The Demolishers (36 page)

Dana said primly, “We prefer the word ‘garbage.’ ”

“I know. GIGO.”

Dana said uneasily, with a glance at the car, “While we’re talking, that girl could be freeing herself.”

“Stick to your computers,” I said. “Let me worry about the kid; that’s my line of work. But talking about feeling untrusted: If Modesto is a member of the Council, he must have given you the names of the other members, unless they meet wearing masks and using aliases. Like Senor Primo, Senor Segundo, Senorita Tercero . . . Tercera?”

Dana laughed. “She’d hardly call herself that. It’s slang for madam, as in whorehouse.” She shook her head. “No, they don’t go in for that kind of conspiratorial nonsense much. Just the explosive kind. What makes you feel untrusted, Matt?”

“If Modesto knows all the names, and you know all the names, and Mac knows all the names, why don’t I know all the names? I’m supposed to be the guy who’s going to take care of the guys who wear them; but you’ve been hoarding them like the last cup of drinking water in a lifeboat drifting under the tropical sun. I twisted your arm once and got Dominic Morelos out of you, and An-gelita Johansen and her two fellow bomb-freaks. ...”

“Angelita is a Council member, but the two men were just rank and file.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Actually, you never did give me their names, but apparently you entrusted the information to Sonny Varek since he managed to make the hits successfully. Then you reluctantly fed me Galvez and Koenig, later removed by Louis on my orders. But why hold back any of them if you know them all?”

She hesitated, and said reluctantly, “I’m afraid you have the reputation of being something of a hothead, Matt; and after all, they did kill your son. It was feared that if you had all the names, you’d lose control and charge off blindly to hunt them down, one by one. That didn’t seem very efficient; there were better ways of doing it. So it was decided to give you enough names so you could put pressure on the Legion, to be sure; but only enough to make them take you seriously and call a meeting of the Council to figure out how to deal with you. Not enough to make them scatter and take cover. Not enough that they’d suspect a leak in their own ranks.”

“Complicated,” I said. “Scare them enough to bring them together; not enough to blast them apart. I know where that intricate idea came from; I’ve seen enough of his ideas. But when their people started falling by the wayside, wouldn’t those fanatics inevitably figure that somebody’d fingered them? Outfits like that are paranoid as hell.”

Dana shook her head. ‘.‘The names released to you were carefully selected. Young Mrs. Helm had got a good look at Angelita and her gofers, or it was spread around that she had, so anything that happened to them could be blamed on her, not Modesto. We picked Arthur Galvez and Howard Koenig to give you because they were heavy drinkers who frequently talked too much in the wrong places; if they were killed, the other members of the Council would assume they’d simply betrayed themselves while drunk. And you were smart enough, as expected, to let Dominic Morelos come to you instead of going after him. That gave the CLL no reason to suspect a traitor. But if we’d given you more names, if more Council members had died, the survivors would have started looking at each other warily, wondering which one was the snitch. We didn’t want that. Modesto had to stay in place, unsuspected, until he could give us the date, time, and place of the proposed Council meeting. So you were left to investigate the Newport bombing and follow the dynamite trail to Puerto Rico by easy stages. As it turns out, your timing is perfect. You’re here just when you’re needed. We have to get Modesto out, wherever he’s being held.”

I said, “He’s still a clown to me, but okay, tell me about this Marvelous Modesto. God, he sounds like a circus aerialist!”

She didn’t speak at once, and I went on grimly: “Come on, let’s have an end to all the mystery, Dana. Who is this guy you have such faith in, such tender concern for, your husband, your father, your brother, your lover. . . . Oh, I see,” I said, watching her face.

She said stiffly, “I don’t think you do, Matt.”

I said, “
That’s
why you cried in the night after doing me a great big favor. It was necessary to keep me happy because I’m a handy guy with a gun and you might need me—as you need me now—but it broke your heart to think how you’d betrayed your wonderful man in San Juan.”

“It wasn’t like that!” she protested. “I cried because . . . Oh, forget my silly tears. I seem to have turned into an ever-dripping human sponge lately. Matt, hadn’t you better take a look at that girl, it’s been quite a while?”

I said irritably, “Don’t teach me my job and I won’t tell you yours. The kid will keep, take my word for it. The subject is still Modesto, Miss Delgado.”

She said, “No.”

“What do you mean, no? Modesto ...”

“I mean I’m not Miss Delgado. I’m Mrs. Delgado. Mrs. Roger Joaquin Delgado. I look a little Hispanic, but I’m not really. My maiden name was Dana Kingsbury. ’ ’

I looked at her for a moment. “I see. So you were married to Delgado but slept with Encinias.”

“Yes.” Her voice was expressionless.

“Well, it happens. It’s an immoral world full of immoral people. But you gave me the impression Modesto was a little, dumpy, middle-aged gent. ...”

“I didn’t say dumpy. And while you may find it hard to believe, at your altitude, there are some nice men who don’t have to duck to go through doors. As for his age, well, after being married to Roger too long, I was ready for an older man, a grown-up man who knew how to be tender and considerate instead of ... Oh, God, this is getting to be a real encounter session, isn’t it?”

“The usual line is that you committed adultery because your husband was a brute.”

She shook her head. “I could have endured being married to a brute, if he was an adult brute. But instead I found myself married to a little boy. A peevish little boy, if I didn’t mother him properly. Oh, he was good to look at, and pretty good in bed if he was humored and flattered and given the adoration he felt entitled to. And he was good at selling things; we weren’t poor. An ideal husband by some standards. We got along reasonably well as long as I understood clearly that I existed only to serve him, as his mother had. But if I showed signs of independence . . . Well, for instance, I’d been very good at mathematics at the university. When I decided that I wanted to learn more about computers, when I said I might even take a job as soon as the baby could be left with somebody, when I did get a good position after I’d finished my courses . . . How would you like to spend several years with an advanced case of the sulks, Matt?” “There was a child?” I asked.

“Yes. The only good thing to come out of my marriage. Dolores. I hadn’t wanted to call her that, think of condemning a girl to spend her life being called Dolly, b
ut it was his mother’s name and that was that. A sweet and wonderful child; and after I started working, he retaliated by staging a deliberate campaign to alienate her from me, spoiling her rotten and telling her what a meanie I was to insist on a few house rules. Telling her how I neglected both of them and it was him and her against the world. Making a point of taking her to church and proving what a heathen I was, pretending to be so tired I had to stay home after merely playing at my silly job all week. That was how . . . how it happened.”

“It?”

I was beginning to have a pretty good idea of what she was leading up to, but she needed a little help to get there.

Dana licked her lips. “It was some kind of a special religious observance, I still don’t know exactly what. I’m supposed to be a Catholic, but I don’t work at it, except around Easter and Christmas. You know. But they got all dressed up for whatever it was and Dolly was happy and excited because there was going to be a lunch party after church, children and parents, at . . . at . . .” She faltered.

I said, “At the restaurant of the Howard Johnson Hotel?”

She nodded dumbly. There was a little silence. At last, she said, “It’s open on Sunday and it was handy, I guess. Anyway, they didn’t come home. They didn’t come home. They didn’t come home. At last somebody called to tell me. . . .” She drew a long, shuddering breath. Then she went on mechanically: “Later, after I’d gone to ... to identify, but -there wasn’t really anything to identify except a little party shoe and a little purse, and a man’s wallet, later I took a big knife out of the kitchen of our apartment, and it wouldn’t go into my purse so I fastened it to my leg with some tape, under my slacks, and went to kill him. Paul. My lover. My tender, con
siderate lover. A big shot in that wonderful, patriotic organization that blows up children!”

‘‘He’d told you about the CLL?”

She nodded. “I’d met him when we helped install his office system. He wanted some lessons in how to use it.

The girl he’d hired was quite competent to run it but impossible as a teacher. On the last day he took me out to dinner to celebrate and . . . well, he was a sweet man, a widower, and I’d had another battle with Roger; and afterwards we said it was a beautiful accident but it mustn’t ever happen again. But of course it did. And that second night, since it was obvious we weren’t going to stop there, he said there was something he had to tell me about himself, and he told me about the brutai regime in Islas Gobemador from which he’d had to flee and the brave band of patriots to which he belonged, working to free their country from the Yankee-supported dictatorship. . . . Well, the world is full of people trying to free something, you meet them everywhere. I just thought it was kind of intriguing, having a lover who was a secret revolutionary. But when the police told me that Paul’s noble Legion of Liberty was claiming credit . .
credit!

... I felt totally betrayed, and I charged out blindly to avenge my daughter; but my vengeance turned into a farce. I had a hard time getting the knife loose from the tape, and Paul stared at me as if I’d gone crazy, which of course I had. He grabbed for it and cut his hand; the blood just poured out. It made me so sick I had to run | in the bathroom and throw up, still holding the bloody knife. It was just a ridiculous mess instead of high tragedy.”

I said, “I suppose, since you still seem to be fond of him, he convinced you that he hadn’t known what was planned.”

Dana said, “Yes, when I came to my senses, and told him why I’d wanted to kill him, told him about Dolly, he was terribly shocked. He Hadn’t known that any action had been planned in San Juan. He explained to me that strike decisions are not made by the Council of Thirteen as a whole. A small group of Council members, picked for experience in the field, makes those decisions in secret and doesn’t reveal them to the Council, or the membership at large, until it’s time to announce another great victory for the cause of Caribbean liberation, in this case a victory over three little children and two parents. This small secret group calls itself the Executive Board. Its chairman is
El Martillo
.”

“Clever. Executive as in execute, ha-ha. Did your Paul give you the identity of
El Martillo
’

She said, “I told you that. Dominic Morelos. But now Paul thinks that
El Martillo
is really an elective office, so to speak; so probably by this time, with Dominic gone, they’ve picked somebody else to be their chairman. The Hammer. The Chairman of the Murder Board!” Her voice was bitter. “Anyway, I asked Paul if he intended to remain a member of an organization that makes war on children. He said he’d been finding it harder and harder to go along with the CLL policies of random terrorism; but it wasn’t a social club from which one could resign at will. I said, well, maybe he shouldn’t resign. If he really loved me, maybe he should stay in and, from inside, find a way of helping me strike back at them. In the meantime I looked around for a U.S. contact. I didn’t want the FBI or the CIA; they’re too big and have too many rules. I wanted a small government agency that wasn’t bound by rules. I heard that a clever reporter from one of the Miami papers was down here doing a piece on the Puerto Rican freedom movements. It occurred to me that he might know of such an agency. I managed to get to talk with him and he said a tall, skinny gent from just such an outfit sometimes called him for information.”

“Spud Meiklejohn.
Miami Tribune '

“Yes. He said you seemed to be a pretty effective character, probably tops in your organization, which wasn’t really a recommendation if I was interested in sound morals and fine citizenship. However, if I was involved in something rough, I couldn’t do much better. Mr. Meiklejohn said your agency didn’t go in for public relations and I wouldn’t find the number in the Washington directory, but he just happened to have come across it a while back and he’d jotted it down in his little black book. He said in return it would be nice if I gave him a head start on the story when and if it could be released.” She drew a long breath. “So I called the number and I was afraid I’d get the crackpot treatment, but the man I talked to sounded interested and the very next day Mr. Trask was down here. By this time I’d, well, persuaded Paul. . . . Anyway, we set it up the way you know, using his office computer; but I couldn’t stand it if anything should happen to him because I twisted his arm and made him help me. ...”

I was flattered by the thought that Spud Meiklejohn thought enough of me, or at least of my abilities, to recommend me to troubled ladies. I glanced at her, sitting beside me on the park bench, and decided I knew very little about women; I hadn’t sensed the fierce fires that must be burning inside her to make her set up this elaborate scheme of vengeance.