What of Terry Conniston? (12 page)

She studied his face; she glanced at Adams and at Orozco; she said tentatively, “The penalty for blackmail is damned severe, Carl.”

“Ten to twenty years,” Frankie Adams said dryly. “Felony.”

Oakley shook his head. “Am I trying to extort a penny from you? Come off it. I'm trying to get Terry back and I believe the only way to do it is to pay the ransom. I'm using the only weapon I've got.”

Louise sank back in her chair. “I suppose I've got no choice.”

“Then you agree to meet the kidnapers' demands?”

“If you think it's best.” She had given up.

Orozco's voice rolled between them abruptly: “This here weapon of yours looks to me like the kind of stick you use to beat dead horses with, Carl. Maybe this all hit you too fast to think it out, but how do you figure to raise the ransom money with Conniston dead? And who's going to make contact with the kidnaper when he calls back and wants to talk to Conniston? He ain't likely willing to talk to anybody else.”

“He won't have to,” Oakley said.

Louise, full of acid, snapped, “I suppose you're going to reincarnate him?”

“In a way. In the morning Earle Conniston's going to call the president of Farmers and Merchants and arrange to have the cash ready for me to pick it up. In the afternoon when the kidnaper calls back Earle Conniston's going to answer the phone.”

Looking past her astonished disbelieving face, he saw slow comprehension spread across Frankie Adams' narrow features. Oakley said relentlessly, “I've heard you do Conniston's voice. Nobody will know the difference, especially over a telephone. You're going to be Earle Conniston.”

Adams shot bolt upright in his chair, ready to rise—but Oakley's eyes jammed him back down in his seat.

“You've got to be out of your gourd,” Adams said.

“You can do it.”

“Count me out. Nuts.”

Oakley just looked at him patiently until Adams began to squirm, remembering the earlier conversation; Adams seemed to grow smaller and heavier in the chair. “Look, I'll try it if I have to but I'm in no shape to do a convincing act. Besides, there's too many holes in it—it's no good. We can't keep Conniston alive forever, can we? What happens when they find out we concealed his death?”

“I'll take care of that. Nobody's going to find out.”

“Maybe so. Maybe so. But Christ, I can't even remember what he sounded like.”

“I'm sure Mrs. Conniston's willing to coach you.” He ignored Louise's sarcastic glance; he added, “If it matters you'll be paid for the performance.”

“A bribe, you mean.”

“Enough to keep body and soul apart,” Oakley agreed with a thin smile. “Maybe it'll encourage you to work on it. I want you to practice voice and delivery until you've got it letter-perfect.”

“Easy for you to say—but what the hell, when I got here I was just about ready to go out on the street with a tin cup, that's no secret. How much I get paid?”

“I won't haggle. Say ten thousand.”

Louise said, “Whose money are you slinging around like that?”

He didn't answer her. Adams said, “Only one thing. I wish I could be sure I can trust you.”

“None of us can afford
not
to trust each other,” Oakley replied. “And don't forget Terry. She's got to trust us too.”

After a while Adams said abstractedly, “He talked like an obstacle race. Didn't he? Left out articles and subjects of sentences. Voice a little like Gregory Peck, deep in the diaphragm. Christ, I guess I'll have a hack at it.”

When the sun burst through the window Adams was practicing Conniston's voice, listening to Oakley's remarks: how to talk to the banker, the name of the banker's wife about whom Conniston always asked, the ostensible reason for raising so much unmarked cash—a big under-the-table payment to secure the cooperation of key stockholders in a corporate takeover. Oakley took him over it a dozen times; when he left Adams with Louise and Orozco he had a taut feeling of expectant confidence. He went back to the bedroom to shower and shave and change into fresh clothes. When he checked his watch it was shortly after eight—ten o'clock New York time. He called a stockbroker in Phoenix and kept his voice low: “How many shares of Conniston stock do I hold? How many shares outstanding?… All right. Sell two hundred thousand shares short for me…. Never mind that. Do it through dummies—scatter it so it won't look like a power play. I'm not trying to manipulate it but I expect it to go down a few points and I want to make a few bucks, that's all. Breathe one word to anybody and I'll make it hurt, Fred.”

Afterward he immediately called another broker in Los Angeles and repeated the substance of the conversation; he repeated the short-sell order with half a dozen brokers across the country before he rang off and turned toward the front of the house, walking briskly on crepe-soled shoes, and saw Orozco looming darkly in the corridor. The fat man, vigilant and silent, held his troubled glance until Oakley felt uncomfortable enough to look away. When he came up, Orozco said mildly, “I went to call my boys to get working on the wiretap call-trace but you were on the line.” There was no hint of guile on Orozco's dark bland cheeks. But Oakley knew he had heard the whole thing.

“Just keep it to yourself, Diego. It'll be worth your while.”

“I'm sure it will,” Orozco murmured, and turned heavily back into the office. Oakley had to steel himself against the sound coming out of the office—Earle Conniston's voice.

C H A P T E R
Nine

Terry Conniston sat like a taut-wound watch spring in the shade of the sagging porch overhang. Near the perilous breaking-edge, she felt as if at any moment she might start screaming and not be able to stop; and so she kept herself rigidly under control, all her movements slow and cautious, all her decisions ponderous. Her slender fingers clenched and opened at regular intervals; she watched a domed anthill which squatted naked like a cancerous boil on the face of the ground below the porch. The brutal little monsters had denuded the surrounding earth of everything but rocks and sand.

Overhead little gray birds flitted soundlessly from rooftop to rooftop and the indifferent sun burned down like brass; the desert heat was thick and close. The young sandy-haired one called Mitch sat against the wall at the far corner of the porch, making a point of not watching her. His face was not cruel like the others'; he seemed willing to respect her desire to be left alone. At first she had been surprised by the casual way they had of keeping desultory watch on her but not confining her at all. Only gradually had it dawned on her that since she didn't have keys to either car her only means of escape would be afoot across the desert, and they would be able to see her on the flats anywhere within a mile of the ghost town. It was a far more effective prison than bars.

About noon by the sun, with a look compounded of the irascible and the hangdog, Mitch uncoiled his length and went inside, leaving her alone. She didn't stir. In a little while he returned with an army-style mess kit of cold food out of cans, handed it to her without a word and went back to his post.

Floyd, the dark evil one, came out and stood on the porch and stretched like a cat. When he glanced at her she felt mesmerized by his cold eyes. Floyd had a driving, brutal, elemental thrust of granite personality. His magnetism, in spite of it, was uncanny—repellent and fascinating at once: the charismatic impact of raw unshielded masculinity, erotic and frightening.

The pulse throbbed at Terry's throat. She addressed herself to her meal, keenly aware that Floyd was watching her with cynical vicious amusement.

The girl, Billie Jean, appeared behind Floyd, filling the caved-in doorway with her body, all meaty thighs and bovine lactic breasts which bobbed and surged with her movements. She studied Floyd's back for a while before she stepped out and passed Floyd with a slow flirt of the shoulder, grinning. Floyd casually reached out and rubbed her breast. “You're a fire hazard, Billie Jean.” It made her laugh.

“How about a jab in the fun hole, Floyd?”

“Later—later.”

Disappointed, Billie Jean moved away, dropping off the porch into the sunshine and wandering aimlessly up the street. Floyd said, “Stay close.”

“I ain't going nowhere,” she said petulantly.

“If you hear an airplane or a car duck inside a building and stay out of sight.”

“I know,” she pouted, and ambled away.

Floyd turned toward Mitch and spoke as if Terry weren't there: “I'm going to make a phone call, arrange for the drop. Keep things under control.”

“What if I can't?”

“That's up to you,” Floyd said. “If you fall you break, Mitch. Law of gravity.” His unrevealing eyes touched Terry briefly; his mouth smiled frighteningly and then, according to his bewildering intricacy of thought, it was time to go: he jumped catlike from the porch and trotted across the street into the barn. Shortly he came out, driving the dusty Oldsmobile, and put it into the central powder of the street, rumbling away.

In the stretching quiet that followed, an overwhelming anxiety slowly poisoned what was left of Terry's willed patience. Unable to remain still any longer she got up. Her knees felt weak. She stepped hesitantly toward the edge of the porch, waiting to see how Mitch would respond. He didn't get up; only his head turned to indicate his interest in her movements. She stepped down into the sunshine and walked very slowly along the street.

She had gone twenty or thirty paces when Mitch caught up with her. He didn't touch her; he fell into step beside her and said, “I hope you don't mind if I walk along with you.”

A sharp report rose to her lips but died stillborn. When she looked at him, his eyes were kind. She thought,
I need any friends I can get
. Yet in the back of her mind she couldn't help thinking of stories she had heard about policemen and confidence men and spies—evil men working in teams, one partner softening you up with friendliness while the other stood ready to pounce. She couldn't see what they stood to gain by that kind of tactic in her case but just the same she couldn't begin to trust Mitch. He was, after all, one of them.

She searched his face with an odd intensity. “You hate him, don't you?”

“He makes it easy.” Neither of them mentioned Floyd's name; it wasn't necessary. Mitch said, “For seven cents he'd hang his own mother on a meathook.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To keep you alive.” He laughed dispiritedly. “This wasn't my idea, this kidnaping thing. I want you to know that. I tried to stop them from doing it. Well, maybe I didn't try all that hard, but I didn't want them to. I wanted to get away. I didn't want anything to do with it.”

The words tumbled out of him. She said afterward, “I'd like to believe you but you're here. You haven't run away. Nothing's stopping
you
.”

“You are,” he said. “If I bug out who's left to keep Theodore away from you?”

She held herself rigidly aloof from him. “You don't know how much I want to believe you. But—”

She didn't finish it, and Mitch said dryly, “Yeah.” They went on, twenty yards in silence. “Well,” Mitch said awkwardly, and trailed off again. Then suddenly he stopped and frowned at her. “You worry me. You're not behaving according to Freud.”

“Having hysterics, you mean? I'm on the verge of it, believe me.” She stepped closer to him and glanced back toward the mercantile. No one was in sight. “He terrifies me, honest to God. The weight of his eyes can buckle you—that horrible cold look of his. Is there
anything
we can do?”

“It's hard to talk to Floyd. He listens to his own little voices—the line's always busy.”

“He's filth,” she said furiously. When she tilted her face down her hair swung out languorously; she brushed it back and laughed dispiritedly. “I'm putting myself on, aren't I? Clutching at straws.”

“What straws?”

“Hoping for a minute that you were on my side.”

“I am,” he said. “But I don't know what to do about it.”

“We could run for it. Both of us—right now.”

“Fat chance.” He was looking back the way they had come. When she followed the direction of his glance she saw the two men standing on the porch—Georgie in his candy-striped shirt; Theodore, tugging at a thick black hair in his nostril. They were watching with fully focused attention. Mitch said, “We'd better get back before Theodore decides to start something. Like find out how much of a beating I can take.”

“Would he?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Who knows. He gets uptight easy. Sometimes he doesn't remember things from one hour to the next but when it comes to grudges and sex he's got a one-track mind like an elephant. Only he doesn't think with it. He thinks with his fists.”

“Has he got a grudge against you?”

“More than one. For one thing he thinks he'd like to—well, wrestle you a little, you know?”

Rape me is what you mean
. She folded her arms and hugged herself, flashing a quick furtive scrutiny at Theodore on the porch, trying to catch some hint of expression on his asymmetrical crippled face.

Mitch was still talking:

“He could use a few inhibitions. I don't think he's got any at all. The only thing that's slowing him down is I've got this crummy kitchen knife in my belt and he's not too sure how good I am with it. He knows he can take me regardless but he doesn't want to get carved up in the process.”

“How good are you with it?”

“Probably lousy. The only thing I've ever used a knife for was peeling potatoes. Fortunately he doesn't know that. But he keeps gnashing his teeth and sooner or later he'll boil over and try something. He hates everybody—it's only a matter of degree, it doesn't take much—if your face isn't all mangled and scarred up like his that's enough to make him hate you, by itself.”