All or Nothing (29 page)

She was just taking the first sip when Bulworth’s phone beeped. He fished it from his pocket. “Bulworth here,” he said.

An amazed look spread over his face. “You’re not bullshitting me,” he said sternly. “Okay, okay, so you’re not––it has been known. Gosh–darn it, man, of course I’m listening. Okay, okay, Giraud, start from the beginning.”

Signaling to Powers for a pad and pen, he listened intently, occasionally interjecting a question, scribbling notes in his large flowing script that had won him first prize at the Headford Road Elementary School in Newark, New Jersey, many moons ago.

“I’ll be there, Giraud,” he concluded. “You sure you’re both okay? Great, good, fine. I’m on my way. And why the hell didn’t you tell me all this earlier, you bastard? None of my business, huh? Don’t give me that client–confidentiality–privilege bullshit, this was police business and you know it. We might have been on to her by now. . . . No, I’m not blaming you for Loretta Harmon’s death. If anybody could have found Laurie Martin it would have been you, I’ll give you that, Giraud. Yeah. I’ll see you there.”

Powers was on the edge of her seat as he clicked off the phone.
“What?”
she demanded so loudly in her deep boom box of a voice that people turned to look.

Bulworth felt the hot color staining his cheeks. Damn it, he had never grown out of that childhood habit and he could see by Powers’s grin she knew she had embarrassed him.

“Too loud for you, am I, boss? Sorry about that, it’s just my outgoing nature,” she said loudly again, causing more heads to turn.

Bulworth got to his feet, drained his beer in one long gulp and said, “Get packed, Powers, we’re off to the airport right now.”

“But I thought we had an investigation under way here . . . where are we going?”

“Texas.” He was already halfway across the room and in case anybody wondered what he did for a living, there was no mistaking it. Somehow Bulworth looked the picture–perfect cop.

“Texas?”

“That’s right, Powers, the place where your gosh–darn boots come from. You’ll be right at home there.”

Giraud and Bulworth, along with Pow! Powers, were dining with Beau Harmon at Benboy’s Steak House in Falcon City, Texas. The same place where Bonnie Victor had, as Beau put it, “schmoozed my pa and had him under her spell.”

Looking at the current crop of hefty middle–aged waitresses, sausaged into their black dresses like the best of Jimmy Dean’s, personally Al wasn’t surprised that cute redheaded Bonnie had caught the old man’s fancy.

They had already gone through the formalities of sympathy about Beau’s wife and were staying over to attend the funeral, which was being held tomorrow. Bulworth was of the opinion that killers were drawn to their victims’ funerals because in some weird way they wanted to see the results of their actions. The local police department would have detectives there too, in plainclothes, keeping watch for strangers or anything untoward, and the graveside service would be videotaped and later each face checked.

“Of course, Loretta being a Larson,” Beau said, tucking into his Texas–size porterhouse with, Giraud thought, an appetite quite unseemly in the recently bereaved, “Loretta being a Larson is a big deal around here. Larson Oil, y’know?”

Bulworth nodded, shooting a sidelong glance at Giraud. “Sure, we all know Larson Oil,” he said.

Giraud knew what that glance meant. Did Beau or did he not now stand to inherit a large chunk of Larson Oil money? And therefore did Beau have more to do with Loretta’s death than anybody around here seemed to suspect?

“It’s gonna be a big Texas funeral,” Beau added between mouthfuls of steak. “Everybody who’s anybody in the Lone Star State’s gonna be there.”

Al caught Bulworth’s eye again and shook his head. Beau Harmon didn’t have enough brains to come up with the double letter bomb plot that killed his wife and almost killed Marla and himself, just to implicate Bonnie. And he figured that whatever was coming to him from Loretta’s estate, the poor sap had probably earned it––the hard way.

“What d’ya plan to do now, Beau?” he asked, tucking into the fried onion rings, which were maybe the best he had ever tasted.

“Well now, once the dust settles I’m planning on putting the big house on the market. Think maybe I’ll move on from San Antone––get away from things, y’know what I mean? Think I’ll give Dallas a try, it’s a lively enough town and I reckon I’ll need a little diverting––away from the bad memories, y’know what I mean?”

Giraud guessed he knew what he meant. Loretta had left a bad enough stain on his own memory and heaven only knew what Beau’s was like.

“So tell us about Bonnie Harmon,” Powers said suddenly. “She must have been quite a woman to hook your pa.”

“She sure was. Nice lookin’ too, y’know what I mean?”

They nodded––they figured by now they knew what Beau meant without him asking every other sentence.

“Tall, slender, but she had good   .   .   .” Beau glanced at Powers then shaped a buxom figure in the air.

“Tits,” Powers said helpfully, and Bulworth almost choked on his chili fries.

“Another Coors for my friend,” Giraud called to the passing waitress. He thought, exasperated, they were wasting their time. This trip to interrogate Beau Harmon was getting them exactly nowhere.

“Yeah,” Beau said, grinning lecherously. “And she liked to show ’em. Caught every eye in the place, she did. And there were plenty of guys in here younger than Boss, and better lookin’ too. But
Bonnie knew
Boss had the money and
I knew
that was what she was after, first time I ever set eyes on her.”

“You ever come on to Bonnie yourself, then, Beau?” Giraud asked the question matter–of–factly and caught Beau off guard.

“Well, you know,” he said, grinning some more and practically strutting like John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever,
if you could do that sitting down. “She kinda gave me the look, y’know what I mean?”

“That come to bed look,” Powers said knowledgeably, taking a couple of chili fries from Bulworth’s plate. She had already finished her own. But Bulworth’s astonished glare was for her comment, not for the stolen fries.

“Oh, Bonnie knew how to do that, alright. Yessiree, she was one babe. And my old man fell for it, darned old fool that he was. Then he went and left her most of his money. But I soon put a stop to that.”

Beau went on to detail exactly how Loretta’s important attorneys had rousted Bonnie Harmon and practically seen her out of town. With, of course, two hundred thousand in cash in her purse.

Powers whistled, astonished. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Yeah, but not nearly as much as she stood to inherit if Boss’s will had been enforced. And that’s why I think it was Bonnie sent that letter bomb. Only I think she intended it for me.”

Beau took another mammoth mouthful of porterhouse, chewing contemplatively. “That, and one other reason,” he added after he’d swallowed. “I killed her dog.”

Giraud’s ears pricked up. “You killed Clyde?”

“Ran over the little bastard right there in the driveway. Boy, I wanna tell ya, that Bonnie came racing over to my place fit to kill me right there and then. I swear to God I’ve never seen nothin’ like the look she gave me. Evil, it was, and I knew I was right and that she had killed Boss. No doubt about it. And now she intended to kill me too. In return for Clyde.”

“An eye for an eye,” Powers said solemnly, finishing off Bulworth’s fries. He gave up and pushed his plate over to her.

Giraud’s phone rang and he excused himself from the table and went out into the hallway to answer it.

“Help, I’ve been kidnapped. I’m a prisoner in my old home, being threatened with a visit from the thirty–six–year–old unmarried orthodontist.” Of course it was Marla, whom he had left in the hospital again, being treated for shock.

“Mom says if I even so much as
mention
seeing you again, she will personally kill you. I told her murder was no solution to this ongoing problem, but she ignored me. Tell me, Giraud, what am I to do?”

“Pacify her,” Giraud said. “I’ll send her a dozen roses.”

“Three dozen. And make them Osianas, she likes pink.”

“Three dozen it is,” he agreed with a sigh.

“You must admit I seem to end up rather regularly in the hospital after a date with you.”

“True, but that’s the way love is, Marla baby. Y’take the rough with the smooth.”

“Isn’t it about time for my smooth?” she demanded plaintively. “I’m getting to be a regular at Cedars Emergency. When do I get a break, Giraud?”

“Soon as we’ve cleared up this case, honey, I promise. But you can’t say I didn’t warn you, this is a hazardous profession.”

“Yup,” she said. “But I like my men hazardous.”

“Make that “man’ and I’ll be home tomorrow night, first flight out of San Antone after the funeral.”

“Whoopee. I’ll try and extricate myself from Mom and the orthodontist. Meet me at my place?”

“I’ll be there, honey, with roses for you this time.”

“Love you, Giraud,” she said longingly.

He was smiling as he said, “Love you too, baby,” and clicked off the phone.

Beau had not been wrong about the funeral, it seemed to Giraud that half of Texas turned out to bid good–bye to Loretta Larson Harmon, as well as the entire San Antonio Police Department. The police chief was there, alongside the governor of the state, and various civic bigwigs, as well as about a hundred ladies who lunch in their very best black with cartwheel hats and expensive stilettos that to their chagrin sank into the soft grass around the grave site, forcing them into a peculiar tottering walk that made them look like a bunch of drunken crows.

Beau looked dignified in a black Brioni suit and a white Stetson, accepting condolences stoically, surrounded by Loretta’s lawyers in lieu of any living family.

The casket was ebony with plenty of the curlicued gold fittings that Loretta had so enjoyed in life and Beau had seen to it that it was lined in her favorite Colefax & Fowler lavender and peach chintz.

“She would have liked it that way,” he said humbly, to those who had passed by the open casket beforehand. Of course, Loretta’s arms that no longer had any hands were well hidden under the silk–lined chintz quilt, but the funeral makeup artist had decked her out with lavender eyeshadow and pink lipstick until she looked almost human.

Giraud smiled into the video camera when it turned his way, then he and Bulworth and Powers beat a hasty retreat. “Heading out,” as Beau phrased it, “for the airport.”

And back to L.A. to continue their search for Bonnie, hereinafter known as Laurie Martin.

“Think she’s going to try it again, Al?”

Marla was reclining on her taupe chenille chaise, her feet resting on pillows, her head in Giraud’s lap. She wore no makeup and her comfy old white terry robe and ancient bunny slippers, and her blond hair was dragged back in an elastic band. She looked, Giraud thought, about fifteen. And she also looked scared.

“Nah, she wouldn’t dare,” he said more confidently than he felt. “Not now she knows we’re on the alert, and the police are investigating. She can’t afford to draw attention to herself. She has to lie low.”

He had calmed Marla’s fears, but he was worried, no doubt about it. Laurie Martin was striking close to home, close to his heart. If anything had happened to Marla . . . but he couldn’t even finish the thought. It had been so close. . . .

“You know what, hon?” he said thoughtfully after a long silence. “Did you ever think maybe your mom is right? You know, about not being an assistant P.I.? About just getting on with your life. You’re bright, educated, have a great job as a legal eagle. . . .”

She scowled at him, her eyes slitted. “You mean I might be the perfect bride for Mr. Right.”

“He doesn’t have to be an orthodontist,” he said in what he considered was a reasonable tone, yelling loudly as she gave him a backward punch in the stomach.

“Jesus, Marla, I thought you were a convalescent. You have a punch like a prizefigher.”

“Fuck you, Giraud,” she said coldly. “And don’t you go brushing me off on any Mr. Rights, okay? And remember this, I’m not a quitter. And I’m certainly not afraid of Miss Evil Bitch, hereinafter called Laurie Martin. So tell me, what’s our next move?”

For once Giraud did not have an answer. “We need a break,” he said wistfully. “Just one tiny break. I only hope we get it before she has a chance to do any more damage.”

Marla swung her bunny feet to the floor and sat up abruptly. “You know what? I need to see Vickie.” Her eyes were wide with sudden panic. “I need to know she’s alright.”

“I’ll call the hospital, check on her with the nurse on duty.” He was already picking up the phone but she stopped him.

“No. You don’t understand. I need to
see
her. I just have this feeling about her. . . .”

“It’s late, Marla,” he objected, checking his watch. “Visiting hours are over. Besides, you shouldn’t be going out yet, you’re not well enough.”

“Damn it, Giraud.” She stamped her slippered foot until the bunny ears flopped up and down like Dumbo’s in the wind. “You don’t understand.
It’s important . . . 
I just have this image of her in my mind, with her eyes wide open but not seeing and the tears sliding down her cheeks. Oh, Giraud, I feel that she needs me . . . 
someone . . . 
right now.”

He nodded, giving in. “I’ll call the hospital, see if they’ll let us in,” and she kissed him as she dashed into the bedroom to throw on some clothes.

“They’ll let us in,” she called over her shoulder. “You can always work miracles, Giraud.”

He only wished it were true.

The drive to the hospital was unusually silent. Marla seemed lost in her own thoughts, huddled into the saddle–leather bucket seat of the Corvette, tense as an unsprung mousetrap. She smelled delicious, of the Hermes 24 Faubourg he had bought her on a romantic flying weekend visit to Paris the previous year. Was it only the previous year? Now it felt like a decade ago.

They were turning into the hospital forecourt when she said, “You never told me what happened to Steve.”