The Man Who Risked His Partner

  This time, I got the timing right all by myself. With the Caddy hammering down toward us, I fisted the Olds into reverse, floored the accelerator again—

  —and stopped before we went twenty feet. Now I was ready. Out of the Caddy’s path. And positioned to ram it if it didn’t crush its rims when it slammed the curb.

  It had good brakes. It came down the hill like a cart of bricks, but somehow it slowed enough so that it didn’t lose a wheel when it hit the curb.

  For a few seconds we stayed where we were and looked at each other. The goon in the Caddy had his shotgun aimed at us. But he was on the wrong side now. His passenger window was closed. And he could see what I was about to do to him.

  He made up his mind without hesitation. Gunning his engine for all it was worth, he did his best to get back up the hill before I could run into him.

  I let him go. The Olds was never going to catch him, anyway. And I didn’t particularly want to shoot it out with him right there in the street. Already Haskell’s neighbors were emerging from their houses to see what the commotion was about.

  Instead of trying to be a hero, I got the Olds moving again and rolled it into Haskell’s driveway.

  “Come on,” I ordered him. My voice sounded tight and breakable, but I couldn’t help it. “Let’s get inside before someone comes over to ask us what the hell we’re doing.”

  The sonofabitch didn’t even have the decency to look scared. His eyes shone with a tension I couldn’t read—it could’ve been adrenaline or stroke. Without a word, he got out of the car and started toward the house.

  I followed him, feeling stiff and cramped, and cursing because I hadn’t managed to see the goon’s face.

  Haskell was passing the cedars into the aisle toward his front door before I regained enough composure to wonder why Ginny hadn’t come out to investigate all that caterwauling of tires.

  Faster than I could think it through, I jumped after Haskell, caught him by the arm. Surely by now—

  “What is it?” Haskell demanded. “What’s the matter?” I couldn’t see his face clearly in the relative dusk of the aisle, but he sounded like a man with a fever.

  Blocking him against the wall to keep him out of my way, I pulled out the .45.

  I was too scared to make sense. Maybe two bad days and no sleep had left me paranoid. But if she was all right, where was she? I could’ve used her a couple of minutes ago—

  “Axbrewder—”

  “Don’t ask,” I hissed. “Shut up. Stay here.”

  As quietly as I could with my muscles stiff and my kneecaps quivering, I moved toward the door.

  When I touched the knob, a voice snapped, “If you open that door, I’ll blow you in half.”

  Her voice twisted a knife under my rib cage. She sounded too demented to be the woman I knew.

  “Ginny.” What was happening to her? “It’s Brew. I’ve got Haskell with me. We’re all right.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Ginny, we’re coming in.”

  Despite the way my hands shook, I holstered the .45, got out the keys, and unlocked the door.

  When I eased it open, I saw her leaning against the wall near the light switches. None of the lights were on—I couldn’t make out her face. But the .357 hung like a dead weight from the end of her right arm. She could hardly keep her grip on it.

  The stump of her left forearm she held clamped over her heart.

  Acid filled my throat. I couldn’t swallow it. She looked like she’d gone over the edge. Like fear and incapacity had finally pushed her farther than she could bear.

  Like she’d learned something that made this case worse than she could possibly stand.

  I wanted to put my arms around her, hold her as hard as I could, just so that my bones would stop shaking. But Haskell shoved his way into the house between us.

  I closed the door behind him, relocked it. He reached past her to snap on the lights. In the sudden glare, her battered expression and her tight face went through me like a cry.

  Haskell considered her, his back to me. His scrutiny reminded me that he’d never seen her stump before. Until now, she’d kept her left forearm hidden in a pocket.

  I bunched my fists. If he said anything I didn’t like, anything at all, I was going to deck him. At the moment I didn’t care whether he survived the experience or not.

  But he didn’t comment on her appearance. Or her hand. He didn’t even mention firing us. Softly, kindly, as if he were a friend of hers, he said, “I need a drink. You want one?”

  She couldn’t meet his eyes. Dumbly she shook her head.

  He shrugged. With a spring in his steps, he turned and went down the stairs, leaving us alone.

  “Ginny.” I didn’t know how to say it. I needed you out there. How did it get this bad? “What happened?”

  “I heard the cars,” she said dully. “I’m getting to be like you. Intuitive. Somehow I knew you were in trouble. I grabbed my gun and ran up here.” She was too ashamed to look at me. “But when I reached the door, I couldn’t—I just couldn’t—”

  Abruptly she threw her .357 at the floor. It bounced once, but the carpet absorbed the impact. Tears spilled from her eyes as she looked at her empty hand and her stump.

  “You know, it’s funny,” she said past the knot in her throat. “I didn’t want this case. But until today I never really believed el Señor had anything to do with it. It didn’t make sense. For God’s sake, Haskell’s just an accountant. How could he possibly be involved with a thug like el Señor?”

  Almost holding my breath, I asked, “What changed your mind?”

  She looked at me then. With all her fear and pain and disgust, her eyes still had room for a flash of wild anger.

  “Haskell has been lying to us all along. I know why el Senor wants him dead.”

  15

  A minute later, she said, “Brew, what happened to your face?”

  I dismissed that. “I’ll tell you later.” But then I didn’t say anything. I stood there like a dummy and stared at her.

  I was confused. Not by her announcement—I can understand plain English, if you enunciate clearly and don’t use big words. No, I was confused by how I felt about it. Normally I would’ve been at least relieved. She thought she knew the answer. And she was usually right. No matter how bad the answer was, just having something solid to work with helped.

  But I didn’t feel relieved. The way she looked left my insides in a knot.

  She studied me for some kind of reaction, practically hanging on to me with her eyes. She was counting on me for something.

  I couldn’t afford to let her down. But I needed time to think, so I went to the head of the stairs and listened for some indication of what Haskell was doing. I thought I heard the clink of a glass—he was fixing himself a drink. With any luck, he might stay down there for a few minutes.

  Turning back to Ginny, I said quietly, “Don’t let him hear you. When I picked him up, he said he was going to fire us. He doesn’t like us prying into his personal life.”

  She still leaned against the wall as if she couldn’t hold up her own weight. But her brain kept functioning, and she was making an effort to cope. “Has he changed his mind?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I moved back across the atrium to stand in front of her. I wanted to be close enough to put my arms around her if I got the chance. But I knew that wasn’t what she needed—even if she thought it was. She needed to find her way back to the woman she used to be. Take-no-prisoners Fistoulari.

  “Maybe that little demolition derby out there made him reconsider,” I went on. “But we might be better off if he doesn’t know how much we know.”

  She nodded. What she was thinking brought the misery back into her eyes, but she forced herself to say it. “Did you see who it was?” She indicated the street with a jerk of her head. She hadn’t had a shower for two days, and her hair looked stringy and unloved.

  The phone rang. I waited until Haskell
picked up an extension downstairs. His voice came vaguely up from below. He sounded like he was telling a neighbor that car chases and shooting on Cactus Blossom Court were nothing to worry about.

  “No.” I couldn’t hide my anger. “Every time I looked at him, he had a shotgun pointed at me.”

  However, the man in the Cadillac hadn’t looked much like Mase Novick.

  Unfortunately, Ginny was in no shape to consider that I might be disgusted at myself. She took my tone as a comment on her failure to come to my rescue. “Brew,” she said softly, “please don’t.” Her face was pale with need and anguish. “I’ve already got more than I can stand.”

  I understood. Folding my arms over my chest to keep them out of the way, I murmured, “Don’t worry about it. If you count the three or four thousand times I’ve let you down, I don’t really have much to complain about.”

  She took a deep breath, held it. Running her fingers through her hair, she straightened it a bit. Slowly she got herself under control. Her broken nose, and the slight flaring of wildness in her eyes, kept her from looking calm. But she did everything she could to turn off her desperation.

  “So tell me,” she said, trying to sound normal. “How was your day?”

  I shook my head. Watching her struggle with herself was going to be the death of me. “You first. I want to hear about it before Haskell gets curious.”

  She tried to produce a sour smile. Apparently her day hadn’t turned bad right away. “I’m not like you,” she said almost steadily. “I can’t live on hunches and instinct. I have to rely on old-fashioned investigating.

  “Sara Haskell said her husband made his money with investments during business trips, weekend business trips. I asked myself how that was possible. I mean, try to think of an investment where you can buy in, make money, and cash out again over the weekend. I had a theory, so I came back here, picked up a few family pictures of our client”—she’d recovered herself enough to drip sarcasm on Haskell—“and drove out to the airport.”

  Staring at her, I asked, “Why?”

  “A lot of people fly in and out of Puerta del Sol. There are seven airlines and who knows how many counter personnel. But I thought that if a man made a lot of trips, and always went to the same place, and always used the same airline, he might get himself remembered. Especially if he tried to make every female employee he met go weak at the knees.”

  I knew from the way she was telling it that she’d found what she was looking for. I made an effort to listen for Haskell while I concentrated on her voice.

  “Brew,” she said, her voice so soft she was almost whispering, “where do you suppose he goes to invest his money over the weekend?”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted her to lay it out for me.

  “He goes,” she said, “to Las Vegas.”

  That surprised me in several different ways at once. But the first thing out of my mouth was, “And he wins?”

  “Not necessarily. I think he did at first. I think that’s how he got into this. But either way, I can prove he’s been to Vegas at least thirty times in the past few years. One of the ticket clerks for Southair recognized his picture. And I’m sure at least two other women there know him. They just didn’t want to admit it. So I leaned on the station manager a bit, and he finally let me look at their passenger manifests. Southair has more direct flights to Vegas than anybody else, and his name turned up on a lot of them. Out on Friday evening, home on Sunday.”

  “He didn’t bother to use a different name?”

  “Why should he? It’s not exactly illegal to go to Vegas over the weekend.”

  I digested that for a moment—and kicked myself for not thinking of it. It wasn’t quite what you might expect from the chief accountant of a bank, but in other ways it fit. It explained where he got his money, explained his “investments.” And poker was even better than bridge for a man who liked to play people, especially if he could get into a private game where he didn’t have to face the house odds. Come to think of it, Vegas was the perfect place for the man who wanted to have everything—including excitement.

  And Haskell admitted that some of his “investments” had gone bad recently. If he’d gotten himself into a game with some pros, they might’ve given him quite a bit of line before reeling him in.

  For a second, I caught a flash of the implications. A few years ago, a friend, an acquaintance, or maybe just a brochure in full color persuaded him to break out of the boredom of being an accountant, go to Vegas for some thrills. And while he was there, he did well because he didn’t make the mistake of playing the cards. He played the people. He had power. He had control. He was alive. It was like magic.

  So he went back. Again. And again. And started getting used to it. Counting on winning. Spending more and more money at home. He began to feel like he could do anything, which made him look like he could do anything, which helped him succeed.

  And then, ever so slowly, the pros pulled the rug out from under him. All that power, control, magic—slipping away. Of course, he didn’t believe it. He was Reg Haskell. Nobody outplays Reg Haskell. So he turned to other kinds of games to get the money he wasn’t winning in Vegas anymore. And that led—

  But I was ahead of myself. With an effort, I pulled back. Ginny still had things to tell me. “All right,” I murmured. “So he went to Vegas a lot. That doesn’t prove he’s been lying about el Señor.”

  “No,” she said, “it doesn’t.”

  “In fact, it fits. After he began thinking he could outplay the big boys—and maybe even got addicted to it—he started to lose. A bit at a time, until he was in deep shit. So when he stumbled on that money laundry, he decided to try el Senor himself. That way he gets the money he needs, and he restores his belief that he can do anything.”

  “Slow down,” she said impatiently. “It sounds good, but it doesn’t hold up. I’m not finished.”

  Fine. I was just saying the same thing myself. Tightening my grip on myself, I waited for her to go on.

  “When I was done at the airport,” she explained, “I finally got around to calling the answering service. They said Canthorpe had been trying to get in touch with me all morning.

  “When I called him back, he was in a lather. He said the cops had paid him a visit. In fact, it was your old friend Cason. He asked Canthorpe the same questions we did about that money laundry.”

  “They tracked down the cab driver,” I put in.

  She nodded. “I figured that. Anyway, Canthorpe says he gave Cason the same answer he was going to give me.

  “There is no money laundry. Haskell made the whole thing up.”

  “He did what?” No doubt about it, I was bright today. Even though she’d warned me. And I really should’ve been expecting it. “How did Canthorpe find that out so fast?”

  She looked at me hard. “It was easy. Nobody in his right mind banks under a name like ‘el Senor.’ And Héctor Jesus Fría de la Sancha doesn’t have an account anywhere with the First Puerta del Sol National Bank.”

  It was that simple. Haskell’s story couldn’t be true.

  When I thought back, I realized that Ginny and I had no reason to believe Haskell even knew el Señor’s real name.

  The sheer audacity of his latest lie dazzled me. No wonder he didn’t want us to pry anymore.

  At least now I knew why Cason hadn’t arrested anyone. In effect, Canthorpe told him that this case didn’t have anything to do with the one he was working on. Cason probably rousted me just to double-check—or maybe to warn me out of his way.

  If Haskell wasn’t curious yet about what we were doing, he wasn’t a well man. But as long as he left us alone, I intended to discuss him.

  “Did Cason talk to Haskell?”

  She shrugged. “I asked Canthorpe that.” She was waiting for me to get to the important stuff. “He said no.”

  “Did Canthorpe mention to Cason that we asked him the same questions?”

  “I asked that, too. Same answer.”
>
  “No?” I didn’t know what that meant. Canthorpe might have any number of reasons for giving the cops as little information as possible. Some of them I didn’t like much. But I let it go for the time being and did my best to face the issues Ginny had in mind.

  “Well, at least now we know why Haskell wanted to fire us. He must’ve seen Cason talk to Canthorpe, so he jumped to the obvious conclusion. We called the cops on him. But he can’t admit that’s why he wants to fire us without also admitting he’s done something illegal.” I was spinning more inferences than I could keep track of all at once. I had one other idea I wanted to pursue, but it could wait. “What’s he trying to hide with all these lies?”

  “His ego,” she snapped. “He wants us to think he’s a big deal, and he isn’t. He’s just a petty philanderer who’s gotten in over his head and can’t give up his delusions of grandeur.”

  Well, maybe. I didn’t know what she was getting at. “You said you’ve finally started to believe that el Senor wants Haskell dead. But if the money laundry doesn’t exist, Haskell can’t threaten him. Why try to kill someone who can’t threaten you?”

  “I know,” she sighed. “It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. But that’s the way it hit me.”

  For some reason, she stopped watching my face. When she dropped her eyes, she saw her .357 lying on the carpet. Grimacing to herself, she bent down and picked it up. Then she didn’t know what to do with it, so she let it dangle loosely from her hand.

  “Haskell goes to Las Vegas,” she said. “For a while he wins. Long enough to get hooked. Then he starts to lose. He’s a small fish with sharks on his tail, and the nice life he’s bought for himself is going to disappear. What does he do for money?

  “Brew.” Slowly her eyes came back up to mine. “I don’t know whether it’s true. But it’s the kind of story I can understand.” Pain and fear filled her gaze. A little thing like that—a story she could understand—took the heart out of her. It made what she was up against seem real. “Where can he get that kind of money? Loan sharks, that’s where. From el Señor.”