The Demolishers (27 page)

Well, I’d been hoping for that kind of a break, hadn’t I? That was why I’d come all the way to Newport to investigate the Silver Conch bombing, wasn’t it? The fact that what I’d got was a nearsighted kid nutty enough to spend years worshiping a tramp like Linda Anson from afar was beside the point. I reminded myself that the boy might be helpless-looking but he wasn’t gutless. He’d waded after Sandra when guns were firing and bullets flying, when a lot of Herculean heroes would have been lying flat in good cover and keeping their heads down. He was an odd avenging angel, but he’d do.

The swans came in at the far end of the pond and swam around for a few minutes, but then the police sirens flushed them out again.

We walked through the hotel parking lot and made a dash across Newport’s busy main drag, proving that we were braver than a lot of visiting small-boat sailors who’ve merely crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s up that street,” Dana Delgado said, pointing, as we reached the other shore in safety against all odds. “The White Horse Tavern. I made reservations. You could say I’m celebrating. I was wondering how to get rid of the brat. Since she’s a relative of yours, even if only by marriage, I thought you might object to strangulation.”

It was a beautiful evening. The evening of any day in which someone has tried to kill you and failed is always beautiful, simply because you’re still alive to see it; but this was really a pretty good specimen for damp and
misty New England. As. we climbed the steep side street, the setting sun spotlighted a large, carefully restored, old hip-roofed frame house ahead of us. I couldn’t read the discreet signs at the distance, but I had a hunch they marked our destination. Delgado wouldn’t have chosen to walk to the restaurant, in her high heels, if it had been much farther away.

I said, “I thought you were looking forward to our little
menage a trois
in Puerto Rico.”

She laughed. ‘‘My dear man, no woman wants to share a male with another female, even in the line of business.” After a moment, she went on: ‘‘I don’t really wish young Mrs. Helm any harm, but I’m just as glad they’re keeping her in the hospital for a few days. She’ll be safe there, and it disposes of her temporarily. . . . Reservation for Delgado,” she said to the somberly dressed gent who came forward to greet us as we entered the restaurant.

‘‘Yes, madam. This way, please.”

The place had once been a comfortable residence. The big, high-ceilinged downstairs rooms were now filled with tables boasting white tablecloths and—those not yet occupied—intricately folded white napkins. Following Dana Delgado as she followed the headwaiter, I had the half-proud, half-jealous feeling that comes to a man in the company of a truly handsome woman who’s being favorably appraised by all the other men present, and also by the women—although perhaps not quite so favorably.

She was wearing a dark red wool dress expensive enough to do nice things for her figure, not that it needed things done for it. The skirt was calf-length in response to the dictates of current fashion, a pleasant compromise, long enough to be dignified and graceful without concealing too much of the view. The dress had long sleeves and was quite severe in its simplicity. Well, she’d always been severe and businesslike in her dealings with me; the fact that she’d unbent enough to call my hotel room when I finally got back to Newport and invite me to dinner had been a pleasant surprise. I’d have expected her to adhere to traditional man-woman protocol and wait for the suggestion to come from me. Her dark hair was as smoothly arranged as always.

“We’d like to see the wine list,” she said after we’d been seated. As the man went away, she smiled at me. “Are you thinking how terrible it is to be the guest of a managing woman? Should I let you choose the wine to make you feel masculine?”

“I feel fine. Carry on.”

We went through the formalities of ordering and it took a while. She held a rather lengthy consultation over the wine list, after which the relative freshness of the various fish on the menu came up for discussion. I’ve eaten too many questionable meals off my lap in too many oddball places, and accompanied them with too many strange libations, to be very critical of my food or drink; but it seems to be a popular indoor sport. Although she played it well and obviously enjoyed it, I had a hunch she was also getting a kick out of putting me in my place, hinting that I was just a clumsy peasant with a gun who had to be shown how civilized people live.

Well, she was nice to look at, and I’ve been snooted by experts; she didn’t really bother me. But I must say I missed the kid, and worried about her a little. Although she was in good hands, the wound had been a nasty one. The bullet had apparently been deformed and upset by its passage through the van door, and it had ripped things up a bit rather than just drilling a neat round hole. The doctor had also had to prospect around in there for flakes of paint and scraps of bullet jacket; and he wasn’t quite sure he’d got them all, which was one reason he was keeping Sandra in the hospital for observation.

“Wouldn’t you know?” she’d whispered, looking up at me from the hospital bed in New Haven, where she’d wound up after a twenty-mile ambulance ride that couldn’t have been much fun. Her face was pale against the short dark hair. She’d been given enough painkiller that her eyes had an unfocused look and her voice was a little slurred. “I just get one lousy sling off and now they’re going to put me in another!”

I said, “That’s what you get for being a sentimental slob. Next time maybe you’ll have sense enough just to let the bastard drown.” I looked at the floral display on the dresser. “Who’s been sending flowers?”

“Not you, that’s for sure.” She grinned weakly. “Lester sent them. Are you jealous?”

“Lester? Oh, the boy with the glasses.”

Her grin faded. “Are you still mad at me?”

“Who’s mad? It isn’t my arm that’s got a hole in it. This way, I get to travel to Puerto Rico all alone with a dame who’s got all her hair, for a change.”

“She won’t have it long if I get hold of her.” Sandra stared at me resentfully. “So you’re going to run off with your glamour agent and leave me lying here crippled and helpless to be blown up by any stray bomber who comes along!”

“You’ll be protected, day and night.”

There was a little silence, then she whispered, “Take care, Matt.”

“You, too.”

I stood there by the bed a moment longer. There was something between us: the fact that there was nothing between us, in the popular sense of the phrase. Even if she’d written me off as an object of romance after the night she’d found her stepmother in my room, she couldn’t help but wonder why, if that was the kind of man I was, I hadn’t at least made a try, considering the opportunities I’d had on our long trip together. Of course I’d told her I’d felt an obligation to look after her for Matthew’s sake, but that didn’t necessarily involve a vow of chastity. However, she was a well-adjusted young lady, and she wasn’t about to go into a decline because a certain lecherous character had failed to make a pass at her. . . .

“Matt?” Delgado’s voice was a little impatient.

“What? Oh, sure. Salmon is fine.”

She’d brought me back to Newport, R.I. I knew that we’d already settled on some kind of a Blanc de Blanc, if I have the name straight, at thirty dollars a bottle. Now I’d given my okay to salmon prepared a special way with certain special fixings. When the negotiations had been completed, and the final waiter had gone away, Delgado raised her wineglass to me.

“Pretentious is the word,” she said softly.

“What?”

“That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it? A pretentious bitch showing off her social graces.”

“To a bloodthirsty roughneck who ought to be fed out in the barn with the other livestock, right?”

She laughed. “When we come to know each other better, we’ll undoubtedly discover that we’re both very fine people. So Morelos came after you to avenge his brother, as we expected.”

“Yes. I guess he was hanging around waiting for me to walk into the Saybrook house and blow myself up. He wanted to see it happen. But the wrong people sneaked onto the premises and set off the fireworks prematurely. . . . Has anybody yet figured out who they were? ’ ’

Delgado nodded. “Yes. It hasn’t been released yet, but
211

I got the information, to be passed to you, just before you knocked on my door back at the hotel. There were three of them. Their names were Vance, Johnson, and Spearman.”

I whistled softly. ‘‘Vance . . . You mean that Presidential Task Force for Illicit Substances? They’re the ones who blew themselves up with the CLL bomb meant for us? Tallman’s little gang of snoops?”

Delgado nodded. ‘‘Yes. Very embarrassing for certain people in Washington. They’re having a hard time trying to explain what Tallman thought he was doing, breaking into your daughter-in-law’s house without a warrant. They’re trying to figure out what he expected to find there.”

‘‘Find, hell!” I said. “He tried to plant something on the kid once before. Why should he stop with just one try? Oh, I’m sure his boys were instructed to search the premises thoroughly first in the hope of finding something. Tallman has the idea Sandra’s just got to be a drugusing degenerate because of her parentage. However, in case they came up empty-handed, I’m willing to bet he gave them a little chemical evidence to hide in a not-too-obvious place so it could be discovered later under the proper incriminating circumstances. Only somebody else had been ahead of them and left something louder, and they tripped the trigger when they broke in and started poking around. . . . Tallman’s got a thing about Sandra’s dad, and he doesn’t care who he has to frame if it gives him leverage against Sonny Varek.”

Dana Delgado hesitated. “You have to understand something, Matt. Robert Tallman has a special reason to hate drugs and the people who deal in them, particularly Alexander Varek. A few years ago Tallman’s daughter Elissa disappeared. A lovely young girl by all accounts. She was just finishing college; but suddenly she dropped out of school and vanished. He found her months later, in dreadful shape, dying. He traced the drugs she’d been taking back through the pusher and dealer to the importer. Varek. He was still in business at that time.”

It was such an old story, these days, that I found it hard to work up much sympathy for an Elissa Tallman who’d died because she’d chosen to play with stuff she’d been warned was dangerous. After all, Tallman wasn’t the only one who’d lost a child. My son was just as dead as his daughter; but Matthew had been offered no choice and given no warning.

I said, “Seems like everybody’s avenging somebody. Tallman wasn’t blown up with the rest?”

“Not unless he was totally vaporized, which they say is unlikely. They could only make three bodies out of what they found in the debris.” She made a little face. “Not very pleasant dinner-table conversation!”

I said, “So I don’t have to look over my shoulder any longer for Dominic Morelos; but I now have Mr. Tallman to worry about seriously. Before, he was just a potential pest. I hope he doesn’t have some cracked notion that I somehow arranged for his boys to wind up in little pieces, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Delgado said, “That’s pretty farfetched, Matt.”

I shrugged. “That’s how I’m still alive, by figuring out the farfetched possibilities. But let’s hope you’re right. I don’t want any more intramural conflicts; they raise hell in Washington.”

She said, “Well, Morelos was a greater danger; at least you’re free of him.”

I grimaced. “Sure, but we’re losing ground, statistically speaking.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Yesterday, the body count was six for our side as
against thirteen for the Legion. Today we made one point, Morelos, but they made three: Vance, Johnson, and Spearman. So the game now stands at seven to sixteen. They’ve gained on us, a little.”

“Ugh, I don’t like thinking of it as a game.”

I grinned. ‘‘That’s exactly what Sandra said. You girls have something in common at least. Weak stomachs.” Delgado said firmly, ‘‘That is enough business talk. I will now change the subject. This is the oldest operating tavern in the United States. It was originally built as a residence, in 1673. ...”

When we came out of the White Horse Tavern, it was cooler than it had been, quite chilly in fact, and late enough that all light had gone from the western horizon. Delgado took my arm to steady herself on her narrow heels as we walked down the hill towards our hotel. The sidewalk wasn’t as smooth as it might have been and the streetlights could have been brighter. I found myself very much aware of her beside me. I thought she knew it and, perhaps, intended it; but I didn’t know if it was a case of mutual attraction or if she was merely building me up so she could slap me down. I didn’t trust her very far. I could still feel the aura of antagonism that I’d sensed at our first meeting in Mac’s office.

I said, “In certain societies I would now burp loudly to indicate my appreciation of a very fine meal. ’ ’ Delgado laughed. “Words will suffice,” she said. “Polite belching is not required. . . .”

She’d been walking on my left. Being right-handed, I always prefer to have the lady over there for the same reason the Three Musketeers made a point of keeping their sword arms free for action; but it put her on the street side, between me and the white van that suddenly drew up alongside us. It seemed as if everybody was driving those bulky heaps today, but this one was much shorter than Morelos’s elongated vehicle, with no side windows except in front. It was elderly and kind of beat-up looking.