it just then, but I suddenly remembered the strange thing she’d said in the elevator. I tried to remember it.

“Say, what was that crazy remark you made in the elevator?” I asked.

“When?”

“This morning. Something about Hialeah.”

“Oh.” She frowned and pushed her paper work aside and put a cigarette in her mouth. “That was it, darling. The opening gun of what we’ve waited sixteen years for.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Do you remember the man who was standing on your left? Big man with a deep tan?”

“Vaguely. Why?”

She struck a match and stared at me through cigarette smoke. “That,” she said, “was Martin Lachlan.”

“What!” I rolled over and sat up. I stared back at her.

“Mr. Martin Lachlan, swindler, oil man, playboy, big-game fisherman, lecher, and soon-to-be-sucker.”

“Wait a minute. You knew he was in Reno?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“So that explains it. I see it now. I’ve been wondering how you knew I was here. You didn’t, did you? It was Lachlan that brought you.”

“Mike, stop yelling. I didn’t come here to see Lachlan. We’re going to see him in San Francisco. I came here because I had to find you. And the way I knew you were here is really quite simple. I couldn’t find you in Las Vegas. I knew you’d be in one or the other.”

I calmed down a little. “All right. But how did you find out he was here?”

“The detective agency. The one I’ve had working on it for the past year. I got a report from them just before I left San Antonio. Lachlan’s here because he’s trying to reach a property settlement with his third wife. She’s staying at a dude ranch here, to divorce him.”

“But how’d you recognize him? You don’t remember what he looked like any more than I do.”

Without a word she opened her purse, which was lying on the desk. She took out something and sailed it across to me on the bed. I picked it up. It was a snapshot. “From the detective agency,” she said.

He was a powerfully built man who’d probably be in his late forties. It was a bold, self-assured face, and there was something about the way he held himself that gave you the idea he was one of those overbearing blowhards who’s always telling and showing you he’s just as good a man as he was twenty years ago. There wasn’t anything of the simpleton about him, though. The eyes told you better than that. They looked sharp and tough.

“A hard nut to crack,” I said, and sailed it back.

She smiled. “Not too hard.”

“He’s no fool. His record tells you that.”

“I know,” she said. “But that just makes it interesting.” Her eyes were shining. She was in love with the idea.

“All right,” I said. “But you still haven’t explained that screwball remark in the elevator.”

She smiled again. “It’s really quite simple, Mike. It was a plant.”

“A what?”

“Something that will stick in his mind. He heard it, because I saw him look around. It’ll puzzle him for a while, and then he’ll forget it. But the next time he sees us he’ll remember it. And he’ll be curious.”

“He won’t be half as curious as I am,” I said.

She got up and began pacing the floor. She ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s just what I’ve been telling you all these years, Mike, you Latin bird brain. We’ve found Lachlan, and you’ve got no plan of operation.”

“No,” I said. “But that’s what we’re going to do now. We’re going to figure one out.”

“It won’t be necessary, I assure you. I took care of that long ago. It’s all set. With just a little help from us, Mr. Lachlan is going to dig his own pit, walk into it, skin himself, and pass us the pelt. Now, do you want to know how it’s done?”

“How? What kind of flimflam is it?”

“The fixed race.”

“Cut it out, Cathy,” I said impatiently. “This is no time for joking.”

“I’m not joking. That’s the way we do it.”

“Don’t be a sap,” I said. “Didn’t you look at that picture? Don’t you remember his record? He’s no idiot. He’ll never go for anything as corny as that.”

She blew a smoke ring and looked at it. “You think not?” she asked smugly.

“Of course not. You tell any six-year-old kid you’re going to let him in on a fixed race and he’ll laugh in your face.”

“Yes. I know. That’s the reason I’m going to use it. I want to make it as humiliating as possible. I want to rub his face in it.”

“But it won’t work, I tell you,” I said angrily.

“Mike, you’re being a little naive. In the first place, you have no conception at all of the depths of human credulity. And in the second place, you don’t tell him you can fix a race. You convince him you can by telling him you can’t.”

“Now, that makes sense,” I said sarcastically.

“It makes a lot of sense when you understand what I mean.”

“If I ever do,” I said. “Suppose you go back to that crazy thing in the elevator and start filling me in from there.”

“All right,” she said. She sat down on the side of the bed. “To begin with, one of the angles of the thing is the fact that we both speak Spanish.”

“So does Lachlan.”

She smiled. “Exactly. If he didn’t, it would be utterly pointless. But he does, and he doesn’t have any idea at all that we know it. And when we meet again, if he’s curious about us, he’ll never let us know he does understand it, and that’s very important.

“Now, remember what I said. I mean, the way it would sound to somebody who understands both languages. I asked if there was going to be another ‘one’ at Hialeah. Hialeah, of course, is obviously a race track to anybody. And then, as I knew you would, you asked, ‘One what?’ Now, that could mean, of course, that you didn’t have any idea what I was talking about, but since there were other people present it could also mean, ‘Shut up, you damn fool.’ So I apologized, very contritely, in another language, which I obviously hoped nobody listening would understand. You see how simple it is?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You sound like Charlie.”

“Oh,” she said, “all that’s elementary. The really dirty work is yet to come.”

“All right, all right,” I said. “But, Cathy, it looks to me as if we’re both off the track in one thing, right at the beginning. And that is, we’ve never thought of any reason why Lachlan should go for any kind of flimflam. They all work on the sucker’s desire to make a few fast bucks. And if Lachlan is already loaded, how can we interest him?”

“Because,” she explained patiently, “nobody has plenty of it, and nobody ever will. And on top of that he’s paying big chunks of alimony to two wives already, and number three is getting ready to push up to the trough. And don’t forget the little matter of income tax. Who couldn’t use a few hundred thousand that didn’t have to show up on March fifteenth?”

“O.K.,” I shrugged. “But I still say this race thing is crazy. So we go to him and whisper in his ear that we’ve got a sure thing in the second at Belmont Park. So then he calls the cops.”

“Dear old Mike,” she said exasperatedly. “We don’t whisper anything in his ear, now or ever. We try our best to avoid him. We don’t know anything about races, fixed or otherwise. And when he comes around pestering you about it, you assure him, quite honestly, that to the best of your knowledge there is no such thing as a fixed race.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You will,” she said.

If the world had lost a great actor when Charlie became a crook, it lost a brilliant general when Cathy was born a girl. The next week was one of the busiest I’d ever put in in my life. When you looked at the thing at close range and out of context, it didn’t make, much sense; all we seemed to be doing was spending money in one mad shopping spree. But when you saw it in perspective and as part of the whole plan, it was all as carefully thought out as the Normandy invasion. We drove to San Francisco and registered at the St. Francis as Dr. and Mrs. Michael Rogers.

I went to a tailor and ordered five new suits and assorted tweed sports coats and slacks and went to a shirtmaker for a couple of dozen new shirts. She began looting the San Francisco shops. She’d always had wonderful taste in clothes, and for once in her life she didn’t seem to care in the slightest what anything cost, so before long she began to stand out as a clothes horse, even in San Francisco. I’d meet her to take her to lunch and when I’d see her coming along the street in the spring sunshine she looked like an angel with charge accounts.

“Could I buy you this flower stand?” I asked.

“Silly, why?”

“We could throw flowers in front of the cable cars.”

“You’re nice, Mike, but impractical.”

“What do we have to do now?”

“The Rotunda of the City of Paris. We’re still looking for pictures for the apartment. Remember?”

“We haven’t got an apartment. Remember?”

“We will have.”

And we did. We got just the one we wanted in the Montlake, the big apartment hotel where Lachlan lived. It was six rooms besides the servants’ quarters, with a view of the bay all the way from the Golden Gate to Alcatraz and a doorman who looked a little like Admiral Drake except that he dressed better. When I learned the rent I managed to keep from wincing.

“We’ll be ready to move in in a day or two, Mike,” she said excitedly that night in the room at the St. Francis. We had gone up to get cleaned up for dinner. A boy had brought up a bottle of Scotch and some ice, and I fixed us a drink. She had on a new robe about the color of moonlit fog and probably less than half as dense. She was something to see.

“You’re something to see,” I said.

“So I noticed, you Latin goat. Just hold some ice cubes on your wrist for a moment, or think of me as your ex-wife. We have to talk business.”

“What now?”

“How would you like a Jaguar?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I used to be married to one.”

“Idiot! I mean the car.”

“Why?” I asked. “Are you turning in the Cadillac?”

“No. The Jaguar is for you.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s just what we need. Two cars, I mean. Nobody’s found space enough to park one around here since the Coolidge administration, so now we’re going to circle the block with two.”

She lit a cigarette and sat down in a big chair. “We need it,” she informed me. “It’s more window dressing.”

“That brings up a point,” I said. “Aren’t we overdoing it a little?”

“No,” she said definitely. “Not for Lachlan. He’s the type of nouveau riche who thinks money’s for show. You have to club people with it if you have it. I know all this is a little thick, but subtlety’d be lost on him.”

I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. But if Lachlan doesn’t go for it, it’ll be an expensive horse laugh.”

“Don’t worry,” she said calmly. “He’ll bite.”

It was one of the primary booby traps in her campaign. She’d explained it to me that day in Reno, in pointing out why we’d had to have so much money to tackle it. I didn’t understand at first.

“It doesn’t match up,” I said. “Michael Rogers is a veterinarian. Well—I mean, they probably do all right, and maybe they even eat steak twice a week, but I never heard of one who had a private pipeline into Fort Knox.”

“Well?” She smiled.

“Oh!” I said.

“You see? There it is. What would be your idea if you were a bank president and noticed one of your seventy-a-week bookkeepers or tellers was coming to work in a Mercedes-Benz and buying his wife a new mink every year?”

“I’d call the auditors. Or grab my piggie bank and scram before he got that too.”

“In other words, you might have a faint suspicion that he had some other source of income?”

“All right,” I said. “You don’t have to draw me a picture.”

It was fine that week—most of the time. I noticed, though, that the moments when she could relax and laugh or even pay much attention to my telling her how lovely she was were becoming more and more rare. She was completely absorbed in this Lachlan thing. It was becoming an obsession with her. We had to rehearse it by the hour. When we weren’t talking about it, she was thinking about it, going through each of the moves in her mind.

And I began to catch myself thinking about Goodwin more than I had. I’d quit worrying so much about the police as time went by and we still seemed safe enough half a continent away, but I had a habit of suddenly—and for no reason at all—-remembering Goodwin himself or his wife and their house in Wyecross. I wondered how he had raised the $65,000, whether it had taken everything he had. And then I’d curse myself. What did I care how he raised it? How much did I suppose he’d worried when he’d helped Lachlan ruin the rest of us?

And there was one other thing. I awoke one night to find her pounding on my chest and crying out that I was breaking her in pieces.

“Mike! What on earth are you trying to do?” she panted.

I was sweating. My pajama top was wet and my hands were shaking. I had to switch on the light and look at her to reassure myself. “It was just a dream,” I said. “A bad dream.”

“For heaven’s sake, what did you dream about? Dinosaurs?”

“Donnelly.”

“Oh, will you ever forget Donnelly?”

“No,” I said. “And I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“I shipped him out here. Remember?”

We moved into the Montlake the next day, and it must have looked like an Indian prince taking off for his summer palace. There were sixteen pieces of luggage, I think, besides all the packages and hatboxes and a fur coat or two.

The apartment was on the ninth floor. I stood by the big windows in the living room and looked out over the bay. It was sparkling and clear in the morning sunshine, and I could see a boat going out to Alcatraz. They’ve got a view over there too, I thought, but they don’t like it. A whole rock covered with tough guys and wisenheimers who knew more than the cops. And just beyond, out of sight up the bay, was San Quentin, where the state of California kept its smart characters who could never be caught. I remembered that awful minute in the hotel room in El Paso when I’d opened the door and seen her standing there with the two men in white Texas-sheriff hats. How many warnings did I need?

I shrugged it off, a little angrily. I was getting as nervous as an old woman. Either we wanted Lachlan or we didn’t. And if we did, I couldn’t spend all my time standing around shaking like a chicken. He’d taken his chances, and if we wanted a rematch we had to be as tough as he was.

We bought the Jaguar that morning and drove it over on Fillmore to try it out on a hill. After that we rolled it down Bayshore to San Mateo, went over to Skyline, and came back to the beach and to the Cliff House for lunch. For a while we were like a couple of high-school kids with a new hot rod. We had a bottle of wine with the abalone and we laughed a lot and were very happy, watching the seals out in the kelp beds and the big ground swells heaving up to batter at the rocks. When we came back to the apartment there was a Chrysler station wagon with a lot of dust on it pulled into the loading zone ahead of us and the doorman and two bellboys were unloading luggage and an armful of heavy boat rods and salt-water reels like drums. The big bareheaded man in the suede jacket was wearing sunglasses, but I saw him turn and do a double take at her as we went past, and I knew we were closing in on him at last. It was Lachlan.

I got up early the next morning and made a trip down to the Skid Row south of Market. To put on this act of ours we had to have the help of one other person—just a brief appearance in the early stages—and he had to speak Spanish. She even had that all figured out. It had to be somebody with enough intelligence to swing his part and still not a wise guy who’d ask too many questions or want to muscle in himself.

And we had to be sure he’d disappear when his job was done. There was an answer to that, which I thought of almost as soon as she did: a wetback.

I took the cable car down to the foot of Powell and walked on over to Howard. It was another beautiful morning, even here among the flophouses and cheap taverns and hole-in-the-wall cafes smelling of grease and chile. A wino slept with his head against a fire hydrant with an empty bottle in the gutter beside him, and somebody had stolen his shoes. There were half a dozen employment agencies along here with big blackboards on the walls and men standing around listlessly as if they had even forgotten what they were waiting for. I tried the first one and didn’t see anyone who looked promising. In the next one my luck was better. He was a young Mexican in clean khakis and a leather coat.

I went over to him. “Good morning. Looking for a job?”

He nodded, a little warily. The jobs came off the board he was watching, not from strangers wandering in off the street.

“You speak English?” I asked.

He nodded again. “I was born in San Antonio. I speak much English.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I was in San Antonio myself, during the war. Stationed at Fort Lewis. You know where that is?”

“Oh, sure. I live near to it. I worked there.”

He looked pretty good and as if he might do. He was a good liar, and a wetback, and that’s what we wanted. “It’s all right,” I said in Spanish, and grinned at him. “I don’t care what part of Mexico you’re from. I’m not an Immigration man.” He was fast on the uptake, all right, for it took him only a second to see he’d gone into the bucket on that Fort Lewis thing. Lewis is in Washington.

“How are you called?” I asked.

“Juan Benavides.”

He probably wasn’t, but it didn’t make any difference. “I’m glad to know you, Juan,” I said. “My name’s Rogers. Let’s go get a cup of coffee. Perhaps I have a job for you.”

We went over to Mission and found a restaurant a little cleaner than most. He was broke, so I ordered him some ham and eggs while I got coffee. While he was eating, I gave him the proposition.

“I’ll give you an outfit of clothes, two hundred dollars American money, and a bus ticket to anywhere you want to go. The job won’t take more than a half hour, with maybe two or three hours’ coaching, but you may have to wait around a week or ten days till I get ready for you. Naturally, I’ll pay for your room and meals while you’re waiting. How about it?”

He stopped his assault on the ham and eggs for a moment to study me with grave Latin suspicion. “What class of job is this?”

“It’s just a little joke I want to play on a friend of mine. I need somebody who speaks Spanish. Very good Spanish, too, not like just any peon.”

“A serious joke?”

“No,” I said. “Not serious.”

“Maybe there will be trouble with the police?” He was a little suspicious of that “joke on a friend” angle, as I knew he would be if he was smart enough to be of any use to us. However, I had a pretty good idea as to what form his reluctance would take.

“No,” I said. “This is not a joke that would interest the police.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I could not do a job of this class for less than three hundred dollars. As you can see, it would take great skill.”

He’ll do, I thought. He doesn’t even know what the job is, and already it takes great skill and three hundred dollars. Maybe we should take him in as a partner.

“Two-fifty,” I said.

“Two hundred and seventy-five, and a gold watch chain with the suit.”

“Two hundred and sixty and a gold watch chain,” I said. There really wasn’t any sense to it, but you can never afford to lose face in one of those transactions by giving in on the first round. It isn’t actually the money so much as a matter of personal honor.

“I accept your job,” he said.

I took him over to a men’s furnishing store on Market and let him pick out the whole outfit from the shoes up. He settled for a sort of semizoot affair in something that looked electric blue in the store and would probably be worse in daylight, and got a high-crowned snap-brim hat to go with it. It was about what I’d had in mind, and it all fitted the picture very well. He had to look sharp. I paid for it and gave him the alteration slip for the suit and the Montlake address and apartment number.

“The clerk says it’ll be ready day after tomorrow,” I said. “As soon as you get it, come on up to this address and see me. Here’s twenty dollars. Get yourself a room, and when you come up, be sure to bring me the hotel telephone number, or at least the name, so I can look it up. You understand all that?”

“I understand. Do you remember the gold watch chain?”

“It will be there.”

We went out and shook hands on the sidewalk. “Until later,” I said. “Until later.”

I watched him take off across the street. Of course he could always pick up his new clothes and lam, with all of it clear profit, but I didn’t think he would. He’d probably show up.

I walked back to Powell. The usual crowd of tourists blocked traffic around the cable-car turntable, but I managed to climb, onto the step as the car started clanging up the hill with people hanging on everywhere, like a subway car turned wrong side out. We only have two cars now, I thought; I have to do this. The trouble was I was just as big a sucker for the cable cars as the other tourists.

When we made the stop at Sutter some more people piled on till we looked like a bunch of grapes being dragged up a hill. Some tall guy made a landing on the step beside me and I tried to crowd over enough to give him something to hang onto. His arm was across in front of my face and our feet were so mixed up I didn’t know whether I was standing on mine or his.

“A little crowded, eh, Belen?” a voice said in my ear. I turned, and Judd Bolton and I were rubbing noses like two Eskimos. Our arms were across each other’s necks as we held onto the stanchions.