Silencer (6 page)

‘Hey, they weren't all fortune-hunters,' Amanda said.

Morgan Scholes uttered a dismissive snort. ‘They were wimps, girl. Transparent as all hell.'

She saw no point in pursuing the matter of old boyfriends, so she let the topic slide. Morgan's opinions tended to be cemented in his brain and therefore unshakable anyway. Besides, she knew that the matter of her past lovers, even if they meant zip to her, wasn't high on Rhees's list of favourite conversation subjects. He had an endearing insecurity at times.

She followed Morgan inside the house, which clung in defiance of gravity to the side of a mountain, and consisted of three wings built around a central courtyard where a clay mermaid lay in a fountain. There were arched walkways, open spaces. In the sunken lounge, stained-glass windows hand-crafted in the Baja filtered and changed the late afternoon sun. Traditional Western art hung on the walls: cowboys in glossy wax coats, a chuck wagon by camp-fire.

‘Gin and tonic OK?'

The old man, dressed in grey slacks and sand-coloured shirt, made the drinks. He passed them out, then sat down next to Amanda and said, ‘You look good in white. Like an angel.'

‘Flattery, Dad. The old silver tongue.'

‘Flattery doesn't enter into it. I never lied to a woman in my life. Made it a rule. Broke it only once and that was when your mother asked me outright if her disease was terminal. I told her no, said she'd get well. Three weeks later, dead.'

‘An excusable lie,' Rhees said.

‘You don't look the woman you love in the eye and tell her she's dying from cancer.'

Amanda tasted her drink. What she remembered of her mother was the voice, soft and Virginian. She'd died when Amanda was three. After that, there had been a series of ‘companions' who came and went quickly because they couldn't compete with the dead. Morgan was more interested in the brutality of business than the delicate structures of relationships anyway. He'd made a fortune pioneering greetings cards with high-art reproductions on their covers. He'd parleyed this into even greater wealth in a series of speculative land deals in the days when property could be bought one morning and sold the next for fabulous profit.

‘It was a damn good marriage,' the old man said.

‘You were fortunate,' Rhees said.

‘Sure I was fortunate. I used to wonder about remarrying, having more kids. Then I'd think, hold on, I've probably used up a whole lifetime's luck with Amanda's mother. You two staying for dinner?'

Amanda said, ‘Not this time. We want to get back before it's too late.'

‘That cabin grows on you,' Scholes remarked. ‘I think you did an admirable thing when you quit, Mandy. You don't like what you're doing, dump it. Move on. You're young.'

‘Relatively.'

Morgan Scholes waved this aside. ‘Forty-two.'

‘Three.'

‘Three then. That's young. Right, John?'

‘Absolutely,' Rhees said.

‘And if you get bored at the cabin, enrol in some college courses, study something different – economics, business. Something practical. It's not like you have money problems.'

‘I have some savings,' Amanda said.

‘Pah. Nickel and dime. I'm talking about your inheritance. I shuffle off, you're a very rich woman.'

‘Let's not talk about shuffling off,' Amanda said.

‘There's nothing wrong with inheriting money, Amanda. What do you want me to do with it? Leave it to some charity? I don't understand why you're always so damn narrow-minded and Bolshevist about it. It's not like it's tainted, for God's sake.'

The subject of her inheritance, which Morgan raised at every opportunity he could, made her uncomfortable. At some point on the graph of her life, she'd decided it was an injustice that one person should inherit another's wealth because of an accident of birth. During her years at law school in Los Angeles she'd worked nights and weekends as a cocktail waitress in a Brentwood hotel, instead of accepting her father's persistent offers of tuition and expenses. It came down to the fact that she wanted to be her own person, not the brat offspring of a rich man.

She didn't need her father's money, and she didn't like the way wealth influenced Morgan's life. He was always consorting with ossified people who just happened to be as rich as himself, industrialists, powerbrokers, men whose wives were face-lifted and ditzy and spent their days in listless shopping or fund-raising for Third World countries they couldn't find on a map if they tried. Wealth bred in some people a kind of blind ignorance, isolated them in a cocoon.

The old man, in a rare display of tact, changed the subject. ‘You're better off out of law anyhow. It's a joke in this country, unless you've got money to burn. Lawyers like only one thing, and it's the folding green. Justice? What's that? John deserves better than a lawyer for a wife when you get right down to it.'

‘How many times, Dad? We're not contemplating marriage.'

‘She ought to have her head examined,' the old man said to Rhees.

Rhees smiled and said, ‘I don't think there's much wrong with Amanda's head, Morgan.'

‘You always take her side, John. Don't encourage her. I want to be there when you and she walk down that aisle, all sweetness and light.'

Amanda glanced at Rhees over her gin and tonic. ‘He doesn't know when to quit, John.'

‘Carve that on my stone,' the old man said. He finished his drink and looked at Amanda for a time, then he said to Rhees, ‘She's stubborn and strong-willed. Don't know where in the world she gets it from.'

He winked at Rhees, then stood up and laughed. ‘Bad habit telling other people what's good for them, huh? Can't break some habits at my time of life.'

‘You mean well,' Amanda said.

‘But the road to hell is paved, yadda yadda,' the old man said. ‘Another drink?'

‘I'm driving,' Rhees said.

‘Not for me,' Amanda remarked.

Morgan Scholes said, ‘I'm in the company of lightweights,' and fixed himself a second drink. Then he looked at his daughter. ‘Say. I just remembered. Some woman's been phoning here for you, Mandy.'

‘Here? What woman?'

‘She called first time two nights ago, then last night again. I must speak to Amanda, she says. I'm in Tuba City, she says.'

‘Tuba City?'

‘That's what she said. I tell her you're not here, and before I can give her the number at the cabin she hangs up.'

‘She doesn't leave her name?'

Scholes shook his head. ‘No, she doesn't.'

‘Describe the voice,' Amanda said.

‘It's low, whispered. Kind of Hispanic accent. She sounds frantic and then she hangs up like she thinks somebody's listening in, or she's in a big hurry. Who do you know in Tuba City?'

Amanda looked down into her drink. Bubbles of tonic popped on the surface. A woman calls and hangs up again quickly. What did that mean? Her mind blanked.

She gazed at Rhees, who was watching her thoughtfully. She saw dying sunlight come in a pale-blue haze through stained-glass. ‘Why didn't you call and tell me this, Dad?' she asked.

‘I've been pretty busy what with one thing and another,' Morgan Scholes said. ‘Who is she anyway?'

She finished her drink. ‘I don't know,' she said.

11

‘I'm racking my brain,' Amanda said in the car. ‘I don't know a soul up in that part of the state.' She lit a cigarette and inhaled smoke a little too quickly.
Frantic
was the word Morgan had used.
I must speak to Amanda
, Yours truly, Frantic, Tuba City.
Hispanic accent
. She didn't want to think.

A shadow rolled through her head, the same smoke signal she'd expelled from her mind when she'd been discussing Galindez with Willie Drumm, the same little shiver of concern she'd felt in Bascombe's office. She shut her eyes. Tuba City, the back-end of beyond. She thought of an endless arid landscape and a voice travelling through telephone wires and the way Galindez had been ferried downstream by the river.

‘Why would somebody phone you at your father's number anyway?' Rhees asked.

‘Maybe she tried our home number first, then when she got no response she looked up Morgan in the book. I don't know.'

Rhees was driving towards Scottsdale from Phoenix. All that remained of the sun were a few spectacular streaks the colour of blood. Downtown Scottsdale was a sequence of traffic lights, all seemingly red. Rhees took a left turn off the main street. He drove until he reached the cul-de-sac where the house he shared with Amanda was located. He parked in the driveway and Amanda strolled ahead of him, unlocked the front door and turned on the lights.

Inside the air was stuffy. They'd been gone a little less than four weeks and yet she felt like an intruder. She went into the living-room, Rhees followed her. More lights. She looked round the room. Their possessions – books, TV, furniture – had that alien quality you sometimes experience when you come back after a vacation. The geometry of the house was all wrong, ceilings too high, windows too large.

Rhees said, ‘Weird.'

‘You feel it?'

‘Yeah, I feel it.'

‘It's like somebody else's house,' Amanda said. ‘I expect if we go into the backyard we'll find duplicates of ourselves emerging from giant pods.'

She walked to the answering machine, then remembered she'd disconnected it before they'd left for the cabin, an act of deliberate severance. Kill the machine.
I don't need and I don't want messages
.

‘You think this mystery woman will call?' Rhees asked.

‘It's a possibility.'

‘I need a drink. Want one?'

‘Please.'

Rhees went inside the kitchen. Amanda could hear him rummaging for ice. She sat on the sofa, glanced at the Adams prints on the walls, chilly black and white rock formations. Objects formerly charged with easy familiarity were shorn of meaning. Even the framed newspaper and magazine clippings that concerned some of her legal cases were related to a person other than herself. It was as if somebody had come here when the house was empty and stripped away the veneer of recognition.

Rhees returned with drinks. ‘We forgot to empty the refrigerator. Something disgusting is growing in there.'

‘Sit beside me.' She patted the sofa. He sat down and touched her wrist. She sipped her drink. She was conscious of the silent black telephone located on the table at her back. She was suddenly uptight, jangled. She wanted the gin to relax her, numb her head a little.

In the distance the shrill whine of a cop car was audible. Night in the city. Deaths and accidents. Casual, drive-by shootings. She yearned for the forest.

‘We should be heading back soon,' Rhees said.

Amanda didn't move.

Rhees got up. ‘Maybe I'll just defuzz the fridge to pass some time while you finish your drink and wait to see if the phone rings.'

He went back inside the kitchen. She listened to the sound of things being clattered around. Jars and bottles, glass knocked on glass impatiently. He didn't want to be here any more than she did. She heard him say, ‘Sweet Jesus, was this sodden mass once a bag of carrots?'

Fifteen minutes dragged past before the telephone rang, and when it did Amanda reached for the receiver at once and spoke her name.

The woman said, ‘Manda, I been trying to phone for days, I can't get you, Manda.'

For a second Amanda couldn't speak. Electricity spiked through her. She was only dimly aware of Rhees materializing in the kitchen doorway with what looked like green compost in his rubber-gloved hand. She leaned forward on the sofa and tried to keep alarm out of her voice. ‘Where are you? Where the hell are you?'

‘It's gone wrong, Manda, the whole goddam thing. This isn't the way you planned it. I'm inside this nightmare where I don't belong.' The woman was crying and her words ran into one another in breathless little utterances.

‘Just tell me where you are,' Amanda said.

‘God, where am I? Jesus, I don't know.'

‘Calm down, calm down.'

‘They're coming after me, Manda.'

‘Who?'

‘These two guys, they're coming after me.'

Amanda's fingers were rigid on the handset. ‘I'll help, just tell me where you are.'

‘OK, where I am, this is,' and her voice faded. Amanda heard the clank of a telephone being set down, then a creaking noise. ‘Where I am. OK, this is a place called, wait a minute, I'm looking at the sign, the Canyon Motel, off the interstate. It's got a big blue light outside.'

‘Which interstate?'

‘What's the one? Seventeen. I-Seventeen.'

‘
Seventeen
? You're here in
Arizona
?'

‘Manda, help me. Come help me.'

‘You're at a pay phone there.'

‘A pay phone, right. Say you'll come.'

‘Stay where you are. Don't move.' Rhees was looking at her with curiosity.

‘How long it gonna take you?'

‘I don't know. Fast as I can get there.'

‘Hurry, Jesus Christ hurry, please.'

‘I'll be there.' Amanda hung up. Rhees was thumbing quickly through the Yellow Pages.

‘The Canyon,' he said, reading from the directory. ‘It's near Black Canyon City.'

Amanda could hear the motion of her blood. ‘Even if I go like a bat out of hell, that's still twenty-five, thirty minutes. Do me a favour. Call Willie Drumm, tell him to meet me there.'

She rushed towards the door before Rhees – who looked puzzled and anxious – had time to say anything. She was all haste, her brain locked in that space where thoughts don't cohere and your head's filled with a strident choir of panic. She blew a quick kiss back at Rhees and said, ‘Tell him it's Isabel Sanchez.'