Sweet Women Lie (21 page)

I folded both sheets and put them in my pocket. Then I made two telephone calls. When that was done I fingered out my cigarette pack, but it was empty. I crumpled it and threw it into the wastebasket. My mouth tasted like cotton filters anyway.

I must have dozed. I came forward in the chair when the fire door boomed shut. Footsteps clicked across the dance floor. The doorknob turned and she came in.

No denim shirt and blue jeans this time. No slinky gown and stilts either. She’d put on a plaid caped overcoat with Madame Butterfly sleeves and a pair of black patent-leather pumps with two-inch heels. With her light brown hair pinned up and makeup on she looked taller, but she would always give the impression of a little girl playing dress-up. She wasn’t carrying a purse.

“I could have you arrested for breaking and entering,” she said.

“They’d just throw me back out in the street. I wore out my welcome there an hour ago.”

“All right, you called and I’m here. I said I was sorry about the other thing. Sahara didn’t give me any choice.”

“Sahara’s dead.”

She wasn’t quick enough to cover it. She was a better actress than anyone had given her credit for, but the hour was early and I’d sprung it on her. For an instant there it was Christmas. Then she sobered. “What happened?”

“I happened. Usher happened. You happened. Not in that order.” I told her about it. When I mentioned the People Mover I was watching her closely, but this time she’d had a chance to prepare. I didn’t get anything out of it.

“I’m not sorry,” she said. “He used me. I might as well have been working for the studios. I’m only surprised that he wanted to quit. I always thought he loved his job, the rotten bastard.”

“When you burn out you burn out. He had two tickets to Central America in his pocket. One of them was for you, wasn’t it?”

She overplayed it that time. Well, it had been years since the cameras had rolled. “Uh-huh, yeah. I’d sooner go off with Hitler.”

“I believe you. But that’s not what you told Sahara. How long had you been sleeping with him? Don’t answer, it doesn’t matter. Long enough anyway to convince a man whose business is to trust no one to take you into his confidence. Long before I entered the picture. No wonder he was amused when I said my helping him out of his job would get you out of his vest pocket. Did you laugh about it late that night in bed?”

“You’re as sick as he was if you think that.”

“Only a lover could have gotten him to confide as much as he did. He told you he was quitting, about the list of undercover agents he’d swiped, either to insure his safety or to extort some case dough out of Uncle Sam. About the people who would enter their own bids. Only a lover — or an actress who could pose as one.” I patted the machine on the desk. “You haven’t asked me why the typewriter isn’t in the file cabinet where it belongs.”

“It’s a little early in the morning to worry about typewriters, especially with a crazy man in the room.”

“Now you’re chewing the scenery, Gail. Or do you prefer Vadya?”

She lost a little color when I mentioned the part she played in
V-8 Vampires.
Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t control that. No reaction otherwise. I let it slide for now and put the two typewritten sheets on the desk.

“They match, of course,” I said. “You couldn’t forge Pingree’s hand, but you should have gotten rid of the typewriter. Maybe you didn’t think anyone would get this far. The People Mover stations were what you wanted them to notice. Since Sahara wouldn’t just ride around aimlessly day after day, it suggested he was meeting someone. Why? To collect bids on that hot list of agents.”

I heard a noise in the nightclub. She had left the door open a crack when she came in. I went on. “I can only guess at the amount of homework it took to find an investigator like Pingree. Maybe not so much; every business has its misfits. In any case he was the ultimate pigeon. Did you come to him as Gail Hope, fading movie queen, or as a distraught housewife?”

“It’s your story,” she said.

“I like distraught housewife. He was young enough not to have seen any of your pictures. He was also a trusting soul, and business was just bad enough to keep him from checking your scenario, if he even knew how. You knew all about Catherine. She even looks like the Other Woman. You came to Pingree, or more likely you met him somewhere to avoid his nosy neighbors, cried a little into a handkerchief like you did in
Beach Blowout,
told him you suspected Catherine of having an affair with your husband, and gave him a lot of money to follow her around. You asked him to keep the job off the books. He agreed, and made good on his agreement. I have to like him for that, harebrained as it was. Men who come through on their promises are rare and getting rarer. You counted on that. There must be no evidence to suggest you ever made contact.”

I heard nothing more from the direction of the nightclub. I hadn’t expected to hear anything to begin with. I’d been in the land of the professionals on this one from the start.

“Naturally, Catherine spotted the tail,” I said. “Pingree was as conspicuous as Sahara was invisible. She wouldn’t go to her husband, because she’d suspect her husband of hiring him in the first place. She’d come to me, being a detective and being in town, but mostly being her ex-husband. That made me a valuable witness. I knew about Pingree, had even spoken with him. Sahara would have told you that. By now he was telling you everything. No wonder he kicked me when I called him a sap. It was easier than kicking himself.

“Maybe my talking to Pingree forced your hand. Even he was starting to smell a Hollywood rat and considered taking me into his confidence. No matter. It was a good time to move.” I tapped the typewritten itinerary. “You’d already given him this, because he’d had time to run off a copy and put it in the safe deposit box where he kept copies of all his records. He was definitely suspicious or he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to hide the originals in the toilet on his floor. I’m not clear yet on what story you told him when you gave him the paper. Planting it on him after he was dead might not have worked. Maybe you knew about the bank box and thought someone would be suspicious if there weren’t a copy of the itinerary in it. It had to convince some people for whom suspicion is a way of life.”

“You’re doing a lot of talking for someone who isn’t saying anything.” As she spoke she moved away from the door. The action might have been unconscious.

“Indulge me. I’m a lonely man. Pingree was crucial, maybe for the only time in his life. If the people who were watching Sahara — the people being Frank Usher, Edgar Pym, Papa, whatever Death is calling itself this season — if they were to buy the premise that Sahara was getting set to peddle that list and sign the death warrant for dozens of deep-cover agents placed at no small expense in key areas across the country, you needed a corpse to put the point across. This is where Gail Hope, former celluloid beach bunny and present Detroit bistro owner, trades petty intrigue for evil genius.

“A dead private investigator with evidence of treason is hard to ignore. The conclusion was inevitable: dick catches spy with his hand in the till, dick blackmails spy, spy kills dick. Using cyanide was a neat touch. A little showy, a little Technicolor and Cinemascope, but so much more in character for an egotistical snuff artist like Sahara than just a bullet. A corpse and evidence suggesting contact with people who buy government secrets. The courts would need more to convict. Usher wouldn’t.” I was watching her closely. “You must have hated Sahara’s guts and the box they came in.”

“I did. Like I said, he used me.” She was standing clear of the door now, directly under the ceiling light. Hairline cracks showed in her make-up, like fissures in an ancient painting. “He would have gone on using me, all because I was young and stupid enough once to believe him when he said I could make the world a better place by getting my Sam to become a stooge for the Feds.” She leaned forward. “But like
you
said, the courts would need more to prove anything. If that piece of paper is all you’ve got . . . ”

“It was gaping at me all along, but I’m slow sometimes. You might say someone had to draw me a picture. A moving picture. I screened
V-8 Vampires
last night.”

“That piece of crap.”

“I agree. The aging scene was the best thing in it. You make a convincing old lady. That’s when I remembered something Sergeant Trilby had told me, about the building cleaning crew and the scrubwoman on Pingree’s floor the morning he was killed.” I paused. “You did your own make-up in
Vampires,
didn’t you?”

She laughed. It wasn’t her Malibu giggle.

“I read about the poisoning in the papers,” she said. “Pingree’s neighbor heard a man’s voice through the wall. Not a woman’s.”

“I already said you were no petty intriguer. You knew better than to say anything out loud in a crackerbox like that. Of course you had help. You couldn’t be sure he’d take the poison when you offered it, and small as he was you’d be no match for him if you tried to force it down his throat. There was a window washer on that floor as well.”

“There’s one here, too.”

The new voice was run-of-the-mill, without a regional accent. You could hear it through a wall and not be able to identify it later. It belonged to a young man in a blue suit who came through the door with a gun in his hand, an L-frame Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter automatic with twice the penetrating power of my old Police Special. His hair was short and dark blond and he had a short nose and a long upper lip and dark eyes with long Mediterranean lashes against very fair skin. He was well-proportioned and didn’t look as big as he actually was; his hand swallowed much of the large pistol. I looked at him a long time before I remembered where I’d seen him last, guarding the door to the hospital room where Sam Lucy lay plugged into an artificial life-support system.

“W
HO’S GUARDING
L
UCY?”
I asked. “Or did you finally decide that’s like locking an empty safe?”

The big man said, “He died last night. Never regained consciousness. Gail was there.”

“So it’s Gail, is it?” I looked at her. “You don’t let any grass grow.”

“I did most of my scenes in one take.” She stepped out from under the direct light. “You guess pretty good. Some of the details are wrong. I told Pingree that Catherine was my brother’s wife and that I thought she was stepping out on him, not that she was having an affair with my husband. I also told him I’d tried following her myself, and that’s when I gave him the itinerary. It’s genuine, by the way. I arranged those appointments and I kept them.”

“Ah.”

“Bill was so charged over his precious list he insisted on telling me the names of all the people who would pay millions for it. You’d be surprised how many of them operate in this area; you’d be surprised how many of them are listed. What’s so funny?”

I stopped grinning. “You had my sympathy for a while there. Not for Pingree, but for wanting to nail Sahara. It’s a respectable aspiration, revenge. It feels too good in practice to be as bad as the ministers say. It isn’t enough for some people, though. Some people have to make it pay.”

“It didn’t start out like that. I set up the first meetings aboard the People Mover to lay down a background. If the itinerary wasn’t enough to hang Sahara, I could always claim I was representing his interests. But when I told them what he had and how it was obtained, the figures they mentioned made my toes curl. Yes, I had to make it pay. Why not? I earned every cent.”

“How were you planning to deliver?”

“If I couldn’t get the list away from Sahara, I’d have faked something when the time came. Spies are dull. They think everyone else is as dull as they are. They’d have met me more than halfway.”

“Everyone else did,” I said. “Pingree may have been a goat, but it was a big herd.”

“Everything I am I owe to men.”

Her lips didn’t appear to move as she said it. It was as if I were looking at one of her posters and the words were in my head.

“So what happens now? I should tell you I’m not thirsty.”

She laughed again. “I wouldn’t dream of using cyanide a second time. You broke into this building, into my office. What do you think’s going to happen?”

“I’m disappointed. Any of the hacks who wrote your stuff in the old days could have come up with a more original plot.”

“That’s the thing about clichés. They work.” She smoothed the skirt of her coat. “Dennis is my new chief of security — bouncer to you. I don’t even have to be here for this.” She turned toward the door.

Big Dennis gestured with the automatic. “Bring ’em up.”

I didn’t move. “Haven’t you been listening?”

“Up.” He flicked back the hammer.

My revolver, which I’d been holding inside the kneehole of the desk, jumped in my hand. There’s only one sure target at that angle. The bullet punched a hole through the modesty panel and plowed into his groin. He made an indescribable noise and lost all interest in his weapon.

He was still standing, though, when Gail Hope sent me a look over her shoulder that reminded me of her aging, decomposing vampire with the flesh peeling away from its skull and broke into a run. I raised the Smith & Wesson and took aim at her back. Not a woman’s back, not Gail Hope’s back. Not even a back. A target.

I didn’t fire. If I had, the bullet might have passed through her and struck Sergeant Trilby. He threw both arms around her, a reflex gesture to keep his balance when she ran into him, and hung on. His service pistol was in his right hand. There was a struggle, but he held her until one of the uniforms he’d brought with him could lend some muscle. There were three of them. Two wore the blue with brown trim of the Detroit Police Department. Inspector Alderdyce would approve of that.

Dennis chose that moment to fall. His blue serge pants were drenched with blood and urine when he toppled forward from the waist and disappeared below the edge of the desk. He groaned when he hit the floor and went on groaning.

By this time I’d placed my gun on the desk in plain sight and folded my hands on top of my head. The two officers not involved with handcuffing Gail Hope had taken up positions on both sides of the door with their sidearms out in the two-handed stance. One of them was a large woman in her early thirties with her hair tucked up under her cap. I found out later her name was Heidi.