Sleuths (23 page)

"Are you trying to tell me you didn't set up that ambush?"

"Ambush?"

"The boat, the shooting."

"No! How could I? You cannot think—"

"Why did you run back to the house just before the shooting started?"

"My
cosmeticos,
I forget them."

"Sure you did."

"I tell the truth! Renzo was my man, we go away together, you cannot think I want him to die!"

"Somebody wanted him to die," Carmody said. "Somebody tipped Gambresca. And you and Lucarelli were the only ones besides me and my man in Rome who knew where the hideaway was. You did it for the money, right? For a cut of the run-out money?"

"No, no, no! I did not, I would not . . ."

She was shaking her head, forgetting the gun at her cheek; Carmody pulled the Beretta back a little. It was quiet in the office just then—and in that quiet he heard the faint sound of a footfall in the darkness out front.

The hackles raised on his neck. He came up off his knee, turning, and when he did that he saw the vague shape of a man appear next to the drill press out there, just beyond the outspill of light from the desk lamp. In the man's hand was a familiar, deadly shape.

Carmody threw himself to one side, pushing Rita and the chair over backwards. She screamed again but the sound of it was lost in the stuttering roar of the machine pistol. A slug ripped through the tail of Carmody's jacket, burned across one buttock. Then the gooseneck lamp flew off the desk, shattered, and the office went dark except for bright flashes from the pistol's muzzle.

Carmody managed to get the desk between himself and the doorway. He could hear the rap, rap, rap of the bullets digging into the desk, into the wall above him, as the shooter raked the office with another burst. He twisted his body into the kneehole. He could see out on the other side, but without the muzzle flashes the darkness was too thick for him to locate the shooter. The air stank of burnt gunpowder; the silence had an electric quality. Carmody listened, knowing that the shooter was listening too.

The silence seemed to gain magnitude until it was almost deafening. Either the shooter didn't know where the overhead lights were or he didn't want to take the chance of putting them on. But with the amount of slugs he'd pumped into the office, he had to be thinking that he was the only one left alive. If he'd opened up with that two seconds earlier he'd have been right. Pretty soon there was a series of scuffling sounds out beyond the doorway. Carmody still didn't move. They were the kinds of sounds somebody makes when he's pretending to leave a place, trying to be clever. The shooter was still out there, waiting. Making up his mind. Another couple of minutes crawled away. The quiet was so intense it was like a humming in Carmody's ears. Then there was a nearly inaudible sliding sound: the shooter was moving again. Not going away this time. Coming back into the office.

Carmody steadied the Beretta on his left arm.

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then there was another faint, whispery footfall. And another, not more than ten feet away and almost directly ahead—

Carmody emptied most of the Beretta's clip on a line waist-high and two feet wide.

There was a half-strangled Italian oath; a moment later Carmody heard the metallic clatter of the pistol on concrete, the sound of a body falling heavily. He stayed where he was, listening. A scrabbling movement, a low moan . . . nothing.

It was another couple of minutes before he was satisfied. He crawled out of the kneehole, got to his feet, moved at an angle to the door. He put his pencil flash on, just for an instant, stepping aside as he did so. Then the tension went out of him and he put the light on again, left it on.

The shooter was lying half in and half out of the office doorway, the MAC-10 alongside him. Face down, not moving. Carmody turned him over with the toe of one shoe, shined the light on his face—on the dead, staring eyes.

Gino Della Robbia.

C
armody swore softly. He wasn't surprised; nothing surprised him anymore. But that didn't make Della Robbia's treachery any easier to take.

He swung the light to the rear of the office, located Rita with it. At first he thought she was dead too because she lay crumpled and still But when he went over there and knelt beside her, he saw that she was breathing Blood glistened on the side of her head: scalp wound. He didn't see any others. She was lucky. They both were—damned lucky.

He found the switch for the overheads, flipped it on. Then he picked Rita up and sat her in a chair. The movement brought her out of it. For a couple of minutes she was disoriented, hysterical; he slapped her face, got her calmed down. Then she saw Della Robbia and that almost set her off again.

When she could talk she said, "Gino? It was Gino who killed Renzo?"

"And tried to kill me," Carmody said. "Twice."

"But I do not understand . . ."

"It's simple enough. Gambresca had nothing to do with the ambush, just like you had nothing to do with it. Della Robbia, nobody else. For the money. He didn't know how much there was but he did know that it would be plenty—enough to take the risks he took."

She shook her head, winced, sat still.

Carmody said, "You went to him tonight after the ambush, didn't you? Heard me mention his name to Lucarelli, remembered it, looked up his address and went to him."

"Yes. I believed you and Renzo were both dead. I had nowhere else to go."

"And he got you to come here."

"Yes."

"What'd he say to you?"

"That this was the
squero
of a friend. That I should wait here. He gave me a key."

"Wait for what?"

"For him to come. He said he would help me leave Venezia."

Carmody nodded. He was thinking that Della Robbia must have been in a hell of a sweat when he got home from San Spirito and one of the men he thought he'd killed called him on the phone—the one man he should have made sure died first. If he could have found out where Carmody was, he'd have gone there to finish the job. But Carmody hadn't told him and Della Robbia had been afraid to force the issue. So he'd sweated some more and waited for the next call. Then Rita had showed up and he'd thought of this
squero—
the perfect set-up for another ambush. Except that this time he'd been the one who got caught in it.

One question remained: How had Della Robbia found out where Lucarelli's hideout was? Piombo wouldn't have told him. The launch hadn't been followed tonight; Carmody had made sure of that. And he hadn't been followed on any of the previous trips he'd made to Rio San Spirito.

Only one possible answer—one that Carmody should have thought of at the Rio di Fontego tonight. By overlooking the possibility, he had gotten Lucarelli killed and almost lost his own life. Unforgiveable. He would never forget this mistake, and he would never make another like it again.

The answer, the oversight, was that the launch had been equipped with a shortwave radio. Della Robbia must have bribed the driver to open the microphone just before he picked Carmody up, so that when Carmody told him where they were going, Della Robbia had heard the address on a radio on his own boat tuned to the same band. Easy enough then to take a different and quicker route to San Spirito, hide and wait.

Carmody prodded Rita onto her feet, led her through the building and outside. The area was still deserted. It would take a while to find transportation at this hour, but that was a minor inconvenience.

Rita said, "Where are we going, Signor Carmody?"

"Della Robbia's house. Odds are that's where the money is."

"You will keep it all for yourself? The money?"

"No. It's yours, you've earned the right to it. All I want is the fee Lucarelli and I agreed on."

"You . . . you mean this?"

"I mean it," Carmody said. "This too: If you still want to go to Sardinia, I'll take you there. I don't like to leave a job unfinished."

"Yes, I want to go. Oh yes."

"It might take another day or two to rearrange things but I'll find a safe place for you to wait. It won't be too bad."

She looked at him with her large dark eyes. "No," she said, "I do not think it will be bad at all."

I
was halfway through one of the bends in Dead Man's Slough, on my way back to the Whiskey Island marina with three big Delta catfish in the skiff beside me, when the red-haired man rose up out of the water at an islet fifty yards ahead.

It was the last thing I expected to see and I leaned forward, squinting through the boat's Plexiglas windscreen. The weather was full of early-November bluster—high overcast and a raw wind—and the water was too cold and too choppy for pleasure swimming. Besides which, the red-haired guy was fully dressed in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved bush jacket.

He came all the way out of the slough, one hand clapped across the back of his head, and plowed upward through the mud and grass of a tiny natural beach. When he got to its upper edge where the tule grass grew thick and waist-high, he stopped and held a listening pose. Then he whirled around, stood swaying unsteadily as if he were caught in a crosscurrent of the chill wind. He stared out toward me for two or three seconds; the pale oval of his face might have been pulled into a painful grimace, but I couldn't tell for sure at the distance. And then he whirled again in a dazed, frightened way, stumbled in among
the rushes and disappeared.

I looked upstream past the islet, where Dead Man's Slough widened into a long reach; the waterway was empty, and so were the willow-lined levees that flanked it. Nor was there any sign of another boat or another human being in the wide channel that bounded the islet on the south. That was not surprising, or at least it wouldn't have been five minutes ago.

The California Delta, fifty miles inland from San Francisco where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers merge on a course to San Francisco Bay, has a thousand miles of waterways and a network of islands both large and small, inhabited and uninhabited, linked by seventy bridges and a few hundred miles of levee roads. During the summer months the area is jammed with vacationers, water skiers, fishermen and houseboaters, but in late fall, when the cold winds start to blow, about the only people you'll find are local merchants and farmers and a few late-vacationing anglers like me. I had seen no more than four other people and two other boats in the five hours since I'd left Whiskey Island, and none of those in the half-mile I had just traveled on Dead Man's Slough.

So where had the red-haired man come from?

On impulse I twisted the wheel and took the skiff over toward the islet, cutting back on the throttle as I approached. Wind gusts rustled and bent the carpet of tule grass, but there was no other movement that I could see. Ten yards off the beach, I shut the throttle all the way down to idle; the quick movement of the water carried the skiff the rest of the way in. When the bow scraped up over the soft mud I shut off the engine, pocketed the ignition key and moved aft to tilt the outboard engine out of the water so its propeller blades wouldn't become fouled in the offshore grass. Then I climbed out and dragged half the boat's length onto the beach as a precaution against it backsliding and drifting off without me.

From the upper rim of the beach I could look all across the flat width of the islet—maybe fifty yards in all—and for seventy yards or so of its length, to where the terrain humped up in the middle and a pair of willow trees and several wild
blackberry bushes blocked off my view. But I couldn't see anything of the red-haired man, or hear anything of him either; there were no sounds except for the low whistling cry of the wind.

An eerie feeling came over me. It was as if I were alone on the islet, alone on all of Dead Man's Slough, and the red-haired guy had been some sort of hallucination. Or some sort of ghostly manifestation. I thought of the old-timer who had rented me the skiff on Whiskey Island a sort of local historian well versed on Delta lore and legends dating back to the Gold Rush, when steamboats from San Francisco and Sacramento plied these waters with goods and passengers. And I thought of the story he had told me about how the slough got its name.

Back in 1860 an Irish miner named O'Farrell, on his way to San Francisco from the diggings near Sutter's Mill, had disappeared from a side-wheeler at Poker Bend; also missing was a fortune in gold dust and specie he had been carrying with him. Three days later O'Farrell's body was found floating in these waters with his head bashed in and his pockets empty. The murder was never solved. And old-time rivermen swore they had seen the miner's ghost abroad on certain foggy nights, swearing vengeance on the man who had murdered him.

But that wasn't quite all. According to the details of the story, O'Farrell had had red hair—and his ghost was always seen clutching the back of his bloody head with one hand.

Sure, I thought, and nuts to that. Pure coincidence, nothing else. Old-time rivermen were forever seeing ghosts, not only of men but of packets like the
Sagamore
and the
R.K. Page
whose steam boilers had exploded during foolish races in the mid-1800s, killing hundreds of passengers and crewmen. But I did not believe in spooks worth a damn. Nor was I prone to hallucinations or flights of imagination, not at my age and not with my temperament. The red-haired guy was real, all right. Maybe hurt and in trouble, too, judging from his wobbly condition and his actions.