Defense for the Devil (13 page)

“I’ve been up for hours,” she said. “Where can we hide a guy, maybe more than one?”

He shook his head. “It’s eight o’clock,” he explained.

“Oh, right.” After pouring coffee for them both, she filled him in. “So, they’ll call back at nine. And I want to be able to tell them where to hole up.”

“And maybe they won’t call,” he pointed out. “And if they call, maybe they won’t come down here.”

“Let’s pretend they will.”

Frank came in then, with wet hair but dressed. “I’ve found that what helps digestion is silence until after breakfast,” he said coldly. “You guys want to eat? Just a simple yes or no.”

“Yes,” they said simultaneously.

Frank busied himself at the refrigerator, pulling out things, setting them down on the counter.

“Well?” Barbara said. She began to drum her fingers on the table.

Bailey scowled and said, just as coldly as Frank had done, “That’s no help.”

Frank was folding an omelette when Bailey said, “Sylvia’s place.”

For a moment Frank stared at him, then he nodded.

Bailey made the call from the wall phone. He had to get past two people before Sylvia was on the line. “Hiya, Sylvia. Want to play cops and robbers?” He grinned broadly. “Yeah, right. A guy or maybe two—hell, I don’t know, maybe more—need a place for a private conversation.”

He listened, nodded to Barbara, and said, “I’ll tell them. And I’ll call back with some details.”

After he hung up, he said, “Okay. They’re house guests, but they’ll never know anyone new has arrived, way that place is set up. And they should come in a limo if possible, so they won’t be conspicuous,” he finished, absolutely deadpan.

Major called at five minutes past nine. Barbara snatched up the wall phone. “Holloway.”

“We’re coming. Tell me where to meet you.”

She gave him the Fentons’ names and telephone number, then said, “I’ll turn this over to my associate, who can give you driving instructions. Can you come in a limousine, with darkened windows, perhaps?”

“Yes.” He said something to someone else, then said, “Here, you do this part.”

Barbara handed her phone to Bailey.

Later, in his downtown office, Frank opened the wall safe and brought out the briefcase. Barbara removed a few sheets of printout and put them in her own briefcase; he returned the other one to the safe and locked it.

At twenty-five minutes after twelve Barbara went out to Bailey’s car, and they left. At twelve-thirty, Ruthie buzzed Frank to tell him Mr. Fenton’s driver had arrived to pick him up.

“Anyone tailing us?” Barbara asked Bailey as he headed out Franklin Boulevard.

“Nope. But they’re watching the office, two of them. Local guys.”

They drove out Franklin, past the university buildings, past the I-5 cloverleaf, over the river, and then turned south. The road became narrow and winding. An overloaded hay truck crawled along in front of them. Strawberry fields, farms, a mini ranch or two, more subdivisions… Bailey turned again, onto a county road that began to snake up into the hills. He turned once more, and they were driving along a high stone wall. When they came to a gate, he stopped and rolled down his window. “Ms. Holloway to see
Mrs. Fenton,” he said into a speaker. The gate opened soundlessly; he drove through, and the gate closed again. There was a wide meadow all around them now, with horses and cattle grazing, and no fence in sight. Barbara knew she was gaping, and couldn’t help it. A real, by-God ranch twenty-five minutes out of Eugene! Dense forest was in the distance, on this side of the stone wall; a bridge over a creek; gardens, fenced off from the cattle.

“How big is this place?” she asked.

“Eight hundred acres. A thousand. Somewhere about that. Jeez! Can you imagine what the property tax is?”

When the house came into view, at first glance it seemed small, then wings began to appear, and the wings had their own wings. Part of the building was two-story, most of it was one. The closer they got, the bigger it grew. They passed a swimming pool with half a dozen people lounging about, no one in the water. Bailey followed a curve around the house and stopped at a side door, at least two wings removed from the front entrance.

“We are here,” he said cheerfully. “And there’s Sylvia herself. What a doll!”

The limousine with Frank inside pulled up behind them as they got out of the car.

Sylvia was more garish than she had been before; she was wearing lime-green silk pants and a pink overshirt with a blue sash. She glittered with jewelry. Her hair was more yellow than orange today, and her earrings were dangling rubies.

Her broken leg had made a miraculous recovery. She rushed to the limousine door and opened it herself. “Frank, you beautiful hunk! Come on out.” As Frank climbed out, she said to Barbara, “I’ve warned him fair and square, the day Joe kicks, I’m coming after him. Haven’t I warned you, Frank?” She threw her arms around Frank and kissed him on the mouth. To Barbara’s amazement, he hugged and kissed back. “Of course,” Sylvia said, disentangling herself, “Joe enjoys perfect health, so it won’t be tomorrow, but I want Frank to take good care of himself, so when I’m ready, he’ll still be full of piss and vinegar. This way, this way.”

The door was only steps from the car; they entered a spacious hallway filled with art: paintings on the walls, sculptures on the floor and on stands, tables adorned with gilt and inlays of mother-of-pearl, red-velvet-covered chairs…. The result was one of clutter, expensive clutter, but too much, too mixed, too crowded, the worst taste Barbara had ever seen west of Versailles.

“There are a couple of bedrooms,” Sylvia said, gesturing, “and a sitting room, and a little dining room. A soon as Mr. Smith and company arrive, lunch will be brought in to the dining room. If you need anything, there’s the telephone.” She looked around for it, then said, “Maybe it’s in the sitting room. It’s somewhere. You’ll find it. The Smith party will be met at the gate and driven around by one of my boys. Well, enjoy.”

She started to walk down the hall; Barbara walked with her. “Mrs. Fenton, this is so very generous—”

“Dear, if I’m going to be your stepmother someday, I insist that you call me Sylvia. I wish I could work more with Bailey. But he holds back. Well, this is better than nothing….” She continued to talk until she reached the door, and left.

When Barbara turned around, both Frank and Bailey were laughing. She grinned, then said, “Well, you beautiful hunk, let’s look over the sitting room.” Bailey went out to move his car and wait for Major and company.

Frank and Barbara were in the sitting room, exclaiming over the excessive art, when Bailey knocked on the door, then entered with three other men.

Barbara stepped forward. “How do you do, Mr. Major. I’m Barbara Holloway, and this is my father and colleague, Frank Holloway.” Major’s handshake was limp. Barbara turned to the next man.

“Garrick Jolin,” he said. His handshake was almost too hard. “This is our driver, he’ll wait outside.”

“As will our driver,” Barbara said, nodding to Bailey. He left with the other man. Her thoughts were swirling; if this was head of security for Major Works, who was that man at Valley River Inn?

Major was exactly what she had expected, bespectacled, unruly long hair, nervous. Jolin was stoop-shouldered, with a receding hairline, and a hardness that was very much like the hardness Bailey showed sometimes. He had a perceptive gaze that was direct and wholly skeptical.

“There’s a washroom, second door down the hall,” Barbara said. “Mrs. Fenton said she would have lunch brought in.”

“Ms. Holloway, we didn’t come here to party,” Jolin said rudely. “What do you have? What do you know? And how do you know anything?”

“Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you.”

Major was moving around the room as if examining the various objects—a Ming vase next to a crude pottery vase with some cattails in it, a Mir
ó
surrounded by what looked like calendar art…. He didn’t stop at anyone thing long enough to take it in, though, just kept moving. Now he perched on the edge of a chair. He looked ill, haggard.

“I have your program, and a suitcase with over two hundred thousand dollars in it,” Barbara said. “I know who killed Thelma Wygood and why. I think I know what she was doing and why.”

Major jumped to his feet and started his aimless walk-around again. Jolin said in a hard voice, “Don’t play games. What do you want? How did you get anything? Can you prove what you say?”

She opened her briefcase and withdrew the sheets of printout, handed them to Jolin. Major made a soft moaning sound and sat down again, his gaze fixed on the printouts. Jolin handed them to him, and after no more than a cursory glance, he nodded.

“Just tell us what you know,” Major said thickly. “How did you get them?”

“I can’t tell you everything,” she said. “I have a client involved in this, but I’ll tell you as much as possible. Afterward, will you fill in some blanks for me? Quid pro quo?”

Major nodded. Jolin was impassive.

“Some time ago an employee stole a new program from you, and you staged a charade to catch the people responsible. Ms. Wygood played her role brilliantly and the trap was set, but the delivery man got greedy, killed his partner and Ms. Wygood, and then he came here to Oregon, no doubt to hide and contact a high bidder. However, he himself has been murdered. And the money and the program ended up in my hands. An attorney named Trassi has been in touch with me to negotiate a sale, and I’ve stalled him.”

Major was on his feet again, with both hands clenched hard. “Wilford’s dead? Who killed him?”

“His name wasn’t Wilford, and he’s dead. I believe Palmer’s men tried to force him to reveal where the money and program were hidden, and then they killed him.”

“How did you get your hands on anything?” Jolin asked then. His eyes were narrowed to slits, and he looked as tense as Major.

“For now, it’s enough that I have the items, and Trassi knows I have them. There’s another man in the picture, and he has made a generous offer also. I don’t know where he fits in, but he knows all about this.”

Jolin looked surprised, then his face became expressionless again.

“It’s your turn,” Barbara said then. “Was the scenario I gave pretty accurate? You were deliberately baiting a trap?”

Major nodded. “God help us all, we did.” He went to stand by a window, facing out. “For nothing,” he said in a choked voice. “Nothing.”

There was a light tap on the door. Frank went to open it. A pretty young woman in a maid’s uniform said lunch was in the dining room.

Briskly, Barbara said, “Why don’t you both go wash up, and then we can pick at lunch. We all have things to think about.”

After they left together, Barbara said, “I might as well tell them more; Jolin’s going to start digging and find out anyway.”

Frank agreed. “But who the hell is Waters? Let’s go see
what kind of a spread Sylvia sent our way.”

There was gazpacho in a crystal bowl set in a second bowl of crushed ice, surrounded by crystal cups. There were several pates, and baguettes and crusty brown bread, little sandwiches, flutes of paper-thin pink ham….

Jolin and Major joined them in the dining room a few minutes later. Major didn’t even glance at the table but started roaming. Jolin spread paté on brown bread, ladled out gazpacho, took them both to Major, and practically forced them into his hands. Major looked as if he didn’t understand.

“Try it,” Jolin said, and returned to the table. No one sat down; they moved around the table and picked at lunch.

“You guessed it almost exactly,” Jolin said. “It was a trap. We had men in Miami at the motel, waiting for Thelma to get there with the car and the money. We had an FBI number to call when it happened. There wasn’t any reason to suspect violence would occur. There hadn’t been any violence in the Palmer deals we were able to learn about; simple business transactions, that’s all they were.” He sounded very bitter. “The plan was to turn over the cash and the car to the FBI, put a tail on the delivery men with the program, and go after Palmer and his client. We know who he is, but there’s no proof. Thelma would have been our star witness; she kept a meticulous diary from day one.” He drank some gazpacho and set the cup down hard. “It was all worked out. For nothing. We’ve spent all this time chasing after Wilford.”

Across the room Major had put his food down, untasted.

Jolin ignored him. “How did you come into it? Who told you about the theft?”

She gave a bare-bones synopsis of her talk with Waters. Jolin didn’t move while she spoke, but Major prowled aimlessly about the room.

“It’s almost right,” Jolin said when she concluded. “A few details are off, but it’s close enough. Our version of what took place,” he said harshly, then told about the theft three years earlier. “So we knew the guy had bought a car from the Palmer Company; it was delivered by Steve Wilford and Eddie Grinwald, who flew back to New York afterward, and our guy headed for California and within a few months started his own company. No proof, parallel research, back luck, bad timing—there wasn’t a damn thing we could do. The other company brought out the program, and that was that.” He glanced at Russ Major, who was standing at a window, possibly even gazing out. “Russ and Thelma knew in a second it was theirs; they told me, and none of us ever mentioned it to anyone else. Our research teams suspected, of course, but since no one talked about it, the matter died. We tightened security, and tried to ferret out the spy.”

“Do you know yet who the in-house spy is?” Barbara asked.

“Yes. The day after Thelma was reported dead, a woman left without warning, terrified.” He scowled. “A little late to find out, though. Anyway, about eighteen months ago Thelma came up with the scheme to trap the thieves. It looked good on paper,” he added, bitter again. “She reasoned that if it had happened once, it would happen again with the next big program, and she was determined to stop it. She didn’t call Trassi or make any movement in that direction. Instead, she and Russ both let out a leak about an exciting new program that was coming along, and, of course, our spy informed our competitor. We tightened security again, as if we intended to guard our work to the hilt. Then they staged the first of their fights. The fights became nastier and more public; they separated, and she finally took her research team to Zurich and waited for someone to make the first move. The last time she flew home, she and Russ went to the island, then came back to Seattle and threw a big party, a celebration party, not to announce anything, but to suggest the last bugs had been worked out. Russ showed up with a model draped on his arm, and Thelma took off that night for Zurich. Our spy was probably on the phone before she got to SeaTac. Two weeks later a man approached her and the opening gambit was played out.”