Defense for the Devil (18 page)

“I can’t make such a promise in the dark,” Maggie said.

“If you trust me, you can.”

For a long time Maggie didn’t move; her gaze on Barbara’s face was intent, searching. Finally she sat down. “All right.”

“I can’t tell you names,” Barbara said then. “I’m sworn to secrecy. But I’ll give you the rest of the story. Mitch was working for a company that acted as a go-between in serious industrial espionage….” She told it briefly, leaving out only the names. Maggie turned very pale when Barbara said that Mitch had killed at least three people. “Company A authorized me to turn the bogus program over to Company B and to keep the money. That’s what I’m doing. What I’ve done. The money is yours, or will be in a few months.”

“And everyone’s letting it go at that?” Maggie asked incredulously.

“No,” Barbara said. “One day I will tell you the rest. When Ray Arno is free, exonerated, and this is really all over, then I’ll tell you everything.”

“Is he going to be free?” Maggie asked. “His lawyer doesn’t believe that.”

“He’s going to be free,” Barbara said.

Maggie continued to study her face, and finally nodded. Barbara told her about the meeting being arranged for Monday with the district attorney, and they started going over the questions that might come up.

When they were done, Maggie said, “Would you like to see the rest of the inn, restored more or less to normal?”

It was beautifully furnished, beautifully decorated, with Laurence’s flower pictures serving as palettes for each room.

“He did a good job,” Barbara said in the Sunflower Room, where a small couch and two chairs were covered in a rich umber fabric, the curtains were pale yellow, and drapes a deeper golden yellow. Red-brown cushions on the couch, and one on each twin bed finished the scheme. Perfect.

“He’s good at many things,” Maggie said. “There’s an art walk in Portland this weekend, or he’d be at my elbow. He keeps hovering,” she said with a sigh.

Barbara gave her a swift glance.

“You might as well ask,” Maggie said. “Everyone else does. Why don’t I marry him?”

“Do you answer?”

“Sometimes. See, the problem is, I can’t afford him. I have my daughters to consider first. Maybe when they’re both done with school, if he’s still around, if he’s grown up yet, maybe then. He doesn’t really want to be married. We have an… arrangement, but if he had a free ride, he’d take it. He really thinks the world owes him that much.” She gave the lovely room a last glance and turned toward the door. “I told him I’m serious, that he has to start paying rent or get out, and he took off in a temper. He might stay away for days, weeks, even months, and all the time he’s gone, I doubt he’ll give me a thought. When he’s here, he’s like my shadow. That’s how it is.”

After leaving Maggie, Barbara drove north on 101, through Newport, nearly to Yachats, where she had managed to book a room, on the wrong side of the highway and in a simple motel, but sufficient. She checked in and found no surprises. Then she went down to the beach.

Later, sitting on a massive driftwood log, she watched the play of light on the ocean as the sun set. No flamboyant sunsets here, not like in Hawaii or Florida, or even out on the desert; the sun just rode its path down to the horizon, turning redder as it sank, until it was an orange globe that quietly dipped into the sea and the afterglow turned violet and very gradually darkened.

She was thinking of the women in this affair: Maggie, who was so clear-eyed about what she had to do, and strong enough to do it. And Sylvia, who knew the kind of world she wanted to live in and had arranged it to suit herself. Even Thelma Wygood had done what she had to do from her earliest years.

If she were as clear-eyed as Maggie or Sylvia or even poor Thelma Wygood, she would know what she had to do, but she wanted two mutually antagonistic things: she wanted to live with John and be his love, and she wanted freedom to work her own hours in her own space.

Abruptly, she stood up to climb the trail back to the highway, then return to the motel, and in a little while drive out somewhere for dinner. Tomorrow, she promised herself, tomorrow she would think more clearly.

Tomorrow she would think of the implications of what John had said, that he hated her work. She had tried to think through that many times and had always been distracted by something or other. Tomorrow, she promised again, and started up the trail.

17

When Barbara went
home on Sunday, she listened to the phone messages, one from Frank, one from Bailey. She called Frank.

“Want some dinner?” he asked.

She said sure, and then sat gazing at the apartment. It looked like a bachelor’s pad. Her good chair and a lamp were the only possessions of hers in sight. Everything else she owned was put away in her little office or in the bedroom; she felt like an intruder here. “A room of one’s own,” she said under her breath. Then,
an apartment of one’s own.
She jumped up and hurried to her office to find some photocopies of apartments and houses one of the real estate people had given her. She stared at the one she had been looking for.

“Rose Garden Apartments, lovely two-bedroom apartments in three groups of twelve units, each group with its own swimming pool. Easy access to the bike trail by the river. Walking distance to town. Ready for occupancy October first….”

That evening, while Frank prepared dinner, she explained. “See, this way we’ll have four bedrooms, and two baths. Plenty of space to spread out our stuff, for both of us to work at home. And when his kids come, they’ll fit, too.”

“You signed up for two apartments?”

“One definitely, one conditionally.” She added, “I can’t breathe in our apartment. Even if we could divvy up the space equally, it’s too small. I can’t move in it. You know as well as I do that in December I’m going to need breathing room.”

He knew. “I say it’s a grand idea.” He didn’t ask the next question, the one she had been asking herself ever since signing the rental agreement: What if John hated the idea?

As Frank sliced tomatoes, he thought that maybe she had found a fine solution to a problem that would only have grown worse. Two adjoining apartments, not the usual mode for live-together lovers, but it would do. And he decided to postpone mentioning his reason in asking her over tonight. He had planned to bring up the idea of her forming her own group, getting her own office space, a secretary, the whole works, now, before she found herself tangled in a mare’s nest in December. He didn’t believe any more than she did that the D.A. would drop the charges against Ray, and he was more than a little worried about how she planned to work it later.

“I’ve got a long list for Bailey to start on,” Barbara said, “but I wasn’t sure where to tell him to meet me. Here?”

“You know here,” Frank said.

It was a bad night; she alternated from imagining John in a mine he had declared unsafe, to stewing about how to tell him she wanted separate apartments, to refusing to look down as she balanced on a tightrope across a bottomless chasm….

By nine in the morning, she was at Frank’s house ready for Bailey, aware that her father had noted the effects of not enough sleep.

“Okay,” she said briskly as Bailey stirred sugar into coffee. “Let’s go over some of the things I want us to follow up on.” Bailey nodded and took out his notebook; she opened her legal pad, and Frank leaned back in his chair to listen.

Later, she put down her pen. “That’s for openers,” she said. Bailey was still writing; she waited for him to finish, then said soberly, “I’ve been stewing about the lead pipe and holder. I want to get them to the New Orleans police, along with the Gary Belmont stuff.”

Bailey scowled. Ignoring that, she continued, “The stuff should be packaged up and mailed to the cops with a New Orleans postmark. And you should call the cops with an anonymous tip—you saw Belmont get in a Lexus coupe with this guy who could have been his brother, they were so alike.”

Bailey’s scowl was ferocious. “You want me to fly down to New Orleans with a lead pipe in my hip pocket!”

“I didn’t think it would be that easy,” she said. “But you’re the expert. If you think that would work…”

He turned his glare toward Frank, who simply shrugged.

“We handled the license and other items,” Barbara murmured. “I suppose it would be a good idea to clean off our prints.”

He didn’t even bother to respond, just gave her a murderous look.

She glanced at Frank. “Anything else?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about something you said the other day, that Gilmore’s life might not be worth much these days. They’ll set bail this morning, more than likely, and he’ll be out and gone. But he’s had time to consider his ways, I suspect. It might be that if someone like my old friend Carter Heilbronner got a tip that Gilmore knows something about big-time espionage, carrying illegal stuff around the country, or anything like that, the FBI might get in touch with him. They could make a deal. Course, we wouldn’t know anything about it; they play it too close. But it could be a way to get to Palmer.”

Barbara nodded thoughtfully. Then she said, “But we would know. They would want Sylvia to drop the charges against Gilmore. They’d have to guarantee him that much up front, wouldn’t they?”

Bailey snorted. “Sylvia working with the FBI! Jeez, where will it all end?”

“Is Gilmore smart enough not to bring in the Major/Wygood deal and her murder?” Frank asked. “Would he have anything else to give them? That’s the question.”

They all thought about it. Finally Barbara said, “I doubt that he would say anything that would implicate him in a murder, not Wygood’s, or Mitch’s, either. He’s worked for Palmer a long time, twelve years or longer. There must be a lot of things he could talk about.” She frowned; then, thinking out loud, she said, “Gilmore could become a threat to Palmer; he’s faced with a prison term and he might cut a deal with the state or the feds. He’ll be a fugitive, a convict, or hidden away in a witness-protection safe house; in any event, no longer an asset. I wonder if Palmer would be worried enough to want him removed? If so, when? My guess is, sooner rather than later. Later he might be whisked away out of sight. Heilbronner isn’t likely to put a lot of effort into a tip without any foundation, but if Gilmore got knocked off and he has the tip in mind, he might then stir a finger and poke around.”

She looked up at Frank, who was frowning also; he nodded. “Or Gilmore could go to ground and hide out for the next few years,” he said, “which also might make Heilbronner curious about Palmer.”

Abruptly she stood up. “Mind if I put on some more coffee?” she asked. It had occurred to her that John would consider this conversation evil, that this was what he hated about what she did. She, Frank, and Bailey were looking at the situation dispassionately, knowing a man’s life might be at risk but also knowing that if it was, the machinery was already in place, the lever already pulled. No one’s past could be undone. Gilmore’s past had made it impossible for him to walk away from a soft touch like Sylvia; he had not resisted the apple. Although he couldn’t have known he was leading Thelma Wygood to her death, he had done nothing about it after the fact, except take on yet another role, well aware that his boss had had Mitch Arno killed. But, Barbara thought bleakly, none of this would be understandable for John, for others like him. And perhaps, she thought then, those others were right, after all. How guilty would she feel if Gilmore got killed because she baited a trap he found irresistible?

“Does he have enough sense to know that maybe his only chance is to cooperate with the FBI?” she said, returning to the table.

“A con man gets pretty good at figuring the odds,” Frank commented.

She recalled Gilmore’s implicit threat to Maggie’s children; he had known the threat was real, or could be made real. “Can you tip off Heilbronner in such a way that he won’t come sniffing around us?”

Frank said to leave that part to him.

They discussed some of the points Barbara had raised earlier, and afterward Bailey and Frank agreed on a time for him to pick up the lead pipe and the Belmont material.

“Just give me the fucking stuff. I’ll think of something,” Bailey said.

Barbara and Frank both raised their eyebrows; Bailey never used such language.

18

Craig Roxbury was
not intimidating in any way, she decided when they met on Monday. Not the district attorney, just an underling, the one who would prosecute Ray Arno, he was clearly uncomfortable here in Frank’s office, and clearly suspicious. She knew a good bit about him already: thirty-one, divorced, no children, in town less than a year, after three years in the Indianapolis district attorney’s office. Methodical and unimaginative, a good worker, conscientious and thoroughly unremarkable, the kind of man who would pass through life leaving little trace. He had dark brown hair cut short and neat, and a clean, freshly shaven appearance. His hands were large and rough-looking, the hands of a man who had worked at hard labor for many years, which fitted the biography she had read. He had worked his way through school as a carpenter’s helper. He seemed very earnest.

After the introductions, they all sat down in the visitors’ end of Frank’s office, Maggie on the couch by Frank, Barbara and Roxbury in the facing chairs. Barbara leaned back and said, “Thanks for agreeing to come, Mr. Roxbury. We really wanted to keep this as informal as possible, but we feel that we have information that may prove vital to your investigation of the murder of Mitch Arno. As you are aware, Ms. Folsum and Arno were married many years ago….”

His suspicious glance toward Maggie said that indeed he was aware. Barbara continued, starting with the Monday after Maggie’s big party, repeating the same story Trassi had told.

She smiled pleasantly at him when she concluded; his face had turned a dull red, and for a time he seemed speechless.

“I have copies of all the documents—”

“Just hold it!” Roxbury finally blurted. “Back up! You’ve known about this for weeks! Why haven’t you mentioned it before?”